Next morning they telephoned again and got the same reply: Mr Zinsenheimer had left a message that he had gone for a drive. They were about to set out on their own affairs when Rose’s car came into the court and stopped in front of their cabin. The couple came in, and after everybody had said ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ Hansi, looking very solemn, announced, ‘I have asked Rose to marry me’. Promptly Rose put in, ‘That’s a fib—I asked him’.
‘Anyhow’, persisted Hansi—it looked as if he were blushing a little—‘we want to go and get married’.
‘Oh, fine!’ said Lanny.
‘Congratulations!’ said Laurel; and then, always the first to face unpleasant realities, she added, ‘But you can’t get married, Hansi, until you have divorced Bess’.
‘I know that. We’re going to Reno. I have to establish residence there, and then I have to wait six weeks’.
‘We asked a lawyer about it’, added Rose.
Lanny said, ‘Sit down’. They had all been standing up. There were two chairs and a couch in the little living room, or whatever it was called. The engaged couple sat in the chairs and the already married couple on the couch. It seemed quite formal.
‘Now listen, children’, said Lanny. ‘You’ve consulted a lawyer. Did he tell you about the Mann Act?’
‘No, what’s that?’ inquired Rose.
‘It’s something that all runaway couples have to know about. Don’t blame me for it, because I didn’t pass it—I think it was passed before I was born. Anyhow, it provided that any person who transports a woman across a state border for immoral purposes is committing a felony and is liable to ten or twenty years, I forget which, in a federal prison’.
‘Good God in heaven!’ exclaimed the author of The Rabbit Race.
‘It was intended to put an end to what was called white slavery, the transportation of women for work in brothels. Then presently it was discovered that the law was so worded that it could be applied to any extra-legal affairs. It became a device by which wives could get revenge upon runaway husbands; also blackmailers discovered that it could be used to force guilty husbands to pungle up a lot of money. For that reason the law has been discredited, and I haven’t read about its being dug up for a long time. But you never can tell, it might be. Tell me, how are you planning to get to Reno?’
‘I am going to drive him’, replied Rose.
‘Well, you see, when you cross the border into Nevada, that is interstate commerce, and brings you under the federal law. If you’re living together in Reno it might be perfectly possible for Bess to dig up the evidence, and if she could prove an act of transportation she could take it to the federal district attorney and could practically force him to prosecute you. The law is the law, and it doesn’t leave him any discretion’.
‘This man act, does it apply only to a man?’
‘It is called the Mann Act because that was the name of the congressman who proposed it. I never saw the text, but I suppose it reads ‘any person’. There are plenty of women procuresses’.
‘Yes, but it says transporting a woman, doesn’t it? Can you transport a man for immoral purposes?’
They couldn’t help laughing over that; but it was a serious matter, and Rose continued her cross-questioning. ‘I am driving my own car, and Hansi doesn’t know how to drive, so they certainly couldn’t say he was transporting me’.
‘I remember reading about cases in the newspapers’, said Lanny. ‘It was a long time ago, but I believe the evidence depended upon money put up for the transportation’.
‘Money?’ said Rose. ‘We can fix that. Hansi, how much money have you got?’
It was evident who was going to manage this new family, at least where the practical affairs of life were concerned. Hans took out his little coin purse. ‘Put it on the table there’, commanded the wife-to-be. ‘And have you got a billfold or something?’ Hansi took out his billfold. ‘Is that all the money you’ve got with you?’
‘That’s all’.
‘Leave them on the table. Now, in the presence of witnesses, he has no money; he won’t have a penny on this trip. If he wants a newspaper I’ll buy it for him. I’ll feed him, I’ll rent the apartment for him—’
‘He’ll have to rent the apartment’, said Lanny; ‘as a matter of legal evidence the receipt will have to be in his name’.
‘All right then. I’ll cash a check for him in Reno, and he can rent the apartment. He’s allowed to have money there, when there isn’t any interstate commerce, I suppose. The point is he’s got no money on the way, and we can prove it. He’s just a helpless piece of merchandise being transported. How’s that?’
‘It sounds all right’, answered Lanny, ‘but you’d better consult that lawyer again before you start’.
Hansi said very humbly, ‘Laurel, I hope you won’t feel that I’m running out on you’.
‘Good heavens, no’, she exclaimed. ‘We are happy for both of you’. And she said to Rose, ‘Not every great man is a good man, but you have got both in one package’. There is a jingle that runs, ‘She kissed her and made her a sister’; and so it was.
XIV
Somehow the fun had gone out of the journey for the Budds. They had been intending to go up and see the big redwoods, the coast sequoias; but now suddenly Laurel began to think about the bundle of letters she had received from home and the problems they had brought up. It was hard to get satisfactory speakers in summertime because so many went on vacation and didn’t want to bother to come back; she and Lanny had to fill out. And there were the children; every day she was away from them they seemed more wonderful in her mind. Suddenly she exclaimed, ‘Lanny, let’s go to Reno!’
‘Oh, good!’ cried the other couple; and it was no sooner proposed than they began to arrange it. Hansi and Rose already had their belongings in the car, ready for the trip. Now Hansi would go out to a telephone pay station and consult the lawyer and make sure that he could be transported as a bundle of merchandise. Laurel would telephone Genie and say good-bye, and Lanny would load up their car.
They could travel by the interior route, east of the Sierras, but it was desert country and hot; to travel northward by the coast would be longer, but it was a delightful trip over a new highway. It wound along the sides of mountains and had taken a long time to build—not only because of the mountains but because the owners of great estates had fought the project with all the power they possessed. One of these owners was William Randolph Hearst, and Laurel and Lanny had visited his combination of palace, playground, and zoological park. Lanny asked, ‘Would you like to see him again?’
‘That old reprobate!’ Laurel said. ‘No!’ She was a censorious lady; and oddly enough Hansi had got the same sort.
They bade farewell to Hollywood and its glamour and drove amid scenery that reminded Lanny of those Corniche roads familiar to him since his childhood. He led the way, and Rose followed. They had agreed to take their time and put safety first. For a hundred miles or so they drove along the sands of the Pacific and presently were on the shelves high up above it. All that time there were cool breezes blowing on them. When they came into the interior it was hot, and the peaches and prunes were ripening.
They did not go to San Francisco but around by the east shore of the bay to Oakland, and from there took the great highway up the valley of the Sacramento River and into the High Sierras, the gold country, made famous to all the world by Bret Harte and Mark Twain.
The road climbed through gutted pine forests, and presently they were over the ridge and rolling down through the Donner Pass. Here was a little mountain lake which had been the scene of a dreadful tragedy a century ago; an emigrant train of covered wagons had been caught by premature snows and blocked through the winter; half of the people had died of starvation, and the living had eaten the dead. Now it was nothing but a legend, and tourists rolling along on a ribbon of smooth concrete mentioned it casually as they passed.
They came to the Nevada line, and no one stopped them to ask
if they were bent on any immoral purposes. Nevada was mountains and deserts, some of it irrigated. Soon they came to the place that was proud of being the wickedest little city in America, but they had no interest in its gambling palaces. They spent the night in an auto camp on the outskirts.
In the morning they parted. Laurel restored to Hansi his coin purse and billfold, so he could buy a newspaper once again. He had got the name of a lawyer who could be counted upon to charge him a liberal fee for getting him a divorce. Then he was going to find a furnished apartment—and he wouldn’t be asked a word about his purposes. Half the persons who came here for six weeks brought along their future new partners, and it was good for the business of lawyers, landlords, and owners of restaurants and gambling palaces. How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho, how pleasant it is to have money!
BOOK SEVEN
Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold
19 ROOT OF ALL EVIL
I
Lanny and Laurel continued rolling eastward over the ribbon of smooth concrete, through a land of red and yellow mountains and valleys shining with tame water in ditches. In that high western country when it gets hot it is really hot, but you do not mind because it is dry. The sun was dazzling, and dark glasses were a comfort. They drove fast on roads whose curves were easy and gradual, and presently they were in Wyoming, with vast high plains where cattle grazed, and you could see ten or twenty miles of the road ahead of you. It came down from the Rocky Mountains, and presently the state was Nebraska, where the descent was even more gradual. These were the plains over which the buffalo had roamed in vast herds—some of them stretching fifty miles in one direction and twenty-five in the other. Huge shaggy brutes they had been, the bulls weighing close to a ton, and so powerful that they were known to catch a horse on one horn and carry him for a hundred yards. Now they were all gone, and even the bones had been gathered up and taken to market.
The descent continued, but more slowly, and presently they were on the farmlands which had once been prairie. These extended for a thousand miles, and the highway ran through them with only a few turns. They could look at a thousand miles of farms, all pretty much alike but smaller as you came east. There were always a red barn and a silo and a white house with trees in front of it. It was the corn and hog country, and the corn was three or four feet high already, and when the weather was hot it would grow a foot in a night. There were villages and small towns with tree-shaded streets and white-painted houses. Many of them had a sign informing you that they had a spare bedroom for tourists. You paid your two or three dollars in advance and slept comfortably, and in the morning you could have breakfast if you wanted it, or you could just put your bags in the car and depart without a word.
It was the Middle West, one of the world’s breadbaskets. Its perfect roads made a checkerboard pattern, and the rivers all had steel bridges over them. The farmers had their prices guaranteed and they liked that and voted the Democratic ticket, to the dismay of Republican newspapers and politicians. They had fed a world at war and now were feeding the nations that had lost as well as those that had won. It was a new and unexpected development in civilisation: you had to feed them or they would go Communist. The Communists of both Europe and Asia were clamouring for power, and the free world was in a state of bewilderment.
A comfortable land, but monotonous. You wanted to get through it so you drove as fast as you could, but you had to slow up at crossings. The towns grew bigger, and presently there were cities with the usual traffic problems. Millions of new cars were being poured out from the assembly lines, and where were you going to park them, and how were you going to get by them? Speedways were being built to get people out of the cities, but they only made it easier for people to come in. Lanny and Laurel wanted to get home, but they wanted to get there alive, so they took two days to pass through the Middle West. They drove by day on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and got into New Jersey in the evening, reaching Edgemere so late that the children and the servants were asleep.
But what a time they had in the morning!—early, of course, because the little ones wake up. They had to see the baby and marvel how she had grown and how many words she had learned. Junior had a perfect Niagara of them, and they had to tell him of their adventures, and hear his laments because he hadn’t been taken along, and promise to take him next time. And then there was the mail, stacks of important letters to be read; there was the office and all the people to be greeted. There had to be conferences in which the state of the enterprise was reviewed and new plans were made. It was at least two days and two nights before they were back in harness again and everything was going as always. They hadn’t told a soul they were taking Hansi Robin along, so now they didn’t have to tell why they had left him behind or what had happened to him. Let the newspapers tell when they found out!
II
Among the letters was one from R.I.A.S., thanking Lanny for the material he had sent and telling him about the new developments. ‘We wish you could pay us another visit’, they said. ‘You would be pleased to see how fast we are growing, and we could use your help’. But Lanny had said no in his mind. He had all the work he could do here, and he knew his work was worth while.
Then one day he was called to the telephone; it was Bernhardt Monck in Berlin. The frugal German had never done that before, and Lanny could be sure he was not doing it at his own expense. His voice, sounding as clear as if he were in the room, said, ‘A very serious situation has arisen in connection with old Ferdinand. You might be able to handle it. I doubt if anyone else could. It is really urgent. Can you possibly come?’
Lanny had never said no to Monck in his life. They had been through so much together, and Lanny trusted him more than any other man he knew—at any rate in secret affairs. He said, ‘I’ll come if you really need me’.
‘I wouldn’t be calling otherwise’, Monck said. ‘I will arrange Army transportation for you’.
‘How soon?’ Lanny asked.
‘As soon as possible; tomorrow morning perhaps’.
Lanny said, ‘I’ll be ready’. And that was that.
He went and told Laurel about it, and she clutched her heart and sat down suddenly. ‘Oh, Lanny, how terrible! I hoped I was through with these emergencies’.
‘We are in another war, dear’, he said. ‘We can’t go on advising other people to face it and not be ready to face it ourselves. I’ll take good care of myself, and I don’t think there is any danger’.
‘Danger’? she echoed. ‘I never draw a free breath while you are up in the air’.
He smiled and kissed her. ‘You oughtn’t to tell me’, he said. ‘You have to do your share of keeping up morale’. He told of the Spartan matron who told her son to come back with his shield or on it.
‘Old Ferdinand’ of course meant Kurt Meissner; nobody else. Lanny hadn’t asked what the trouble was; he knew that if it had been something that could be said over the telephone Monck would have said it. All Lanny could do was to turn his imagination loose on the Völkischerbund, and on Treasure Island, and on young Ferdinand and the Soviets in East Germany. Or would it be the counterfeiting outfit which had been moved to Hungary? They could hardly be expecting Lanny to go there. What he looked forward to was another pleasant trip to the Tegernsee in early summer weather.
III
He packed his bags; he signed a lot of letters and dictated some more and gave instructions to this person and that. Laurel put a smile upon her face and stored up her tears until after he had got into his car. Somebody in Washington must have got busy indeed, for late in the afternoon came a telephone call from a Pentagon official. ‘Mr Budd, can you be at Idlewild Airport at nine tomorrow morning?’ Lanny said he could, and the voice said, ‘Your tickets will be there. Be on time’. Lanny promised.
He allowed himself plenty of time; a flat tyre was always a possibility. Freddi Robin drove him, and on the way he talked about his Uncle Hansi, and how terrible it was, and what had become of him? Lanny, of course, cou
ld give no hint that he knew. He said that Uncle Hansi’s communism might not last; it was Bess who had prodded him on, and most decent people who got into the Communist party got out again after a year or two. He said that the case would probably drag along for a considerable time; if the accused were convicted they would appeal and use all the legal tricks. If they were sent to prison they would be treated well, especially Hansi; federal prisons weren’t so bad nowadays, and they probably would let him give concerts for the inmates.
When they reached the airport Lanny sent his young friend home and sat and read the morning paper. He had been at a hundred airports and the sights were familiar to him; he was more interested in reading about the mounting tension in Berlin. The Reds apparently were trying to make the Allies so uncomfortable that they would vacate the city. It was a policy of pinpricks, and it seemed rather childish, for the Kremlin should have known that the Allies would never get out without a war. The blow to the prestige of all three would have been unendurable.
Lanny would say that in his own mind—it was unendurable to him. But then he would begin to wonder. Would it be unendurable to the State Department and to a half-isolationist Senate? Lanny thought of all those farmers back in the corn and hog country through which he had just driven. What did it mean to them, the ‘prestige’ of holding Berlin? They wanted their sons back on the farm; and all those ‘moms’ who rented the bedrooms to tourists, they wanted their boys to mow the lawns in the summer and rake up the leaves in the fall.
The flight was the routine one, by way of Gander and Prestwick. It was pleasant in mid-June. This was the land of the midnight sun—only most of it was sea. The plane was carrying Army personnel and stopped in Scotland only to refuel and then went on to Berlin. Lanny, who had been an assimilated colonel, first having to do with art works and then with atomic scientists, talked with interest to military men who were now seeing service in West Germany and in Greece and Turkey and Iran. Different indeed was their outlook from that of the corn and hog farmers and the ‘moms’ of Nebraska and Iowa!
The Return of Lanny Budd Page 44