Lanny never heard these two men of large affairs say that they hoped for the spreading of distrust among nations, in order that their own business might thrive; he never heard them say that they hated pacifists and pacifying statesmen because they kept Budd’s and Vickers “in the red.” But that was the attitude to which they were automatically driven; it was the underlying assumption of their talk. Lanny knew that many people hated them, and wrote books attacking them bitterly; he had started to read one of these, but it had made him unhappy. He knew that the “merchants of death” were the product of forces beyond their own control. It was a game they played, and they lost themselves in the excitement of it. He told himself that it wasn’t so different from the thrill of selling pictures. He won thousands, while his father won hundreds of thousands and Zaharoff millions; but the feelings were the same.
VIII
Robbie told his son that Esther was going to bring the family to Europe for the coming summer. This was a part of every young person’s cultural equipment—that is, among those who had the price. Lanny’s stepmother didn’t approve of Europe or of Americans who lived there, but she knew that Europe was history, Europe was art, and she couldn’t deny her children their share. So they were coming, along with a million other tourists, as soon as school closed; reservations had been made and tickets paid for.
Also Zoltan happened to be passing, and gave his opinion that the time had come to let an eager world see the work of Marcel Detaze; they would rent a first-class gallery in Paris and have a “one-man show,” not letting any dealers in on it; they would put extremely high prices on all the works, not with the idea of selling many but of lending glamour to them all. The latter part of the season would be best; Zoltan suggested June, and Robbie said: “Keep it open into the first days of July, so that the family can see it, and they’ll help to advertise it in America.”
Soon after that came a letter from the Robins. They too were interested in culture; they too were working hard at their studies and earning a vacation. Papa had promised to let them come to Paris and learn all they could about French music. They knew that Lanny was accustomed to spending his summers in or near Paris; might they see something of him, and perhaps visit art galleries with him? Would the kind Mrs. Chattersworth care to have Hansi play music for her? And so on. These two virginal youths had never got any hint of the real reason why Lanny spent his summers in or near Paris, and could have no idea that they might embarrass him by an offer of intimacy. Lanny didn’t worry about it, for the pair were old enough to know their way about; he would say to them quite simply: “Madame de Bruyne has been my amie for the past few years.” And that would be that.
Gracyn Phillipson, alias Pillwiggle, showed up on the Cap at the height of the season. Did she come on account of the delightful Lanny Budd, or was she too seeking culture? “Pill-wiggle” of course wasn’t any name, just an absurdity that Robbie had invented for a high-school girl presuming to act in a play at his country club. Since then she had made herself a name that even the flippant munitions man could remember. Her show had run in London for the better part of a year, after which she had gone back to New York and starred in a “triangle” play which hadn’t done very well—but everybody agreed that it wasn’t the fault of Phyllis Gracyn, whose acting had been brilliant. Her producer had given her a rather repulsive play, in which she had set out to carry off another woman’s husband, and the man was such a dub that nobody cared very much who got him or what they did with him.
To be sure, the star might have gone to Florida for her rest; Florida also had a “season.” It had alligators and palmettos and gambling-palaces, but it didn’t have culture; except for St. Augustine it had no history, no romantic-sounding names that highbrow people talked about. So the ambitious young actress took the warm Mediterranean route, which brought her via Gibraltar and Algiers and Naples and Genoa; at this last port she parted from a young man of wealth whom she had been fascinating for eleven days, and took the train to Antibes and put herself up at the expensive hotel on the Cap. From there she wrote a note to Lanny; her friends now called her “Phil,” but to him she would always be “your grateful and admiring Gracyn.”
Naturally, he went to call on her. He had found her good company in London, and she had helped to bid up the price of the Detaze. She had asked a lot of questions about the Côte d’Azur, and he had said: “Come and see it.” Now he decided—out of the vast knowledge of the heart of woman which he had acquired at the age of twenty-five—that he would tell Marie where he was going, and all about the Broadway celebrity whom so many people adored, but not he. Gracyn might be ever so expert at creating “triangles” on the stage, but she wouldn’t make Lanny a part of one, and would Marie please not worry because he was polite to her? Marie promised, and Lanny kissed her to seal the compact.
IX
There were other celebrities on the Cap; it was coming to be a rendezvous for them, and they preferred one another’s company, looking down on the uncelebrated as not worth bothering with. Already there were several at the hotel who called Gracyn “Phil,” but when Lanny appeared she shook them all off and strolled with him to a quiet seat in one of the nooks with which the grounds had been thoughtfully provided. She was only a year or so older than he, but she had matured with surprising speed, and was nothing of the crude small-town girl who had been so excited over playing the part of Puck in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. She was the same small sylph-like creature who had been dowered with charm; but now she had made a study of it, both on stage and off, and could exercise it when and where she pleased—just as Hansi Robin could pick up a fiddle and a bow and extract melancholy or rapture from it. It didn’t matter what Gracyn had been in the past, any more than it mattered that the bow was strung with horsehairs, and the fiddlestrings made from the intestines of a pig.
Her way of charming Lanny was to be his old pal, with whom it was a delight to be simple and straightforward. He, the old-timer, could come into her dressing-room and see her with her grease paint off and her wig on the dressing-table. Not literally, of course, for she wore a gay spring costume of white organdy and a wide floppy hat with pink poppies, and if all that color in her cheeks was real her sea voyage had certainly done her good. She chatted about old times, and what funny young things they had been, and how little they had guessed what was coming to them. He told her about the picture business, and about his friend who composed music, and how Rick was writing an extraordinary play. “Oh, has it got a part for an ingénue?” she asked.
Lanny, who had learned something about worldly arts himself, had meant for her to put that question, and he answered that it surely had. “I want a good play the worst way!” exclaimed the actress. “Could I read it?”
“I don’t know,” said the other. “Rick has always been fussy about getting his work just right before anybody sees it. He says that first impressions are permanent.”
“You know how it was with us in the old days—we worked over a play and we all helped to get it right.”
“I know, but Rick has ideas about literature. He wants to write something that will be published in book form and be permanent; and then he wants it produced just the way he writes it.”
“That makes it very hard,” replied the actress; “but anyhow, will you bring him to see me?”
“My mother wants you to come to our home, and he’ll be there. Also you’ll meet my amie.”
“Oh, have you got an amie?” On the stage great ladies of fashion met unexpected situations with perfect savoir faire, and Gracyn had learned the phrase and what it meant.
Lanny explained that he had been for many years in love with a married lady who didn’t live with her husband. Gracyn found that romantic, if disappointing; she said that she would feel exactly as though she were on the stage. Lanny laughed and said: “Don’t behave as you did in your last play!” He had read reviews of it, and told her that he would always follow her career. Friendship was a pleasure, memory was a pleasure, and by means
of art both could be extended.
“Oh, Lanny darling, you do say such lovely things!” exclaimed the star. “Why didn’t I stick by you when I had you?”
“Because you wanted to go on the stage,” he replied, gravely. “Don’t say you aren’t satisfied!”
“Who is ever satisfied, Lanny? Are you?”
“Indeed I am!” he replied.
X
Phyllis Gracyn came to tea, and there were the three embattled ladies of Bienvenu, each prepared to guard her own. But the actress kept to her role of an unpretentious small-town girl, grateful for an opportunity to observe life in a villa on the Riviera about which she had heard so much. She wanted to know an artists’ model who had married a munitions king and borne him a son; ditto a French lady who didn’t love her husband but did love a shining art expert; ditto the young wife of a crippled English aviator turned playwright. The Prussian artillery officer turned musician didn’t often show up at tea parties, but Gracyn had heard about him, and it was her thought that if she proved herself a perfect lady, attentive, considerate, and in no way dangerous, she might have a chance to study all these fascinating types. It was what the French called the haut monde, which the actress learned to her great bewilderment sounded like “Oh Maud!” It was “high life,” which the French pronounced the way it looked to them—“hig leaf!”
What are the emotions of a mother who meets for the first time a woman who seduced her son at the age of eighteen years? Well, it depends upon the mother, and also upon the son. Lanny laughed at Beauty’s idea of the episode, insisting that Gracyn hadn’t done him any harm, but had taught him to look out for himself. Seven years had passed, and bygones were far gone, so be a woman of the world, and maybe Gracyn would get interested in Rick’s play and make a fortune for both author and star. Nina was not indifferent to that argument, and was quite sure that nobody was going to run off with Rick. As for Marie, if she had any anxieties she was too proud to reveal them.
Gracyn found the lame playwright difficult to deal with. He didn’t show himself sufficiently eager for the attentions of a leading lady of renown. He told her that if ever he wrote a play that he thought would please the great public, he’d be happy to let her see it, but the one on which he was working was an attempt to portray the spiritual problems of the youth of his generation, and he thought that only a few were as yet awake to them. The story had to do with a young writer who had made a success, and whose socially ambitious wife looked forward to moving on to the next one; but the writer had become troubled with the problem of poverty versus wealth. His questionings were embodied in a girl of the ruling class—the scenes of the play were laid in England—who didn’t appreciate her high social position, but wanted to help the workers to pull down her own class.
When Rick outlined this story, Gracyn looked worried. “It sounds as if it was going to be a ‘radical’ play.”
“Stupid people will call it that,” answered the playwright; which might or might not have been impolite.
Gracyn noted that it was going to be another “triangle,” a theme which has been thoroughly tried out on the stage. She begged Rick to read her the first act, and he did so, with Lanny listening, and afterward they had a discussion, Lanny still listening. It carried him back to those old days which Gracyn called “funny,” when he had been driving a real ingénue about the roads of Connecticut, she plying him with naive questions about the world of fashionable society to which she looked up as if it were heaven. Now she had managed to climb there, by what sacrifices she would never tell; and here was a young man to that heaven born, assuring her that the place was “phony,” its scenery papier-mâché, its glory tinsel and gilt, its dwellers spoiled and silly children, playing on harps out-of-tune music which they had got from degraded savages in the jungles of Africa!
To Gracyn all this sounded crazy; but if it was the latest thing, of course she wanted it. Rick quoted the phrase of an American philosopher: “the worship of the bitch goddess Success.” But what did that mean? Didn’t everybody want to succeed? And what was wrong with succeeding? You worked hard and got on top and then somebody told you it was all nothing. But how did Rick know? If everybody and everything was bad, who was going to judge? Said the darling of Broadway: “The way it seems to me, you and Lanny have had success all your lives and you’ve got bored with it. But I’ve just got mine, and, believe you me, I like it.”
The fastidious young Englishman was amused and somewhat touched. It was a statement of the arriviste attitude. It seemed characteristically American—because in that “land of unlimited possibility” the classes were in a state of flux, and it was possible for a girl who had been brought up in rooms over a decorating-shop to find herself at the age of twenty-six at a de luxe hotel, diving off springboards into the same water with the sons of German barons, Rumanian boyars, and members of the old French noblesse.
Lanny, who had watched the birth of this dancing star, now listened while the baronet’s son patiently explained that modern society was based on commercialism, and therefore many of its values were open to suspicion; there were a great many people trying to hold onto their money, and making whatever pretenses were necessary to that end. Lanny wondered: Is Rick going to make a “radical” out of Gracyn? Or is he just going to get his play turned down?
He guessed that the latter would be easier, and so it proved. Gracyn didn’t give up her stage career and become a crusader for social justice. What she did was to tell Rick that his ideas were interesting, and that she was grateful for the explanation; she would think about his play, and do what she could to find a manager who was interested in modern ideas; but it wouldn’t be easy, because managers also worshiped the bitch goddess, who was known in the theatrical world as Box-Office.
To Lanny the actress said: “Your friend is a very bright man; but he doesn’t realize what an advantage he has over the rest of us. You can’t look down on things until you’ve got above them.” Lanny said that was a good “line” for Rick’s play.
XI
The lady from Broadway and Forty-Second Street made herself so agreeable that Beauty decided she was a real celebrity and gave a tea in her honor. The members of the smartest sets came, and Gracyn liked that a lot better than listening to talk about the woes of the poor. These ladies and gentlemen wore such elegant costumes and had such smooth and easy manners that it was hard indeed to believe they were papier-mâché, tinsel and gilt, spoiled and silly. Even those who criticized these people went on playing their game; Rick’s wife wore a lovely tulle frock to this tea party, and her sweet little children were dressed up and showed off their perfect manners along with Baby Marceline; Lanny wore a simple sport-suit, but somebody had seen to it that it was freshly laundered. To a poor girl from a near-slum in a New England manufacturing town it appeared that the sons and daughters of the rich had had things far too easy.
There came a cablegram from a manager in New York who had a play for Gracyn, so she went to Marseille to take a steamer. Lanny offered to drive her, and invited Marie to go along, but Marie found an excuse for letting them go alone. Maybe an old friend might have something she wanted to say to Lanny; and so it proved.
“Darling,” she began—it being the stage formula—“are you sure you are happy?”
“Perfectly, dear.”
“It seems a queer sort of arrangement. It can’t last forever, can it?”
“Forever is a long word.”
“Do you think that you and I could ever be happy again, Lanny? I mean as lovers.”
“No,” he answered, promptly. “I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s like two comets flying about in space. We come near each other, and then fly a long, long way apart and stay for a long, long time.”
“But I could stay with you, Lanny, if you wanted me very much.”
“You’re an actress, old dear. You know I like you, and I’ll always be interested in what you’re doing. Let’s be friends.”
She was leaning toward him, but he kept both hands on the steering-wheel, as good driving requires. She was going to a great city where there were plenty of men; perhaps she had one waiting there. Lanny’s father had seen to it that he was well informed on the subject of venereal diseases, and Lanny didn’t like the thought of Gracyn’s men, and had no desire to take a chance on what they might or might not have had. He had made up his mind that one woman at a time was enough—and let it be some woman who wanted one man at a time!
The great steamer lay at the quai, and there were a couple of hours to spare. The actress had a comfortable cabin to herself, and there was a bolt on the inside of the door, so it would have been an easy matter for them to be alone for a while—such things have happened on transatlantic steamers, even in the première classe. But Lanny showed her the sights of the crowded quais, and took her to a little place where there was sawdust on the floor and bouillabaisse in bowls; he told her that Thackeray had praised this seafood mixture in a poem. When she revealed that she had never heard of that novelist, he told her about Vanity Fair; there had been people finding fault with fashionable society long before Rick was born!
When he took her back to the steamer he kissed her hand, French fashion, which she found delightful; he told her that he wished her all the luck there was, and promised to do his best to persuade Rick not to make that play too “radical.” He quoted: “To go away is to die a little.” She always took any quotation as a product of his own brilliance, so she said again: “What a darling you are!” Her last words were: “If ever you want me, Lanny, I’ll come!”
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 50
