“Just a brief note, darling, telling me that she was settled and at work. She thanked me for our hospitality, and said that she was writing the same to you.”
“I received that note. She is an intelligent woman, and just your sort, I suppose. How much are you interested in her?”
“I am deeply interested in her, both as a writer and a trance medium; but I’m not in love with her, if that is what you mean.” He knew perfectly well that that was what she always meant.
“Lanny, I can’t understand you. You are keeping things from your mother, and what is the reason for it?”
“Bless your heart, old dear—you can’t understand because you don’t want to. I am interested in my work, and not interested in getting married. I tried it once, and discovered that it’s all right for those who like it, but not for me.”
Beauty had said every possible word there was to say on this subject, but that didn’t keep her from saying it all again. Lanny kissed her on her well-rounded cheek and tickled her gently under the ample chin which distressed her when she looked into the mirror. “Why should I want a wife,” he demanded, “when I have a mother to tell me everything I need to know?”
Of course no woman is going to let herself be diverted by devices so transparent. “Tell me,” persisted Beauty, “are you corresponding with Lizbeth Holdenhurst?”
“I wrote her a sort of bread-and-butter letter, and I’ve written to her father several times. I’ve had to, in connection with the handling of the Detaze paintings. I tell him news from Europe that I think will interest him.”
“Why don’t you write to Lizbeth?”
“Because I don’t want to encourage ideas in her mind. I’m not in love with her and I’m not going to be, and she has to understand it and find herself some proper swain in Baltimore.”
“Have you ever told Laurel that her cousin is in love with you?”
“Of course not. In the first place, Lizbeth has never told me that she’s in love with me—”
“Her father has told you!”
“Yes, but fathers can be mistaken, and anyhow that is their secret. If they want to tell Laurel, it’s up to them.”
“Does Laurel go to Baltimore, do you know?”
“She didn’t mention it. I told her when she was here that I had never mentioned to Lizbeth or her family that I had met Laurel in Germany.”
“Why on earth didn’t you do that?”
“I was never quite sure what terms the two families were on. Laurel is a sort of poor relation, you know, and the Holdenhursts are very conscious of their wealth and their importance. Laurel’s ideas are different from theirs—antagonistic in many ways.”
“You mean they would quarrel with her about that?”
“I don’t know exactly. Lizbeth Holdenhurst is only a child, but she is a child who has always had her own way, and rightly or wrongly, I’ve an idea that she’d be upset because I didn’t pop the question in Baltimore. I thought: If she hears that I’ve been meeting her cousin in Germany and here in Juan, which she thought such a delightful place, she might have the same idea that my own mother has, that I can’t try psychic experiments with a woman, or read her stories in the magazines, without falling in love with her. She might be upset and perhaps spiteful.”
“She’s not at all that sort of girl, Lanny.”
“I’ve learned that girls sometimes surprise you; and anyhow, it wasn’t my business. I had the idea that Laurel was in Germany more or less clandestinely, and I wasn’t sure that she had told her relatives. She doesn’t like the Nazis, and may be writing a book to say so. I had to be careful where I met her for that reason. My general impulse is to let other people manage their own affairs in their own way.”
“What a strange secretive person you are coming to be, Lanny! I am worried by the idea that you are up to something dangerous, and are hiding your affairs from me.”
“Forget it, old dear!” he smiled. He had thought now and then of taking this shrewd mother at least partly into his confidence; but what good could it do? She did not share his ideas, and would have had a lot of anxiety which it would have been hard for her to conceal from others. Now he said: “I am watching the world, and liking it less and less the more I know it. I am keeping aloof and not making the mistake you are making, of getting involved with people who call themselves my friends and really haven’t any idea but to get out of me all they can.”
VII
If Lanny had been free to consult his own preferences, he would seldom have gone off the Bienvenu estate. He would have continued his experiments with Madame Zyszynski, and read some of the books in the well-chosen library which had been bequeathed to him. He would have had his piano tuned, limbered up his fingers, and played over again a rich treasury of sound. He would have taken up once more what he playfully called the subject of child study; in the enclosed court of the villa was a charming specimen, eager to be investigated—Marceline’s son and Beauty’s grandson whom they had named after the painter, Marcel Detaze.
He was half Italian, a quarter French, and a quarter American. His mother was in Berlin, dancing in a night club, and presumably happy with her Junker lover; but tiny Marcel knew nothing about that, and did not miss her. His divorced father, the Capitano, was a Fascist braggart, but the baby didn’t know that either, and Lanny could hope that with wise training and example he might turn out better than his inheritance. He was just two, a delightful age; he raced here and there about the court, stumbling over half a dozen puppies and filling the place with sounds of merriment. Lanny would bring out the small phonograph and put on a record and teach him dancing steps—exactly as he had done for the little one’s mother. Just twenty-one years ago that had been, when Lanny had come down from Paris after the Peace Conference which had undertaken to make the world safe for Democracy and instead had made it safe for Nazi-Fascism.
As a result of that, Lanny couldn’t stay at home and read old-time philosophers and poets, and play the piano and give dancing lessons. He had to go out into a world of treacheries and corruptions, and make himself the playmate and pal of persons whose ideas and tastes he despised. He had to spend his money upon affording them hospitality. He had to listen to their conversation and cultivate the art of guiding it into channels he desired. He had to be sly as the serpent and watchful as the tiger on the hunt; every word had to be studied, every gesture, every facial expression, and many a time he had known that his life depended upon his shrewdness. For these persons were killers and the hirers of killers—and not merely in Germany and Italy and Spain, their own lands, but here in France, and even before the war had broken out. To turn traitor and menace them could mean not merely death but cruel torture preceding it.
And when, after these fashionable forays, Lanny would come back to the family nest, even then he was not free; even then Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God, controlled his life. Instead of reading Emerson and Plato, instead of playing Chopin and Liszt, he had to shut himself up in his studio and sit staring with blank eyes, going over in his mind exactly what he had heard and making sure that it was fixed in his memory. It had to be right or it was no good at all; and never once in the course of three years as presidential agent had he set down one single memorandum; never had there been on his person or in his luggage or even in his home anything that the Gestapo and the Italian OVRA were not free to peruse and to photostat.
VIII
Just across the Cap, a pleasant walking distance, lived Sophie Timmons, once Baroness de la Tourette and now Mrs. Rodney Armitage. She had a jolly disposition, a loud voice, henna hair which she would not permit to become gray, and most important of all, oodles and oodles of money. It was the Timmons Hardware Company of Cincinnati, whose advertisements you have seen in the magazines. Sophie’s brothers and nephews ran it, and sometimes they came visiting, and when Lanny went to Cincinnati they bought Detazes and other paintings from him. They deposited Sophie’s dividend checks in their home bank, and Sophie drew on the account for wha
t she wanted, and it was a lot—for what was the use of having money if you didn’t get any fun out of it?
She had been Beauty’s friend in Paris before Lanny was born, and she and Emily Chattersworth had kept secret the fact that Beauty had never been married to Robbie and so had never divorced him. They had done it because Robbie had asked them to, and they had been pleased to thwart even partly the old Puritan father in Connecticut who had threatened to disinherit his son if he married an artist’s model. So Beauty owed a lot to these older women friends—not so much older, Sophie would insist with a wry face. Lanny couldn’t recall the time when her laughter and sharply cynical wit hadn’t been a part of his world. Years had passed before he realized that she wasn’t the most refined of persons, but even so, he found her good company; and useful, too, for all the world came to her parties, and Nazis and Fascists and Spanish Falangists were not particular whose food they ate and whose wine they drank.
Among Sophie’s grandnieces was one named Adele Timmons. She had come on a yachting tour with friends, and had stopped off to visit her great-aunt and been caught by the war. They might have shipped her home on one of the liners, but she liked the Riviera, and shared Sophie’s belief that the Italians who had drunk her wine would never be impolite to any of the family. Perhaps also she had listened to stories about the wonderful Lanny Budd who sometimes came visiting at Bienvenu. She was just sixteen, but precocious for her age, a brunette with lovely large dark eyes and a soft, well-rounded figure; she was of a gentle, trusting disposition, and just ready to fall into some man’s arms. At any rate, the ladies had that idea, and nothing would have pleased them more than for Lanny Budd to provide the arms.
A month or so previously Adele had stayed too long in the Riviera sun. It is right overhead in midsummer and not to be fooled with; the peasants, who have lived there all their lives, gaze with astonishment at visitors who lie out in it almost naked, broiling themselves to the color of an overdone steak. Adele had got a case of sunstroke, with high fever and almost coma. Sophie, in panic, phoned for a doctor, and also to Parsifal Dingle, and Parsifal stepped into a little runabout and got there first. According to his custom he put his hand on the girl’s forehead and sat there, saying his prayers or whatever he called them, and it happened as it had in a hundred other cases, the girl opened her eyes and smiled, and in half an hour or so was all right.
That was before the doctor got there, and he would have had to be more than human if he hadn’t resented it. Unfair competition—the same idea as the priests had. Parsifal did it in the name of God, but he never took money for it, and so there didn’t seem to be anything the objectors could do; the law could hardly forbid an elderly cherub to lay his hand on a girl’s forehead—while the girl’s great-aunt was in the room watching, with two hands clasped together in terror. If this exemplar of divine love had been willing to accept a fee he could have had anything he asked; but his only desire was that great-aunt and great-niece should learn the lesson that love is the most priceless of God’s gifts, and is free to all His children, and that their duty is to practice it and teach it to others who may be ready to learn.
In spite of all that skeptics and cynics can say it is a fact that this attitude is as “catching” as any disease. Adele Timmons came out of that experience convinced that she had met the most wonderful man who had ever lived; her vocabulary being limited, she repeated the statement many times. She gazed at him with awe-stricken eyes, she drank in every word he spoke and remembered it; she resolved fervently that she was going to live that kind of life, and love everybody—the worse they were the better, for that would be a test of faith. She read diligently all the “New Thought” literature he gave her. She came on every occasion to visit at Bienvenu and watch Parsifal give “treatments” to other persons, and now and then receive one herself.
There was nothing unusual about all that; it had been happening to this kindly man of God ever since he had appeared on the Riviera. With him, exactly as with the apostle Paul, “some of them believed … and of the chief women not a few.”
IX
Such was the situation when Lanny arrived. Even before he had met Adele, as soon as he heard her name mentioned he knew what the two elderly ladies would be planning; he was to be the lucky man who would marry her, and Sophie would give her a generous dot and will her a block of Timmons Hardware stock. Many years ago Emily Chattersworth had had the same plan for one of her nieces, and it was devilish awkward, for Lanny had been a ladies’ man from boyhood—and these were the ladies! He resolved to be very busy with picture deals, and to have urgent engagements in London and New York, regardless of war. When he went to lunch at Sophie’s, he treated Adele as a child, which, according to etiquette, she was, not having made her debut. He directed his fascinating conversation to the great-aunt, telling about mutual friends whom he had met on his tour. Kurt Meissner, who had lived for seven years at Bienvenu and knew Sophie well, had composed a Führer Marsch which the German Army had played on its entrance into Paris; Kurt had taken Lanny to meet Hitler in the Hotel Crillon, and later to the ceremony of Hitler’s visit to the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides. Nobody could fail to be interested in such a story—not even a sixteen-year-old miss who had just acquired a religion.
Thus the much pursued and gun-shy Lanny Budd. He knew the ladies would be disappointed, but they would have to bear it; he was determined not to let them get him into another mess as they had done in the case of Lizbeth Holdenhurst, who had got her cap set at him so firmly that she had caused her father to come and make a proposal. Lanny clenched his hands and resolved that he wasn’t even going to look at this girl; he wasn’t going to be left alone with her, either outside in the moonlight or inside in any cosy nook; he wasn’t going to dance with her, or even go swimming unless others went along.
He was relieved to observe that the girl seemed to fall in with his program. She flashed him no signals, no downcast eyes or sidelong glances; she behaved as a child, and not as a romantic-minded miss. Beauty, too, behaved better than he had expected; she didn’t try to lure him over to Sophie’s and she didn’t sing the praises of this “catch”; instead she talked some more about Lizbeth. Lanny sensed that there was something peculiar in the situation, but he didn’t try to find out; he was glad enough to keep out of it, and his thoughts were concentrated upon finding out the details of the headlong preparations which the Germans were making for the invasion of England.
There was nothing especially secret about that program, for the Führer himself had announced it to Lanny in Paris, and Lanny had got off a message to President Roosevelt through the American Embassy. Here in Cannes he went to take eine Tasse Kaffee at the home of Kurt’s aunt, the Frau Hofrat von und zu Nebenaltenburg, an aged Dame who had refused to stir from her apartment at the outbreak of war, declaring her certainty that the Wehrmacht would arrive before long. The French had apparently not thought her worth bothering about, and now that the Germans were free to come to the Riviera for their holidays, her home had become a social center for various dignitaries and their wives. They all knew about Lanny Budd, who had been a visitor at Schloss Stubendorf, to say nothing of Berchtesgaden and Karinhall. He would tell them about the rapid spreading of sympathy for Germany in America, and how that man Roosevelt was grabbing rope to hang himself; in return they would discuss the tremendous preparations being rushed in the Fatherland, how landing craft were being built, and barges assembled from all the canals, and motorboats from the inland lakes and rivers. September was the month—wir segeln gegen England!—and meantime the Luftwaffe was engaged in knocking the British out of the skies. How confident they all were, and full of gloating! Der Tag was every day.
X
Only little by little Lanny came to the realization that his mother was distressed about something. She was unusually silent, she avoided her son, and when he got close to her he discovered that her eyes were red from weeping. He knew her too well to be in any doubt; and after a few days of it he went to her
room, shut the door behind him, sat down on the side of the bed, and exclaimed: “Look here, old darling—what is the matter with you?”
He was fully prepared to have her declare that she was unhappy because her firstborn and only son wouldn’t do his duty to posterity by settling down in Bienvenu and raising a family. He wasn’t sure if it would be Lizbeth or Laurel Creston, or possibly Adele; Beauty might have been trying the experiment of letting him entirely alone, on the theory that in previous cases she had irritated him by pushing too hard. But no, it wasn’t anything like that; it was something she didn’t want to talk about, and Lanny became suddenly worried, for this was just the way his amie Marie de Bruyne had behaved before she had admitted that she had a cancer.
He asked if it was Beauty’s health. No, it wasn’t that; it was something too terrible to be voiced; she began to weep, and he wondered, in sudden horror, if it could be that she had fallen in love with some man other than her husband—she, at an age which she would never speak, but which was getting close to sixty, and with a son who would be forty next November!
“Look, dear,” he pleaded, “it’s much better to spit it out and get it over with. I’ve got to know it sooner or later. I’ve always trusted you and you have trusted me; and did I ever break faith?”
“No, Lanny, but I’m too humiliated! It’s so utterly degrading!”
“Yes, darling, but that’s all the more reason for telling me. I’ve got to leave pretty soon, and I surely can’t go while you are in serious trouble. Imagine what my thoughts would be!”
“They couldn’t be as bad as the reality, Lanny!”
“Maybe not, but they could be pretty bad, and I simply have to know. I’m going to sit here and not move till you tell me.”
A World to Win Page 5