Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  “You’ll meet that English lady?”

  “She may be at some of the functions to which my mother will have to be escorted. But it’ll be all right now, because I’ve told you about her, and you will stand between us.”

  “Is that why you told me?”

  “What else? I’ve decided that I want to help Spain, and I’m building up a barricade, like those I encountered in the streets of Barcelona.”

  “You are quite sure there is no chance of happiness between you and Irma?”

  “I have an appointment to meet Irma’s uncle in London, and I don’t think he’s crossing the sea just for a chat or to hear about my travels. It’s been almost a year since Irma and I parted, and I’m guessing that she’s interested in some other man and wishes to arrange a divorce.”

  “She will be the one to get it, I suppose.”

  “That is the convention.”

  “It has occurred to me, Lanny—ought you to be coming here? Nobody would believe that we are just friends.”

  “I have thought of it,” he said, “and I take the trouble to make sure that I am not being followed. Members of Irma’s family might conceivably take such steps, but I don’t think she herself would. She does not go out of her way to look for trouble or to make it. She will rent a comfortable house in some place like Reno, Nevada, and take some woman friend along for company, and several of her servants to wait on them. She’ll have to stay only a couple of months.”

  “A most extraordinary arrangement!” said Trudi.

  “I have never visited the Far West,” replied the grass-widower-to-be. “I have heard a lot about California, and you and I might enjoy a trip there some day.”

  It was something more than a hint.

  VII

  Lanny arranged to take Jean Longuet for a drive and have lunch in a quiet place in the suburbs, so that he could tell the story of Barcelona. He hoped to do the same with Leon Blum, but the Premier had gone to London to consult about the emergency. Longuet reported that there was a split in the Cabinet over the issue of aid to Spain; the Radical Socialist members were unwilling to sanction any steps which might lead to war, and they threatened to resign—which-would have brought down the Blum government. Blum himself had made the same threat, but had not stood by it. Longuet quoted him as saying: “Everything is difficult. France is not ready for war, and I do not want war. If it comes, it will wreck our whole social-reform program.”

  “Mon dieu!” exclaimed Lanny. “What is the use of social reform, if Hitler and Mussolini succeed in establishing a western front against you? Germany is getting ready for war as no nation ever did in history, and if she builds a Nazi fortress in Northern Spain, what will that mean to France and Britain?”

  “You’ll have to go to London and ask that. Downing Street is telling Blum that he can expect no British support if he gets into war with Germany and Italy over the question of aid to Spain; and of course both Mussolini and Hitler are telling us that if we sell munitions to Spain it will mean war.”

  “The same bluff they worked over Abyssinia and then the Rhineland! Any opposition to anything they want will mean war. On that basis they can take the whole of Europe, one slice at a time.”

  It was a tragic situation for editors and party leaders who had fought a hard campaign on the issues of reforming the Banque de France and socializing the munitions industry and granting shorter hours to labor. They had won a resounding victory on those issues, and now here came a gigantic military tank, threatening to roll over the whole thing and smash it flat!

  From this conference Lanny went to a reunion in the great Salle Wagram, called by those elements of the Left which saw the situation clearly and were not afraid to face it. He discovered that the Communists, men of action, always eager to force every issue, had taken possession of this meeting. The crowd sang the old revolutionary songs of France, the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole, but they sang the Internationale more frequently and loudly; they gave the signal of the upraised fist and shouted: “Les soviets partout!”—soviets everywhere. The speakers were from the various Left and labor and even women’s groups; through channels of their own they had learned exactly what was going on in Spain, and an orator told about the execution squads in the towns which Franco had taken, how they dug great pits in the cemeteries, drove the prisoners out by the truckload, stood them on the edge of the pits, then shot them and tumbled them in. The crowds screamed with horror and fury, and the cry: “Des avions pour l’Espagne!”—airplanes for Spain—sounded loud enough to be heard in the Foreign Office across the Seine. They chanted it slowly, putting equal emphasis on each of the seven syllables.

  Lanny had taken Trudi to this meeting, but they had not entered together. After the meeting he got the car and met her at an appointed corner. She had been deeply shaken by the oratory, and exclaimed: “Lanny, we must help the people of Spain, no matter how often we hear it called a Communist fight!”

  “Well, of course,” he said. “That applies to the people’s struggle everywhere. If we give up because they call us Reds, we might as well hand the world over to Hitler and Franco and be done with it.”

  VIII

  He went to see how the Comendador was coming along, and stood for hours watching this fascinating work. Amazing how the rich crimsons of the costume leaped out, and the gold of the buttons and the braid, sparkling as freshly as when Goya had painted them! Lanny had thought the grim old grandee was wearing a green uniform of a most unattractive shade, but when the dirty yellow varnish came off, lo and behold, it was a bright blue. The holes weren’t going to cause much trouble, the clever demoiselle insisted, for the bullets had left clean, sharp edges, and when the job was finished it would require X-ray tests to find the damage.

  She described to her client the complicated process of relining. The front of the painting would be covered with paper, and the painting then turned over and the back carefully cleaned; it would receive two coats of rabbit-skin glue, then a special kind of gauze with another glue made of fish-glue, rye and wheat flour, and Venetian turpentine. The new canvas of pure linen would be stretched on a special frame larger than the painting, laid flat over it, and ironed down several times with a heavy iron slightly warmed.

  When this job was thoroughly dry the whole thing would be stretched on a permanent frame, and then would begin the delicate work of filling up and painting the holes in the original canvas. The filling was done with a specially prepared mastic, and the paints were mixed with egg-white, not with oil. All paints change color in the course of time, and such tempera paints change quickly, so that the results can be observed. The demoiselle explained that it was something of a trick to select shades which did not match when they were applied, but would match a week or two later.

  Lanny sat for hours watching the fascinating work of nettoyage, sharing in the pleasure of new discoveries. One of them was worth a large sum of money to him; the demoiselle with the sensitive fingers was rubbing lightly the gold ornament on the watch-fob of the Comendador, when she gave an exclamation of pleasure and said: “I think we have something important here, Monsieur. You know that it was the practice of this painter to sign his name in strange places.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I have seen one on a ring on the sitter’s hand.”

  “This ornament is a seal, and it has some strange design on it.”

  After that Lanny followed every stroke of the swift fingers, and little by little there appeared letters on the shining gold. Complete, the inscription read: “F. J. de Goya y L.,” and of course it settled the question of the genuineness of the painting.

  In high spirits because of this vindication, Lanny went to call on his Communist uncle, and found him up and hard at work. A tough old nut he had called himself, and said that he lived on faith, hope, and charity—directed, of course, to the proletariat exclusively. He wanted to hear his nephew’s story and then to draw conclusions in accord with the party line. Really, he had all the arguments this time, for here wer
e the capitalist exploiters and the aristocrats, the professional killers and the priests of God all united to confirm the Leninist formula; it seemed that it couldn’t be a slice of history, it must be a laboratory experiment, arranged for purposes of demonstration! Said Uncle Jesse: “How many times have I told you that the propertied classes will never submit to a decision by majority vote, but will take up arms to protect their privileges?”

  Lanny couldn’t keep from smiling. “A great many times, Uncle Jesse.”

  He told the aging warrior what Raoul had reported, how in the sacristy of the Barcelona Cathedral the government had found a treasure of sixty million pesetas in gold. That, too, seemed to fit the Bolshevik formula rather than the Christian. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.” Jesse Blackless was a preacher’s son, and could quote Scripture like the devil!

  IX

  From Montmartre the traveler set out for London, stopping overnight at Les Forets. Emily was feeling better than she had for some time, and glad as always to hear the adventures of her protege. When she heard about his date with Joseph Barnes she was sad, for it meant the end of one of her efforts at happiness for others. Believing as she did in money, she told Lanny that he was foolish to let the Barnes fortune go without claiming a share; he had certainly helped to save it during the seven years that he had been prince consort. When he replied that money wasn’t going to mean so much in the future as it had in the past, he was speaking a language which an old woman of the old world had no means of translating.

  She had an interesting item of news: Kurt Meissner was in Paris. He had come out to see her and played some of his new compositions, very fine things, she thought. He had offered to play at one of her soirees, and in spite of Lanny’s warnings a salonniere had not known how to decline. “Really, Lanny,” she said, “I find it hard to imagine the German government being able to employ a distinguished musician such as Kurt has become.”

  “Kurt is a former artillery officer and a former secret agent, and surely you must understand that when a German has once been either of these things he is never thereafter a free man. And now that Germany has gone to war again, of course he is subject to command.”

  “Germany at war, Lanny?”

  “Apparently your newspapers haven’t made it clear to you. Hitler and Mussolini have embarked on a war to put down the people’s government of Spain. They have been planning it for the past six months, and already there are German planes in the fight. No doubt the aviators will be in the employ of commercial concerns, and the technicians will be tourists, and so on, but they will be Nazi officers and men, under the orders of the General Staff or the Gestapo.”

  “But what would Kurt be doing in Paris?”

  “I don’t know, but I am guessing that he is here to keep the French government from interfering in this war. He is to encourage and activate those reactionaries and native Fascists who are trying to frighten Blum. Kurt will meet members of the Cabinet, politicians and editors, their wives and mistresses, and influential ladies who conduct salons. He will play his music for them, charm them by his distinguished manners, and then, over the teacups, he will point out to them the grave peril involved in letting the Reds get a foothold in Western Europe. He’ll point out that Germany is the only country which is in position to bulwark Europe against the advance of the Bolshevik hordes. He will point out that the Front Populaire in France is identical in all respects with the Frente Popular in Spain, and that the Reds in France plan to do just what the Spanish have done—that is, burn churches and confiscate church property and divide the estates of the rich among the peasants—and how would you like to have your beautiful estate divided up among your tenants?”

  Mrs. Chattersworth began to laugh; and when Lanny looked inquiringly she said: “It may be just a coincidence, but Kurt said nearly all those things!”

  “Coincidences do not happen in Nazi affairs. They have taken over the old German bureaucracy, the Army and the scientific laboratories and everything is planned to the minutest detail and carried through with precision.”

  “And you believe that Kurt is being paid to present such arguments to me?”

  “I haven’t the slightest doubt that he enjoys a salary and a liberal expense account. He will play at your soiree and meet your friends, and thus be established in the very highest circles. He will play for other ladies, and be passed from group to group, and worm his way into people’s homes and their private affairs. He is not alone, you understand; he is a member of a powerful organization, with hundreds of paid agents in Paris, and they are not all of them musicians and men of genius. Their machine includes spies and burglars and even assassins—do not forget that the Nazis have already murdered three premiers in Europe and a king, also a foreign minister-of France, not to mention great numbers of small and obscure idealists. They have dossiers on you and your friends and thousands of other prominent persons; they will intimidate some and bribe others; they will eat like termites into the center of French public life, and either bring French policy into line with Nazi interests or else destroy France.”

  Emily Chattersworth had known and loved Lanny Budd since he was a baby, and had watched him grow up and develop a widely inquiring mind. Now she really didn’t know what to make of him. He had gone off by himself into a region as strange and terrifying to her as the swamps of the Amazon filled with crocodiles or the mountains of New Guinea swarming with headhunters. She knew no other traveler in those regions, and she knew that Lanny’s father, his mother, and his wife all agreed that he was a victim of designing and intriguing agitators.

  “Dear Lanny,” she said, “I am old and not very well, and this new world which is developing is too terrible for me to comprehend. What you tell me sounds like a scenario for a horror film.”

  “I tell you that all the horror writers of Hollywood put together will never be able to imagine anything to equal the reality of Nazism; and precisely because it is real, Hollywood has not dared to attack it. The controls which the Nazis are developing would surely not fail to include anything so powerful as the motion-picture industry; so we have films about wicked and criminal individuals, but none about a world system which offers itself to the capitalist class as a means of putting down the labor movement and keeping it down for a thousand years.”

  X

  Lanny’s first destination in England was The Reaches. He arrived at dinnertime, and afterward the family sat out on the terrace in the moonlight and listened to his story of Spain and then of Paris. It was the making of several articles for a journalist, and Rick would begin to work at his typewriter the first thing in the morning. He was giving more and more of his time to political subjects, and his friends were warning him that his standing as a playwright was suffering in consequence; he had another play, but nobody would produce it because it was too bitter. Rick replied to his friends that if the Nazis and the Fascists were allowed to divide Europe between them, there very soon wouldn’t be any drama.

  There were the baronet and his wife, now an invalid, and Nina and Rick with all three of their children; Alfy now nineteen, his brother seventeen, and the girl sixteen. All these young people had been brought up to look at their world and do their own thinking about it. All three were tinged with Pink in various shades. Angela, the daughter, sounded very much like Bessie Budd, and worried her mother; but Rick said that most such cases recovered in a year or two.

  Lanny had been an intimate of this family since before the young people were born, and they looked upon him as a romantic personality; they drank in every word of his story, and very certainly it didn’t tend to divert them from the leftward path. Even the old baronet, debonair and dilettante, got hot under the collar of his polo shirt, and said that the damned pig-raising Prime Minister they had got ought to be shipped off to live with the Blackshirts whom he had allowed to humiliate the British Empire. Sir Alfred’s sweet-natured wife, who had spent forty yea
rs trying to tone him down, begged him to remember that Baldwin had a case. Defending his course in private, the pig-raiser pleaded that the Empire wasn’t sufficiently armed, and the reason was because labor and the Liberals had all gone pacifist. “I was one of them,” said the baronet’s wife, “and so were you, Alfred.”

  “What good would it do us to build up the fleet or the Air Force for the Tories to use?” burst out the older grandson.

  Lanny could see that it was a confused situation. Great numbers of Britons had signed a pledge that they would never take part in any future war; and now, all of a sudden, here was a war that great numbers of them desired! A war to defend a duly elected people’s government against invaders! Rick said: “We ought to stop speaking of this as a civil war. We might as well call the invasion of Abyssinia a civil war because Mussolini had native Abyssinians trained to fight on his side. Franco has a few Spaniards, but mostly it’s the Foreign Legion and the Moors who are being used to crush the Spanish people.”

  XI

  When the company broke up and Lanny went to his room, Alfy came there; it was late, but he asked if he could have a chat, important to him. Lanny said: “Shoot!”

  First, the youngster wanted to know about Marceline: was she happy and likely to stay so? Lanny thought she was, and would be—certainly so long as she and her husband were guests at Shore Acres. He was sorry if that sounded cynical, but there was no use letting Alfy grieve over a Marceline who had never existed. Alfy said he guessed that was the best way to look at it; he hated to think of the girl having fallen into the hands of a Fascist S.O.B. Lanny said: “It really isn’t that way. Vittorio seems to suit her very well. She looks upon him as a hero, and other people in her world do the same.”

  Alfy told what was troubling him most. He had got some training in the air in the previous summer, and now he wanted to go at once and perfect himself and serve as an aviator for Spain. Several of his friends were all on fire about it; if Mussolini could send “volunteers,” why shouldn’t England match him man for man? How did one set about it?