So they got in; and there was the oil lady from Oklahoma, short, plump, brunette; she wore black silk lace and open-work black gloves coming halfway up her arms, and she shone like a lighthouse with diamonds. She was pretty—but don’t mistake the determination in those dark eyes. She was a fighting lady, fighting for prestige, for glory. To come to Washington with a name like Perle Mesta, née Skirvin, and make your way to the top of the social heap—that took the determination of a Napoleon and the strategy of a general staff. To have a Democratic President to dinner one evening and the Republican leader of the House the next evening; to have the Chief Justice and three other justices of the Supreme Court, seventeen senators, and a dozen diplomatic stars at the same reception—that was fame, that was something to which a woman would devote her life and upon which she would spend a fortune.
How did she manage it? Not by money alone; there were many other mansions where champagne flowed out of fountains and where fifty turkeys and as many hams were cooked and carved for a single social event. No, it took brains; you had to know how to flatter and please people, and how to make them talk about your doings. At one of her parties you might hear General Ike sing “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or Senator Pat Hurley, ex-muleskinner from New Mexico, give his famed Indian warwhoop. At the party attended by Lanny and Laurel was an enormous sturgeon which had been flown from the Black Sea, cooked in the biggest oven in Washington, and served whole on a silver platter which it took four men to carry. A hundred and seventy guests dug into this carcass and helped themselves, and went away and talked about it for days. So long as oil flowed, and sturgeons swam, and refrigerators froze, the world would welcome Perle Mesta’s hospitality. “Two-party Perle,” they called her, because she had shifted sides and still had Republican friends.
VIII
“Don’t forget that you are a novelist,” Lanny had said to his wife with a grin; so she left him to his own devices and let herself be squired by America’s one and only millionaire newspaper columnist, who knew everybody. He made a lioness of her. “This is Miss Morrow, Mary Morrow, you know, author of an anti-Nazi novel.” It was the first time Laurel had ever been so introduced, and she watched with her shrewd, darting eyes. Everybody pretended—oh, yes, of course, how interesting!—but she doubted if a single one of them had read her book. Eminent statesmen whose pictures she had seen in the papers would beam upon her, bend over her small figure and ask her opinion of the present policy toward conquered Germany and what she thought of the possibility of Nazism surviving underground.
It wasn’t all pretense; it was the busy gentlemen’s way of sounding out public opinion and getting ideas. Washington’s political pot boiled all day and most of the night; the city had become the capital of the world, and these black-clad legislators and officials carried the world’s fate in their pockets. Half a dozen would get off in a corner and hold an informal committee meeting while chewing up Mrs. Mesta’s sturgeon and washing it down with her California champagne. Several diplomats would huddle in another room, and try to figure out how to improve their chances of a loan from the alphabetical agencies that ruled their future. “Why don’t you take up a collection in this room?” inquired a lady who had had enough champagne to make her witty.
The ladies were here, one to each gentleman. Mostly they were wives, for political parties have to be decorous. Laurel reported that the wives looked as if they had been married when the statesmen were young; many of them had not kept up with the intellectual progress of their lords and masters. But they could all put on the clothes, and Laurel, who had been wandering about in the shops that morning, knew what it cost to put such items on display. She had been telling her Husband about the wickedness of it: $975 for a scarf, plus $195 tax; a flexible bracelet with clasp, $4400, plus $880 tax; dainty sunburst earrings, $5500, plus $1100 tax; a natural Russian sable wrap, custom-made, $50,000, plus $10,000 tax; you could even have a fashionable mink coat for your dog, $246 plus $49.20 tax. You didn’t bring your dog to a reception, but you would walk him in the park and meet other ladies, who would judge your social position by your dog’s clothing as well as your own.
All Washington went by what was called protocol. New statesmen, new officials, new diplomats came, and their rank was predetermined. Every hostess had to know about this, and there were authorities who would furnish her the “dope” for a fee. There was a story of an ambassador who gave a dinner in honor of Toscanini, and invited so many high-ranking persons that he had to put the maestro at the bottom of the table. There was a story of a hostess who made a dreadful faux pas at an afternoon affair, setting one great lady to pouring tea and a lady of lower rank to pouring coffee. Too late it was explained to her, “Coffee outranks tea.”
IX
It was the job of a woman novelist to observe all this and store it in her memory so that someday it might become “local color.” It was not her business to preach. She wouldn’t remind the gross feeders that millions were starving in Europe. She wouldn’t show disgust at the swilling of liquor, but enjoy the jest about the three major parties in Washington—the Republican party, the Democratic party, and the Cocktail party. She would observe the large powdered bosoms, and if some of the powder had got onto a black velvet costume she would pretend not to see it. She would accept her role as literary lioness and not pin anybody down as to the names of her books. She would note the variety of perfumes, and recall the labels she had seen in the luxury stores, and wonder which was which—Frenzy, Menace, Innuendo, Whirlwind, Intoxication, Tailspin, Tigress, My Sin. A hundred-million-dollar industry had been built in America on the basis of titles such as these, and here you got the end products through your nose. No lady of refinement would mention the fact—if she knew it—that the smells were manufactured from a substance called ambergris, the result of indigestion suffered by whales.
Some of these powdered and perfumed ladies were kindly, and several had ideas. Laurel met one who actually had read her novel satirizing the Nazis; this lady was the tall and gray-haired wife of a senator from New England, and she said, “My dear, you take life too seriously. Believe me, the world isn’t worth it. People won’t do anything for you, and they won’t appreciate what you do for them. You will only get wrinkles in your face, like me, and then men won’t look at you any more.”
Laurel would have liked to say that she had caught one man and that was enough; but she was guarding her tongue. “Come and see me some time,” said the lady, and Laurel promised to do so, and moved on to another group. There was the wife of another senator, this time from the Rocky Mountains, and she looked as if she had walked all the way alongside a pack mule. She was expressing her opinion of men, in the presence of several of them. “Trust a man? I wouldn’t trust one as far as I could th’ow a bull by the horns.” The abbreviated word intrigued a novelist, and she would have liked to learn where the lady had been raised; but she had no chance to ask.
Lanny too was collecting impressions. In this crowd were fashionable people whom he had met in Irma’s Long Island fox-hunting set, and in New York society, and in the playgrounds of Florida and Hollywood. Also he knew some of the foreigners, and they gathered about him; he spoke fluent French and German, some Spanish and Italian, and even knew a few words of Swedish and Dutch, not to mention Provençal and Ligurian. An unusual American, rich yet not cynical; these worried gentlemen, who had populations at home living on half rations, begged him for advice. What was going to happen to them, and how could the American people be brought to realize the situation and send help out of their abundance?
X
It was two o’clock in the morning when the trio took their departure from this super-party, and they sat in the hotel lobby for another hour discussing the people they had met. Jim was like a Russian, he would have talked all night. Lanny and Laurel slept late the next morning, and then the frugal novelist spent a couple of hours making notes, her own and her husband’s. He telephoned the office to see what had come in the mail and to give ord
ers; then they went for a stroll, to see what the art dealers in the city were offering.
Jim came to dine, bringing with him a newspaper friend, and the four of them sat before a radio set furnished by the hotel. It was Thursday, and at seven they listened to a station in Baltimore which carried the Peace Program. A novel experience for the Budd couple, to hear their product from outside. Gerald de Groot was taking the place of “Billy Burns” and doing it well; the program wouldn’t suffer if Lanny went away.
The guest of the evening was Professor Alston, and he was questioned about his work with F.D.R. as a “fixer” and inside man. Roosevelt, a man of peace, had been forced to become a man of war. That had happened to George Washington, to Lincoln, and to Woodrow Wilson—four times in our history; evidently there must be forces operating in our society, more powerful than the will or disposition of any statesman, driving our nation into war. It was the fashion to blame other nations; but the other nations blamed us, and blaming got us nowhere. Alston endorsed the effort of the Peace Program to try to find out what those forces were, and he agreed that they must be overwhelmingly economic. Let America apply its collective intelligence to finding out how we could so distribute the world’s natural resources and trade that all the peoples could obtain the means of life and be secure against the assaults of dictators and despots.
A good talk, the other two men agreed. The newspaperman, a Washington correspondent, knew all the dirt, and during dinner he dished it out. If you were going to change the world, Washington was the place to begin, and the first task was to find a way to get the truth to the people, the facts about their government that the newspapers would never print. The town was fairly crawling with lobbyists and lawyers representing every form of wholesale greed, and the most elegant and perfectly legal forms of bribery existed wherever business touched government or government touched business. The American way of life, as it was called, consisted of the hand-in-glove operation of these two forces, and never since the beginning of the world had private interests collected such sums of money from public bodies. Every newspaperman knew what was going on, but few had any idea what to do about it, and most of them took it as a matter of course. “You reformers have whole mountain ranges to move,” said this correspondent of a conservative and complacent newspaper.
XI
The expected call from Colonel Josephus came next morning. The War Crimes prosecution formally requested Mr. Budd to let himself be flown to Nürnberg at the government’s expense, and there to give his testimony. Mr. Budd said, “OK.” He wanted a couple of days to arrange his affairs, and then he would board a plane and be flown by the southern route. Arrangements could be made by phone, and his ticket, passport, and credentials would be brought to him by a messenger.
He drove his wife back to Edgemere and explained matters to Rick and Nina; he gave orders to his subordinates, dictated a stack of letters, and packed for both hot and cold weather. It was an old story to him: the big airport, the Constellation plane, silver now that the war was over, the blue-uniformed attendants, including the pretty stewardess, the packages of magazines and books to read, and the itinerary—Key West, Belém, Cape Verde Islands, Casablanca, Naples, Rome, Munich. Everything comfortable and safe—how pleasant it is to have money! Or prestige and political preferment will do as well.
BOOK NINE
Truth Crushed to Earth Shall Rise
27
Shame Cometh After
I
In the romantic medieval city of Nürnberg—Nuremberg to Americans—Lanny Budd had been a guest of Reichsminister Rudolf Hess at the Parteitag, in September of the fateful year of 1938. This was the great Nazi festival, held at the same date every year; they called it their Party Day, but it was eight days and nights of uproarious excitement, parading, shouting, singing and listening to propaganda bellowed from loudspeakers. The issue of war or peace with Britain and France had been hanging in the balance; the settlement known to history as “Munich” was in the making, and Lanny was sick with anxiety. But he had to march and sing and, above all, listen with the rest of them; he had been treated with high honor by the young Nazi fanatics because he was known to be the Führer’s one American friend, and believed to be chosen Gauleiter of the North American continent. Their favorite song declared, “Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world.”
Everything had been done with that thoroughness which promised so much for the Fatherland and so little for her foes. A million or two party leaders and followers had poured into the city of half a million, and enormous tent encampments had been set up in all the suburbs, with Army cooking outfits serving millions of hot meals every day. The flags in the streets had been like the leaves of a forest, and everywhere you went were bands of men marching with banners and standards. The streets of the nine-hundred-year-old city were narrow and crooked, and made an American think of Grimm’s fairy tales read in his childhood; the houses had high-pitched roofs, peaked gables, and innumerable chimney pots; the churches had tall spires and every sort of Gothic exuberance. And out on the enormous Zeppelin Field was a colossal spectacle, on which Adolf Hitler, man of imagination, had been working for some fifteen years; he had devised it, and year by year had improved it; in 1938 it was, quite literally, the Parteitag to end all Party Days—or, in German, Parteitage.
Indelibly stamped upon Lanny’s memory was the Wagnerian scenery, combined with the solemnity of a Catholic High Mass; all the primitive sentiments that had been born in the hearts of the Germans in those dark forests where they had lived through centuries while getting ready for the conquest of the Roman Empire. Hitler had devised the ceremony of calling the roll of the Nazi martyrs, and to Hess had been assigned the calling. Hitler had devised the ceremony of the dedication of the flags, and had performed that himself, solemnly marching down the row of flags and touching each one with the sacred Blutfahne, which had been carried in the Beerhall Putsch and had been stained with the blood of those who had died or been wounded in that street riot.
Memories, memories! This very old city, home of the Meistersinger and Albrecht Dürer, lived in Lanny’s mind as swarming with red-faced, sweating male creatures, fanaticism in their faces and rage in their hearts, that ancient furor teutonicus which the ancient Romans had known and dreaded. “Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!” The American art lover had hated hatred, but these men had been brought up on it, they had been taught it from childhood. Adolf Hitler had a favorite word, fanaticism, which was hardly ever omitted from any of his speeches, and he had put skilled psychologists and advertising men at work to make certain that the new generations of Germans would never know anything else.
Nineteen centuries had passed since the Emperor Augustus had sent his legions into these dark northern forests and the furor teutonicus had destroyed them. Since then the world had thought that Germany had become a civilized nation. But the Führer had come, and had revived the ancient furor, until the British and Americans had come and destroyed both Führer and furor. Here now was Nürnberg, a pitiful, a ghastly, sight; whole blocks of the medieval houses were nothing but wreckage, most of it burned as well as blasted; skeleton walls sticking up, and here and there a brick chimney with its pot still on top. It was the most completely smashed city the ex-P.A. had seen; the Americans, coming by day, had pinpointed the great factories and the railroad yards, and the British had come by night, doing their area bombing on the inner, walled portion—just what the Germans had done to London and a score of other cities, feeling so sure of victory. Now the sweating, khaki-clad hordes were gone, and from the city of the Parteitag all you saw were a few shivering women and children, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed, crawling into the caves they had dug for themselves in the rubble of their former homes.
II
Lanny hadn’t had time to get word to Captain Jerry Pendleton that he was coming; he telephoned from the Grand Hotel, and Jerry drove in for him. Those two fellows were so happy. They exchanged bear hugs, and if they had been real citiz
ens of the Riviera instead of just foreigners who resided there they would have kissed each other on both cheeks. Twelve years had crawled by since good old Jerry had come to Munich to try to help Lanny smuggle Freddi Robin out of the Dachau hell; he had failed, but it hadn’t been his fault. Later, as an OSS agent, he had helped Lanny in Morocco and in Spain, and while Lanny had never mentioned being a presidential agent, Jerry had been a competent guesser. Now the struggle was over, and all there was left of the sacred city of Nürnberg was a hungry population having to be fed—and twenty-one miserable, cowed, and broken men, a few of them middle-aged but most of them old, prisoners in the same jail to which in their days of glory they had blithely consigned their political opponents.
Jerry wanted nothing so much as to sit down and tell about the things he had seen and done. But first the new arrival had to report himself to the U.S. Chief of Counsel and his staff. The chief himself was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Robert H. Jackson, whom President Roosevelt had detailed to this special assignment. He was taking it with great seriousness, establishing what all Americans hoped would be a world precedent, so that any dictators contemplating another assault on the freedom of nations would know in advance what they would bring down upon their heads.
Lanny was turned over to a couple of the assistant counsel, and he told them his story. They thought it would be a charming bit of strategy to let Göring’s counsel put an American on the stand as their witness, and then discover under cross-examination that he had something to say for the other side too. The only difficulty was the Germans weren’t altogether fools and might be suspicious of the fact that the Americans were presenting them with a witness free of charge. They would be likely to ask if he knew anything to Göring’s discredit—and how would Lanny answer?
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 57
