Another day of mist and light rain, and Lanny sat in his friend’s study in front of one of those delightful fires such as they have in English grates, made of chunks of soft coal which sputter and emit oily juices and burn with large varicolored flames. The door was shut, and there was no chance of spies in this Englishman’s castle, but even so, Lanny spoke low, because it was becoming an instinct. “Rick,” he said, “I’ve got a contact with the underground movement in Germany.”
“Indeed?” said his friend, his interest awakened at once. “Tell me about it.”
“I had to give my word not to reveal any details. It’s a message from some of the people I used to know there; you can guess if you choose. They want money, of course.”
“Are you sure it’s the real thing?”
“Pretty nearly; but I mean to make absolutely sure before I give much. I think I’ll be going into Germany.”
“The devil you do!” exclaimed his friend; then right away: “What’s Irma going to make of that?”
“It’ll have to be on some picture deal; or maybe you could ask me to get some material for an article.”
“Look here, Lanny, you’re not going to find it so pleasant living a double life.”
“I know, but there’re a lot of unpleasant things going on. I can’t turn those comrades down flat, can I? After all it’s our fight, too.”
“Irma’s bound to find out about it; and she’ll raise bally hell.”
“I know; but I’ll try to spare her as long as I can.”
A smile broke over the older man’s face. How characteristic of Lanny—trying to spare Irma, not himself! Being an Englishman, Rick wouldn’t say all that he felt, but his heart ached for this friend of his boyhood who was so kind and generous and had chosen such a very bad time to be born. Also, of course, Rick was interested professionally, for he had used Lanny’s problem as the basis for a drama of class conflict, and the way things were going he might do it again. One cannot be a writer without thinking about “copy.”
II
What Lanny wanted to talk about was not his marital situation, which Rick had known for a long time, but the services he might render to the cause they both had at heart. He enjoyed an exceptional position for several reasons. Being an American, he was supposed to be neutral in the quarrels of old Europe; also, being the type which Hollywood has chosen for its heroes, he carried to many people some of the glamour of the screen. His rich wife gave him access to the great and powerful, and his genuine occupation of art expert provided him with reasons for traveling from one capital to the next. Such a man ought to be able to give real help to the cause of social justice.
“I’m no writer or speaker,” he said; “I guess I’ve had too easy a life, and I’ll never be anything but an amateur. But I can get information, and there ought to be some place where I could bring it and have it put to use.”
“Wickthorpe and Albany would give you a liberal expense account,” declared the Englishman, with a bit of mischief in his eye.
“No doubt,” said Lanny; “they’ve already sounded me out. But what use would they make of the information I brought them? All they want to do with Hitler is to set him to fighting Russia, and I can think of better uses for him.”
“What, for example?”
“Well, let him fight Mussolini over Austria.”
“Have Robbie get you a diplomatic post,” suggested Rick, “and you can enjoy yourself setting all your enemies at one another’s throats!”
“In the first place, my father will be the last man in America to have any influence in Washington; and as for our State Department, from what I hear it’s going ahead just like your Foreign Office—business as usual. I want to take my information to some place where it will serve our cause.”
Up to this time the best Lanny had been able to think of was to help Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson to write plays, and occasional articles for those few newspapers and weeklies which were open to ideas of a pinkish tinge. That was the tragedy of both men’s position: when you adopted such ideas you condemned yourself to futility; you became a voice crying in the wilderness, and you might as well have been crying to the hawks and the buzzards, for all the attention you got.
It had become worse than ever since Adolf Hitler had seized power in Germany, nearly two years ago. Before that time Lanny and Rick had had a party they could believe in and a press they could help: the Socialist party of France and the Labor party of Britain, groups which stood for peace and international understanding, the cutting down of exploitation and the power of financial oligarchies. But how could anybody be for peace, with the Nazis turning all the power of Germany to armaments, with General Goring setting out to build an air force that would terrorize Europe? Lanny and Rick, pointing this out, were scolded by their former comrades and told that they were crazy. Rick found himself, to his great embarrassment, on the side with Winston Churchill, resonant imperialist, while Lanny Budd found himself agreeing with the Army and Navy League!
Rick said: “Do you still have the idea that you can go into Germany and pose as a friend of Goring?”
“I don’t know,” Lanny said. “It won’t do any harm to try. He can only order me out.”
“Surely he must know your record by now, Lanny!”
“I kept thinking that the last time; but you know how it is—every bureaucracy commits boners. Also, you must remember, the fat Hermann is so corrupt it’s hard for him to believe that anybody is honest. The offers he made to me must seem to him irresistible. He may be thinking: ‘Well, if the fellow has accepted, and is going ahead, he’d have to be posing as a Leftist in England and France.’ That’s the way the game is played; wheels within wheels and treachery piled on treachery.”
“You’re poorly equipped for it, Lanny,” warned the friend who knew him best.
“I’m not so sure,” was the reply. “The honest man may be very successful as a liar when nobody believes a word he says. The Nazis may be convinced that I’m deep, and they won’t ever be quite sure how deep I am—how many levels there are to my tricks! All I want is to have one person who knows what I’m really up to.”
“It seems to me you’re starting on a darned uncomfortable career,” declared the playwright.
III
It was a Friday afternoon, and Rick’s eldest son came home for the weekend. Alfy, as he was called, was nearly ready for his career as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, which the English so unaccountably pronounce Maudlin; he had taken a bus from Oxford, and had had to walk quite a distance, so he arrived with shoes muddy and trousers wet, but with the glow of good health in his cheeks; he was just seventeen, tall and slender like his father, also his grandfather for whom he was named; dark eyes, dark wavy hair, a thin serious face. He was precocious, as he had to be in such a family; a conscientious student, much more to the left than his father had been at seventeen.
“Topping!” he said when Lanny asked how he was, and “Righto!” when his father suggested that he change to something dry. Lanny had promised to drive him some forty miles to the fashionable school where Marceline Detaze was a boarder, to bring the girl over for Sunday. Lanny didn’t mind dashing about the country like that, regardless of weather. He was fond of this eager intelligent youth and ready to do his share in helping along the match which he had suggested when the two babies had made their appearance in a world torn by universal war. Beauty’s daughter had been left fatherless a few months after her birth, and Rick’s son had very nearly become a half-orphan before his eyes saw the light. Now it seemed to both Rick and Lanny that the dark shadow of conflict was looming over the world again; but no use to say it, for people didn’t want to believe it and they knew how to believe what they chose. Perhaps some deep-hidden instinct guided the young people, causing them to pair off early and fulfill their chief function before it was too late.
It amused Lanny to discover that he was an elder; he didn’t feel it, but Alfy did and looked up to him with great respect, as a person who h
ad traveled widely, met the great ones of the earth, and had adventures concerning which it perhaps wasn’t sporting to question him too closely. Was it really true that he had been taken into the dungeons of the Nazis and seen them beating a poor old Jewish banker to make him give up his money? “Do you think we’ll have to fight those beggars some day? And is it a fact that we are letting them outbuild us in planes?” Lanny realized that here was somebody who took his statements seriously and didn’t regard him as slightly daffy. “I’m taking more mathematics than I properly should,” revealed the baronet’s grandson. “I’ve an idea it’ll be needed in our air service. But don’t speak of that when the mater’s around because you know how it would trouble her.”
Poor Nina! Something shivered inside Lanny Budd at the thought that she might some day have to go through that agony again. One time was enough for any woman’s life! He was moved to repeat to this lad the story of the strange experience which had befallen him when he was just at Alfy’s age, living with the Robbie Budd family in Connecticut while Rick was flying in the battle of France; how Lanny had awakened at dawn, at the very hour that Rick had crashed and all but died, and Lanny had seen what he thought was his friend standing at the foot of the bed, with a red gash across his forehead—the same scar which the ex-aviator bore to this hour. “Your mother nursed him back to life,” said Lanny. “It’ll be deuced hard on her if she has to do it again.” That was as far as English good form permitted you to go.
IV
Here came Marceline, dancing; she always seemed to be dancing, so happy, so young, so full of energy. She was a month or two younger than Alfy, but, after the way of the female, she had left him far behind; she was a full-blooming young lady while he was a gawky boy—so he felt himself, and was helpless in her hands. The daughter of Beauty Budd couldn’t fail to be something special to look at, and this had been made doubly certain when her father had been so handsome a man as Marcel Detaze. The child had been well provided with mirrors and had listened to the talk of the ladies and the women servants of her household, so she knew what she had and what she was going to do with it. A slender, graceful figure, in accord with the fashions of the time; lovely blond hair with glints of gold; and that feature with which Lanny had been familiar in her father, eyebrows much darker than her hair, lending an unusual touch to her bold, high-colored charms. She was half American and half French, having the vivacious temperament of her father’s people and the self-reliance she had got from a mother who had run away from a Baptist preacher’s home and become an artist’s model when no older than Marceline now.
Yes, indeed; poor Alfy, very much in love; and with a lack of worldly graces, was going to be hard put to it to hold her. She was the only child of a great painter whom everybody talked about, who, indeed, was on his way to becoming an “old master”; out of the proceeds of his toil Marceline was going to enjoy comfort and perhaps luxury. She knew there was London and Paris, she knew there were palaces and yachts, and that all such delights were within her reach. That was the way she had been brought up. Lanny, who would have had it different if he could, had to take the position of a spectator, here as in so many other places in that beau monde which enveloped and conditioned him, he was forced to remain silently acquiescent.
This Beauty-in-the-Budd, as Rick called her, sat wedged in the front seat between the two men, and Lanny drove and listened to her chatter. Words poured out in floods, because life was so wonderful it could not be restrained. Her talk was all about persons: about girls in the school whom Alfy knew or should know, about boys who were coming to The Reaches for the weekend dances and parties. When they got together they all chattered like this, at least the girls did. They remembered what they had said in other places and repeated what they had heard others say, and it was like the conversation of a family of chickadees in the hedge. Quite a contrast between this and the talk which Lanny had been carrying on with Alfy; he wondered: “Did women all have to be chickadees or was it simply the way they were trained?”
This young couple were in love with each other, but in their own competitive way which outsiders could not regulate. Marceline resented having her destiny decided, and insisted upon starting all over again on her own terms. She said that Alfy was as solemn as an old owl, and persisted in teasing him into activity and making him miserable in the process. She hadn’t the slightest interest in such matters as politics and only the vaguest notion as to what mathematics might be; but there was nothing she didn’t know about the arts of coquetry, and she practiced them on every personable young man who came in sight—generally those who were older than Alfy and therefore more likely to throw him into a panic. It was all rather cruel, but it was nature, and doubtless it was better to settle these affairs with quips and teasing than for the young men to butt each other like the stags in the forest.
V
Back at The Reaches they had dinner, and afterward young friends from the neighborhood came in. Things were just the way they had been in Lanny’s boyhood, when he had first visited here and met Rick’s playmates, including Rosemary, who had become his first sweetheart and had sat out in the moonlight while Kurt Meissner played the piano and they dreamed wonderful dreams. Now it was a new generation, sons and daughters of Lanny’s playmates, but they seemed exactly the same. Fashions hadn’t changed much—they came in cycles; skirts were short, and then they were longer, and the same with haircuts. Love was the same, only they talked about it more freely; laughter was the same and no less of it, in spite of wars past and others on the way. Lanny’s first visit to this home had been in the spring of 1914, and nobody had been worrying; he wondered now, in the autumn of 1934, would they be worrying next summer or the one after that?
They moved the rugs and furniture from the center of the drawing-room, and put on phonograph records and danced. “Hot jazz” had come from America, and now a new thing called “swing,” and the young people shivered with delight, cherishing their favorite records and raving over them endlessly. They had forgotten that the old dances existed—all but a few like Marceline, to whom Lanny had taught everything he knew. When he danced with her, the others were apt to stop and watch; this had happened in many a drawing-room and even on the floor of a casino; they could have got engagements and made their living that way if they had cared to. When Marceline danced, something arose inside and possessed her; she became a creature of music and motion, expressing delight and at the same time knowing that she was doing so, exulting in the attention she was getting. Joy and pride in equal measure, each stimulated the other.
It had been that way from earliest childhood, the first toddling steps that Lanny had watched her discovering for herself; he had praised and encouraged her, and others had done the same, and so they had made a dancer. She would dance alone for the pure delight of it, but she would find a mirror to practice before, and would be thinking of those who would be watching her later on. She came by this honestly, for her mother had loved to be looked at, first as a model and then in the world of fashion; she had been what was called a “professional beauty.” Marceline’s father had painted pictures to be looked at; and while he had professed to be indifferent to praise and had refused sternly to promote his own work, Lanny suspected it was because he had met with so many disappointments that he had been forced to paint for himself. Surely the primary purpose of art is to communicate to others, and not alone to the artist!
VI
Back in Wickthorpe Lodge, as his temporary home was called, Lanny settled down to normal domestic life, something he had denied himself for a long time. He enjoyed the society of his lovely young wife; he dressed himself properly and took her to social affairs, carefully avoiding the expression of any ideas with which she might disagree. He reminded himself that after all she was only twenty-six, and her mind wasn’t entirely matured; it was no use expecting her to know everything or even to wish to know it. He played with his little daughter, teaching her dance steps and going with her to see the new kittens. He played th
e piano, and read books he was interested in; he went over his card-files and carried on his business correspondence with the help of a stenographer who came when summoned. He enjoyed peace and quiet, and thought with an ache in his heart: “If only men would learn to let one another be happy!”
But all the time he was like a man waiting for a court to pass sentence upon him and for a bailiff or sheriff to come and take him away. He counted the days and tried to guess when Genosse Monck would probably get back to Berlin and a letter from Trudi Schultz, alias. Frau Mueller, might be expected. He felt certain that she would write; the conspirators would need all the money they could get, and she would hardly leave him in uncertainty. If no letter came, it could only mean that Monck was some kind of fraud.
As the days passed, Lanny fell to guessing about that—what kind of fraud would he be? A terrorist—and had he now bought his gaspipe and his nitroglycerin, or whatever it is that bombs are made of nowadays? And who would it be? Hitler or Stalin or Trotsky, Hermann Goring or Pierre Laval, or—God forbid!—Ramsay MacDonald or King George of England? Lanny couldn’t believe that this man of intelligence and force was a common swindler who would spend the money on wine and women; no, he was some sort of revolutionary, or else a well-trained agent—in which case Lanny ought to get a letter from Trudi Schultz that would be written under duress or else would be a forgery. Rather difficult to lose yourself in the music of Liszt or Chopin while speculations such as these were haunting your mind!
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 8