‘I’ll be glad to play for her’, Hansi said. ‘But what a funny name. It’s hard to believe that it’s real’.
‘It would be funnier yet if you should marry her’, said Lanny. ‘Mrs Rose Pippin Robin—you would have to go and live in an orchard’.
‘Oh dear!’ said Hansi. ‘Let me get rid of my old wife before you get me a new one. I’m trying so hard to get over my heartaches about Bess’.
They phoned to the potential Mrs Rose Pippin Robin and said they were not sure how long they would stay in Hollywood, so could she come in the morning? She said she had an engagement at the studio, but they didn’t really need her, and anyhow they never got started until eleven. Could she come early in the morning? They settled upon nine o’clock.
X
It was an odd encounter, as odd as anything in The Rabbit Race. Hansi had brought his fiddle and played for Lanny and Laurel a new theme he had been elaborating. They were talking about it when there came a tap on the door; they opened it, and there was Rose, with her feet firmly planted upon the one concrete step before the cabin. She came in, and Lanny, the host, said, ‘This is our friend, Mr Moishe Zinsenheimer’.
Rose suddenly stopped and stared. ‘Oh, but—’ she said, and hesitated—‘but I heard you play. I heard you in San Diego’. What could Hansi reply? He didn’t know and just stood there. ‘But’, persisted the woman, ‘you are Hansi Robin!’ It was a truly embarrassing moment. Lanny, who had faced many emergencies in his life, had the quickest wit. ‘Hansi Robin is his professional name’, he said.
‘Oh, I see!’ was the reply, and then, ‘But—but I thought—I read in the papers—’
‘He has been released on bail’, said the ever ready Lanny. ‘We have taken him away from it all’.
‘But’—she seemed to have a hard time thinking of any other word—‘why didn’t you tell me, Mr Budd?’
‘I didn’t suppose that that would have any special interest, Miss Pippin’.
‘It just happens that it does, Mr Budd. I have rather positive convictions on the subject of Communist spies. I have convictions on the subject of all Communists and what they are doing to our country. I don’t tolerate them if I know it’.
‘I ought not have to tell you, Miss Pippin, that under our law a man is not assumed to be guilty until he has been proved guilty’.
‘Am I to understand then that you think the F.B.I. has had a man arrested without having the evidence?’
‘I don’t want to prejudge the case, Miss Pippin, but I can assure you that Mr Zinsenheimer is an idealist and a man of high principles—’
‘I know all those fine words, Mr Budd. We hear them all the time here. This place is full of Communists and Communist agents, and when you find it out and say so you are called a redbaiter. I made up my mind that I was going to speak out, and speak out clearly, whenever the occasion arose. Let me make it plain, I’m not any sort of reactionary. I know poverty, I was brought up in it, and I’ve known all the bitterness of defeat. I believe that social changes were needed and that many are still needed, and I am willing to work for them and help; but I want it done in the American way, by educating the people and by using the political remedies we have in our hands. I tell that to the world, and I’m telling it to you and Mr Zinsenheimer’.
It was a very good speech and was delivered not without eloquence. To Lanny it was one of the funniest situations he had encountered in a long time, and it was hard to keep himself from chuckling. He said, ‘Miss Pippin, do me a favour to sit down and let me tell you a little story. We spent a good part of last evening reading your book, so we know a lot about your life. I would like to tell you just one anecdote out of mine. Do please hear me’.
She complied; but she sat on the edge of the chair, very stiff and straight, as if she were saying that she might get up at any moment and go.
Said Lanny, ‘When I was young I too objected to poverty, and I made speeches that shocked the wealthy friends of my mother and father. Then later I made the discovery that Adolf Hitler was preparing to seize Europe and that he stood a good chance of success. It happened that through a German friend I had met him, and I decided I would cultivate his acquaintance and learn all I could about his movement. I did so, and for years I was working as what you call a spy on Hitler and the other top Nazis—Goring, Goebbels, Hess, and so on. In order to carry on that dangerous task I had to make everybody in the world think that I had become a Nazi sympathiser; I didn’t tell even my own mother or father the truth about myself. And one day in the home of one of our old friends, a baroness who lived near the Cap d’Antibes, I was expressing some of my sentiments to the effect that Hitler was the wave of the future, Europe’s best guarantee of security, and so on. Among the company in that room was a woman writer of short stories, a rather small person, but she had a hot fire inside. She spoke up and told me what she thought of me; as the saying is, she took the top of my head off. I went away chuckling over it. Sometime later it happened that the lady found out the truth about me, and then we were married, and here she is. Don’t you find that a suggestive story, Miss Pippin?’
She was staring at him hard. ‘Mr Budd, if I understand you correctly, you are hinting that Mr Robin—Mr Zinsenheimer—is secretly helping our government’.
Lanny said very gravely, ‘Miss Pippin, if by any possibility such a thing were true, it would be a breach of security for even to hint at it. I am sure that if such a bit of information were to come to your knowledge you would understand that you might be doing grave harm to the government by mentioning it to anyone else’.
‘Yes, Mr Budd, but—’
‘Furthermore, you will understand that a man who possessed information damaging to the Reds and was prepared to appear in court and give testimony—such a man might be in real danger of his life. I could give you a list of persons who were working against the Reds and have been murdered, and not in any remote, half-civilised land but right here in the United States. They have been shot, or beaten to death, or thrown out of windows, or have just never been heard from again. So you can see that a man in that position might be advised to disappear and not show up until the time of the trial. I am sure that if you, as a loyal American, were to meet such a man and recognise him, you would not be so indiscreet as to go off and speak his name; especially not in a place like Hollywood, where there are so many newshounds hunting their prey. How does that seem to you, Miss Pippin?’
‘The first thing I would say, Mr Budd, is that such a man ought not to come to a place like Hollywood’.
‘It might happen that he was hiding in a place outside, but was tempted into Hollywood in order to meet a young lady whose book had interested him very much. It might be that the young lady had expressed a desire to hear him play the violin, and his impulses of kindness had got the better of his discretion’.
‘Mr Budd’, said the young lady, ‘I don’t know you very well—’
‘If you really want to know me, Miss Pippin, you might go somewhere to a short-wave radio set and hear our Peace Programme tonight. My wife and I started that, and we have been directing it from the beginning. You would discover that we have not been taken in by the Communist or fellow-traveller idea of peace, which consists in sitting still while a boa constrictor prepares to swallow you. What we are calling for is a world order, with a court to which all nations will submit themselves. It will be a free world for all those nations who are willing to let other nations alone; and if there is any nation that sets out upon a course of aggression we will be ready to meet force with force. The way you spoke, I imagine that is according to your ideas’.
‘Yes, Mr Budd; but I don’t know Mr Robin either—’
‘That is even easier. The way to know Hansi Robin is to listen to his music. Since the age of five he has been working day and night to learn to express himself with a violin, and millions of people have learned to know him that way—people all over the world, in Russia, in Australia, in the Argentine. Now here he is, willing to play just f
or us three. Don’t you think it would be nice to hear him?’
XI
So Hansi played. He had guessed that this ranch girl’s taste would be simple and that the old favourites would be new to her. He played Raff’s ‘Cavatina’, which has a lovely melody on the G string, enabling Hansi to produce his most heart-warming tone. You can take it as a love song, or you can take it as a prayer; in the middle is a gentle disturbance, a clamour not unknown to either of these varieties of experience; and then the melody climbs to the top of the E string with piercing harmonic notes that are like the opening up of heaven:
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
The sun on the hills forgot to die,
The lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Hansi Robin did not indulge in any histrionics when he played music. He did not sway and swing to it or make himself into any sort of actor. He stood straight and stiff, closed his eyes, and hoped that you would close yours and have no sense except that of hearing.
When he finished nobody spoke a word. He waited a bit before playing the ‘Londonderry Air’ in Albert Spalding’s transcription. It is gentle and charming and consonant with country life; he was speaking directly to a country girl. And then Lanny said, ‘Now show us some of your tricks’; so Hansi launched into the finale of a Vieuxtemps concerto. There was a composer who had set himself to exhaust the possibilities of the violin, everything that men had learned to do with it in the course of centuries of diligent experimenting. The music came faster and faster, madder and madder. It went leaping up a scale through half a dozen octaves and down again; there were double stoppings, triple stoppings, arpeggios and pizzicatos. It was like mounting on a wild horse and galloping over the prairie or over the mountain-tops. The crazy creature bucked and kicked—it was a rodeo conducted on four strips of a cat’s intestines. To be in a small room and watch it as well as hear it was a breath-taking experience.
And when Hansi finished, in a hailstorm of notes, you were breathless and expected that he would be breathless also. But he wasn’t—only a little warm. He had been learning to do this since childhood, and it was second nature to him. His mind was a storehouse of millions of musical notes, and he never had the slightest trouble sorting them out; he never had a doubt which note came next or what precise movements of the fingers would produce it.
‘Marvellous, marvellous!’ exclaimed Rose Pippin, and Hansi replied, ‘The eye of one of your rabbits is more so’.
The ranch girl was in no hurry to leave. She said that the studio didn’t care a thing about her; they would have paid her to stay away and not bother them with her suggestions. She said that meeting new friends was far more important. Real friends were scarce, and every new one was an extension of your life. You learned new things and you shared new experiences. It was evident that that was the way she looked on Hansi Robin; she was completely fascinated by him. He was the whole of the old world to her; he was not merely music but all culture; he was dignity, and at the same time he was fame; he was not merely Paris and Berlin and New York, he was Palestine and the Old Testament. She plied him with questions and listened closely to his answers. Lanny wondered, Is she falling in love with him, or is she planning to put him into a book?
He could have found out by asking, because she was the frankest of creatures; she hadn’t a particle of guile that he could discover. She said, ‘Look, you people are wonderful to me. I’ve met a lot of phonies here in Hollywood, people who are acting culture, acting elegance and glamour, and at the same time trying to cut one another’s throats. Can you stand a critter just off the ranch with the soil still behind her ears?’
‘Indeed we can’, said Laurel promptly and added, ‘Rose’.
‘Oh, I know I’m a character, and I might be picturesque in a book; I’ve never been anywhere but La Mesa and San Diego, and I don’t know anybody that’s anybody. When I meet people like you I feel like I was being introduced to Beethoven’.
‘You’ll get over that soon’, said Laurel. ‘Remember, kind hearts are more than coronets—or even Hollywood Oscars’.
‘Couldn’t we go and have lunch somewhere? I mean, as my guests. We could drive away off where nobody would recognise Mr Robin’.
‘You must get used to calling him Zinsenheimer’, said Laurel with a laugh. ‘It would have to be some very obscure place’.
‘Some dump if you like’, said Rose. ‘Believe me, I’ve eaten in a lot of them and was glad to get a hamburger sandwich or a malted milk’.
XII
Put that way the invitation was hard to refuse; so she took them in her car and drove them right fast out through Cahuenga Pass. Presently they took a side road leading toward the Mojave Desert, and on the way they found a little ‘dump’ where they were sure that none of the Hollywood glamour people would condescend to stop. There was a table for four in the back corner, and they put Hansi in a seat with his back turned to the rest of the world. There they had ham and eggs and hot cakes with syrup. They were careful not to call one another by name, and when they talked about the evil state of the world none of the three world travellers said anything about possessing inside knowledge. Rose couldn’t take her eyes off Hansi and didn’t try.
Then they drove some more, and there was Hansi on the front seat with Rose, and Lanny and Laurel in the back seat, very much amused but keeping quiet and listening. Hansi never was much of a talker, but he had to talk now because Rose plied him with questions about everything that had ever happened to him and all the wonderful people he had ever known in the world. She wanted to hear about Rotterdam where he had been brought up, and about his music teachers and what they were like, and about his mother and his father and his dead brother Freddi; and then about Berlin, and the yacht trips to the Mediterranean; and about the Nazis and their cruelties, and how Johannes had lost his fortune and was making another small one in New York; about Paris and the Riviera, and London, and Moscow, and Sydney, and Buenos Aires, and other places where Hansi had made concert tours. One curios thing they noticed—not once did she ask about Bess, and not once did Hansi mention her. Rose must have known, for she had read the stories of the arrest and they had gone into detail about the wife.
All motor rides have to come to an end, and when this end was near Rose said, ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I hope we can see more of each other’.
Laurel hastened to say, ‘Of course we can’. Then with tact and kindness she asked, ‘May we give your telephone number to Hansi?’
‘Oh, indeed you may!’ was the reply. ‘And if you’ll call up, Mr Zinsenheimer, I’ll be delighted to take you for a ride, anywhere you want to go. I promise not to take you where you might be recognised, and I won’t breathe a word about you’.
Hansi said, ‘I don’t want to impose upon you—’
‘Please don’t look at it that way’, she interrupted. ‘I’m just so sick of the motion-picture business I don’t know what to do. I was making up my mind to run away to New York and see if the book business could be any better’.
So that was the way they parted. She delivered Hansi to the motel where he was staying, and then she delivered Lanny and Laurel, and they made her happy by assuring her that they loved her and would be really truly friends from that time on.
‘Well, there you are’, said Lanny when they were alone. ‘There’s Hansi’s fate if he wants it’.
‘Oh’, exclaimed the wife, ‘I came near to fainting when I heard you begin to tell the secret’.
‘What could I do? She had recognised him, and if we hadn’t hushed her up she would have called Genie as soon as she got home, and the story would have been all over town in an hour. The reporters would come, and a lot of people would decide that he was a fugitive from justice and call the F.B.I.’
‘I think she’s an honest person’, ventured Laurel. ‘But I’m afraid she’s making a mistake throwing herself at Hansi’s head’.
&nb
sp; ‘I’m not so sure’, replied the sapient husband. ‘There’s an old saying, catch him on the rebound’.
‘Yes, but not before the rebound’, said Laurel.
‘We’ll see’, said Lanny, and this is what they saw. Next morning they called the offce of Hansi’s motel and asked for him. The clerk reported that he had left a message; he had gone for a drive. They went about their business of looking up several friends. In the evening the Armbrusters were having a party—which was their business. On the way to the party the Budds stopped off to see Hansi, and the report was that he hadn’t got back, or if he had he had gone out again.
‘He’s telling her his whole story’, said Lanny,’and it’s a long one’.
‘God help us if she talks about it’, said the wife.
‘She talks an awful lot’, added the husband.
‘That’s because she’s nervous. She thinks he’s the most wonderful man in the world, and she’s trying to impress him. If she gets him she’ll settle down and write a book about him’.
XIII
The Budds went to the party and met a number of Hollywood celebrities, some of whom they had met on their previous visit. You were used to seeing these people enormously enlarged upon the magic screen; to meet them in a drawing room, walking around and chatting, was, as Rose had said, like ‘being introduced to Beethoven’. Lanny and Laurel stayed late, and on the way home they drove by Hansi’s motel and found his cabin dark. They had no way of knowing whether he was there or not; they did not knock.
The Return of Lanny Budd Page 43