One Clear Call I Read online

  When the pair came down to the lobby, Jim took one glance at the lady, whom he had never met before; he saw that she was “right,” and Lanny saw that he saw it. That is the way matters go in the smart world; you are “right,” and your woman is “right,” and if you’re not you don’t go but once.

  On the drive genial Jim told about the place to which they were going and the hostess who was to entertain them. Evalyn Walsh was the daughter of a wretchedly poor miner who had wandered through the Rocky Mountains knocking off chunks in a search for gold. That was no secret, because Evalyn herself had told the details in a book called Father Struck It Rich. It was a sort of Aladdin’s-lamp story of a sudden rise in the world, far too violent for comfort or even sense. Evalyn, sole heiress to a score of millions, had married the heir of the McLean fortune, derived from a newspaper in Cincinnati. Ned McLean, a loutish fellow with an almost insane temper, had come to Washington and built a monstrous palace in the Victorian style, calling it Friendship House. When Evalyn couldn’t stand him any more she had gone to Riga—an odd choice—and got a divorce. Ned had contested it, and there had been a lively scandal. Evalyn, victorious, had sold the mansion and bought herself an estate in George-town, where she had built a still more monstrous place, calling it by the old name. It stood on a hilltop, and behind it was a swimming pool as big as the house; inside it was such an assortment of junk as had never been in the world before—for example, an “animal room,” full of miniature creatures made of glass, porcelain, and even plaster.

  Long lines of cars were lined up in the drive. Evalyn couldn’t endure ever to be alone, and had four huge dining-rooms in which to entertain her guests. “It’s all terribly vulgar, of course,” said the scion of the Stotzlmanns, whose fortune had come from his great-grandfather and therefore was established and respectable. “Everybody comes because Evalyn really is warmhearted and likes people. It’s a place to meet the people you want to talk to, and have everything in the world you want to eat and drink.”

  “How can she manage that in wartime?” asked Laurel; and the answer was, “Some of the more expensive things aren’t rationed; and I suppose she gets poultry and meat and butter and such things from her other estates. No doubt she has a staff who manage it for her, and it wouldn’t be good form to ask questions.”

  “I won’t,” said Laurel with a smile. She couldn’t explain that her curiosity was that of a novelist; she kept that fact as closely guarded as a war secret. Her story about life in Germany under the Nazis bore the pen name of Mary Morrow, and was now being praised in papers all over the country; but nobody knew who this writer was, and nobody had any suspicions about a quiet little woman with a slow smile and soft brown eyes; nobody guessed what was going on in the busy brain behind those eyes. That suited Laurel, for she wanted to watch people and not to have them watch her. If she were introduced as the author of a popular novel, the people at Friendship House would crowd around her eagerly; but they would be afraid of her too and would try to pose before her. Let her be plain Mrs. Budd, daughter-in-law of Budd-Erling, and let them be occupied in showing themselves off; she would go home and make notes about them, and when she put them into a story they wouldn’t recognize themselves, since what they read would not coincide with what they believed.

  X

  Driving into the Friendship House estate was like approaching the opera on opening night; entering the mansion was like catching the 5:38 at Grand Central Terminal. A line of elegant ladies and gentlemen waited to greet the hostess, and Jim and his pair of pals waited their turn, chatting meantime with others whom Jim knew—there were few he didn’t. The hostess proved to be a tall bony lady dressed in pink marabou, satin, and ostrich feathers. She had heavy eyebrows and drooping eyes and mouth, as if she weren’t awake yet; she would tell you that this was her waking time and that she never ate anything until dinner. She would tell you anything about herself, and made it a point not to let riches and fame tone down her mining-camp language and manners. When the party was breaking up, in the small hours of the morning, Lanny heard the hostess screaming to the butler, “Call a car and take these two bums to the station.” The “two bums” were leading newspaper columnists, and the hostess wasn’t meaning that they were drunk; she was just kidding them because they had come in a taxicab. The hostess was slightly drunk herself, and so were the majority of her guests, for they had been plied with food and liquor over a period of five or six hours.

  You couldn’t avoid noticing the great lady’s jewelry, nor were you supposed to. Two pear-shaped diamonds hung from her ears, and a great ruby surrounded by diamonds hung by a gold chain across her forehead. Chains of diamonds dangled all over her, and miscellaneous jewels gleamed from her fingers. The pièce de résistance was the famed Hope diamond said to be the largest in the world. It hung from a chain over her bosom and was set off by diamond sunbursts, one pinned to her dress on each side. If you expressed interest in the Hope—and of course that was why it was there—you would be invited to lift it by the chain and feel its weight; but you had to promise not to touch it, because there was an old tradition that ill luck befell anyone who so presumed.

  Washington society agreed in polite whispers that this tradition had surely been vindicated in the case of the present owner of this treasure. Evalyn’s marriage had gone on the rocks and her husband had died in an insane asylum; her daughter, a frail and melancholy girl, had recently become the wife of “Buncombe Bob” Reynolds, onetime circus barker who had become senator from North Carolina and was one of the most ardent propagandists of that brand of hundred-per cent Americanism which could hardly be distinguished from Nazi-Fascism. Lanny and his wife had no means of knowing that the young wife of an old man was going to poison herself within a year or two, but when they were introduced to her they realized that she was a far from happy person. Lanny had met so many sons and daughters of the rich who were maladjusted that it had become a sort of formula to him.

  The heir of the Stotzlmanns wasn’t happy either; he had had four marriages and four failures, and on the drive back home he poured out his heart to the wife of Lanny Budd. It had occurred to him that she might know some girl who was what he called “nice”; that is to say, a girl who was old-fashioned and believed in love; who wouldn’t have her head turned by an awesome family name and attempt to buy out the contents of Tiffany’s in the first month of marriage. Laurel said that was a difficult problem and she’d have to think it over. Before she had finished this thinking, she read in the papers that Jim was married again, and the next time she met him she learned that he was on the way to his fifth divorce.

  XI

  But meantime, here he was, a deputy host and loyal friend. Lanny had expressed a desire to meet some Italians, for a reason too important to be explained. All right; Jim wandered about in the crowded drawing-rooms, something that was difficult because so many people knew him and grabbed hold of him, and he couldn’t hurt their feelings, being kind of heart. Especially the ladies; there were scores of them who had spent the day as Laurel had spent it, making themselves beautiful and getting ready for whatever adventure might come into sight. What better than this unattached heir of Chicago’s famous family?

  Jim persisted and presently came upon what he wanted—no less a personage than Signor Generoso Pope, which the Italians rhyme with “ropey,” but which the Americans say as one syllable. He was indeed a sort of lay pope to well-to-do and conservative Italians of the United States; publisher of the newspaper they all read, and counselor and guide in matters of business, politics, and finances. Signor Pope had told his readers that Mussolini was the heaven-sent regenerator of la patria, destined to restore the glories of the ancient Roman Empire, and they had believed him, all save a few malcontents. Now, alas, the Signor and his subscribers were in an embarrassing position, and he had to use more weasel words than had ever crawled backward out of any hole in the earth.

  There were many people of that sort here tonight, for Friendship House was the council hal
l of all the New-Deal haters in the national capital. Here Lanny shook hands with the all-powerful Mr. Harrison Dengue, who not long ago had been working on a plan to have President Roosevelt kidnaped from his Hyde Park home and kept under the orders of persons who wanted to stop lend-lease to Russia. Here he shook hands with Congressman Ham Fish, who had allowed the Nazi agents in this country to use his congressional frank to mail out literature written by a Nazi agent. Here he met multi-millionaire Jimmie Cromwell, and publisher Cissie Patterson, and Igor Cassini, her venomous little “society” columnist.

  But Lanny was looking especially for Italians; and by extraordinary good fortune, when he and his wife entered one of the four big dining-rooms, he discovered himself seated next to the person of all persons whom he would have chosen. What had happened was that Jim had got the ear of the hostess and mentioned that his friend, the son of Budd-Erling, was interested in meeting this product of the melting pot; and Evalyn had beckoned to her steward, or whoever it was that stood near awaiting her orders. The place cards were shifted, and thus Signor Generoso Pope found himself in conversation with an agreeable gentleman who had been raised almost at the front door of Signor Pope’s native land, who had traveled all through it by motorcar, knew its cities, its art treasures and cathedrals, and had met pretty nearly every distinguished person the Signor could name.

  Lanny Budd put himself out to make himself agreeable, and he had what it took. He was an art expert who had had the choosing of several collections of paintings for wealthy Americans; more than that, he was the son of one of America’s great industrialists, whose airplanes were flying all over the world and helping to win a war which the son insisted ought never to have been started. It was one of the tragedies of history, and whichever side won, both sides would lose. That was exactly what Signor Pope thought, and he wished he could say it in such eloquent language. He was a naïve-appearing gentleman, with a round face, dark hair, and prominent eyes.

  A warm friendship was struck up; and when the Signor learned that Mr. Budd was proceeding to New York next day, he asked the pleasure of taking him in his car. Lanny said he was delighted, and didn’t mention anything about having a wife and baby and a car of his own. Laurel would drive that car to New York, and Lanny would ride with the publisher; he would deplore the war, and also the New Deal and its extravagances, and lead this exuberant son of the south to pour out his troubled soul. When the ride was over, Lanny would know pretty nearly everything he wanted to know about the near-Fascists and the crypto-Fascists of the Italian colony of New York; and about the nine Italian generals who had been captured in North Africa and were now interned in Tennessee, from where they were diligently working for a separate peace. All this for the price of one evening ensemble, which his wife would carefully preserve for other occasions when it might be necessary to help her husband meet the “right” sort of people.

  XII

  Laurel did not fail to notice her husband’s sudden interest in the Italian publisher, and the fact that he had upon his reading table an assortment of literature—pamphlets, clippings, typewritten and mimeographed sheets—all dealing with that country. With an Anglo-American army poised just across the strait of Sicily, and with radio and newspapers speculating as to when it meant to cross, Laurel had no trouble in guessing her husband’s destination. When tears welled into her eyes, she would turn her head and go into the next room and pull herself together. As old as human history is the fact that men go away into danger while women stay at home and weep. But in this case the woman had to want him to go; she had to value the overthrow of Nazi-Fascism more than she valued his life and her own happiness.

  Only once did he mention the data he was storing in his mind. That was when he came upon a pamphlet bearing the imprint of the Italy-America Society of New York; reading it, he began to chuckle, and then to laugh. “Listen,” he said, “here is your guide and guardian, Otto Hermann Kahn.” He liked to tease her about a strange circumstance which had developed in her life: an intimacy with a departed spirit, onetime possessor of a vast fortune upon which he could no longer draw. A thing almost beyond imagining, for in real life Laurel Creston had met this urbane and elegant gentleman only in the most casual way, and it was with consternation she had learned that he had taken up uninvited residence in her subconscious mind.

  The son of Budd-Erling had long been interested in what is known as “psychical research,” but only four years had passed since Laurel had learned that she was a possessor of the gift called mediumship. From that time on the former senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, Wall Street bankers, had been her “steady company.” Whenever she went into a trance, he would speak without waiting to be invited. Laurel herself had never heard this “spirit” voice and knew about him only what Lanny or others told her he had said while she lay in a deep kind of sleep. Of late she had feared to enter this state with any person other than her husband present, for Lanny had so many secrets to hide, and Otto seemed to know them. They could not take the risk that he might mention forbidden matters at the séance.

  What Lanny now had in his hands was an address which had been delivered by the great or ex-great banker, revealing him in the role of social philosopher and prophet. Nearly twenty years ago, on November 15, 1923, he had betaken his cultured and affable self to Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and there before the faculty and students had spoken ex cathedra concerning the events of the time. Benito Mussolini had taken power a year and a half earlier, and America wanted to know what sort of man he was. Otto Kahn told them:

  “The credit for having brought about this great change in Italy, and without bloodshed, belongs to a great man, beloved and revered in his own country, a self-made man, setting out with nothing but the genius of his brain. To him not merely his own country but the world at large owes a debt of gratitude.… Mussolini is far from fomenting class hatred or using class animosities or divergencies for political purposes.… He is neither a demagogue nor a reactionary. He is neither a chauvinist nor a bull in the china shop of Europe. He is no enemy of liberty. He is no dictator in the generally understood sense of the word.”

  There was a whole discourse along those lines, and a memorandum attached to the pamphlet stated that the Italy-America Society had printed it in both English and Italian and given it wide circulation in both countries. When Lanny got through with it he remarked, “I ought to remind Otto of that, and hear what he thinks of it now!”

  “He might resent it,” his wife objected. “He might drop us from his calling list.”

  “Well, he hasn’t had anything useful to tell us for some time, and it might be well if you had a change of ‘controls.’ Let’s try a séance and maybe he’ll bring it up himself.”

  XIII

  It was in the autumn of 1929, during the dreadful Wall Street panic, that Lanny had learned about this strange mode of procedure from an old Polish woman whom his stepfather had discovered in a New York tenement. Lanny had taught it to his wife, and now she lay on her bed in a half-darkened room, while he sat close by with a writing pad on his knee and a pencil in his hand. Laurel began to breathe heavily; she moaned for a while and then lay still. Lanny waited. At length he asked in a quiet tone, “Is anyone present?”

  There came at once the voice which claimed to be Otto Kahn. The way to get results from that voice was to take it for what it called itself, and be as urbane as the most urbane of Maecenases had been on earth. “Well, Otto, happy to meet you again. Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  “I would tell you if I knew, Lanny.”

  One couldn’t be sure whether that was banter, or whether it was a fact concerning the strange limbo in which these subconscious entities had their existence. The banker-being wouldn’t state explicitly, but at times it appeared that he wanted Lanny to believe that he existed only when Laurel invited him to exist. At other times he would know things that Laurel didn’t know, or at any rate that she didn’t know she knew. Since the learned psychologists agree that
the subconscious mind never forgets anything, how can you know what you know? To be accurate, you can only say, “I don’t know it so far as I remember at this moment.”

  Lanny and the banker-being chatted for a while as two gentlemen might who encountered each other in a broker’s office or the smoking-room of a club. After a bit Lanny said, “By the way, Otto, I just happened to come upon a copy of an address which you delivered at Wesleyan University almost twenty years ago.”

  “Indeed,” said the other. “I hope it didn’t bore you as much as it did me.”

  “It didn’t bore me at all. I thought it an interesting example of precognition. Do you remember that you said, ‘Mussolini is far too wise and right-minded a man to lead his people into hazardous foreign adventures’?”

  “Did I really say that, Lanny?”

  “It stands in print; and you went on to say, ‘Mussolini is particularly desirous for close and active co-operation with the United States. I feel certain that American capital invested in Italy will find safety, encouragement, opportunity, and reward.”

  “Dear me!” said the ex-banker. “I am embarrassed.”

  “Did you put any of your own funds into Il Duce’s bonds, Otto?”

  “As you know, my friend, we international bankers took foreign bonds in large blocks and sold them to the public. If we had any left over, we considered that we had exhibited bad judgment.”

  “I believe the record shows that before he marched on Rome—in a sleeping car—Mussolini got the assurance of the American Ambassador, Richard Washburn Child, that he would get a loan of two hundred million dollars from J. P. Morgan and Company.”

  “We bore no affection for that firm, but it may be that we handled a portion of those securities. That was, no doubt, the reason I made the speech. You know how it is, Lanny—no man who plays the races can say that he never backed the wrong horse.”