III
The German anaconda was busy with his digestion, so not much was happening in Europe, at least not on the surface. Lanny thought that he had earned a holiday, and his relatives made this a pleasant place to take it. He played tennis, sailed a boat, and sometimes when members of the family were away he made loud noises on the piano. He took long walks, and sometimes stopped and talked with plain Americans, being pleased to discover that they did not believe all they read in the newspapers, and did not hate the New Deal so ardently as the gentlemen of the country club.
More than once he passed the public library of Newcastle, an ancient inadequate building in a small park. Lanny would think of the polite maiden lady who functioned as head of that institution, and feel a twinge of discomfort, recalling how, in the previous summer, he had driven this lady home in his car one evening; the evil contrivance known as sex had caused him to lay his hand upon the lady’s hand and had caused her, in turn, to lay her head upon his shoulder. One thing led to another, as it does, with the result that Lanny was afraid he had awakened false hopes in the lady’s bosom; so now he avoided going into the library. But he knew that she would know that he had been in town for some weeks, and perhaps her feelings would be hurt because he never found occasion to consult any book in her collection.
The time came when in the course of his professional labors he needed to refer to Vasari’s Lives of the Painters. He took his courage in hand and went in, and there was the rather frail New England gentlewoman, Miss Priscilla Hoyle, seated at her desk in one of those chairs with little rubber-tired wheels and ball bearings, which can be run from place to place with a slight push. Lanny bowed as he went in, and did not stop to see the flush which spread over the lady’s pale features. When he had got the information he needed, he stopped to speak to her on subjects proper for librarians. “I have been reading some new books, and when I leave I mean to turn them over to you.”
This enabled the lady to conceal the reason why her heart was beating fast. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Budd! Our appropriations are so inadequate. You can’t imagine how painful it is to see worthwhile books published and have to renounce the hope of them.”
“I have been reading Jeans and Eddington,” the visitor continued. “Have you read them?”
“I have read about them, Mr. Budd, but we don’t have them.”
“I will present my copies. They support the idealist position in philosophy, which you probably approve.”
“By all means,” was the reply. Lanny assumed that New England transcendentalism would be fed with mother’s milk to persons of good family in this old-fashioned town. Really, it was a town within a town, for the descendants of ship captains and farmers still looked upon the factory people as interlopers, even after a hundred years.
Lanny went back to his father’s home, and remarked to his stepmother: “I stopped at the library, and got to talking with Miss Hoyle. She seems to be a highly cultured person.”
“Yes, indeed,” replied Esther, a trustee of the institution; “and a most faithful soul. I don’t know quite what we should do without her.”
“I wondered why you don’t invite her to the house. We have rather a tendency to get shut up in a narrow set, don’t you think?”
“I suppose that is true,” admitted the grande dame of Newcastle society. “I just somehow never thought of inviting Miss Hoyle. Do you suppose she would care to come?”
“She would consider it a preliminary visit to heaven,” replied the irreverent stepson. “But don’t do it until you are ready to make your politicians vote an appropriation for a new building, for that is what her heart is set upon.”
“I suppose I really ought to do that, too. But everybody is so poor nowadays—the New Deal draws all the money out of Newcastle, as you know.”
Lanny would have liked to say that the New Deal was putting the money back into Newcastle, in the form of aid to unemployed workers; but that was the sort, of remark he had ceased making several years ago. His stepmother postponed the carrying out of his unusual suggestion, and he had left before she got round to it; which was just as well, for he was quite willing to have Miss Hoyle think she was going to get her new building, but not that she was going to get Lanny Budd.
IV
In the month of June the King and Queen of England crossed the sea on a visit of state. They received a truly royal welcome in Washington, with sixty tanks preceding and following their cars and ten “Flying Fortresses” overhead. It was one of the hottest of days, and that poor frail potentate in a heavy admiral’s uniform with its gold lace and decorations must have suffered abominably. But it is the business of royalty in England to be both uncomfortable and bored, and this King, who was afflicted with a speech impediment and had to stop at short intervals and meditate upon the next word before he tried to say it—this Majesty had been catapulted into his job a couple of years ago, and had to learn it in action.
The royal pair were here in an effort to wipe out old scores and win the friendship of America in the grave crisis which confronted the British Commonwealth. They were, so far as one could judge through the stage trappings, quite kindly people; and of course every move they made had been studied by expert propagandists for weeks in advance. They went to the White House for a state dinner and a concert which was broadcast over the radio; all-American music for all-America—cowboy ballads, square dances, Negro spirituals, and then Lawrence Tibbett, Marian Anderson, and the large Kate Smith with her large voice singing When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.
After three days of festivities Their Majesties went up to Hyde Park, where they had a picnic and ate hotdogs. They might have preferred other foods, but were trying to be democratic, and there were photographers and newsreel cameramen on hand to record them eating hotdogs and smiling between bites. Britain needed airplanes now, and before long might need ships and even warships, and if this was the way to get them, God help us to like hotdogs, and not to choke while we are in front of the cameras, or to stammer when we try to say: “Okeydokey!”
Lanny was in sympathy with the purpose for which this ceremony was being conducted; he wanted a union of the British and the American fleets, even of the British Commonwealth and the American Republic. But he couldn’t help remembering a stage performance he had attended not long ago, when he had made acquaintance with the delicate and ingenious art of Angna Enters. A young woman came upon a bare stage, with only the simplest of accessories, and to the music of a piano gave little pantomimic episodes which brought a period of history before the audience. She had made Lanny think of Isadora Duncan—not because of any similarity in what they did, but because, for the first time since Isadora’s tragic death, Lanny saw a woman alone on a stage and without a spoken word holding the attention of an audience through an entire evening.
Most of these sketches were of the simplest: an old-time Viennese serving maid putting on her black kid gloves and taking up her prayer-book and lace handkerchief, getting ready to go to church; then returning and putting these treasures away in a little box with loving precision and care. Or a Spanish boy cardinal, infinitely corrupt, dressed in yellow silk, taking a stroll and casting lascivious glances at imaginary girls. Only one of the episodes had been political, and that had portrayed Britannia, clad in her robes of state, sublimely haughty and unapproachable. But something frightened her, something drove her into a panic; she pulled out a tiny green flag and began waving it, casting seductive glances at an imaginary Eire; then a little American flag, then another and another, casting them here and there, pleadingly, in abject humility. It was a malicious, not to say vinegary little cartoon, but as a piece of art it was unforgettable.
Now Lanny looked at the many pictures of dressed-up royalty in the newspapers, and he knew that Britannia was in her panic, and with plenty of reason. He told himself that this was not really a King and Queen in the old meaning of those words, but two symbols of the hopes of the British people. There were three Britannias, and had been for cen
turies: that of the aristocracy, aloof and impervious, as they had always been in every land; that of the plutocracy, the lords of pounds and guineas, blind to everything but their profits; and that of the workers, the democracy, plus the saving minority of liberal thinkers and statesmen who had made the British Commonwealth and kept it an agency of progress. This third Britannia had pleaded the cause of the colonies throughout the American Revolutionary War; it had saved the American Union in the Civil War by keeping the British ruling classes from coming to the aid of the slave power; and now it was fighting appeasement of the dictators, and those forces at home which were Fascist in sympathy and as near-Fascist in action as they dared to be with a general election coming on.
V
A telephone message from New York—Professor Charles Alston calling Mr. Lanny Budd. It was about dinnertime, and Lanny was in. “Hello, Lanny, this is your old friend from the Peace Conference. I may be mistaken, but I am under the impression that you and I haven’t met since we parted in Paris, twenty years ago. Is that correct?”
Much practice in intrigue had made the son of Budd-Erling quick on the uptake. It took him only a fraction of a second to realize that there must be someone in the room with Alston, or else he was afraid there might be someone on the line in the Budd home, and he didn’t want any such person to know that he had met Lanny two years ago and had been the means of introducing him to F.D.R. Lanny, who shared this wish and had been keeping this secret, answered, quietly: “That is according to my recollection.”
“Is your father at home?” was the next question; and then: “I wonder if that is according to his recollection, also?”
Lanny understood then that his friend was trying to make sure whether Lanny had told his father about the meeting with Alston in New York. Lanny hadn’t told anyone, so he said: “I have no doubt that his recollection agrees with mine.”
The one-time professor of geography continued: “It happens that I have some information which may be of great importance to your father. I would like very much to see him.”
“I am sure he’ll be glad to see you at any time, Professor.”
“Does he often come to New York?”
“Not often nowadays. The plant keeps him tied down.”
“It so happens that I have to fly to Washington tomorrow afternoon. I wonder if he would do me the great favor to run in to town for an hour or so in the morning?”
“I don’t know what his engagements are,” replied the son. “I had better call him to the phone, if that is O.K. with you.”
“I hesitate to call on you for a favor, Lanny, because I feel guilty, having neglected you all these twenty years.”
Lanny understood that his former employer was making doubly sure that the crucial point hadn’t been missed. “It’s quite all right, Professor. My feelings haven’t been hurt. I know how busy you have been. Everything is all right.”
VI
Lanny went to the dining room, where his father had just taken his seat at the table. “Professor Alston is on the wire, calling from New York.”
“Charlie Alston?” exclaimed Robbie. “Well, I’ll be—” Then he stopped, because his wife was present, and a couple of her women friends. Esther permitted them to have a cocktail before dinner, but it was assumed that they never heard the word “damn” except in church.
Robbie went to the phone, and Lanny followed, in case he might be needed. He listened to one side of a conversation while two college mates who had not seen each other for more than twenty years exchanged greetings; then, with some amusement, while his father carried on a struggle over precedence. A man does not forget the impressions of his youth, and to the rich and fashionable Robbie Budd the man on the other end of the telephone wire was still a “barb,” the fellow who had never been tapped for a fraternity at Yale. He hadn’t helped matters by becoming a professor of geography in a freshwater college, and still less by taking up with the New Deal and being named in the newspapers as one of the “brain trust.” There was nothing in this world the president of Budd-Erling hated more than the spectacle of a college professor taking a post in government and telling businessmen what to do about their affairs. The idea of being summoned to New York to meet such a man, when it was so obviously his business to step onto a train and come to Newcastle—that made Robbie swell up like a balloon-fish out of water.
But evidently the ex-professor was making it sound portentous; and deep under Robbie’s bluster there lay anxiety, for, after all, these fellows were in power, and who could guess what dark secrets they might possess? It was the beginning of a revolution; but then, revolutions have been known to happen, and they are darned uncomfortable things. The end of the conversation was: “Oh, all right, I’ll come.” But he wasn’t going to be gracious about it—no, sirree! “The Ritzy-Waldorf, eleven tomorrow morning”—and his voice seemed to say: “What the devil does a barb mean, stopping at a hotel like that?”
Robbie was too well bred to grumble at the dinner table, in the presence of his guests, but he did a plenty of it to his son later on. He wasn’t going to give in one inch to the New Deal, in any manner, now or ever. Lanny stopped him with the suggestion: “Look, Robbie—suppose he wants to tell you that somebody has been getting ready to bomb the plant?”
Robbie hadn’t thought of that one, and it left him staring. “Somebody?” he demanded. “What somebody?”
“I’m sure I can’t guess. But I know that this world isn’t more than a year or two away from war, and when you undertook to fabricate military planes you put yourself right up in the front trenches. Do you imagine that the angels are going to protect you?”
The president of Budd-Erling decided that it wasn’t such a long drive to the city after all.
VII
Seated in a hotel room in which there might or might not be a dictaphone installed, the gray-haired little ex-geographer with the gold pince-nez wasted no time beating about the bush. Just a few words of greeting, remarks about how Robbie looked after twenty years, which was pretty good, and how Lanny looked, which was marvelous—and incidentally conveyed the idea that Alston hadn’t seen Lanny in those twenty years; then an offer of a drink, which Robbie declined, having laid down the law for himself, one cocktail at lunch and one at dinner and no more. Then they were seated, and the New Deal “fixer” opened up with a battery of a hundred and eighty-eight millimeter guns:
“Budd, I’m afraid you aren’t going to like this, and I don’t like it either, but I want you to understand that I’m not speaking on my own initiative, but on very high authority. What I have to tell you is that your present dealings with the Nazi government are considered a menace to the safety of the country, and to put it up to you as a patriotic American that they have to be discontinued.”
Robbie behaved like one of those small PT-boats when shells from the big battery go off all round it; he was lifted right out of the water and bounced around. The blood began to rush into his face in the dangerous-looking way it had, suggestive of apoplexy. “What the hell do you know about my dealings with Germany?”
“It will save time, Budd, if you assume that I know everything about them. I know that you have an arrangement by which you share ideas, and that Göring has been getting yours while you haven’t been getting his; so I shouldn’t think you’d be exactly heartbroken over the idea of parting company with him. I know also that he has three men in your plant, and that they are under agreement to take no part in political activities, but they are keeping that agreement no better than Nazis keep any agreement anywhere.”
“If you know that they are doing anything illegal,” said Robbie, in a sneering tone, “the place for you to go is to the Department of Justice.”
“I am coming to an old classmate,” was the patient reply. “When you have had time to think it over, I am sure you won’t desire to blacken your plant and your family with scandals in the newspapers. You must realize that events are moving fast, and they are beyond your control or mine. Our country is in rea
lly grave danger, and things that were permissible two or three years ago are simply intolerable now.”
“If our country is in danger, it is because we have a President who is not content to remain within his constitutional limits and let us stay at home and mind our own business.”
“We could argue a long time about that, Budd. You as a maker of military planes ought to be the first man in the country to understand that staying at home and minding our own business is no longer as simple as it used to be. Let me assure you that the General Staff of the Army does not share your ideas as to what constitutes safety in a world where the range of bombing planes is being extended week by week.”
“Am I to understand that you come to me on behalf of the General Staff of the Army? Or are you one of these New Dealers trying to frighten a businessman out of his right to carry on his business in his own way?”
“I am first of all a friend, Budd. I have a vivid recollection of the help which your son gave me all through the Peace Conference, and of the understanding of the world situation which he showed at that time. Tell me, Lanny, have you been abroad much during the past twenty years?”
“I have lived there most of the time, Professor.”
“And do you share your father’s idea that we can stay quietly at home and have nothing to fear from the Nazis and the Fascists?”
“I don’t think my father is quite so naïve as he sometimes sounds,” replied the tactful son. “He is anxious to have the country well armed for its own protection.”
“What I object to is having this country fighting the wars of the British Empire and of France,” put in Robbie, who was under no necessity of having anybody else, even his firstborn son, called upon to speak for him.
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