Part of it was a great foundry, and a power plant was already belching black smoke, making electricity for the construction work and the lighting at night. Already some of the machines were arriving, mysterious in their waterproof wrappings. “Come back in another month,” Robbie said, “and you won’t know the place; in six months we’ll be rolling out our first plane, and you can take a ride in it.” He was doing the honors personally, because Irma was his largest single stockholder and was entitled to know just what her money was buying. She was greatly impressed and asked many questions, showing that she was thinking not merely about her money but about the work it was going to do.
Lanny was content to look and let the others talk. He believed in machinery and the power it gave to humankind, but he was ill satisfied with the uses to which it was being put. He dreamed of seeing it collectively owned and serving collective purposes; but there was no use saying a word about this to either his father or his wife. These two belonged together, for they understood and supplemented each other. Irma had the “stuff,” and Robbie put it to use for her; they would share the profits, and expect the rest of the world to work for them and do what it was told. For those who were dissatisfied with the arrangement there would be a company police force—already it was being organized and taught its duties by that dependable ex-cowboy Bub Smith, who had taught Lanny how to shoot guns, and had pretended to be a Socialist while acting as bodyguard to Baby Frances at Bienvenu.
V
The consequences of Robbie’s social theories became apparent to Lanny while passing through the district surrounding the plant. Robbie expected to have a thousand skilled men at work in a month or two, but it hadn’t occurred to him to make arrangements to get them here or provide them with places to live. All that, according to the master’s philosophy, was a matter for private enterprise. The men would be skilled workers, getting good pay and having their own cars; and Robbie did his part by setting aside a tract of the company’s land on which their cars could be parked. Where the men were going to have their homes was up to them, and the matter was being settled by a swarm of speculators who had got wind of the new project and had come rushing to buy up the adjoining land. Now there were “subdivisions,” and busy salesmen marking out lots with little colored flags, and bringing people in busses from the cities to look at the land and eat free lunches of hot dogs and coffee. Already scores of workers’ homes were arising; they would be jerry-built, with silly little pretenses at elegance but nothing substantial, and as a result the workers would soon be putting in their spare time mending leaky roofs and cracked plaster and windows and doors that got stuck. But all that was their look-out, not the company’s.
It was the thought of starry-eyed New Dealers that housing-projects might be constructed at the same time as new factories; that parks and schools and playgrounds might be provided for workers’ families from the very outset. That was done as a matter of course in the Soviet Union, and that fact was enough to damn it for the rugged individualists of New England. Lanny knew there wouldn’t be any use mentioning the idea now; he had been mentioning it for the past eighteen years—ever since he had met the first Pink while a pupil at St. Thomas’s Academy in Connecticut.
He knew in advance every word his father would say; Robbie intended to institute what was called “welfare work” in the new plant, as soon as things got going and he had time to think about it; but he didn’t ask Lanny to help, and Lanny knew why—because from the first moment the question of labor unions would come up, and Robbie was going to run an open-shop plant or die in the effort. “Free labor,” he called it, and meant by the phrase that the men were free to do what he told them or move elsewhere and do the same for some other hard-headed industrialist. The men who had charge of the providing of rest places and recreation for the workers wouldn’t be “cranks” picked out by Lanny, but sensible fellows who knew where their salaries came from. They would organize baseball teams and bowling-tournaments and run a company organ full of pep talks and production slogans.
So Robbie Budd was in triumphant course of producing another center of industrial feudalism in a land which preached democracy and government by popular consent. Robbie’s new town wouldn’t be called a company town, and it wouldn’t be company-owned, but would be company-run by devices which Robbie didn’t have to invent, for they were standard practice in this sweet land of liberty. The workers had come swarming from nobody knew or cared where; they wouldn’t know one another and would have no ties or loyalties. They would be free to vote for political candidates every year or two, and they would assume that these candidates were crooks, and for the most part they would be right. Robbie or one of his agents would appoint a political boss to run the town, and at election time would put up campaign funds to elect the candidates whom the boss had chosen. If anywhere active in opposing the company’s wishes, whether as to policies, unionism, or anything else, those men would be “let out” and would move elsewhere. Such was the system, and Lanny knew that he wanted no part in it. If he was planning to denounce it, good taste required him to begin somewhere else but the place where his wife’s money and his father’s time, energy, and reputation were being thrown into the pot.
VI
From a safe distance of three thousand miles the amateur publicist watched events in the unhappy Continent on which he had been born. He saw them through the medium of newspaper dispatches written by men whom he knew; also of letters from Rick, and Raoul Palma, and one to his father from Denis de Bruyne. At the beginning of May the French signed a treaty of mutual defense with the Soviet Union, and Denis said that it represented an effort to bluff Germany. But in order to bluff successfully you have to look as if you meant it, and France didn’t mean it. Hitler knew it well, and took the treaty as a basis of propaganda attacks. Pierre Laval meant the treaty so little that it wasn’t even presented to the Chamber for ratification, nor was it implemented by any military arrangements. Marianne wouldn’t trust her new ally with any of her defense secrets—and what sort of ally was that?
At the end of the month the fripon mongol became Premier—a sort of booby prize, Rick said, for having proved himself the most inept of living French statesmen. Early in June, Ramsay MacDonald was replaced as Prime Minister of Britain; poor old packhorse for the Tories, he had carried them as far as he could, and now they set him down to rest and dream in a pasture called the Lord Presidency of the Council. His place was taken by a steel manufacturer named Baldwin, whose specialties were pipe-smoking and pig-raising. “England also has her two hundred families,” wrote Rick, “and they don’t have to hide themselves behind the mask of an innkeeper’s son.” The first act of this new “jumped-up blacksmith” was the treaty for naval parity with Germany, which had been so incredible that insiders had laughed at Lanny when he talked about it. Now John Bull kindly gave the Germans permission to build up to thirty-five per cent of his own sea-power and actually included the right to parity in submarine building. The tiger that had been let out of his cage was now invited into the family dining-room—though of course seated near the foot of the table.
Benito Mussolini, Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon, was bound by no less than nine treaties to respect the independence and territorial integrity of that ancient land called Abyssinia and sometimes Ethiopia; but he was going right ahead with his propaganda against it, and shipping soldiers and supplies to his Red Sea bases. This was an excellent thing for the British, who owned most of the stock of the Suez Canal Company and collected goodly sums for every ton of shipping and every soldier traveling through that long sandy ditch. It was also excellent for the New England-Arabian Oil Company which Robbie Budd had founded and recently sold out to Zaharoff and his associates; they were right there with the fuel which Mussolini couldn’t do without, and in return they would take the food and wine and oil of the Italian people.
Lord Wickthorpe went with a British mission to negotiate with “the blighter,” and when he came back he told Rick about it, and Rick wrote
it to Lanny on his old battered typewriter. Bit by bit, like careful traders, the British had offered Il Duce everything he could hope to get, asking only that he should proceed under the forms of legality and let the League hand it to him on a golden platter; but no, he was determined to take it by force, for the sake of the effect on his domestic situation. Some forty years ago these black fighting-men—a mysterious race supposed to be descended from wandering Jews—had given invading Italian troops an awful licking, and Il Duce wanted the glory of wiping out that disgrace. He saw himself going out there and receiving the submission of the “Lion of Judah,” then coming home in a triumphal procession and building a monument to himself in the Forum.
The only real obstacle in his path was British public opinion. Four years previously the Tories had got into power in a snap election, in which, polling fifty-five per cent of the vote, they had got ninety-one per cent of the House of Commons. Now the British people had proceeded to organize independently and take a poll of eleven and a half millions of themselves, and they had voted something like thirty to one in favor of staying in the League. They had voted thirteen to one in favor of prohibiting the manufacture and sale of armaments for private profit—imagine the feelings of Robbie Budd when he opened his paper and read that item of news! With Mussolini’s African adventure before them, these amateur voters had been asked if a nation which insisted upon attacking another nation should be stopped by economic and non-military measures, and they had answered Yes by fifteen to one. Asked whether such an aggressor nation should be stopped by military measures, they had answered Yes by nearly three to one. In the face of such a vote Mussolini brought to completion his plans to march into Abyssinia; and what was the League of Nations going to do about it? What was the Tory government of Britain going to do about it?
VII
Soon after his arrival at Shore Acres, Lanny had received a note from Trudi Schultz, forwarded from Bienvenu; a duplicate of the one he had so nearly missed in Berlin. After that, nothing for a couple of months; he had to accustom himself to thinking in a special way about these people who were “death’s own.” Their owner might have claimed them or they might be on the way to him by the route of dungeons and concentration camps. A letter might come, or it might not; and there was no good fearing or worrying in the meantime.
One came in the middle of July; a real letter, the longest he had ever received from Trudi: “I am very busy, illustrating a work of fiction dealing with the time of the Emperor Diocletian. The heroine is a persecuted Christian who has to flee; there are several scenes of vigorous action, and these are difficult for me, because, as you know, my drawings have so far dealt with still life. I should value your opinion of my work highly, and hope you will be visiting Berlin. I am expecting to move and not sure of my address but will get in touch with you when I hear of your arrival. It is convenient that you are a famous person whose comings and goings are reported in the press. By the way, my clerical friend has been ill for some time and is confined to his bed. I do not know just what is the matter with him; he does not talk about his ailments. Hoping that this finds you and your family well and the picture business thriving, I am, respectfully, Kornmahler.”
Lanny didn’t need to spend much effort interpreting this elaborate parable. Trudi was being sought by the Gestapo and was in hiding; she couldn’t give an address, but wished him to come to Berlin and find some way to get himself and his picture business into the newspapers; then she would get word to him. The clerical friend, of course, was Monck, and she was telling the tragic news that he was in a concentration camp but was not betraying his friends.
Serious news indeed for the grandson of Budd’s. Maybe the man hadn’t talked yet, but he might talk tomorrow, and his first statement would be that the money for the criminal activities of his group was being put up by an American playboy who posed as a friend of the Gestapo General, and, indeed, was getting his money by acting as an art broker for the Nazi second-in-command. That would be of genuine interest to the Secret State Police; and what would they do about it? The question called for no little guessing. An art lover of imaginative temperament could spend hours, especially the wee small ones in the morning, picturing scenes with the fat General, and with the acting head of his Gestapo, a former schoolteacher named Himmler who had managed to make himself the most dreaded individual on the continent of Europe. Lanny’s first thought was: “That settles me for Germany!”
But very soon he began having second thoughts. Trudi hadn’t been obliged to tell him about Monck; she had taken a risk doing it—and why? Obviously, in order to be fair. She was saying: “The danger is greater; perhaps you won’t want to come.” And what was his answer to be? Should he say: “The danger is too great, and I give up”? If he said that, what would Trudi think of him? What would he think of himself? For more than half a year he had been maintaining his self-respect on the basis that now he was really doing something worth while. He had won new regard from Rick on the basis of being no longer an idler and parasite. Should he now say: “The job was too risky, and I had to quit”? Or should he merely keep quiet, and let Rick go on thinking of him as something he didn’t dare to be?
A gnawing began in his conscience and did not stop. He had been justifying his life of luxury by the fact that he met his clients that way, kept up his prestige, and so made his picture deals. Clients would repose confidence in a social equal, but hardly in a subordinate, a professional no matter how truly qualified: such was the world of snobbery. So Lanny made money easily and abundantly; but what did he want it for? So that he could buy new suits of clothes whenever his wife or his mother cast a critical glance at one he was wearing? Or whenever those public enemies, the fashion creators, decided that coats must have three buttons instead of two, or that lapels should be an inch longer and have an angle somewhat more acute?
VIII
Lanny’s thoughts were continually occupied with those comrades in Germany; not only Trudi, but all who were helping her. They were not vague abstractions to him; he had met a score of them, and their names, faces, and personalities haunted him. In the happy days before Hitler they had sat in one another’s homes, or in the reception room of the school, drinking coffee and eating Leibnitz Keks—a modest proletarian form of celebration—and talking about their cause, what it meant to them and how they hoped to make it prevail. They had used large and noble words: Freiheit and Gerechtigkeit Bruderlichkeit and Kameradschaft. They had quarreled over points of doctrine and tactics, they had been irritated with one another, they had displayed petty jealousies; but it had always been understood that deeper than all such things was the powerful bond between them. They were comrades in a sacred cause, human beings in a world of wolves, civilized men surrounded by barbarians, producers in a society of exploiters, plunderers, and parasites.
And now, did all that mean anything? Was it a real moral force, or had it been only fine phrases, a form of self-indulgence, a system of pretenses, a means of self-advancement for the intellectuals and a whim or diversion for the idle rich? Lanny couldn’t get out of it by saying that he had gone among them as an investigator, that he had wished to understand their movement among many others. No, he had told them that he was a “comrade”; he had encouraged them to fight Nazism, assuring them of his own democratic sentiments and of the moral support of all decent and right thinking men. They had acted on those promises and those hopes. They had done what they could—not all of them, of course, for no movement is perfect. For their weaknesses of character and errors of judgment they had paid frightful penalties and would pay more. The weaklings had dropped out, and a little group, perhaps a mere handful, was carrying on the fight trying to keep the spark alive, to save the soul of the future.
Trudi hadn’t told Lanny what they were doing. She had assumed that there was no need to do so. Lanny had been in the movement for years and had known some of its great leaders. She and Ludi had poured out their hearts to him and Freddi; they had set forth their ideas in detail, an
d Lanny had agreed with them. He had said to himself: “Here are two people who understand not merely the economic forces which move society, but the moral forces which move the souls of men.” That combination of understanding was rare, and these four young idealists, three men and one woman, had merged their souls and their labors. They had forged weapons for the future—and now it appeared that only two of them were left alive to put the weapons to use.
Lanny didn’t have to guess what was going on, for the underground movement against Hitler had been pretty well written up in the neighboring lands; even the capitalist press had now and then printed news of it. There was a “flash-sender,” as the Germans call it, a secret radio transmitter, hidden somewhere in the country, and every now and then it would start up, revealing forbidden news, exposing official falsehoods, tormenting the Nazis with jeering comments. If it had stayed in one place, it could have been quickly located, but it kept moving; it must be carried in a van or covered car, and the powers of the Gestapo had been set to hunting it—so far without success.
Also there were secret printing-presses; leaflets were printed or mimeographed, and would be found on the benches of workers when they came in the morning, or perhaps in their dinner-pails at noon. Very often it would be the Socialists attacking the Communists, or vice versa—they still kept up their factional disputes, even in the concentration camps. But Lanny could be sure that Trudi was not taking any part in that, because she had agreed with him in deploring the blunder. She would be exposing the fraudulent Socialism of the Nazis and pointing out to the workers how they were being led into the path of war.
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 23