X
Zoltan was in London and Lanny had business there, so he cabled that he was coming and engaged a passage to Southampton. He thought of saving money for Trudi by going second cabin; but no, he had to meet the “right” people, and a steamship was as likely a place as any; if he were a second-class passenger he would become a second-class art expert, and now of all times he had to keep up his morale.
He knew nobody on board, and was content to read and to pace the windy deck and ponder his future; but others soon found out who he was, and the ladies tried to rope him in for bridge and conversation. Young ones, bright-eyed and full of chatter, or soft-eyed and shy; middle-aged ones not having given up hope; they knew that he was married, but also they knew about Reno and were willing to take a chance. A handsome young man traveling alone, and saying that he was on the business of purchasing old masters—well, they were pleased to learn about this distinguished occupation, and when he made it plain that he served only the very rich and discerning they were impressed. Before the steamer docked, he had a wealthy widow from Chicago begging to be made acquainted with great art in London, and willing to pay any price to a teacher.
Two days before leaving Shore Acres, Lanny had run over to Newcastle to say good-by and had learned that the last of the Budd-Erling P7’s had left that day on a fast cargo boat for Bremen. The fat General had been so eager to get them that he had had his men in the plant watching production and begging for speed; they had dispensed with most of the customary tests and had put down the cash and taken into their own hands the job of loading the planes. Robbie Budd hadn’t known what all this was about, but Lanny found out the morning he reached London, for the newspapers had placards with letters a foot high: “HITLER MARCHES!”
It was the Fuhrer’s move into the Rhineland, long planned and carefully staged; on a Saturday, as usual, so that British statesmen would be paralyzed! He had put his troops on the road at dawn, and made public announcement to his assembled Reichstag at noon. As always, whenever he made a military move, it was in the cause of peace. This time he repeated it: “Peace! Peace!” With a perfectly straight face he declared: “We have no territorial demands to make on Europe.” He called upon the men of the German Reichstag to “unite in two holy inner confessions: First, we swear to yield to no force whatever in the restoration of the honor of our people, and prefer to succumb with honor to the severest hardships rather than capitulate. Second, we confess that now, more than ever, we shall strive for an understanding between European peoples, especially for one with our western neighbor nations.”
What he was doing was obvious: preparing to fortify this strategic border, so that he would be able to hold the French while attaching Poland and Czechoslovakia. Lanny Budd, along with every thinking person in Europe, knew that the fate of the old Continent was being decided that Saturday. Were Britain and France going to stop him or were they going to surrender to him? Under the Versailles pact, Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy were pledged to prevent this specific action. “The maintenance and the assembly of armed forces, either permanently or temporarily,” was declared to be “a hostile act” against all the powers, and they were obligated to resist it. Hitler knew this so well that he had given his commanders orders to fall back at once if they met with opposition from the French; this while he was proclaiming to the Reichstag: “We swear to yield to no force whatever.”
XI
Lanny was so excited that he forgot his own business, and phoned to Rick, who came to town by the next train. He tried to telephone Wickthorpe at Downing Street, but the report was that His Lordship was away for the weekend, and later that he was on his way to town. Rick wanted to send telegrams to everybody he knew; he wanted to call a meeting and make a speech, to organize a parade and carry a banner. But at the same time he was in despair; he said: “It’s all fixed up. Lord Londonderry has been to Berlin, and dined with Ribbentrop, and with Goring, and then with Hitler, and they have filled him full of the idea that they mean to put down Bolshevism and are the only ones who can do it. A friend of the pater’s had a talk with Londonderry just a couple of days ago, and he argues that the ratifying of the Franco-Soviet pact by the French Senate constitutes an act of aggression against Germany and releases Hitler from the Versailles and Locarno agreements.”
The only hope was an appeal to labor and other anti-Nazi forces. But the trouble was, you were calling for war, and labor was pacifist and looked askance upon all “warmongers”—especially those whose fathers were selling military planes! Lanny found it in London as in Paris: the Right was militant, while the Left was using words. As if Hitler cared about their words! Hitler had thirty-five thousand troops in the Rhineland by Sunday night, and ninety thousand by the middle of the week; he paced the floor of his Chancellery, rubbing his hands with glee while the French statesmen argued in an agony of fear and uncertainty. They were afraid of German bombers over Paris; they were afraid of the several billions it would cost to mobilize the Army—and precisely while they were struggling to save the franc, and losing gold every day!
Late on Saturday night the French Cabinet announced that France was appealing to the League Council. All the world knew what that meant: Hitler had got away with it! On Sunday morning Lanny and Rick had the agony of reading the rejoicings in the Tory press of Britain, which was for all practical purposes a Fascist press and came out with editorial hymns celebrating the fact that “Locarno” was dead and “sanctions” also, and Britons were not going to die to help the ally of Soviet Russia. Several months earlier they had been rejoicing because Britons weren’t going to die to open the way for the Reds in Italy. On Monday the pipe-smoking and pig-raising Prime Minister of Britain told the House: “We have no more desire than to keep calm, to keep our heads, and to try to bring France and Germany together in a friendship with ourselves.”
Tragic hours for two clear-sighted men of the Left! On Monday the League Council condemned Germany’s action; whereupon began a long exchange of protocols and demands upon Germany, sickening in their futility. Perfectly marvelous how many formalities and rigmaroles they could invent, how many pretexts for delay and talk, while Hitler poured his labor battalions into the Rhineland and set them to work digging fortifications day and night. You could see the white lights of the construction jobs blazing across the river, and in a few weeks they would have barred Germany away from the French armies, and the rest of Europe would belong to the Nazis. The French Premier and the Foreign Minister came to London with their staffs and got just what they had given to the British five months previously. You let us down in the matter of Lake Tsana, and now it’s tit for tat. How do you like it, messieurs les mangeurs de grenouilles?
XII
Lanny attended to his picture business and then wrote Trudi Schultz, making an appointment in Paris. She was the first person he wanted to see, and the only one in all France to whom he could talk with complete frankness. He found her all but in tears over what had happened, and he had no comfort to give her concerning the attitude of Britain. Hard, hard men were in control of that empire; silk-hatted savages, Rick had called them. They thought about their class and their class privileges, their property and their property system, and they thought about little else in the world. Their system was threatened in every country, and they were frightened, and hated what they feared. Class had become more than country, and the enemy at home more to be dreaded than anyone abroad.
The success of Hitler’s coup was, of course, a setback for Trudi and her friends, and might add years to the work they had to do. Lanny said: “It’s no good fooling ourselves about it. We may none of us live to see the end of what Adi is building. This victory will make him into a master-magician to the Germans. So we’ve got to go back and take a fresh start, and plan a long war.”
Lanny heard his friend’s story of her activities, and told her the outcome of his visit to Shore Acres. Very sad, but no help for it and that book was closed. He couldn’t live in Irma’s world nor she in his, and
neither desired to try.
They drove out into the country, and strolled and saw the signs of spring underfoot and overhead. Life was renewing itself, even on the banks of the River Marne, which twice during the late unpleasantness had run red with blood of French patriots. It was pretty sure to happen again, Lanny said. The intelligence of men was not equal to management of the huge societies they had built; their moral sense was not powerful enough to restrain the weapons of destruction they had invented. “We social organizers are a tiny group,” he said, “and we are going to be rolled over by the tanks.”
What was Trudi going to do with her life? She couldn’t live entirely alone, hiding in a wilderness of bricks and tiles and thinking about nothing but the composing and distributing of anti-Nazi literature. That way she would surely be an object of suspicion to her neighbors in time of stress; she would be much safer, Lanny advised, if she took up some sort of normal life as a camouflage. “Doesn’t your drawing interest you any more?”
“It would,” she said, “if I could do it for the cause.”
“Do it without labeling it,” he suggested. “Use a little cunning as our enemies do. Why not get a studio in Montmartre or over on the Left Bank and be one artist among thousands? Call yourself an Austrian, if you like, and no one will pay any attention to you, in war or peace. Now and then you can disappear for a few hours and meet your underground friends. This will be pleasanter for me, because I can come to see you when I’m in Paris and we won’t have to meet on street corners.”
“What are you planning to do, Lanny?”
“My home on the Cap will be a quiet place for a while,” he replied. “My mother will reconcile herself to what she cannot help, and I will write letters and make as much money as I can for our propaganda. I’ll spend my leisure time in the company of Beethoven and Liszt and some other old friends. I have a library of books which I’ve been telling myself I’d like to find time to read: Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, War and Peace and Jean-Christophe—I could compile quite a list. We’ve got to wall ourselves in, Trudi, and learn to hibernate like the bears; to live on our own intellectual and spiritual substance. There’s a long winter ahead of us—and it may be an ice age, who can say?”
BOOK FIVE
A Tide in the Affairs of Men
18
FEARS OF THE BRAVE
I
Life was peaceful and pleasant at Bienvenu in that early spring of 1936. Nature put on her annual fashion show, and the court of the Villa was a bower of blossoms, the haunt of bees and butterflies. The fruit trees all over the estate became silent explosions of pink and white. In his studio Lanny played his music and read his books; Parsifal wandered about, meditating, or sat in a shady nook saying his prayers; Beauty played bridge with her friends, and combated her unresting lifelong enemy, the demon of embonpoint. Her share in the season’s gaiety was modest, because she no longer had Irma’s purse. Emily wasn’t well enough to manage big parties, so Beauty would go up to Sept Chenes and arrange dinners and dances, thus helping to maintain the good name of the Coast of Pleasure.
Lanny Budd, bachelor pro tem, evaded playfully all questions regarding his affairs. This was annoying to the ladies he met, for how could they know what attitude to take to him, either for themselves or for their daughters? He was an eligible man, provided he was going to stay away from his wife and let her get a divorce in the normal way. But was he? And she? Nobody seemed to be sure. Cannes and Long Island are three thousand miles apart, but are connected by cables and wireless, and the gossip columns at each end of the line concerned themselves with the problem. Apparently the couple had quietly uncoupled themselves, and were going on living as if there were no such thing as love and marriage in the world. But all writers of gossip columns know that the case is otherwise.
Lanny would stay at home as much as he could. When his mother begged hard enough, he would dress and take her to a party; he would dance with her, and with his hostess; then, considering his duty done, he would stroll into the smoking-room or onto the loggia and engage in conversation with gentlemen who were on the inside of affairs. What were the prospects of the coming elections? Was there a chance of victory for the canaille, and if it happened, what were the holders of property going to do about it? What were the consequences of the new laws forbidding political organizations to wear uniforms or to carry arms? What would be the effect of the statement of Colonel de la Roque, pledging the Croix de Feu to legality in its procedures? Was it true that the Jeunesses Patriotes was rapidly taking membership away from its rival organization as a result of the Colonel’s gaffe?
The grandson of Budd’s had been strongly suspected of Leftist leanings, and had been wont to make cynical remarks about the status quo; but now, as he explained, he had come to realize that political affairs are not the proper field for art lovers, and he had adopted a spectator’s role in the great European tug-o’-war. That was a normal development at the age of thirty-six, and especially after one has married a fortune; members of the two hundred families vacationing on the Riviera found nothing suspicious about it, and avowed freely their intention under no circumstances to submit to the domination of the “doggery,” no matter what majority of votes it might cast. They complained of the rapacity of their political representatives—who, for political purposes, denominated themselves “Radical Socialists.”
If later on some of this information leaked into Le Populaire of Paris, and from there filtered down into lesser political sheets and into speeches at reunions, nobody ever thought of Lanny Budd in this connection. The men of great affairs expressed themselves to many persons, and it is characteristic of civil wars that leaks are frequent, the antagonists being so mixed up together and espionage and intrigue so easy. Anyhow, nobody reads what appears in the Pink and Red rags; they make clever guesses and don’t hesitate to advance them as facts. They say? What say they? Let them say!
II
Rick in one of his letters wrote: “Ceddy has gone to Washington. I suppose we are trying to get some sort of commitment in support of sanctions, just in case. At least that is what the pater hears in the clubs.”
When Lanny read that to his mother, she said: “Tommyrot! He’s gone there after Irma!”
There had come a cordial letter from Fanny Barnes, inviting the other grandmother to spend the summer at Shore Acres and offering her a cottage. Lanny pointed out: “They would hardly do that if Irma was expecting to be carrying on another courtship.”
The mother’s response was: “By summer she’ll be in Reno.”
Beauty put this on the record, and so she got a melancholy satisfaction when several friends in England and on the Continent sent her an item from the Tatler, reporting that the fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe was a guest of Mrs. Irma Barnes Budd on Long Island, New York, while that lady’s husband was sojourning on the estate of his mother at Juan-les-Pins, on the Cap d’Antibes. “You see what I told you!” cried Beauty. “You are losing her, Lanny!”
“It’s a load off my mind,” answered the incorrigible one. “I was afraid it might be a German-American poet.”
“Oh, Lanny, how crude of you!”
“Irma is bound to marry again, I take it; and Ceddy is a gentleman—something of a dub, to be sure, but the same sort that she is. When you take time to think it over, you’ll decide that having Frances the stepdaughter of an earl is not so bad. I don’t know what it will make you, but it ought to be some sort of an Honorable.”
Beauty saw fit to ignore this unseemly persiflage. “Your mind is quite made up to losing her, Lanny?”
“Her mind is made up, and that’s enough. I can only say that I’d rather see the mother of Frances happy than otherwise, and I’m advising you to go there and exhibit that savoir-faire for which you have become celebrated.”
Beauty had had half a year in which to get her thoughts adjusted to this calamity, and she hated to admit that she had succeeded. However, she took a plunge. “Lanny, can’t you bring yourself to talk
frankly to your mother?”
“I’d love to—if only you’d make up your mind that I’m going to be what I am and not what you’d like me to be.”
“Stop scolding me, and answer honestly: Do you expect to get along indefinitely without a woman in your life?”
“I have no such long-range program. It so happens that I’ve had an overdose of matrimony of a sort that I let other people push me into. Now I’m going to take a rest, and when I start looking again, it’ll be for the sort of woman I want and not the sort that anybody else thinks I ought to want.”
“Have you any idea what that sort would be?”
“It’s so simple that it sounds childish: some woman who is interested in the same things that I’m interested in.”
“Tell me honestly: Is it that woman you helped out of Germany?”
Lanny guessed that she had extracted some information from his father. “Bless your heart,” he replied, “that woman happens to have a husband in a concentration camp, or so she believes, and her life is centered on the idea of saving him.”
“You are planning to assist her?”
“I would be, except that I think the chances are a hundred to one that he is dead.”
“And if she ever decides that he’s dead, what then?”
Lanny thought for a while.
“Please, dear,” she pleaded. “Trust your mother as you used to do in the old days!”
“The matter is confidential in a way that I cannot even explain.”
“Lanny, I will pledge my word of honor not to speak about the matter to anybody but you. I want to know if my son is in love, and if so, with what sort of woman.”
“I’m not in love with her. I’ve thought about it a lot, naturally. I realize that I am two persons and live in two worlds. I like to play around, as I’ve always done; then sometimes I have an impulse to work for a cause. I ask myself: ‘Do I want to do either all the time?’ I read about Jeanne d’Arc and I’m tremendously thrilled, I think that life is holy and marvelous. But if I found myself falling in love with Jeanne d’Arc, I’d begin to wonder if I could stand it. I might get tired of hearing her voices, and want to get off and hear my own for a while.”
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 42