In one way or another they kept the play going. Gracyn, to whom it gave such a “fat” part, offered to postpone taking her salary for two weeks. Lanny wrote articles for the labor papers, pointing out what the production meant to the workers, and so they continued to attend and cheer. The affair grew into a scandal, which forced the privileged classes to talk about it, and then to want to know what they were talking about. In the end it turned out that Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson had a “hit”—something he had been aiming at for more than ten years. He insisted on paying back all his friends, and after that he paid off some of the mortgages of “the Pater,” who had been staking him for a long time. The main thing was that Rick had managed to say something to the British people, and had won a name so that he would be able to say more.
VII
The Robins were begging the Budds to take a little run into Germany. Yachting time was at hand, and they had persuaded Papa to put the Bessie Budd into commission again; they wanted so much to get him away from the worries of business—and who could do it so well as the wonderful Lanny Budd and his equally wonderful wife? Lanny might even be able to persuade him to retire for good; or perhaps to take a long cruise around the world, where he couldn’t be reached by friends or foes.
Germany was in the midst of a hot election campaign. A new Reichstag was being chosen; the “Cabinet of the Barons,” otherwise known as the “Monocle Cabinet,” was asking for popular support. Elections were always interesting to Lanny, and the young people urged him to come and see. But Irma had another maternal seizure; she said “Let’s run down to Juan again, and come back for a cruise at the end of the campaign.” Lanny said: “Any way you want it.”
So the party broke up. Fanny took a steamer to New York, the Robins took the ferry to Flushing, and the Budds took one to Calais. They sent a telegram to the palace in Paris, and dinner was ready when they arrived. Irma observed: “It’s nice to have your own place; much nicer than going to a hotel.” Lanny saw that she wished to justify herself for having spent all that money, so he admitted that it was “nicer.” Jerry was there, and with a lot of checks ready for her to sign; he wanted her to go over the accounts, but she was sure they were all right, and she signed without looking. The three went to a cabaret show, very gay, with music and dancing and a scarcity of costumes; some of it made Irma blush, but she was trying to acquire the cosmopolitan tone.
The following evening they were at Bienvenu again. Baby was bigger and brighter; she knew more words; she remembered what you had taught her. She was growing a mind! “Oh, Lanny, come see this, come see that!” Lanny would have been glad to settle down to child study, and to swimming and target-shooting with Bub, and talking to the workers at the school; but they had made a date with the Robins; and also there came a letter from Pietro Corsatti, who was at Lausanne, reporting the conference for his paper. He said: “A great show! How come you’re missing it?”
At this time there were two of Europe’s international talk-fests being held on the same Swiss lake. For many years such gatherings had been Lanny’s favorite form of diversion; he had attended a dozen, and had met all the interesting people, the statesmen and writers, the reformers and cranks. Irma had never been to one, but had heard him tell about them, and always in glowing terms. Now he proposed: “Let’s stop off on our way to Berlin.”
“O.K. by me!” said Irma.
VIII
They followed the course of the River Rhone, every stage of which had some memory of Marie de Bruyne: the hotels where she and Lanny had stopped, the scenery they had admired, the history they had recalled. But Lanny judged it better for Irma to have her own memories, unscented by the perfume of any other woman. They climbed into the region of pine-trees and wound through rocky gorges where the air was still and clear. Many bridges and a great dam, and it was Lake Leman, with Geneva, home of the League of Nations, an institution which for a few years had been the hope of mankind, but now appeared to have fallen victim to a mysterious illness. Since the beginning of the year a great Conference on Arms Limitation, with six hundred delegates from thirteen nations, had been meeting here, and was to continue for a year longer; each nation in turn would bring forward a plea to limit the sort of weapon which it didn’t have or didn’t need, and then the other nations would show what was wrong with that plan.
Farther up the lake was Lausanne, where the premiers and foreign ministers were gathered to debate the ancient question of reparations. Lanny Budd greeted his friend Pete and other journalists whom he had been meeting off and on since the great peace conference thirteen summers ago. They remembered him and were glad to see him; they knew about his gold-embossed wife and her palace in Paris; they knew about Rick and his play. Here was another show, and a fashionable young couple was taken right behind the scenes.
Lausanne is built on a mountainside, with each street at a different level. The French had a hotel at the top, the British one at the bottom, and the other nations in between; the diplomats ascended or descended to have their wrangles in one another’s suites, and the newspapermen wore themselves thin chasing the various controversies up hill and down. Such, at any rate, was Corsatti’s description. The statesmen were trying to keep their doings secret, and Pete declared that when one saw you he dived into his hole like a woodchuck. Your only chance was to catch one of them in swimming.
It was good clean fun, if you were a spectator who liked to hear gossip and ferret out mysteries, or a devil-may-care journalist with an expense account which you padded freely. The food was of the best, the climate delightful, the scenery ditto, with Mont Blanc right at your back door—or so it seemed in the dustless Alpine air. You would be unhappy only if you thought about the millions of mankind whose destiny was being gambled with by politicians. The gaming-table was a powder-keg as big as all the Alps, and the players had no thought but to keep their own country on top, their own class on top within their country, and their own selves on top within their class.
IX
The statesmen had to drop the Young Plan, by which Germany had been bound to pay twenty-five billion dollars in reparations. But France couldn’t give up the hope of getting something; so now with incessant wrangling they were adopting a plan whereby at the end of three years Germany was to give bonds for three billion marks. But most observers agreed that this was pure futility; Germany was borrowing, not paying. Germany was saying to the bankers of the United States: “We have five billions of your money, and if you don’t save us you will lose it all!” The people of Germany were saying: “If you don’t feed us we shall vote for Hitler, or worse yet for Thälmann, the Bolshevik.” The statesmen of Germany were saying: “We are terrified about what will happen”—and who could say whether they were really terrified or only pretending? Who could trust anybody in power, anywhere in all the world?
Robbie Budd had told his son a story, which he said all business men knew. A leather merchant went to his banker to get his notes renewed and the banker refused to comply with the request. The leather merchant told his troubles and pleaded hard; at last he asked: “Were you ever in the leather business?” When the banker replied: “No,” the other said: “Well, you’re in it now.” And that, opined Pietro Corsatti, was the position of the investing public of the United States; they were in the leather business in Germany, in the steel and coal and electrical and chemical businesses, to say nothing of the road-building business and the swimming-pool business. Nor was it enough to renew the notes; it was necessary to put up working capital to keep these businesses from falling into ruins and their workers from turning Red!
Irma knew that this was the “great world” in which her career was to be carried on, so she listened to the gossip and learned all she could about the eminent actors in the diplomatic drama. Lanny had met several of the under-secretaries, and these realized that the wealthy young couple were entitled to be introduced to the “higher ups.” Irma was told that next winter would probably see more negotiations in Paris, and it was her intention tha
t these important personages should find her home a place for relaxation and perhaps for private conferences. Emily herself couldn’t have done better.
Lanny observed his wife “falling for” the British ruling class. Many Americans did this; it was a definite disease, known as “Anglomania.” Upper-class Englishmen were tall and good-looking, quiet and soft-spoken, cordial to their friends and reserved to others; Irma thought that was the right way to be. There was Lord Wickthorpe, whom Lanny had once met on a tally-ho coach driving to Ascot; they had both been youngsters, but now Wickthorpe was a grave diplomat, carrying a brief-case full of responsibility—or so he looked, and so Irma imagined him, though Lanny, who had been behind many scenes, assured her that the sons of great families didn’t as a rule do much hard work. Wickthorpe was divinely handsome, with a tiny light brown mustache, and Irma said: “How do you suppose such a man could remain a bachelor?”
“I don’t know,” said the husband. “Margy can probably tell you. Maybe he couldn’t get the girl he wanted.”
“I should think any girl would have a hard time refusing what he has.”
“It can happen,” replied Lanny. “Maybe they quarrel, or something goes wrong. Even the rich can’t always get what they want.” Lanny’s old “Pink” idea!
X
The assembled statesmen signed a new treaty of Lausanne, in which they agreed to do a number of things, now that it was too late. Having signed and sealed, they went their various ways, and Irma and Lanny motored out of Switzerland by way of Basle, and before dinner-time were in Stuttgart. A bitterly fought election campaign had covered the billboards with slogans and battle-cries of the various parties. Lanny, who got hold of a newspaper as soon as he arrived anywhere, read the announcement of a giant Versammlung of the Nazis to be held that evening, the principal speaker being that Reich Organization Leader Number One who had received such a dressing-down from his Führer in Lanny’s presence some twenty months ago. Lanny remarked: “I’d like to hear what he’s saying now.”
“Oh, dear!” exclaimed Irma. “Such a bore!” But she didn’t want to be left in a hotel room alone, so she said: “Let’s not stay too late.”
During those twenty months a Franco-American playboy had been skipping over the world with the agility conferred by railroads and motor-cars, airplanes, steamships, and private yachts. He had been over most of western Europe, England, and New England. He had read books on many subjects, he had played thousands of musical compositions, looked at as many paintings, been to many theaters, danced in many ball-rooms, and swum in many seas; he had chatted with his friends and played with his baby, eaten the choicest of foods, drunk the best wines, and enjoyed the love of a beautiful and fashionable wife. In short, he had had the most delightful sort of life that the average man could imagine.
But meantime the people of Germany had been living an utterly different life; doing hard and monotonous labor for long hours at low wages; finding the cost of necessities creeping upward and insecurity increasing, so that no man could be sure that he and his family were going to have their next day’s bread. The causes of this state of affairs were complex and hopelessly obscure to the average man, but there was a group which undertook to make them simple and plain to the dullest. During the aforementioned twenty months the customs official’s son from Austria, Adi Schicklgruber, had been skipping about even more than Lanny Budd, using the same facilities of railroad trains and motor-cars and airplanes. But he hadn’t been seeking pleasure; he had been living the life of an ascetic, vegetarian, and teetotaler, devoting his fanatical energies to the task of convincing the German masses that their troubles were due to the Versailles Diktat, to the envious foreigners who were strangling the Fatherland, to the filthy and degraded Jews, and to their allies the international bankers and international Reds.
Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry—that was Adolf Hitler’s technique. He had been applying it for thirteen years, ever since the accursed treaty had been signed, and now he was at the climax of his efforts. He and his lieutenants were holding hundreds of meetings every night, all over Germany, and it was like one meeting; the same speech, whether it was a newspaper print or cartoon or signboard or phonograph record. No matter whether it was true or not—for Adi meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn’t dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seen it, it was God’s truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it—shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night. If one person states it, it is nonsense, but if ten thousand join in it becomes an indictment, and when ten million join in it becomes history. The Jews kill Christian children and use their blood as a part of their religious ritual! You refuse to believe it? But it is a well-known fact; it is called “ritual murder.” The Jews are in a conspiracy to destroy Christian civilization and rule the whole world. It has all been completely exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the party has printed these, the Führer has guaranteed their authenticity, the great American millionaire Henry Ford has circulated them all over America. Everybody there knows that the charges are true, the whole world knows it—save only the Jew-lovers, the Jew-kissers, the filthy Jew-hirelings. Nieder mit den Juden!
XI
So here was another huge mass meeting, such crowds that you could hardly get in, and two rich Americans having to climb to distant seats in a gallery. But it was all right, for there were loudspeakers, a wonderful device whereby one small figure on a platform could have the voice of a score of giants, while a dissenter became a pigmy, uttering a squeak like a mouse. The radio was a still more marvelous invention; that feeble little “crystal set” with earphones which Robbie Budd had brought to Bienvenu ten years ago had become the most dominating of psychological forces, whereby one man could indoctrinate a hundred million. Learned technicians of the mind had evolved methods of awakening curiosity, so that the millions would listen; and no matter how much anyone disagreed, he was powerless to answer back. The dream of every dictator was to get exclusive control of that colossal instrument, so that never again in all history would it be possible to answer back. Then what you said would become the truth and the only truth—no matter how false it might have been previously! He who could get and hold the radio became God.
Once more Lanny observed the application of the art of moving the mass mind. Adolf Hitler taught that the masses did not think with their brains but with their blood; that is to say, they did not reason but were driven by instincts. The most basic instinct was the desire to survive and the fear of not surviving; therefore Adolf Hitler told them that their enemies desired to destroy them and that he alone could and would save them; he told them that they were the Herrenvolk, the master race, designed by nature to survive and to rule all other races of the earth. The second basic instinct was hunger, and they had suffered it, and he promised them that under his leadership Germany would break into the storehouses of the world’s plenty; the Fatherland would have Lebensraum, the space in which to expand and grow. The third basic instinct is sex, and he told them that they were destined to populate the earth, and that every pure-blooded Aryan Mädchen was the predestined mother of blond heroes; that was what she was created for, and no permission was needed for her to begin; a wise Fatherland would provide for her care and give all honor to her and her offspring.
All these instincts added up into pride and victory over the foes of Germany. “Sieg Heil!” they shouted; and the party had invented an elaborate ritual to embody these concepts and to thrill the dullest soul. At the futile Beerhall Putsch which Lanny had witnessed in Munich there had been carried banners, and these banners had been riddled with bullets and stained with the blood of martyrs; that made them holy, and Adolf Hitler had carried them all over Germany, and upon public platforms ha
d performed the ceremony of touching the new banners with the old; that made all the Nazi banners holy, and worthy of being stained with the blood of martyrs. So now when they were carried all hearts beat high, and all good party members longed for a chance to become martyrs and have a new Horst Wessel Lied sung about them. Shrill trumpets proclaimed the entry of these banners, drums beat and fifes shrilled and a bodyguard of heroes marched into the hall with faces solemn and grim.
To the speakers’ platform ascended large, heavy Gregor Strasser; not humbled and browbeaten as Lanny had last seen him, but bursting with assurance of power. He was one of the original party leaders, and had helped Adolf to keep alive in the early days. He had believed in the early program with all its promises for the overthrow of the rich and the setting up of the disinherited. Did he believe in them still, when he knew that the Führer no longer meant them? You could never have guessed it from listening to his speech, for he seemed to have but one rule: to think of everything that ten thousand Württembergers could possibly want, and promise it to them, to be delivered on the day when they would elect the candidates of the N.S.D.A.P.
Lanny said: “That’s surely the way to get out the vote!”
Irma, who didn’t understand what the orator was promising, and had to judge by gestures and tones, remarked: “It is surprising how much like Uncle Jesse he sounds.”
Dragon's Teeth Page 27
