Wide Is the Gate

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Now Lanny Budd was the same, only more of it. He had lived nearly two more decades between Europe and America, meeting the prominent ones of all lands and learning to take care of himself in all situations. Art to him was not just art; it was history and social science, psychology and human nature, even gossip, if you chose to take it that way. You had to get used to the fact that he really knew the “headliners,” and that when he mentioned them he was not indulging in vainglory but just trying to make himself agreeable.

  “Here you have an interesting contrast, Professor: a John and a Brockhurst side by side, and both dealing with the same subject. It is as if our host had wished to decide the question who is the better painter—or perhaps to provoke a perpetual debate. This is one of Augustus John’s earlier works, and in my opinion they put him in a contemporary class by himself. Poor fellow, he is not taking good care of himself nowadays, and his work is not improving. Gerald Brockhurst is technically a sound painter, but I imagine that he himself would admit the supremacy of John at his best. Brockhurst’s success can be attributed to his firm line and to his color. Both these characteristics have increased with the years, and that, I am sure, is why he has just been chosen to paint a portrait of my former wife. She has become Lady Wickthorpe, as you perhaps know, and is engaged in renovating a castle whose former chatelaines were painted by Gainsborough. Irma will be delighted with a portrait which will make her appear like a cinema star.”

  So once more an ex-geographer perceived that art was also psychology and even gossip!

  “You have children?” he felt privileged to inquire.

  “One daughter,” was the reply. “She is seven, which is old enough to make the discovery that to live in an ancient castle is exciting, and that titles of nobility are impressive. It will be her mother’s duty to see that she marries one of the highest.”

  “And you, Lanny?”

  “I am the father, and, for having achieved that great honor, I am allowed to visit the child when I wish, and am shown every courtesy. It is taken for granted that I will not do or say anything to break the fairy-story spell under which the little one is being brought up.”

  IV

  With the hot copper sun sinking low behind the long stone canyons of Manhattan Island, the two friends strolled back to the hotel where they had met. Lanny had a room there and invited the other up; he ordered a meal, and when it was served and the waiter withdrew, they lingered long over iced coffee and conversation. So many memories they had to revive and so many questions to ask! A score of men whom they had worked with at the Peace Conference: where were they now and what had happened to them? Many had died, and others had dropped out of sight. Alston spoke of those he knew. What did they think now about their work? He had been one of the dissidents, and Lanny had gone so far as to resign his humble job in protest against the misbegotten settlement. A melancholy satisfaction to know that you had been right, and that the worst calamities you had predicted now hung over the world in which you had to live!

  Better to talk about the clear-sighted ones, those who had been courageous enough to speak out against blind follies and unchecked greeds. Lanny’s Red uncle, who still lived in Paris—he was now a député de la république française, and once or twice his tirades had been quoted in the news dispatches to America. Lanny recalled how he had taken Alston and Colonel House to call on this uncle in his Paris tenement, this being part of President Wilson’s feeble effort to bring the British and the French to some sort of compromise with the Soviets. “How my father hated to have me go near that dangerous Red sheep of my mother’s family!” remarked Lanny. “My father still feels the same way.”

  They talked for a while about Robbie Budd. Alston told with humor of the years in college, when he had looked with awe upon the magnificent plutocratic son of Budd Gunmakers, who wore heavy white turtleneck sweaters, each with a blue Y upon it, and was cheered thunderously on the football field. Alston, on the other hand, had had to earn his living waiting on table in a students’ dining room, and so was never “tapped” for a fashionable fraternity. Lanny said: “Robbie isn’t quite so crude now; he has learned to respect learning and is even reconciled to having one of his sons play the piano and look at paintings instead of helping in the fabrication of military airplanes.”

  “And your mother?” inquired the elder man. When informed that she was still blooming, he said: “I really thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”

  “She was certainly in the running,” replied the son. “Now she contemplates with grief the fact that she is in her late fifties, and with a seven-year-old grandchild she cannot fib about it.”

  V

  The ex-geographer was persuaded to talk about himself. He had made an impression upon his colleagues in Paris and had been offered a post in Washington. Among the acquaintances he had made there was the then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a tall, robust young man of ability and ambition who appeared to have a weakness for college professors. “Likes to have them around,” said Alston; “has an idea they know a lot, and that their knowledge ought to be used. A novel idea in American public life, as you know.”

  “It is one that annoys Robbie beyond endurance,” replied Robbie’s son.

  “When F.D.R. became governor of New York State, he invited me to come to Albany and take a minor post—not to have much to do, but so that I could have a salary and be at hand to consult with him about the problems of his office, more complicated than any one man could deal with. A strange destiny for a geographer, but you know how it was in Paris; we all had to be politicians and diplomats, linguists, ethnographers, jurists—or anyhow we had to pretend to be. It is the same in government; you have to study human nature and the social forces that surround you, and apply your common sense to whatever problems arise. F.D. seemed to think that I was reasonably successful at it, so he brought me to Washington, and now I’m one of those ‘bureaucrats’ whom your father no doubt dislikes.”

  “Don’t get within earshot of him!” exclaimed Lanny, with a grin.

  “What I really am is a fixer. I have a subordinate who runs my office reasonably well, and I keep myself at the President’s disposal, to find out what he needs to know, if I can, and to straighten out tangles if anybody can. When two self-important personalities fall to quarreling I go quietly to see them and persuade them that the Republicans are the only people who will profit by their ill behavior. All kinds of disagreeable and disillusioning jobs like that—and every now and then I get sick of it and decide that this shall be the last; but more troubles arise, and I am sorry for an overburdened executive who is trying to keep a blind world from plunging over a precipice.”

  “You think it’s as bad as that, Professor Alston?”

  “I think it’s as bad as possible. What do you think, Lanny?”

  “You mean about this country, or about Europe?”

  “It’s all one world—that is one of the things I learned as a geographer, and that the American people have to learn with blood and tears, I very much fear.” It was the summer of 1937.

  VI

  Lanny, as he listened, had been thinking hard. His thought was: “How much ought I to tell?” He was always restraining the impulse to be frank with somebody; always having to put a checkrein on himself. Now, cautiously, he began:

  “You remember, Professor Alston, that I was an ardent young reformer in your service. I didn’t give up even after Versailles. I used to travel to one after another of the international conferences—I believe I went to a dozen, and met the statesmen and the newspaper fellows, and served as a go-between; I used to smuggle news—whatever I thought needed to be made known. I really believed it would be possible to instruct the public, and bring some peace and good fellowship to the unhappy old continent where I was born. But of late years I have been forced to give up; I was antagonizing everyone I knew, breaking up my home—it was like spitting against a hurricane. You must understand, I have built up something of a reputation as an art
expert; I have played a part in making great collections which I have reason to hope will be bequeathed to public institutions, and thus will help in spreading culture. I persuade myself that this is a real service, and that taste in the arts is not just a fantasy, but an important social influence.”

  “Yes, Lanny, of course. But can you not also have political opinions and exercise some influence on the side of humanity?”

  “It would be difficult, almost impossible. Most of the persons for whom I buy pictures are conservative, not to say reactionary, in their opinions. I have met them because I move in my father’s world and my mother’s, and in neither of these would I be received unless I kept a discreet attitude on the questions which now inflame everyone’s mind. I don’t doubt that you know how the people of money and fashion abuse and defame Roosevelt.”

  “He is trying to save them, and they will not have it.”

  “Not under any circumstances. Every man of them is a Louis Seize and every woman a Marie Antoinette, hellbent for the chopping block. I made enemies by pointing this out to them, and now I have learned to let them do the talking and reply that I am a nonpolitical person, living in the world of art. They take that as my professional pose, and assume that I am after the money, like everybody else. You see I lead a sort of double life; I talk frankly only to half a dozen trusted friends. I’d like to have you as one of them, if you consent; but you must promise not to talk about me to anyone else.”

  “I use many devices to keep my own name out of the papers, Lanny—so I can understand your attitude.”

  “You surely will when I tell you that one of my best-paying clients is Hermann Wilhelm Göring.”

  “Good grief, Lanny!”

  “You may recall hearing me speak of my boyhood chum, Kurt Meissner, who became an artillery officer in the German Army. Now I am free to tell you something I was not free to mention at the time—that while I was serving as your secretary I ran into Kurt on the street in Paris; he was there as a secret agent of the German General Staff, and my mother and I sheltered him and saved him from the French police. Afterwards he lived in our home on the Riviera for a matter of eight years, and became a well-known pianist and composer. Then he went back to Germany and became a Nazi; through him I met many of those high in the Party, including the Führer, whose favorite Kurt still is. You see my position: I could tell my boyhood friend what I really think of his party and his cause, and thus break with him; or I could take the color of the Braune Haus and listen to what they told me, on the chance that what I learned might some day be of use outside. So I have played Beethoven for ‘Adi,’ as Hitler’s intimates call him, and General Göring finds me a gay companion, invites me to his hunting lodge, and pumps me for information about the outside world. I tell him what I am sure he already knows, and I market for him the pictures which he has stolen from the wealthy Jews of his Third Reich. My father goes in and leases his airplane patents to the fat Exzellenz, and they try their best to outwit each other, and laugh amiably when they fail. Geschäft ist Geschäft.”

  “It is a terrible thing to be giving the Nazis the mastery of the air over Europe, Lanny.”

  “Don’t think that I haven’t warned my father, and pleaded with him to change his business policy. But he answers that he went first to the British and the French, and they wouldn’t pay him enough to keep his plant running. ‘Am I to blame because it is the Nazis who have the brains and the foresight?’ he asks, and is too polite to add: ‘What business has an art expert trying to determine the destiny of nations?’ Robbie insists that he believes in freedom of trade, and quotes Andrew Undershaft on ‘The True Faith of an Armorer.’ But, alas, when I put this creed to the test, it didn’t stand up. My father would not, either directly or indirectly, permit the democratically elected people’s government of Spain to purchase a Budd-Erling P9—not for cash on the barrelhead.”

  “You know Spain, Lanny?”

  “Not so well as I know France and Germany and England, but I have visited it three times in the past year. Each time I brought out paintings, but also I met and talked with all sorts of people, and kept my eyes open. I saw the putting down of the Franco uprising in Barcelona and the arrival of the International Brigade for the defense of Madrid.”

  “What do you think will be the outcome of that fight?”

  “The people will certainly be crushed if we continue our refusal to let them buy arms, while at the same time we permit the Italians and the Germans to send Franco everything he asks for. I cannot understand our country’s diplomacy, and I wish that you would tell me: Why is it, and what does it mean?”

  “The answer is not simple. There are so many forces, some pulling one way and some another.”

  “But the President himself, Professor Alston! He is the head of the government and is responsible for its policies. Can he not see what he is doing to Europe when he permits the Nazis and the Fascists to combine and murder a democratically chosen people’s government?”

  “The President is not the ruler of Europe, Lanny.”

  “No, but he is the head of our State Department, or ought to be, and has the say about our foreign policy. Why has he reversed what has been international law since the beginning; that any legitimate government has the right to purchase arms for its own defense? Why did he go to Congress and demand that the arms embargo be extended to apply to the Spanish Civil War? Why does he go on supporting the farce of Non-Intervention after he has had a whole year to see what it means—that we keep faith with Hitler and Mussolini while they keep faith with nobody in the world?”

  VII

  The ex-geographer was gazing into a pair of earnest brown eyes and listening to a voice that was always well modulated, even when it was full of concern. They seemed to him young eyes and a young voice; the same as he had observed them in the conference rooms of the Hotel Crillon, where the grandson of Budd Gunmakers had labored so hard to save the district of Stubendorf, the home of his friend Kurt Meissner, from being turned over to the Poles. Now here was this Lanny in the summer of 1937, nearly twice as old, but still stating a complex problem in simple terms. Or, at least, so it seemed to a “fixer” of high state affairs. Why doesn’t President Roosevelt see this? Why doesn’t he do that? A fixer hears such questions all day and most of the night; and perhaps he doesn’t know the answer, or perhaps he’s not free to tell it.

  Alston listened until this friend had finished pouring out his demands; then, after a moment’s pause, and with a trace of a smile, he said: “Why don’t you ask him yourself, Lanny?”

  “I have never had that opportunity, Professor.”

  “You could have it quite easily, if you wished.”

  The younger man was startled. “You think he’d have time to talk to me?”

  “He is a great talker; he loves it. Also, he likes to meet people, all sorts—even those who disagree with him.”

  “I hadn’t thought of the idea,” said Lanny; but he was thinking now while he spoke. “It would be a great honor, I know; but I might get into the newspapers—and then what would Robbie say?”

  He stopped, and the other laughed. “You might go to sell him a picture. He might really buy one, to make it all right!” Then, more seriously, he explained that the President was at Krum Elbow, his mother’s Hyde Park home, which was not so closely watched by the news-hounds. “They make their headquarters in Poughkeepsie, some distance from the estate, and they don’t haunt the grounds as they do the White House. The President could easily instruct his secretary that your name was not to be included among the daily list of visitors. That might be of advantage to him, also—for it’s possible that he might have something confidential to say to a friend of Hitler and Göring.”

  VIII

  It doesn’t take long to arrange an appointment when the telephone service is working—and when you are the right person. Early next afternoon Lanny left his hotel, driving a sport car which was at his disposal whenever he visited his father’s home in Connecticut. His route t
ook him through Central Park and up Riverside Drive; across a great tall bridge from which he had a breathtaking view; then up the valley of the Hudson River, known to history and legend. Here Major André had been hanged and General Arnold had fled to avoid hanging; here mysterious Dutch figures had played at bowls in the night, thus causing the thunder, and Rip van Winkle had anticipated Freud with his “flight from reality.”

  The Dutch settlers had moved up this broad valley and with bright cloth and glass beads and other treasures had purchased large tracts from the Indians. Wars and revolutions had left them undisturbed, and now their tenth generation descendants were gentlemen farmers, living in dignified leisure and voting the Republican ticket. Once in a while comes a black sheep to every fold, and so in this staid Dutchess County was a family of Democratic Roosevelts whom their relatives and neighbors looked upon with horror, referring to the head of it as “That Man.” The Nazis had changed his name to Rosenfeld and said he was a Jew; millions of worthy Germans believed it, and Herr Doktor Josef Goebbels, who had started the story, had chuckled over it to Lanny Budd.

  A well-paved boulevard winds along the edge of the hills, now losing sight of the river and then coming again upon a sweeping view. Every few miles is a village, with houses surrounded by lawns and shaded by ancient trees. Cars are parked in front of general stores, and loungers sit in front of them, chewing cigar stubs, whittling sticks, discussing their neighbors and the doings of their politicians. In the heat of a midsummer afternoon everything is still that can be; only the bees hum, and the motor of a car speeding along the highway at the customary rate of ten miles faster than the law allows.