Dragons’s teeth

I

LANNY BUDD was the only occupant of a small-sized reception-room. He was seated in a well-padded armchair, and had every reason to be comfortable, but did not appear so. He fidgeted a good deal, and found occasions for looking at his watch; then he would examine his fingernails, which needed no attention; he would look for specks of lint on his tropical worsted trousers, from which he had removed the last speck some time ago. He would look out of the window, which gave on one of the fashionable avenues of the city of Cannes; but he had already become familiar with the view, and it did not change. He had a popular novel on his knee, and every now and then would find that he could not interest himself in the conversation of a set of smart society people.

Now and then one of several white-clad nurses would pass through the room. Lanny had asked them so many questions that he was ashamed to speak again. He knew that all husbands behave irrationally at this time; he had seen a group of them in a stage play, slightly risqué but harmless. They all fidgeted and consulted their watches; they all got up and walked about needlessly; they all bored the nurses with futile questions. The nurses had stereotyped replies, which, except for the language, were the same all over the world. "Oui, oui, monsieur. . . . Tout va bien. . . . Il faut laisser faire. . . . Il faut du temps. . . . C’est la nature."

Many times Lanny had heard that last statement in the Midi; it was a formula which excused many things. He had heard it more than once that afternoon, but it failed to satisfy him. He was in rebellion against nature and her ways. He hadn’t had much suffering in his own life, and didn’t want other people to suffer; he thought that if he had been consulted he could have suggested many improvements in the ways of this fantastic universe. The business of having people grow old and pass off the scene, and new ones having to be supplied! He knew persons who had carefully trained and perfected themselves; they were beautiful to look at, or possessed knowledge and skills, yet they had to die before long — and, knowing that fact, must provide a new lot to take their places.

Lanny Budd belonged to the leisure classes. You could tell it by a single glance at his smiling unlined face, his tanned skin with signs of well-nourished blood in it, his precise little mustache, his brown hair neatly trimmed and brushed, his suit properly tailored and freshly pressed, his shirt and tie, shoes and socks, harmonizing in color and of costly materials. It had been some time since he had seen any bloodshed or experienced personal discomfort. His life had been arranged to that end, and the same was true of his wife. But now this damnable messy business, this long-drawn-out strain and suffering—good God, what were doctors and scientists for if they couldn’t devise something to take the place of this! It was like a volcanic eruption in a well-ordered and peaceful community; not much better because you could foresee the event, going in advance to an immaculate hospice de la maternité and engaging a room at so much per week, an accoucheur at so much for the job.

A surgeon! A fellow with a lot of shiny steel instruments, prepared to assist nature in opening a woman up and getting a live and kicking infant out of her! It had seemed incredible to Lanny the first time he had heard about it, a youngster playing with the fisherboys of this Mediterranean coast, helping them pull strange creatures out of the sea and hearing them talk about the "facts of life." It seemed exactly as incredible to him at this moment, when he knew that it was going on in a room not far away, the victim his beautiful young playmate whom he had come to love so deeply. His too vivid imagination was occupied with the bloody details, and he would clench his hands until the knuckles were white. His protest against nature mounted to a clamor. He thought: "Any way but this! Anything that’s decent and sensible!" He addressed his ancient mother, asking why she hadn’t stuck to the method of the egg, which seemed to work so well with birds and snakes and lizards and fishes? But these so-called "warm-blooded creatures," that had so much blood and spilled it so easily!

II

Lanny knew that Irma didn’t share these feelings. Irma was a "sensible woman," not troubled with excess of imagination. She had said many times: "Don’t worry. I’ll be all right. It doesn’t last for­ever." Everybody agreed that this young Juno was made for motherhood; she had ridden horseback, swum, played tennis, and had a vigorous body. She hadn’t turned pale when she crossed the thresh­old of this hospital, or even when she heard the cries of another woman. Things always went all right with Irma Barnes, and she had told Lanny to go home and play the piano and forget her; but here he sat, and thought about the details which he had read in an encyclopedia article entitled "Obstetrics." From boyhood he had had the habit of looking up things in that dependable work; but, damn it all, the article gave an undue proportion of space to "breech presentations" and other variations from the normal, and Lanny might just as well have been in the delivery-room. He would have liked to go there, but that would have been considered an extreme variation from the normal in this land of rigid conventions.

So he sat in the little reception-room, and now and then the perspiration would start on his forehead, even though it was a cool spring day on the Riviera. He was glad that he had the room to himself; at times, when somebody came through, he would lower his eyes to his book and pretend to be absorbed. But if it was one of the nurses, he couldn’t keep from stealing a glance, hoping that it was the nurse and the moment. The woman would smile; the conventions permitted her to smile at a handsome young gentleman, but did not permit her to go into obstetrical details. "Tout va bien, monsieur. Soyez tranquille." In such places the wheel of life revolves on schedule; those who tend the machinery acquire a professional attitude, their phrases become standardized, and you have mass production of politeness as well as of babies.

III

Lanny Budd was summoned to the telephone. It was Pietro Corsatti, Italian-born American who represented a New York newspaper in Rome and was having a vacation on the Riviera. He had once done Lanny a favor, and now had been promised one in return. "Pete" was to have the news the moment it happened; but it refused to happen, and maybe wasn’t going to happen. "I know how you feel," said the correspondent, sympathetically. "I’ve been through it."

"It’s been four hours!" exclaimed the outraged young husband.

"It may be four more, and it may be twenty-four. Don’t take it too hard. It’s happened a lot of times." The well-known cynicism of the journalist.

Lanny returned to his seat, thinking about an Italian-American with a strong Brooklyn accent who had pushed his way to an important newspaper position, and had so many funny stories to tell about the regime fascista and its leaders, whom, oddly enough, he called "wops." One of his best stories was about how he had become the guide, philosopher, and friend of a New York "glamour girl" who had got herself engaged to a fascinating aristocrat in Rome and had then made the discovery that he was living with the ballerina of the opera and had no idea of giving her up. The American girl had broken down and wept in Pete’s presence, asking him what to do, and he had told her: "Take a plane and fly straight to Lanny Budd, and ask him to marry you in spite of the fact that you are too rich!"

It is tough luck when a journalist cannot publish his best story. Pete hadn’t been asked not to, but, all the same, he hadn’t, so now Lanny was his friend for life, and would go out of his way to give him a break whenever he could. They talked as pals, and Lanny didn’t mind telling what only a few of his friends knew, that Irma had done exactly what Pete had said, and she and Lanny had been married on the day she had found him in London. As the Brooklyn dialect had it, they had "gone right to it," and here was the result nine months later: Lanny sitting in a reception-room of an hospice de la maternité, awaiting the arrival of Sir Stork, the blessed event, the little bundle from heaven—he knew the phrases, because he and Irma had been in New York and had read the "tabs" and listened to "radio reporters" shooting out gossip and slang with the rapid-fire effect of a Budd machine gun.

Lanny had promised Pete a scoop; something not so difficult, because French newspapermen were not particularly active in the pursuit of the knightly stork; the story might be cabled back to Paris for the English language papers there. Lanny had hobnobbed with the correspondents so much that he could guess what Pete would send in his "cablese" and how it would appear dressed up by the rewrite man in the sweet land of liberty. Doubtless Pete had already sent a "flash," and readers of that morning’s newspapers were learning that Mrs. Lanny Budd, who was Irma Barnes, the glamour girl of last season, was in a private hospital in Cannes awaiting the blessed event.

The papers would supply the apposite details: that Irma was the only daughter of J. Paramount Barnes, recently deceased utilities magnate, who had left her the net sum of twenty-three million dollars; that her mother was one of the New York Vandringhams, and her uncle was Horace Vandringham, Wall Street manipulator cleaned out in the recent market collapse; that Irma’s own fortune was said to have been cut in half, but she still owned a palatial estate on Long Island, to which she was expected to return. The papers would add that the expectant father was the son of Robert Budd of Budd Gunmakers Corporation of Newcastle, Connecticut; that his mother was the famous international beauty, widow of Marcel Detaze, the French painter whose work had created a sensation in New York last fall. Such details were eagerly read by a public which lived upon the doings of the rich, as the ancient Greeks had lived upon the affairs of the immortals who dwelt upon the snowy top of Mount Olympus.

IV

Lanny would have preferred that his child should be born outside the limelight, but he knew it wasn’t possible; this stream of electrons, or waves, or whatever it was, would follow Irma on her travels—so long as she had the other half of her fortune. As a matter of fact the fortune wasn’t really diminished, for everybody else had lost half of his or hers, so the proportions remained the same. Irma Barnes still enjoyed the status of royalty, and so did the fortunate young man whom she had chosen for her prince consort. In the days of the ancien regime, when a child was born to the queen of France it had been the long-established right of noblemen and ladies to satisfy themselves that it was a real heir to the throne and no fraud; no stork stories were accepted, but they witnessed with their own eyes the physical emergence of the infant dauphin. Into the chamber of Marie Antoinette they crowded in such swarms that the queen cried out that she was suffocating, and the king opened a window with his own hands. It wasn’t quite that bad now with the queen of the Barnes estate, but it was a fact that the newspaper-reading and radio-listening public would have welcomed hourly bulletins as to what was going on in this hospice de la maternité.

But, damn it, even Lanny himself didn’t know what was going on! What was the use of planning what to say to newspaper reporters about the heir or heiress apparent to the Barnes fortune, when it refused so persistently to make itself apparent, and for all the prince consort knew the surgeon might be engaged in a desperate struggle with a "cross-birth," or perhaps having to cut the infant to pieces, or perform a Caesarean section to save its life! Lanny dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands, and got up and began to pace the floor. Every time he turned toward the bell-button in the reception-room he had an impulse to press it. He was paying for service, and wasn’t receiving it, and he was getting up steam to demand it. But just at that juncture a nurse came through the room, cast one of her conventional smiles upon him, and remarked: "Soyez tranquille, monsieur. Tout va bien."

V

Lanny called his mother on the telephone. Beauty Budd had been through this adventure two and a half times—so she said—and spoke as one having authority. There wasn’t a thing he could do, so why not come home and have something to eat, instead of worrying himself and getting in other people’s way? This was the woman’s job, and nobody in all creation was so superfluous as the husband. Lanny answered that he wasn’t hungry, and he wasn’t being allowed to bother anybody.

He went back to his seat in the reception-room, and thought about ladies. They were, as a rule, a highly individualistic lot; each on her own, and sharply aware of the faults of the others. He thought of those who made up his mother’s set, and therefore had played a large part in his own life; he recalled the sly little digs he had heard them give one another, the lack of solidarity he had seen them display. They had been polite to Irma, but he was certain that behind her back, and behind his, they found it difficult to forgive her for being so favored of fortune. However, as her pregnancy had moved to its climax they had seemed to gather about her and become tender and considerate; they would have come and helped to fetch and carry, to hold her hands and pull against them in her spasms of pain, had it not been for the fact that there were professional women trained for these services.

Lanny thought about his mother, and her role in this drama, the stage entrance of another soul. Beauty had been an ideal mother-in-law so far. She had worked hard to make this marriage, for she believed in money; there was in her mind no smallest doubt of money’s rightness, or of money’s right to have its way. Had not her judgment been vindicated by the events of a dreadful Wall Street panic? Where would they all have been, what would have become of them, if it hadn’t been for Irma’s fortune? Who was there among Irma’s friends who hadn’t wanted help? Go ahead and pretend to be contemptuous of money if you pleased; indulge yourself in Pink talk, as Lanny did—but sooner or later it was proved that it is money which makes the mare go, and which feeds the mare, takes care of her shiny coat, and provides her with a warm and well-bedded stall.

Beauty Budd was going to become a grandmother. She pretended to be distressed at the idea; she made a moue, exclaiming that it would set the seal of doom upon her social career. Other handicaps you might evade by one device or another. You might fib about the number of your years, and have your face lifted, and fill your crow’s-feet with skin enamel; but when you were a grandmother, when anyone could bring that charge publicly and you had to keep silent, that was the end of you as a charmer, a butterfly, a professional beauty.

But that was all mere spoofing. In reality Beauty was delighted at the idea of there being a little one to inherit the Barnes fortune and to be trained to make proper use of the prestige and power it conferred. That meant to be dignified and splendid, to be admired and courted, to be the prince or princess of that new kind of empire which the strong men of these days had created. Beauty’s head was buzzing with romantic notions derived from the fairytales she had read as a child. She had brought these imaginings with her to Paris and merged them with the realities of splendid equipages, costly furs and jewels, titles and honors—and then the figure of a young Prince Charming, the son of a munitions manufacturer from her homeland. Beauty Budd’s had been a Cinderella story, and it was now being carried further than the fairytales usually go. Grandma Cinderella!

VI

Lanny couldn’t stand any more of this suspense, this premonition of impending calamity. He rang the bell and demanded to see the head nurse; yes, even he, the superfluous husband, had some rights in a crisis like this! The functionary made her appearance; grave, stiff with starch and authority, forbidding behind pincenez. In response to Lanny’s demand she consented to depart from the established formula, that all was going well and that he should be tranquil. With professional exactitude she explained that in the female organism there are tissues which have to be stretched, passages which have to be widened—the head nurse made a gesture of the hands— and there is no way for this to be accomplished save the way of nature, the efforts of the woman in labor. The accoucheur would pay a visit in the course of the next hour or so, and he perhaps would be able to put monsieur’s mind at rest.

Lanny was disturbed because this personage was not in attendance upon Irma now. The husband had assumed that when he agreed to the large fee requested, he was entitled to have the man sit by Irma’s bedside and watch her, or at any rate be in the building, prepared for emergencies. But here the fellow had gone about other duties, or perhaps pleasures. He was an Englishman, and was probably having a round or two of golf; then he would have his shower, and his indispensable tea and conversation; after which he expected to stroll blandly in and look at Irma—and meanwhile whatever dreadful thing was happening might have gone so far as to be irremediable!

Lanny resumed his seat in the well-cushioned chair, and tried to read the popular novel, and wished he had brought something more constructive. The conversation of these fashionable characters was too much like that which was now going on in the casinos and tearooms and drawing-rooms of this playground of Europe. The financial collapse overseas hadn’t sobered these people; they were still gossiping and chattering; and Lanny Budd was in rebellion against them, but didn’t know what to do about it. Surely in the face of the awful thing that was happening in this hospice—knowing it to be their own fate through the ages—the women ought to be having some serious concern about life, and doing something to make it easier for others! They ought to be feeling for one another some of the pity which Lanny was feeling for Irma!

VII

The door to the street opened, and there entered a tall, vigorous-appearing American of thirty-five or so, having red hair and a cheerful smile: Lanny’s one-time tutor and dependable friend, Jerry Pendleton from the state of Kansas, now proprietor of a tourist bureau in Cannes. Beauty had phoned to him: "Do go over there and stop his worrying." Jerry was the fellow for the job, because he had been through this himself, and had three sturdy youngsters and a cheerful little French wife as evidence that la nature wasn’t altogether out of her wits. Jerry knew exactly how to kid his friend along and make him take it; he seated himself in the next chair and commanded: "Cheer up! This isn’t the Meuse-Argonne!"

Yes, ex-Lieutenant Jerry Pendleton, who had enlisted and begun as a machine-gun expert, knew plenty about blood and suffering. Mostly he didn’t talk about it; but once on a long motor ride, and again sitting out in the boat when the fish didn’t happen to be biting, he had opened up and told a little of what he had seen. The worst of it was that the men who had suffered and died hadn’t accomplished anything, so far as a survivor could see; France had been saved, but wasn’t making much use of her victory, nor was any other nation. This battle that Irma was fighting in the other room was of a more profitable kind; she’d have a little something for her pains, and Lanny for his—so said the former doughboy, with a grin.

More than once Lanny had been glad to lean on this sturdy fellow. That dreadful time when Marcel Detaze had leaped from a stationary balloon in flames it had been Jerry who had driven Lanny and his mother up to the war zone and helped to bring the broken man home and nurse him back to life. So now when he chuckled and said: "You ain’t seen nothin' yet," Lanny recognized the old doughboy spirit.

The tourist agent had troubles of his own at present. He mentioned how fast business was falling off, how many Americans hadn’t come to the Riviera that season. Apparently the hard times were going to spread to Europe. Did Lanny think so? Lanny said he surely did, and told how he had argued the matter with his father. Maybe the money values which had been wiped out in Wall Street were just paper, as so many declared; but it was paper that you had been able to spend for anything you wanted, including steamship tickets and traveler’s checks. Now you didn’t have it, so you didn’t spend it. Lanny and his wife could have named a score of people who had braved the snow and sleet of New York the past winter and were glad if they had the price of meal tickets.

Jerry said he’d been hard up more than once, and could stand it again. He’d have to let his office force go, and he and Cerise would do the work. Fortunately they had their meal tickets, for they still lived in the Pension Flavin, owned and run by the wife’s mother and aunt. "You’ll have to take me fishing some more and let me carry home the fish," said the ex-tutor; and Lanny replied: "Just as soon as I know Irma’s all right, we’ll make a date." The moment he said this his heart gave a jump. Was he ever going to know that Irma was all right? Suppose her heart was failing at this moment, and the nurses were frantically trying to restore it!

VIII

The surgeon arrived at last: a middle-aged Englishman, smooth-shaven, alert, and precise; his cheeks were rosy from a "workout" in the sunshine followed by a showerbath. He had talked with the head nurse over the telephone; everything was going excellently. Lanny could understand that a surgeon has to take his job serenely; he cannot suffer with all his patients; whatever others may do, he has to accept la nature and her ways. He said he would see Mrs. Budd and report.

Lanny and his friend resumed their discussion of depressions and their cause. Lanny had a head full of theories, derived from the Red and Pink papers he took. Jerry’s reading was confined mostly to the Saturday Evening Post and the Paris edition of the New York Tribune; therefore he was puzzled, and couldn’t figure out what had become of all the money that people had had early in October 1929, and where it had gone by the end of that month. Lanny explained the credit structure: one of those toy balloons, shining brightly in the sunshine, dancing merrily in the breeze, until some­one sticks a pin into it. Jerry said: "By heck, I ought to study up on those things!"

The surgeon reappeared, as offensively cheerful as ever. Mrs. Budd was a patient to be proud of; she was just the way a young woman ought to keep herself. The "bearing-down pains," as they were called, might continue for some little time yet. Meanwhile there was nothing to be done. Lanny was dismayed, but knew there was no use exhibiting his feelings; he too must maintain the profes­sional manner. "I’ll be within call," said the surgeon. "You might as well get it off your mind for a while." Lanny thanked him.

After the surgeon had gone, Jerry said: "When do we eat?" Lanny wanted to say that he couldn’t eat, but he knew that Jerry was there for the purpose of making him change his mind. It was dinner-hour at the Pension Flavin, and Jerry recited a jingle to the effect that he knew a boarding-house not far away where they had ham and eggs three times a day. "Oh, how those boarders yell when they hear the dinner-bell!"—and so on. This was the sporting way to deal with the fact that your mother-in-law runs a medium-priced pension in the most fashionable of Riviera towns. Lanny knew also that he hadn’t visited the Pendleton family for some time, and that, having won the biggest matrimonial sweepstakes, it was up to him to show that he didn’t mean to "high-hat" his poor friends.

"All right," he said; "but I’ll be glum company."

''The boarders know all about it," responded Jerry.

Indeed they did! Wherever the boarders came from and whatever they were, they knew about the Budd family and felt themselves members of it. For sixteen years Jerry Pendleton had been going fishing with Lanny Budd, and the boarders had eaten the fish. At the outset Jerry had been a boarder like themselves, but after he had driven the Boches out of France he had married the daughter of the pension. And then had come the time when another of the boarders had married Lanny’s mother; from that time on, the boarders had all regarded themselves as Budds, and entitled to every scrap of gossip concerning the family.

IX

Driving back to the hospital, Lanny took the precaution to stop and purchase several magazines, French, English, and American. He would equip himself for a siege, and if one subject failed to hold his attention he would try others. Arriving at the reception-room, he found that he was no longer alone; in one of the chairs sat a French gentleman, stoutish and prosperous, betraying in aspect and manner those symptoms which Lanny recognized.

The stranger’s misery loved company, and he introduced himself as an avocat from a near-by town. It was his wife’s first accouchement, and he was in a terrible state of fidgets and could hardly keep his seat; he wanted to bother the nurses with questions every time one entered the room. He seemed to Lanny absurdly naive; he actually didn’t know about the "bearing-down pains," that they were according' to the arrangements of la nature, and that women didn’t very often die of them. Speaking as a veteran of some ten hours, Lanny explained about the stretching of tissues, and comforted the stranger as best he could. Later on, seeing that his advice was without effect, Lanny became bored, and buried himself in the latest issue of the New Statesman.

He would have liked very much to inquire whether there had been any change in the status of his wife; but the egregious emotionalism of Monsieur Fouchard reminded him that the Budds were stern Anglo-Saxons and should behave accordingly. He resolutely fixed his attention upon an article dealing with the final reparations settlement of the World War, now more than eleven years in the past, and the probable effects of that settlement upon the various nations involved. This was a subject of interest to a young man who had been born in Switzerland of American parents and had lived chunks of his life in France, Germany, England, and "the States." His many friends in these countries belonged to the ruling classes and took political and economic developments as their personal affairs.

The surgeon was a long time in returning, and Lanny began once more to feel himself a defrauded client. He forgot that there are telephones, whereby an obstetrician can keep informed as to his patient while reading the latest medical journal at home or playing a game of billiards at his club. When the Englishman at last appeared, he informed the anxious husband that the time for action was approaching, and that Mrs. Budd would soon be taken to the delivery-room. After that Lanny found it impossible to interest himself in what L’illustration had to report about the prospects for the spring Salons—important though this subject was to one who earned his living by buying or selling works of art on commission.

There was no use trying to be Anglo-Saxon any longer. Better give up and admit the hegemony of mother nature. Lanny put down his magazine and watched Monsieur Fouchard pacing the floor of the reception-room, and when Monsieur Fouchard sat down and lighted a cigarette, Lanny got up and did the pacing. Meanwhile they talked. The Frenchman told about his wife; she was only nineteen, her charms were extraordinary, and Monsieur Fouchard spared no details in describing them. He wanted to tell the whole story of their courtship and marriage, and was grateful to a stranger for listening.

Lanny didn’t tell so much; nor was it necessary. Monsieur Fouchard had heard the surgeon call him by name, and was aware who this elegant young American must be. He had read about Irma Barnes, and began to talk as if he were an old friend of the family, indeed as if he were about to take charge of Irma’s convalescence and the nursing of her infant. Lanny, who had grown up in France, knew that it wasn’t worth while to take offense; much better to be human. They would set up a sort of temporary association, a League of Husbands in Labor. Others might be joining them before the night was over.

X

The accoucheuse of Madame Fouchard arrived, a Frenchwoman; she succeeded in persuading the husband that it would be a long time before the blessed event could take place, so that gentleman bade his fellow league-member a sentimental farewell. Lanny answered a call from his mother and reported on the situation; after pacing the floor some more, he sat down and tried to put his mind upon an account of a visit to the hanging monasteries of Greece. He had seen them as a boy, but now wouldn’t have cared if all the monks had been hanged along with the monasteries. He simply couldn’t believe that a normal delivery could take so long a time. He rang the bell and had a session with the night head nurse, only to find that she had learned the formulas. "Tout va bien, monsieur. Soyez tranquille."

Lanny was really glad when the door opened and a lady was escorted in, obviously in that condition in which ladies enter such places. With her came a French gentleman with a dark brown silky beard; Lanny recognized him as a piano-teacher well known in Cannes. The lady was turned over to the nurse’s care, and the gentleman became at once a member of Lanny’s league. Inasmuch as Lanny was a pianist himself, and had a brother-in-law who was a violin virtuoso, the two might have talked a lot of shop; but no, they preferred to tell each other how long they had been married, and how old their wives were, and how they felt and how their wives felt. This confrontation with nature in the raw had reduced them to the lowest common denominator of humanity. Art, science, and culture no longer existed; only bodies, blood, and babies.

Lanny would listen for a while, and then he would cease to hear what the bearded Frenchman was saying. Lanny was walking up and down the floor of the reception-room, with beads of perspiration standing oat upon his forehead. Oh, God, this surely couldn’t be right! Something dreadful must be happening in that delivery-room, some of those things which the encyclopedia told about: a failure of the mother’s heart, the breaking of the "waters," or one of those irregular presentations which occur in varying percentages of cases. Manifestly, if the accoucheur had encountered trouble, he wouldn’t come running out to tell the expectant father; he’d be busy, and so would the nurses. Only when it was all over would anyone break the tragic news; and then Lanny would never be able to forgive himself.

A serious defect in the practical arrangements of this hospice de la misere! There ought to be some system, a telephone in the delivery-room, a bulletin board, a set of signals! It is a problem which calls for collective solution; the opening of a paternity hospital, a place for expectant fathers, where they may receive proper care! Nurses will have some time for them. Attendants will consider their feelings, and give them information—perhaps lectures on the subject of obstetrics, especially prepared for sensitive minds, with the abnormalities omitted or played down. There will be soft music, perhaps motion pictures; above all there will be news, plenty of it, prompt and dependable. Perhaps a place like a broker’s office, where a "Translux" gives the market figures on a screen.

Every time Lanny came near the wall with the bell-button he wanted to press it and demand exact information as to the condition of his beloved wife. Every time the French music-teacher asked him a question it was harder to conceal the fact that he wasn’t listening. A damnable thing! Put the blame wherever you chose, on nature or on human incompetence, the fact remained that this wife whom he loved so tenderly, with so much pity, must be in agony, she must be completely exhausted. Something ought to be done! Here it was getting on toward midnight—Lanny looked at his wristwatch and saw that three minutes had passed since he had looked the last time; it was only twenty-two minutes to eleven— but that was bad enough—some thirteen hours since the labor pains had begun, and they had told him it was time to leave her to her fate. Damn it—

XI

A door of the room opened, and there was a nurse. Lanny took one glance, and saw that she was different from any nurse he had seen thus far. She was smiling, yes, actually beaming with smiles. "Oh, monsieur!" she exclaimed. "C’est une fille! Une tres belle fille! Si charmante!" She made a gesture, indicating the size of a female prodigy. Lanny found himself going suddenly dizzy, and reached for a chair.

"Et madame?" he cried.

"Madame est si brave! Elle est magnifique! Tout va bien." The formula again. Lanny poured out questions, and satisfied himself that Irma was going to survive. She was exhausted, but that was to be expected. There were details to be attended to; in half an hour or so it should be possible for monsieur to see both mother and daughter. "Tout de suite! Soyez tranquille!"

The teacher of piano had Lanny Budd by the hand and was shaking it vigorously. For some time after the American had resumed his seat the other was still pouring out congratulations. "Merci, merci," Lanny said mechanically, meanwhile thinking: "A girl! Beauty will be disappointed." But he himself had no complaint. He had been a ladies' man from childhood, seeing his father only at long intervals, cared for by his mother and by women servants. There had been his mother’s women friends, then his half-sister and his stepmother in New England, then a new half-sister at Bienvenu, then a succession of his sweethearts, and last of all his wife. He had got something from them all, and would find a daughter no end of fun. It was all right.

Lanny got up, excused himself from the French gentleman, and went to the telephone. He called his mother and told her the news. Yes, he said, he was delighted, or would be when he got over being woozy. No, he wouldn’t forget the various cablegrams: one to his father in Connecticut, one to Irma’s mother on Long Island, one to his half-sister Bess in Berlin. Beauty would do the telephoning to various friends in the neighborhood—trust her not to miss those thrills! Lanny would include his friend Rick in England and his friend Kurt in Germany; he had the messages written, save for filling in the word "girl."

He carried out his promise to Pietro Corsatti. It was still early in New York; the story would make the night edition of the morning papers, that which was read by cafe society, whose darling Irma Barnes had been. After receiving Pete’s congratulations, Lanny went back for others which the French gentleman had thought up. Astonishing how suddenly the black clouds had lifted from the sky of a young husband’s life, how less murderous the ways of mother nature appeared! It became possible to chat with a piano-teacher about the technique he employed; to tell one’s own experiences with the Leschetizsky method, and later with the Breithaupt; to explain the forearm rotary motion, and illustrate it on the arm of one’s chair. Lanny found himself tapping out the opening theme of Liszt’s symphonic poem, From the Cradle to the Grave. But he stopped with the first part.

XII

The cheerful nurse came again, and escorted the successful father down a passage to a large expanse of plate-glass looking into a room with tiny white metal cribs. Visitors were not permitted inside, but a nurse with a white mask over her mouth and nose brought to the other side of the glass a bundle in a blanket and laid back the folds, exposing to Lanny’s gaze a brick-red object which might have been a great bloated crinkled caterpillar, only it had appendages, and a large round ball at the top with a face which would have been human if it hadn’t been elfish. There was a mouth with lips busily sucking on nothing, and a pair of large eyes which didn’t move; however, the nurse at Lanny’s side assured him that they had been tested with a light, and they worked. He was assured that this was his baby; to prove it there was a tiny necklace with a metal tag; monsieur and madame might rest assured that they would not carry home the baby of an avocat, nor yet that of a teacher of piano technique.

The bloated red caterpillar was folded up in the blanket again, and Lanny was escorted to Irma’s room. She lay in a white hospital bed, her head sunk back in a pillow, her eyes closed. How pale she looked, how different from the rich brunette beauty he had left that morning! Now her dark hair was disordered—apparently they hadn’t wished to disturb her even that much. Lanny tiptoed into the room, and she opened her eyes slowly, as if with an effort; when she recognized him she gave him a feeble smile.

"How are you, Irma?"

"I’ll be all right," she whispered. "Tired, awfully tired."

The nurse had told him not to talk to her. He said: "It’s a lovely baby."

"I’m glad. Don’t worry. I’ll rest, and get better."

Lanny felt a choking in his throat; it was pitiful, the price that women had to pay! But he knew he musn’t trouble her with his superfluous emotions. A nurse came with a little wine, which she took through a tube. There was a sedative in it, and she would sleep. He took her hand, which lay limp upon the coverlet, and kissed it gently. "Thank you, dear. I love you." That was enough.

Outside in the passage was the surgeon, all cleaned up and ready for the outside world. His professional manner was second nature. Everything was as it should be; never a better patient, a more perfect delivery. A few hours' sleep, a little nourishment, and Mr. Budd would be surprised by the change in his wife. A lovely sturdy infant, well over nine pounds—that had caused the delay. "Sorry you had such a long wait; no help for that. Do you read the Bible, Mr. Budd? A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she re-membereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. In this case it’s a woman, but we’re no longer in ancient Judea, and the women are bossing the show. In my country and yours they have the vote, and they own more than half the prop­erty, I’m told; it’s their world, and what they are going to do with it we men have to wait and find out. Good night, Mr. Budd."

"Good night," said Lanny. He owed the man thirty thousand francs, which sounded like a thumping price, but the franc was low. Lanny didn’t begrudge it. He thought: "I’d have offered a hundred thousand an hour ago!"

I

THE house on the Bienvenu estate in which Irma and Lanny were living was called the Cottage, but was nearly as large as the villa and uniform in style, built around a central patio, or court; the walls were of pink stucco with window shutters of pale blue, and a red-tiled roof over its single story. It looked out over the ever-changing Golfe Juan, and beyond to the mountains behind which the sun went down. The house was only three years old, but already the banana plants in the patio were up to the eaves, and the bougainvillaea vines were crawling over the tiles. Early April was the loveliest time of the year, and the patio was a little paradise, with blos­soms of every hue exulting in the floods of sunshine. The young mother might lie on a chaise-longue in sun or shade, and read in a New York paper about March weather, with icy gales wrecking the seashore cottages and piling small boats up on beaches.

In the most exquisite of silk-lined bassinets lay the most precious of female infants, with a veil to protect her from over-curious insects. Near by sat a trained nurse, a mature and conscientious Church of England woman. She had two nursemaids under her orders, which were based on the latest discoveries in the physiology and psychology of infants. There was to be no coddling, no kissing, no rocking to sleep of this mite of royalty; there was to be no guesswork and no blundering in its care; no hostile germs were to steal past the barricades which surrounded it, and anyone who showed the least trace of a cold was banished from the premises. Guests and even relatives had to obey the orders of the all-knowing Miss Severne; she was armed with authority to defy even grand- mothers. As for Irma, she had agreed to make the supreme sacrifice; every four hours the precious bundle was to be brought for her nursing, and she was to be on hand, no matter what temptations the world of fashion might put in her way. Back to Rousseau!

There had been family councils and international negotiations concerning a name for this multimillionaire heiress. Many claims had been entered, and if they had all been granted, the little one would have been loaded down after the fashion of European royalty. Manifestly, it wouldn’t do to give her the name Beauty; that was something that had to be earned—and suppose she failed to meet the test? Beauty’s real name, Mabel, she didn’t like—so that was out. Irma’s own claims she renounced in favor of her mother, to whom it would mean so much. Irma was going to live most of her life in Europe, because that was what Lanny wanted; so should they not give a pining dowager in a Long Island palace whatever solace she could derive from having her name carried on? The Barnes clan also was entitled to consideration, having furnished the money. "Frances Barnes Budd" was a name not hard to say; but never, never was it to be "Fanny"! The Queen Mother of Shore Acres was helpless to understand how her once lovely name was being put to such base uses in these modern days.

II

Irma was reclining in the patio, enjoying the delight of holding the naked mite in her arms while it absorbed the sunshine of the Midi for a measured three minutes. Lanny came in, saying: "Uncle Jesse is over at the villa. Do you want to meet him?"

"Do you think I should?"

"You surely don’t have to if you don’t feel like it."

"Won’t his feelings be hurt?"

"He’s used to that." Lanny said it with a grin.

Irma had heard no little talk about this "Red sheep" of her mother-in-law’s family. At first her curiosity hadn’t been aroused, for she didn’t take political questions to heart, and while she had no doubt that Communists were dreadful people, still, if that was what Jesse Blackless believed, he had to say it. Threats to the social order had never been real to Irma—at least not up to the time of the panic. During that convulsion she had heard many strange ideas discussed, and had begun to wonder about them. Now she said: "If you and your mother see him, I ought to see him too."

"Don’t let him corrupt you," replied the husband, grinning again. He got fun out of arguing with his Red uncle, and used him for teasing other people.

Lanny went over to the villa and came back with a tall, odd-looking man, having an almost entirely bald head fairly baked by the sun—for he went about most of the time without a hat. He was dressed carelessly, as became a painter, with sandals, white duck trousers, and a shirt open at the throat. His face had many wrinkles, which he increased when he smiled in his peculiar twisted way; he was given to that kind of humor which consists in saying something different from what you mean, and which assumes under­standing on the part of other people which they do not always possess. Jesse Blackless was satisfied with the world in which he lived, and found his pleasure in reducing it to absurdity.

"Well, so this is Irma!" he said, looking down at her. She had covered up her bosom with the orange-colored peignoir of Chinese silk which she was wearing. Her vivid brunette color, which had come back quickly, should have pleased a painter; but Uncle Jesse painted only street urchins and poor beggar folk and workingmen with signs of hard toil on them.

"And this is the baby!" he said, peering into the well-shaded bassinet. He didn’t offer any forbidden intimacies, but instead remarked: "Watch out for her—she’d be worth a lot to kidnapers." A sufficiently horrid idea.

The visitor seated himself in a canvas chair and stretched his long legs. His glance wandered from the young wife to the young husband and back again, and he said: "You made a lucky choice, Irma. A lot of people have tried to ruin him, but they haven’t succeeded." It was the first time Lanny had ever known his Red uncle to pay anybody a compliment, and he valued it accordingly. Irma thanked the speaker, adding that she was sure his judgment was good.

"I know," declared the painter, "because I tried to ruin him myself."

"Have you given up hope?"

"There’d be no use in trying now, since he’s married to you. I am a believer in economic determinism."

Lanny explained: "Uncle Jesse thinks he believes that everybody’s behavior is conditioned by the state of his pocketbook. But he’s a living refutation of his own theory. If he followed his pocket-book, he’d be painting portraits of the idle rich here on this coast, whereas he’s probably been meeting with a group of revolutionary conspirators somewhere in the slums of Cannes."

"I’m a freak," said Uncle Jesse. "Nature produces only a few of these, and any statement of social causes has to be based upon the behavior of the mass."

So this pair took to arguing. Irma listened, but most of her thoughts were occupied with the personality of the man. What was he really like? Was he as bitter and harsh as he sounded, or was this only a mask with which he covered his feelings? What was it that had hurt him and made him so out of humor with his own kind of people?

III

The discussion lasted quite a while. They both seemed to enjoy it, even though they said sarcastic things, each about the other. The French word for abuse is "injures," which also means injuries, but no hard saying appeared to injure either of these men. Apparently they had heard it all before. Lanny’s favorite remark was that his uncle was a phonograph; he put on a record and it ground out the old dependable tune. There was one called "dialectical materialism" and another called "proletarian dictatorship"—long words which meant nothing to Irma. "He wants to take my money and divide it up among the poor," she thought. "How far would it go, and how long would it take them to get rid of it?" She had heard her father say this, and it sounded convincing.

They talked a great deal about what was happening in Russia. Irma had been a child of nine at the time of the revolution, but she had heard about it since, and here on the Riviera she had met Russians who had escaped from the dreadful Bolsheviks, sometimes with nothing but what they had on. You would be told that the handsome and distinguished-looking head waiter in a cafe was a former Russian baron; that a night-club dancer was the daughter of a one-time landowner. Did Uncle Jesse want things like that to happen in France and the United States? Irma tried to tell herself that he didn’t really mean it; but no, he was a determined man, and there often came a grim look on his face; you could imagine him willing to shoot people who stood in his way. Irma knew that the Paris police had "detained" him a couple of times, and that he had defied them. Apparently he was ready to pay whatever price his revolution cost.

Presently he revealed the fact that he was taking steps to become a citizen of France. He had lived in the country for thirty-five years without ever bothering; but now it appeared that "the party" wanted him to run for the Chamber of Deputies. He had made himself a reputation as an orator. Said Lanny: "They want him to put on his phonograph records for all France."

Irma, who was money-conscious, thought at once: "He’s come to get us to put up for his campaign." Lanny didn’t have much money since his father had got caught in the slump. Irma resolved: "I won’t help him. I don’t approve of it." She had discovered the power of her money during the Wall Street crisis, and was learning to enjoy it.

But then another point of view occurred to her. Maybe it would be a distinguished thing to have a relative in the Chamber, even if he was a Communist! She wasn’t sure about this, and wished she knew more about political affairs. Now and then she had that thought about various branches of knowledge, and would resolve to find out; but then she would forget because it was too much trouble. Just now they had told her that she musn’t get excited about anything, because excitement would spoil her milk. A nuisance, turning yourself into a cow! But it was pleasant enough here in the sunshine, being entertained with novel ideas.

Lanny apparently agreed with his uncle that what the Russians were doing was important—for them. The dispute was over the question whether the same thing was going to happen in France and England and America. Lanny maintained that these countries, being "democracies," could bring about the changes peaceably. That was his way; he didn’t want to hurt anybody, but to discuss ideas politely and let the best ideas win. However, Uncle Jesse kept insisting that Lanny and his Socialist friends were aiding the capitalists by fooling the workers, luring them with false hopes, keeping them contented with a political system which the capitalists had bought and paid for. Lanny, on the other hand, argued that it was the Reds who were betraying the workers, frightening the middle classes by violent threats and driving them into the camp of the reactionaries.

So it went, and the young wife listened without getting excited. Marriage was a strange adventure; you let yourself in for a lot of things you couldn’t have foreseen. These two most eccentric families, the Budds and the Blacklesses! Irma’s own family consisted of Wall Street people. They bought and sold securities and made fortunes or lost them, and that seemed a conventional and respectable kind of life; but now she had been taken to a household full of Reds and Pinks of all shades, and spiritualist mediums and religious healers, munitions makers and Jewish Schieber, musicians and painters and art dealers—you never knew when you opened your eyes in the moming what strange new creatures you were going to encounter before night. Even Lanny, who was so dear and sweet, and with whom Irma had entered into the closest of all intimacies, even he became suddenly a stranger when he got stirred up and began pouring out his schemes for making the world over—schemes which clearly involved his giving up his own property, and Irma’s giving up hers, and wiping out the hereditary rights of the long-awaited and closely guarded Frances Barnes Budd!

IV

Uncle Jesse stayed to lunch, then went his way; and after the nap which the doctor had prescribed for the nursing mother, Irma enjoyed the society of her stepfather-in-law—if there is a name for this odd relationship. Mr. Parsifal Dingle, Beauty’s new husband, came over from the villa to call on the baby. Irma knew him well, for they had spent the past summer on a yacht; he was a religious mystic, and certainly restful after the Reds and the Pinks. He never argued, and as a rule didn’t talk unless you began a conversation; he was interested in things going on in his own soul, and while he was glad to tell about them, you had to ask. He would sit by the bassinet and gaze at the infant, and there would come a blissful look on his round cherubic face; you would think there were two infants, and that their souls must be completely in tune.

The man of God would close his eyes, and be silent for a while, and Irma wouldn’t interrupt him, knowing that he was giving little Frances a "treatment." It was a sort of prayer with which he filled his mind, and he was quite sure that it affected the mind of the little one. Irma wasn’t sure, but she knew it couldn’t do any harm, for there was nothing except good in the mind of this gentle healer. He seemed a bit uncanny while sitting with Madame Zyszynski, the Polish medium, in one of her trances; conversing in the most matter-of-fact way with the alleged Indian spirit. "Tecumseh," as he called himself, "was whimsical and self-willed, and would tell something or refuse to tell, according to whether or not you were respectful to him and whether or not the sun was shining in the spirit world. Gradually Irma had got used to it all, for the spirits didn’t do any harm, and quite certainly Mr. Dingle didn’t; on the contrary, if you felt sick he would cure you. He had cured several members of the Bienvenu household, and it might be extremely convenient in an emergency.

Such were Irma’s reflections during the visits. She would ask him questions and let him talk, and it would be like going to church. Irma found it agreeable to talk about loving everybody, and thought that it might do some people a lot of good; they showed the need of it in their conversation, the traces they revealed of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. Mr. Dingle wanted to change the world, just as much as any Bolshevik, but he had begun with himself, and that seemed to Irma a fine idea; it didn’t threaten the Barnes fortune or the future of its heiress. The healer would read his mystical books, and magazines of what he called "New Thought," and then he would wander about the garden, looking at the flowers and the birds, and perhaps giving them a treatment—for they too had life in them and were products of love. Bienvenu appeared to contain everything that Mr. Dingle needed, and he rarely went off the estate unless someone invited him.

The strangest whim of fate, that the worldly Beauty Budd should have chosen this man of God to accompany her on the downhill of life! All her friends laughed over it, and were bored to death with her efforts to use the language of "spirituality." Certainly it hadn’t kept her from working like the devil to land the season’s greatest "catch" for her son; nor did it keep her from exulting brazenly in her triumph. Beauty’s religious talk no more than Lanny’s Socialist talk was causing them to take steps to distribute any large share of Irma’s unearned increment. On the contrary, they had stopped giving elaborate parties at Bienvenu, which was hard on everybody on the Cap d’Antibes—the tradesmen, the servants, the musicians, the couturiers, all who catered to the rich. It was hard on the society folk, who had been so scared by the panic and the talk of hard times on the way. Surely somebody ought to set an example of courage and enterprise—and who could have done it better than a glamour girl with a whole bank-vault full of "blue chip" stocks and bonds? What was going to become of smart society if its prime favorites began turning their estates into dairy farms and themselves into stud cattle?

V

There came a telegram from Berlin: "Yacht due at Cannes we are leaving by train tonight engage hotel accommodations. Bess." Of course Lanny wouldn’t follow those last instructions. When friends are taking you for a cruise and paying all your expenses for several months, you don’t let them go to a hotel even for a couple of days. There was the Lodge, a third house on the estate; it had been vacant all winter, and now would be opened and freshly aired and dusted. Irma’s secretary, Miss Featherstone, had been established as a sort of female major-domo and took charge of such operations. The expected guests would have their meals with Irma and Lanny, and "Feathers" would consult with the cook and see to the ordering of supplies. Everything would run as smoothly as water down a mill-race; Irma would continue to lie in the sunshine, read magazines, listen to Lanny play the piano, and nurse Baby Frances when one of the maids brought her.

Lanny telephoned his old friend Emily Chattersworth, who took care of the cultural activities of this part of the Riviera. Her drawing-room was much larger than any at Bienvenu, and people were used to coming there whenever a celebrity was available. Hansi Robin always played for her, and the fashionable folk who cared for music and the musical folk who were socially acceptable would be invited to Sept Chenes for a treat. Emily would send Hansi a check, and he would endorse it over to be used for the workers' educational project which was Lanny’s special hobby.

Just before sundown of that day Lanny and Irma sat on the loggia of their home, which looked out over the Golfe Juan, and watched the trim white Bessie Budd glide into the harbor of Cannes. They knew her a long way off, for she had been their home during the previous summer, and Lanny had taken two other cruises in her. With a pair of field-glasses they could recognize Captain Moeller, who had had a chance to marry them but had funked it. They could almost imagine they heard his large Prussian voice when it was time to slow down for passing the breakwater.

Next morning but one, Lanny drove into the city, with his little half-sister Marceline at his side and Irma’s chauffeur following with another car. The long blue express rolled in and delivered five of their closest friends, plus a secretary and a nursemaid in a uniform and cap with blue streamers, carrying an infant in arms. It was on account of this last that the cruise was being taken so early in the year; the two lactant mothers would combine their dairy farms, put them on shipboard, and transport them to delightful places of this great inland sea, famed in story.

Just prior to the World War, Lanny Budd, a small boy traveling on a train, had met a Jewish salesman of electrical gadgets; they had liked each other, and the stranger had given Lanny his card. This small object had lain in a bureau drawer; and if, later on, Lanny hadn’t happened to be rummaging in that drawer, how much would have been different in his life! He wouldn’t have written to Johannes Robin, and Johannes wouldn’t have come to call on him in Paris, and met Lanny’s father, and with the father’s money become one of the richest men in Germany. Lanny’s half-sister wouldn’t have met Hansi Robin, and shocked her family by marrying a Jewish musician. The yacht wouldn’t have been called the Bessie Budd, and wouldn’t have taken Lanny and his family on three cruises, and been the means of Lanny and Irma’s getting married in a hurry. They mightn’t have got married at all, and there wouldn’t have been any honeymoon cruise to New York, or any Baby Frances, or any floating dairy farm! In short, if that business card, "Johannes Robin, Agent, Maatschappij voor Electrische Specialiteiten, Rotterdam," had stayed covered up by Lanny Budd’s neckties and handkerchiefs most of Lanny’s life would have been missing!

VI

Two happy members of the prosperous classes welcoming five of their intimate friends on the platform of a railroad station. Everybody there knew who the Budds were, and knew that when they hugged and kissed people, and laughed and chatted with them gaily, the people must be wealthy and famous like themselves. A pleasant thing to have friends whom you can love and appreciate, and who will love and appreciate you. Pleasant also to have villas and motorcars and yachts; but many people do not have them, and do not have many dear friends. They know themselves to be dull and undistinguished, and feel themselves to be lonely; they stand and watch with a sad envy the behavior of the fortunate classes on those few occasions when they condescend to manifest their feelings in public.

Johannes Robin was the perfect picture of a man who has known how to make use of his opportunities in this world. His black overcoat of the finest cloth lined with silk; his black Homburg hat; his neatly trimmed little black mustache and imperial; his fine leather traveling-bags with many labels; his manner of quiet self-possession; his voice that seemed to be caressing you—everything about him was exactly right. He had sought the best of both body and mind and knew how to present it to the rest of the world. You would never hear him say: "Look at what I, Johannes Robin, have achieved!" No, he would say: "What an extraordinary civilization, in which a child who sat on the mud floor of a hut in a ghetto and recited ancient Hebrew texts while scratching his flea-bites has been able in forty years to make so much money!" He would add: "I’m not sure that I’m making the best use of it. What do you think?" That flattered you subtly.

As for Mama Robin, there wasn’t much you could do for her in the way of elegance. You could employ the most skillful couturier and give him carte blanche as to price, but Leah, wife of Jascha Rabinowich, would remain a Yiddishe mother, now a grandmother; a bit dumpier every year, and with no improvement in her accent, whether it was Dutch or German or English she was speaking. All she had was kindness and devotion, and if that wasn’t enough you would move on to some other part of the room.

The modern practice of easy divorces and remarriages makes complications for genealogists. Lanny had grown tired of explaining about his two half-sisters, and had taken to calling them sisters, and letting people figure it out. The name of Marceline Detaze made it plain that she was the daughter of the painter who had been killed in the last months of the war; also it was possible to guess that Bessie Budd Robin was the daughter of Lanny’s father in New England. On that stern and rock-bound coast her ancestors had won a hard and honest living; so Bess was tall and her features were thin and had conscientiousness written all over them. Her straight brown hair was bobbed, and she wore the simplest clothes which the style- makers would allow to come into the shops. She was twenty-two and had been married four years, but had put off having children because of her determination to play accompaniments for Hansi in exactly the way he wanted them.

Very touching to see how she watched every step he took, and managed him exactly as her mother at home managed a household. She carried his violin case and wouldn’t let him pick up a suitcase; those delicate yet powerful fingers must be devoted to the stopping of violin strings or the drawing of a bow. Hansi was a piece of tone-producing machinery; when they went on tour he was bundled up and delivered on a platform, and then bundled up and carried to a hotel and put to bed. Hansi’s face of a young Jewish saint, Hansi’s soulful dark eyes, Hansi’s dream of loveliness embodied in sound, drove the ladies quite beside themselves; they listened with hands clasped together, they rushed to the platform and would have thrown themselves at his feet, to say nothing of his head. But there was that erect and watchful-eyed granddaughter of the Puritans, with a formula which she said as often as it was called for: "I do everything for my husband that he requires—absolutely everything!"

The other members of the party were Freddi Robin’s wife, and her baby boy, a month older than little Frances. Freddi was at the University of Berlin, hoping to get a degree in economics. Rahel, a serious, gentle girl, contributed a mezzo-soprano voice to the choir of the yacht; also she led in singing choruses. With two pianos, a violin, a clarinet, and Mr. Dingle’s mouth-organ, they could sail the Mediterranean in safety, being able to drown out the voices of any sirens who might still be sitting on its rocky shores.

VII

If music be the food of love, play on! They were gathered in Lanny’s studio at Bienvenu, which had been built for Marcel and in which he had done his best work as a painter. There were several of his works on the walls, and a hundred or so stored in a back room. The piano was the big one which Lanny had purchased for Kurt Meissner and which he had used for seven years before going back to Germany. The studio was lined with bookcases containing the library of Lanny’s great-great-uncle. Here were all sorts of memories of the dead, and hopes of the living, with cabinets of music-scores in which both kinds of human treasures had been embodied and preserved. Hansi and Bess were playing Tchaikovsky’s great concerto, which meant so much to them. Hansi had rendered it at his debut in Carnegie Hall, with Bess and her parents in the audience; a critical occasion for the anxious young lovers.

Next evening they went over to Sept Chenes to meet a distinguished company, most of the fashionable people who had not yet left the Cote d’Azur. The whole family went, including Irma and Rahel. Since it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Bienvenu, the young nursing mothers might have three hours and a half of music and social life; but they mustn’t get excited. The two of them heartened each other, making bovine life a bit more tolerable. The feat they were performing was considered picturesque, a harmless eccentricity about which the ladies gossiped; the older ones mentioned it to their husbands, but the younger ones kept quiet, not wishing to put any notions into anybody’s head. No Rousseau in our family, thank you!

Hansi and Bess played Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, a composition which audiences welcome and which has to be in the repertoire of every virtuoso: a melancholy and moving andante over which the ladies may sigh; a scherzando to which young hearts may dance over flower-strewn meadows. It was no holiday for Bess, who wasn’t sure if she was good enough for this fastidious company; but she got through it all right and received her share of compliments. Lanny, who knew the music well, permitted his eyes to roam over the audience, and wondered what they were making of it, behind the well-constructed masks they wore. What to them was the meaning of these flights of genius, these incessant calls to the human spirit, these unremitting incitements to ecstasy? Whose feet were swift enough to trip among these meadows? Whose spring was high enough to leap upon these mountain-tops? Who wept for these dying worlds? Who marched in these triumphal processions, celebrating the birth of new epochs?

The thirty-year-old Lanny Budd had come to understand his world, and no longer cherished any illusions concerning the ladies and gen­tlemen at a soiree musicale. Large, well-padded matrons who had been playing bridge all afternoon, and had spent so many hours choosing the fabrics, the jeweled slippers, the necklaces, brooches, and tiaras which made up their splendid ensemble—what fairy feet did they have, even in imagination? What tears did they shed for the lost hopes of mankind? There was Beauty’s friend, Madame de Sarce, with two marriageable daughters and an adored only son who had squandered their fortune in the gambling-palaces. Lanny doubted if any one of the family was thinking about music.

And these gentlemen, with their black coats and snowy shirt-fronts in which their valets had helped to array them—what tumults of exultation thrilled their souls tonight? They had all dined well, and more than one looked drowsy. Others fixed their eyes upon the smooth bare backs of the ladies in front of them. Close to the musicians sat Graf Hohenstauffen, monocled German financier, wear­ing a pleased smile all through the surging finale; Lanny had heard him tell Johannes Robin that he had just come from a broker’s office where he had got the closing New York prices. In this April of 1930 there was a phenomenon under way which was being called "the little bull market"; things were picking up again, and the speculators were full of enthusiasms. Was the Graf converting Hansi’s frenzied rans on the violin into movements of stocks and bonds? However, there might be somebody who understood, some lonely heart that hid its griefs and lived in secret inner happiness. Someone who sat silent and abstracted after the performance, too shy to approach the players and thank them; who would go out with fresh hopes for a world in which such loveliness had been embodied in sound. In any case, Hansi and Bess had done their duty by their hostess, a white-haired grande dame who would always seem wonderful to them because it was in her chateau near Paris that they had met and been revealed each to the other.

VIII

It was considered a social triumph, but it was not sufficient for young people tinged with all the hues between pink and scarlet. In the Old Town of Cannes, down near the harbor, dwelt members of depressed classes, among whom Lanny had been going for years, teaching his ideas in a strange, non-religious Sunday school, helping with his money to found a center of what was called "workers' education." He had made many friends here, and had done all he could to break down the social barriers. As a result, the waiter in some fashionable cafe would say: "Bon soir, Comrade Lanny!" When he got out of his car to enter the Casino, or the Cercle Nautique, or some other smart place, he would be delayed by little street urchins running up to shake hands or even to throw their arms about him.

What would these people feel if they knew that the famous violinist who was Lanny’s brother-in-law had come to town and given a recital for the rich but had neglected the poor? Unthinkable to go sailing off in a luxurious pleasure yacht without even greeting the class-conscious workers! Lanny’s Socialist friend Raoul Palma, who conducted the school, had been notified of the expected visit, and had engaged a suitable hall and printed leaflets for the little street urchins to distribute. When Hansi Robin played in concert halls the rich paid as much as a hundred francs to hear him, but the workers would hear him for fifty centimes, less than a cent and a half in American money. From the point of view of Hansi’s business manager it was terrible; but Hansi was a rich man’s son and must be allowed to have his eccentricities. Wherever he went, the word would spread, and working-class leaders would come and beg his help. He was young and strong, and wanted to practice anyway, so why not do it on a platform for this most appreciative kind of audience?

Perhaps it was because they knew he was a "comrade," and read into his music things which were not there. Anyhow, they made a demonstration out of it, they took him to their hearts, they flew with him upon the wings of song to that happy land of the future where all men would be brothers and poverty and war only an evil mem ory. Hansi played no elaborate composition for them, he performed no technical feats; he played simple, soul-warming music: the adagio from one of the Bach solo sonatas, followed by Scriabin’s Prelude, gently solemn, with very lovely double-stopping. Then he added bright and gay things: Percy Grainger’s arrangement of Molly on the Shore, and when they begged for more he led them into a riot with Bazzini’s Goblins' Dance. Those goblins squeaked and squealed, they gibbered and chattered; people had never dreamed that such weird sounds could come out of a violin or anything else, and they could hardly contain their laughter and applause until the goblins had fled to their caverns or wherever they go when they have worn themselves out with dancing.

When it was late, and time to quit, Bess struck the opening chords of the Internationale. It is the work of a Frenchman, and, pink or scarlet or whatever shade in between, everybody in that crowded hall seemed to know the words; it was as if a charge of electricity had passed through the chairs on which they sat. They leaped to their feet and burst into singing, and you could no longer hear the violin. "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation; arise, ye wretched of the earth!" The workers crowded about the platform, and if Hansi had let them they would have carried him, and Lanny, and Bess too, out to their car, and perhaps have hauled the car all the way to the Cap d’Antibes.

IX

The trim white Bessie Budd crept slowly beyond the breakwater of Cannes and through the Golfe Juan, passing that group of buildings with the red-tiled roofs which had been Lanny Budd’s home since his earliest memory. Now for several months the yacht was to be his home. It carried five members and a small fraction of the Robin family—if that be the way to count an infant—and four members and two fractions of the Budd family: Lanny, his wife, and their baby; Beauty, her husband, and her daughter. This was the twelve-year-old Marceline’s first yacht trip, and with her came the devoted English governess, Miss Addington; also Miss Severne, to look after Baby Frances, with one of the nursemaids assisting. Finally there was Madame Zyszynski and, it was hoped, Tecumseh with his troop of spirits, requiring no cabin-space.

A windless morning, the sea quite still, and the shore quite close. The course was eastward, and the Riviera glided past them like an endless panorama. Lanny, to whom it was as familiar as his own garden, stood by the rail and pointed out the landmarks to his friends. A most agreeable way of studying both geography and history! Amusing to take the glasses and pick out the places where he had played tennis, danced, and dined. Presently there was Monte Carlo, a little town crowded onto a rock. Lanny pointed out the hotel of Zaharoff, the munitions king, and said: "It’s the time when he sits out in the sunshine on those seats." They searched, but didn’t see any old gentleman with a white imperial! Presently it was Menton, and Lanny said: "The villa of Blasco Ibanez." He had died recently, an exile from the tyranny in Spain. Yes, it was history, several thousand years of it along this shore.

Then came Italy; the border town where a young Socialist had been put out of the country for trying to protest against the murder of Matteotti. Then San Remo, where Lanny had attended the first international conference after the peace of Versailles. Much earlier, when Lanny had been fourteen, he had motored all the way down to Naples, in company with a manufacturer of soap from Reubens, Indiana. Lanny would always feel that he knew the Middle Western United States through the stories of Ezra Hackabury, who had carried little sample cakes of Bluebird Soap wherever he traveled over Europe, giving them away to beggar children, who liked their smell but not their taste. Carrara with its marbles had reminded Ezra of the new postoffice in his home town, and when he saw the leaning tower of Pisa he had remarked that he could build one of steel that Would lean further, but what good would it do?

A strange coincidence: while Lanny was sitting on the deck telling stories to the Robin family, Lanny’s mother and her husband had gone to the cabin of Madame Zyszynski to find out whether Tecumseh, the Indian "control," had kept his promise and followed her to the yacht. The Polish woman went into her trance, and right away there came the powerful voice supposed to be Iroquois, but having a Polish accent. Tecumseh said that a man was standing by his side who gave the name of Ezra, and the other name began with H, but his voice was feeble and Tecumseh couldn’t get it; it made him think of a butcher. No, the man said that he cleaned people, not animals. He knew Lanny and he knew Italy. Ask Lanny if he remembered—what was it?—something about smells in the Bay of Naples and about a man who raised angleworms. Mr. Dingle, doing the questioning, asked what that meant, but Tecumseh declared that the spirit had faded away.

So there was one of those incidents which cause the psychical researchers to prepare long reports. Beauty thought of Ezra Hacka-bury right away, but she didn’t know that Lanny was up on the deck telling the Robins about him, nor did she know how the Bluebird Soap man had cited the smells of the Naples waterfront as proof that.romance and charm in Italy were mostly fraudulent. But Lanny remembered well, and also that the gentleman from Indiana had told him about the strange occupation of raising angleworms and planting them in the soil to keep it porous.

What were you going to make out of such an episode? Was Mr. Hackabury really there? Was he dead? Lanny hadn’t heard from him for years. He sat down and wrote a letter, to be mailed at Genoa, not mentioning anything about spirits, but saying that he was on his way to Naples, planning to retrace the cruise of the yacht Bluebird, and did his old friend remember the drive they had taken and the smells of the bay? And how was the man who raised angleworms making out? Lanny added: "Let me know how you are, for my mother and I often talk about your many kindnesses to us." He hoped that, if Ezra Hackabury was dead, some member of his family might be moved to reply.

X

They went ashore at Genoa, to inspect that very ancient city. They had in Lanny a cicerone who had wandered about the streets during several weeks of the Genoa Conference. A spice of excite ment was added by the fact that he wouldn’t be allowed to enter the country if he were identified. But local officers would hardly know about that old-time misadventure, or cross-question fashionable people coming ashore from a private yacht; they could hardly check every tourist by the records of the Fascist militi in Rome.

No question was raised. Italy was a poor country, and visitors brought much-needed foreign exchange; the richer they were, the more welcome—a rule that holds good in most parts of the world. They engaged three cars and were driven about the town, which is crowded between mountains and sea, and since it cannot float on the latter is forced to climb the former. Ancient tall buildings jammed close together; churches having facades with stripes of white and black marble, and inside them monotonous paintings of sorrowful Italian women with infants in their arms. Before the shrines were wax images of parts of the body which had been miraculously healed, displays not usually seen outside of hospitals. Mr. Dingle might have been interested, but he had a deep-seated prejudice against the Catholic system, which he called idolatrous. Mr. Hackabury had had the same idea.

Lanny showed them the old Palazzo di San Giorgio, where the conference had been held, a dingy and depressing place, in keeping with the results of the assemblage. Lloyd George had made the most inspiring promises of peace and prosperity to the representatives of twenty-nine nations; after which, behind the scenes, the leaders had spent six weeks wrangling over what oil concessions the Russians were to make to what nations. Lanny’s father had been here, trying to get a share; it had been his first fiasco, and the beginning of a chain of them for all parties concerned. Instead of peace the nations had got more armaments and more debts. Instead of prosperity had come a financial collapse in Wall Street, and all were trembling lest it spread to the rest of the world.

XI

All this wasn’t the most cheerful line of conversation for a sightseeing jaunt; so Lanny talked about some of the journalists and writers whom he had met at this conference, and forbore to refer to the tragic episode which had cut short his stay in Genoa. But later, when Irma and Rahel had gone back to the yacht, he went for a stroll with Hansi and Bess, and they talked about the Italian Syndicalist leader who had set them to thinking on the subject of social justice. The young Robins looked upon Barbara Pugliese as a heroine and working-class martyr, cherishing her memory as the Italians cherish that virgin mother whose picture they never grow tired of painting. But the Fascist terror had wiped out every trace of Barbara’s organization, and to have revealed sympathy for her would have exposed an Italian to exile and torture on those barren Mediterranean islands which Mussolini used as concentration camps.

When you talked about things like this you lost interest in ancient buildings and endlessly multiplied Madonnas. You didn’t want to eat any of the food of this town, or pay it any foreign exchange; you wanted to shake its polluted dust from your feet. But the older people were here to entertain themselves with sight-seeing; so, take a walk, climb the narrow streets up into the hills where the flowers of springtime were thick and the air blew from the sea. These gifts of nature were here before the coming of the miserable Fascist braggart, and would remain long after he had become a stench in the nostrils of history. Try not to hate his strutting Blackshirts with their shiny boots, and pistols and daggers in their belts; think of them as misguided children, destined some day to pay with their blood for their swagger and bluster. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!"

And when you come down from the heights and get on board the yacht again, keep your thoughts to your own little group, and say nothing to your elders, who have grown up in a different world. You cannot convert them; you can only worry them and spoil their holiday. Play your music, read your books, think your own thoughts, and never let yourselves be drawn into an argument! Not an altogether satisfactory way of life, but the only one possible in times when the world is changing so fast that parents and children may be a thousand years apart in their ideas and ideals.

I

TНЕ trim white Bessie Budd was among the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung, and where Lanny at the age of fourteen had fished and swum and climbed hills and gazed upon the ruins of ancient temples. The yacht stole through the Gulf of Corinth and made fast to a pier in the harbor of the Piraeus, now somewhat improved; the guests were motored to the city of Athens, and ascended the hill of the Acropolis on little donkeys which had not been improved in any way. They gazed at the most-famous of all ruins, and Lanny told them about Isadora Duncan dancing here, and how she had explained to the shocked police that it was her way of praying.

The Bessie Budd anchored in the Channel of Atalante, and the experienced Lanny let down fishing-lines and brought up odd-appearing creatures which had not changed in sixteen years, and perhaps not in sixteen million. The guests were rowed ashore at several towns, and drank over-sweet coffee out of copper pots with long handles, and gazed at the strange spectacle of tall men wearing accordion-pleated and starched white skirts like those of ballet-dancers. They climbed the hills surmounted by ancient temples, and tried to talk in sign language to shepherds having shelters of brush built into little cones.

History had been made in these waters between Lanny’s visits. German submarines had lurked here, British and French craft had hunted them, and a bitter duel of intrigue had been carried on over the part which Greece was to play. The Allies had landed an army at Salonika, and the Bessie Budd now followed in the wake of their transports; her guests were driven about in a dusty old city of nar­row crooked streets and great numbers of mosques with towering minarets. The more active members of the party wandered over the hills where the armies of Alexander had marched to the conquest of Persia; through which the Slavs had come in the seventh century, followed by Bulgars, Saracens, Gauls, Venetians, Turks.

There are people who have a sense of the past; they are stirred by the thought of it, and by the presence of its relics; there are others who have very little of this sense, and would rather play a game of bridge than climb a hill to see where a battle was fought or a goddess was worshiped. Lanny discovered that his wife was among these latter. She was interested in the stories he told the company, but only mildly, and while he and Hansi were studying the fragments of a fallen column, Irma would be watching the baby lambs gamboling among the spring flowers. "Oh, how charming!" Observing one of them beginning to nuzzle its mother, she would look at her wrist-watch and say: "Don’t forget that we have to be back on board in an hour." Lanny would return to the world of now, and resume the delights of child study which he had begun long ago with Marceline.

II

When you live day and night on a yacht, in close contact with your fellow-guests, there isn’t much they can hide from you. It was Lanny’s fourth cruise with a Jewish man of money, but still he did not tire of studying a subtle and complex personality. Johannes Robin was not merely an individual; he was a race and a culture, a religion and a history of a large part of human society for several thousand years. To understand him fully was a problem not merely in psychology, but in business and finance, in literature and language, ethnology, archaeology—a list of subjects about which Lanny was curious.

This man of many affairs could be tender-hearted as a child, and again could state flatly that he was not in business for his health. He could be frank to the point of dubious taste, or he could be devious as any of the diplomats whom Lanny had watched at a dozen international conferences. He would drive a hard bargain, and then turn around and spend a fortune upon hospitality to that same person. He was bold, yet he was haunted by fears. He ardently desired the approval of his fellows, yet he would study them and pass judgments indicating that their opinion was not worth so very much. Finally, with his keen mind he observed these conflicts in himself, and to Lanny, whom he trusted, he would blurt them out in disconcerting fashion.

They were sitting on deck after the others had gone to bed; a still night, and the yacht gliding through the water with scarcely a sound. Suddenly the host remarked: "Do you know what this show costs every hour?"

"I never tried to estimate," said the guest, taken aback.

"You wouldn’t, because you’ve always had money. I figured it up last night—about a hundred dollars every hour of the day or night. It cost me several hours' sleep to realize it."

There was a pause. Lanny didn’t know what to say.

"It’s a weakness; I suppose it’s racial. I can’t get over the fear of spending so much!"

"Why do you do it, then?"

"I force myself to be rational. What good is money if you hoard it? My children don’t want it, and their children won’t know how to use it; and, anyhow, it mayn’t last. I assume that I give my friends some pleasure, and I don’t do any harm that I can think of. Can you?"

"No," replied the other.

"Of course I shouldn’t mention it," said the host, "but you like to understand people."

"We’d all be happier if we did," replied Lanny. "I, too, am conscious of weaknesses. If I happened to be in your position, I would be trying to make up my mind whether I had a right to own a yacht."

III

Lanny went to bed thinking about this "racial" peculiarity. When he had first met Johannes Robin, the salesman had been traveling over Europe with two heavy suitcases full of electric curling-irons and toasters, and a "spiel" about promoting international trade and the spread of civilization. During the war he had made money buy­ing magnetos and such things to be sold in Germany. Then he had gone in with Robbie Budd and bought left-over supplies of the American army. He had sold marks and bought shares in German industry, and now he was sometimes referred to as a "king" of this and that. Doubtless all kings, underneath their crowns and inside their royal robes, were hesitant and worried mortals, craving affection and tormented by fears of poison and daggers, of demons and gods, or, in these modem times, of financial collapses and revolutions.

Jascha Rabinowich had changed his name but had remained a Jew, which meant that he was race-conscious; he was kept that way by contempt and persecution. Part of the time he blustered and part of the time he cringed, but he tried to hide both moods. What he wanted was to be a man like other men, and to be judged according to his merits. But he had had to flee from a pogrom in Russia, and he lived in Germany knowing that great numbers of people despised and hated him; he knew that even in America, which he considered the most enlightened of countries, the people in the slums would call him a "sheeny" and a Christ-killer, while the "best" people would exclude him from their country clubs.

He talked about all this with Lanny, who had fought hard for his sister’s right to marry Hansi. People accused the Jews of loving money abnormally. "We are traders," said Johannes. "We have been traders for a couple of thousand years, because we have been driven from our land. We have had to hide in whatever holes we could find in one of these Mediterranean ports, and subsist by buying something at a low price and selling it at a higher price. The penalty of failure being death has sharpened our wits. In a port it often happens that we buy from a person we shall never see again, and sell to some other person under the same conditions; they do not worry much about our welfare, nor we about theirs. That may be a limitation in our morality, but it is easy to understand."

Lanny admitted that he understood it, and his host continued:

"My ancestors were master-traders all the way from Smyrna to Gibraltar while yours were barbarians in the dark northern forests, killing the aurochs with clubs and spears. Naturally our view of life was different from yours. But when you take to commerce, the differences disappear quickly. I have heard that in your ancestral state of Connecticut the Yankee does not have his feelings hurt when you call him slick. You have heard, perhaps, of David Harum, who traded horses."

"I have heard also of Potash and Perlmutter," said Lanny, with a smile.

"It is the same here, all around the shores of this ancient sea which once was the civilized world. The Greeks are considered skillful traders; take Zaharoff, for example. The Turks are not easy to deceive, and I am told that the Armenians can get the better of any race in the world. Always, of course, I am referring to the professional traders, those who live or die by it. The peasant is a different proposition; the primary producer is the predestined victim, whether he is in Connecticut buying wooden nutmegs or in Anatolia receiving coins made of base metal which he will not be clever enough to pass on."

IV

Lanny sat with Madame Zyszynski, but the results he obtained were not of the best. Tecumseh, the noble redskin, was suspicious and inclined to be crotchety; he took offense when one did not accept his word, and Lanny had made the mistake of being too honest. The way to get results was to be like Parsifal Dingle, who welcomed the spirits quite simply as his friends, chatting with them and the "control" in an amiable matter-of-fact way. Apparently it was with the spirits as with healing: except ye be converted, and become as little children! . . .

What Tecumseh would do was to send messages to Lanny through Parsifal. He would say: "Tell that smart young man that Marcel was here, and that he is painting spirit pictures, much more wonderful than anything he ever did on earth—but they will never be sold at auctions." Lanny wanted to know if Marcel objected to having his works sold; but for a long time the painter ignored his question. Then one day Tecumseh said, rather grudgingly, that it didn’t really matter to Marcel; everything was sold in Lanny’s world, and it was no use keeping beautiful things in a storeroom. This sounded as if the spirit world was acquiring a "pinkish" tinge.

Madame gave several seances every day. She had done it while she was earning her living on Sixth Avenue, and insisted that it didn’t hurt her. She would accommodate anyone who was interested, and presently she was delving into the past of the Rabinowich family, telling about those members who had "passed over." It was a bit unsatisfactory, for there were many members of that family, and Jascha had lost track of them; he said that he never heard from them except when someone needed money for some worthy purpose, and all purposes were worthy. He said that the way to check on the identity of any member of his family in the spirit world would be that he was asking for money to be given to a son or daughter, a nephew or niece still on earth!

But there had been indeed an Uncle Nahum, who had peddled goods in Russian-Polish villages, and had been clubbed to death by the Black Hundreds. The realistic details of this event sounded convincing to Mama Robin, who had witnessed such an incident as a child and still had nightmares now and then as a result. Then it was Jascha’s own father talking to him; when he mentioned that his beard had turned white faster on one side than on the other, and how he had kept his money hidden under a loose brick in the hearth, Lanny saw his urbane host look startled. Johannes said afterward that he had thought all this must be a fraud of some sort, but now he didn’t know what to think. It was really unthinkable.

So it went on, all over the pleasure vessel. The gray-bearded and heavy-minded Captain Moeller condescended to try the experiment, and found himself in conversation with his eldest son, who had been a junior officer on a U-boat, and told how it felt to be suffocated at the bottom of the sea. Baby Frances’s nursemaid, a girl with a Cockney accent who had got a few scraps of education at a "council school," learned to sit for long periods talking with her father, a Tommy who had been killed on the Somme, and who told her all about his early life, the name of the pub where he had made bets on horse races, and where his name was still chalked up on a board, along with that of other dead soldiers of the neighborhood.

How did Madame Zyszynski get such things? You could say that she sneaked about in the yacht and caught scraps of conversation, and perhaps rummaged about in people’s cabins. But it just happened that she didn’t. She was a rather dull old woman who had been first a servant and then the wife of the butler to a Warsaw merchant. She suffered from varicose veins and dropsy in its early stages. She understood foreign languages with difficulty and didn’t bother to listen most of the time, but preferred to sit in her own cabin playing endless games of solitaire. When she read, it was the pictures in some cheap magazine, and the strange things she did in her trances really didn’t interest her overmuch; she would answer your questions as best she could, but hardly ever asked any of you. She declared again and again that she did these things because she was poor and had to earn her living. She insisted, furthermore, that she had never heard the voice of Tecumseh, and knew about him only what her many clients had told her.

But what a different creature was this Indian chieftain! He was not the Tecumseh of history, he said, but an Iroquois of the same name. His tribe had been all but wiped out by smallpox. Now he ruled a tribe of spirits, and amused himself at the expense of his former enemies, the whites. He was alert, masterful, witty, shrewd— and if there was anything he didn’t know, he would tell you to come back tomorrow and perhaps he would have it for you. But you had to be polite. You had to treat him as a social equal, and the best way to get along was to be a humble petitioner. "Please, Tecumseh, see if you can do me this great favor!"

V

What did it all mean? Was this really the spirit of an American aborigine dead more than two hundred years? Lanny didn’t think so. After reading a number of books and pondering over it for months, he had decided that Tecumseh was a genius; something of the sort which had worked in William Shakespeare, producing a host of characters which the world accepted as more real than living people. In the case of the poet, this genius had been hitched up with his conscious mind, so that the poet knew what it was doing and could put the characters into plays and sell them to managers. But the genius in Madame Zyszynski wasn’t hitched up; it stayed hidden in her unconscious and worked there on its own; a wild genius, so to speak, a subterranean one. What, old mole, work’st i' the earth so fast!

This energy played at being an Indian; also it gathered facts from the minds of various persons and wove stories out of them. It dipped into the subconscious mind of Lanny Budd and collected his memories and made them into the spirit of Marcel Detaze, painting pic­tures on the Cap d’Antibes or looking at ruins in ancient Greece. It dipped into the mind of Jascha Rabinowich and created the spirits of his relatives. Like children finding old costumes in a trunk, putting them on and making up stories about people they have heard of or read of in books—people alive or dead! Every child knows that you have to pretend that it’s true, otherwise it’s no fun, the imagination doesn’t work. If you put on a bearskin, get down on your hands and knees and growl. If you put on the headdress of an Indian chieftain, stalk about the room and command the other children in a deep stern voice—even if it has a Polish accent!

All this seemed to indicate that there was some sort of universal pool of mindstuff, an ocean in which Lanny’s thoughts and Madame Zyszynski’s and other people’s merged and flowed together. Figure yourself as a bubble floating on the surface of an ocean; the sun shines on you and you have very lovely colors; other bubbles float near, and you come together and form a cluster of bubbles—the guests of the yacht Bessie Budd, for example. One by one the bub bles break, and their substance returns to the ocean, and in due course becomes the substance of new bubbles.

This theory obliged you to believe that a medium had the power to dip into this mind substance and get facts to which the medium did not have access in any normal way. Was it easier to believe that than to believe that the spirits of dead persons were sending communications to the living? Lanny found it so; for he had lived long enough to watch the human mind develop along with the body and to decay along with it. In some strange way the two seemed to be bound together and to share the same fate. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you knew what the nature of that union was; how a thought could make a muscle move, or how a chemical change in the body could produce cheerful or depressed thoughts. Those questions were going to take wiser men than Lanny Budd to answer them; he kept wishing that people would stop robbing and killing one another and settle down to this task of finding out what they really were.

VI

The hundred-dollar-an-hour cruise was continued eastward, and presently they were approaching the Peninsula of Gallipoli, where so many Englishmen had paid with their lives for the blundering of their superiors. Great ships had gone down, and the beaches had been piled with mangled bodies. Among the many wounded had been the father of Lanny’s amie, Rosemary Codwilliger, Countess of Sandhaven. He had "passed over" not long ago, and Lanny wondered, did his spirit haunt this place? He asked Tecumseh about it, and it wasn’t long before Colonel Codwilliger was "manifesting"; but unfortunately Lanny hadn’t known him very well, and must write to Rosemary in the Argentine to find out if the statements were correct.

They passed through the Dardanelles on a gusty, rainy afternoon, and the shores looked much like any other shores veiled in mist. Lanny and Bess walked for a while on deck, and then went into the saloon and played the Schubert four-hand piano sonata. Then Lanny came out again, for somewhere ahead was the Island of Prinkipo which had been so much in his thoughts at the Peace Conference eleven years before. It had been chosen as the place for a meeting with the Bolsheviks, in President Wilson’s effort to patch up a truce with them. The elder statesmen had found it difficult to believe there existed a place with such a musical-comedy name.

It might as well have been a musical-comedy performance—such was Lanny’s bitter reflection. The statesmen didn’t go to Prinkipo, and when later they met the Russians at Genoa they didn’t settle anything. They went home to get ready for another war—Lanny was one of those pessimistic persons who were sure it was on the way. He told people so, and they would shrug their shoulders. What could they do about it? What could anybody do? C’est la nature!

Perhaps it was the rain which caused these melancholy thoughts; perhaps the spirits of those tens of thousands of dead Englishmen and Turks; or perhaps of the dogs of Constantinople, which during the war had been gathered up and turned loose on this musical-comedy island to starve and devour one another. Under the religion of the country it was not permitted to kill them, so let them eat one another! The Prophet, born among a nomadic people, had loved the dog and praised it as the guardian of the tent; he had endeavored to protect it, but had not been able to foresee great cities with swarms of starveling curs and a denouement of cannibalism.

The southern hills of this Sea of Marmora had been the scene of events about which Lanny had heard his father talking with Zaharoff. The munitions king had financed the invasion of Turkey by his fellow-Greeks, spending half his fortune on it, so he had said— though of course you didn’t have to assume that everything he said was true. Anyhow, the Greeks had been routed and hosts of them driven into the sea, after which the victorious Turkish army had appeared before the British fortifications and the guns of the fleet. This critical situation had brought about the fall of the Lloyd George government and thus played hob with the plans of Robbie Budd for getting oil concessions. Robbie was one of those men who use governments, his own and others', threatening wars and sometimes waging them; while Lanny was an amiable playboy who traveled about on a hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht, making beautiful music, reading books of history and psychic research, and being troubled in his conscience about the way the world was going. He asked his friends very earnestly what ought to be done. Some thought they knew; but the trouble was, their opinions differed so greatly;

VII

The company went ashore in the crowded city, which had once been the capital of the Moslem world, and now was known as Istanbul. They got cars, as usual, and were driven about to see the sights. They visited the great cathedral of St. Sophia, and in the seraglio of the late sultan they inspected the harem, in which now and then a faithless wife had been strangled with a cord, tied in a sack, and set afloat in the Bosporus. They strolled through the bazaars, where traders of various races labored diligently to sell them souvenirs, from Bergama rugs to "feelthy postcards." Through the crowded street came a fire-engine with a great clangor; a modern one, painted a brilliant red—but Lanny saw in imagination the young Zaharoff riding the machine, busy with schemes to collect for his services. Were they still called tulumbadschi? And did they still charge to put out your fire—or to let it burn, as you preferred?

The unresting Bessie Budd stole northward along the coast of the immensely deep Black Sea, called by the ancient Greeks "friendly to strangers." The Soviet Union was in the middle of the Five-Year Plan, and miracles were confidently expected. The travelers' goal was Odessa, a city with a great outdoor stairway which they had seen in a motion picture. Their passports had been visaed and everything arranged in advance; they had only to make themselves known to Intourist, and they would have automobiles and guides and hotels to the limit of their supply of valuta.

"I have seen the future and it works." So Lincoln Steffens had said to Lanny Budd. Stef had had the eyes of faith, and so had Hansi and Bess and Rahel. When they looked at buildings much in need of repair and people wearing sneakers and patched sweaters, they said: "Wait till the new factories get going." They told the girl guides that they were "comrades," and they were taken off to in spect the latest styles in day nurseries and communal kitchens. They were motored into the country to visit a co-operative farm; when Hansi was asked about his occupation at home, he admitted that he was a violinist, and the people rushed to provide an instrument. All work on the place stopped while he stood on the front porch and played Old Folks at Home and Kathleen Mavourneen and Achron’s Hebrew Melody. It was heart-warming; but would it help get tractors and reapers into condition for the harvest soon to be due?

VIII

Irma went on some of these expeditions, and listened politely to the enthusiasms of her friends; but to Mama Robin she confessed that she found "the future" most depressing. Mama shrugged her shoulders and said: "What would you expect? It’s Russia." She had learned about it as a child, and didn’t believe it could ever be changed. In the days of the Tsar people had been so unhappy they had got drunk and crawled away into some hole to sleep. The Bolsheviks had tried to stop the making of liquor, but the peasants had made it and smuggled it into the towns—"just like in America," said Mama. She would have preferred not to have these painful old memories revived.

Odessa had changed hands several times during the revolution and civil war. It had been bombarded by the French fleet, and many of its houses destroyed. One of the sights of the city was the Square of the Victims, where thousands of slain revolutionists had been buried in a common grave, under a great pyramid of stones. The young people went to it as to a shrine, while their elders sought entertainment without success. The young ones insisted upon visiting some of the many sanatoriums, which are built near bodies of water formed by silted-up river mouths. These too were shrines, because they were occupied by invalided workers. That was the way it was going to be in the future; those who produced the wealth would enjoy it! "They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat." Thus the ancient Hebrew prophet, and it sounded so Red that in Canada a clergyman had been indicted by the grand jury for quoting it. Hansi and Rahel had the blood of these ancient prophets in their veins, and Bess had been taught that their utterances were the word of God, so this new religion came easily to them. It promised to save the workers, and Lanny hoped it would have better success than Mohammed had had in his efforts to help the watch-dogs of the tents.

Lanny was in his usual position, between the two sets of extremists. During this Russian visit he served as a sort of liaison officer to the Robin family. Johannes didn’t dare to discuss Communism with any of his young people, for he had found that by doing so he injured his standing; he talked with Lanny, hoping that something could be done to tone them down. In the opinion of the man of money, this Bolshevik experiment was surviving on what little fat it had accumulated during the old regime. People could go on living in houses so long as they stood up, and they could wear old clothes for decades if they had no sense of shame—look about you! But the making of new things was something else again. Of course, they could hire foreign experts and have factories built, and call it a Five-Year Plan—but who was going to do any real work if he could put it off on somebody else? And how could any business enterprise be run by politicians? "You don’t know them," said Johannes, grimly. "In Germany I have had to."

"It’s an experiment," Lanny admitted. "Too bad it had to be tried in such a backward country."

"All I can say," replied the man of affairs, "is I’m hoping it doesn’t have to be tried in any country where I live!"

IX

This was a situation which had been developing in the Robin family for many years, ever since Barbara Pugliese and Jesse Black-less had explained the ideals of proletarian revolution to the young Robins in Lanny’s home: an intellectual vaccination which had taken with unexpected virulence. Lanny had watched with both curiosity and concern the later unfoldment of events. He knew how Papa and Mama Robin adored their two boys, centering all their hopes upon them. Papa made money in order that Hansi and Freddi might be free from the humiliations and cares of poverty. Papa and Mama watched their darlings with solicitude, consulting each other as to their every mood and wish. Hansi wanted to play the fiddle; very well, he should be a great musician, with the best teachers, everything to make smooth his path. Freddi wished to be a scholar, a learned person; very well, Papa would pay for everything, and give up his natural desire to have the help of one of his sons in his own business.

It had seemed not surprising that young people should be set afire with hopes of justice for the poor, and the ending of oppression and war. Every Jew in the world knows that his ancient proph­ets proclaimed such a millennium, the coming of such a Messiah. If Hansi and Freddi were excessive in their fervor, well, that was to be expected at their age. As they grew older, they would acquire discretion and learn what was possible in these days. The good mother and the hard-driving father waited for this, but waited in vain. Here was Hansi twenty-five, and his brother only two years younger, and instead of calming down they appeared to be acquiring a mature determination, with a set of theories or dogmas or whatever you chose to call them, serving as a sort of backbone for their dreams.

To the Jewish couple out of the ghetto the marriage of Hansi to Robbie Budd’s daughter had appeared a great triumph, but in the course of time they had discovered there was a cloud to this silver lining. Bess had caught the Red contagion from Hansi, and brought to the ancient Jewish idealism a practicality which Johannes recognized as Yankee, a sternness derived from her ancestral Puritanism. Bess was the reddest of them all, and the most uncompromising. Her expression would be full of pity and tenderness, but it was all for those whom she chose to regard as the victims of social injus­tice. For those others who held them down and garnered the fruits of their toil she had a dedicated antagonism; when she talked about capitalism and its crimes her face became set, and you knew her for the daughter of one of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

Lanny understood that in the depths of his soul Johannes quailed before this daughter-in-law. He tried to placate her with soft words, he tried to bribe her with exactly the right motor-car, a piano of the most exquisite tone, yachting-trips to the most romantic places of the seven seas, and not a single person on board who would oppose her ideas; only the members of her own two families and their attendants. "Look!" the poor man of nullions seemed to be saying. "Here is Rahel with a baby who has to be nursed, and here is the lovely baby of your adored brother; here is this ship of dreams which exists for the happiness of all of you. It will go wherever you wish, and the service will be perfect; you can even break the rules of discipline at sea, you and Hansi can go into the forecastle and play music for the crew, or invite them up into the saloon once a week and play for them—in spite of the horror of an old martinet trained in the merchant marine of Germany. Anything, anything on earth, provided you will be gracious, and forgive me for being a millionaire, and not despise me because I have wrung my fortune out of the toil and sweat of the wage-slaves!"

This program of appeasement had worked for four years, for the reason that Bess had laid hold of the job of becoming a pianist. She had concentrated her Puritan fanaticism upon acquiring muscular power and co-ordination, in combining force with delicacy, so that the sounds she produced would not ruin the fine nuances, the exquisite variations of tone, which her more highly trained husband was achieving. But Johannes knew in his soul that this task wasn’t going to hold her forever; some day she and Hansi both would consider themselves musicians—and they meant to be Red musicians, to play for Red audiences and earn money for the Red cause. They would make for themselves the same sort of reputation that Isadora Duncan had made by waving red scarves at her audiences and dancing the Marseillaise. They would plunge into the hell of the class struggle, which everyone could see growing hotter day by day all over Europe.

X

Besides Mama, the only person to whom Johannes Robin unbos­omed himself of these anxieties was Lanny Budd, who had always been so wise beyond his years, a confidant at the age of fourteen, a counselor and guide at the age of nineteen. Lanny had brought Johannes together with his father, and listened to their schemes, and knew many of the ins and outs of their tradings. He knew that Johannes had been selling Budd machine guns to Nazi agents, to be used in the open warfare these people carried on with the Communists in the streets of Berlin. Johannes had asked Lanny never to mention this to the boys, and Lanny had obliged him. What would they do if they found it out? They might refuse to live any longer in the Berlin palace, or to travel in the hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht. Bess might even refuse to let it carry her name. Thus Jascha Rabinowich, standing in front of his private wailing wall. Oi, oi!

He was in the position only too familiar to the members of his race through two thousand years of the Diaspora: surrounded by enemies, and having to play them one against another, to placate them by subtle arts. Johannes had risen to power by his shrewdness as a speculator, knowing whom to pay for inside information and how to separate the true from the false. Having made huge sums out of the collapse of the mark, he had bought up concerns which were on the verge of bankruptcy. To hold them and keep them going meant, in these days of governmental interference with business, some sort of alliance with politicians; it meant paying them money which was close to blackmail and became ever closer as time passed. It meant not merely knowing the men who were in power, but guessing who might be in power next week, and making some sort of deal with them.

So it came about that Johannes was helping to maintain the coalition government of the Republic and at the same time supporting several of the ambitious Nazis; for, under the strain of impending national bankruptcy, who could tell what might happen? Knowing that his children were in touch with the Reds, and continually being importuned for money—who wasn’t, that had money?—Johannes would give them generous sums, knowing that they would pass these on to be used for their "cause." Yet another form of insurance! But do not let any of these groups know that you are giving to the others, for they are in a deadly three-cornered war, each against the other two.

All this meant anxious days and sleepless nights. And Mama, from whom nothing could be hidden, would argue: "What is it for? Why do we need so much money?" It was hard for her to understand that you must get more in order to protect what you had. She and the children would join in efforts to get Papa away from it all. For the past three summers they had lured him into a yachting-trip. This year they had started earlier, on account of the two young mothers, and they were hoping to keep him away all summer.

But it appeared that troubles were piling up in Berlin: business troubles, political troubles. Johannes was receiving batches of mail at the different ports, and he would shut himself up with his secretary and dictate long telegrams. That was one of his complaints concerning the Soviet Union: letters might be opened, and telegrams were uncertain; you paid for them but couldn’t be sure they would arrive. Everything was in the hands of bureaucrats, and you were wound up in miles of red tape—God pity the poor people who had to get a living in such a world. Johannes, man of swift decisions, plowman of his own field, builder of his own road, couldn’t stand Odessa, and asked them to give up seeing the beautiful Sochi. "There are just as grand palaces near Istanbul, and the long-distance telephone works!"

XI

The Bessie Budd returned in her own wake, and in Istanbul its owner received more telegrams which worried him. The yacht had to wait until he sent answers and received more answers, and in the end he announced that he couldn’t possibly go on. There was serious trouble involving one of the banks he controlled. Decisions had to be made which couldn’t be left to subordinates. He had made a mistake to come away in such unsettled times!—the Wall Street crash had shaken all Europe, and little by little the cracks were revealing themselves. Johannes had to beg his guests to excuse him. He took a plane for Vienna, and from there to Berlin.

It had come to be that way now; there were planes every day between all the great capitals of Europe. You stepped in, hardly knew that you were flying, and in a few hours stepped out and went about your affairs. Not the slightest danger; but it tormented Mama to think of Jascha up there amid thunder and lightning, and so many things to bump into when you came down. They waited in Istanbul until a telegram arrived, saying that the traveler was safe in his own palace and that Freddi was well and happy, and sent love to all.

It was too late to visit the coast of Africa—the rains had come, and it was hot, and there would be mosquitoes. They made themselves contented on the yacht, and did not bother to go ashore. The dairy farm prospered; the ample refrigerators provided the two young mothers with fresh foods, and they in turn provided for the infants. The grandmothers hovered over the scene in such a flutter of excitement as made you think of humming-birds' wings. Really, it appeared as if there had never been two babies in the world before and never would be again. Grandmothers, mothers, babies, and attendants formed a closed corporation, a secret society, an organization of, by, and for women.

It was a machine that ran as by clockwork, and the balance wheel was the grave Miss Severne. She had been employed to manage only Baby Frances; but she was so highly educated, so perfectly equipped, that she overawed the Robins; she was the voice of modern science, speaking the last word as to the phenomena of infancy. Equally important, she had the English manner, she was Britannia which rules the waves and most of the shores; she was authority, and the lesser breeds without the law decided to come in. What one grandmother was forbidden to do was obviously bad form for the other to do; what little Frances’s nursemaid was ordered to do was obviously desirable for little Johannes’s nursemaid to do. So in the end Jerusalem placed itself under the British flag; Rahel made Miss Severne a present now and then, and she ran the whole enterprise.

Every morning Marceline was in Miss Addington’s cabin, reciting her lessons. Mr. Dingle was in his cabin thinking his new thoughts and saying his old prayers. Madame Zyszynski was in hers, playing solitaire, or perhaps giving a "sitting." That left Hansi, Bess, and Lanny in the saloon, the first two working out their interpretation of some great violin classic, and Lanny listening critically while they played a single passage many times, trying the effect of this and that. Just what did Beethoven mean by the repetition of this rhythmic pattern? Here he had written sforzando, but he often wrote that when he meant tenuto, an expressive accent, the sound to be broadened—but be careful, it is a trick which becomes a bad habit, a meretricious device. They would discuss back and forth, but always in the end they deferred to Hansi; he was the one who had the gift, he was the genius who lived music in his soul. Sometimes the spirit caught them, they became not three souls but one, and it was an hour of glory.

These young people could never be bored on the longest yachting-cruise. They took their art with them, a storehouse of loveliness, a complex of ingenuities, a treasure-chest of delights which you could never empty. Lanny had stabbed away at the piano all his life, but now he discovered that he had been skimming over the surface of a deep ocean. Now he analyzed scientifically what before he had enjoyed emotionally. Hansi Robin had had a thorough German training, and had read learned books on harmony, acoustics, the history of music. He studied the personalities of composers, and he tried to present these to his audiences; he did not try to turn Mozart into Beethoven, or Gluck into Liszt. He would practice the most difficult Paganini or Wieniawski stuff, but wouldn’t play it in public unless he could find a soul in it. Finger gymnastics were for your own use.

XII

Every afternoon, if the weather was right, the vessel would come to a halt, and the guests, all but Mama Robin, would emerge on the deck in bathing-suits; the gangway would be let down over the side, and they would troop down and plunge into the water. A sailor stood by with a life-belt attached to a rope, in case of acci­dent; they were all good swimmers, but the efficient Captain Moeller took no chances and was always on watch himself. When they had played themselves tired, they would climb up, and the yacht would resume her course. The piano on little rubber wheels would be rolled out from the saloon, and Hansi and Bess would give an al­fresco concert; Rahel would sing, and perhaps lead them all in a chorus. Twilight would fall, "the dusk of centuries and of song."

There was only one trouble on this cruise so far as concerned Lanny, and that was the game of bridge. Beauty and Irma had to play; not for money, but for points, for something to do. These ladies knew how to read, in the sense that they knew the meaning of the signs on paper, but neither knew how to lose herself in a book or apply herself to the mastering of its contents. They grew sleepy when they tried it; they wanted other people to tell them what was in books; and Irma at least had always been able to pay for the service. Now she had married a poor man, and understood it to mean that he was to keep her company. In the world of Irma Barnes the nursery rhyme had been turned about, and every Jill must have her Jack.

Lanny didn’t really mind playing bridge—only there were so many more interesting things to do. He wanted to continue child study with the two specimens he had on board. He wanted to read history about the places he visited, so that a town would be where a great mind had functioned or a martyr had died. But Beauty and Irma were willing to bid five no trumps while the yacht was pass~ ing the scene of the battle of Salamis. They would both think it inconsiderate of Lanny if he refused to make a fourth hand because he wanted to write up his notes of the last seance with Madame Zyszynski. Lanny thought it was important to keep proper records, and index them, so that the statements of Tecumseh on one occasion could be compared with those on another. He had the books of Osty and Geley, scientists who had patiently delved into these phenomena and tried to evolve theories to explain them. This seemed much more important than whether Culbertson was right in his rules about the total honor-trick-content requirement of hands.

Irma had persuaded Rahel to prepare herself for life in the beau monde, and Lanny had helped to teach her. Then he had given the same sort of help to Marceline, who was going to be thirteen in a short while, and already was the most perfect little society lady you could imagine. Even on board a yacht she spent much time in front of the mirror, studying her charms and keeping them at their apex; surely she ought to be preparing to defend herself against those harpies with signaling-systems who would soon be trying to deprive her of her pocket-money. After she had been taught, Lanny could plead that he wasn’t needed any more, and go back to the study of Liszt’s four-hand piano compositions with Bess: the Concerto Pathetique, a marvel of brilliant color, turning two pianos into an orchestra; the Don Juan Fantaisie, most delightful of showpieces— Hansi came in while they were playing it, and said they really ought to give it on a concert stage. A memorable moment for two humble amateurs.

XIII

The Bessie Budd came to rest in the harbor of Cannes, and the company returned to Bienvenu for a few days. Beauty wished to renew her wardrobe—one gets so tired of wearing the same things. Lanny wished to renew the stock of music-scores—one’s auditors get tired of hearing the same compositions. Also, there were stacks of magazines which had been coming in, and letters with news of one’s friends. Lanny opened one from his father, and exclaimed: "Robbie’s coming to Paris! He’s due there now!"

"Oh, dear!" said the wife. She knew what was coming next. "I really ought to see him, Irma. It’s been eight months." "It’s been exactly as long since I’ve seen my mother." "Surely if your mother were in Paris, I’d be offering to take you." "It’ll be so dreadfully lonesome on the yacht, Lanny!" "I’ll take a plane and join you at Lisbon in three or four days. You know Robbie’s been in a crisis and I ought to find out how he’s getting along."

Irma gave up, but not without inner revolt. She was going through such a trying ordeal, and people ought to do everything to make it easier for her. A violent change from being the glamour girl of Broadway, the observed of all observers, the darling of the colum­nists and target of the spotlights—and now to be in exile, almost in jail for all these months! Would anybody ever appreciate it? Would Baby appreciate it? Irma’s observation of children suggested that Baby probably would not.

She thought of taking a couple of cars and transporting her half of the lactation apparatus up to Paris. But no, it would upset all the arrangements of the admirable Miss Severne; Baby might pick up a germ in the streets of a crowded city; it was so much safer out at sea, where the air was loaded with a stuff called ozone. And there was Rahel, with whom Irma had agreed to stick it out; knowing it would be hard, she had wanted to tie herself down, and had made a bargain.

"Another thing," Lanny said; "Zoltan Kertezsi should be in Paris and might help me to sell a picture or two."

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the wife. "Do you still want to fool with that business?"

"A little cash would come in handy to both Beauty and me."

"I don’t think it’s kind of you, Lanny. There’s no sense in your bothering to make money when I have it. If you have any time to sell, do please let me buy it!"

They had talked about this many times. Since Robbie couldn’t afford to send Beauty her thousand dollars a month, Irma insisted upon putting it up. She wanted the life of Bienvenu to go on ex­actly as before. The cost was nothing to her, and she liked the people around her to be happy. She would send money to Lanny’s account in Cannes, and then she didn’t want anybody to talk or think about the subject. That her husband might actually enjoy earning a few thousand dollars by selling Marcel’s paintings, or those of old masters, was something hard for her to make real to herself. It was harder still for Lanny to explain that he sometimes wanted to do other things than entertain an adored young wife!

I

FROM the windows of the Hotel Crillon Lanny Budd had looked out upon quite a lot of history: the World War beginning, with soldiers bivouacked in the Place de la Concorde; the war in progress, with enemy planes overhead and anti-aircraft firing; after the armistice, with a great park of captured German cannon, and May Day mobs being sabered by cuirassiers. In the hotel had lived and worked a couple of hundred American peace-makers, all of them kind to a very young secretary-translator and willing to assist with his education. The only trouble was, they differed so greatly among themselves that Lanny’s mind had reached a state of confusion from which it had not yet recovered.

Now the hotel had been restored to the system of private enter prise in which Robbie Budd so ardently believed and which he was pleased to patronize regardless of cost. In view of his reduced circumstances, he might well have gone to a less expensive place, but that would have been to admit defeat and to declass himself. No, he was still European representative of Budd Gunmakers, still looking for big deals and certain that Europe was going to need American weapons before long. Keep your chin up, and make a joke out of the fact that you have lost five or six million dollars. Everybody knows that you had to be somebody to have that happen to you.

Here he was, comfortably ensconced in his suite, with a spare room for Lanny; his whisky and soda and ice early in the morning, his little portable typewriter and papers spread out on another table. He was in his middle fifties, but looked younger than he had in New York under the strain of the panic. He had got back his ruddy complexion and well-nourished appearance; a little bit portly, but still vigorous and ready to tackle the world. Already he was in the midst of affairs; there was a Rumanian purchasing commission in town, and a couple of Soviet agents—Robbie grinned as he said that he was becoming quite chummy with the "comrades"; he knew how to "talk their language," thanks to Lanny’s help. He meant, not that he could speak Russian, but that he could speak Red.

Lanny told the news about the Dingles and the Robins, and Robbie in turn reported on the family in Newcastle. Amazing the way the head of the Budd tribe was holding on; at the age of eighty-three he insisted upon knowing every detail of the company’s affairs; he sat in his study and ran the business by telephone. Esther, Lanny’s stepmother, was well. "I really think she’s happier since the crash," said the husband. He didn’t add: "I have kept my promise to stay out of the market." Lanny knew he didn’t break promises.

They talked about Wall Street, about that "little bull market" which had everybody so stirred up, a mixture of hope and fear currently known as the "jitters." When the Bessie Budd was setting out, the market had been booming, and Robbie in a letter had repeated his old formula: "Don’t sell America short." Now stocks were slipping again, business going to pot, unemployment spreading; but Robbie had to keep up his courage, all America had to hold itself up by its bootstraps. The most popular song of the moment announced: "Happy days are here again."

II

They discussed Johannes Robin and his affairs, in which Robbie was deeply interested. He was going to Berlin on this trip: a subtle change in the relationship of the two associates, for in the old days it had been Johannes who came to Paris to see Robbie. The Jewish trader was on top; he hadn’t lost any part of his fortune, and wasn’t going to. He would never make Robbie Budd’s mistake of being too optimistic about this world, for he had made most of his money by expecting trouble. Now he had sent a message, by Lanny, that he was going to help Robbie to come back; but it would have to be

by the same judicious pessimism.

"He’s a good sort," said Robbie, English-fashion. He knew, of course, that his old associate couldn’t very well drop him, even if he had wished to, because Hansi and Bess had made them relatives. Moreover, Johannes was one of those Jews who desire to associate with gentiles and are willing to pay liberally for it.

Having had long talks with the financier on board the yacht, Lanny could tell what was in his mind. He considered that Germany was approaching the end of her rope; she couldn’t make any more reparations payments, even if she wished. Taxation had about reached its limits, foreign credit was drying up, and Johannes couldn’t see any chance of Germany’s escaping another bout of inflation. The government was incompetent, also very costly to deal with; that, of course, was a money-man’s polite way of intimating that it was corrupt and that he was helping to keep it so. Elections were scheduled for the end of the summer, and there would be a bitter campaign; sooner or later the various factions would fall to fighting, and that wouldn’t help the financial situation any. Johannes was trimming his sails and getting ready for rough weather. He was taking some of his investments out of the country. Those he kept in Germany were mostly in industries which produced goods for export.

Lanny made a brief report upon the younger Robins, and the present condition of their political diseases. Fate had played a strange prank upon the business association known as "Robin and Robbie." The Robin half had got somewhat the worst of it, having two Reds and two Pinks, whereas Robbie had only one Red and one Pink, and didn’t see either very often. The Robin half was considerate and never referred to the fact that the infection had come from the Robbie side. Johannes knew how his associate hated and despised Jesse Blackless, the man who had talked revolution to Lanny, and then to Hansi and Freddi, seducing these sensitive, idealistic minds away from their fathers.

Robbie wanted to know about Irma, and how she and Lanny were making out. Very important, that; the father had found out last October what a convenient thing it was to have the Barnes fortune back of you. He hoped that Lanny wasn’t going to fail to make a success of it. Lanny reported that he and Irma were getting along as well as most young couples he had known; better than some. Irma wanted a lot, and most of the things he was interested in didn’t mean much to her, but they were in love with each other, and they found the baby a source of satisfaction. Robbie said you never got everything you wanted out of a marriage, but you could put up with a lot when it included a thumping big fortune. Lanny knew that wasn’t the noblest view to take of the holy bonds of matrimony, but all he said was: "Don’t worry. We’ll make out."

III

One of Robbie’s purposes was to see Zaharoff. The New England-Arabian Oil Company had managed to survive the panic, but Robbie and his associates at home needed cash and must find a buyer for their shares. Doubtless the old spider knew all about their plight, but Robbie would put up a bold front. As usual, he asked if his son would like to go along, and as usual the son "wouldn’t have missed it for anything. He had never given up the hope that somehow he might be able to help his father in his dealings with the retired munitions king of Europe.

Robbie phoned the old man’s home, and learned that he was at his country estate, the Chateau de Balincourt in Seine-et-Oise, close to Paris. Robbie sent a telegram, and received an appointment for the next afternoon; he ordered a car through the hotel, and they were motored to the place, which had once belonged to King Leopold of Belgium. Now there was a new kind of kings in Europe, and one of them was this ex-fireman of Constantinople. A lodge-keeper swung back the gates for them, and they rolled down a tree-lined drive and were received at the door by an East Indian servant in native costume. All the servants were Hindus; an aged king wanted silence and secrecy, and one way was to have attend ants who understood only a few simple commands. One of Zaharoff’s married daughters lived with him, and no one came save by appointment.

The visitors were escorted into a drawing-room decorated in the lavish French fashion. On the walls were paintings, and Lanny had been invited to see them, so now he took the occasion. But it didn’t last long, for the owner came in. His heavy shoulders seemed a bit more bowed than when Lanny had watched him, in his undershirt, burning his private papers in the drawing-room of his Paris house and setting fire to the chimney in the process. Now he wore an embroidered purple smoking-jacket, and his white mustache and imperial were neatly trimmed. He had become almost entirely bald.

"Eh, bien, mon garçon?" he said to Lanny.

Being at the beginning of his thirties, Lanny felt quite grown up, but understood that this might not impress one who was at the beginning of his eighties. "I was looking at your paintings," he remarked. "You have a fine Ingres."

"Yes; but I have looked at it for so many years."

"Paintings should be like old friends, Sir Basil."

"Most of my old friends are gone, and the younger ones are busy with their affairs. They tell me you have been making your fortune."

It was an allusion to Irma, and not exactly a delicate one; but Lanny knew that this old man was money-conscious. The duquesa, his companion, had tried tactfully to cure him of the defect, but without succeeding. Lanny was not surprised when Zaharoff added: "You will no longer have to be a picture-dealer, hein?"

He smiled and answered: "I get a lot of fun out of it."

The old man’s remark was noted by Robbie, who had said on the way out that if Zaharoff knew that Lanny had the Barnes fortune behind him, he might expect to pay a higher price for the shares of the New England-Arabian Oil Company!

They seated themselves, and tea was served; for Robbie it was scotch and soda. The two men discussed the state of business in Europe and America, and Lanny listened attentively, as he had always done. One who found pleasure in buying and selling old masters could learn from the technique being here revealed. The Knight Commander of the Bath of England and Grand Officer of the Legion d’Honneur of France was the very soul of courtesy, of suavity in manner; a bit deprecating, as if he were saying: "I am a very old man, and it would not be fair to take advantage of me." His soft voice caressed you and his smile wooed you, but at the same time his blue eyes watched you warily.

He was known as "the mystery man of Europe," and doubtless there had been mysteries enough about what he was doing in the political and financial worlds; but so far as his character was concerned, Lanny no longer found any mystery. An aged plutocrat had fought his way up in the world by many deeds of which he now did not enjoy the contemplation. He had intrigued and threatened, bribed and cajoled, made promises and broken them; by tire­less scheming and pushing he had acquired the mastery of those great establishments which the various countries of Europe needed in order to wage their wars of power. But all the time he had remained in his soul a Greek peasant living among cruel oppressing Turks. He had been afraid of a thousand things: of his own memories, of the men he had thwarted and ruined, of slanderers, black­mailers, assassins, Reds—and, above all, of what he had helped to make Europe. A man who wanted to sell munitions, who wanted all the nations of the earth to spend their incomes upon munitions, but who didn’t want any munitions shot off—at least not anywhere within his own hearing! Unaccountably the shooting continued, Europe seemed to be going from bad to worse, and Zaharoff’s conversation revealed that he trusted nobody in power and had very little hope of anything.

A bitter, sad old man, he felt his powers waning, and had hidden himself away from dangers. He would soon be gone; and did he worry about where he was going? Or was it about what was going to become of his possessions? He mourned his beloved Spanish duquesa of the many names. Did he contemplate the possibility of being reunited to her? Lanny had something to say to him on that subject, but must wait until the two traders had got through with their duel of wits.

IV

It was Robbie Budd who had sought this interview, and he who would have to say what he had come for. Zaharoff, while waiting, would be gravely interested in what Robbie had to tell about the state of Wall Street and the great American financial world. The visitor was optimistic, sure that the clouds would soon blow over. Lanny knew that his father really believed that, but would Zaharoff believe that he believed it? No, the Greek would think that Robbie, having something to sell, was playing the optimist. Zaharoff, the prospective buyer, was a pessimist.

At last Robbie saw fit to get down to business. He explained that his father was very old, and the cares of the Budd enterprise might soon be on Robbie’s shoulders. Budd’s was largely out of munitions; it was making everything from needles to freight elevators. Robbie would no longer be in a position to travel—in short, he and his friends were looking for someone to take the New England-Arabian shares off their hands at a reasonable figure.

There it was; and Zaharoff’s pessimism assumed the hues of the nethermost stage of Dante’s inferno. The world was in a most horrible state; the Arabians were on the point of declaring a jihad and wiping out every European on their vast desolate hot peninsula; Zaharoff himself was a feeble old man, his doctors had given him final warning, he must avoid every sort of responsibility and strain —in short, he couldn’t buy anything, and didn’t have the cash anyhow.

A flat turn-down; but Lanny had heard a Levantine trader talk, and knew that Zaharoff’s real purpose and desire would not be revealed until the last minute, when his two guests had their hats in their hands, perhaps when they were outside the front door. Meanwhile they mustn’t show that they knew this; they mustn’t betray disappointment; they must go on chatting, as if it didn’t really mean very much to them, as if Robbie Budd had crossed the ocean to have one more look at Zaharoff’s blue eyes, or perhaps at his very fine Ingres.

It was time for Lanny to mention the paintings, which he had been invited to inspect. He asked if he might stroll about the room, and the Knight Commander and Grand Officer rose from his seat and strolled with him, pointing out various details. Lanny said: "You know I am interested in the value of paintings, that being my business." The remark gave no offense; quite the contrary. The old man told the prices, which he had at his fingertips: a hundred thousand francs for this Fragonard, a hundred and fifty thousand for that David. "Before-the-war francs," he added.

They went into the great library, a magnificent room with a balcony all around it, having heavy bronze railings. Then they inspected the dining-room, in which was a startling Goya, the portrait of an abnormally tall and thin Spanish gentleman wearing brilliant-colored silks with much lace and jewelry. "An ancestor of my wife," remarked the old man. "She didn’t care for it much; she found it cynical."

An opening which Lanny had been waiting for. "By the way, Sir Basil, here is something which might interest you. Have you ever tried any experiments with mediums?"

"Spiritualist mediums, you mean? Why do you ask?"

"Because of something" strange which has been happening in our family. My stepfather interested my mother in the subject, and in New York they found a Polish woman with whom they held seances, and she gave them such convincing results that we brought her to the Riviera with us, and she has become a sort of member of our family."

"You think she brings you messages from—" The old man stopped, as if hesitating to say "the dead."

"We get innumerable messages from what claim to be spirits, and they tell us things which astonish us, because we cannot see how this old and poorly educated Polish woman can possibly have had any means of finding them out."

"There is a vast system of fraud of that sort, I have been told," said the cautious Greek.

"I know, Sir Basil; and if this were an alert-minded woman, I might think it possible. But she is dull and quite unenterprising. How could she possibly have known that the duquesa was fond of tulips, and the names of the varieties she showed me?"

"What?" exclaimed the host.

"She mentioned the names Bybloem and Bizarre, and spoke of Turkestan, though she didn’t get it as the name of a tulip. She even gave me a very good description of the garden of your town house, and the number "fifty-three. She was trying to get Avenue Hoche, but could only get the H."

Lanny had never before seen this cautious old man reveal such emotion. Evidently a secret spring had been touched. "Sit down," he said, and they took three of the dining-room chairs. "Is this really true, Lanny?"

"Indeed it is. I have the records of a hundred or more sittings."

"This concerns me deeply, because of late years I have had very strange feelings, as if my wife was in the room and trying to communicate with me. I have told myself that it could only be the product of my own grief and loneliness. I don’t need to tell you how I felt about her."

"No, Sir Basil, I have always understood; the little I saw of her was enough to convince me that she was a lovely person."

"Six years have passed, and my sorrow has never diminished. Tell me—where is this Polish woman?" When Lanny explained about the yacht, he wanted to know: "Do you suppose it would be possible for me to have a séance with her?"

"It could be arranged some time, without doubt. We should be deeply interested in the results."

V

For half an hour or more the rich but unhappy old man sat asking questions about Madame Zyszynski and her procedure. Lanny explained the curious obligation of pretending to believe in an Iroquois Indian chieftain who spoke with a Polish accent. No easy matter for an intellectual person to take such a thing seriously; but Lanny told about a lady who had been his amie for many years prior to her death; she had sent him messages, including little details such as two lovers remember, but which would have no mean­ing for others: the red-and-white-striped jacket of the servant who attended them in the inn where they had spent their first night, the pear and apricot trees against the walls of the lady’s garden. Such things might have come out of Lanny’s subconscious mind, but even so, it was a curious experience to have somebody dig them up.

"I would like very much to try the experiment," said Zaharoff. "When do you think it could be arranged?"

"I will have to consult my mother and my stepfather. The yacht is on the way from Cannes to Bremen, and the plan is to go from there to America and return in the autumn. If you go to Monte Carlo next winter, we could bring Madame over to you."

"That is a long time to wait. Would it not be possible for me to bring her here for at least a trial? Perhaps the yacht may be stopping in the Channel?"

"We expect to stop on the English coast, perhaps at Portsmouth or Dover."

"If so, I would gladly send someone to England to bring her to me. I would expect to pay her, you understand."

"There is no need of that. We are taking care of her, and she is satisfied, so it would be better not to raise the question."

"This might mean a great deal to me, Lanny. If I thought that I was in contact with my wife, and that I had some chance of seeing her again, it would give me more happiness than anything I can think of." There was a pause, as if a retired munitions king needed a violent effort to voice such feelings. "I have met no one in any way approaching her. You have heard, perhaps, that I waited thirty-four years to marry her, and then she was spared to me barely eighteen months."

Lanny knew that Zaharoff and the duquesa had been living together during all those thirty-four years; but this was not to be mentioned. A young free lance could mention casually that he had had an came, but the richest man in Europe had to look out for chantage and scandal-mongers—especially when the lady’s insane husband had been a cousin to the King of Spain!

"If you want to make a convincing test," continued Lanny, "it would be better not to let Madame Zyszynski know whom she is to meet. She rarely asks questions, either before or after a sitting. She will say: Did you get good results? and if you tell her: Very good, she is satisfied. I should advise meeting her in some hotel room, with nothing to give her any clue."

"Listen, my boy," said the old man, with more eagerness than Lanny had ever seen him display in the sixteen years of their acquaintance, "if you will make it possible for me to see this woman in the next few days, I will come to any place on the French coast that you name."

"In that case I think I can promise to arrange it. I am to fly and join the yacht at Lisbon, and as soon as I can set a date, I will telegraph you. In the meantime, say nothing, and my father and I will be the only persons in the secret. I will tell my mother that I have a friend who wants to make a private test; and to Madame I won’t say even that."

VI

To this long conversation Robbie Budd had listened in silence. He didn’t believe in a hereafter, but he believed in giving the old spider, the old gray wolf, the old devil, whatever would entertain him and put him under obligations to the Budd family. When they rose to leave, Zaharoff turned to him and said: "About those shares: would you like me to see if some of my old-time associates would be interested in them?"

"Certainly, Sir Basil."

"If you will send me the necessary data concerning the company—"

"I have the whole set-up with me." Robbie pointed to his briefcase. "I have thirty-five thousand shares at my disposal."

"Are you prepared to put a price on them?"

"We are asking a hundred and twenty dollars a share. That represents exactly the amount of the investment."

"But you have had generous profits, have you not?"

"Not excessive, in view of the period of time and the work that I have put in on it."

"People are glad to get back the half of their investment these days, Mr. Budd."

"Surely not in oil, Sir Basil."

"Well, leave the documents with me, and I’ll see what I can do and let you hear in the next few days."

They took their leave; and in their car returning to Paris, Robbie said: "Son, that was an inspiration! How did you think of it?"

"Well, it happened, and I thought he’d want to know."

"That business about the tulips really happened?"

"Of course."

"It was certainly most convenient. If that woman can convince him that the duquesa is sending him messages, there’s nothing he won’t do. We may get our price."

Lanny well knew that his father wasn’t very sensitive when he was on the trail of a business deal; but then, neither is a spider, a wolf, or a devil. "I hope you do," he said.

"He means to buy the shares himself," continued Robbie. "It will take a lot of bargaining. Don’t let him see too much of the woman until he pays up."

"The more he sees, the more he may want," countered the son.

"Yes, but suppose he buys her away from you entirely?"

"That’s a chance we have to take, I suppose."

"My guess is he won’t be able to believe that the thing is on the level. If he gets results, he’ll be sure you told the woman in advance."

"Well," said the young idealist, "he’ll be punishing his own sins. Goethe has a saying that all guilt avenges itself upon earth."

But Robbie wasn’t any more interested in spirituality than he was in spirits. "If I can swing this deal, I’ll be able to pay off the notes that I gave you and Beauty and Marceline."

"You don’t have to worry about those notes, Robbie. We aren’t suffering."

"All the same, it’s not pleasant to know that I took the money which you had got by selling Marcel’s paintings."

"If it hadn’t been for you," said the young philosopher, "I wouldn’t have been here, Beauty would have married some third-rate painter in Montmartre, and Marceline wouldn’t have been traveling about in a private yacht. I have pointed that out to them."

"All the same," said Robbie, "I came over here to sell those shares. Let’s get as much of the old rascal’s money as we can."

Lanny had made jokes about the firm of "R and R." In the days when his mother and Bess had been trying to find him a wife, there had been a firm of "B and B." Now he said: "We’ll have a Z and Z. "

VII

Back in Paris Lanny might have sat in at a conference and learned about the rearmament plans of the Rumanian government; but he had an engagement with Zoltan Kertezsi to visit the Salon and discuss the state of the picture market. The blond Hungarian was one of those happy people who never look a day older; always he had just discovered something new and exciting in the art world, always he wanted to tell you about it with a swift flow of words, and always his rebellious hair and fair mustache seemed to be sharing in his gestures. There wasn’t anything first rate in the Salon, he reported, but there was a young Russian genius, Alexander Jacovleff, being shown at one of the galleries; a truly great draftsman, and Lanny must come and have a look right away. Also, Zoltan had come upon a discovery, a set of Blake water-color drawings which had been found in an old box in a manor-house in Surrey; they were genuine, and still fresh in color; nobody else on earth could have done such angels and devils; doubtless they had been colored by Blake’s wife, but that was true of many Blakes. They ought to fetch at least a thousand pounds apiece

Immediately Lanny began running over in his mind the names of persons who might be interested in such a treasure trove. It wasn’t only because Zoltan would pay him half the commission; it was because it was a game that he had learned to play. No use for Irma to object, no use to think that the money she deposited to his account would ever bring him the same thrills as he got from putting through a deal.

"We shan’t be able to get what we used to," said the friend. "You’d be astonished the way prices are being cut."

No matter; the pictures were just as beautiful, and if you kept your tastes simple, you could live and enjoy them. But the dealers who had loaded themselves up were going to have trouble paying their high rents; and the poor devils who did the painting would wander around with their canvases under their arms, and set them up in the windows of tobacco-shops and every sort of place, coming back two or three times a day and gazing at them wistfully, hop­ing that this might cause some passer-by to stop and take an interest.

Paris in the springtime was lovely, as always, and the two friends strolled along, feasting their eyes upon the chestnut blossoms and their olfactories upon the scents of flowerbeds. Zoltan was near fifty, but he acted and talked as young as his friend; he was full of plans to travel here and there, to see this and that. He was always meeting some delightful new person, discovering some new art treasure. Happy indeed is the man with whom business and pleasure are thus combined! A thousand old masters had made life easy for him, by producing works over which he could rave and feel proud when he secured one for some customer.

There were always wealthy persons on the hunt for famous works of art; and Zoltan would caution his Pink friend not to be too contemptuous in his attitude toward such persons. Many were ignorant and pretentious, but others were genuine art lovers who could be helped and encouraged; and that was not only good business, it was a public service, for many of these collections would come to museums in the end. Zoltan didn’t know much about economics, and didn’t bother his head with Lanny’s revolutionary talk; he said that, no matter what happened, the paintings would survive, and people would want to see them, and there would be occupation for the man who had cultivated his tastes and could tell the rare and precious from the cheap and common.

VIII

Lanny rented a car and motored Zoltan out to have lunch with Emily Chattersworth at her estate, Les Forêts, where she spent the greater part of each year, a very grand place of which Lanny had memories from childhood. On this lawn under the great beech-trees he had listened to Anatole France exposing the scandals of the kings and queens of old-time France. In this drawing-room he had played the piano for Isadora Duncan, and had been invited to elope with her. Here also he had played accompaniments for Hansi, the day when Hansi and Bess had met and fallen irrevocably in love.

The white-haired chatelaine wanted to hear the news of all the families. She was interested in the story of Zaharoff and the duquesa, whom she had known. Emily had had a seance with Madame Zys-zynski, but hadn’t got any significant results; it must be because she was hostile to the idea, and had frightened the spirits! She preferred to ask Zoltan’s opinion of the Salon, which she had visited. Having a couple of paintings which no longer appealed to her taste, she showed them to the expert and heard his estimate of what they might bring. She told him not to hurry; she had lost a lot of money, as everybody else had, but apparently it was only a paper loss, for the stocks were still paying dividends. Lanny advised her not to count on that.

A young Pink wouldn’t come to Paris without calling at the office of Le Populaire and exchanging ideas with Jean Longuet and Leon Blum. Lanny knew what they thought, because he read their paper, but they would want to hear how the workers' education movement was going in the Midi, and what the son of an American industrialist had seen in the Soviet Union. From a luncheon with Longuet, Lanny strolled to look at picture exhibitions, and then climbed the Butte de Montmartre to the unpretentious apartment where Jesse Blackless was in the midst of composing a manifesto to be published in L’Humanite, denouncing Longuet and his paper as agents and tools of capitalist reaction. When Jesse learned that his nephew had been to Odessa he began to ply him with questions, eager for every crumb of reassurance as to the progress of the Five-Year Plan.

Jesse lived here with his companion, a Communist newspaper em­ployee. Theirs was a hard-working life with few pleasures; Jesse had no time to paint, he said; the reactionaries were getting ready to shut down upon the organized workers and put them out of business. The next elections in France might be the last to be held under the Republic. Lanny’s Red uncle lived under the shadow of impending class war; his life was consecrated to hating the capitalist system and teaching others to share that feeling.

He was going into this campaign to fight both capitalists and Socialists. Lanny thought it was a tragedy that the labor groups couldn’t get together to oppose enemies so much stronger than themselves. But there couldn’t be collaboration between those who thought the change might be brought about by parliamentary action and those who thought that it would have to be done by force. When you used the last phrase to Jesse Blackless, he would insist that it was the capitalists who would use force, and that the attitude of the workers was purely defensive; they would be attacked, their organizations overthrown—the whole pattern had been revealed in Italy.

Lanny would answer: "That is just quibbling. The Communists take an attitude which makes force inevitable. If you start to draw a gun on a man, he knows that his life depends upon his drawing first."

Could capitalism be changed gradually? Could the job be done by voting some politicians out of office and voting others in? Lanny had come upon a quotation of Karl Marx, admitting that a gradual change might be brought about in the Anglo-Saxon countries, which had had parliamentary institutions for a long time. Most Reds didn’t know that their master had said that, and wouldn’t believe it when you told them; it seemed to give the whole Bolshevik case away. Jesse said that quoting Marx was like quoting the Bible: you could find anything you wanted.

They went on arguing, saying little that they hadn’t said before. Presently Francoise came in, and they stopped, because she didn’t share the carefree American sense of humor, and would get irritated with Lanny. He told her the good things about the Soviet Union; and soon came Suzette, her young sister, married to one of the murderous taxi drivers of Paris. Uncle Jesse said this gargon had the right solution of the social problem: to run over all the bourgeois, while using Suzette to increase the Red population. They had a second baby.

The women set to work to prepare supper, and Lanny excused himself and walked back to the Crillon to meet his father. When Robbie asked: "What have you been doing?" he answered: "Looking at pictures." It was the truth and nothing but the truth—yet not the whole truth!

IX

One other duty: a visit to the Chateau de Bruyne. Lanny had promised Marie on her deathbed that he would never forget her two boys. There wasn’t much that he could do for them, but they were friendly fellows and glad to tell him of their doings. He phoned to the father, who came and motored him out. Denis de Bruyne, though somewhat over seventy, was vigorous; his hair had become white, and his dark, sad eyes and pale aristocratic features made him a person of distinction. He was glad to see Lanny because of the memories they shared.

On the way they talked politics, and it was curious to note how the same world could appear so different to two different men. Denis de Bruyne, capitalist on a modest scale, owner of a fleet of taxicabs and employer of Suzette’s husband—though he didn’t know it—agreed with Jesse Blackless that the Communists were strong in Paris and other industrial centers and that they meant to use force if they could get enough of it. Denis’s conception of statesmanship was to draw the gun first. He was a Nationalist, and was going to put up money to keep Jesse and his sort from getting power. Lanny listened, and this was agreeable to an entrepreneur who was so certain of his own position.

Denis de Bruyne was worried about the state of his country, which was in a bad way financially, having counted upon German reparations and been cheated out of most of her expectations. A French Nationalist blamed the British business men and statesmen; Britain

was no true ally of France, but a rival; Britain used Germany to keep France from growing strong. Why did American business men further this policy, helping Germany to get on her feet, which meant making her a danger to France? Foreign investors had lent Germany close to five billion dollars since the end of the war: why did they take such risks?

Lanny replied: "Well, if they hadn’t, how would Germany have paid France any reparations at all?"

"She would have paid if she had been made to," replied Denis. He didn’t say how, and Lanny knew better than to pin him down. The men who governed France hadn’t learned much by their invasion of the Ruhr and its failure; they still thought that you could produce goods by force, that you could get money with bayonets. It was useless to argue with them; their fear of Germany was an obsession. And maybe they were right—how could Lanny be sure? Certainly there were plenty of men in Germany who believed in force and meant to use it if they could get enough of it. Lanny had met them also.

Denis wanted to know what was going to be the effect of the Wall Street collapse upon French affairs. The season was beginning, and many of the fashionable folk were not here. Would the tourists fail to show up this summer? A question of urgency to the owner of a fleet of taxicabs! Lanny said he was afraid that Paris would have to do what New York had done—draw in its belt. When Denis asked what Robbie thought about the prospects, Lanny reported his father’s optimism, and Denis was pleased, having more respect for Robbie’s judgment than for Lanny’s.

The Chateau de Bruyne was no great showplace like Balincourt and Les Forêts, but a simple country home of red stone; its title was a tribute to its age, and the respect of the countryside for an old family. It had been one of Lanny’s homes, off and on, for some six years. The servants knew him, the old dog knew him, he felt that even the fruit trees knew him. Denis, fils, had got himself a wife of the right sort, and she was here, learning the duties of a chatelaine; they had a baby boy, so the two young fathers could make jokes about a possible future union of the families. Chariot, the younger brother, was studying to be an engineer, which meant that he might travel to far parts of the earth; incidentally, he was interested in politics, belonging to one of the groups of aggressive French patriots. Lanny didn’t say much about his own ideas—he never had, for it had been his privilege to be the lover of Denis’s wife, but not the cor-rupter of his sons. All that he could hope for was to moderate their vehemence by talking about toleration and open-mindedness.

The two young men—one was twenty-four and the other a year younger—looked up to Lanny as to an abnormally wise and brilliant person. They knew about his marriage, and thought it a coronation. In this opinion their mother would have joined, for she had had a Frenchwoman’s thorough-going respect for property. The French, along with most other Europeans, were fond of saying that the Americans worshiped the dollar; a remark upon which Zoltan Kertezsi had commented in a pithy sentence: "The Americans worship the dollar and the French worship the sou."

I

Friendship is a delightful thing when you have had the good judgment to choose the right friends. Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson had come in the course of the years to be the most congenial of Lanny’s friends. It could be doubted whether the younger man would have had the courage to stick to so many unorthodox ideas if it hadn’t been for Rick’s support. The baronet’s son watched everything that went on in the world, analyzed the various tendencies, and set forth his understanding of them in newspaper articles which Lanny would clip and send to persons with whom he got into arguments. Not that he ever converted anybody, but he kept his cause alive.

Rick was only about a year and a half the elder, but Lanny was in the habit of deferring to him, which pleased Rick’s wife and didn’t altogether displease Rick. Whenever the Englishman wrote another play, Lanny was sure it was bound to make the long-awaited "hit." When it didn’t, there was always a reason: that Rick persisted in dealing with social problems from a point of view unpopular with those who bought the best seats in theaters. The young playwright was fortunate in having parents who believed in him and gave him and his family a home while he wrote the truth as he saw it.

Nearly thirteen years had passed since a very young English flier had crashed in battle, and been found with a gashed forehead and a broken and badly infected knee. In the course of time he had learned to live with his lameness. He could go bathing from the special landing-place which Lanny had had made for him at Bienvenu; and now the carpenter of the Bessie Budd bolted two handles onto the landing-stage of the yacht’s gangway, so that a man with good stout arms could lift himself out of the water without any help. He would unstrap his leg-brace, slide in, and enjoy himself just as if humanity had never been cursed with a World War.

II

Nina was her usual kind and lovely self, and as for Little Alfy— he had to be called that on account of his grandfather the baronet, but it hardly fitted him any more, for he had grown tall and leggy for his almost thirteen years. He had dark hair and eyes like his father’s, and was, as you might have expected, extremely precocious; he knew a little about all the various political movements, also the art movements, and would use their patter in a fashion which made it hard for you to keep from smiling. He had thin, sensitive features and was serious-minded, which made him the predestined victim of Marceline Detaze, the little flirt, the little minx. Marceline didn’t know anything about politics, but she knew some of the arts, including that of coquetry. Half French and half American, she also had been brought up among older people, but of a different sort. From the former Baroness de la Tourette, the hardware lady from Cincinnati, she had learned the trick of saying outrageous things with a perfectly solemn face and then bursting into laughter at a sober lad’s look of bewilderment. Apparently Alfy never would learn about it.

The families had planned a match for these two by cable as soon as they had appeared on the scene. The parents made jokes about it, in the free and easy modern manner, and the children had taken up the practice. "I’ll never marry you if you don’t learn to dance better," Marceline would announce. Alfy, peeved, would respond: "You don’t have to marry me if you don’t want to." He would never have the least idea what was coming next. One time her feelings would be hurt, and the next time she would be relieved of a great burden; but whichever it was, it would turn out to be teasing, and Alfy would be like a man pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp on a dark night.

There had been dancing in Marceline’s home ever since she was old enough to toddle about. So-called "society" dancing, Dalcroze dancing, Isadora Duncan dancing, Provencal peasant dancing, English and American country dancing—every sort that a child could pick up. Some kind of music going most of the time, and a phonograph and a radio so that she could make it to order. On the yacht, as soon as her lessons were finished, she would come running to where Hansi and Bess were practicing; she would listen for a minute to get the swing of it, then her feet would start moving and she would be dancing all over the saloon. She would hold out her hands to Lanny, and they would begin improvising; they had learned to read each other’s signals, and once more, as in the old Dalcroze days, you saw music made visible.

No wonder Marceline could dance rings all around a lad who knew only that somnambulistic walking in time to jazz thumping which prevailed in fashionable society. Alfy would try his best, but look and feel like a young giraffe caught in an earthquake. "Loosen up, loosen up!" she would cry, and he would kick up his heels and toes in a most un-English manner. The girl would give him just enough encouragement to keep him going, but never enough to let him doubt who was going to call the tune in their household.

Lanny would see them sitting apart from the others while music was being played in the evening. Sometimes they would be holding hands, and he would guess that they were working out their problem in their own way. He recalled the days when he had paid his first visit to The Reaches, and had sat on the bank of the River Thames, listening to Kurt Meissner playing the slow movement of Mozart’s D-minor concerto. How miraculous life had seemed to him, with one arm about Rosemary Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver, shivering with delight and dreaming of a marvelous future. Nothing had worked out as he had planned it; he reflected upon life, and how seldom it gives us what we expect. The young people come along, and clamor so loudly for their share, and have so little idea of the pain that awaits them. One’s heart aches at the knowledge, but one cannot tell them; they have to have their own way and pay their own penalties.

III

The Bessie Budd cruised in waters frequented by vessels of every size, from ocean liners down to tiny sailboats. One more did not matter, provided you kept a lookout and blew your whistle now and then. They went up into the Irish Sea; the weather was kind, one day of blue sky succeeded another, and the air resounded with music and the tapping of feet upon the deck. Hansi and Bess practiced diligently, Beauty and Irma played bridge with Nina and Rahel, while Lanny and Rick sat apart and discussed everything that had happened to them during the past year.

Lanny had visited the great manufacturing-plant of his forefathers, and had been received as a prince consort in the Newcastle Country Club and in Irma’s imitation French chateau on Long Island. Rick, meanwhile, had written a play about a young married couple who were divided over the issue of violence in the class struggle. Rick had written several plays about young people tormented by some aspect of this struggle. In the present opus the talk of his young idealist sounded much like that of Lanny Budd, while the ultra-Red wife might have had a private yacht named after her. Rick apologized for this, saying that a dramatist had to use such material as came to his hand. Lanny said that doubtless there were plenty of futile and bewildered persons like himself, but not many determined, hard-fighting rebels like Bess among the parasitic classes.

Rick had talked with editors and journalists in London, with statesmen, writers, and all sorts of people in his father’s home. He knew about the upsurge of the Nazi movement in the harassed Fatherland. Not long ago he had had a letter from Kurt, who was always hoping to explain his country to the outside world; he sent newspaper clippings and pamphlets. The Germans, frantic with a sense of persecu­tion, were tireless propagandists, and would preach to whoever might be persuaded to listen. But you rarely heard one of them set forth both sides of the case or admit the slightest wrong on his country’s side.

They were put ashore in a small Irish harbor, and the young people took a ride in a jaunting car, while the ladies dickered with sharp-witted peasant women for quantities of hand-embroidered linen. They were put ashore in Wales, where the mountains did not seem imposing to one who had lived so close to the Alps. They visited the Isle of Man, and Lanny recalled a long novel which he had thought was tremendous in his boyhood, but which he now guessed to be no great shakes. They put into Liverpool, where they had arranged to receive mail, and among other things was a telegram from Robbie, who was back in Paris. "Sale concluded at eighty-three better than expected thanks to you sailing tomorrow good luck to the ghosts."

At his father’s request Lanny had put off making the promised date with Zaharoff. Now he mailed a note, saying that the yacht was due on the French coast in a few days and he would wire an appointment. The Bessie Budd idled her way south again, and returned the Pomeroy-Nielsons to Cowes, from which place Lanny sent a wire to the Chateau de Balincourt, saying that he would bring his friend to a hotel in Dieppe on the following afternoon. He had explained to Mama Robin that he wished to meet a friend there, and she was pleased to oblige him. His mother and his stepfather were told that he desired to make a test with Madame, and to name no names until after it was over. As for the Polish woman, she was used to being bundled here and there for demonstrations of her strange gift.

IV

Dieppe is a thousand-year-old town with a church, a castle, and other sights for tourists; also it is a popular watering-place with a casino, so Lanny didn’t have to think that he was inconveniencing his friends. The yacht was laid alongside a pier, and at the proper time he called a taxi and took his charge to the hotel. He had received an unsigned telegram informing him that "Monsieur Jean" would be awaiting him; at the desk he asked for this gentleman, and was escorted to the suite in which Zaharoff sat waiting, alone.

A comfortable chaise-longue had been provided for the medium and an armchair for each of the men. Since the old one had been thoroughly instructed, no talk was necessary. Lanny introduced him by the fictitious name, and he responded: "Bon jour," and no more. Lanny said: "Asseyez-vous, Madame," and not another word was spoken. The retired munitions king was inconspicuously dressed, and one who was not familiar with his photograph might have taken him for a retired business man, a college professor or doctor.

The woman began to shudder and moan; then she became still, and was in her trance. There was a long wait; Lanny, who kept telling himself that these phenomena were "telepathy," concentrated his mind upon the personality of Maria del Pilar Antonia Angela Patro-cino Simon de Muguiro у Berute, Duquesa de Marqueni у Villa-franca de los Caballeros. It was a personality which failed to live up to the magnificent-sounding names; a rather small, dark lady, very

quiet, reserved, but kind. She had fitted the needs of an extremely exacting man of affairs; guarded him, cared for him, loved him, and, if gossip was correct, borne him two daughters. Anyhow, he had adored her, and shown his pride in the restrained fashion which circumstances imposed upon him. For more than thirty-five years they had been inseparable, and a million memories of her must be buried in the old man’s subconscious mind. Would the medium be able to tap them? If so, it might be embarrassing, and perhaps it would have been more tactful of Lanny to offer to withdraw. But Zaharoff had placed a chair, possibly with the idea that the younger man’s help might be needed for the guiding of the experiment.

Suddenly came the massive voice of the Iroquois chieftain, speaking English, as always. "Hello, Lanny. So you are trying to bowl me out!" It certainly wasn’t an Iroquois phrase, nor did it seem exactly Polish.

Said Lanny, very solemnly: "Tecumseh, I have brought a gentleman who is deeply sincere in his attitude to you."

"But he does not believe in me!"

"He is fully prepared to believe in you, if you will give him cause; and he will be glad to believe."

"He is afraid to believe!" declared the voice, with great emphasis. There was a pause; and then: "You are not a Frenchman."

"I have tried to be," said Zaharoff. Lanny had told him to answer every question promptly and truly, but to say no more than necessary.

"But you were not born in France. I see dark people about you, and they speak a strange language which I do not understand. It will not be easy for me to do anything for you. Many spirits come; you have known many people, and they do not love you; it is easy to see it in their faces. I do not know what is the matter; many of them talk at once and I cannot get the words."

V

From where Lanny sat he could watch the face of Madame, and saw that it was disturbed, as always when Tecumseh was making a special effort to hear or to understand. By turning his eyes the observer could watch the face of the old munitions king, which showed strained attention. On the arm of Lanny’s chair was a notebook, in which he was setting down as much as he could of what was spoken.

Suddenly the control exclaimed: "There is a man here who is trying to talk; to you, not to me. He is a very thin old man with a white beard. He says, in very bad English, he was not always like that, he had a black beard when he knew you. His name is like Hyphen; also he has another name, Tidy; no, it is one name, very long; is it Hyphen-tidies? A Greek name, he says, Hiphentides. Do you know that name?"

"No," said Zaharoff.

"He says you lie. Why do you come here if you mean to lie?"

"I do not recall him."

"He says you robbed him. What is it he is talking about? He keeps saying gall; you have gall; many sackfuls of gall. Is it a joke he is making?"

"It must be." Zaharoff spoke with quiet decisiveness. Of all the persons Lanny knew, he was the most completely self-possessed.

"He says it is no joke. Gall is something that is sold. A hundred and sixty-nine sacks of gall. Also gum, many cases of gum. You were an agent." Tecumseh began to speak as if he were the spirit, something which he did only when the communications came clearly. "You took my goods and pledged them for yourself. Do you deny it?"

"Of course I do."

"You did not deny it in the London court. You pleaded guilty. You were in prison—what is it?—the Old something, Old Basin? It was more than fifty years ago, and I do not remember."

"Old Bailey?" ventured Lanny.

"That is it—Old Bailey. I was in Constantinople, and I trusted you. You said you did not know it was wrong; but they were my goods and you got the money—"

The voice died away; it had become querulous, as of an old man complaining of something long forgotten. If it wasn’t real it was certainly well invented.

VI

Lanny stole a glance at the living old man, and it seemed to him there was a faint dew of perspiration on his forehead. From what Robbie had told him he was prepared to believe that the Knight Commander of the Bath and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor had many recollections which he would not wish to have dragged into the light of day.

Said Tecumseh, after a pause: "I keep hearing the name Mugla. What is Mugla?"

"It is the village where I was born."

"Is that in Greece?"

"It is in Turkey."

"But you are not a Turk."

"My parents were Greeks."

"Somebody keeps calling you Zack. Then I hear Ryas. Is your name Ryas?"

"Zacharias is one of my names."

"There is a man here who says he is your uncle. Anthony; no, not that. I don’t know these Greek names."

"I had an Uncle Antoniades."

"He says: Do you wish to talk to me?"

"I do not especially wish it."

"He says: Ha, ha! He does not like you either. You were in busi­ness with him, too. It was not so good. You made up wonderful stories about it. Do you write stories, or something like that?"

"I am not a writer."

"But you tell stories. All the spirits laugh when Uncle Antoniades says that. You have become rich and important and you tell stories about the old days. They tell stories about you. Do you wish to hear them?"

"That is not what I came for."

"There is a big strong man with a white beard; it looks like your own, only more of it. He gives the name Max. He speaks good English—no, he says it is not good, it is Yankee. Do you know the Yankee Max?"'

"I don’t recognize him."

"He says he is Maxim. You were in business with him, too."

"I knew a Maxim."

"You bought him out. He made millions, but you made tens of millions. There was no stopping you. Maxim says he did not believe in the future life, but he warns you, it is a mistake; you will be happier if you change all that materialism. Do you know what he means?"

"It does not sound like him."

"I have put off the old man. I was a strapping fellow. I could lick anybody in the Maine woods. I could lick anybody in Canada, and I did. I licked you once, you old snollygoster. Does that sound more like me?"

"Yes, I recognize that."

"I once wrote the emperor’s name with bullets on a target. You haven’t forgotten that, surely!"

"I remember it."

"All right, then, wake up, and figure out how you will behave in a better world. You cannot solve your problems as you used to do, putting your fingers in your ears."

A moment’s pause. "He went away laughing," said Tecumseh. "He is a wild fellow. When he ate soup it ran down his beard; and it was the same with icecream. You do not like such manners; you are a quiet person, Zacharias—and yet I hear loud noises going on all around you. It is very strange! What are you?"

VII

The old Greek made no reply, and the voice of the control sank to a murmur, as if he was asking the spirits about this mystery. For quite a while Lanny couldn’t make out a word, and he took the occasion to perfect his notes. Once or twice he glanced at the munitions king, who did not return the glance, but sat staring before him as if he were an image of stone.

"What is this noise I keep hearing?" burst out the Indian, sud denly. "And why are these spirits in such an uproar? A rattling and banging, and many people yelling, as if they were frightened. What is it that you do, Zacharias?"

Sir Basil did not speak.

"Why don’t you answer me?"

"Cannot the spirits tell you?"

"It is easier when you answer my questions. Don’t you like what these people are saying? It is not my fault if they hate you. Did you cheat them? Or did you hurt them?"

"Some thought that I did."

"What I keep hearing is guns. That is it! Were you a soldier? Did you fight in battles?"

"I made munitions."

"Ah, that is it; and so many people died. That is why they are screaming at you. I have never seen so many; never in the days when I commanded a tribe of the Six Nations, and the palefaces came against us. They had better guns and more of them, and my people died, they died screaming and cursing the invaders of our land. So men died screaming and cursing Zacharias the Greek. Do you run and hide from them? They come crowding after you, as if it was the first time they ever could get at you. They stretch out their hands trying to reach you. Do you feel them touching you?"

"No," said Zaharoff. For the first time Lanny thought there was a trace of quavering in his voice. Another quick glance revealed distinct drops of sweat on his forehead.

"It is like a battle going on—it gives me a headache, with all the smoke and noise. I see shells bursting away off, and men are falling out of the sky. No, no, keep back, he can’t hear you, and there is no use yelling at me. Let somebody speak for you all. Any one of you. Come forward, you man, you with the ragged flag. What is it you want to say? No, not you! I don’t want to talk to a man with the top of his head blown off. What sense can come out of only half a head? Keep your bloody hands off me—I don’t care who you are. What’s that? Oh, I see. All right, tell him. … I am the Unknown Soldier. I am the man they have buried by the Arc de Triomphe. They keep the undying flame burning for me, and they come and lay wreaths on my tomb. You came once and laid a wreath, did you not? Answer me!"

"I did." The munitions king’s voice was hardly audible.

"I saw you. I see all who come to the tomb. I want to tell them to go away and stop the next war. I want to tell them something else that will not please them. Do you know my name?"

"Nobody knows your name."

"My name is Mordecai Izak. I am a Jew. Their Unknown Soldier is a Jew, and that would worry them very much. Are you a Jew?"

"I have been called that, but it is not so."

"I understand, brother. Many of us have had to do it."

There was a pause, and then Tecumseh was speaking. "They are all laughing. They tell me not to mind if you do not speak the truth. You are a very important man, they say. They push forward a little old woman. I cannot make out her name; it sounds like Haje —is that a woman’s name? She says that she is the mother of your son. Is that possible?"

"It might be."

"She says that your name was Sahar. You changed it in Russia. It was a place called Vilkomir, a long, long time ago. She says your son is living; he is a very poor fellow. She says you have grandchildren, but you do not wish to know it. Does that mean anything to you?"

"Possibly."

"The wounded men crowd her away. They do not let her talk. They are shouting again: There is blood on your money! You have a great deal of money, and there is a curse upon it. You murdered a man when you were young, but that is nothing, you have murdered all of us. We are waiting for you in the spirit world. We are the avengers—we, the men without faces, without bowels! Some day you will come to us— "

The voice of Tecumseh had become shrill; and suddenly the aged Greek started to his feet. Two steps brought him to Lanny’s side, and he said: "Give me the book." The younger man, taken aback, handed over his notebook; Zaharoff grabbed it and hastened, almost running, to the door, and went out, slamming it behind him.

VIII

That was the end of the seance. Not another word was spoken, but the medium began to moan pitiably. Lanny was prepared for trouble, because any sort of abrupt action always had a bad effect on her; it was something about which he had warned Zaharoff. Now she was seized by a sort of light convulsion, and sputum began to drip from her lips. Lanny ran and got a towel and wiped it away; he was frightened for a while, but gradually the moaning died, and after a space the woman opened her eyes.

"Oh, what is the matter?" she asked; and then, seeing the empty chair: "Where is the old gentleman?"

"He went away."

"He should not have done that. Something went wrong; I feel so bad."

"I am sorry, Madame. He was frightened."

"Did he hear something bad?"

"Very bad indeed."

"Somebody is dead?"

Lanny thought that was an easy way out. "Yes," he said. "He was not prepared for it and did not want to show his feelings."

"It is terribly bad for me. Tecumseh will be angry."

"I think he will understand, Madame."

"It made me so weak; and my head aches."

"I am sorry. I will call for a little wine, if you like."

"Please do."

Lanny ordered some wine and biscuits. She would not eat, but she sipped the wine, and after a while he helped her downstairs and into a taxi. He was interested to note that even under these rather sensational circumstances the woman did not press him with questions. It was her own feelings that she was concerned about. People should not treat her that way; they should be more considerate.

He helped her on board the yacht, and Baby Johannes’s nursemaid, who had become her friend, helped her into bed. Beauty and the others were out seeing the sights of Dieppe, so Lanny went to his own cabin to write up his notes a second time before his memories grew cold.

A really striking experience! He couldn’t judge about all the details—for example, the hundred and sixty-nine sacks of gall—but Zaharoff’s behavior was proof of the general accuracy of the revelations. The young observer was clinging to his theory that these details had come out of the subconscious mind of Zacharias Basileos ZaharofF, formerly Sahar, who had given several names, several birthplaces and birthdates, according to his convenience at the moment. But what a subconscious mind for a man to carry about with him! Were those the things he thought about when he woke up in the small hours of the morning and couldn’t get to sleep again? How much money would it take to compensate a man for having such memories and such feelings?

IX

Lanny could not forget that his own father was a manufacturer and salesman of munitions, and that he had bribed and deceived and had documents stolen in order to promote various deals. Did Robbie have a subconscious mind like that? Certainly he showed few signs of it. His cheeks were rosy, he was sleeping well (so he reported), and he seemed to have his zest for life. But was that all bluff? Was he holding himself up by his bootstraps? Lanny remembered how quickly and how angrily Robbie would leap to the defense of the munitions industry whenever he heard it attacked. That wasn’t the sign of a mind perfectly at ease

Lanny had learned his father’s formulas in earliest childhood. Budd Gunmakers Corporation was one of the bulwarks of American national security, and what it did was a great patriotic service. To say that it worked for profit was the vilest demagogy, because it put the profits back into the business—that had been the family tradition for nearly a hundred years. To blame them for selling munitions to other countries in times of peace was mere nonsense, for you couldn’t make munitions without skilled labor and you couldn’t have such labor unless you gave it work to do and paid it wages to live. The government wouldn’t order any large supplies in times of peace, but it expected to have a completely equipped plant running and ready to serve it in case of need. What could you do but follow the example of all other merchants and sell your goods whenever and wherever you could find customers?

There was a basic difference between Zacharias Basileos Zaharoff and Robbie Budd. Robbie really considered himself a patriot, and no doubt that is an excellent thing for a subconscious mind. On the other hand, Lanny had heard the old Greek say that he was a citizen of every country where he owned property. Did he want to enable each of his countries to fight his other countries? No, for Lanny had heard him, early in the year 1914, expressing his dread of war, in language which had surprised and puzzled a very young idealist. Robbie had joked about his attitude, saying that the old spider, the old wolf, the old devil wanted to sell munitions but didn’t want them used.

But they had been used, and Zaharoff had had to live and see them used—and evidently that had been bad for his subconscious mind! Zaharoff had attended the Armistice Day ceremonies and laid a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He had thought about that soldier, and now Lanny knew what he had thought! Had he guessed that the national hero of France might be a Jew? Or was it that the national hero really had been a Jew? Was Zaharoff himself a Jew, or part Jew? Lanny didn’t know, and wasn’t especially interested. There were few people in Europe who didn’t have Jewish blood, even those who despised the outcast race. For two thousand years the Jews had been scattered over the old Continent like thistledown in the wind; and the most carefully tended family trees don’t always show what pollen has fallen upon them.

X

Lanny thought: What is the old man going to make of this? He can hardly believe that I planted it on him; that I knew about his uncle Antoniades! No, he will know that the thing must be genuine, and when he cools off he will realize that he wasn’t quite

a gentleman. Maybe he’ll want to beg Tecumseh’s pardon and have another try for the duquesa.

Lanny decided that this would be interesting; so he sat down and wrote a note to be mailed in Dieppe:

My dear Sir Basil:

I am truly sorry that the seance turned out to be so disturbing. I want to assure you that I am not telling anyone about it. I have seen many inaccuracies appear at sittings, and I have no interest in spreading them. You may count upon me in this.

Also he wrote a note to Rick, as follows:

I wish you would see if you can find someone to do a job of research for me; that is, go through the records of Old Bailey prison during the 1870’s and see if there is an entry of a prisoner by the name of Sahar, or Zahar, or Zaharoff. I enclose check for ten pounds to start it off, and if you will let me know the cost from time to time, I’ll send more. Please say nothing about this, except to the dependable person you employ.

It wasn’t going to be so easy to keep quiet about that afternoon’s events. Beauty’s curiosity had been aroused, and Irma’s also. Fortunately Lanny had time to get over his own excitement, and to let Madame get over her bad feelings. He told his family that he had tried an experiment with someone who was interested, but the tests had not been conclusive, there were certain matters which had to be looked up, and then a second test might be made; he would tell them all about it later on. This was far from satisfactory, but he stuck to it, and pretty soon there were other seances, and other matters to talk about. Every now and then Beauty or Irma would say: "By the way, whatever became of that Dieppe affair?" Lanny would answer: "It hasn’t been settled yet."

From Zaharoff he received no reply.

XI

The trim white Bessie Budd steamed away—or, to be exact, was propelled by crude oil, burning in a Diesel engine. At Bremerhaven the owner and his younger son were waiting, both proud and happy—the latter especially so, because he was a father and his fatherhood was new and shiny. How Freddi adored that gentle, sweet wife, and how he shivered with delight while gazing upon the mite of life which they had created! Nearly three months had passed since he had seen them both, and a newborn infant changes a lot in that time. The other Robins, including Bess and the nursemaid, stood by when Freddi came aboard, sharing his happiness, of which he made quite a show, not being an Anglo-Saxon.

They all had a right to share, because this lovely infant was a prize exhibit of their dairy farm, so carefully supervised. Both father and grandfather had to certify themselves free of all diseases before they came on board, and there were to be no contaminating kisses, no demoralizing pettings, pokings, or ticklings. Wash your hands before you permit an infant to clutch your finger, for you can observe that the first thing he does is to convey your collected germs to his mouth.

Freddi had worked tremendously hard all year, and had got himself the coveted title of doctor. He was a handsome fellow, not quite so tall as his brother, but having the same large dark eyes and serious expression. He lacked Hansi’s drive—he was never going to be a famous man, only an earnest student and teacher, a devoted husband and father. Not so Red as Hansi and Bess, but nearer to Lanny’s shade; he still had hopes of the German Social-Democrats, in spite of the timidity and lack of competence they were displaying. Freddi had said that he was studying bourgeois economics in order to be able to teach the workers what was wrong with it. Already he and a couple of his young friends had set up a night school along the lines of Lanny’s project in the Midi. A non-party affair, both the Socialists and the Communists took potshots at it, greatly to Freddi’s disappointment. The workers were being lined up for class war, and there was no room for stragglers between the trenches.

Johannes had bad news for them. Business conditions in Germany were such that it was impossible for him to set out across the Atlantic. He wanted them to go without him, and the rest of the Robin family were willing to do this because of the promises they had made. But the Budds knew that the purpose for which the yacht existed was to get Papa away from business cares, and they knew that the Robins would have a hard time enjoying themselves without him. Beauty talked it over with Lanny and his wife, and they agreed not to accept such a sacrifice. Irma would be sorry to miss seeing her mother, but, after all, it was easier to transport one stout queen mother across the ocean than to put a whole establishment ashore on Long Island. Irma said she really didn’t have much pleasure in any sort of social life when she had to keep within four-hour time limits and have Miss Severne look grim if she came in hot and tired from any sort of exercise. Irma’s smart young friends would all laugh at her and make jokes about cows. So it was better to stay on the yacht, where no explanations or apologies had to be made and where Rahel backed you up by her good example. "Jewish women seem to be much more maternal," said Irma. "Or is it because she is German?"

XII

It was decided that the Bessie Budd would loaf about in the North Sea and its adjoining waters so as to come back quickly and take its owner aboard whenever he was free. There would be regattas during the summer, and concerts and theaters in near-by cities and towns; art galleries to be visited—yes, one could think of worse ways of spending two or three months than on a luxury yacht based on Bremerhaven. The ship’s library included Heine’s Nordseebilder, also musical settings of some of these poems. Rahel would sing, Freddi would tootle, Hansi would scrape and scratch, Lanny and his sister would rumble and thump, Marceline would caper and prance, and Irma and Beauty and Johannes would raid the orchestra for a fourth hand at bridge.

The Bessie Budd steamed, or was propelled, to Copenhagen, where the party inspected the royal palace and attended a performance at the royal theater—the latter being comfortably within the young mothers' time limit. Lanny studied the sculptures in the Thorvald sen museum. Many interesting works of man to be seen, but not many of nature in these low, flat islands and inlets, once the haunt of fishermen and pirates. Having loaded themselves up with culture, they returned Johannes to Bremerhaven, and then set out behind the Frisian islands, visiting Norderney, where a hundred years previously an unhappy Jewish poet had written immortal verses. Sei mir gegrusst, du eiviges Meer!

Back to port, where the owner of the yacht joined them again, bringing with him a large packet of mail. Included was a letter from Rick to Lanny, as follows:

With regard to your request concerning the Old Bailey, these records are not available, so I had a search made of the criminal reports in the Times. Under the date of January 13, 1873, appears an entry numbered 61: "Zacharoff, Zacharia Basilius, agent pledging goods intrusted to him for sale." In the Times of January 17 appears a column headed "Criminal Court," beginning as follows: "Zacharia Basilius Zacharoff, 22, was indicted for that he, being an agent intrusted by one Manuel Hiphentides of Constantinople, merchant, for the purpose of sale with possession, among other goods, 25 cases of gum and 169 sacks of gall of the value together of £ 1000, did unlawfully and without any authority from his principal, for his own use make a deposit of the said goods as and by way of pledge."

Rick’s letter gave a summary of the entire account, including the statement: "Subsequently, by advice of his counsel, the prisoner withdrew his plea of Not Guilty and entered a plea of Guilty." Rick added: "This is interesting, and I am wondering what use you intend making of it. Let me add: Why don’t your spirits give you things like this? If they would do so, I would begin to take them seriously!"