So Lanny was moved, very timidly, to draw closer to this delightful being, and she did not seem to mind. When he gently touched her hand she did not draw it away, and presently they resumed, quite naturally and simply, the relation they had had in the old days. He put his arm about her, and after a while he kissed her, and they sat dissolved in the well-remembered bliss. But this time it did not stop at the same point.
Rosemary Codwilliger was a friend and admirer of that ardent suffragette, Miss Noggyns, who had so upset Kurt Meissner at The Reaches. With the coming of the war these redoubtable ladies had dropped their agitation, but they expected to have their demands granted before the war was over; and what were they going to do with their new freedom? That they would go into Parliament, attend the universities, and move into all the professions—such things went without saying. But what would they do about love and sex and marriage? What would they do about the so-called “double standard,” which permitted men to have premarital sex relations without social disgrace, but denied that privilege to women?
Obviously, there were two alternatives. Women could adopt the double standard, or they could demand that men conform to the single standard. It soon appeared that the latter was very difficult, whereas the former was easy. The subject was made more complex by the possibility that not all women were alike; what might be pleasing to some might not be to all. In magazines, pamphlets, and books of the “feminist” movement these questions were vehemently debated, and the ideas were tried out by numbers of persons, with results not always according to schedule.
Rosemary’s young mind was a ferment of these theories. First of all, she had been taught, you must be frank. You couldn’t be so with the old people, of course; but young people in love, or thinking of being in love, had to be honest with each other and try to understand each other; love had to be a give and take, each respecting the other’s personality, and so on. The problems of sex had apparently been changed by the discovery of birth control, which Mr. Bernard Shaw called “the most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century.” Since you no longer needed to have babies, the question to be considered was whether love would bring happiness to the lovers.
Rosemary was blond, with features regular and a manner gentle and serene. In many ways she reminded Lanny of his mother, and perhaps that was why she had drawn him so strongly. He was a mother’s boy, used to being told what to do, and Rosemary was prepared to deal with him on that basis—it was, apparently, what they all meant by “women’s rights.” Anyway, they sat in a remote and well-shadowed part of the garden, with arms around each other; and it seemed unavoidable that they should talk of intimate matters. Lanny told about love problems which puzzled him, and Rosemary imparted ideas which she had gathered from a weekly journal called the Freewoman.
When Lanny had listened to Kurt Meissner’s expositions of German philosophy, he had attributed it all to Kurt’s wonderful brain; so now he thought that Rosemary had worked out the theory of sexual equality for herself. Of course he was deeply impressed, and at first rather frightened. But after these ideas had been discussed for two or three evenings, they no longer seemed so strange; the boy who had become a man within the last year began to wonder whether all those words about freedom and happiness might possibly apply to him and his lovely friend. This had an alarming effect; a wave of excitement swept over him, and his teeth began to chatter and his hands to shake uncontrollably.
“What’s the matter, Lanny?” asked the girl.
He didn’t dare to answer at first, but finally he told her: “I’m afraid maybe I’m falling in love with you.” It was all as if it had never happened in the world before.
“Well, why not, Lanny?” she asked, gently.
“You mean—you really wouldn’t mind?”
“You know I think you are a very dear boy.”
So he kissed her on the lips—the first time he had ever done that. They sat clasped together, and a clamor arose in him. He pressed her to him, and when she submitted, he began to fondle her more and more intimately. He knew then that the experience had come to him about which he had heard everybody talking, and which had been such a mystery in his thoughts.
The girl stayed his trembling hands. “You mustn’t, Lanny. It wouldn’t be safe.” Then she whispered: “I’ll have to go to the house first, and get something.”
So they got up and walked. Lanny found his knees shaking, which perplexed him greatly. It must be what the French novelists call la grande passion! He waited some distance from the house while Rosemary went in—as it happened, there was company and no one paid any heed to her. Presently she came back, and they lost themselves in a secluded part of the garden, and there she taught him those things about which he had been so curious. At first his agitation was painful, but presently he was dissolved in a flood of bliss, which seemed to justify the theories of the “new women.” If he was happy and she was happy, why should the vague and remote “world” of their elders concern itself with their affairs?
VI
It wasn’t long before Lanny told his mother about this affair. Impossible not to, because she asked pointed questions, and it would have been hurting her feelings to evade. Beauty’s reaction to the disclosure was a peculiar one. She had been what you might call a practicing feminist, but without any theories; she had had her own way about love, but always with the proper feeling that she was doing wrong. It was hard to explain, but that feeling seemed necessary; you knew it was wrong, and that made it right. But to assert that it was right was a shocking boldness. And when a girl was only seventeen! “Was she virgin?” asked Beauty, and added with distaste: “Certainly she didn’t act like it.” Lanny didn’t know and couldn’t make inquiries.
Beauty couldn’t altogether dislike Rosemary, but she never got over the idea that there was something alarming about her—a portent of a new world that Beauty didn’t understand. The mother’s feeling was that her dear little boy had been seduced, and that he was much too young. She took the problem to her husband, but failed to get him excited. “Nature knows a lot more about that than you do,” said the painter, and went on painting.
Springtime again on the Riviera, to Lanny the most delightful he had ever known. The flesh of woman was revealed to him, and the discovery transfused everything else in his life. The world and every common sight to him did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. Now for the first time he knew what music was about, and poetry, and dancing, not to mention the birds and the butterflies. The flowers had the colors of Rosemary, and she had their perfume. She was to him a being of magic, and when he was with her he never wanted to take his eyes from her, and when he wasn’t with her he wished he was.
Of course he couldn’t be with her all the time; because “what would people say?” The “world” did matter after all, it appeared. Cool and serene, Rosemary took charge. Lanny must go on with his studying, and not make her feel that she was a bad influence. When they boated and swam and played tennis, they must be with other young people, for appearance’ sake; and the same in the evening—there must be some sort of pretext, a dance, a party, a sail—the young people all understood that, they all had the same desires, and would stroll away in couples, casually and innocently. They protected one another, a conspiracy of the new against the old.
Did Rosemary succeed in fooling her mother and her aunt? In those early days of the revolt of youth the old were in a peculiar state of emotional paralysis. They didn’t dare to know; it was too awful to let themselves know—and yet of course they did. They would look at the young with fright in their eyes, and seldom dare to speak—for what could they say? Rosemary had given her answer in advance—she wanted to go out and earn her own living. Girls were nursing, they were even getting jobs in munitions factories, wearing black overalls and filling shells with explosives. They were going out on the streets delivering tirades, calling on men to enlist, pinning white feathers on those who looked as if they ought to. And the things the
y were reading, and left around the house, careless of who might see them!
It had been prior to the outbreak of the war that Rosemary had fallen under the spell of one of those suffragettes—a teacher, it was. Still a child, with pigtails down her back, she had walked into the National Gallery with a hand ax concealed under her skirt, and at a prearranged signal had passed it to one of those notorious women who hadn’t dared bring it in herself, because she was known and might be searched. And that not a crazy whim or a lark, but a means of reforming the world! Something they took up as a religion, for which they were willing to die! You might put them in jail, but they would only try to starve themselves to death; you wanted to say to the devil with them and let them do it, but you didn’t dare.
VII
The German high command had made up its collective mind that in order to win the war they had to break through on the western front, and they had picked the fortress of Verdun as the place. This was the head of the original French defenses, the part which had not given way; a complex of fortifications covering various heights along both banks of the river Meuse. Now that the war had been going on for a year and a half, the technique of taking such fortifications had become well settled. You had to bring up enough heavy guns, and pile enough ammunition behind them, to reduce the enemy entrenchments to dust and rubble; then you put down what was called a “creeping barrage” of shells which exploded in small fragments, to destroy the men who had been hiding underground and who came up after your heavy bombardment. The “creeping barrage” moved forward, just ahead of your lines of infantry, which could thus advance in comparative safety, and take what was left of the trenches, an operation known as “mopping up.” The enemy would have line after line of trenches, and you had to repeat this same procedure and hope to break through finally and turn a “war of position” into a “war of movement.”
To stop such an attack, the French gunners had to be better than the Germans, and have more shells. The French airmen had to keep the mastery and bring in more information as to what was happening. But more than anything else, the plain everyday poilu had to crawl into his rabbit warrens, and those of him who were left alive had to pop up at the right moment, and hide in whatever shell holes might be left and shoot enough of the advancing Germans to discourage the rest. That was all there was to it, you just had to outstay the enemy. When you had fired all your cartridges, you got more from a dead comrade in the same shell hole. If the night passed and nobody brought you food, you starved. If it rained, you lay in the mud, and if the mud froze, you tried to keep your hands alive so that you could shoot.
The Verdun area covered a hundred square miles or so, and during the fighting it was turned into a chaos of shell craters and nothing else. Places like Fort Douaumont were taken and retaken a half-dozen times, and the living fought among the dead of both sides. The main battle began in February of 1916 and lasted until July without cessation, and after that off and on for a year. The Germans brought sixty-four divisions, which was more than a million men. The French fired more than ten million shells from field guns, and nearly two million from medium and heavy guns.
The German Crown Prince was in command, and that was one more reason for the French wanting to win. The whole world watched and waited while the armies staggered back and forth. A break-through might mean the German conquest of France, and nobody knew that better than the poilu; he invented for himself a chant, which became a sort of incantation, a spell to rouse the souls of men perishing of wounds and exhaustion, who yet would kill one more enemy before dying. “Passeront pas, passeront pas!” they sang or gasped. “They shall not pass.”
VIII
Such were the events some three hundred miles to the north of Lanny Budd while he was playing with love in springtime. He couldn’t keep the war from troubling his conscience, but there was nothing he could do about it—especially not so long as he was under pledge to keep neutral. He was the one person of that sort he knew. Eddie Patterson was now driving an ambulance behind the lines at Verdun, and so his Sophie no longer had any motive for not hating the Germans, and she was hating them. All Lanny could say was: “Excuse me, I promised my father not to talk about the war.”
Budd’s were now making small arms and ammunition in large quantities, and exclusively for the Allies. There was no way to make any for the Germans; the British blockade was too tight, and anyhow the British and French were on hand to buy everything you could produce, paying top prices on the nail. The big Wall Street banks took British and French bonds and sold them to the American public, and Budd’s got the cash. Under Robbie’s contract he was entitled to a commission on every deal. He would spend this money freely and gaily, as always; but he was a stubborn fellow, and nobody was going to get him to say that any nation of Europe—and that included the British Empire—was ever right about anything. Robbie had been on the inside, and knew they were all wrong.
Out of this came the first little rift between Lanny and his girlfriend. Rosemary wasn’t satisfied to have him hold his tongue; she began to pin him down and ask what he really thought. When he repeated his formula, she wanted to know: “What are you, a man or a dummy? Do you have to think everything your father thinks? If I thought what my parents think, would I be here with you?” Lanny was troubled, because he had taken it for granted that this delightful young woman was as gentle as she looked. But apparently a sharp tongue was part of the equipment of every “feminist,” and first among “women’s rights.” was the right to tell her man what she thought of him.
Both British and French were bitter against the Americans, because they were not taking part in the war, but just making money out of it, and at the same time making objections to the blockade. Nearly all the Americans in France felt the same way, and were ashamed of their country. The conversation at Bienvenu was all along that line; and while Marcel was careful not to say anything in Lanny’s presence, the boy knew that Marcel blamed Robbie because he was making money out of the French and at the same time withholding his sympathy from them. The painter was eaten up with anxiety all during the battle of Verdun; he would burst out with some expression of loathing for the “Huns,” and Lanny wouldn’t say anything, and it would appear that a chill had fallen in the home. The relationship of stepfather and stepson is a complicated one at best, and this wasn’t the best.
The boy would go off and try to think out by himself the problems of the war. He would remember things that Robbie had told him about the trickery of Allied diplomacy. Right now it was being said in America that the Allies had made secret treaties dividing up the spoils of the war they hadn’t won; worse yet, they had promised the same territory to different peoples. Robbie would send articles about such matters to his son, finding ways to get them by the censor—and the consequence of knowing about such things was that the boy no longer fitted anywhere in France.
IX
Marcel painted a picture of the poilu, the savior of la patrie. He tried to put into it all his love for the men with whom he had trained and fought. When he was done, he said it wasn’t good enough, he hadn’t got what he wanted; but his friends thought differently; the painting was shown at a salon in Paris, and made a hit, and was taken up and reproduced in posters. Beauty thought that her husband would get satisfaction out of that service to his country; but nothing could please him, it appeared. He didn’t want to be a popular painter—and anyhow, art was futility in a time like this.
So came a crisis in the affairs of this married pair. How rarely does it happen that two human creatures, with all their differences, weaknesses, moods can get along without quarreling! Beauty was carrying her cross, in the best evangelical church fashion; she was pouring out her own redemptive blood in the secrecy of her heart. But she couldn’t be happy in her tragic situation, and the bitterness which she repressed was bound to escape at some spots in her life. She couldn’t restrain her annoyance at this contrary attitude of Marcel. Why should a man go to the trouble of making pictures, and then not want
to have people see them, even quarrel with those who wanted a chance to admire them? Why was it necessary to say something contrary every time his work was praised? In vain did Lanny, budding young critic, try to make plain to his mother that a true artist is wrestling with a vision of something higher and better, and cannot endure to be admired for what he knows is less than his best.
Out of this clash of temperaments came a terrible thing: Lanny came home one evening from his love-making to find his mother lying on her bed sobbing. Her husband had broached to her the idea of going back into the army. He had the crazy notion that he ought to be helping to hold the line at Verdun; he was a trained man, and France needed every one. He was as good as ever, he in-insisted; he could march, and had tried long walks to make sure. He could handle a gun—the only thing wrong was that he was ugly, but out there in mud and powder smoke who would care?
Beauty had had a fit of hysterics and called him some bad names, an ingrate, a fool, and so on. If she meant no more to him than that, he would have to go—but he would never see her again. “I did it once, Marcel, but I won’t do it a second time.”
She really meant it, so she declared to her son. She had reached the limit of endurance. If Marcel went, la patrie could take care of him next time in some soldiers’ home. She said it with hardness in her face that was a new thing to Lanny; one does not wrestle with duty for long periods without going back to the moods and even the facial expressions of one’s Puritan forefathers. But five minutes later Beauty broke down; her lips were trembling, and she was asking whether perhaps it was her impatience and lack of art sense which were making the painter dissatisfied with his lot.
World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 32
