She and Lanny rehearsed those gay and graceful forms of bodily expression which Lanny had begun while playing with the fisher children on the beach at Juan; which he had disciplined at the Dalcroze school in Hellerau, and had set free again while watching Isadora Duncan through the years. He had begun teaching Marceline when she was just able to toddle, and they had played together on a hundred dancing floors, until they had become as one person, knowing each other’s every impulse even before it was born. This ease and grace gave delight to any sort of audience; and Marceline, an extrovert, living to be admired, would catch the crowd excitement, be swept away by it and dance like one possessed.
Of course the gossips had been busy with her story; everybody in this fashionable company knew that her man had “done her dirt,” and everybody knew that this was her defiance, her announcement that she wasn’t going to whimper or weaken. They admired her for it, and called her out again and again, and warmed the hearts of both the dancing pair. Lanny saw once more what his half-sister was meant to be; and Marceline had known it for a long time.
The consequences were immediate. At lunchtime next day—or rather, that same day, since they had danced until long after midnight—the telephone rang, and a man announced himself as M. Cassin, proprietor of the Coque d’Or, one of the smartest of the Cannes night clubs. He wanted to know if he might come over to talk with M. Budd and Madame Marceline—so he called her—about the possibility of their appearing in his floor show. Lanny said that he might come, and Marceline pretty nearly blew up with delight. She forgot her ice-cold melon and began capering all about the room. The shocked Beauty exclaimed: “My child! Would you be willing to dance in a place like that? And for money?”
“Hell!” said the child. “What do you suppose I would dance for?” Then, seeing the pained look on her mother’s face: “Didn’t you pose for painters for money?” She didn’t have to add “in the altogether,” for Beauty knew that several years ago, rummaging in the storeroom, Marceline had come upon that painting of her mother which Lanny had found in an art-dealer’s shop and had purchased, but which the respectable widow of Marcel Detaze didn’t wish him to hang upon any wall in Bienvenu.
Brother and sister talked it out. Lanny said that he hadn’t the time and didn’t care for the life. But Marceline begged and clamored; he must do her this one favor, just this one, and she would be off his hands forever; just help her to get a start and she would never trouble him again. This was what she wanted, to be a dancer; she had everything that it took, youth, beauty, grace, verve—she said it herself, knowing that it was true and that Lanny knew it. She wanted money, and this was the way to get it; she wanted independence, a career, a chance to make the headlines and to shine. Never mind if he approved it or not; just grant her the right to be herself, and give her one good push.
Beauty suggested, feebly: “If you would do it for charity—” and the daughter replied: “Charity, the devil!” But Lanny pointed out, it was important to keep her social prestige, to be a Budd as well as a Detaze; she would get more money that way. So then she said: “I’ll let it be announced that the engagement is for charity and that will set the tone; then after the first week there can be an engagement for me. Oh, Lanny, you must do it! Just one week! Then if I make a hit I can get somebody else. You can pick any charity you please, and make all the arrangements. I’ll do whatever you say. Oh, please, please!”
So finally Lanny said: “All right; but let me do the talking to that fellow.”
IV
M. Robert Cassin introduced himself as an “impresario,” and said that he had been told about the triumph which the dancing pair had achieved last night. Previously he had seen them dancing at the casino and other places, and knew about the family and its exalted social position. There was much curiosity concerning the pair in those circles which would like to get into smart society but couldn’t. M. Cassin knew that he couldn’t tempt them with money, he said, tactfully, but they would give refined pleasure to a great many people, and might help to raise the standard of dancing on the Côte d’Azur, which was far from high at present.
Lanny replied: “This is something quite out of our line; but my sister enjoys dancing, and people enjoy seeing her. If we do it, the money will go to the fund for the widows and orphans of fishermen here on the coast, some of whom were my playmates in boyhood. You might advertise that fact.”
“Magnifique, M. Budd! That will be très snob.” The French had managed to find a worthy significance in this word.
“And how much would you offer us?”
The “impresario” hemmed and hawed. For charity—for widows and orphans of the men who were injured or drowned in these sometimes stormy waters—one would have to be proud to contribute. Would ten thousand francs a week—?
Lanny answered promptly that it wouldn’t. That was only about three hundred dollars, less than fifty dollars a night. “My idea is a round fifty thousand francs for the week.”
M. Cassin was shocked, or so pretended. They had an argument on the subject of how many smart people would come to the Coque d’Or and how much they would spend for food and drink. At the end they compromised on three thousand francs a night, to be paid each night in cash to the secretary of the fund. The proprietor said he would make a ceremony out of it, he would pay the money after the last of three appearances by the couple, and tell the audience what he was doing. A master of ceremonies likes to have things to talk about, and this would confer great éclat.
Lanny added: “If the engagement is a success, my sister might wish to continue. I would not be interested myself, because I have other work which keeps me busy; therefore I suggest that you feature her in the billing. She will use the name Marceline, and you may point out that she is the daughter of one of France’s most eminent painters.”
“You might add that some of his paintings have been sold for as high as two hundred thousand francs apiece,” put in Marceline. Even if she wasn’t allowed to sell those paintings, she was surely allowed to advertise them!
V
The hour when this child of fortune first stepped forth as a professional performer was the greatest hour of her life so far. She was shivering with nervousness, but nobody was allowed to see it; she knew what she was doing, and was perfectly right in her statement that she had what it takes. In a night club you perform only for the rich, and Marceline had been one of them all her life, and they knew it. Many in her first audience were the same friends for whom she had danced at Sophie’s, and before that at Emily’s and in her mother’s home. Lanny accompanied her modestly, doing everything he could to put her forward and display her charms. The affair went off like magic; word went out that here was a new sensation—and when the bored victims of snobisme discover a new sensation, they pay for it gladly. The nightclub gentleman was delighted with his bargain, and told Marceline that he would be happy to have her continue with any partner of her choice.
So, after a few hours’ sleep, the new sensation had herself driven to the casino at Nice, where she entered quietly and sat for an hour watching the gigolos, the dancing men who were hired by ladies who because of age or lack of charms had nobody to companion them. Marceline went from one place to another, looking for a boy who was young and agile, and had a reasonable amount of talent; she was going to hire him permanently and train him. She knew what she wanted, and found him without too much delay, brought him to Juan and put him up at a hotel, took him every night to the Coque d’Or to watch her performances, and then, in the afternoons, had Lanny drill him and teach him the steps.
He was an eager if somewhat corrupt youth, and did reasonably well. Within two weeks after the close of the engagement with Lanny, Marceline was ready to show her new partner to the “impresario,” and they bargained again; this time Marceline took charge, for she said she might as well learn. She got a two-weeks’ engagement at twenty-five thousand francs a week, and there wasn’t any nonsense about charity this time; the night club was to have the option to renew
for as many weeks as it pleased at the same rate, and that was all right with the dancer, because she could live at home free of charge, and she liked to dance for people she knew and to chat with them between the turns. As for her new partner, she was paying him two thousand francs a week, which was more than he had ever seen in his life before; he had agreed to work for a year on that basis. One other proviso in the agreement: No love-making! “That nonsense is out for me,” Marceline told him; and in the privacy of her family she added: “If any man ever makes love to me again, he’s going to pay for it, I’ll tell the world!”
So that was that, and Lanny could consider that the problem of his half-sister had been solved; no longer would she be complaining, and blaming him for her frustrations. All he could do for her now was to help her think up new ideas—for of course she wouldn’t want to go on doing the same old things. She wanted to know about Isadora, and how she had made such a sensation. There would be no “Red” nonsense in the career of Marceline, of course, nor would she waste herself getting drunk, or trying to start a school and teach children; enough if she could teach herself and one indispensable man. When the winter season came, she would want to go to Paris; and what would be the best place for her début, and would Lanny try to pull some strings for her? Emily would give her an engagement at Les Forêts; and what: about Baron Schneider, and the Due de Belleaumont, and Graf Herzenberg, and Olivie Hellstein? Marceline would accumulate a cardfile, like her brother; and Beauty would begin pulling strings—just as she had done for Robbie’s munitions, and then for Marcel’s paintings, and then for Lanny’s old-masterings!
VI
While sharing these events, Lanny was not entirely idle politically. He met influential Fascists on the Riviera, and listened while they discussed their plans for the undermining of the North American states and the taking over of those in South America. As soon as Franco’s rule was secure—and it couldn’t be long now—his state would become the motherland of a new Spanish-American empire, built upon the Fascist formula. Spain had always been the cultural center for these lands, and Spanish Fascism, standing upon a firm Catholic foundation, would not antagonize the somewhat primitive peoples of South America as Nazism had done. This was explained to the Norte Americano by a Spanish bishop in exile to whom Lanny listened attentively, giving the Most Reverend Father cause to hope that his listener was on the way to becoming a convert. Afterwards Lanny went home and wrote a report—but not for El Papa.
If you stayed on the Riviera long enough, you met “everybody”—meaning, of course, everybody who was rich and important. At Sophie’s Lanny ran into Charles Bedaux, Franco-American millionaire who had been one of the guests at Baron Schneider’s dinner in Paris. An extraordinary person, he had emigrated to the United States as a penniless laborer and worked as a bottle-washer in a New York waterfront saloon, then as a “sandhog,” boring tunnels under rivers. With his eager and alert mind, nothing could keep him down; he had devised a method of timing the motions of every sort of labor; the “Bedaux system” had been installed all over the world, and he had made so much money he had a shooting box in Scotland and palaces all over Europe where he entertained the great and famous.
He knew Lanny’s father and mother and Lanny’s former wife and everybody in their great world. He had just come back from Salamanca, where he had talked with Franco and Juan March, Franco’s money backer. Bedaux admitted that he, too, had invested heavily in Spanish “Nationalist” bonds. He had a châlet on the Obersalzberg where he had spent the previous summer and had visited the Berghof frequently; the home of the Donnersteins was near by, and Hilde was one of his intimates. A big man with a fat face, an eager manner, and a loose tongue, he was a goldmine of information about the big-money world and its denizens. He was all tied up in the Nazi-Fascist schemes, and with money-making on an international scale—always a bit dubious—but he had no reserves with the son of Budd-Erling, merchant of death. All Hitler’s intimates, Göring and Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Abetz and Wiedemann, even Max Amman, the Führer’s publisher, were investing huge sums outside Germany, and Bedaux was their adviser and silent partner. After talks with him, Lanny had a long report to write.
Also, with his stepfather he continued experiments in psychic research. He tried out the idea of hypnotizing a medium and endeavoring thus to shape the developments of a séance. Perhaps he overworked Madame, or produced confusion in her various subconscious minds; anyhow, the results were one of those dreary stretches which try the patience of psychic investigators. Lanny had been fortunate over a long period of time, but now he got only scraps and irrelevancies, with just enough that was real to tantalize him and keep him trying. Tecumseh resumed laughing at him; and could it be that this malicious old personality was deliberately destroying Madame as a medium, the source of his own being? Was she really the source, or could he wreck her and then go off and enjoy himself elsewhere? Lanny reread Morton Prince’s Dissociation of a Personality, the case record of a young lady of Boston whose subconscious mind had developed five different personalities. One of them, called “Sally,” was a demon, a mischief maker identical with those one read about in ancient fable. Dr. Prince was able to kill her in the mind of Miss Beauchamp, but Lanny’s efforts to kill Tecumseh only caused that grim old Amerindian to express scorn.
VII
Also Lanny read the newspapers of London and Paris, which reached him one day late, and watched the slow preparation of that tragedy which he had foretold to F.D.R. Poor compensation to be able to say: “I told you so!” Rick sent him a beautifully written article about the people who had maintained for many centuries the ancient kingdom of Bohemia, and now had built the modern republic of Czechoslovakia, and were trying to protect it in the midst of many angry dictatorships. Lanny had never visited Prague, but he had seen pictures of that romantic old city and had imagined it while listening to Smetana’s tone poem of the River Moldau. In Paris he had met Professor Masaryk, son of a coachman and a cook, who had begun as apprentice to a locksmith and a blacksmith, and had ended at the age of eighty-five as founder and president of the most liberal democracy on the Continent. His foreign minister and successor, Beneš, pronounced Béhn-esh, was a peasant’s son, one of the few diplomats of Europe who said that he spoke the truth and spoke the truth when he said it.
Now the great boa-constrictor called Nazism was getting ready to swallow this small mountain-girded state. Hitler had had his agitators among the Sudeten Germans from the beginning; their Führer was a bank-clerk named Henlein who had become head of the Turnvereine, the gymnastic societies which were camouflage for Stormtroop armies all over the world. Their technique was identical with that used in Austria: agitate, organize, make trouble, and then, when you are suppressed, clamor against “persecution.” The Germans in Czechoslovakia were citizens with equal rights and liberties, and that suited most of them; but not the Nazi agitators and terrorists, who had money, arms, and propaganda literature in an unending stream. The Hitler borders had been increased in length by the taking of Austria, and the position of the Czechs was exactly that of a soft woolly lamb in a boa-constrictor’s mouth.
Lanny had thought it was all over in the month of May, for Henlein came to London and was received by the leading Tories, and spent a week-end at Wickthorpe Castle. Rick wasn’t invited there any more, but living not far away he heard the gossip, and wrote that Chamberlain had definitely decided to deliver the Sudetens as the price of peace in Europe. Hitler declared that this was the last demand he had to make on the Continent, and the British Tories wanted desperately to believe him.
But they had reckoned without the Czechs, who thought something of their liberties and didn’t intend to be given away. When the Nazi armies moved toward their borders, the Czechs mobilized and announced their will to fight. The French were pledged to come to their aid, and the Russians were pledged to join the French. Europe hung on the verge of war, and Hitler wasn’t ready for it; he backed down, his first big defeat—and Lanny imagined the rug
-chewing that must be going on in Berchtesgaden, and wished he had stayed to see the show. But that joy in his heart didn’t last very long; he knew that Adi would never give up his purpose, and Rick wrote that the Tories would give up anything that wasn’t British. Lanny burned letters like these, taking no chance that they might somehow fall into the hands of his enemies.
VIII
Beauty could be spared now, since Marceline had her career for company, and had got a competent nurse to take care of the baby. Lanny agreed to drive his mother and stepfather to London, with some necessary stop-overs. One was at Le Creusot, gigantic forge of Vulcan; the couple stayed in a smokestained hotel while Lanny spent the night at La Verrerie. He had been asked by his father to cultivate Schneider, and had assented gladly, for the Baron was a pipeline into the center of French financial and political affairs. What this elderly hawk-nosed moneymaster believed and desired affected the destinies of every Frenchman alive, and of millions of other persons who had never even heard his name. It seemed to Lanny Budd a defect in education for democracy, that the people knew so much about the politicians and so little about the men who made the politicians and paid their fares on the bandwagon.
Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 70