Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels)
Page 82
He had received in Caceres a brief note from Marceline, asking for more money and saying that they had moved to a cheaper hotel. Driving into Seville, Lanny found the Capitano in a state of great discouragement, for the salary he was receiving was entirely inadequate to the support of such a very elegant wife. The news from the Guadalajara front had taken all the Fascist starch out of him, and he hinted at a desire to get out of his predicament on the plea of ill health and return with Lanny to Bienvenu. The art expert was greatly shocked, and said: “Oh, Vittorio, you couldn’t desert your cause—now in its hour of trial!”
“It’s going to be a long and nasty fight, Lanny, and Marceline wasn’t brought up to stand hardships. Do you realize that it sometimes gets as hot as a hundred and twenty degrees in the summertime here in Seville?”
“Yes, but everybody takes a siesta, and the nights are delightful.”
“The mosquitoes are here already,” declared the young Fascist hero.
“It seems to me your party would never respect you if you deserted them now, Vittorio.” So said the malicious brother-in-law. You’re in the army now!
Of course they wanted to know what he had accomplished on his journey. He had given time to thinking exactly what to say, and now he said it. “I made certain that Alfy is not in Caceres. I didn’t make any further efforts. I found it extremely difficult to make connections and find out even a little.”
“Then you had your trip all for nothing?” exclaimed Marceline.
“No, I saw some wonderful old Roman ruins, and a lot of fine religious paintings.” Lanny had been accustomed to saying things like that with a grin, but now he was learning to keep a dead sober face.
“Oh, by the way,” remarked the Capitano, “don’t forget to let me have that uniform.”
“I’m so sorry!” responded Lanny. “Somebody carried that suitcase off and I never saw it again.”
“Diacine!” exclaimed the other.
“I promised you a new one, and I’ll pay for it. But since you’re going to spend the summer in Seville, perhaps you’d rather have some lighter material.”
IX
Lanny returned the rented car, paid the agreed price, and exchanged thanks and compliments. That was his last duty, except to give his dancing sister a little money and promise her a little more. It was hard for her to understand the sudden alterations of his mood, from stinginess to lavish generosity and then back again. “We still might find out something about Alfy,” she said, alluringly.
He answered: “If you do, let me know and I’ll come.”
He took the train to Cadiz, and in the harbor by good fortune found a Swedish steamer about to sail for Marseille. He engaged passage, and by telephoning to Seville he got hold of Senor Lopez and arranged to have the “household furniture” put on the same vessel. Lanny himself walked on board with his roll which looked like charts, and nobody asked what was in it. His last act before the vessel sailed was to send two telegrams, one to Beauty, telling her to meet him, and the other to Albert Romney, Avenida Palace Hotel, Lisbon, saying: “Family joins in kindest regards all well here.”
The next two days were a perpetual smorgasbord. He had been in Stockholm once, on a cruise of the yacht Bessie Budd, so he was prepared for enormous Swedish meals. The officers practiced their English on him and he told them about Franco Spain from the point of view of a strict neutral. He would not forget that this was a war zone, and he wouldn’t even write letters until he was safe on the soil of the French Republic. When the vessel docked, there was his ample blooming mother, waving happily; she was alone, except for the chauffeur, and Lanny knew what that meant—she wanted his story right hot off the griddle.
They sent the man to get his lunch, and Lanny took her for a short drive in order to be alone. She was one of very few who would be entrusted with the real facts. She clasped her hands and had tears in her eyes, because he had been in such dreadful peril, and would persist in doing such things—her only and her precious son! He said: “It’s all right, and the family will be glad to see Alfy. Don’t forget the story he’s going to tell; when he arrives, you can say you had it from the family. Also you can write and tell it to Marceline.”
They went to a hotel and he treated her to a modest luncheon, keeping the cream pitcher on his side of the table. Then he wrote a couple of notes; one would go by airmail to Rick, saying: “Alfy is well and on his way to you. Tell no one but the family until you see him. You will understand when you hear his story.” The other was to Trudi, and would go by ordinary mail, for they had agreed that telegrams were barred, and all letters were to be of the plainest and cheapest-appearing sort. “The big painting is perfect,” he wrote. “It has been carefully packed and shipped to England. I am curious to see your new sketches. Will arrive in a couple of days.” If any Gestapo agent managed to purloin that note, he wouldn’t get much.
X
Lanny saw the “household furniture” off the ship and arranged with the customs brokers to put it into a fireproof warehouse pending further instructions. Then the chauffeur drove them to Bienvenu, Lanny talking about art and architecture in Southern and Western Spain, and Beauty telling the latest gossip of the Coast of Pleasure; it was all right for the chauffeur to hear that, because the servants knew everything anyhow.
Beauty said: “Oh, by the way, I had a note from a man named Jose, who says he met you in Spain. I was just going to send for him when your telegram came.”
“Where is he?” Lanny inquired.
“He’s staying in Cannes.”
“He gave me some help. I’ll tell you about him.” He had already, told her the story, and now he took some papers out of his pocket and wrote on the back of an envelope: “the lame waiter,” and showed her the words.
Thus his first duty upon arriving home was to send a telegram telling Jose to take a taxi and come out. Beauty was in a state of trepidation, for a servant means so much to a woman—especially a butler, who bosses the others. But Leese was developing such terrible varicose veins! And if Lanny was sure this poor crippled man could get about—he could hardly make a very impressive appearance, but if he could really learn French, and if he wouldn’t steal the silver! “Lanny, you are so reckless about making promises—and for me to keep!”
However, it turned out all right. Jose had got himself a decorous black suit and tie and was all ready for his role. His lameness wasn’t offensive, and he was humble and grateful, a serious man, well pounded by fate. He told the story of his flight from Caceres; he had paid the driver of an empty supply truck to take him to Cadiz, and had ridden all the way lying under some blankets with only a hunk of bread and a bottle of water to sustain him. He had got passage on a ship to Marseille, and his life’s savings had barely sufficed to bring him here and outfit him. Lanny translated what he said, and the mother was touched. She told Lanny: “Give him some money, and tell him to go back to Cannes and get somebody to teach him French. He mustn’t come here till I’ve explained matters to Leese and got her out of the house. Otherwise she might tear his eyes out.” Jose was relieved at these instructions, for he had been worrying about that very thing.
Next Lanny went to call on Senora Villareal and told her what he had done. He had to run up to Paris for a week or so, he explained, and then he would be ready to return to Marseille, have the paintings properly packed, and take them to New York. He told her the news about her various friends, and how gracious they had been to him. Sadly he told her about the terrible mess the Italians had been making in Spain, and she agreed that his advice had been good; she complimented this conscientious art expert, and would live the rest of her life without knowing what use he had made of her introductions.
XI
All aboard for Paris! Lanny had a wife in that Ville Lumiere. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night and was startled to realize that he had got another wife. And why did he have to be leaving her all the time? Perhaps the wife was thinking the same thing. Wives are apt to be confining.
A strange world that Trudi lived in, the “underground” world of miners and counterminers. “Old mole, work’st i’ the earth so fast?” Lanny couldn’t telegraph or telephone to say that he was coming; if anything delayed him, he couldn’t explain. When Trudi received a note saying that someone was coming to inspect her sketches, she went out and bought a supply of food and then shut herself in her studio and waited. Every step in the hall made her pulses leap; if the steps paused before her door, her heart pounded so that she was almost suffocated.
Lanny would drive to his hotel and have his car put in the garage. Then, carrying a suitcase, he would walk once around Trudi’s block, making sure there was no spy on his trail. He would pause in front of a shop window and examine furtively the houses across the street, to see if there were loiterers in doorways. Then he would go upstairs and give a special tap on Trudi’s door, and when it came open, he would slip inside without a sound and wait until she had bolted the door before he took her in his arms.
But after that it was the same as with other people. She forgot her fears, she forgot the Gestapo for a while. Powerful as Herr Himmler might be, and influential with the French police, he couldn’t break into this room and take Trudi out of Lanny’s arms, or Lanny out of Trudi’s. She clung to him with passion that surprised him—she had been so reserved for so many years. She had given all her devotion to a cause, and had been impersonal and business-like when she met him. But now she had missed him, and it was no longer improper to tell him so!
When their first raptures had passed he told her about Alfy; quickly, in a sketch, to relieve her anxiety, her bewilderment over the feat he had performed; then again, in detail, for it was to her the most wonderful of anti-Fascist stories. She was the one who could appreciate it best, the one to whom he most wanted to tell it. Achieving the feat had been a double satisfaction, first the helping of Alfy and his family, and second the prospect of telling the story to Trudi. She would live every moment of it, shudder with fears at the dangers, then clasp him to her bosom to make sure that he was out of it, safe and alive.
Such is the life of women in wartime, swinging between the two, extremes of grief and pride. They send their men forth to do their duty and then seize them in their arms and drag them back. “Oh, Lanny, stay a while this time!” exclaimed this “underground” woman. “Stay and have a little happiness!” But only a minute or two later she was crying: “Oh, poor Spain! Is it going to be saved, Lanny? I can’t endure to see another people murdered!”
They had chosen a bad time to be born.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Lanny Budd Novels
1
Sweet Aspect of Princes
I
Like two ships that rest for a while in some port and then sail away to distant seas; years pass, decades, perhaps, and then by chance they meet in some other port; the two captains look each other over, wondering what time has done to an old-time comrade, what places he has visited, what adventures have befallen him, what losses, what gains he has made. So it was when Lanny Budd caught sight of Professor Alston in the lobby of one of New York’s luxury hotels. “Long time no see,” he said—for it was the fashion of the hour to be Chinese; you greeted your friends with the words: “Confucius say,” followed by the most cynical or most absurd thing you could think of.
“Really, Professor,” Lanny continued, seriously, “I’m ashamed of having lost contact with you. You can hardly guess how important a part you played in my life.”
“Eighteen years almost to a day since we parted in Paris,” calculated the other.
“And almost half my life up to now,” added Lanny.
Alston still thought of him as a youth, and saw now that the ensuing years had dealt kindly with him. There were no lines of care on the regular and agreeable features, no hint of gray in the wavy brown hair and neatly trimmed little mustache. Lanny was dressed as if he had just come out of a bandbox, and he had that ease of conversation which comes from having known since earliest childhood that everything about you is exactly as it ought to be. When you are so right, you can even be wrong if you want to, and people will take it as an amiable eccentricity.
What Lanny saw was a rather frail little gentleman with hair entirely gray, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and a linen suit with some of the wrinkles which these suits acquire so quickly. “Charlie” Alston would never be exactly right; he had been a “barb” at college, so Lanny’s father had told him, and he would never be free from the consciousness that the people who had always been right were watching him. He was a kind and also a wise old gentleman, and that helps somewhat but not entirely, as all the smart world knows. Lanny recollected that he had come upon the mention of Charles T. Alston as one of the active New Dealers; so perhaps he was no longer teaching classes in college.
“I have heard from you indirectly,” said Alston; but he didn’t elaborate the remark. It might have been from the newspapers, for the ex-geographer added: “I hope your divorce didn’t hurt you too much.”
“My ex-wife has moved up the social ladder, and I was one of the rungs.” Lanny said it with a smile; he didn’t really mean it, for he was satisfied with the position on the social ladder assigned to a grandson of Budd Gunmakers and son of Budd-Erling Aircraft.
II
“What has life been doing to you?” the older man wanted to know.
This was an overture and called for a cordial response. “Have you anything to do for the next hour or two?” Lanny inquired, and went on to say that he had an appointment to view a collection of modern paintings which might soon come on the market. “That’s how I have been earning my living. There are people who are naïve enough to trust my judgment as to what paintings are worth, and that enables me to spend the rest of my time as an idler and parasite.” Again he said it smiling.
The ex-geographer replied that he would be happy to inspect works of art under the guidance of such an authority, and they left the hotel and took a taxi. A short drive and they stepped out in front of one of those establishments on Park Avenue where you either own your apartment or pay several thousand dollars a month rent. A personage who might have been one of Frederick the Great’s grenadiers opened the taxi door for them; a clerk wearing a boutonnière took Lanny’s name; a young woman with shiny red lips spoke it over the telephone; an elevator boy with several rows of buttons shot them toward the skies; and an elderly caretaker admitted them to a tier of rooms which apparently went most of the way around the building, and gave a hawk’s-eye view of Manhattan Island and its environs.
The family was away in midsummer; the furniture was shrouded in tan-colored robes and the shades were drawn, but the caretaker raised one, and the visitors stopped to admire a penthouse rose garden. Then they strolled from room to room, examining paintings, each with its separate “reflector” which the caretaker turned on. They would stand for a while in silence, after which Lanny Budd would begin one of those well-modulated discourses with which he had learned to impress the most exclusive sort of people, those doubly élite who possess both wealth and culture.
“You observe the aristocratic aura with which Sargent could surround his model. You note that the head is somewhat small in proportion to the rest of the lady. Mrs. Winstead wasn’t really that way, I can assure you, for I knew her; nor was it any blunder of the painter’s, for I knew him even better. I watched him work in the hills and valleys around my mother’s Riviera home, and can testify that he was able to get his proportions exact when he thought it desirable. It was his aim to select the salient characteristics of his subject and bring them to your attention. If you wanted literal exactness, he would say, a pho
tographer could get it for you in the fraction of a second. It was the business of a painter to portray the soul of his subject.”
“Not entirely overlooking what the subject might choose to believe about his soul,” remarked Alston, with the trace of a smile.
“Surely not,” agreed the other. “As far back as the days of ancient Egypt painters learned to make the masters taller and more impressive than the slaves. It is only in recent times, beginning perhaps with Goya, that painters have ventured to mingle a trace of humor with their subservience.”
“Would you say that was the case here?”
“This was a sad lady, as you can perceive. They were enormously wealthy and correspondingly proud. They lived on an immense estate, and their two lovely daughters were brought up with great strictness and chaperoned in all their comings and goings. The result was that one of them eloped with a handsome young groom and the other made a marriage hardly more satisfactory. The haughty old father never consented to see either of them again. He has been one of my clients and I have had chances to observe his sorrow, in spite of his efforts to conceal it. I have no doubt that John Sargent, a kindly man in spite of all his brusqueness, thought that if there was any way of bringing a moment’s happiness to Mrs. Winstead, there would be no great harm done to art. In his later years he wearied of such charity and refused to paint the rich at all.”
III
“Charlie” Alston realized that this was the same informed and precocious Lanny Budd who had accompanied him to the Paris Peace Conference and shared a six months’ ordeal. A youth who had lived most of his life in Europe; who not merely could chatter in French, but knew the subtle nuances, the argots, even the bad words; who knew customs and etiquette, personalities, diplomatic subterfuges; who could stand behind the chair of an “expert” during a formal session and whisper things into his ear, point to a paragraph in a document or write the correct word on a slip of paper—thus equipping a one-time farmboy from the State of Indiana to be something less than helpless in the presence of the age-old and super-elegant treacheries of Europe.