This was true enough to trouble Lanny’s mind continually. He watched his own influence upon his proletarian friends and wondered, was he really doing them good? Or were the preachers of class struggle right, and the social chasm too wide for any bridge-builder? What community of feeling or taste could survive between the exquisite who lived in Bienvenu and the roustabout’s son who lived in the cellar of a tenement in the Old Town of Cannes? Was it not possible that in coming to the school well dressed, and speaking the best French, Lanny was setting up ideals and standards which were as apt to corrupt as to stimulate?
His friends at the school saw him driving his fancy car, they saw him with his proud young wife; for though she came rarely, they knew her by sight and still more by reputation. And what would that do to youths at the age of susceptibility? Would it teach them to be loyal to some working-class girl, some humble, poorly dressed comrade in their movement? Or would it fill them with dreams of rising to the heaven where the elegant rich ladies were kept? Lanny, surveying his alluring spouse, knew that there was in all the world no stronger bait for the soul and mind of a man. He had taken that bait more than once in his life; also he knew something about the four Socialists who had become premiers of France, and knew that in every case it had been the hand of some elegant siren which had drawn him out of the path of loyalty and into that of betrayal.
VI
There stood unused on the Bienvenu estate a comfortable dwelling, the Lodge, which Lanny had built for Nina and Rick. He begged them to come and occupy it this season; he had some important ideas he wanted to discuss. But Rick said the pater had been hit too hard by the slump, which seemed to have been aimed at landowners all over the world. Lanny replied with a check to cover the cost of the tickets; it had been earned by the sale of one of Marcel’s pictures, and there were a hundred more in the storeroom. Also, Lanny explained, the vegetable garden at Bienvenu had been enlarged, so as to give some of Leese’s cousins a chance to earn their keep. Come and help to eat the stuff!
Mother and father and the three children came; and after they had got settled, Lanny revealed what he had in mind: to get some more money out of the picture business (perhaps Irma would want to put some in) to found a weekly paper, with Rick as editor. They would try to wake up the intellectuals and work for some kind of co-operative system in Europe before it was too late. Lanny said he didn’t know enough to edit a paper himself, but would be what in America was called an “angel.”
Rick said that was a large order, and did his friend realize what he was letting himself in for? The commercial magazine field was pretty crowded, and a propaganda paper never paid expenses, but cost like sin. Lanny said: “Well, I’ve spent my share on sin, and I might try something else for a change.”
“One can’t publish a paper in a place like Cannes,” declared Rick. “Where would you go?”
“I’ve wondered if it mightn’t be possible to bring out a paper in London, and at the same time in Paris in French?”
“You mean with the same contents?”
“Well, practically the same.”
“I should say that might be done if the paper were general and abstract. If you expect to deal with current events, you’d find the interests and tastes of the two peoples too far apart.”
“The purpose would be to bring them together, Rick. If they read the same things, they might learn to understand each other.”
“Yes, but you’re trying to force them to read what they don’t want. The paper would seem foreign to both sides; your enemies would call it that and make it appear still more so.”
“I don’t say it would be easy,” replied the young idealist. “What makes it hard is exactly what makes it important.”
“I don’t dispute the need,” Rick said. “But it would cost a pile of money. A paper has to come out regularly, and if you have a deficit, it goes on and on.”
“Would you be interested in it as a job?” persisted the other.
“I’d have to think it over. I’ve come down here with a mind full of a play.”
That was the real trouble, as it turned out. There was no use imagining that anybody could edit a paper as a sideline; it was a full-time job for several men, and Rick would have to give up his life’s ambition, which was to become a dramatist. He had had just enough success to keep him going. That, too, was an important task: to force modern social problems into the theater, to break down the taboo which put the label of propaganda upon any effort to portray that class struggle which was the basic fact of the modern world. Rick had tried it eight or ten times, and said that if he had put an equal amount of energy and ability into portraying the sexual entanglements of the idle rich, he could have joined that envied group and had plenty of entanglements. But he was always thinking of some wonderful new idea which no audience would be able to resist; he had one now, and so the Franco-British weekly would have to wait until the potential editor had relieved his mind.
Lanny said: “If it’s a good play, maybe Irma and I will back it.” He always included his wife, out of politeness, and the same motive would cause her to come along.
“That costs money, too,” was Rick’s reply. “But at least, if the play falls flat, you don’t have to produce it again the next week and the week after.”
VII
Zaharoff was back at his hotel in Monte, and would send his car for Madame Zyszynski, and write notes expressing his gratitude to the family. He said he wished there were something he could do in return; and apparently he meant it, for when Robbie Budd came into possession of a block of New England-Arabian stock, he came to see the old man, who bought the stock at Robbie’s own price. It wasn’t a large amount, but Lanny said it was a sign that the duquesa really was “coming through.”
Beauty was devoured by curiosity about these séances, and questioned Madame every time she came back; but the medium stuck to her story that she had no idea of what happened when she was in her trance. Evidently Tecumseh was behaving well, for when she came out she would find the sitter gracious and considerate. She always had tea with the maid of Sir Basil’s married daughter, and sometimes the great man himself asked questions about her life and ideas. Evidently he was reading along the lines of spiritualism, but he never said a word about himself, nor did he mention the duquesa’s name.
Beauty thought it was poor taste for a borrower to keep the owner so entirely in the dark; and perhaps the idea occurred to Sir Basil, for he called Lanny on the telephone and asked if he could spare time to run over and see him. Lanny offered to drive Madame on the next trip, and Zaharoff said all right; Lanny might attend the séance if it would interest him. That was certainly an advance, and could only mean that Zaharoff had managed to make friends with the Iroquois chieftain and his spirit band.
“All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.” So Lanny’s stern grandfather had quoted, at the time when Lanny was making a scandal in Newcastle by falling in love with a young actress. The playboy thought of it now as he sat and watched this man who might be as old as Grandfather Samuel. His suave manners were a mask and his soul a bundle of fears. He had fought so hard for wealth and power, and now he sat and watched infirmity creeping over him and everything slipping out of his grasp. “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”
Secretiveness was the breath of the munitions king’s being. For nearly a year he had had Tecumseh and the spirits to himself, and if he had told anyone what was happening it hadn’t come to Lanny’s ears. But he couldn’t hold out indefinitely, because his soul was racked with uncertainties. Was it really the duquesa who was sending him messages? Or was it merely a fantasy, a cruel hoax of somebody or something unknown? Lanny had attended many séances, and was continually studying the subject. The old man had to know what he made of it.
The sitting itself was rather commonplace. E
vidently the munitions king and the spirit of his dead wife had become established on a firm domestic basis. She came right away, as she would have done if he had called her from the next room. She didn’t have much to talk about—which probably would have been the case if her “grass” had not withered and blown away. The only difference was that Zaharoff would have known the “grass” for what it was; but this imitation grass, this mirage, this painting on a fog—what was it? She assured him that she loved him—of which he had never had any doubt. She assured him that she was happy—she had said it many times, and it was good news if it was she.
As to the conditions of her existence she was vague, as the spirits generally are. They explain that it is difficult for mortal minds to comprehend their mode of being; and that is a possibility, but also it may be an evasion. The duquesa had given evidence of her reality, but now she seemed to wish that he should take it as settled; that made her happier—and of course he sought to make her happy. But afterward he tormented himself with doubts. Should he torment her with them?
She greeted Lanny and talked to him. She had come to him first, with messages to her husband, and now she thanked him for delivering them. It was exactly as if they had been together in the garden of the Paris mansion. She reminded him of it, and of the snow-white poodles shaved to resemble lions. She had escorted him into the library, and he, a courteous youth, had understood that she might have no more time for him, and had volunteered to make himself happy with a magazine. Did he remember what it was? She said: La Vie Parisienne, and he remembered. He darted a glance at Zaharoff, and thought he saw the old white imperial trembling. “Tell him that that is correct,” insisted the Spanish duquesa with a Polish accent. “He worries so much, pauvre chéri.”
The spirit talked about the unusually wet weather, and about the depression; she said that both would end soon. Such troubles did not affect her, except as they affected those she loved. She knew everything that was happening to them; apparently she knew whatever she wanted to know. Lanny asked her politely, could she bring them some fact about the affairs of her ancient family which her husband had never known, but which he might verify by research; something that was in an old document, or hidden in a secret vault in a castle; preferably something she hadn’t known during her own lifetime, so that it couldn’t have been in the subconscious mind of either of them?
“Oh, that subconscious mind!” laughed the Spanish lady. “It is a name that you make yourself unhappy with. What is mind when it isn’t conscious? Have you ever known such a thing?”
“No,” said Lanny, “because then it would be conscious. But what is it that acts like a subconscious mind?”
“Perhaps it is God,” was the reply; and Lanny wondered: had he brought with him some fragment of the subconscious mind of Parsifal Dingle, and injected it into the subconscious mind which called itself María del Pilar Antonia Angela Patrocino Simón de Muguiro y Berute, Duquesa de Marqueni y Villafranca de los Caballeros?
VIII
When the séance was over, the maid invited Madame into another room to have tea; and Sir Basil had tea and a long talk with Lanny. He wanted to know what the younger man had learned and what he now believed. Lanny, watching the aging and anxious face, knew exactly what was wanted. Zaharoff wasn’t an eager scientist, loving truth for truth’s sake; he was a man tottering on the edge of the grave, wanting to believe that when he departed this earth he was going to join the woman who had meant so much to him. And what was Lanny, a scientist or a friend?
He could say, quite honestly, that he didn’t know; that he wavered, sometimes one way, sometimes the other. Then he could go on to waver in the right direction. Certainly it had seemed to be the duquesa speaking: not the voice, but the mind, the personality, something which one never touches, never sees, but which one comes to infer, which manifests itself by various modes of communication. The duquesa speaking over a telephone, for example, and the line in rather bad condition!
Zaharoff was pleased. He said he had been reading the books. “Telepathy?” he said. “It seems to me just a word they have invented to save having to think. What is this telepathy? How would it work? It cannot be material vibrations, because distance makes no difference to it. You have to suppose that one mind can dip into another mind at will and get anything it wants. And is that easier to credit than survival of the personality?”
Said Lanny: “It is reasonable to think that there might be a core of the consciousness which survives for a time, just as the skeleton survives the body.” But he saw that this wasn’t a pleasing image to the old gentleman, and hastened to add: “Maybe time isn’t a fundamental reality; maybe everything which has ever existed still exists in some form beyond our reach or understanding. We have no idea what reality may be, or our own relationship to it. Maybe we make immortality for ourselves by desiring it. Bernard Shaw says that birds grew wings because they desired and needed to fly.”
The Knight Commander and Grand Officer had never heard of Back to Methuselah, and Lanny told him about that metabiological panorama. They talked about abstruse subjects until they were like Milton’s fallen angels, in wand’ring mazes lost; also until Lanny remembered that he had to take his wife to a dinner-party. He left the old gentleman in a much happier frame of mind, but he felt a little guilty, thinking: “I hope Robbie doesn’t have any more stocks to sell him!”
IX
Lanny found his wife dressing, and while he was doing the same she told him some news. “Uncle Jesse was here.”
“Indeed?” replied Lanny. “Who saw him?”
“Beauty was in town. I had quite a talk with him.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s absorbed in his election campaign.”
“How could he spare the time to come here?”
“He came on business. He wants you to sell some of his paintings.”
“Oh, my God, Irma! I can’t sell those things, and he knows it.”
“Aren’t they good enough?”
“They’re all right in a way; but they’re quite undistinguished—there must be a thousand painters in Paris doing as well.”
“Don’t they manage to sell their work?”
“Sometimes they do; but I can’t recommend art unless I know it has special merit.”
“They seemed to me quite charming, and I should think a lot of other people would like them.”
“You mean he brought some with him?”
“A whole taxicab-load. We had quite a show, all afternoon; that, and the Comintern, and that—what is it?—diagrammatical?—”
“Dialectical materialism?”
“He says he could make a Communist out of me if it wasn’t for my money. So he tried to get some of it away from me.”
“He asked you for money?”
“He may be a bad painter, dear, but he’s a very good salesman.”
“You mean you bought some of those things?”
“Two.”
“For the love of Mike! What did you pay?”
“Ten thousand francs apiece.”
“But, Irma, that’s preposterous! He never got half that for a painting in all his life.”
“Well, it made him happy. He’s your mother’s brother, and I like to keep peace in the family.”
“Really, darling, you don’t have to do things like that. Beauty won’t like it a bit.”
“It’s much easier to say yes than no,” replied Irma, watching in the mirror of her dressing-table while her maid put the last touches to her coiffure. “Uncle Jesse’s not a bad sort, you know.”
“Where are the paintings?” asked the husband.
“I put them in the closet for the present. Don’t delay now, or we’ll be late.”
“Let me have just a glance.”
“I didn’t buy them for art,” insisted the other; “but I do like them, and maybe I’ll hang them in this room if they won’t hurt your feelings.”
Lanny got out the canvases and set them up against two chairs. T
hey were the regular product which Jesse Blackless turned out at the rate of one every fortnight whenever he chose. One was a little gamin, and the other an old peddler of charcoal; both sentimental, because Uncle Jesse really loved these poor people and imagined things about them which fitted in with his theories. Irma didn’t have such feelings, but Lanny had taught her that she ought to, and doubtless she was trying. “Are they really so bad?” she asked.
“They aren’t any bargain,” he answered.
“It’s only eight hundred dollars, and he says he’s broke on account of putting everything into the campaign. You know, Lanny, it might not be such a bad thing to have your uncle a member of the Chamber.”
“But such a member, Irma! He’ll make himself an international scandal. I ought to have mentioned to you that he’s gone into a working-class district and is running against a Socialist.”
“Well,” said the young wife, amiably, “I’ll help the Socialist, too, if you wish it.”
“You’ll take two horses, and hitch one to the front of your cart and one to the back, and drive them as hard as you can in opposite directions.”
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