Lanny had been neglecting the de Bruyne family for some time. Now he was glad of a chance to listen to Denis telling Robbie the inside story of French political life: all the blunders the Blum regime was committing, and the steps which the two hundred families were taking to counteract them and bring the Front Populaire to confusion. When the younger men talked, as they did freely, Lanny was submerged in that powerful current of reaction which had seized the wealthy and aristocratic youth of Europe. They so hated and feared the Left that they were forgetting old national antagonisms, and it was possible for two young Frenchmen to look with hope to a man who had called for the annihilation of France. Class was more than country!
Both Denis, fils, and Charlot had been seeing a great deal of Kurt Meissner, and so, without meeting his old friend, Lanny could follow his trail in Paris. In the days when Kurt had been Beauty’s lover he had held the culture of France to be decadent and had kept himself deliberately aloof from it; but now he sang the praises of la vieille gloire francaise and declared that all Europe looked upon it as a fortress under siege by the barbarian hordes of Moscow. Kurt talked against the alliance between Russia and France, which he called an act of treason to Western civilization. As a personal friend of the Fuhrer, possessing his confidence, he was assuring all Frenchmen that their efforts to overthrow the traitorous Leftist government had the Fuhrer’s full sympathy, and, if need be, would have his aid. Germany wanted to bury all the ancient grudges and join with France and Britain to build a new world order, based on frank and free co-operation of the superior nations and the superior classes within those nations.
Kurt didn’t make speeches along this line or appear in any political way. He was a Komponist and piano virtuoso who sometimes played his works in drawing-rooms of the elite. There he would meet some master of a supple French prose style, and would inspire a chapter in that fastidious gentleman’s new book. He would meet the publisher of one of the big dailies and give him Hitler’s assurances, and next day that powerful person would call in his staff to receive a new editorial directive. Or perhaps it would be a leading capitalist of the Comite des Forges, whom Kurt would so move with indignation at the secret aid being sent from France to the Spanish Reds that he would make a large contribution to the war-chest of the Croix de Feu. This and the other French Fascist organizations had been dissolved by order of the Blum government, but they were going on with secret work and had kept the streets of Paris in a turmoil.
V
Lanny told about what he had seen in Spain, making it a purely business trip; Robbie told about the interview with Goring, but suppressing Lanny’s part in this affair. As a stockholder of Budd-Erling, Denis, pere, was glad to hear of a financial triumph, while as a French patriot he was worried by the evidence of German efficiency and drive. He said that Germany was building a brand-new military machine, and was now having a chance to test out everything and train her technicians in actual combat. He had been told by an officer of the French General Staff that Goring was following a definite policy of giving his fliers a couple of months in Spain, then bringing them back to become instructors and sending a new lot to get the practice.
“It is a terrible thing to say,” declared the pere de famille, whose hair had now turned white, “but I am afraid the Germans are a coming race while ours is declining. Our Army is in a serious state of inefficiency and depressed morale. What can we expect with a Jewish internationalist and pacifist phrase-maker at the head of the government?”
Poor Blum! Lanny thought. He had been in office only seven months, but that was time enough for the condition of the French Army to be laid at his door! But Lanny couldn’t say anything; his role required him to sit in his ivory tower and let the de Bruynes run France.
“Of course, I know that the trouble dates back farther,” admitted the troubled man of affairs. “We forced Germany to disarm at Versailles while we kept our own weapons; with our native frugality we still think they are weapons, and nobody can bring us to face the fact that they are junk.”
That sounded like a lead for Robbie, who began talking about the errand which had brought him to Paris. What was the prospect of persuading the new French Air Minister to place an order for Budd-Erling P10’s, which would embody certain improvements based on the Germans’ experiences in Spain? The contract which Robbie had with Goring was no secret—on the contrary, he showed it to Denis, with the idea that Denis would tell influential officials about it. The fact that Goring was going to have twenty of these new planes every month ought to cause the French to desire at least fifty.
But the owner of Paris taxicabs shook his head sorrowfully. As a patriot and a stockholder he would be glad to see Budd-Erling get a contract, but as an insider in French public affairs he had to report that the new policy of “nationalization” had thrown the airplane industry into a state of confusion; also that the Air Ministry was hopelessly committed to the policy of what they called “prototypes.” They designed and built and tested the best planes possible of every type, got all the tools ready for quick manufacture, made enough planes for practice, and then felt that they were safe. “Again our native frugality!” said Denis. “Planes get out of date so fast that we cannot bear to make a lot of them, knowing that they will be surpassed in a year or two.”
“But that means that in time of need you will have practically no planes,” said Robbie, to whom such talk was a personal grief. “When war comes nowadays it will come overnight, and the first places to be bombed will be the factories where you have those prototypes.”
“Dieu sauve la patrie!” was the Frenchman’s reply.
VI
Robbie Budd came back to Paris, to do what he could to wake up Marianne. Then he would go to London and try to prod John Bull. The German contract was a powerful lever, and he would send Johannes Robin and make sales to smaller countries on the basis of it; but the French would stick to their program, and the British Air Force officers who had to do with purchasing would hem and haw, and discount the enthusiasm of their young fliers—what are middle-aged brass-hats for but that? They had been doing it to Robbie Budd for more than thirty years, and their monocles and Sandhurst manners gave him what he called a pain in the neck. They were gentlemen, and would scrupulously refrain from stealing his patents; but Robbie rather wished they would, so that he could have an excuse for talking to them straight. “It will take Mr. Obese to wake them up,” he wrote to his son.
Just after the father left Paris, Lanny received a cablegram from his mother, forwarding one from Irma at Shore Acres. Irma informed Beauty that she had just been married to Ceddy Wickthorpe, and added that she was coming to England to live; thus Frances would be nearer to her grandmother. Beauty had been hoping for this, and now she telegraphed Lanny that Irma was being gracious, and that it was his duty to send her a message at once. Lanny didn’t need any prompting, but cabled his congratulations, best wishes for happiness, and gratitude for many kindnesses. He hoped that wasn’t too effusive to one who was now an English countess; the fact that she had referred to her new spouse as “Ceddy” instead of “Lord Wickthorpe” was an indication that she desired things to continue on the old basis.
The newspapers and the gossip sheets reported the wedding, for the heiress had made herself an international figure and when she bought herself a title she was crowning her career. They described the ceremony, quiet and unostentatious, presumably on account of the recentness of the divorce. It had been held at the bride’s palatial home, with a Congregationalist minister of the neighborhood officiating. The gossip sheets mentioned that the Barnes family were Episcopalians, but of course under the laws of that church a Reno divorcee could not be remarried. One gossiper with a long memory went back to the beginning of the century and mentioned that an English earl who had resorted to Reno to get rid of one wife and acquire another had been convicted of a misdemeanor by his peers and sentenced to three months in jail. But, added the long-memoried one, nobody anticipated that either the fourteenth Earl of
Wickthorpe or his American bride would be subjected to such humiliation.
The discarded husband rated brief mention as the grandson of Budd’s and the son of Budd-Erling. He had been behaving himself discreetly, and his pinkness had apparently been forgotten. Nobody disliked him especially, so he was let off with a few lines, which suited him perfectly. He showed the items to his new partner, and remarked: “Irma used to give most of her discarded costumes to my mother, and she has given her discarded husband to you.”
Said Trudi: “I’d never have got him otherwise!”
VII
Six months had passed since General Francisco Franco had set out from the Canary Islands to overthrow the people’s government of Spain; and he had not succeeded. It was a source of great annoyance to him, and he found it difficult to understand the forces which had brought his armies to a standstill and kept them there. Liberty, and the desire for it, were concepts foreign to the Generalissimo’s mind; but he believed in the Devil, and it was his firm conviction that this Evil Being was at work in the modern world, inspiring men from twoscore nations to join the International Brigade and keep his troops out of Madrid. The same wicked and rebellious Being had caused a Christ-killer to become Premier of France and permit the smuggling of arms across the border; also the satanic Bolsheviks to send shiploads of tanks and planes, bombs and shells to Cartagena and Alicante. It was obvious that the Red forces couldn’t keep going without these arms from abroad; so said the Generalissimo and his partisans—and omitted to mention that the same thing was true of his own forces. The Loyalists had some manufacturing-power, but the Insurgents had practically none.
Franco was a Catholic, a devout believer of that old Spanish sort which for many centuries had maintained an Inquisition and had tortured tens of thousands of people for the good of their own souls. Franco’s thinking was firmly rooted in the idea that this world was of little importance compared with the rest of eternity. The one purpose for which you were in this world was to save your soul, and you did that by accepting and holding firmly the One True Faith. From this it followed that dying wasn’t a matter of special importance; provided that you died in the Faith, you made certain of a happier and infinitely longer existence. Nor was killing other people a serious matter, for if they were good Catholics you sent them to the same abode of bliss, where, presumably, they forgave you gladly. If they were enemies of the Faith, then to kill them was the noblest of actions, because every day they lived they would be undermining and destroying the faith of other souls, whereas when they were dead and sent to hell they could no longer do any harm.
Francisco Franco was a rather small commonplace-looking man with a round mild face and quiet manner. He had been somewhat looked down upon by his fellow-generals, but having got the backing of Juan March he was the master, and was showing no little competence in the job for which he had been trained. Strange as it might seem, he was not a bloodthirsty man and took no special pleasure in killing; he killed firmly, steadily, and systematically, that being at once his profession and his religious duty. He killed to save not merely his own soul, but the souls of all the children of Spain who otherwise would be educated by atheists and thus consigned to everlasting flames. He killed to restore Holy Mother Church to her power in Spain, so that everybody might be compelled to come back into her bosom and the teaching of atheistic doctrines might cease forever.
And just as to Franco the dread word Red included everybody who denied the right of monarchy, Army, and Church to rule the state and own the land and the banking-enterprises, so the dread word atheist included everybody who presumed to question the authority of Holy Mother Church; not merely Communists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, and such vermin, but all those who called themselves Socialists, Liberals, Republicans, Democrats, Protestants, Masons. Franco shot them all, or else he packed them into jails where they died slowly of the many diseases of malnutrition. He shot everybody against whom any charges of this sort were made, and he didn’t have to worry about mistakes, because the priests were always on hand to give extreme unction to those who asked for it, and then, if there was a mistake, the victim could explain it before a Tribunal whose sources of information were less fallible than those of the Fifth Column.
VIII
It has been an ancient and honored practice for Holy Mother Church to make use of the Devil in the service of God; the Jesuits have been cultivating that art for four hundred years. So it did not trouble General Franco that the funds which gave him his start had come from a tobacco-smuggler whose sole interest in the war was to make money. The Generalissimo didn’t mind promising monopolies which would enable the ex-smuggler to become richer than all the other rich men of Spain put together. Juan March was a Catholic, and performed faithfully the simple routine which was necessary to preserve his soul; when he was through making money, he might wish to secure a preferential place in heaven by willing his fortune to God. If he left it to his wife, the chances for God would be still better, for women accept much more readily the advice of their confessors. Sooner or later everything in Spain would come to God, and God’s agent, the Church, would administer it.
Besides the Church, there was really but one power needed in Spain, and that was the Army. According to its own laws, Holy Mother Church never killed anybody; what she did was to turn the doomed persons over to what she called the “secular arm.” Naturally she wanted that “arm” to be obedient and also up-to-date. The Church herself is ancient, and her motto is semper eadem, forever the same. But the Devil changes continually, and one of the things he does is to invent new methods of killing: Budd-Erling planes and Krupp tanks, armor-piercing bombs and rocket-shells. Therefore, in order to protect God’s Church, the secular arm must have an abundance of the Devil’s weapons. To help General Franco in getting them the Church was now pouring out her hoarded treasures, her priests were blessing the weapons and banners, and in every country of the world Catholic influence was being used to promote a holy crusade against the Reds.
Excepting only a handful of Catholics in New York and London and Paris who presumed to call themselves “liberal” and to suggest that the wealthy and proud Church of Spain was not the perfect representative of the humble and lowly Carpenter of Nazareth. To Franco and his partisans these Catholics were merely another sort of Reds, another device of the Devil to produce confusion among God’s elect. The Devil was so diabolically clever that not even the Church, not even Heaven Itself was safe against his wiles. Who but the Devil could have contrived it that God, when He came to earth and took the form of a man, should have behaved and talked so much like a Red? As a result of this calamity here were “liberal” Catholics and Pink-tinged Protestants objecting to the wholesale slaughter of men and women in the name of the Prince of Peace; questioning, a priestly hierarchy who dressed in jeweled robes in honor of one who had told his followers to take no heed, saying wherewithal should they be clothed; inquiring why bishops should dwell in palaces for the glory of one who upon earth had had not where to lay His head!
And, if possible, even more confusing, the spectacle of pious white Christians employing barbarous dark Mohammedans to kill other Christians! To Generalissimo Franco the answer was obvious: the “others” were not really Christians, but servants of the Devil well disguised. But the Moors failed to understand this distinction; the poor benighted near-black heathen took all white men for Christians and delighted in killing them. The Moors had their own True Faith, and the fact that it was different was a joke on the Christians, who thought they were getting to heaven when in reality they were all tumbling into hell. The Moors enjoyed fighting, as the only proper occupation for a man, and they didn’t mind getting killed, because they, too, had it fixed up in advance; the more Christians they sent to hell, the higher their rank in heaven and the more beautiful houris they would have with which to beguile eternity. Meanwhile they had the women in the towns and villages which they captured; so it was a satisfactory arrangement all around, and if anybody found fault with it, ob
viously he must be a Red, and would be taken out to the cemetery and made to dig a deep trench for himself and his friends to be dumped into.
IX
On his trip to England with Trudi, Lanny had read letters from Alfy to his mother and father. The volunteer aviator hadn’t been able to say much about the war, on account of the censor, but he had written that he was having a grand adventure and learning a lot that would be useful to him and to England. “We are doing our job, and I hope the papers are letting you know at least a little about it. Madrid is still ours, and will remain so.”
Rick’s comment on this had been: “I took my chances, and he has to take his.” Poor Nina had sat with her lips pressed tightly together, and afterward had remarked to Trudi: “I suppose it is enough if I go on living and taking care of the others.”
Now there came to Lanny a postcard signed “Romney,” telling about developments in the art world of Spain. There was still a shortage of good colors, he reported, so he was doing rather crude pen-and-ink drawings. He had seen some fine paintings by Lawrence, of whom he was a great admirer. After showing this card to Trudi, Lanny mailed it to Rick, who in return sent clippings in which a correspondent of the London press in Albacete mentioned the grandson of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson as among the aviators flying in the service of the Loyalists. The press associations and larger newspapers had correspondents with both armies, and you could take your choice; unfortunately several of those in Madrid were Fascist sympathizers and did as much harm to the government cause as they dared. This was made into a scandal by Loyalist friends in London and New York; so the world civil war spread into the newspaper offices, as well as into pulpits of churches, halls of parliaments, and political mass meetings everywhere.
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 71