Be careful of every word, Lanny! Kurt Meissner, in spite of his notion that he is a modern man and artist, has the instincts of a German aristocrat, and how can he face the thought of being supported by a woman, especially by the one he loves? The English have a name for a man like that, and Kurt has no mind to carry it. When Kurt writes this, Lanny has to be deeply hurt, and to argue for his mother’s right to be happy too. Lanny’s money is his, not his mother’s, and it may be a loan if Kurt insists—every franc of it carefully recorded, so that a great musician can repay it out of the proceeds of future performances, or royalties, or salary as a conductor, whatever it may be. There is precedent enough in the lives of musicians—for the borrowing if not for the repaying!
V
The painters came and started on the outside trim of the villa. The paperhangers were working inside the drawing-room. The upholsterers took away the furniture, to do it over with soft brown cloth that would wear. The background was to be a wallpaper of cream color with an unobtrusive pattern, Lanny having decided that this would be in keeping with the austere spirit of his friend and the domestic intentions of his reformed mother.
A man came and tuned the piano; and Lanny lived again in that music to which his fancy had turned during the past couple of years, whenever life had become too complicated. A translator-secretary at a peace conference had been powerless to restrain Italians from seizing Yugoslav territory, or Turks from slaughtering Armenians; but when he sat down at the piano he was his own master, and if he didn’t like the way a composer achieved his modulations he could change them. Lanny’s fingers had lost some of their speed while preparing reports on the distribution of Europe’s populations; but when fingers are not yet twenty years old they limber up quickly, and Lanny soon had the freedom of that garden of delights in which he planned to spend the rest of his days.
At the driveway entrance of Bienvenu were a pair of heavy gates which you could lock if you wished. At the entrance to the footpath was a light wooden door with a tall aloe, now in blossom, on either side, and a bell which you had to ring. Inside were palms and bananas, a cascade of purple bougainvillaea, the scent of narcissus and the murmur of bees; there were beauty and peace, and Lanny meant that there should be friendship and love. Good-by, proud world, I’m going home! So he had said, the day the unsatisfactory treaty had been signed. Every month Robbie Budd sent Beauty a check for a thousand dollars, and from now on Lanny was to have three hundred. Besides that, he had a thousand which he had earned his very self, and of which he was unduly proud. It was mixed up with the rest in his bank account at Cannes, but in his mind he saw it separately, a series of checks signed by the disbursing officer of the State Department of the United States.
He wanted to spend these sums to make a little happiness and order in the world. He would get a few friends around him, persons who loved the arts and were content to live with them. The fact that his mother had fallen in love with one of his best friends was an odd circumstance which would help to close the little circle. It would solve the problem of a German army officer’s broken life, and at the same time would keep Beauty out of the clutches of those many fashionable persons who abused her hospitality and won her money at bridge. While Lanny wrestled with the intricacies of a Bach fugue he told himself that Kurt’s serious disposition would reform him as well as his mother, and keep him from futile love affairs and other escapades that he wanted to put behind him.
VI
The carpenters were working on the new studio. The framework had magically arisen—one large room with a small bedroom and bath in the rear. Lanny would watch the work and amuse himself trying to help; then he would go and practice sight-reading for a while. When he felt the need of companionship, he would phone to Jerry Pendleton to come over for a swim, or perhaps go torch-fishing at night. They would sit in the boat on the still water and recall the Austrian submarine that had risen in the sea close beside them. The ex-tutor and veteran of the Meuse-Argonne was in much the same mood as his former pupil; he too had wanted to get away from it all—and what an unusual sort of refuge he had found for himself in the Pension Flavin in Cannes!
He had married the French nation, so he told Lanny: the sweet and gentle Cerise, the mother who owned half the pension, the aunt who owned the other half and helped to run it, and the boarders, who in this hot midsummer season were not tourists but respectable French permanents employed in banks or other offices, and who considered themselves as members of the family, entitled to be concerned with its affairs. Jerry had to have some American to whom he could unbosom himself, and as Lanny had lived most of his life in France, he was able to explain matters and clear up misunderstandings. Another peace conference!
French women of the middle class are apt to be frugal, and when they are in business they have to be if they are to survive. And here was a son-in-law who presented them with a complicated problem. An upstanding, capable young American, he had plunged into a fiery furnace and helped to rescue la patrie. American soldiers enjoyed enormous prestige among the French in those days; they had come as semi-divine beings, several inches taller than the average poilu, accoutered and equipped like no troops ever seen in Europe, and laughing, insolent, ready to make a lark even out of a plunge into a furnace. “Ah, comme ils sont beaux!” the mademoiselles had cried with one voice.
Lieutenant Jerry Pendleton, handsome and red-headed, was now a husband with responsibilities; but what was he to do about them? He had no money, and there was no work to be had in Cannes. Thousands of Frenchmen coming back from the war, all looking for jobs; and no tourists in summertime, no certainty that there would be any in winter. Jerry was willing to go to work with his hands, a l’américaine, but that was unthinkable in France; he must have a white-collar job, and uphold the dignity and prestige of a pension which catered to the most respectable bourgeois. The two anxious ladies fed him, and withheld any word that would remind him of his humiliating position. His father owned a couple of drugstores in a far-off region of cyclones called Kansas, and if Jerry’s dignity was affronted, he might order his wife to pack up and follow him across the seas—thus depriving the two ladies of their hopes, one for a grandson and the other for a grand-nephew.
A happy solution ad interim—Jerry would go fishing, taking a basket and bringing back specimens of the many strange creatures that swarm along the rocky Mediterranean shore: mérou, and mostele, the long green moray, the gray langouste in his hard shell, cuttlefish large or small, each with his own ink to be cooked in. This pleased the palates of all the guests, and at the same time was entirely respectable, being le sport. The son-in-law went with a friend who owned a sailboat, and lived in an elegant villa on the Cap, and associated with the wealthiest and most distinguished persons. While Jerry entertained his friend with stories about the boarders, the widow ladies fed the boarders upon details of a new studio at Bienvenu, the redecorating of the villa, and the sad case of Madame Detaze, whose husband had given his life for la patrie, and who was now spending her period of mourning in Spain.
VII
In a corner of the garage at Bienvenu were piled some forty wooden cases which had come by steamer from Connecticut to Marseille, containing the library willed by Great-Great-Uncle Eli Budd to Lanny. The youth summoned his courage and took a carpenter to Marcel’s studio and set him to lining the walls with shelves. Lanny was taking this place for his own, being certain that if anywhere in the limbo of good souls Marcel was watching, he would approve that course. The studio meant more to Lanny than to anybody else, not even excepting Beauty. She had loved Marcel’s paintings because they were his, but Lanny had loved them because they were works of art, and Marcel had understood this difference and made jokes about it in his fashion half gay and half sad.
After the shelves were stained and dried, Lanny had the cases brought down a few at a time, and Jerry came to help him unpack. The ex-lieutenant was no scholar, in spite of having been nearly through college; but he was impressed by the physical bulk of tw
o thousand volumes and by Lanny’s firm declaration that he intended to read them all. The old Unitarian minister had been even more learned than his heir had realized, for here was a pretty complete collection of the best books of the world in half a dozen languages: not much theology, but a great deal of philosophy, history, and biography, and a little of every sort of belles-lettres. Only the Latin and Greek were hopeless, Lanny decided. He had French and German, and could brush up his Italian, and soon learn Spanish, which Beauty and Kurt were now studying.
The classifying of so many books was quite a job. They moved armloads to one shelf, and then decided they had made a mistake and moved them to another. Presently there came another assistant—M. Rochambeau, the elderly Swiss diplomat who was spending his declining years in this village of Juan-les-Pins. He lived in a little apartment with a niece, and found it lonely during the summer season. He had known Marcel and admired his paintings before the war, and had stood by him in those dreadful days when the painter had been brought back from battle with his mutilated face covered by a silk mask. A man of reading and taste, M. Rochambeau could tell about these books, and where the doubtful ones should be placed. He would become excited by the contents of this one or that, and Lanny would tell him to take it home and read it.
The friends would leave, and evening fall; Lanny would stroll down to the studio and sit inside, with the pale moonlight streaming in at the door. The place now had two ghosts to haunt it. Lanny would introduce the ghost of Marcel to the ghost of his great-great-uncle and please himself with the fancy that this introduction was taking effect in the limbo where they now resided. Lanny listened to their cultured conversation, which began, naturally, with Greek art and civilization; for the youth had told Eli how the yacht Bluebird had taken him and Marcel to the Isles of Greece, and how they had stood among the ruined temples and Marcel had read aloud out of the anthology. Lanny had written Marcel about Eli’s comments; so the two ghosts were no strangers, but exchanged freely their deepest sentiments. The young ghost, who had arrived first in this limbo, made the old ghost welcome. “Upon that far shore I wait for thee, O Callimachus, and prepare for thee a banquet worthy of thy noble deeds.”
VIII
So passed the rest of the summer. The workingmen labored steadily, and the villa shone like new, and the studio approached completion. Lanny had written Kurt to inquire what sort of interior decoration might be appropriate to the music of Bach and Brahms; Kurt had tactfully expressed approval of Lanny’s taste, so the studio was being done uniform with the villa. Step by step Lanny sought to lure his friend on. “That thousand dollars which I earned trying to make a just peace I want to spend for the best piano that can be found in Paris, and I want you to select it so I can be sure it really is the best.”
But seducing Kurt was no simple task. Beauty’s letters would reveal that the haughty one was brooding over his country’s fate, and thinking of Brazil or the Argentine, where Germans were still able to earn a living without British or American permission. Lanny would have to go deeply into the psychology of vanquished artillery officers, aspiring musical geniuses, and lovers dependent upon their ladies. The money of Beauty and her son had come out of guns and ammunition used to blast the hopes of the Fatherland; how now could Kurt endure to live upon it? Lanny would make tactful references to the moral problems of a munitions manufacturer and his son. “My father refuses to let his own conscience be troubled, but he can’t help knowing that mine is. It pleases him when he can give me money, because then he doesn’t have to think of me as sitting aloof and condemning him in my mind. You and I can’t change what has happened, Kurt; but if you believe in music and in your own gifts, why shouldn’t you turn some of our money into beauty and kindness?”
Kurt of course would share these letters with his companion, and she would report to Lanny what effect they were producing. Having spent more than half her thirty-eight years managing recalcitrant men, Beauty possessed a store of wisdom. She wouldn’t plead too much, and never find fault, but just make love the loveliest thing in Spain. She would reveal her own weakness and the need of a man’s moral strength. She would gently refer to Lanny’s needs; he was a good boy, but so easily influenced, and with a tendency to wander from one art to the next. He needed some older and steadier person to help him concentrate. For such a service many a rich man would be glad to pay, but couldn’t buy it at any price. So many tutors Lanny had had, of German and Italian, of piano and dancing and the study of the encyclopedia. The least competent of them had received more than it would cost for Kurt to stay at Bienvenu. What Kurt did for Lanny’s mother would be purely incidental—and surely the dullest person who came to the home would know that!
So at last the young officer’s scruples were broken down, and he wrote his parents in Schloss Stubendorf—now a part of Poland, thanks to the evil treaty—to ship him the music and the instruments which he had collected. Kurt told them that he was to be the teacher of that American boy who had been the family’s guest nearly six years ago. Since the boy’s mother hadn’t been a guest, it was not necessary to tell about her. Kurt hoped that his parents would forgive him for living in France; he would have nothing to do with that hateful people, but would live a retired life inside the Budd estate and go on with his serious labors as at home before the war.
IX
Lanny’s twentieth birthday came, and the adoring mother was sad because she wasn’t with him; her conscience pricked her, and she wrote a letter full of apologies and of advice which she herself had not always put to use. Not for the first time nor for the last, her pen turned to the subject of love, and the women who would be after her precious one, and his need of caution in such matters. So many cunning creatures hunting him with deadly arts, impossible to resist!
It went without saying that no woman could really be worthy of Lanny Budd in the estimation of his mother; least of all these modern chits, these shallow ones, bold and forward products of the war, which Beauty thought of as a universal plague that had poisoned the world. She had watched them in Paris during the Peace Conference, and reported them ravenous for pleasure, for sensation; knowing no restraint, no loyalty; greedy for attention, for worldly success—“golddiggers” was the new name for them, and a woman of the old days contemplated them with a horror which was rather comical when you recalled how far she herself had been from a model of discretion.
Perhaps it was Beauty Budd’s sins returning to torment her—a not uncommon phenomenon of the moral life. While Kurt worked at his music, Beauty would sit upon the shore of the Bay of Biscay, and before her mind’s eye would arise an image of a youth slender, graceful, with brown eyes forever a-shine with the expectation of new delights; with wavy brown hair worn long according to the fashion, and having a tendency to drop over into his eyes; a smile quick yet gentle, a heart kind as a girl’s. Lanny, back there in Bienvenu, was nearing the age at which his father, traveling in Paris, had met an artists’ model even younger than himself. Beauty knew exactly what had befallen that youth, for she had planned it; even in the moments when her heart had seemed to be hitting hard blows under her throat, she had known what she was doing, and why, and how. Women always know, and whatever happens is their fault—so Beauty insisted!
But she had really loved Robbie Budd; not merely his money or his position as the son of an old and proud New England family. She had proved it when the cruel test came, when by a little effort she might have married him and caused him to break with his stern old father. Where would you find a woman today who would make such a sacrifice? Was Lanny going to meet one on that Coast of Pleasure, where already the roulette wheels were beginning to spin and the colored bands to thump and screech? When Lanny in his letters mentioned the sloe-eyed demoiselle in the pension, the jeweler’s daughter who wore too many of her father’s wares; when he referred to the American females who had come down from Paris to lie in the sand and forget the war that had been won and the peace that had been lost—and how they drank too much and drove mo
tor-cars crazily—yes, Beauty knew them, she had attended the after-midnight parties and knew what the pleasure-hungry creatures might be doing to her darling, her precocious, her incomparable son! “Remember, Lanny,” warned the birthday letter, “the more attractive you make Bienvenu, the more eager some woman will be to get in there before I do.” Lanny chuckled; he could have named a woman, several in fact; but he couldn’t fail to be amused when his flighty mother turned Puritan—a joke which he and his father had shared on many an occasion.
X
Lanny would go back to his music. He had learned a lot of Bach by heart, thus paying tribute to Kurt’s taste. Also he derived pleasure from the swiftly falling notes of Debussy’s Gardens in the Rain, but wasn’t sure if Kurt would permit himself to approve any French music. He enjoyed the strange fantasies of Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exposition; having visited one exposition with Kurt, and others with his English friend Rick and with his stepfather, Lanny took all these friends with him to this odd Russian exposition. Ordinarily he didn’t care for “program music,” but when it was humorous and full of quaint turns, his curiosity was aroused and he wished that the pictures had come with the score.
Baby Marceline had solved the problems of equipoise, and was able to walk and even to run without stumbling. She would stand in the doorway while Lanny played, and presently, watching her, he saw that she was swaying to the rhythm. He played a simple tune with a strong accent, and her steps began to move to it; he decided then that she should discover the art of the dance all by herself. A new department of child study; it went on for weeks, while the tiny feet tottered here and there and the laughing brown eyes shone with the delight of adventure. Suddenly she began to display marvelous improvement, and Lanny was about to write his mother that they had a terpsichorean prodigy, when he learned that Leese had unwittingly spoiled a scientific experiment by taking the little one’s two hands and dancing with her out in the patio. After that Lanny would put a record on the phonograph, and Baby Marceline began a full course in the eurythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze, with variations according to the free expressionism of Isadora Duncan.
World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 79
