VIII
Robbie Budd expatiated upon the defenses of Montauk Point, and the safety of Long Island Sound and its tributary rivers as a nesting-place for war industries; he told about railroad connections, and steel that was brought from the Great Lakes through the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. He pictured the factory of steel and glass he was going to build, air-conditioned, a twenty-four-hour-a-day plant. He showed the drawings of his air-cooled radial engine to Zaharoff, who had owned tens of thousands of engines. In its lighter parts Robbie was going to use magnesium, a metal which the industry had slighted. Small shavings of it are explosive, but he had a method of gathering them up automatically. Instead of hammering the cast parts into place he was going to freeze them in liquid air and set them, and when they had returned to normal temperature they were there for life. When he was running tests on his engines he was going to hitch them up to generators and so make electricity for his plant.
So many new ideas this hard-driving Yankee had, and the retired munitions king watched him as a fascinated cobra watches its Hindu charmer. “I am an old man, Mr. Budd,” he pleaded, pathetically. “My doctors tell me that I must avoid the slightest strain. I have my safe investments, and find that it disturbs me to think about shifting them.”
“Yes, Sir Basil,” agreed the promoter; “but this is the sort of thing that comes only a few times in a long life. Here is the one really live industry, the one that is going to shove everything out of its way. We shall make our turnover every few months—I don’t want to exaggerate, but I have studied the field thoroughly, and I cannot see how we can fail to make enormous profits.”
The operation of greed in this aged Greek trader’s psychology was something automatic. He was like some old toper who has sworn off, but cannot resist the sight and smell of his favorite beverage; like Rip Van Winkle: “This time don’t count!” Lanny, watching him, saw a light gleaming in the cold pale-blue eyes; the palsied fingers seemed reaching out for the treasure and the old white imperial seemed waggling with excitement.
What did he want with more money? What could he imagine himself doing with it? Here he was, with all but one or two toes in the grave, and, whatever else he might believe about the future, he couldn’t expect to take Budd-Erling stock with him. He had no one to inherit it but his two married daughters, and what could they do with it? Lanny’s mother had met them in society, and reported them as entirely undistinguished persons. They would inherit several billions of francs—nobody knew the real figure. Yet Zaharoff had to have more; it was the nature of his being.
Robbie had him at a disadvantage, because he knew so much about the old man’s affairs: his staff, his attorneys, the advisers he trusted. Robbie had already talked to one of them, and perhaps—who could say?—promised him a douceur, a “sweetener.” He knew how easy it would be for Zaharoff to order the sale of a million dollars’ worth of bonds, and the buying of Budd-Erling preferred, with an equal number of common shares for bait. Robbie waved this bait in front of Sir Basil’s prominent nose, and it followed this way and that. Lanny saw that there was going to be a “killing,” and the procedure made him faintly sick, but he decided that this was sentimentality. Who would worry about the fate of an old spider, an old wolf, an old devil?
After all, Zaharoff would get real value for his money. There was really going to be this wonderful building, with a long line of objects moving along slowly and being constantly added to by parts taken from overhead conveyors, until each in turn became recognizable as an airplane and finally rolled off on its own wheels, ready to mount upon the air. All this would continue, long after Sir Basil had gone to his duquesa; as long as civilization endured, with its paper titles of ownership, his descendants would be entitled to dividend checks payable at the First National Bank of Newcastle, Connecticut.
The upshot was that Sir Basil took a copy of Robbie’s “set-up,” promising to study it, and if he found it according to Robbie’s statements, to come in on the deal; he wouldn’t say for how much, but would let Robbie know in a couple of days. The promoter was in high spirits on the drive back to Paris. It was the best day’s work he had done since the depression, he said; you can’t keep a good man down!
IX
Lanny ought to have been a true son of his father and done his share in the making of this new Budd glory. Robbie had cherished that hope for many years, but had had to give it up. He had two sons by his wife in Connecticut; solid fellows, nearing thirty, they would be his right hand and his left. Lanny would sell a block of his securities and put the money into his father’s enterprise, and then he would go back to playing the piano, advising purchasers of art works, and dreaming of seeing the world a less cruel place.
What he did now was to go for an afternoon stroll along the pleasant streets of Paris in the pleasantest season of the year. There was a visit he wanted to pay, and he wasn’t going to tell his father about it. His mother, perhaps—she couldn’t very well object to his visiting her brother, who had befriended her and had never done her the least harm. But with Robbie it would mean the starting of an argument, and what was the use? Lanny wouldn’t tell his wife, either, for that would mean another argument, and of even less use.
Lanny Budd, good-looking, rich, and called a darling of fortune, was a man with a secret vice; and like many such unfortunates, having learned what other people thought of his weakness, he had evolved subtle devices to protect himself. He didn’t enjoy lying, so when he stole away to practice his vice he would include in his journey some innocent occupation such as looking at pictures; then when Irma asked him what he had been doing, he would answer: “Looking at pictures.” He would learn to keep silent on all subjects that might possibly be connected with his vice and bring it to his wife’s mind. What you don’t know won’t hurt you—such is the maxim of erring husbands.
The fact that he refused to recognize his vice for what it was made a difference to him, but, alas, it made none to Irma; and he had had to learn the lesson that if what you do brings unhappiness to someone you love, the question of vice or virtue is a mere matter of words. They had said all the words it was possible to say on the subject, and it hadn’t made any difference; so now Lanny had walled off a portion of his life and mind from most of his friends, including the woman who was dearest to him.
Lanny’s vice was that he liked to talk to “Reds”; he liked to meet them, and hear them discuss the state of the world and what they were proposing to do about it. Whenever he expressed his own opinion, he got into an argument with them, too, but he took that as part of the fun. He didn’t mind if they denounced the system under which he enjoyed a delightful leisure; he didn’t even mind if they denounced him, calling him an idler, a playboy, a parasite. He didn’t mind if they got his money, and then refused to pay the tribute of gratitude, saying that it wasn’t really his money, he had no right to it, it belonged to the wage-slaves, the disinherited of the earth—in other words, to themselves. These things infuriated Irma, but Lanny took them all with a grin.
There was some kind of queer streak in him which Irma and her friends couldn’t make out; some called it “yellow,” though not often in Irma’s hearing. The grandson of Budd’s had somehow got fixed in his mind the notion that he wasn’t entitled to his money and, worse yet, that Irma wasn’t entitled to hers. It was like a thorn buried deeply in his conscience; it festered there, and no surgery had been able to extract it. This caused him to take an apologetic attitude toward disturbers of the social peace and made him their predestined victim; a soft-shell crab in an ocean full of hard-shell creatures. Irma had her own ideas about “parasites”; she thought they were the grumblers and soreheads, the crackpots and cranks who wrote letters to her husband and laid siege to his home, in the effort to dump their sorrows into his heart and their burdens onto his shoulders.
Irma had tried to be good-natured about these annoyances, up to the last year or two; but the episode of the Robin family had broken her patience. She blamed all the misfortunes o
f that family upon the doings of the Red Hansi and the Pink Freddi and the failure of the head of the family to control his wayward sons. She went further and blamed all the troubles of Europe upon the activities of the Bolsheviks. It was their threats of class war and wholesale robbery which were responsible for the development, first of Fascism in Italy and then of Nazism in Germany. When the well-to-do classes found they could no longer sleep safely in their beds, naturally they hired someone to protect them. Hadn’t Irma and Lanny themselves done it, for the safety of their “twenty-three-million-dollars baby”? Irma was quite willing to admit that Mussolini and Hitler and Goring were not the most agreeable types of people, but perhaps they were the best the well-to-do classes had been able to find in the emergency. Thus spoke, vigorously and frequently, the daughter and heiress of J. Paramount Barnes, one-time utilities king.
X
Uncle Jesse Blackless still resided in the apartment in the working-class neighborhood where Lanny had grown used to visiting him. The fact that he had become a deputy of the French Republic hadn’t made any difference in his life—except that it might have had something to do with his decision to marry the French Communist who had been his “companion” for ten years or more. The living-room of his apartment was still a studio, one corner of it packed solid with his paintings; he was busy making another when Lanny knocked on the door. He had a little gamin for his model, and when he saw his nephew he gave the youngster a few francs and sent him along, then lighted his old pipe and settled back in his old canvas chair to “chew the rag.”
They had plenty to talk about: family affairs, the news that Beauty was in Paris and that Robbie was going to become a millionaire all over again; the news about pictures, what Lanny had bought and what was to be seen in the autumn Salon; then political events, the killing of Barthou, and the chances of Laval’s taking his place—Lanny told what Denis de Bruyne had said about this fripon mongol, and it was data that Jesse would use in his next Red tirade in the Chamber. Of course without hinting at the source of his information.
Bald, lean, and wrinkled Jesse Blackless was what is called a “character”; perhaps he was born one, but now he clung to it as a matter of principle. The income he enjoyed from the States was sufficient to have enabled him to wear a clean new smock, but he chose to be satisfied with one which revealed all the different colors he had had on his palette for several years. And it was the same with many of his habits; elegance was a sign of caste, and he chose to be one of the “workers”—although he had never worked at anything but making pictures and speeches. He chose to believe that everything the workers did was right and that everything the rich did was wrong, this being in accordance with the doctrine of economic determinism as he understood it.
Lanny hadn’t been able to find many formulas which satisfied him, and it amused him to pick flaws in his Red uncle’s. They would wrangle, both taking if as a sort of mental boxing-match. Jesse sounded quite fierce, but basically he was a kind-hearted man who would and frequently did give his last franc to a comrade in distress. What he wanted was a just world, and the preliminary to this was for the rich to get off the backs of the poor. Since dialectical materialism demonstrated that they wouldn’t, the thing to do was to throw them off.
The funeral of Freddi Robin had been reported in both Le Populaire and L’Humanite, the former celebrating it as a Socialist event and the latter treating it as an anti-Nazi event. This provoked the painter to declare the futility of attempting to overthrow the Nazis except by Communism; which in turn made it necessary for Lanny to declare the futility of attempting to achieve the goal without the co-operation of the middle classes. Jesse said that the middle classes were being ground to pieces by the economic process, and to hell with them. Lanny said statistics showed the middle classes increasing in America, despite all Marxist formulas. And so on.
If Irma Barnes had heard her husband arguing she might have imagined that she had converted him; but no, if she had been here, he would have been driven to take the side against her. This wasn’t perversity, he would insist; he was trying to see the problem from all of its many sides, and argued against all persons who wanted to see only one side. He dreamed of a just social order which might come without violence; but apparently everything in this old Europe had to be violent!
XI
The newly established mistress of this household came in, and the argument was dropped, for Francoise, hard-working party member, lacked the American sense of humor and would be annoyed by Lanny’s seeming-flippant attitude to the cause which constituted her religion. Lanny chatted for a polite interval and then excused himself, saying that he had an engagement to dine with his father. He went out to walk in the pleasant streets of Paris at the most pleasant hour of sunset, and stopped in a couple of art-shops whose dealers were acquainted with him and were pleased to show him new things. This would keep his record clean—he had been “looking at pictures.”
The ladies of the trottoir manifested an interest in a handsome; well-dressed, and young-looking man. In fact, walking alone on the streets of la Ville Lumiere was no easy matter on this account. Lanny liked women; he had been brought up among them and was sorry for them all, the rich as well as the poor; he knew that nature had handicapped them, and this was no world in which to be weak or dependent. He would look at the thin pinched faces of those who sought to join him; their paint did not deceive him as to the state of their nutrition, nor their artificial smiles as to the state of their hearts. He saw their pitiful attempts at finery, and his own heart ached for the futility of these efforts at survival.
There came one, more petite and frail than usual, and with a manner showing traces of refinement. She put her arm in Lanny’s, saying: “May I walk with you, Monsieur?” He answered: “S’il vous plait, Mademoiselle—vous serez mon garde du corps.” One would keep the others away!
He took out his purse and gave her a ten-franc note, which she crammed hurriedly into her sleeve. She didn’t know what he meant, but it sufficed for a start, and as they strolled along he asked her where she came from, how she lived, and how much she earned. Like so many others she was a midinette by day; but work was uncertain in these terrible times and one couldn’t earn enough to pay for food and shelter, to say nothing of clothes. She perceived that this was a kind gentleman; and Lanny understood that if she wasn’t sticking exactly to the facts, this also could be explained by the formulas of economic determinism. Anyhow, she was a woman, and the tones of her voice and the pressure of her hand on his arm told him a good deal.
Their stroll brought them to where the Rue Royale debouches onto the Place de la Concorde. Lanny said: “We have to part now. I have an engagement.” She replied, this time doubtless with entire truth: “Je suis desolee, Monsieur.” She watched him enter the Hotel Crillon, and knew that a big fish had got away. However, the ten francs would buy her a dinner and leave enough over for a scanty breakfast.
XII
Lanny went into the hotel, in whose red-carpeted and marble-walled lobby great events had happened during the Peace Conference of fifteen years ago. For the grandson of Budd’s the place would be forever haunted by the ghosts of statesmen, diplomats, functionaries of all sorts, some in splendid uniforms, others in austere black coats. Many were now dead and buried in far corners of the earth, but the evil they had done lived after them; they had sowed the dragon’s teeth, and already the armed men were beginning to rise out of the ground, in Italy, Germany, Japan; in other places the ground was trembling and one saw the round tops of steel helmets breaking through. Lanny and others who thought they understood dragon agriculture predicted a bumper crop, perhaps the biggest in history.
He went to the desk for his mail. There was a letter, a poor-looking letter in a cheap envelope, not usual in this haven of the rich. But it was common enough in Lanny’s life, he and his wife being targets for begging letters. This one was postmarked London and addressed to Bienvenu, from which place it had been forwarded; the handwriting was foreign
, apparently German, and Lanny didn’t recognize it. He opened the envelope as he walked toward the ascenseur, and found a note and also a little sketch on a card the size of a postcard. He looked at it and saw the face of the dead Freddi Robin; it caused him to stop in his tracks, for it was extraordinarily well done.
He glanced at the signature, “Bernhardt Monck,” and did not know the name. He read:
Dear Mr. Budd:
I have a communication which I am sure will be of interest to you. I came to England because I understood that you were here. I hope this letter will find you and I thank you kindly to reply promptly, because the circumstances of the writer are not permitting of a long wait. It is a matter not of myself but of others, as you will understand quickly.
The stranger signed himself, “Respectfully,” and had put in the envelope this little password, this shibboleth or countersign, which had the power to send cold chills up and down Lanny’s spine. To an art expert this simple pencil drawing, which bore not even an initial on it, was the surest means of identification and the most secret message that could be contrived. Every line of the drawing cried aloud to him: “Trudi Schultz!” The date on it, October 1934, with a black line drawn around it, said to him: “I have learned of Freddi’s dying condition, and have sent a messenger to see you.” The young artist Trudi had been one of the teachers at Freddi’s school in Berlin, and her style was not to be mistaken.
If Lanny had been a discreet person, if he had learned thoroughly the lessons which life was apparently trying to teach him, he would have put this little drawing away in a portfolio with other art treasures, including a sketch of himself by Jacovleff and several by John Sargent; as for the letter, he would have torn it into small pieces and sent them down into those sewers of Paris which have been so vividly described in Les Miserables. He thought of these prudent actions, to be sure; he thought of his wife and what she would make of this situation. He argued with her in his mind. He hadn’t promised her that he would never have anything more to do with Reds or Pinks; he hadn’t said that he wouldn’t receive any more messages from Germany or give any more thought to the struggle against the Nazis. All he had said was: “I will never again get into trouble with the Nazis, or cause you unhappiness because of my anti-Nazi activities.” Surely it couldn’t do harm if he saw a messenger from a young artist of talent and found out what had happened to her, and to her husband, and to the other friends of himself and Freddi Robin in Germany.
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