These heroic people were depending upon Lanny for their funds. He knew enough about left-wing movements to understand that they would have dropped efforts to get funds elsewhere and be devoting themselves to spending what he sent them. And now their supply would stop. There would be no way for him to notify them not to expect more; they would wait and go on waiting—in the same unhappy state of mind which he had known in Berlin, waiting for word from Trudi. The flash-sender would fall silent because they had no money for new batteries or gasoline for the car; the leaflets would no longer be distributed because there was no paper. Trudi might write to him—or more likely, she would give him up in disgust, and he would never hear from her again, never know whether she was alive or dead. But he, the young lord of Shore Acres, would be safe and comfortable, and if there was anything in the world that money could buy, he could have it for the asking. Everything, save his peace of mind!
IX
He had managed to find purchasers for a couple more of Goring’s paintings; and after a week or two of wrestling within himself he said to his wife: “How would you like to take another run over to Berlin?” He would have preferred to go alone, but tact required that he invite her.
As it happened, Irma had just received a letter from Margy, the very sporty Dowager Lady Eversham-Watson. Being nearly sixty, she ought to have known that she was “on the shelf,” but she refused to. With the proceeds of the rapidly reviving business of whisky-distilling she had got herself a yacht, and instead of being content to invite Beauty and Sophie and other ladies of her own age she craved the society of the young. So, wouldn’t Irma and Lanny be her guests for the regatta week at Cowes? It was a great show, which Lanny had seen but Irma hadn’t. Irma said: “Poor old Margy’s a bore, but I imagine it will be rather swank—what do you think?”
What Lanny thought was: “O.K., let’s go!” And so began one of those periods of agreeable confusion in which you make plans and decisions. They would leave Frances here with her grandmother, for they were coming back, having accepted an invitation for a couple of weeks’ hunting on one of the estates of the South Carolina tidelands. Irma would take her maid, because you couldn’t participate in regatta festivities without a personal maid. But not too many clothes, because they would have several days in London to get yachting-togs. Lanny would look kind of cute in such an outfit; his wife would order one and order him to have it fitted. As a reward for his being so sweet, she would accompany him to Berlin and let him look at pictures for as long as he needed.
They had to choose a steamer, and engage accommodations, and send cablegrams to friends. Lanny called his father and told him; he called Johannes, and found that he had just had a cablegram from Hansi and Bess. The two musicians had left South America for a tour around the world and had got as far as Japan. Now they had learned of a Congress of the Comintern to be held in Moscow, the first in seven years, and they were leaving by way of Vladivostok to take in this show.
Lanny, too, had heard about this coming event. The Third International had summoned its parties all over the world to send delegates, to consult concerning the new emergency which confronted them in the upsurge of Fascism-Nazism. Rumor had it that a change in the party line was contemplated; some sort of united front was to be set up with the Socialists and other liberal forces. This was what Lanny had been urging for many years; he could say that the Comintern was about to adopt his party line! Having attended a dozen conferences of “bourgeois” statesmen, he would have greatly enjoyed attending one of revolutionists. But, alas, nobody could go from the Kremlin to Karinhall, or from Karinhall to the Kremlin! He said to Irma: “We’ll meet Hansi and Bess when they come out, and hear all about it.”
Irma said: “You can!”
X
Early one morning a procession set out from Shore Acres: two cars and a station-wagon, the first with Irma, driven by her husband, with their five-year-old darling between them, and Miss Addington, the elderly English governess, in the back seat; in the second car, Mrs. Barnes and Uncle Horace, driven by their chauffeur, and with one of their favored pensioners beside him. In the station-wagon rode Celeste, Irma’s Breton maid, and a load of trunks. They drove to the pier where the great Cunard liner was already rumbling her whistle. Lanny’s car had steel chains put under it and was lifted into the hold; the trunks were piled into a heavy rope net and thus let down into another hold; the three passengers and their guests went up by the gangplank, preceded by stewards carrying armfuls of their bags. Moving the rich about the world is a task involving a lot of labor for other people, but the rich themselves maintain a calm and unhurried aspect. “The sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part.”
To go away is to die a little, the French say; but the sons and daughters of Mary do their dying in private, and in this case only little Frances shed any tears. She liked steamships and wanted to go along. When the call came: “All ashore that’s going ashore!” she wanted violently to remain, and it wasn’t complimentary to her grandmother and her great-uncle. Irma had to promise to throw her a red paper ribbon, and for that she went eagerly.
This pleasant custom had grown up in recent years. The steamship people furnished rolls of thin paper ribbon of bright colors; the passenger held one end and tossed the roll to a friend on the pier, and he or she caught it, and so they were connected by symbolical bonds until the vessel began to move and all ties were severed. Irma tossed a red one, and it was caught and handed to the twenty-three-million-dollar child. Lanny tossed a blue one, and she wanted that also, and stood with a ribbon in each fist, carrying on with both parents a conversation of which they heard no word. However, she heard her father’s voice: “I’ll be back soon!”
Lanny said this because it was the proper thing; but inside him a voice whispered: “Oh, yeah?” This voice had taken to speaking at intervals by day and night, and was pretty well spoiling Lanny’s enjoyment of the agreeable life which fate had assigned him. Irma noticed it, and would say: “What makes you so glum, Lanny?” He would answer: “I’m just thinking.” Irma was thinking, too, and guessing that her strange husband wasn’t entirely cured of his Pink vice, and was brooding because the world didn’t behave according to his formulas.
Pressing against Lanny’s chest on his right side was a wad which he had wrapped in a handkerchief and kept pinned in his inside coat pocket. It contained a large number of hundred-mark notes, which he had acquired by visiting different money-changing agencies in New York, using care to attract no attention. One of the results of his meditations on the problem of what might be happening in Berlin: he had decided that he had taken a serious chance by going to his regular bank, drawing out a large sum, and passing it on to Trudi Schultz. Doubtless the bank had kept a record of the serial numbers of those notes. In Naziland, a record was kept of everything; the hairs of your head were numbered, and if too many sparrows fell to the ground in your garden the fact would be reported to the Polizei. Suppose one or more of those notes had been found on Comrade Monck or some other arrested person and the source of the funds had been traced! This was just one of a great number of imaginations which were trying to ruin a yachting-regatta for Lanny Budd.
11
FAREWELL TO EVERY FEAR
I
In the month of August the weather man is apt to be less unfriendly to the English, which is perhaps why the Cowes regatta is held at the beginning of that month. Yachtsmen and yacht lovers assemble from all the shores of Britain and indeed of the Atlantic; the Solent is crowded with vessels large and small, both steam and sail. Everything is new and shiny; white sails, white paint, and spit-and-polish brass; the sea green, or blue-green, with whitecaps when it breaks; the sky a light blue, and the clouds like wind-filled sails. Everybody puts on nautical clothes and a holiday air, and nowhere on the scene is there the slightest sign of what the English hymnbook refers to as sorrow, toil, and woe.
This was the jubilee year of the event, so there were jubilee cups offered by King George
for the best records for yachts of various classes. There were several races each day, of various lengths, around certain buoys and lights outside the harbor; sight-seeing vessels trooped out in the morning to follow the contenders, keeping politely off the course, shepherded by guard vessels with little flags to mark their authority and officials with megaphones to warn the careless. You stood by the rail, conscious of your sea-costume and also of your sea-legs, and watched the contenders through binoculars which made it almost as if you were on board. If you were an old-timer you displayed knowledge of the vessels and their owners, and the records which they and their predecessors had established. You knew the “corrected times,” and even knew who had designed the various boats. It was a classic example of what Veblen calls “the conspicuous consumption of goods”; the frail craft were built for one purpose, to carry the utmost amount of sail and slide through the water at the utmost speed; they cost thumping sums and in a couple of years were obsolete because some other designer had gone them one or two better. Therefore, when you joined a yachting crowd you were telling the world that you were tops financially and had been for some time.
Late in the day you came back into the harbor of your boat club, sunburned and with salt in your eyebrows. You bathed and dressed in evening clothes and perhaps went ashore for dinner and dancing, or were invited to some other yacht, or had friends invited to yours. All talked about the day’s events, paid off their bets, and made new ones. In the first three days of this regatta the winds were featherlight, and that favored the English yachts; in the last three days there were “spanking” breezes, which favored the American, which had to be a shade more substantial in order to cross the ocean. So there was plenty about which to wager and to work up patriotic excitement. Margy Petries, proprietor of “Petries’ Peerless,” wasn’t sure whether she favored the vessel called Yankee; remembering she was also a dowager countess, she would consider “hedging” on her bets.
There are always some bridge fiends who cannot pass an evening without their rubber or two, and these would retire to the saloon. The young people would bring out phonographs and dance on deck. The vessels were closely crowded in their yacht-basins, and motorboats were chugging this way and that; but English decorum prevailed even over the waters, and you danced to your own music, and enjoyed knowing that you were socially impeccable. King George went on board the Yankee for dinner, the second time that had happened in the history of Cowes, and it was “Hands across the Sea,” an admission that Britain was preparing to share her rule. Irma was so impressed that she said: “Lanny, don’t you think it would be fun to build one of these yachts and learn to sail it?” She was always thinking about some gadget that might capture her husband’s fancy, and the more expensive it was the better, because, after all, if you could do things that nobody else could, weren’t they the things to do?
II
Among the guests was what Margy called the “old crowd,” including Beauty and her husband, and Sophie and her new husband—she might, according to the European custom, have kept her title though divorced and remarried, but she said that America was good enough for her, and this was considered a radical almost revolutionary action. Also there came an old friend, Edna Fitz-Laing, of whose marital scandal Lanny had been an eye-witness in his boyhood. Now her lame English officer was dead, and she was a widow, rather poor, so Margy was being kind to invite her as well as a couple of elderly bachelors who might be attracted by her remnants of beauty. Two of them, with the idea that each might be jealous of the other!
There were enough bridge-players, and Lanny could sit on deck in the evening and chat with Rick. The baronet’s son and his wife were here because Margy knew this would please Lanny and cause him to bring his heiress to Margy’s affairs. That is the way to keep in the swim and build yourself into a social personality; by understanding your fellow-humans, their prejudices and desires; by learning how to mix them and make them have a good time.
Lanny and Rick, a pair of social philosophers mature beyond their years, reclined on deck chairs and gazed at the golden stars in the clear sky, thinking of their distance, and how insignificant were the two-legged creatures dressing themselves up and strutting on a very small planet. How long the stars had been there, and how short a time was allotted to the creatures—and what were they doing with it? The newspapers came from the city, and you could study the details of their activities, at least those which the press lords considered fit for your perusal. Both the art expert and the lame exaviator were students of this press, and had learned to read between the lines and draw conclusions different from what the vendors intended.
Mussolini was admitting having sent more than a quarter of a million troops to Eritrea, his jumping-off place into the land of the Negus, known also as the Lion of Judah and King of Kings; the ardent young Fascists were singing a song—you could get the lilt of it even in English: “Of the whiskers of the Negus we will make a little brush to polish off the boots of Mussolini!” Their hero now had a million of them under arms, and while the lovely yachts were gliding over the blue waters of the Solent he mobilized three more divisions. The League was continuing the farce of pretending to mediate between the black whiskers and the prognathous jaw, but they couldn’t get anywhere because the two Italian members of the arbitration board refused to join the two Abyssinian members in naming a fifth. It was plain to all the world that Mussolini was merely stalling until the end of the rainy season, a couple of months off.
In the Geneva debates the Italians were having the ardent support of their friend the innkeeper’s son from Auvergne who was now Premier of France. In that land of revolutionary traditions the class war was being waged merrily; there were strikes in the arsenals, accompanied by violence; with the secret backing of Pierre Laval the Croix de Feu was practicing what it called “lightning mobilizations,” also the conversion to military purposes of the airplanes owned by its wealthy members. “I no longer care a hang for legality,” said Colonel de la Roque, its founder, and Lanny had been to their meetings and could imagine the yells with which his followers would greet this declaration.
The American could tell about conditions in New York; how rapidly the Nazis were organizing, with many large camps where they drilled. Just before his sailing they had held a meeting in Yorkville, the German quarter of the city, in which their uniformed guards had worn revolvers. The steamers of the German lines which came to the port brought loads of Nazi propaganda which was mailed out to their “Bund” headquarters all over the land. This had provoked a fury of indignation among the anti-Nazis, and they had mobbed the steamer Bremen at its sailing a week before Lanny’s own departure.
III
Over in Moscow the sessions of the Comintern were under way, and on the third day of the Cowes regatta, while the wind was light and the Enterprise was winning the forty-mile race for the big Class J yachts, the Bulgarian delegate Dimitroff made a fiery speech announcing plans for the “united front” against Fascism all over the world. This was the man whom Lanny had heard defending his life against the fat General Goring at the Reichstag fire trials less than two years ago. He had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, and now the Nazis agreed that they had made a mistake, and that in future such men would be silenced at once and forever.
On the day when the wind freshened and the Yankee won, the co-ordinated press of Naziland burst forth in furious onslaughts against the Comintern, calling upon the friends of order throughout the world to join with the Fuhrer in destroying this vipers’ nest. On the last day of the regatta the American Earl Browder called upon the Communists to broaden their appeal, so as to win the farmers and workers and middle-class elements of his country. From the American press came indignant protests to the effect that Moscow was breaking the promise it had made as the price of American recognition, not to make Communist propaganda in the United States. To this Moscow had its answer: Moscow had nothing to do with what the Comintern did, the Comintern was an independent assemblage of delegates from all t
he countries of the world.
When you confronted a diplomatic evasion such as that, what were you going to call it, a lie or a fib? And was it your program to repudiate and expose all lies and fibs? If so, you would have a busy life, for the world was lining up on opposite sides of a revolutionary struggle, and who in all history had ever waged war without falsehoods? Certainly not anyone who had won his war! Didn’t every nation try to deceive its enemies as to its plans? Didn’t every nation send spies into the enemy nations and wasn’t deception the essence of their job? Above all, who was Lanny Budd to raise this issue, being now on his way into Germany to do a fancy job of lying?
The gravest of moral problems confronted a social being in these unhappy times. For when you let down the bars and admitted the right to lie and to cheat, you were undermining the very bases upon which human societies are built. Particularly when you admitted the right of political parties to lie and cheat, for how, then, could anybody have faith in them? How could their own followers know what they were or what they would become? And yet, here in old Europe you didn’t have any ideal government to pin your hopes to; you had a number of far from perfect governments and had to choose the least objectionable. If you took your stand on what you called fundamental moral principles, it was like retiring to a mountain top, away from all human affairs; you could live there like a hermit, or a Hindu mystic, gazing at your own navel—until the guns started shelling your mountain top, and the bombing-planes took it for an objective!
Wide Is the Gate Page 24