They talked about this on their way into Cannes, where Lanny was taking the evening train for Paris. He drove his friend in the family car, with the chauffeur in the back seat to bring the car back. Lanny, who had met Hitler and heard him talk, warned Raoul that he was only half a madman and no fool whatever, but on the contrary a trickster of infinite cunning, who had managed to get the German people behind him by a program of radical social changes which he had no slightest intention of carrying out. “We can’t ignore him and his purposes,” the American insisted. “We can’t shut our eyes to him and go ahead with our plans just as if he didn’t exist. He is a reactionary and a slave-driver, and he has said in his book that his program requires the annihilation of France.”
This was hard doctrine for Raoul Palma, an internationalist preaching disarmament and brotherhood. Here was his friend and patron insisting that the time for such ideas was past; nobody could trust Adolf Hitler in any agreement, and only prompt and united action could keep him from rearming Germany. Frenchmen of all parties had to get together on this program before it was too late. “But, Lanny,” objected the school director, “the French capitalists would rather have Hitler than have us!”
“That’s because they don’t know Hitler,” was the reply.
IX
They talked about the disquieting state of the country in which they lived. The head of the French government was a round elderly gentleman wearing an old-fashioned white imperial; a former President of the Republic who had become Premier during a crisis in which nobody would trust anybody else. The mainspring of his being was a childish vanity, and he took delight in addressing the people of France over the radio as if they were his own progeny. But they were a stubborn brood, and by loud clamor had managed to keep Premier Doumergue from interpreting the constitution of the nation so that he could act independently of the Cabinet. What he wanted to do with his power was suspected by Raoul and confirmed by Lanny, who knew that the Premier of France held secret conferences with Colonel de la Roque, head of the Croix de Feu, the leading organization of the French Fascists.
The American felt less anxiety about the situation because of the Foreign Minister, Louis Barthou, a Frenchman of the old school who had learned to distrust any and every sort of German and therefore was not to be fooled by Adolf Hitler’s wiles. This was a new point of view to Raoul, who looked upon Barthou as just one more politician and pointed to his reactionary utterances on domestic affairs; but Lanny felt sure he knew what was in the little round head with the high dome and the gray mustache and beard beneath. “He has some fine pictures and showed them to me, and a shelf of the books he has written—including lives of Danton and Mirabeau. You see he really knows the old revolutionary traditions.”
“They all learn about them,” replied the skeptical schoolman; “the better to fool the workers and sell them out—exactly as Mirabeau did.”
“Barthou will never sell out France to Germany. When I met him was before Hitler took power, but the little Gascon realized exactly what the Fuhrer meant. He said: ‘Hitler is the man who is going to dominate our political life for as long as he lives.’”
Lanny reminded his friend of the “grand tour” which Barthou had recently made in the Balkans, to rally Yugoslavia and other states to an alliance against the new German counter-revolution. His success had been made plain by the effort the Nazis had made to bomb his train in Austria. “That’s the way you tell your friends nowadays,” added the American, and went on to point out that the determined little lawyer had been willing to drop his antagonism to the Soviet Union in the face of a greater peril; he had helped to bring Russia into the League of Nations last month and was working hard to prepare public opinion for a military alliance between that country and France.
X
The American was in a somber mood, the funeral having brought back to his mind all the horrors he had witnessed since the Nazi Fuhrer had seized the mastery of Germany. Lanny told of his meeting with Freddi Robin in Berlin, a fugitive from the Nazis, sleeping in the Tiergarten of in a shelter for the unemployed; then the broken and shuddering figure he had helped to carry across the boundary line between Germany and France, when at last it had pleased the fat General Goring to release his prey. Dreadful, unspeakably wicked men the Nazi chieftains were, and Lanny was haunted by the idea that it was his duty to give up all pleasures and all other duties and try to awaken the people of Western Europe to a realization of the peril in which they stood.
So he spoke with repressed feeling; and then, when they reached the station, he bought an evening paper to read on the train. Glancing at its banner headlines he gave a cry. “LE ROI ALEXANDRE ET BARTHOU ASSASSINES!”
Quickly Lanny’s eyes ran over the story, and he read the salient details to his friend. The King of Yugoslavia had come for a visit of state to France, to celebrate the signing of their treaty of alliance; he had landed at Marseille, and the Foreign Minister had met him at the dock. They had been driven in an open car into the city, through cheering throngs. In front of the stock exchange a man had run out from the crowd, shouting a greeting to the king, and before the police could stop him he had leaped upon the running-board and opened fire with an automatic gun, killing the king and fatally wounding Barthou, who tried to shield his guest.
The crowd had beaten the assassin to death, in spite of the efforts of the police to save him. He had been identified as one of a Croatian terrorist organization; but Lanny said: “You’ll find the Nazis were behind him!” So it proved, in due course. The reactionary conspirators had been publishing a paper in Berlin, with funds obtained from the head of the foreign policy department of the Hitler party. The assassin had been traveling on a forged passport, obtained in Munich, and the weapon he had used bore the trademark of Mauser, the German munitions firm.
Such was the new technique for the conquest of power. Fool those who were foolable, buy those who were buyable, and kill the rest. It was the third Nazi murder of foreign statesmen within a year. First, Premier Duca of Rumania had been shot to death. Then a band of gangsters had broken into the office of Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria, the Catholic statesman who had been responsible for the slaughter of the Socialist workers in Vienna and the bombardment of those blocks of model apartments which Lanny had so greatly admired. And now both signers of the Yugoslav-French agreement had been wiped out.
“Good God!” exclaimed Raoul. “How much more will the people need to wake them up?”
“A lot more, I’m afraid,” was Lanny’s heartsick reply. “You and I, Raoul, chose a bad time to be born!”
2
INDOCTUS PAUPERIEM PATI
I
In his youth Lanny had attended St. Thomas’s Academy in Connecticut, and one of the subjects forced upon him was Latin. He had got so far as to translate several of the odes of Horace, and in his mind there remained a simile about a merchant whose vessels were wrecked, and he, “untaught to bear poverty,” refitted them and sent them forth again. Lanny thought of that when he sat at luncheon in the Hotel Crillon with another merchant, a Roman though he did not know it, and heard him planning with eagerness a new expedition of his ships. In nineteen hundred years the world had changed and now they were ships of the air, but that made little difference in the psychology of the merchant.
Robbie Budd was entering his sixties, but was still driven by pride and ambition, still determined to prove that nothing could lick him. Five years ago the Wall Street crash had knocked him clean over the ropes, but he had picked himself up and wiped the blood out of his eyes and come in for round after round. The fact that his father had not named him as successor to the presidency of Budd Gunmakers Corporation, the fact that the great concern was no longer a Budd family affair, these blows might have finished a less sturdy fighter; but here was Lanny’s father ready to start all over again and show them the stuff he was made of. By “them” he meant his family, his friends, his business associates and rivals; more especially his older brother, who had fought him a
ll his life for control of Budd’s, and the Wall Street banking crowd who had taken over the family name and the institution which for close to a century had been the family pride.
Robbie’s contract as European representative of Budd Gunmakers still had more than a year to run, but Robbie was on the point of dropping it. He had been willing to work for his stern old Puritan father, but he couldn’t be happy serving a bunch of interlopers, no matter how greatly they valued his services and how careful they were of his feelings. Robbie was reviving the dream of his early years, of a magnificent new fabricating plant to be built on the Newcastle River above the Budd plant. The land was still there, and could be bought more cheaply than ever—for, whatever the New Deal had accomplished by the end of 1934, it hadn’t brought back land values and wasn’t likely to.
The sentimentalists and cranks had had their way, and America lay disarmed in the face of a world of enemies—so Robbie declared. Budd Gunmakers was producing mostly hardware and what Robbie called “notions,” meaning everything from hairpins to freight elevators. What the salesman now had in mind was the weapon of the future, and the means of transport of the future, the plane. All the world was taking to the air; the nations which wished to survive would be driven to it; and behind the sheltered and well-protected waters of Long Island Sound Robbie would erect an airplane factory. Before long he would make it into the greatest in the world, and give the name of Budd’s a new and better meaning.
An expert in aerodynamics had showed up, and in an abandoned warehouse near the Newcastle docks had done a lot of experimenting; Robbie had helped him with a few thousand dollars, and they had got an important new design for an internally braced flying wing. Also Robbie had discovered a fellow with patents for an air-cooled radial engine that was going to add another hundred miles to the speed of planes, and if they could do that they would own the world. Robbie was on fire with enthusiasm about it; he had organized a company and gone the rounds among his friends, those who had put their money into New England-Arabian Oil with him and done very well. Business was picking up and people had money, but good investments were scarce, because the government was putting out most of the bonds. So Robbie had had no trouble in selling stock in Newcastle, and had taken an option on the land. Now he was in Paris to talk with Zaharoff and with Denis de Bruyne and some of Denis’s associates; later he was going to London to see investors there; he was doing it all privately—the Wall Street crowd wasn’t going to get a look-in. “Believe me, son, I’m not going to stay a poor man.” Indoctus pauperiem pati!
II
Robbie sat at the well-appointed table a deux, enjoying his sole meuniere and his Chablis, dry and well chilled. Business didn’t interfere with his appetite, quite the contrary; he had always taken the good things of life as they came along, and in spite of his graying hair and hard work he was robust and rosy. He enjoyed telling about his affairs; not exactly boasting, but speaking with quiet assurance, pointing out how he had been right and forgetting when he had been wrong. He had studied the field thoroughly and convinced himself that aviation was the industry of the future, the only one that wasn’t overbuilt. It held the advantage that it was both a peace and a war industry; you could turn out “flivver planes,” and then with only a few changes in design you could be turning out training planes and perhaps fighters. “Our country is asleep,” declared the ever-vigilant patriot; “but the day is coming when everybody will be grateful to a few men who have-learned to design high-speed planes and to make them in a hurry.”
The promoter had an appointment with the one-time munitions king of Europe for the following morning and he wanted to have his son come along. “You know how to handle that old spider better than I do,” he said, meaning it for a compliment. “You might sell him a Detaze; but don’t try it until I get through with my deal. If I get this thing going, you’ll never need for money.”
“I don’t need for it now,” said Lanny, amiably.
Robbie didn’t notice this unhelpful remark, but went on to say that Denis de Bruyne and his elder son were to dine with them in the evening; he had taken the liberty of assuming that Lanny wouldn’t mind having the matter put before Denis. Robbie phrased it tactfully, as if the husband of Lanny’s former amie were Lanny’s own special property.
“Denis is a business man,” the son replied. “If he puts his money into anything, he’ll look into it carefully.”
Robbie inquired about the funeral, and when Lanny described the ceremonies he couldn’t keep from smiling, even though he felt deeply for the bereaved family. “It’s hard to understand how people would want to go through such a rigmarole,” he commented. “But I suppose that when they suffer too much they lose their balance.”
“It’s what Mama was brought up in,” replied Lanny. “It helped her in a crisis, so it’s all right.”
“No use expecting women to be rational,” added the father; it was one of his oft-repeated formulas. Following an obvious train of thought, he added: “Beauty’s coming over from London to see what she can do with some of her friends.”
Lanny knew what that meant without asking any questions. From boyhood he had watched this team at work on one sort of deal or another: his “go-getter” father and his lovely mother, who passed for the father’s divorced wife, working together so perfectly that nobody could understand why they should ever have separated. It was always something involving large sums of money, and also what most people would have called gossip, but which Robbie would refer to as psychology; it involved the rehearsing of conversations in advance—you say this and then I’ll say that, and so on; because even in the smartest society people want to believe that you are entertaining them because you like them and not just because you want them to invest in oil stock or to introduce you to a government official who is charged with the purchasing of light machine guns for his country. Most of the time the deal would be put through, and then Mabel Blackless, alias Beauty Budd, alias Madame Detaze, and now Mrs. Parsifal Dingle, would receive a present of a new car or a mink coat or perhaps a check for a couple of thousand dollars with which to do her own purchasing.
“Why do you take so much trouble?” asked the son of this odd partnership. “Why don’t you put your plans before Irma?”
“I want a lot of money this time—five millions, at least. I mean to build a model plant, and I don’t want to start on a shoestring.”
“That’s all right, Robbie, Irma’s got it, and you know how highly she thinks of you.”
“Yes, son, but that’s one thing I never have been willing to do—to barge in on your marriage. If anything did go wrong with my enterprise—not that it possibly can—but I try to keep business apart from family.”
Lanny understood quite well that he was having an expert salesman’s tact applied to himself. Robbie fully meant to put the project before Irma, but he wanted to be told to do it. The younger man knew what he was expected to say and he didn’t mind saying it. “Irma’s doing her own deciding. She’s quite proud of her judgment, and if you have a good proposition she’ll expect you to put it before her; she wouldn’t like it if you left her out.”
“All right,” said the father. “You tell her what I’m doing, and tell her I don’t mean to approach her unless she asks for it.”
III
The French practice of la vie a trois, which seems so strange to Americans and so highly immoral to the orthodox, had made Denis de Bruyne and Robbie Budd into friends of some ten years’ standing. In the Anglo-Saxon parts of the world an elderly husband and pere de famille would hardly choose for a friend the father of his wife’s young lover; but in Paris it had come about, and two men of large affairs had discovered that business customs are more powerful than marital in the shaping of minds and manners. These two, who lived and operated three thousand miles apart, thought and felt in much the same way about their worlds. In return for Denis’s courtesy in listening while Robbie abused “that man Roosevelt” and his so-called “New Deal” which really was the
rankest kind of Socialism, Robbie would listen while Denis applied the same phrases to Leon Blum and his Socialist party which really was the rankest kind of Communism.
Robbie Budd was a son of Puritan ancestors, but he was a rebel son and had gone out into the world prepared to take it as he found it. He had watched his boy as a happy lover, then through a period of widowerhood of an odd irregular sort, and now for a period of godfatherhood of the same sort. Lanny was only a few years older than Denis, fils, and Charlot, but he had promised their dying mother to look after them, and when he was in Paris he seldom failed to meet them; he would inquire gravely about their affairs, and they in turn would dutifully report, and accept whatever admonitions he considered it proper to give—even though they had no intention of following them.
Robbie’s business brought him often to Paris, where he would meet Denis, and they would discuss the state of America and France, and those nations whose affairs were tied up with them. Each met a sensible man of the world, cherishing the same hopes and balked by the same evil forces. Each would have liked to have his own way, but could succeed only to a limited extent. Each was troubled by a vague sense of inadequacy, and each had sons who tried unsuccessfully to tell him what was wrong. When the fathers met together they comforted each other, forming a clan against both the demagogues and the younger generation.
Denis was past seventy, a handsome gray-haired man with a thin aristocratic face. His vices, which had broken up his marriage, hadn’t seemed to injure his health. Lanny had been told that he had an unfortunate hankering for virgins; but Denis had never mentioned the subject. To his father Lanny had expressed a mild curiosity on the subject of an elderly Frenchman’s affliction. How did one find virgins? Were there, in the lush underworld of Paris, merchants who made a specialty of this commodity? Or did one advertise in the newspapers: “Wanted virgins; highest prices paid; references required”? Having lived most of his life in the beau monde, Lanny had come to understand that a dignified and even austere appearance, the best tournure and the most gracious and benevolent manners did not exclude the possibility of secret practices, amusing or disgusting according as you chose to take such matters.
Dragon's Teeth Page 70