VIII
Another old friend came visiting that season: Margy Petries, Dowager Countess Eversham-Watson. Poor old “Bumbles” had died in great pain of his gout, and his son by a previous marriage was the young lord. Margy wasn’t as rich as she had been, for “Petries’ Peerless” had been put clean out of business by Prohibition, the most wicked act of confiscation ever perpetrated, so Margy would declare; however, her family had seen it coming and had salted money away, so she didn’t have to “go on the country,” as the phrase was at home. She and Beauty were old cronies, and never were there two more sprightly widows; they would put on their best duds and amuse themselves breaking the hearts of all the suitors on the Riviera—but as for letting one trap them—never, never! Wealthy widows come to look upon themselves as grouse in the shooting-season; all the men on the moors are carrying guns and looking especially for them.
Margy solved the problem of Beauty’s immediate future by inviting her to London for the fashionable doings. Margy still had her town house, her own property, and it was “a barn,” and hard to fill; Beauty would come and help her to entertain. She could bring Marceline and the governess if she wished, and Marceline could have music- and dancing-lessons, or could stay out in the country, where Margy had the use of the lodge on her stepson’s estate. Later on, the Robins were planning a cruise in the Baltic, and would visit—of all places on earth—the city which had once been called St. Petersburg and now had a name which one apologized for pronouncing. A special concession to the young Reds in the family, Beauty explained; but Margy said it required no apology, it sounded like a lark, and Beauty thereupon wrote to Johannes, who in turn wrote inviting the Dowager Countess Eversham-Watson to join the cruise. Lanny was delighted, for it meant, among other things, that he wouldn’t have to play bridge on the new trip.
Thus everything was happily arranged for the rest of the year. Toward the end of April, Rosemary took her brood home by train and Lanny drove to Paris, where he met Zoltan; they discussed their many business affairs and attended the salon and some of the sales. Lanny paid his duty call at the Château de Bruyne and met the two young men, now students at the Ecole Polytechnique; Denis, fils, had become affianced to a young lady of the neighborhood, the match having been arranged by his aunt. It seemed one of which Marie would have approved, and, anyhow, it would have been awkward for Lanny to meddle. He slept again in the room which had so many memories, but they were growing dimmer, or at any rate the emotions they brought were less intense. He saw no apparitions.
He went also to call upon his Socialist and his Communist friends, and gave them money which they promised not to use in fighting one another. They had their rival papers and rival political candidates. The Communists sang the glories of an epoch-making event now getting under way in the Soviet Union, the Five-Year Plan for the industrializing of what had been the most backward of great nations. The Socialists charged that their rivals were subordinating the interests of France to those of a foreign land. Uncle Jesse invited Lanny to a réunion of the Communists, and made a speech in which he denounced the rival party for betraying the international hopes of the workers in the interest of French nationalism.
Lanny refused to argue, but took the family to supper after the event. Little Suzette had got herself married to a party member who was one of those homicidal taxidrivers of Paris; he came along, and Lanny was amused to discover that he was much too far to the left for Uncle Jesse. Suzette was expecting a baby, and also expecting the social revolution in France, and didn’t seem quite sure which would arrive first. Lanny thought he could tell her—and without being an authority on obstetrics.
Robbie sailed for France in his impromptu way, and Lanny waited to meet him. Always pleasant to hear the news from the family across the seas, and to tell Robbie about Bienvenu and its visitors, and about the beaux who were dancing attendance on Beauty, and about Robbie’s Red daughter and son-in-law. But when those personal details were finished, Lanny didn’t have much to talk to his father about. Robbie was a rich man, and growing richer, and this brought him satisfaction, but it didn’t widen his interests. Such things as salons and concerts weren’t real to him, and the details of his battles over oil and munitions brought Lanny no happiness.
Also, he had to work so hard to avoid provocative topics! Just now the father was in a state of exasperation over the so-called Kellogg pact for the outlawry of war, which had been the subject of negotiations between France and the United States for more than a year, and was now being broadened to take in all the nations. They were going to renounce war as an instrument of national policy, and forbid all wars except those of self-defense. As if any nation ever went to war without calling it self-defense! Robbie said that all these moves were just devices to keep the United States from arming as it could and should, and he took this Kellogg pact as a personal betrayal by the strong silent statesman whom he had helped to make President of the United States. Right now he and his associates were looking for a more trustworthy candidate!
IX
Lanny drove Zoltan to The Hague, where there was a friend of M. Rochambeau with some old Dutch masters for sale. From there they drove to Hanover, in Germany, where Hansi was giving one of his concerts. Bess was with him, also an accompanist—for Bess wasn’t nearly good enough yet. All three were most conscientious about their work, and happy in its success; the audience was enthusiastic, and Hansi didn’t wave any Red flags or make incendiary speeches. If he said anything about political questions to the interviewers they were considerate enough not to mention it in what they wrote. They reported that the German musical classics had a new and inspired interpreter; and Bess dutifully cut out the notices and mailed a set to Papa’ and another to Robbie.
Lanny and Zoltan took the Hook of Holland ferry to London and attended the sales and shows there. Another season, and everybody rolling in money—that word “everybody” being used in a special sense, for there were few streets so fashionable that you didn’t see men peddling matches and women peddling their bodies. That remained a part of what was called civilization, and you had your choice of hardening your heart and refusing to think about it, or else tormenting yourself with problems which couldn’t be solved. If you chose the former course, you became irritated with persons who threw spokes into the wheels of your forgetting machinery.
The play on which Rick had collaborated was produced, and Lanny and Rosemary, Zoltan and Beauty attended the opening. It was what the critics called a “problem play,” and they praised it as conscientious and well informed, but didn’t think it would appeal to the general public. Rick was choosing the hard road to success; he was interested in ideas, and refused to write down to his audience. His book had done fairly well, and he picked up a few pounds here and there, but couldn’t have got along if he hadn’t lived with his parents, and at Bienvenu.
Since Kurt Meissner had passed out of Beauty’s life she had taken her position as a perfectly respectable Franco-American lady, widow of a painter whose work was winning the esteem of the most distinguished critics. There was no longer any blot upon her escutcheon; she could even be a chaperon! Rosemary invited her to visit at Sandhaven Manor, and she came for a week-end, arriving conspicuously with her son and her pretty little daughter, and being conspicuously driven away again. After that the most prudish Victorian could have cherished no doubts concerning the relationship between the mistress of the manor and the handsome young American who was conducting her education in the arts.
The season waned, and there came what was called the hot weather in London, though of course it never seemed that to visitors from the Riviera. The fashionable folk went away to the beaches, or to Switzerland, or to the Normandy coast. It was arranged that Marceline and her governess were to spend July with Rosemary’s children at the seashore and August with Nina’s at The Reaches. The yacht Bessie Budd made its second appearance at Ramsgate, bringing the Robin family and one new member, Freddi having got himself engaged, without the help of a schadche
n, to a very intelligent Jewish girl, a fellow-student in the University of Berlin. She was an addition to any yachting party, for she had a lovely soprano voice and a boxful of music for which Lanny played accompaniments.
Also there were the ex-baroness and her new husband, and Margy with a visiting nephew who raised thoroughbred horses in the blue-grass region of Kentucky. Altogether a variegated party; a host who had sat and scratched fleas in a hut with a dirt floor in the ghetto of Lodz could figure that he had traveled a long distance in a very short time. Where had he acquired that cultivated, agreeable voice? By what model had he shaped his gracious manners? Who had taught him never to boast, never to make pretenses, never to talk about himself unless he was asked to, and then to say simply what he had been and how hard he had struggled to become better. A man can pattern himself on good models, but there has to be that in him which knows the good when he sees it. Jascha Rabinowich had learned something from every person of culture he had met in the forty years since his parents had brought him from Russian Poland to Rotterdam. And most of all he had learned from the Budd family.
X
The Bessie Budd sailed to Copenhagen and the party inspected that lovely city, not overlooking its art museums. Thence they proceeded across the Baltic, stopping in the harbors of those little states which had been set up by the League of Nations in the hope of keeping Germany and Russia apart. Nine years and a half had passed since Lanny had served as secretary to an expert on geography at the Peace Conference, and now another section of that geography came to life for him. He remembered the elaborate detail maps, tons of them; the filing clerks who had had to get them out and spread them on the floor, and the aged statesmen who had got down on hands and knees and crawled here and there making pencil marks to decide the destinies of millions. It had seemed rather haphazard and crazy at the time; but when Lanny told Johannes about it he said: “Was it any crazier than having armies fight battles and settle down on whatever they could take?”
The trim white yacht glided over the still blue waters, and they inspected the gracious capital city of Sweden. From there they crossed to the Gulf of Finland, and as they neared the head of it the owner and host told a story which he declared was true, he had it direct from the horse’s mouth. There was, he said, a certain young graduate of the technical schools of the new Soviet Union who had been asked to fill out a questionnaire for the guidance of his superiors in placing him under the Five-Year Plan. He had received a mimeographed form and had studied the questions carefully and replied conscientiously, as follows: “Where were you born?” Answer: “St. Petersburg.” “Where were you educated?” Answer: “Petrograd.” “Where are you employed at present?” Answer: “Leningrad.” “Where would you prefer to be employed?” Answer: “St. Petersburg.”
This was a sample of the kind of anecdote which was going the rounds outside the Soviet Union. It amused all the guests on the, yacht save the young ones: Hansi and Freddi and their two ladies. A curious situation, that Johannes should have toiled so hard to climb in the world, and should then discover his sons and the mothers of his future grandchildren looking with moral disapprobation upon his triumphs. He took it in a sporting spirit—too much so for some of his guests; Mr. Armitage, the retired engineer, remarked to his wife in the privacy of their cabin that it would have been better if Johannes had given the two young jackasses a good hiding.
A strange situation, and certainly not according to the alleged laws of economic determinism. If the formula had been working, you would have looked in the fo’c’sle for the Bolsheviks—and of course there may have been some there, though nobody tried to find out. The records of the Comintern contain cases of sons and daughters of the master class who have espoused the cause of the wage-slaves, but there has not yet been brought to light any case where the former have tried to incite the latter to mutiny on board their father’s yacht!
The young people on the Bessie Budd were going to visit Leningrad with eager curiosity, while their elders were going to visit St. Petersburg if they could, and if not they were going to put flowers on its tomb. There were discussions, and when these became too animated, they had to be hastily dropped. The piano was wheeled onto the deck, the amateur orchestra struck up, and it was Flora’s holiday, sacred to ease and happy love, to music, to dancing, and to poetry. Pipe and tabor gaily play, drive all sadness far away, and fitly crown with dance the day!
XI
The floating dance-hall came to rest in the harbor of the great city of palaces and churches built on a marsh. They had procured their visas at home, but discovered that there were many formalities to be gone through. Not many pleasure yachts came to “the Tsar’s Window” in these days, and it was difficult for overworked and suspicious revolutionaries to realize that there were persons in the world with nothing to do but glide about from place to place on a vessel big enough for all the pupils of a school or the patients of a sanatorium. In the end the strangers were permitted to come ashore and spend their valuta in the new workers’ state, but all baggage had to be gone through with care, and they might bring in without duty only precisely measured quantities of perfume, soap, cigars, and so on. They could not return at night to sleep on the yacht, or they would have to go through the same formalities each morning. They had to stay at the Hotel de l’Europe at twenty-five dollars a day per person, and be waited on by pathetic servitors left over from the old regime, men and women who had been born and trained in St. Petersburg and would have been glad to go back there.
The various members of the party saw what they had come to see. Several of the elders had visited this city in the days of the Tsars, and remembered the gaiety and splendor, the handsome guards, the elegant officers, the traffic, the busy shops, the scenes of luxury. Now they saw one vast slum, as drab and dull as it had been before Peter the Great had struck his staff into a marsh and said: “Build here.” A tired, bedraggled population, wearing worn and patched clothing full of smells; execrable service, table linen unclean, toilets out of order, nothing in the shops, and in the markets the painful spectacle of former ladies and gentlemen peddling furtively their faded finery to peasants who brought in eggs and vegetables and stood on the embankments along the canals chewing and spitting sunflower seeds. It was enough and more, and the general cry was: “Let’s get out of here!”
But to the young people there was a new world to be explored. Knowing few words of Russian, they employed the young women guides whom the regime supplied for tourists. These were ardent propagandists, inclined to patronize bourgeois visitors and, if antagonized, to argue in a manner most exasperating; but when you called them “tovarish” and convinced them of your good faith, their faces lighted up, and they would conduct you sixteen hours a day to look at nurseries and kindergartens, playgrounds and wholesale feeding establishments for factory workers, model creameries, clinics, laboratories—all the marvels of this new world which they were building with such pride and joy. It was “the future” to them, as it had been to Lincoln Steffens nine years ago, and it was still “working,” as he had seen it with prophetic eyes. Huge new factories arising, former laborers learning to run them; rivers being dammed, power-houses constructed—and all these things public property in which everyone had the pride of ownership.
XII
A conflict of wills developed between the two groups of visitors. To the ladies of fashion it was as if someone had dumped them into the midst of the East End of London and left them there. The ex-baroness found a family of old friends, members of the former plutocracy, now turned out of their palace and living in one room in the utmost misery; the great slum became a jail to Sophie, a scene in a nightmare from which she struggled to escape. She and Margy and their escorts came back to the hotel for elaborate but tasteless meals, and exchanged new impressions of disgust. “Oh, let’s go!” they cried, each day more loudly.
The plan had been for the yacht to visit the Finnish towns and sail up the Gulf of Bothnia. Now the young people said: “All right, bu
t go without us! We want time to visit a co-operative farm and see all the things that interest us, and we’ll rejoin you in Helsinki.”
So the arrangement was made; and it suited Lanny, because Leningrad possessed one of the world’s great treasure-houses of art, the Hermitage Museum, and he wanted to spend days wandering through its halls. Rosemary had no fine frenzies over paintings, but she elected to stay with him because she knew that otherwise she would have to help Beauty teach Mama Robin to play bridge.
When the reunion of the groups took place, the Bessie Budd had become a yacht divided against itself. There was no open warfare, for these were all polite people; but when the bourgeoisie spoke of the Soviet Union as a slum, the intelligentsia wanted to know how much time the contemptuous ones had spent in the slums of London and Berlin and Paris. When the bourgeoisie inquired what was gained by reducing everybody to the level of the lowest, the answer was that the slums of capitalist nations were a permanent part of their system, whereas the Soviet Union’s prosperity, once achieved, would be shared by all. It was a debate that was going on in every part of the earth; “the future,” as the Reds proposed to make it, by force if necessary, was a fighting topic wherever people talked, and on board a yacht the only solution was for the young to do their talking on one part of the deck while the middle-aged did their bridge-playing on another part.
Between Two Worlds Page 69
