Wide Is the Gate

by Sinclair, Upton;

  From the mother’s aspect, manner, and conversation you would never have guessed that there was anything “spiritual” about her; but upstairs in a room of this ample dwelling, full of historic memories, a retired real-estate salesman from a small town in Iowa sat for hours at a time in front of his fireplace with his eyes closed. He was doing what he called praying, a form of mental exercise which consisted in fixing his mind upon images of the good, the true, and the beautiful, to the exclusion of a world full of the bad, the false, and the ugly. The method must be working, for whenever Beauty entered that room she came out with a light of hope in her eyes and feelings of love in her heart. Was it not love of Marceline which prompted her to find the child a proper husband? Was it not love of Robbie and the other stockholders, including Margy, her hostess, which prompted her to try to sell fighter planes to the British who apparently needed them so badly? Truly, it would be terrible if the British home and Mediterranean fleets were to be destroyed; what then would protect this beautiful old town house, and the spreading country estate, and all the other charming places where Beauty Budd had been having good times for more than thirty years—ever since Petries’ Peerless had become Eversham-Watson and had brought her here and Introduced her as the ex-wife of Budd Gunmakers?

  A touching and pathetic thing to see Marcel’s daughter at this great moment of her life; a lovely frail butterfly just emerged from her chrysalis, waving her wings in the sun and preparing to take flight into the wide world. A wonderful rose-pink toilet had been got ready and Lanny was privileged to see it in advanced. No use trying for the serious talk which he had been preparing in his mind; he could get time for only a few words: “Are you going to break off with Alfy, dear?”

  “Oh, Lanny, he’s so fussy! He quarrels with everything I do. He thinks I’m nothing but a silly.”

  “Well, are you?” he wanted to say; but it might have spoiled the party. “Have you invited him?”

  “Of course. I wrote him a nice note, even though he was an old bear the last time I saw him. I suppose he’ll come, if his very important studies permit; but I don’t believe he’ll enjoy it, because he thinks that parties are frivolous and that I ought to be learning nursing or something.”

  “Well,” said Lanny, “he thinks there’ll be another war, and he expects to be an aviator, so he may need to be nursed.”

  “Oh, Lanny, you think of such depressing things! I believe you taught them to him!”

  XII

  Beauty found time for a word of warning to this wayward son of hers. One of the persons he might meet at this affair was Rosemary Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver, only you didn’t have to pronounce it since she had become the Countess of Sandhaven. Lanny said: “Rick told me she was in town.”

  “Tell me honestly, are you going to take up with that horrid woman again?”

  “Unless she has changed greatly, she’s not in the least horrid, Beauty. She was gentle and kind, and taught me no end.”

  “She seduced you, and then turned you down twice,” declared this stern moralist. “That’s enough for any man’s mother.”

  “If she had married me,” countered the man, “she’d have been just as unhappy as Irma, and what good would that have done either of us?”

  “Tell me, are you going to let it happen again?”

  “If it will comfort you to know, I am going to live in poverty and chastity and devote myself to improving mankind.”

  However, he didn’t talk that way to Rosemary when he met her in the ballroom. Seven or eight years had passed, and he was prepared to see the ravages of time, but there was none to be observed. She was a year older than he, but that doesn’t mean so much in the mid-thirties as it does in the mid-teens. She had been in the Argentine and then in the Far East; evidently she had taken care of herself wherever she was. She was of that sort, serene, unhurried and unworried; the best of everything came to her, for she had inherited that good part. Her heavy flaxen hair had lost none of its luster and her shoulders and back none of their smooth whiteness. She wore a cream satin gown with one deep-purple orchid at the V in front. Had she put that on for him?

  “Oh, Lanny!” she exclaimed. “It’s so good to see you! I came just on your account.”

  “I had to come anyhow,” he replied; “but I’m glad you’re here. You haven’t changed a bit. Where is Bertie?”

  “He’s in the Canadian Rockies, trying to shoot a wild sheep. How is Irma?”

  “She’s quite well. She’s in New York.”

  “Are you happy, Lanny?”

  “Who is, entirely?”

  “We all hope to be; and you deserve it, because you’re so kind.”

  “Happiness doesn’t always go with kindness. It’s as wild as a Rocky Mountain sheep.”

  They danced, and it was just like the old days; they moved together, they felt themselves one, they were wrapped in a garment made of a thousand agreeable memories: the nights on the banks of the Thames, looking at the stars on the water and listening to Kurt playing the piano; the nights on the shore of the Golfe Juan, listening to a distant orchestra playing the barcarole from the Tales of Hoffmann. Belle nuit, O nuit d’amour, souris a nos ivresses; nuit plus douce que les jours, O belle nuit d’amour! Nights much later, ten years or more, when they had sat before the fire in her villa and he had recited to her all the poetry he knew.

  She was one of the most adorable of women, and if he wanted to be consoled, her bosom would be soft and warm. She said: “Bertie has quit the diplomatic service, you know; they worked him too hard and wouldn’t give him any real promotion; and anyhow, he wanted to be free and play round.” Lanny knew what that meant: “My husband prefers shooting sheep to taking care of his wife.” “Playing round” meant some other woman, as it had meant in the old days. She might as well have said: “I am free, Lanny, if you want me.”

  Did he Want her? He did and he didn’t; such problems are less simple at thirty-six than at sixteen. He had time to think it over, for of course they couldn’t dance together the whole evening; that would have made a scandal. He strolled out on the terrace, it being a still evening and not too cold. There was young Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson pacing up and down, very ill-contented; he had had one dance with his beloved and couldn’t expect more at her debut party.

  “Hello, Alfy!” said the old friend of his family. “How do you find Magdalen?”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said the youth, English fashion; then, in a sudden burst: “Tell me something, will you, Lanny?”

  “Anything I know, old man.”

  “Does Marcy really love me?”

  “Well, that’s not for yes or no. She’s a very different person from you, and what she means by love may be different from what you mean.”

  “She keeps me in a dither all the time. Sometimes I think it’s my fault, and sometimes I think she means to. I imagined that love would mean peace and understanding, but I discover it’s a struggle of wills. Is that right?”

  “What something is and what it ought to be are often quite different.” Lanny took the arm of the tall slender young man, who at this time happened to have exactly half as many months on earth as Lanny himself had. With his dark hair and keen intellectual features he seemed a return to life of Rick as Lanny had seen him when he had volunteered as a flier and come to Paris for a two-day furlough.

  Moved by sudden pity, the older said: “Alfy, I’ll tell you something that your father and mother know, but otherwise it’s a secret. My own marriage happens to be on the rocks right now.”

  “Oh, Lanny, I’m so sorry!” Alfy was quite overcome, partly because he had believed this a really happy union and partly because of the honor his father’s friend was doing him by his confidence.

  “That may account for my being pessimistic,” Lanny went on. “But this is what I’ve been thinking about love and marriage for many years: that the most indispensable thing is intellectual harmony. Nietzsche says somewhere that the most important question for a man to consider is wheth
er he’s going to be bored by what the woman says to him at breakfast every morning; for that is what marriage comes down to.”

  “That’s a new thought to me, I admit, Lanny.”

  “It is something to think about beforehand, rather than afterwards, and save yourself a lot of regrets.”

  “Then you don’t think I ought to try to marry Marcy?”

  Lanny smiled. “Don’t put that responsibility on me! I’m telling you what has caused my unhappiness, and you decide whether it means anything to you.”

  They went inside, because Lanny had promised to give an exhibition dance with his half-sister; they did the maxixe, a society dance which had been popular when Lanny was a boy, but which was judged too strenuous for modern taste. They took the ballroom floor, and the fashionable company sat in the chairs which lined the walls. Half-brother and sister made a lovely couple, and knew each other so well they hadn’t had to rehearse. Robbie Budd was there; he watched and thought that his one wild oat had produced two very fine flowers. (He took Marceline for his, because he had set Beauty up in Bienvenu and had supported both the painter and the child.) Beauty watched, bursting with pride, for these flowers were hers beyond dispute—and who now would say they were not worth the price they had cost? Apparently no one, for there was vigorous applause, and the couple had to do an encore.

  A most effective way to show off a debutante; the mothers of eligible sons sat gazing through their jeweled lorgnettes and weighed the problem of a French painter’s daughter who could hardly be as good as she looked. The grandson of a baronet watched and weighed, and so did his mother. Rosemary watched, knowing nothing about Alfy and his problems, but thinking about Lanny: “Should I have married him? Or would I rather be a countess?”

  She danced with him again; after which they sat in one of the side rooms and he brought her food and drink, and they chatted. Having given sound advice, Lanny now decided to apply it. The news about the Hoare-Laval Pact, as it was called, had appeared in New York that morning and had been in the London papers of the afternoon. Addressing an ex-diplomatist’s wife, Lanny remarked: “What’s this, Rosemary, about a deal with France over Abyssinia?”

  “I’ve been told about it,” she replied. “Too bad it had to break into the newspapers ahead of time. It will stir up a lot of fuss.”

  “I suppose so,” he admitted.

  “What can we do?” she went on. “We certainly don’t want to get into a war over a place like that. If we have vital interests there, we ought to be able to make some reasonable arrangement.”

  “I imagine you could put Mussolini out without too much trouble,” he remarked; “but you might get something worse in his place.”

  “Exactly!” exclaimed his old sweetheart. “Most probably some wild-eyed Red.”

  So Lanny decided it was up to him to take his own advice. When Rosemary said: “Will you come to see me?” he answered: “I’m afraid I won’t have time, old darling. I’m working hard for my father, and then I have to go back to New York. I’m not free like you, alas!”

  16

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  I

  Lanny thought he had never seen such a show of public anger as resulted from the publication of the Hoare-Laval Pact to surrender Abyssinia to Mussolini. Rick spoke at a huge mass meeting in Trafalgar Square and at another in Albert Hall, and at both places the audience roared its indignation over this betrayal of a public trust. The intensity of feeling was due to the recentness of the elections; there hadn’t been time for anybody to forget the promises made by the government. One feature of the campaign had been a poster showing Baldwin’s fist hammered down on the Covenant of the League of Nations, with the proclamation: “OUR WORD IS OUR BOND.” And now, before three weeks had passed, they were selling the League out and turning its procedure into a farce!

  Lanny thought: “Well, I helped a little.” He said it to his chum, who replied: “Stay right where you are, my lad, and bring us all the news you can pick up.” This was pleasant for Lanny in a way, because it spared him the pain of breaking with his environment; it was hard in another way, because his feelings were becoming so intense. He had to keep repeating Zoltan’s formula: “I am an art lover, and do not take sides on political questions.” To himself he said: “It’s exactly like living with Irma!”

  He took his father and mother back to Paris. Marceline went along, for she and Beauty were going to Bienvenu for the season’s doings. As for Robbie, he expected orders from both British and French governments, but they were smaller than he had looked for and he was more than ever disgusted with bureaucratic sluggards. He owed it as a matter of courtesy to report to Zaharoff, and Lanny drove him out there, and watched again how this old man’s being came to life while listening to talk about marketing instruments of death. He chuckled and said: “I remember my first sale of the Nordenfeldt submarine, which in those days was as hard for the officials to believe in as planes are now. I sold one to my own Greek government, and then I went to the Turks, whom I hated, and said: ‘The Greeks have one of these, and so your whole fleet is in direst peril. You must have two if you wish to feel safe.’ So they bought two; and after that no government in Europe could withstand me.”

  Robbie knew that story, and told the old spider that it was a classic of their industry; whereat the spider was pleased. “The man you ought to visit right now is Mussolini,” he said; but the American replied: “Unfortunately my hands are tied, because my government has issued an imbecile neutrality proclamation, forbidding the sale of munitions to any belligerent.”

  “Well, then, go to Goring,” suggested the Knight Commander. “That will surely stir them out of their sleep.”

  “I have been invited by him,” was Robbie’s answer. “I’ve been waiting until I had something definite to tell him about what the others are doing.”

  “Tell him anyhow,” said Sir Basil. “In my day I made it a rule to tell people that things were so, and then I went ahead and made them so. When I found that the Maxim machine gun was better than the Nordenfeldt, I told the world that it was my gun that had done the work. It wasn’t long before I had bought Maxim out, so what difference did it make?” Few people had ever seen the munitions king of Europe laugh, and now, when Lanny saw it, he thought it an unlovely spectacle.

  II

  Lanny had guessed that his father wouldn’t be overlooking the German market, and had been prepared to be asked for an introduction to the German Air Commander. Now, however, he learned that Goring had sent an agent to see Robbie in Paris and that Robbie was going to Berlin in the next few days. As it happened, Zoltan had got an order for one of the General’s pictures; and Lanny received a letter from a merchant in Berlin, one of Johannes’s old associates, saying that hard times and increased taxes had decided him to follow Lanny’s suggestion and put a price on several old masters. So, on the way back from Zaharoff’s, Lanny said: “Would you like me to drive you to Berlin?”

  “I don’t think I ought to take the time, son; I ought to fly. Why don’t you come with me?” It was mid-December, but aviation technique had been so perfected that passenger planes were rarely off schedule. Lanny said: “All right,” for he mustn’t forget that it was his father who had given him the tip about the Hoare-Laval deal, and possibly the fat General would talk more frankly to a man of large affairs than he had ever talked to an art lover. Certainly, if you were going to be an anti-Nazi spy, you couldn’t have picked a better father than the president of Budd-Erling.

  Robbie had told Zaharoff that Goring would probably want to lease the American patents; but Robbie wouldn’t consider that, he was going to keep the business in his own hands, and the old munitioneer had agreed that this was the part of wisdom. “Make him pay, plane by plane,” he said.

  Neither of them appeared to have considered the possibility that the fat General might steal Robbie’s designs. On the drive back to Paris, Lanny brought up this question, and the father replied: “Business men don’t do things like that. It
wouldn’t pay them in the long run, because nobody would have anything more to do with them.”

  “You think of Goring as a business man, Robbie?”

  “He’s rapidly becoming one of the biggest. I’m told he’s building the greatest steel plant in Germany, and it’s privately owned.”

  “Yes, Robbie; any pirate or bandit might go into business after he’s got enough money. I suppose Al Capone might have, if the government had let him alone.”

  “Well, when he did, he’d be a business man; he’d learn that the way to make profits is to do business on a big scale, and in order to do that you have to make your word count with the people from whom you buy and to whom you sell. What you call capitalism pays a lot better than any piracy or banditry ever did.”

  “Oh, I know that,” replied the errant son, and smiled to himself, thinking how naive his father was—as naive as any Nazi!

  Lanny knew that it wouldn’t do any good to pursue the subject, because this man of great affairs would pay no attention to what a Pink might say. Robbie was just like Irma, he refused to believe that the Nazis were as bad as they advertised themselves, and he found excuses for each and every evil deed that was brought to his attention. They had plundered Johannes Robin—yes, of course, but then Johannes had been an unconscionable Schieber, and as such he should have taken the precaution to get out of Germany at once and not try to sail on a yacht.

  Robbie wouldn’t say that to Johannes, naturally—he rarely mentioned the Nazis to his associate. But both of them had been business men all their lives and would take it for granted that their duty to the stockholders of Budd-Erling outweighed any duty they might owe to truth, justice, humanity, or any other glittering generality. Robbie would handle the German market himself, and no Jewish names would appear in connection with the concern; after the profits had been made—well, pecunia non olet, money has no smell, and Johannes, a stockholder on a small scale, would put the dividend checks to his bank account and not to his nose.