Lanny felt sure from various signs that she was not going to let that money go out of the house. So he took a firm tone; he had tried his best to get more from his friend, but that was absolutely the maximum obtainable. He was intending to get up and prepare to take his departure, if necessary, but he didn’t have to. “Bien!” exclaimed the Spanish lady, suddenly; and Lanny produced the receipts for her to sign—two copies, for he meant to have one as a souvenir of an adventure which might never happen to him again! He had left a blank space for the amount, and he now filled it in, and placed the documents and his fountain pen in front of the duquesa.
But it couldn’t be settled so quickly as that. The elderly aristocrat wasn’t going to be content with counting packages; she was going to count seven hundred and fifty notes, and make sure that each had one thousand francs printed on it. With her skinny old fingers shaking she broke the bands around one package, and with her quavering old voice she counted aloud from one to fifty, occasionally stopping to wet her fingers on her tongue. One package counted, she set it aside, and went to work on the next; Lanny sat and waited patiently while this performance was repeated fifteen times. Fortunately the bank had made no mistakes, and at last the job was completed. There being no other excuse for delay, the duquesa looked at the pile of packages, she looked at the two receipts, and from them to Lanny. Was she at the last moment trying to get up the nerve for a fight?
She was trembling, and Lanny was trembling—it is always hard upon the nerves, dealing in large sums of money. But at last she took up the fountain pen, and with slow uncertain fingers wrote her name on one piece of paper, then on the other, and permitted Lanny to pick them up and put them into his pocket, together with his pen. He thanked her and shook hands with her, and her final act was to summon a man-servant to carry the heavy picture down to the car. She might have claimed the frame, and Lanny was prepared to have her do so; but she had probably never seen the picture out of the frame, and may have thought they were one. It was so big that it would barely go into the car.
They drove to the bank, where Lanny put the rest of the money on deposit. They drove to a carpenter shop and had the precious object securely crated, and then saw a truck carry it to the express office, where it was shipped to Mrs. Murchison in London, insured for its full purchase price. Lanny sent the new owner a telegram, telling her what he had done, and sent her by registered mail her receipt and a bank draft for the rest of the money, less his commission and the various expenditures. Only as time passed did he realize the impression he had made upon the plateglass couple by the return of approximately a hundred and seventy-three thousand francs. The story would be told in Pittsburgh, and the fame of it would radiate in many directions; years later someone would introduce himself as a friend of the Murchisons, and say: “I understand that you buy paintings and return part of the money if you don’t have to spend it all.”
IV
So Lanny had made some real money, easy money; it grew on trees for him. He found that he had grown a foot in the estimation of his family and friends. He did the “Alphonse and Gaston act” with Zoltan, and the result was that the expert consented to take one-third the commission; also Lanny gave one of the smooth virginal notes to his bodyguard, surely the largest sum that that redhead from Kansas had ever earned in so short a time. This left the budding art dealer a net of forty-nine thousand francs, or, at the prevailing rate of exchange, somewhat less than twenty-five hunded dollars; but it wasn’t going to be exchanged, it was going to be spent in France, and forty-nine has a much more exciting sound than two and a half.
Lanny looked back upon a time, only four years distant, when he had been so pleased at receiving two hundred dollars a month from the disbursing officer of the State Department of the United States government. By five months of assiduous day-and-night labor he had then earned one thousand dollars. But now he had worked only a few hours, not more than one good day altogether, and see what he had! From that time on it would be difficult for Lanny to contemplate the system known as “individualism” without a certain amount of indulgence; also he would be disposed to look upon all kinds of public officials, from postmen up to premiers, as ill-rewarded drudges, the most pathetic of wage-slaves.
And what he had got was only the beginning, he found. The Murchisons received their valuable shipment and had it uncrated in their hotel room and hung up on the wall, opposite a sofa where they could sit and study it. So they discovered for the first time what art was, and is, for it remains what it is, semper eadem. Ars longa, vita brevis! Adella saw that gorgeous if evil old warrior occupying the position of honor in her drawing-room, and she got books about the time and its court painter, and began to prepare and rehearse her “spiel.” Before long it occurred to her that there was space at the top of the broad staircase of her home where something splendid seemed to be called for. She got a photograph of the dubious Velásquez, and learned from the books that this painter’s works were almost unobtainable; she decided that nobody in Pittsburgh would ever have heard of del Mazo, surely none of her friends, at least. She went to work and persuaded her husband, and then sent a wire to Juan-les-Pins, asking what the double portrait could be had for.
Lanny answered that he thought Zoltan should come and look at the work, and give his expert opinion whether it was a Velásquez; if it wasn’t, that would help to shatter the old duquesa’s nerve. His guess was that a million francs would do the trick, but it might be well to send a million and a half. How easily Lanny now tossed off such figures!
The program was carried out according to schedule. The expert came, and gave his shattering opinion, and the elderly aristocrat flew into a rage and considered herself personally insulted. Zoltan said that was something he had learned to expect; these people were used to having their own way, and truth and reality were not vital concepts to them. But a million francs was; so let the old creature have a while to think about them. Lanny brought his friend to Bienvenu, where the ladies all treated him as if he were an archangel sent down from the skies to set a golden crown on Lanny’s head. Zoltan had his fiddle, and for two days Lanny and Kurt played sonatas with him, and they had a grand holiday, no less enjoyable because of the thought of the duquesa in her chateau—which they had converted into a hot griddle for her to be toasted on!
V
The money arrived at the bank, and on the third morning Lanny and Jerry went and got it. Zoltan insisted that his pupil must handle the matter, while the teacher amused himself with a more humble role. Since the picture was too big to be got into Lanny’s car, Zoltan would hire a small truck and park at an inn near the château, where Lanny could telephone in case of victory. Lanny left ten of the bundles of banknotes in Jerry’s care, and took in twenty and laid them out on the table. He sat and listened to scolding, whining, almost weeping; he thought: How odd that a duchess should not be a “lady”; that noblesse should manifest so little desire to oblige! It was like pulling all the old woman’s teeth all over again to make her take a million francs for that dubious Velásquez. Lanny had to pretend that his dignity was affronted, and put the money back into the satchel and start to take his leave; when he was almost at the front door the châtelaine called to him “Eh bien! Revenez!”
It was a game, and he had won. She composed her face, and went at the serious business of counting one thousand banknotes. Everything must wait until she had accepted the money and signed the receipts and Lanny had them in his pocket. Then he telephoned, and the duquesa rang for her servant; she was quite cheerful now—it wasn’t so hard to make the best of being a millionaire. The great picture was so heavy that Lanny had to help the servant carry it down the steps; and here came Zoltan, the truck-driver, with a lot of blankets, one of them waterproof, for wrapping the precious treasure. Off they drove in triumph, Lanny following the truck, and Jerry with the automatic on the seat beside him.
This time they came to Bienvenu, for it had been decided that Jerry should drive that precious freight all the way to Lond
on, Lanny following with Marie in his car. It was June, and time for their trip to Seine-et-Oise; they would take a little excursion to London, where Marie would meet that ex-secretary who was scattering her husband’s money like a drunken sailor—that straightforward American type in whom she still found it impossible to believe. But she had to admit that if Adella Murchison was setting a trap for Lanny, she was certainly baiting it generously!
An odd sort of holiday! The truck broke down and had to be repaired, and meanwhile the treasure was carried into a bedroom of an inn, where either Lanny or Jerry stayed with it every moment. On their overnight stop they saw to it that Jerry got a room with a good stout bolt, and he slept with the gun under his pillow. They took both truck and car across on the ferry and delivered their consignment to its owners—also a bank draft for half a million francs less expenses. Adella met Marie, and behaved like a woman of the world, giving no sign of being shocked to discover that this exemplary young lover of the arts was also the lover of another man’s wife. She spent most of the time hearing Lanny’s story of the purchases, and asking him questions about the paintings; she made no signs with her eyelashes or anything else, and so Lanny’s amie had to give up and admit that there really was an “American type.”
VI
The two dealers went fifty-fifty on this second transaction, so Lanny had almost a hundred thousand francs. That was news to take to the Château de Bruyne, to lend glamour to la vie á trois. Impossible for a businessman not to respect a youth who had performed such a feat! From that time on Lanny Budd would be no playboy but a serious man of affairs. When he entered a home of wealth, he wouldn’t be thinking, as formerly: “Am I going to be bored here?” He would be thinking: “I wonder if they buy paintings, or if they have any they’d like to sell.” When he saw a beautiful work, he would enjoy its beauty, but his mind would go on to the thought: “I wonder what that would bring,” and then: “I wonder who would be interested in it.” He would run over in his mind the different persons he knew, and the art collections he had seen or heard of—not those in museums and galleries, but paintings in private homes, where they had been for a long time, so that the owner had had a chance to get tired of them.
A similar transformation took place in the minds of the ladies who played a part in Lanny’s life. To them art had been an expensive form of pleasure—conspicuous waste, to use Veblen’s phrase; but now it became a source of income, it was game to be hunted. Beauty Budd began thinking of all the persons she knew in or near Paris; all the rich homes to which she might arrange for Lanny to have access, and work up schemes of plunder. It was the thing that Beauty had done for Robbie for some twenty years, and there wasn’t a device that she hadn’t put to use. Now, of course, it was a double pleasure, for Lanny was young, and her maternal impulses came into play. Sophie, the ex-baroness, a childless woman, shared these feelings; also Emily, the salonnière, who had taken Lanny as a sort of foster-son. She even began to think of cetain of her own paintings which it might be fun to replace with others having somewhat more lively colors.
But the most eager and most active friend was Marie de Bruyne. Here was the way to make her lover into something substantial and useful! Marie didn’t want his money, but she wanted him to have money; her mind, at once unselfish and materialistic, wanted him to take hold of life and make himself a place in it. Above all, here was the way to get him out of the clutches of those dangerous Reds! When he had to earn money, he would learn the value of it; he would become a man among men, competing with them, winning their respect, and bringing all his faculties into play. Marie loved art herself, and wanted Lanny to love it, and wouldn’t have turned him into a manager of taxicab companies like Denis or an oil operator like his father. No, she understood his fine gifts and wanted to cultivate them, and it seemed to her a most happy development that he should be able to combine his love of art with the easy acquisition of the money he would need for the gratifying of all his tastes.
After consulting with Denis she invited Zoltan Kertezsi to their home, and for a week they played music and talked art, and it was wonderful for Marie’s two boys as well as for her lover. The woman herself listened and learned, for she must know all the phrases, all the cues, so that she could guide a conversation into proper channels and help to start a deal or to put one through. Zoltan knew a thousand stories about painters and paintings, and there was hardly a subject you could mention that he couldn’t connect with the buying or selling of art. And one thing leads to another, as we all know.
Yes, Zoltan was a wonderful fellow, and wouldn’t have been different if he had really been that archangel sent down from the skies to tear Lanny Budd out of the hands of the dangerous and disreputable Reds, and make him into an art authority. Marie devoted a full week to cultivating this Hungarian gentleman, making him comfortable, praising him, drinking in his stories—always, of course, with Lanny present, Lanny kindling with delight, warming both hands before the fire of life. Also two lads budding into manhood, who had hardly been aware of art before, listened to stories about enormous sums paid for paintings by the richest and most famous persons; they too began to kindle, and wanted Lanny to take them to the Louvre and the Luxembourg and let them see such wonderful creations, and try to understand what it was about Jan van Eyck’s little painting of a madonna and child which caused it to be worthy sixty-four thousand francs per square inch!
When Zoltan was gone, Marie began taking Lanny about to the rich homes in the neighborhood, to show him the treasures they contained and give him a chance to mention that he knew many Americans who were on the hunt for such things. Most of Marie’s acquaintances would be sellers, not buyers, so when she told what her young magician had been able to do for a Spanish duquesa, she shaded the story in favor of the seller’s side; the American millionaires were represented as infatuated persons scattering their money like Millet’s Sower with his bag of seed. On the other hand, when Denis brought out a great banker over the week-end, a man who might be a customer, the unnamed duquesa was transformed into a slightly ridiculous person whom Lanny by extraordinary cleverness had managed to hold down to very low prices. Mutatis mutandis, is the Latin phrase; and Zoltan said that Latin is a wonderful language, well suited to apothegms and inscriptions, since it says so much in a few words.
VII
This development came at a fortunate moment in the life of Lanny and Marie. Three years had passed since their intimacy had begun, and that is time enough for lovers to discover what is wrong with each other. Their physical happiness was as complete as ever, but intellectually there were large tracts where they would never meet. Marie wasn’t a political-minded person, and would have been content to avoid the subject; but Lanny couldn’t or wouldn’t do so; he kept meeting persons who stirred him up, persons whom his amie hated and feared. He knew it, and refrained from mentioning those persons; but somehow it always came out where he had been, and even if he didn’t say what he was thinking, Marie guessed it, and it made her unhappy and him impatient.
They might have let each other’s ideas alone; but the world and its events wouldn’t let either of them alone, it kept forcing itself upon their attention. That dreadful strangling process was going on in the Ruhr, and the cries of it penetrated the ears of every thinking person in Europe. Germany was down and France was at her throat, and either you sympathized with France, or else you were a friend of the Boches, and therefore a suspect. Denis de Bruyne would come home from conferences with members of his party and would tell what he had seen and heard, what Poincaré was doing and what his supporters expected to get out of it, and to Lanny it seemed repulsive, almost crazy; he would know that his beloved one agreed with these ideas, and Marie would know that Lanny hated them. The only way they could avoid quarreling was to wall off portions of their minds completely from each other.
Robbie came to Paris after the close of the Lausanne conference in midsummer, and spent a Sunday at the château. He listened to everything Denis said, and they talked as
two businessmen who understand each other’s point of view; but Lanny knew that his father wasn’t saying all that he thought, and when they were alone Robbie remarked that France was in one hell of a mess, and that men like Denis were blinding themselves to her plight. He said that Poincare was really a very timid and incompetent bureaucrat, a slave to routine and red tape; he had promised the French people things that he couldn’t deliver, and now he was scared to death by what he had started and didn’t know how to finish.
“France can starve Germany into bankruptcy,” said Robbie, “but France will get nothing out of it, and will only cripple both countries. The plain truth is that France hasn’t the economic resources to support the military role that her pride forces her to play. The part of wisdom would be to accept her position as a second-class power and tie her fortunes to those of the British Empire; but she may put off doing this until it’s too late, and the British offer of an alliance may not be renewed.”
If that was the situation, it was obvious that an ardent Nationalist and his wife were not going to be very happy people in the years to come. Their country would suffer, and they would look around for somebody to blame. They would blame the Germans for failing to pay indemnities. They would blame the British for encouraging the Germans. They would blame the Americans for not ratifying President Wilson’s treaty of alliance and for trying to collect debts which France couldn’t pay and pretty soon wouldn’t want to pay. Altogether it was going to be a mess; and how was Lanny going to be happy in a home where people were bitter against the Americans, how was Marie going to be happy in a home where people out of the kindness of their hearts felt sorry for the French?
Between Two Worlds Page 38
