“I am not going back to it. I have made up my mind—I will end my life first. What I want is to go to America, where women are safe. What I am asking from you, Herr Budd, is advice about getting to America.”
“It is not especially difficult. You can go into France and take a steamer from a French port.”
“But I must have passports, and that troubles me; the delay, and the danger in the meantime. I shall be in terror every moment; I dare not Jet my children out of my sight. Can you not help me to get passports quickly?”
“I am terribly sorry, gnädige Frau; I have no influence with the State Department, and would have no idea what to do except to follow the regular routine. Also, I must point out to you that I am an unmarried man, and if I became active on your behalf, the gossip-mongers would have a story ready to their hands, and one that could surely not help your case.”
The second lady of Naziland sat with her hands locked tightly in her lap, staring ahead of her as if turned to marble. Her lips barely moved, as she whispered: “Gott in Himmel, what am I to do?”
He answered: “I will make a suggestion. My former wife, Irma Barnes, is now Lady Wickthorpe, and a person of influence. It would be a simple matter for you to travel through France and enter England as a tourist. Then ask Irma to see you and help you.”
“Will she remember me?”
“She remembers you well, and has spoken of you often. I would advise you not to say anything to her about the Big Shot, because she is one of his ardent admirers. But she has doubtless heard about your husband’s misconduct and will be prepared to sympathize with a wronged wife. She has the same reason for gratitude to you that I have, with the difference that she is a woman and therefore not a cause of scandal. She undoubtedly knows the American ambassador in London, and would actively interest herself on your behalf.”
“Thank you, Herr Budd. I was sure that you were a kind man.”
“It is difficult to be kind nowadays, and often dangerous. Let me suggest that you do not mention our meeting to Irma, or to anybody else—ever.”
“I have promised that, and you may count upon it.”
“It is not wise for me to stay longer; so—Auf Wiedersehen.”
He went out into the corridor, and observed, standing near the elevator, a gimlet-eyed man of a type which all Europe was learning to recognize—the Nazi in civilian clothes. Lanny didn’t go to the elevator, but turned into the stairway and went down fast to his own floor. In his room he packed his belongings, rang for his bill, paid it by the bellboy, and left the hotel by a rear entrance. He stepped into a taxi and was driven to the depot. From a telephone booth he called Hansi at Hansi’s hotel and said: “Something has happened which makes it better for me to be elsewhere. Write me to my home. By-by and good luck.”
BOOK FIVE
Extravagant and Erring Spirit
18
Après Nous le Déluge
I
Lanny Budd stepped from the train into the old, large, and poverty-smitten city of Vienna, which he had once described as a head without a body, the result of an anatomical experiment which had been tried under his youthful eyes by the surgeons of Versailles. First they had dissected the Austro-Hungarian body into two halves; then they had dissected away the greater part of the Austrian extremities, and the flesh from its bones, and tossed out what was left to sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish. Eighteen years had passed, and the almost bodiless Vienna had still managed to keep going.
More than a million and three-quarters of townspeople had only four or five million country people to support them; and it might be doubted whether ever in history so highly organized and cultured a group of humans had been suddenly plunged into such extreme and hopeless poverty. A good part of the middle class was condemned to extinction, by a process rapid or slow; rapid if you had no job, for then you had to sell your possessions one by one in order to get the price of a meal; slow if you had a job, for then you could buy enough food to keep you from starvation, and could keep your respectability so long as your clothing held together and you could get enough pieces to patch it with. When your white collar, symbol of social status, became dirty, you washed it yourself and pressed it against your mirror. When it became frayed, you trimmed it with scissors, and confronted with dismay the prospect that it would fall to shreds; for you could not be seen on the street without it, and if you stayed in your room, you would starve.
This socio-surgical experiment had succeeded in producing a fierce class struggle. The workers of Vienna were Socialist, and exercising their democratic franchises they had put their trade-union leaders into political office and proceeded to tax the rich for the benefit of the poor. Lanny had visited here with Irma six years ago, and had never forgotten the horror with which her fashionable friends had told of being taxed for having servants; a graduated tax, increasing with the number you had, and twice as much for men as for women! Owners of great estates and many palaces had known nothing so cheap as servants, and had taken it for granted from childhood that this was the natural condition of the masses; but now came a tax collector, requiring a list of names, and spying, asking questions of your gardeners and footmen, suspecting you of falsifying your reports! Irma had agreed with her friends that Pink Vienna was hardly to be distinguished from Red Moscow.
The situation was complicated by the fact that Socialist Vienna was surrounded by a Catholic and reactionary countryside. The same aristocrats who owned the white marble palaces on the Ringstrasse and in the third and fourth Bezirk also owned great tracts of timber and wheat lands, and they closed their palaces for economy’s sake, and moved out to the countryside, out of reach of a confiscatory municipal government. There with the help of the priests they proceeded to organize their peasantry and marshal its votes into a strong conservative party; when this proved not enough, their hotheaded sons proceeded to form the younger peasantry into the Heimwehr, or home guard, which soon became the same thing as Fascism, only it was native Austrian, and supported by Holy Mother Church, as in Spain. As the saying was, they led the village taverns against the Vienna cafés.
Six years ago Lanny had inspected with enthusiasm great blocks of workers’ apartments, built by the city of Vienna out of the proceeds of taxes on higher-rent houses and apartments. Two years later he had read with personal grief of the bombardment of these homes by the Heimwehr troops, financed with money put up by Mussolini, and commanded by reactionary officers under the direction of the Catholic Premier Dollfuss. This devout little statesman had suspended the parliament, in which he commanded a majority of one vote; and thus died one more republic and came one more dictatorship to the unhappy old Continent. From that time the history of Austria was a struggle among three kinds of Fascism, each bent upon exclusive rule: Mussolini’s, Hitler’s, and the native brand run by landowners and capitalists who wanted to keep the almost bodiless head for their private consumption.
II
On his previous visits to Vienna Lanny Budd had been an ardent young Pink. Now he came as an ivory-tower esthete, son of an American millionaire and perhaps one himself, associating only with persons of his own social rank. Such an evolution is generally accepted as normal. All he had to do was to avoid his former bohemian and workingclass acquaintances, and this was easy, because many of them were dead and others in exile or hiding underground; if by chance one sought him out and tried to borrow money, Lanny would give it, but strictly as charity, and with such a manner of reserve as did not encourage a second call. He sought no publicity, but announced his presence by a note to his old friend and client, Graf Oldenburg, who had been living for the past six years on the price which Lanny had got him for a small Jan van Eyck.
Lanny judged that the funds would have run out by now, and this guess was confirmed by the promptness with which the agreeable and self-indulgent old aristocrat replied. He invited the American to lunch, and the food was plain, but prepared with elegance and served by an elderly valet in faded livery and clean white co
tton gloves. The wine also was old, and the conversation was about the glories of old Vienna, when Franz Joseph, longest-lived of emperors, had set the tone of society, and the archdukes had entertained the loveliest actresses in the Hotel Sacher. Swarms of two-horse Fiakers had raced through the Prater, a cause of much complaint; everybody danced to the music of Franz Lehár, and a Hungarian nobleman by the odd name of Nicholas de Szemere de genere Huba won more than a million crowns from Count Potocki in a single night of gambling at the Jockey Club.
This invitation to lunch was a small seed from which sprang up almost overnight a garden of the loveliest flowers. Word spread, literally by lightning—since Benjamin Franklin had found out what it was and another American had taught it to carry messages over copper wires. Leisure-class Vienna learned that there was a wealthy American in town, one who was socially presentable, and indeed had a sort of charm which made him almost Viennese. “You remember, he used to be the husband of that frightfully rich heiress—twenty-three million dollars, the papers said—no, not schillings—dollars, I tell you—and he must have kept some of them. His father makes the Budd-Erling airplane, and the son buys paintings—he says they are for clients in America, but nobody can be sure about that.” So everybody who owned a Defregger, or knew anybody who owned one, wanted to meet Lanny Budd. Invitations poured in, and without loss of a day he found himself in the fastest-moving section of the social whirl.
Since the Socialists had been put down, a degree of prosperity had returned to the almost bodiless head. The owners of wheat and timber lands, and of a mountain of iron ore, made money; and those who controlled the marketing of such products, and the speculators who were clever enough to guess the course of prices, all could reopen their palaces. In Vienna luxurious pleasure-seeking had become a sort of delirium, the most hysterical that Lanny had ever encountered. Everybody seemed to know that the present situation couldn’t go on much longer; everybody wanted to spend his or her last schilling on one last fling of enjoyment. Après nous le déluge!
It appeared that five years of war, followed by eighteen years of economic dislocation, had undermined the sexual defenses of many of the ladies of Vienna. Nowhere had so many in what was called good society pressed their knees against Lanny’s when seated beside him at the dinner table. It had always been his habit to wear a pleasant smile when dealing with the other sex, but here he decided that it wouldn’t do, and took to looking stern. But that didn’t do so well either; that made him appear masterful and military. He remembered the story he had heard about Brand Whitlock, who had been American ambassador to Belgium immediately after the World War. The ladies in the Palace Hotel of Brussels, owned by the King of Spain, had made a practice of knocking upon the doors of unattached gentlemen, and proved embarrassingly hard to get rid of, until the diplomat had the bright idea of purchasing a pair of lady’s shoes and putting them outside his door every night along with his own boots to be polished!
III
The founder and chief of the Austrian Fascist army had been Ernst Camillo Maria Rüdiger, Prinz von Starhemberg, who traced his ancestry back to robber barons of the tenth century; the successful robbers had left him a total of thirty-six castles. He was a nephew of Graf Oldenburg, and Lanny met him at a dinner party. He was a man of Lanny’s age, tall, vigorous, handsome in a greenish-gray military uniform with a blackcock’s tail in his hat. He had served in a dragoon regiment in the war, and ever since had been active in political war against the people’s movements of his part of the world. He was one of those whom Lanny had seen marching in the streets of Munich in Adolf Schicklgruber’s abortive beer-hall Putsch. Later he had broken with the Nazis and become Mussolini’s man in Austria. He was bold, haughty, and opinionated; a reckless gambler and popular with the ladies—in the latter activity it was easier for him to have his own way than in politics.
With him came his latest flame, the young and very lovely actress, Nora Gregor. She sat next to Lanny at the table, and did not try secretly to hold his hand. It was plain that she was completely fascinated by her rather boyish and primitive-minded aristocrat, who was in process of divorcing his wife in order to marry her; this was something unprecedented in the society of Catholic Austria, and meant that Ernst Camillo Maria Rüdiger was through in politics. This he admitted, saying that he was sick of its stupidities and shams, and Austria could go to hell, or Hitler could have it. This, Lanny knew, was sour grapes; Ernst’s hated rival with the unprepossessing name of Schuschnigg had ousted him from command of the Heimwehr, and had disbanded this dangerous private army, in the face of Ernst’s public statement that it would be done only over his dead body.
Nora Gregor had lovely soft white shoulders, revealed by a filmy pink tulle dress. She had a sweet gentle face, a caressing voice, an innocent manner—in short, the perfect ingénue, in private life as on the stage and screen. She was expecting to become a princess, but said that she was afraid of the world of great affairs, and would much prefer to live in some quiet place in the country. Perhaps it was so—it was the mood of Hollywood, and Nora had been there.
After the fashion of stage people, she talked frankly about her love; she made it seem very lovely—and Lanny wondered, was she saying what she had rehearsed so many times on the stage and before the camera? Manifestly, a woman cannot very well spend her professional hours learning to imitate the tones and gestures of passion, watching her performance before a mirror and trying it out before audiences, without carrying over into real life some of the consciousness of technique. Or was it the other way around—had she given her heart to this arrogant and domineering playboy-politician, and then enacted before her audience the tones and gestures she had practiced upon him? Lanny asked her, and she laughed and said that the web of life was complicated, and she lacked the skill to unravel its many threads.
This much a presidential agent learned for certain: Ernst Camillo Maria Rüdiger, Prinz von Starhemberg, was out of politics to stay, if his future princess had anything to say about it. That, she declared, was a statement never rehearsed before any camera, but straight out of her heart. She told how Ernst had traveled to Rome to interview Mussolini and try to get Il Duce’s support against Schuschnigg’s intrigues, only to discover that Ernst’s own supporters had sold him out, in return for office and promotion. That was the kind of thing that made politics so odious, and caused a star of stage and screen to desire to flee from the grand monde and live in a cottage. At any rate, so she told the son of an American millionaire, at the dinner table of a Viennese nobleman, with several men-servants in livery coming and going on velvet carpets, placing reverently before her the choicest wines and most exquisitely prepared foods. Lanny Budd, a devotee of the theater, might well have wondered whether this, too, was a play, and if so, how soon was the curtain to be rung down.
IV
It was a “P.A.’s” business to meet Schuschnigg, the Jesuit-educated doctor of laws who had taken over the destinies of this unhappy country. Lanny wanted it to come about naturally, and without an appointment; he went to one splendid reception after another, and let the word spread that he had recently talked with Hitler. So it wasn’t long before members of the government were seeking him out; and when he was introduced to the Chancellor at a musicale, that worried gentleman took him off into the library. Seine Exzellenz was a tall blond intellectual of about forty, with blue-gray eyes, a small light-brown mustache and tortoise-shell spectacles. When he smiled, he revealed even white teeth, and gave the impression of an amiable college professor, a younger Woodrow Wilson.
He started right away asking questions. What did that most dangerous and inexplicable Führer of the Germans really mean? Lanny answered that he really didn’t know, and didn’t think Adi knew quite yet; Adi was a man of impulses and intuitions. The Chancellor Doktor appeared to shrink at these words. He was extremely apprehensive, and made no attempt to veil or disguise his feelings. He was a man of no great personal force, Lanny gathered; he ruled “with an iron hand,” as the saying w
as, but that seemed rather easy—the police and the military did the dirty work, and the head of the government could smile, or say his prayers if he preferred. It was a form of government familiar to Old Austria—despotism tempered by Schlamperei, that is, slackness, inefficiency.
This amiable-mannered Exzellenz talked as if he would like to put his too-heavy burdens off on his visitor. Austria, he insisted, had been created by a Diktat of the Allies, who had won the World War and now refused to accept the responsibilities which their victory entailed. “What will France and Britain do, Herr Budd?”—and Herr Budd had to admit the fear that they were in a mood not to do very much.
“Why, a few years ago France threatened war merely because the Germans talked about a customs union with us!”
“I know,” said Lanny; “but a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. Hitler has built an army, and General Göring a lot of planes.”
“Ach, du lieber Gott!” exclaimed the pious Catholic. “And what do you in America expect? You came here and broke us down—it was your armies which landed at Salonika and forced the capitulation of Bulgaria—and that was the beginning of the end.”
“You may be sure it will be a long time before we do anything of the sort again,” declared Lanny, reassuringly. “We thought we were setting the people of Europe free, and hoped they would govern themselves.”
“With us,” replied the Chancellor, “freedom is taken to mean Marxism, and presently it becomes Bolshevism, and no more freedom for anyone but the commissars. America will have to send us some wise man who can solve that problem for us.”
Lanny was sorry, but could not pretend to be that man. Even so, Seine Exzellenz wanted to talk to him, more at length than was possible at a musicale. Would he come to the Ballplatz on the morrow?—and the visitor said he would be very happy. He went and listened to an earnest appeal for American, British, and French protection of Austria; apparently the Chancellor had been told that Lanny possessed wealthy and influential friends in each of these lands. He wanted it understood that while his country was now under a one-party dictatorship, it was a benevolent one, a Christian one, for the good of the country, and having the backing of all the sound elements of the public.
Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 48
