VIII
So Lanny had an interesting story to tell Trudi when he flew back to Paris. He had his ten per cent on two picture sales to put into her hands, and she had the proofs of a new pamphlet celebrating Bismarck as the founder of the modern German state. At least, it celebrated him for the first page and a half, and after that it turned into a carefully documented indictment of force as the basis of a state’s progress in the modern world. Why was the Nazi regime keeping secret its budget of military expenditures? Was it hoping to deceive Germany’s neighbor states, or was it the German people themselves who were not allowed to know that their government was now spending three times as much on armaments as Britain?
Lanny stopped his reading, and said: “You can make it stronger. It is five times as much as Britain and more than two and a half times as much as Britain and France combined. So Goring told my father a few days ago.”
“So much the better,” said Trudi. Already she was learning to take the writer’s point of view!
“The comrades who are doing the distributing are to be complimented,” said Lanny. He repeated what Heinrich had said, and added: “Don’t ever give me a hint about those people. I might say it in my sleep sometime; but I can never say it if I don’t know it.”
“You might get it by telepathy,” smiled his friend.
He took her for a drive, and they had lunch in a remote auberge by the bare and frosty banks of one of those seven rivers which meander through the plains surrounding Paris. He had laid down rules as to her eating and sleeping, and she had been obeying them, with the result that she had regained some of her lost weight and had a little color in her cheeks. She could still worry all she pleased about the fate of her husband and friends, but she no longer had to be afraid for her own physical safety, and the human creature is so constituted that this is a great relief to the subconscious if not to the cosscious mind.
“My father wants me to go back to New York with him,” he told her, “but I think I’ll make excuses.”
“You ought to go, Lanny,” insisted the woman. “Your wife may have changed her mind.”
“There is the mail,” he responded.
“I know; but there is her pride to be considered. She doesn’t want to lose her status and be taken for granted. She has to be wanted, if love is to mean anything.”
“I’ll go a bit later; I’ve promised to spend Christmas at Bienvenu and dance with my sister at a party. And besides, I have to admit that my father’s conversation tries my patience. I’ve heard a couple of weeks’ talk about destroying men and making money, and it becomes hard for me to be polite. I’ve done a lot of philsophizing about what seems to me a ghastly perversion of thought. My father is a good man in many ways, a man of real creative energy. He’s supposed to be educated, too—he went to Yale, and they taught him a social code that might have come out of ancient Rome. He talks about the survival of the fittest, and takes it for granted that the fittest are the most greedy. He’s not at all like that himself; he’s generous and considerate to his friends, and it’s only when he thinks of social classes and nations that you’d take him for another Hermann Goring.”
Trudi made a curious reply: “I wonder if Goring could be like that, too.”
IX
Christmas at Bienvenu; but it wasn’t the same, because there were no children. Lanny realized more acutely that he had lost his family. Of course there was Marceline, who remained a child even while playing at being a young lady. He was fond of her, and was glad to see her happy; he tried to teach her something that might be of use to her, and he kept on, even though sadly aware that most of what he said went in at one ear and out at the other. It wasn’t that she did not have the brains; it was that she had been trained by Beauty and Beauty’s friends, including Irma. For six years she had lived in the reflected glory of the Barnes fortune, and while she didn’t admit it to Lanny, she was dreaming of making a rich match and becoming a grande dame whose doings would be reported in the newspapers. Lanny could disturb and distress her by his antisocial remarks, but he was powerless to change her.
He didn’t want to live in the Cottage with its thousand memories of Irma and Frances. He had a cot put in his studio, and stayed there a good part of the time, playing the piano and reading the books of his great-great-uncle which had decorated the walls for many years. Also he pushed the picture business, so as to keep a stream of illegal literature flowing into Germany—that was his excuse for living. But he was restless, because he had been a married man and now he was what the world called a grass-widower, and he missed what he had got used to.
All the time there was his mother, watching him yearningly, pushing at him gently but firmly; she spoke only a small part of her thoughts, but Lanny knew them all—he was to go back to Irma, apologize and promise to be “good,” and repair his dreadful blunder before it was too late. She begged him to write and say that he was coming; to pacify her, he did this. He told Irma about his trip with Robbie, and the messages that Kurt and Heinrich sent, and about the Oberleutnant becoming a Hauptmann; he told about the party in London and the one being prepared at Sept Chenes; he sent messages of love to his little daughter and promised to come and see her before the end of January. He added: “I am sorry, and I still love you”; but he didn’t follow his mother’s sly suggestion and mention having danced with Rosemary at his half-sister’s debut party.
X
Right after New Year’s, Emily Chattersworth arrived, bringing her servants according to her custom. She had offered to have the party at her place, and now Beauty would have the time of her life giving the orders and going over the lists of guests with her old friend. The Riviera was a place where people came and went, and you had to study the newspapers and then telephone your friends to find out who the newcomers were; your friends would ask you to invite So-and-so, and if you valued these friends you would say Yes, and if you didn’t you would make excuses, and also, perhaps, enemies. You mustn’t have too long a list, because that wouldn’t be distingue; on the other hand, if you had too few, that would indicate that you were skimping. Robbie had given Beauty a check for her services, and had added ten thousand francs for Marceline, telling the mother to go the limit, since the girl would have only one chance. There wouldn’t be any need to engage “talent,” since she and Lanny would provide it; but there must be the best colored band on the Riviera, and there must be food and drink without limit.
Lanny had taken part in preparations of this sort ever since he could remember; he had run errands and offered advice—at first his mother had accepted it in a spirit of play, but before long she began accepting it seriously. Now he was not merely Beauty’s son but Irma’s husband, which meant that he was an authority on the affairs of the beau monde, and it would have been unkind to shut himself up and play the piano and refuse to take any interest in the question whether Prince Dimitrovitch was an ex-nobleman or only a sort of ex-country squire, and whether Mrs. Packingham from Chicago was socially important now that she was living here permanently on a comparatively small alimony.
Marceline had never taken any responsibility; it was her role to be beautiful, gay, and free, and this she did to perfection. Having already been launched under the best auspices in London, she was invited everywhere, and had to be advised which invitations to accept and which to evade. She wasn’t told in crude language that certain persons had money while others lacked it; she was told in refined language that certain families were “desirable,” and that certain partis—that is, candidates for matrimony—were “hardly eligible,” while others were “catches.” If the parti was European, some member of his family or else the family lawyer would make the proper approach to Beauty or Lanny; while if he was American, he waded right in on his own account. It was the duty of a girl just turned eighteen to know how to deal with these different sorts of males: which it was safe to flirt with, which must be treated with reserve, and which must be “frozen.” The Riviera was full of all kinds of pretenders and parasites,
impecunious noblemen and refugees from revolutions which might or might not be permanent, so that marrying off a daughter became a political as well as an economic problem.
Among many candidates was a nephew of the Marchesa di San Girolamo, who lived very modestly in an unfashionable part of Cannes. The marchesa belonged to one of the oldest Tuscan families, but there had been some scandal which nobody seemed to know about, and she had been a resident of the Cote d’Azur since before Mussolini. Just recently had come this nephew, a Fascist aviator with the rank of captain; he had led the first attack by an Italian squadron in Abyssinia, and after gloriously bombarding native troops and villages and being decorated for it he had been grounded in rough mountain country by engine trouble. He had come near to death, having crawled into hiding and been saved from the savage enemy only by the advance of Il Duce’s army. As a reward for all this he had several medals, a badly scarred body, a bloodless pale face, and an empty left sleeve. From the happy days before his accident he had brought aristocratic features and a tiny sharp-pointed black mustache; also pride, romantic charm, and a devil-may-care spirit.
A dangerous person, as any competent mother would instantly perceive; and it did not escape Beauty Budd’s mother eagle eye that this elegantissimo was strongly attracted to her incomparable daughter. Vittorio di San Girolamo couldn’t dance like the other suitors, but he could stroll on a terrace in the moonlight or sit by a gleaming fireside and tell hair-raising stories about solo flights along the sides of mountain precipices, dropping bombs upon fortresses never before seen by a white man, so close to the targets that the explosions would throw the plane into the air; plunging down into canyons so narrow that the wingtips had brushed the foliage, machine gunning savage enemies who were accustomed to inflict dreadful mutilations upon prisoners of war.
When Marceline came home and repeated these tales, the anxious mother replied: “Don’t forget, my darling, he probably has a pension of a couple of hundred lire a month—about sixteen dollars—and his aunt has to collect her income from a score of peasant families who scratch a bare living out of terraces on a mountainside.”
XI
It gave Lanny satisfaction to see the British Foreign Secretary forced out of office as a result of the Hoare-Laval fiasco; but Rick wrote him not to be too hopeful. “The Tories will bend before the storm, but they won’t break,” said the Englishman. “Public opinion in this country can prevent some especially flagrant offense, but it is powerless to compel any sound positive action. Mussplini will go right ahead with his conquest, and in the end he’ll probably get more than Hoare-Laval tried to give him.”
The forces of protest in France were equally active, centering their attacks upon Laval. Lanny couldn’t keep away from it entirely—he would learn about a meeting somewhere in the neighborhood and decide that he ought to know what the people were thinking and saying; he would slip in unobserved and sit in a corner, and when he found that the speakers didn’t know as much as they ought to, he would yearn to get up and tell the whole truth. He would take Raoul to lunch, finding excuse to drive somewhere into the country where they wouldn’t be recognized. He knew that German agents swarmed like flies over the Riviera, and he didn’t want to sacrifice any part of his double role.
French national elections were due in the spring, and all the energies of the Left were centered upon getting rid of the fripon mongol and his gang. The Front Populaire program was now in effect and the two powerful workers’ parties, Communist and Socialist, had ceased their sniping at each other. It was the thing for which an American Pink had been pleading over a period of years, and he urged his Spanish friend to stick to it in spite of all difficulties. Raoul said that those at the school were doing their best; he believed the effort would succeed, at least until after the election period, but it was hard to travel along with Communists, because they had a philosophy which justified intrigue and deception. Did any Communist ever really believe in parliamentary methods of procedure? Lanny recalled what Bess had said, and fell silent.
The elections in Spain were due even earlier, in February; and there Raoul had high hopes. The united front was working there also, and a tremendous campaign of education was being carried on among the peasants and the workers in the towns. In spite of all the jailings and beatings, nothing had been able to stop it. “My people are fierce individualists,” said the school director. “Really, Lanny, you ought to go there and get to know them; it would do your heart good. A man may be in rags, and wearing sandals made of rope, but he keeps his natural dignity, and by now he has learned who it is that is exploiting his labor.”
“I am expecting to leave for New York in a few days,” Lanny explained. “When I come back, I might like to take such a trip. Would you care to go with me and act as interpreter?”
“I’m afraid it would be risky for me to go into Spain, Lanny; they’re bound to have me on their shooting-list.”
“Not if you travel with a rich American,” replied the other, with a smile. “I would be an art expert, and I’d take you into the palaces of your enemies; they would tell you all their plans, just as they do here on the Riviera. I have to report the painful fact that they have no idea of submitting to a popular verdict if it goes against them; that applies to Spain as to France. If they are forced to it, they will find some man like Mussolini, to hold you down and keep their seat on your backs.”
“I know,” said Raoul, sadly. “That is why I try not to quarrel with the Communists in spite of all provocations. We have to bear them in mind as a sort of last resort. There may be no peaceful way.”
XII
Marceline Detaze, half French and half American, had been reared in one country and got her ideas from another. She desired to live like an American girl on the Coast of Pleasure: to have her own car and drive where she pleased, to make her own dates, and above all to choose her husband without tiresome consultations with her elders. She was of an affectionate nature, but apparently that was on the surface and did not reach down to the level from which her actions were derived. She had in her an odd stubborn streak: she would listen amiably to all the warnings and exhortations—and then go quietly ahead and do what she pleased.
She liked the company of Vittorio di San Girolamo. She said that the idea of her falling in love with him was silly; she wasn’t going to fall in love with any man, she was going to have a good time, and for a long, long time. She was going to have beaux, all kinds, and many of each. Since it was better for her to do her entertaining at home, Beauty invited the young airman to Bienvenu; he came to lunch and spent the afternoon, and presently it was time to dress for dinner; Marceline asked him to stay, and he was there all evening—for practical purposes a member of the family.
To Lanny this was an unpleasant development, and Il Capitano di San Girolamo a most unpleasant personality. He was only twenty-four, and hadn’t read much, but there were few things he thought he didn’t know. He had been filled to the brim with the Fascist ideology and his assurance that it comprehended all truth was the more annoying because it was expressed with such suavity and quiet dignity of manner. He knew that Fascismo was destined to rule Mare Nostrum—Our Sea—and the lands all about it, and he was sorry for any persons who hadn’t adjusted their minds to the fact. As to his personal future he was clear: his wounds, decorations, and family position entitled him to a diplomatic career, and to become governor of a province in that new Roman Empire which Il Duce was engaged in establishing.
Sacro egoismo was the phrase; you made yourself holy by the force with which you asserted your own Godhead. The Italians were the coming race, and Fascismo the creation of their genius. By the right of their newly discovered power and under the guidance of their great leader they would take what they pleased, as other races had done in the past, as their own race had done more than two thousand years ago, building an empire which had endured for centuries and had been revived for yet more centuries. Vittorio had got his history out of some Fascist textbook, and apparently i
t hadn’t informed him that the Holy Roman Empire had been pretty much a dream, and that while it existed it had been governed by Franks and Teutons, never by Italians.
This glorious bomber of barefooted black troops and mudhovels had apparently never heard about his host’s eccentric ideas; he took it for granted that Lanny believed what the other darlings of fortune on the Riviera believed, and so he talked freely. Lanny held his tongue, and, watching his half-sister, perceived that she was swallowing hook, line, and sinker; it was her first glimpse of the world of ideas and her first dream of glory. When he got her alone he tried patiently and kindly to show her how phony it was, the cheapest circus tinsel, illuminated by some kind of calcium light which would fizzle out quickly; but he found that he was getting nowhere, for the reason that Marceline had heard ever since her childhood that her half-brother was a victim of the subtle Red propaganda—and now he was trying to pass the disease on to her! No, Vittorio was a real hero, and his cause was proving itself in action. In the battle for Marceline’s mind Lanny was licked before he began.
XIII
He talked to his mother about it. “The fellow looks to me like a fortune-hunter under the sign of the fasces. All this career-that he’s outlining depends upon money, and he hasn’t the nerve to claim that his own family has it.”
“But, Lanny, he can’t imagine that we have!”
“Of course he does; he thinks we are American multimillionaires. We live on a big estate, and know all the smart people, and we’re planning a grand party. What else can he suppose?”
“He should see my unpaid bills!”
“All the rich have unpaid bills; that is one of their privileges. He has doubtless heard that Robbie is launching a new industry. Above all, he knows about Irma. You are leaving your friends to suppose that she is coming back here, so naturally Vittorio imagines it’s all in the family.”
Wide Is the Gate Page 39