IV
In one of the hangars stood a two-seater trainer plane, and Alfy said: “Would you like to go up with me?” Lanny answered: “Sure thing.” He had been up in a Budd-Erling at home, and anything else would be tame in comparison.
The plane was wheeled out, and while the motor was being warmed up he put on the heavy flying-suit and the parachute which the law required. Alfy examined the gauges, and they strapped themselves into their seats and put on the headphones; for the pilot has a phone to talk to his co-pilot, even when they are side by side; in combat he does not take his eyes off the objective even long enough to shout a word into somebody’s ear. The motors began to roar and the plane to move; it gained speed and rose gracefully, and soon they were soaring over the countryside of Hertfordshire, with Alfy pointing out features of the landscape which it was a part of his business to study in photographs and maps and then to recognize from the air.
Very pleasant to sit there and chat, while accomplishing a feat which had been the dream of mankind for twenty or thirty centuries, or perhaps since the first man observed the eagle and the hawk performing with delightful grace and tempting ease. Alfy said: “I don’t ever let myself get bored, because I practice and learn something.” Lanny replied: “Go ahead,” for he knew that this luxury was costing a lot.
The plane began to climb, and little frying sounds began to crackle in the passenger’s ears. The pilot said: “Don’t let me take you too high. I’m in practice, you know.” Lanny waited until he had all he thought his ear-drums would stand and then he said: “I holler ’nuff.”
They leveled off at ten thousand feet and it was decidedly cold, even in the flying-suit. Alfy inquired: “Shall we try a stall?”
Lanny knew all about that, the most dreaded accident which can happen in a plane. It starts to slip sideways and plunges down, and is completely out of control unless the pilot knows the trick. Fighters have to know every trick, and this one especially, as it is a means of dodging out of reach of a pursuer, of disappearing out of his world in a flash. Lanny inquired: “Have you tried it in this plane?” and when his friend answered: “Many times; that’s what I come up for,” he said, in the formula which his country had given to the world: “O.K. by me.”
So all of a sudden the plane turned half over and began to slide sideways. At first you didn’t know that you were falling, because everything was so far away; but presently you realized that the land was rushing toward you, and the heavier air came crowding back against your ear-drums, driving the blood out of your capillaries. The instinct of the pilot is to pull hard on the stick, because that is the ordinary way to level off; but now the stick will not move and the harder you try the worse you make matters. What you have to do is to turn into a dive, gain speed and yet more speed, and if you have altitude enough at the start you can gradually come out in safety. Lanny clenched his hands and tried not to be frightened; he knew that if his friend’s skill failed, he wouldn’t be frightened for long. There began a terrific roaring in his ears, and when the plane began to level off, everything went suddenly black before him and he slumped into his seat and knew nothing about the landing.
When he opened his eyes again he was dizzy and things were blurred; he heard the voice of his young friend saying, in great anxiety: “Oh, Lanny, I shouldn’t have done it!” Right away he realized that he was back on English soil, and it was his duty to put a grin on his face. He made the effort, and remarked: “It’s quite curious; just like taking an anesthetic.”
“Oh, I was a fool!” exclaimed the lad.
“Not at all,” Lanny answered, quickly. “An interesting experience, and I’m glad to have had it.”
“You just weren’t used to it. I’ve been prepared for it gradually, and I ought to have realized the difference.” Lanny saw that Alfy was trying to save his friend’s face in the presence of the mechanics and students who had come running.
It was up to an American to play the game according to the rules; so he said: “Now I’ll know how you chaps feel when you go out after the rebels.” There were several here who were getting their training for the same purpose as Alfy, and Lanny had been introduced to them. He sat for a while and listened to talk about different planes and how they behaved in a nose-dive; he was glad not to have to move until he was sure his legs would balance and not make a spectacle of him.
V
Back in Paris, Lanny possessed himself of a car and went to see Trudi. They had exchanged cautious letters, in which their work was referred to as “sketches.” Lanny had written that the Comendador had found a pleasant place of residence in Pittsburgh; Trudi, in return, had stated that one of the persons who had been marketing her art works had met with a serious accident.
He arrived at her studio late in the afternoon, and the first question he asked was about that matter. The man in question, a former schoolteacher and Social-Democrat, now a refugee earning his living by doing translation work in Paris, had disappeared. That was all there was to be said; he had left some friend in a cafe in the evening to walk to his lodgings and he had not arrived there. More than two weeks had passed and the French police had been unable to find any trace of him.
To Trudi it was obvious that the Gestapo had got on the man’s trail and had done away with him. There had been a number of such cases, not merely in France but also in Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia—all the countries bordering on Naziland. Trudi suspected the Surete Generale of being not deeply concerned in the matter; she herself had kept aloof, but friends of the missing man had been reminded by the police that he might have fallen into the river, or committed suicide, or run off either with some woman or to dodge his debts—they were most ingenious in thinking up excuses when they wished to avoid trouble with a provocative and dangerous neighbor. How different, said Trudi, when a Russian general, a prominent leader of the Whites, had disappeared and it was suspected that he was a victim of the O.G.P.U.!
A serious matter for Trudi, because she might be next. She could only say that her meetings with the missing man had been carefully camouflaged, and they had never exchanged any notes. She had another connection, and the work was going on; she would keep it going as long as she lived and as long as funds could be found. That meant Lanny, of course. So he told her about his trip and what he had done with the price of the Comendador. She was disappointed about the Budd-Erling, having heard so much about the wonders it was going to do in Spain.
Sad news from that tormented land! The Italians had landed close to a hundred thousand troops, and General Franco was marching in four columns upon Madrid, still taking very few prisoners. Meanwhile the farce of “non-intervention” was continuing; the powers were meeting in one conference after another, and the Nazi and Fascist delegates with their usual effrontery were denying everything and turning all charges against the “Bolshevist Jews.” Since the Committee would not receive complaints of violation from either the Spanish government or private individuals, it followed that the only complaints came from the government of the Soviet Union. This government had announced that if the violations of neutrality did not cease, it would consider itself at liberty to sell arms to the Loyalist government. So the civil war of Spain spread into the press and over the air, becoming a civil war of Europe.
VI
In the midst of such strife and danger, it seemed like disloyalty to think about one’s own concerns. But Lanny had lived most of his years—they were going to be thirty-seven in a few days—in war-torn or war-threatened Europe, and he had learned to turn his mind away from troubles. He let Trudi say all she had to say, and when a pause came, he asked: “Well, have you thought about us?”
She had, and was prepared for the question. “Lanny, how can I think of making any man happy when I have to live the life I do, when I may disappear off the street any night?”
“You must leave that to me, dear,” he replied. “I am the sole judge as to my own happiness.”
“I can’t give up this work, you know.”
“No, but I thought—”
“That wasn’t what you were asked to think about, dear Trudi. You were going to decide whether you are, in your own mind, a widow.”
There was no more chance to evade. She hesitated a while, and then murmured: “I have decided that I am a widow.”
It was a somewhat unusual preliminary to love-making, but this was a special case and Lanny a special lover. They were sitting in two not very comfortable chairs three or four feet apart, and he made no move toward her, but looked straight into her sad blue eyes and smiled tenderly. She was wearing a painter’s smock which she had laundered for his coming. As always she had braided her corn-colored hair and wound it into a roll at the back of her neck. She wore no ornament of any sort, and had nothing to recommend her but those delicately chiseled and sensitive features and the straightforward gaze of eyes like the summer sky.
Meeting them fairly, Lanny began a little discourse on the most ancient of all topics:
“I have had four love affairs so far in my life, Trudi. I learned something from each of them, and the benefit may be yours. Love is one of nature’s precious gifts, which we in our folly often do our best to spoil. We spoil it with superstitions and taboos, with vanity, greed; selfishness, and plain dumb stupidity—the same forces which destroy most other good things of life. The prudes and bigots spurn love as sensual, but with civilized people it is overwhelmingly mental. It is what you believe about love, and what the other person believes, that makes it. That is why I have waited so long to let you make up your own mind.”
“It was a kindness, and I am grateful,” she assured him.
“It is possible for young people to fall distractedly in love with a face, or even with an ankle; but when we grow up we take ideas seriously, and find that we cannot love a person who does not share our motivating faith. That is what broke my marriage; I just couldn’t stand Irma’s mind and she couldn’t stand mine.”
“I understand that, Lanny; but are you sure you’re not going to the other extreme now? We agree very well in our ideas; but then, I am so alien to your world—I wouldn’t know how to live in it.”
“I don’t think I should ever want you to live in it. I go into it to get money or information, and otherwise I doubt if I should ever go back.”
“Can you really mean that? Your little daughter, for example?”
“I thought about her a lot on this visit. She is lovable, and I am deeply drawn to her. But there was a time when I felt the same emotions concerning my half-sister; she was such a gay and delightful child, and I played music for her and danced with her, and thought such innocent happiness was going to last all my life. But on this trip I was glad she was absent, because she belongs to a man I despise, and it would have been unpleasant for me to have to pretend to respect him and even, to tolerate his opinions. I doubt if I’ll ever be able to live in Bienvenu if Marceline and her husband are there. And naturally I fear the same disappointment with Frances. She will be trained by her mother and her two grandmothers, and if this world stays what it is she will become the wife of some plush-lined young snob whose conversation will inspire me with an impulse to hurl a sofa pillow at his head. Don’t you see why I want to make some sort of life on the basis of my own way of thinking?”
“Yes, Lanny,” she said, her voice low; “but you have chosen a woman who lives such an abnormal existence!”
“I have hopes that I may change that a little. We don’t do our best work under conditions of anxiety and strain.”
“My conditions are not of my choosing. I have thought about the matter day after day, and decided to put this cruel question to you: Suppose we became lovers, and then some day I decided that my duty required me to go back into Germany?”
Inside him he quailed; but he answered at once: “If you should make such a proposal I would expect to discuss the matter with you. You have advised me to stay in my world and do what I am doing, and perhaps I could convince you that your best job would be to help me. But if I failed, then of course I would go into Germany with you and do whatever I could. My connections there were of use to you once, and might be again.”
“But all that wouldn’t leave us much time or thought for love, Lanny.”
“My dear Trudi, if either of us had been asked what sort of world we wished to be born into, I don’t think we would have chosen this one; but here we are, and it’s a place where love leads a precarious existence. There is an old German poem which I learned when I was a youth, about the two chambers of the heart and what they contain. Do you know it?”
“I don’t recall it.”
“The anatomists tell us that the heart has four chambers, but this poet says two; in one dwells joy and in the other grief. When joy wakes in one, grief sleeps in the other. The poet whispers to joy to be careful and speak softly, lest grief should awaken. O Freude, habe Acht! Sprich leise, dass nicht der Schmerz erwacht!”
VII
Lanny knew: that the lady of his latest choice was a predominantly ethical being. She was guided by her intellect and moral sense. He had taken a long time to think what he was going to say to her; in fact, he had been over it so often that, without meaning to, he had learned it pretty well by heart. He guessed that it wouldn’t trouble Trudi if it sounded somewhat like a speech. She wouldn’t want him to be overcome by his feelings, and she wouldn’t want him to try to stir hers. She would listen attentively to every word he spoke, desiring to make sure that she was appealing to the best in his nature and that he was appreciating the best in hers. He desired every word to be exactly right; but at the same time he would keep his friendly smile, for he wanted to teach her to play, and to bring back some of the color into her fear-blanched cheeks.
He pointed out to her that love-making is an extremely ancient practice, which nature has established for purposes of her own. “The ascetics give it a bad name,” he said, “but the fact is that it is one of the most delicate and gracious of the arts, and its delights penetrate every fiber of the being and become the basis of sympathy and understanding, companionship and co-operation, loyalty and devotion. Love is like the fire under the boilers, which gives power to all the machinery. Without it, life is a film in black and white; with it, the picture glows with all the colors of the rainbow.”
“I can see something of that effect in your speech,” she replied.
“I have been blessed with the gift of words; but making these dreams into a reality calls for serious thought and effort. It is not enough that we have an honest purpose; we need some understanding of psychology, for no two human beings are alike and no two can know each other fully—how could it be possible, when we know so little about ourselves? The main thing is that we appreciate the possibility of great happiness, and are willing to pay the price of it in kindness and patience, in unselfish concern for the other person’s welfare. One of the great secrets I have learned about the embrace of love is that it is wiser to think not about the happiness we are getting, but about that which we are giving. Such an attitude has to be mutual, of course, otherwise love becomes exploitation, which is something else entirely.”
“I agree with all that, Lanny.”
“I am asking a gift from you, and you have a right to know what use I expect to make of it. I am not any sort of predatory person, and I expect to pay in fairness and friendship for what I take. I cannot promise to pay in pleasure, because it would be egotistical for me to assume that I can furnish as much of that as you.”
He smiled again, but she did not respond. The serious blue eyes were fixed intently upon his brown ones; the delicately chiseled features, concentrated in attention, made him wonder if this was the proper method of approach to a saint. “First of all,” he resumed, “comes frankness. I will do my best to tell you what I am and what I feel and what I desire. If you will do the same we can understand each other and avoid many errors. One of my firm convictions is that love has to be based upon realities, an
d not upon any form of self-deception. Since you have been a married woman, this is what you might call a post-graduate course in the art of love. Will you tell me frankly what is in your heart now?”
“First of all, Lanny, I must not have a child. I could not bear to bring a child into the same world with the Nazis.”
“The Nazis are having plenty of children. They are planning it that way.”
“I know; they have the power. They have government, education, money, everything. I, who have to fight them, have very little, and must save that for my job.”
“All right,” he answered; “for the present, at any rate, no children. And now, another practical matter: you know that I cannot marry you until I get a cablegram from Reno, Nevada.”
“I don’t think you ought ever to marry me, Lanny.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to tie you down. Perhaps I will be able to make you happy and perhaps not. If I am not going into your world, why should we risk publicity and embarrassment for you and your work?”
“You don’t think that a marriage ceremony is necessary to justify our love?”
“Such an idea would not occur to me. What I care about is what is in your heart. You have told me that, in your several little speeches.”
“I will honor and respect you. I will try to understand you and your needs, and give you what you ask for. I will help you to the best of my ability, and if you are in danger I will stand by you as I did before. Is that what you want to hear?”
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 62
