IV
The two peace crusaders drove home next morning, or rather, later the same morning. On the way they talked, not about the two happy families they had visited, only about the one unhappy family. Marital tragedies were growing more common in the world, it seemed; as people developed ideas, they were more apt to develop different ones. Here were two sensitive artists who had played magnificent music together, and now they could hardly speak to each other. Lanny and Laurel agreed that the bitterness was bound to increase, because the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western world was bound to increase.
Lanny noted a curious fact: they no longer agreed even about their language; with Bess it was always the Soviets and the Soviet Union, and to Hansi it was Russia and the Russians. Hansi insisted that the Soviets no longer had any power; in fact, for all practical purposes they had ceased to exist; it was Russia now, Holy Russia, the Russia of Tsarist imperialism; it was the bear that walked like a man. Now the bear had put on a Red costume and walked waving a Red flag with a hammer and sickle on it—but he still desired the territory of his neighbours and insisted on having warm-water ports all around Europe and Asia. He was a bear who no longer wielded a knout—no, he now had a torture chamber devised by modern scientists, with brilliant lights which the eyes could not escape, and concrete walls and floors so shaped that it was impossible to sit down or lie down without torment.
Highly trained modern psychologists now supervised the most barbarous torturings, and each of the dictators had learned from the last and improved upon his art. Mussolini had learned from Lenin, Hitler had learned from Mussolini, and Stalin had learned from both of them. It was like a virus which increases in virulence every time it is transferred to a new culture medium. So Hansi had talked in the evening before Bess had arrived. Bess hadn’t heard him—but she must have heard him many times before.
Laurel asked, ‘If they get a divorce, what will they do about the children?’
Lanny answered, ‘What will they do about the children anyway? They can’t put off the problem for ever’.
They had solved it so far by putting the boys in boarding school. But the boys were at an age where they were beginning to ask questions about what was going on in the world. For how long could they be kept in ignorance of the fact that their mother and father were in a deadly struggle over these questions? Would Bess be willing for them to absorb the current prejudices against the Reds? Of course she wouldn’t; she would insist upon telling them that the Reds were heroes and martyrs. And then, if they asked Hansi about it, what would he say? If he told them his opinion, Bess would be in a fury and the battle for the children’s souls would be on.
Hansi couldn’t stand this tension, they both agreed. Hansi was a sensitive artist, and five minutes of quarrelling was enough to ruin his day. It ruined the day for Lanny and Laurel also, for they could not bear to see the suffering of this loved friend. The wise Francis Bacon wrote: ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune’. And it is equally true that he that hath friends hath done the same. Friends represent an extension of one’s life, but they extend into sorrow as well as into joy, into failure as well as into success.
V
At home was that delightful little boy named Lanning Creston Budd, now going on five years. He had fair hair and brown eyes like his mother. He was at that most charming of all ages, where his mind was growing fast, like corn in hot midsummer, so fast that you could see the difference in one night. He came home from kindergarten chattering like a magpie, and there had to be someone to listen to every detail of what had happened to him. He had not a trouble in the world, unless it was that he fell and got a bump, and that could be healed by two or three kisses.
But his mother had a trouble, one that never left her; the dreadful thought of the war that was coming, and when would it come? There was a traitor thought: O God, let it come soon and be over before he is drawn into it! But then, suppose it didn’t get over; suppose it was a thirty years’ war, or a hundred years’ war; suppose that in spite of all the dreadful new weapons, or because of them, it went on and on until every vestige of civilisation was wiped out, and men were again hiding in caves and fighting with clubs and spears! Bess was in the mood where she was ready to face that prospect, such was her hatred of the capitalists; and it was easy enough to find capitalists who were willing to meet her in the same spirit. Bess’s own father, for example—that bejowled old man who was both affectionate and generous but who turned into a mad rhinoceros when his privileges and prerogatives were threatened.
At least Laurel had the consolation that she and her husband could agree. ‘Thanks for that!’ she exclaimed. ‘We do not have to fight and break up our marriage’. But that seemed a pharisaical attitude, like that of the man who went up on the housetop and thanked God that he was not as other men.
Their conversation came back to poor Hansi and his grief. What could they do for him, how could they help him? They didn’t worry about Bess, because they knew that she had found a new religion, which meant more to her than love. Like the Christian who looked forward to a heaven where all problems would be solved and all sorrow would be ended, Bess was looking forward to a utopia where all men would do as she wished them to do, and thus there would be no more need for cruelty and force. Bess had fallen victim to that Marxian dialectic which is so plausible, so overwhelming, having the inevitability of a proposition in Euclid. The contradictions of capitalism would bring about its inevitable collapse, and the awakening proletariat would replace it: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis!
What was wrong with the proposition? Lanny said that it failed to allow for human nature and its weaknesses. The proletariat was just an abstraction; no such thing really existed, it was just men, and in this case it had turned out to be the Politburo—very far from perfect men indeed! Lanny liked to quote the saying of Lord Acton, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Lenin in his last testament had repudiated Stalin as being ‘too rude’; but that hadn’t kept Stalin from seizing power and holding it, and killing nearly all the men whom Lenin had favoured. Lanny drew a picture of that lonely despot, guarded by enormously thick stone walls and whole arsenals of machine guns, haunted by fears and suspicions, and ordering the execution of one set after another of his colleagues and protectors. He made it so vivid that Laurel woke up in the middle of the night and composed some verses:
THE STRONG MAN
Ivan, what makes the strong man strong?
The sweat and tears of countless slaves,
The will to power, right or wrong,
A little clique of willing knaves,
These are the sinews of all-power.
To these he gives the law supreme:
While minions cringe, and brave men cower,
Sweet freedom is a madman’s dream.
Lanny thought that was good and wanted to put it into the Peace paper, but Laurel wouldn’t let him. She was afraid that was really red-baiting.
VI
They were back in their routine, which was automatically guided and determined by the mail that came in twice a day. It was a large mail and very diverse; there were orders for the Peace paper, and that meant stamps, dollar bills, cheques, and sometimes even coins poorly concealed in pieces of cardboard. All had to be counted and accounted for. People wrote from all over the world—the programme was now going out also by shortwave. People wrote advice, they wrote criticism, they wrote their theories about how to end wars; they wrote asking for jobs or offering to come and help without pay; they told all about themselves. They wrote because they were in trouble and wanted advice or financial help.
There were many touching letters, and some that were wise, and some that were hopelessly crazy. There were people who wrote with different-coloured inks or coloured crayons, and who submitted elaborate charts and designs, outlining a philosophy of life or the reorganisation of human society. They wrote about new inventions that would make millions, provided
only that the person could get money enough to obtain a patent. They wrote telling about new religions, new scientific discoveries, new schemes to end poverty by printing paper money. They wrote just because they were lonely and felt friendly toward the voices they heard over the air. They wrote offering to speak on the programme or suggesting others to speak. And all these suggestions had to be considered. Laurel would get magazine articles, pamphlets, and books in order to find out about this person or that. Every letter had to be answered, even if it was only with a formula. There was a mighty clicking of typewriters in numerous little cubicles which had been constructed inside the one-time fuse factory.
Such is your life when you set out to change the world; and it is all right so long as you are sure that you know what the change is to be and how it is to be brought about. But when you suddenly begin to have doubts about everything you are doing; when suddenly you find yourself saying, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace’, and you wonder if there is going to be war, or even whether it might not be better to fight than to appease—then indeed your life becomes complicated, and you find yourself lying awake at night and asking questions of whatever God you may believe in.
VII
But meantime life has to go on; you have your personal problems, and all the people you know have them. There was, for example, the problem of Frances Barnes Budd and Scrubham Pomeroy-Nielson, who were in love. Scrubbie had been named for the first baronet, who had made a fortune out of shoe blacking and had happened to be a pal of the prime minister of those days. The name Scrubbie was most unusual, but then the name of the prime minister had been Dizzy, and that was unusual too.
The present-day Scrubbie was young, but he was old enough to have been up in the air over England and Germany, darting here and there like a swallow pursued by a hawk—or sometimes like a hawk pursuing a swallow. As for Frances, she had come over to visit her father and was supposed to go to school; but she found that the education she wanted was to help bring about world peace by sealing up envelopes and writing form letters and pasting up proofs for a little weekly newspaper—in short, doing anything she was told, provided that she was working in the same office as Scrubbie.
They wanted to marry and had heard a rumour to the effect that two could live as cheaply as one. They were willing to live any way they could, provided it was together; so Lanny had the duty of writing to his former wife, now Lady Wickthorpe, explaining the situation. Irma wouldn’t like it, of course, for Frances was due to inherit a fortune and was supposed to be educated in a way to prepare her for that state of life—which did not include learning the radio business, the small weekly-newspaper business, or even the business of changing the world.
What Irma did was to send her mother over to look into the matter. Fanny Barnes, that old battle-axe as she was impolitely called, had only a little money herself, because she had quarrelled with her husband and he had left the fortune to their daughter. Lanny had always been considerate of her—he tried to be considerate of everybody—and had joined in innumerable games of bridge with her, in the days after her daughter had run away with him and married him. So Mother Fanny came to New York and put herself up at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Lanny drove in and took her out to Edgemere, getting a scolding all the way and taking it meekly.
There really wasn’t any fault to be found with Scrubbie, except that he was a younger son, and in England the younger sons don’t have any money and are not too highly thought of. To be sure, he had helped to save England from Hitler; and Mother Fanny, unlike her daughter, had never been an admirer of the Führer. To be sure, Frances was nothing but a child, but then she was a happy child and she was doing what she wanted, and it was something useful—not the same as if she had been dancing in night clubs. ‘You know, Mother’, said Lanny, ‘you didn’t have so much money yourself when you started. And you’ve heard the old saying about three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves’.
‘I know’, said Fanny Barnes, ‘it’s this horrid business of income taxes; almost as bad here as they are in England’.
‘Yes’, answered Lanny, ‘but if both the young people have jobs and learn how to take care of themselves, they won’t have to worry about taxes anywhere—nor about Irma’s fortune or Robbie’s. We don’t like to raise their salaries here at the Peace Group because it would look like nepotism and set a bad example. They are each getting thirty-five dollars a week and they can live on that if they are careful’.
‘Oh fudge!’ said Fanny. ‘What are they going to do for clothes?’
So when she arrived in Edgemere she gave them a good scolding, and she gave Rick and Nina a good scolding for encouraging such nonsense, and she gave Lanny and Laurel another scolding, and all of them a scolding for wasting their time talking about peace when there couldn’t be, and shouldn’t be, with the Bolsheviks behaving as they were. The upshot of her visit was that she agreed to airmail Irma that there was no way to keep the foolish creatures from having their own way, and so Irma should settle an income of, say, two hundred dollars a month upon Frances, so that at least they wouldn’t starve.
So there was a wedding in the rented home of Nina and Rick; the ceremony being performed by the minister of the Congregational church of Edgemere, who was a member of the Peace Group. The young couple went off for a honeymoon which was to last all Saturday and Sunday—the maximum time they were willing to take from their all-important jobs. They would see a play on Saturday and attend two concerts on Sunday; then they would come back and spend their evenings fixing up the four-room cottage they had rented in a factory town nearby. Houses were almost unobtainable in those post-war days, and in Edgemere the various peace workers had taken everything in sight.
Fanny Barnes went back to Wickthorpe Castle and reported that she had met the queerest lot of cranks ever seen or heard of, and she was certainly glad to be back where somebody played cards. Frances was happy, and parents in these days were supposed to be content with that. After all, Irma had her two boys, one of whom had been born a viscount and the other an honourable. These she would be able to bring up properly, with no danger of interference by Pinkos and peace cranks.
VIII
Christmas came, but Laurel’s time was too near and they took no share in parties. Three days after Christmas Lanny took her to a maternity hospital in New York, and she was safely delivered of a baby girl. Lanny duly played his part as an anxious husband; then, after the happy event, he was free to enjoy himself at such times as he was not sitting with his wife and admiring their new joint achievement.
He looked up his old friend Zoltan Kertezsi, art expert, and heard his report on the state of the market. Zoltan had a stock of the paintings of Marcel Detaze in a storeroom in New York, and occasionally he sold one and sent Lanny a handsome cheque, two-thirds of which was transmitted to Beauty and Marcel as their share of the heritage. Zoltan and Lanny took a stroll on East Fifty-seventh Street, visiting the galleries of various dealers. One of these had an exhibition of modern paintings, so-called abstractions, which neither of the two fastidious gentlemen favoured. Standing in front of one of them, Lanny read its title and remarked, ‘I can suggest a better one’. Zoltan duly asked ‘What?’ and Lanny said, ‘“Palette before Cleaning”.’ Zoltan thought this was funny and passed it on to a newspaper columnist who specialised in collecting the town’s witticisms; he published it, and Lanny became famous again for three or four hours.
Hansi and Bess were playing at a concert, a benefit affair for one of those refugee-relief organisations. Lanny was quite sure it was a Communist-front affair, but he doubted if Hansi knew it. They all went to the Yorkville café after the concert, and, sitting at the table, Lanny tried to discuss harmless subjects such as the new infant.
But it just couldn’t last very long; Bess wouldn’t have it that way. It happened that at this time there was fighting in Azerbaijan. The Russians had at last evacuated, and the Iranian troops had marched in. Bess considered that an example of what happened when the
Soviets let the anti-Soviets have their way; there was disorder and chaos. Lanny couldn’t help pointing out that Azerbaijan was the northern part of Iran and that the country was simply imposing order; but Bess insisted that wherever the Soviets were there was order without any fighting. Lanny was mean enough to mention that there was also oil; and so the oil was in the fire.
It happened that the Atomic Energy Commission of United Nations had that day voted in favour of a project to provide for international control; the vote had been ten in favour and two abstaining—the two being the Soviet Union and Poland. That proved among other things that Poland was a stooge of the Communists—an offensive word that Lanny refrained from using; but Bess used it. It had happened that a couple of weeks earlier the General Assembly of the United Nations, meeting at Lake Success on Long Island, had adopted a resolution in favour of world disarmament, and the Soviets had forced the deletion from that resolution of a provision for a world census of armies. The significance of that seemed obvious to Lanny; the Soviet Union was retaining her armed forces while the United States was disbanding hers, and the Soviet Union didn’t propose to let the fact be demonstrated and published. To Bess it was obvious that the Soviet Union had to keep its armies, because capitalism owned the world and meant to go on taking possession of more and more of the world. ‘America has the money, and all that Americans want is to let the rules of the game stay as they are, and they will buy up everything and keep it’.
‘My God, Bess!’ exclaimed her brother. ‘This after we have given Stalin eleven billion dollars, and with no prospect whatever of getting it back!’
‘You paid that money to have the Soviets lick Hitler for you; you hired a few million Russians to die for you’.
The Return of Lanny Budd Page 17