“Lanny, you’ll swear to me you won’t say anything or do anything without my consent?”
“Darling, of course. You are a grown-up person, and in the final showdown you’re the one who has to decide your fate.”
At last she blurted it out. It was indeed terrible, and beyond any man’s guessing; a woman’s possibly—one of the ideas that tormented her was that the shrewd-eyed Sophie might have got some hint of her humiliation. It was the fact that Parsifal was receiving visits from that girl, and that he prayed with her, and Beauty had seen him with his hand upon her forehead!
“But good Lord, Beauty, he does that to everybody!”
“I know, but not to young girls!”
“Male or female, old or young! Don’t you remember he treated Leese’s niece?”
“A peasant girl, Lanny; that’s not the same as a social equal.”
“Darling, everybody is Parsifal’s social equal. Don’t you remember how he helped a Senegalese soldier, and how the poor devil stank?”
“There’s no use trying to fool me, Lanny; this girl smells of the highest-priced perfume she can buy.”
“You are tormenting yourself with a fantasy. Parsifal doesn’t know that any woman but you exists.”
“I thought so, Lanny. But I know men; the old ones especially fall for the young things, and do they make perfect fools of themselves! I have seen it happen to one after another.”
“You never knew anyone like Parsifal before, and you are doing your own self a wrong when you suspect him.”
“I’m not really suspecting him, Lanny; I would despise him if I did. It’s a sudden hatred of all men—and of all empty-headed women. I was empty-headed once, I know. So I hate myself, too. But I never stole another woman’s man!”
“Do you think Adele wants to steal Parsifal? She is too young to think of him that way. She probably thinks even I am too old for romance—at any rate she has never made eyes at me.”
“That’s the most suspicious thing of all! Why shouldn’t she be interested in you? It’s her business to be looking for a marriageable man, and not for my old one. It’s pure vanity—she wants to show me!”
“Darling, you are missing the point, I am sure. Adele thinks she has found a religion.”
“Religion, fudge! What girl at her time of life is not looking for romance? For adventure, even for the thrill of showing a once famous beauty that her day is done!”
“You’re surely off in that idea; ask the Catholic Church! They know that Adele’s age is just the time to catch them for spiritual devotion. The neophytes have religious ecstasies, they become the brides of Christ, and spend the rest of their lives telling their beads and scrubbing floors in the service of a Heavenly Bridegroom.”
Beauty found comfort in those words. She stared at her son and exclaimed: “Lanny, do you really think he is teaching her to be good?”
“I’m sure he is trying to,” he replied, “and you ought to know how effective he is; didn’t he make a saint of you? Now forget this foolishness, darling, and think of good old Parsifal—how hurt he would be if he had any idea of your suspicions.”
“Oh, Lanny, he mustn’t know. I must manage to get myself together. I must think up some other trouble, if he asks me why my eyes are red! Don’t think me too foolish, Lanny—try to realize my plight! What chance has a woman with wrinkles against a young girl with dimples?”
XI
Lanny went off and thought it over. Surely this was one of the oddest human entanglements he had come upon in a life among odd people. He thought about both parties in the suspected intrigue. He had spoken with vigorous certainty for his dear mother’s benefit, but in the secrecy of his heart he wondered: could it conceivably be that Parsifal Dingle, a man in the sere and yellow leaf, was being lured by the dream of budding youth and blossoming beauty, things which he had missed in his own early days in a small unlovely village of the Middle West? Parsifal didn’t say much about those days, but Lanny had gathered that they had been barren. All life was barren without God, the healer said, and Lanny could agree with that; but men sometimes find difficulty in making sure what is God and what is Satan.
As for that “young thing with dimples,” anything might be true. Sex was written all over her, but that wasn’t her fault, it was her time of life. Lanny knew all about it, because Rosemary, now Countess of Sandhaven, had been at just that age when she had taken Lanny into camp, and under her particular tent, so to speak. She had told him all about it, every thrill and shiver, being an unusually matter-of-fact creature, and under the influence of what had then been called the feminist movement, which made it a matter of principle to talk about everything, and in many cases not about anything else. Adele, so far as Lanny knew, had never heard of such ideas; but she was like a tinderbox, ready to catch fire at the smallest spark. Who could guess what might happen when a divine hand was laid upon her forehead and a divine voice murmured words about universal and all-possessing Love?
Yes, it was a situation to think about. If Beauty should prove to be right in her suspicions, what could she do? Certainly not anything to affront Sophie Timmons or her great-niece; and certainly not anything to wound her husband’s feelings. What would probably result would be a flare-up of wifeishness on Beauty’s part, a wild impulse to hold her man; but she would be too shrewd to find much hope in this strategy. She would know that if Parsifal could once become “like some other old men,” he would find plenty of Adeles to fall for. From now on until the end of her life Beauty would be watching every tiniest sign; and she had the eyes of a hawk when it came to other people’s secret thoughts. Her life would become a tragedy—the tragedy of a woman too old to charm a new mate, and too genuinely devoted to her husband ever to want another.
XII
Lanny worried; and a day or two later, passing his mother’s door, he heard what he thought was suppressed sobbing. It was mid-morning, and Parsifal was out in the court, reading one of his devotional books. Lanny tapped several times, and more imperiously; finally his mother opened the door and let him in. There she was, with tears streaming down her cheeks, in spite of dabbing with a wet handkerchief. He knew it must be serious this time, and said: “What the devil?”
“Oh, Lanny, the most awful thing!” Then, somewhat contradictorily: “Oh, I am such a fool! You will think I have gone crazy.”
“I can’t think anything till you tell me what it’s all about, dear.”
“Oh, Lanny, I had a dream! The most awful dream in all my life!”
“A dream!” he exclaimed, lost in wonder. “You mean you are in this state about a dream?”
“But it was so vivid, and so utterly horrible. I can’t realize that I am awake. I can’t believe that it isn’t symbolic, that it isn’t a warning. You have told me many times that dreams are sometimes that.”
“What was the dream?”
“I found Parsifal in Adele’s arms; and Parsifal told me he no longer loved me. Then Adele defied me; she said: ‘Don’t you know that you are an old woman? You are through, and he is mine! Mine, mine!’ She screamed it at me—oh, the little vixen, the viper! I could have strangled her!”
“I hope you didn’t hurt her,” said Lanny gravely.
“I woke up before I could do anything to her. I lay there perfectly rigid, numb with horror. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it hadn’t happened. It was so real, so paralyzing. It was early in the morning, but I didn’t dare go to sleep again, for fear of falling into the clutches of that nightmare. Even now, when I tell you about it, I am certain that it happened, that it is a warning; I know that it’s real, and that I have been a fool, that I should have acted long ago to stop it—and now it’s too late!”
The tears were still flowing; and Lanny thought: “It is becoming an obsession. I’ve got to tell Parsifal. He is the only cure.” There was that modern saint, sitting out in the court thinking Love, with a capital L, and the Power of the Mind over the Body. He really believed in this power, and Lanny did, too.
But after you had become convinced, what a bore to keep on repeating it! That was what these New Thoughters did, that was what you had to do if you wanted to make the thing work inside you. You had to keep on thinking it. “Stand porter at the door of thought,” Mother Eddy had commanded, and over and over again she had insisted that the mind must hold continuously to the one thought, of God as Love, Life, All. Call it autosuggestion, or self-hypnosis; but they were only names for a power of the mind. Some called it God, and it worked better that way. Lanny could not find any answer to one question: “If God meant me to say prayers all day, why did He give me such an intense curiosity about the outside world?”
Anyhow, there was Parsifal in a shady corner of the court, as contented as the bees and the butterflies fulfilling their routine and never bored by it; and here was his beloved wife shut up in her room, tormenting herself with a dream! “Look here, old dear,” said the son, “you’ve got to snap out of this! You’re really driving yourself crazy.”
“I know it, Lanny; but I can’t get over the idea that this awful thing has happened, or is on the verge of happening.”
“It’s perfectly obvious that you have simply made a dramatization of your own suspicions. You’ve got to use your reason and convince yourself that it has no basis in reality.”
“That’s so easy to say, Lanny; but it only shows you don’t know what is in the hearts of women—all women.”
“You mean that all women think their husbands are going to be unfaithful to them?”
“When a woman gets to be my age, she discovers something horrible—she finds that men love only youth!”
“I don’t agree with you that all men are satyrs; and I think there is such a thing as growing old gracefully. When you were young, you saw other women doing it; you must have realized that your turn would come.”
“I suppose I knew it, as a matter of theory; but I never actually faced the idea that I might grow too stout, and then if I reduced I’d be full of wrinkles!”
“You’ve never been a merely beautiful body. You’re nobody’s fool, darling, and it’s time you used your brains and admitted that you’re going to be sixty, and that’s different from sixteen. Age has its comforts, too, and its dignities. You can learn things and understand life, as you couldn’t hope to do then.”
“That’s all true, Lanny, and I argue it with myself. But when I face the thought that some younger woman is going to grab the man I love, and leave my home and heart empty, then it seems to me that my life has come to an end. And when I have these horrible dreams—what on earth am I going to do?”
XIII
Lanny didn’t really know what to suggest. It helped her to confide in someone she loved, and he was glad he could help her that much. When she exclaimed that it was her own freedom in love that was bringing a harvest of dragon’s teeth, he could comfort her by saying that she had never broken up another woman’s home. Four men in a period of more than forty years wasn’t such a bad record—when it was in Paris and on the Coast of Pleasure. She had had only one of those men at a time, and had loyally served and helped each of them to the best of her understanding. She might have married Robbie Budd if she had been more cold-blooded; but she had known that his family and the family institution of Budd Gunmakers were his ordained life, and if he had been cast off and disinherited he would never have been a happy man and might have gone entirely to pieces.
Then, after some years, when Robbie had decided that it was his duty to marry and raise a family in Connecticut, Beauty had consoled herself with a French painter for whom she had posed. That he had been a man of genius had been a bit of luck, but that he was a wise and kind man, and had loved her truly, was no accident, nor even merely her physical charms, but also her good sense and devoted attention. That was a matter of ten years or so, and when Marcel had been defaced in the war, she had married him and stuck by him until he died. It hadn’t been easy, but she had stood the trial.
A year or two later she had fallen in love with Kurt Meissner, Lanny’s friend and boyhood hero. That had been a scandal, because she was so much older than Kurt; but it had been real love, or so they had thought, and Beauty’s son thought so too. The facts stood that she had saved Kurt’s life, and taken care of him while he became a famous Komponist, and that his best work had been done during the seven years he had lived in Bienvenu. Then his country had called him, and he had become a friend of Hitler, and a devotee of the Nazis. That hadn’t meant much to Beauty, who did not have a political mind; but he had told her the same thing that Robbie had told her, two decades earlier, that his parents wanted him to marry a young wife and raise a family, and that he felt it his duty to oblige them.
Finally she had chosen this odd marriage, to a man of God whom all her friends had considered to be slightly cracked. But thirteen years had passed, and they had been compelled to love him, willy-nilly—for how can you hate anybody who refuses to hate you? Beauty, after her fashion, had tried to be of use to him, and to accommodate her ways to his. When she had been married to a merchant of death, she had done her best to sell death; when she had loved a painter, she had listened to talk about art and tried to learn what the strange words meant; when she had been the wife of a Komponist she had listened to his compositions and praised them in the German language. So now she read New Thought literature, and was sure that she was becoming spiritual, and said that she was no longer concerned to be fashionably dressed, and to meet smart people and play cards for high stakes; but of course she only partly meant it, and couldn’t practice it too strenuously—because that would have hurt the feelings of her smart friends!
XIV
Lanny went off thinking about dreams. What an extraordinary phenomenon, that we should abandon control of our minds, and that they should go tearing off like an automobile without a driver, like the screws of a steamship “racing” when a wave passes and they come out into the air. Someone has remarked that we are all insane for one-third of our lives; and here was the subconscious mind of Beauty Budd, taking her imagined troubles and weaving them into an elaborate web of fiction which might bring her close to real insanity.
In Lanny’s own mind something hardly less freakish had been going on; he had manufactured for himself a recurrent dream—a dream about China, everything in China, camel trains with bells, pagodas with gongs, city streets with rickshaws and crowds shuffling along in straw sandals and padded cotton garments. Lanny had seen pictures of such scenes, both in books and on the screen, but he had no special interest in that remote land, and no thought of going there. But several years ago in Munich an astrologer had cast his horoscope and told him that he was fated to die in Hongkong. Lanny had no particle of belief in astrology, nor in the integrity of this sharp-witted young Rumanian; but something in his subconscious mind had picked up this theme and proceeded to make up stories about it. As a result, one interesting method of tapping the subconscious mind had been quite spoiled for Lanny; he no longer amused himself looking into a crystal ball, because all he saw there was a Cook’s tour of the land of Cathay.
What was to be done about Beauty’s dream life? The son thought that it would be an interesting case for a hypnotist; put her into a trance and tell her that she would never again believe any evil about her husband! But it isn’t so easy to hypnotize a person who knows you as well as your mother does; and Parsifal of course was out of the question to perform his service.
A couple of days passed, and fear was still written on Beauty’s usually placid face; her smiles when her husband was present were so forced that to Lanny they seemed like grimaces. Then one morning the phone rang, and Lanny, in the living-room, heard his mother answering in the hall. “Oh, hello, Sophie,” and then a silence, and: “Oh, dear me! Is there anything we can do?” Then: “Well, tell her good-by for us. She is a lovely child.”
The wife of Parsifal Dingle came into the room with a face of rapture: the expression of the man who coughed up the alligator. “Lanny! Adele is going home!”
&nb
sp; “What for?” The thought flashed over him: had Beauty appealed to Sophie in her distress?
But no! “Her father has cabled. The mother has been hurt in an automobile accident. Adele is to take a plane from Marseilles by way of the Azores. Her father has made the arrangements.”
Tears of delight, of utter bliss on the features of Beauty Budd! “Oh, Lanny, nobody can ever tell me that God doesn’t answer prayers!”
Lanny couldn’t restrain a burst of merriment. “Tell that to Adele’s mother, old dear!”
3
This Sceptered Isle
I
Lanny Budd was an American, and therefore a neutral, a privileged position in this war. He wanted to travel to England, and the route lay through Spain and Portugal. From Lisbon it would be easy, because as the son of Budd-Erling he was important to the British; but he could hardly expect that to help him with the Vichy French or their Nazi overlords. He could have got help from Laval or Pétain, but that would probably have come to the attention of the British and wouldn’t have sat so well with them. Better to put his trust in that universal world power which knows no boundaries and no sympathies; “bright and yellow, hard and cold—gold! gold! gold! gold!”
Lanny called upon his friend Jerry Pendleton; good old Jerry who had been his tutor a quarter of a century ago and his tennis partner ever since; a lieutenant from World War I, and now the owner of a travel bureau in Cannes. There wasn’t much travel nowadays, but Jerry’s little French wife owned half a pension, and that enabled the family to eat. For a matter of two decades Jerry had had an excuse to go fishing with Lanny Budd—they were providing food for the boarders. One of these had been Parsifal Dingle, so that Lanny had been fattening his future stepfather and psychic collaborator without having any idea of it.
A World to Win Page 6