Johannes Robin was the perfect picture of a man who has known how to make use of his opportunities in this world. His black overcoat of the finest cloth lined with silk; his black Homburg hat; his neatly trimmed little black mustache and imperial; his fine leather traveling-bags with many labels; his manner of quiet self-possession; his voice that seemed to be caressing you—everything about him was exactly right. He had sought the best of both body and mind and knew how to present it to the rest of the world. You would never hear him say: “Look at what I, Johannes Robin, have achieved!” No, he would say: “What an extraordinary civilization, in which a child who sat on the mud floor of a hut in a ghetto and recited ancient Hebrew texts while scratching his flea-bites has been able in forty years to make so much money!” He would add: “I’m not sure that I’m making the best use of it. What do you think?” That flattered you subtly.
As for Mama Robin, there wasn’t much you could do for her in the way of elegance. You could employ the most skillful couturier and give him carte blanche as to price, but Leah, wife of Jascha Rabinowich, would remain a Yiddishe mother, now a grandmother; a bit dumpier every year, and with no improvement in her accent, whether it was Dutch or German or English she was speaking. All she had was kindness and devotion, and if that wasn’t enough you would move on to some other part of the room.
The modern practice of easy divorces and remarriages makes complications for genealogists. Lanny had grown tired of explaining about his two half-sisters, and had taken to calling them sisters, and letting people figure it out. The name of Marceline Detaze made it plain that she was the daughter of the painter who had been killed in the last months of the war; also it was possible to guess that Bessie Budd Robin was the daughter of Lanny’s father in New England. On that stern and rock-bound coast her ancestors had won a hard and honest living; so Bess was tall and her features were thin and had conscientiousness written all over them. Her straight brown hair was bobbed, and she wore the simplest clothes which the style-makers would allow to come into the shops. She was twenty-two and had been married four years, but had put off having children because of her determination to play accompaniments for Hansi in exactly the way he wanted them.
Very touching to see how she watched every step he took, and managed him exactly as her mother at home managed a household. She carried his violin case and wouldn’t let him pick up a suitcase; those delicate yet powerful fingers must be devoted to the stopping of violin strings or the drawing of a bow. Hansi was a piece of tone-producing machinery; when they went on tour he was bundled up and delivered on a platform, and then bundled up and carried to a hotel and put to bed. Hansi’s face of a young Jewish saint, Hansi’s soulful dark eyes, Hansi’s dream of loveliness embodied in sound, drove the ladies quite beside themselves; they listened with hands clasped together, they rushed to the platform and would have thrown themselves at his feet, to say nothing of his head. But there was that erect and watchful-eyed granddaughter of the Puritans, with a formula which she said as often as it was called for: “I do everything for my husband that he requires—absolutely everything!”
The other members of the party were Freddi Robin’s wife, and her baby boy, a month older than little Frances. Freddi was at the University of Berlin, hoping to get a degree in economics. Rahel, a serious, gentle girl, contributed a mezzo-soprano voice to the choir of the yacht; also she led in singing choruses. With two pianos, a violin, a clarinet, and Mr. Dingle’s mouth-organ, they could sail the Mediterranean in safety, being able to drown out the voices of any sirens who might still be sitting on its rocky shores.
VII
If music be the food of love, play on! They were gathered in Lanny’s studio at Bienvenu, which had been built for Marcel and in which he had done his best work as a painter. There were several of his works on the walls, and a hundred or so stored in a back room. The piano was the big one which Lanny had purchased for Kurt Meissner and which he had used for seven years before going back to Germany. The studio was lined with bookcases containing the library of Lanny’s great-great-uncle. Here were all sorts of memories of the dead, and hopes of the living, with cabinets of music-scores in which both kinds of human treasures had been embodied and preserved. Hansi and Bess were playing Tchaikovsky’s great concerto, which meant so much to them. Hansi had rendered it at his debut in Carnegie Hall, with Bess and her parents in the audience; a critical occasion for the anxious young lovers.
Next evening they went over to Sept Chênes to meet a distinguished company, most of the fashionable people who had not yet left the Côte d’Azur. The whole family went, including Irma and Rahel. Since it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Bienvenu, the young nursing mothers might have three hours and a half of music and social life; but they mustn’t get excited. The two of them heartened each other, making bovine life a bit more tolerable. The feat they were performing was considered picturesque, a harmless eccentricity about which the ladies gossiped; the older ones mentioned it to their husbands, but the younger ones kept quiet, not wishing to put any notions into anybody’s head. No Rousseau in our family, thank you!
Hansi and Bess played Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, a composition which audiences welcome and which has to be in the repertoire of every virtuoso: a melancholy and moving andante over which the ladies may sigh; a scherzando to which young hearts may dance over flower-strewn meadows. It was no holiday for Bess, who wasn’t sure if she was good enough for this fastidious company; but she got through it all right and received her share of compliments. Lanny, who knew the music well, permitted his eyes to roam over the audience, and wondered what they were making of it, behind the well-constructed masks they wore. What to them was the meaning of these flights of genius, these incessant calls to the human spirit, these unremitting incitements to ecstasy? Whose feet were swift enough to trip among these meadows? Whose spring was high enough to leap upon these mountain-tops? Who wept for these dying worlds? Who marched in these triumphal processions, celebrating the birth of new epochs?
The thirty-year-old Lanny Budd had come to understand his world, and no longer cherished any illusions concerning the ladies and gentlemen at a soirée musicale. Large, well-padded matrons who had been playing bridge all afternoon, and had spent so many hours choosing the fabrics, the jeweled slippers, the necklaces, brooches, and tiaras which made up their splendid ensemble—what fairy feet did they have, even in imagination? What tears did they shed for the lost hopes of mankind? There was Beauty’s friend, Madame de Sarcé, with two marriageable daughters and an adored only son who had squandered their fortune in the gambling-palaces. Lanny doubted if any one of the family was thinking about music.
And these gentlemen, with their black coats and snowy shirt-fronts in which their valets had helped to array them—what tumults of exultation thrilled their souls tonight? They had all dined well, and more than one looked drowsy. Others fixed their eyes upon the smooth bare backs of the ladies in front of them. Close to the musicians sat Graf Hohenstauffen, monocled German financier, wearing a pleased smile all through the surging finale; Lanny had heard him tell Johannes Robin that he had just come from a broker’s office where he had got the closing New York prices. In this April of 1930 there was a phenomenon under way which was being called “the little bull market”; things were picking up again, and the speculators were full of enthusiasms. Was the Graf converting Hansi’s frenzied runs on the violin into movements of stocks and bonds?
However, there might be somebody who understood, some lonely heart that hid its griefs and lived in secret inner happiness. Someone who sat silent and abstracted after the performance, too shy to approach the players and thank them; who would go out with fresh hopes for a world in which such loveliness had been embodied in sound. In any case, Hansi and Bess had done their duty by their hostess, a white-haired grande dame who would always seem wonderful to them because it was in her château near Paris that they had met and been revealed each to the other.
VIII
It was consid
ered a social triumph, but it was not sufficient for young people tinged with all the hues between pink and scarlet. In the Old Town of Cannes, down near the harbor, dwelt members of depressed classes, among whom Lanny had been going for years, teaching his ideas in a strange, non-religious Sunday school, helping with his money to found a center of what was called “workers’ education.” He had made many friends here, and had done all he could to break down the social barriers. As a result, the waiter in some fashionable café would say: “Bon soir, Comrade Lanny!” When he got out of his car to enter the Casino, or the Cercle Nautique, or some other smart place, he would be delayed by little street urchins running up to shake hands or even to throw their arms about him.
What would these people feel if they knew that the famous violinist who was Lanny’s brother-in-law had come to town and given a recital for the rich but had neglected the poor? Unthinkable to go sailing off in a luxurious pleasure yacht without even greeting the class-conscious workers! Lanny’s Socialist friend Raoul Palma, who conducted the school, had been notified of the expected visit, and had engaged a suitable hall and printed leaflets for the little street urchins to distribute. When Hansi Robin played in concert halls the rich paid as much as a hundred francs to hear him, but the workers would hear him for fifty centimes, less than a cent and a half in American money. From the point of view of Hansi’s business manager it was terrible; but Hansi was a rich man’s son and must be allowed to have his eccentricities. Wherever he went, the word would spread, and working-class leaders would come and beg his help. He was young and strong, and wanted to practice anyway, so why not do it on a platform for this most appreciative kind of audience?
Perhaps it was because they knew he was a “comrade,” and read into his music things which were not there. Anyhow, they made a demonstration out of it, they took him to their hearts, they flew with him upon the wings of song to that happy land of the future where all men would be brothers and poverty and war only an evil memory. Hansi played no elaborate composition for them, he performed no technical feats; he played simple, soul-warming music: the adagio from one of the Bach solo sonatas, followed by Scriabin’s Prelude, gently solemn, with very lovely double-stopping. Then he added bright and gay things: Percy Grainger’s arrangement of Molly on the Shore, and when they begged for more he led them into a riot with Bazzini’s Goblins’ Dance. Those goblins squeaked and squealed, they gibbered and chattered; people had never dreamed that such weird sounds could come out of a violin or anything else, and they could hardly contain their laughter and applause until the goblins had fled to their caverns or wherever they go when they have worn themselves out with dancing.
When it was late, and time to quit, Bess struck the opening chords of the Internationale. It is the work of a Frenchman, and, pink or scarlet or whatever shade in between, everybody in that crowded hall seemed to know the words; it was as if a charge of electricity had passed through the chairs on which they sat. They leaped to their feet and burst into singing, and you could no longer hear the violin. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation; arise, ye wretched of the earth!” The workers crowded about the platform, and if Hansi had let them they would have carried him, and Lanny, and Bess too, out to their car, and perhaps have hauled the car all the way to the Cap d’Antibes.
IX
The trim white Bessie Budd crept slowly beyond the breakwater of Cannes and through the Golfe Juan, passing that group of buildings with the red-tiled roofs which had been Lanny Budd’s home since his earliest memory. Now for several months the yacht was to be his home. It carried five members and a small fraction of the Robin family—if that be the way to count an infant—and four members and two fractions of the Budd family: Lanny, his wife, and their baby; Beauty, her husband, and her daughter. This was the twelve-year-old Marceline’s first yacht trip, and with her came the devoted English governess, Miss Addington; also Miss Severne, to look after Baby Frances, with one of the nursemaids assisting. Finally there was Madame Zyszynski and, it was hoped, Tecumseh with his troop of spirits, requiring no cabin-space.
A windless morning, the sea quite still, and the shore quite close. The course was eastward, and the Riviera glided past them like an endless panorama. Lanny, to whom it was as familiar as his own garden, stood by the rail and pointed out the landmarks to his friends. A most agreeable way of studying both geography and history! Amusing to take the glasses and pick out the places where he had played tennis, danced, and dined. Presently there was Monte Carlo, a little town crowded onto a rock. Lanny pointed out the hotel of Zaharoff, the munitions king, and said: “It’s the time when he sits out in the sunshine on those seats.” They searched, but didn’t see any old gentleman with a white imperial! Presently it was Menton, and Lanny said: “The villa of Blasco Ibáñez.” He had died recently, an exile from the tyranny in Spain. Yes, it was history, several thousand years of it along this shore.
Then came Italy; the border town where a young Socialist had been put out of the country for trying to protest against the murder of Matteotti. Then San Remo, where Lanny had attended the first international conference after the peace of Versailles. Much earlier, when Lanny had been fourteen, he had motored all the way down to Naples, in company with a manufacturer of soap from Reubens, Indiana. Lanny would always feel that he knew the Middle Western United States through the stories of Ezra Hackabury, who had carried little sample cakes of Bluebird Soap wherever he traveled over Europe, giving them away to beggar children, who liked their smell but not their taste. Carrara with its marbles had reminded Ezra of the new postoffice in his home town, and when he saw the leaning tower of Pisa he had remarked that he could build one of steel that would lean further, but what good would it do?
A strange coincidence: while Lanny was sitting on the deck telling stories to the Robin family, Lanny’s mother and her husband had gone to the cabin of Madame Zyszynski to find out whether Tecumseh, the Indian “control,” had kept his promise and followed her to the yacht. The Polish woman went into her trance, and right away there came the powerful voice supposed to be Iroquois, but having a Polish accent. Tecumseh said that a man was standing by his side who gave the name of Ezra, and the other name began with H, but his voice was feeble and Tecumseh couldn’t get it; it made him think of a butcher. No, the man said that he cleaned people, not animals. He knew Lanny and he knew Italy. Ask Lanny if he remembered—what was it?—something about smells in the Bay of Naples and about a man who raised angleworms. Mr. Dingle, doing the questioning, asked what that meant, but Tecumseh declared that the spirit had faded away.
So there was one of those incidents which cause the psychical researchers to prepare long reports. Beauty thought of Ezra Hackabury right away, but she didn’t know that Lanny was up on the deck telling the Robins about him, nor did she know how the Bluebird Soap man had cited the smells of the Naples waterfront as proof that romance and charm in Italy were mostly fraudulent. But Lanny remembered well, and also that the gentleman from Indiana had told him about the strange occupation of raising angleworms and planting them in the soil to keep it porous.
What were you going to make out of such an episode? Was Mr. Hackabury really there? Was he dead? Lanny hadn’t heard from him for years. He sat down and wrote a letter, to be mailed at Genoa, not mentioning anything about spirits, but saying that he was on his way to Naples, planning to retrace the cruise of the yacht Bluebird, and did his old friend remember the drive they had taken and the smells of the bay? And how was the man who raised angleworms making out? Lanny added: “Let me know how you are, for my mother and I often talk about your many kindnesses to us.” He hoped that, if Ezra Hackabury was dead, some member of his family might be moved to reply.
X
They went ashore at Genoa, to inspect that very ancient city. They had in Lanny a cicerone who had wandered about the streets during several weeks of the Genoa Conference. A spice of excitement was added by the fact that he wouldn’t be allowed to enter the country if he were identified. But local officers w
ould hardly know about that old-time misadventure, or cross-question fashionable people coming ashore from a private yacht; they could hardly check every tourist by the records of the Fascist militi in Rome.
No question was raised. Italy was a poor country, and visitors brought much-needed foreign exchange; the richer they were, the more welcome—a rule that holds good in most parts of the world. They engaged three cars and were driven about the town, which is crowded between mountains and sea, and since it cannot float on the latter is forced to climb the former. Ancient tall buildings jammed close together; churches having façades with stripes of white and black marble, and inside them monotonous paintings of sorrowful Italian women with infants in their arms. Before the shrines were wax images of parts of the body which had been miraculously healed, displays not usually seen outside of hospitals. Mr. Dingle might have been interested, but he had a deep-seated prejudice against the Catholic system, which he called idolatrous. Mr. Hackabury had had the same idea.
Lanny showed them the old Palazzo di San Giorgio, where the conference had been held, a dingy and depressing place, in keeping with the results of the assemblage. Lloyd George had made the most inspiring promises of peace and prosperity to the representatives of twenty-nine nations; after which, behind the scenes, the leaders had spent six weeks wrangling over what oil concessions the Russians were to make to what nations. Lanny’s father had been here, trying to get a share; it had been his first fiasco, and the beginning of a chain of them for all parties concerned. Instead of peace the nations had got more armaments and more debts. Instead of prosperity had come a financial collapse in Wall Street, and all were trembling lest it spread to the rest of the world.
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 97