Nearly a year ago the various governments had formed what was called a “Non-Intervention Committee”; it was meeting in London and had held something like seventy sessions, every one of them an acrimonious wrangle. The Italians and the Germans, who had intervened in Spain from the first hour, meant to go on intervening, while steadily denying that they had ever thought of such a nefarious action. Lanny had heard a story of a Kentucky Colonel who knocked a man down, and when asked: “Did he call you a liar?” replied: “Worse than that; he proved it.” That was the situation before this Committee, which refused to receive complaints from individuals, but couldn’t prevent representatives of the Soviet government from proving that the Italians and the Germans were systematically sending in troops and matériel to General Franco. Then the Italian and German delegates would fly into a fury and fight their share of the war in London.
A German cruiser off the coast of North Africa had been attacked by what Berlin called “Spanish-Bolshevist submarines.” Berlin now demanded that Britain and France take part in a naval demonstration off Valencia. France, patrolling the French frontier with Spain, demanded that Portugal should patrol its frontiers, through which Italy and Germany were pouring in supplies; when Portugal refused, France withdrew her patrol officers and left her highways open into Spain. That was the way it went; one crisis after another, and no way to stop them. It was obvious to insiders of every nation that Franco alone could not conquer his people; if “Non-Intervention” were actually enforced, the Fascists would be licked. Italy and Germany were determined that this should not happen. At any and all costs, their man was going to win.
What did the British want? They had great difficulty in making up their minds; all choices were painful. Obviously they couldn’t permit the Reds to build themselves a fortress on the Atlantic seaboard, enclosing all Europe in two prongs of a pincers. The British owned immensely valuable properties in Spain—Rio Tinto copper, for example, indispensable in making munitions—and certainly they didn’t want strikes and Red commissars in those mines. On the other hand it might be fatal in wartime to have German submarines based on the Atlantic, and France enclosed in a pair of Nazi pincers. On the whole it seemed best to let the two sides fight it out and exhaust each other, and then a compromise government could be set up, the sort the British could lend money to. The only trouble was, neither side was willing to admit that it was exhausted; this was a war to the death, a kind which is bad for trade and every sort of vested interest.
In Downing Street there had been one crisis after another, and people’s tempers were beginning to be frayed. Even in the most exclusive drawing-rooms, among English ladies and gentlemen, there were exhibitions of bad manners. Among the guests at Wickthorpe Lodge was an author of novels very popular in smart London circles; he had airy manners and was a great ladies’ man, in spite of the fact that he was growing bald. In his thinking he was for practical purposes a Fascist, and did not resent the label. Lanny had met him here and there at parties, and knew that he was a confidant of Lanny’s Fascist brother-in-law, Vittorio di San Girolamo. When Gerald Albany remarked that the trouble was that nobody could depend upon the word of Mussolini, he was “such a gutter-rat,” this novelist blew up. “My God, man, what sort of world do you think you’re living in? Do you imagine you can handle those Italian Reds like members of your Sunday-school class? They are bomb-throwing, knife-sticking anarchists, and before Mussolini put them down they had seized half the factories in Italy. Do you imagine you know how to deal with people of that kidney? And when you have to find men to do the same job in England, do you imagine they’ll be polite church members like yourself?”
“I’m not telling Mussolini how to govern Italy,” replied the Foreign Office man mildly. “But when he asks for the right to blockade Spanish ports and keep British ships out of them, I naturally have to consider what he offers in return, and whether I can believe what he tells me.”
“All I can say is,” retorted the novelist, “when there’s a killer in your house and you call for the police, you expect them to shoot first and present their character certificates afterward.”
VI
Lanny Budd would listen and say little; only now and then a well-chosen question, to steer the conversation if it could be done. He fixed in his memory details which might be of importance; the character of statesmen and their secret purposes, the attitude of great industrialists, the state of popular movements, the military preparations of this country and that. Alone in his room, he would type out the data and address them to Gus Gennerich, not putting the letter in with other mail that went out from the castle, but saving it to be posted in a public box.
Having done this, he would have moods of satisfaction, followed by others of depression. He had fallen for the Roosevelt charm, but the spell did not last all the time. Professor Alston had warned him that F.D.R. was of an “impressionable” temperament. He had been full of sympathy for Spain while listening to Lanny’s story, but could it be that next day he had received a visit from someone high up in the hierarchy of the Holy Church and had heard stories about nuns being sprinkled with oil and burned by Spanish Reds? And would he believe these stories—or at any rate let the prelate depart in the belief that he believed them?
Anyhow, even with the best of intentions, could he absorb all the facts which came to him? What a brain would have to be in that large head to classify and retain them all! The President of the United States must have hundreds of people working for him and bringing him information; thousands must be sending it on their own impulse. Where did it all go? Who read it and heeded it? Lanny saw a vision of his reports being handed in by Gus and added to the pile on the desk. Something else would cover them up in a few minutes, and would they ever be uncovered again? Lanny would have to go back and find out if F.D.R. had ever heard of them, or if they had been lost in the files! And suppose the great man happened to be too busy to see him—what then would become of an art expert’s bright dream of changing world history?
“Put not your trust in princes,” the psalmist had advised, and Lanny was not heeding the warning. In those old days princes had had to take measures to keep other princes from poisoning them; the surest way was to poison the other princes first. Nowadays princes had to think about raising campaign funds and getting re-elected, keeping control over Congress in the off years, and matters such as that. They wanted to make the world safe for democracy, and at the same time to keep the country out of war. When they discovered that these aims were incompatible, they were in a predicament, and what wonder if their words one day contradicted the words of the previous day, and if their actions were not always in accordance with the campaign platforms of their party?
This much Lanny had already learned: that the favor of princes is a very tempting thing. For princes can act, whereas art experts can do nothing except talk in drawing-rooms. One gets so tired of futility, and of seeing things going the wrong way. If only somebody who could do something would do it! That had been Lanny’s thought for more than half his life, ever since he had seen a world war burst upon a horrified humanity. Now he saw another getting ready to burst; black thunderclouds on the horizon, rolling rapidly upward, shutting out the sunlight; and people going about, heedless, as if in a dream; as if they were blind and couldn’t see the darkness, deaf and couldn’t hear the rumble of the thunder—those guns and bombs in Spain, to abandon the simile and deal with plain facts. The grandson of Budd’s had been close enough to the first World War to have shell splinters fall near, and the son of Budd-Erling had already been close enough to the second to see houses destroyed by shellfire and hear bullets whining past his ears. How could he help being nervous about the prospects?
VII
Lanny couldn’t visit England without paying a call at The Reaches, one of his half-dozen homes. A lovely thing to have friends, and to know that you have chosen well and aren’t going to have to sever precious ties and mutilate your own life; to know that marriage isn’t going to chang
e your friend, nor political disagreements, nor weaknesses of character. To see a family grow, and yet always be the same; to see a tradition surviving and being passed on to new generations; to see knowledge increasing and loyalty never failing—yes, if you have a friend like that, and his adoption tried, you grapple him to your heart with hooks of steel.
Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, Bart., was in his seventies, but as lively as ever and as interested in what was going wrong in the world about him. He had filled two rooms of his rambling old red-brick house with original documents on the contemporary English drama, and was still dreaming that he might find somebody to help him pay the expenses of this unusual sort of collection. His wife had died not long ago, but he had three children and twice as many grandchildren, all living in England and dutifully visiting him now and then. His oldest, Rick, lived with his family at The Reaches; Nina kept the house, a task not too difficult, since servants were plentiful. In 1937, as in 1914, there were young people dancing and singing all over the place, playing tennis, punting on the Thames, and in the evening sitting out in the moonlight, listening to distant music and experiencing thrills the like of which they were sure had never before been heard of in the world. As always, they considered themselves a unique and original and vitally significant generation; they were respectful to their elders, who held the purse-strings, but slightly sorry for them, as being so backward and out of date, preferring Beethoven to hot jazz, and Tennyson and Browning to Auden and Spender.
Rick was no good for punting, on account of his knee which had got smashed while helping to save England; but his oldest son was at home, vacationing from Oxford, and Alfy’s long legs and digestion were sound, in spite of his months in a Franco dungeon. It was the first time Lanny had seen him since their parting on the right bank of the Tagus River several months ago; Lanny hadn’t really seen him then, just a dark form stepping out of a boat and scrambling up the bank, dislodging the stones of Portugal. Of course Alfy had written, pouring out his thanks, more ardently than he could do now that he was face to face with his rescuer. But he managed to get out: “I’ll never forget it, Lanny; and be sure that if I ever have a chance to return it in kind, I’ll be there.”
“I hope I’ll never be in a fix as bad,” replied the family friend. “But if I do, I’ll holler.”
“And be sure I’m going to earn that money and pay it back,” added the youth.
“That was a contribution to the cause, Alfy; and both you and I will make more of them, I don’t doubt.”
“You will make them all until I have paid you back,” declared the baronet’s grandson. He said no more, for the subject of money wasn’t dwelt upon in his world. Rick had already sent an installment of what it had cost to buy the lad out of a Fascist dungeon, but Lanny had returned it, knowing that the large family was in debt and not likely to get out of it, with Rick deliberately refusing to write “potboilers,” as he called the sort of plays his rich friends enjoyed seeing.
Lanny said: “I’ve come on something interesting in the States; a way to put some of our ideas across. But I’m pledged not to talk about it.”
“That’s all right,” replied Rick; “if it’s a secret, the fewer who know it the better.”
“There’s nothing to prevent my passing information on to you as always,” added the visitor. He told some of the news from his Connecticut home, and bits of what he had heard at Wickthorpe Lodge.
“The Beaver is on the warpath, privately as well as publicly,” commented the playwright. “They call him flighty, but you notice that he never wavers from loyalty to his fortune.”
“And to Empire Free Trade,” added Alfy. It was the scheme of having parts of the British Empire trade with one another, to the exclusion of the rest of the world; “the Beaver” had been tireless in its advocacy ever since his Canadian days.
“It’s all the same,” replied the father. “It means that greed and jealousy continue to rule the world, and people spend their substance building fences to keep the rest of the world out.”
Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson was a saddened man. He was only a couple of years older than Lanny, but already there were touches of gray in his wavy dark hair and lines of care in his forehead. He had had his success as a playwright, but that had been a fluke, so he declared, and wasn’t likely to happen again. He had his ideas of what was decent, and he followed them, even though he saw the rest of the world traveling another road. He slaved to collect material and organize it into a thoughtful article, and then he sold it to one of the weeklies for five or six pounds. He might have got ten times as much from one of their press lordships, Beaverbrook or Rothermere or Astor, on the single condition that he would write what they told him instead of what he believed.
Alfy was tall like his father, more slender, and had dark wavy hair; his features were thin and sensitive and his spirit high. He had absorbed his father’s ideas, and took them with desperate intensity; he had proved it by going off to Spain to fight in the air for the people’s cause. Now he was under a sort of parole and couldn’t go to Spain again; he had taken up the idea of the law as a career, and Lanny knew that it was as a means of repaying his debt. Lanny didn’t think that this idealistic lad would ever be a moneymaker in any field, but he let the matter rest until Alfy should have finished at Magdalen College, pronounced Maudlin.
VIII
The grandson of Budd’s was accustomed to refer to himself playfully as an amphibious animal; one of those prehistoric lizards whose ancestors had always lived in the water, but which was now climbing out onto the rocks and painfully learning to breathe air in its pure state instead of air that was hidden in the interstices of drops of water. The Lanny lizard could manage it for a while, he said, but every now and then the effort would become too great and he would have to slip back into the element which was his natural home.
By that element he meant the world of fashion and pleasure. It was a world where everybody had, or at any rate was assumed to have, all the money he could possibly want. It was the “leisure-class” world, and the people in it were proud of the fact that they had never done and didn’t know how to do anything useful. The farther back they could trace an ancestry which had never done it, the more distinguished they were. To them the world provided every luxury the ingenuity of men had been able to devise: delicious foods and rare wines, with skilled cooks to prepare and trained servants to serve them; soft and delicate fabrics, cut always in a manner having esoteric significance; fast motorcars, swiftly gliding yachts—and not merely physical satisfactions, but intellectual and moral and aesthetic; great music and literature and art—in short, all the delicate and gracious things that life had to offer. The best examplars of that leisure-class life were truly delightful companions.
The Lanny lizard would crawl out of this agreeably warm ocean onto the hard rocks which were called “reality,” into the rare and cold atmosphere known as “social reform.” Here people slept in uncomfortable beds, ate poor food badly served, and wore clothing entirely without distinction. They were frequently worried about money and forced to borrow it from someone who had it—which usually meant the Lanny lizard. They worked hard and had few pleasures; they were frequently embittered and hard to please; they were jealous, not merely of the idle rich, but sometimes, alas, of their own comrades whose labors had won too great appreciation. They played little and studied and read a great deal; they were apt to be proud of their knowledge, and had invented a jargon of their own, more adapted to repel than to enlighten.
In short, it was a difficult atmosphere to breathe, and the lizard would find himself getting dizzy and yearning for his old-time home. It was fatally easy to slide back into that pleasure ocean; and moreover, it was from there that he got his food; he had to go back for what were called “business reasons,” and his friends the reformers were glad to have what he brought out of it. The result was, Lanny was one of those creatures which have both gills and lungs, and spend their time splashing in the tide-waters, being caugh
t by the waves and bumped against the rocks, and never sure what they are or where they belong.
IX
In this world of fashion and pleasure one of the conspicuous activities was the making of love. To these elegant ladies and gentlemen love had become a game; something to cultivate and experiment with, always in refined and elegant ways, of course. It was something which pervaded their beings, like a perfume always in the air, like soft music heard from far off, while eating, sleeping, or conversing. The ladies of fashionable society prepared themselves elaborately for the practice of this gracious art. Their costumes were carefully devised to stimulate and suggest it, by revealing exactly the proper portion of their “charms.” Ideas of what was permissible differed widely in different lands, but in those of the West it had been the custom to reveal the face, the arms and shoulders, and the upper part of the bosom; of late years the entire back down to the waist had been added to this list. When stimulation began to fail, exposure must be increased.
The same sort of changes had been observable in the dance. A little more than a hundred years ago Englishmen had considered it grossly indecent to stand face to face with a lady and put one arm around her and hold her ever so lightly while going through the movements of a dance; Lord Byron, usually no prude, had written a vehement protest against a vile new procedure known as “waltzing.” Now this practice had had its day and lost its charms; it wasn’t tantalizing enough or mimetic enough to interest anybody. Dancing had become still more obviously a form of love play, a way of titillating the most basic of all instincts, of suggesting the most universal of pleasures.
Wide Is the Gate Page 89