II
This punishment was part of the job of making the peace of the world secure, and it was to Lanny’s satisfaction. No one knew better than he how evil these men had been, and how little right they had to put the cloak of legality over their deeds. Let the precedent be established that the beginning of aggressive war was a crime against mankind and that it would be punished by world authority. Law had to have a beginning, and there was no better time than the present.
The United Nations delegates were about to assemble in New York and set up a world legislature and a court to adjudicate disputes and make fighting forever unnecessary. The United States was assuming the leadership and paying a good part of the bills. What kind of example was America going to set, and what were the world delegates going to find when they came here? These were questions the four Peace conspirators kept asking themselves.
In the days when Lanny had been playing the role of Mister Irma Barnes, he had gone about with the smart set on Long Island and in the New York night clubs; he had come to know scores of these people well and perhaps a hundred of them casually. Now they were middle-aged like himself; many had been in the Armed Services and were coming back; others had had civilian jobs—it wasn’t good form for anybody to be idle in a crisis such as the country had been passing through. He ran into them in hotel lobbies and on the street; they recognized and greeted him. Where had he been keeping himself all this time? They invited him to their cocktail parties, and sometimes he went, for he had to know America, high and low, and what people were saying and thinking and planning to do with the new world of peace.
One thing that Americans were doing, and that nobody could miss, was drinking liquor. It was alarming to see them pouring it down, and a mystery how they got away with it. No wonder you read of automobile accidents and that some of your acquaintances were taken to the hospital or the morgue. Women sat in bars with the men, or they sat alone, drinking themselves into a dull stupor. Drinking places called “night spots” were springing up on the outskirts of every town. In New York there was one opening up on New Year’s Eve whose cover charge was seventy-five dollars per person. Food and drink were in addition.
Millions of women had been left alone for one year, two years, three. They suspected that their men, in Britain, France, North Africa, or on lonely Pacific islands, hadn’t been living lives of plaster saints; the women had been experimenting also, and now the divorce rate was mounting fast—one marriage in three went on the rocks. In New York State, where the Catholic Church had succeeded in limiting the grounds of divorce to adultery only, there had been worked out a friendly arrangement of professional co-respondents; for the sum of ten dollars a nice respectable lady would consent to be discovered in a hotel room with you and be named as your partner in adultery. You would conduct yourself as a gentleman and not assume that any impropriety was expected.
In this period while Daddy had been overseas, the children also had been running wild. In California were “zoot-suiters,” who wore strange-looking clothing and fought in gangs with rocks and knives—not seldom they fought the police. They smoked what they called “reefers,” meaning marihuana. There were “bobby-soxers,” who gathered in radio studios to hear their favorite crooners and screamed like maniacs. They mobbed the movie stars for autographs and tore the buttons off the men’s clothes for souvenirs. Those who were not quite old enough for such exploits sat at home studying their lessons, but couldn’t do them unless the radio was running; they read with their eyes and listened with their ears. If you mentioned John Milton they looked blank, but they knew the names of scores of hot trumpeters.
This new generation had invented a fantastic language all their own and kept improving on it. At the moment all phrases had to rhyme, and so a youth would remark that his dream beam was a chill bill, meaning that she didn’t yield quickly to the seductions of the hot trumpet. Or he would call her a dull skull and say that she wasn’t alive to the jive. If she got tired of him she would tell him to drop dead, or perhaps just to get lost. You had to know all the subtleties of this new jargon, for if she said “Leave us get lost,” it meant that she wanted to take him out into the woods or upstairs to a bedroom.
Yes, there were things that needed to be changed in America; and the people who didn’t know it wouldn’t thank you for calling their attention to it; they would call you a drip or a droop or a jerk, or, worse yet, an unhep. They would put the rope up on you, a phrase which might puzzle you unless you knew the snooty night spots where they had a velvet rope across the entrance to the tables and you couldn’t get by unless the headwaiter knew you and was sure that you were prepared to spend several hundred dollars during the evening. People young and old wanted to go to hell in a hurry, and wouldn’t stop to think about the consequences to themselves, to say nothing of the rest of the world. “Nobody bothers about me,” Sister Flo had said. “Why the hell should I bother about them?”
III
The four crusaders set their course grimly and reconciled themselves to being unpopular. Perhaps in course of time they would discover some new friends and allies—there must surely be some old-fashioned people in this hard-pressed world. So far in human history there had been at least a score of great civilizations which had been built with hard toil and had gone down in ruins because of luxury and corruption at the top and misery and revolt at the bottom. Always there had been prophets crying doom and being stoned. What was new in this case was that the prophets had a million dollars, and that might make a difference in the outcome. There was no way to find out but to try.
Preparing to become a radio expert, Nina spent her spare time in front of the instrument in their drawing-room. It was, she said, exactly like the little girl who had a little curl; when it was good it was very very good, and when it was bad it was horrid. Mostly it was bad; but from it you could chart the American mind, and you had to know what anything was before you set out to change it. Radio was supported by the advertisers, and the advertisers spent millions studying the public, seeking ways to shift it from one brand of cigarettes to another brand, as like each other as two peas. The words that the public loved, the ideas the public accepted, were in those commercials. A generation of American children was being brought up on them. There was a story of a little girl of five who was taken to church for the first time by her father. When it was over he asked what she thought of it, and the answer was, “The music was very good, but I thought the commercial was too long.”
Early in the morning people apparently wanted to open their windows and do calisthenics with imaginary company. Then they wanted to hear the news, and plenty of hot jazz while they ate their bacon and eggs and swallowed their coffee. After that the men went off, and the women of America owned the radio. They had loud music while they swept and dusted, and they had menus for the day’s dinner, and fashion notes to guide their shopping or sewing or trimming of hats. They listened to gossip about their favorite movie stars and praise of the pictures they might choose to see in the evening.
And always commercials, a double dose every fifteen minutes. Music had its charms, and so they sang them; and before you shut one off, stop and recall the days when you were bounced on your grandmother’s knee and listened to Mother Goose rhymes. They had delighted both grandmother and child, and now it was the same thing for the same stages of mentality—first childhood and second. In those days it had been the cat and the fiddle and the cow that jumped over the moon; now it was Duz soap powder and somebody’s face lotion. Lanny had once asked a great lady of society why she persisted in taking a dangerous kind of “alkalizing” drink, and the answer came without a trace of a smile, “The man who tells about it has such a pleasant voice.”
IV
After her pick-up lunch it appeared that the American housewife liked to settle down for a good cry. For a matter of three hours she was fed soap operas, serial stories of the unending perils and romantic entanglements of heroines exactly like herself. As fast as the heroine got out of one
trouble she was in another; she was unjustly suspected, her marriage was breaking up, her children were about to be taken away from her. Did Charlie love her or did he love the other girl? It went on and on; the listeners knew these different families and the characters involved and could hardly wait for the next day to learn what was going to happen to their favorites. Zoltan Kertezsi, who had been brought to New York as a child and had lived in a tenement, said that in those days there were papers issued weekly with much the same sort of stories; they were pushed under the grilled doors of areaways, intended for servant girls, and were free because the revenue came from advertisements of patent medicines and abortion mixtures and other things that servant girls were supposed to need.
Toward evening the men came home, and there was news, and horror dramas to frighten the children before they went to bed. Then came the comedies, with laugh meters to test the reaction of the audience in the studios to each and every joke, old or new. Also there were programs in which members of the audience competed for prizes. “Take it or leave it,” the master of ceremonies would say, and the audience would shout the warning, “You’ll be sorry!” This program gave the American language a new phrase, “the sixty-four-dollar question.” Nobody could foresee the horrid developments which were about to come out of the many “give-away programs.” How often was it that anybody could foresee the consequence of any action to which the big-money motive was driving this greedy world?
With Mr. Huebsch’s advice, Nina found a radio announcer who would come in his off time and teach her the ins and outs of this business. She wanted to know it all, even though she herself would never be an announcer, on account of her English accent. It was a fact that puzzled and hurt her but that she had to face, that the English weren’t as popular in New York as they deserved to be. English lecturers weren’t wanted, nor English advice. Perhaps it was the influence of the Irish, and of the Germans in past years; or perhaps it was what the children had read in their schoolbooks. The redcoats had burned Washington, and lecturers had come over and collected dollars and then gone back and written impolite books about the domestic manners of the Americans. England was a land of kings and queens and dukes, pronounced “dooks”; the new England of the Labour party hadn’t managed to register yet, and when it did the former Anglo-maniacs wouldn’t like it.
V
Sir Eric Pomeroy-Nielson spent his time inviting editors and authors to lunch or dine with him—those men and women whose names had been supplied by the heaven-sent publisher. The Englishman would tell them about the plan, and if they were interested they would sit and chat for an hour or two after the meal. Rick wanted first of all a tiptop man as assistant, one who knew not merely New York but America. It had to be one who had been trained in the newspaper game and yet who was capable of independent judgment; a man who believed in world order and co-operation and would have his heart in the job of promoting them.
Rick also wanted writers, many of them, and they had to believe what they were putting on paper. If they were successful writers they would have to take less money in return for freedom of expression. They would have to have conscience enough to give their best work to the cause and not try to palm off the stuff they had put away in a bureau drawer. Rick had done many kinds of writing, and had been around in a big city, and wasn’t an easy man to fool.
Word got about town that a titled Britisher had a wallet stuffed with money and a new scheme up his sleeve. Reporters and executives out of jobs came to see him, and he listened to what they had to say and made notes; poets and storywriters sent him manuscripts, and he promised to read them and did. Already the mill was beginning to grind. A secretary was busy, files were accumulating, and pretty soon there would have to be an office somewhere.
That was Lanny’s job. He went scouting in the car, to one town after another, interviewing real-estate agents. Nothing acceptable could be rented; he would have to buy, and that was a serious matter: an office with room enough for four busy managers and their staffs, secretaries, files, and what not; also a home for the four, plus a youngster and his governess. Each of the four would have to have a workroom, and there would have to be at least a couple of servants to keep the place in order. Quite an outlay, and a million dollars didn’t look so big as it had sounded.
Also there had to be a printer in the neighborhood; someone who could make letterheads and circulars and such things for an office, and could start with a small paper and be willing to expand. For Lanny that meant learning the printing business and getting bids; it meant putting Sam de Witt at work locating a fast press that could be purchased if need developed. If you meant to succeed you had to be ready to hoist anchor and set sail while the breeze was fair. If you were stuck in the mud you might stay forever, mourning your lost opportunity.
VI
While Lanny and Freddi Robin had bummed around in Munich, Lanny had told about the bequest, and Freddi had gone off like a chain reaction. He would give his services for the cost of food and lodging; he would be office boy, janitor, chauffeur, anything that would enable him to be within earshot of this wonderful enterprise, to learn about it and show what he could do. Since then he had written not merely to Lanny but to his Uncle Hansi to plead his cause. He was wild to get out of the Army now that the job was done; he begged his grandfather to pull wires, and to ask the president of Budd-Erling to do the same. This youngster had a keen mind and could get his education by reading copy and listening to his elders just as well as by sitting in a crowded college classroom.
And now at this crisis came a wonderful event: Freddi came home! He came with his uniform newly pressed and himself well and fairly bursting with eagerness. How his discharge had been managed he had no idea; his grandfather, the ex-Schieber, the onetime multimillionaire, wouldn’t tell. Johannes just smiled and said there were wires that could be pulled if you knew where to look for them; the boy was here, and now put him to work and keep him out of mischief.
Freddi didn’t know a thing in the world about the printing business or the real-estate business; but it was with him as it had been with Jerry Pendleton when he had come to be Lanny Budd’s tutor a full generation ago. Beauty had asked what he could teach and he had answered, “Anything, if you give me two weeks’ start.” He was keen and amazingly well informed for his age. He would run errands and bring back the right answers; he would get people on the telephone and make notes of what they said; he would hop in and out of the car, he would type letters with two fingers, and all the while he would keep you cheerful with his faith and hope—he was the new generation. Lanny would have trained him for a business manager, only it was obvious that he was the intellectual type.
Also there was Laurel. She was going to be writing for all of the three departments, and every day she would go for a walk in the park—that was where and how her mind worked. Stories, poems, essays, news material—Mr. Huebsch had specified all these, and Laurel’s imagination would race from one form to another and weigh and test the ideas that came to her. She would come home and make careful notes before anything else had driven them out of her mind. For years she had been writing novels and stories exposing and ridiculing the Nazis, and she could feel that she had had something to do with putting them in the hotel-jail at Mondorf-les-Bains. Now she would use her talents against the profiteers, those who turned not merely industry but also government to the service of wholesale greed. She would write against these with all the energy she possessed, knowing in advance that the critics would say she was wasting her talents upon propaganda. There was a war between ethics and esthetics, and it had been going on for a long time. One side would say that you couldn’t have civilized life if you didn’t have moral standards; the other would say, what was the good of having any sort of life if you didn’t have beauty?
VII
Lanny found what he thought would serve them in the small town of Edgemere, in Jersey. You took the train at the Pennsylvania Station and it carried you under the Hudson River. In a little more than
half an hour you got off, and a car would meet you and take you about three miles; or you could motor the whole way, via the Holland Tunnel and the Pulaski Skyway. Lanny showed his colleagues the layout. On the edge of the town had been a fine old mansion; the family had decayed and so had the mansion, becoming a rooming-house for workers in a war plant not far away. The plant had shut down suddenly and most of the occupants had gone. The place could be bought for twenty-four thousand dollars, which was high, but then everything was high.
It was depressing at first glance, as he had warned them; it was dirty and run down. But the Army had discovered a wonderful device, a DDT-bomb; you set one of them in the middle of the floor and turned a little knob, and it began to shoot a fine spray; you left it there, and a fog spread through the house. With three or four such bombs in different parts you would never have to think about vermin again. Then you would have everything scrubbed and cleaned, and the rooms redecorated if you could find workers to do it. There was a furnace in the cellar, and a man would come night and morning to tend it. There were rooms enough; a suite with bath on the ground floor for Rick and Nina, a second story with two bathrooms in it, and a wing with a room where the youngster could play without disturbing anyone else. They could make it do.
The big factory in the town had been making incendiary bombs—the small boy who pointed out the place to Lanny called them “incinerator bombs.” Now it was shut down, and so was a small place near by which had been making fuses for the bombs. This latter was a one-story stucco building about a hundred and fifty feet long and thirty wide. There was a front office, and all the rest was one long room. Work had stopped one day, and they hadn’t even bothered to sweep out the scraps of metal; you could imagine that news had come of the ending of the war and everybody had rushed outside and never come back. Through the center of the main room ran a long table with a moving top, a “belt,” it was called, and women workers had sat on stools; the table could be taken apart and the lumber used to build partitions; they could make as many small rooms as they needed, and put in small gas heaters with vents in the roof or the outside walls. The company was asking twenty thousand for the place, and Lanny proposed to offer ten and expected to pay from twelve to fifteen.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 47
