But Lanny Budd was lonely. There wasn’t a single person in this great city to whom he could talk frankly; indeed there was only one person in the world to whom he could speak with complete openness, and that was his Boss. With all others, even his relatives and best friends, there were shades and degrees, there were subjects he must shy away from. He had always been a ladies’ man, yet most of the women he met now were in the enemy’s camp. His half-sister was his only real woman friend in this country, and Rick’s wife his only real woman friend in England; on the whole Continent there was only Raoul’s wife, and Lanny hadn’t seen her for a long time.
At first Laurel Creston had assumed him to be what he pretended to be among his mother’s friends, an esthete, an ivory-tower dweller—only she had preferred to call him a troglodyte. Later she had decided that he must be a Fascist agent, and she had thought it her duty to investigate him. Only after she had got into trouble in Naziland and he had helped her to get out had she made the right conjecture about him. She had pledged her word never to mention him, and she was the sort of person to keep a promise.
Another tie, also; Laurel had discovered herself to be a medium, and she had promised to continue her experiments and report. In a decade of search Lanny had come upon only one medium whom he trusted, and here was another. He would have liked nothing better than to settle down somewhere and probe this woman’s subconscious mind, which appeared to be entirely different from the personality she presented to the world and to herself. Apparently it was all mixed up with his own mind, and with Laurel’s deceased grandmother’s, and—oddest thing imaginable—with the mind of the late Otto H. Kahn, senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, one of the great international banking houses in New York. If Napoleon Bonaparte or the Emperor Charlemagne had turned up in Laurel Creston’s subconscious mind, she could not have been more taken by surprise.
She was living in an apartment hotel and had sent Lanny her address; all he had to do was to call her on the telephone, and that appeared such a simple and harmless action. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t; but that was before he came upon The Gauleiter’s Cousin. The reading of this started him to arguing with himself once more. After all, they had got away with it right under the nose of the Gestapo; and here in New York you could come and go freely, and didn’t have to register with the police or anything of the sort. So why not?
III
“This is Bienvenu,” he said, and she exclaimed: “Oh, good!” He asked: “Will you have lunch with me?” and gave her the name of a little Hungarian restaurant on lower Second Avenue. They had lunched at such a place in Berlin, and it would remind them of old times.
Was that why she was wearing a blue and white print dress, similar to the one she had worn on those two occasions? It couldn’t have been the same one, for she had left her trunk and everything else when she had fled from the attentions of the German police. She was a small person, quick in her motions, and he thought of her as birdlike; he knew that she was thirty-two, that revelation having come in the course of experiments with hypnotism. She had nice brown eyes and hair, and he thought she was quite pretty; but what really interested him was the alert intelligence that operated in that small head. She observed everything that was going on, and remembered it, and understood it in relation to other events; she was serious and attentive to his discourse, but then would come a flash of humor, of teasing perhaps, and he would be a bit afraid of her, as every heavy-footed man-at-arms has need to be of any quick-darting Amazon archer.
They sat opposite each other at a little table and ate golden brown veal goulash and drank red wine, and nobody knew them or paid any special attention to them. Even so, they kept off the subject of world politics. Lanny told her the news from his mother’s home, where she had been a guest for quite a while; he told her about Parsifal’s latest experiments, and what Madame had produced as purporting to come from Laurel’s deceased grandmother. She said: “How strange! I tried an experiment with a woman friend here, and Grandmother came—at least, she said she was Grandmother—and told me she had known of my escape from Germany and congratulated me. It was embarrassing, because I didn’t want this friend to know anything about my having been in trouble there. I laughed and said it was nothing, that I had lost my passport. I decided it was too dangerous to go on with those experiments; I didn’t know what might come up next.”
Lanny told her: “It will hurt you with the smart crowd in this town if you let them know about your mediumship. They will call it ‘fooling with spooks,’ and be sure you must be slightly cracked. It is so much easier to be ignorant than to go against the prejudices of your time, whatever they may be. Here you will meet intellectuals who call themselves Marxists but haven’t read Marx, and others, or perhaps the same ones, who call themselves Freudians but haven’t read Freud. They are quite certain that Freud discovered the subconscious mind, and they know nothing about the patient research that had been done before Freud was born. If you tell them that their master became convinced of the reality of telepathy before he died, they will look at you with incredulity.”
“I don’t go among them very much,” declared the woman. “Tell me your own conclusions. Do you believe that my grandmother had anything to do with these communications?”
“My dear Laurel,” he replied, “it is most awkward to have to say ‘I don’t know,’ but that is the way matters stand with me. I don’t know what my mind is now; I don’t know how it came to be, and I can’t form any idea what it may be after my body has turned to dust. You know that your own mind makes up stories, and persists in doing it even while you are asleep. That mind might be working in secret, making up an imitation grandmother, and gathering information about her from your memories, and from everything you have ever known, and possibly from other minds, living or dead. It will take the research and study of scientists, perhaps for centuries, to answer the question. I picture our minds as bubbles floating on an infinite ocean of mind-stuff, and when we break, we go back to that ocean, and we know everything, or perhaps nothing—who can guess?”
“Sometimes,” said Laurel Creston, “I decide that it is an intolerable outrage that we should be put here so ignorant, and so helpless to remedy our ignorance.”
“Still worse,” smiled Lanny, “is to be sure that we know so much when we know so pitifully little.”
IV
He took her to his car and said: “Would you enjoy a drive?” Who wouldn’t on a lovely afternoon of sunshine with the first hint of autumn in the air? He took her across one of the East River bridges and through an avenue of Brooklyn, lined with shops and crowded with traffic; before long it had become a wide boulevard, leading into the farming country of Long Island.
They were free now to talk about the dreadful thing that was going on across the seas. One of the great decisions of history was being fought out, Lanny opined; but his companion said: “I cannot think about anything but the young men being killed, and the children and old people buried or burned alive.”
“History is a dreadful thing, at whatever point you take it,” he replied; “but some” points are worse than others, and some decide for better or worse over long periods of time. The defeat of the Spanish Armada decided whether we should have Shakespeare, and freedom of conscience, and parliaments and constitutions—everything that England means to you and me. This battle will decide whether there is to be any more England, or whether its children will be taught to walk the goose-step and heil Hitler.”
“I know. I have to fight with myself to keep that in mind. How is it going?”
“I have been making note of the reports, and have observed that the daylight raids are becoming less frequent and the night raids more so. That is an acknowledgment of failure on the Germans’ part. They have lost as many as two hundred planes in a single daylight raid, and they can’t keep that up.”
“But night raids can destroy London!”
“They are far less effective, because it is impossible to pick the targets
. It doesn’t do much good to drop bombs on Hampstead Heath or in the Thames.”
“But in the long run—”
“That is one of the questions to be decided—whether there will be any long run. The British will work out methods of defense against any form of attack—if they have time enough.”
“What defense can there be against bombs dropped out of the darkness?”
“It is all very secret and I can only pick up hints. The German bombers start fires at strategic places by daylight, and then use them as targets by night. The British trick them by starting great bonfires just outside the city. Also, you may notice that you don’t hear so much about searchlights as you did; the reason is that they betray the location of a city. I am told that the British have an electronic device which determines the altitude of planes in the darkness; so they can put up a box barrage and get many of the enemy; the greater the number that come, the more will be hit. I have heard hints that they have developed night-fighters which use the same electronic instruments. Be sure the Nazis haven’t all the scientists on their side.”
“Oh, God! Shall we never see the day when science will not be working at wholesale destruction?”
Such was the conversation of men and women in these days. The men for the most part had their thoughts on winning a tough fight; but the women thought about their sons and lovers, or those of other women. Lanny remarked: “I had a woman friend, a German Socialist whom the Nazis murdered. She had a phrase: ‘It was a bad time to be born.’”
V
At one of the many villages they turned off toward the south shore. At a rise in the land the ocean came into view, and Lanny stopped the car. In the distance was a lovely rolling landscape with clumps of trees, and among them you could see part of a structure big enough to have been a hospital or hotel. Lanny pointed, and said: “I thought it might amuse you to see where I lived for long periods, off and on. This is the first time I have seen it in several years.”
“What is it?” she asked, and he told her: “It is called Shore Acres, and I used to say it ought to be Shore Miles. It was built by the late J. Paramount Barnes, utilities king of Chicago, whom you may have heard of.”
“Oh!” she said with a suggestion of apology. “I didn’t take it for a private residence.”
“I did,” he smiled. “Later I took the palace of a duc in Paris, and then a villa next door to a castle in England. Then Irma took the castle—and the earl who owned it.”
“It must have been an odd sort of life,” she replied. Was she a little bit shocked because he had driven her here and brought up this subject? A lady from Baltimore who had been strictly reared was continually being shocked by things she encountered in New York, to say nothing of Berlin and the French Riviera. However, she told herself that she was a writer of fiction first and a practitioner of etiquette second.
Lanny, who had learned about Baltimore as a boy through old Mrs. Sally Lee Sibley, mother of Emily Chattersworth, could read her thoughts. Said he: “It is a story which might be valuable to you as local color. It is the sort of thing the public eats up.”
If she had been really on the job, she would have said: “Tell me now.” Instead, she remarked: “It is hard for me to imagine your being happy in that very extravagant world.”
“I wasn’t happy, but I’ve always been a pliable sort of person, and I let the ladies guide me. They told me I was the most fortunate man on earth, and I tried to believe it was so. Only four years have passed since I got out, but it seems like an age. I have a different sort of boss now—a man. I have to do what I am told, and it is impossible for me to have much life of my own.”
She wondered: Was that what he had brought her out here to tell her? Subtle persons have the advantage of being able to recognize subtlety when they meet it, but they are at a disadvantage in that they sometimes suspect subtlety where it doesn’t exist, or where, at any rate, it isn’t operating. She didn’t want to seem curious on the subject, so she inquired: “What has become of this estate?”
“It was put on the market and bought by someone whose name I haven’t troubled to remember. One of the amazing things about this country of ours is the number of persons who possess great fortunes and whom no one has ever heard of. They turn up in the most unexpected places; they have five, ten, twenty, perhaps fifty million dollars; nobody knows how they got it, and often they don’t care to tell. They are perfectly commonplace looking and acting, and they don’t seem to have the remotest idea what to do with their wealth; they just reinvest their income and let it go on piling up. I remember somewhere hearing about a dingy couple from California wandering into the office of the president of some university, Yale, or perhaps it was Chicago. They said they had money and thought it might be a good idea to found a university, if they could find somebody to tell them how to begin. The man was a railroad man, he said, and his name was Leland Stanford. In the end he put up twenty million dollars.
VI
Lanny drove again, turning inland. It was a district of palatial estates with elaborate bronze gates, high fences with metal spikes turned outward, or walls of stone with broken glass bottles cemented into the top. Sometimes you couldn’t see the houses from the road; but in one case there was a view, and Lanny stopped the car and pointed to a super-elegant mansion of brownstone with many gables, and extremely elaborate Italian gardens. Said he: “That was the home of a very dear friend of yours.”
“You must be joking,” she replied. “I don’t have any such friend.”
“It is your subconscious friend, Otto Kahn,” he chuckled. “The place is said to have cost three millions, and to have been sold for about a fourth of that amount.”
“It must have broken his heart,” she commented, “assuming that he knows about it!”
“We’ll try a séance, and tell him!”
“What a curious thing to think about, Lanny! Suppose he really does exist and that he knows what we are saying about him!”
“We must be careful, for he was a distinguished person, and accustomed to be treated with deference. He had charming and gracious manners, but he never forgot that he was a prince of the blood—or the blood money, should I say?”
They drove on. It was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, and Lanny knew this district by heart, having raced about it with Irma and her swagger friends to dinners and dances, tennis and golf and polo parties, the race tracks and yachting regattas. This was the playground of the second and third generations of Wall Street speculators and department-store magnates, newspaper publishers, bankers, landlords, every sort of big business which serves the great metropolis, or plunders it—according to one’s point of view. Lanny told funny stories about events he had witnessed among them, or that he had heard. He had no doubt that in the course of a few months he would find the atmosphere and ideas of the Long Island sporting set portrayed in one or more magazine stories. He had told her that the public would eat it up.
Twilight was falling when they came back to the great city. The bridges were quadruple strings of lights, and the city itself was a magical thing, a fairy spectacle to be compared only with the stars in the sky above. “You can’t imagine how strange it seems after London,” he remarked; “after having groped your way about in utter blackness, and knowing that you risked your life every time you stepped off a curb.”
“We may see the same thing here before this war is over,” said Laurel; and in this he concurred.
“History has always fascinated me,” declared the amateur philosopher. “One reason is that we know all the answers; we know the things which were hidden from the people of that time. I often think how interesting it would be to bring some of them back and let them see what has come after them. For example, to put the score of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben in front of Beethoven, and watch his expression while he ran through it!”
“Or let him listen to one of our swing orchestras,” suggested Laurel. “He would die again, I imagine.”
VII
Lanny drove to her apartment house, not stopping in front of it but letting her out just around the corner. When he started to explain she said: “You don’t need to say anything. I understand completely. I haven’t told a soul that I have met you, and I won’t mention this afternoon. I have had a delightful time, and whenever you have leisure again, do give me a ring.” No lady from Baltimore could say more.
He went off thinking about her, and it was the old story, only more so. He, too, had had a good time, and would have been glad to have more of the same; he wondered about her, what was in her mind, or her heart, or whatever it is in women. He knew them well, and strongly doubted whether this serene and even-tempered lady was entirely absorbed in producing miniature masterpieces of fiction. He didn’t believe she thought about nothing but the war and who was going to win it; or about her own subconscious mind, what it was and how it was and what would become of it when her visible part had turned to dust. She had met an eligible man whom she liked, and of course she was thinking about whether she loved him, or whether she would like to love him, and whether she would like him to love her.
Nature has played a trick upon man, making him complementary to woman, so that his thoughts dovetail into hers. Lanny Budd was thinking: I wonder if I love her; I wonder if I would like to love her; I wonder if she would like me to love her. He didn’t mean to be condescending about the matter; it was just that he was the lord of creation, and accustomed to wander over the earth at his sweet will, picking and choosing.
A World to Win Page 13