“Irma has been your friend and there is no reason why she should cease to be. Go there whenever you want to, and she will treat you as you treated her when she was your guest. The place is huge, and nobody need be in any other’s way. Play bridge with Fanny Barnes, and don’t object if she cheats you a little; Irma will make it up with a handsome check now and then, and everything will be jake.”
II
Poor soul! She tried to lecture her son on the holy bonds of matrimony, but it was rather late in both their lives; he soon kidded her out of it and forced her to talk about facts. It would be, she argued, a perfectly frightful blow to the family prestige—his, hers, and especially Marceline’s. Right now, of all times; such a cruel thing to do to a young girl just ready for the marriage market! Beauty had been planning, with the abettal of Emily and her other smart friends, to give her a grand debut at Bienvenu at the beginning of the season in January. But now, of course, it would be a farce. Nothing could save them socially; they would be plunged from the top of the scale to third-rate or lower.
“Listen, old girl,” he said, “be sensible and write Irma a nice letter. Tell her how sorry you are and that you want to be friends. Explain how a scandal will hurt Marceline’s chances, and suggest that she give her a party at Shore Acres to show that everything is all right. Irma will understand without your dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and I’m sure she’ll be glad to do it.”
“But, Lanny, I don’t want to have Marceline marry in America. I want her to marry here and live at Bienvenu, so that I won’t be so lonely.”
“Has she definitely broken with Alfy?”
“They quarrel half the time, and spend the other half making up. It seems to me it would be a very silly match, because Alfy has to spend the next four years in college, and he has no income. Marceline will be eighteen this month, and she ought to marry some older man who can give her what she needs now.”
“What you have taught her to need,” he was tempted to say; but that would have been unkind—and useless, since he couldn’t change his half-sister. “Listen, Beauty,” he said, “we have to take what we can get in this world and no good crying for the moon. It seems to me your husband is the person to give you advice at this stage in your life. You have talked about spirituality, and what’s the matter with your applying a little of it right now?”
“Oh, Lanny,” she wept, “what’s the good of your telling me such things? You know you don’t believe a word of them.”
“That shows how little you understand your son,” he replied. “Parsifal knows better, I am sure. He has his faith and I have mine and each of us works at it. I don’t think that to stop wage-slavery and war, to stop human beings from robbing and killing one another, is exactly a trivial ideal, either in your sight or in that of your Creator. Incidentally, I think my mother has been a very well-preserved lady all her life. You have a lot to be grateful for, and it’s the part of wisdom to learn to be happy with it instead of tormenting yourself because you’re losing things that you really haven’t any use for.”
That stern talk frightened her a little, and she tried to dry her eyes. “Lanny, I’m only thinking about my children’s happiness!”
“Well, if that is so, understand where my happiness lies. I’m not entirely joyful over losing the wife I love; but I have my faith that I live by, and I don’t intend to give it up in order to be kept in a palace and be stared at as a Prince Fortunatus.”
“Lanny, you do such dreadful things, and frighten us women half out of our wits.”
“I’m sorry about that, dear; but I didn’t make the profit system and I didn’t make war.”
She was staring at him through her tears, which wouldn’t stop coming. “Lanny,” she burst out, suddenly, “you haven’t really been making love to any other woman, have you?”
“Indeed I have not.”
“And Irma knows that you haven’t?”
“She knows it well.”
“Then I’ll tell you what I really think. She’s a cold-hearted and selfish woman, and what she’s doing is shocking and inexcusable!”
He couldn’t help laughing. “Well, darling, don’t take it as your duty to tell her. It is no part of my plan to turn you into a social uplifter. Just remember that Irma is the mother of your granddaughter, and that, right or wrong, she’s the boss. So, whatever happens, keep on friendly terms with her.”
“When are you going to see her?”
“I haven’t any definite plans.”
“You’re not going to ask her to come back to you?”
“Not on her terms. How can I?”
“Remember her pride, Lanny, and give her a little the best of it. Women nearly always get the worst, you know.”
“I’ll tell her I’m sorry, of course. I said it in a cable, but she didn’t see fit to take note of it.”
“Don’t wait too long, dear. Remember what swarms of men will be after her money!”
III
He drove his mother out to Les Forets, so that she might talk things over with Emily, and find out if Emily had managed to worm any more out of him than his mother had. (She hadn’t.)
When Lanny got back to his hotel there was a cablegram from Robbie, saying that he was sailing that night for for Cherbourg, and Lanny wondered if that was a conspiracy with his mother, or an overture from his wife, or both, or neither. It was possible, of course, that Robbie was coming on business; he had got his factory going, and his planes were diving and swooping over the field he had built by the banks of the Newcastle River. They were equaling the promised performances, and Robbie was exulting, but also fuming because of the red tape of the bureaucrats and the dumbness of the brass-hats. What did they imagine a fabricating-plant was going to do with its time and labor while they were fussing over commas in contracts and insisting that demonstrations already made should be repeated for some new board? Robbie had been fussing about things like that ever since Lanny had known him. And now it was to be expected that he would be coming to try the French markets, making use of his personal influence and that of his stockholders in France. Especially in view of the new crisis, and the possibility that Mussolini might really have the air superiority of which he was boasting.
Meeting Robbie wouldn’t be such a strain as meeting Beauty, for Robbie was a sensible man and ideas counted with him as they never could with his one-time amie. Moreover, Robbie would have had a talk with Irma, and Lanny was curious to hear about that. While waiting, he talked picture business with Zoltan, and they looked at masters old and new and wrote letters to clients. Lanny decided to go shares with Zoltan on the rest of the Goring collection, for Zoltan had many clients of his own and could work at art while Lanny was working at changing the world.
He decided to get the meeting with Zyszynski out of the way, so he phoned the Chateau de Balincourt and arranged to call for her in the mid-morning two days later. Then he wrote a note to “Kornmahler,” telling her that the medium would be at a certain cheap hotel in “le treizieme” at a certain hour. Lanny would wait in his car across the street from the hotel and would instruct Madame that after the seance she was to go and get her lunch and attend a cinema, thus giving Trudi time to join Lanny and report results.
So Lanny motored into Seine-et-Oise on a rainy and chilly November morning and picked up the old woman—incidentally being told by the butler that the master would be pleased to see him on his return. Poor old Knight Commander, sitting there in his castle waiting for the grim reaper to come and cut him down, and dreaming meanwhile of the woman he had loved and trusted; yearning for any word about her, any faintest perfume of her presence! Come and tell me what happens at the seance, Lanny!
On the way into Paris that dull old woman had her hour of happiness with the adopted son of her fancy. With other people she was content to be silent, but to him she talked about the Hindu servants and what strange men they were and how hard to talk to. She told about her childhood in Poland, where she had lived in a peasant hut and had once raised a calf
which her parents had given to her; she had called it Kooba, and everything about it was as real and dear to her as Zaharoff’s duquesa to him. If somebody had told her that Tecumseh had brought a message from the spirit Kooba, nothing would have brought the old woman more happiness.
Lanny told her how she was to spend her day, and gave her money to pay for her hotel room, also a pack of cards so that she could play Patience in case the visitor might be late. The visitor’s name was Mademoiselle Kornmahler, and Lanny had already instructed her how to behave: to speak no unnecessary word until the medium was in her trance, and after that to treat the Amerindian chieftain with the greatest respect, answer his questions promptly and truthfully, but tell him no more than necessary; to wait until Madame was out of her trance before moving, and then to thank her politely, tell her that all had gone well, and leave without unnecessary conversation.
IV
He deposited his charge and parked across the street a little way down the block. He sat and read some of Richet’s Thirty Years of Psychical Research, which he was going to lend to Trudi. He never minded waiting, because he always had something to read in his car. After an hour or more, Trudi appeared suddenly and slid into the seat beside him; he dropped the book, started the engine, and said: “Well, how was it?”
“I didn’t hear from Ludi,” were her first words.
“Too bad!” he replied. “That’s the way it goes.”
“But I heard many other things. Lanny, it is a most uncanny experience!”
“You bet it is! Tell me everything.”
“Well, first he said there was my mother. She was tall, had gray hair, and wore black; that is all true, because my father was killed in the war. But you see, Lanny, I am fairly tall, and so it is reasonable to guess that my mother might have been.”
“Did she give her name?”
“Tecumseh said it sounded like Greta. She was called Gretchen.”
“A very common name,” commented Lanny, who knew how to deal with newcomers to this strange field; “so you might call that a guess, too. Did she give any message?”
“She wanted me to know that she was well and happy. Of course I’d be much pleased to know that my mother is well and happy anywhere—if I knew it was my mother.”
“And then what?”
“Then a strange thing: I was told that there was a large, heavy-set man who said his name was Gregor. I said I had once had a teacher by that name; but it wasn’t he. He said he had a message for Otto, but I didn’t know any Otto.”
“What was the message?”
“I was to tell him that Gregor was working with him, and that the despot would be overthrown in time—but a long time.”
“That didn’t mean anything to you?”
“I thought of Gregor Strasser and his brother, who founded the Black Front against Hitler. You know about them, no doubt.”
“I once came very close to Gregor. I was in the room with him when Hitler gave him a fearful dressing down in Hitler’s apartment in Berlin. I had such a good chance to study him that I’ve always felt I knew him. Also I heard him make a speech at a Versammlung in Stuttgart. When he was murdered in the blood purge I was in Stadelheim Prison, and afterwards I got a message about it—but that was in a normal way. Since Gregor Strasser occupies a prominent place in my mind, perhaps the message was meant for me.”
“Do you know where Otto is?”
“I haven’t an idea, though I’ve heard he is somewhere in Europe, working against the Nazis. For my part I wouldn’t be interested, for I wouldn’t trust any man who had ever been one of them.”
“I agree with you,” said Trudi. “But it is extraordinary that this old woman should know about the Strassers.”
“She doesn’t,” declared Lanny. “I’d wager all I own on that. She has no mind for any political affairs. While I was driving her here she told me all about a calf she raised as a child; what the calf ate, the noises it made, and the strange feeling she had when she dipped her fingers in a pail of milk and let the calf suck them.… Go on; what else?”
“There was an old man who said he was your grandfather.”
“He haunts all my seances. He was very angry now, I suppose.”
“He was; he said he wished you to know that you are breaking the laws of man as well as of God. He commands you to return to your wife.”
“I don’t know any law that obliges me to live with my wife when she won’t have me. You see, the old gentleman wanted Irma and me to have babies, and he cross-examined us about it in plain biblical language before he died.”
“Do you think it is really your grandfather now, Lanny?”
“I don’t know what the devil it is. I know that Zyszynski doesn’t know anything about my grandfather, and nothing about my being parted from Irma, because she’s been at Balincourt for several months. Anybody else?”
“There was a Lady somebody—Ladybird?”
“That is quite cute,” said Lanny. “I’m sorry I never thought of it while she was alive. That is Lady Caillard, called Birdie.”
“That is the name.”
“She comes frequently. She talks to Zaharoff, and tells him she is in heaven.”
“There was a message for Zaharoff, from his wife. She is watching and waiting for him, and he will come soon. That is not such a pleasant message, is it?”
“It will be for him. He would go gladly if he were sure that she was there. He has little reason to love this world, so far as I know his life.”
V
That completed the list of the spirit visitors—a strange assortment. Lanny took his friend back over the various episodes and she added details under his questioning. He wished he might have been there, taking notes. “Madame knows that you are associated with me,” he said; “so that might account for the messages to me and about me. But it doesn’t account for her knowing that Irma and I are separated, or about my special interest in the Strassers.”
“On the other hand,” countered Trudi, “suppose we call it spirits, did Gregor Strasser know who you were when he got his scolding from Hitler?”
“It is possible that he may have asked someone of the household about the strange young man who had witnessed his humiliation; or again, it might be that spirits know more than they knew when they were people. But what my mind always comes back to is the idea of telepathy. There was nothing in any of these communications which wasn’t in either your mind or mine.”
She reflected. “It might be hard to say how there could be a communication which mightn’t have been known to somebody.”
“Quite so. Take the famous case of Glastonbury Abbey, which is in the psychic research books; the communicators were supposed to be long-dead monks, and they told secrets about the architecture of the long-buried ruins. Excavations proved the statements correct. But who can be sure there may not exist some records of those old days, and that some scholar might not have happened to be studying them at the time?”
“Has anybody ever succeeded in working out an answer to that?”
“It can be done with what you might call artificial facts. Suppose, for example, I cut a small slot in a piece of paper, and thrust that paper between the pages of a book at random. It is obvious that when I open the book, certain words or letters will be visible through the slot; but until the book is opened, nobody knows what those words or letters are. Now seal up the book and lock it in a safe, and let people in New York and Australia consult mediums and see if they can find out what will show through the slot.”
“Has anything like that ever been done?”
“The records of the British Society for Psychical Research are full of all kinds of experiments along that line; but the trouble is, nobody except members of the society ever reads them. The average scientist just knows it couldn’t happen, and therefore it didn’t, and that settles it. If you find that it does happen, right away you become a crank like the others, and your testimony has no value.”
VI
He turned T
rudi loose on the street with the Richet book under her arm, and drove to the hotel and took Madame back to the chateau. It wasn’t often that Zaharoff asked to see anyone, but he had asked for Lanny Budd, and so the art expert went into the library with the big blazing fire and told the retired munitions king of Europe that another message had come from the duquesa, given to a woman friend whom Lanny did not name. He could have made a hit with the old man by bringing or sending such messages frequently; but he played the game honestly, and wondered if Sir Basil appreciated the fact. Probably he trusted Lanny as much as he trusted anybody in the world. He could never get away from the thought that this agile-minded young American was the son of a businessman, and must be expected to be helping his father play the game. Nobody knew this game better than the Knight Commander, and when others tried it on him he watched with a sad heart.
There he sat, warming his aching old bones by a fire of wood from his grand old forests; keeping his false teeth clamped firmly together, so that the visitor might not see or hear the shaking of his jaw; keeping his hands firmly upon his knees so that the visitor might not see their trembling. In those old hands he still held a vast fortune, the extent of it known only to himself. Dominant in his mind was the certainty that these hands were soon going to fall lifeless, and the fortune be left for others to dissipate.
This castle had once belonged to a very old king with a white beard like Zaharoff’s; then it had belonged to the king’s mistress, whom he had followed on the street and bought through an agent like any other objet d’art. Who would live in it next, and sit before the fire and tell tales about a shrewd Greek ex-fireman and guide to brothels who had acquired the mastery of most of the great munitions plants of Europe and had sold impartially to all nations the means of mutual suicide? Would the Greek know what they were saying about him? Lies, mostly—but the truth had been worse, if they had known it! Would it trouble him what they said? Would he tremble inside, and feel his blood pressure mount, as happened now whenever he came upon the most harmless item about himself in that press of Paris which he had bought so freely in the past? Or would he be sitting in some lovely garden, looking at the duquesa’s tulips, knowing the different varieties and observing nature’s odd incalculable whims?
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 35