XII
There were still parts of the world where the Jews were not tortured and degraded; where they were citizens and free men and women. One of them was America, and another was the Soviet Union, where Hansi and Bess had visited several times. Whenever they played for the workers, which they did frequently, the couple always closed by playing the Internationale. Always the audience would rise and cheer, even those who were not Communists; for, whatever their creed might be, they knew that this hymn meant battle against the oppressors. These New York Jews wanted to fight Hitlerism with any and every weapon they could lay hands upon.
After Hansi had exchanged greetings with one or two hundred workers, the three went out to their car, and Lanny drove them west to the pier where a great steamer lay waiting for its passengers. They had an hour or so for a final chat; then the deep whistle sounded, and the two musicians went out to the pier and watched the steamer towed out into the river. A great harbor, and, half-way out of it, the Statue of Liberty with her blazing torch. Lanny had first seen her in the midst of World War, and she had been welcoming him to the land of his fathers. Later, departing from New York during the Wall Street panic, he had thought that she was drunk. Now she had reformed, but was sad, because so few looked at her or thought about her any more. She might have liked to send back a message to her native land of France, which was facing such a dark and uncertain future. Her torch was wavering in shreds of fog, and it might have been a signal.
But Lanny Budd wasn’t on deck to see it. He was down in his cabin, hammering away on his little portable, making notes of statements which Johannes Robin had made and which were to be sealed up and marked “No. 103,” and sent by the little boat which took the pilot back to land.
3
Trust in Princes
I
Irma Barnes, once Mrs. Lanny Budd and now the Countess of Wickthorpe, had at last found a way to spend some real money. She had been handicapped for years because Lanny hadn’t cared about spending it, but preferred to live in a little old villa on the shore of the Mediterranean. Now Irma was engaged in modernizing one of the most famous of English castles, part of it dating back to Tudor days. She was taking out pretty nearly everything but the walls and floors, and putting in every gadget she could think of, or that was suggested by a lively young architect whom she had met in a New York night club. Wickthorpe Castle was going to show the English upper classes what they had been missing all these years. She went every day to watch the work, and to imagine the sumptuous entertainments she was going to give when it was completed. Meantime the family was living in Wickthorpe Lodge, adjoining the estate. She had rented it years ago and lived there with Lanny; a convenient arrangement, because it had enabled her to get acquainted with her second husband before breaking with her first.
Irma had crowned her career by being taken into the English nobility; everybody showed her deference, the servants addressed her as “my lady,” and it was all delightful. She was going to bear an heir to an earldom; at least, she had a fifty-fifty chance of doing so, and was praying for luck. At the same time she was having her portrait painted by Gerald Brockhurst, a painter who was well recommended and who charged accordingly. One hour every morning she sat for him; not being a chatty person, she sat for the most part in silence, considering whether the armor room of the castle should be left in its present gloomy condition, or should be done over in batik or something else cheerful.
The daughter of J. Paramount Barnes was happy. She had had the responsibility of a great fortune placed upon her shoulders in childhood, and now at last she felt that she was making proper use of it. Her husband had an important post in the Foreign Office—he was a careerman in spite of being an earl, something out of the ordinary. He worked hard and took seriously his duty to protect the future of the British Empire in unusually trying times. His wife would help him by entertaining splendidly but at the same time with dignity; she would spread his influence, and get him promoted. Ceddy couldn’t become Prime Minister, but he might become Viceroy of India. Mary Leiter had made it—why not Irma Barnes? In any case she would help to preserve an ancient and honorable tradition, and hold in check the forces of discontent which were undermining property and religion in England as everywhere else. Irma was only twenty-seven, but had lived a great deal, so she considered; she had come close to those satanic forces, and been shocked to the depths of her otherwise placid being; she hated them, and knew that she was going to devote her influence, social and political as well as financial, to combat them.
II
In the midst of these labors and planning came a wireless message from her former husband, on board a ship. “Arriving day after tomorrow will it be convenient for me to see Frances reply Dorchester Hotel regards Lanny.” Brief and to the point; polite beyond criticism, but Irma knew that inside the velvet glove was the mailed fist. Lanny had a fifty per cent interest in Irma’s child; he could claim fifty per cent of the little one’s time, and of the control of her rearing. He could come to see her when he pleased, and everything must be made pleasant for him. If there was any hint of disharmony, he might suggest taking the child away with him, and that filled both Irma and her mother with distress. To be sure, the “twenty-three-million-dollar baby,” as the newspapers called her, was no longer anywhere near that rich, for Irma’s fortune had been reduced by the depression, and she had settled a chunk of the remainder on her new husband and their future offspring. But kidnapers mightn’t know that; and while there was said to be none in England, what was to prevent the child’s father from taking her to France, where she had been born, or to New York, where Irma herself had been born? No law that Irma’s solicitors could find for her!
Irma really knew her former husband. She knew that he called himself a “Pink,” using the word jestingly. Irma herself declined to recognize shadings; she called him in her heart a “Red,” and generally with the double adjective “out-and-out.” No amount of play-acting on his part, no talk about art for art’s sake or ivory-tower residences, could fool Lanny’s ex-wife. She could be sure that whatever political facts Lanny might pick up from the lips of her highly placed guests he would carry off and repeat to his friend Rick, the bitter and aggressive left-wing playwright and journalist.
But what could Irma do about it? She had agreed with Lanny in their parting that she would not mention his political opinions as the cause of their break. She had granted this in return for Lanny’s promise not to propagandize the child with his ideas. Irma had taken her mother into her confidence—and Fanny Barnes cared very little about the safety of the British Empire but very much about her prerogatives as grandmother. Fanny was urgent on the subject—her daughter must not do the slightest thing to irritate Lanny and cause him to assert the prerogatives of the other grandmother. Lanny was socially acceptable, wasn’t he? He knew how to make people like him, and most of Irma’s friends did like him. All right then, let him come as a guest and treat him like any other guest.
In America it was supposed to be “sporting” to take divorce lightly and remain friends; and Irma, as an American, would take that right. Nobody, save perhaps the rector of Wickthorpe parish, would be shocked to meet her ladyship’s first husband at dinner in her home; and Fanny Barnes would take the rector off, explain matters to him, and require him to show a true Christian spirit. If Lanny pretended to be in sympathy with the ideas of the other guests, that was his concession to harmony, his effort to avoid causing embarrassment. For heaven’s sake, let him get away with it, and don’t say a word, don’t even frown, but make him feel that he is the most appreciated of personalities!
So Lanny would have a cottage on the estate; he would have servants to wait on him and prepare his meals; and if an innocent child wanted him to come to lunch with her and her mother and grandmother, she would have her way. Lanny would entertain them with news about the Budd family, whom Irma knew well, and the Budd-Erling plant, in which Irma owned a million-dollar block of stock. Lanny would play the piano for
his daughter, dance with her the farandole which he had taught her in Provence, and take her horseback riding on the estate, of course with a groom to follow them.
Seven-year-old Frances Barnes Budd was a happy child, and healthy like her two parents. She had dark brown eyes and a wealth of dark brown hair like her mother; a vigorous and active body, eager for every sort of play, but not much impulse toward the life of the mind—again like her mother. She adored her father, who came to her like a prince out of a fairy story, always with adventures to tell, and music and dancing and games. She had been guarded from every evil thought, including that of trouble between her parents, or that there was anything unusual about having two fathers.
She was the incarnation of six years of marriage, with their joys and sorrows. Lanny could put all these out of his thoughts when he was out in the busy world, but when he came here he saw them before his eyes. Being of an imaginative temperament, he would fall to thinking: “Could I have saved that marriage? And should I?” Six years of shared experience are not to be wiped out of the soul, which has depths beyond the reach of any eraser. He would wonder: “Could I have been a little more patient, more tolerant? Could I have made more allowances for her youth, and for the environment which made her different from me?” He would wonder: “Is she thinking such thoughts now? Is she remembering our old happiness?” He would never ask such questions, of course, for that would be a breach of good form, a trespassing upon her new life.
He had not come to visit Irma, but Frances. He would play with the child, devote himself to her—but how could he help seeing the mother in the child? He would start thinking his “Pink” thoughts about their offspring. Poor little rich girl! Some day she would awaken to the fact that she was set apart from other children, and that what was supposed to be a great good fortune was in fact an abnormality and a burden. She would discover that friends could be mercenary and designing, and that love was not always what it pretended to be. She would discover the secret war in the hearts of her mother and father, and that this war extended over the whole earth and divided all human society, a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, or those which lie at the bottom of the ocean floor. Frances’ mother was content to live on her own side of that social chasm, while Frances’ father insisted upon crossing from one side to the other and back again—a most unstable and nerve-trying sort of life. But he must never let the child know about it—for that would be unsettling her mind, that would be propagandizing!
III
In the evening Lanny would be invited over to the house which for a year or two had been his home and Irma’s. Perhaps it would have been tactful for him not to come, but he had his secret purposes in coming. He had known Ceddy since boyhood, and Ceddy’s friend and colleague in the Foreign Office, Gerald Albany, who lived near by. They knew that Lanny had been tinged with Pinkness, and they were used to that in their own ranks; they took it for granted that as men acquire experience, they learn how hard it is to change the nature of men and nations. When Lanny said that he had decided to leave politics to the experts, they took that to mean themselves, and the arrangement was satisfactory.
So they talked freely about the problems facing the British Empire. They had a “line,” which Lanny understood perfectly: British governments change, but foreign policy never, and that was why Britannia had ruled the waves over a period of four centuries. If in the course of the conversation the American guest put in the suggestion that it might now be necessary for the old lady to give some thought to the air above the waves, that was taken good-naturedly; it was well known that Lanny’s father had airplanes to sell, and one might reasonably assume that the son had an interest in the business. Commercial men weren’t looked down upon as they had been in old England; for, after all, this was an industrial age, and business and politics were pretty thoroughly mixed. The recent Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had been an ironmaster, and the present Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, was an arms manufacturer from Birmingham.
There existed at this time a peculiar situation in the inner shrine of the British government. Intelligence Service, most secret of all organizations, was turning in one report after another showing that the German Air Force had outstripped the British; also, that the German Navy was disregarding its pledged word to limit construction to one-third of the British. Prime Minister Chamberlain, who believed in business and called it peace, was solving the problem by sticking the reports away and forgetting them. But Anthony Eden, Foreign Minister, was on the warpath against this course, and Sir Robert Vansittart, the highest permanent official of the Foreign Office, was backing him up.
Gerald Albany, the embodiment of propriety, would probably not have mentioned this delicate subject in the presence of an American; but Lanny let it be known that he had heard about it. So then they talked. Ceddy declared that the trouble was due to the inability of some statesmen to face frankly the fact that Hitler had made Germany into a great power, and that she was again entitled to cast her full vote in the councils of Europe. Irma supported him, speaking with that new assurance which had come with her title. It was her idea that her new country should make a gentleman’s agreement with Hitler covering all the problems of Europe, and should use this as a lever to force France into breaking off the Russian alliance. Thus, and only thus, could there again be security for property and religion. Lanny, listening to her emphatic phrases, thought: “She is still quarreling with me in her heart!”
IV
The basic principle of British policy for a couple of centuries had been to maintain a balance of power on the Continent, and to fight whatever nation attempted to gain dominance there. Before the World War that power had been Germany. After that war, it had been France, which had accumulated a huge gold reserve and used it to build up a “Little Entente” in Central Europe and to demand a share of the oil of the Near East. Thus it had become necessary for the British to lend money to Germany and build it up as a counterweight. Now there were many in Britain who thought the counterweight was growing dangerously heavy, and that France should again receive the support for which she was clamoring, and for which Léon Blum had come a year ago to beg in vain.
The problem was complicated by the upsurgence of Russia, which most British statesmen had written off as a derelict after 1917. Russia now had an alliance with France, but didn’t know whether to trust it or not, and the British didn’t know whether the French meant it, and whether they should be encouraged to mean it or to sabotage it. French policy, unlike the British, did change with the government, and that was a bad thing for the French, and for their friends and backers. Many persons in Britain took the position that the question of Russia was not merely a political issue, but a moral one; they refused to “shake hands with murder.” Gerald Albany, a clergyman’s son, was among these; but Ceddy spoke cautiously, saying that in statecraft it was not always possible to be guided by one’s moral and religious ideas. “We should have had a bad time at the outbreak of the last war if we hadn’t had the aid of Russia; and surely the hands of the Tsar had bloodstains enough.”
The fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe was about Lanny’s age, and everyone agreed that he had a brilliant career before him. He was tall and fair, with delightful pink cheeks and a little blond mustache of which he took care. He was quiet and serious, a good listener and slow speaker. He considered himself modern and democratic, meaning that in his own set he did not exact any tribute to his rank. In his dealings with those below him it had never occurred to him to do anything but to say what he wanted in the fewest words and to be at once obeyed.
He had known Lanny well, and had excused Lanny’s free and easy ways on the ground that Americans were like that. When he had met Lanny’s wife, at one of the international congresses, he had the thought that she had made a poor match, and it was a pity. He wondered if she had realized it, and before long he decided that she had. He had known about the American practice of easy divorce, but the idea had been repugnant to him, and
he had been rigidly correct in his attitude to his friend’s wife all through the period when they had rented the Lodge and had the run of the castle.
Only when he heard the news that Irma was in Reno getting a divorce had he allowed himself to think about her seriously. Evidently she liked him, and evidently liked the thought of being a countess. He wasn’t pleased by the idea of having a second-hand wife or of being a stepfather; but, on the other hand, he was pleased by the idea of getting out of debt and being able to preserve his great estate in spite of outrageously high taxes. He had contrived to be sent to “the States” on a diplomatic errand, and had invited the blooming grass widow to become his bride with the same grave courtesy as if it had been a proposal to lead the grand march in a ballroom. She had been very generous; the trustees of her estate had sat down with his lordship’s solicitor and inquired what settlement was desired, and had agreed to everything with no more than a casual reading of the somewhat elaborate document.
V
There were not many guests at week-ends, because of the lack of room in the Lodge; but friends dropped in in the evening and there was talk about the problems of the world. Just now it was Spain, which resembled a bunch of firecrackers going off in the vicinity of a powder-keg; no one could tell which way the sparks were going to fly and when all Europe might blow up. A publisher of newspapers, a little man who himself resembled a bunch of firecrackers going off, urged Wickthorpe to talk to friends in the Cabinet and bring about the recognition of General Franco as a belligerent without further delay. Lanny, who had been informing President Roosevelt that the British and French governments were conniving at the destruction of the Spanish people’s government, now heard this powerful British publisher maintain that the British and French governments were favoring the Spanish Red government so outrageously that it amounted to driving Italy and Germany to war against them. “It will come, and we shall be to blame for it,” declared Lord Beaverbrook, who had once been plain Max Aitken, company promoter of Canada. He had made a million pounds there, and now he owned The Daily Express and the Evening Standard, and from his state of mind you would have thought that the Bolsheviks were in the act of laying siege to these valuable properties.
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 88