Reflections upon this subject of love and love-making were passing through the mind of Lanny Budd for the reason that he had promised his friend Adella to get a price on a painting in the fine Georgian home of his old sweetheart, Rosemary. She was a year older than Lanny, which meant that she was at the age called “dangerous” for women, and therefore not entirely safe for men. Lanny had been keeping away from her on purpose, but now business drew him to her. He could come near to guessing her thoughts, for he knew her as well as he ever could know any woman. She had been his first love, and memories of her perfumed nearly all his haunts. She had sat with him by the river-bank at The Reaches, and on the shore at Bienvenu, his mother’s estate. She had motored with him through France and Germany, and sailed on the yacht Bessie Budd all the way to the Lofoden islands.
She was gentle and kind, and had accommodated herself to his eccentricities. When the time had come for her to marry, she had considered that she owed it to her family to choose a member of her own class; at least, that is what she told Lanny, though he suspected that she had wanted to become a countess, and had enjoyed that eminence. Anyhow, she hadn’t wanted to hurt him, and didn’t see why he should be hurt. The ladies of her class made such state marriages—mariage de convenance was the French phrase; they bore their children and then considered their duty done; after that they could be free if they wished, and as a rule they did. Bertie, the earl, had had his affairs, when and as he pleased; in the course of the years Rosemary had become certain that he would play fair and not object to what she did, provided she observed reasonable discretion. Such was the fashion in the smart world, and if you didn’t like it you could stay out of it—which you probably had to do, anyway.
Rosemary and Lanny had been happy for a couple of years, and then, after a ten years’ interval, for another year or two; why not for a third period? She knew that he was divorced, and she would be frank and straightforward in “propositioning” him. And what was he going to answer? He couldn’t say: “I am married again,” for that was a secret which he shared with only three persons, Rick and Nina and F.D.R. He couldn’t be mysterious and say: “Sorry, old dear,” for Rosemary would ask straightway: “Is there another woman?” and if he was the least bit vague about it she would draw her own conclusion. She knew many of his friends, and it was a part of their modernism to talk with frankness about their own and others’ sex lives. The story would go out: “Lanny Budd has another woman, and who is she?” Everybody would be watching him, and the longer he kept the secret the hotter would become their curiosity. Reserve was one thing your smart friends wouldn’t forgive; it was a mark of distrust and opened you to the suspicion that you were involved in something disgraceful.
On the other hand if he said: “I am no longer interested in you, Rosemary,” that would be wounding her intolerably. He couldn’t say: “I have adopted a different moral code,” for either she would know it was an evasion, or else her curiosity would be aroused; that was one of her characteristics, and she would want to know all about these new ideas and where had he picked them up. He thought of telling her that he wasn’t well, but he knew that his looks belied it. In short, he couldn’t make up his mind what to say, and had to leave it to the inspiration of the moment, a dangerous thing for a person of sympathetic nature.
X
Rosemary had taken care of herself, as ladies of her world know so well how to do. She did not look her age; a bit “matronly,” but nowhere near to “plump”; Lanny knew that it meant heroic dieting, the foregoing of a lesser pleasure for the sake of a greater. She had always had a wealth of straight flaxen hair; she had scorned to bob it in the bobbing season and now she scorned to wave it in the “permanent” season. She was as Nature made her, trusting that great mother and with good reason. She permitted few cares to disturb her, for she had “inherited that good part.”
She received him in her sitting-room, newly done in pale blue silk. Windows were open and a gentle breeze stirred the curtains; a bird sang on a branch almost inside. “He gets paid with breadcrumbs,” said Rosemary. “Oh, Lanny,” she added, “it’s so good to see you! Why don’t you come often?”
It was a bid at the very outset, and he chose to evade. “This bird has to travel long distances for his breadcrumbs. I have just come from America.” He talked about Robbie Budd, who had always been her friend, and who sent his warm regards. He told news about the Robin family, and his mother, and other mutual friends; that was the sort of conversation she liked; she could take an interest in general ideas if she had to, but she found it rather exhausting and rarely did it if the other person would let them alone. She told him about Bertie, who was fishing in Scotland, and about her children, who were nearly grown, depriving their mother of the last hope of concealing her age.
Presently he asked: “Have you any more paintings you would like to get rid of?”
“Oh, Lanny, you are going to make me talk about horrid business things!” But she resigned herself without difficulty, and they strolled through the gallery. She remarked that Bertie was always spending more than he made; women were always “working him” for presents. When Lanny came to the unhappy Amy Robsart he looked at her for a while and then said: “I know a woman in the States who might be interested in that, if you would put a reasonable price on it. The woman has been reading Kenilworth.”
Possibly Rosemary had never heard of that novel, but she wouldn’t be gauche enough to reveal the fact. “What is it worth, Lanny?”
“I’m not the one to tell you, because I’d be getting my commission from the purchaser and I’d have to represent her.”
“I know, Lanny, but you’re my friend, and I have to ask someone I can trust. Tell me what you’d be willing to pay if you were buying it from a dealer.”
“Bless your heart, darling, I’d pay the least I thought the dealer would take, and the dealer would ask the most he thought I’d pay. There really is no fixed value for a painting.”
“Tell me the highest price you would recommend as fair to your client.”
“Well, if you would quote me eight hundred pounds, I’d feel justified in advising anyone to take it—that is, assuming that the person wanted such a painting.”
“It’s a very old thing, Lanny.”
“I know; but the old houses of England are full of old paintings, and unless they have a well-known name they’re just curiosities. I have grave doubts whether this is a Garrard, as it is supposed to be, and I wouldn’t offer it as such.”
“I’ll have to telegraph Bertie; you know it’s his property.”
“Of course.” Lanny knew Rosemary made her husband allow her ten per cent commission for her cleverness in making these deals. That didn’t hurt Lanny.
They went back to the sitting-room, and after tea was brought, they were again alone. She looked lovely in a Japanese silk teagown which matched the pale blue of her room, and had golden herons and clumps of bamboo on it; he wasn’t sure if he ought to look at her, but of course that was what she was made for. Suddenly she exclaimed: “Lanny, we used to be so happy! Don’t you suppose we might be again?”
There it was, “plain and flat,” as he had expected and feared. “Darling,” he replied, “I’m in the same fix as you were when you were young; I have to think about my parents. My mother is so anxious for me to settle down, and I’ve made her so unhappy with my entanglements; my break with Irma was a blow.”
It was a “red herring,” cleverly dragged out for the emergency. Rosemary asked: “What was the matter between you and Irma, Lanny?”
“Well, you know how it is: Irma wants one kind of life and I want another. I think you had something to do with it. She saw how high you had flown, and she wanted to sit on the same perch. Now she’s got there, and I hope she has the fun she expects.”
“She’ll probably find it isn’t so romantic as she imagined. Do you think you’ll ever go back to her, Lanny?”
“I’m quite sure that is finished. My mother is begging me to find the r
ight sort of wife and stick by her. You know my habits; I’ve never stayed very long in one place in my life, and I’m afraid it would be hard to find a wife who could stand me.”
A second red herring, brought into being by inspiration! It worked even better than the first. “Why don’t you let me try to find you a wife?” inquired his old sweetheart.
“Bless your heart, dear, how could I stay here long enough? I have some picture business in Paris now, and after that I have to go to Germany.”
It amused her very personal nature to talk about him, and the sort of woman who could make him happy. So long as it wasn’t a married woman, this was a safe topic while he was drinking his tea. When he was leaving she said: “I’ll let you know about the painting—and also about the wife!” Then she added: “You’d be conceited if you knew how much I think about you, Lanny. Come again soon!” It was always hard for her to face the idea of not getting what she wanted.
XI
Once every week while Lanny was on his travels he wrote a letter to his wife in Paris. She had had a number of names; just now she was Jeanne Weill, pronounced as the French pronounce it, Vay. She was supposed to be from Geneva, and Lanny had got her a book so that she could read up on that old city of watchmakers and moneychangers, not to mention the League of Nations, which was clinging feebly to life in a magnificent palace recently completed for it, which Rick in an article had called its mausoleum. Trudi occupied a small studio on Montmartre, and did sketches which were sold on commission by the proprietor of a tobacco shop near by; she lived on the proceeds, and talked about her work to the concierge and the tradespeople, thus maintaining an adequate camouflage.
Lanny’s letters to her were always on cheap stationery, always addressed by hand, and with nothing distinctive about them; the contents were designed so that any agent of the Nazis in Paris might read them and learn nothing, save that a person named Paul was well, and that he had made so-and-so-many francs, and expected to be in Istanbul on such-and-such a date. The city on the Bosporus was code for Paris, and the francs were supposed to be multiplied by thirty; that is, they meant dollars, and Trudi would know from this what plans her underground friends were to make for the future. Lanny had never sent her a cablegram or even a telegram; he had never stopped his car near her place and never entered the building except after elaborate precautions. Nazi agents had found her once in Paris, and they weren’t going to find her again if he could help it. She no longer had any contacts with other refugees, except for the one man whom she met at night and to whom she turned over the money and her occasional writings.
Trudi Schultz was one of those persons who, in the words of a German poem which Lanny had quoted, “belong to death.” When he left her, he could never know if he would see her again; when he received a note from her saying she was well, it couldn’t satisfy him completely for the reason that it was several days or weeks late, and he could never know what might have happened in the interim.
How does a man love such a woman? The first thing to be said is that, unless he is extremely neglectful of his own interests and peace of mind, he doesn’t. Lanny had got into this position because of that weakness which his mother and father and all their friends so greatly deplored: a sentimental streak which made him oversorry for the underdog and overanxious concerning evils which have been in the world a long time and are beyond the power of any man to change. Hitler had seized Germany, and his nasty Nazis were beating and torturing poor Jews and others who opposed them. When you met some victim of that terror you were sorry for the poor devil and helped him to get on his feet again; but when it came to declaring a private war on the Hitlerites and setting out to overthrow them—well, Don Quixote tilting at the windmills was a sensible citizen in comparison with such a person.
But this art expert had got himself in for it; he had gone and got married to an “underground” worker so that he could take her away to America—if only he could persuade her to come, which so far he hadn’t had the nerve to try! Did he really love her? Could any man really love a woman who led him such a life; who gave him only little snatches of joy, and no comfort or peace of mind whatever? Lanny hadn’t told a single one of his smart friends about it, but he could hear their comments just as well in his mind. “Good God, a man might as well fall in love with a buzzsaw!” A woman whom he couldn’t hold in his arms without the thought that a gang of bullies might break in the door and murder them both! Whom he couldn’t think of when he was away from her without seeing images of her stretched out naked on a table, being beaten with thin steel rods! It was indecent even to know about such things!
Trudi had foreseen all this; she had warned him about it, over and over, in the plainest words. She hadn’t wanted to marry him, she hadn’t wanted even to live with him. She had insisted that the things she had seen and experienced made it impossible for her ever again to be a normal woman, ever to give happiness to a man. But he had thought that he could give happiness to her; he had argued that men going off to war clutch eagerly at the joys of love before they depart, and why could it not be the same with a woman soldier? Was it because men are naturally more selfish? Or was it because women are not meant to be soldiers, and are less able to bear the strain of belonging to death? Wir sind all’ des Todes Eigen!
He had given her a lot of happiness, of that he could be sure. He had picked her up on obscure street corners by appointment and driven her out into the safe countryside; they had stayed in little inns and he had seen that she got substantial food. He had given her love, of mind and soul as well as body; he had kept the faith with her and helped to renew her courage. Yes, she had said sometimes that she couldn’t have gone on without him. But even while she said it, a cloud would darken her features and she would fall silent; he would know that she was thinking about her comrades who had fallen into the clutches of the German secret police, and about the horrors which even at this moment were being perpetrated upon them.
XII
Did Lanny Budd really love Trudi Schultz, alias Mueller, alias Kornmahler, alias Corning, alias Weill, et aliae, or was he just sorry for her and full of respect for her intelligence and integrity of character? It was a question he asked himself, a problem he wrestled with in his own soul. He could never love her completely, for she was a creature of the hard rocks and the rare cold atmosphere, while he had been playing in the warm soft ocean of pleasure. Trudi could never give him what Rosemary had given, or Marie de Bruyne, or Irma Barnes. All these had been “ladies”; they had known how to dress and how to dance, how to talk and how to behave in the fashionable world; they had known how to “charm” their man. Trudi, while she had come out of the German middle class, had voluntarily joined the workers in order to help them; her very names were commonplace—Schultz, while it meant a village magistrate, had become the name for a butcher or a grocer, while Trudi was a name for a serving maid.
Lanny’s Trudi had been an art student of great talent, and had worked hard to develop it; all Germans worked hard, whether it was in the cause of God or the devil, and Trudi had lived a Spartan life from the time that Lanny had first met her in Berlin. She had been severe in her moral judgments, even of the Social-Democratic movement to which she belonged. She had not glorified self-sacrifice as an ideal, but had accepted it as a necessity of her time and circumstances. The workers were not going to get freedom and justice without heavy sacrifices, and those who aspired to guide them must be prepared to think wholly about their cause and not at all about their pleasures.
Somewhere inside Lanny Budd a bell rang whenever he thought these thoughts; a great gong with quivering tones which sent shivers all over him. Yes, that was the way to speak, that was the way to live; that was honest and decent, fair to one’s fellow humans; that was the way to pay the debt you owed for being a civilized man, an heir to culture, instead of a savage, dirty and diseased, living in a hut with pigs and chickens. Lanny had felt that high regard for Trudi from the very first hour; she had renewed his distrust of the fashi
onable world and all its beliefs and practices. Lanny had said: “Yes, I know; I am a parasite; we are all parasites. I ought to get out of it and get something useful to do.”
But the trouble was, circumstances wouldn’t let Lanny get out. Time after time, something had turned up that he could do for the cause, but only by staying on in the leisure-class world, keeping the role of playboy, art expert, moneymaker. It had taken both money and social intrigue to get Freddi Robin out of a Nazi dungeon, and again to get Alfy out of a Franco dungeon. Even Trudi hadn’t wanted Lanny to break with his family and his wealthy friends; no, for the underground had to have money for paper and printing and radio tubes and what not, and had even been willing for Lanny to sell General Göring’s paintings in order to keep them in funds.
So while other people were tortured in prisons or starved in concentration camps, it was Lanny Budd’s agreeable duty to travel first-class on steamships or airplanes, to stop at de luxe hotels, to put his feet under the dinner tables of the richest and most exalted persons. Boredom was the worst of hardships he had to endure—unless you counted that of having to make the greater part of his life into an elaborate lie, to watch every word and every facial expression for fear of revealing his real sentiments. Whatever you did in that haut monde you must always be smiling and insouciant, and you must always agree that disturbers of so perfect a social order had to be put down with a firm hand.
XIII
Lanny put all doubts and disharmonies away in a cupboard of his mind and locked them with a secret key. He was on the way to his beloved; he ached for her presence and his thoughts were of the interesting things he would have to tell her. She rarely had much news for him, but he was a messenger of the gods, who came from Mount Olympus and their other haunts, laden with the latest installments of international mythology.
Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 90
