Lanny remembered his Christmas at Schloss Stubendorf, where people ate enormously, but were frugal in other spending. Here in New England it was the other way around—it wasn’t quite good form to stuff your stomach, but Yankee ingenuity had been expended in devising toys to please the children of the rich, and adults were swamped under a flood of goods incredibly perfect in workmanship. On Christmas morning the base of the tree was piled with packages wrapped in multicolored paper and tied with ribbons. Pipes and cigars, bedroom slippers, silk dressing gowns, neckties—these were standard for the men—while ladies received jewels wristwatches, silk stockings, veils and scarves, handbags and vanity cases, elaborately decorated boxes of chocolates and candied fruits—everyone had such quantities of these things that it was rather a bore opening parcels, and you could read in their faces the thought: “What on earth am I going to do with all this?”
Robert junior and Percy were two friendly and quite normal boys, living rather repressed lives at home. Esther considered all forms of extravagance as bad taste, and tried to teach this to her children; but she was fighting the current of her time, in which everything grew more elaborate and expensive, and a vast propaganda for spending was maintained by thousands of interested agencies. Here came this flood of goods, bearing the cards of uncles and aunts and cousins and school friends and even employees; the boys became surfeited, and couldn’t really appreciate anything.
Lanny had his share of goods and of bewilderment. Good heavens, three sweaters—when already he had several hanging in his clothes closet! More neckties, more handkerchiefs, more hair brushes; an alligator-skin belt that was too heavy for comfort; newly published books that some clerk in a store had said would appeal to a youth. And in the midst of all that superfluity, a gift from Great-Great-Uncle Eli—a much worn copy of Thoreau’s Walden, appearing as misplaced as its author would have been in this fashionable company. Henry David Thoreau, telling you how to live in a hut on a diet of cornmeal mush and beans, in order to have your spirit free and your time not in pawn to commercialism! Old New England and new New England met in the Budd family drawing room, and neither was much interested in the other.
II
Lanny had sent his great-great-uncle the handsomest book he could find in the local store, a “de luxe” copy of Don Quixote with the Doré illustrations. There came now an invitation to spend a week-end with the old gentleman, and to bring Bess along. Esther wasn’t entirely pleased by the intimacy between her daughter and her stepson, but Lanny promised to drive very, very carefully on the snow-covered roads, and Bess was so thrilled and Robbie so pleased that the mother couldn’t forbid the visit.
Between Lanny and his stepmother lay a temperamental gulf that nothing could ever bridge. Lanny was guided by his love of beauty, whereas Esther had to think carefully about everything she felt or did, and bring it into conformity with rigid standards. A few times in the afternoon she had come in to find her stepson playing the piano in a loud and extravagant manner, completely absorbed in it; Esther had stood and listened, uneasy in her mind. She had never heard such music, at least not in a drawing room, and to her it was disorderly and unwholesome. Impossible to believe that anyone could let himself go like that and not sooner or later misbehave in other ways.
Bess with her excitability had been something of a “problem child” to her mother; and now came this youth from abroad to stimulate that tendency. Bess would listen to his playing with a rapt expression, as if transported to some strange land where her mother had never been. Bess wanted to play like Lanny, she wanted to dance like him—and wear a one-piece bathing suit in a drawing room while doing it! She chattered about the places her romantic half-brother had visited, the people he had met, the sights he had seen, the stories he told her. Books on child training which Esther conscientiously read all agreed that you shouldn’t be saying “Don’t! Don’t”—and so Esther didn’t. But uneasiness troubled her heart.
On that lovely winter ride, snugly wrapped in fur robes, Lanny told the child about the wonderful old gentleman she was going to meet. Great-Great-Uncle Eli had once helped slaves to escape; his friend Thoreau had gone to jail for refusing to pay taxes to a slave-catching government, and when the poet Emerson had come and asked: “Henry, what are you doing here?” Henry had answered: “Waldo, what are you doing out of here?” Some of them had gone to live in a colony called Brook Farm, in order to be independent and have more wholesome lives. “What is a colony?” demanded Bess; and then: “Oh, what fun! Are there any colonies now? Could we go and live in one, do you suppose?”
These two reincarnations of New England idealism arrived in the village of Norton in the proper mood to appreciate their venerable relative. The sweet little Quaker wife and the spinster daughter made them at home, and Bess sat for hours at the old man’s feet. She couldn’t understand all his long words, but she knew that what he said was good. When the two young people drove home again they had this new bond between them, as if some ancient prophet had anointed them with holy oil.
III
The last winter of the war was the darkest and most dreadful. For three years and a half all the ingenuities of man and the resources of science had been devoted to the ends of destruction. Both sides now had many kinds of poison gases: some which penetrated the clothing and tormented the skin, some which destroyed the lungs, some which blinded men, or made them vomit unceasingly. These gases were put into shells, and whole battlefronts were drenched with them. The Germans had flame throwers, which killed the man who used them as well as those in front. The British and French had tanks, “big Willies” and “little Willies,” which advanced in front of the troops, spitting fire and death.
The poet’s vision had come to reality, and there rained a ghastly dew from the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue. Squadrons of swift fighting craft darted here and there; they swooped from the clouds and machine-gunned the marching troops; they raided behind the lines and dropped bombs upon railroads and ammunition dumps. The Zepps were fought with explosive bullets, and so great was the peril that the crews of two vessels destroyed them at home in order to avoid going out in them.
Everything had become bigger and more deadly than ever before. The Germans constructed enormous siege guns, known as “Big Berthas,” and set them up in a forest behind Laon, and were firing shells into Paris from a distance of seventy-five miles. At first people had refused to believe such a thing possible; but now they were being fired every twenty minutes, and on Good Friday one of their shells struck a church and killed and wounded nearly two hundred persons, many of them women and children.
For the U-boats there were depth bombs, and nets across all the principal harbors and channels. The Americans were furnishing seventy thousand mines, which were being laid in a chain across the northern entrance to the North Sea, from the Orkney Islands to the coast of Norway, a distance of nearly three hundred miles. That made one for every twenty feet. Also the British had devised the “Q-boats”—old tramp steamers with concealed armor sent out to wander in the danger zones. A submarine would rise and open fire with shells—for they tried to save their torpedoes for bigger craft. Some of the men of the “Q-boat,” the “panic-crew,” would take to the boats; the “sub” would come closer to complete her job—and suddenly portions of the steamer sides would drop down, disclosing six-inch guns which would open deadly fire.
America was getting ready, upon a scale and with a speed never before known in history. You could feel the spirit of the country hardening in the face of world-wide danger. People talked about the war to the exclusion of everything else; even at St. Thomas’s, even at the “bull sessions,” the fellows discussed what was going on, and what part they hoped to have in it. The draft age was twenty-one, but you could volunteer younger, and now and then some upper classman would pack up his belongings and move to an officers’ training camp.
Lanny was now eighteen, and his father worried over the possibility that his emotional temperament might ta
ke fire. Whenever the youth came home over Sunday, Robbie would sound him out to see if the bacteria of propaganda had found lodgment in his mind; if so, he would be subjected to a swift prophylaxis. “Did you ever hear of Lord Palmerston?” the father would inquire. “He was Prime Minister of England during our Civil War, and he said: ‘England has no enduring friendships. She only has enduring interests.’”
Robbie and Esther didn’t agree about England, or about America either, and Robbie’s rule was to let her say anything she pleased, uncontradicted. He did the same thing with his friends; of course they all knew that he had special opportunities to get information, and their curiosity was aroused, but all he would say was that he made weapons for those who wanted to fight and had the cash. Now and then old Samuel would caution his son: “Tend to business and let fools shoot off their mouths.” No one ever found out what the president of Budd Gunmakers thought about this war; all they knew was that he made munitions twenty-four hours every day, including the Lord’s.
As a result of all this Lanny wasn’t entirely happy through the war period. People weren’t satisfied to let you think your own thoughts; they considered it their duty to probe you, to cross examine you, and if you were wrong to try to set you right. At school the fellows decided that Lanny was lacking in appreciation of the land where his fathers died; his fashionable cousin told him so, and they agreed to have different roommates the following year. At the same time Lanny was deprived of the companionship of Mr. Baldwin, for the young master had been advised to confine his teaching to the subject of literature, and to avoid contacts with his pupils outside the classroom.
IV
There came a letter which gave Lanny an extraordinary thrill. The envelope was addressed by typewriter, with no sender’s name, but with a United States stamp and a New York postmark; inside was a long missive from Kurt Meissner! At first Lanny wondered, had Kurt come to New York; but then he realized that his friend must have known somebody in a neutral country who was coming.
Anyhow, here was a real letter, the first Lanny had had from Germany since the outbreak of the war. Kurt gave the news about himself and his family. He was a captain of artillery, and had been twice wounded, once with a bullet through the thigh, and the second time having pieces of ribs torn out by a shell fragment. He was not at liberty to give the name of his unit or where it was stationed; only that he was writing from a billet in a town behind the front, while having a few days’ recuperation. All three of his brothers had been in the war; one had been killed during the early invasion of East Prussia, and another was now at home recovering from a wound. Kurt’s father had an important government post. His sister had married an officer, and was a widow with two babies.
Kurt told about the state of his soul, which was uncomplicated, and oddly like that of Marcel and of Rick. The country was at war, and it was necessary for a man to put aside everything else, and to help to overcome an arrogant and treacherous foe. Kurt said he was as much interested in music and philosophy as ever, but his duties as an artillery officer left him little time to think about these subjects. After the Fatherland had emerged victorious, as surely it must and would, he would hope to hear that his American friend had been able to go on with his studies.
This led to the main purpose of the letter, which was to plead with Lanny to resist the subtle wiles of the British propaganda machine. Kurt wasn’t afraid that his friend might get physically hurt, for it was obvious that the British would be driven into the sea and the French would lose Paris long before the Americans could take any effective part in this war. But Kurt didn’t want his friend’s mind distorted and warped by the agents of British imperialism. These people, who had grabbed most of the desirable parts of the earth, now thought they had a chance to destroy the German fleet, build their Cape-to-Cairo railroad, keep the Germans from building the Berlin-to-Bagdad railroad, and in every way thwart the efforts of a vigorous and capable race to find their place in the sun.
It was to be expected that France would hate Germany and make war upon her, because the French were a jealous people, and thought of Germans as their hereditary enemies; they were pursuing their futile dream of getting Alsace-Lorraine with its treasures of coal and iron. But Englishmen Were blood kinsmen to the Germans, and their war upon Germany was fratricide; the crime of using black and brown and yellow troops to destroy the highest culture in Europe would outlaw its perpetrators forever. Now the desperate British militarists were spending their wealth circulating a mass of lies about Germany’s war methods and war aims; what a tragedy that Americans, a free people, with three thousand miles of ocean between them and Europe’s quarrels, had swallowed all this propaganda, and were wasting their money and their labor helping Britain to grab more territory and harness more peoples to her imperial chariot!
Lanny took that letter to his father, and they read it together, and Robbie pointed out how its arguments resembled those which you could read every day in the Newcastle Daily Courier—but with everything turned around! Each saw his own side, and was blind to the other fellow’s. “You write Kurt and tell him that you are going on with your studies,” said the father; and added: “Phrase it carefully, because you can’t tell who may read a letter nowadays.”
V
Now and then Lanny would write to his mother, reciting his adventures in the land of the pilgrims’ pride: all the strange kinds of people he was meeting, and how different it was from Provence. Knowing how Beauty was interested in human beings, he went into detail about his stepmother: a good woman, but so inhibited—a word Lanny had learned from the conversation of Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette, who was very different from Esther Remson Budd, and would have been a scandal if she had ever come to Newcastle. Lanny left no doubt that he preferred Juan as a home, but he was doing his job here as his father wished.
Beauty wrote once or twice a month, nice gossipy letters. Baby Marceline was thriving upon her natural diet, and Beauty herself was well, and as happy as one could expect to be in these sad days. More and more widows on the streets, more and more mutilés for Emily Chattersworth to crowd into her place. Prices were rising, and fear was universal—Beauty said she couldn’t write all the alarming things that were reported. Everywhere an American, went he heard one question: “When are your soldiers coming?” The Germans were preparing an enormous offensive by which they hoped to end the war; and poor France had scraped the bottom of the national pot for man power. There just weren’t any more young men, hardly any middle-aged ones; you didn’t see them on the streets, you didn’t see them in the fields. “Oh, Lanny, I am praying to God it may be over before you grow up!”
Marcel would send a message, or scribble a line or two on the bottom of the page. Marcel didn’t discuss the war, or his own problems; he would say something about the state of Lanny’s soul: “Remember you are an artist, and don’t let the Puritans frighten you.” He would say: “I am painting a chasseur parting from his mother; it looks like this”—and he would give a little pencil sketch. He would say: “Seine Majestät is worried,” and make a comic drawing of the figure most hated in France. Lanny treasured these sketches, and showed them to his father, but not to anyone else. His stepmother would of course disapprove of his having a stepfather; if Lanny’s mother had been a woman with a sense of propriety she would have expiated her sin by living a celibate life.
But Beauty had been born without that sense. Beauty had a husband of a sort, and was making the most of him. She talked about his work upon every occasion, fought for it, and intrigued to get it shown and recognized—a custom in France, and possibly not unknown in other lands. When some critic called Marcel Detaze a painter with a future, Beauty purchased all the copies of that paper she could find, and cut out the article and sent it to her friends. Marcel still didn’t care for being “promoted,” but his wife had won the right to do what she could.
Her main struggle was to keep him from going back into the army. She would say, over and over: “The Americans are coming, Marce
l! They are making a real army! They mean to finish it!” She would find things in the British and American papers and magazines and bring them to him. She wrote to Robbie, asking him to tell her what was going on, in such a way that Marcel would be convinced, and so be willing to stay at home and leave the saving of France to men who didn’t happen to be geniuses.
VI
The new masters of Russia, the Bolsheviks, made peace with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, an action regarded as treason by almost everybody in the Allied lands. It set the Germans free in the east, and enabled them for the first time to have an actual superiority of numbers on the western front. Their long-prepared offensive was launched in the middle of March; first against the British on the Somme, a front of nearly fifty miles. They brought up masses of artillery, and mountains of smoke shells and gas shells; they overwhelmed the British and drove them back with a loss of some three hundred thousand men. They attacked again farther north, and pushed the weakened British lines almost to the sea. Then they fell upon the French, and drove them again to the river Marne, close to Paris, as in the early days of the war.
This desperate fighting lasted for about three months, and all that while the French people lived in an agony of suspense, waiting hour by hour for news of the collapse which seemed inevitable. Frenchmen and Britons were dying by hundreds every hour, sometimes by thousands; and hopes were dying even faster—among them those of poor, tormented Beauty.
The first news came to Lanny by mail; no use to cable, since there was nothing to be done. “Marcel has gone,” wrote the mother. “He stole away at night, leaving a letter on my pillow. I made it too hard for him, I suppose; he couldn’t face any more scenes. Do not worry about me, I have got myself together. I’ve been living this over and over for the past two years, and never really believed I could escape it. Now I don’t torment myself with hope; now I know I shall never see him again. They will take him into the army, and he will die fighting. I have to reconcile myself to the fact that one cannot have happiness in these times.
World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 45
