These young people still had it, though the streams were drying up. The worst of the embarrassments of a depression, as it presented itself to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes, was that so many of her friends kept getting into trouble and telling her about it. A truly excruciating situation: in the midst of a bridge game at Tuxedo Park the hostess received a telephone call from her broker in New York, and came in white-faced, saying that unless she could raise fifty thousand dollars in cash by next morning she was “sunk.” Not everybody had that much money in the bank, and especially not in times when rumors were spreading about this bank and that. Irma saw the eyes of the hostess fixed upon her, and was most uncomfortable, because she couldn’t remedy the depression all by herself and had to draw the line somewhere.
Yes, it wasn’t all fun having so much money. You didn’t want to shut yourself up in yourself and become hard-hearted and indifferent to others’ suffering; but you found yourself surrounded by people who wanted what you had and didn’t always deserve it, people who had never learned to do anything useful and who found themselves helpless as children in a crisis. Of course they ought to go to work, but what could they do? All the jobs appeared to be filled by persons who knew how to do them; right now there were said to be six, or eight, or ten million people looking for jobs and not finding any. Moreover, Lanny and Irma didn’t seem to be exactly the right persons to be giving that sort of advice!
VIII
The first of July was a time for dividends, and many of the biggest and most important corporations “passed” them. This gave a shock to Wall Street, and to those who lived by it; Irma’s income was cut still more, and the shrinkage seemed likely to continue. The news from abroad was as bad as possible. Rick, who knew what was going on behind the scenes, wrote it to his friend. The German Chancellor was in London, begging for funds, but nobody dared help him any further; France was obdurate, because the Germans had committed the crime of attempting to set up a customs union with Austria. But how could either of these countries survive if they couldn’t trade?
All Lanny’s life it had been his habit to sit and listen to older people talking about the state of the world. Now he knew more about it than most of the people he met, even the older ones. While Irma played bridge, or table tennis with her young friends who had acquired amazing skill at that fast game, Lanny would be telling the president of one of the great Wall Street banks just why he had blundered in advising his clients to purchase the bonds of Fascist Italy, or trying to convince one of the richest old ladies of America that she wasn’t really helping to fight Bolshevism when she gave money for the activities of the Nazis in the United States. Such a charming, cultivated young German had been introduced to her, and had explained this holy crusade to preserve Western civilization from the menace of Asiatic barbarism!
It was a highly complicated world for a devout Episcopalian and member of the D.A.R. to be groping about in. A great banking fortune gave her enormous power, and she desired earnestly to use it wisely. Lanny told her the various radical planks of the Nazi program, and the old lady was struck with dismay. He told her how Hitler had been dropping these planks one by one, and she took heart again. But he assured her that Hitler didn’t mean the dropping any more than he had meant the planks; what he wanted was to get power, and then he would do whatever was necessary to keep it and increase it. Lanny found it impossible to make this attitude real to gentle, well-bred, conscientious American ladies; it was just too awful. When you persisted in talking about it, you only succeeded in persuading them that there must be something wrong with your cynical self.
IX
Lanny just couldn’t live with these overstuffed classes all the time; he became homesick for his Reds and Pinks, and went into the hot, teeming city and paid another visit to the Rand School of Social Science. He told them what he had been doing for workers’ education on the Riviera, and made a contribution to their expenses. The word spread quickly that here was the bearer of a Fortunatus purse, and everybody who had a cause—there appeared to be hundreds of them—began writing him letters or sending him mimeographed or printed appeals for funds. The world was so full of troubles, and there were so few who cared!
Also he sent in a subscription to the New Leader, and got a weekly dose of the horrors of the capitalist system, which had developed such marvelous powers of production and was unable to use them; which left millions to starve while a few parasites fattened themselves in luxury. This paper would lie on the table in his room, and Irma would see the prominent headlines and say: “Oh, dear! Are you still reading that stuff?” It irritated her to be referred to as a parasite and to have Lanny say: “But that’s what we are,” and go on to prove it.
Several of the workers’ groups and labor unions had summer camps where their members could spend a vacation. Lanny went to have a look at one of them, having the idea that he ought to know the workers at first hand. But he made the mistake of taking his wife along, which spoiled matters. Irma did her best, but she didn’t know how to unbend. The place was crowded, and mostly they were Jews; their dress was informal and their manners hearty; they were having a good time in their own way, and didn’t mind if it was different from her way; they didn’t look up to royalty, and didn’t enjoy being looked at as a zoo. In short, as an effort to bridge the social chasm the visit was a flop.
On the same South Shore of Long Island with the Barnes estate is the resort known as Coney Island. Lanny had heard about it but had never seen it, and Irma had only vague memories from a time in childhood when her father had taken her. On a hot Sunday afternoon the perverse idea occurred to one of their smart crowd: “Let’s go and see Coney!” It really was a spectacle, they insisted; the world’s premier slumming-tour—unless you went to Shanghai or Bombay on one of those de luxe cruises.
Two motor-carloads of them drove to the resort, which is a long spit of land. It was hard to find a place to park, and they had to walk a couple of miles; but they were young, and were out for fun. There must have been a million people at the resort, and most of them crowded onto the wide stretch of beach; it was barely possible to move about for the swarms of people lying or sitting in the sand, sweltering in the blazing sunshine. If you wanted to know the elementary facts about the human animal, here was the place to see exactly how fat they were, or how skinny, how hairy, how bow-legged, how stoop-shouldered, how generally different from the standards established by Praxiteles. You could discover also how they stank, what raucous noises they made, what a variety of ill-odored foods they ate, and how utterly graceless and superfluous they were.
To the fastidious Lanny Budd the worst thing of all was their emptiness of mind. They had come for a holiday, and wanted to be entertained, and there was a seemingly endless avenue of devices contrived for the purpose. For prices from a dime up you could be lifted on huge revolving wheels, or whirled around sitting on brightly painted giraffes and zebras; you could ride in tiny cars which bumped into one another, you could walk in dark tunnels which were a perpetual earthquake, or in bright ones where sudden breezes whipped up the women’s skirts and made them scream; you could be frightened by ghosts and monsters—in short, you could have a thousand fantastic things done to you, all expressive of the fact that you were an animal and not a being with a mind; you could be humiliated and made ridiculous, but rarely indeed on Coney Island could you be uplifted or inspired or taught any useful thing. Lanny took this nightmare place as an embodiment of all the degradations which capitalism inflicted upon the swarming millions of its victims. Anything to keep them from thinking.
Thus a young Pink; and he got himself into a red-hot argument with a carload of his young companions, who had drawn their own conclusions from this immersion in carnality. Irma, who monopolized a half-mile of ocean front, was disgusted that anyone should be content to squat upon ten or a dozen square feet of it. Her childhood playmate, Babs Lorimer, whose father had once had a “corner” in wheat, drew political conclusions from the spectacle and wondered ho
w anybody could conceive of the masses’ having anything to say about the running of government. “Noodles” Winthrop—his name was Newton—whose widowed mother collected a small fraction of a cent from everyone who rode to Coney Island on a street railway, looked at the problem biologically, and said he couldn’t imagine how such hordes of ugly creatures had survived, or why they desired to. Yet look at the babies they had!
X
With the members of Irma’s immediate family Lanny found that he was getting along surprisingly well. The domineering Fanny Barnes was set in her opinions, but for the most part these had to do with questions of manners and taste and family position; she didn’t give much thought to politics and economics. Pride was her leading motive; she lived in the faith that her Protestant Episcopal God had assigned to her family a specially precious strain of blood. She had the firm conviction that bearers of this blood couldn’t do anything seriously wrong, and she found ways to persuade herself that they hadn’t. She had made up her mind to make the best of this son-in-law whom fate had assigned to her, and presently she was finding excuses for him. Did someone call him a Socialist? Well, he had been reared in Europe, where such ideas didn’t mean what they did in America. Hadn’t some distinguished Englishman—Fanny couldn’t recall who it was—declared: “We are all Socialists now”?
For Lanny as a prince consort there was really quite a lot to be said. His manners were distinguished and his conversation even more so. He didn’t get drunk, and he had to be urged to spend his wife’s money. The uncertainty about his mother’s marriage ceremony hadn’t broken into the newspapers, and he was received by his father’s very old family. So the large and majestic Queen Mother of Shore Acres set out to butter him with flattery and get from him the two things she ardently desired: first, that he should help Irma to produce a grandson to be named Vandringham; and second, that they should leave Baby Frances at Shore Acres to be reared in the Vandringham tradition.
Uncle Horace, that pachyderm of a man who moved with such astonishing energy, proved to be an equally complaisant relative. He had a sense of humor, with more than a trace of mischief in it. He was amused to hear Lanny “razz” the American plutocracy, and especially those representatives of it who came to the Barnes estate. The fact that he himself had been knocked down and out had diminished his admiration for the system and increased his pleasure in seeing others “get theirs.” He chuckled at Lanny’s Pinkish jokes, and took the role of an elderly courtier “playing up” to a newly crowned king. Did he hope that Lanny might some day persuade Irma to let him have another fling in the market? Or was he merely making sure of holding onto the comfortable pension which she allowed him? Anyhow, he was good company.
XI
The echoes of calamity came rolling from Germany to England. Trade was falling off, factories closing, unemployment increasing; doubts were spreading as to the soundness of the pound sterling, for a century the standard of value for all the world; investors were taking refuge in the dollar, the Dutch florin, the Swiss franc. Rick told about the situation in his country; boldness was needed, he said—a capital levy, a move to socialize credit; but no political party had the courage or the vision. The Tories clamored to balance the budget at any cost, to cut the dole, and the pay of the schoolteachers, even of the navy. It was the same story as Hoover with his “rugged individualism.” Anything to save the gold standard and the power of the creditor class.
At the beginning of September the labor government fell. An amazing series of events—the labor Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and several of his colleagues in the old Cabinet went over to the Tories and formed what he called a “National” government to carry out the anti-labor program. It had happened before in Socialist history, but never quite so dramatically, so openly; Rick, writing about it for one of the leftist papers, said that those who betrayed the hopes of the toiling masses usually managed to veil their sell-out with decorous phrases, they didn’t come out on the public highway to strip themselves of their old work-clothes and put on the livery of their masters.
Rick was a philosopher, and tried to understand the actions of men. He said that the ruling classes couldn’t supply their own quota of ability, but were forced continually to invade the other classes for brains. It had become the function of the Socialist movement to train and equip lightning-change artists of politics, men who understood the workers and how to fool them with glittering promises and then climb to power upon their shoulders. In Italy it had been Mussolini, who had learned his trade editing the principal Socialist paper of the country. In France no fewer than four premiers had begun their careers as ardent revolutionaries; the newest of them was Pierre Laval, an innkeeper’s son who had driven a one-horse omnibus for his father, and while driving had read Socialist literature and learned how to get himself elected mayor of his town.
For what had these men sold out their party and their cause? For cash? That played a part, of course; a premier or prime minister got considerably more than a Socialist editor, and learned to live on a more generous scale. But more important yet was power: the opportunity to expand the personality, to impress the world, to be pictured and reported in the newspapers, to hold the reins and guide the national omnibus. A thousand flatterers gather round the statesman, to persuade him that he is indispensable to the country’s welfare, that danger lies just ahead, and that he alone can ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.
Rick sent his friend a bunch of clippings, showing how the man who had once lost his seat in the House of Commons for his convictions had now become the hero and darling of those who had unseated him. The entire capitalist press had rallied behind him, praising his action as the greatest of public services. “He will find that he is their prisoner,” wrote Rick. “He can do nothing but what they permit; he can have no career except by serving them.”
Rick mailed this letter; but before the steamer reached New York, the cables brought word that the prisoner of the Tories had failed. Britain was off the gold standard, and the pound sterling had lost about twenty per cent of its value! It happened to be the twenty-first of September, a notable day in Wall Street history, for it marked two years from the high point of the big bull market. In those two years American securities had lost sixty per cent of their value; and now came this staggering news, causing another drop! “Look where steel is now!” said Lanny Budd to his father over the telephone.
XII
In the midst of this world chaos Pierre Laval, innkeeper’s son, paid a visit to Germany to see what could be done for that frantic government. The boy driver had grown up into a short, stocky man with black hair always awry, with somber, rather piratical features and a thick black mustache. He had made a lot of money, a tremendous aid to a political career. Of his Socialist days he kept one souvenir: he always wore the little four-in-hand wash ties which had been the fashion in his youth, and had been cheap because he could wash them himself. In France it was well for a statesman to retain some proletarian eccentricity; that he sold out his convictions mattered less, for the people had become so cynical about public men that they hoped only to find the least dishonest.
With Laval traveled Aristide Briand, his Foreign Minister, another innkeeper’s son and another Socialist who had changed his mind. He had been a member of twenty-one cabinets—which had required not a little flexibility. But he had labored with genuine conviction to make peace between France and Germany. Now he was an old man, bowed and gray; the glorious organ voice was broken and the strong heart was soon to break. He was still pleading for peace, but he was the prisoner of Laval; and anyhow it was too late. Ancient hatreds and fears had prevailed, and now Germany was in a desperate plight, and France in a worse one, but couldn’t realize it.
A curious whim of history: Briand meeting with Hindenburg! The washerwoman’s child and the East Prussian aristocrat; old-time enemies, now both nearing their graves; each thinking about his country’s safety, and helpless to secure it. Der alte Herr talking about the menace of revo
lution in Germany; not the respectable kind which would put the Kaiser’s sons on the throne, but a dangerous gutter-revolution, an upsurge of the Lumpenproletariat, led by the one-time odd-job man, the painter of picture postcards, the “Bohemian corporal” named Schicklgruber. Briand demanding the dropping of the Austro-German customs-union project, while Hindenburg pleaded for a chance for his country to sell goods. Briand denouncing the Stahlhelm and the new pocket-battleships, while Hindenburg complained that France was not keeping her promise to disarm. Hindenburg begging for loans, while Briand explained that France had to keep her gold reserve as the last bulwark of financial security in Europe. No, there wasn’t much chance of their getting together; the only one who could hope to profit by the visit was the aforesaid “Bohemian corporal,” whose papers were raving alike at the French visitors and at the German politicians who licked their boots to no purpose.
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