Here came this smooth-spoken young man who had known the duquesa and admired her, spoke of her kindly, and brought rare messages from her; what did that mean? Impossible to believe that he really cared for a slowly dying old man! Was he really interested in psychic research? Or was he merely helping his father to get contracts? He had a rich wife himself; but then, who ever has enough money? Was he perchance wondering if an old friend would remember him in his will? That is the supreme tragedy of the aged rich. Who ever comes near them that is not thinking that ghoulish thought? Who could tolerate their infirmities, their indecencies, except that he or she is taking a gambler’s chance at a fortune—the cheapest and easiest chance? To hell with you, hyenas all, you shan’t have a sou of it!
VII
The march into Abyssinia continued, and the diplomatic duel went on in the secret chambers. Lanny had been buoyed up with hope, but not for long after he got to Paris, for all the “insiders” agreed that nobody was going to call Il Duce’s bluff. The League had imposed “sanctions” of a very mild character—not enough to stop the Italians, just enough to infuriate them and cause them to burn Anthony Eden in effigy. The British tried to lay the blame on the French refusal to support a policy of action; this infuriated the French, who had known as early as September that the British were unwilling to close the Suez Canal or to shut off the oil supplies, the only two measures which might have been effective. So Denis de-Bruyne told Lanny, having got it direct from Pierre Laval.
Recriminations everywhere the diplomats met; Rick called it a thieves’ kitchen. They were all imperialists, he declared, all in a squabble over dividing the loot. British general elections were due in a few days, and Rick was campaigning against the government candidates, so he could only write briefly. “The Tories have to pretend to support the League; and the day after the elections they will cut the League’s throat. They are even allowing the Italians to carry poison gas through the Suez; gas so declared for transit fees, mind you!”
There was that magnificent fleet waiting at Alexandria; two, in fact, the home fleet and the Mediterranean. In Lanny’s ears rang the proud boast: “The British lion never bluffs!” But Rick said the statesmen were shivering at the thought of a mad dictator sending his bombing-planes, his submarines and swarms of tiny sea-sledges on some dark night, and next morning there would be no British lion. There were even rumors that the fleet had been sent without sufficient ammunition—and how could you know what to believe?
In the midst of this long-drawn-out crisis Robbie Budd and his right hand, Johannes Robin, arrived in Paris. It was harvest time for them; Robbie, having foreseen it, had his harvesting-machinery well greased and its engines warmed. He had shipped one of his new fighter planes, the. Budd-Erling P7, on board a freighter, and with it came a crew ready to uncrate and assemble it; also a test-pilot who was going to put the marvel through its paces for the French government, and fly it to England and repeat the performance. The French were a penurious people, Robbie said, and would hate like sin to pay cash for planes which they might hope to reproduce in a year or two; but in this game of air-fighting you didn’t use what you might have next year, but what you had today. Robbie carried a threat to every war office, that if they didn’t get the Budd-Erling P7 the next country would.
A man of great affairs couldn’t afford to put up at the second-class hotel where Lanny and Beauty were staying. He and his man Friday had to be at the Crillon, and the mother and son came over to lunch with them and found them so full of business that they hardly had time to tell the news from home. Robbie wasn’t going to waste time with subordinates, but ask de Bruyne to bring him together with the French Premier. Beauty said: “I think I could arrange it so that you would meet him socially.” She explained that at one of Irma’s receptions she had met a titled French lady who was the mistress of one of Laval’s closest associates; she offered to see this lady and arrange to have her give a dinner at her home, where Robbie might meet two or three of the key men of the French government and have a chance to talk to them while they were feeling mellow.
“What will she expect?” Robbie asked, and Beauty said: “Not very much, I should think; say, five thousand francs.”
“All right,” said the man of affairs. “See what you can do; but I’ll have to know today, because this crisis may soon be over.”
VIII
It was like the old days which Lanny remembered so vividly, when the World War had hit them and he had to become his father’s secretary at the age of fourteen. Now Robbie had brought a secretary with him, one who knew French well. Lanny sat and watched the master of affairs read cablegrams, dictate answers, and talk over the phone with important persons. It was late in the afternoon before he said: “Now, son, we’ll have time for ourselves. How about a bit of fresh air?”
“Fine!” replied the son. “Walk or drive?”
“Walk, if you’re equal to it,” said the father—joking, for he was trying to take off weight and not succeeding any too well. They strolled on the great Place de la Concorde, where Lanny had seen the soldiers bivouacked in war days, the captured German cannon parked in peace-making days, and mobs, Communist or Fascist, combating the gendarmes on several occasions. The hotel suite which had been assigned to his father was the one on whose balcony a maidservant had been shot while watching the rioting less than two years ago. The bitterness of that night of battle was still poisoning the public life of France.
“Well, son,” began Robbie, “I’ve had several talks with Irma, and I needn’t say what a sad affair it seems to me.”
“She told you the whole story?”
“She says she did; but of course I want to hear your side.”
“I really haven’t much of a side, Robbie. Irma and I disagree in our ideas, and it makes her unhappy; she wants me to give up my ideas, and I can’t. That’s about all there is to it.”
“Your ideas mean more to you than your wife and child?”
“They mean more to me than anything else, including life.”
“That’s serious talk, Lanny. You must realize that going up against a bunch of people like the Nazis is no child’s play, and it doesn’t leave a man’s wife much chance of happiness.”
“I realize that fully, and I’m not blaming Irma, either publicly or in my heart. It’s just her hard luck that she didn’t realize what she was taking on. I explained it to her before I asked her to marry me, but she was young and it just didn’t register.”
“Do you still love her?”
“Of course I love her; but how can there be love when there is no harmony of mind? I know I’ve made her unhappy in the past and will make her still more unhappy in the future. So what’s the use of fooling with it?”
“You’re not going to make any attempt at a reconciliation?”
“How can I, when she laid down the law to me that I had to break with all my friends?”
“She was angry when she said that, and I don’t think she would expect to stand by it literally.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She said as much.”
“Well, why doesn’t she say it to me?”
“She told me she had written to you.”
“Yes, but nothing like that. She wrote the news about Frances and assured me that she wished me all happiness.”
“I think you ought to go and see her, Lanny, and talk the thing out fairly and frankly.”
“I know, that sounds reasonable, but it’s because you don’t realize how much talking we’ve already done. We just don’t agree about any of the things that I really care about. You know how it is with you and me—we argue, but you have a sense of humor, and we kid each other and manage to get along. But Irma has no humor, at least not where her intellectual prestige is concerned; she thinks I think she’s dumb about politics and economics, and I do, and so she gets her feelings hurt, and I can’t help it. It’s just a damn bore, not being able to say what you think and have the other fellow stand the gaff. Take Uncle Jes
se; I can fight with him and he gives me as good as he gets and that’s the end of it. But with Irma—good Lord, it’s like running a newspaper under censorship. I have to accumulate a long list of topics I must never mention in her presence; I have to bite my tongue off a dozen times a day. I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to be able to go anywhere and meet anybody and not feel that I’ve committed a crime.”
Robbie was a tactful man, and had known this unusual son for a long time. “I think, you ought to go, Lanny,” he said. “You don’t want Frances to forget you entirely.”
“Of course not. I’m planning to see Frances before long; but I don’t see what Irma and I can say that we haven’t said too many times already.”
IX
Robbie wanted to know about the international situation, so urgently important to him, and Lanny told him what he had been able to pick up in Paris. The barefooted black soldiers of the Negus were putting up a tough fight for their freedom, and some of Lanny’s Leftist friends were cherishing the hope, that in their wild mountainous country they might be able to wear down the invaders. Robbie said: “Poor niggers, they don’t realize what has happened since the time of Adowa. Believe me, son, the airplane has changed the world, and a nation or people that loses command of the air might just as well quit and save what it can.”
Lanny had heard his father make confident assertions about public events, and his score was far from perfect. “You have something to sell!” he answered, with a grin, and the father replied: “You bet your bottom dollar!”
Robbie was still more confident after he had had his dinner with the fripon mongol and other key Frenchmen. He told his son that the Abyssinian goose was already cooked and ready for carving. “Britain and France are going to compromise,” he declared. “They understand clearly that they can’t afford to see Mussolini licked. It would be a defeat for the white race; there’d be a revolution in Italy, and the Communists would take over the country.”
There it was again: Fascism as a bulwark against the Reds! A Communist revolution would be a calamity, while a Fascist counter-revolution might be a necessity! Robbie said that the French army generals would refuse to fight Italy; they would rather turn the politicians out. Lanny had heard it before and knew it was the regular Fascist talk. Who could say if it was true?
He didn’t want to argue with his father any more than with his wife. It was his role to ask questions and get information to be passed on to his Pink friends. So now he learned that while the League members in Geneva were being stalled in their program of applying sanctions to oil, the French Premier and the British Foreign Secretary were working out a plan to give Mussolini most of what he was out to grab. The prospect disturbed an American merchant of death and he remarked: “I have to get busy and get some contracts signed before this whole thing blows over!”
They went out to the Villacoublay flying-field just south of Paris to witness the tests of the Budd-Erling P7. Robbie went in a fancy staff car with magnificoes wearing loads of gold braid, and Lanny drove his mother, also the titled French lady who had been paid five thousand francs (about two hundred dollars) for a dinner. A fascinating and at the same time a terrifying thing to watch that man-made bird wheeling and darting in the sky, more rapidly than any creature had ever moved on land, sea, or air up to that moment. To see it mount out of sight, and then come rushing down with the throttle wide open and the motor roaring—down, down, until you caught your breath, certain that it must be too late and that the man inside must be dead; leveling off at the very last instant and sweeping like a hurricane across the field. The test-pilot was helped out of the plane with blood running from his mouth and nose, and it was rather horrible, but it was war. The American Navy had invented this new method of attack, and it was said that the Germans and Italians had both taken it up and were going to win wars with it. “Is France going to lose wars without it?” asked the president of Budd-Erling, addressing officers of the French Air Force.
X
Robbie left Johannes in Paris and set out for London; Beauty went along to help with her social arts, and Lanny motored them—it was like a family reunion. Lanny wanted to see Rick and tell him about Irma, also to consult with him as to what a grown-up playboy might do to keep the Nazi-Fascists from getting control of Europe.
He stayed a weekend at The Reaches, and it was like being at home. He had spent so many of his happiest hours here, and this leftist writer represented the wisest and sanest influence in his life. Rick had just been through a hard spell of electioneering; it had meant traveling here and there addressing audiences, for the most part of workingpeople in obscure halls. Rick had poured his soul into the task of making them realize the need of scotching the Fascist serpent before it had grown to man-killing size. It had been an unpaid, and as the event proved, a futile labor. Because of the division among the opposition forces, the Tories had got nearly two-thirds of the seats with less than half the total votes, and so the betrayal of the people’s hopes would go on. Rick’s face was lined, and his hair was showing traces of premature gray at the sides; he took the election results as a personal tragedy, and suffered calamities which had not yet befallen but which his clear mind saw on the way.
They strolled outside in the garden, and Lanny told the news he had gathered in Paris, of the secret negotiations between Laval and the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare. Rick said his father had heard rumors of the deal, supposed to be the gravest of state secrets; now he learned just which provinces the “poor niggers” were going to surrender to Il Duce, and how the rest were to be governed by an Italian “adviser.” Rick said: “That’s the damnedest sell-out of public opinion in the history of this country!” When he learned how sure Lanny was of having it right, he added: “How would it do for me to tip off some news chaps about it?”
“Exactly what I was hoping,” replied the American. The playboy thought for a while and said: “I met a New York journalist the other day; if the story came from there it could never be traced to you. Suppose I ride up to town with you in the morning and attend to it?”
Lanny told about his domestic problem. The advice he got wouldn’t have pleased his father and mother, for Rick had never liked the match and had been afraid that it would cost him a friend. He said that a fortune such as Irma Barnes’s represented an accumulation of social crimes and was a corrupting force which very few could withstand, certainly not an amiable and pliable art lover. He said: “Stay away from Irma till the wound has healed; let her find another man, or you find another woman, somebody who believes what you believe and will encourage what you want to do.” Lanny’s mind told him that this was wise advice; but there was something in him that winced when his friend added: “I wouldn’t be surprised if she hit it off with Ceddy Wickthorpe. It would be an admirable match from the point of view of both of them.”
The code of the smart intellectuals required Lanny to take this lightly. “My mother has been trying to hint that to me for a year or two,” he remarked. “Have you seen any signs of it?”
“They wouldn’t let you see any signs,” declared Rick; “but you can trust Beauty’s insight in matters of that sort. Ceddy is having the devil’s own time to keep going in the face of rising taxes, and the Barnes fortune would be a windfall to him. Irma would modernize the castle and make the grandest countess in the realm. Your job might be to persuade Augustus John or Gerald Brockhurst to paint her portrait.”
“I have thought of both,” said Lanny, with a smile. “But are they quite up to it?”
“They might rise to the occasion. And as for her ennoblement, just keep out of the way and leave it to economic determinism!”
The anti-Nazi conspirator wasn’t at liberty to give any hint concerning his associate in Paris. All he said was: “I am doing something for the cause which I’m pledged not to mention; but I want you to know that I’m not just playing round.”
“Good for you, old top!” replied the Englishman. He put his arm about Lanny and gave
him a squeeze, a form of demonstration he did not often permit himself.
XI
Lanny went back to London and appeared in the smart world with his smart mother. This return to the period of apron-strings of course did not fail to excite comment. Three months had passed since the parting of the heiress and her prince consort, and the event had been noticed in those newspaper columns which occupy themselves with the doings of the rich. The brilliant young ladies and gentlemen whose business it was to flit from flower to flower and collect the honey of gossip came to Lanny with sly and insinuating questions; they expected him to answer in the same tone, and he did so. “My wife has her reasons for wishing to be at home for the present. I am here on picture business, and am planning to leave for New York before long.” He would say it with a grin, and add: “Nothing more.” Cablegrams would be shot to New York, asking about storks on the extensive red-tiled roofs of Shore Acres. Telephone calls would come to the estate, and Irma would be furious. Lanny, who hadn’t said a word but the truth, thought he was entitled to have a few smiles out of his misfortunes.
There was going to be a grand evening reception and dance at the town house of Margy Petries, to mark the coming out of Marceline Detaze, just eighteen, and one of the loveliest young creatures your eyes ever fell upon. Her mother had decided that a London debut would be distinguished, and it had better come before the scandal broke. Here Beauty was in her element, working two rackets at the same time, selling airplanes and a daughter; there was no conflict between the efforts, for the same man might elect to buy both, and it would all be in the family.
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 36