VIII
“Oh, by the way,” said the daughter of Jerusalem, all at once; “I understand that you were in Germany not long ago.”
“Just before Christmas,” replied Lanny.
“I do wish you would tell me about it. It must be dreadful.”
“In some ways, and for some people. Others hardly notice it.”
“Oh, Monsieur Budd,” said Olivie, lowering her voice, “may I tell you something without its going any farther? I’m really not supposed to talk, but we are all so worried.”
“You may be sure that my wife and I will respect your confidence, Madame.”
“We have just learned that the Nazis have arrested my Uncle Solomon. You know him, possibly?”
“I had the pleasure of meeting him at the home of Johannes Robin. Also, I am one of his depositors in Berlin.”
“They have trumped up some charge against him, of sending money out of Germany. You know, of course, that a banker cannot help doing that; especially a family like ours, doing business in Austria and Czechoslovakia and Rumania, and so many other countries.”
“Of course, Madame.”
“We Jews hear the most dreadful stories—really, it makes you quite sick.”
“I am sorry to say that many of them are true. They tell you that such things happen in violent social overturns. But I doubt if the Nazis would do physical harm to a man like your uncle. They would be more likely to assess him a very large fine.”
“It is all so bewildering, Monsieur Budd. Really, my father cannot be sure whether it would be safe for him to go into Germany to see about it.”
“I will make a suggestion, Madame, if you don’t mind.”
“That is just what I was hoping you might do.”
“I ask you to consider it confidential, just as you have asked me. Tell your mother and father, but nobody else.”
“Certainly, Monsieur Budd.”
“I suggest their sending somebody to interview General Göring. He has a great deal of influence and seems to understand these matters.”
“Oh, thank you!” exclaimed Olivie Hellstein. “I am so glad I thought to ask you about it.”
Irma put in: “Send somebody who is dignified and impressive-looking, and tell him to be dressed exactly right, and not forget any of the Minister-Präsident General’s titles.”
IX
Out of duty to the memory of Marie de Bruyne, Lanny made an effort to see her younger son, but found it impossible. Charlot was meeting somewhere with the leaders of his society, and the inquiries of strangers were not welcomed. This Tuesday, the sixth of February, was to be the great night in which all organizations of the Right in France would “demonstrate” against the government. Marching orders had been published in all the opposition papers, under the slogan: “A bas les voleurs! Down with the thieves!” At twilight Charlot would emerge from his hiding place, wearing his tricolor armband with the letters F.C.F., which meant that he was a Son of the Cross of Fire. He would be singing the Marseillaise; an odd phenomenon, the battle-song of one revolution becoming the anti-song of the next! In between singing, Charlot and his troop of patriotic youths would be yelling the word “Démission!”—which meant the turning out of the Daladier government. Less politely they would cry: “Daladier au poteau!” meaning that they wished to burn him alive.
Lanny drove his wife to the Chamber, going by a circuitous route because the Pont de la Concorde was blocked by gendarmes. For an hour the couple sat in the public gallery and listened to an uproar which reminded Lanny of what he had heard on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at the height of the panic. Daladier couldn’t make his speech; his political enemies hurled at him every abusive name in the extensive French vocabulary, while at the same time the Communists sang the Internationale.
When this became monotonous, the Americans went out to have a look at the streets. They couldn’t see much from a car, for fear of being caught in fighting, and decided that the best place from which to witness a Paris démonstration was from the windows of their hotel suite. Robbie, sensible fellow, was in his rooms, talking business with the head of a French building concern which sometimes bought ascenseurs. The two younger people stood on the balcony of their drawing-room, which looked over the great Place de la Concorde, brilliantly lighted, and with an obelisk in the center having floodlights on it. Directly across the Place was the bridge over the Seine to the Palais-Bourbon, where the deputies met; a building in Roman style with many tall pillars brightly shining.
There must have been a hundred thousand people in the Place, and more pouring in by every street. They were trying to get across the bridge, but the police and troops had blocked it with patrol-wagons. The mob started throwing things, and soon there was a pitched battle, with charges and counter-charges going on most of the night. The Fascists hurled whatever they could lay hands on. They pried up stones from the pavement, and tore off the scaffolding from the American Embassy, which was under repair. The railings of the Tuileries gardens provided them with an iron missile, shaped like a boomerang and impossible to see in the dark. When the mounted gardes républicaines tried to drive them off the bridge, charging and striking with the flat of their sabers, the mob countered with walking-sticks having razor-blades fastened to the ends, to slash the bellies of the horses. In one attack after another they crippled so many of the police and gardes that they came very near getting across the bridge and into the Chamber.
So at last shooting began. The street-lights were smashed, and the floodlights on the obelisk were turned off, so you couldn’t see much. An omnibus had been overturned and set afire near the bridge, but that gave more smoke than light, and it soon burned out. The last sight that Lanny saw was a troop of the Spahis, African cavalrymen in white desert robes looking like the Ku Kluxers, galloping up the Champs Élysées and trampling the mob. There came screams directly under where Irma and Lanny were standing; a chambermaid of the hotel had been shot and killed on the balcony. So the guests scrambled in quickly, deciding that they had seen enough of the class war in France.
“Do you think they will raid the hotel?” asked Irma; but Lanny assured her that this was a respectable kind of mob, and was after the politicians only. So they went to bed.
X
“Bloody Tuesday,” it was called, and the Fascist newspapers set out to make it into the French “Beerhall Putsch.” From that time on they would have only one name for Daladier: “Assassin!” They clamored for his resignation, and before the end of the next day they got it; there were whispers that he could no longer depend upon the police and the gardes. More than two hundred of these were in the hospitals, and it looked like a revolution on the way. There was wreckage all over Paris, and the Ministry of Marine partly burned. Charlot had got a slash across the forehead, and for the rest of his life would wear a scar with pride. “La Concorde,” he would say, referring to the bridge; it would become a slogan, perhaps some day a password to power.
On Wednesday night matters were worse, for the police were demoralized, and the hoodlums, the apaches, went on the warpath. They smashed the windows of the shops in the Rue de Rivoli and other fashionable streets and looted everything in sight. It wasn’t a pleasant time for visitors in Paris; Robbie was going to Amsterdam on business, so Irma and Lanny stepped into their car and sped home.
But you couldn’t get away from the class war in France. The various reactionary groups had been organized all over the Midi, and they, too, had received their marching orders. They had the sympathy of many in the various foreign colonies; anything to put down the Reds. Rick, after hearing Lanny’s story, said that la patrie was awaiting only one thing, a leader who would have the shrewdness to win the “little man.” So far, all the Fascist groups were avowedly reactionary, and it would take a leftish program to win. Lanny expressed the opinion that the French man in the street was much shrewder than the German; it wouldn’t be so easy to hoodwink him.
Life was resumed at Bienvenu. Rick worked on his play
and Lanny read the manuscript, encouraged him, and supplied local color. In the privacy of their chamber Irma said: “Really, you are a collaborator, and ought to be named.” She wondered why Lanny never wrote a play of his own. She decided that what he lacked was the impulse of self-assertion, the strong ego which takes up the conviction that it has something necessary to the welfare of mankind. Uncle Jesse had it, Kurt had it, Rick had it. Beauty had tried in vain to awaken it in her son, and now Irma tried with no more success. “Rick can do it a lot better”—that was all she could get.
Irma was becoming a little cross with this lame Englishman. She had got Lanny pretty well cured of his Pinkness, but now Rick kept poking up the fires. There came a series of terrible events in Austria—apparently Fascism was going to spread from country to country until it had covered all Europe. Austria had got a Catholic Chancellor named Dollfuss, and a Catholic army, the Heimwehr, composed mainly of peasant lads and led by a dissipated young prince. This government was jailing or deporting Hitlerites, but with the help of Mussolini was getting its own brand of Fascism, and now it set out to destroy the Socialist movement in the city of Vienna. Those beautiful workers’ homes, huge apartment blocks which Lanny had inspected with such joy—the Heimwehr brought up its motorized artillery and blasted them to ruins, killing about a thousand men, women, and children. Worse yet, they killed the workers’ movement, which had been two generations building.
A terrible time to be alive in. Lanny and Rick could hardly eat or sleep; they could only grieve and brood over the tragedy of the time into which they had been born. Truly it seemed futile to work for anything good; to dream of peace and order, justice or even mercy. This wholesale slaughter of working people was committed in the name of the gentle and lowly Jesus, the carpenter’s son, the social rebel who had been executed because he stirred up the people! A devout Catholic Premier ordering the crime, and devout Catholic officers attending mass before and after committing it! And not for the first time or the last in unhappy Europe. Rick reminded his friend of that cardinal in France who had ordered the St. Bartholomew massacre, saying: “Kill them all; God will be able to pick out His Christians.”
XI
Hot weather came to the Riviera, and the people whom Irma considered important went away. Those who were poor, like the Dingles and the Robins, would stick it out and learn to take a siesta. But Nina and Rick went back to England, and Emily Chattersworth moved her servants to Les Forêts and invited Irma and Lanny to visit her and see the spring Salon and the new plays. It was Irma’s idea, to keep her husband’s mind off the troubles of the world. They went, and after they had played around for a couple of weeks, Irma had a letter from her mother, begging them to come to Shore Acres and bring Baby Frances for the summer. Really it was a crime to have that magnificent place and never use it; also it was grossly unfair that one grandmother should have her heart’s desire all the time and the other not at all. “I don’t believe that Beauty cares for the child anything like as much as I do,” wrote the Queen Mother; a sentence which Irma skipped when she read the letter aloud.
The couple talked over the problem. Irma was reluctant to take her precious darling on board a steamer; she hadn’t got over her memories of the Lindbergh kidnaping, and thought that an ocean liner was an ideal place for a band of criminals to study a twenty-three-million-dollar baby, her habits and entourage. No, it would be better to spend the summer in England’s green and pleasant land, where kidnapers were unknown. Let Mother be the one to brave the ocean waves! Irma hadn’t spent any money to speak of during the past year, and now interest on bonds was being paid and dividends were hoped for. She said: “Let’s drive about England, the way we did on our honeymoon, and see if we can find some suitable place to rent.”
Nothing is more fun than doing over again what you did on your honeymoon; that is, if you have managed to keep any of the honeymoon feeling alive after five years. “There are so many nice people there,” argued the young wife. Lanny agreed, even though he might not have named the same persons.
He knew that Rick’s play was nearly done, and he wanted to make suggestions for the last act. Then there would be the job of submitting it to managers, and Lanny would want to hear the news. Perhaps it might be necessary to raise the money, and that wouldn’t be so easy, for it was a grim and violent play, bitter as gall, and would shock the fashionable ladies. But Lanny meant to put up the money which he had earned in Germany—all of it, if necessary, and he didn’t want Irma to be upset about it. They were following their plan of keeping the peace by making concessions, each to the other and in equal proportions.
They crossed the Channel and put up at the Dorchester. When their arrival was announced in the papers, as it always would be, one of the first persons who telephoned was Wickthorpe, saying: “Won’t you come out and spend the week end?”
Lanny replied: “Sure thing. We’re looking for a little place to rent this summer. Maybe you can give us some advice.” He said “little” because he knew that was good form; but of course it wouldn’t really be little.
“I have a place near by,” responded his lordship. “I’ll show it to you, if you don’t mind.”
“Righto!” said Lanny, who knew how to talk English to Englishmen.
When he told Irma about it, she talked American. “Oh, heck! Do you suppose it’ll have tin bathtubs?”
XII
But it didn’t. It was a modern villa with three baths, plenty of light and air, and one of those English lawns, smooth as a billiard table, used for playing games. There was a high hedge around the place, and everything lovely. It was occupied by Wickthorpe’s aunt, who was leaving for a summer cruise with some friends. There was a staff of well-trained servants who would stay on if requested. “Oh, I think it will be ducky!” exclaimed the heiress. She paid the price to his lordship’s agent that very day, and the aunt agreed to move out and have everything in order by the next week end. Irma cabled her mother, and wrote Bub Smith and Feathers to get everything ready and bring Baby and Miss Severne and the maid on a specified date. Jerry Pendleton would see to the tickets, and Bub would be in charge of the traveling, Feathers being such a featherbrain.
So there was a new ménage, with everything comfortable, and no trouble but the writing of a few checks and the giving of a few orders. A delightful climate and many delightful people; a tennis court and somebody always to play; a good piano and people who loved music; only a few minutes’ drive to the old castle, where Lanny and his wife were treated as members of the family, called up and urged to meet this one and that. Again Lanny heard statesmen discussing the problems of the world; again they listened to what he had to tell about the strange and terrifying new movement in Germany, and its efforts to spread itself in all the neighboring countries. Englishmen of rank and authority talked freely of their empire’s affairs, telling what they would do in this or that contingency; now and then Lanny would find himself thinking: “What wouldn’t Göring pay for this!”
Zoltan had been in Paris, and now came to London. It was the “season,” and there were exhibitions, and chances to make sales. An art expert, like the member of any other profession, has to hear the gossip of his monde; new men are coming in and old ones going out, and prices fluctuating exactly as on the stock market. Lanny and his partner still had money in Naziland, and lists of pictures available in that country, by means of which they expected to get their money out. Also, there was the London stage, and Rick to go with them to plays and tell the news of that world. There was the fashion rout, with no end of dances and parties. Dressmakers and others clamored to provide Irma with costumes suited to her station; they would bring them out into the country to show her at any hour of the day or night.
Good old Margy Petries, Dowager Lady Eversham-Watson, had opened her town house, and begged the young couple to make it their headquarters whenever they came to town; she telegraphed Beauty and Sophie to bring their husbands and come and have a good old-fashioned spree. When Mrs. Barnes arrived
, she, too, was “put up”; that was the custom in Kentucky, and Margy still called herself a blue-grass-country girl, even at the age of fifty-five.
So it was just like Bienvenu at the height of midwinter; so many things going on that really you had a hard time choosing, and would rush from one event to the next with scarcely time to catch your breath. It was extremely difficult for Lanny to find time to brood over the fate of the world; and that was what his wife had planned. She saw that she was winning out, and was happy, and proud of her acumen. Until one Saturday noon, arriving at their villa for a week end, Lanny found a telegram from Bienvenu, signed “Rahel” and reading:
“Letter from Clarinet in place you visited most distressing circumstances he implores help am airmailing letter.”
26
Out of This Nettle, Danger
I
The argument started as soon as Irma read the telegram and got its meaning clear. She knew exactly what would be in her husband’s mind; she had been thinking about it for more than a year, watching him, anticipating this moment, living through this scene. And she knew that he had been doing the same. They had talked about it a great deal, but she hadn’t uttered all of her thoughts, nor he of his; they had dreaded the ordeal, shrinking from the things that would be said. She knew that was true about herself, and guessed it was true about him; she guessed that he guessed it about her—and so on through a complication such as develops when two human souls, tied together by passionate love, discover a basic and fundamental clash of temperaments, and try to conceal it from each other and even from themselves.
Dragon's Teeth Page 59
