“Where are they going? Into the Balkans?”
“It looks like that. If they could get Greece and Crete, they would be within bombing range of Suez, and that would make it hard for the British. They will be heading for oil, whether in Mesopotamia or the Caucasus. The fate of Europe hangs in the balance there.”
The President thought for a moment, then said: “I’ll tell you a secret, Lanny, something very hush-hush. It will make you happy.”
“Well, Governor, frankly, I could do with a little happiness right now.”
“This is something you’ve been begging of me for a long time. I’m going all out for aid to Britain; not military, of course, but financial, and everything we can manufacture that they need. Lothian’s last report convinced me that it can’t be put off any longer.”
“Well, Governor, when you do it, I’ll get up and dance a jig, wherever I am.”
“I’m going to give a fireside chat in the next few days. I wrote my speech on the Tuscaloosa. Would you like to read it?”
“I’d be as proud as that dog with two tails I once told you about.”
“You might have some suggestions. Take that chair over there and turn on the light beside it. Here’s the script; you read it, and I’ll go on with my work.”
VIII
So Lanny Budd spent one of the happiest half hours of his life. It seemed to him that he saw the towers of National Socialism crumbling and a new world of peace emerging—right there before his eyes. This was the fireside chat to end all chats; it was a bugle call to America and to the world. Lanny read:
“The Axis not merely admits but proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.… There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.… The British people are conducting an active war against this unholy alliance. Our own future security is greatly dependent on the outcome of that light.… Democracy’s fight against world conquest is being greatly aided, and must be more greatly aided, by the rearmament of the United States and by sending every ounce and every ton of munitions and supplies that we can possibly spare to help the defenders who are in the front lines.… There will be no ‘bottlenecks’ in our determination to aid Great Britain. No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination by threats of how they will construe that determination.”
When the reading was over, the P.A. was in a glow; but he sat in silence until the Chief looked up from the documents he was signing. “Well, Lanny, how is it?”
“It’s absolutely gorgeous. If you don’t change your mind, Governór—”
“The time for changing minds is over; now it’s time for action. Have you any suggestions?”
“I remember that early in the last war Sir Edward Grey spoke of America as ‘the reserve arsenal of the Allies’—I think that was it. The circumstances are the same, and you might revive that phrase. How about saying: ‘We must be the great arsenal of democracy’?”
The President thought for a moment. “That’s a good sentence,” he decided. “Find a place where it will fit and write it in.” He went back to the signing of documents, while Lanny went over the text again. When he had inserted his little sentence he was, quite literally, as happy as that unusual English dog.
IX
Lanny went back to New York by train, and two days later he received a notice that his passport was ready. He phoned to his father, who had undertaken to get him passage on a Clipper to Lisbon. These great flying boats were hard to get into now; their spaces were taken by British officers and bureaucrats of both nations. But Robbie phoned to Juan Trippe, president of Pan American Airways; when one man is flying hundreds of planes and another is making hundreds, either is pleased to do the other a favor. Mr. Trippe said: “When does your son wish to go?” and Robbie said: “As soon as possible after Christmas.” The other consulted his records and asked: “Shall we make it the last day of the year?” Robbie replied: “Thanks, I will mail you a check.”
The old rascal might have obtained a date before Christmas if he had asked for it, but he wanted Lanny to spend the holiday with the family. Was he thinking about keeping him out of danger a few days longer? Or had he been talking to Esther, and been told that Peggy showed a lively interest in her cousin, and that if he stayed and attended holiday festivities, he might come to realize what a desirable young person she was? Lanny wondered if his father still had in mind “that German woman” who had been haunting Beauty’s thoughts for many years. Beauty didn’t know that Lanny had been married to this woman, or that the Nazis had killed her in one of their torture dungeons. Robbie might be thinking that Lanny was still tied up with her, and that if he could be got interested in the right sort of girl he might settle down in Newcastle or New York.
Anyhow, Lanny stayed since he had to, and he didn’t worry too much, because it is pleasanter to oblige your friends than to affront them; he danced with Peggy Remsen because it would have been rude to evade her, and she came to lunch because Esther invited her when Lanny was there. The stepmother suggested that he take the girl for a drive through the lovely winter scenery of the Connecticut uplands, and Lanny obliged; he liked winter scenery himself. He told stories about the collecting of old masters, and about the political intrigues of old Europe—such details as were fit for a virgin’s ears. When she asked if he did not think the Nazis were abominable people, he explained that there were various evil forces struggling for power in Europe, and sometimes it was hard to make a choice among them.
Meantime the dreadful bombing of Britain went on night after night. It was one city, then another, and the vast sprawling capital was seldom spared. The nights were long, and this was the time of death and destruction. One result was that telegrams and telephone calls besieged Robbie Budd, and visitors came from Washington and from overseas. They wanted planes, more planes, still more planes. They wanted Robbie to throw away caution and go ahead and expand, and when he tried to plead the interests of his stockholders they considered him a stubborn reactionary. What value would be left in the stocks of any American plant if Britain went down?
The military men of both countries kept Robbie up late at night painting pictures of the calamities they foresaw as the result of the swift development of air war. If Hitler got Britain, he would surely get Gibraltar, and then Dakar at the western bulge of Africa. They repeated their strategical question: what was to keep him from flying an army of paratroopers from there to the eastern bulge of Brazil? And when he had an airbase there, wouldn’t he have all South America at his mercy? And what could we do about it? He could fly his bombers and destroy the Panama Canal, which would be the same as cutting America in halves; we should be two nations fighting two wars, one with Germany and one with Japan.
There was a limit to the stubbornness even of Robbie Budd. The governments had the power; the British and the American governments had become for all practical purposes one, with Churchill and Roosevelt talking over the telephone every night. They could commandeer Budd-Erling if they wanted to; or they could carry out their unveiled threats to build more new plants in the Middle West and hire all Robbie’s experts away from him. All right, he would put up more buildings, and start a whole new schedule; but Washington must furnish every dollar, and must agree to take the plants back at cost after the war, if Robbie so desired. “After the war?” said bureaucrats. “Christ! Who is thinking about the war? Our job is not to be exterminated.”
They were so scared that even Robbie got scared, and said to his son: “I suppose you’d better go over there and find out what Göring is up to.” An extraordinary concession.
X
Lanny went to visit Hansi and Bess. He avoided but listened to their music, and played duets with his half-sister while Hansi was practicing in another part of the house—something he did every day, regardless of other events. Then La
nny drove into New York and got in touch with Jim Stotzlmann. It was Sunday, the 29th of December, and they had dinner in an obscure place where nobody knew them, and then went out and sat in Lanny’s car. Wearing warm overcoats and with a robe over their knees, they turned on the radio in the car to hear the scheduled fireside chat. Lanny didn’t feel at liberty to say that he had already read it.
They listened with rapt attention to the warm friendly voice; and they noticed a curious phenomenon—passers-by on the street heard that voice and stopped. They stayed, regardless of a wintry wind and snow on the ground. Lanny didn’t know who they were; he didn’t turn to look at them, but lowered the window a crack for their benefit. More and more came and nobody went away. That was the sort of compliment the humble people paid to Franklin D. Roosevelt, all over the land; the plain people, of whom there were so many, whose names never got into the newspapers, but who discussed the country’s problems among themselves, made up their minds, and managed sooner or later to let the politicians know what they wanted.
It was America burning her bridges behind her; America laying down the law that Nazi-Fascism wasn’t going to be permitted to take control of the world. America was going to become the great arsenal of democracy. Lanny’s phrase rang out, and his heart gave a jump when he heard it. He had promised to dance a jig, but the circumstances hardly permitted that. He and his friend patted each other on the back, and were so happy they had tears in their eyes. The impromptu audience faded away silently, as if they had been eavesdropping and were embarrassed. What they thought, Lanny would only learn in the course of years, when at the ballot box and at mass meetings and in other ways the people would register endorsement of their great President’s policies.
XI
Lanny had taken Peggy Remsen to see the lovely scenery of the uplands of Connecticut in winter, and it would hardly be fair not to do the same for Laurel Creston. He discovered that he liked to tell Laurel about what had happened to him, and wished that he might be free to tell more. She enjoyed riding, and from the secure peace of New England they looked back upon perils in the land of the Hitlerites. They were veterans of a war, and could enjoy the delights of fighting their battles over again. Lanny was returning to the front, and Laurel might have liked to join him but had to stay and wage what she called her feeble little war of the pen. Lanny had to remind her that the Nazis were skilled with the pen and never made the mistake of undervaluing it.
While F.D.R. had been giving his fireside chat, the Nazis had been carrying on another mass bombing of London. This time it had been with incendiaries; and while this happy couple enjoyed the winter scenery they turned on the radio and listened to details of the dreadful conflagration blazing in the very heart of the capital, the portion known as The City. Laurel had never visited it, but Lanny had known it from childhood, because Margy Petries’s husband—Lord Eversham-Watson, shortened to “Bumbles”—had been a “City man,” operating busily with his wife’s fortune. Now Lanny told of the sights he had then seen and which no one would ever see again.
The district was small, and crowded like an ants’ nest. Nobody knows why ants run their tunnels here and not there, but presumably it is because their forefathers of generations ago started that way; and just so with London City, which had enough secret doors and hidden passages to supply the writers of murder mysteries for the rest of time. In its tangle of buildings and cellars had been developed the most modern banking technique in the world, but that had changed few of its outward forms. It was a little empire inside the great empire on which the sun never set. The sovereign was the Lord Mayor of London, and he had his own police; the army of the King of England might never enter, and the King himself might enter only after an elaborate ceremony; he was represented by a sort of ambassador with the odd title of the King’s Remembrancer. The odder a title was, the more the English people cherished it.
Lanny’s visit had been on St. Michael’s Day, because that was the day of the Lord Mayor’s procession. It had been like a fairy story to see his civilian majesty riding in a golden carriage, escorted by lackeys in wigs, and the Aldermen with caps of black velvet, and the Sheriffs, and the drummers of the City Marshal, followed by the Marshal himself in violet velvet embroidered with silver. All the different Guilds had their costumes, designed more than six hundred years ago. Each had their jealously cherished privileges—for example, the Wine Merchants’ Guild were the only persons, excepting the King, who were permitted to raise swans in England!
Alongside all this ancient frippery was the Bank of England, the most powerful in the world; the Stock Exchange, and the Royal Exchange, where all the currencies of the world were sold every business day; the Clearing House, a huge establishment; the Baltic, where ships were chartered for every port known; also, the five great chain banks which ruled the land’s credit. In Lanny’s Pink days he would have been willing to dispense with all this, but now he would mourn for it, because these great institutions had been financing the war on Nazi-Fascism all over the earth. “Including Budd-Erling fighter planes?” suggested Laurel; and he answered: “Yes, but there weren’t enough of them.”
XII
Robbie’s man came down from Newcastle to drive Lanny to the airport and bring the car home. Lanny’s two bags and his little portable typewriter were put on board the giant flying boat, and Lanny made himself comfortable in a cushioned leather seat. When he glanced about him he observed a fellow-passenger, a slender gentleman in a rumpled gray suit; a gentleman partly bald and with a pale complexion and a worried expression suggestive of poor health. Lanny had never seen him before, but the newspapers had made his features familiar to all the world. It was the top New Dealer, the Lord High Chief Boondoggler and Grand Panjandrum of Leaf-raking, the especial pet peeve of Robbie Budd and the other economic royalists: the harness-maker’s son from Iowa who had become F.D.R.’s fidus Achates, his Man Friday, his alter ego; the former social worker who was seeking to turn America into one gigantic poorhouse, an asylum for the lazy and incompetent—a perfectly run institution, whose floors were scrubbed every morning and whose menus were according to the latest discoveries of the dietitians. At any rate, that had been Robbie Budd’s idea of the man, cherished over a period of eight or nine years, and Robbie had foamed like a soda-water siphon when anybody so much as spoke the name of Harry Hopkins.
“Harry the Hop,” as his Chief called him, lost no time after taking his seat in the plane, but opened up a voluminous brief case and started studying some documents. He did that through the whole trip, and Lanny didn’t interrupt him. Lanny might have got attention if he had said: “I was with the President in his bedroom just after he came back from Warm, Springs.” But Lanny wasn’t free to say that; he couldn’t even say that he was the son of Budd-Erling and was going abroad on business for his father. He would have had to say: “I am an art expert and an ivory-tower dweller,” and that wouldn’t have interested America’s hardest-worked errandboy.
Lanny knew that Harry Hopkins was on his way to England, to help make good the promises which F.D. had just proclaimed in the most public manner possible. The documents in his brief case contained the figures as to what America was prepared to do now and over the coming months; no doubt they would be put before Churchill and his aides and compared with their schedule of what they had to have. The P.A., who would have liked nothing better than to look through those documents, consoled himself by imagining a scene that would happen some day after this grim struggle was over; he would meet the harness-maker’s son in the White House bedroom, and F.D. would say: “Harry, this is my friend Lanny Budd, who has been one of my most useful agents since the days before Munich. Treat him with honor, because we couldn’t have won the war without him!”
10
His Faith Unfaithful
I
The small city of Vichy was as crowded and uncomfortable as when Lanny Budd had left it, the only difference being that the broad valley of the Allier River had been blazing hot and now it was bit
terly cold. The Germans took most of the fuel of France and most of the rolling stock, and the people suffered through an unusually severe winter. It seemed to Lanny that the only times he was comfortable in Vichy France were when he was walking briskly or was in one of the hotels which had been taken over as government offices.
He didn’t want to be known as a secret agent, nor yet as the son of Budd-Erling Aircraft; he wanted to be a private party, earning his living by trading in art works; so he asked no help in finding accommodations, but wandered about among lodginghouses, and got a hall bedroom by the device of paying the propriétaire a hundred francs extra per night to move himself into his cellar. Lanny’s papers were in order, and the travel permit which Laval had got for him was still good, even though the fripon mongol himself was in Paris, taken there by the Germans for his safety. Lanny wandered about and looked at the sights and bought the painting for old Mrs. Fotheringay and another for Mrs. Ford, and arranged to have them shipped. He could guess that his doings were being observed and that before long the observers would decide he was harmless.
Food was fairly plentiful, since the district was productive, and the Germans, trying to make friends, were not commandeering too much. Dining in the cafés, Lanny kept a lookout for familiar faces, and presently came upon a man whom he had known in Paris: a journalist-snob by the name of Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who fancied himself a man-about-town—which meant that he spent more money than he could normally earn. Young and eager to rise, he had been one of Kurt Meissner’s men in Paris, and had written a two-volume work about the Wehrmacht, so well done that the Nazis had had it translated into a number of languages. Subsequently he had been taken prisoner of war, but had been released and sent to Vichy because Otto Abetz could use him there.
A World to Win Page 24
