“Abraham Lincoln was the friend of the common man, and in his debate over the issue of slavery he said:
“‘That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. They are the two principles which have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says: “You toil and work and earn bread and I’ll eat it.”’
“The man who spoke thus founded the Republican party of the United States of America; but today that party is in the hands of great bankers, industrialists, and landlords. So it is that political parties degenerate; so the common people give their devotion to a cause, and discover too late how they have been betrayed. In many countries today are political leaders who have solemnly pledged themselves to the abolishing of monopoly and interest slavery, but those leaders now ride on the backs of the workers, eat their bread, dwell in palaces, dress themselves in fancy uniforms, and ride about in costly motor-cars. Do you not know of such countries and such leaders?”
IX
“I begin to get the idea,” said Lanny. “Very clever!”
“Read, it all, if you don’t mind,” replied Trudi. “It is important to me.”
She sat in silence while he read a detailed and well documented indictment of the Nazi program of ending unemployment by the piling up of national debt and spending of national surplus upon rearmament. Germany no longer made public its military budget; but other nations had ways of finding out how it had grown, and automatically they were driven to increase their armaments proportionately. So in the end you had a whole continent, in fact a whole world, engaged in a mad race, whose end must be the most frightful explosion of war in history. Abraham Lincoln had denounced militarism; and what a loss to human culture that his party should have been betrayed and should be serving as an agency of the North American plutocracy! What a tragedy that this great man of the people, this great cause to which the Germans had contributed their labor and their blood, should not be recognized as a German achievement and thus serve the glory of the Teutonic-Aryan race!
At this point Lanny perceived that he was nearing the end of the pamphlet, and that it was finishing in the orthodox Nazi tone, so that anyone glancing at the last page would get no idea of the dangerous thoughts concealed in the middle section.
“Well, what do you think of it?” asked Trudi, anxiously.
“It’s built like a bear-trap. Who got it up?”
“I did.” He glanced at her and saw a bit more color in her cheeks.
“It seems to me a very neat idea, and it ought to set a lot of Germans to thinking. I agree with every bit of it—except the beginning and the end, of course.”
“What I did was to try to remember all the things you had said on the subject of militarism and its consequences.”
“Thanks for the compliment. They are none of them original ideas, but they are sound, and you have put them in simple language which a plain man can understand.”
“It’s my first effort at writing, and I tried hard to produce something that you would find worth while.”
Lanny started his car. Safer to talk while driving. “Tell me, what have you done with this pamphlet?”
“I had a few copies printed, so that you and others could see the idea. I can change it if you find anything wrong.”
“I haven’t a single improvement to suggest.”
“Well, then, I can have twenty thousand copies printed with the money I managed to save out of what you gave me in Salzburg.”
“Including what you saved by not eating enough?” he inquired. She didn’t answer, so he put that question off until later. “Have you any plan to get these distributed in Germany?”
“I have several plans. There are thousands of workers who cross the border into Germany every day, and all sorts of goods are being imported. These will be among them.”
“It won’t take the Gestapo long to find out where they came from, Trudi.”
“They will come from different places, provided we can raise the money.”
“I’ll do my share,” he said. “Tell me, is there such a concern as the Deutscher Nationalsocialistischer Kulturbund?”
“The concern was born and will die with this pamphlet. The next will be of different appearance, and will be printed in Amsterdam or Geneva.”
“I see you have cut out a job for yourself. Do you expect to keep from being known as the source?”
“For as long as I can. So far, I have only two contacts here in Paris, and I feel sure that neither will betray me. Unfortunately, I have to expect that the French police will be helping the Germans.”
“Surely so long as Laval is Premier of France,” he commented.
“Even longer, Lanny. The police do not change when a government changes. The police serve the two hundred families.”
X
Lanny was driving toward Versailles, and he commented: “This is the road where the market women marched out on a rainy day and dragged the King and Queen back to Paris. It wasn’t so well paved in those days, or so lined with houses, and Marie Antoinette would hardly know it. Did you ever read the story of Count Fersen, the young Swedish nobleman who was her lover and who accompanied her on this march of doom?”
“I only know what was in the school-books,” she replied. “They don’t mention lovers.”
“For my memory this route is lined with cuirassiers in brass helmets and plumes, guarding elderly gentlemen in top-hats and frock coats. They used to travel back and forth to conferences, and we subordinates speculated eagerly as to what was going on underneath the hats. Most of us were disappointed, for it turned out that President Wilson had been studying theology when he should have studied economics.”
“The treaty was bad,” assented Trudi, “but not half so bad as Hitler represents.”
“On the day when it was signed,” Lanny continued, “I was under custody in the old Conciergerie in Paris, and I heard the guns and knew what they meant. Afterwards my friends described the scene. Did you ever see the great Salle des Glaces?”
“I have never been here before.”
“It’s a sight that no tourist misses. May I take you?”
“Oh, Lanny! We must not dare!”
“I assure you, no one will pay the least attention to us. Hundreds of Americans go out there on bright sunny days like this.”
“But some of them may know you!”
“If so, what? I am with a respectable-looking young lady, showing her the sights. She might be the daughter of one of my mother’s sisters whom she left behind her in New England, close to forty years ago.”
“It would start the gossips, Lanny!”
“There is no way to stop them, since my wife has removed to New York.”
“She really went?”
“She did, and has sent me a polite cablegram wishing me success in life.”
“Oh, Lanny, I am so bitterly sorry to have been the cause of that misfortune!”
“Let me tell you a little story—what happened in the Berghof while you were sitting out in the car and no doubt finding it a long wait.”
“The time did seem long, I admit.”
“It was somewhat less than two hours; and for a full hour Hitler made us a speech—just such a speech as millions of Germans have been forced to listen to over the radio, under penalty of being sent to a concentration camp. He gave us the whole story that he told first in 1919 and has stuck to ever since: the wicked Versailles Diktat and the treachery of the Allies under the inspiration of the Jewish-Bolshevik plutocrats. You know it only too well, I am sure.”
“Ach leider!”
“Well, Irma listened to it for a solid hour; and when he had finished she stepped forward and told him: ‘I want you to know that I agree with ev
ery word you have said.’”
“Oh, Lanny, how dreadful!”
“You understand, she didn’t have to say that. Nobody asked her. It was her own spontaneous act.”
“But wasn’t it because of her anger with us?”
“No doubt that caused her to speak, but it didn’t determine what she said. The reason I gave up and let her go was that later, in Salzburg, she gave me her terms for the future: that I would agree to have nothing more to do with Communists and Communism, or with Socialists and Socialism. Considering that my half-sister and her husband and also my uncle are Communists, and that several of my oldest friends are Socialists, she would hardly have expected me to say yes.”
“You’re not going back to her, then?”
“I’m going to see my little daughter, and I suppose I’ll meet Irma; but I don’t expect to reopen the subject, and I doubt if she would let me. We’ve agreed not to make a scandal. What concerns you especially, she has promised not to talk about you.”
“Do you think she will keep the promise?”
“She is getting all that she asked for, and she isn’t a vindictive person. She offered me money, provided I wouldn’t spend it on Socialism; but of course that’s the only thing I would take it for, and she knows that.”
“Don’t you feel rather desolate?”
“At times; but no more so than you and many people we know. There just isn’t any use expecting one’s life to be perfect in a time like this.”
XI
They wandered through the beautiful park of Versailles, once the playground of the Grand Monarque and his successors, and for a long time one of the world’s tourist attractions. In the Petit Trianon they inspected the chapel in which Marie Antoinette had prayed and the harpsichord upon which she had played accompaniments for Fersen’s flute. They strolled about the grounds, observing the Belvidere and the Orangerie, the Jeu de Bague and the Temple d’Amour. At the garden front Lanny remarked: “There is a report widely current that if you come here on the tenth of August, and happen to be what is called psychic, you may see Marie Antoinette sitting outside here, wearing a wide flapping hat and a pink dress; also you will see many of the people of her time, moving about the place in costume.”
Trudi smiled and replied: “Perhaps there was once a motion-picture company her on that date.”
“The tenth of August is the date of the sacking of the Tuileries in Paris, which was, of course, a dreadful experience for poor Toinette. Perhaps she comes here to escape the painful memories.”
Farther on was the little lake and stream, and at one of the rustic bridges Lanny stopped. “Here is a spot which played a part in an experience which you may take as a ghost story, not trying to believe it. In my library is a volume called An Adventure, written by two respectable English ladies, college-teachers and daughters of clergymen, who came here at the beginning of the century and strolled about these grounds, moved by idle curiosity like you and me. It happened to be the tenth of August, though that date meant nothing to them. They had never been interested in psychic matters and had no idea of what was coming. They had what I suppose one might call a collective hallucination; they saw the people of the ancien regime and were spoken to by several of them. Everything seemed strange, but they didn’t know what it meant; only afterwards, when they began to compare notes, they realized that one had seen things which the other was certain had not been there. They began looking up old data and discovered that they had seen the grounds as they had been a century and a half earlier, but were not at the time of their visit.”
“You take that sort of thing seriously, don’t you, Lanny?”
“Much against my inclinations, I have been forced to. It has occurred to me as a possibility that time may not be the fixed and permanent system which it seems to us, but may be a product of our own minds, a form which we impose upon our experiences.”
Trudi had no comment, and they strolled on. Presently Lanny remarked: “You asked me if I could manage to get you a seance with our Polish medium.”
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “Is she still with you?”
“She is visiting Zaharoff at his chateau near here. It wouldn’t do to take you there, but I could bring Madame to some hotel and have her take a room, and then bring you to her. It would be better if I were not present, because I have managed to get her ‘spirit control’ irritated with me because of my skeptical questions. You see, I please neither side; the Marxists think I am a fool and a dupe and the spirits think I am irreverent.”
“I’ll try to be open-minded,” said this Marxist; “but I can’t promise to be convinced.”
“I would be foolish indeed to ask such a promise. All that you must agree to is to accept my word that I shall not give Madame the faintest hint about your identity.”
“I’ll certainly believe that, Lanny.”
“Also,” he added, “I’m hoping that you’ll let me see something of you when I happen to be in Paris. I’m quite sure I’m not being followed, and you can easily make sure about yourself. We can meet at that corner as we did today, and I can drive you to some different part of France where nobody will have the slightest interest in us. You can’t work all the time, and if you try to, your work will suffer. At least I can do what I’m hoping to do this evening, find some quiet auberge and see that you get one substantial meal. Will your conscience permit that much self-indulgence?”
“Lanny,” she said, “I’m not an ascetic; it’s just that when I think of what is happening to our comrades, my food chokes me.”
“I know, my dear; I’ve had the feeling many a time. But here we are, in this old tormented Europe, and there’s never been an hour since I was born when I couldn’t have starved myself for that reason. I suddenly became aware of it at the end of July 1914. That early in my life I had to work out a philosophy that would permit me to eat and sleep and even play music. Cruelty and suffering aren’t going to be ended in our lifetime, and it’s the part of wisdom to make a rule never to expend more energy in one day than you can restore in one night. So now let us go and find our auberge, and I’ll tell you how you have to behave with Madame Zyszynski if you hope to get any significant results.”
15
NEED A BODY CRY?
I
Beauty Budd couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. She telegraphed that she was coming, and next morning here she was; putting up at her son’s hotel, full of strange memories for her, and hardly stopping to take off hat and coat before going to work on him. “Now, Lanny, do for God’s sake tell me what has happened!”
He had rehearsed this scene in his mind; knowing her so thoroughly, he had been able to say everything for her as well as for himself. Now, patiently and kindly, he told her that he and Irma had been discovering how they were irritated by each other’s opinions and bored by each other’s friends; they had finally decided there was no sense standing it.
“Tell me this,” she persisted, “just what did you do to Irma in Germany?”
“Nothing different from anywhere else. It’s the same old story. I wanted to meet my friends there—”
“Men friends or women?”
He had anticipated this, and prepared a humorous reply. “There have to be both, in order that there may be more.”
“Don’t be silly. I can’t believe that Irma is interested in any other man; I know it must be some woman, somewhere. Tell me, is it that young German artist whose work you were so interested in?”
He was surprised by this; he hadn’t imagined that she was keeping a notebook on his doings. But Beauty Budd was like that. Nobody was going to persuade her that any man was interested in any woman’s sketches, any more than in any woman’s poetry or music or ideas or whatever it might be. Women existed for one purpose so far as men were concerned, and every woman knew it in her heart, no matter how hard she might try to fool herself.
Lanny had to make up his mind in a small fraction of a second. He said, rather severely: “I’m sorry, dear. If you want to
take that line, I’m not going to discuss it. I think you might leave it to somebody else to start the scandals on us.”
Tears began creeping into her eyes, as he knew they would sooner or later. She would have to have a good cry before this was over, and it was better while they were alone and she didn’t have to worry about her makeup.
“I know how bitterly disappointing it must be to you,” he continued, more gently. “You just have to make up your mind that this is one of the things you can’t help. Irma and I know our own minds, and we’ve taken the trouble to think it out thoroughly. She is going to live at Shore Acres, and I’m going to live here and there, as in the past. We’ve agreed that we’re not going to have any sort of fuss, and in this I expect to receive the co-operation of my mother. When people ask about it, just say that she seems to like Long Island and I seem to like Europe, and that’s that.”
“Lanny, there’ll be some other man, and you’ll lose her.”
“I hope that whoever he is, he’ll be able to make her happy. I have made up my mind that there is small possibility of happiness in love where people differ in their fundamental beliefs as completely as Irma and I do.”
“You’re definitely giving her up, then?”
“It was she who gave me up, and I’m accepting her decision because I have to.”
“And you don’t mean to see her again?”
“I shall probably see her, because she is the mother of my child, and I certainly don’t intend to give up the child.”
“And what about my grandchild?”
“Irma has been your friend and there is no reason why she should cease to be. Go there whenever you want to, and she will treat you as you treated her when she was your guest. The place is huge, and nobody need be in any other’s way. Play bridge with Fanny Barnes, and don’t object if she cheats you a little; Irma will make it up with a handsome check now and then, and everything will be jake.”
Wide Is the Gate Page 34
