Wide Is the Gate Page 6

  III

  Lanny talked about his trip. Not much about the funeral, for Irma wanted to forget all that as quickly as she could. But she was interested in Robbie and his project, and in the visit of Zaharoff and its outcome. She said: “Lanny, that ought to prove a big thing.”

  “I believe it will,” he replied.

  “Doesn’t Robbie want me to come in on it?”

  “You know how he is—he’s shy about putting it up to you.”

  “But that’s silly. If he has a good thing, why shouldn’t I have a chance at it?”

  “Well, he said he wouldn’t mention it unless you asked him to.”

  “He ought to know that I have confidence in him, and that it’s a family matter. I would be hurt if he left me out.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Lanny; and so that was settled most agreeably. Would that it had all been as easy!

  “I’m glad you got home early,” remarked Irma. “Wickthorpe is having the Albanys to dinner and asked us over in the evening. I said we would come if you got back.”

  “Fine,” replied the husband. “And by the way, would you like to run up to town with me tomorrow? I have a letter from a man in Ohio, asking if I can find him a good Sir Joshua. I think I know where there’s one.”

  What the art expert had said was true; he was determined never to lie to his wife. If Irma had asked: “Did you see Uncle Jesse?” he would have answered “Yes” and told her what they had talked about. But she didn’t ask; she knew that she didn’t have the right to expect him not to meet Beauty’s brother. He, for his part, knew that she must have known that he would go there, and perhaps meet other Reds, and perhaps make them promises of the sort they always tried to get from him. They would unsettle his thoughts, make him discontented with his life, cause him to be moody and to make sarcastic remarks to his wife’s friends. The wild echoes were set flying in their hearts again; but neither spoke of them.

  IV

  Gerald Albany was a colleague of Lord Wickthorpe in the British Foreign Office; they had been through Winchester together and were close friends. Albany was the son of a country clergyman and had to make his own way; perhaps for that reason he was more proper and reticent than other members of the diplomatic set whom Lanny had met. He was a tall lean man with a long serious face, and had found a wife who matched him perfectly, a large-boned lady wearing a dark-blue evening costume which was doubtless expensive but looked extremely plain. The half-starved little fille de joie with whom Lanny had strolled on the boulevards had more chic than Vera. Albany could ever have or perhaps wish to have.

  The husband was a carefully studied model of a British diplomat, cold in manner and precise in utterance; yet, when you knew him, you discovered that he was a sentimental person, something of a mystic, knowing long stretches of Wordsworth by heart—he had even read the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, not once, but many times, and was prepared to defend them as poetry. He was conservative in his opinions, but tried hard to be open-minded or at least to believe that he was; he would permit Lanny to voice the most unorthodox ideas, and discuss them in such a carefully tolerant way, with so much suavity, that unless you knew his type of mind you might think he half agreed with you. Yes, of course, we are all Socialists now; we are enlightened men and we understand that the world is changing. The ruling classes must be prepared to give way and permit the people to have a larger say about their affairs; but not in India or Central Africa, in Hong Kong or Singapore. Above all, not in too much of a hurry; right now only the Conservatives understand the situation and are able to guide the ship of state in perilous seas!

  Irma was deeply impressed by this conscientious functionary, and wished that her husband might be; she tried in a way which she thought was tactful to bring this about. But Lanny, the impatient one, thought that the world ought to be changed right away. He said that the difference between a Bolshevik and a Tory was mainly one of timing; the toughest old die-hard in the Carlton Club could be got to admit that maybe in a few thousand years from now the dark-skinned races might be sufficiently educated to manage their own affairs both political and industrial. But, meanwhile, we have to carry the white man’s burden, placed upon our shoulders by that God of our fathers so intimately known of old.

  V

  Lanny had been on a scouting expedition, as it were. His friends were pleased to hear what a French financier thought about political prospects in his country and what an ex-munitions king, a Knight Commander of the Bath, had to say about the state of Europe. Pierre Laval had just become Foreign Minister of France, and Lanny told what he had heard about him; speaking in the privacy of the home, the Englishmen agreed that he was an unscrupulous and undependable fellow. That was the difficulty in relations with France; the governments changed so rapidly, and policies changed with them; you could never be sure where you stood. British foreign policy, on the other hand, changed very slowly; in fundamentals it never changed at all. Britain had a Prime Minister who was a Socialist, yet everything remained as it had been. Politicians may come and politicians may go but the old school tie goes on forever.

  These friends knew all about Lanny’s misadventures in Germany and made allowances for his extreme views on the subject of Nazism. But they were not prepared to change the fixed bases of their empire’s policy because an American playboy with a pinkish tinge to his mind had got thrown into the dungeons of the Gestapo—nor yet because a family of wealthy German Jews had been blackmailed and plundered. Wickthorpe was prepared to admit that the Nazis were tough customers; an irruption from the gutter, he called them; but they were the government of Germany, de facto and de jure, and one had to deal with them. They might be made to serve very useful purposes; for one thing, as a counterweight to French political upstarts who had a tendency to become extremely arrogant, on account of their country’s great store of gold; and for a second thing, as a check upon Russia. “Oh, yes!” exclaimed Lanny. “Hitler is to put down, the Bolsheviks for you!”

  Wherever an American art expert traveled, in Europe, in England, in America, he found the privileged classes, his own kind of people, hypnotized by the Fuhrer’s flaming denunciations of Communism and the Red Menace. The ex-painter of postcards voiced then thoughts completely on this subject; he was their man and promised to do their job. In vain Lanny tried to make them realize that no slogan meant anything to Hitler, except the gaining and keeping of power; political opinions were an arsenal of weapons from which he picked up those which served his need at a certain moment of conflict. When conscientious, God-fearing English gentlemen stood upon a platform and made promises to their electorate, they meant at least part of what they said; and how could they imagine that Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels would change their entire “line” overnight if it suited their political or military purposes?

  Lanny was frightened about it, and sad about the state of opinion in all the countries he knew. But there is a limit to the amount of arguing and protesting you can do in the drawing-room of even your best friends; if you keep it up, they will stop inviting you; and long before that happens, your wife will be pointing out to you that you are making yourself socially impossible. Lanny, well trained from childhood and now provided with a thoroughly competent wife, had to sit and listen while Lord Wickthrope proceeded to “adumbrate”—so he said—the future of world history in accord with the best interests of the British Empire. “Good God, man, don’t you suppose that Hitler knows what you are expecting? And why should he oblige you?”—so Lanny wanted to cry out; but he knew that if he did he would get a scolding on his way home.

  VI

  The master of this ancient chilly castle, a sight for tourists and a home for bats, was slightly older than Lanny, but, like Lanny, appeared younger than his age. He had pink cheeks, fair wavy hair, and a tiny pale-brown mustache; how he had managed to remain a bachelor had been a mystery to Irma since the first day she had met him at the Lausanne Conference. He had elegant manners and an assured mode of speech. His was a civil service job, and he
had had to pass very stiff examinations, so he knew what to do and say in every eventuality. He would listen courteously to what you had to report, and then, if he thought it worth while, would explain to you where you were mistaken. If he didn’t think it worth while, he would turn and talk to someone else.

  Irma thought him one of the best-informed men she had ever met, and sometimes she cited him to her husband as an authority. Irma loved the romantic gray-stone castle, in spite of its portable bathtubs which she called “tin.” She loved the respectful tenants who always tipped their hats to her if they were men and “bobbed” if they were women. She liked English reserve, as contrasted with French volubility. She liked living in a world where all the people knew their places and everything had been happening just so for hundreds of years. She wished that Lanny could be dignified, instead of bohemian, meeting all sorts of riffraff, rubbing elbows with “radicals” in smoke-filled cafes and letting them argue with and even ridicule him.

  In short, Irma liked a world without confusion whether domestic or intellectual. She had seen, first in Russia and then in Germany, that if you played with dangerous ideas you presently began to witness dangerous actions. She thought that Lanny was old enough to have sowed his cultural wild oats, and she yearned for him to settle down and take care of her and her fortune and her child. She found in Lord Wickthorpe the perfect model of what she would like her husband to be; and while she was too tactful to put it in plain words, Lanny could gather it without difficulty. He wasn’t in the least jealous, but he couldn’t help thinking now and then how pleasant it would be if his wife could agree with him about the things he considered important. His effort to keep his annoying thoughts to himself was resulting in a sort of split personality, and as time passed the hidden part of him was becoming the larger and more active.

  VII

  Emily Chattersworth had persuaded Irma that it was important for her to take a serious interest in her husband’s occupation and to let him have the manly sensation of earning his own money, however small the amount. So Irma would go with him to look at old masters and would gravely offer her opinion upon their merits and prices. She wanted to be cultured, and this was a part of it. Many of the paintings really were beautiful, and now and then when Lanny came upon a bargain Irma would buy it herself and have it stored until the time when she had her own palace, either in England or France, she wasn’t sure which.

  Sir Joshua was an especially interesting master, because he had done so many beautiful aristocratic ladies and their children. Irma herself was such a lady, and Lanny had told her that he was looking for the right man to do a life-size portrait of her. So now she saw herself in these duchesses and countesses, and studied poses and costumes, in order that when the time came she would be able to tell the artist exactly what she wanted. That is the way to meet life, she had decided: know how to spend your money, say what is your pleasure, and hold the respect of those you deal with, from the humblest slavey who brings in your coal-scuttle to the proudest nobleman who invites you to grace his drawing-room.

  Lanny was conscientious about serving his clients. When the owner of a ball-bearing plant in Ohio wrote that he wanted a good Sir Joshua for his collection, Lanny didn’t pick up the first one the fashionable dealers offered; he didn’t say: “That fellow has so much money it doesn’t matter what he pays.” No, he would consult his card-file and list all the Sir Joshuas of which he had been able to learn; he would get photographs of each, and send them to his client, with a long letter detailing the qualities of each and discussing the possible prices.

  “I advise you to let the matter rest for a few weeks,” he would write, “until word has got round about the inquiries I have made. You understand that the market for old masters is a small world, full of busy and eager traders, and they gossip among themselves like a hive of bees. They regard Americans as their proper prey, and invariably ask fifty per cent more than they would ask of an Englishman. I have succeeded in impressing them with the view that I am not an easy mark; I worry them with the idea that my client prefers some other picture, and usually in a few days they call up and invite me to dicker, and try to get me to set a price, which I refuse to do until I hear from some other dealer on some other picture. All this is very sordid, but it’s the way paintings are bought, and there’s no use letting yourself be plucked.”

  Such a letter would impress the manufacturer, for it was the way he would proceed when placing an order for steel ingots. When he got his painting at last he would appreciate it much more because he had had to worry obout it. He would say to his friends: “That chap Lanny Budd got it for me—you know, Budd Gunmakers; he’s married to Irma Barnes, the heiress, so it’s really a labor of love with him.” The arrival of the painting would be celebrated in the local newspapers, and not merely would the painting be reproduced, but also a photograph of the proud owner; so the other steel men of the district would learn that art pays, and the wife of one of them would get Lanny’s address and inquire if there was anything really first class now on the market. Lanny would get his ten per cent out of all this, and it provided him with pocket money and made an amusing sort of life.

  VIII

  After Irma had looked at several paintings she always got tired, and remembered various things which ladies have to do when they visit a great city; hairdressers, manicurists, masseuses, milliners, dressmakers, furriers, jewelers—all sorts of shrewd purveyors who are busy day and night thinking up schemes to persaude them that it is impossible to live worthily and romantically without such services. After lunch Irma said: “I want to go to So-and-so’s,” and they made an appointment for later in the afternoon to have tea and dance for a while. Lanny, having known that this would happen, had telegraphed Mr. or “Comrade” Monck at what hour he would call upon him, in a very poor neighborhood in Limehouse, near the docks. Here were rows and rows of two-story slum dwellings, laid end to end and exactly alike, each with its two chimneys emitting wisps of soft-coal smoke. With the help of hundreds of factory chimneys they formed a pall which had enveloped the district for a hundred years and brought it to the appearance of a vast dustbin.

  In such a neighborhood a fancy sport-car would be a phenomenon; so Lanny, taught by his experience in Germany, spotted the house and then drove around the corner and parked. When he knocked on the door there came a slattern old woman, in features and voice completely Cockney. When he asked for Mr. Monck she said: “Ow, yuss,” and as she led him up the narrow stairs she said it was a nice dye, sir; he was quite sure that, whatever Nazi or anti-Nazi plotting might be going on here, the lydy of the ’ouse ’ad nuffin to do wiv it. Lanny hadn’t failed to consider the possibility that he might be dealing with the Gestapo; they might have got Trudi Schultz in their clutches and be using one of her sketches as a means of trapping her friends and getting information. He had read of their kidnaping persons from Austria and Switzerland; the brother of Gregor Strasser had been one of their near-victims; but he didn’t think it likely they would go that far in London—not quite yet!

  The woman, grumbling about her rheumatism, didn’t really have to climb the stairs and knock on the door of the rear room; Lanny guessed that she was curious about her foreign lodger and the “toff” who had come to see him. A man inside answered the knock, took one glance, and said, quickly: “Bitte, keinen Namen!” Lanny said not a word, but stepped in. The lodger shut the door in the landlady’s face and carefully hung a coat over the knob so as to cover the keyhole; he sighed Lanny to the sole chair in the small and dingy room, and said, in a low voice: “Besser wirsprechen Deutsch.”

  Lanny had been imagining some sort of “intellectual,” but a single glance told him that this was an outdoor man, used to hard and tough labor. His frame was stocky and filled out like a boxer’s, and his neck went up straight and solid in the back. His face was weatherbeaten, his hands gnarled; his clothes were those of a laborer and his dark hair was cropped short in Prussian style. Lanny thought: “A sailor or perhaps a longshoreman.
” He had met the type among the Socialists in Bremen as well as on the Riviera: the man who has labored by day and read at night. His education is narrow, but he has forged it into a sharp sword for his purposes. He knows what he wants, and his speech is direct. If he is middle-aged, he is probably a Socialist; if he is young, he is more likely to be a Communist.

  IX

  The stranger seated himself on the edge of the narrow bed, not more than three feet from Lanny, and, gazing straight into his face, began, in a voice with a strong North German accent: “The name I gave you is not my real name, so there is no harm in your speaking it; but I will try not to speak your name, and let us not name any of our friends or any places. There are, you understand, extremely important reasons.”

  “Have you reason to believe that you are being watched here?” inquired the visitor, speaking low, as the other had done.

  “I have to assume it always. That is the only way to survive. I sent you something in the way of credentials. Did you recognize it?”

  “I believe I did,” replied Lanny.

  “Let us refer to the woman in the case as Frau Mueller. Let that be for both speaking and writing in the future.”