Wide Is the Gate

by Sinclair, Upton;

  That is what Lanny was supposed to write, but of course he actually wrote something different. He had already discussed the idea of Vittorio with Rick, and they had agreed upon a code name, Veronese. Now Lanny wrote that he had what seemed an excellent chance to get a genuine Veronese painting, and requested that Sir Alfred would write by return mail to Lanny as follows: “I have your letter outlining your friend’s plan and will be pleased to pay the reasonable expenses of two persons for not more than a month. I will furnish additional sums not exceeding two thousand pounds which you may authorize them to pay out to others, and as soon as I see the final results of their effort, I will pay them two thousand pounds reward. I am depositing one thousand pounds to your account at your London bank.”

  That was hardly the sort of letter a man of judgment would write; but Lanny said in his letter to Rick: “Tell the pater not to worry, for I hereby assume responsibility for all consequences of this letter and will reimburse him for any losses in which it might involve him. He doesn’t have to pay any money; the letter he is to write is just a blind, as you can explain to him.” But the baronet wasn’t satisfied to have it that way; he had his own ideas of what became an English gentleman, and he actually put the thousand pounds into Lanny’s bank—something which Lanny knew represented a heavy sacrifice for that family.

  Two thousand pounds at this time was equal to nearly ten thousand dollars, or more than two hundred thousand francs; a neat fortune for a young married couple. Lanny, whose unusual notions included some called “feminism,” insisted that if Marceline went along she would be doing her share of the work and should have half the reward. Vittorio chose to take this as an insult to an Italian officer and gentleman; but Marceline was delighted, and forgave all her brother’s sins forthwith. Lanny stood firm, and even threatened to demand a share for his mother, whose bright mind had hit upon the scheme. For his own part he would claim nothing, for he wished to take no part in the risky affair, except for acting as a go-between with Sir Alfred. Vittorio and his wife must undertake the venture on their sole responsibility, and would affirm Lanny’s innocence if any trouble should arise.

  Beauty showed signs of being anxious over Lanny’s insistence upon this point; but he said: “Let them earn what they get, if they can. And as for their getting caught, what good would it do for me to get caught with them? Much better to be free and try to help them!”

  VIII

  The four conspirators settled down to work out their problem. At this time the land connection between France and Insurgent Spain was undependable, and the quickest route was from Marseille to Cadiz. It was patrolled by many warships and there had been “incidents” of various sorts; the situation was confused, but Lanny said they would be reasonably safe on a French, British, or American vessel, for neither side in the Spanish conflict desired trouble with the major powers.

  In the past four years Lanny had given no little thought to the problem of smuggling people out of prisons and prison-lands. He didn’t mention it now, but out of the ideas he had accumulated he told the young pair: “If you’re able to get Alfy out of jail, you’ll have the job of getting him to the coast and on board a ship. In a country at war you’ll have to have military passes, and your car is apt to be pretty carefully examined. It seems to me that one of us will have to stay in hiding for a while and let Alfy use that person’s papers. Alfy is tall and thin and wouldn’t do as a woman, so he’d have to take either Vittorio’s place or mine. Being taller than either of us, he couldn’t wear our clothes, so I suggest that we have a couple of suits made for him. I know his size pretty well, and there’ll be nothing suspicious about our having extra suits; nobody will unpack them and measure them to see if they fit us.”

  So Lanny went to his tailor and said he wanted to make a present to a friend, and ordered a lightweight suit for a man two inches taller than himself and an inch smaller about the chest. Vittorio went to a different tailor and said he had an officer friend arriving by steamer, and as he would have to attend a formal function, Vittorio wished to provide him with a dress uniform similar to that which Vitorrio was wearing. These orders were filled and the accessories purchased; so that in case of need, a war prisoner could doff whatever he might be wearing and emerge as either an American art expert or an Italian Air Force officer.

  Meanwhile the matter of passports had to be arranged. The Insurgent government of Spain had not been recognized by France, but it had its agents who were performing diplomatic and consular functions. There was such an official in Nice, and before him appeared an American gentleman of elegant appearance who exhibited a contract with a wealthy lady of Seville and letters of introduction to some of the most important personalities of that city; also an Italian officer with proper credentials and an empty sleeve gained in the Abyssinian war; and a fashionable young lady of the Cote d’Azur, the bride of this officer. The “consul” knew that there were several thousand Italian officers now in Spain, helping in the liberation of his country, and that a wounded one on furlough should wish to see what his comrades were doing seemed a quite natural thing.

  Lanny bought a considerable quantity of American and English money and sewed it in the underside of a belt which he would not take off even while he slept. He had learned that trick from his father in boyhood, when the munitions salesman had carried his secret cable code in that way. Franco Spain was using the paper money of Madrid, but required that it be specially stamped, and Lanny would buy that money in Cadiz and Seville. In one of his suitcases he put a copy of his card-file and a briefcase full of correspondence with rich and important clients. Franco Spain needed foreign credits, and the government officials might see no reason to enforce the republic’s law against the exporting of art works.

  IX

  Beauty’s chauffeur deposited them in Marseille, where they began visiting shipping-offices and wandering up and down the docks. Anything could be shipped to Cadiz except munitions, and many neutral shipowners were glad to get the money of Juan March and the Duque de Alba; for six hundred francs apiece, about twenty-four dollars, the voyagers obtained two clean and comfortable cabins on an English passenger-freighter which was due to sail the next day; meanwhile they put up at the Hotel de Noailles, and entertained themselves with one of those “screwball comedies” which were the rage among Hollywood fans all the way from Singapore to Buenos Aires. The heroine was the daughter of a railroad tycoon who lived in a house which might have been mistaken for his biggest railroad station, and she ran away from home and got into a mixup which caused her to be mistaken for a gangster’s moll. She had to be rescued by a newspaper reporter who looked not a little like Lanny Budd, and Vittorio said such a story was proof of the decadence of pluto-democratic society. However, that didn’t keep him from staying to see the reporter round up half a dozen gangsters singlehanded.

  Mare Nostrum is far from dependable in February, but it put on its best show for the travelers, who sat on deck and watched the parade of the sea go by, everything from fisher-boats with red lateen sails to cruisers with gray warpaint. A tense and crucial period in the history of this old sea which so many had claimed and some were claiming still. Britain had just concluded a treaty with Italy, trying to win her away from Germany; they agreed to protect the freedom of this highway so vital to them both; so a British captain and an Italian officer could talk as allies and discuss the dangers which might threaten both. The Britisher was hostile to sailors of the Spanish fleet who had dumped their officers overboard; the survivors, he opined, were not very adept at managing the vessels and had not been able to do much for their cause. The “Nationalists”—so Lanny had to get used to calling them—were out hunting with the vessels they had kept, and British destroyers and cruisers out of Gibraltar were protecting their own. But still, you could never be sure, and a torpedo, especially in the night, was a possibility not to be excluded.

  The only challenge was by a Franco gunboat as they were approaching Cadiz. They were authorized to proceed, and crept into
a harbor which was handling several times its normal shipping with several times the normal delays. The passengers had to spend another night on board, and when at last they were able to present their papers to a port officer and be taken ashore, they had to spend several hours waiting for a train to Seville, and not being certain whether they could get on board it.

  Meanwhile they could stroll and take in the sights, to which Vittorio’s uniform gave them free admission. They watched an Italian transport unloading a thousand or more Militi in Blackshirt uniforms, and several Italian vessels being emptied of tanks, guns, and boxes of ammunition by the cradleful. It was amusing, after having read for the past half-year the solemn protestations of the Italian government before the Nonintervention Committee in London. Vittorio was free with his comments on this theme, which he took as evidence of the superiority of Italian brains to those of the decadent democracies. Apparently his Italian brain overlooked how this point of view might affect a citizen of the democracies, causing him to hesitate in entrusting a Fascist with money, information, or anything else.

  X

  They reached Seville late at night, and put up at the Hotel Bristol, having learned that the Alfonso XIII, also the Andalucia, had been reserved for Italian officers. Really, you could hardly be sure whether you were in Seville or Naples, there were so many black shirts on the streets and so much Italian talk. Officers and privates all walked proudly, swelling out their chests, for they had just taken Malaga almost unassisted, and were confident of going straight on to Valencia, wiping out the Red government and cutting off Madrid from the sea.

  Next morning Lanny set out to find out what could be done about hiring a car, and Vittorio went in high spirits to look up some of his friends. He promised to bring one or more back to lunch if it could be done. And it could. He turned up with no less than three guests: a comrade of his days in the flying-school, a comrade of this comrade, and a distant cousin, lieutenant in the quartermaster’s department. All three clicked their heels, doubled in the middle like jackknives, and kissed the hand of the Capitano’s bride. All three proved to have excellent appetites, and enjoyed the meal provided by an expensive restaurant. In Continental fashion, all three stared at Marceline, in fact, they found it hard to do anything else; they were, in the French formula, foudroyes, in the Italian, fulminati, that is, thunderstruck. They talked about the war, so eccitante, gloriosa, but their eyes would come back to the young bride, and their sentences, in English, French, or Italian, would stumble.

  It was going to be that way, Lanny soon perceived—and so did Marceline. She had come to a dancing lady’s paradise. Here were swarms of elegantissmi, torn suddenly from their homes and shipped off to a strange and unexpected land. Most of them had been told they were going to Abyssinia to become consuls in the ancient Roman sense; but here, instead, they found themselves on the way to an actively erupting war. Few of them had opportunity to meet the upper-class ladies of Spain, who dwelt in great two-story homes having marble-paved patios cooled by fountains. In Marceline they were confronted with elegance and grace, fashionable manners and smart conversation; the French chic, the American free-and-easy, do-as-you-please and take-what-you-can-get spirit! The Fascist code required motherhood and the domestic virtues of their own women, but imposed no such restrictions so far as concerned the women of other nations—or even of other men.

  Would Marceline dance? Indeed she would! Here was a space cleared and an orchestra, so that young men going out to suffer privation, wounds, and perhaps death might have one last fling of pleasure, a hint of love, an intimation and imitation of romance. Vittorio would have to sit and watch covertly and try not to glower too ridiculously. He had married a dancing lady and couldn’t very well expect to lock her up in a Bluebeard’s castle. He couldn’t deny to his comrades what all the world considered their social right. Each would have a turn and then another, and would come back flushed with pleasure, telling Vittorio as well as his wife that there had never been a dancer like her.

  It was going to be that way always. Nobody, and no power on earth, was going to keep Marceline from being delighted with men’s delight in her dancing. She was a creature of that sublimated and sophisticated kind of sexuality which is called feminine charm; she would play with love and then run away from it, laughing; not maliciously, because that wasn’t her nature, but gaily, because she had played all her life. She was bored by seriousness, and treated it as the torero treats the very serious bull in the early stages of their encounter, waving his cloak in the creature’s face and stepping lightly out of the way of his charges.

  So life in Seville was going to be for Vittorio what life is everywhere, a mingling of pleasure and pain. A pleasure to stay at a fashionable hotel and be free to invite a swarm of friends and play the gracious host at the expense of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson; on the other hand a torment to watch his darling gyrating in the arms of some other man, to see her face all smiles and her eyes closed with rapture. Vittorio would think all the thoughts which the jealous Moor had thought; and, it must be admitted, with not quite so little reason. Lanny would watch, also, and think his own thoughts; he was not in position to object to either the flirtations or the extravagances. Marceline would exclaim: “Mon dieu!” and Vittorio would exclaim: “Diacine!” and both would demand to know: “How are we ever to find a way to help Alfy unless we make friends?”

  XI

  Lanny had watched the beginning of Fascist education more than fifteen years ago, and here was the end-product for him to study with a sociological eye. These young officers treated him with respect and gave him no personal offense, but their attitude toward all the non-Fascist world was one of disciplined and systematic scorn. They knew very little about that world, and believed what they had been taught; whenever they spoke about international affairs, it seemed to Lanny that he was listening to the voice of Mussolini giving an interview to Rick during the Cannes Conference of sorrowful memory. Mussolini was no ignoramus, but a thoroughly trained Socialist party member and editor. He knew all the weaknesses of the bourgeois lands, and had carefully selected the worst of them and taught them to his followers. Here now were the elite of these followers, repeating his words like so many black-shirted poll-parrots.

  They were riding their wave of glory; they were the new empire-builders, making new history. Doubtless there were some who resented having been tricked into a journey to Spain, but they kept silence, and it would have taken a long time for Lanny to win their confidence. The accepted explanation among them was that they were fooling the democracies, and that was a delightful joke upon which they never wearied of playing variations. When one of them referred to himself as a volontario, he winked and all the others grinned.

  Their attitude to the Spanish, whom they had come to save, was curious. They would have been willing to take all the Latin peoples in as equals in the glorious destiny of Fascismo, but the others would not have it so. The French were decadent, indeed rotten—look at them, with a Giudeo for the head of their state, a pacifist, a sentimentalist who called himself a democrat and submitted to the “blackmail of the street”—they had learned that phrase of the French Rightists. As for the Spanish, they were too proud of themselves to be capable of discipline, and in this crisis were doing almost nothing to save their country. First they had depended upon Moors and the Foreign Legion, and when these were stalled in front of Madrid they had come crying to Il Duce for help. And did they think they were going to get it for nothing? The Italians had taken possession of the Balearic Islands—and were they expected to hand them back when the Reds had been put down? When the Italians took Gibraltar from Britain, would they be expected to hand that over to Franco, who could hardly have got Cadiz without Italian air support?

  XII

  Lanny presented his letters of introduction in Seville, and thus had an opportunity to inspect the other side of this picture. The Spanish aristocracy had, of course, been terrified by the people’s government, and had been helpless to put it down
for themselves; but they didn’t admit that fact, and safe here, a long way from the battle-line, they were not altogether grateful to the foreign hordes which had burst in upon their city. The remarks of the Spanish ladies about the motives of the intruders were such that Lanny forbore to mention having brought a Fascist brother-in-law along with him.

  What troubled these proud ladies was that the war had taken their men-servants, and made their women-servants too greatly aware of strange males on the streets. Also, the cost of food had more than doubled, and the end appeared to be not yet. Manners and morals were declining, and it was a hard time indeed: so said an elderly noble lady who had known Zaharoff’s duquesa and was pleased to talk about her with the grandson of Budd Gunmakers. When she learned that he was interested in paintings she showed him some of her own, obviously hoping that he would offer to buy them—but he didn’t, for while they were most aristocratic they were not very artistic.

  Also Lanny met General Aguilar, back from the Jarama front for a rest; he had silver hair and mustaches, silver medals across his chest, also bronze, and two or three military crosses. A very distinguished person, distressed at the moment because the chusma, the rabble, were putting up such an unexpected resistance, and it was an unheard-of thing, contrary to all precedent. Now the Italian Militi had come to that front, just south of Madrid—and really, it seemed that the General was afraid they might win where his own troops of the regular Spanish Army had failed. What would that leave of prestige to a man who had devoted his whole life to learning to fight and had failed every time he had tried it? The General didn’t say that, of course, but when Lanny mentioned his name to the young Blackshirts, they hailed it with loud contempt.