Lanny drove Rick back to The Reaches, as the Pomeroy-Nielson home was called, and saw that green and pleasant land once more, and met that friendly and agreeable family. Four years had passed since he had been there, but it was as if he were returning after four days in town. They made no fuss over you, but put the house at your disposal, and well-trained servants ministered to your wants. You punted and played tennis, and played music for those who cared to listen; then in the twilight you sat outside, or if the spring evening was chilly you sat before a fireplace, and heard talk about the problems of the world by persons who had a share in governing it.
A very disturbed and unhappy world just then, and if you had wisdom or knowledge to contribute it was welcomed. The French had moved into the Ruhr and a new war had begun, a strange and puzzling kind, never before tried; blockade and slow strangulation applied to one of the greatest industrial districts in the world. The Germans, helpless as regards military force, were trying a policy of non-co-operation. The workers simply laid down their tools and did nothing; and what could the enemy do? They couldn’t bring in French labor and work the coal mines, because the machinery was complicated, and, moreover, the mines were among the most dangerous, the control of firedamp being a special technique which the Germans had been learning for centuries.
So everything just remained in a state of paralysis; the Germans shipped in food, barely enough to keep their workers alive, and printed mountains of paper money to pay for it. Robbie Budd had learned from his partner in Berlin that the government was permitting Stinnes and the other Ruhr magnates to print money to pay their own workers, an absolutely unprecedented action. Of course it could have only one effect: the mark was now tumbling in an avalanche; the firm of “R and R,” which had foreseen this, was making money faster than if they owned the printing-presses themselves.
British statesmanship, the most conservative in the world, looked upon all this with horror. Downing Street had explicitly disapproved the French invasion, and the alliance seemed about at its last gasp. France was isolated on the Continent—unless you chose to count Poland, which Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson and his friends mostly didn’t. They thought that Poincare was leading the country straight to ruin. France simply didn’t have the numbers or the resources to dominate Europe; the old trouble against which Clemenceau had railed—the fact that there were twenty million too many Germans—was still unremedied, and the seizure of the Ruhr wasn’t going to alter that. Not even the most rabid French patriot would propose to starve all those workers to death, and putting Krupp and his directors into jail, as the French had done, wasn’t going to kill even one German.
X
A strange thing for Lanny to leave this realm, this England, where everything was so serene and rational, and arrive a few hours later in Seine-et-Oise and spend an evening listening to one of Poincaré’s supporters, one of the pillars of the Nationalist party. Denis de Bruyne was quite exultant, because he believed that Germany was going to be brought to her knees at last; the peace which had been lost by the Allies was to be won by la patrie alone. The hereditary foe was to be disarmed, the indemnities to be paid, the treaty of Versailles to be enforced. Lanny found that this treaty was taken as a sort of holy writ by a French businessman; a text like the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.
Knowing how futile it would be to argue, Lanny held his peace to the best of his ability. But Denis knew that his young visitor had recently been in Germany, and couldn’t resist questioning him. Wasn’t it true that the Germans had hidden great quantities of arms, and that they were insulting and sometimes even abusing the Allied commissioners who were supposed to find and destroy them? Yes, Lanny had to admit that this was true; he had heard about thousands of rifles walled up in vaults in the monasteries of Catholic Munich; but he was forced to add that he didn’t see how the French could ever get these except by invading the country, and did forty million people have the military force to garrison and hold down sixty million? If they tried it, could they stand the expense, or would they bankrupt themselves? Was it possible to run modern industry by force, in the Ruhr or anywhere else?
These were questions to trouble any capitalist; and it is only human to be annoyed by a person who forces such unwelcome facts upon your attention. Lanny was glad that he was spending only one night in the Château de Bruyne; and perhaps his host had the same gladness. How did he feel about having this arrogant and self-confident young man carry away with him the chief treasure of the chateau? Denis was paying for his sins; but rarely does it happen that we love the rod which scourges us, however much we may have deserved it.
XI
Lanny, motoring his sweetheart to Juan, carried with him the uncomfortable certainty that she too was a Nationalist; she believed all those things which her husband had told her about France and the outside world. She considered Kurt Meissner one of the few good members of a cruel race which was bent upon the subjection of la patrie; she considered Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson one of the few cultured members of a nation of shopkeepers which was willing to set the Prussian monster on its feet again as a counterforce to keep France from becoming prosperous and powerful. She believed these things because they had been taught to her from childhood, and because they were in all the newspapers she saw.
There was no use trying to change her mind about any such matters; Lanny had tried it and discovered that he caused her distress. She considered that her lover was credulous, because of his generous temperament, his impulse to believe that other people were as good as himself. She considered that he was being misled by German and British propaganda, and by his faith in his friends. Worse yet, his sympathy for the poor and afflicted led him into the trap of the Reds, and that was something which filled Marie with terror. She tried not to voice it, but kept it locked in her heart; she would watch her lover, and note the little signs of what he was feeling and thinking, and often the image of him which she constructed in her mind was more alarming than the reality. Nothing could ever change that, for she was a cautious Frenchwoman of middle age, and he was an imaginative youth, descended from ancestors who had crossed a stormy ocean in order to have their own way in a land where no white man had ever lived before.
Lanny told her about his adventures in London; and here again his enthusiasm encountered her fears. What sort of woman was that who invited a handsome young man to meet her secretly, and pretended to wish to buy a picture at an unthinkable price? In vain Lanny assured his amie that Adella Murchison was a straightforward American type; Marie had never met such a type, and was not to be fooled. The woman was a subtle schemer, and the longer she delayed to reveal her true purpose, the more dangerous she was. Though, Marie had declared her willingness to give up her lover when he was ready for marriage, here was a married woman, a mother of children as Marie was, and toward such a one she had no impulse of self-sacrifice, but on the contrary the feeling of a tigress on guard.
However, the desire for money is a powerful force in the French; and Lanny was firmly convinced that these Americans might actually send him a million francs to buy a picture, and pay him a hundred thousand additional for the service. Of course it is well known that rich Americans are fantastic, and the bare chance of such a thing was not to be thrown away. Marie didn’t want the money for herself, but she wanted Lanny to want it—it would be a way to tone him down and make him into a careful conservative citizen. So she informed him that she had met the Duquesa de San Angelo, and thought she could arrange for Lanny to see the painting. In her secret soul Marie resolved to keep a day-and-night watch over that strange female from the valley of steel and smoke—and, oh, how the Frenchwoman was prepared to hate her if she ventured to move so much as an eyelash in the direction of Lanny Budd!
17
Merchants of Beauty
I
The war of the Ruhr continued; a war of starvation, of slow decay; a war carried on within the countless cells of millions of human bodies. How long could they endure the steady
weakening, the fading away of their powers? There comes a time when an underfed man can no longer labor, a time when he can no longer walk, no longer stand up, no longer move his arms, his tongue. The women bear their children dead, and those already born acquire distended stomachs and crooked bones; they cease to run and play, but sit listlessly staring ahead, or crawl away into some dark corner where their wailing will not be punished. Nature, more merciful than statesmen, usually steps in at one of these stages, and sends the victim some germs of pneumonia or of flu, and puts an end to his misery.
It was a war also of ideas, of propaganda; cries of anguish mixed with those of hate. To the fastidious Lanny Budd it seemed like a fight between two fishwives in the marketplace, screaming, cursing, tearing each other’s hair. It was something hardly to be dignified by the name of politics; just a squabble over great sums of money and the means of making more. Lanny, by right of birth, was privileged to know about it, and his father explained that on the one side were Stinnes and Thyssen and Krupp, the great Ruhr magnates, and on the other side the de Wendels and other French steel men, who had got the iron ore of Lorraine and now wanted the coal and coke of the Ruhr so as to work it cheaply.
Robbie Budd was in Lausanne again; or back and forth between there and London and New York. The great conference was still going on—and that was another squabble over property, the oil and other natural resources hidden in the Turkish land. Robbie, with the help of Zaharoff and his new associates, was “horning in” on Mosul and getting a big concession; he was elated about it, also not a little harassed, and to his son rather pathetic. Why he wanted so much more money was something he couldn’t answer, and it was better not to embarrass him by repeating the question.
The Turks were getting back Constantinople and much of what they had lost in the World War. The French were on top, and the British humiliated—but they were holding onto the oil and to Palestine, through which the pipeline was bringing the precious fluid to the sea. The Russians were attending the conference, for they had rights to defend in the Black Sea, and were still hoping for loans. One of their delegates was Vorovsky, with whom Lanny and his father had talked at Genoa, and whom Lanny remembered vividly; a thin, ascetic intellectual with wistful gray eyes, a soft brown beard, and the delicate, sensitive hands of a lover of art like Lanny himself. Now an assassin shot him dead in a cafe; and in due course a jury of moral businessmen would acquit the killer, thus informing the other Whites in Switzerland that it was open season for Bolshevik diplomats.
II
It was in the midst of such world events that Lanny Budd, having learned that there was money in art-works, set about the task of learning how to get it out. Marie phoned to the duquesa, who graciously agreed to permit a young American connoisseur to inspect her family treasures. She proved to be a little, wizened, dark old lady whose dental plates didn’t seem to fit her very well; in appearance she was as far from aristocratic as you could have imagined, but Lanny had learned that that was frequently so, and he did not fail in any of the courtesies which a highborn lady would expect. The duquesa was dressed in black for a husband who had been killed in the Moroccan wars two decades or more ago.
She showed him the paintings herself, and told him their histories; he listened attentively to everything she said, and remembered it, and praised the paintings—for it was no part of his technique to conceal his love of great art. The Greco proved to be a portrait of a clerical member of the duquesa’s family: a strange figure of a man, distorted like so many of this painter’s representations; abnormally tall and lean, and having fingers longer and thinner than nature has ever seen fit to lend to man. A dark picture, rather sinister, and Lanny couldn’t imagine that Adella Murchison would want it in her house.
But there was a Goya; and, oh, what a Goya for a valley of steel and smoke! A figure of a soldier, splendid, yet decadent, and with a touch of the painter’s satire; a costume with all the colors that a man of arms must have put on when he went to report a victory to King Charles IV. It was a grand piece of composition, with everything arranged to lead your eye to the tall figure with the face of a warrior and the eyes of a bird of prey. Yes, if a plateglass man’s wife wanted something to stir her imagination, and that of the professors of her university, here it was!
Also there was a Velásquez, a double portrait. Lanny had read that many pictures attributed to Velásquez had really been painted by his son-in-law; but superficially they could hardly be distinguished from the real ones, and fetched very high prices on the chance that the master might have put his brush upon them. Being now in the process of learning, Lanny asked duquesa about this, and saw right away that he had hurt her feelings. He was sorry—but he knew all the same that he had brought down the price, if price there was to be.
Only when he was ready to leave did he venture to ask timidly whether his hostess had ever considered the possibility of parting with any of these treasures. She answered proudly that she never had; and this was in accordance with what Zoltan Kertezsi had foretold. Obeying instructions, Lanny said tactfully that if it ever should happen that she was disposed to consider a sale, he hoped that she would not fail to let him know, as he had friends who might be interested. The little old lady hesitated, looked troubled for a minute or so, and then said that she might be willing to consider parting with one or two of them; but the price would have to be very, very high. So Lanny knew that the trading had begun.
Zoltan had said: “Never under any circumstances make an offer, but invite the owner to set a price.” He did so, and the lady told him that the price of the Greco would be at least a million and a half francs, and that of the Velásquez at least two million—for the duquesa took no stock whatever in the del Mazo theory, she declared. No, no, it was a genuine Velásquez, one of the best, and was reproduced in various books of art. Then Lanny asked about the Goya, and was told that the old lady couldn’t part with that for one franc less than a million. That too was famous. Lanny noted down the names of the books in which reproductions of these paintings were to be found; he was sure that these would be in the British Museum, so he wouldn’t have to get photographs. He thanked his hostess over and over again and took his departure.
III
Lanny posted a letter to his client, telling her the details of his interview, the prices asked for the pictures, and where the reproductions could be seen. His advice was that she choose the Goya and authorize him to pay a million francs for it, but of course he would try to get it for less. According to the advice of Zoltan, the actual cash should be sent to Lanny’s bank in Cannes, for a bank draft or express order would be of feeble effect compared with the physical presence of a large bundle of crisp new banknotes. Lanny sent this letter by the new airmail system, and waited in no little trepidation.
Marvelous people, these Pittsburghers! Two days later came a telegram: “Will take your advice forwarding money thanks good luck. Adella Murchison.” Just as simple as that; she tossed him a million francs as if it had been the price of two theater tickets! Lanny had never seen so much cash in his life, but Zoltan had assured him that any bank could obtain it if you gave notice. Lanny called his old friend Jerry Pendleton and arranged to take him as a bodyguard, Beauty having insisted upon that precaution. She made Lanny load up one of the Budd automatics and made Jerry promise to keep it right on the seat of the car.
When the money was at the bank Lanny phoned the duquesa, asking permission to see her about a matter of business. He drove Jerry to the bank, where they were escorted into a private room, and no less than three officials came in to witness the sensational transaction. The highest denomination of note which the French government printed was a thousand francs, and the money was banded up in packages of fifty each; if Lanny had been a really careful business person he would have counted every one of the notes, but he was satisfied to count the packages and the contents of one. He signed the receipt in triplicate, and put the precious bundles into a satchel, and he and Jerry went out to their car, feelin
g decidedly self-conscious, and looking about for anyone bearing a resemblance to the gangsters of the American movies.
They drove to the heights above San Raphael, where the duquesa’s château was situated. Lanny left five of those valuable packages in Jerry’s care, and carried the remaining fifteen in the satchel into the presence of the little old lady. Seated in her drawing-room, he made a carefully studied speech: “Duquesa, I have interested a friend in the purchase of your Goya, and am authorized to offer you the sum of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs in cash for it. That is the very best that I can do. It is a large sum of money, and I believe that if you think it over you will realize that it would be wise to accept it.” To assist the thinking process, Lanny opened the satchel, and proceeded to count the packages of virginal banknotes onto the table in front of his hostess. The last of the fifteen he placed in her hands, so that she might feel the weight of it, and make certain that it was actually composed of notes having the guarantee of the Banque de France.
It was not a pretty spectacle that Lanny watched during the next half-hour. The old woman’s mouth had come open simultaneously with the satchel; her black eyes shone with an unholy light, and her fingers trembled as she clutched this extraordinary dynamic package. It appeared as if she tried to put it down, but couldn’t manage to do so. She started to bargain for more; the painting was one of the most beautiful in the world—actually, she attempted to talk about beauty! It was a family heritage—she even tried to talk about whether she had a moral right to part with it! But all the time her eyes kept wandering to the other packages, and her hand could hardly be kept from stretching out to them.
Between Two Worlds Page 37