“And how long would Emily’s million keep you going?” inquired Lanny, entering into the spirit of the occasion.
“Maybe a week, maybe a month, depending how much of our skeleton we were trying to save. Every little helps.”
“Well, Robbie, I’ll see if Laurel can get in touch with Emily in a trance, and ask if that will be a satisfactory solution of the problem.”
“Emily was a Budd-Erling stockholder, and Laurel is one, so between them they ought to be able to fix it up.”
“Joking aside, Robbie, you wouldn’t have much hope for my undertaking?”
The father shifted from gay to grave. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but I think the project a piece of pernicious nonsense, and I’ll be greatly embarrassed to see you undertaking it.”
“You don’t think there is any kind of educational work that might prepare people’s minds for an international organization to keep the peace?”
“I remember a sentence once spoken by Grover Cleveland: ‘It is a condition and not a theory that confronts us.’ When this war ends the only active pacifists will be the Commies and their dupes. They will have the biggest army in the world and they will keep it; but they will preach disarmament for Italy and Germany, for France and Britain, for Turkey and China, all the countries they want to throw to the dogs. They will want our Army to disband right away, and then to rot us with strikes and discontent. They will be enthusiastic for your work; they will swarm around you, with or without false faces on, and you will be following their party line whether you know it or not.”
IV
Lanny always dealt gently with his father on the subject of the Reds, for he knew the wound that was festering in the old man’s heart. To have a dearly loved son who was a parlor Pink was bad enough; but to have a daughter who was an out-and-out Communist party member was beyond endurance. Bessie Budd Robin came at long intervals to see her parents out of politeness, and they talked about her husband, her children, and her music, but never one word about her ideas. Now that the Soviet Union was an ally in the war, many people thought it was proper to be tolerant of Reds in America, but the president of Budd-Erling was not one of these. He knew that the Communist program was revolution throughout the world, and he made no compromises with those who advocated it. He would call them bad names and then suddenly stop and fall silent. Lanny would know what was in his mind, that one of these evildoers was his own flesh and blood!
Bessie was his only daughter, and in the early days her parents had laid the blame upon her marriage, which they had opposed. Hansi Robin might be ever so fine a violinist, but he was a Socialist and a Jew, and the Jews, a homeless people, were prone to internationalism and radicalism—so said Robbie. But now poor Hansi had been left far behind in the march to the future; Hansi was an idealist, a gentle soul, a lover of all mankind, and he was as unhappy over his wife’s course as were Robbie and Esther. Where had Bess got such ideas, and how could she possibly believe in them?
The father couldn’t bear to talk about it, but the proud mother asked this question, and Lanny answered, “She got them from you, Esther, and from your forefathers and their creed.”
“What nonsense, Lanny! My forefathers never heard of Communism, and it was nothing but a vague bad word to me.”
“You are an ethical person, Esther. You have convictions from which nobody can budge you—not if you had to go to the stake for them. I once called you a daughter of the Puritans, and you smiled over it, and perhaps never stopped to realize how true it is. Your forefathers had a faith they would die for and many of them did; and the Communists are like that. Your forefathers wanted to save souls for heaven, and the Communists want to save them on earth, but at base all fanaticism is the same thing.”
“Such cruelty, Lanny! Such dreadful, wholesale wickedness!”
“You have read New England history, dear, but you’ve let the ugly parts slip into the back of your mind. Your forefathers hanged helpless old women as witches.”
“Yes, Lanny, but they believed the devil was in them.”
“The Communists believe the devil is in the capitalists, the great landlords and others who monopolize the means of life and use them to exploit the laboring masses. It is a different set of ideas, but the fundamental attitude, the type of mind, is the same. Your forefathers put men in stocks, they ducked women in ducking stools, they drove Roger Williams, a gentle mystic, out into the wilderness.”
“Surely they never murdered people wholesale as the Communists have done!”
“Are you sure? Just go to your public library and get a history of Ireland, and see what Oliver Cromwell did to the Irish people, the names he called them, and the wholesale ferocious slaughter. Ireland is a smaller country than Russia, but proportionately I doubt if the Communists have killed as many people in Russia as the Roundheads killed in the Emerald Isle. You and I are used to seeing social progress made by means of the ballot, but we have to bear in mind that some peoples haven’t reached that stage of development and cannot get any sort of change without violence, and a lot of it.”
“Lanny,” said the stepmother with sudden anxiety, “you’re not going to let Bess win you over, are you?”
He smiled gently, being sorry for her. “Mother dear, I am one of those unlucky people who have to stand in the middle and get the brickbats from both sides. I see the good in both and I see the evil. But if you point that out the fanatics on both sides want to kill you.”
V
Hansi and Bess had a home halfway between Newcastle and New York, and Lanny and Laurel drove to see them and spent the day. All these four people loved one another, and the conflict of minds and wills that went on between the two musicians corresponded to that which went on inside the mind of Lanny Budd, and to a lesser extent in that of Laurel Creston. Could there really be in America such a thing as an orderly and peaceable change from a system of exploitation to one of co-operation, or were the Socialists just deluding themselves with a vain hope? Were the Commies—so determined, so unresting—helping to prepare America for the great social change, or were they hindering the change and putting weapons into the hands of the reactionaries?
Hansi and Bessie Budd Robin had labored unceasingly and made themselves true artists. They had given recitals for violin and piano all over America and Europe and had been hailed by uncounted numbers of people. They had made money and bought a beautiful home overlooking Long Island Sound; they had two lovely children, and everything that was needed to make them happy; but they were tormenting themselves because they couldn’t agree on their political and social beliefs. They had argued, each trying to convince the other, until each could no longer endure the sound of the other’s voice. The only way they could live together was by a strict agreement never to mention these subjects in each other’s presence. They would listen to news over the radio and never utter a word about what they heard. If a Communist came to call, Hansi would excuse himself, and if a Socialist came, Bess would do the same. They cut their minds in half, and each put one half aside and kept it in a locked compartment. But of course the other knew where it was and what was in it!
They could talk about the war, since both of them wanted the same outcome. Lanny told about his Monuments adventure and about the art treasures he had discovered and then had to leave to the Germans. He told about Emily’s bequest, and this interested them greatly, because it had been in her Paris town house that Hansi and Bess had met. Hansi had performed the Beethoven concerto, with Lanny playing the piano arrangement, and that had settled Bess’s fate. But they couldn’t discuss how Lanny would spend the money, for they knew in advance what Bess would say, that the only way to world peace was by the route of the Communist International. Stalin had abolished this organization, reportedly to oblige Roosevelt, but both the Hansibesses and the Lannybudds knew this was merely a temporary move and that the organization would be revived in some form as soon as the war was won.
Not even the topic of music was absolutely safe, for the
Soviet rulers objected to musical compositions that were oversubtle and precious, and Hansi had remarked that Stalin wanted tunes the commissars could whistle. Better to leave out modern music and stick to the classics, by which the taste of all four had been molded. What was Hansi playing now? He had composed a little “Concert Piece” which he used as an encore, and the audiences gave evidence of liking it. He played that for his relatives; it was gentle, lovely, and a little bit sad, like himself. Could any Jew be really happy, knowing what had been going on in Germany for twelve years?
The composer was pleased by what Lanny and Laurel said about the piece, and he kissed Bess and exclaimed, “Let’s celebrate our honeymoon again!” So they played the sweeping and grand first movement of the Beethoven concerto. Hansi could play it as only perhaps half a dozen virtuosos in the world, and that was a real treat, worth coming all the way from Juan-les-Pins to hear. It cheered them, and started the lives of two musicians over again.
VI
In the afternoon the two men put on their overcoats and went for a walk in the softly falling snow. Bess and Laurel stayed and talked, and then music was forgotten. Bess poured out her troubles. She had the idea that Laurel was more radical than Lanny, or at any rate took her social creed more seriously; perhaps she thought that Laurel might be able to influence Hansi. He persisted in reading newspapers like the New Leader, which filled his mind with all the evils that could be found in the Soviet Union and never by any chance reported what was good: the hundred and fifty million people who had been lifted out of ignorance and superstition, who had been taught to read and write and had had the world’s classics put before them; the hundred or more tribes and races which had been given cultural freedom, many of them given an alphabet for the first time, and books printed in it. Bess would tell things like this for hours, and had done so with Hansi—but how much effect had it had? Nothing that next week’s New Leader couldn’t wipe out!
Meantime there was Hansi walking and telling about Bess and the evil company she kept. Nothing sexual—it wasn’t like that, but something worse; conspiratorial persons who went about under aliases and carried dark secrets which they mentioned in whispers; efforts to steal the secrets of American weapons and plans to promote strikes after the war. Lanny himself had been doing that sort of thing in Germany, but he hadn’t told Hansi and didn’t tell him now. He listened sympathetically to statements that his half-sister read poisonous papers like the Daily Worker and the New Masses, which told her only the evil things about America and never by any chance mentioned the good: the New Deal and all the benefits it had brought to the public; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a model of what a public service enterprise ought to be; the laws establishing social security and protecting the rights of labor.
Wasn’t it true, asked the violinist, that a revolution sometimes degenerated and fell into the hands of men who used its slogans as covers for their love of personal power? And when you had a one-party system and suppressed all criticism, how could any evil be corrected? Even Stalin himself couldn’t get truth, because the men around him, seeking to please him, would tell him what they knew he wanted to hear. Hansi insisted that the Communist world revolution had become a tool of Russian power politics; every day it grew more narrow, more limited, less open to modern ideas. Birth control, for example; wasn’t that a test of reaction versus progress? To suppress knowledge of birth control could only mean that you were breeding soldiers for war. Just as with the Catholics, the top classes had the knowledge and used it but denied it to the poor underlings.
The Hansibesses had been in Russia for nearly two years, returning only a short time ago, so Hansi knew what he was talking about. On the concert platform he had been welcomed tumultuously, but in private life few Russians dared to be his friend. To associate with a foreigner meant to fall under the suspicion of the dread secret police; and even foreign Communists, who came to work for the cause in Moscow, found that they were watched, and only in a very few cases were they trusted.
Hansi told about Lanny’s Uncle Jesse Blackless, who was Beauty’s elder brother. Jesse had lived most of his life in France, and had been the fountainhead from which had flowed all this “radicalism” which had brought so much distress into the life of the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft. Just thirty years ago Jesse had taken his young nephew to meet a woman Syndicalist in the working-class quarter of Cannes, and the two of them had planted in a sensitive young mind the seeds of doubt which had sprouted fast and spread widely. Lanny had influenced both Hansi and Freddie Robin, and Hansi had converted Bess; so it had gone.
A lean, nearly bald painter of fair-to-average portraits, Jesse had espoused the cause of the Soviet revolution from the day it had occurred, and had risked his liberty in France to aid it during the Peace Conference in Paris. He had joined the party, and had taken as his companion a woman worker in the party office in Paris. He had gone to Moscow to help with the French Section of the International, and Hansi and Bess had seen a good deal of him. Like other foreign Communists whom the pair had met, he was too free-spoken, too independent; he was open to suspicion of having been infected with the heresy known as “Trotskyist deviationism.” This meant simply that you were international instead of being Russian; it meant that you couldn’t be trusted to react instantly and automatically to the party line, but might ask tactless questions and express dangerous doubts. So Lanny Budd’s Red uncle had become a tired, discouraged old man who was given routine jobs of translation, but could never hold any power and knew that his few Russian friends were there to watch him.
VII
Laurel and Lanny drove back to New York in the car which Robbie always loaned them. That crowded island had become the center of the world’s finance, and America’s center of publication and publicity. Ideas went out from it in billions of printed pages and by short wave to the whole world. There was an incessant struggle for power between the lower part of this island and the center of government on the Potomac River. The Man in the White House had taken so much of the power from Wall Street to Washington that he had become the most hated President in American history.
New York remained the center of all the luxury trades, and among them was Lanny’s trade, that of advising about art. Here he met his friend and associate, Zoltan Kertezsi, who had taught him how to judge paintings and how to persuade the rich that his judgment was correct. For more than two decades Lanny had been following this occupation, an easy one for him because he loved beautiful things, and studying them, and talking about them; also because, as the son of Budd-Erling, he naturally met the rich and might as well get something substantial out of the acquaintance. They wished to decorate their homes, and might better have good things than bad; they were going to take somebody’s advice, and it would be wiser for them to pay Lanny a ten per cent commission than to be unconscionably cheated by some dealer.
Now these two amiable gentlemen wandered along East 57th Street and strolled in to see the exhibitions and chatted with the dealers, who knew them and gladly spread out the best of their wares. Quality and price were inseparably mixed in their conversation, and that had become the case also in Lanny’s mind. Quality was something fixed, you might have thought, but what counted was the estimation of quality, and that varied like the ebb and flow of tides. Some schools were on their way in and others on their way out, and prices went up and down with them; the man who could tell what was of permanent value might build himself a marble palace.
Zoltan Kertezsi was a Hungarian, a very elegant person with iron-gray hair and wide mustaches. He was of a conservative turn of mind and looked with scorn upon those modern painters who slapped colors on canvas any old way and were too busy to finish anything properly. In these days a colossal fraud was being perpetrated upon the public by men who painted jumbles of objects as in a kaleidoscope; a face with the eye stuck on sidewise, or something that looked like telephone wire after a cyclone had passed, and was called “Man Asleep,” or maybe “Daydream,” or just “Etude.”
Such jumbles were given mysterious titles, and the public was left to guess at a meaning where there was nothing but idiocy. Worse yet were things called “collages”; you might see a board on which a piece of torn burlap was nailed, its beauty enhanced by pieces of string, newspaper, and broken glass glued on, the whole in a fine antique Italian frame.
The works of Marcel Detaze were stored in a fireproof vault, and now and then Zoltan would put some of them into a van and take them to a distant city for a “one-man show.” He knew how to get them advertised, and he put prices on them which the dealers said were beyond reason—but how could you be sure? All over America were people who were swamped under floods of money and who were proud to say, “I paid twenty thousand for that Detaze”—and would be happy all their lives, knowing it must be good because of what it had cost. Ten per cent of the price would go to Zoltan, and thirty each to Lanny, to Beauty, and to Marceline—if she was alive to receive it.
VIII
In the previous October the Russian armies had come to a halt along the Vistula River, in front of Warsaw, and had begun preparations for a winter offensive. Tanks can move in snow, unless it is very deep; the only thing that really troubles them is sticky mud; and on the level plains of Poland everything freezes. The Russians brought up enormous masses of supplies, and artillery in such quantities as the world had never seen before. They had many thousands of American trucks and uncountable swarms of peasant carts—their advance was more like a migration than an army. They had all lived more than half their lives in cold and knew how to exist in spite of it.
Just as the Battle of the Bulge was ending, the second week of January, these vast hordes struck. Artillery barrages knocked down the German defenses, and the Russians poured through great gaps in the line, all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, a distance of some four hundred miles. They had command of the air, and the supply bases of the Germans behind the lines were being pounded by British and American bombers flying from France. The Germans brought reserves from the western front and threw them into the battle, but in vain. Hitler had sent too many of his troops to the south, trying to keep the Russians away from Budapest and Vienna. That was Adi’s way; he couldn’t bear to give up anything, and so he was losing everything.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 13
