The guest made himself agreeable to such good effect that when they came to Cannes and learned that his home was on the Cap, they volunteered to make a slight detour. There was a tumult of welcome from the dogs, and Baby Marcel toddled out, shouting. The officiers de marine perceived that this was an elegant place, and when Lanny invited them in to have coffee they reasoned that it would be too late to transact any business that day, so why not?
In the well-shaded drawing-room Beauty Budd was still the most charming of hostesses; her wrinkles showed only in bright sunlight, and she never let strange gentlemen catch her there if she could help it. When she learned that they had brought her darling son all the way from Vichy she put herself out to make them feel at home; when they learned that she was the former Madame Budd of the famous Budd-Erling Aircraft and knew many distinguished persons of French social and political life, they exhibited pleasure to such effect that they were urged to stay for dinner. “Pas de gêne,” insisted Madame; most of their food was now grown on the place, a wise precaution in wartime; the only trouble was the impossibility of getting about, so when you had company in the house you wanted to make the most of them.
There was the very kind of old gentleman with snow-white hair and rosy cheeks who was Madame Budd’s present husband. All Frenchmen understood that American ladies changed their husbands frequently, and they found the circumstance novel and amusing. It did not interfere with their enjoyment of a good onion soup with croutons, and then of a large fish called mérou which had come that morning out of the Golfe Juan and had been stuffed with breadcrumbs and chestnuts and slices of bacon, and baked in an oven. Yes, people know how to live on the Côte d’Azur, and there were fashion and gaiety even in the midst of war. Madame Budd told how she had had to jack her two motorcars up off the wheels, but from an old barn she had resurrected an almost-forgotten buggy and had it scrubbed and painted and the wheels greased, and now could drive herself magnificently into Cannes behind a proper middle-aged horse which she had purchased from one of the flower growers on the Cap.
XII
So Lanny was home again, amid the scenes of his childhood so dear to his heart. Here everybody knew him and loved him, here nature held out soft warm arms to him, and art invited him in the aspect of a marble Greek goddess in the court. In his study was a library, and every time he looked at the titles he was tempted to take down a book and lose himself in its pages. There were a piano and several cabinets full of music; there was the ever-fascinating subject of child study, and also the seeming-infinite field of psychic research, which drew Lanny Budd as the New World had drawn Columbus. Madame Zyszynski was waiting to try experiments with him, and indeed would have her feelings hurt if he neglected this duty. Hidden in the subconscious mind of the old Polish woman were forces which tantalized Lanny with their mystery; from her lips in trance had come words which had brought to him the feelings of that watcher of the skies in Keats’s sonnet—when a new planet sweeps into his ken.
They rarely mentioned the subject of politics in the family; it had become too cruel and wicked in these times. Lanny talked about old masters, and left it to be supposed that they were his reason for traveling about over the Western World. Parsifal Dingle rested in the certainty that his duty was to set an example of loving kindness, in the certainty that men could not resist its divine force. Lanny would have liked to ask how love could make progress when all the forces of several mighty states were concentrated upon the teaching of hatred to a whole generation of childhood and youth; but that would have been a painful question, and Lanny suspected that his stepfather deliberately closed his mind to it. God was wiser than men, and God left it for men to make whatever blunders they pleased, and to learn by the hard way they seemed to prefer. In Lanny’s mind was the question which no philosopher had thus far succeeded in answering: Why had God chosen to make them like that?
Lanny had to tell his mother about all the places he had been and all the people he had met, and what they were doing and what they had said. If he had failed to look up any old friend she would make gentle complaint, and when he had told her everything he could think of she would ask for more. Here she was, to all practical purposes a prisoner, cut off from communication with the outside world, and that Lanny had been able to travel to London and then to New York and back again was simply a miracle. All he could say was: “Well, you know Robbie generally manages to get what he wants; and his very survival in the business world depends upon his knowing what is going to happen in this war.”
“And what is going to happen, Lanny?”
It was a question she had asked him on his last visit, and he gave her the answer again. “It will be a long war, old dear, and you might as well make up your mind to it.”
Beauty paled, even under the rouge vinaigre which she skillfully applied. “As long as the last one, Lanny?”
“Certainly that long, perhaps longer.”
“Oh, Lanny, I can’t stand it! I shall die of the horror!”
“That won’t shorten the war any. Make up your mind that you didn’t start it and you can’t stop it. Cultivate the ancient art of surviving.” He couldn’t say more than that, for she had too many friends here and they were all full of curiosity about Lanny and his doings.
XIII
Parsifal Dingle had a stack of psychic records for his stepson to examine. He rarely missed a day without a séance, and he had a mass of data concerning the monastery of Dodanduwa in Ceylon. He was firmly convinced that the voices he heard from Madame’s lips were those of monks dead more than a hundred years, and he was fascinated by the idea of tracing the evolution of certain doctrines of this religion, more than five thousand years old. It was no longer possible to communicate with the living monks, but Parsifal declared that as soon as the war was over he intended to visit the place and check his findings. He had quite a library of books on New Thought and what was now called “parapsychology.” Lanny, rummaging among these books and pamphlets, came upon one dealing with the Upanishads, and containing many of the doctrines in question. Parsifal declared that he hadn’t read this book, and there could be no doubt that he was sincere; but Lanny speculated upon the possibility that he might have read and forgotten it, and it had stayed and worked in his subconscious mind.
Even if you supposed that, you had not solved the problem, for the words had been spoken, not by Parsifal but by Madame Zyszynski, and surely Parsifal had never expounded these doctrines to this former servant, and if he had, she wouldn’t have had the remotest idea what he was talking about. Here was Lanny again, fooling with “that old telepathy”; the idea that the subconscious mind was in some way one mind, just as the ocean is one ocean. It was his favorite simile.
Lanny took the feeble old woman off to his study and seated her in the easy chair which she knew so well and which may have had some effect upon her mind, or minds. And here came Tecumseh, grumbling at a skeptical playboy as he had done for more than a decade. Presently he announced that there was the spirit of an old lady named Mary who insisted that she had met Lanny in New York; but Lanny couldn’t recall her, and was bored. Then came the quavering voice of Zaharoff, greatly distressed because Lanny hadn’t even tried to pay munitions king’s debt in Monte Carlo, and refusing to be satisfied with Lanny’s excuses that he didn’t have the money, and anyhow, nobody could get to Monte Carlo at present, it was surrounded by the Italian army, and an American would have to get permission from Washington as well as Rome. Hadn’t Zaharoff heard about the war? The Knight Commander said of course he had; and then he added something that made Lanny shiver to the soles of his feet: “What do you mean by using my name the way you have been doing?”
There was only one person in the world besides Lanny who was supposed to know that Lanny was using the name of Zaharoff. That was Lanny’s Boss, and he was too busy to be fooling with trance mediums or talking with spooks. But here was the former Knight Commander of the Bath and Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur fussing about it, and saying th
at his relatives on earth would sue Lanny for libel if they knew about it—and maybe he would tell them! This was something for a P.A. to think over for a long time—and to worry over. He decided that he would be careful about whom he allowed to attend séances with Madame, or for that matter with any medium!
XIV
Lanny had told his two friends of the underground, Monck in Switzerland and Palma in France, approximately when he might return to Bienvenu and be expecting a letter. He wasn’t sure about letters from Switzerland to Occupied France, but presumably the underground would have ways of dealing with such a problem. However, Lanny had found no letter from either man, and he didn’t like to go off on another jaunt without giving them time. It was a reason for yielding to temptation and doing what he pleased for a while. He felt very proud over what he had accomplished with Kurt, and told himself that it entitled him to a rest.
He could picture what would happen when F.D. got that note; he would instruct Sumner Welles to warn Oumansky, and that lively and genial but decidedly skeptical Soviet Ambassador would no doubt pass it on to Stalin, his personal friend. From Hitler to Kurt to F.D. to Welles to Oumansky to Stalin—that made it sixth-hand information, and no doubt it would lose most of its urgency in the journey. The P.A. could only say: “I did my best.”
He read and played the piano and consulted the “spooks.” Driving his mother’s nag, he paid a duty call upon his near-fostermother, Emily Chattersworth. With Beauty he dined at the villa of Sophie and her husband and played a rubber of contract. He played tennis and went fishing with his old crony, Jerry Pendleton. He danced with his tiny nephew, whose mother was dancing in Berlin and couldn’t visit or even write. No doubt she, like all others in Hitlerland, had been shocked by the length of the war, so contrary to promises. Lanny had to tell his mother that Berlin had been bombed by the British; not much as yet, but more was coming, because America was making big planes—the best for British purposes, since they could fly the ocean and the subs couldn’t get at them.
There was domestic mail inside Vichy France, but irregular and uncertain. At last came a letter, one of that inconspicuous kind which meant so much to a secret agent. It was from Toulon, and informed M. Budd, in French, that the writer had come upon a small but very good collection of Daumier drawings which might be purchased for something like fifty thousand francs. The writer, who signed himself Bruges, said that he was employed in Armand Mercier’s bookstore in Toulon, and would be happy to show the drawings at any time. Daumier being an artist of the people, a satirist of the privileged classes of his time, would have understood and loved Raoul Palma’s underground friends. The sum named, worth about five hundred dollars at the moment, represented the funds Raoul wanted Lanny to bring.
So the secret agent knew that his holiday was at an end. He borrowed his mother’s conveyance and drove into Cannes and drew the money from the bank; then he purchased various presents for friends and servants, as a means of getting small denomination bills. Having all his pockets stuffed with money, he went to see Jerry Pendleton at the latter’s travel bureau. Lanny explained that he could buy some fine Daumier drawings in Toulon, if only he could find a way to get there. Jerry grinned and replied: “I know a nice polite pirate who will take you, and he’ll agree to the price in my presence, so that he won’t dare ask more than twice the amount. C’est la guerre!”
11
Defend Me from My Friends!
I
Jerry’s “pirate” showed up at eight o’clock in the morning with a reasonably efficient car, a tank full of essence, and three twenty-liter cans in the rear compartment, to complete a round trip of some two hundred miles. How he had got this he didn’t say, and it would have been bad form to ask. Lanny was to have two full days in Toulon, according to the bargain, and if he stayed longer was to pay five hundred francs per day. He was to be limited to a hundred kilometers for driving about town, otherwise there wouldn’t be enough fuel to bring them home. Étienne, the driver, would probably try to add other charges, Jerry warned; and Lanny said he would pay them if they were not too extreme, for he might want to take more trips in the future.
This one was without incident, Étienne was a discharged soldier and had adventures to tell. He understood that an American gentleman had nothing to do but enjoy life and did not bother himself with politics. Étienne had brought along a supply of cognac, which Lanny might have enjoyed for a price, but he didn’t want any, and requested the driver to keep it corked. Also, Étienne knew a very nice girl who lived on the route, but Lanny said he had an important engagement with the commandant of the port; he didn’t say anything about having his pockets stuffed with banknotes of all sizes.
Toulon is the naval base and arsenal of Mediterranean France. It is surrounded by high hills, like nearly all that shore, and every hill is fortified. Below lies a deep harbor with immense breakwaters and moles, and four great basins, called darses, in which lay long gray-painted battleships and cruisers and, tied up against the piers, several rows of destroyers and smaller warcraft, many of them déclassés. It wouldn’t do to manifest too great interest in this fleet, or to ask questions; but Étienne pointed out the Dunquerque and the Strasbourg, two battleships which had got away from the British at Mers-el-Khébir. He cursed the treacherous friends who had committed that act, and the passenger made no comment.
There was a commercial harbor, and a town of some hundred thousand population, now swelled by refugees; the British blockade having cut off most of the traffic, people were having a hard time to get along. Everywhere were sailors, wearing little round caps with bright red pompons on top. Lanny went to the Grand Hotel and was told that it was crowded; he asked to see the manager and exhibited his credentials from Admiral Darlan, whereupon a room was found for him. Losing no time, he telephoned to the office of the commandant, and was received with all courtesy by a dapper old gentleman—the heads of the French Army and Navy were invariably elderly, and while they were well trained in the technicalities of their jobs they were nearly always stiffly conservative, and hadn’t had a new idea since the days of the Dreyfus case.
Yes, this commandant knew the d’Avrienne family well, and was familiar with their collection of paintings, one of the cultural monuments of the city. He had no doubt that they would be pleased to have an American connoisseur inspect them; the officer wrote a note of introduction, and had one of his aides make out a carte d’identification, which would spare him formalities with the police and port authorities. Lanny went back to his hotel and telephoned to the mansion, which lay in a sheltered valley behind one of the hills of the suburbs. He was told that the master was ill, but that the paintings would be shown to him in the morning—it would be better to view them by daylight. Since the visitor didn’t care to wander about a harbor town at night with all that money, he stayed in his room, wearing his overcoat in bed and reading War and Peace. Étienne had put his car in a garage and was sleeping in it, for fear that somebody might pour off the precious essence and fill the cans with something cheaper.
II
In the morning a middle-aged daughter of this ship-owning family showed M. Budd the paintings, a rather commonplace collection, mostly family portraits. Lanny admired them, as courtesy required, and made his usual tactful inquiry as to whether any of them might be for sale. Then he was driven back to town, went for a stroll and without saying anything to anybody found the secondhand bookshop of Armand Mercier. He went in and took a quick look, but didn’t see Raoul Palma. He began looking at the books, a practice which takes much longer in France than it usually does in America; you can stand and get yourself an education dipping into one old book after another, just as you can sit in a café and read a whole newspaper while you sip one cup of coffee.
There was a woman clerk, and Lanny stole glances at her. Was this a leftwing place, and were the proprietors in touch with the underground? The books were all kinds, and the few that dealt with politics had no special character; but that meant nothing, for if a man
had a stock of anti-Nazi or anti-Fascist literature, he surely wouldn’t keep it in plain sight in days like these. Lanny wandered here and there, running his eyes over the shelves, and when the woman asked politely if there was any special thing he wanted, he replied that he was just browsing. What he was doing was making sure there was nobody else in the little shop. He couldn’t say: “Is Raoul Palma here?”—because it might be that Raoul was going under an assumed name and that the woman did not share his secret. Certainly she must not share Lanny Budd’s!
He couldn’t stay forever, so he bought a paper-backed copy of Le Lys Rouge by Anatole France, which Beauty had read aloud to him when he was a boy, she having been an unusually frank mother, who made insufficient allowance for the difference between childhood and maturity. With the volume in an overcoat pocket—on top of a wad of money—Lanny strolled and looked at the very old city of Toulon. Like most of them along this shore, it had been conquered by Romans and Goths and Burgundians and Franks and Saracens. Here Napoleon had first made his name known by driving out the British. This he had done in the name of the republic which he destroyed a few years later; it was a melancholy story, not so different from the one that Adolf Hitler was now unfolding. Sad old Europe with her bloody soil, and her patient, toiling peoples who learned so slowly!
Lanny thought: Raoul’s hours of work may be in the evening. So after dinner he went back, and the little shop was open, with a man in charge, but it wasn’t the former school diréctor. Lanny browsed again for a while, to make certain; then he bought another novel and went back to his hotel room and read. Very annoying, but there was nothing he could do but wait. Perhaps Raoul was ill; or perhaps the proprietor had sent him on some errand; or perhaps his hours were in the morning.
A World to Win Page 27
