III
Lanny and Rosemary were in love. Nothing had changed since a decade ago. Their passion was intense, yet peaceful and secure; it burned like the English soft coal in a grate, steadily and dependably, lending a glow to everything in the room. Magically they took it with them wherever they went or whatever they did: walking, talking, listening to music, meeting friends.
These friends came with eager curiosity. Rosemary, Countess of Sandhaven, had a new lover—what was he like?—buzz, buzz! An American, but half Frenchified, perhaps a bit of a bounder, good-looking and all that—but what a funny idea! Childhood playmates, and they thought they could pull it off again—buzz, buzz! Winnie and Patsy and Edie and Cissy, Creapy and Aggie and Jippy—all ultra-smart young men and matrons with nothing to do but play around all day and most of the night, and love was their most exciting form of play. When any pair of them tried a new combination, the rest came running like spectators outside the monkey-cage in a zoo, to watch and gossip and speculate. If one of them brought in a stranger, some welcomed a novelty, others resented it, but all chattered like the simians when a leopard appears under their trees. None of them took much stock in childhood sweethearts, but it was a chance to exercise one’s wit, to show one’s sophistication, ultra beyond all other ultras.
Rosemary and Lanny made a mystery of it and wouldn’t give their address; it was a honeymoon. They went to theaters and picture exhibitions, they walked in Hyde Park, and when the fog was too thick to grope through they stayed in their rooms and he played for her—he always got a piano wherever he stayed for even a few days. Bringing it made exercise for four sturdy men who appeared glad to get the tips. Also he read to her. Nothing old, nothing foreign; she liked English scenes and people that she knew about. She found Galsworthy right, so he read The Dark Flower, and it caused her distress. A warning against letting passion run away with you! Keep your head, don’t expect too much, or make extravagant promises! Sufficient to the day is the pleasure thereof, and tomorrow will be another day, and perhaps entirely different.
IV
Lanny telegraphed Zoltan, who was in Amsterdam, and he came at once. Lanny drove him and Rosemary out to the manor to inspect the paintings. Rosemary wasn’t interested in the details; she went to play with her children and hear what had happened since Mumsy had gone up to town. Later, after the experts had finished their inspecting and discussing, she came to get the results. She was no trader, and made no effort to conceal her astonishment when this agreeable Hungarian gentleman confirmed Lanny’s idea that they should be able to get at least fifty thousand pounds for those dingy and tiresome old family heirlooms. Absolutely incredible! Why, Bertie would be able to pay all his debts and be on easy street the rest of his life! The money-lenders had been riding him hard, and he couldn’t sell any part of the estate because it was entailed. The Honorable Little Bertie, now seven, would have everything it might produce after his accession; but he needn’t have any old paintings!
Rosemary said she would leave everything to Lanny. Make out a contract or authorization or whatever they needed, and she would take it to Bertie and have him sign it right away. She thought that Lanny ought to get more than five percent, but she waited until she was alone with him to say that. When he told her that they planned to put several of these English masters in the palace of the new German money-lord, Johannes Robin, and that they wouldn’t charge her and Bertie a commission on these, because Johannes was paying them and they never took commissions from both parties, Rosemary had the bright idea that she would get that commission for pocket money! “I’ve done work, haven’t I?” she asked, and he assured her that he himself had received large sums for doing no more.
The three of them went to the shop of an expert in London who attended to the cleaning of old pictures. Rosemary was interested now, since she had learned how much money was at stake. She witnessed the excitement of the bespectacled old man who did this delicate work when Zoltan told him that they had an undoubtedly genuine Gainsborough of his best period, and two Richard Wilsons—“poor red-nosed Dick!” the man called him; also a full-length Raeburn, a Hoppner, and two characteristic portraits by Opie, that sarcastic and unpopular painter who had told a patron that he “mixed his paints with brains.” Zoltan was minute in his instructions as to how each of these masterpieces was to be treated, and said that he would submit his orders in writing for safety. None of the “Joe Duveen monkey-shines” this time! Lanny listened attentively and learned how to handle such matters, what prices to pay and how to speak with authority, courteously and yet firmly. “This is what I want”—and if you knew what you wanted you could get it.
V
Rosemary went home for a week-end, and Lanny drove to The Reaches, home of the Pomeroy-Nielsons. Everybody so kind, and glad to see him, in the quiet, undemonstrative English way. Rick’s sister, married for several years, gentle, refined young mother with two babies, had come for a visit. A sense of peace and security prevailed in this home; everybody did or said what he or she pleased, but no one did any harm, because they had lived that way for generations and learned to combine liberty with order. If only everybody, all over the world, would do the same! They set the example, and hoped others would follow.
Among the week-end guests was a member of Parliament; large sort of country-squire Englishman wearing a snuff-colored golf suit. His complexion worried you because you thought his blood vessels were breaking; but it didn’t worry him. He smoked a pipe and listened to the others, and only when they got on the subject of “shootin’” did he have much to contribute. Later, after a game of billiards, he and Sir Alfred discussed foreign affairs and Lanny discovered that he was very well informed. They talked about France, which had done herself so much harm because she couldn’t make up her mind whether to let Germany get up or not; she kept scolding at Britain like a bad-tempered woman, because Britain wanted to trade with everybody, including her former foes. There was trade enough to go round, and you could always make more. Why couldn’t people do business instead of “fightin’”?
Mr. Cunnyngham learned that Lanny had come from France, and so took him into the conversation. What was the matter with those Nationalists? Lanny explained their neurosis on the subject of Germany. And did the plain people of France feel like that? Lanny said no, but they felt that they had been let down by the war. The average Frenchman had an urgent desire to re-establish the foyer. Also he wanted real disarmament—a peace that could be trusted. He was provoked by the idea that the English used the Germans as a counter-weight against the French. He felt contempt for the Americans, who had come into the war so late, yet thought that they had won it; who wanted their money back—as if it hadn’t been America’s war, too!
The talk moved on to Germany. Lanny told his new friend about the Nazis, but found that no member of the British governing class could be persuaded to concern himself with people of that sort. There would always be fanatics, and they would always be yellin’ and makin’ speeches; let the blighters blow their heads off. Mr. Cunnyngham told of troubles he had experienced in India. Cows were sacred, even though they blocked the streets and made them filthy; crocodiles were sacred, even though they ate the babies. The Hindu fanatics insisted on breakin’ up the sacred processions of the Mohammedans, and vice versa—they were always havin’ shindies in the streets, and the British had to bring up native soldiers armed with long sticks called lathis and beat them over the heads. In India these things were centuries old and you couldn’t change them; but this fellow Hitler with his notions couldn’t get anywhere in a country as enlightened as Germany. Let him fight the Reds—that was all to the good.
Lanny had expected to tell Nina and Rick about his new adventure in the garden of love, but he found that it had already reached them by the gossip grapevine which flourishes so luxuriantly in that garden. They thought the affair was “rippin’” and wished him happiness, and why hadn’t he brought Rosemary with him? Rick had a new play, but hadn’t been able to get it produced
because it was too grim. People wanted to be happy, and tried so pathetically hard. Rick was writing articles in which he predicted new troubles for Europe, and nobody would publish them but the Labor papers. Rick didn’t know whether they could afford to come south that winter, and Lanny had to argue with him; he stood to make more than half a million francs out of those pictures of Rosemary’s, and what would be the good of it if he couldn’t be allowed to buy a bunch of railroad tickets for his best friends?
They promised to come; and so did Rosemary. She hadn’t had a holiday for many months, and this would be her time. She didn’t care anything about Berlin, that cold, forbidding city, and, moreover, couldn’t be away from the children at Christmas; but after that the youngsters would get along with a competent governess and maids, and Rosemary would come to the heights above Cannes, where one of her friends had a villa that stayed empty most of the time. If the friend came, Rosemary would be her guest, and otherwise the caretakers would take care of Rosemary, and in either case Lanny would visit her and everything would be “ducky.” With Rosemary everything pleasant was that, and everything unpleasant was “horrid,” and so one could get along with a comparatively small vocabulary.
But this was a minor defect in an otherwise almost perfect mistress. Lanny had everything that a man could crave; he would have said that he was completely happy—and yet always that worm within the bud, that doubt which gnawed in his soul: the spectacle of misery amid luxury in all the great capitals of Europe! The knowledge that you couldn’t step a hundred yards off the main thoroughfares without finding yourself in some hideous and depressing slum! Here on one of the fashionable shopping-streets of this fabulously rich capital—on Regent Street, where the great ladies descended from their limousines to enter jewelers’ and couturiers’—here you saw war veterans still grinding hand-organs or rattling collection boxes. England had just had a coal strike that had become a general strike and had looked desperately menacing; it had been starved out, and so bitterness and hate were in the faces of the people, and misery and depression could not be hid. All that a rich man needed to be happy was to have no heart. If he had one, then all the gifts which fortune showered upon him might turn to dust and ashes in his hands.
VI
In the middle of December Lanny set out for Berlin. He had a heating device in his car, and enjoyed seeing the German countryside in its winter garb, and watching the people at the places where he stopped. His mother was due to be waiting at the Robins’, for she was coming with Kurt. She too had earned a holiday, and had found a reliable governess to take care of her child. An English maiden lady, very stiff and strict High Church, had been coming every day to give Marceline lessons, and twice a week took her to town for dancing-lessons. The proper soul must have been shocked by what she found going on in Bienvenu, but she wasn’t asked to take part in it, and had become fond of her eager and lovely charge. Now she was staying at the villa while the mother was traveling. Beauty said that religious principles didn’t make very good company, but were indispensable in the persons you employed to wait on you; she was always particular in her inquiries on the subject.
The blond Beauty was gorgeous in her autumnal blooming, and never more so than in this cold weather which seemed to bring a glow to her whole personality. The German palace provided just the sort of background she was made for; she was as completely in place in it as the owners seemed out of place, and they were aware of it, and proud and happy to have such elegant interior decoration. Beauty knew rich and important people in every part of Europe, and she brought some to tea and showed them the lovely paintings which her son had collected, and was as proud of them as she was of her son. It was the thing she had done through so many years for Robbie Budd, meeting the right people and making the right impression, so that they would buy machine guns and hand-grenades and automatic pistols; now she would cause them to buy Halses and Dürers, Marises and Israelses and Menzels—she could have drummed up enough business to keep Lanny occupied for a year, if the eccentric fellow hadn’t preferred to sit and play piano accompaniments for Hansi and Freddi!
Only one fly in this Beauty cream—the painful news which Lanny imparted about his evil behavior in London. There wasn’t anything the mother could do about it, of course; the tears ran down her cheeks and she said: “I am being punished for my sins!” Lanny wanted to know: “Am I such a bad sin? And are you really so sorry about me?” He petted her, and presently was able to get her to reflect that a genuine English countess wasn’t such a heavy social handicap; she had only to look at the photos of Rosemary which Lanny had brought in order to see that she wouldn’t really be embarrassed to present her son’s lady-love in the drawing-room of her home. Beauty made a moue and exclaimed: “Oh, dear, what will poor Miss Addington say now?” Lanny burst out laughing and answered: “She’ll say that Rosemary belongs to the aristocracy and that only God can deal with her.”
VII
Hansi had made his first public appearance in Berlin with success, and Lanny thought he had never seen two human beings so happy as his half-sister and her bridegroom. Apparently Bess was never going to tire of listening to the music of the violin, clarinet, and piano, and had been working loyally at her own job—she had a teacher who came every day, and a study of her own in which to pound away to her heart’s content. She wished that Kurt might see how much progress she had made. Lanny didn’t tell her the true reason, but said that when Kurt came to Berlin he was occupied with his business affairs and with his brother and friends.
For how long would it be possible to keep hidden from a keen-eyed girl the painful facts about this Europe which she had adopted as her home? Not long, Lanny feared, for she was determined to know all about it; she read the incendiary pamphlets of which her husband had a supply, and Lanny saw Socialist and Communist magazines and newspapers in her study. It couldn’t have escaped her attention that the Jews were the objects of bitter dislike among large sections of German people. Would she discover how the fashionable ones whom Beauty brought to the house despised the Schieber, their host, and resented the fact that he was able to live in a palace and to decorate it with masterpieces of art? Sooner or later Bess would have to learn that Lanny’s friend and Beauty’s lover tolerated Hansi only because he was a genius, and refused to tolerate Hansi’s father on any terms.
Kurt’s attitude was a source of increasing uneasiness to Lanny. He had difficulty in understanding it, and had started more than once to press inquiries, but had been forced to realize that they were not welcome. The Kurt Meissner who had come out of the trenches and entered France with forged passports and money to buy Paris newspaper publishers, was a different human being from the consecrated lad with whom Lanny had pledged everlasting friendship on the heights of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Port. Kurt was a man who no longer told what he thought, at any rate not to foreigners. He had built a shell around him like a tortoise, and he drew into it and shut it tight when he was approached.
Kurt never said in so many words that he didn’t like the Jews as Jews; but he must have known in his heart that it was so. Lanny asked, had any Jews ever done him any wrong, and Kurt replied that this was a ridiculous question; he didn’t let himself be influenced by personal prejudices. His attitude to the Jewish race was a scientific one, he declared, based upon observation of the part they played in German society. Doubtless they had been a great race in their own Palestine, and it might be well if they went back there, as the British were endeavoring to arrange. But in Germany they were a source of many sorts of corruption. Perhaps they were too shrewd traders for the honest, straightforward, kind-hearted Aryan folk.
VIII
Lanny tried also to argue with Kurt about the National Socialists. They seemed to him terrible men; harsh and violent, their doctrine a kind of madness. Incomprehensible how a generous, idealistic philosopher could tolerate either their ideas or their company! Kurt would answer that Lanny didn’t understand the position of Germany, a nation able to exist only upon the sufferan
ce of Britain and France. Kurt would cite facts about the orders which the Reparations Commission was issuing to his country. They had even taken the national railways and turned them over to private foreign ownership! The Fatherland was to become a sort of serfdom, a nation of robots which toiled to produce wealth for their conquerors. The German people didn’t think of themselves thus and wouldn’t stay thus; they were a proud people, and had a future.
“All right,” Lanny argued; “but can’t we by orderly and peaceful methods—”
“We have tried them, and it’s not that sort of world. It’s a world in which you only get what you can take! We have to awaken the consciousness of the German people, inspire them with courage and hope, and that takes a leader, a prophet. If there’s any other man in German life who can do it except Adolf Hitler he has not been shown to me.”
“But look at the men he’s got around him, Kurt!”
“He has to take what he can find. Our politicians are corrupt or cowardly, our intellectuals are infected with skepticism and diletantism—this job calls for men of action, willing to go out and give their lives in the streets, fighting the Communists with their own weapons—and you can’t get that sort of work done by saints and idealists.”
Yes, Kurt Meissner was a different man! No longer rigid in his uprightness, but what the world called “practical,” willing to compromise, to make concessions; he wanted to get something done so badly that he would seize whatever tools were at hand. He would excuse lying and cheating, and the smuggling in of Budd automatics and daggers! Nor was he any longer satisfied to live in an ivory tower and produce music which mankind might discover and appreciate after he was dead; he wanted to write something which would stir the German soul now—a rallying song for the people, a cantata which patriots could sing at meetings, and which would inspire masses of men to battle for the Fatherland. It was significant that Kurt didn’t tell Lanny about this idea, which had been suggested to him by some of the leaders of the new movement. Lanny found out about it only from a chance remark of Kurt’s brother.
Between Two Worlds Page 63
