Lanny well knew that his father wasn’t very sensitive when he was on the trail of a business deal; but then, neither is a spider, a wolf, or a devil. “I hope you do,” he said.
“He means to buy the shares himself,” continued Robbie. “It will take a lot of bargaining. Don’t let him see too much of the woman until he pays up.”
“The more he sees, the more he may want,” countered the son.
“Yes, but suppose he buys her away from you entirely?”
“That’s a chance we have to take, I suppose.”
“My guess is he won’t be able to believe that the thing is on the level. If he gets results, he’ll be sure you told the woman in advance.”
“Well,” said the young idealist, “he’ll be punishing his own sins. Goethe has a saying that all guilt avenges itself upon earth.”
But Robbie wasn’t any more interested in spirituality than he was in spirits. “If I can swing this deal, I’ll be able to pay off the notes that I gave you and Beauty and Marceline.”
“You don’t have to worry about those notes, Robbie. We aren’t suffering.”
“All the same, it’s not pleasant to know that I took the money which you had got by selling Marcel’s paintings.”
“If it hadn’t been for you,” said the young philosopher, “I wouldn’t have been here, Beauty would have married some third-rate painter in Montmartre, and Marceline wouldn’t have been traveling about in a private yacht. I have pointed that out to them.”
“All the same,” said Robbie, “I came over here to sell those shares. Let’s get as much of the old rascal’s money as we can.”
Lanny had made jokes about the firm of “R and R.” In the days when his mother and Bess had been trying to find him a wife, there had been a firm of “B and B.” Now he said: “We’ll have a ‘Z and Z.’”
VII
Back in Paris Lanny might have sat in at a conference and learned about the rearmament plans of the Rumanian government; but he had an engagement with Zoltan Kertezsi to visit the Salon and discuss the state of the picture market. The blond Hungarian was one of those happy people who never look a day older; always he had just discovered something new and exciting in the art world, always he wanted to tell you about it with a swift flow of words, and always his rebellious hair and fair mustache seemed to be sharing in his gestures. There wasn’t anything first rate in the Salon, he reported, but there was a young Russian genius, Alexander Jacovleff, being shown at one of the galleries; a truly great draftsman, and Lanny must come and have a look right away. Also, Zoltan had come upon a discovery, a set of Blake water-color drawings which had been found in an old box in a manor-house in Surrey; they were genuine, and still fresh in color; nobody else on earth could have done such angels and devils; doubtless they had been colored by Blake’s wife, but that was true of many Blakes. They ought to fetch at least a thousand pounds apiece—
Immediately Lanny began running over in his mind the names of persons who might be interested in such a treasure trove. It wasn’t only because Zoltan would pay him half the commission; it was because it was a game that he had learned to play. No use for Irma to object, no use to think that the money she deposited to his account would ever bring him the same thrills as he got from putting through a deal.
“We shan’t be able to get what we used to,” said the friend. “You’d be astonished the way prices are being cut.”
No matter; the pictures were just as beautiful, and if you kept your tastes simple, you could live and enjoy them. But the dealers who had loaded themselves up were going to have trouble paying their high rents; and the poor devils who did the painting would wander around with their canvases under their arms, and set them up in the windows of tobacco-shops and every sort of place, coming back two or three times a day and gazing at them wistfully, hoping that this might cause some passer-by to stop and take an interest.
Paris in the springtime was lovely, as always, and the two friends strolled along, feasting their eyes upon the chestnut blossoms and their olfactories upon the scents of flowerbeds. Zoltan was near fifty, but he acted and talked as young as his friend; he was full of plans to travel here and there, to see this and that. He was always meeting some delightful new person, discovering some new art treasure. Happy indeed is the man with whom business and pleasure are thus combined! A thousand old masters had made life easy for him, by producing works over which he could rave and feel proud when he secured one for some customer.
There were always wealthy persons on the hunt for famous works of art; and Zoltan would caution his Pink friend not to be too contemptuous in his attitude toward such persons. Many were ignorant and pretentious, but others were genuine art lovers who could be helped and encouraged; and that was not only good business, it was a public service, for many of these collections would come to museums in the end. Zoltan didn’t know much about economics, and didn’t bother his head with Lanny’s revolutionary talk; he said that, no matter what happened, the paintings would survive, and people would want to see them, and there would be occupation for the man who had cultivated his tastes and could tell the rare and precious from the cheap and common.
VIII
Lanny rented a car and motored Zoltan out to have lunch with Emily Chattersworth at her estate, Les Forêts, where she spent the greater part of each year, a very grand place of which Lanny had memories from childhood. On this lawn under the great beechtrees he had listened to Anatole France exposing the scandals of the kings and queens of old-time France. In this drawing-room he had played the piano for Isadora Duncan, and had been invited to elope with her. Here also he had played accompaniments for Hansi, the day when Hansi and Bess had met and fallen irrevocably in love.
The white-haired châtelaine wanted to hear the news of all the families. She was interested in the story of Zaharoff and the duquesa, whom she had known. Emily had had a séance with Madame Zyszynski, but hadn’t got any significant results; it must be because she was hostile to the idea, and had frightened the spirits! She preferred to ask Zoltan’s opinion of the Salon, which she had visited. Having a couple of paintings which no longer appealed to her taste, she showed them to the expert and heard his estimate of what they might bring. She told him not to hurry; she had lost a lot of money, as everybody else had, but apparently it was only a paper loss, for the stocks were still paying dividends. Lanny advised her not to count on that.
A young Pink wouldn’t come to Paris without calling at the office of Le Populaire and exchanging ideas with Jean Longuet and Léon Blum. Lanny knew what they thought, because he read their paper, but they would want to hear how the workers’ education movement was going in the Midi, and what the son of an American industrialist had seen in the Soviet Union. From a luncheon with Longuet, Lanny strolled to look at picture exhibitions, and then climbed the Butte de Montmartre to the unpretentious apartment where Jesse Blackless was in the midst of composing a manifesto to be published in L’Humanité, denouncing Longuet and his paper as agents and tools of capitalist reaction. When Jesse learned that his nephew had been to Odessa he began to ply him with questions, eager for every crumb of reassurance as to the progress of the Five-Year Plan.
Jesse lived here with his companion, a Communist newspaper employee. Theirs was a hard-working life with few pleasures; Jesse had no time to paint, he said; the reactionaries were getting ready to shut down upon the organized workers and put them out of business. The next elections in France might be the last to be held under the Republic. Lanny’s Red uncle lived under the shadow of impending class war; his life was consecrated to hating the capitalist system and teaching others to share that feeling.
He was going into this campaign to fight both capitalists and Socialists. Lanny thought it was a tragedy that the labor groups couldn’t get together to oppose enemies so much stronger than themselves. But there couldn’t be collaboration between those who thought the change might be brought about by parliamentary action and those who thought that it would have to be done b
y force. When you used the last phrase to Jesse Blackless, he would insist that it was the capitalists who would use force, and that the attitude of the workers was purely defensive; they would be attacked, their organizations overthrown—the whole pattern had been revealed in Italy.
Lanny would answer: “That is just quibbling. The Communists take an attitude which makes force inevitable. If you start to draw a gun on a man, he knows that his life depends upon his drawing first.”
Could capitalism be changed gradually? Could the job be done by voting some politicians out of office and voting others in? Lanny had come upon a quotation of Karl Marx, admitting that a gradual change might be brought about in the Anglo-Saxon countries, which had had parliamentary institutions for a long time. Most Reds didn’t know that their master had said that, and wouldn’t believe it when you told them; it seemed to give the whole Bolshevik case away. Jesse said that quoting Marx was like quoting the Bible: you could find anything you wanted.
They went on arguing, saying little that they hadn’t said before. Presently Françoise came in, and they stopped, because she didn’t share the carefree American sense of humor, and would get irritated with Lanny. He told her the good things about the Soviet Union; and soon came Suzette, her young sister, married to one of the murderous taxi drivers of Paris. Uncle Jesse said this garçon had the right solution of the social problem: to run over all the bourgeois, while using Suzette to increase the Red population. They had a second baby.
The women set to work to prepare supper, and Lanny excused himself and walked back to the Crillon to meet his father. When Robbie asked: “What have you been doing?” he answered: “Looking at pictures.” It was the truth and nothing but the truth—yet not the whole truth!
IX
One other duty: a visit to the Château de Bruyne. Lanny had promised Marie on her deathbed that he would never forget her two boys. There wasn’t much that he could do for them, but they were friendly fellows and glad to tell him of their doings. He phoned to the father, who came and motored him out. Denis de Bruyne, though somewhat over severity, was vigorous; his hair had become white, and his dark, sad eyes and pale aristocratic features made him a person of distinction. He was glad to see Lanny because of the memories they shared.
On the way they talked politics, and it was curious to note how the same world could appear so different to two different men. Denis de Bruyne, capitalist on a modest scale, owner of a fleet of taxicabs and employer of Suzette’s husband—though he didn’t know it—agreed with Jesse Blackless that the Communists were strong in Paris and other industrial centers and that they meant to use force if they could get enough of it. Denis’s conception of statesmanship was to draw the gun first. He was a Nationalist, and was going to put up money to keep Jesse and his sort from getting power. Lanny listened, and this was agreeable to an entrepreneur who was so certain of his own position.
Denis de Bruyne was worried about the state of his country, which was in a bad way financially, having counted upon German reparations and been cheated out of most of her expectations. A French Nationalist blamed the British business men and statesmen; Britain was no true ally of France, but a rival; Britain used Germany to keep France from growing strong. Why did American business men further this policy, helping Germany to get on her feet, which meant making her a danger to France? Foreign investors had lent Germany close to five billion dollars since the end of the war: why did they take such risks?
Lanny replied: “Well, if they hadn’t, how would Germany have paid France any reparations at all?”
“She would have paid if she had been made to,” replied Denis. He didn’t say how, and Lanny knew better than to pin him down. The men who governed France hadn’t learned much by their invasion of the Ruhr and its failure; they still thought that you could produce goods by force, that you could get money with bayonets. It was useless to argue with them; their fear of Germany was an obsession. And maybe they were right—how could Lanny be sure? Certainly there were plenty of men in Germany who believed in force and meant to use it if they could get enough of it. Lanny had met them also.
Denis wanted to know what was going to be the effect of the Wall Street collapse upon French affairs. The season was beginning, and many of the fashionable folk were not here. Would the tourists fail to show up this summer? A question of urgency to the owner of a fleet of taxicabs! Lanny said he was afraid that Paris would have to do what New York had done—draw in its belt. When Denis asked what Robbie thought about the prospects, Lanny reported his father’s optimism, and Denis was pleased, having more respect for Robbie’s judgment than for Lanny’s.
The Château de Bruyne was no great showplace like Balincourt and Les Forêts, but a simple country home of red stone; its title was a tribute to its age, and the respect of the countryside for an old family. It had been one of Lanny’s homes, off and on, for some six years. The servants knew him, the old dog knew him, he felt that even the fruit trees knew him. Denis, fils, had got himself a wife of the right sort, and she was here, learning the duties of a châtelaine; they had a baby boy, so the two young fathers could make jokes about a possible future union of the families. Charlot, the younger brother, was studying to be an engineer, which meant that he might travel to far parts of the earth; incidentally, he was interested in politics, belonging to one of the groups of aggressive French patriots. Lanny didn’t say much about his own ideas—he never had, for it had been his privilege to be the lover of Denis’s wife, but not the corrupter of his sons. All that he could hope for was to moderate their vehemence by talking about toleration and open-mindedness.
The two young men—one was twenty-four and the other a year younger—looked up to Lanny as to an abnormally wise and brilliant person. They knew about his marriage, and thought it a coronation. In this opinion their mother would have joined, for she had had a Frenchwoman’s thorough-going respect for property. The French, along with most other Europeans, were fond of saying that the Americans worshiped the dollar; a remark upon which Zoltan Kertezsi had commented in a pithy sentence: “The Americans worship the dollar and the French worship the sou.”
5
From the Vasty Deep
I
Lanny rejoined the Bessie Budd at Lisbon, and they sailed again and put in at the yacht basin of Cowes. Awaiting them was a letter from Johannes, saying that he was tied up in some bad business, so no use hurrying to Bremen; also a letter from Rick, begging them to come to The Reaches for a few days; he and his wife hadn’t seen them for a whole year. Lanny consulted Mama, and then “shot a wire” to Rick, inviting him to bring his wife and their oldest boy for a short cruise.
Friendship is a delightful thing when you have had the good judgment to choose the right friends. Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson had come in the course of the years to be the most congenial of Lanny’s friends. It could be doubted whether the younger man would have had the courage to stick to so many unorthodox ideas if it hadn’t been for Rick’s support. The baronet’s son watched everything that went on in the world, analyzed the various tendencies, and set forth his understanding of them in newspaper articles which Lanny would clip and send to persons with whom he got into arguments. Not that he ever converted anybody, but he kept his cause alive.
Rick was only about a year and a half the elder, but Lanny was in the habit of deferring to him, which pleased Rick’s wife and didn’t altogether displease Rick. Whenever the Englishman wrote another play, Lanny was sure it was bound to make the long-awaited “hit.” When it didn’t, there was always a reason: that Rick persisted in dealing with social problems from a point of view unpopular with those who bought the best seats in theaters. The young playwright was fortunate in having parents who believed in him and gave him and his family a home while he wrote the truth as he saw it.
Nearly thirteen years had passed since a very young English flier had crashed in battle, and been found with a gashed forehead and a broken and badly infected knee. In the course of time he had learned to live wi
th his lameness. He could go bathing from the special landing-place which Lanny had had made for him at Bienvenu; and now the carpenter of the Bessie Budd bolted two handles onto the landing-stage of the yacht’s gangway, so that a man with good stout arms could lift himself out of the water without any help. He would unstrap his leg-brace, slide in, and enjoy himself just as if humanity had never been cursed with a World War.
II
Nina was her usual kind and lovely self, and as for Little Alfy—he had to be called that on account of his grandfather the baronet, but it hardly fitted him any more, for he had grown tall and leggy for his almost thirteen years. He had dark hair and eyes like his father’s, and was, as you might have expected, extremely precocious; he knew a little about all the various political movements, also the art movements, and would use their patter in a fashion which made it hard for you to keep from smiling. He had thin, sensitive features and was serious-minded, which made him the predestined victim of Marceline Detaze, the little flirt, the little minx. Marceline didn’t know anything about politics, but she knew some of the arts, including that of coquetry. Half French and half American, she also had been brought up among older people, but of a different sort. From the former Baroness de la Tourette, the hardware lady from Cincinnati, she had learned the trick of saying outrageous things with a perfectly solemn face and then bursting into laughter at a sober lad’s look of bewilderment. Apparently Alfy never would learn about it.
The families had planned a match for these two by cable as soon as they had appeared on the scene. The parents made jokes about it, in the free and easy modern manner, and the children had taken up the practice. “I’ll never marry you if you don’t learn to dance better,” Marceline would announce. Alfy, peeved, would respond: “You don’t have to marry me if you don’t want to.” He would never have the least idea what was coming next. One time her feelings would be hurt, and the next time she would be relieved of a great burden; but whichever it was, it would turn out to be teasing, and Alfy would be like a man pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp on a dark night.
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