The violinist had revealed the engagement to his parents prior to his leaving for the States, and Mama Robin had cried all over the palace. She had seen pictures of Bess, for these young people all had cameras, and whatever happened to them was preserved in innumerable little snapshots which became a nuisance in bureau drawers. A sweet-looking girl—but Mama would have liked it so much better if she had been Jewish. If it made Hansi happy, all right, but he was so young, and what would she do without him? She had thought of braving a sea voyage with him, but of course she would ruin his chances with those fashionable goyim. Mama had stopped wearing a wig and keeping the shabbas, but in her heart she was troubled, and was ready to fly back into the shelter of her ancient Judaism at the smallest sign of danger.
Papa Robin wanted to load his new daugher-in-law with more gifts than the Queen of Sheba had received from Solomon; but first he had to find out if she would take them. He began with a fancy sport-car made in Germany; surely that would be useful and sensible! Hansi would never drive, for a violin virtuoso does nothing with his hands that he can avoid. Cautious Mama wanted to wait and make sure that Bess knew how to drive, but Papa said: “Gewiss, all those rich young goyim have cars, in America they are driving all over the place.” Indeed they were, and sometimes over bridges and embankments and things like that.
So this honeymoon couple showed up at Juan, radiating happiness like one of the new high-powered broadcasting-stations. It was the best of all possible things for Lanny, who was deeply depressed, and for a month had been playing the saddest music, such as the tone poem of Sibelius called Kuolema, which is Death, and the one called The Swan of Tuonela, which is River of Death. He had dug out a lot of old books from his great-great-uncle’s library: books like Mackail’s Greek Anthology, containing the sorrowful things which the ancients had carved on tombstones and mausoleums; also Amiel’s Journal, full of discouraging reflections; a tome by a three-hundred-year-old Englishman, called The Anatomy of Melancholy, and another by an equally venerable scholar, entitled Urn Burial.
Beauty had been unable to get him to meet a single one of the many fair misses who would have been so glad to heal his broken heart. But now came Bess, his half-sister and the bride of his friend, and she was different from other young females. Marie had loved Hansi, and had put the seal of her approval upon these nuptials; so Lanny could enjoy vicarious happiness. Hansi knew what to do, and went right to it; he brought out his fiddle, and told Lanny how the Tchaikowsky concerto had been received in Carnegie Hall, and how differently the orchestra conductor had interpreted various passages; Lanny must try this and that, and he did, and naturally they could spend many hours getting that great work right. It would always be cherished by Lanny as his young friend’s debut music.
And then those little MacDowell pieces which Lanny had transcribed, and which the audience at the country club had appeared to like. They were full of romantic feeling, and playing them and hearing about them carried Lanny back to his year and a half in Newcastle, now far enough away to appear glamorous. He was eager to hear the adventures of the young Jewish Lochinvarsky who had come out of the East. Hansi told his version, and later on, when Bess was alone with her brother, she added the intimate family details which Lanny had a right to know.
Beauty had never been to Newcastle, but she had been born in New England, and of course had had Robbie’s family in her thoughts ever since she had met him; so Lanny couldn’t withhold this delicious and exciting gossip from her. When you stopped to think of it; the story was not without elements of triumph for the mistress of Bienvenu; she the cast-off one, the almost demimondaine. Esther had raised a lovely young daughter, and tried her best to keep her, but now this pearl without price was in Beauty’s hands! Beauty wasn’t malicious, and didn’t want to harm the woman who had supplanted her; but nobody could blame her if she was kind to Bess, and tried to gain and hold her affection.
At the first opportunity Lanny’s mother would tell Lanny’s half-sister the whole sad story of Marie de Bruyne; being now a wife and no prude, Bess would become familiar with the customs of France. Beauty would ask for her help in lifting Lanny out of his depression, and in finding some suitable wife for him. That would be among Bess’s duties as a member of the family. There was a firm known as “R and R,” and now let there be another known as “B and B.”
Esther Budd’s daughter was gaining her first knowledge of illicit love; also she was being initiated into the secret society of the matchmakers! A most noble, benevolent, and protective order—for how could Bess, drinking deep drafts of happiness herself, fail to wish the same for her adored Lanny, the center of her admiration since childhood? She would enter an alliance with this wise mother, and together they would search the Côte d’Azur, and pick the very likeliest among all the international damsels, and contrive plausible schemes to have her meet Lanny by pure chance. They would get the pair in a corner of the bowered summer house in the garden of Bienvenu, with the moon shining overhead, the scent of star jasmines loading the air, and Hansi on the loggia playing, say, the Angel’s Serenade.
VIII
There was the empty lodge, Nina and Rick having returned to England in May. It would be at the disposal of the young Robins every summer, if they found Juan tolerable in the hot season. A great many people had discovered that they liked it, and more and more were coming. If you dressed lightly and followed the southern practice of the siesta, you would find it not so bad. Beauty urged Bess to think of this place as her home; for Lanny loved and admired her, and felt that her blissful marriage was partly of his making. There was a piano in the lodge, and Bess could practice as long as Hansi could stand it, and then she could come over to the villa and practice, for it made no difference to Beauty, who had lived in the lighthouse over a stormy ocean ever since Lanny had taken up the piano in earnest.
Of course Hansi wanted to pay rent for the lodge, but Beauty said that was nonsense; Lanny was making so much money out of Hansi’s father that it was really embarrassing. He had those plans of the Robin palace with the red and blue marks on them; Bess had seen the paintings which were already installed, and now she and Hansi encouraged Lanny to show them the plans and explain what was to go here and what there. Prior to Marie’s illness Lanny had “lined up” several paintings on the Riviera, and now came Zoltan, and Lanny had to take him to inspect these works. They took the bridal couple along, to continue their education in the graphic arts; this was a service to Zoltan, for in due course the sons and daughters of art collectors become collectors on their own. Incidentally it was another stage in the process of luring Lanny from his grief.
Kurt Meissner did his part, contributing dignity and prestige to the life at Bienvenu. Being a man of the world as well as a Komponist, he wouldn’t fail to realize how important it was to Beauty to gain and keep the esteem of Robbie’s daughter. Kurt’s prejudice against Jewish Schieber could be modified to exclude their sons, especially one who was an artist. Since Hansi had been “finished” in Berlin, there was no basis for refusing to recognize him as a distinguished musician; Kurt, who aspired to compose for all instruments, could make good use of a violin virtuoso on the place. He brought out his orchestral works, both published and in process, and played them with Hansi, and discussed the technicalities of bowings and fingerings of the whole stringed choir; he was properly pleased by Hansi’s praise of his work, and practiced piano accompaniments for the young artist’s repertoire.
To cap the climax, Kurt said that if Bess really wanted to work at the piano, he would help her; but only if she meant it, and no nonsense. The granddaughter of the Puritans was in awe of this grave Prussian ex-officer, about whom she had been hearing ever since Lanny had read her his letters while he was serving a battery of heavy guns on the Russian front, and then lying in hospital with pieces torn out of his ribs. Bess was honored by his offer, and accepted it gladly, which meant that the young couple would stay at Bienvenu for a considerable time.
There was no use trying t
o hide from Bess the truth about Kurt and Lanny’s mother, and Beauty told her the whole story, even the part about Kurt’s having been a secret agent of the German government; seven years having passed, that could be classified with old, unhappy, far-off things. Bess was in a mood to believe in all love affairs; she felt that she was being initiated into la vie intime of Europe, and never stopped to realize how she was weakening the ties with her mother and her mother’s world, and forming new ties with a world which had been a menace on the horizon of her mother’s life for a quarter of a century. It was a sort of war; and it would go on and on, for it was not merely between two individuals, but between two civilizations.
IX
In this sheltered nest were all the makings of a happy family and a happy life; if only the outside world had been willing to let it alone! But in that world were misery and anguish, and they came knocking on the gates of the estate, and on the hearts and consciences of the persons who dwelt within. Impossible to build an ivory tower which was entirely soundproof; impossible to play music loudly enough to drown out the cries of one’s suffering fellow-beings!
Less than forty miles from Juan was the Italian border, and within it a new form of society was being brought to birth. You might love it or you might hate it, but you couldn’t be indifferent to it. Benito Mussolini, that Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon, had been proclaimed il Duce di Fascismo, and was making it necessary that you either adored him or wanted to overthrow him. His government was following in the path which all one-man governments are forced by their nature to tread. Having procured the murder of Matteotti, he was threatened by the vengeance of Matteotti’s friends and followers, so he had to put these out of the way. He could not permit the agitation, the discussion of this notorious case in his realm, so he was driven to outlaw the opposition, and have its leaders slugged and shot, or seized and immured on barren sunbaked islands of the Mediterranean.
There was one continuous reign of terror, with thousands of people seeking safety in flight, trying to get into France by climbing through wild mountain passes or by rowing in little boats at night. They would arrive destitue, having had to flee with no more than the clothes they had on their backs, and sometimes these would have been torn to rags; many refugees had been beaten bloody, or mutilated, or wounded by bullets. They were pitiable objects, pleading for help in the name of that cause to which they had consecrated their lives: the cause of justice, of truth, of human decency. They appealed to Lanny Budd because he had been the friend of Barbara Pugliese and a public defender of Matteotti; they appealed to Raoul Palma as a leader of Socialist workers’ groups, a conspicuous comrade; and of course Raoul would call up Lanny and tell him—for what could a few poverty-stricken toilers do in the face of such mass need? Lanny lived in a rich home, he was known to be making large sums of money, and how could he shut his ears to the cries of these heroes and martyrs, saints of the new religion of humanity? “For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not!”
The balance of opinion in Bienvenu had shifted on this issue; Marie, who had been Beauty’s chief ally, was heard no more; instead there were Hansi and Bess, who were worse even than Lanny. Two sensitive, emotional young things, without any discretion whatever, without knowledge of the world, of the devices whereby charlatans and parasites prey upon the rich. If Hansi and Bess could have had their way they would have thrown open the gates of the villa and turned it into a refugee camp for the victims of Fascism; they would have had former Socialist editors and members of the Parlamento sleeping on cots in the drawing-room, and a continuous breadline at the kitchen door. Being guests, they couldn’t do those things; but they gave away all their money, and wrote or telegraphed their parents for more, telling the most dreadful stories about the deeds of this black reaction. Such stories were hard for the parents to believe or understand, for the newspapers and magazines which they read were portraying Mussolini as a great modern statesman, builder of magnificent new morale in Italy, the man who was showing the whole world the way of deliverance from the dreadful Red Menace.
The worst of the matter was the moral support which the young idealists gave to the always pliable Lanny. They dinned their convictions into his ears, they swept him away with their fervor. To these exalted souls the thing called “social justice” was axiomatic, something beyond dispute; they took it for granted that all good people must agree with them about the wickedness of what was going on in Italy. Bess had come from a new land, where cruelty wasn’t practiced; at any rate, if it was, nobody had ever let her know about it. Beauty saw that she had to step carefully in her opposition, lest she forfeit all that regard which she had been so happy to gain.
Nor could she expect much help from Kurt. To be sure, he disliked and distrusted the Reds and Pinks; the movement of National Socialism which he favored was pledged to exterminate them just as ruthlessly as Fascism was doing. But the Nazis were Germans, and Kurt was interested in German problems; he took no part in French politics, and concerning Italian politics he followed the advice of a distinguished personality by the name of Dante Alighieri—to do his work and let the people talk. Kurt and Lanny had an old understanding, that the Idea precedes the Thing, and now Kurt would remind his friend of it. He would say to Bess: “You remember that you weren’t going to let anything interfere with your piano practice.” He would say to Hansi: “The violin is an extremely complicated instrument, and if you expect to master it you will have to keep not merely your fingers but also your mind on it.”
Quiet rebukes such as these would bring the young people to their senses for a time; but they did not diminish the disturbances in the world outside or the knocking at the gates of Bienvenu. Poor Beauty found herself back in the position of the early settlers of her New England homeland, with hordes of a new and more dangerous kind of Red Indian lurking outside her little fort and shooting arrows of poisoned propaganda into the minds and souls of her loved ones.
27
Neue Liebe, Neues Leben
I
In October Hansi and Bess motored to Berlin; Hansi was still a pupil—he said that the artist’s path was without an end. It happened to be a time when the Red siege of Bienvenu was especially hot, and the worried mother thought that a change of scene might be of benefit to her too compliant son. She wrote a letter to Emily Chattersworth, explaining the situation, and by return mail came a letter to Lanny: wouldn’t he come for a visit to Les Forêts, and visit the autumn salon, and perhaps take his hostess along and explain the new tendencies in painting?
Very flattering; and Lanny began to think of pleasant things in Paris at this pleasant time of the year. When you have stayed several months in one place, you develop an itch for adventure; distant fields begin to look green. Lanny reflected that Zoltan would be there, and they would have business deals to work out. He would meet painters, writers, journalists, and hear inside stories of events; he would pay a duty call upon the de Bruynes; he would see Blum and Longuet, and his Uncle Jesse, and, as usual, listen to conflicting views. Lanny had youth, he had health, he had a car, and he had all Europe for his entertainment. How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!
He wired Emily, and packed up and set out with some eagerness; but he couldn’t drive far without being assailed by melancholy. There was that empty seat beside him, and Marie would come and sit in it; he would comment on the scenery and remind her of the inns where they had stopped, the food they had eaten, the little incidents; he would tell her his plans for the future. A wave of grief would sweep over him, an ache of loneliness, and he would want to stop the car and put his head down on the steering-wheel and weep. Sentimental, and quite irrational, for France was full of lovely young women, her native product as well as visitors from hundreds of nations and tribes of the earth; how many of them would have been happy to fill that empty seat, and stop at the inns, and eat the delicious
foods, and share in all the incidents! The number of young men in France had been abnormally reduced, and the same was true of most other countries of Europe.
Lanny knew that he could count upon the help of his hostess at Les Forêts. She would know the state of his heart without any explaining, and it would give her pleasure to assist him in finding a traveling-companion. The proprieties required you to wait a year after the death of a wife—but what was the rule regarding an amie? Lanny didn’t know, yet he knew that he had waited longer than Marie would have wished, and that the empty seat was not of her making. Everything was pushing Lanny in one direction: his mother, Bess, Nina, Sophie, Mrs. Emily—every woman he knew, to say nothing of many who wanted to know him.
II
The day after his arrival at Les Forêts, Lanny drove the châtelaine into Paris and they wandered through the rooms of the salon, examining hundreds of pictures and discussing them. Then they had lunch; and because Emily wasn’t as young as she had been, and tired easily, she went to a hotel room and lay down for a rest, while Lanny went back to the salon, to give more time to paintings which interested him especially. A matter of business as well as of pleasure; those paintings were for sale, and he had money in the bank. It was his form of gambling; he rarely went into the casinos and risked his cash on the turn of a wheel or a card, but he would risk it now and then on his judgment that this or that painter would some day win the prize of fame. Zoltan liked to play this game, and they would put their heads together, discussing details of technique and subject and feeling. It was one of the most fascinating speculations in the world; more so than the “woman game,” which so many played with similar ardor.
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 59