World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 4

  When the time came for Kurt to leave, he told his disciple that the aunt had consented to write to her brother, endorsing Lanny as worthy of guesthood. The American boy was extraordinarily delighted about it, for by this time he had heard so much about the castle and the wonders of life there that it had come to seem to him a place out of Grimm’s fairy tales. He would meet Kurt’s family, see how Kurt lived, and become acquainted with the environment in which his friend’s lofty ideals had been nurtured.

  VI

  Kurt went away, and Lanny settled down to reading German, practicing finger drill, and teaching fisherboys to dance Dalcroze. He was never lonely, for Leese and the housemaid Rosine loved him as if he were their own. He knew that Beauty would come in the end, and a month later she came, full of news and gaiety. Then, out of the blue, came a telegram from Robbie, saying that he was leaving Milan and would arrive the next day.

  That was the way with Lanny’s father, who thought no more of sailing for Europe than Beauty did of going in to Cannes to have a fitting. He didn’t bother to cable, for he might be taking a train for Constantinople or St. Petersburg, and he couldn’t know how long he would be there. Post cards would come, sometimes from Newcastle, Connecticut, sometimes from London or Budapest. “See you soon,” or something like that. The next thing would be a telegram, saying that he would arrive on such and such a train.

  Robbie Budd was still under forty and was the sort of father any boy would choose if he were consulted. He had played football, and still played at polo now and then, and was solid and firm to the touch. He had abundant brown hair, like his son, and when you saw him in bathing trunks you discovered that it was all over his chest and thighs, like a Teddy bear’s. From him Lanny had got his merry brown eyes and rosy cheeks, also his happy disposition and willingness to take things as they came.

  Robbie liked to do everything that Lanny liked, or maybe it was the other way around. He would sit at the piano and romp for hours, with even worse technique than his son’s. He was no good at “classical” music, but he knew college songs, Negro songs, musical comedy songs—everything American, some of it jolly and some sentimental. In the water he did not know what it was to tire; he would stay in half the day or night, and if he thought you were tiring, he would say: “Lie on your back,” and would come under you and put his hands under your armpits, and begin to work with his feet, and it was as if a tugboat had taken hold of you. He had ordered two pairs of goggles, to be strapped around the head and fitted tight with rubber, so that he and Lanny could drop down and live among the fishes. Robbie would take one of the three-pointed spears used by the fishermen; he would stalk a big mérou, and when he struck there would be a battle that Lanny would talk about for days.

  Robbie Budd made quantities of money—he never said how much, and perhaps never knew exactly—but he left a trail of it behind him. He liked the smiling faces of those who have suddenly been made prosperous. He needed a lot of people to help him, and that was the way he persuaded them—a little bit at a time, and collecting the service quickly, before the debt was forgotten!

  He expected some day to have the help of his son at this money-making; and because, for all his gaiety and his cynicism, he was a far-seeing and careful man, he had devised a system of training for this, his first and most dearly loved child. It appeared quite casual and incidental, but it had been thought out and was frequently checked for results. Robbie Budd caused his son to think of the selling of small arms and ammunition as the most romantic and thrilling of all occupations; he surrounded it with mysteries and intrigues, and impressed upon the boy the basic lesson that everything concerned with it was a matter of most solemn secrecy. Never, never, was the son of a munitions salesman to let slip one word about his father’s affairs to any person, anywhere, under any circumstances! “On the whole continent of Europe there is nobody I really trust but you, Lanny”—so the father would declare.

  “Don’t you trust Beauty?” the boy asked, and the answer was:

  “She trusts other people. The more she tries to keep a secret, the quicker it gets out. But you will never dream of saying a word to anybody about your father’s business; you will understand that any one of Beauty’s rich and fashionable friends may be trying to find out where your father has gone, what contracts he’s interested in, what cabinet minister or army officer he has taken for a motor ride.”

  “Never a hint, Robbie, believe me! I’ll talk about the fishing, or the new tenor at the opera.” Lanny had learned this lesson so thoroughly that he was able to recognize at once when the Conte di Pistola or the wife of the attaché of the Austrian embassy was trying to pump him. He would tell his father about it, and Robbie would laugh and say: “Oh, yes, they are working for Zaharoff.”

  Lanny wouldn’t have to hear any more; Zaharoff—accent on the first syllable—was the gray wolf who was gobbling up the munitions plants of Europe one by one and who considered the placing of a contract with an American as an act of high treason. Ever since he was old enough to remember, Lanny had been hearing stories of his father’s duels with this most dangerous of men. The things Lanny knew about him might have upset every chancellery in Europe, if there had been any way to get them published.

  When Robbie stepped off the train—he had come all the way from Bulgaria—both Beauty and Lanny were there to welcome him. He gave the latter a bear hug and the former a friendly handshake. Having a wife in Connecticut, Robbie didn’t stay at the house, but at the hotel near by. He and Lanny ran a race down to the boathouse to get into their swimming trunks, and when they were out in a boat, far enough from all prying ears, Robbie grinned and said: “Well, I landed that Bulgarian contract.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I made a mistake as to the day of the week.”

  “How did that help?” There were so many strange ways of landing contracts that the brightest boy in the world couldn’t guess them.

  “Well, I thought it was Thursday, and I bet a thousand dollars on it.”

  “And you lost?”

  “It was last Friday. We went to a kiosk on the corner and bought a Friday newspaper; and of course they couldn’t have had that on Thursday.” The two exchanged grins.

  Lanny could guess the story now; but he liked to hear it told in Robbie’s way, so he asked: “You really paid the debt?”

  “It was a debt of honor,” said the father gravely. “Captain Borisoff is a fine fellow, and I’m under obligations to him. He turned in a report that Budd carbines are superior to any on the market. They really are, of course.”

  “Sure, I know,” said the boy. They were both of them serious about that; it was one of the fixed laws of the universe that Americans could beat Europeans at anything, once they put their minds to it. Lanny was glad; for he was an American, even though he had never set foot upon the land of the pilgrims’ pride. He was glad that his father was able to outwit Zaharoff and all the other wolves and tigers of the munitions industry. Americans were the most honest people in the world, but of course if they had to, they could think up just as many smart tricks as any Levantine trader with Greek blood and a Russian moniker!

  VII

  It might occur to you that all this was hardly the best kind of moral training for a child; but the fact was that Lanny managed to preserve a sort of gay innocence toward it. Other boys got their thrills out of the “pulps” and the movies, but Lanny Budd got his from this wonderful father, his diplomatic and conspiratorial aides, and the generals, cabinet ministers, financial tycoons, and social high lights whom the boy met and would continue to meet so long as he was Robbie Budd’s son.

  The father’s attitude toward these people was suave, even cordial, but behind their backs he laughed at them. They were the crème de la crème of Europe; they lived a life of many formalities and solemnities, gave themselves fancy titles, covered themselves with orders and decorations, and looked upon an American munitions salesman as a crude commercial fellow. Robbie didn’t pay them enough of a tribu
te to resent these pretensions; he would chuckle as he told his son about the absurdities and weaknesses of this great one and that. He would refer to the stout Countess Wyecroft as a “puller-in,” and to the elegant and monocled Marquis de Trompejeu as a pimp. “They’ll all do anything if you pay them enough—and guarantee them against being caught!”

  Robbie had constructed a complete suit of intellectual armor to protect himself and his business against criticism, and he made a smaller-sized suit for Lanny and taught him to wear it. “Men hate each other,” he would say. “They insist upon fighting, and there’s nothing you can do about it, except learn to defend yourself. No nation would survive for a year unless it kept itself in readiness to repel attacks from greedy and jealous rivals; and you have to keep your weapons up to date, because the other fellow’s always improving his. From the beginning of time there was a duel between those who made shields and those who made swords and spears; nowadays it’s war between the makers of armorplate and the makers of shells and torpedoes. This will go on as long as there’s any sort of progress.”

  The munitions industry was the most important part of every nation, insisted the head salesman of Budd Gunmakers Corporation; the one upon which all others depended. Most people would admit that, but they had the notion that the makers of guns and shells ought to work only for their own country, and that there was something unpatriotic in supplying other nations with such products. “But that’s just people’s ignorance,” said Robbie; “they don’t realize that propellants”—it was the industry’s way of speaking of the various kinds of powder—“deteriorate fast, and after a few years they’re worthless. So you can’t store up the product and feel safe; you have to keep your producing machinery in order, and how can you do it unless you give it something to do? Are you going to stay at war just to keep your munitions workers in practice?”

  Back there in the state of Connecticut was an establishment which Budd’s had been building for three generations. Lanny had never seen it, but many pictures had been shown him and many stories told. In the beginning was a Connecticut Yankee who first thought of the idea of making guns with interchangeable parts, exactly alike, so they could be replaced and manufactured wholesale. Lanny’s great-grandfather had been one of those who took up the idea and helped the country to put down the Indians, conquer Mexico, preserve the Union, and free Cuba and the Philippines. “That’s the kind of service the armament people render,” said Robbie. “They do it when it’s needed, and at the time everybody’s mighty glad to have it done!”

  America hadn’t had a really big war for half a century, and so American armaments plants were small by European standards. American wages were so much higher that the only way to compete was to turn out a better product—and to persuade the customers that you were doing so. This last was Robbie’s job, and he worked hard at it, but was never satisfied; he grumbled at Europe’s inability to appreciate Yankee brains. Americans labored under another handicap, in that their plants used English inches as their standard of measurement, whereas Europe employed the metric system. Robbie had persuaded his father to install machinery of the latter sort, and he now had the duty of keeping that costly machinery running. The business he did never satisfied him; the contracts were “mere chicken-feed,” he would say—but he was a well-fed and handsome chicken, all the same!

  Some day Lanny would visit the Budd plant across the seas and learn its secrets. Meantime, he must get to know Europe, its different races and tribes and classes, what arms they needed, and how to get there with the right samples and grease the right palms. Said Robbie: “It’s a serious matter to realize that thousands of workmen and their wives and children are dependent upon your business foresight. If Zaharoff had got the contract for the carbines from Bulgaria, it would have been British or French or Austrian workingmen who would have had the work and the wages, and not merely would workers’ children in Connecticut have gone hungry, but storekeepers would have been bankrupted and farmers would have had no market for the food they grew.” So it was not for himself and his family, but for a whole townful of people that Robbie Budd practiced the tricks of salesmanship, and lost large sums of money at poker or betting that it was Thursday when he knew it was Friday!

  Of course it was terrible that men went to war and killed one another; but for that you had to blame nature, not the Budd family. Robbie and his son would put on their goggles and drop down among the fishes for a while, and when they came up and sat on the rocks to rest, the man would talk about the life that went on in that strange dim world. Uncounted billions of microscopic creatures called plankton were produced in the sunshine at the surface, and tiny fish and shrimp and other creatures fed upon them. Larger fish devoured the small ones, and monsters like the sharks preyed upon these. All reproduced themselves incessantly, and this had gone on for tens of millions of years, with changes so slight that they were hardly to be noticed. Such was life, and you could no more change it than you could stop the rising and setting of the sun; you just had to understand the sun’s behavior and adjust yourself to it.

  This was a lesson which Robbie preached incessantly, so that to Lanny it became like the landscape and the climate, the music he heard and the food he ate. Robbie would enforce it with picturesque illustrations; he would bring up a lame fish that had had one of its fins bitten off, and he would say: “You see, he didn’t keep up his armaments industry!”

  Now Lanny heard more of this, and decided that he had better put off telling his father about becoming a Dalcroze dancer. And what about all those noble ideals which Kurt Meissner had revealed to him, and which had impressed him so greatly a month or so ago? What was the use of thinking about religion and self-dedication and all that, if men were shrimps and crabs, and nations were sharks and octopi? Here was a problem which men had been debating before Lanny Budd was born and which it would take him some time to settle!

  3

  Playground of Europe

  I

  Beauty stayed a couple of weeks, and so did Robbie, with the result that Lanny’s life became what the newspapers call one continuous round of social gaieties. Beauty gave a tennis party, with afternoon tea, and a row of fashionable ladies decorating the sidelines. She gave a dinner party, with dancing on the loggia, and Venetian lanterns hanging, and an orchestra from Cannes. When they were not having or preparing things like these, they were motoring to the homes of friends up and down the coast, for motorboat races, or bridge, or fireworks, or whatever it might be.

  Lanny had his part in these events. People who had heard about “Dalcroze” would ask for a demonstration, and he would oblige them without having to be begged. Lady Eversham-Watson put up her ivory and gold lorgnette and drawled: “Chawming!” and the Baroness de la Tourette lifted her hands with a dozen diamonds and emeralds on them and exclaimed: “Ravissant!”—all exactly as Lanny had foreseen. This attention and applause did not spoil him, because it was his plan to take up the role of teacher, and here was a beginning. He liked to please people, and everybody loved him for it; or at any rate they said they did, and Lanny took the world for the gay and delightful thing it strove so hard to appear.

  It was a world of people who had money. Lanny had always taken it for granted that everybody had it. He had never known any poor people; or, to be more exact, he had never known about their poverty. The servants worked hard, but they were well paid and had plenty to eat and enjoyed working in the rich homes, knowing the rich people and gossiping about their ways. The Provençal peasants partook of nature’s bounty, and were independent and free-spoken. The fishermen went to sea and caught fish; they had done that all their lives, and liked to do it, and were healthy, and drank wine and sang and danced. If now and then one was hurt, or lost his boat, a collection would be taken, and Lanny would tell Beauty about it and she would contribute.

  The rich people had the function of exhibiting elegance and grace to the world, and the Côte d’Azur was a place set apart for that performance. It was the winter pl
ayground of Europe; the wealthy and fashionable came from all over the world and either built themselves homes or stayed in luxurious hotels, dressing in the latest fashions and displaying themselves on waterfront parade grounds such as the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. They danced and played baccarat and roulette, golf and tennis; they motored and sailed, and ate and drank in public, and lay about on the beaches under gaily striped umbrellas. Photographers took pictures of them, and newspapers and magazines all over the world paid high prices for them, and so the exhibition of elegance had become a large-scale business.

  The ladies who lent their charms to this parade were spoken of as professional beauties, and they took their profession with the same seriousness as a physician takes the healing of bodies or a priest the saving of souls. It was an exacting occupation and left its devotees little time to think about anything else; during the exhibition periods, known as “seasons,” they made it a rule to change their costumes four times a day, thus keeping the cameramen on the jump; during the “off seasons” they hardly got a chance to recuperate, because they had to spend their time planning with couturiers and marchands de modes and others to keep them at the head of the next procession.

  It would seem as if a woman by the name of Beauty Budd had been especially cut out for such a career. And she might have had it, but for the fact that she was so poor. All she had was this home, and a thousand dollars a month which Robbie allowed her. He was strict with her; had made her promise not to incur debts, and never to gamble unless it was a business matter, with Robbie himself taking part. Of course you couldn’t take that too literally; she had to play bridge, and couldn’t very well insist upon paying cash for the clothes she ordered—the makers would have thought there was something wrong with her.