Zoltan had many times as much knowledge and experience as his pupil; but Lanny was young, and bold, as becomes youth; many times he had bought paintings and put them away in the storeroom at home. Of course, having banked on a certain painter, he set out to make good on his guess; he would tell others about the man, and they would listen, because Lanny was getting a reputation as a connoisseur. He would mention him to critics and news-writers, and these would take his hints, for they were looking for things to write, and why bother to think for themselves when it was so much easier to pick up conversation? Of course Lanny wouldn’t sound eager, or give any hint that he was backing So-and-so. It was a common practice to corner the work of some unknown painter and then have him boosted to sudden celebrity. The only trouble was that the painter might get busy and break your market; the ungrateful wretch would dig up his old works, or rush out new ones in a few days and sell them through some scoundrelly dealer!
Anyhow, the pictures were beautiful, and if you enjoyed looking at them, the rest didn’t matter. What you lost on half a dozen bad guesses you would make up on one good one, and meanwhile you had the fun. You could have many kinds of fun in Paris, and if you chose wisely you could live to enjoy spring and autumn salons for many a year. It might have seemed strange that a young man who was to be twenty-seven next month, and who had grown a little brown mustache, English fashion, to make himself look more dignified, should choose to attend a salon whth a white-haired lady who might be taken for his grandmother. To be sure, she was a very rich lady, and childless, and many a young man would have squired her about town on the chance that she would remember him in her will; but Lanny wasn’t interested in that aspect of friendship, and Emily knew it, which was why she liked to be with him.
III
Reclining on a chaise-longue in her sitting-room in a very grand château, Emily listened to the tale of what had happened to him during a sorrowful year; also the story of Hansi and Bess, and an account of the great unhappiness in Italy and its repercussion upon the dwellers in Bienvenu. Emily didn’t mention that Beauty had written about this; she heard Lanny’s side of the story, and it was a means of checking on his mother, something which is just as well in dealing with fashionable ladies. They don’t tell lies, but they frequently “fib,” and if you wish to live wisely you watch people and understand their frailties—not blaming them too much, for we are none of us perfect, but knowing exactly how far you can trust each one.
“Do you want to marry, Lanny? Or do you want to go on drifting around?”
Lanny was prepared for that question and it didn’t trouble him. He said that marrying seemed a serious matter, and maybe he expected too much, but he didn’t want to tie himself until he had met a woman he really loved.
“Just what do you expect in a wife?”
He was prepared for that also; he had been forced to give thought to it by both his mother and Marie. He told her what his amie had said to him, the death-bed promises he had given her, and Emily knew that that had been real love, and wouldn’t be easy to replace. Lanny said that he wanted a woman who was interested in the same things that he was, and when she opened her mouth he wanted her to say something. “Most of the time they’re just trying to make conversation, and it gets to be a bore.”
“If they’re young,” said the woman, “they don’t know what they believe, or what to say; they’re apt to be nervous, meeting an attractive young man, and they fall into a panic.”
“What I find is, it’s darned uncomfortable, because your emotions get in the way of your mind; everybody else is thinking, are you going to fall in love? The girl is thinking it, and you don’t have any chance to find out what you really think about her or what she really thinks about anything.”
“Sex is much too urgent,” assented Emily; “but what can you do about it?”
“I often wonder if they’ve solved the problem in those coeducational colleges in the States. Do the young people get used to each other and go on with their work in a sensible way?”
“I hear a lot of talk about what they call ‘petting-parties,’” replied the other. “When they are supposed to be reading Plato or Spinoza they are parked out somewhere in an automobile.”
“I suppose so,” he responded. There appeared to be more problems in the world than he or anyone could solve.
His friend mentioned a problem of her own. She had two nieces, one in New York and the other in the West; one the daughter of a sister and the other of a brother. They were both of marriageable age, and it was their aunt’s obvious duty to invite them for a visit in Paris. “I haven’t seen either since they were children,” she said. “They have both been to finishing-schools and no doubt are perfect young ladies, and probably virtuous; their pictures are attractive, and their letters intelligent, but of course they can’t say much because they don’t know me at all. I can’t recommend them beyond that, but it won’t do any harm for you to meet them when they come.”
“Of course, Mrs. Emily,” he replied, “I’ll be glad to meet relatives of yours; but it’ll be a little awkward—” He stopped. “I’ll have them at different times,” she smiled.
“I don’t mean that; I was thinking—if it didn’t happen—”
She began to laugh. “I absolve you in advance, Lanny. I have very little pride of family, and if neither of them happens to strike a spark in your soul, I won’t have my feelings hurt.”
“It’s something you never can tell,” continued the cautious young man. “They mightn’t see anything in me; but if they did, and I didn’t happen to—then I’d feel embarrassed.”
“I could tease you,” said his friend, banishing the twinkle from her eyes; “I won’t, because I know you are kind. I have listened to women talking about you, and it appears that you are attractive to them. Do you know why it is?”
“I’ve guessed that it’s because I have learned to do things by myself; I mean, I like to play music, and read, and look at pictures. I suppose that makes me seem aloof and mysterious to them.”
“They are used to being pursued by men, and the men want only one thing, it seems. But they feel that you want more.”
“I want love, of course,” said Lanny.
“That’s what the woman wants; but it’s hard to find, and seems to be getting harder.”
“They do appear more anxious,” admitted the young philosopher. “It’s getting so that it’s dangerous to go about.”
“I suppose it’s the effect of the war.”
“You show the least little bit of interest in one, even look at her a few seconds too long, and you see the color begin to mount in her throat—whatever places she hasn’t taken to painting yet; you see her eyes get sort of misty, and you know you’d better cut the conversation off and get somewhere else. Don’t even stop to shake hands, or you may find that you’ve got a girl in your arms, and you don’t know what the devil to do with her.”
The châtelaine of Les Forêts was laughing heartily. “I see I’ll have to get busy and get you some protection,” she said.
IV
Lanny called up Denis de Bruyne, and arranged to spend a night at the chateau. Charlot was still at his military camp, but Denis, fils, had finished his eighteen months’ training, and he and his father would be at home. A widowed sister of Denis had taken charge of their household, and they all gave Lanny a warm welcome. A strange thing to return to that house where every object spoke of Marie; to sit in the chair where she had sat, to rest his head against a cushion which she had sewed, to touch the keys of a piano which she had played. He went into the garden, where the leaves that she had seen burgeoning had fallen and been swept up like herself; the flowers that would spring from her plants would never meet her eyes, and the fruits of her trees would never touch her lips.
They put Lanny in the room which had been his in the old days; there was a connecting door to her boudoir, in which she had died and which had not been used since her body had been carried from it. A clamoring multitude of memories
, the intensest pleasures and pains that Lanny had experienced. On the table under his night-lamp lay the copy of Eugénie Grandet which he had been reading to her on the last day; a bookmark showed where he had stopped, and now, seeking to compose his mind, he lay reading the part which she would miss forever. Whatever they have in that land of shades, the Comédie Humaine of Honoré de Balzac would hardly be included.
In the library of Eli Budd the bereaved lover had found a two-volume work called Phantasms of the Living, a study bearing on that strange experience which he had had in his youth, when his English aviator friend had crashed and been near to death, and Lanny had seen, or had thought he saw, an image of him standing at the foot of the bed. That happening had been unique in his life, but from Gurney’s volumes he learned that it was not uncommon, and that hundreds of persons had taken the trouble to write out detailed accounts of similar experiences.
More than once in her last days Marie had promised that if it was possible, she would come back to him; that was one of the reasons why he had come to visit the Château de Bruyne, and why he lay in this familiar bed in a room so haunted with memories. Late at night, when the house was still, he turned the light out and lay staring for a long time into the darkness; the door to her room was open, and he watched it, and trembled at the thought of what he might see, but he did not see it. Later he got up and lay on her bed; he was there when the first trace of dawn began to outline the windows of the room. This was the hour when the image of the wounded Rick had appeared to him in Connecticut, seeming to gather all the coming dawn into an image of light. Lanny could see an image of the wounded Marie in his imagination, but he knew that it wasn’t the real thing.
Perhaps she couldn’t come; perhaps she had decided that it was better not to; perhaps she just wasn’t, and couldn’t know or decide anything. Lanny fell asleep at last, and when he opened his eyes it was a bright and bracing autumn day, and he knew that he would have only the memory of his beloved, and would have to make some new love and new life for himself.
V
He came to Paris. That beautiful city was shining in bright sunlight, and seething with an infinitude of activity. A delight to walk its streets, so full of his own memories and those of the world for a thousand years. Full also of promises of delight for a young man of good health and inquiring mind. Gaily dressed and chic women and girls tapped the pavements with their sharp little heels and smiled their carmine-painted smiles at one who obviously had money in his pockets. Lanny wished that he could have believed about them some of the wonderful things which were necessary to his temperament. He strolled up the slopes of Montmartre, through crooked old streets which sometimes had only a couple of feet of sidewalk, and again had sidewalks raised high above the street, with a railing. Queer shops and odd sights—paintings for sale in many of the windows, and out in the open, set up against railings, or hanging from lamp-posts or trees. He would stop and look at them, but again he did not find the genius which his soul craved.
Isadora Duncan was dancing in Paris, and Lanny attended an exciting performance. Always now she included revolutionary themes and waved a long red scarf; when a part of the audience applauded, she came to the footlights and spoke in praise of Russia. After the performance, Lanny went behind the scenes and greeted her, lying on a couch with a heavy robe over her. She welcomed him cordially, and he told her that she was the world’s wonder. She answered that Russia had conferred a great boon upon her by depriving her of twenty pounds of flesh; to a dancer it was a renewal of youth.
“Oh, Lanny, you should go!” she exclaimed, and he said it was one of the hopes he was cherishing. She told him of her adventures there, and in Berlin and New York, where she had made a tour—and many scandals. She had taken along the half-crazy and half-drunken Russian poet; a “divine child,” this Essenin whom she had pitied and tried to help. “But evidently I wasn’t the right person to do it,” she remarked, sadly. “I had to divorce him, and now I’m desolate, as usual.”
Isadora was as irresponsible as a child, and told with laughter things about herself which anybody else would have tried hard to conceal. In Berlin she had been stranded, unable to pay her hotel bills, and an American newspaperman had learned that she possessed a trunkful of letters from her old-time admirers, many of whom had admired extravagantly. The story had been cabled to America that she was writing the story of her love life, and meant to publish a selection of the letters. This had brought a cablegram from “Lohengrin,” the American millionaire who had been the father of her second child. This gentleman’s real name was almost as famous as the play-name which she gave him, for he had inherited a great company which made sewing-machines, and in remote villages of Paraguay and Iceland and Ceylon peasant women honored and blessed him. “Lohengrin” had come by the first steamer, and had provided for Isadora’s needs so that she could discontinue writing and continue dancing.
But not even the wealth of a sewing-machine company could keep this daughter of the Muses in funds, for she spent everything as soon as she got it. She had found herself stranded in Paris, and her studio in Neuilly was sold for her debts, and she didn’t even know about it because she had thrown the legal papers into the wastepaper basket. The news of her plight was published in the press, and the artists of Paris rushed to her assistance; funds were raised and the studio was saved, but unfortunately nobody thought to provide money for Isadora’s food and lodgings, and she inquired sadly what good it would do to save her studio while she herself starved to death.
She asked what Lanny was doing, and he told her about his Socialist Sunday school. She had apparently not heard that his amie was dead; he refrained from mentioning it, out of fear that she might again propose to go motoring. He did promise to visit her studio and play for her when he had transacted certain business which he had in hand; but, thinking it over, he decided to stay busy for the present.
VI
He went to call on his Socialist friends and hear stories about the sufferings of the workers, the franc still going down and the cost of necessities rising. Great bitterness among the masses, and a plague of strikes. Paris was living by the tourists who came thronging to spend their money where it would buy the most; that was good for the merchants, but it took food out of the workers’ mouths. When Lanny learned that they were printing a pamphlet to tell of the Fascist terror in Italy he gave them a thousand-franc note to help in the distribution. It was a fortune for them, but it represented only twenty dollars to him; less than a day’s proceeds from the contents of his safe-deposit box in New York.
He went next to call on his Red uncle. Here, too, he heard about strikes and discontent; but here it seemed that the capitalists were less to blame than the yellow Socialists, who misled the workers into politics. It seemed to Lanny that the Communists were in politics also; but they called it revolutionary agitation, it was only for propaganda—using the institutions of the republic as a fulcrum by which to overthrow it. Lanny had described his uncle’s discourse as a phonograph record, and now he put the record on and started it.
He found that the older man was informed as to what was going on in Italy, and hated the Fascists, but there was a subtle difference in his feeling—he had adopted the theory that Fascismo was a stage toward the social revolution; Mussolini was destroying the bourgeois state, and in due course the Communists would take it over. Lanny said: “When he gets through, there won’t be enough of you left to take over a village.” But the bald-headed and wrinkled old painter replied that hunger would make more; it was a process, like the grinding of a machine; capitalism put the workers through a hopper and ground the profits out of them, and the residue came out Red.
The nephew told about two young converts who hadn’t had to be poor. A delightful story, even if it wasn’t according to the Marxist-Leninist formula. Jesse’s amie came in in the middle of it, with an armful of things which she planned to make into a supper; but she became interested in hearing about romance in a munitions town in far-off New Engl
and. With her was her younger sister, and the two of them, in spite of their revolutionary convictions, swallowed the details of life among the bloated rich as eagerly as any reader of a “confessions” magazine. Seeing how he had delayed their meal, Lanny said: “Let’s go out and see what we can find.”
He took them to a near-by café, full of tobacco smoke and a clatter of conversation about art, music, books, politics, and the events of the day. Artists with spike beards and flowing ties proclaimed the glories of surrealism, or pounded the tables and denounced it. A poet with a spade beard would be called upon by his followers and would stand up on a chair and recite. A singer with a von Tirpitz bifurcation would be shouted for, and he would chant a ballad denouncing the latest crimes of the government or praising the white limbs of the lady-love who sat by his side and did not blush. It was the vrai ton of Montmartre, but Jesse Blackless said that half the people in the place were tourists, and the old crowd was moving out and finding new haunts.
VII
Paris was a beautiful city, but, if you could believe a revolutionist and his companion, it was a city very near to collapsing of its own rottenness. Sitting at a crowded little table in this noisy room, being served a dinner which cost about fifteen cents per plate in United States money, vin compris, Lanny spent a couple of hours listening to a picture of corruption—moral, social, political, financial—that would have appalled him if he had not been taught from childhood that that was the way of all the world. The newspapers and every department of them were for sale to the highest bidder; and that went not merely for the scandal sheets, but for the most august and conservative, whose names were famous all over the world; they took British money, Turkish money, Polish money, even German money—as Lanny knew, because Kurt had been one of the paymasters; they took the money of Zaharoff, and Deterding, and the Comité des Forges—the son of Robbie Budd didn’t have to be told about that. The same thing was true of the politicians, the members of the Cabinet and of the Chamber—their campaign expenses were put up by special interests, and they faithfully served these until some more generous paymaster put in his appearance. From top to bottom this condition prevailed, so Jesse Blackless declared; the services of government were for sale to those who bid highest, and the laws were enforced sternly against the poor alone.
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 60
