She was small and slender—Lanny judged that she couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. She was extraordinarily trim, soignée with all the skill of French hairdressers and costumers, and neat to the point of primness. She had the brightest of blue eyes, always alert, watchful, with tiny wrinkles all around them—for she was in her forties. Among those she trusted she had a keen sense of humor, and moods of gaiety which recalled the Southern “charmer”; but she trusted very few, and most of the time her expression was rather grim, as of one who had had to fight her way through the world, and hadn’t yet made certain of her victory. Her accent showed no trace of her years in England; she spoke with a languid drawl, though her words were never slurred and were carefully chosen, never any clichés or slang. There was a sort of rising inflection, almost a questioning where no question was involved. Her voice was soft, and her manner gentle.
Lanny decided that she was what is called “a man’s woman”; she stood by her one and only man and fought for him, keeping him away from drinkers and gamblers, parasites and notoriety seekers. The unhappy man had been torn up by his roots and now had no place in the world. He had taken seriously his royal duties, and one of his major mistakes lay in having been too deeply moved by the poverty and squalor he had seen among the miners of Britain, and having tried to do something about it. Lanny had wondered if he might not be a bit to the Left, and sounded him out by mentioning the subject of Spain. “But what else could have been done to keep Communism out of Western Europe?” asked the little man, earnestly. There the conversation came to a halt because of the passing of an express train on the Mediterranean line. It made such a roaring that you thought it must be going straight through the château; but it missed and went on, past the gates or doors of numerous other homes of the well-to-do on that somewhat narrow shore.
XII
One of the unwritten rules of this unconventional château was that all the guests wore bathing clothes until lunchtime. For the men that meant a pair of trunks and for the women two or three dabs of bright-colored and expensive cloth. This was fine for the young folks, but less so for the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, who kept his hunched and pudgy figure wrapped in a bright red bathrobe, and the top of his head, which had once had a red thatch, protected by a wide-brimmed loose straw hat. Thus accoutered, he sat on the edge of the bright blue and green pool and discoursed on world politics to all who cared to listen or pretend to.
He had been several times a cabinet minister over the years, but now for a long time he was out, and at the age of sixty-five he amiably described himself as a political failure. He wrote histories, and a biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough; he painted pictures, and at home on his estate he built brick walls of which he was proudest. He had had an American mother, which was perhaps the reason he was informal and easy-going. He had been for years an ardent Liberal, but then had decided that they were becoming socialistic. When Lanny Budd had met him just twenty years ago in Paris he had come to the Peace Conference with the determination to bring about the putting down of the Bolsheviks by the Allied armies.
Now the whirligig of time had taken several turns, and an imperialist statesman’s thoughts had changed once more. He saw that there was a greater menace in the world than Communism, and he had been tirelessly calling upon his countrymen to arm and put a stop to the appeasement of Hitler. He was even willing to admit that he had blundered in Supporting Franco’s conquest of Spain: and this of course came pleasantly to Lanny Budd’s ears. But Lanny dared not show such feelings; in this company he kept his pose of ivory-tower art lover, rich man’s son, playboy—anything but politician, whether Red, Pink, White, Black, or Brown.
In his compulsory role he wouldn’t be of special interest to a former Chancellor of the Exchequer; but he made a good listener, and as such was appreciated in this gadabout company. There were seldom fewer than thirty persons sitting down to lunch, and often twice that many gathered round the pool; when Churchill denounced Nazism the hostess would look up from her backgammon—or maybe six-pack bézique—and exclaim: “Winston, you are a social menace!” The guest would reply, most amiably: “Don’t worry, my dear Maxine, there isn’t a single person here who knows what I am talking about.”
Most interesting to the son of Budd-Erling was the occasion when Lord Beaverbrook became one of the house guests. Here was somebody who knew what Winston was talking about, and would talk back; all Lanny had to do was to sit and listen, while the insides of Tory politics were spread before him like a map. Startling indeed was the change of mind in the four months since Neville Chamberlain had come back from Munich hoping that it was “peace for our time.” Every action of the Nazis since then had made clear that it wasn’t going to be peace, and that Hitler’s solemn declaration that he had no further territorial demands upon Europe was just another Hitler lie. His “co-ordinated” press was carrying on a fresh campaign against Prague, and the most besotted of “Munichmen” could see that this meant further disturbances.
Even “the Beaver” had come to see it—the busiest little money-making and speech-making Beaver that Canada had ever contributed to English public life. Listening to him, Lanny Budd could tell himself that he was reaping a harvest he had been secretly sowing over a long period of years. He had been bringing out of Germany the facts about Nazi-Fascism and seeing his English friend Rick put them into literary form and get them published in English newspapers and weeklies. Great is truth, and it will prevail!
The Beaver had met Lanny at Wickthorpe Castle, and knew that he had been a guest of the high-up Nazis on many occasions. When Churchill learned this he was greatly interested, even excited. Lanny explained that his visits had had to do only with art; he had sold some of Marshal Göring’s paintings abroad, and had purchased paintings for the Führer. He was free to talk about the aims of these great men, since they had authorized him to do so. Both desired friendship and cooperation with Britain more than anything—or so they said; as to the sincerity of their professions, the tactful son of Budd-Erling refrained from expressing or even having any opinion. His father’s business as well as his own made that necessary, and a noble lord who was also a businessman, owner of the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, would understand and respect that attitude.
XIII
The mistral blew, and scattered the crowds at the outdoor swimming-pool. The Right Honorable Winston, who did not care for card games and was important enough to say so, phoned to Lanny, asking him to come for a talk. They sat alone in the library of this very fine château, and the Englishman asked questions about the personalities of Naziland: Hitler, Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, and Goebbels; Himmler, now head of the Gestapo, Heydrich, now in charge of the Sudetenland, Dr. Wiedemann, who had come as an emissary to England at the height of the Munich crisis. And then, their agents in France: Otto Abetz, and Kurt Meissner, who had been Lanny Budd’s chum from boyhood; and the Frenchmen of the Right, including Laval and Bonnet, and the three de Bruynes, who had been in jail for their efforts to overthrow the Third Republic. Churchill must have known these men, but he wanted Lanny’s opinion, and was tireless in asking questions.
At one point he remarked: “Franklin Roosevelt seems to be one man who is really informed about these matters.” Lanny smiled, thinking what a sensation he might have made by replying: “I have been keeping him informed for the past year and a half.”
They talked as long as their imperious hostess would permit; and at the end Churchill remarked: “This information may be very useful some day.”
The other added: “If you should find yourself called on to become Prime Minister.”
The Englishman’s laugh had a touch of bitterness in it. “No, no, Mr. Budd. They have put me on the shelf to stay. They don’t want a man who says what he thinks.”
Lanny would have liked to ask who “they” were; but Maxine was calling loudly from the grand salon: “I want somebody to take me to the movies!”
2
Cherry Ri
pe, Ripe, Ripe!
I
A woman of the fashionable world who owns a lovely villa with several acres of choice land, and who at the same time has a kind heart, inevitably acquires in the course of years a number of old servants and other pensioners. She complains about these burdens but cannot find a way to get rid of them, and she tries, mostly in vain, to find something useful for them to do. Among Beauty Budd’s pensioners was Leese, the Provençal cook, who was now bedridden, and Miss Addington, who had been Marceline’s governess, and then Frances’s, and was waiting for Baby Marcel to be old enough. Also there was the elderly Polish woman with the unusual name of Madame Zyszynski, who had been the agent of Lanny Budd’s introduction into the mysteries of the subconscious world.
Parsifal Dingle, her discoverer, would invite her to his study, and there, with the doors left open for propriety’s sake, the old woman would go into one of her strange trances. Parsifal would make notes of her utterances, and would study them and compare them, and when Lanny came he would have a report of new incidents which neither of them could explain. Lanny, too, would try experiments—he had enough notes for several volumes of the British or the American Society for Psychical Research.
The result of these activities, now in their tenth year, had been a transformation in Lanny’s way of thinking. Just as the modern physicist has changed this solid earth into an infinity of universes, each made up of minute electrical charges whirling about in relatively immense spaces, so Lanny had come to think of his conscious mind as a brilliant and scintillating bubble floating on top of an infinite ocean of some kind of mind-stuff. What was the mind that nourished his blood and renewed his tissues and attended to his breathing while he slept? Was he to say that all this activity was a matter of chance? Accidents may happen; but systematic, continuous, and perfectly co-ordinated accidents are contrary to logic and common sense. The mind that shaped the petals of the rose and painted the colors of the hummingbird’s wing was a real mind, even though Lanny did not share its secrets.
Madame had a conscious mind, entirely commonplace, slow, and un-enterprising. But when she rested her head back and shut her eyes and went into one of her trances, she revealed a quite different mind, which spoke with different voices and knew things that Madame had no way of finding out. What was that trance mind, and where did it come from? Did it inhere in her brain, or did it exist without a brain, and if so, would it survive after Madame’s brain had turned into a spoonful of gray dust? Was it a person? A spirit? A mental creation, like a dream, or like a character in a novel or play? Lanny was willing to believe anything, provided he could prove it. Until that time he would keep his mind open, not fooling himself with the idea that he knew something when he didn’t.
Whenever he was in Bienvenu he would have sittings with this old woman, who in her secret heart adored him as a son. He was hoping for communications purporting to come from his dead wife—though he never would be able to make up his mind whether what he got was Trudi or his own subconscious memories of Trudi, as when he dreamed of her. But she came no more in the séances; that page in his life had apparently been turned. Likewise Grandfather Samuel Budd seemed to have given up this bar-sinister grandson as a hopeless case, who refused to heed the Word of God as set down in the Hebrew Testament.
The communications of Madame had become tiresome and disappointing. Tecumseh, the Indian control, was cross with Lanny, and Claribel, old-time English lady, bored him with her feeble poetry. Only one thing new: both these “controls” said to the son of Budd-Erling, in solemn tones: “Your fate is approaching!” But when he tried to find out what that fate was, they either didn’t know or wouldn’t take the trouble to answer him. In the course of his unusual duties, Lanny had been in danger more than once, and might be again. His conscious mind was well aware of that, and doubtless his subconscious mind was equally so.
II
Parsifal Dingle had discovered another method of tapping this mental underworld. He had got himself a crystal ball and set it up on a table in his darkened study; lighting a candle and setting it just beyond the globe, and then sitting at the table, resting his head on his arms, he stared into the globe in silence and with intense concentration. Such concentration and fixed staring are among the established ways of inducing trances and thus tapping the subconscious forces. Lanny’s stepfather was interested, because by this means he was seeing visions of the Buddhist monastery of Dodanduwa in Ceylon, from whose old-time monks he had been getting communications for years. He had written letters and received replies from the now-living monks, and the pictures they had sent him of the monastery buildings corresponded exactly to what he had seen in the crystal ball.
So, of course, Lanny wanted to try this experiment. The visions were not in the ball, but in the mind of the gazer, so presumably Lanny could use Parsifal’s ball without being affected by what Parsifal had seen there. But even that you couldn’t be certain about; for who could say what effect mind might have on matter, and what traces of mental activity might remain in a piece of glass? There is a faculty called “psychometry,” based on the fact that objects appear to carry some trace of the persons who have owned and used them. If Lanny had seen Dodanduwa, would it have been Parsifal’s visions of Dodanduwa, or Lanny’s thoughts about what Parsifal had been telling him? In a universe so full of fantastic things, who could say what was too fantastic?
What Lanny saw, from the very first attempt, were crowded streets in the Orient: Chinese shops with Chinese signs, rickshaws running fast, pagodas and walls with towers, and everywhere Chinese faces; all sorts of men and women, old and young, rich and poor, some angry, some laughing, all astonishingly vivid and fascinating. Lanny had never been especially interested in China; he had met a few traveling students and diplomats, and of course he had seen pictures, but never anything with the vividness of detail that he got in this crystal ball. An astonishing thing; and naturally Lanny didn’t fail to recall an experience of the previous autumn, when he had consulted a young Rumanian astrologer in Munich, and had been told: “You will die in Hongkong.” Lanny hadn’t then and hadn’t now any interest in Hongkong, but he perceived that he might have to, if the subconscious powers were so determined upon it.
The clear-minded art expert disliked every form of superstition, and especially when it took the ugly aspect of fear. But he could not rule out the possibility of precognition, one of the most ancient beliefs. Modern physics now gave support to Kant’s conception of time as a form of human thinking; and why might it not be that among the many forms of mind in the universe there were some to which the future was as clear as the past is to our own? Some day there might be a Society for the Study of Dreams, with thousands of members recording their dreams according to the technique of J. W. Dunne, and watching to see how many came true.
Through this crystal ball came a long train of camels with ragged Chinese drivers. They went through a narrow city gate, and Lanny followed them, just as if he had been on one of those photographic trucks by which motion pictures travel with a moving object. He didn’t hear any camel bells or shouts of drivers, but watched the silent train, and saw them passing over barren wastes, past ruins of ancient cities half buried. They might have been the palaces of Ozymandias, king of kings, where, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretched far away.
Lanny told Parsifal about these visions, and also his mother; Beauty reminded him that he had read a book about Marco Polo when he was a small boy. Maybe this was it, all coming back. As for his “fate” which was approaching, Beauty hoped it was so; for to her the word meant one thing: a woman, the right woman, so that Lanny would settle down, preferably here in Bienvenu, and supply more babies to play in the court and make old age less intolerable to a one-time professional beauty. Ten years ago she had had her way in the Irma Barnes match, but that failure hadn’t discouraged her; she wouldn’t give up while there was a single heiress left on the Riviera, in Paris, London, or New York.
III
A few days later Lanny tried the crystal ball again, and here came something new. Blue water, sparkling in sunshine—everything was always bright in that globe, like a technicolor film. Little boats sailed across, and that had been one of the most familiar sights ever since Lanny could remember. Then came a yacht, stately, white, with gleaming brass and everything spick-and-span, gliding by and spreading a wake behind her: another sight that had always been familiar, not merely from the Cap but all over the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In boyhood Lanny had cruised to the Isles of Greece in the yacht Bluebird, owned by the creator of Bluebird Soap; later in the yacht Bessie Budd, named for his half-sister. The German-Jewish financier, Johannes Robin, had taken the Budd family all over the Mediterranean, and then over the North Sea, and up to the Lofoden Islands and across to Newcastle, Connecticut, home of Budd Gunmakers and now of Budd-Erling. So there was nothing strange about yachts.
This was a different one; the image was small, so Lanny couldn’t read the name, but the picture was so vivid that the curiosity of a psychic researcher was aroused and he got up and walked out of his studio for a look over the Golfe Juan. By heck!—there was a yacht, having just rounded the Cap, and gliding past the shore toward the breakwater of Cannes. It wasn’t more than a mile or two away, and on a clear day with calm water, that seems right at your front door. Straightway began an argument in the mental works of a researcher: was this the same yacht he had seen, or was he just fooling himself as to the details? And was it a coincidence?—for of course at the height of the winter season there was never a day that yachts were not coming and going along the Côte d’Azur.
Dragon Harvest Page 3
