Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Lanny telephoned his old friend Emily Chattersworth, who took care of the cultural activities of this part of the Riviera. Her drawing-room was much larger than any at Bienvenu, and people were used to coming there whenever a celebrity was available. Hansi Robin always played for her, and the fashionable folk who cared for music and the musical folk who were socially acceptable would be invited to Sept Chênes for a treat. Emily would send Hansi a check, and he would endorse it over to be used for the workers’ educational project which was Lanny’s special hobby.

  Just before sundown of that day Lanny and Irma sat on the loggia of their home, which looked out over the Golfe Juan, and watched the trim white Bessie Budd glide into the harbor of Cannes. They knew her a long way off, for she had been their home during the previous summer, and Lanny had taken two other cruises in her. With a pair of field-glasses they could recognize Captain Moeller, who had had a chance to marry them but had funked it. They could almost imagine they heard his large Prussian voice when it was time to slow down for passing the breakwater.

  Next morning but one, Lanny drove into the city, with his little half-sister Marceline at his side and Irma’s chauffeur following with another car. The long blue express rolled in and delivered five of their closest friends, plus a secretary and a nursemaid in a uniform and cap with blue streamers, carrying an infant in arms. It was on account of this last that the cruise was being taken so early in the year; the two lactant mothers would combine their dairy farms, put them on shipboard, and transport them to delightful places of this great inland sea, famed in story.

  Just prior to the World War, Lanny Budd, a small boy traveling on a train, had met a Jewish salesman of electrical gadgets; they had liked each other, and the stranger had given Lanny his card. This small object had lain in a bureau drawer; and if, later on, Lanny hadn’t happened to be rummaging in that drawer, how much would have been different in his life! He wouldn’t have written to Johannes Robin, and Johannes wouldn’t have come to call on him in Paris, and met Lanny’s father, and with the father’s money become one of the richest men in Germany. Lanny’s half-sister wouldn’t have met Hansi Robin, and shocked her family by marrying a Jewish musician. The yacht wouldn’t have been called the Bessie Budd, and wouldn’t have taken Lanny and his family on three cruises, and been the means of Lanny and Irma’s getting married in a hurry. They mightn’t have got married at all, and there wouldn’t have been any honeymoon cruise to New York, or any Baby Frances, or any floating dairy farm! In short, if that business card, “Johannes Robin, Agent, Maatschappij voor Electrische Specialiteiten, Rotterdam,” had stayed covered up by Lanny Budd’s neckties and handkerchiefs most of Lanny’s life would have been missing!

  VI

  Two happy members of the prosperous classes welcoming five of their intimate friends on the platform of a railroad station. Everybody there knew who the Budds were, and knew that when they hugged and kissed people, and laughed and chatted with them gaily, the people must be wealthy and famous like themselves. A pleasant thing to have friends whom you can love and appreciate, and who will love and appreciate you. Pleasant also to have villas and motorcars and yachts; but many people do not have them, and do not have many dear friends. They know themselves to be dull and undistinguished, and feel themselves to be lonely; they stand and watch with a sad envy the behavior of the fortunate classes on those few occasions when they condescend to manifest their feelings in public.

  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 considered 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 munitio
ns 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.