Presidential Agent

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Lanny took the occasion to remark, ‘For a matter of eight years I gave FDR what help I could, and I made it a point never to ask the smallest favour of him. You may count upon me to continue that attitude’.

  ‘Come and see me when you come back from Europe, Mr Budd’, said the sorely burdened man.

  IX

  Lanny returned to his hotel and found his wife still absorbed in making notes on the margins of manuscripts and letters. All sorts of people sent her material which they hoped to get on the radio, and she felt a sense of obligation to these earnest souls. So many agreed with her on the subject of peace, it seemed strange indeed that there should be so little peace in the world and so many prospects of wars.

  ‘I was with Truman’, he told her. He had a right to tell that because Truman had sent her a message. But he didn’t deliver it correctly, because it seemed to imply that the President was losing his hopes for the success of their programme.

  ‘Did you invite him to talk on the programme?’ she asked—the insatiable one. He told her he had overlooked doing so; the President had had a confidential request to make. Lanny said no more than that, and she did not ask. He told how the President looked, and about the six hundred documents he had to sign every day. He had said that he was a man of peace, and this was a consolation to Laurel, who had been worried by the speech he had made to Congress, propounding the so-called Truman Doctrine. It had sounded warlike, though it said no more than that the Kremlin would not be allowed to have its way with Greece and Turkey. But obviously there could be no reason for considering it warlike, unless Stalin did mean to do some harm to those two countries. It appeared that persons who were calling the ‘doctrine’ warlike were persons who didn’t mind seeing the harm done.

  Lanny reported that he would fly to Berlin by way of London in three days. He could not say just how long he would be gone, but he hoped it would not be more than a week or two. They would have time to discuss matters with the Peace staff and arrange for Laurel not to have too many burdens to carry. She said, ‘I won’t complain. Do take care of yourself’.

  X

  Next morning they drove back to Edgemere, and in the evening there was a session of the whole Peace family. It was quite an impressive family, whether you judged it by standards worldly or intellectual. The oldest member was an English baronet with the distinguished name of Sir Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson. He was a year or so older than Lanny, which had meant a great deal when they were boys together. The two, with Kurt Meissner, had been dancing demons in Gluck’s Orpheus at the Dalcroze festival away back before World War I. Most of his life he had walked with a limp, having crash-landed as a flier in that war.

  Rick had helped to build the Labour party in England and to bring it to power the previous year. He might have gone back and had an important post, but he preferred to stay and feed ideas on the subject of peace and social reconstruction to the American press. He considered these two causes to be one and the same, wars being simply the culmination of unrestricted competition in the world’s economic affairs. ‘Let there be peace’ meant to him ‘let there be social planning’. He was a man of exacting literary standards and spent his time wading through manuscripts and looking for hidden talent. Now he sat, taking an occasional puff on his pipe, listening attentively to what the others had to say. When he spoke it was with decision, and they heeded him.

  There was his wife, Nina, who had taken care of him as a war nurse and married him soon thereafter. She edited the weekly paper called Peace, made up in part of the radio talks, with comments about the speaker and the audience, and the fan letters, full of ideas and arguments. It also used some of the material which the syndicate sent out to the press. It was not a heavy job, so Nina had time to help with reading manuscripts and interviewing would-be talent.

  Then there was the eldest son of this pair, who went by the odd pet name of Scrubbie. He had been a flier in the recent war, and had come to Edgemere partly to be with his parents and partly to be with Frances Barnes Budd, Lanny’s daughter by his first marriage. Scrubbie didn’t say much, and Frances didn’t say anything; they sat close together and listened attentively to the wisdom of their elders. She was going to school, and he was making a regular job of the Peace work. The same was true of Freddi Robin, a Jewish boy whose father had been murdered by the Nazis. His uncle, Hansi Robin, the violinist, came now and then to play over the radio.

  Then there was Gerald de Groot, scion of an old New York family; his mother was in the Social Register, but Gerald wasn’t apt to make it himself, with the present company he was keeping. It was he who did the radio announcing when Lanny was away. He had a most elegant manner and a cultivated voice, from what he called Havvud. He was proud to be earning his own keep, and he boarded with an elderly family which did and delivered the town’s laundry. The woman was an ardent Socialist, while her husband called himself an Anarchist. The scion of the de Groots found them both delightful.

  Such was the Peace group. Freddi’s mother would come in an emergency, and there were several other persons in New York and nearby suburban towns who would do the same. Also there were secretaries and other paid employees. They had had to get along without Lanny in the past and could do it again. The scheduling of speakers for the radio was always several weeks ahead, so Laurel, who ran the programmes, did not have to worry. They promised to help her out, for the special reason they all understood.

  In the studio from which the Peace Programme went out over the air there hung on the wall in front of the microphone a life-size oil painting of a stately grey-haired lady, Mrs Emily Chattersworth, who had lived on the heights above Cannes on the French Riviera and had been the friend and protectress of Beauty Budd when she had borne a man child and had had him christened Lanning Prescott, that having been the name of Emily’s father. Emily had been the daughter of a fashionable but impoverished family and had been married off to a New York banker much older than herself. This gentleman moved to France when it was discovered that he had been using life-insurance funds in his private speculations. Emily stood by him, but always thereafter felt guilty about her money; she suffered both in mind and fortune through two world wars, so when she died she left a million dollars to a foundation in the hope of preventing a third calamity.

  That was the way the Peace group had come into being. The programme had been very carefully planned with the best expert advice. It had been budgeted to spend two hundred thousand a year for five years; apparently it might be able to run longer and to spend more, for contributions kept coming in. There were so many people wanting peace!

  2 KNOW YOUR MONEY

  I

  The Budds were one of the old families of Connecticut, and their name was known all over the world because of the guns they made. Lanny had known about those guns as soon as he was old enough to know anything, and he had learned to use the smaller ones when he was a young boy. His father, Robbie Budd, had been the European salesman of the company, and in Paris he had loved an artist’s model whom he had called Beauty because she deserved the compliment. He hadn’t married her because his stern old Puritan father back home had received in an anonymous envelope a photograph of her portrait in the nude, and had told his son that if he married such a woman he would be disinherited.

  But Robbie had allowed Beauty to say that she was married, and he had set her up in a lovely estate on the French Riviera, where he came to visit her several times every year. When later on, at his father’s urging, he had married the daughter of the president of the First National Bank of Newcastle, Connecticut, he gave it out that he had divorced the painter’s model.

  It was not until Lanny was seventeen and America entered the First World War that Robbie took him home to meet the family and be made respectable. Esther Budd, Robbie’s wife, was a conscientious daughter of the Puritans; she had done her best to win Lanny’s affection and respect and had done so. She had three children of her own: two sons, who were by now middle-aged businessmen taking over their fath
er’s affairs little by little; and a daughter, Bessie Remsen Budd, who was called Bess by everyone. When she was seventeen her mother had taken her to Europe, and in Paris at the home of Mrs Chattersworth she had listened to the violin playing of Hansi Robin, then a brilliant and ardent youth. Bess had found it the most wonderful music she had ever heard, and she had been fascinated by this young genius.

  A year later he had come to America to make his debut in Carnegie Hall, and he had been invited to Esther’s home. She had been really shocked by that uproar in her drawing room—she knew it was great art, but it belonged in the concert hall, not in a private home. But the whole town had been in a frenzy of excitement about it. Bess and Hansi had fallen desperately in love, and what was the daughter of the Puritans to do about it? She wouldn’t for the world have admitted to anti-Semitic feeling, but she could certainly admit that she hadn’t looked forward to such an exuberant husband for her daughter. Bess had pleaded and wept; she had been giving all her time to improving her piano playing, so that she might some day become Hansi’s accompanist as well as his wife. There had been nothing for the mother to do but give way and have the marriage in her home.

  That had been nearly a quarter of a century ago, and in that time the fates had dealt to the couple their due quota of good fortune and bad. The Nazis had grabbed Hansi’s younger brother, Freddi, and tortured him in the Dachau concentration camp, and handed him over to Lanny Budd only when he was near to death. They had grabbed Hansi’s father and robbed him of his fortune, so that now he was working as the sales agent for Budd-Erling Aircraft. Hansi and Bess had played together on tour after tour in every civilised country of the world. They had two sons who were hoping to be musicians like their parents. Those were good things and would have made most people happy; but one thing was not so good—the daughter of Robbie Budd and Esther Remsen Budd of Newcastle, Connecticut, had been for many years an active member of the Communist party of America, and was growing more bitter and more outspoken with every year.

  II

  Hansi Robin was to play with the Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall; and that was a place of memories for the son of Budd-Erling. He had heard Paderewski play here and Chaliapin sing, and seen Isadora Duncan dance on flitting bare feet. To recall them brought melancholy feelings—‘Eheu fugaces!’ Lanny had the fancy that the molecules which composed these walls must have been affected by the vibrations, and perhaps these effects endured; some day might come awizard scientist who would devise a way to detect them—and what a time he would have sorting them out!

  The name of the hall brought back to Lanny’s mind an elderly Scotsman whom he had met somewhere in London in his early youth: a smallish man with twinkling grey eyes and white beard closely trimmed. True to his type, he had been frugal and had saved his pennies; he had become a steel master and had saved his dollars, until he had some three or four hundred million of them. In his old age he had sold out his properties for that amount of cash to the only man in the world who could have paid it—J. P. Morgan, who controlled all the credit in Wall Street and wanted to form a steel trust and fix prices.

  Andrew, canny as ever, had looked about him for a way to buy the greatest amount of post mortem publicity. He had built this fine concert hall in New York, thus compelling every music lover to speak his name frequently. He had scattered twenty-five hundred and five libraries over the world, and upon each of them had engraved his name, and inside had hung a portrait of himself. You could say this for Andrew—he was more intelligent than the youth who fired the Ephesian dome or the Egyptian king who set a couple of hundred thousand slaves to dragging huge blocks of stone across the desert to build a pyramid.

  It was a decorous audience. They had come to have a gracious inner experience, each one alone. They sat waiting, and if they spoke at all it was in low tones. The musicians came out on the platform, one or two at a time, took their seats, and began making their mysterious little noises, each on his own. That was individualism, and presently there was a hush, and the conductor came out and took his stand on the podium, tapped with his little baton, and after that it was co-operation, a social product known as the ‘Oberon Overture’, a creation of the purest delight.

  When its melodies died away the conductor walked off the stage and presently came back escorting a tall black-clad gentleman, carrying a violin. In this year 1946 Hansi Robin was forty-one years old; his hair, which had been black, now showed touches of grey. Lanny had first known him as a lad lost in the wonders of music, flitting from one composition to the next like a humming bird over a bed of flowers. Hansi’s younger brother had played the clarinet, and Lanny had seen them as two shepherd lads out of ancient Judea, chanting the holy psalms of their race: ‘Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice: and let men say among the nations, The Lord reigneth. Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof; let the fields rejoice, and all that is therein. Then shall the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the Lord, because he cometh to judge the earth. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever’.

  The mercy of the Lord had been manifested in a strange way to Hansi Robin, German-born Jew. The Lord had turned loose a herd of wild beasts in that civilised land, and they had seized some six million of the Lord’s chosen people, poisoned them, and turned their bodies into fertiliser for the fields. They had done this to most of Hansi’s relatives and friends, and had almost done it to his brother and his father. The horror of the experience had graven deep lines in the musician’s face, never to be removed; it had become a mask of sorrow, and he rarely smiled. There was something priestlike about his aspect as he stood acknowledging the welcome of the audience with slow inclinations of his head.

  The hall fell silent, the conductor tapped his desk, and the orchestra swept into the opening notes of the Beethoven concerto. Hansi must have played that masterwork many hundreds of times since his boyhood. Lanny had heard him play it a score of times and knew every note of it. Hansi’s execution was perfect, his tone clear. In the slow movement all his grief wailed, and to those who knew him it was a heart-rending utterance.

  But sorrow never lasts to the end of a Beethoven composition. He was the defier of fate, the great yea-sayer, and presently the music was like the wind running over a meadow of flowers, superlative happiness infinitely multiplied. ‘O youths and maidens, in song delighting, come dance and play and pleasure with me’—Hansi and Lanny had agreed upon these words as conforming to the theme. To listen to it was to be reborn in courage, hope, and joy; to be uplifted to a splendid climax and go out with spirit renewed. Such was the meaning of the applause; people were trying to tell Hansi Robin that they loved both him and Beethoven, and that both were to go on living forever. In these modern days the double miracle was commonplace; there were not merely Beethoven’s printed notes, but Hansi Robin’s recording, which you could buy in a music store for a few dollars.

  III

  After the concert was over, Lanny and Laurel and Hansi’s nephew Freddi took the musician to a café and tried to get him to eat, because he would never eat anything before a concert, and afterward he was exhausted, depressed from the reaction of the excitement. There had been a time when Bess had done this service for him; she would never have dreamed of letting him go to a concert alone. But now she had some committee meeting, a higher duty. She was on so many committees that her name had become a sort of Red talisman when you saw it you would say to yourself, ‘Aha! Another Communist front!’

  The four friends sat at a table in the little café, in the portion of New York known as Yorkville. Hansi had before him a wienerschnitzel and a glass of milk. Now and then he sipped the latter absent-mindedly and put a piece of the meat into his mouth. He was very sad and did not try to hide it; if your friends cannot help you any other way, at least they can let you be sad.

  ‘Lanny’, he said, ‘I am afraid I am going to have to get another accompanist. Bess no longer has the time to practise, and we can’t learn anything new. Y
ou know, a performer nowadays can’t get along on just the Beethoven and the Mendelssohn and the Tchaikovsky’.

  ‘Have you told Bess?’ inquired Bess’s brother, and the answer was, ‘Many times, but it only leads to a quarrel. She has her mission, and it is no longer the same as mine. Don’t mind if I talk about it; you are the only people I can be frank with’.

  Laurel asked, ‘Do you suppose it would do any good if I appealed to her?’

  ‘Not a bit. She is saving the world and no longer has any use for people who aren’t. She knows how I dislike her friends, so she doesn’t bring them to the house very often. She meets them outside—and that means I’m alone a good part of the time’. Hansi sat brooding, then added as if in haste, ‘Understand, I don’t mean she is having an affair. I don’t think she feels the need of love any more; she is satisfied with hate’.

  ‘The Communists live on hate’, Lanny assented.

  ‘In the old days, Lanny, I went to several of their conventions with Bess. They were open to the public then. I had read that the old-time Russian peasants were known as the “dark people”, but I decided that those Reds I watched were the ones who really deserved the name. I don’t refer to their complexions—I am no blond myself. I mean their souls. They are full of suspicion and couldn’t carry on any kind of discussion without attributing base motives to one another. I suppose that is why in Russia they cannot settle any problem except by killing their opponents’.

  ‘Or putting them in a concentration camp’, suggested Laurel.

  ‘It comes to the same thing. I am tormented by the thought that we are going to have another war, and that I’m going to have to see my wife in a concentration camp. Do you suppose it is coming, Lanny?’

  Said Lanny, ‘The Communists are all for peace, of course; but the capitalists and imperialists of the whole world are going to force war upon them’. Irony is a dangerous form of utterance, but Lanny could be sure that none of these three friends would miss his meaning.