Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  That was what the National Socialist movement meant to Kurt Meissner. He and his young wife listened with eager attention while Lanny told about his meeting with Adolf Hitler; then Herr Meissner asked to have the story told to his family, and later on the lord of the Schloss wanted his friends to hear it. They questioned the visitor closely as to just what Adi’s program now was; and of course Lanny knew what was in their minds. Had the Führer of the Nazis really dropped that crazy Socialist stuff with which he had set out on his career? Could he be depended upon as a bulwark against Bolshevism, a terror so real to the people on Germany’s eastern border? Would he let the landowners alone and devote himself to rearming the country, and forcing the Allies to permit the return of Stubendorf and the other lost provinces, the Corridor and the colonies? If the Germans in exile could be sure of these things, they might be willing to support him, or at any rate not oppose him actively.

  IV

  Kurt had composed a symphony, which he called Das Vaterland. He and his adoring wife had copied out the parts for an orchestra of twenty pieces, and Kurt had engaged musicians from the near-by towns, of course at the Graf’s expense. They had been thoroughly drilled, and now played the new work before a distinguished company on Christmas night. This was the high point of Lanny’s visit, and indeed of his stay in Germany. In his boyhood he had taken Kurt Meissner as his model of all things noble and inspiring; he had predicted for him a shining future, and felt justified when he saw all the hochgeborer Herrscbaften of Kurt’s own district assembled to do him honor.

  During the composer’s time in Bienvenu his work had been full of bitterness and revolt, but since he had come home he had apparently managed to find courage and hope. He didn’t write program music, and Lanny didn’t ask what the new work was supposed to signify; indeed, he would rather not be told, for the military character of much of the music suggested it was meant for the Nazis. It pictured the coming of a deliverer, it portrayed the German people arising and marching to their world destiny; at its climax, they could no longer keep in march tempo, but broke into dancing; great throngs of them went exulting into the future, endless companies of young men and maidens, of that heroic and patriotic sort that Heinrich Jung and Hugo Behr were training.

  The music didn’t actually say that, and every listener was free to make up his own story. Lanny chose to include youths and maidens of all lands in that mighty dancing procession. He remembered how they had felt at Hellerau, in the happy days before the war had poisoned the minds of the peoples. Then internationalism had not been a Schimpfwort, and it had been possible to listen to Schubert’s C-major symphony and imagine a triumphal procession shared by Jews and Russians, by young men and maidens from Asia and even from Africa.

  Irma was much impressed by the welcome this music received. She decided that Kurt must be a great man, and that Beauty should be proud of having had such a lover, and of having saved him from a French firing-squad. She decided that it was a distinguished thing to have a private orchestra, and asked her husband if it wouldn’t be fun to have one at Bienvenu. They must be on the lookout for a young genius to promote.

  Lanny knew that his wife was casting around in her mind for some sort of career, some way to spend her money that would win his approval as well as that of their friends. She had timidly broached the idea of becoming a salonnière, like Emily. He had felt compelled to point out that this was a difficult thing to do, for it was better to have no salon at all than to have a second-rate one, and the eminent persons who frequent such assemblages expect the hostess not merely to have read their books but to have understood them. It isn’t enough to admire them extravagantly—indeed they rather look down on you unless you can find something wrong with their work.

  Now Lanny had to mention that musical geniuses are apt to be erratic, and often it is safer to know them through their works. One cannot advertise for one as for a butler or a chef; and suppose they got drunk, or took up with the parlor-maid? Lanny said that a consecrated artist such as Kurt Meissner would be hard to find. Irma remarked: “I suppose they wouldn’t be anywhere but in Germany, where everybody works so hard!”

  V

  Among the guests they had met at the Schloss was an uncle of their host, the Graf Oldenburg of Vienna. The Meissners had told them that this bald-headed old Silenus was in financial trouble; he always would be, it having been so planned by the statesmen at Paris, who had cut the Austro-Hungarian Empire into small fragments and left a city of nearly two million people with very little hinterland to support it. The Graf was a gentleman of the old school who had learned to dance to the waltzes of the elder Strauss and was still hearing them in his fancy. He invited Irma and Lanny to visit him, and mentioned tactfully that he had a number of fine paintings. Since it was on their way home, Lanny said: “Let’s stop and have a look.”

  It was a grand marble palace on the Ringstrasse, and the reception of the American visitors was in good style, even though the staff of servants had been cut, owing to an outrageous law just passed by the city administration—a graduated tax according to the number of your servants, and twice as high for men as for women! But a Socialist government had to find some way to keep going. Here was a city with great manufacturing power and nowhere to export its goods. All the little states surrounding it had put up tariff barriers, and all efforts at a customs union came to naught. Such an agreement with Germany seemed the most obvious thing in the world, but everybody knew that France would take it as an act of war.

  An ideal situation from the point of view of a young art expert with American dollars in the bank! The elderly aristocrat, his host, was being hounded by his creditors, and responded promptly when Lanny invited him to put a price on a small-sized Jan van Eyck representing the Queen of Heaven in the very gorgeous robes which she perhaps was now wearing, but had assuredly never seen during her sojourn on earth.

  Among Irma’s acquaintances on Long Island was the heiress of a food-packing industry; and since people will eat, even when they do nothing else, Brenda, Spratt’s dividends were still coming in. She had appeared fascinated by Lanny’s accounts of old masters in Europe and his dealings in them; so now he sent her a cablegram informing her that she could obtain a unique art treasure in exchange for four hundred and eighty thousand cans of spaghetti with tomato sauce at the wholesale price of three dollars per case of forty-eight cans. Lanny didn’t cable all that, of course—it was merely his way of teasing Irma about the Long Island plutocracy. Next day he had a reply informing him at what bank he could call for the money. A genuine triumph of the soul of man over the body, of the immortal part over the mortal; and incidentally it would provide Lanny Budd with pocket-money for the winter. He invited his wife to state whether her father had ever done a better day’s business at the age of thirty-one.

  The over-taxed swells of Vienna came running to meet the American heiress and to tell her brilliant young husband what old masters they had available. Irma might have danced till dawn every night, and Lanny might have made a respectable fortune, transferring culture to the land of his fathers. But what he preferred was meeting Socialist writers and party leaders and hearing their stories of suffering and struggle in this city which was like a head without a body. The workers were overwhelmingly Socialist, while the peasants of the country districts were Catholic and reactionary. To add to the confusion, the Hitlerites were carrying on a tremendous drive, telling the country yokels and the city hooligans that all their troubles were due to Jewish profiteers.

  The municipal government, in spite of near-bankruptcy, was going bravely ahead with a program of rehousing and other public services. This was the thing of which Lanny had been dreaming, the socialization of industry by peaceful and orderly methods, and he became excited about it and wished to spend his time traveling about looking at blocks of workers’ homes and talking to the people who lived in them. Amiable and well-bred people, going to bed early to save light and fuel, and working hard at the task of making democracy a success. Their
earnings were pitifully small, and when Lanny heard stories of infant mortality and child malnutrition and milk prices held up by profiteers, it rather spoiled his enjoyment of stately banquets in mansions with historic names. Irma said: “You won’t let yourself have any fun, so we might as well go on home.”

  VI

  It wasn’t much better at Bienvenu, as the young wife was soon to learn. The world had become bound together with ties invisible but none the less powerful, so that when the price of corn and hogs dropped in Nebraska the price of flowers dropped on the Cap d’Antibes. Lanny explained the phenomenon: the men who speculated in corn and hogs in Chicago no longer gave their wives the money to buy imported perfumes, so the leading industry of the Cap went broke. Leese, who ran Bienvenu, was besieged by nieces and nephews and cousins begging to be taken onto the Budd staff. There was a swarm of them already, twice as many as would have been employed for the same tasks on Long Island; but in the Midi they had learned how to divide the work, and nobody ever died from overexertion. Now there were new ones added, and it was a delicate problem, because it was Irma’s money and she was entitled to have a say. What she said was that servants oughtn’t to be permitted to bother their employers with the hard-luck stories of their relatives. Which meant that Irma still had a lot to learn about life in France!

  The tourists didn’t come, and the “season” was slow—so slow that it began to stop before it got started. The hotelkeepers were frightened, the merchants of luxury goods were threatened with ruin, and of course the poor paid for it. Lanny knew, because he went on helping with that Socialist Sunday school, where he heard stories which spoiled his appetite and his enjoyment of music, and troubled his wife because she knew what was in his thoughts—that she oughtn’t to spend money on clothes and parties while so many children weren’t getting enough to eat.

  But what could you do about it? You had to pay your servants, or at any rate feed them, and it was demoralizing if you didn’t give them work to do. Moreover, how could you keep up the prices of foods except by buying some? Irma’s father and uncles had fixed it firmly in her mind that the way to make prosperity was to spend; but Lanny seemed to have the idea that you ought to buy cheap foods and give them to the poor. Wouldn’t that demoralize the poor and make parasitos of them? Irma thought she saw it happening to a bunch of “comrades” on the Riviera who practically lived on the Budd bounty, and rarely said “Thank you.” And besides, what was to become of the people who raised the more expensive foods? Were they going to have to cat them?

  Life is a compromise. On Sunday evening Lanny would go down into the Old Town of Cannes and explain the wastes of the competitive system to a group of thirty or forty proletarians: French and Provençal, Ligurian and Corsican, Catalan and even one Algerian. On Monday evening he would take his wife and mother to Sept Chênes and play accompaniments for a singer from the Paris opera at one of Emily’s soirées. On Tuesday he would spend the day helping to get ready for a dinner-dance at Bienvenu, with a colored jazz band, Venetian lanterns with electric lights all over the lawns, and the most fashionable and titled people coming to do honor to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes. Yes, there were still some who had money and would not fail in their economic duty! People who had seen the storm coming and put their fortune into bonds; people who owned strategic industries, such as the putting up of canned spaghetti for the use of millions who lived in tiny apartments in cities and had never learned how to make tomato sauce!

  VII

  Robbie Budd came visiting that winter. He had some kind of queer deal on; he was meeting with a former German U-boat commander who had entered the service of a Chinese mandarin, and this latter had been ousted and now wanted Budd machine guns so as to get back. He had got the support of some bankers in French Indo-China, but they didn’t want to buy French munitions, for fear of publicity—a shady affair all round, but Robbie explained with a grin that one had to pick up money where one could these days. No chance to sell any of the products of peace in Europe now!

  He told the same stories of hard times which his son had heard in Berlin and Vienna. There were breadlines in all the American cities, and on street corners one saw men, and some women, stamping their feet and holding out apples in their half-frozen hands. The price of apples having slumped, this was a way to get rid of them; a nickel apiece, Mister, and won’t you help a poor guy get a cup of coffee? There was no way to count the unemployed, but everybody agreed that the number was increasing and the situation was terrible. Robbie thanked God for the Great Engineer whom he had helped to elect President; that harassed man was standing firm as a rock, insisting that Congress should balance the budget. If it was done, business would pick up in the end. It always had and always must.

  Robbie had paid off one-half of the notes which he had given to Lanny, Beauty, and Marceline as security for the money turned over to him during the Wall Street panic. He had invested a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the three of them in United States government bonds, and now tried to persuade them to shift it to stocks. They discussed the matter for an hour or so, sitting in front of a blazing fire of cypress wood in the drawing-room of the home. Beauty wavered, but Lanny said “No,” and said it again and again.

  “Look where steel is now!” exclaimed the father.

  “But,” argued the younger man, “you said exactly the same thing when you were here last time. You were sure it couldn’t go lower.”

  He took his father on a tour of the civilized world. Where was there a nation that had money to buy American steel? Britain, France, Germany—all could make more than they could market, and the smaller nations were kept going only by the fears of their creditors. Here was Robbie, himself a steel man, reduced to selling to Chinese mandarins and South American revolutionists! Russia wanted steel desperately, but had to learn to make it for herself because she had no foreign exchange and nobody would trust her. “And you talk about steel ‘coming back’!” exclaimed the son.

  Robbie couldn’t answer, but neither could he change. He knew that Lanny got his ideas out of his Pink and Red papers—which he kept in his own study, so as not to offend the eyesight of his relatives and friends. All these papers had a vested interest in calamity; but they couldn’t be right, for if so, what would become of Robbie’s world? He said: “Have it your way; but mark what I tell you, if only Hoover can hold out against inflationary tendencies, we’ll be seeing such a boom as never was in the world before.”

  VIII

  Lanny returned to the delights of child study. Truly a marvelous thing to watch a tiny organism unfolding, in such perfect order and according to schedule. They had a book which told them what to expect, and it was an event when Baby Frances spoke her first word two full weeks ahead of time, and a still greater thrill when she made her first effort to get up on her feet. All, both friends and servants, agreed that they had never seen a lovelier female infant, and Lanny, with his imaginative temperament, fell to speculating as to what might become of her. She would grow up to be a fine young woman like her mother. Would it be possible to teach her more than her mother knew? Probably not; she would have too much money. Or would she? Was there any chance of a benevolent revolution on the Viennese model, compelling her to do some useful work?

  He had the same thought concerning his half-sister, who was ripening early in the warm sunshine of the Midi and in the pleasure-seeking of its fashionable society. Marceline was going to be a beauty like her mother; and how could she fail to know it? From earliest childhood she had been made familiar with beauty-creating and beauty-displaying paraphernalia: beauty lotions, beauty creams, beauty powders and paints, all put up in such beautiful receptacles that you couldn’t bear to throw them away; clothing designed to reveal beauty, mirrors in which it was to be studied, conversation concerning the effects of it upon the male for whom it was created. Self-consciousness, sex-consciousness were the very breath of being of this young creature, paused on tiptoe with excitement, knowing by instinct that she was appro
aching the critical period of her life.

  The prim Miss Addington was troubled about her charge, but Beauty, who had been that way herself, took it more easily. Lanny, too, had been precocious at that age, and so could understand her. He would try to teach her wisdom, to moderate her worldly desires. He would talk about her father, endeavoring to make him effective as an influence in her life. The pictures made him a living presence, but unfortunately Marceline did not know him as a poor painter on the Cap, working in a pair of stained corduroy trousers and an old blue cap. She knew him as a man of renommée, a source of income and a subject of speculation; his example confirmed her conviction that beauty and fame were one. To receive the attentions of other persons was what she enjoyed. Important persons, if possible—but anyone was better than no one!

  IX

  Amid this oddly assorted family Parsifal Dingle went on living his quietist life. He had the firm faith that it was impermissible to argue with people; the only thing was to set an example, and be certain that in due course it would have its effect. He took no part in any controversy, and never offered an opinion unless it was asked for. He sought nothing for himself, because, he said, everything was within him. He went here and there about the place, a friend of the flowers and the birds and the dogs. He read a great deal, and often closed his eyes; you wouldn’t know whether he was praying or asleep. He was kind to everybody, and treated rich and poor the same; the servants revered him, having become certain that he was some kind of saint. His fame spread, and he would be asked to come and heal this person and that. The doctors resented this, and so did the clergy of the vicinity; it was unsanctioned, a grave violation of the proprieties.