And dance she did, with mounting delight, until her breath gave out and she had to sit down, panting. And how happy she was then! What a marvelous discovery! “I know a lot about dancing! I remember it! I love to dance! I can be happy dancing!” And so Lanny knew that she was cured.
BOOK SIX
’Tis Excellent to Have a Giant’s Strength
17
Earthquake and Eclipse
I
The terrible World War had been shifted now to the Pacific; the time had come for the Japanese to feel the weight of America’s power. The Philippines had been retaken after half a year of the toughest kind of fighting. The small island of Okinawa, close to Japan, had required nearly three months to capture; a hundred and twenty thousand Japanese had been killed or driven to suicide, and only eight thousand captured—which showed the kind of war it was. This island was crucial because it immediately became a base for the big bombers; they could make what the airmen called a “milk run” to the Japanese cities and do to them what had been done in Germany, destroying their oil and munitions-making centers.
But Lanny knew no military man who believed that this fanatical enemy would give up until the homeland itself had been taken. He knew that armies were being transported from the Mediterranean to the Far East and that the invasion was set for November. Patton had told him that they were reckoning upon a million casualties, more than the British, French, and Americans had sustained in all the European fighting. A terrible prospect indeed, and one that weighed upon the consciences of two idealists dreaming peace on earth and good will toward men.
Lanny found himself thinking continuously about his million dollars and what he was going to do with it. He talked about it with Laurel whenever her mind was not on her own work. He decided that he had done all he could for the United States Army in Europe; he had got all the information he could get for both Alsos and Monuments, and the rest was up to others. The scientists would study and appraise the documents; the museum people would collect the works of art and transport them and classify them and deliver them to the owner countries, with banquets and ceremonies for which Lanny didn’t especially care.
The day came when Laurel said, “I have written all about this war that I care to write. From now on I want to give whatever power I possess to your project.” That was important indeed to Lanny; it meant that for the first time his marriage and his job would be one and the same.
One decision they had come to: this was not going to be a long-term job. If anybody was going to prevent World War III, about which many of the big brass were speculating, it would have to be done soon. Lanny had decided that they would divide the money into five equal portions and spend one portion every year. Whatever seed they had to sow would be sown in that time; when the harvest would be reaped was beyond guessing. Anyhow, they wouldn’t establish a foundation and set up a group of chairwarmers for life.
II
The next move was to England, to have things out with Rick and Nina. Transportation for a concentration-camp victim had been hard to get, but for Lanny and his wife it was a simple matter; they were officers in uniform, with permission to go where they pleased. They were flown to Paris and from there to London; they went by train to The Reaches, Rick’s home in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames. Lanny hadn’t seen it for more than eight years. While he posed as a Nazi sympathizer, his meetings with a well-known Labour journalist had taken place in an obscure hotel room which one or the other would rent for the purpose.
Nothing changes much in the English countryside. This old brick house had been added to at several periods in different styles; it had many gables and dormer windows, and a chimney with a pot on top for every tier of rooms. In the old days that had meant a slavey carrying coals and ashes all day in cold weather; but now the slaveys were working at munitions, and most of the rooms had been left unused of late. There were few modern comforts, because the old baronet had spent all his money on “little theaters,” and since he had died Rick had spent his paying the old gentleman’s debts.
From the house a graveled path between a double row of oak trees led down to the river; there was a boathouse, and a punt in which two boys had explored a historic waterway, meantime expressing firm convictions about all the problems of mankind. On the grassy banks of this river Lanny had sat in the evening, listening to Rick playing the piano in the house; Rosemary Codwilliger—pronounced Culliver, please—had sat by his side, and a fourteen-year-old lad had felt the first touches of a magic wand. Rosemary had come to the Riviera one winter and had seduced him but refused to marry him, because she preferred to become a countess. Now she was a grandmother several times over, and Lanny went to see her—but only when she was hard up and had persuaded her husband to sell another of his ancestral portraits.
Memories, memories! Beauty Budd had come to the Henley Regatta, the boat race between Oxford and Cambridge; all in pink, a lovely rose in full bloom, attended by a young millionaire from Pittsburgh, who was begging her to marry him—but the young Lanny had begged her to stick to Marcel and stay what she called poor, with no more than the thousand dollars a month that Robbie sent her. Beauty and her fast, free-spending friends—Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette, and Margy, Lady Eversham-Watson, rich Americans married to titles, and both of them old ladies now. Decked out in their fashionable finery, and with a World war hanging over their heads, they had been a swarm of gaily colored butterflies in a garden that was about to be struck by a lightning bolt. Most of the boys Lanny had played with here, slightly older than himself, had died in Flanders. The sons they had left behind had died in the recent war; but the breed went on—generation after generation born, raised, educated at great expense and trouble, only to be slaughtered on some foreign field. To the pair of English parents at The Reaches it did not seem rational, and the American pair agreed.
III
It was summer, and Britain was in the midst of the hottest of political campaigns. Their unwritten constitution required a general election every five years at the maximum, and this time the war had forced a breach of the rule. Now that the land was safe, they did not wait until the Japs had given up. The Conservatives thought they would stand a better chance before the glamour of victory had faded from Winston Churchill’s brow; Labour thought that he was a grand old man for warmaking but they didn’t want any of his peacemaking. They were “going to the country,” as they phrase it, and the polling was to be in late July.
Following Lanny’s suggestion, Rick had invited the Labour party leaders to consider Alfy, already well known to them. It was obvious enough that campaigning would be hard on a man who could not walk or stand without a steel brace on one leg; service in Parliament wouldn’t be any picnic either. Alfy had got a leave and come home, and his personality had charmed everyone. He had entirely recovered from his wounds, his legs were long and sound, and he had drawn in the Labour program with his mother’s milk. He was only twenty-eight, and the movement kept talking about “new blood.” He knew how to talk to servicemen, and to the young women who had toiled in the munitions plants to keep the war going. At the end of World War I they had been promised homes fit for heroes to live in, and they had assuredly not got them. This time they meant for things to be different.
So this twice-wounded Royal Air Force hero had been put up as the candidate and now was in the midst of a whirlwind, speaking at several meetings every night and at noon-hour meetings in factories. His mother and father came to the more important meetings and spoke for him. Nina went to gatherings of the women and explained to them what it would mean to have a government of their own kind of people, familiar with their needs. The Labour party was campaigning on a carefully studied program, telling the people exactly what they would do during five years of office: the nationalization of basic industries, coal, transport, communications, steel, and so on. The campaign was one of education, to show the people what such a program would do for them and what a difference it would make in their lives. Security from the
cradle to the grave was the slogan.
IV
In the midst of these excitements the family hadn’t much time to give to problems of the future; but Rick said that he had canvassed the situation thoroughly and was ready to go in for the five-year deal if Lanny still wanted him. What attracted him, he said, was Lanny’s assurance that, whatever the program decided upon, it would be some sort of job that he could do in part at home. At the age of forty-six, he was beginning to be troubled by his game leg, and he had been attracted by Lanny’s picture of Roosevelt lying in bed without his braces and with a stack of documents beside him. If Rick could read, edit, and dictate that way, he would get a lot more out of his mind. Lanny said, “Come and do it.”
They took a morning off to thrash out their problems. Their first job would be in New York, where they would rent an apartment, if one could be found, and set to work to get the best advice from persons who knew the movement for peace and social justice. When they had chosen their course, they would pick out some small town not too far away and there would establish a small office and two homes. Rick said, “I understand there’s a terrible housing shortage and you can’t rent anything.” Lanny answered, “You can’t rent but you can buy, and we’ll have to pay the price. I’ll find you a bungalow-type house so that you won’t have stairs to climb, and it won’t be far from the office.”
They assented to the ex-P.A.’s proposal that he was to stay in the background. He didn’t want to involve Budd-Erling, and besides that, his own record was dubious; he was supposed to have been a pro-Nazi and he didn’t want to bother with public explanations. Laurel would use her pen name; she would be Miss Mary Morrow and would be the one who was supposed to have the money; a woman’s money was like her age, she didn’t have to talk about it unless she pleased. When the publicity started there would be a lot of it, and Laurel would stand it as best she could. There would be a mysterious gentleman in the background, carefully keeping out of the way of reporters. A lady had a right to end war in the world if she could, and she also had a right to have a gentleman friend.
V
Far away to the west, across the American continent, there had been an assemblage of major importance to anybody interested in the keeping of the peace. Delegates had come to San Francisco from most of the governments of the earth, to form a new version of the League of Nations. Roosevelt hadn’t lived to see it, but he had given it a name, the United Nations Organization. Having completed its work and adopted a charter, it dropped the last word, but for some reason the British preferred to retain it and kept writing and talking about UNO. Lanny hadn’t been able to get adequate accounts at Bienvenu, but now in the British newspapers and magazines he studied the details.
There had been a long-drawn-out struggle over the proposed charter. The Soviet representatives had been leery of any proposal which would give power to the small nations; their position was that Russia, America, and Britain had won the war and would have to keep the peace. How farcical to pretend that Honduras, for example, should have a say about it! The strategy of this was clear enough; Russia had swallowed all the small nations about her and didn’t want them to have any say about anything. The other small nations were capitalist small nations and looked for financial favors to the capitalist big nations; obviously they would vote the way the big nations said. In this argument the discerning reader could see the pattern of all the disputes of future years; these four trained Socialists did not fail in discernment.
The dispute had grown so warm and the blockade so serious that President Truman had sent the ailing Harry Hopkins flying to Moscow to talk to Stalin about voting procedure and other questions that had arisen between the two countries. That poor man was the only one who could do this job, because he had been present at the previous conferences, and knew what had been in Roosevelt’s mind, and what had been in Stalin’s mind as far as Stalin was willing to reveal it to Americans. So in the end a compromise had been worked out. The Soviet Union got three votes, and it was agreed that the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States should each have the right to veto any action of the Security Council that involved their affairs. The Soviet Union reluctantly agreed to permit the General Assembly to discuss whatever problems were brought before it, but would not let it have any power to take action. Such was the new instrument to preserve world peace—like a horse with hobbles on, and no way to get them off. It took no powers of divination to say that UN, or UNO, would not travel very far on the road to Utopia.
The four peace conspirators agreed that they would have to study that charter, and probably spend more than five years pointing out to the world what was wrong with it. Rick said, “It all depends on the thirteen men of the Politburo. If they are willing to take what they’ve got and settle down and develop it with loans from America, then we’re all right until the next slump comes. On the other hand, if they insist upon taking the rest of Central Europe and making a try for Western Europe, then all the charters in the world won’t bind them, and it won’t matter how Honduras votes.”
“Funny thing,” added Lanny. “In the early twenties Stalin was all for Socialism in one country, and it was Trotsky who was for world revolution. Now that Trotsky is dead, it will be odd to see Stalin adopting the program of his hated rival.”
Rick said, “Don’t let Sister Bess hear you say that!”
VI
Lanny and Laurel were flown by the familiar Iceland route and set down gently on the tip of Long Island. Robbie had a car waiting, and they went by ferry to the Connecticut shore. There was that large Budd family, scattered over a township, each subgroup with its own comfortable home and its own sense of importance. They ranged in age from ninety-seven to two-and-a-half; Baby Lanny was the latest addition, the new generation being not so prolific as the old had been in its time. The old grumbled about this, and the young smiled.
Nearly three months had passed since mother and father had seen their little one; he could run faster and more safely, and he knew many new words. He had been kept reminded of his parents, and was ready to tell them his adventures and show them his rabbit. Far-off lands and wars didn’t mean much to him, but a rabbit was alive, and would eat lettuce leaves, and wrinkle his nose, and learn to follow you about. Life is a source of wonder, to a child as well as to a philosopher. A part of it is rhythm; and when Lanny sat at the piano and played little tunes with strong accent his son behaved just as Baby Marcel had done, and Frances in her time, and Marceline in hers. Frances would take Baby Lanny’s two hands and teach him the same dance steps that Lanny had taught her; so it is that the torch of culture is passed down the corridor of time.
Frances was fifteen, a very lovely age, where the brook and river meet, womanhood and childhood fleet. She too had a world of her own and delighted in telling about it: the school she had attended, the friends she had made, the boat they sailed on the river. Her crushes had been girls, and now they were boys, and her cheeks took on color when she was teased about them. That was according to nature’s scheme and was understood by parents. It was early July, and she was going with her cousins to a mountain camp, and later her mother and stepfather had promised to come and take her back to England. She had been so happy in both countries that it was hard to choose; she thought she would like to divide her time between them.
One half of the war was over, the worst half, as people believed; but nearly everybody, high or low, had some relative in the Far East. Everybody read the papers and listened to the radio, trying to guess how long the Japs would hold out and would the Russians come in. Lanny wasn’t free to tell what he knew about the matter. He said, “It will be bad if they don’t,” and his skeptical father answered, “It will also be bad if they do.” Robbie was in a state of dissatisfaction with that New Man in the White House. New Man and True Man, you could make puns about him, but they weren’t funny to the president of Budd-Erling; he said it was like turning a high-powered automobile over to a child. Robbie wanted the war to be won, but you couldn’t expe
ct him to be too eager about it, considering what the end was going to mean to his business.
Esther of course wanted to hear about her niece, Peggy Remsen, and what she was doing. The returning couple made it sound quite fascinating, but really it was hard work, and messy, like cleaning up after a fire or an earthquake. However, Peggy was enjoying it and was meeting very nice young fellows, of the sort that her aunt would approve. Barely four years ago Esther had been thinking of her stepson as a possible nephew-in-law, and maybe Peggy had had thoughts along the same line, but that was all over now. There was Baby Lanny, and Esther hoped they would let him stay on, for the summer at least. Esther disapproved of big cities on many grounds, hygienic, moral, esthetic, political. It saddened her to see her own little river port growing at so insane a rate, and the money her husband was making out of it weighed little in her balance.
VII
The couple drove to New York, in the car which Robbie always loaned them, and with gasoline coupons of which he had a plentiful supply. They opened up their apartment, and Laurel went to see her editors and find out what else they wanted her to write. Lanny took off his uniform, not wishing to advertise his past. He wanted to report to some of his clients about conditions in Europe, and what he had found there, and the prices. Zoltan was at the seashore, but came to town to meet his colleague; the Hungarian-born art expert had wanted to join the Monuments, but they wouldn’t take him because he was too old. He was familiar with all the places Lanny had visited and with the art works he told about. His heart ached for the old continent and its tragedies.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 35
