The party moved on to Berlin, where there was another picture job to be done. This time Lanny guessed the values more closely; he was learning fast and gaining assurance. A portion of his mind would be set aside for a catalogue of artworks; in it would be several thousand names of painters, and the instant he heard a name and the date of a picture he would be able to say: “One thousand dollars,” or “ten thousand,” or “a hundred thousand.” With lower figures it wasn’t worth while to bother; but here was one of the temptations to which he would never be entirely immune—some poor devil of ability would be brought to his attention and he would have an urge to promote him, even though the commission on the sales wouldn’t pay for the gasoline he used in traveling about.
But that didn’t apply to the palace of a deposed nobleman in the suburbs of Berlin. Here were a dozen old masters, and Zoltan Kertezsi would decide their destiny in the manner of a hostess writing the place-cards for a dinner party. This Frans Hals should be in the Taft collection in Cincinnati, and that Sir Joshua belonged in the Huntington collection in southern California. Zoltan would “shoot a wire” and the sale would be made—those American millionaires like to do business in that swift yes-or-no way. Apparently they put a price on every minute of their time, and Lanny wondered what they did with any which they had left over. It must seem unbearably extravagant to go for a stroll or to look at anything so cheap as a flower. Zoltan said that that was the reason they had orchids.
Johannes Robin was delighted with what had been done. He was getting his money back in short order, and without earning the enmity of an aristocrat who had many powerful friends. He began to sing the praises of this Budd and Kertezsi outfit, and the pair received inquiries from other Schieber who wanted to put a part of their gains into something that could be rolled up into a small package and carried out of Germany quickly. One thing led to another, and Lanny could have spent all his time at this exciting new business.
But they must have some fun, too. Zoltan had brought his fiddle, and with two of these, a clarinet, and a piano they could play most any chamber music; they did so for hours on end. They even tackled the later quartets of Beethoven, and became lost in their mazes, and had to admit that they didn’t know what the great master was driving at. Could it be that there was truth in what the critics of the time had said, that, being deaf, Beethoven no longer knew what he was writing? Or was he trying to say things so subtle that only a metaphysipal mind could follow him? Lanny didn’t know, and would have liked to ask Kurt; but the former artillery officer was firm in his refusal to visit the home of a Jewish speculator in marks, one who had so large a share in responsibility for the misfortunes of the Fatherland.
VIII
Kurt was staying with his brother; and Lanny was invited to a dinner party given by a group of young officers, Emil’s friends. Lanny had met British army people and French, but this was his first acquaintance with Germans. He got the impression of men who took their profession much more seriously; they were highly trained technical men, like engineers. But that didn’t make their conversation very interesting at a dinner party. All men “talk shop,” but when your “shop” is killing other men, it is depressing to a lover of humanity. These officers were young in years, but old in tragic experience, and they had to drink too much wine before their tongues were loosened. They were interested in what Lanny and Kurt had to tell about events in Munich, and from their comments it was clear that they had little tolerance for Nazi lunacies; they were supporting the present republic as a stopgap, but to a man they were convinced that the only permanent government for Germany must be a monarchy, and when the time came they meant to strike toward that goal.
During the Berlin visit Lanny and his mother laid siege to Kurt to persuade him to let them advance money for the publishing of his musical compositions. Here was the extraordinary situation, that for what Beauty would spend and did spend for a pair of dancing-slippers, all Kurt’s compositions might be put into type by faithful German workmen who would be glad of a chance to earn their daily bread. Lanny’s commission on the sale of a single mediocre painting would pay for paper and printing, and all Kurt’s friends might have copies of half a dozen operas in first editions.
It was too great a temptation for any man who believed that his work had merit. Kurt gave way, upon the understanding that the money was to be a loan, to constitute a mortgage upon receipts for the rendition rights of the works. Lanny went with him to one of the old-established music houses, and a contract was signed, and Lanny wrote a check for a few of those pounds sterling which he had in one of the Berlin banks. Nothing he had ever done with money gave him more pleasure; and Beauty was even happier, for she knew that Kurt was at a serious crisis just then, and that attention paid to his music would be a powerful force to keep him at work. Beauty loved Kurt’s music for one solid and practical reason—that it kept him shut up in her sanctuary, away from Schicklgrubers and Maxim guns!
IX
Christmas was near, so the party broke up. Beauty and Marie took the night train for Paris, the latter to return to her home, the former to spend a couple of days with Emily Chattersworth at Les Forets and then to motor with her to the Riviera. Zoltan would have to travel between Berlin and Munich to oversee the selling and shipping of pictures—no simple matter in these times of disorder, when people did not starve gladly and any servant or employee might steal a painting and substitute an inferior one. Rick was returning to The Reaches, to write an article about inflation and its effects upon everyday life. After Christmas he was planning to bring his family to Bienvenu.
Lanny and Kurt traveled to Stubendorf, which had now become a sort of third home for a wandering young American. Once more the elderly horses toiled up the slope to the castle on the height; once more the sleighbells jingled and the family came running out; once more the hearts of two blond young Aryan widows went pit-a-pat at the sight of a super-eligible young American whose dark love secret would never be told to them. They sang the old Christmas songs, and some new ones which Lanny had picked up at the publishers’. They rejoiced at the news of Kurt’s good fortune, and did their pathetic best to reward his benefactor and pupil—as they still thought of their guest. Once more the wise Herr Meissner discussed the affairs of Germany, and Lanny set down some of his opinions for Rick to use in his article.
In Upper Silesia were once prosperous families having art treasures they would gladly exchange for foreign money; Lanny traveled about and looked at them, and made notes as to prices expected. He learned that the Graf Stubendorf had a cousin in Vienna with a famous collection, and that this gentleman shared the hardships of his dismembered land. So, on their way home, Lanny and Kurt stopped for a couple of days in a city which had been famed as the home of wine, woman, and song, and which now had been sentenced to slow misery and decay. The beautiful blue Danube had turned a muddy yellow, the skies above it were gray and the people depressed, and pitiful in their faded finery.
The two friends looked at more pictures, and Lanny imparted some of the knowledge he had gained—but nothing about prices! He sent Kurt off to a concert while he discussed that delicate subject with an elderly aristocrat who seemed too tired to care what happened to his fortunes. Lanny made notes, and promised to do the best he could. He sent a complete schedule to Zoltan, and when he got to Bienvenu called in a stenographer and wrote letters to his growing list of prospective customers. Lanny figured that after deducting all the costs of the trip for himself and his friends he had cleared more than twenty thousand dollars—and he was only twenty-four years old!
So for the rest of his days he would have the comforting certainty of being able to have whatever he needed, and without asking any man’s permission or being told what to do or say. The only thing that would make trouble for him was the trouble of all the people around him, of a world in torment whose cries came to him as if in a delirium. It seemed irrational to heed these cries, for there was nothing you could do about them; yet how could you help wishing that you could, and
wondering if you couldn’t? A strange plight for art lovers, who trained themselves to be receptive and then didn’t dare use their faculties except upon imaginary things! Divide your mind in half, and build an emotion-tight compartment between the two; be sensitive to art and insensitive to life; learn to follow the example of that Russian countess who wept for the woes of the tenor in the opera while her coachman froze to death on the box outside!
19
Broad Is the Way
I
It was to a greatly depressed France that the travelers came back. The franc had been going down all through the Ruhr invasion; reparations appeared to be mythical, and bonds that had been issued on them were losing value. Exaggerated amounts had been paid as restitution for war-damaged properties—it was a way of rewarding political supporters, not so different from what is called “graft” in the States. All the losses came back on those who had fixed incomes and salaries; the only gainers were speculators, and those fortunate few whose incomes were in dollars.
A delightful thing to find that you could get fifty percent more francs for your remittances from home! American visitors wrote or cabled about it, and steamers were crowded with refugees from Prohibition and Puritanism. Each year the boom on the Riviera became bigger and noisier; hotels and pensions were crowded, jazz-bands thumped all night, casinos were crowded with gamblers and dancers. The bathing-suits worn on the beaches became more and more scanty, until it seemed that nothing more could be spared. There was no longer any limit to anything; you did what you pleased, provided you had the price or could get it away from somebody else.
All the familiar figures came back every season: the kings playing tennis and baccarat, the maharajas playing polo or “chemmy,” the Russian aristocrats running tearooms as a cover for pandering; the “beauty queens,” the “lounge lizards,” the “sugar daddies” with their “warm babies,” the “hot mammas” with their “dancing boys”—the types were old, but the language was fresh from New York or Hollywood. The movie stars came, and walked like gods among an adoring population which had seen them magnified and transfigured upon the screen, and now stood to watch them, sleek and supple in tight bathing-suits, diving from the springboards below the great Hotel du Cap, or strolling on the Boulevard de la Croisette in costumes fit for a million-dollar super-feature.
Pick any famous name from the headlines of the newspapers, and it was a safe bet that you would meet him or her on the Côte d’Azur some time between January and March. The money they spent filled the purses of food and wine merchants, and the money they owned made the subject of awe-stricken gossip. If a giant hand could have come down on the Riviera and swept up a few hundred of them and put them through a financial squeezer, it would have collected most of the treasures of the earth. Cattle kings from the Argentine, wool kings from Australia, diamond kings from South Africa, copper kings from Montana—you had only to list the places where wealth was produced, and here were the owners of it.
Sir Basil Zaharoff, wearying of la haute politiqué and the financing of wars, had found himself a friendly little business, a toy to play with in his old age, a means of recouping his losses in Turkey; he had purchased for a round million pounds the stocks of the “Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Etrangers de Monaco,” and was now its president and manager. The Knight Commander of the Bath had become yet another kind of bathing-master—but don’t imagine that he went into the sea himself, or that he rented the privilege to others; no, the name of this company was a sixty-year-old camouflage for the most sumptuous and ornate gambling-palace in the world, so important that its locale was a separate nation all by itself, its owner a prince by right of purchase. The Monte Carlo casino had been done over and made more fashionable than ever. Previously you had been admitted free, but that was not according to the moral code of an old Greek trader; you now paid to get in, and paid still more before you got out—despite the fact that thousands of brains in Europe and America were concentrated on the devising of a “system” whereby they might beat the bank. Sir Basil himself might be observed taking his constitutional every afternoon, just as Lanny and his father had observed him ten years before; but he had a fixed rule never to go into the casino, and there was a story of a lady who had lost money and appealed to the great man to tell her how to avoid losing more. “Certainly, madame,” he replied. “Do not gamble.”
II
Ever more varied and strange were the forms which life took in this world of pleasure; and few were in better position to observe them than a young man with an agreeable smile, a well-filled purse, and a reputation for being able to dispose of works of art. It was astounding how many persons had inherited such works from their forefathers and cherished them as treasures without price; also how many schemes they devised to get introductions to Lanny Budd so that they might show him these possessions and sell them to him at almost any price. A Coromandel screen, a Japanese golden Kwannon—what means did Lanny have to know whether such things were genuine or not? He would never forget a sight which he had been taken to as a boy—a workshop in an obscure quarter of Florence where replicas of marble sculptures were made wholesale. The device, invented in America, consisted of half a dozen steel drills attached at intervals to a long rod, and caused to revolve by machinery. In front of each of these whirling drills a block of marble was fastened, and at one end of the rod an operator sat in front of the statue which was to be reproduced, a steel point attached to his end of the rod was passed over the model, and the other six drills moved in unison, eating away the marble from the other six blocks and gradually bringing into existence six replicas of the original. In other parts of this workshop the products were sprayed with chemicals and otherwise treated to make them “genuine old masters” for the American trade. Garde á vous, Lanny Budd—this art business is not all beer and skittles!
There was a young and dashing Rumanian countess who had fled from her country at the height of the war, bringing an old mother and a few art treasures in her automobile. She was pathetic, almost tearful over the plundering of her castle—she really had had one, and Lanny had been taught to respect genuine titles. The lady took him to her apartment and showed him an invaluable cloisonné vase—at least she called it that, and only with difficulty was she persuaded to suggest a value of a hundred thousand francs. Lanny said he didn’t know anyone who bought vases, and he himself was not a dealer, he acted only as an agent for customers. The upshot was that the countess broke down and wept, admitting that she was in desperate financial straits. Perhaps Lanny might have been moved if she hadn’t tried to spill the tears on him; he kept politely out of reach, and said that he would try to interest someone in the vase—with the result that the price came down ten thousand francs at a time, and in the end he paid two thousand for it, just to get away from a painful scene.
He packed the object carefully and shipped it to Zoltan, who was in Paris at the time, and in due course came a letter from his friend saying that it was a very lovely vase for anyone who wanted something to put flowers in, and if Lanny needed another to match it, Zoltan knew the shop in Paris where it could be bought for a hundred francs. Two thousand being then less than ninety dollars, it was a not too expensive lesson; but when the story was told to the family it was suggested that in future Lanny should take Jerry Pendleton or someone else when he inspected objets d’art in the apartments of strange ladies. Beauty made this suggestion, but Lanny had an idea that Marie had been taken into consultation!
III
Artists, also, began to take an interest in this well-connected youth. They all knew him because he was the stepson of Detaze and the nephew of Blackless—to say nothing of being the son of a pink-and-gold butterfly who had emerged from the chrysalis of an artists’ model in Paris. Several who had painted her and fallen in love with her now lived on the Riviera or came there to paint, and when they heard about Lanny’s good fortune they all brought their works and invited him to make such fortunes for them. It got so that the s
ervants were told that whenever anybody came to the gates of Bienvenu with a portfolio, Lanny was absent for an indefinite time. That didn’t fit very well with a name meaning “Welcome”; but how often it happens in this world that people are not able to carry out their good intentions!
American painters came often to the Côte d’Azur; among them the great John Sargent—a hard man to know, but Zoltan knew him and gave Lanny a letter. Sargent was old, but still erect, a broad-shouldered, handsome man with ruddy face and a small white beard; he had painted portraits of the wealthy and great, and made them noble-looking as they wished to be, but now he was weary of them and desired no more of their wealth. One of the last had been old John D. Rockefeller, who had paid him fifty thousand dollars for a portrait, and the painter had given the money to the Red Cross. Lanny brought him an offer from one of the richest ladies in Cannes; he was free to name his own price, but he looked at a photograph of her and remarked that he would as soon paint a bar of soap.
Instead he said: “Come sketching with me.” So Lanny, who had loved this coast from childhood, took him to some little-known beauty spots, and sat and observed Sargent making watercolor sketches. One of the most interesting things in the world, to watch a man of genius working in a frenzy of concentration and something lovely growing under his hands. Lanny kept as still as a mouse, answering only when he was spoken to, and after several such expeditions the artist gave him sketches which might have been sold for a thousand dollars.
All kinds of people on this lovely shore, and all kinds of artworks coming into being! One day Lanny went with his mother to lunch at the home of a divorcée from New York who had brought a considerable fortune with her. On the walls of her dining-room he saw four panels which hit him between the eyes. They were painted on silk backed with wood, and he thought he had never seen such a glory of color; peacocks and other great tropical birds, magnificent stylized designs in purple and gold and scarlet and black. Lanny couldn’t eat for looking at them, and the hostess said: “Oh, don’t you know Dick Oxnard? He’s spending the winter here.”
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 41
