The granddaughter of an English earl and wife of another didn’t take part in silliness like this, but she liked to watch the crazy ones and make amused comments; she and Lanny went about with the smart set, and many times it would be daylight before they returned to that villa in the hills where Rosemary was a guest. You slept by day if you slept at all, and it soon destroyed a woman’s health and complexion. Lanny as a boy had seen Marcel protesting against it with his mother, and now he would protest to Rosemary, and she would promise to reform, and do so—until the telephone rang and it was another invitation.
Amusing to see the effect of all this upon Beauty Budd, that old war-horse, who would smell the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting. She would start to run up bills at dressmakers’ and marchands de modes’. The real estate men had convinced her that she was worth tens of millions of francs, so why not get some good out of them? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you will be offered twice as much for your property! The ex-baroness Sophie, being an heiress, always had a superfluity of beaux, and she would tell one of these to take Beauty to a dinner-dance, or something that meant late hours, and brought the mother into conflict with Kurt’s rigid notions. She too would have to promise to reform.
If she stayed at home she would play bridge, a game which had been something of a nuisance in Lanny’s young life. It seemed forever needing a fourth hand—and how very unkind of anyone to want to go off by himself and read a book! It transpired that Rosemary liked to play, and also that she was used to having men be “attentive.” What was the use of a title of nobility if you couldn’t command the services of a commoner—a foreigner, too—upon whom you conferred your favors? Lanny played cards many times when he would have preferred to examine the contents of a weekly which had just arrived from England; he played and liked it, because his sweetheart said it was “ducky” of him—also his mother said it was “darling.” Seeing him so obliging, Beauty became reconciled to the fact that he didn’t interest himself in this or that heiress who was the toast of the Côte d’Azur and who might have been persuaded to furnish grandchildren. Very soon Beauty adopted Rosemary as a member of the family, and urged her to move to Bienvenu, which she did, and it was more convenient for all purposes.
II
Kurt Meissner looked upon these activities with thoughts which he kept to himself, but Lanny knew him well enough to hear the unspoken words. Lanny was a weakling; he had always been led around at women’s apron-strings, and would never amount to anything because he couldn’t choose and follow a consistent course. Kurt wasn’t being led around by anybody—at least not by anybody in this land of wasters and parasites! Kurt solved the bridge problem by the simple method of refusing to know one card from another. He was working at his music, and produced a cantata for four voices and chorus, designed to inspire the youth of the Fatherland with new vision and resolve. Kurt showed his attitude to the playboys and girls of Bienvenu by not offering to perform this work for them, hardly even bothering to tell them about it. The culture of the Fatherland was becoming revolutionary and sublime, and was wholly beyond the grasp of slack and pleasure-loving foreigners.
Kurt sent the score to Munich, where the Nazis had a publishing-house and were pouring out a stream of literature. No delays, no inefficiency here; proofs came promptly, and Kurt read them, and very soon had copies of his finished opus. Then it would have been rude not to offer one to Lanny and Rick, and he did so. Lanny played as much of it as could be played with two hands, and saw that it was a glorification of young people as the builders of the future, a call to them to take up the sacred duty of making themselves the torch-bearers of a new civilization. Deutscher Jugend, naturally; unser Jugend meant National Socialist Party youth.
But why limit it that way? Lanny said that all the youth of the world ought to help to build that future, and he felt sure that Kurt’s words could be translated and his opus published in Britain and the United States, possibly also in France. He was saddened to find that Kurt wasn’t interested in this proposal; Kurt didn’t think those nations could understand the spirit of his work, and didn’t even care to find out. Apparently he wanted the new German culture to be kept a German secret!
Lanny knew that Fascimo had been devoting its attention to its youth from the very outset; their song was called Giovinezza, and its spirit was identical with that of Kurt’s new work. But it would be tactless to hint at this, for Kurt regarded the Italians as a thoroughly decadent race, and would be indignant at the idea that the Fuhrer had taken the smallest hint from the Duce. The fact that one word was a translation of the other was not mentioned in Nazi circles. Truth was German, virtue was German, and power was going to be German. Kraft durch Freude was a German phrase, and the idea of cultivating youth, glorifying it, feeding it well so that it would be sound and vigorous, teaching it to march and drill and chant about solidarity and devotion to lieb’ Vaterland—assuredly all this had come not from Mussolini, but rather from Bismarck, if you must go back of the present Nazi movement. It was a part of the German system of social security. Call it paternalism if you wished—it meant that the Volk was one, its sentiments one, and those who had the gift of genius and the technique of art would inspire the rest with hope and courage, a new ideal of service.
“Of course,” assented Lanny; “that is what we have talked about since we were boys. But what kind of service is it to be? For what purpose are the young people marching? We used to dream that it was to help all mankind.”
“The rest of the nations don’t want any help from Germany,” replied the ex-artillery officer; “neither do they want to give us help. We social outcasts have to do our own job.”
III
Rick and Nina came, according to their promise. Nina was a devoted wife and mother, and didn’t go about much. Rick was working hard, making a book out of his various magazine articles; weaving them into a picture of Europe during the eight years since the Armistice. He read, wrote, and studied most of the time, and was rather pallid and harassed looking. Nina tried her best to divert his mind and to get him out of doors. She and Rosemary, being English, understood each other and were good friends. Lanny would take them sailing, or drive them whenever Rick could be pried loose. The children played happily with Marceline, under the watchful eye of the most proper of governesses, who was glad to see one respectably married English couple installed on the estate.
Lanny took a great interest in Rick’s output; read his manuscript day by day and discussed the different points with him. It was Rick’s thesis that nature had intended Europe to be a unity; economics and geography made it necessary, and the splitting of the continent into a number of little warring states meant poverty for them all. Lanny considered that an unanswerable proposition, but when he took it to Kurt he got the reply that Europe would have been a unity half a century ago if it had not been for England, whose fixed policy it was never to permit one people to gain hegemony, but always to raise up a rival. Divide and rule, the ancient formula. What Rick wanted was a Socialist Europe; but when that proposal had passed through Kurt’s mind it emerged as a Europe disciplined and organized by the genius of the blond and blue-eyed Aryans.
While the Englishman was in the midst of his work there arrived from Heinrich Jung the second volume of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Kurt read it, but didn’t offer to talk about it with either of his friends. However, to a visiting German professor he declared that with all its obvious faults it was the work of a genius, a revelation of the insurgent German Geist; all kinds of mystical things like that, and so Rick decided that perhaps the book had a place in what he was writing, and he borrowed and read it. He judged it important enough to write a review and offer it to newspapers and weeklies, but in vain—for nobody in civilized and rational England could be interested in such stuff. Rick’s favorite editor wrote him that there were hundreds of eccentric movements all over Europe and thousands in America, and why single out an author who was so clearly pathological?
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sp; Rick didn’t mention the subject to Kurt, or to any other German; but to Lanny he pointed out the passages in which the Nazi Führer proclaimed it the destiny of the German race to rule the world. That was what the blue-eyed young Aryans were being marched and drilled for, that was what the fair Aryan maidens were taught to have babies for! “It’s nothing but old-style chauvinism, with a German label instead of French,” said the Englishman, who knew his history. “Not a new feature in it from cover to cover.”
“Isn’t the anti-Jew business new?” asked the American.
“Have you forgotten the Dreyfus case? It’s the same thing all over Europe. Demagogues who don’t know how to solve the problems of their time find it cheap and easy to throw the blame on the Jews, who made use of the scapegoat and now have to play the role.”
Lanny was sad over these developments. His private Locarno wasn’t succeeding so well as he had hoped. Rick and Nina stayed more and more in the lodge, and Kurt stayed in his studio; both worked hard, and their products would go forth into the world to wage ideological war upon one another! How long would it be before that kind of war became a deadlier kind?
IV
Robbie Budd came back from his journey to the land of desert sheiks. Lanny and Rosemary drove to meet him at Marseille, and found him browned by the sun and fattened by the life on shipboard. With him was Bub Smith, ex-cowboy and handy man in all emergencies. Bub was taking the first train for Paris on important business, but the father was coming to Juan for a few days’ visit with his ex-family, or whatever you chose to call it. Robbie was good company, as always; he had funny stories to tell about the primitive world into which he had plunged, and was proud of Lanny and the tiptop young female he had picked for himself. He showed it in just the right jolly way, and Rosemary, who didn’t as a rule take to Americans, found this a pleasant breeze out of what was to her the Far West. Connecticut was an Indian name, wasn’t it? Did they still have them there?
When Robbie and his son were alone in the sailboat, the father had a lot of news. He had found things very bad at the property of the New England-Arabian Oil Company. None of the various kinds of trouble had been accidental. Robbie had fired one man, and had cabled to New York for an engineer to meet him in Paris. Robbie had made friends with some of the desert sheiks, and Bub Smith had awed them by a demonstration of pistol-shooting the like of which had never before been seen in Arabia. Robbie had learned that the sheiks’ increased demand for money hadn’t originated in their own brown skulls, but had been suggested from outside—in short, money had been paid in this desert land to make trouble for Robbie Budd and his associates.
“Who’s doing it?” Lanny asked, and Robbie said: “That’s one of the things Bub and I have to find out. I’ve had a notion in the back of my head for quite a while that Zaharoff may have something to do with it.”
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed the son.
“Don’t put it beyond him. It’s an old trick, and he knows them all.”
“But why should he be sabotaging himself?”
“He owns many oil properties, and mightn’t object to shutting one of them down and waiting. If he could get us well ‘softened,’ as the military men phrase it, he might buy us out at his own figure.”
“He’s supposed to be broken-hearted over the duquesa,” remarked the unmilitary Lanny.
“Doubtless he misses her; but it only leaves him more time to think about his money.”
“What do you expect to do about it?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m going to see him, and I’ll be able to judge better when I note his attitude.”
V
The old munitions king now spent his winters regularly at Monte Carlo, and was a familiar sight strolling on its wide parkway, or sitting in the sunshine alone, staring ahead into vacancy. If some stranger approached and ventured to disturb him he would bite, and the severity of his bite had become something of a legend. He stayed at that same hotel where the young Lanny had had his amusing adventure with him; thirteen years had passed, but the richest man in Europe had never forgotten it, and there was always a twinkle in his blue eyes whenever he saw the son of Budd’s.
Lanny and his father came by appointment, and were ushered to the same drawing-room by the munitions king’s secretary, a retired British army officer. They were struck by the change in their host. Both his face and figure seemed to have shrunk, with the result that there were wrinkles in his skin, and his green satin smoking-jacket was a size too big for him; it covered half his hands, and Lanny wondered if it was because of the fact that the duquesa wasn’t there to get him properly fitted. The snow-white mustache and imperial which he wore seemed longer and more straggly, and perhaps he needed someone to remind him to have it trimmed. A forlorn old figure he seemed to the sensitive younger man.
He was glad to see this pair, because they had known the wife whom he so adored. He spoke of his bitter loss, and they talked for a while about her; Lanny would have talked the same way about Marie de Bruyne, and it seemed to him that the genuineness of the old trader’s feeling was obvious. Was it possible that a man could speak such words of sorrow, and accept words of sympathy in return, and then go off and stab the speaker in the back? Robbie said that he could and would, and to Lanny it was a type to study and a problem to meditate upon. In spite of having lived in a very bad world, the younger man hadn’t had much personal acquaintance with villains, and was inclined to think of them as sick men, objects of pity. Had this master of money spent so many years tricking people that he couldn’t help doing it, even when he could no longer use his gains?
“Well, young man,” said Zaharoff, “I hear that you have become a captain of industry since we last met.” Lanny was struck by the remark, which seemed to suggest that the old spider was getting reports on him. Surely Lanny’s doings weren’t important enough to be a subject of investigation by the munitions king of Europe!
“It wouldn’t seem much to you, Sir Basil,” he replied politely. “But it’s enough to keep me contented.”
“In that case, you might take me into partnership,” remarked the other. “You have a secret worth more than money.”
“Well, if you have any pictures that bore you, I will help you to get rid of them.”
“I have a great many, and they all bore me.”
“Perhaps you have learned too much about your fellow-men, Sir Basil,” suggested the young philosopher; and the other replied sadly that there was no way to unlearn such lessons.
He always talked like that to Lanny. Was it because of the odd set of circumstances which had begun their acquaintance? Or was it because he thought that was the way to please a young idealist? Robbie had remarked to his son that a rascal was the last thing in the world that a successful rascal would appear to be. If he wished to win your favor he would find out what you admired and then be that. So don’t take any of Zaharoff’s remarks too seriously; don’t be surprised if he was a scholar and an art lover—or even a moralist and a pacifist!
VI
The two oil men got down to business. Robbie reported on his visit to the Gulf of Aden; he gave no hint of his suspicions of sabotage, but laid the blame upon the native turbulence of Arab sheiks. He reminded Zaharoff that his reason for taking British investors into this undertaking had been the hope that British power could be assured for their protection.
“Yes,” agreed the other; “but you know that these are disturbed times, and governments are less willing to incur risk and expense for us investors than they used to be.”
“It is an awkward position for Americans to be caught in, Sir Basil. We had every hope that your influence could be counted upon.”
“My influence is not what it was, Mr. Budd; I am an old man, and have retired from all activities.”
“But you have many friends in the government.”
“Governments change rapidly, and so, I am sorry to say, do friendships. When you sever business ties, you find that you are left pretty much alone.”
The old Greek talked along that line for quite a while; he was extremely pessimistic concerning both himself and his world. The Reds were hanging on in Russia, and this was having the worst possible effect in other countries; the propagandists of sedition were spending fortunes in all of them, including Britian and France, to undermine the morale of the workers. “That Zinoviev letter wasn’t the only one, Mr. Budd.”
Robbie knew about that document, which had been given out a few days before the general elections in Britain and had enabled the Tories to sweep the country. Lanny’s Uncle Jesse was sure the letter was a forgery, but Lanny knew that this idea could have no place in the discussion of two masters of money. He listened in silence while his father felt out the old trader’s position on the subject of oil markets, prices, prospects, and what might or might not be done to persuade the British government to give naval support in places under British mandate from the League of Nations. Robbie suggested that Zaharoff might go to London and see if he could not get the necessary assurances; but the reply was that he was seventy-six years of age and his physician would not permit him to take such a trip in winter.
Finally Robbie dropped a hint to the effect that certain of his associates were discouraged about the prospects for New England-Arabian Oil, and were inclined to dispose of their holdings. Both father and son watched with interest to see what would be the reaction. Zaharoff said that such persons would be ill-advised, because there were many signs of trouble in various parts of the world, and if war broke out, oil shares were sure to rise. Lanny decided then that Robbie must be mistaken as to Zaharoff’s purposes; but later, when the pair were leaving, the old man put in a casual remark that if any of the Americans were determined to part with their holdings, he might be willing to consider making an offer. Lanny changed his mind hurriedly; and when they were out in the car the father said: “You see the old spider spinning his web!”
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 65