She had something else she wanted to talk about: the unhappiness which was eating like a cancer into the souls of the members of the Robin family. They had become divided into three camps; each husband agreeing with his own wife, but with none of the other members of the family; each couple having to avoid mentioning any political or economic problem in the presence of the others. With affairs developing as they now were in Germany, that meant about every subject except music, art, and old-time books. Johannes read the Börsenzeitung, Hansi and Bess read the Rote Fahne, while Freddi and Rahel read Vorwärts; each couple hated the very sight of the other papers and wouldn’t believe a word that was in them. Poor Mama, who read no newspaper and had only the vaguest idea what the controversy was about, had to serve as a sort of liaison officer among her loved ones.
There was nothing so unusual about this. Lanny had lived in disagreement with his own father for the greater part of his life; only it happened that they both had a sense of humor, and took it out in “joshing” each other. Jesse Blackless had left home because he couldn’t agree with his father; now he never discussed politics with his sister, and always ended up in a wrangle with his nephew. The majority of radicals would tell you the same sort of stories; it was a part of the process of change in the world. The young outgrew their parents—or it might happen that leftist parents found themselves with conservative-minded children. “That will be my fate,” opined the playboy.
In the Robin family the problem was made harder because all the young people took life so seriously; they couldn’t pass things off with teasing remarks. To all four of them it seemed obvious that their father had enough money and to spare, and why in the name of Karl Marx couldn’t he quit and get out of the filthy mess of business plus politics in which he wallowed? Just so the person who has never gambled cannot understand why the habitué hangs on, hell-bent upon making up his night’s losses; the teetotaler cannot understand the perversity which compels the addict to demand one more nip. To Johannes Robin the day was a blank unless he made some money in it. To see a chance of profit and grab it was an automatic reflex; and besides, if you had money you had enemies trying to get it away from you, and you needed more of it in order to be really safe. Also you got allies and associates; you incurred obligations to them, and when a crisis came they expected you to play a certain part, and if you didn’t you were a shirker. You were no more free to quit than a general is free to resign in the midst of a campaign.
The tragedy is that people have lovable qualities and objectionable ones, impossible to separate. Also, you have grown up with them, and have become attached to them; you may be under a debt of gratitude, impossible to repay. If the young Robins were to lay down the law: “Either you quit playing at Gross Kapital in Germany, or we move out of your palace and sail no more in your yacht”—they might have had their way. But how much would have been left of Johannes Robin? Where would they have taken him, and what would they have done with him? Lanny had put such pressure on his father in the matter of playing the stock market, and had got away with it. But in the case of Johannes it was much more; he would have had to give up everything he was doing, every connection, associate, and interest except his children and their affairs. Said Lanny to Bess: “Suppose he happened to dislike music, and thought the violin was immoral—what would you and Hansi do about it?”
“But nobody could think that, Lanny!”
“Plenty of our Puritan forefathers thought it; I’ve a suspicion that Grandfather thinks it right now. Very certainly he thinks it would be immoral to keep business men from making money, or to take away what they have made.”
So Lanny, the compromiser, trying to soothe the young people, and persuade them that they could go on eating their food in the Berlin palace without being choked. Including himself, here were five persons condemned to dwell in marble halls—and outside were five millions, yes, five hundred millions, looking upon them as the most to be envied of all mortals! Five dwellers begging to be kicked out of their marble halls, and for some strange reason unable to persuade the envious millions to act! More than a century ago a poet, himself a child of privilege, had called upon them to rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number; but still the many slept and the few ruled, and the chains which were like dew retained the weight of lead!
III
The dowager queen of Vandringham-Barnes had gone down to Juan in order to be with the heir apparent. A dreadful thing had happened in America, something that sent a shudder of horror through every grandmother, mother and daughter of privilege in the civilized world. In the peaceful countryside of New Jersey a criminal or gang of them had brought a ladder and climbed into the home of the flyer Lindbergh and his millionaire wife, and had carried off the nineteen-month baby of this happy young couple. Ransom notes had been received and offers made to pay, but apparently the kidnapers had taken fright, and the body of the slain infant was found in a near-by wood. It happened that this ghastly discovery fell in the same week that the President of the French republic was shot down by an assassin who called himself a “Russian Fascist.” The papers were full of the details and pictures of both these tragedies. A violent and dreadful world to be living in, and the rich and mighty ones shuddered and lost their sleep.
For a full generation Robbie Budd’s irregular family had lived on the ample estate of Bienvenu and the idea of danger had rarely crossed their minds, even in wartime. But now it was hard to think about anything else, especially for the ladies. Fanny Barnes imagined kidnapers crouching behind every bush, and whenever the wind made the shutters creak, which happened frequently on the Côte d’Azur, she sat up and reached out to the baby’s bed, which had been moved to her own room. Unthinkable to go on living in a one-story building, with windows open, protected only by screens which could be cut with a pocket-knife. Fanny wanted to take her tiny namesake to Shore Acres and keep her in a fifth-story room, beyond reach of any ladders. But Beauty said: “What about fire?” The two grandmothers were close to their first quarrel.
Lanny cabled his father, inquiring about Bub Smith, most dependable of bodyguards and confidential agents. He was working for the company in Newcastle, but could be spared, and Robbie sent him by the first steamer. So every night the grounds of Bienvenu would be patrolled by an ex-cowboy from Texas who could throw a silver dollar into the air and hit it with a Budd automatic. Bub had been all over France, doing one or another kind of secret work for the head salesman of Budd Gunmakers, so he knew the language of the people. He hired a couple of ex-poilus to serve as daytime guards, and from that time on the precious mite of life which was to inherit the Barnes fortune was seldom out of sight of an armed man. Lanny wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, for of course all the Cap knew what these men were there for, and it served as much to advertise the baby as to protect her. But no use telling that to the ladies!
Bub came by way of Paris, so as to consult with Lanny and Irma. He had always been a pal of Robbie’s son, and now they had a confidential talk, in the course of which Bub revealed the fact that he had become a Socialist. A great surprise to the younger man, for Bub’s jobs had been among the most hardboiled, and Bub himself, with his broken nose and cold steely eyes, didn’t bear the appearance of an idealist. But he had really read the papers and the books and knew what he was talking about, and of course that was gratifying to the young employer. The man went down to the Cap and began attending the Socialist Sunday school in his free time, becoming quite a pal of the devoted young Spaniard, Raoul Palma.
That went on for a year or more before Lanny discovered what it was all about. The bright idea had sprung in the head of Robbie Budd—to whom anarchists, Communists, and kidnapers were all birds of a feather. Robbie had told Bub that this would be a quick and easy way to get in touch with the underworld of the Midi; so before stepping onto the steamer, Bub had got himself a load of Red literature, and all the way across had been boning up as if for a college entrance examination. He had “passed” with Lanny, and then w
ith Raoul and the other comrades, who naturally had no suspicions of anybody coming from Bienvenu. It was somewhat awkward, because Bub was also maintaining relations with the French police; but Lanny didn’t know just what to do about it. It was one more consequence of trying to live in the camps of two rival armies getting ready for battle.
IV
Hearing and thinking so much about the Lindbergh case had had an effect upon Irma’s maternal impulses; she decided that she couldn’t do any more traveling without having at least a glimpse of Baby. She proposed that they hop into the car and run down to Bienvenu—the weather was hot there, and they could have a swim, also. The young Robins hadn’t seen Baby for more than a year; so come along! Hansi had been motored to Paris by Bess, in her car; now the couples “hopped” into two cars, and that evening were in Bienvenu, with Irma standing by the bedside of her sleeping darling, making little moaning sounds of rapture and hardly able to keep from waking the child.
The next two days she had a debauch of mother emotions, crowding everything into a short time. She didn’t want anybody else to touch the baby; she washed her, dressed her, fed her, played with her, walked with her, talked to her, exclaimed over every baby word she managed to utter. It must have been bewildering to a twenty-seven-month child, this sudden irruption into her well-ordered life; but she took it serenely, and Miss Severne permitted some rules to be suspended for a brief period.
Lanny had another talk with Bub Smith, keeper of the queen’s treasure and sudden convert to the cause of social justice. Bub reported on his experiences at the school, and expressed his appreciation of the work being done there; a group of genuine idealists, he said, and it was a source of hope for the future. Lanny found it a source of hope that an ex-cowboy and company guard should have seen the light and acknowledged his solidarity with the workers.
Also Bub told about conditions in Newcastle, where some kind of social change seemed impossible to postpone. There wasn’t enough activity in those great mills to pay for the taxes and upkeep, and there was actual hunger among the workers. The people had mortgaged their homes, sold their cars, pawned their belongings; families had moved together to save rent; half a dozen people lived on the earnings of a single employed person. So many New Englanders were proud and wouldn’t ask for charity; they just withdrew into a corner and starved. Impossible not to be moved by such distress, or to realize that something must be done to get that great manufacturing plant to work again.
Bub Smith had always been close to Robbie Budd, and so this change of mind appeared important. There was no secret about it, the man declared; he had told Mr. Robert how he felt, and Mr. Robert had said it would make no difference. Lanny thought that, too, was important; for some fifteen years or so he had been hoping that his father would see the light, and now apparently it was beginning to dawn. In a letter to Robbie he expressed his gratification; and Robbie must have had a smile!
V
The young people had their promised swim, diving off the rocks into that warm blue Mediterranean water. Afterward they sat on the shore and Bub lugged a couple of heavy boxes from the car, one containing Budd automatics and other weapons, the other containing several hundred rounds of ammunition. Bub had brought a liberal supply from Newcastle, enough to stave off a siege by all the bandits in France. He said the family ought to keep in practice, for they never knew when there might be an uprising of the Fascists or Nazis, and “we comrades” would be the first victims. He was shocked to learn that neither Hansi nor Freddi had ever fired a gun in his life, and hadn’t thought of the possible need. The ex-guard wanted to know, suppose their revolution went wrong and the other side appeared to be coming out on top?
He showed them what he would propose to do about it. He threw a corked bottle far out into the water, then popped off the cork with one shot from an army service revolver. He threw out a block of wood and fired eight shots from a Budd .32 automatic, all in one quick whir, and not one of the shots struck the water; Bub admitted that that took a lot of practice, because the block jumped with every hit, and you had to know how far it would jump in a very small fraction of a second. He did it again to show them that it was no accident. He couldn’t do it a third time, because the block of wood had so much lead in it that it sank.
Lanny couldn’t perform stunts like that, but he was good enough to hit any Nazi, Bub said. All the targets were either Nazis or Fascists, for the guard had made up his mind that trouble was coming and no good fooling yourself. He wanted Hansi to learn to shoot, but Hansi said he would never use his bowing hand for such a nerve-shattering performance. Bess would have to protect him; she had learned to shoot when a child, and proved that she had not forgotten. Then it was Freddi’s turn, and he tried it, but had a hard time keeping his eyes open when he pulled the trigger. The consequences of this pulling upon a Budd automatic were really quite alarming, and to a gentle-souled idealist it didn’t help matters to imagine a member of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party in the line of the sights.
Lanny, who had been used to guns all his life, had no idea of the effect of these performances upon two timid shepherd boys out of ancient Judea. Hansi declared that his music didn’t sound right for a week afterward; while as for the younger brother, the experiment had produced a kind of moral convulsion in his soul. To be sure, he had seen guns being carried in Berlin and elsewhere by soldiers, policemen, S.S.’s and S.A.’s; but he had never held one in his hand, and had never realized the instantaneous shattering effect of an automatic. Calling the targets a portion of the human anatomy had been a joke to an ex-cowboy, but Freddi’s imagination had been filled with images of mangled bodies, and he kept talking about it for some time afterward. “Lanny, do you really believe we are going to see another war? Do you think you can live through it?”
Freddi even talked to Fanny Barnes about the problem, wondering if it mightn’t be possible to organize some sort of society to teach children the ideal of kindness, in opposition to the dreadful cruelty that was now being taught in Germany. The stately Queen Mother was touched by a young Jew’s moral passion, but she feared that her many duties at home would leave her no time to organize a children’s peace group in New York. And besides, wasn’t Germany the country where it needed to be done?
VI
Fanny set up a great complaint concerning the heat at Bienvenu; she became exhausted and had to lie down and fan herself and have iced drinks brought to her. But Beauty Budd, that old Riviera hand, smiled behind her embonpoint, knowing well that this was one more effort—and she hoped the last—to carry Baby Frances away. Beauty took pleasure in pointing out the great numbers of brown and healthy babies on the beaches and the streets of Juan; she pointed to Lanny and Marceline as proof that members of the less tough classes could be raised here successfully. Baby herself had developed no rashes or “summer complaints,” but on the contrary rollicked in the sunshine and splashed in the water, slept long hours, ate everything she could get hold of, and met with no worse calamity than having a toe nipped by a crab.
So the disappointed Queen Mother let her bags be packed and stowed in the trunk of Lanny’s car, and herself and maid stowed in the back seat, from which she would do as much driving as her polite son-in-law would permit. On the evening of the following day they delivered her safely in London, and obtained for her a third-row seat on the aisle for the opening performance of The Dress-Suit Bribe, a play of which she wholly disapproved and did not hesitate to say so. Next day when most of the London critics agreed with her, she pointed out that fact to the author, who, being thirty-four years of age, ought to have sowed his literary wild oats and begun to realize the responsibilities he owed to his class which had built the mighty British Empire. The daughter of the Vandringhams and daughter-in-law of the Barneses was as Tory as the worst “diehard” in the House of Lords, and when she encountered a propagandist of subversion she wanted to say, in the words of another famous queen: “Off with her head!”—or with “his.”
B
ut not all the audience agreed with her point of view. The house divided horizontally; from the stalls came frozen silence and from the galleries storms of applause. The critics divided in the same way; those with a pinkish tinge hailed the play as an authentic picture of the part which fashionable society was playing in politics, an indictment of that variety of corruption peculiar to Britain, where privileges which would have to be paid for in cash in France or with office in America, go as a matter of hereditary right or of social prestige. In any case it was power adding to itself, “strength aiding still the strong.”
It was the kind of play which is automatically labeled propaganda and therefore cannot be art. But it was written from inside knowledge of the things which were going on in British public life and it told the people what they needed to know. From the first night the theater became a battleground, the high-priced seats were only half filled but the cheap ones were packed, and Rick said: “It’s a question whether we can pay the rent for two or three weeks, until it has a chance to take hold.”
Lanny replied: “We’ll pay, if I have to go and auction off some pictures.” No easy matter raising money with hard times spreading all over the world; but he telephoned all the fashionable people he knew, begging them to see the play, and he cajoled Margy, Dowager Lady Eversham-Watson, to have a musicale and pay the Robin family a couple of hundred pounds to come and perform: the money to go for the play. Irma “chipped in,” even though in her heart she didn’t like the play. As for Hansi, he wrote to his father, who put five hundred pounds to his son’s credit with his London bankers—a cheap and easy way to buy peace in his family, and to demonstrate once again how pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
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