In the days when Lanny had been a young Pink he had hated this philosophy and fought hard against it. But now he and his tough-minded father had been brought together in a peculiar and complicated way. The coming of Hitler had convinced Lanny that the country had to arm, and do it in a hurry; and now the submarine sinkings and the triumph of Nazi arms on the Continent had forced Robbie Budd to make terms with the hated New Deal, with “That Man in the White House” who had been for eight years the symbol of everything Robbie hated in public affairs. First, to Lanny’s infinite amusement, his father had been forced to “go on the dole”; quite literally, because the Administration had wanted to arm, and a purblind Congress wouldn’t vote the money, so the President had hit upon the bright idea of using relief funds, the WPA, the much ridiculed leaf-rakers, the boondogglers. Why wasn’t it just as important to put unemployed airplane workers and battleship builders at work as any other sort of laborers? So the proud Robbie Budd had got contracts from the Army, and the payments had come from the despised “dole.”
But now that stage was past, Lanny discovered. Congress, in a panic, was voting defense funds; first, in the spring, a billion dollars and then another billion; in midsummer five billion, and then another five; compulsory military service was being talked of—and right in the midst of a presidential campaign! So now Robbie could get respectable contracts from the Army and the Navy, contracts which he didn’t have to keep secret, nor blush when his golfing friends found out about them. Also the British had come down off their high horses; the Colonel Blimps who had been so toplofty and had plagued Robbie through the years—except the years numbered 1914–1918! They came now to Newcastle and begged almost on their knees for planes and then more planes and still more planes, even while claiming that these planes weren’t good enough to fight with, and demanding more changes at every stage of manufacture!
XI
Lanny’s first duty was to sit down with his father and tell what he had been able to find out concerning the performance of the Budd-Erling Typhoon. In just what respects had the Spitfire managed to surpass it, and even more important, what was the Messerschmitt 109 now able to do? Robbie already had a mass of information, and drawings and plans and specifications for improvements; but he wanted the personal experiences of Alfy and his mates. Each detail threatened to knock out some process in Robbie’s elaborately planned establishment; the sum total would mean chaos or near it for weeks, perhaps months.
It was going to be this way right along, only more so, and Robbie, in his middle sixties, had to keep his mind flexible and make life-and-death decisions between firepower and armor on the one hand and speed and maneuverability on the other. Upon his judgment would depend the lives of hundreds of British flyers, and perhaps of Britain itself. The president of Budd-Erling Aircraft, who had been an extreme isolationist, had been suddenly brought to face the fact that if Hitler got the British Fleet he would not merely have all Europe at his mercy but could cross to Africa, and from there with his bombers and paratroopers to Brazil; he would build his airports there, and might be at the Panama Canal before we were in position to offer him serious resistance. “What do you think, Lanny?”
The bombing attacks upon London were going on without cessation. Day and night the swarms of bombers and fighter planes came over. It was indeed the blitz; Göring der Dicke had been preparing it for almost eight years, and had boasted about it to both the elder and the younger Budd. Now the elder, deeply concerned, gazed at the younger, asking: “Can he get away with it?” All Lanny could say was: “It’s the test of battle, and I doubt if anybody living can tell how it will turn out. Göring will send planes as long as he has any; and sooner or later one side or the other will be exhausted.”
“This much I know,” declared Robbie, “the British here in Newcastle are scared stiff; they aren’t just play-acting.”
“What will decide the issue, I am guessing, is how many planes the Generalstab will insist upon keeping on the eastern border. Somewhere they will have to draw the line and say: ‘Not one more!’”
“You think the Russians might attack them?”
“I think either side will attack the moment it can see a certainty of victory. That is a war that has got to be fought some day.”
“Well,” said the father, “you know Abraham Lincoln’s story of the pioneer who came home to his cabin and found his wife in hand-to-hand conflict with a bear?”
“I don’t think I’ve heard it.”
“The old fellow rested his gun against the rail fence, took a seat on the top rail, and called: ‘Go it, woman; go it, bear!’”
XII
Lanny didn’t tell his friends in Newcastle about having been present at the evacuation of Dunkirk, for that wasn’t the sort of thing he could afford to have talked about. He could say that he had been in Paris at the time of the armistice, and that subsequently he had stayed in Vichy. This was enough to rouse the burning curiosity of everybody in town; the local newspaper wanted to interview him and the local women’s club wanted to hear him talk; but in both cases he declined—he was an art expert and not competent to discuss public affairs. But privately he would answer questions for those whom his father and stepmother considered important. The town was rent with arguments between the friends of England and the friends of America, as the isolationists called themselves. “America First Committee” was the name chosen by a group of rich conservatives who were Fascists without knowing it; when Lanny read their full-page advertisements he called them “America First Aid to Hitler”—but of course only under his breath.
Naturally, people didn’t talk about war and peace all the time. The Country Club set played tennis and golf, they danced, gave elaborate dinner parties, and gossiped freely about one another’s love affairs. They did not spare this agreeable and eligible elder son of Budd-Erling; if he engaged in conversation with any debutante, or danced with her more than once, the rumor would spread that he was interested in her, and his stepmother would hear it and ask if he would like to have the young person invited to tea. Incidentally, Esther informed him that the town librarian, Miss Priscilla Hoyle, had married a teacher in the local high school, but was still continuing as librarian. “I don’t know where we should have found anybody to take her place,” said Esther, a member of the Library Board. Lanny had once kissed this lady in his automobile, though Esther had no idea it had gone that far. Now his reply was: “I have some data to look up in Vasari, and I’ll stop in and congratulate her.”
Also, there was the Holdenhurst family to be reported on. Esther would be expecting to hear something about Lizbeth, so Lanny remarked that she was lovelier than ever, and that a flock of the Baltimore swains were mad about her. He didn’t say as to himself, and his stepmother, playing a difficult role with patience and tact, went over the problem in her mind once again. “If I urge him he’ll be bored. He may even take a dislike to her, and he won’t come here or go there so often.” She could never be sure in her mind about this strange man whom fate had deposited in her household; more and more her shrewd judgment told her that he wasn’t all on the surface, and her most natural thought was of some hidden woman. Esther had heard about the Countess of Sandhaven, and about Madame de Bruvne; what more likely than that there was some new one, perhaps even more highly placed and therefore more carefully protected? To this daughter of the Puritans, now gray of hair and austere of features, Europe was a poisonous place; its cruel wars shocked her no more than its lack of sexual morals, and indeed she would have named the former as a consequence of the latter.
XIII
The radio habit had become dominant in these critical days; people would sit and turn the dials; they would interrupt a card game, or a dinner conversation if there was a radio set in the dining-room. Somebody would say: “It’s time for Swing,” and not mean the music but the commentator; you had your favorite, according to his political tinge, from Pink to pure White, or with touches of Brown or Black. You wanted the latest news, and you got it
even while it was happening. “This is London,” Ed Murrow would announce—it became a sort of trademark; he would be standing on the roof of some building, describing the searchlights in the sky, the bombs bursting in air—sometimes you could actually hear them, as F.D.R. had done while talking with Churchill over the transatlantic telephone.
It was the genuine “all out.” It went on for weeks, day and night. The Germans had decided to destroy London, the brain of the British Empire; they would break the nerve of its seven million inhabitants and end their will to resist. The Reichsmarschall, head of the Luftwaffe, had told Lanny Budd that Warsaw would be nothing in comparison; Warsaw had been far from Berlin, but London was close to the new bases in France and Belgium, and it would be merely a freighting proposition, a routine job. Impossible to miss the target, ten miles or more in every direction; no need to aim, you could drop the loads from twenty thousand feet, even thirty thousand, above the reach of ack-ack, and wipe out everything and everybody in the world’s most populated metropolis.
And now they were doing it. An endless procession of planes, bombers, and fighters, by day and by night, and no rest for anybody down below. The newspapers were filled with the ghastly details; whole blocks of the city wrecked and burning, a pall of black smoke everywhere, hiding the sky and making it difficult to breathe. The firefighters worked without rest, but they could hardly get about through streets blocked with rubble; their hoselines were dragged here and there through the ruins. An appalling thing to see a six-story office building collapse and fall inward, all in a few seconds, and to know that scores, perhaps hundreds of people were trapped within those ruins; many would still be alive, and would hear the crackling flames and smell the acrid smoke and feel the deadly heat stealing closer.
The fires and the searchlights made night into day, and after a day’s work people toiled at rescuing the wounded. Sirens screamed, and the roar of the anti-aircraft guns was one continuous sound, like the pounding of a freight train when you are “riding the rods.” The air blasts deprived people of breath, and often killed them; there were whole districts of London without a window intact, and oftentimes a single giant blast would blow in every door in a city block. Yet people went on with their work, through all these horrors. They traveled to and fro between their homes and their jobs; they worked in shops and offices with the roofs or the walls missing; there were stories of men who set up their desks in the street and went on with their duties. Business as usual! Never say die! There will always be an England!
Lanny heard these stories, and read them in the papers, and it was as if it were his own home being destroyed. He had known this grimy old city since childhood, and loved it and the people in it. The poor were easy to know, and had “guts,” as they called it, and a cheery courage; their “betters” were not so easy, but kindly and agreeable when you had broken the ice. Now they were all on a level—the bombs made no distinction. Buckingham Palace was hit, and the House of Commons wiped out. The West End, the fashionable district, suffered greatly; and Lanny thought of the splendid mansions, many of them historic, in which he had dined and danced, the luxury shops to which he had accompanied his mother in boyhood, the theaters in which he had seen Shakespeare played. Hermann Göring wouldn’t spare Shakespeare; he wouldn’t spare the hospitals filled with the wounded, nor the morgues in which the dead were piled. Make way for the Neue Ordnung!
5
Sweet Land of Liberty
I
For one who had just come from France and England, it was difficult indeed to realize that it was possible to have a car, and to stop at any roadside station and say: “Fill her up!”—and for no more than a couple of dollars per load. When Lanny tried it and found that it worked, he could understand why on the Continent so many of the middle-class people he met had expressed a hope of emigrating to America. “The land of unlimited possibilities,” it had been dubbed, and apparently the only limit was on tickets of admission.
Robbie Budd had half a dozen cars in his garage, and one was a sport car which Lanny was privileged to take. He drove down the shore road to the home of his half-sister Bess and her husband, Hansi Robin, the violinist; both younger than himself, both his protégés, whose love affair he had guided and whose musical career he had fostered. They were a lovely couple, and, so far as the world knew, among the happiest. But Lanny had been watching the development of a rift that was now growing to the proportions of a chasm.
They were both as much interested in political affairs as in their art; they had both called themselves Communists, up to the time of the deal between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Now Bess, a Party member, was following the Party line; this was a capitalist war, no different from any other capitalist war, and therefore every true Red must oppose it. But to Hansi, the Jew whose younger brother had been murdered by the Nazis, this point of view was beyond comprehension; to him the overthrow of Hitler was the first step toward sanity in the world. Even if it had to be done by Winston Churchill! They had tried to convince each other, and found that they could only quarrel. So they had made a rule and never spoke of politics in each other’s presence. Not even when Lanny Budd came calling!
They talked about the family at Bienvenu, and the one at Wickthorpe; they talked about Rick and Alfy—and of course that led to the war, and how it was going, and what Lanny had seen in France. That came close to politics, so Bess exclaimed: “You must see the babies!” Two lovely little ones, half Jewish, half New England Puritan—strains which were spiritually not so far apart. The Puritan grandfather of Lanny and Bess had hammered the Old Jewish Testament into them as the authentic and imperative word of God. The lessons hadn’t had much effect on Lanny, so far as he could see, but they had prepared his half-sister to receive the rigid orthodoxy of Marx-Leninism—that, too, being half Jewish, and in line with the Old Testament proletarian prophets. A curious thing to trace the currents of thought and impulse sweeping from one nation and one race to another, all over the world, generation after generation, millennium after millennium!
Near by was the home of Hansi’s father, Johannes Robin, whose mansion in Berlin now belonged to Hermann Göring, and whose art works, selected by Lanny Budd, now hung on the walls of Karinhall. Johannes ran the sales department of Budd-Erling, which was in New York; since the product sold itself, he now put his shrewd mind on the study of contracts and the search for scarce materials. He met many people and picked up information which could be of value to a PA. Lanny spent a week-end with him and his family, and ate gefuellte Fisch and Blintzes and other Jewish foods. Mama Robin was one of half a dozen old ladies who adored him and yearned to see him married and the father of many little ones, all as handsome and elegant as himself. With them lived-Rahel, Freddi Robin’s widow who had remarried; Mama had adopted the new husband and the new children, because she couldn’t bear to be separated from Freddi’s child, the little Johannes. They were a croup of refugees who had been lashed by the Nazi terror, and were glad to be alive on any terms. They clung together, and shuddered when they thought of that wicked Old World overseas, now trampled under the hoofs of the dread four horses of the Apocalypse.
II
In the Bluebook magazine, which Lanny watched each month, he had found what he expected, a short story signed “Mary Morrow.” Its title was an odd one, The Gauleiter’s Cousin. It was little more than a sketch, showing what had come to be the manners and morals of the “New Order” which Adolf Hitler had established. It had been written with an acid pen, and obviously by someone who had lived there. The locale was a small pension, whose ruling spirit, the star boarder of the establishment, held this position because she was a cousin of the ruling Nazi politician of the town. A greedy and vicious-tempered woman, she queened it over the other guests, and even the couple who owned and ran the pension. Never did she lose an opportunity to boast of the powers of her upstart relative, and to call attention to his ability to reward those who pleased his cousin and to punish those who displeased her.
&nbs
p; In carefully studied detail the writer showed this mean and petty spirit, flattered and fawned upon, claiming precedence everywhere and especially at the dining-table; the pension was a little miniature of Hitlerland, with its greeds, its sham glories, its raging jealousies and servile fears. The climax of the story had to do with a trunk belonging to the Gauleiter’s cousin. The undernourished slave of the establishment who undertook to carry it up from the basement to the star boarder’s room stumbled and fell, and both the trunk and the railing of the stairs were damaged. The man was damaged, too, but nobody thought about him; he was to be made to pay for both trunk and railing, and the question was which took precedence. A quarrel resulted between the landlady and her guest, but in the end the power of the Gauleiter’s name swept everything before it—just as it was sweeping the Continent of Europe, with the rest of the world watching in awe.
Even if there had been no name signed to this story, Lanny would have known that only one person could have written it; that was Laurel Creston, who was Reverdy Holdenhurst’s niece and Lizbeth’s first cousin. She had lived in just such a pension, only it had been in Berlin instead of in a small provincial town. She had come to dislike the Nazis in that special way, and had brought to the study of them that shrewd observant eye and malicious humor. Lanny had read half a dozen sketches in the same vein, and his admiration for them was based upon his own knowledge of the locale.
There had been a duel going on in his mind for the past couple of years, having to do with his desire for the company of this brilliant woman writer. His conscience told him that he had no right to know her; she was an outspoken person, and bound to become conspicuous, more so with every product of her pen; the Nazi agents who swarmed in New York—never so thickly as now—were bound to seek her out and watch her, to find out where she got her information. From the point of view of a presidential agent she was poison.
A World to Win Page 12