XI
Lanny had assured Esther that there was no other woman in his life; and this was true, or at any rate he meant for it to be true. He had told himself that he was never going to see Laurel Creston again. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to think about her; he couldn’t help doing so, because every time he thought about falling in love with Lizbeth he found himself thinking about Laurel, too. He compared them in his mind, weighed them in the balance—and sometimes it swung one way and sometimes the other. Both were impossible, he told himself, but sometimes one seemed less impossible than the other; each served in an odd way to make him less aware of the defects of the other. It was a sort of parody of the old song—how happy could I be with either, were t’other dear charmer away!
Lanny would dance with Lizbeth at the country club, and become aware all over again of her charms, so carefully nurtured and now exhibited at this all-important moment of her life. To what man was she going to attach herself, and mold herself to his habits and tastes? Whose home was she going to live in, whose children was she going to bear? Manifestly, these were number-one questions to a girl, and if she had picked out Lanny Budd from many others, what were her reasons, and what light did they throw upon her character and tastes? These were number-one questions to Lanny, and he gave earnest thought to them.
In Baltimore she must have met many eligible men, and surely she was meeting them in Newcastle—many who were handsome, also wealthy or certain to become so. Why had this child—so he called her in his mind—chosen an art expert, one slightly eccentric and highly uncertain? Had it been something that Emily Chattersworth or some of the other ladies of the Riviera had told her? Was it the trace of foreign atmosphere, the languages, the travel? Lanny guessed that more than anything else it was his acquaintance with the famous and great. The child wouldn’t be able to judge statesmen or painters or writers or musicians, but she would have noted that every time one was mentioned, Lanny Budd knew him, and would tell funny stories about him, indicative of intimacy with and possibly a slight superiority to. She had found Lanny distingué—a word worn threadbare, and easy to ridicule, but Lizbeth Holdenhurst wouldn’t see it that way; she would take it as the apex of desirability, the thing for which she wanted to spend her share of her father’s money. A baby reaching out for the moon!
Lanny would dance discreetly, holding her not too tightly; and that made him seem dignified and aloof—as far away as the moon. But he wasn’t really so; he was right here on the ballroom floor, and aware that he was holding a lovely young virgin; aware of her warmth and shapeliness, of the smile on her gently rounded face, the glances of her eyes, the state of dreamy bliss which possessed her in the arms of the man she wanted. She used a delicate and exotic perfume—and of course Lanny knew all about perfumes, knew that they were put up in fancy bottles with preposterous sexual labels and sold at fantastic prices in shops which preyed upon female credulity. He knew that hair was arranged exactly so by persons who called themselves artists, and that evening dresses were cut out of the costliest materials in such a way as to reveal exactly the right amount of the female person.
Yes, he knew all that, and in the cold light of the morning after, he told himself that it was an unworthy thing to let himself be influenced by the bodily seductions of a healthy young animal with very few brains, at least of the sort he wanted. Marriage, to be worth anything, ought to be a union of minds, because it is in our minds that we truly live, it is by our minds that we have survived and lifted ourselves above the level of the animals—however young, however healthy, and however lovely to look at!
XII
Such reflections would start him to thinking about Laurel Creston again. (How happy could I be with either!) Laurel had the brains, in fact a superfluity of them. Lanny found himself slightly afraid of them, wondering how it would be if ever that satiric energy were to be turned upon him and his worldly pretensions. Perhaps it had already happened, in the secrecy of Laurel’s thoughts; and was she deciding to avoid him at the same time that he was deciding to avoid her? But no, it wasn’t that, Lanny decided in his secret thoughts. It was that Laurel would be irresistibly driven to write stories and perhaps books; her superfluity of brains would manifest themselves in some public way, and make it impossible for a P.A. to associate with her except clandestinely—or even to explain why that must be so. And what decent woman will meet a man on the sly, and without knowing any reason for such a humiliating procedure?
No, Lanny had had all that out with himself, and it was a waste of time to go over it again. Perhaps, after all, the sensible thing was to pick out some healthy young animal, one that was especially easy to look at. The problem became even more simplified when the young animal picked him out and saved him the bother. A wife who would never trouble him with the product of her brains, but would make a home for him—and pay a good share of the expenses! One who would bear him children, and let him have them for his own, to be brought up according to his ideas. Lanny had always been fond of children, and delighted to watch them and teach them; but they had always been other people’s children: Marceline, and Robbie’s boys, and the Robin boys, and Marie’s two and Rosemary’s three; now Freddi’s one child, and Bess’s two, and Marceline’s one. Even Irma’s one was only Lanny’s in a very restricted way.
But if Lizbeth had children, and he kept her respect and affection, they would be really his to control. When he went out spying he would always make one or more picture deals as a cover, and when he came back he would talk art and literature and psychic research, never politics or war. Lizbeth would be a perfectly proper wife, in the eyes of all his rich reactionary friends; even Hitler and Göring would approve her. That was a thought which sent a shudder through Lanny, and made his whole being recoil. Suppose she admired Hitler and Göring, as Irma had done! Suppose that in England or France or wherever he took her, she picked out the Fascists to play with! She could hardly fail to do that, if she was trying to follow Lanny and to mold herself to his ideas. She would never know him, but only his role, and he would come to hate her as he hated all those poisonous people whom he pretended to admire!
XIII
The day came when the last document had been signed; also, if there had been a hope lurking in anybody’s heart that Lanny Budd was going to “pop the question,” that hope must have died. The skipper of the Oriole announced that it was time to put an end to a delightful visit. He begged that if any of the Budd family, old or young, ever came near Baltimore, they would take his home for their own. That applied to any of the other Newcastlers who had entertained his party; in short, all the amenities were complied with, and the life of the rich was dignified and serene, according to conventions elaborately contrived.
Lanny rendered the extra courtesy of coming on board for the trip down the river and out into the Sound, returning in the launch with the pilot. He stood by the rail with his friends, pointing out the sights, first of the Budd-Erling plant, then of Budd Gunmakers, then of the city. The yacht slid gently through two open drawbridges, one for the highway and the other for the railroad. Then came the inlet, with the wide blue Sound where no pilot would be needed. It would soon be time to part, and Reverdy said, not for the first time: “Come and pay us a visit, Lanny. I’m not just being polite—we’ll be truly happy to have you.”
Lanny answered: “It’s a little hard for me to set dates, because my comings and goings depend upon the whims of clients. But I’ll telephone you when I know I’m free.”
“You can make it a business trip,” added the other. “I am going to take my Detazes off the boat and hang them in my home and start a boom in Baltimore. When people hear what I paid for them, they will know they’re good.”
That was making it hard indeed for Lanny to hang back; for his friend had been in the storeroom and seen the stock of Detazes and been told that they were for sale. He said: “That is really kind of you, and I’ll do my best to arrange for a visit before I go back to Europe.”
“
It gets very hot in midsummer, but May and June are lovely,” added Lizbeth; which was certainly making a girl’s attitude known to a reluctant swain.
Lanny shook hands all round, with perhaps half a second’s longer shake of a soft feminine hand and half a second’s longer glance into a pair of inviting brown eyes. Lizbeth had been very sweet to him, and if it hadn’t been for the infernal business of sex they might have danced and played tennis and golf together and been as happy as the two babes in the woods. “Au revoir,” he said, and not “Good-by,” and followed the pilot down a rope ladder into the little launch. It darted away from the yacht’s side and turned back into the inlet; the people at the Oriole’s stern waved and Lanny waved; the distance between them widened swiftly, and parting was such sweet sorrow.
13
Where Duty Calls Me
I
Lanny was reading, for the second time, a book which he had brought with him from England, a newly published series of lectures entitled The Philosophy of Physical Science. Its author was a very learned gentleman: O.M., M.A., D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S., Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Lanny had always been under the impression that philosophy was a matter of speculation, but Sir Arthur Eddington now informed him that it had reached the stage of experiment, a development surely worth knowing about.
Lanny had been brought to a state of mental insecurity by almost ten years of dabbling in what was known as psychic research—or, in England, “psychical.” He had seen so many things happen that were incredible, and the effort to account for them had led him into unorthodox reading and upset most of the things he had imagined he knew about the universe. His own too too solid flesh had melted and turned into empty space with minute electrical charges whirling about in it. Still more incredibly, space had become a form of his thought, and also had become curved, while time had become a fourth dimension of space, and the universe had become circular. All this not the raving of lunatics or the phantasy of “surrealists,” but a new science which called itself physics, but appeared to end up in a demonstration that the physical existence of the physical world was a matter of grave uncertainty.
Lanny had to admit himself ill equipped for the study of Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans. He had never been to college, and hadn’t even finished prep school. He had once known some algebraic formulas, but now retained only a vague memory of how they looked. However, if a learned writer would be kind enough to explain at the outset the meaning of the words he used, Lanny would read the first paragraph, and if he couldn’t understand it he would go back patiently and read it again. Each philosopher and each scientist gave his own special meanings to words, but was unable to persuade others to use the same vocabulary. In a chapter entitled “The Scope of the Epistemological Method,” the astronomer-knight informed Lanny that: “The term ‘electron’ has at least three different meanings in common use in quantum theory, in addition to its loose application to the probability wave itself.” And then in a footnote the explanation: “Namely, the particle represented by a Dirac wave function, the particle introduced in second quantization, and the particle represented by the internal (relative) wave-function of a hydrogen atom.”
This learned lecturer had a sense of humor, and it amused him to take sly digs at the large number of scientists who still called themselves “materialists,” all unaware that “the classical scheme of physics is a punctured bubble.” Someone near the beginning of the century had asked the question: “What is it that we really observe?” and thus had started us “on a path of revolution of which the end is perhaps not yet in sight.” The end, according to Sir Arthur, was that: “We reach then the position of idealist, as opposed to materialist, philosophy. The purely objective world is the spiritual world; and the material world is subjective in the sense of selective subjectivism.”
There was nothing novel about this “idealist” position in philosophy. When Lanny was a youth his Great-Great-Uncle Eli Budd had set him to reading Emerson, and Emerson had sent him to Plato, who had it all. An eighteenth-century Irish bishop by the name of Berkeley—which the English pronounce “Barclay”—had written a book to prove that we know only sensations, and can have no knowledge of whatever reality may or may not be behind the sensations. Dr. Samuel Johnson had answered him by kicking a stone; thus proving that it is easier to make a joke than to understand a metaphysical argument. For he didn’t prove that the stone was there, but only that he had experienced a complex of sensations which he and his fellow-men had agreed to indicate by the name of “stone.”
In the days from Plato to Emerson all this had been a matter of speculation. But now the physical experimenters had come along, and had granted Hamlet’s request that his too too solid flesh would melt; Hamlet’s flesh and Dr. Johnson’s stone had been turned into electrons, and electrons were, according to Sir Arthur Eddington, not merely “the probability wave itself,” but also “the particle represented by a Dirac wave function, the particle introduced in second quantization, and the particle represented by the internal (relative) wave-function of a hydrogen atom.” Said the Cambridge professor, in his playful mood:
“It is pertinent to remember that the concept of substance has disappeared from fundamental physics; what we ultimately come down to is form. Waves! Waves!! Waves!!! Or, for a change—if we turn to the relativity theory—curves! Energy, which, since it is conserved, might be looked upon as the modern successor of substance, is in relativity theory a curvature of space-time, and in quantum theory a periodicity of waves.”
II
Lanny would read sentences such as these, and then would go for a walk, or for a sail in a catboat belonging to one of his half-brothers, and would meditate upon what he had read. The ideas seemed to him of enormous importance, ultimately the most important in the world; they would form the basis of a new religion, which mankind needed most urgently. Were mind, will, and conscience fundamental to the universe? Were they forces which had some effect upon the universe? Or were they accidental and temporary products of the activity of matter—like sparks thrown off from a grindstone or a rainbow refracted through drops of water? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, the ancient Hebrew preacher had announced, and the Greek philosopher had drawn the obvious conclusion: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
For a couple of years Lanny had been traveling about with what he called the Trudi-ghost, meaning the memory of his murdered wife, which had become the voice of duty in his soul. He had received what claimed to be communications from her “spirit,” but he had never been able to make up his mind whether they were actually that, or the product of his own living memories. As Lanny had said to Monck, memory is a mystery, as great a mystery as “spirits” would be if you had decided to believe in them. Skeptics laughed at the idea that the universe, or the air, or whatever, might be full of the souls of uncounted numbers of the dead; where would they stay and what would they do? But these skeptics took it quite as a matter of course that their minds should be full of millions of memories—for the psychologists had proved that you never forgot anything you had once known or that had ever happened to you.
Where did these memories stay? In the brain cells, the materialist would reply, and think that he had said something. But how did they stay? Did each memory hide in a separate cell? The cells were changing all the time, with the wear and tear of the body; did the memory move out of an old cell and into a new one? The cells were composed of molecules and the molecules of atoms and the atoms of electrons—and electrons were waves, or curves, or “form.” Was the memory, too, a form? And what made all these forms, and controlled them, and kept them and used them?
Lanny wanted to say that it was the thing he called his personality; that is, his mind, his will, his conscience. He asked one of the world’s leading physicists whether or not he had the right to believe this, and the sharp-tongued scholar replied with two sentences that were like the snapping of a whip. Comparing the ideas of scientists an
d those of savages, he said: “We now think it ludicrous to imagine that rocks, sea and sky are animated by volitions such as we are aware of in ourselves. It would be thought even more ludicrous to imagine that the volition-less behavior of rocks, sea and sky extends also to ourselves, were it not that we have scarcely yet recovered from the repressions of two hundred and fifty years of deterministic physics.”
It was a question that went to the very fundament of a man’s life. If mind, will, and conscience guided the universe, a man could believe in right conduct and strive to practice it and make it prevail in the world—even though his individual consciousness might not survive in its present form. But if he was just an accident, a cog in a vast machine that had no purpose, what difference did it make what he did, and what was the use of striving, since he couldn’t affect the result? What is mind? No matter! What is matter? Never mind!
Lanny had once heard Adolf Hitler utter what seemed to him the most atheistic sentence ever spoken by man, to the effect that it didn’t matter how spiritual a man might be, his spirituality couldn’t function if his body was beaten to pieces with rubber truncheons. There spoke what Lanny, for lack of a better word, called Satan. Satan’s minions had put that doctrine into effect with Trudi Schultz; and were they right or were they wrong? Truth, honor, justice—were these real forces, real “forms” under the relativity theory? These were the questions with which Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington were wrestling, and their answers gave Lanny Budd the courage he needed to go on living his lonely secret life.
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