Dragons’s teeth

I

THE betrayal of the British labor movement had entered like a white-hot iron into the flesh of Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson. He had brooded over it and analyzed its causes; he had filled his soul with images of it; and the result was to be a drama called The Dress-Suit Bribe. No literary title, dignified and impartial, but a fighting title, a propaganda title.

The central figure was a miner’s son who had escaped from the pits by becoming a secretary of his union. He had a wife who had been a schoolteacher, somewhat above him in station. They had no children, because the labor movement was to be their child. At the opening of the play he was a newly elected member of Parliament. There were characters and episodes recalling his early days of fervor and idealism, but now we saw him absorbed in the not very edifying details of party politics, the maneuvers for power, the payment of past obligations in the hope of incurring more.

The leisure-class woman in the story had no doubt been modeled on Rosemary, Countess of Sandhaven, Lanny’s old flame; one of those women touched by the feminist movement who did not permit themselves to love deeply because it would interfere with their independence, their enjoyment of prominence and applause. She was a political woman who liked to wield power; she set out to seduce a labor leader, not because she wanted to further the interests of her Tory group, but because she enjoyed playing with a man and subjecting him to her will. She tried to teach him what she called common sense, not merely about love, but about politics and all the affairs of the world they lived in. She didn’t mind breaking the heart of a wife whom she considered an inferior and superfluous person; if in the process she broke up a labor union, that was an incidental gain.

It was a "fat" part for an actress, and at Lanny’s suggestion Rick had endowed the woman with an American mother; a common enough phenomenon in London society, this would make the role possible for Phyllis Gracyn. Lanny’s old friend and playmate had been starred in two plays which had "flopped" on Broadway through no fault of her own; so she was in a humble frame of mind, and when Lanny wrote her about Rick’s play she cabled at once, begging to be allowed to see the script. The part had been written for her— even to allowing for traces of an American accent.

Lanny had become excited about the play, and had talked out every scene with his friend, both before and after it was put down on paper. Irma and Beauty read it, and Emily and Sophie, and of course Rick’s wife; these ladies consulted together, and contributed suggestions as to how members of the grand and beau and haut monde felt and behaved. So the play became a sort of family affair, and there was small chance of anything’s being wrong with its atmosphere and local color. After Emily had read the entire script, she offered to put in five thousand dollars on the same terms as the rest of them, and Sophie, the ex-baroness, was not to be outdone.

The play would be costly to produce, on account of the money atmosphere. If you want actors to look like workingmen or labor leaders, you can hire them cheaply, but if you want one who can play the Chancellor of the Exchequer, you have to dip into your own. Rick, who by now had considerable experience, estimated the total at thirty thousand dollars, and the figure sounded familiar to Lanny, because that had been the cost of Gracyn’s first production, the sum for which she had thrown him over. Now he would take a turn at being the "angel"; a higher, celestial kind, for whom she wouldn’t have to act anywhere but on the stage.

II

The play was finished early in April, and the family went north, with Alfy returning to school. Lanny and Irma motored the mother and father as far as Paris, starting several days ahead; for Zoltan Kertezsi was there, and they wanted to see the spring Salon through his expert eyes; also there were plays to be seen, of interest to professionals such as they were about to become. As it happened, France was in the midst of a furious election campaign, and when you had an uncle running for the Chamber of Deputies, you were interested to see the show. Hansi and Bess had consented to come and give a concert for the benefit of his campaign, so it would be a sort of family reunion.

The Hungarian art expert was his usual serene and kindly self. He had just come back from a trip to the Middle West, where, strange as it might seem, there were still millionaires who enjoyed incomes and wanted to buy what they called "art paintings." Lanny had provided Zoltan with photographs of the Detazes which were still in the storeroom, and three had been sold, at prices which would help toward the production of The Dress-Suit Bribe. Irma insisted upon putting up a share of the money, not because she knew anything about plays, but because she loved Lanny and wanted him to have his heart’s desires.

She took the same tolerant attitude toward political meetings. If Lanny wanted to go, she would accompany him, and try to understand the French language shouted in wildly excited tones. Jesse Blackless was running as candidate in one of those industrial suburbs which surrounded Paris with a wide Red band. Under the French law you didn’t have to be a resident of your district but had to be a property-owner, so the Red candidate had purchased the cheapest vacant lot he could find. He had been carefully cultivating the constituency, speaking to groups of workers every night for months on end, attending committee meetings, even calling upon the voters in their homes—all for the satisfaction of ousting a Socialist incumbent who had departed from the "Moscow line." Irma didn’t understand these technicalities, but she couldn’t help being thrilled to find this newly acquired uncle the center of attention on a platform, delivering a fervid oration which drove the crowd to frenzies of delight. Also she couldn’t fail to be moved by the sight of Hansi Robin playing for the workers of a foreign land and being received as a comrade and brother. If only they hadn’t been such terrible-looking people!

III

All this put Lanny in a peculiar position. He attended his uncle’s réunion, but didn’t want him to win and told him so. Afterward they repaired with a group of their friends to a cafe where they had supper and argued and wrangled until the small hours of the morning. A noisy place, crowded and full of tobacco smoke; Irma had been taken to such haunts in Berlin, London, and New York, so she knew that this was how the intelligentsia lived. It was supposed to be "bohemian," and certainly it was different; she could never complain that her marriage had failed to provide her with adventures.

By the side of the millionairess sat a blond young Russian, speaking to her in English, which made things easier; he had just come out of the Soviet Union, that place about which she had heard so many terrible stories. He told her about the Five-Year Plan, which was nearing completion. Already every part of its program had been overfulfilled; the great collective farms were sowing this spring more grain than ever before in Russian history; it meant a complete new era in the annals of mankind. The young stranger was quietly confident, and Irma shivered, confronting the doom of the world in which she had been brought up. From the attitude of the others she gathered that he was an important person, an agent of the Comintern, perhaps sent to see that the campaign followed the correct party line; perhaps he was the bearer of some of that "Moscow gold" about which one heard so much talk!

Across the table sat Hansi and Bess; and presently they were telling the Comintern man details about the situation in Germany. Elections to the diets of the various states had just been held, and the parties of the two extremes had made tremendous gains; the middle classes were being wiped out, and with them the middle-class point of view. Hansi said that the battle for the streets of the German cities, which had been waged for the last two or three years, was going against the Communists; their foes had the money and the arms. Hansi had witnessed a battle in broad daylight in Berlin. A squad of Stormtroopers had been marching with their Hakenkreuz banners and a fife and drum, and passing a co-operative store they had hurled stones through the windows; the men inside had rushed out and there had been a general clubbing and stabbing. The Jewish violinist hadn’t stayed to see the outcome. "I don’t suppose I ought to use my hands to beat people," he said, spreading them out apologetically.

"Poor Hansi!" thought Irma. He and Freddi were unhappy, having discovered how their father was dealing with all sides in this German civil war. The Nazis were using Budd machine guns in killing the workers, and how could that have come about without the firm of "R & R" knowing about it? The boys hadn’t quarreled with their father—they couldn’t bear to—but their peace of mind was gone and they were wondering how they could go on living in that home.

Also Irma thought: "Poor Lanny!" She saw her husband buffeted between the warring factions. The Reds were polite to him in this crowd because he was Jesse’s nephew, and also because he was paying for the supper, a duty he invariably assumed. He seemed to feel that he had to justify himself for being alive: a person who didn’t enjoy fighting, and couldn’t make up his mind even to hate wholeheartedly.

Yet he couldn’t keep out of arguments. When the Communist candidate for the Chamber of Deputies put on his phonograph record and remarked that the Social-Democrats were a greater barrier to progress than the Fascists, Lanny replied: "If you keep on asking for it, Uncle Jesse, you may have the Fascists to deal with."

Said the phonograph: "Whether they mean to or not, they will help to smash the capitalist system."

"Go and tell that to Mussolini!" jeered Lanny. "You’ve had ten years to deal with him, and how far have you got?"

"He knows that he’s near the end of his rope."

"But we’re talking about capitalism! Have you studied the dividend reports of Fiat and Ansaldo?"

So they sparred, back and forth; and Irma thought: "Oh, dear, how I dislike the intelligentsia!"

But she couldn’t help being impressed when the elections came off, and Zhess Block-less, as the voters called him, showed up at the top of the poll in his district. On the following Sunday came a runoff election, in which the two highest candidates, who happened to be the Red and the Pink, fought it out between them. Uncle Jesse came to Irma secretly to beg for funds, and she gave him two thousand francs, which cost her seventy-nine dollars. As it happened, the Socialist candidate was a friend of Jean Longuet, and went to Lanny and got twice as much; but even so, Zhess Block-less came out several hundred votes ahead, and Lanny had the distinction of having an uncle who was a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the French Republic. Many a young man had made his fortune from such a connection, but all Lanny could expect was a few more additions—that is to say, accounts for food and wine consumed by parties in restaurants.

IV

The Pomeroy-Nielsons had gone to London, where Rick was engaging a stage director and a business manager. The Budds and the Robins went for a visit to Les Forêts, where Emily Chattersworth had just arrived. Hansi and Bess played for her; and later, while Bess and Lanny practiced piano duets, Irma sought out the hostess to ask her advice about the problems of a Pink husband and a Red uncle-in-law.

Mrs. Chattersworth had always been open-minded in the matter of politics; she had allowed her friends and guests to believe and say what they chose, and as a salonnière had been content to steer the conversation away from quarrels. Now, she said, the world appeared to be changing; ever since the war it had been becoming more difficult for gentlemen—yes, and ladies, too—to keep their political discussions within the limits of courtesy. It seemed to have begun with the Russian Revolution, which had been such an impolite affair. "You have to be either for it or against it," remarked Emily; "and whichever you are, you cannot tolerate anyone’s being on the other side."

Said Irma: "The trouble with Lanny is that he’s willing to tolerate anybody, and so he’s continually being imposed upon."

"I watched him as a little boy," replied her friend. "It seemed very sweet, his curiosity about people and his efforts to understand them. But like any virtue, it can be carried to extremes."

Lanny’s ears would have burned if he could have heard those two women taking him to pieces and trying to put him together according to their preferences. The wise and kind Emily, who had been responsible for his marriage, wanted to make it and keep it a success, and she invited the young people to stay for a while so that she might probe into the problem. Caution and tact were necessary, she pointed out to the young wife, for men are headstrong creatures and do not take kindly to being manipulated and maneuvered. Lanny’s toleration for Reds and Pinks was rooted in his sympathy for suffering, and Irma would love him less if that were taken out of his disposition.

"I don’t mind his giving money away," said Irma. "If only he didn’t have to meet such dreadful people—and so many of them!"

"He’s interested in ideas; and apparently they come nowadays from the lower strata. You and I mayn’t like it, but it’s a fact that they are crashing the gates. Perhaps it’s wiser to let in a few at a time."

Irma was willing to take any amount of trouble to understand her husband and to keep him entertained; she was trying to acquire ideas, but she wanted them to be safe, having to do with music and art and books and plays, and not politics and the overthrowing of the capitalist system. "What he calls the capitalist system," was the way she phrased it, as if it were a tactical error to admit that such a thing existed. "I’ve made sure that he’ll never be interested in my friends in New York," she explained. "But he seems to be impressed by the kind of people he meets at your affairs, and if you’ll show me how, I’ll do what I can to cultivate them—before it’s too late. I mean, if he goes much further with his Socialists and Communists, the right sort of people won’t want to have anything to do with him." "I doubt if that will happen," said Emily, smiling. "They’ll tolerate him on your account. Also, they make allowances for Americans— we’re supposed to be an eccentric people, and the French find us entertaining, much as Lanny finds his Reds and Pinks."

V

The husband wasn’t told of this conversation, or others of the kind which followed; but he became aware, not for the first time in his life, of female arms placed about him, exerting a gentle pressure in one direction and away from another. Not female elbows poked into his ribs, but soft, entwining arms; a feeling of warmth, and perhaps a contact of lips, or whispered words of cajolement: darling, and dear, and intimate pet names which would look silly in print and sound so from any but a chosen person. Never: "Let’s not go there, dear," but instead: "Let’s go here, dear." And always the "here" had to do with music or pictures, books or plays, and not with the overthrow of the so-called, alleged, or hypothetical capitalist system.

Under Emily’s guidance Irma decided that she had made a mistake in discouraging Lanny’s efforts as an art expert. To be sure, it seemed silly to try to make more money when she had so much, but the prejudices of men had to be respected; they just don’t like to take money from women, and they make it a matter of prestige to earn at least their pocket-money. Irma decided that Zoltan Kertezsi was an excellent influence in her husband’s life. So far she had looked upon him as a kind of higher servant, but now decided to cultivate him as a friend.

"Let’s stay in Paris a while, dear," she proposed. "I really want to understand about pictures, and it’s such a pleasure to have Zoltan’s advice."

Lanny, of course, was touched by this act of submission. They went to exhibitions, of which there appeared to be no end in Paris.

Also, there were private homes having collections, and Zoltan possessed the magic keys that opened doors to him and his guests. Pretty soon Irma discovered that she could enjoy looking at beautiful creations. She paid attention and tried to understand the points which Zoltan explained: the curves of mountains or the shape of trees which made a balanced design in a landscape; the contrasting colors of an interior; the way figures had been placed and lines arranged so as to lead the eye to one central feature. Yes, it was interesting, and if this was what Lanny liked, his wife would like it, too. Marriage was a lottery, she had heard, and you had to make the best of what you had drawn.

VI

"Zaharoff’s house on the Avenue Hoche contains some gay and bright Bouchers," remarked Lanny. "He’s not apt to be there, but the servants know me, so no doubt we can get in."

The three of them called at the white-stone mansion with the glass-covered window-boxes full of flowers. The tottery old butler was still on duty, and the beautiful portraits still hung in the drawing-room where Sir Basil had burned his private papers and set fire to his chimney. The butler reported that his master was at the chateau and seldom came to town now; but no one knew when he might come, and he continued the custom which had prevailed ever since Lanny had known him, of having a full-course dinner prepared every evening, enough for himself and several guests. If after a certain hour he had not arrived, the servants ate what they wanted and gave the rest to worthy poor. The duquesa’s bybloemen and bizarres still bloomed in her garden, fifteen springtimes after she had shown them to Lanny. "They have their own kind of immortality," she had said; and these words had been repeated to him by an old Polish woman in a Mother Hubbard wrapper, then living in a tenement room on Sixth Avenue, New York, with the elevated railroad trains roaring past the windows.

There were old masters worth seeing at Balincourt, and Lanny telephoned and made an appointment to bring his wife and his friend. He motored them out on a day of delightful sunshine, and the Knight Commander and Grand Officer received the party with every evidence of cordiality. He had discovered that Lanny’s wife was kind, and any lonely old man appreciates the attentions of a beautiful young woman. He showed them his David and his Fragonard, his Goya, his Ingres, and his Corots. These also had their kind of immortality, a magical power to awaken life in the souls of those who looked at them. Zaharoff had told Lanny that he was tired of them, but now it appeared that the fires of the young people’s appreciation warmed up the dead ashes of his own.

The Hungarian expert never failed to have something worth while to say about a painting, and Zaharoff didn’t fail to recognize that what he said was right; they talked about prices, which were of interest to them both, and important to Zoltan—one never knew what might come of such a contact. Lanny said: "This is the man who has taught me most of what I know about art." Zoltan, flushing with pleasure, replied: "This from the stepson of Marcel Detaze!"

They talked about that painter, of whom Zaharoff had heard. He asked questions, and in his mind the seed of an idea fell and began to germinate. Perhaps this was a way to get more of Madame Zyszynski’s time! Buy a Detaze!

Tea was served on the terrace in front of the chateau. A beautiful view of formal gardens and distant forest, and when Lanny commented on it, Zaharoff said: "My wife chose this place and I bought it from King Leopold of Belgium."

He didn’t go any further, but Lanny knew the story, and on the drive back to Paris entertained his passengers with the scabrous details. The King of the Belgians, a tall, magnificent personage wearing a great square-cut white beard, had been wont to roam the highways and byways of Paris in search of likely pieces of female flesh. The sixty-five-year-old monarch had chanced upon the sixteen-year-old sister of one of the famous demi-mondaines of the city and had sent a procuress to buy her; he had taken her to live in Hungary for a while, had fallen madly in love with her and brought her back to Paris, and purchased this splendid chateau for her home. He hadn’t been content with it, but had insisted upon remodeling a great part, tearing out the ceiling of his lady’s bedroom and making it two stories tall, like a church. The four windows facing the bed had draperies which had cost twenty thousand francs; the coverlet of English point lace had cost a hundred and ten thousand—the pre-war kind of francs! Her bathroom was of massive porphyry and her tub of silver; in the basement was a swimming-pool of gold mosaic. Lanny, who had never had a bath here, wondered if the very proper Duquesa Marqueni had retained these Byzantine splendors.

VII

Another of the homes which the trio visited was the town house of the Duс de Belleaumont, a member of the old French nobility who had married a cattle-king’s daughter from the Argentine and so was able to live in the state of his forefathers. The palace stood on a corner near the Parc Monceau, and had an impressive white marble exterior and about thirty rooms, many of them spacious. It was decorated with that splendor which the French have cultivated through centuries. Every piece of furniture, every tapestry and statue and vase was worthy of separate study. A crystal cross set with sixteenth-century gold-enamel reliquaries, an inlaid Louis Seize writing cabinet, a set of translucent azure ginger jars from ancient China—such things moved Zoltan Kertezsi to raptures. The total effect was somewhat like a museum, but this does not trouble anyone in France, and has been known to occur on Long Island, too.

The family was away, and the furniture was under dust-covers, but Zoltan knew the caretaker, who, being sure of a generous tip, exhibited anything in which they expressed interest. The idea occurred to Irma that the depression might have affected the market for Argentine beef, and she inquired whether the place could be rented; the reply was that Madame should consult the agent of M. le Duc. Irma did so, and learned that a properly accredited family might lease the residence for the sum of a million francs per year.

"Why, Lanny, that’s nothing!" exclaimed Irma. "Less than forty thousand dollars."

"But what on earth would you do with it?"

"Wouldn’t you like to live in Paris and be able to entertain your friends?"

"But you’ve got one white elephant on your hands already!"

"Be sensible, darling, and face the facts. You don’t like Shore Acres, or the people who come to it. You want to live in France."

"But I’ve never asked for a palace!"

"You want your friends about you, and you want to do things for them. All your life you’ve taken it for granted that somebody will do the entertaining, and you enjoy the benefits. You’re delighted to go to Sept Chenes and meet intellectual and cultivated people. You hear famous musicians, you hear poets read their work —and apparently you think that kind of pleasure grows on trees, you don’t even have to pick the fruit, it comes already cut up in little cubes and served on ice! Hasn’t it occurred to you that Emily’s health is failing? And some day you won’t have your mother, or Sophie, or Margy—you’ll be dependent on what your wife has learned."

He saw that she had thought it all out, and he guessed that she had consulted the other ladies. Naturally, they would approve, because it would provide good fun for them. "You’ll be taking a heavy load on your shoulders," he objected, feebly.

"It won’t be so easy in a foreign country; but I’ll get help, and I’ll learn. It will be my job, just as it has been Emily’s."

"What will you do with Shore Acres?"

"Let’s try this place for a year. If we like it, perhaps we can buy it, and sell Shore Acres; or if mother wants to go on living there, she can cut down on the staff. If this depression goes on, they’ll be glad to work for their keep, and that’ll be fair."

"But suppose your income goes on dropping, Irma!"

"If the world comes to an end, how can anybody say what he’ll do! Anyhow, it can’t do us any harm to have a lot of friends."

VIII

It was a compromise she was proposing; she would live in France, as he desired, but she would live according to her standards. In order to stop her, he would have to say a flat no, and he didn’t have the right to say that. It was her money, and all the world knew it.

There was nothing very novel to Lanny Budd in the idea of living in Paris. He had spent a winter here during the Peace Conference, and another during the period of his vie a trois with Marie de Bruyne. Paris offered every kind of art and entertainment, and it was centrally situated; roads and cars had been so improved that you could reach London or Geneva or Amsterdam in a few hours. They could step into their car in the morning and be in Bienvenu by nightfall. "Really, it’ll be about the same as commuting," said Irma.

What astonished him was the zest with which she set to work, and the speed with which she put the job through. She was the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes, and all her life she had been used to hearing decisions made and orders given. As soon as Lanny gave his consent she seated herself at the telephone and put in a call for Jerry Pendleton in Cannes. "How’s business?" she asked, and when the familial cheery voice informed her that it was dead and buried, she asked if he would like to have a job. He answered that he would jump for it, and she said: "Jump for the night express, and don’t miss your hold."

"But darling!" objected Lanny. "He doesn’t know anything about running a palace!"

"He’s honest, he’s lived in France for fifteen years, and employed some help. It won’t take him long to learn the ropes."

When the red-headed ex-lieutenant from Kansas arrived, she put it up to him. He would become steward, or perhaps Controleur-General, like Herr Meissner in Stubendorf. "Put on lots of side," she advised, "and be taken at your own valuation." He would engage a first-class major domo and a butler who would know what was done and what wasn’t. He would be paid enough so that he could have his own car, and run down to see his family now and then.

Jerry Pendleton had once undertaken to tutor Lanny Budd without any preparation, and now he was taking another such chance. No time even to read a book on the duties of a Controleur-General! Go right to work; for the "season" was soon to begin, and Irma wanted what she wanted when she wanted it. The elaborate inventory of the contents of the palace was made and checked and signed on every page; the lease was signed, the money paid, and the keys delivered. Emily’s butler had a brother who was also in the profession, and knew everything there was to know about Paris society. Also he knew servants, enough for an emergency staff, and they came and took off the dust-covers and got things ready with American speed.

Irma and her prince consort and her Controleur-General moved into their new home, and it was but a few hours before the newspapers had got word of it, and the doorbell was ringing and the flashlight bulbs of the photographers exploding. Lanny saw that his wife was once more getting her money’s worth; they were back in cafe society, with the spotlight centered upon them. Paris was going to have a new hostess, a famous one. The marble steps of the palace were worn by the feet of chauffeurs and lackeys leaving calling cards with distinguished names on them, and the side entrance bell was ringing to announce the presence of bijoutiers and couturiers and marchands de modes.

Irma said: "Your mother must come and help us." So Lanny wrote at once, and that old war-mare said "Ha, ha!" and scented the battle afar off. It would have been a mortal affront to invite one mother-in-law and not the other, so Irma sent a cablegram to Shore Acres, and that older and more experienced charger dropped all her plans and took the first steamer. Even Emily came to town for a few days, bringing her calling lists with the secret symbols. Feathers sat by her side with a stenographer’s notebook, collecting pearls of information which dropped from the lips of the most esteemed of Franco-American hostesses.

In short, Lanny Budd found himself in the midst of a social whirlwind; and it would have been cruelly unkind of him not to like it. Once more the ladies were in charge of his life, and what they considered proper was what he did. He listened to their talk and he met the people they brought for him to meet; if he wanted to play the piano it had to be done at odd moments between social engagements; while, as for sitting down in a splendid library and burying himself in a book—well, it was just too selfish, too solitary, too inconsiderate of all those persons who wanted to pay their attentions to the lessee of so much magnificence.

IX

The election results had given a tremendous jolt to the conservative elements in France. The party of Jesse Blackless had gained only two seats, but the party of Leon Blum had gained seventeen, while the "Radicals" had gained forty-eight. To be sure that word didn’t mean what it meant in the United States; it was the party of the peasants and the small business men, but it was expected to combine with the Socialists, and France would have a government of the left, badly tainted with pacifism, and likely to make dangerous concessions to the Germans. The groups which had been governing France, the representatives of big industry and finance capital, popularly known as the mur d’argent, the "wall of money," were in a state of great alarm.

One of Lanny’s duties in Paris was to keep in touch with his exfamily, the de Bruynes. Having now a suitable home of his own, he invited them to dinner and they came, father, two sons, and the young wife of Denis fils. Irma hadn’t met them before, but had heard a lot about them, and felt herself being fascinatingly French when she welcomed the family of her husband’s former mistress. They, for their part, appeared to take it as a matter of course, which made it still more French. They were people of high culture and agreeable manners, so Irma was pleased to assist in carrying out the death-bed promises which Lanny had made to the woman who had done so much to prepare him to be a good and satisfactory husband.

They talked about politics and the state of the world. That was what this splendid home was for; so that Lanny wouldn’t have to meet his friends in crowded cafes, where they were jostled and could hardly hear one another’s voices, but might sit in comfort and express themselves with leisure and dignity. It was Irma’s hope that the things said would take on something of the tone of the surroundings; and certainly this appeared to be true with the de Bruynes, who were Nationalists, all four of them, and in a state of great concern as to the trend of the country and its position in the world.

Said the proprietor of a great fleet of taxicabs, speaking with some hesitation to a hostess from overseas: "I am afraid that the people of your country do not have a clear realization of the position in which they have placed my country."

"Do feel at liberty to speak freely, Monsieur," replied Irma, in her most formal French.

"There is a natural barrier which alone can preserve this land from the invasion of barbarians, and that is the River Rhein. It was our intention to hold and fortify it, but your President Veelson"— so they called him, ending with their sharp nasal "n"—"your President Veelson forced us back from that boundary, onto ground which is almost indefensible, no matter how hard we may try with our Maginot line. We made that concession because of your President’s pledge of a protective agreement against Germany; but your Congress ignored that agreement, and so today we stand well-nigh defenseless. Now your President Oovay has declared a moratorium on reparations, so that chapter is at an end—and we have received almost nothing."

Lanny wanted to say: "You received twenty-five billions of francs under the Dawes plan, and the products have glutted the world markets." But he had learned in Denis’s home that it was futile to argue with him, and it would be no less so in the palace of the Duc de Belleaumont, one of Denis’s financial associates.

"You do not feel that there is any possibility of trusting the German Republic?" inquired Irma, trying hard to perfect her political education.

"When one says Germany today, Madame, one means Prussia; and to these people good faith is a word of mockery. For such men as Thyssen and Hugenberg, and for the Jewish money-lenders, the name Republic is a form of camouflage. I speak frankly, because it is all in the family, as it were."

"Assuredly," said the hostess.

"Every concession that we make is met by further demands. We have withdrawn from the Rheinland, and no longer have any hold upon them, so they smile up their sleeves and go on with their rearming. They waited, as you have seen, until after our elections, so as not to alarm us; then, seeing the victory of the left, they overthrow their Catholic Chancellor, and we see a Cabinet of the Barons, as it is so well named. If there is a less trustworthy man in all Europe than Franz von Papen, I would not know where to seek him."

Irma perceived that you might invite a French Nationalist to the most magnificent of homes and serve him the best of dinners, but you would not thereby make him entirely happy. Practicing her new role of salonniere, she brought the young people into the conversation; but this succeeded no better, for it turned out that Charlot, the young engineer, had joined the Croix de Feu, one of the patriotic organizations which did not propose to surrender la patrie either to the Reds or to the Prussians. The Croix de Feu used the technique of banners and uniforms and marching and singing as did the Fascists of Italy and the Nazis of Germany; but Lanny said: "I’m afraid, Charlot, you won’t get so far, because you don’t make so many promises to the workers."

"They tell the people falsehoods," said the young Frenchman, haughtily; "but we are men of honor."

"Ah, yes," sighed his old friend; "but how far does that go in politics?"

"In this corrupt republic, no distance at all; but we have set out to make France a home for men who mean what they say".

Lanny spoke no more. It made him sad to see his two foster sons —they were supposed to be something like that—going the road of Fascism; but there was nothing he could do about it. He knew that their mother had shared these tendencies. They were French patriots, and he couldn’t make them internationalists, or what he called "good Europeans."

X

Having had such a dose of reaction, he had to have one of hope. He said to Irma: "I really ought to call on Leon Blum, and perhaps take him out to lunch. Would you care to come along?"

"But Lanny," she exclaimed, "what is this house for?"

"I didn’t suppose you’d want to have him here."

"But dear, what kind of home will it be if you can’t bring your friends?"

He saw that she was determined to be fair. He guessed that she had talked the matter out with the wise Emily, and was following the latter’s program. If one’s husband must have vices, let him have them at home, where they may be toned down and kept within limits. After all, Leon Blum was the leader of the second largest political party in France; he was a scholar and a poet, and had once had a fortune. In the old days, as a young aesthete, he had been a frequenter of Emily’s salon; now he had exchanged Marcel Proust for Karl Marx, but he remained a gentleman and a brilliant mind. Surely one might invite him to lunch, and even to dinner—if the company was carefully chosen. Emily herself would come; and Lanny knew from this that the matter had been discussed.

He took the good the gods had provided him. The Socialist leader sat in the same chair which Denis de Bruyne had filled, and maybe he felt some evil vibrations, for he spoke very sadly. In the midst of infinite corruption he was trying to believe in honesty; in the midst of wholesale cruelty he was trying to believe in kindness. The profit system, the blind competitive struggle for raw materials and markets, was wrecking civilization. No one nation could change this by itself; all must help, but someone must begin, and the voice of truth must be heard everywhere. Leon Blum spoke tirelessly in the Chamber, he wrote daily editorials for Le Populaire, he traveled here and there, pleading and explaining. He would do it at the luncheon table of a friend, and then stop and apologize, smiling and saying that politics ruined one’s manners as well as one’s character.

He was a tall slender man with the long slim hands of an artist; a thin, sensitive face, an abundant mustache which made him a joy to the caricaturists of the French press. He had been through campaigns of incredible bitterness; for to the partisans of the French right it was adding insult to injury when their foes put up a Jew as their spokesman. It made the whole movement of the workers a part of the international Jewish conspiracy, and lent venom to all Fascist attacks upon France. "Perhaps, after all, it is a mistake that I try to serve the cause," said the statesman.

He was ill content with the showing which his party had made at the polls. A gain of seventeen was not enough to save the day. He said that immediate and bold action was required if Europe was to be spared the horrors of another war. He said that the German Republic could not survive without generous help from France. He said that the "Cabinet of the Barons" was a natural answer to the cabinet of the bigot, Poincare, and to that of the cheat, Laval. Blum was standing for real disarmament of all the nations, including France, and he had been willing to split his party rather than to yield on that issue. Said Irma, after the luncheon: "We won’t ever invite him and the de Bruynes at the same time!"

XI

From the time her decision was taken to rent the palace, Irma’s mind was occupied with the problem of a party which tout Paris would attend; a sort of housewarming—Lanny said that a building of that size, made of white marble, would require a lot of cordiality to affect its temperature. His wife wanted to think of something original. Parties were so much alike. People ate your food and drank your wine, often too much of it; they danced, or listened to a singer they had heard many times at the opera and been bored by. Lanny quoted an old saying: "Gabble, gobble, git."

Irma insisted that tout Paris would expect something streamlined and shiny from America. Couldn’t they think of something? The husband tried various suggestions: a performing elephant from the circus, a troop of Arabian acrobats he had seen in a cabaret—their black hair was two feet long and when they did several somersaults in one leap they brought down the house. "Don’t be silly, dear," said the wife.

He thought of an idea to end all ideas. "Offer a prize of a hundred thousand francs for the most original suggestion for a party. That will start them talking as nothing ever did." He meant it for burlesque, but to his amusement Irma was interested; she talked about it, speculating as to what sort of suggestions she would get, and so on; she wasn’t satisfied until she had asked Emily, and been assured that it might be a good idea for Chicago, but not for Paris. Even after Irma dropped it, she had a hankering, and said: "I believe my father would have done it. He didn’t let people frighten him away from things."

It would have to be a conventional soiree. The young Robins would come and play—a distinguished thing to furnish the talent from your own family, and have it the best. Fortunately the Paris newspapers did not report Communist doings—unless it was a riot or something—therefore few persons knew that Hansi had assisted in electing Zhess Block-less to the Chamber of Deputies. (Already that body had met, and the new member, refusing to be intimidated by the splendid surroundings, had put on his old phonograph record, this time with a loud-speaker attachment, so that his threats against the mur d’argent had been heard as far as Tunisia and Tahiti, French Indo-China and Guiana.)

Lanny was fascinated to observe his young wife functioning in the role which she had chosen for herself. She was not yet twenty-four, but she was a queen, and had found out how queens conduct themselves. No worry, no strain, no sense of uncertainty. Being an American, she could without sacrifice of dignity ask the chef or the butler how things were done in France; then she would say whether or not they were going to be done that way in her home. She spoke with quiet decision, and the servants learned quickly to respect her; even the new Controleur-General was impressed, and said to Lanny: "By heck, she’s a whiz!"

When the great day arrived, she didn’t get excited, like many hostesses, and wear herself out so that she couldn’t enjoy her own triumph; no chain smoking of cigarettes, no coffee or nips of brandy to keep her going. Nor did she put responsibilities off on her mother or mother-in-law; that would be a bad precedent. She said: "This is my home, and I want to learn to run it." She had thought everything out, and had lists prepared; she summoned the servitors before her and checked off what had been done and gave them their final instructions. She had learned to judge them in two or three weeks. Jerry was a "brick," and anything he undertook was just as good as done. Ambroise, the butler, was conscientious, but had to be flattered; Simone, the housekeeper, was fidgety and lacking in authority; Feathers had always been a fool and would get rattled in any emergency. Having checked everything, Irma took a long nap in the afternoon.

At about nine in the evening the shiny limousines began rolling up before the palace, and a stream of immaculate guests ascended the white marble stairs, covered with a wide strip of red velvet carpet. It was the cream of that international society which made its headquarters in the world’s center of fashion. Many of them had met Irma in New York or on the Riviera, in Berlin, London, Vienna, or Rome. Others were strangers, invited because of their position; they came because of curiosity as to a much-talked-about heiress. They would see what sort of show she put on, and were prepared to lift an eyebrow and whisper behind a fan over the slightest wrong detail.

But there wasn’t much to quarrel with. The young Juno was good to look at, and the best artists had been put to work on her. The prevailing fashions favored her; they had gone back to natural lines, with high waists. The décolletage for backs was lower; in fact, where the back of the dress might have been there was nothing but Irma; but it was enough. Her dark brown hair was in masses of curls, and that looked young and wholesome. Her gown of pale blue silk chiffon appeared simple, but had cost a lot, and the same was true of her long rope of pearls.

The daughter of the utilities king was naturally kind; she liked people, and made them feel it. She did the honors with no visible coaching. She had taken the trouble to learn who people were, and if she had met them before, she remembered where, and had something friendly to say. If they were strangers, she assumed that they were welcoming her to Paris and thanked them for their courtesy. At her side stood a good-looking young fellow, bon garçon, son of his father—Budd Gunmakers, you know, quite a concern in America. In the background was a phalanx of older women: the two mothers, large and splendid, and Mrs. Chattersworth, whom everyone knew. In short, tout comme il faut, viewed by tout le monde.

XII

A modest-appearing young Jewish violinist came forward, and with his wife accompanying him played Cesar Franck’s violin sonata; French music, written in Paris by a humble organist and teacher who had lived obscurely among them until an omnibus had killed him; now they honored him, and applauded his interpreter. As an encore Hansi played Hubay’s Hejre Katy, fiery and passionate; when they applauded again, he smiled and bowed, but did not play any more. His sister-in-law, Rahel Robin, whom nobody had ever heard of, came to the piano, and with Lanny Budd accompanying and her husband playing a clarinet obbligato, sang a couple of Provencal peasant songs which she herself had arranged. She had a pleasing voice, and it was a sort of homelike family affair; you wondered if they were showing themselves off, or if they were saving money.

Certainly they hadn’t saved on the food and drink, and that is important at any party. In the ball-room a smart colored band played jazz, and in the other rooms the young wife and the young husband moved here and there, chatting with this one and that. Madame Hellstein, of the international banking-house, with her daughter Olivie, now Madame de Broussailles; Lanny had told his wife: "I might have married her, if Rosemary hadn’t written me a note at the critical moment!" So, naturally, Irma was interested to look her over. A lovely daughter of Jerusalem—but she was growing stout! "These Jewish women all do," thought Irma.

And then one of Zaharoff’s married daughters, who also had looked upon the son of Budd as a parti. And old M. Faure, rich importer of wines and olive-oil who had bought paintings of nude ladies from Zoltan. A traveling maharajah who bought ladies—but from another dealer! A Russian grand duke in exile; a crown prince from one of the Scandinavian lands; a couple of literary lions, so that you wouldn’t appear to be snobbish. Lanny had been a dear and hadn’t asked for any Reds or Pinks; they wouldn’t appreciate the honor, he said.

Irma wasn’t clever; but that is a quality for the "outs," whereas she was among the "ins." She was serene and gracious, and as she moved among this elegant company little shivers of happiness ran over her and she thought: "I am getting away with it; it is truly distingué"—this being one of the first French words she had learned. Lanny, thirty-two and world weary, thought: "How hard they all try to keep up a front and to be what they pretend!" He thought: "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players"—these being among the first words of Shakespeare he had learned.

He knew much more about these players than his wife did. He had been hearing stories from his father and his business friends, from his mother and her smart friends, from his Red uncle, from Blum and Longuet and other Pinks. This lawyer for the Comité des Forges who had all the secrets of la haute finance hidden in his skull; this financier, paymaster for the big banks, who had half the members of the Radical party on his list; this publisher who had taken the Tsar’s gold before the war and now was a director of Skoda and Schneider-Creusot! Who would envy these men their stage roles? The whole show was tolerable to the players only because of the things they didn’t know, or which they thrust into the back of their minds. Lanny Budd, treading the boards, playing acceptably his part as prince consort, enjoyed it with one-half his mind, while the other half wondered: how many of his guests could bear to dance if they knew what would be happening to them ten years from now?

I

THE Dress-Suit Bribe was in rehearsal in London, and if Lanny could have had his own way, he would have been there to watch every moment. But Irma had her new white elephant on her hands, and had to get some use of it; several weeks would have to pass before she would feel justified in going away and leaving its staff of servants idle. Meanwhile, she must invite people to come, at any hour from noon to midnight. Supposedly she was doing it because she wanted to see them, but the real reason was that she wanted them to see her. And having offered them hospitality, she was under obligation to accept theirs; she would be forever on the go, attending social affairs or getting ready for future affairs.

Always she wanted company; and Lanny went along, because it had been his life’s custom to do what he didn’t want to do rather than to see a loved one disappointed and vexed. His wife was attaining her uttermost desire, she was standing on the apex of the social pyramid; and what could it mean to her to climb down and go off to London to watch a dozen actors and actresses rehearsing all day on an empty stage, the women in blouses and the men with their coats off on a hot day? The fact that one of these women was Phyllis Gracyn didn’t increase her interest, and Lanny mustn’t let it increase his too much!

He persuaded the young Robins to stay for a while; he much preferred their company to that of the fashionable folk. They would play music every morning, and at odd times when social duties permitted. Nothing was allowed to interfere with Hansi’s violin practice; it was his task to master one great concert piece after another—which meant that he had to fix in his head hundreds of thousands of notes, together with his own precise way of rendering each one. Nobody who lived near him could keep from being touched by his extraordinary conscientiousness. Lanny wished he might have had some such purpose in his own life, instead of growing up an idler and waster. Too late now, of course; he was hopelessly spoiled!

II

Sitting in the fine library of the Duc de Belleaumont, filled with the stored culture of France, Lanny had a heart-to-heart talk with his half-sister, from whom he had been drifting apart in recent years. She was one who had expected great things of him, and had been disappointed. It wasn’t necessary that he should agree with her, she insisted; it was only necessary that he should make up his mind about anything, and stick to it. Lanny thought that he had made up his mind as to one thing: that the Communist program, applied to the nations which had parliamentary institutions, was a tactical blunder. But it would be a waste of time to open up this subject to Bess.

She had something else she wanted to talk about: the unhappiness which was eating like a cancer into the souls of the members of the Robin family. They had become divided into three camps; each husband agreeing with his own wife, but with none of the other members of the family; each couple having to avoid mentioning any political or economic problem in the presence of the others. With affairs developing as they now were in Germany, that meant about every subject except music, art, and old-time books. Johannes read the Borsenzeitung, Hansi and Bess read the Rote Fahne, while Freddi and Rahel read Vorwarts; each couple hated the very sight of the other papers and wouldn’t believe a word that was in them. Poor Mama, who read no newspaper and had only the vaguest idea what the controversy was about, had to serve as a sort of liaison officer among her loved ones.

There was nothing so unusual about this. Lanny had lived in disagreement with his own father for the greater part of his life; only it happened that they both had a sense of humor, and took it out in "joshing" each other. Jesse Blackless had left home because he couldn’t agree with his father; now he never discussed politics with his sister, and always ended up in a wrangle with his nephew. The majority of radicals would tell you the same sort of stories; it was a part of the process of change in the world. The young outgrew their parents—or it might happen that leftist parents found themselves with conservative-minded children. "That will be my fate," opined the playboy.

In the Robin family the problem was made harder because all the young people took life so seriously; they couldn’t pass things off with teasing remarks. To all four of them it seemed obvious that their father had enough money and to spare, and why in the name of Karl Marx couldn’t he quit and get out of the filthy mess of business plus politics in which he wallowed? Just so the person who has never gambled cannot understand why the habitué hangs on, hell-bent upon making up his night’s losses; the teetotaler cannot understand the perversity which compels the addict to demand one more nip. To Johannes Robin the day was a blank unless he made some money in it. To see a chance of profit and grab it was an automatic reflex; and besides, if you had money you had enemies trying to get it away from you, and you needed more of it in order to be really safe. Also you got allies and associates; you incurred obligations to them, and when a crisis came they expected you to play a certain part, and if you didn’t you were a shirker. You were no more free to quit than a general is free to resign in the midst of a campaign.

The tragedy is that people have lovable qualities and objectionable ones, impossible to separate. Also, you have grown up with them, and have become attached to them; you may be under a debt of gratitude, impossible to repay. If the young Robins were to lay down the law: "Either you quit playing at Großkapital in Germany, or we move out of your palace and sail no more in your yacht"—they might have had their way. But how much would have been left of Johannes Robin? Where would they have taken him and what would they have done with him? Lanny had put such pressure on his father in the matter of playing the stock market, and had got away with it. But in the case of Johannes it was much more; he would have had to give up everything he was doing, every connection, associate, and interest except his children and their affairs. Said Lanny to Bess: "Suppose he happened to dislike music, and thought the violin was immoral—what would you and Hansi do about it?"

"But nobody could think that, Lanny!"

"Plenty of our Puritan forefathers thought it; I’ve a suspicion that Grandfather thinks it right now. Very certainly he thinks it would be immoral to keep business men from making money, or to take away what they have made."

So Lanny, the compromiser, trying to soothe the young people, and persuade them that they could go on eating their food in the Berlin palace without being choked. Including himself, here were five persons condemned to dwell in marble halls—and outside were five millions, yes, five hundred millions, looking upon them as the most to be envied of all mortals! Five dwellers begging to be kicked out of their marble halls, and for some strange reason unable to persuade the envious millions to act! More than a century ago a poet, himself a child of privilege, had called upon them to rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number; but still the many slept and the few ruled, and the chains which were like dew retained the weight of lead!

III

The dowager queen of Vandringham-Barnes had gone down to Juan in order to be with the heir apparent. A dreadful thing had happened in America, something that sent a shudder of horror through every grandmother, mother and daughter of privilege in the civilized world. In the peaceful countryside of New Jersey a criminal or gang of them had brought a ladder and climbed into the home of the flyer Lindbergh and his millionaire wife, and had carried off the nineteen-month baby of this happy young couple. Ransom notes had been received and offers made to pay, but apparently the kidnapers had taken fright, and the body of the slain infant was found in a near-by wood. It happened that this ghastly discovery fell in the same week that the President of the French republic was shot down by an assassin who called himself a "Russian Fascist." The papers were full of the details and pictures of both these tragedies. A violent and dreadful world to be living in, and the rich and mighty ones shuddered and lost their sleep.

For a full generation Robbie Budd’s irregular family had lived on the ample estate of Bienvenu and the idea of danger had rarely crossed their minds, even in wartime. But now it was hard to think about anything else, especially for the ladies. Fanny Barnes imagined kidnapers crouching behind every bush, and whenever the wind made the shutters creak, which happened frequently on the Cote d’Azur, she sat up and reached out to the baby’s bed, which had been moved to her own room. Unthinkable to go on living in a one-story building, with windows open, protected only by screens which could be cut with a pocket-knife. Fanny wanted to take her tiny namesake to Shore Acres and keep her in a fifth-story room, beyond reach of any ladders. But Beauty said: "What about fire?" The two grandmothers were close to their first quarrel.

Lanny cabled his father, inquiring about Bub Smith, most dependable of bodyguards and confidential agents. He was working for the company in Newcastle, but could be spared, and Robbie sent him by the first steamer. So every night the grounds of Bienvenu would be patrolled by an ex-cowboy from Texas who could throw a silver dollar into the air and hit it with a Budd automatic. Bub had been all over France, doing one or another kind of secret work for the head salesman of Budd Gunmakers, so he knew the language of the people. He hired a couple of ex-poilus to serve as daytime guards, and from that time on the precious mite of life which was to inherit the Barnes fortune was seldom out of sight of an armed man. Lanny wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, for of course all the Cap knew what these men were there for, and it served as much to advertise the baby as to protect her. But no use telling that to the ladies!

Bub came by way of Paris, so as to consult with Lanny and Irma. He had always been a pal of Robbie’s son, and now they had a confidential talk, in the course of which Bub revealed the fact that he had become a Socialist. A great surprise to the younger man, for Bub’s jobs had been among the most hardboiled, and Bub himself, with his broken nose and cold steely eyes, didn’t bear the appearance of an idealist. But he had really read the papers and the books and knew what he was talking about, and of course that was gratifying to the young employer. The man went down to the Cap and began attending the Socialist Sunday school in his free time, becoming quite a pal of the devoted young Spaniard, Raoul Palma.

That went on for a year or more before Lanny discovered what it was all about. The bright idea had sprung in the head of Robbie Budd—to whom anarchists, Communists, and kidnapers were all birds of a feather. Robbie had told Bub that this would be a quick and easy way to get in touch with the underworld of the Midi; so before stepping onto the steamer, Bub had got himself a load of Red literature, and all the way across had been boning up as if for a college entrance examination. He had "passed" with Lanny, and then with Raoul and the other comrades, who naturally had no suspicions of anybody coming from Bienvenu. It was somewhat awkward, because Bub was also maintaining relations with the French police; but Lanny didn’t know just what to do about it. It was one more consequence of trying to live in the camps of two rival armies getting ready for battle.

IV

Hearing and thinking so much about the Lindbergh case had had an effect upon Irma’s maternal impulses; she decided that she couldn’t do any more traveling without having at least a glimpse of Baby. She proposed that they hop into the car and run down to Bienvenu—the weather was hot there, and they could have a swim, also. The young Robins hadn’t seen Baby for more than a year; so come along! Hansi had been motored to Paris by Bess, in her car; now the couples "hopped" into two cars, and that evening were in Bienvenu, with Irma standing by the bedside of her sleeping darling, making little moaning sounds of rapture and hardly able to keep from waking the child.

The next two days she had a debauch of mother emotions, crowding everything into a short time. She didn’t want anybody else to touch the baby; she washed her, dressed her, fed her, played with her, walked with her, talked to her, exclaimed over every baby word she managed to utter. It must have been bewildering to a twenty-seven-month child, this sudden irruption into her well-ordered life; but she took it serenely, and Miss Severne permitted some rules to be suspended for a brief period.

Lanny had another talk with Bub Smith, keeper of the queen’s treasure and sudden convert to the cause of social justice. Bub reported on his experiences at the school, and expressed his appreciation of the work being done there; a group of genuine idealists, he said, and it was a source of hope for the future. Lanny found it a source of hope that an ex-cowboy and company guard should have seen the light and acknowledged his solidarity with the workers.

Also Bub told about conditions in Newcastle, where some kind of social change seemed impossible to postpone. There wasn’t enough activity in those great mills to pay for the taxes and upkeep, and there was actual hunger among the workers. The people had mortgaged their homes, sold their cars, pawned their belongings; families had moved together to save rent; half a dozen people lived on the earnings of a single employed person. So many New Englanders were proud and wouldn’t ask for charity; they just withdrew into a corner and starved. Impossible not to be moved by such distress, or to realize that something must be done to get that great manufacturing plant to work again.

Bub Smith had always been close to Robbie Budd, and so this change of mind appeared important. There was no secret about it, the man declared; he had told Mr. Robert how he felt, and Mr. Robert had said it would make no difference. Lanny thought that, too, was important; for some fifteen years or so he had been hoping that his father would see the light, and now apparently it was beginning to dawn. In a letter to Robbie he expressed his gratification; and Robbie must have had a smile!

V

The young people had their promised swim, diving off the rocks into that warm blue Mediterranean water. Afterward they sat on the shore and Bub lugged a couple of heavy boxes from the car, one containing Budd automatics and other weapons, the other containing several hundred rounds of ammunition. Bub had brought a liberal supply from Newcastle, enough to stave off a siege by all the bandits in France. He said the family ought to keep in practice, for they never knew when there might be an uprising of the Fascists or Nazis, and "we comrades" would be the first victims. He was shocked to learn that neither Hansi nor Freddi had ever fired a gun in his life, and hadn’t thought of the possible need. The ex-guard wanted to know, suppose their revolution went wrong and the other side appeared to be coming out on top?

He showed them what he would propose to do about it. He threw a corked bottle far out into the water, and then popped off the cork with one shot from an army service revolver. He threw out a block of wood and fired eight shots from a Budd .32 automatic, all in one quick whir, and not one of the shots struck the water; Bub admitted that that took a lot of practice, because the block jumped with every hit, and you had to know how far it would jump in a very small fraction of a second. He did it again to show them that it was no accident. He couldn’t do it a third time, because the block of wood had so much lead in it that it sank.

Lanny couldn’t perform stunts like that, but he was good enough to hit any Nazi, Bub said. All the targets were either Nazis or Fascists; for the guard had made up his mind that trouble was coming and no good fooling yourself. He wanted Hansi to learn to shoot, but Hansi said he would never use his bowing hand for such a nerve-shattering performance. Bess would have to protect him; she had learned to shoot when a child, and proved that she had not forgotten. Then it was Freddi’s turn, and he tried it, but had a hard time keeping his eyes open when he pulled the trigger. The consequences of this pulling upon a Budd automatic were really quite alarming, and to a gentle-souled idealist it didn’t help matters to imagine a member of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party in the line of the sights.

Lanny, who had been used to guns all his life, had no idea of the effect of these performances upon two timid shepherd boys out of ancient Judea. Hansi declared that his music didn’t sound right for a week afterward; while as for the younger brother, the experiment had produced a kind of moral convulsion in his soul. To be sure, he had seen guns being carried in Berlin and elsewhere by soldiers, policemen, S.S.'s and S.A.'s; but he had never held one in his hand, and had never realized the instantaneous shattering effect of an automatic. Calling the targets a portion of the human anatomy had been a joke to an ex-cowboy, but Freddi’s imagination had been filled with images of mangled bodies, and he kept talking about it for some time afterward. "Lanny, do you really believe we are going to see another war? Do you think you can live through it?"

Freddi even talked to Fanny Barnes about the problem, wondering if it mightn’t be possible to organize some sort of society to teach children the ideal of kindness, in opposition to the dreadful cruelty that was now being taught in Germany. The stately Queen Mother was touched by a young Jew’s moral passion, but she feared that her many duties at home would leave her no time to organize a children’s peace group in New York. And besides, wasn’t Germany the country where it needed to be done?

VI

Fanny set up a great complaint concerning the heat at Bienvenu; she became exhausted and had to lie down and fan herself and have iced drinks brought to her. But Beauty Budd, that old Riviera hand, smiled behind her embonpoint, knowing well that this was one more effort—and she hoped the last—to carry Baby Frances away. Beauty took pleasure in pointing out the great numbers of brown and healthy babies on the beaches and the streets of Juan; she pointed to Lanny and Marceline as proof that members of the less tough classes could be raised here successfully. Baby herself had developed no rashes or "summer complaints," but on the contrary rollicked in the sunshine and splashed in the water, slept long hours, ate everything she could get hold of, and met with no worse calamity than having a toe nipped by a crab.

So the disappointed Queen Mother let her bags be packed and stowed in the trunk of Lanny’s car, and herself and maid stowed in the back seat, from which she would do as much driving as her polite son-in-law would permit. On the evening of the following day they delivered her safely in London, and obtained for her a third-row seat on the aisle for the opening performance of The Dress-Suit Bribe, a play of which she wholly disapproved and did not hesitate to say so. Next day when most of the London critics agreed with her, she pointed out that fact to the author, who, being thirty-four years of age, ought to have sowed his literary wild oats and begun to realize the responsibilities he owed to his class which had built the mighty British Empire. The daughter of the Vandringhams and daughter-in-law of the Barneses was as Tory as the worst "diehard" in the House of Lords, and when she encountered a propagandist of subversion she wanted to say, in the words of another famous queen: "Off with her head!"—or with "his."

But not all the audience agreed with her point of view. The house divided horizontally; from the stalls came frozen silence and from the galleries storms of applause. The critics divided in the same way; those with a pinkish tinge hailed the play as an authentic picture of the part which fashionable society was playing in politics, an indictment of that variety of corruption peculiar to Britain, where privileges which would have to be paid for in cash in France or with office in America, go as a matter of hereditary right or of social prestige. In any case it was power adding to itself, "strength aiding still the strong."

It was the kind of play which is automatically labeled propaganda and therefore cannot be art. But it was written from inside knowledge of the things which were going on in British public life and it told the people what they needed to know. From the first night the theater became a battleground, the high-priced seats were only half filled but the cheap ones were packed, and Rick said: "It’s a question whether we can pay the rent for two or three weeks, until it has a chance to take hold."

Lanny replied: "We’ll pay, if I have to go and auction off some pictures." No easy matter raising money with hard times spreading all over the world; but he telephoned all the fashionable people he knew, begging them to see the play, and he cajoled Margy, Dowager Lady Eversham-Watson, to have a musicale and pay the Robin family a couple of hundred pounds to come and perform: the money to go for the play. Irma "chipped in," even though in her heart she didn’t like the play. As for Hansi, he wrote to his father, who put five hundred pounds to his son’s credit with his London bankers—a cheap and easy way to buy peace in his family, and to demonstrate once again how pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!

In one way or another they kept the play going. Gracyn, to whom it gave such a "fat" part, offered to postpone taking her salary for two weeks. Lanny wrote articles for the labor papers, pointing out what the production meant to the workers, and so they continued to attend and cheer. The affair grew into a scandal, which forced the privileged classes to talk about it, and then to want to know what they were talking about. In the end it turned out that Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson had a "hit"—something he had been aiming at for more than ten years. He insisted on paying back all his friends, and after that he paid off some of the mortgages of "the Pater," who had been staking him for a long time. The main thing was that Rick had managed to say something to the British people, and had won a name so that he would be able to say more.

VII

The Robins were begging the Budds to take a little run into Germany. Yachting time was at hand, and they had persuaded Papa to put the Bessie Budd into commission again; they wanted so much to get him away from the worries of business—and who could do it so well as the wonderful Lanny Budd and his equally wonderful wife? Lanny might even be able to persuade him to retire for good; or perhaps to take a long cruise around the world, where he couldn’t be reached by friends or foes.

Germany was in the midst of a hot election campaign. A new Reichstag was being chosen; the "Cabinet of the Barons," otherwise known as the "Monocle Cabinet," was asking for popular support. Elections were always interesting to Lanny, and the young people urged him to come and see. But Irma had another maternal seizure; she said "Let’s run down to Juan again, and come back for a cruise at the end of the campaign." Lanny said: "Any way you want it."

So the party broke up. Fanny took a steamer to New York, the Robins took the ferry to Flushing, and the Budds took one to Calais. They sent a telegram to the palace in Paris, and dinner was ready when they arrived. Irma observed: "It’s nice to have your own place; much nicer than going to a hotel." Lanny saw that she wished to justify herself for having spent all that money, so he admitted that it was "nicer." Jerry was there, and with a lot of checks ready for her to sign; he wanted her to go over the accounts, but she was sure they were all right, and she signed without looking. The three went to a cabaret show, very gay, with music and dancing and a scarcity of costumes; some of it made Irma blush, but she was trying to acquire the cosmopolitan tone.

The following evening they were at Bienvenu again. Baby was bigger and brighter; she knew more words; she remembered what you had taught her. She was growing a mind! "Oh, Lanny, come see this, come see that!" Lanny would have been glad to settle down to child study, and to swimming and target-shooting with Bub, and talking to the workers at the school; but they had made a date with the Robins; and also there came a letter from Pietro Corsatti, who was at Lausanne, reporting the conference for his paper. He said: "A great show! How come you’re missing it?"

At this time there were two of Europe’s international talk-fests being held on the same Swiss lake. For many years such gatherings had been Lanny’s favorite form of diversion; he had attended a dozen, and had met all the interesting people, the statesmen and writers, the reformers and cranks. Irma had never been to one, but had heard him tell about them, and always in glowing terms. Now he proposed: "Let’s stop off on our way to Berlin." "O.K. by me!" said Irma.

VIII

They followed the course of the River Rhone, every stage of which had some memory of Marie de Bruyne: the hotels where she and Lanny had stopped, the scenery they had admired, the history they had recalled. But Lanny judged it better for Irma to have her own memories, unscented by the perfume of any other woman. They climbed into the region of pine-trees and wound through rocky gorges where the air was still and clear. Many bridges and a great dam, and it was Lake Leman, with Geneva, home of the League of Nations, an institution which for a few years had been the hope of mankind, but now appeared to have fallen victim to a mysterious illness. Since the beginning of the year a great Conference on Arms Limitation, with six hundred delegates from thirteen nations, had been meeting here, and was to continue for a year longer; each nation in turn would bring forward a plea to limit the sort of weapon which it didn’t have or didn’t need, and then the other nations would show what was wrong with that plan.

Farther up the lake was Lausanne, where the premiers and foreign ministers were gathered to debate the ancient question of reparations. Lanny Budd greeted his friend Pete and other journalists whom he had been meeting off and on since the great peace conference thirteen summers ago. They remembered him and were glad to see him; they knew about his gold-embossed wife and her palace in Paris; they knew about Rick and his play. Here was another show, and a fashionable young couple was taken right behind the scenes.

Lausanne is built on a mountainside, with each street at a different level. The French had a hotel at the top, the British one at the bottom, and the other nations in between; the diplomats ascended or descended to have their wrangles in one another’s suites, and the newspapermen wore themselves thin chasing the various controversies up hill and down. Such, at any rate, was Corsatti’s description. The statesmen were trying to keep their doings secret, and Pete declared that when one saw you he dived into his hole like a woodchuck. Your only chance was to catch one of them in swimming.

It was good clean fun, if you were a spectator who liked to hear gossip and ferret out mysteries, or a devil-may-care journalist with an expense account which you padded freely. The food was of the best, the climate delightful, the scenery ditto, with Mont Blanc right at your back door—or so it seemed in the dustless Alpine air. You would be unhappy only if you thought about the millions of mankind whose destiny was being gambled with by politicians. The gaming-table was a powder-keg as big as all the Alps, and the players had no thought but to keep their own country on top, their own class on top within their country, and their own selves on top within their class.

IX

The statesmen had to drop the Young Plan, by which Germany had been bound to pay twenty-five billion dollars in reparations. But France couldn’t give up the hope of getting something; so now with incessant wrangling they were adopting a plan whereby at the end of three years Germany was to give bonds for three billion marks. But most observers agreed that this was pure futility; Germany was borrowing, not paying. Germany was saying to the bankers of the United States: "We have five billions of your money, and if you don’t save us you will lose it all!" The people of Germany were saying: "If you don’t feed us we shall vote for Hitler, or worse yet for Thalmann, the Bolshevik." The statesmen of Germany were saying: "We are terrified about what will happen"—and who could say whether they were really terrified or only pretending? Who could trust anybody in power, anywhere in all the world?

Robbie Budd had told his son a story, which he said all business men knew. A leather merchant went to his banker to get his notes renewed and the banker refused to comply with the request. The leather merchant told his troubles and pleaded hard; at last he asked: "Were you ever in the leather business?" When the banker replied: "No," the other said: "Well, you’re in it now." And that, opined Pietro Corsatti, was the position of the investing public of the United States; they were in the leather business in Germany, in the steel and coal and electrical and chemical businesses, to say nothing of the road-building business and the swimming-pool business. Nor was it enough to renew the notes; it was necessary to put up working capital to keep these businesses from falling into ruins and their workers from turning Red!

Irma knew that this was the "great world" in which her career was to be carried on, so she listened to the gossip and learned all she could about the eminent actors in the diplomatic drama. Lanny had met several of the under-secretaries, and these realized that the wealthy young couple were entitled to be introduced to the "higher ups." Irma was told that next winter would probably see more negotiations in Paris, and it was her intention that these important personages should find her home a place for relaxation and perhaps for private conferences. Emily herself couldn’t have done better.

Lanny observed his wife "falling for" the British ruling class. Many Americans did this; it was a definite disease, known as "Anglomania." Upper-class Englishmen were tall and good-looking, quiet and soft-spoken, cordial to their friends and reserved to others; Irma thought that was the right way to be. There was Lord Wickthorpe, whom Lanny had once met on a tally-ho coach driving to Ascot; they had both been youngsters, but now Wickthorpe was a grave diplomat, carrying a brief-case full of responsibility— or so he looked, and so Irma imagined him, though Lanny, who had been behind many scenes, assured her that the sons of great families didn’t as a rule do much hard work. Wickthorpe was divinely handsome, with a tiny light brown mustache, and Irma said: "How do you suppose such a man could remain a bachelor?"

"I don’t know," said the husband. "Margy can probably tell you. Maybe he couldn’t get the girl he wanted."

"I should think any girl would have a hard time refusing what he has."

"It can happen," replied Lanny. "Maybe they quarrel, or something goes wrong. Even the rich can’t always get what they want." Lanny’s old "Pink" idea!

X

The assembled statesmen signed a new treaty of Lausanne, in which they agreed to do a number of things, now that it was too late. Having signed and sealed, they went their various ways, and Irma and Lanny motored out of Switzerland by way of Basle, and before dinner-time were in Stuttgart. A bitterly fought election campaign had covered the billboards with slogans and battle-cries of the various parties. Lanny, who got hold of a newspaper as soon as he arrived anywhere, read the announcement of a giant Versammlung of the Nazis to be held that evening, the principal speaker being that Reich Organization Leader Number One who had received such a dressing-down from his Führer in Lanny’s presence some twenty months ago. Lanny remarked: "I’d like to hear what he’s saying now."

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed Irma. "Such a bore!" But she didn’t want to be left in a hotel room alone, so she said: "Let’s not stay too late."

During those twenty months a Franco-American playboy had been skipping over the world with the agility conferred by railroads and motor-cars, airplanes, steamships, and private yachts. He had been over most of western Europe, England, and New England. He had read books on many subjects, he had played thousands of musical compositions, looked at as many paintings, been to many theaters, danced in many ball-rooms, and swum in many seas; he had chatted with his friends and played with his baby, eaten the choicest of foods, drunk the best wines, and enjoyed the love of a beautiful and fashionable wife. In short, he had had the most delightful sort of life that the average man could imagine.

But meantime the people of Germany had been living an utterly different life; doing hard and monotonous labor for long hours at low wages; finding the cost of necessities creeping upward and insecurity increasing, so that no man could be sure that he and his family were going to have their next day’s bread. The causes of this state of affairs were complex and hopelessly obscure to the average man, but there was a group which undertook to make them simple and plain to the dullest. During the aforementioned twenty months the customs official’s son from Austria, Adi Schicklgruber, had been skipping about even more than Lanny Budd, using the same facilities of railroad trains and motor-cars and airplanes. But he hadn’t been seeking pleasure; he had been living the life of an ascetic, vegetarian, and teetotaler, devoting his fanatical energies to the task of convincing the German masses that their troubles were due to the Versailles Diktat, to the envious foreigners who were strangling the Fatherland, to the filthy and degraded Jews, and to their allies the international bankers and international Reds.

Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry—that was Adolf Hitler’s technique. He had been applying it for thirteen years, ever since the accursed treaty had been signed, and now he was at the climax of his efforts. He and his lieutenants were holding hundreds of meetings every night, all over Germany, and it was like one meeting; the same speech, whether it was a newspaper print or cartoon or signboard or phonograph record. No matter whether it was true or not—for Adi meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn’t dare make up a thing like that. Imagine the worst possible about your enemies and then swear that you knew it, you had seen it, it was God’s truth and you were ready to stake your life upon it—shout this, bellow this, over and over, day after day, night after night. If one person states it, it is nonsense, but if ten thousand join in it becomes an indictment, and when ten million join in it becomes history. The Jews кill Christian children and use their blood as a part of their religious ritual! You refuse to believe it? But it is a well-known fact; it is called "ritual murder." The Jews are in a conspiracy to destroy Christian civilization and rule the whole world. It has all been completely exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the party has printed these, the Führer has guaranteed their authenticity, the great American millionaire Henry Ford has circulated them all over America. Everybody there knows that the charges are true, the whole world knows it—save only the Jew-lovers, the Jew-kissers, the filthy Jew-hirelings. Nieder mit den Juden!

XI

So here was another huge mass meeting, such crowds that you could hardly get in, and two rich Americans having to climb to distant seats in a gallery. But it was all right, for there were loudspeakers, a wonderful device whereby one small figure on a platform could have the voice of a score of giants, while a dissenter became a pigmy, uttering a squeak like a mouse. The radio was a still more marvelous invention; that feeble little "crystal set" with earphones which Robbie Budd had brought to Bienvenu ten years ago had become the most dominating of psychological forces, whereby one man could indoctrinate a hundred million. Learned technicians of the mind had evolved methods of awakening curiosity, so that the millions would listen; and no matter how much anyone disagreed, he was powerless to answer back. The dream of every dictator was to get exclusive control of that colossal instrument, so that never again in all history would it be possible to answer back. Then what you said would become the truth and the only truth—no matter how false it might have been previously! He who could get and hold the radio became God.

Once more Lanny observed the application of the art of moving the mass mind. Adolf Hitler taught that the masses did not think with their brains but with their blood; that is to say, they did not reason but were driven by instincts. The most basic instinct was the desire to survive and the fear of not surviving; therefore Adolf Hitler told them that their enemies desired to destroy them and that he alone could and would save them; he told them that they were the Herrenvolk, the master race, designed by nature to survive and to rule all other races of the earth. The second basic instinct was hunger, and they had suffered it, and he promised them that under his leadership Germany would break into the storehouses of the world’s plenty; the Fatherland would have Lebensraum, the space in which to expand and grow. The third basic instinct is sex, and he told them that they were destined to populate the earth, and that every pure-blooded Aryan Mädchen was the predestined mother of blond heroes; that was what she was created for, and no permission was needed for her to begin; a wise Fatherland would provide for her care and give all honor to her and her offspring.

All these instincts added up into pride and victory over the foes of Germany. "Sieg Heil!" they shouted; and the party had invented an elaborate ritual to embody these concepts and to thrill the dullest soul. At the futile Beerhall Putsch which Lanny had witnessed in Munich there had been carried banners, and these banners had been riddled with bullets and stained with the blood of martyrs; that made them holy, and Adolf Hitler had carried them all over Germany, and upon public platforms had performed the ceremony of touching the new banners with the old; that made all the Nazi banners holy, and worthy of being stained with the blood of martyrs. So now when they were carried all hearts beat high, and all good party members longed for a chance to become martyrs and have a new Horst Wessel Lied sung about them. Shrill trumpets proclaimed the entry of these banners, drums beat and fifes shrilled and a bodyguard of heroes marched into the hall with faces solemn and grim.

To the speakers' platform ascended large, heavy Gregor Strasser; not humbled and browbeaten as Lanny had last seen him, but bursting with assurance of power. He was one of the original party leaders, and had helped Adolf to keep alive in the early days. He had believed in the early program with all its promises for the overthrow of the rich and the setting up of the disinherited. Did he believe in them still, when he knew that the Führer no longer meant them? You could never have guessed it from listening to his speech, for he seemed to have but one rule: to think of everything that ten thousand Wurttembergers could possibly want, and promise it to them, to be delivered on the day when they would elect the candidates of the N.S.D.A.P.

Lanny said: "That’s surely the way to get out the vote!" Irma, who didn’t understand what the orator was promising, and had to judge by gestures and tones, remarked: "It is surprising how much like Uncle Jesse he sounds."

"Don’t let either of them hear that!" chuckled the husband.

XII

It was a political campaign of frenzied hate, close to civil war. Troops of armed men marched, glaring at other troops when they passed, and ready to fly at the others' throats; in the working class districts they did so, and bystanders had to flee for their lives. The conservatives, who called themselves Democrats and Nationalists, had their Stahlhelm and their Kampfring, the Nazis had their S.S.'s and S.A.'s, the Sozis had their Reichsbanner, and the Communists their Rotfront, although the last named were forbidden to wear uniforms. The posters and cartoons, the flags and banners, all had symbols and slogans expressive of hatred of other people, whether Germans of the wrong class, or Russians, French, Czechs, Poles, or Jews. Impossible to understand so many kinds of hatreds or the reasons for them. Irma said: "It’s horrible, Lanny. Let’s not have any more to do with it."

She had met charming people in Berlin, and now Johannes gave her a reception, and they all came; when they found that she didn’t like politics they said they didn’t blame her, and talked about the music festivals, the art exhibitions, the coming yacht regattas. The Jewish money-lord tried to keep friendly with everybody, and he knew that many who would not ordinarily darken his door were willing to come when a celebrated American heiress was his guest. According to his custom, he did not try to hide this, but on the contrary made a point of mentioning it and thanking her. She knew that this Jewish family had risen in the world with the help of the Budds; but so long as they showed a proper gratitude and didn’t develop a case of "swelled head," it was all right for the help to continue.

German big business men came, and their wives, still bigger as a rule. German aristocrats came, tall, stiff gentlemen wearing monocles, and their Damen who seemed built for the stage of Bayreuth. All had long titles, and left off none of the vons and zus; Irma had trouble in telling Herr vons from Herr Barons, Herr Grafen from Erlauchts, and Erlauchts from Durchlauchts.

Graf Stubendorf came, reported on affairs at home, and cordially renewed his invitation for next Christmas, or for the shooting season earlier. The new Chancellor came; tall and thin-faced, the smartest of diplomats and most elegant of Catholic aristocrats, he lived entangled in a net of intrigue of his own weaving. A son of the Russian ghetto might have been overwhelmed by the honor of such a presence, but Johannes took it as the payment of a debt. The gentlemen of the fashionable Herren Klub hadn’t been able to raise enough money to save their party, so the Chancellor had had to come to the Jew for help.

Irma found him charming, and told her husband, who remarked: "There is no greater rascal in all Europe. Franz von Papen was put out of the United States before we entered the war because he was financing explosions in munitions plants."

"Oh, darling!" she exclaimed. "You say such horrid things! You can’t really know that!"

Said the young Pink: "He didn’t have sense enough to burn his check-stubs, and the British captured his ship on the way home and published all the data."

I

THE cruise of the Bessie Budd began. Not a long cruise, never more than a week at a time in these disturbed days. They stopped to fish and swim, and they sent out upon the North Sea breezes a great deal of romantic and delightful music. The seamen and the fishermen who glided by in the night must have been moved to wonder, and perhaps some young Heine among them took flight upon the wings of imagination. Far on the Scottish rock-coast, where the little gray castle towers above the raging sea, there, at the high-arched window, stands a beautiful frail woman, tender-pellucid and marble-pale, and she plays the harp and sings, and the wind sweeps through her long tresses and carries her dark song over the wide storming sea.

Resting from such flights of fancy the solicitous Lanny Budd had quiet talks with his host, hoping by gentle and tactful intervention to lessen the strain of that family conflict which had been revealed to him. Johannes explained, in much the same words that Robbie Budd had used when Lanny was a small boy, that the business man did not think merely of the money he was making or might make; he acquired responsibilities to thousands of investors, not all of them greedy idlers, but many aged persons, widows, and orphans having no means of support but their shares of stock; also to workingmen whose families starved unless the weekly pay envelopes were filled. It was a libel upon business administrators to suppose that they had no sense of duties owed to other people, even though most of these people were strangers.

"Moreover," said Johannes, "when a man has spent his life learning to pursue a certain kind of activity, it is no easy matter to persuade him to drop it at the height of his powers. Difficulties, yes; but he has expected them, and takes them as a challenge, he enjoys coping with them and showing that he can master them. To give up and run away from them is an act of cowardice which would undermine his moral foundations; he would have no use for himself thereafter, but would spend his time brooding, like an admiral who veered about and deserted his fleet.

"My children have their own moral code," continued the money master, "and they have the task of convincing me that it applies to my case. They wish to build a new and better world, and I would be glad if they could succeed, and if I saw any hope of success I would join them. I ask for their plans, and they offer me vague dreams, in which as a man of affairs I see no practicality. It is like the end of Das Rheingold: there is Valhalla, very beautiful, but only a rainbow bridge on which to get to it, and while the gods may be able to walk on a rainbow, my investors and working people cannot. My children assure me that a firmer bridge will be constructed, and when I ask for the names of the engineers, they offer me party leaders and propagandists, speechmakers who cannot even agree among themselves; if it were not for what they call the capitalist police they would fall to fighting among themselves and we should have civil war instead of Utopia. How can my two boys expect me to agree with them until they have at least managed to agree between themselves?"

Lanny was sad to have no answer to this question. He had already put it to his sister, and she could say only that she and her husband were right, while Freddi and Rahel were wrong. No use putting the question to the other pair, for their answer would be the same. Neither couple was going to give way—any more than Lanny himself was going to give up his conviction that it was the program of the Communists which had caused the development of Fascism and Nazism—or at any rate had made possible its spread in Italy and Germany. Only in the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon lands, where democratic institutions were firmly rooted, had neither Reds nor anti-Reds been able to make headway.

II

So there wasn’t any chance of persuading Johannes Robin to retire to a monastery or even to a private yacht right now. He didn’t pretend to know what was going to happen in Germany, but he knew that these were stormy times and that he, the admiral, would stand by his righting fleet. He would protect his properties and keep his factories running; and if, in order to get contracts and concessions it was necessary to make a present to some powerful politician, Johannes would bargain shrewdly and pay no more than he had to. That had been the way of the world since governments had first been invented, and a Jewish trader, an exile barely tolerated in a strange land, had to be satisfied with looking out for his own. His sons felt more at home in Germany and dreamed of trying to change it; but for the child of the ghetto it was enough that he obeyed the law. "Not very noble," he admitted, sadly; "but when the nobler ones come to me for help, they get it."

The world was in a bad way and getting worse. Banks were failing all over the United States, and unemployment increasing steadily. A presidential election was due in November, and the political parties had held their conventions and made their nominations; the Republicans had endorsed the Great Engineer and all that he had done, while the Democrats nominated the Governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt by name. Johannes asked if Lanny knew anything about this man, and Lanny said no; but when the yacht picked up some mail, there was Robbie’s weekly letter, a cross between a business man’s report and one of the lamentations of Jeremiah. Robbie said that the Democratic candidate was a man wholly without business experience, and moreover an invalid, his legs shriveled by infantile paralysis. Surely these times called for one at least physically sound; the presidency was a mankilling job, and this Roosevelt, if elected, couldn’t survive it for a year. But he wasn’t going to be elected, for Robbie and his friends were pulling off their coats, to say nothing of opening their purses.

"I suppose Robbie will be asking you for a contribution!" chuckled the irreverent son, and the other replied: "I have many interests in America." Lanny recalled the remark he had once heard Zaharoff make: "I am a citizen of every country where I have investments."

III

They discussed conditions in Germany, living on borrowed capital and sliding deeper and deeper into the pit. The existing government had no popular support, but was run by the Herren Klub, an organization of big business men, aristocrats, and "office generals," having some twenty branches throughout Germany. Its two most active politicians were Chancellor von Papen and General von Schleicher, and they were supposed to be colleagues, but neither could trust the other out of his sight. Now Papen was in office, and Schleicher was trading secretly with the Nazis for their support to turn him out. Nobody could trust anybody, except the eighty-five-year-old monument of the Junkerdom, General von Hindenburg. Poor alte Herr, when the burdens of state were dumped upon him he could only answer: "Ich will meine Ruhe haben!"— I must have my rest.

Johannes judged it certain that the Nazis would make heavy gains at the coming elections, but he refused to worry about this. He had several of them on his payroll, but what he counted upon most was the fact that Hitler had gone to Dusseldorf and had a long session with Thyssen and other magnates of the Ruhr. They wanted the Red labor unions put down, and Hitler had satisfied them that he was ready to do the job. You might fool one or two of those tough steelmen, but not many; they knew politicians, and dealt with one crop after another; it was part of the game of conducting industry in a world full of parliaments and parties. A nuisance, but you learned to judge men and saw to it that none got into power who couldn’t be trusted. The same thing applied to the great landlords of Prussia; they wanted above all things a bulwark against Bolshevism, and were willing to pay a heavy price for that service. These two powers, the industrialists of the west and the landed gentry of the east, had governed Germany since the days of Bismarck and would go on doing so.

"But aren’t you afraid of Hitler’s anti-Semitism?" asked Lanny.

"Herrgott!" exclaimed the owner of the Bessie Budd. "I was brought up in the midst of pogroms, and what could I do then? It is said that there once lived a Jew called Jesus, and other Jews had him executed by the Romans; such things happened ten thousand times, no doubt; but because of this one time my poor people have to be spat upon and clubbed and stabbed to death. What can any of us do, except to pray that it will not break out in the street where we live?"

"But they threaten it wholesale, Johannes!"

"It is a means of getting power in a world where people are distracted and must have some one to blame. I can only hope that if ever the Nazis come into office they will have real problems to deal with, so that the spotlight will be turned away from my unfortunate people."

IV

Irma had voted to keep out of German political affairs, but that couldn’t be arranged entirely. There was the workers' school, in which Freddi was so deeply interested, and which had been more or less modeled upon Lanny’s own project. When they came back to Berlin Lanny’s wife played bridge while he went with Freddi and Rahel to a reception at which he met the teachers and friends of the enterprise, heard its problems discussed, and told them how things were going in the Midi.

In his way of thinking Lanny was nearer to these young Socialists than to any other group; yet what a variety of opinion there was among them, and how difficult to get them together on any program of action! A few days before the election the von Papen government had effected a coup d’Etat in the state of Prussia, which includes Berlin; the premier and the principal officials, all Social-Democrats, were turned out of office and threatened with arrest if they attempted to resist—which they did so feebly that it amounted to submission. As a result, the Socialists were buzzing like a swarm of bees whose hive has been upset; but alas, they appeared to be bees which had lost their stingers! The Communists had proposed a general strike of the workers and called upon the Socialists to co-operate with them; but how could anybody cooperate with Communists? They would take advantage of an uprising to seize the reins themselves; they would turn upon their allies as they had done with Kerensky in Russia. The Socialists were more in fear of the Communists than of the reactionaries; they were afraid of acting like Communists, of looking like Communists, of being called Communists.

So the Cabinet of the Barons seized control of the Berlin police and all the other powers of the local government. How different it had been twelve years ago during the "Kapp Putsch"! Then the workers hadn’t waited for their leaders, they had known instantly what to do—drop their tools and come into the streets and show their power. But now, apparently, they had lost interest in the Republic. What good had it done them these twelve years? It couldn’t prevent hard times and unemployment, it couldn’t even make promises any more! It was so chained by its own notions of legality that it couldn’t resist the illegality of others.

Lanny listened to the discussions of these Berlin intellectuals. They came from all classes, brought together by community of ideas. They had the keenest realization of danger to the cause of freedom and social justice. They all wanted to do something; but first they had to agree what to do, and apparently they couldn’t; they talked and argued until they were exhausted. Lanny wondered, is this a disease which afflicts all intellectuals? Is it a paralysis which accompanies the life of the mind? If so, then it must be that the thinkers will be forever subject to the men of brute force, and Plato’s dream of a state ruled by philosophers will remain forever vain.

Lanny thought: "Somebody ought to lead them!" He wanted to say: "My God, it may be settled this very night. Your republic will be dead! Let’s go now, and call the workers out!" But then he thought: "What sort of a figure would I cut, taking charge of a German revolution? I, an American!" He settled back and listened to more arguments, and thought: "I’m like all the others. I’m an intellectual, too! I happen to own some guns, and know how to use them—but I wouldn’t!"

V

There was a teacher of art at the school, by name Trudi Schultz, very young, herself a student at an art school, but two or three evenings a week she came to impart what she knew to the workers, most of them older than herself. She was married to a young commercial artist who worked on a small salary for an advertising concern and hated it. Both Trudi and Ludi Schultz were that perfect Aryan type which Adolf Hitler lauded but conspicuously was not; the girl had wavy fair hair, clear blue candid eyes, and sensitive features which gave an impression of frankness and sincerity. Lanny watched her making sketches on a blackboard for her class, and it seemed to him that she had an extraordinary gift of line; she drew something, then wiped it out casually, and he hated to see it go.

She was pleased by his interest and invited him to come and see her work. So, on another evening while Irma played bridge, Lanny drove Freddi and Rahel to a working class quarter of the city where the young couple lived in a small apartment. Lanny inspected a mass of crayon drawings and a few water-colors, and became interested in what he believed was a real talent. This girl drew what she saw in Berlin; but she colored it with her personality. Like Jesse Blackless she loved the workers and regarded the rich with moral disapprobation; that made her work "propaganda," and hard to sell. But Lanny thought it ought to appeal to the Socialist press and offered to take some with him and show it to Leon Blum and Jean Longuet. Of course the Schultzes were much excited— for they had heard about Lanny’s having selected old masters for the palace of Johannes Robin, and looked upon the wealthy young American as a power in the art world.

Lanny, for his part, was happy to meet vital personalities in the workers' movement. More and more he was coming to think of art as a weapon in the social struggle, and here were young people who shared his point of view and understood instantly what he said.

He had traveled to many far places, while they knew only Berlin and its suburbs and the countryside where they sometimes had walking trips; yet they had managed to get the same meaning out of life. More and more the modern world was becoming one; mass production was standardizing material things, while the class struggle was shaping the minds and souls of workers and masters. Lanny had watched Fascism spread from Italy to Germany, changing its name and the color of its shirts, but very little else; he heard exactly the same arguments about it here in Berlin as in Paris, the Midi, and the Rand School of Social Science in New York.

These five young people, so much alike in their standards and desires, talked out of their hearts in a way that Lanny had not had a chance to do for some time. All of them were tormented by fears of what was coming in Europe, and groping to determine their own duty in the presence of a rising storm of reaction. What were the causes of the dreadful paralysis which seemed to have fallen upon the workers' movement of the world?

Trudi Schultz, artist-idealist, thought that it was a failure of moral forces. She had been brought up in a Marxist household, but was in a state of discontent with some of the dogmas she had formerly taken as gospel; she had observed that dialectical materialism didn’t keep people from quarreling, from being jealous, vindictive, and narrow-minded. Socialists talked comradeship, but too often they failed in the practice of it, and Trudi had decided that more than class consciousness was needed to weld human beings into a social unity.

Freddi Robin, who had a scholar’s learning in these matters, ventured the opinion that the identification of Social-Democracy with philosophic materialism was purely accidental, due to the fact that both had originated in nineteenth-century Germany. There was no basic connection between the two, and now that modern science had moved away from the old dogmatic notion of a physical atom as the building material of all existence, it was time for the Socialists to find themselves a philosophy which justified creative effort and moral purpose.

The eager girl student was glad to hear someone say that, in the long philosophical terms which made it sound right to a German. She said that she had observed this error working in everyday life. Men who preached that matter and force were the bases of life, the sole reality, were tempted to apply this dogma in their own lives; when they got a little power they thought about keeping it, and forgot their solidarity with the humble toilers. People had to believe in moral force, they had to let love count in the world, they had to be willing to make sacrifices of their own comfort, their own jobs and salaries, yes, even their lives, if need be. It was lack of that living spirit of brotherhood and solidarity which had made it possible for Otto Braun, Social-Democratic Premier of the Prussian state, and Karl Severing, Minister of the Interior, to bow to the threats of monocled aristocrats, and slink off to their villas without making the least effort to rouse the people to defend their republic and the liberties it guaranteed them.

Lanny thought: "Here, at last, is a German who understands what freedom means!"

VI

On a Sunday, the last day of July, more than thirty-seven million citizens of the German Republic, both men and women, went to the polls and registered their choice for deputies to represent them in the Reichstag. As compared with the elections of two years previously, the Socialists lost some six hundred thousand votes, the Communists gained as many, while the Nazis increased their vote from six and a half million to fourteen million. They elected two hundred and thirty deputies out of a total of six hundred and eight-outnumbering the Socialists and Communists, even if combined, which they wouldn’t. So from then on it became impossible for anyone to govern Germany without Adolf Hitler’s consent.

There began a long series of intrigues and pulling of wires behind the scenes. Johannes would report events to Lanny, and also to Lanny’s father, who had come over for a conference with his associate and went for a short cruise on the Bessie Budd. The politicians of the right, who had polled less than five per cent of the vote, nevertheless hung on to power, trying to persuade Hitler to come into their cabinet, so that they might flatter him and smooth him down as had been done with MacDonald in England. They would offer him this post and that; they would try to win his followers away from him—and Adi would summon the waverers to his presence and scream at them hysterically. When he couldn’t get his way he would threaten suicide, and his followers never knew whether he meant it or not.

A great event in Berlin life when the haughty old Field Marshal consented to receive the "Bohemian corporal." Hitler was driven to the Wilhelmstrasse, with crowds cheering him on the way. He had lunch with von Papen, the Chancellor whose post he was demanding, and when he was escorted into the presence of Hindenburg he was so nervous that he stumbled over a rug; he started one of his orations, just like Gladstone before Queen Victoria, and had to be stopped by his old commander. Hindenburg told him that he would not turn over the chancellorship to a man whose followers practiced terrorism and systematic violations of the law; he thought the vice-chancellorship was enough for such a man. But Hitler refused it, demanding full power. The aged Junker stormed, but the ex-corporal had been brought up on that, and all he would reply was: "Opposition to the last ditch." Said Hindenburg: "Ich will meine Ruhe haben!"

There began a new wave of terrorism; attacks upon Reds of all shades by the Nazi Stormtroopers in and out of uniform. Irma heard about it and began begging Lanny to cease his visits among these people; she tried to enlist Robbie’s help, and when that failed she wanted to leave Berlin. What was this obscure tropism which drove her husband to the companionship of persons who at the least wanted to get his money from him, and frequently were conspiring to involve him in dangerous intrigues? What had they ever done for him? What could he possibly owe them?

Lanny insisted that he had to hear all sides. He invited Emil Meissner to lunch—not in the Robin home, for Emil wouldn’t come there. Kurt’s oldest brother was now a colonel, and Lanny wanted to know what a Prussian officer thought about the political dead-lock. Emil said it was deplorable, and agreed with Lanny that the Nazis were wholly unfitted to govern Germany. He said that if von Papen had been a really strong man he would never have permitted that election to be held; if the Field Marshal had been the man of the old days he would have taken the reins in his hands and governed the country until the economic crisis had passed and the people could settle into a normal state of mind.

"But wouldn’t that mean the end of the Republic?" asked Lanny.

"Republics come and go, but nations endure," said Oberst Meissner.

VII

Heinrich Jung called up, bursting with pride over the triumph of his party. He offered to tell Lanny the inside story, and Lanny said: "But I am consorting with your enemies." The other laughed and replied: "Then you can tell me the inside story!" He seemed to take the view that Lanny, an American, was above the battle. Was it that a young Nazi craved the admiration of a foreigner? Was there in his secret heart some pleasure in free discussion, the expression of unbiased opinion which he did not get from his party press? Or was it that Lanny was so rich, and looked like a figure out of a Hollywood movie?

The Jung family had been increased again. "More Junkers," said Lanny, with what seemed a pun to him. Heinrich’s salary had been increased and he had moved into a larger home. He had invited Hugo Behr, and the three of them sat for a couple of hours sipping light beer and settling the destiny of Germany and its neighbors. Lanny was interested to observe that there were disagreements among Nazi intellectuals, as elsewhere; the two names of Hitler’s party covered widely different and inconsistent points of view. Heinrich was the National and Hugo was the Socialist, and while they agreed in workingclass consciousness and the program of socialization; whereas Heinrich, son of one of Graf Stubendorf’s employees, had the mentality of a Prussian state servant to whom Ordnung und Zucht were the breath of being.

Lanny thought there was drama in this, and that it might pay an English playwright to come to Berlin and study what was going on. He had suggested the idea to Rick, who hadn’t thought the Nazi movement important enough; but maybe the recent vote would change his mind! Anyhow, Lanny was interested to listen to two young zealots, setting out to make the world over in the image of their inspired leader; it pleased him to take a mental crowbar and insert it in the crack between their minds and make it wider and deeper. Just how deep would it go before they became aware of it themselves?

Lanny couldn’t tell them what he knew. He couldn’t say to Hugo: "Your Führer is in the thick of negotiations with Thyssen, and Krupp von Bohlen, and Karl von Siemens, and others of the greediest industrialists of your country. He is making fresh promises of conservatism and legality. He will do anything to get power, and anything to keep it. You and your friends are just so many pawns that he moves here and there and will sacrifice when his game requires it." No, for they would ask: "How do you know this?" And he couldn’t reply: "Fritz Thyssen told my father yesterday." They would assume that he had got the stories from Johannes Robin, a Jew, which would mean to them two things: first, that the stories were lies, and second, that some Nazi patriots ought to visit the Robin palace by night and smash all its windows and paint Juda verrecke! on its front door.

No, among Catholics one did not question the purity of the Holy Virgin, and among Nazis one didn’t question the honor of the Führer. When he said in his book that he would have no honor, he meant as regards his foes; but for his Parteigenossen he was a loving shepherd, to be followed after the manner of sheep. All that Lanny could do was to ask impersonal questions. "How can the Führer get commercial credits, if Germany defaults in payments on her bonds? I don’t mean reparations, but the bonds of private investors." Hugo Behr, naive young Socialist, didn’t even know that there were such bonds. Lanny said: "I have several of them in a safe-deposit box in Newcastle, Connecticut. I bought them because I wanted to help your Socialist republic."

"It is a bourgeois fraud!" said the ex-Marxist; and that settled all Lanny’s claims.

VIII

Kurt had written, begging Irma and Lanny to come for a visit. Lanny had never been to Stubendorf except at Christmas time, and he thought it would be pleasant to see the country in midsummer. They drove with a speed greater than the wind over the splendid level roads of Prussia, past fields where gangs of Polish immigrant women labored on the potato crops. The roads were lined with well-tended fruit trees, and Irma said: "We couldn’t do that in America. People would steal all the fruit." She had never seen vast fields so perfectly cultivated: every inch of ground put to use, no such thing as a weed existing, and forests with trees planted in rows like orchards. She renewed her admiration for the German Volk.

They stayed at the Schloss, even though the Graf was not at home. Kurt had a new "Junker," and so had his brother’s family and his sister’s. Herr Meissner was feeble, but able to talk politics; he renewed his complaints of corruption and incompetence of the Polish government under which he was forced to live. Just now there was wrangling over religious questions; the old problem of the relations of church and state was being fought over with bitterness inherited through six centuries or more. There were Polish Lutherans and German Lutherans who couldn’t and wouldn’t say the Lord’s prayer together. There were Polish Catholics trying to polonize German Catholics. There was the Volhynian Russian church, and the Uniat church which was half-way between Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic—they accepted the Pope, but their priests married and had large families. Superimposed upon all this was a new Polish ecclesiastical system, which subjected all the churches to the government. Herr Meissner, soon to depart from this earth, found the making of a proper exit as complicated a problem as had ever confronted him while staying on.

Lanny had been looking forward to having a frank talk with his old chum. He wanted to tell Kurt what he had learned about the Nazi political machine, and make one last effort to get him out of it. But he realized that it would be a waste of effort. Kurt was in a state of exultation over the election results, for which he had been hoping for ten years and working for five. He considered that Germany was being redeemed, and he was composing a Victory March to end all marches. Lanny decided sadly that it was better to play piano duets and consider politics as beneath the notice of inspired musicians.

He and Irma had intended to return to Berlin for another cruise; but there came a telegram from Miss Severne, who was under strict orders to report the slightest sign of indisposition on the part of her charge. She reported a digestive disturbance and a temperature of 101; that didn’t mean much in a child, and the nurse was sure it wasn’t serious, but Irma fell into a panic right away—she was a neglectful and selfish mother who had run away from her responsibilities, amusing herself all over Europe. She wanted to take a plane; but Lanny said: "By the time you get to an airport and arrange for one we can be half way home. You spell me and we’ll drive straight through."

So they did, and reached Juan in a little over two days—not so bad considering the mountains in Austria and Italy. Twice on the way they stopped to telephone, and when they arrived they found that the fire was all out. Was it the magic of Parsifal Dingle, or just the natural tendency of very young children to get over a fever as quickly as they get it? There was no way to know; suffice it that Lanny’s stepfather had done his best, and Miss Severne had done hers, and Baby Frances was well—and ready to take full advantage of a reformed and penitent mother! Irma was so happy to prattle and dance and play with her darling that she couldn’t understand how she had ever wanted to be fashionable.

IX

They settled down to domestic life. In the evening Sophie and her husband would come over to play bridge with Irma and Beauty. Marceline had begun attending a private school, where fashionable young ladies didn’t learn very much but were watched and kept out of mischief. That left Lanny free to read the magazines which had accumulated in his absence, and to play the music that took his fancy; also to attend the workers' school and tell them what he had learned in England and Germany, and advise them how to avoid the misfortunes which had befallen their comrades in these countries.

The only trouble was, the data appeared so complicated and the conclusions so uncertain. "MacDonaldism" appeared to indicate the futility of "gradualness" and legality; the moment you mentioned it, up popped some young Red to say: "You see what happens when the workers put their trust in parliaments!" When you mentioned Hitler, right away a wrangle started as to what had caused him. Was he an agent of German heavy industry, and a proof that capitalism would not submit peaceably to any form of limitation upon its rule? Or were the Nazis-a product of the fears which Bolshevism had inspired in the Kleinbürgertum—the small business men, the petty officials, the white collar workers who had no unions and couldn’t protect their status?

You could take either side of this debate, produce a mass of facts to prove your case, and come out feeling certain that you had won. The uncomfortable person was the one like Lanny, who wanted the whole truth, and could see that there was some of it on both sides. Nobody could look at an issue of a Nazi newspaper without seeing that they were exploiting the fear of Red Russia to the limit; on the other hand, who could look at Hitler’s Braune Haus with its costly equipment, or see the Stormtroopers marching with their shiny new uniforms and weapons—and not know that this movement was being financed by big money of some sort. Großkapital was afraid of Russia, just as the white collar workers were; but Großkapital was exploiting all the workers, and these two groups couldn’t agree on any domestic policies. Sooner or later the Nazis would have to make up their minds which master they meant to serve.

There lay the drama of present day events in Germany, and Lanny strove to explain it to the French workers and to such of their leaders as he met. Hitler sat in his study in Berlin, or in Munich, or in the retreat which he had bought for himself in the mountains, and the Nazi chieftains came to him and argued and pulled him this way and that; he thought it over, and chose whatever course seemed to him to open the way to power. He was as slippery as an eel, and as quick to move, and nobody could say what he was going to do until he had done it. The one thing you could say for sure was that National Socialism was power without conscience; you might call it the culmination of capitalism, or a degenerate form of Bolshevism—names didn’t matter, so long as you understood that it was counter-revolution.

The important question was, whether this same development was to be expected in every country. Was the depression going to wipe out the middle classes and drive them into the arms of demagogues? Were the workers being driven to revolt, and would their attempts be met by the overthrow of parliaments? Were the Communists right in their seemingly crazy idea that Fascism was a necessary stage in the breakdown of capitalism?

Apparently the question was up for answer in the land which Lanny and Irma called theirs. The ex-service men who had gone overseas to fight for their country had come back to find the jobs and the money in the hands of others. Now they were unemployed, many of them starving, and they gathered in Washington demanding relief; some brought their destitute families and swarmed upon the steps of the Capitol or camped in vacant lots beside the Potomac. The Great Engineer fell into a panic and could think of nothing to do but turn the army loose on them, kill four, and burn the tents and pitiful belongings of all. The "bonus men" were driven out, a helpless rabble, no one caring where they went, so long as they stopped bothering politicians occupied with getting re-elected.

To Lanny this appeared the same thing as the Cabinet of the Barons, seizing control of Prussia and ruling Germany with only a few votes in the Reichstag. It was Poincaire occupying the Ruhr for the benefit of the Comite des Forges; it was Zaharoff sending an army into Turkey to get oil concessions. It was the same type of men all over the world. They tried to grab one another’s coal and steel and oil and gold; yet, the moment they were threatened by their wage slaves anywhere, they got together to fight against the common peril. Do it with the army, do it with gangsters, do it with the workers' own leaders, buying them or seducing them with titles, honors, and applause!

Lanny could see that clearly; and it is a pleasure to the mind to discover unity in the midst of variety. But then the thought would come to him: "My father is one of these men, and so are his father and his brothers. My sister’s father-in-law is one, and so was my wife’s father, and all the men of her family." That spoiled the pleasure in Lanny’s mind.

X

Two or three weeks passed, and ambition began to stir once more in the soul of Irma Barnes Budd. There was that splendid palace in Paris, for which she was paying over eighty thousand francs rent per month, and nearly as much for upkeep, whether she used it or not. Now it was autumn, one of the delightful seasons in la Ville Lumiere. The beau monde came back from the mountains and the sea, and there were the autumn Salons, and operas and concerts and all the things that Lanny loved; there were balls and parties, an automobile show and other displays of luxury. The young couple set out in their car, and Sophie and her husband in theirs, and Beauty and her husband in hers. Mr. Dingle didn’t mind wherever she took him, for, strange as it might seem, God was in Paris, and there were people there who knew Him, even in the midst of the rout of pleasure-seeking.

Margy, Dowager Lady Eversham-Watson, came from London, bringing Nina and Rick for a short holiday. Rick was a celebrity now, and the hostesses were after him. Also General Graf Stubendorf was invited, in return for his hospitality, and to Lanny’s surprise he accepted. Others of the fashionable Berliners came, and it was hands across the Rhein again—but Lanny was no longer naive, and couldn’t persuade himself that this was going to keep the peace among the great European powers. The Conference on Arms Limitation was still arguing at Geneva, and facing complete breakdown. The statesmen and fashionable folk, even the army men, would wine and dine one another and be the best of friends; but they would go on piling up weapons and intriguing, each against all the others—until one day an alerte would be sounded, and you would see them all scurrying back to their own side of the river, or mountains, or whatever the boundary line might be.

It didn’t take Irma long to become the accomplished hostess. With Emily Chattersworth and the other ladies coaching her, she played her part with dignity and success; everybody liked her, and the most fastidious denizens of St. Germain, le gratin, could find no fault in her. She wasn’t presuming to attempt a salon—that would take time, and perhaps might grow as it were by accident. Meanwhile she gave elegant entertainments with no sign of skimping, at a time when all but a few were forced to that least pardonable of improprieties.

For three years the business prophets had been telling the world that the slump was only temporary, that prosperity was just around the corner. But apparently it was a round house. Apparently some devil had got into the economic structure and was undermining it. In Wall Street, at the culmination of a furious political campaign, there was a new wave of bank failures; dividends seemed to have stopped, and now interest on bonds was stopping. Irma’s income for the third quarter of the year had fallen to less than a hundred thousand dollars. She said to her husband: "We’ll have a splurge for the rest of this lease and then go back and crawl into our stormcellar."

He answered: "All right," and let it go at that. He knew that he couldn’t change Irma’s idea that she was helping to preserve the social order by distributing money among domestic servants, wine merchants, florists, dressmakers, and all the train that came to the side-door of this palace—as they had come in the days of Marie Antoinette a hundred and fifty years ago. It hadn’t succeeded in saving feudalism, and Lanny doubted if it was going to save capitalism; but there was no use upsetting anybody ahead of time!

Lanny worried because his life was too easy; he had worried about that for years—but how could he make it hard? Even the harsh and bitter Jesse Blackless, depute de la republique francaise, couldn’t forget the fact that he owed his election to Irma’s contributions, and that sooner or later he would have to be elected again. Even Jean Longuet, man of letters as well as Socialist editor, didn’t presume to question the judgment of a wealthy young American who brought him some drawings by a German art student. He said he would be delighted to use them, and Trudi Schultz was made happy by a modest honorarium from Le Populaire. She had no idea that the money came out of a contribution which Lanny had made to the war-chest of that party organ.

XI

Hitler’s program of "opposition to the last ditch" had forced the dissolution of the Reichstag, and a new election campaign was going on. It was hard on Adolf, for he couldn’t get the money which such an effort required, and when the election took place, early in November, it was found that he had lost nearly two million votes in three months. Johannes Robin was greatly relieved, and wrote that it was the turning of the tide; he felt justified in his faith in the German people, who couldn’t be persuaded to entrust their affairs to a mentally disordered person. Johannes said that the Führer’s conduct since the setback showed that he couldn’t control himself and ought to be in an institution of some sort.

Two days after the German elections came those in the United States. Robbie Budd had his faith in the American people, and he clung to it up to 7:00 p.m. on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November 1932, but then it was completely and irremediably shattered. The Great Engineer, Robbie’s friend and idol, went down in ignominious defeat, and "that man Roosevelt" carried all the states but six. One that he failed to carry was Robbie’s home state, and a rock-ribbed Republican could thank God for that small atom of self-respect left to him! Adi Hitler might be a mental case, but he had the wisdom of Jove compared with Roosevelt as Robbie saw him; a candidate who had gone on a joy-ride about the country, promising everything to everybody—completely incompatible things such as the balancing of the budget and a program of government expansion which would run the public debt up to figures of the sort used by astronomers.

Both Robbie and Johannes made it a practice to send Lanny carbon copies of their letters containing comments on public affairs. For the first time since the World War the Jewish trader was the optimist. He repeated his favorite culinary formula, that no soup is ever eaten as hot as it is cooked. He offered to prove his faith in the land of the pilgrims' pride by letting Robbie buy more Budd shares for him; but Robbie wrote in the strictest confidence—typing the letter himself—that Budd’s might soon be closing down entirely; only Hoover’s wise and merciful Reconstruction Finance Corporation had kept it from having to default on its bonds.

Under the American system, four months had to elapse between Roosevelt’s election and his taking of power. Robbie thought that would be a breathing-spell, but it proved to be one of paralysis; nothing could be done, and each side blamed the other. Herbert was sure that Franklin wanted to see the country go to wreck in order that he might have the glory of saving it. Anyhow, there it was, wave after wave of bank failures, and people hiding their money in mattresses, business men buying gold because of the expected inflation, and people in Europe who had shipped their money to America now calling it back. Seventeen million workers were said to be without jobs—a world record!

XII

Meanwhile the deadlock in Germany continued. The Socialists had lost another big chunk of votes to the Communists, and they hated each other more than ever. Hitler had another interview with Hindenburg, and demanded the chancellorship, but didn’t get it.

The Nazi extremists were infuriated by Hitler’s "legality complex," and clamored for him to seize power. There was another violent quarrel between the Führer and his Reich Organization Leader Number One, Gregor Strasser; the former threatened suicide again, and the latter threatened to resign from the party and set up a new one of his own.

Strasser began intriguing with the gentlemen of the Herren Klub, who were ready to make a deal with anybody who could deliver votes. General von Schleicher wanted to supplant von Papen, who was supposed to be his friend and ally; he had the bright idea of a cabinet which would combine the extreme Junkers with the extreme Nazis—they could browbeat Hitler, because his party was bankrupt, his paymasters had drawn the purse-strings, and he himself was in a state of distraction. Schleicher and Strasser combined would threaten another dissolution of the Reichstag and another election, with the certainty that without money the Nazi vote would be cut in half. Such was the X-ray picture of German politics which Johannes Robin sent to his trusted friends; he didn’t say in so many words that both the conspirators had come to him for funds, but he said that he hadn’t got the above information at second hand.

This deal apparently went through. When the members of the Budd family drove to Bienvenu to spend Christmas, the "office general" was Chancellor of the German Republic, Gregor Strasser had broken with Hitler and was being talked of for a cabinet post, and Hitler had been browbeaten into consenting to an adjournment of the Reichstag until January.

From Connecticut and from Long Island came Christmas letters in which you could see that the writers had labored hard to think of something cheerful to say. Irma, reading them, said to her husband: "Maybe we’d better close up the palace and save money, so that we can take care of my mother and your father if we have to."

"Bless your heart!" replied the prince consort. "You’ve hired that white elephant until April, so you might as well ride him that long."

"But suppose they get really stuck, Lanny!"

"Robbie isn’t playing the market, and I don’t suppose your mother is, so they can’t be broke entirely."

Irma thought for a while, then remarked: "You know, Lanny, it’s really wonderful the way you’ve turned out to be right about business affairs. All the important people have been wrong, while you’ve hit the nail on the head."

Said the young Pink: "It’s worth going through a depression to hear that from one’s wife!"

I

BACK in Paris during the month of January Lanny would receive every morning a copy of the Berlin Vorwärts, twenty-four hours late; he would find on the front page details of the political situation, displayed under scare headlines and accompanied by editorial exhortations. All from the Socialist point of view, of course; but Lanny could check it by taking a stroll up the Butte de Montmartre and hearing the comments of his deputy-uncle, based on the reading of L’Humanité, the paper which Jaures had founded but which now was in the hands of the Communists. This paper also had its Berlin news, set off with scare headlines and editorial exhortations. Because L’Humanité got its stories by wire, Lanny would sometimes swallow the antidote ahead of the poison.

"You see!" the Red uncle would exclaim. "The Social-Democrats haven’t a single constructive proposal. They only denounce what we propose!"

"But you do some denouncing also, Uncle Jesse."

"The workers know our program; and every time there’s an election, the Socialist bureaucrats lose half a million or a million votes, and we gain them."

"But suppose there aren’t any more elections, Uncle Jesse. Suppose Hitler takes power!"

"He can’t do any harm to our monolithic party. We have educated and disciplined our members and they will stand firm."

"But suppose he outlaws your organization!"

"You can’t destroy a party that has several hundred thousand members, and has polled four or five million votes."

"Don’t make the mistake of underestimating your enemy."

"Well, if necessary we’ll go underground. It has happened before, and you may be sure that we have made plans—in France as well as in Germany."

"I hope you’re not mistaken, Uncle Jesse." Lanny said it and meant it. He argued against the Communists, but was only halfhearted about it, because after all, they were a workers' party, and nobody could be sure they mightn’t be needed. The first Five Year Plan of the Soviet Union had been completed with success, and all the Reds were exulting over it; the Pinks couldn’t fail to be impressed, and many wavered and wondered if maybe the Russian way might be the only way. Anyhow, they had a right to be heard; Lanny did what he could to persuade both sides to stop quarreling, and he set them an example by refusing to let them quarrel with him.

II

Any time he was in doubt about what was really happening in Germany he had only to write to Johannes Robin. A letter from the Jewish money-master was like a gust of wind blowing away a fog and revealing the landscape. It disclosed the German nation traveling upon a perilous path, with yawning abysses on every side, earthquakes shaking the rocks loose and volcanoes hurling out clouds of fiery ashes. Assuredly neither of the Plinys, uncle or nephew, had confronted more terrifying natural phenomena than did the Weimar Republic at the beginning of this year 1933.

The ceaselessly aggressive Nazis were waging daily and nightly battles with the Communists all over the country. And meantime the two ruling groups, the industrialists of the west and the landlords of the east, were concentrating their attention upon getting higher tariffs to protect their interests; one hundred per cent wasn’t enough in these days of failing markets. The workers, who wanted lower prices for goods and for food, had refused time after time to vote for candidates of these groups; but with less than five per cent of the votes, the reactionary politicians still clung to power, playing one faction against another, using cajolements mixed with threats.

Chancellor von Schleicher had begun wooing the labor unions, calling himself the "social general," and pointing out to the moderates among Socialists and Catholics how much worse things would be if either set of extremists came in. By such blandishments he lost favor with the paymasters of the Ruhr, who wanted the labor unions broken and were listening to the siren song of Hitler, promising this service. Also there was the problem of Osthilfe, a scandal hanging over the heads of the landed aristocrats of East Prussia. Huge public funds had been voted to save the farmers from ruin, but the owners of the big estates, the powerful aristocrats, had managed to get most of the money, and they had used it for other purposes than land improvements. Now hardly a day passed that the Socialist and Communist press didn’t print charges and demand investigations.

Papen and Schleicher still pretended to be friends, while scheming to cut each other’s throats. Schleicher had ousted Papen by a deal with the Nazis, and two could play at that game. Papen, the "gentleman jockey," was the most tireless of wirepullers. A pale blond aristocrat with a thin, lined face wearing a perpetual smile, he went from one secret meeting to another telling a different story to everybody—but all of them carefully calculated to injure his rival.

"Papen has had a meeting with Hitler at the home of Thyssen’s friend, Baron von Schroeder," wrote Johannes, and Lanny didn’t need to ask what that meant. "I am told that Papen and Hugenberg have got together;"—that, too, was not obscure. Hugenberg, the "silver fox," had come to one of the Robin soirees; a big man with a walrus mustache, brutal but clever; leader of the Pan-German group and owner of the most powerful propaganda machine in the world, practically all of the big capitalist newspapers of Germany, plus U.F.A., the film monopoly. "Papen is raising funds for Hitler among the industrialists," wrote Johannes. "I hear that the Führer has more than two million marks in notes which he cannot meet. It is a question whether he will go crazy before he becomes chancellor!"

III

The Nazis held one of their tremendous meetings in the Sportpalast, and Hitler delivered one of his inspired tirades, promising peace, order, and restoration of self respect to the German people. The conservative newspapers in Paris published his promises and half believed them; they were far more afraid of the Reds than of the Nazis, and Lanny found that Denis de Bruyne was inclined to look upon Hitler as a model for French politicians. Even Lanny himself began hesitating; he was so anxious to be sure that he was right. Hitler was calling upon Almighty God to give him courage and strength to save the German people and right the wrongs of Versailles. Lanny, who had protested so energetically against those wrongs, now wondered if it mightn’t be possible for Hitler to scare France and Britain into making the necessary concessions, and then to settle down and govern the country in the interest of those millions of oppressed "little people" for whom he spoke so eloquently.

The son of Robbie Budd and husband of Irma Barnes might waver, but the German workers didn’t. A hundred thousand of them met in the Berlin Lustgarten, clamoring for the defense of the Republic against its traitor enemies. "Something is going to pop," wrote Johannes, American fashion. "Der alte Herr is terrified at the prospect of having the Osthilfe affair discussed in the Reichstag. Schleicher is considering with the labor unions the idea of refusing to resign and holding on with their backing. I am told that the Catholics have assented, but the Socialists are afraid it wouldn’t be legal. What do you think?" Lanny knew that his old friend was teasing him, and didn’t offer any opinion on German constitutional law.

Johannes didn’t say what he himself was doing in this crisis, but Lanny guessed that he was following his program of keeping friendly with all sides. Certainly he possessed an extraordinary knowledge of the intrigues. Now and then Lanny would call him on the long distance telephone, a plaything of the very rich, and Johannes would speak a sort of camouflage. He would say: "My friend Franzchen wants to be top dog, but so does his friend the publisher, and their schemes will probably fall through because they can’t agree." Lanny understood that this meant Papen and Hugenberg; and when Johannes added: "They may harness up the Wild Man and get together to drive him," Lanny had no trouble guessing about that. Presently Johannes said: "They are telling the Old Gent that the General is plotting a coup d’etat against him." It was like reading a blood and thunder novel in instalments, and having to wait for the next issue. Would the rescue party arrive in time?

IV

On the thirtieth of January the news went out to a startled world that President von Hindenburg had appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of the German Republic. Even the Nazis were taken by surprise; they hadn’t been invited to the intrigues, and couldn’t imagine by what magic it had been brought about that their Führer’s enemies suddenly put him into office. Franz von Papen was Vice-Chancellor, and Hugenberg was in the Cabinet; in all there were nine reactionaries against three Nazis, and what could that mean? The newspapers outside Germany were certain that it meant the surrender of Hitler; he was going to be controlled, he was going to be another Ramsay MacDonald. They chose not to heed the proclamation which the Führer himself issued, telling his followers that the struggle was only beginning. But the Stormtroopers heeded, and turned out, exultant, parading with torchlights through Unter den Linden; seven hundred thousand persons marched past the Chancellery, with Hindenburg greeting them from one window and Hitler from another. The Communist call for a general strike went unheeded.

So it had come: the thing which Lanny had been fearing for the past three or four years. The Nazis had got Germany! Most of his friends had thought it unlikely; and now that it had happened, they preferred to believe that it hadn’t. Hitler wasn’t really in power, they said, and could last but a week or two. The German people had too much sense, the governing classes were too able and well trained; they would tone the fanatic down, and the soup would be eaten cool.

But Adolf Hitler had got, and Adolf Hitler would keep, the power which was most important to him—that of propaganda. He was executive head of the German government, and whatever manifesto he chose to issue took the front page of all the newspapers. Hermann Goring was Prussian Minister of the Interior and could say to the world over the radio: "Bread and work for our countrymen, freedom and honor for the nation!" Dwarfish little Jupp Goebbels, President of the Propaganda Committee of the Party, found himself Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment of the German Republic. The Nazi movement had been made out of propaganda, and now it would cover Germany like an explosion.

Hitler refused to make any concessions to the other parties, and thus forced Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and order a new election. This meant that for a month the country would be in the turmoil of a campaign. But what a different campaign! No trouble about lack of funds, because Hitler had the funds of the nation, and his tirades were state documents. Goebbels could say anything he pleased about his enemies and suppress their replies. Goring, having control of the Berlin police, could throw his political opponents into jail and nobody could even find out where they were. These were the things of which Adi Schicklgruber had been dreaming ever since the end of the World War; and where else but in the Arabian Nights had it happened that a man awoke and found such dreams come true?

V

Lanny Budd lived externally the life of a young man of fashion. He accompanied his wife to various functions, and when she entertained he played the host with dignity. Having been married nearly four years, he was entitled to enjoy mild flirtations with various charming ladies of society; they expected it, and his good looks and conversation gave him reason to expect success. But instead, he would pick out some diplomat or man of affairs and disappear into the library to discuss the problems of Europe. These gentlemen were impressed by a young man’s wide range of knowledge, but they thought he was unduly anxious concerning this new movement of Nazism; they had learned what a French revolution was, and a Russian one, but had difficulty in recognizing a revolution that happened in small instalments and under ingenious camouflage. Hardly a man of wealth and importance in France who didn’t accept Nazism as a business man’s answer to Bolshevism. When they read in the papers that Communists were being shot pretty freely throughout Germany, they shrugged their French shoulders and said: "Eh, Men? Do the Reds complain of illegality?"

Lanny ran up a large telephone bill calling his friends in Berlin. It was his one form of dissipation, and Irma learned to share it; she would take the wire when he got through and ask Rahel about the baby, or Mama about anything—for Mama’s Yiddish-English was as delightful as a vaudeville turn. Lanny was worried about the safety of his friends, but Johannes said: "Nu, nu! Don’t bother your head. I have assurances that I cannot tell you about. I wear the Tarnhelm."

He would retail the latest smart trick of those Nazis, whose cleverness and efficiency he couldn’t help admiring. "No, they will not outlaw the Communist party, because if they did, the vote would go to the Sozis, and there would be the same old deadlock in the Reichstag. But if they let the Communist deputies be elected, and then exclude them from their seats, the Nazis may have a majority of what is left! What is it that you say about skinning a cat? There are nine ways of doing it?"

How long would a Jew, even the richest, be allowed to tell the inmost secrets of the Führer over the telephone to Paris? Lanny wondered about that, and he wondered about the magic cap which Johannes thought he was wearing. Might he not be fooling himself, like so many other persons who put their trust in political adventurers? Who was there among the Nazi powers who had any respect for a Jew, or would keep faith with one for a moment after it suited his purpose? To go to a rich Schieber to beg money for a struggling outcast party was one thing; but to pay the debt when you had got the powers of the state into your hands—that was something else again, as the Jews said in New York.

Lanny worried especially about Hansi, who was not merely of the hated race, but of the hated party, and had proclaimed it from public platforms. The Nazi press had made note of him; they had called him a tenth-rate fiddler who couldn’t even play in tune. Would they permit him to go on playing out of tune at Red meetings? The Stormtroopers were now turned loose to wreak their will upon the Reds, and how long would it be before some ardent young patriot would take it into his head to stop this Jewish swine from profaning German music?

Lanny wrote, begging Hansi to come to Paris. He wrote to Bess, who admitted that she was afraid; but she was a granddaughter of the Puritans, who hadn’t run away from the Indians. She pointed out that she and her husband had helped to make Communists in Berlin, and now to desert them in the hour of trial wouldn’t be exactly heroic, would it? Lanny argued that a great artist was a special kind of being, different from a fighting man and not to be held to the military code. Lanny wrote to Mama, telling her that it was her business to take charge of the family in a time like this. But it wasn’t so easy to manage Red children as it had been in the days of Moses and the Ten Commandments.

However, there was still a Providence overseeing human affairs. At this moment it came about that a certain Italian diva, popular in Paris, was struck by a taxicab. The kind Providence didn’t let her be seriously hurt, just a couple of ribs broken, enough to put her out of the diva business for a while. The news appeared in the papers while Lanny and Irma were at Bienvenu, having run down to see the baby and to attend one of Emily’s social functions. Lanny recalled that the diva was scheduled with one of the Paris symphony orchestras; she would have to be replaced, and Lanny asked Emily to get busy on the long distance telephone. She knew the conductor of this orchestra, and suggested Hansi Robin to replace the damaged singer; Mrs. Chattersworth being a well-known patron of the arts, it was natural that she should offer to contribute to the funds of the symphony society an amount equal to the fee which Hansi Robin would expect to receive.

The bargain was struck, and Lanny got to work on Hansi at some twenty francs per minute, to persuade him that German music ought to be promoted in France; that every such performance was a service to world culture, also to the Jewish race, now so much in need of international sympathy. After the Paris appearance, Emily would have a soiree at Sept Chênes, and other engagements would help to make the trip worth while.

"All right," replied the violinist, anxious to cut short the expenditure of francs. "I’m scheduled to give a concert at Cologne, and that is half way."

Lanny said: "For God’s sake, keep off the streets at night, and don’t go out alone!"

VI

Lanny missed his inside news about Germany, because the government forbade the publication of Vorwärts for three days, as a punishment for having published a campaign appeal of the Social-Democratic Party. Communist meetings were forbidden throughout the whole nation, and many Communist and Socialist papers were permanently suspended. "In ten years there will be no Marxism in Germany," proclaimed the Führer. All over Prussia Goring was replacing police chiefs with Nazis, and the Stormtroopers were now attending political meetings in force, stopping those in which the government was criticized. Next, all meetings of the Centrists, the Catholic party, were banned; the Catholic paper, Germania, of which Papen was the principal stockholder, was suppressed, and then Rote Fahne, the Communist paper of Berlin. These events were reported in L’Humanite under the biggest of headlines, and Uncle Jesse denounced them furiously in the Chamber of Deputies; but that didn’t appear to have much effect upon Hitler.

What the Nazis were determined to do was to win those elections on the fifth of March. If they could get a majority in the Reichstag, they would be masters of the country; the Nationalists and aristocrats would be expelled from the cabinet and the revolution would be complete. Papen, Hugenberg, and their backers knew it well, and were in a state of distress, according to Johannes’s reports. A curious state of affairs—the gentlemen of the Herren Klub defending the Reds, because they knew that Hitler was using the Red bogy to frighten the people into voting for him! Goebbels was demanding the head of the Berlin police chief because he wouldn’t produce evidence of treasonable actions on the part of the Communists. "The history of Germany is becoming a melodrama," wrote the Jewish financier. "In times to come people will refuse to believe it."

He was now beginning to be worried about the possibility of attacks upon his boys; those gentle, idealistic boys who had been playing with fire without realizing how hot it could get. Being now twenty-eight and twenty-six respectively, they ought to have had some sense. Johannes didn’t say it was Lanny’s half-sister who led them into the worst extremes, but Lanny knew the father thought this, and not without reason. Anyhow, he had got a trusted bodyguard in the palace—a well-established and indubitable Aryan bodyguard. Freddi’s school had been closed; such a simple operation—a group of Stormtroopers appeared one evening and ordered the people out. Nothing you could do, for they had arms and appeared eager to use them. Everybody went, not even being allowed to get their hats and coats in February. The building was closed, and all the papers had been carted away in a truck.

The Nazis wouldn’t find any treason in those documents; only receipted bills, and examination papers in Marxist theory. But maybe that was treason now! Or maybe the Nazis would prepare other documents and put them into the files. Orders to the students to blow up Nazi headquarters, or perhaps the Chancellery? Such forgeries had been prepared more than once, and not alone in Germany. Hadn’t an election been won in Britain on the basis of an alleged "Zinoviev letter"?

The headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany was in Karl Liebknecht Haus, and that was the place where treason was to be sought. The police had seized the documents, and two days later Herr Goebbels’s press service gave details about "catacombs" and "underground vaults," a secret and illegal organization functioning in the basement of the building, and so on. Johannes reported an embittered conflict in the Cabinet over these too obvious forgeries; they were considered beneath the dignity of the German government—but perhaps the German government wasn’t going to be so dignified from now on! The Jewish financier couldn’t conceal his amusement over the discomfiture of the "gentleman jockey," the "silver fox," and the rest of the Junker crew. They had made this bed of roses, and discovered too late how full of thorns it was.

The thing that worried Lanny was the possibility that some Nazi agent might produce letters proving that Hansi Robin had been carrying dynamite in his violin case, or Freddi in his clarinet case. They must have had spies in the school, and known everything that both boys had been doing and saying. Lanny said; "Johannes, why don’t you and the whole family come visit us for a while?"

"Maybe we’ll all take a yachting trip," replied the man of money, with a chuckle. "When the weather gets a little better."

"The weather is going to get worse," insisted the Paris end of the line.

VII

Lanny talked this problem over with his wife. She couldn’t very well refuse hospitality to Johannes, from whom she had accepted so much. But she didn’t like the atmosphere which the young Robins brought with them, and she thought them a bad influence for her husband. She argued that the danger couldn’t really be so great as Lanny feared. "If the Nazis are anxious to get votes, they won’t do anything to important persons, especially those known abroad."

Lanny replied: "The party is full of criminals and degenerates, and they, are drunk with the sense of power."

He couldn’t stop worrying about it, and when the day for Hansi’s coming drew near, he said to Irma: "How would you like to motor to Cologne and bring them out with us?"

"What could we do, Lanny?"

"There’s safety in numbers; and then, too, Americans have a certain amount of prestige in Germany."

It wasn’t a pleasant time for motoring, the end of February, but they had heat in their car, and with fur coats they would be all right unless there happened to be a heavy storm. Irma liked adventure; one of the reasons she and Lanny got along so well was that whenever one suggested hopping into a car the other always said: "O.K." No important engagement stood in the way of this trip, and they allowed themselves an extra day on chance of bad weather.

Old Boreas was kind, and they rolled down the valley of the Meuse, by which the Germans had made their entry into France some eighteen and a half years ago. Lanny told his wife the story of Sophie Timmons, Baroness de la Tourette, who had been caught in the rush of the armies and had got away in a peasant’s cart pulled by a spavined old horse.

They reached Cologne late that evening, and spent the next day looking at a grand cathedral, and at paintings in a near-by Gothic museum. Hansi and Bess arrived on the afternoon train, and thereafter they stayed in their hotel suite, doing nothing to attract attention to a member of the accursed race. Among the music-lovers Hansi would be all right, for these were "good Europeans," who for a couple of centuries had been building up a tradition of internationalism. A large percentage of Europe’s favorite musicians had been Jews, and there would have been gaps in concert programs if their works had been omitted.

Was the audience trying to say this by the storms of applause with which they greeted the performance of Mendelssohn’s gracious concerto by a young Jewish virtuoso? Did Hansi have such a message in his mind when he played Bruch’s Kol Nidrei as one of his encores? When the audience leaped to its feet and shouted, "Bravo!" were they really meaning to say: "We are not Nazis! We shall never be Nazis!" Lanny chose to believe this, and was heartened; he was sure that many of the adoring Rheinlanders had a purpose in waiting at the stage door and escorting the four young people to their car. But out in the dark street, with a cold rain falling, doubts began to assail him, and he wondered if the amiable Rhinelanders had guns for their protection.

However, no Nazi cars followed, and no Stormtroopers were waiting at the Hotel Monopol. Next morning they drove to the border, and nobody searched Hansi’s two violin cases for dynamite. They went through the routine performance of declaring what money they were taking out of the country, and were then passed over to the Belgian customs men. Lanny remembered the day when he had been ordered out of Italy, and with what relief he had seen French uniforms and heard French voices. Eight years had passed, and Benito, the "Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon," was still haughtily declaring that his successor had not yet been born. Now his feat was being duplicated in another and far more powerful land, and rumors had it that he was giving advice. In how many more countries would Lanny Budd see that pattern followed? How many more transformations would it undergo? Would the Japanese conquerors of Manchuria adopt some new-colored shirts or kimonos? Or would it be the Croix de Feu in France? Or Mosley’s group in England? And if so, to what part of the world would the lovers of freedom move?

VIII

The tall slender figure of Hansi Robin stood before the audience in the symphony hall; an audience of fastidious Parisians whose greeting was reserved. In the front row sat Lanny, Irma, and Bess, greatly excited. Hansi’s appearance was grave and his bows dignified; he knew that this performance was an important one, but was not too nervous, having learned by now what he could do. The conductor was a Frenchman who had given a long life to the service of the art he loved; his hair had grown white, and what was left of it stood out as a fringe under his shiny bald pate. He tapped upon the edge of his stand and raised his baton; there came four beats of the kettledrum, followed by a few notes of a timid marching song; then four more beats, and more notes. It was Beethoven’s violin concerto.

Hansi stood waiting, with his instrument in the crook of his arm and his bow at his side; the introduction is elaborate, and not even by a movement of his eyes would he distract anyone’s attention from the sounds. Lanny Budd, in the front row with his wife and Bess, knew every note of this composition, and had played a piano transcription of the orchestral part for Hansi at Les Forêts, on that fateful day seven years ago when Bess had first met the shepherd boy out of ancient Judea and fallen under his spell. That was one reason why Hansi made a specialty of this concerto; love infused his rendition, as love has a way of doing with whatever it touches.

The march acquired the firm tread of Beethoven; the orchestra thundered, and Lanny wanted to say: "Careful, Maestro. He didn’t have so many instruments!" But the conductor’s expressive hands signed for gentleness as Hansi’s bow touched the strings. The song floated forth, gay yet tender, gentle yet strong-those high qualities which the soul of Beethoven possessed and which the soul of Hansi honored. The fiddle sang and the orchestra made comments upon it; various instruments took up the melody, while Hansi wove embroidery about it, danced around it, over and under it, leaping, skipping, flying in feats of gay acrobatics. A concerto is a device to exhibit the possibilities of a musical instrument; but at its best it may also illustrate the possibilities of the human spirit, its joys and griefs, toils and triumphs, glories and grandeurs. Men and women plod through their daily routine, they become tired and insensitive, skeptical or worse; then comes a master spirit and flings open the gates of their being, and they realize how much they have been missing in their lives.

For more than twenty years this sensitive young Jew had consecrated himself to one special skill; he had made himself a slave to some pieces of wood, strips of pig’s intestine, and hairs from a horse’s tail. With such unlikely agencies Beethoven and Hansi contrived to express the richness, elegance, and variety of life. They took you into the workshop of the universe, where its miracles are planned and executed; the original mass-production process which turns out the myriad leaves of trees and the petals of flowers, the wings of insects and birds, the patterns of snow crystals and solar systems. Beethoven and Hansi revealed the operation of that machinery from which color and delicacy, power and splendor are poured forth in unceasing floods.

Lanny had made so many puns upon the name of his brother-in-law that he had ceased to think of them as such. There was nothing in the physical aspect of Hansi to suggest the robin, but when you listened to his music you remembered that the robin’s wings are marvels of lightness and grace, and that every feather is a separate triumph. The robin’s heart is strong, and he flies without stopping, on and on, to lands beyond the seas. He flies high into the upper registers, among the harmonic notes, where sensations are keener than any known upon earth. The swift runs of Hansi’s violin were the swooping and darting of all the birds; the long trills were the fluttering of the humming-bird’s wings, purple, green, and gold in the sunlight, hovering, seeming motionless; each moment you expect it to dart away, but there it remains, an enchantment.

IX

Hansi was playing the elaborate cadenza. No other sound in the auditorium; the men of the orchestra sat as if they were images, and the audience the same. Up and down the scale rushed the flying notes; up like the wind through the pine trees on a mountain-side, down like cascades of water, flashing rainbows in the sunshine. Beethoven had performed the feat of weaving his two themes in counterpoint, and Hansi performed the feat of playing trills with two of his fingers and a melody with the other two. Only a musician could know how many years of labor it takes to train nerves and muscles for such "double-stopping," but everyone could know that it was beautiful and at the same time that it was wild.

The second movement is a prayer, and grief is mixed with its longing; so Hansi could tell those things which burdened his spirit. He could say that the world was a hard and cruel place, and that his poor people were in agony. "Born to sorrow—born to sorrow," moaned the wood-winds, and Hansi’s violin notes hovered over them, murmuring pity. But one does not weep long with Beethoven; he turns pain into beauty, and it would be hard to find in all his treasury a single work in which he leaves you in despair. There comes a rush of courage and determination, and the theme of grief turns into a dance. The composer of this concerto, humiliated and enraged because the soldiers of Napoleon had seized his beloved Vienna, went out into the woods alone and reminded himself that world conquerors come and go, but love and joy live on in the hearts of men.

"Oh, come, be merry, oh, come be jolly, come one, come all and dance with me!" Lanny amused himself by finding words for musical themes. This dance went over flower-strewn meadows; breezes swept ahead of it, and the creatures of nature joined the gay procession, birds fluttering in the air, rabbits and other delightful things scampering on the ground. Hand in hand came young people in flowing garments. "Oh, youths and maidens, oh, youths and maidens, come laugh, and sing, and dance with me!" It was the Isadora rout that Lanny would always carry in his memory. When the storm of the orchestra drowned out Hansi’s fiddle, the listener was leaping to a mountain-top and from it to the next.

Others must have been having the same sort of adventure, for when the last note sounded they started to their feet and tried to tell the artist about it. Lanny saw that his brother-in-law had won a triumph. Such a sweet, gentle fellow he was, flushed from his exertions, but even thinner than usual, showing the strain under which he was living. People seemed to realize that here was one who was not going to be spoiled by adulation. He wasn’t going to enjoy himself and his own glory, he would never become blase and bored; he would go on loving his art and serving it. Nobody in that hall failed to know that he was a Jew, and that this was a time of anguish for his people. Such anti-Semitism as there was in Paris was not among the art-lovers, and to shout "Bravo!" at this young virtuoso was to declare yourself for the cause of freedom and human decency.

Lanny thought about the great composer, friend of mankind and champion of the oppressed. His concerto had been played badly in his own lifetime, and what a revelation it would have been to him to hear it rendered by a soloist and a conductor, neither having a score. But then Lanny thought: "What would Beethoven think if he could see what is happening in the land of his birth?" So the dreams of art fled, and painful reality took their place. Lanny thought: "The German soul has been captured by Hitler! What can he give it but his own madness and distraction? What can he make of it but an image of his distorted self?"

X

Hansi always wanted to be taken straight home after a performance; he was exhausted, and didn’t care for sitting around in cafes. He entered the palace and was about to go to his room, when the telephone rang; Berlin calling, and Hansi said: "That will be Papa, wanting to know how the concert went."

He was right, and told his father that everything had gone well. Johannes didn’t ask for particulars; instead he had tidings to impart. "The Reichstag building is burning."

"Herrgott!" exclaimed the son, and turned and repeated the words to the others.

"The Nazis are saying that the Communists set fire to it."

"But, Papa, that is crazy!"

"I must not talk about it. You will find the news in the papers, and do your own guessing. The building has been burning for a couple of hours, and they say that men were seen running through it with torches."

"It is a plot!" exclaimed Hansi.

"I cannot say; but I am glad that you are not here. You must stay where you are for the present. It is a terrible thing."

So Hansi did not go to bed for a long while. They sat and talked, and Lanny, who had friends on Le Populaire, called up that paper to get further details. It was believed that the great building was gutted, and the government was charging that it had been deliberately fired by emissaries of the Red International.

All four of the young people were familiar with that elaborate specimen of the Bismarck style of architecture, and could picture the scenes, both there and elsewhere in the city. "It is a frame-up," said Bess. "Communists are not terrorists." Lanny agreed with her, and Irma, whatever she thought, kept it to herself. It was inevitable that every Communist would call it a plot, and every Nazi would be equally certain of the opposite.

"Really, it is too obvious!" argued Hansi. "The elections less than six days away, and those scoundrels desperate for some means of discrediting us!"

"The workers will not be fooled!" insisted Bess. "Our party is monolithic."

Lanny thought: "The old phonograph record!" But he said: "It’s a terrible thing, as Papa says. They will be raiding Communist headquarters all over Germany tonight. Be glad that you have a good alibi."

But neither of the musicians smiled at this idea. In their souls they were taking the blows which they knew must be falling upon their party comrades.

XI

What happened in the Reichstag building on that night of February 27 would be a subject of controversy inside and outside of Germany for years to come; but there could be no doubt about what happened elsewhere. Even while the four young people were talking in Paris, the leader of the Berlin S.A., Count Helldorf, was giving orders for the arrest of prominent Communists and Socialists.

The list of victims had been prepared in advance, and warrants, each with a photograph of the victim in question. The Count knew that the Marxists were the criminals, he said; and Goring announced that the demented Dutchman who was found in the building with matches and fire-lighters had a Communist party membership card on him. The statement turned out to be untrue, but it served for the moment.

Next day Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree "for the safeguarding of the state from the Communist menace," and after that the Nazis had everything their own way. The prisons were filled with suspects, and the setting up of concentration camps began with a rush. The Prussian government, of which Goring was the head, issued a statement concerning the documents found in the raid on Karl Liebknecht Haus three days before the fire. The Communists had been plotting to burn down public buildings throughout Germany, and to start civil war and revolution on the Russian model; looting had been planned to begin right after the fire and terrorist acts were to be committed against persons and property. The publication of these documents was promised, but no one ever saw them, and the story was dropped as soon as it had served its purpose—which was to justify the abolishing of civil liberties throughout what had been the German Republic.

XII

As the evidence began to filter into the newspapers of Britain and France, the young Reds and Pinks spent many an hour trying to make up their minds about one of the great "frame-ups" of history. What brain had conceived it? What hand had carried it out? For the former role their suspicions centered upon a German World War aviator who had fled to Sweden, where he had become a dope addict and had been in a psychopathic institution. Hermann Goring was a great hulk of a man, absurdly vain, with a fondness for gaudy uniforms which was to make him the butt of Berlin wits; he was also a man of immense energy, brutal and unscrupulous, the perfect type of those freebooters who had ravaged the borders of the German empire in medieval times, had given themselves titles, and now had huge white marble statues of themselves in the Siegesallee, known to the Berlin wits as "the Cemetery of Art."

Hermann Goring had got his titles: Minister without Portfolio, Federal Commissioner for Air Transport, Prussian Minister of the Interior. They carried the same grants of power as in the old free-booting days, but unfortunately they were subject to elections; on the following Sunday the proletariat might go to the polls and strip Hermann of his glories—and this would be extremely annoying to a man of aristocratic tastes, a friend of the former Crown Prince and of Thyssen. As it happened, the man of action was in position to act, for his official residence was connected with the Reichstag building by a long underground passage; also he had at his command a well-trained army, eager to execute any command he might give. What did a building amount to, in comparison with the future of the.N.S.D.A.P.?

The man whom the Nazis were finally to convict of the crime was a feeble-minded Dutchman who had been expelled from the Communist party of that country and had been a tramp all over Europe. The police maintained that at his original examination he had told a detailed story of setting fire to the curtains of the restaurant with matches and fire-lighters. But the restaurant wasn’t the only room that burned; there had been a heavy explosion in the session chamber, and that vast place had become a mass of flames and explosive gases. The head of the Berlin fire department had observed trains of gasoline on the floors of the building. Immediately after the fire he announced that the police had carted away a truck-load of unburned incendiary materials from the scene of the fire; and immediately after making this announcement he was dismissed from his post.

Such were the details which the young radicals abroad put together and published in their papers. But the papers which might have spread such news in Germany had all been suppressed; their editors were in prison and many were being subjected to cruel tortures. A sickening thing to know that your comrades, idealists whom you had trusted and followed, were being pounded with rubber hose, danced upon with spiked boots, having their kidneys kicked loose and their testicles crushed. Still more terrible to know that civil rights were being murdered in one of the world’s most highly developed nations; that the homeland of Goethe and Bach was in the hands of men who were capable of planning and perpetrating such atrocities.

XIII

The fire had the intended effect of throwing all Germany into a panic of fear. Not merely the Nazis, but Papen and Hugenberg were denouncing the Red conspirators over the radio. All the new techniques of propaganda were set at work to convince the voters that the Fatherland stood in deadly peril of a Communist revolution. Friday was proclaimed the "Day of the Awakening Nation." The Nazis marched with torchlights, and on the mountain-tops and on high towers in the cities great bonfires burned—fires of liberation, they were called. "O Lord, make us free!" prayed Hitler over the radio, and loud-speakers spread his words in every market-square in every town.

On Sunday the people voted, and the Nazi vote increased from nearly twelve million to more than seventeen million. But the Communists lost only about a million, and the Socialists practically none. The Catholics actually gained, in spite of all the suppressions; so it appeared that the German people were not so easy to stampede after all. The Nazis still didn’t have a majority of the Reichstag deputies, so they couldn’t form a government without the support and approval of the aristocrats. What was going to come out of that?

The answer was that Adi Hitler was going to have his way. He was going right on, day after day, pushing to his goal, and nobody was going to stop him. Objections would be raised in the Cabinet, and he would do what he had done in party conferences—argue, storm, plead, denounce, and threaten. He would make it impossible for anyone else to be heard, raise such a disturbance as could not be withstood, prove that he could outlast any opposition, that his frenzy was uncontrollable, his will irrepressible. But behind this seeming madness would be a watchful eye and a shrewd, calculating brain. Adi would know exactly what he was doing and how far he could go; if the opposition became too strong, he would give way, he would make promises—and then next day it would be discovered that his followers were going right ahead doing what he wanted done, and he would be saying that he couldn’t control them. If it was something serious, like the Reichstag fire, he would know nothing about it, he would be completely taken aback, astounded, horrified; but it would be too late—the building would be burned, the victim would be dead, the die would be cast.

For more than a decade he had been training his followers to these tactics. They must be a band of desperadoes, stopping at nothing to get their way. Nothing on earth or in heaven was sacred except their cause; nothing was wrong that helped their cause and nothing was right that delayed it for a single hour. Individually and collectively they must be the most energetic and capable of criminals, also the most shameless and determined liars. They must be able to say anything, with the most bland and innocent expression, and if they were caught they must admit nothing, but turn the charge against the other fellow; he was the liar, he was the crook, he alone was capable of every wrongdoing. Adolf Hitler had never admitted anything to anybody; he had never told a lie in his life, had never committed any improper action; he was a consecrated soul, who lived and was ready to die for one single cause, the triumph of National Socialism and the liberation of the German Volk.

For ten years he had been organizing two private armies of young men, several hundred thousand fanatics imbued with that spirit: the Sturm Abteilung, or Storm Division, and the Schutz Staffel, or Defense Formation. They were the men who were going to carry out his will, and by now they knew it so well that they could act while he was eating, resting, sleeping—even while he was telling the world that he didn’t want them to do what they were doing. Even if he told them to stop they would go right ahead to crush the last foe of National Socialism inside the Fatherland, and make the streets free to the brown battalions—the promise of that Horst Wessel Lied which Hitler had taught them to sing.

XIV

A dreadful series of events to watch; and the fact that you were physically safe from them wasn’t enough for persons with any sensitiveness of soul. Hansi and Bess couldn’t eat, they couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t think about anything except what was happening to their friends and associates at home. The Stormtroopers came when they pleased and did what they pleased; the police had orders to co-operate with them. They came to people’s homes at night and took them away, and nothing more was heard of them. But gradually, through secret channels, word began to leak out concerning the dreadful happenings in the cellars of the Nazi headquarters in the Hedemannstrasse, in the Columbus-Haus, and in the old military prison in the General-Papen-Strasse.

Papa wrote brief notes, carefully guarded; he said: "Don’t worry about us, we have friends." But Hansi and Bess knew a hundred people to worry about, and they read all the papers they could get and tried to put this item of news together with that and guess about the fate of their "monolithic party." They wrote anxious letters and then worried because no replies came. What had become of this leader and of that? Surely some must have escaped, and it didn’t take long to get from Berlin to Paris.

Very difficult to practice music under such circumstances. What did the turn of a phrase matter, when madmen were loose in one’s homeland, when a great civilization was being strangled. But the young couple had made engagements and had to keep them. They had to let Lanny and Irma drive them to Juan, dress themselves properly, and go to Emily’s villa and play a program, not too mournful. When an encore was called for, Hansi played one of his favorites, Achron’s Jewish Prayer, and he put two thousand years of weeping and wailing into it; it was quite wonderful, and the fashionable audience was deeply moved. The tears ran down Hansi’s own cheeks, and he would have liked to say: "It is my people, weeping now in Germany."

But no, he couldn’t say anything, it wouldn’t have been good form; art must remain inside its ivory tower, and not descend onto that darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. Elegantly gowned ladies with sensitive souls enjoy mournful tones from the G-string of a fiddle, but do not care to weep over a bunch of Jews being beaten and kicked in the underground dungeons of old castles and prisons on the other side of the eastern border.

I

HANSI and Bess didn’t return to Germany. Papa and Mama forbade them to come, and Lanny forbade them to go; Robbie Budd cabled, forbidding Bess; and more important yet, Adolf Hitler forbade them both. He did it by hunting down and jailing all prominent Communists, and making it plain that they could no longer exert any influence or accomplish any purpose in Germany. The policy of Schrecklichkeit, made famous during the World War, hadn’t worked on the outside world, but could surely be made to work inside the Fatherland.

There was the Lodge at Bienvenu, and the young couple settled down in it. Beauty felt exactly as Irma did, she didn’t want Reds about her, or want her home to have such an atmosphere; but she, too, had been a guest on the Bessie Budd and at the Berlin home, and couldn’t fail to make a return; nor could she fail in kindness to Robbie’s daughter. A compromise was worked out without ever a word being said about it; Hansi and Bess didn’t invite their Red friends to the estate, but met them in Juan or Cannes. That helped a little, but not entirely, for the young couple couldn’t help bringing their troubles home with them in their thoughts and aspect.

It was the same thing Lanny had witnessed ten years ago, when Mussolini had seized power. Swarms of refugees fled from the terror, and naturally it wasn’t long before they found out where Hansi and Bess were staying. The young couple were supposed to be rich, and, compared to the status of most Communists, they were. They could hardly say no to anybody—for what did the word "comrade" mean if not to open your heart and your purse in a time of agony such as this? Papa would send money; they didn’t tell him what it was for—since it was to be assumed that letters both going and coming were liable to be opened; but Papa could guess, and no price was too high to keep his darlings from coming back into danger.

But he couldn’t send enough; not the purse of Fortunatus, not the touch of Midas, would suffice for the needs of all the Hitler victims, from this time on for years beyond any man’s guessing. Either you must have the hide of a rhinoceros, or you would have heartache for your portion. Fate would devise new ways to make you suffer—every day, every hour, if you would permit it. The most pitiful victims, the most tragic stories: people who had been tortured until they were physical and mental wrecks; people whose husbands or wives, sweethearts, children, parents, or what not, were being tortured, or might be tomorrow. People who had fled, leaving everything, and had not the price of a meal; people begging for railroad fare to bring this or that imperiled person out of the clutches of the fiends.

Hansi and Bess were having their own meals, with one of Leese’s relatives to work for them, and presently this girl began to report that they weren’t having enough to eat; they had given their last franc to some hungry comrade, and were even taking out of the house food which they had obtained on credit. Beauty would invite them over to a meal, and they would come; because, after all, you can’t play music if you don’t eat, and it wouldn’t do for Hansi to faint in the middle of concerts which they were giving for the benefit of refugees. Beauty broke down and wept, and Bess wept, and they had a grand emotional spree; but there wasn’t a word they could say to each other, literally not a word, without getting into an argument.

Beauty wanted to say: "My God, girl, don’t you know about Europe? I’ve lived here more years than I like to tell, and I can’t remember the time when there weren’t people fleeing from oppression somewhere. Even before the war, it was revolutionists from Russia, and Jews, and people from the Balkans, and from Spain, and from Armenia—I forget most of the places. Do you think you can solve all the problems of the world?"

Bess wanted to reply: "It is your bourgeois mind." But you can’t say that to your hostess, so she would content herself with the statement: "These are my comrades and this is my cause."

II

Lanny and Irma went back to Paris, and it was the same there. The refugees had Lanny’s address—the first arrivals got it from Uncle Jesse, and the rest from one another. It was an extremely fashionable address, and it was incomprehensible to any comrade in distress that a person who lived, even temporarily, in the palace of the Duc de Belleaumont could fail to be rolling in wealth, and be in position to help him, and all his comrades, and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts back in the homeland, and bring them all to Paris and put them up in one of the guest suites of the palace— or at least pay for the rent of a garret. It was a situation trying to the tempers and to the moral sense of many unfortunate persons. Not all of them were saints, by any means, and hunger is a powerful force, driving people to all sorts of expedients. There were Reds who were not above exaggerating their distress; there were common beggars and cheats who would pretend to be Reds, or anything whatever in order to get a handout. As time went on such problems would grow worse, because parasites increase and multiply like all other creatures, and are automatically driven to perfect the arts by which they survive.

Lanny had been through this and had learned costly and painful lessons from the refugees of Fascism; but now it was worse, because Hitler was taking Mussolini’s arts and applying them with German thoroughness. Also, Lanny’s own position was worse because he had a rich wife, and no refugee could be made to understand how, if he lived with her, he couldn’t get money from her. He must be getting it, because look at his car, and how he dressed, and the places he went to! Was he a genuine sympathizer, or just a playboy seeking thrills? If the latter, then surely he was a fair mark; you could figure that if you didn’t get his money, the tailors and restaurateurs and what not would get it; so keep after him and don’t be troubled by false modesty.

Irma, like Beauty, had a "bourgeois mind," and wanted to say the things which bourgeois ladies say. But she had discovered by now what hurt her husband’s feelings and what, if persisted in, made him angry. They had so many ways of being happy together, and she did so desire to avoid quarreling, as so many other young couples were doing. She would repress her ideas on the subject of the class struggle, and try by various devices to keep her weak-minded partner out of the way of temptation. The servants were told that when dubious-looking strangers called, they were to say that Monsieur Budd was not at home, and that they didn’t know when he would return. Irma would invent subtle schemes to keep him occupied and out of the company of Red deputies and Pink editors.

But Lanny wasn’t altogether without understanding of subtleties. He had been brought up with bourgeois ladies, and knew their minds, and just when they were engaged in manipulating him, and what for. He tried to play fair about it, and not give too much of Irma’s money to the refugees, and not so much of his own that he would be caught without funds. This meant that he, too, had to do a lot of dodging and making of excuses to the unfortunates; and then he would feel ashamed of himself, and more sick at heart than ever, because the world wasn’t what he wanted it to be, nor was he the noble and generous soul he would have preferred to believe himself.

III

In spite of the best efforts in the world, Lanny found it impossible to keep out of arguments with the people he met. Political and economic affairs kept forcing themselves upon him. People who came to the house wanted to talk about what was happening in Germany, and to know what he thought—or perhaps they already knew, and were moved to challenge him. Nobody had been better trained in drawing-room manners than Beauty Budd’s son, but in these times even French urbanity would fail; people couldn’t listen to ideas which they considered outrageous without giving some signs of disapproval. Gone were the old days when it was a gossip tidbit that Mr. Irma Barnes was a Pink and that his wife was upset about it; now it was a serious matter, and quite insufferable.

"I thought you said you were not a Communist," remarked Madame de Cloisson, the banker’s wife, with acid in her tone.

"I am not, Madame. I am only defending those fundamental liberties which have been the glory of the French Republic."

"Liberties which the Communists repudiate, I am told!"

"Even so, Madame, we do not wish to make ourselves like them, or to surrender what we hold dear."

"That sounds very well, but it means that you are doing exactly what they would wish to have done."

That was all, but it was enough. Madame de Cloisson was a grande dame, and her influence might mean success or failure to an American woman with social ambitions. Irma didn’t hear this passage at arms, but some kind friend was at pains to tell her about it, and she knew that it might cancel the efforts she had been making during the past year. But still she didn’t say anything; she wanted to be fair, and she knew that Lanny had been fair—he had told her about his eccentricities before he asked for her, and she had taken him on his own terms. It was her hard luck that she hadn’t realized what it would mean to have a husband dyed a shade of Pink so deep that the bourgeois mind couldn’t tell it from scarlet.

IV

The new Reichstag was summoned promptly. It met in Potsdam, home of the old glories of Prussia, and Hitler applied his genius to the invention of ceremonies to express his patriotic intentions and to arouse the hopes of the German Volk. All the land burst out with flags—the new Hakenkreuz flag, which the Cabinet had decreed should replace that of the dying Republic. Once more the beacons blazed on the hilltops, and there were torchlight parades of all the Nazi organizations, and of students and children. Hitler laid a wreath on the tomb of his dead comrades. Hindenburg opened the Reichstag, and the ceremonies were broadcast to all the schools. The "Bohemian corporal" delivered one of his inspired addresses, in which he told his former Field Marshal that by making him Chancellor he had "consummated the marriage between the symbols of ancient glory and of young might."

Hitler wanted two things: to get the mastery of Germany, and to be let alone by the outside world while he was doing it. When the Reichstag began its regular sessions, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, he delivered a carefully prepared address in which he declared that it was the Communists who had fired the Reichstag building, and that their treason was to be "blotted out with barbaric ruthlessness." He told the rich that "capital serves business, and business the people"; that there was to be "strongest support of private initiative and the recognition of property." The rich could have asked no more. To the German peasants he promised "rescue," and to the army of the unemployed "restoration to the productive process."

To enable him to carry out this program he asked for a grant of power in a trickily worded measure which he called a "law for the lifting of want from the people and empire." The purpose of the law was to permit the present Cabinet, and the present Cabinet alone, to make laws and spend money without consulting the Reichstag; but it didn’t say that; it merely repealed by number those articles in the Constitution which reserved these crucial powers to the Reichstag. The new grant was to come to an end in four years, and sooner if any other Cabinet came into office. Nobody but Adolf was ever to be the Führer of Germany!

This device was in accord with the new Chancellor’s "legality complex"; he would get the tools of power into his hands by what the great mass of the people would accept as due process of law. His speech in support of the measure was shrewdly contrived to meet the prejudices of all the different parties, except the Communists, who had been barred from their seats, and the Socialists, who were soon to share that fate. A mob of armed Nazis stood outside the building, shouting their demands that the act be passed, and it carried by a vote of 441 to 94, the dissenters being Socialists. Then Goring, President of the Reichstag, declared the session adjourned, and so a great people lost their liberties while rejoicing over gaining them.

V

During this period there were excitements in the United States as well as in Germany. Crises and failures became epidemic; in one state after another it was necessary for the governor to decree a closing of all the banks. Robbie Budd wrote that it was because the people of the country couldn’t contemplate the prospect of having their affairs managed by a Democrat. When the new President was inaugurated—which fell upon the day before the Hitler elections— his first action was to order the closing of all the banks in the United States—which to Robbie was about the same thing as the ending of the world. His letter on the subject was so pessimistic that his son was moved to send him a cablegram: "Cheer up you will still eat."

Really it wasn’t as bad as everybody had expected. People took it as a joke; the richest man in the country might happen to have only a few dimes in his pocket, and that was all he had, and his friends thought it was funny, and he had to laugh, too. But everybody trusted him, and took his checks, so he could have whatever he wanted, the same as before. Robbie didn’t miss a meal, nor did any other Budd. Meanwhile they listened to a magnificent radio voice telling them with calm confidence that the new government was going to act, and act quickly, and that all the problems of the country were going to be solved. The New Deal was getting under way.

The first step was to join Britain and the other nations off the gold standard. To Robbie it meant inflation, and that his country was going to see what Germany had seen. The next thing was to sort out the banks, and decide which were sound and in position to open with government backing. The effect of that was to move Wall Street to Washington; the government became the center of power, and the bankers came hurrying with their lawyers and their brief-cases. A harum-scarum sort of affair, in which all sorts of blunders were made; America was going to be a land of absurdities for many years, and the Robbie Budds would have endless opportunities to ridicule and denounce. But business would begin to pick up and people would begin to eat again—and not just the Budds.

Lanny didn’t have any trouble, for the French banks weren’t closed, and he had money to spare for his refugees. If Irma’s income stayed in hock they could go back to Bienvenu—the cyclone cellar, she called it. She had never had to earn any money in her life, so it was easy for her to take her husband’s debonair attitude to it. If she lost hers, everybody else would lose theirs, and you wouldn’t have any sense of inferiority. Really, it was rather exciting, and the younger generation took it as a sporting proposition. Irma would swing between that attitude and her dream of an august and distinguished salon; when Lanny pointed out to her the inconsistency of the two attitudes she was content to laugh.

VI

Rick came over to spend a few days with them; he was no longer so poor that he had to worry about a trip to Paris, and it was his business to meet all sorts of people and watch what was going on. A lame ex-aviator who would some day become a baronet, and who meanwhile had made a hit as a playwright, was a romantic figure, even though he was extreme in his talk. The ladies were pleased with him, and Irma discovered that she had what she might call a home-made lion; she would tell the smartest people how Lanny had been Rick’s boyhood chum, had taken him to conferences all over Europe and helped to plan and even revise his plays; also how she, Irma, had helped to finance The Dress-Suit Bribe, and was not merely getting her money back but a considerable profit. It was the first investment that had been her very own, and she could be excused for being proud of it, and for boasting about it to her mother and her several uncles.

Irma decided more and more that she liked the English attitude to life. Englishmen felt intensely, as you soon found out, but they were content to state their position quietly, and even to understate it; they didn’t raise their voices like so many Americans, or gesticulate like the French, or bluster like the Germans. They had been in the business of governing for a long time, and rather took it for granted; but at the same time they were willing to consider the other fellow’s point of view, and to work out some sort of compromise. Especially did that seem to be the case with continental affairs, where they were trying so hard to mediate between the French and the Germans. Denis de Bruyne said: "Vraiment, how generous they can be when they are disposing of French interests!"

The Conference on Arms Limitation was still in session at Geneva, still wrangling, exposing the unwillingness of any nation to trust any other, or to concede what might be to a rival nation’s advantage. Rick, the Socialist, said: "There isn’t enough trade to go round, and they can’t agree how to divide it." Jesse Blackless, the Communist, said: "They are castaways on a raft, and the food is giving out; they know that somebody has to be eaten, and who will consent to be the first?"

There was a lot of private conferring between the British and the French, and British officials were continually coming and going in Paris. Rick brought several of them to the palace for tea and for dancing, and this was the sort of thing for which Irma had wanted the palace; she felt that she was getting her money’s worth—though of course she didn’t use any such crude phrase. Among those who came was that Lord Wickthorpe whom she had met in Geneva last year. He had a post of some responsibility, and talked among insiders, as he counted Rick and the Budds. Irma listened attentively, because, as a hostess, she had to say something and wanted it to be right. Afterward she talked with Lanny, getting him to explain what she hadn’t understood. Incidentally she remarked: "I wish you could take a balanced view of things, the way Wickthorpe does."

"Darling," he answered, "Wickthorpe is a member of the British aristocracy, and is here to fight for the Empire. He’s got pretty much of everything he wants, so naturally he can take things easy."

"Haven’t you got what you want, Lanny?"

"Not by a darn sight! I want a better life for masses of people who aren’t in the British Empire, and for many in the Empire whom Wickthorpe leaves out of his calculations."

"But, Lanny, you heard him say: We’re all Socialists now."

"I know, dear; it’s a formula. But they write their definition of the word, and it means that Wickthorpe will do the governing, and decide what the workers are to get. The slum-dwellers in the East End will go on paying tribute to the landlords, and the ryots in India and the niggers in South Africa will be sweated to make luxury for British bondholders."

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the would-be salonnière. "Who will want to come to see us if you talk like that?"

VII

Lanny was interested in the point of view of these official persons, and sat in the splendid library of his wife’s rented home and listened to Rick discussing the Nazi movement with Wickthorpe and his secretary, Reggie Catledge, who was also his cousin. It was a point of view in no way novel to Lanny, his father having explained it when he was a very small boy. The governing classes of Britain made it a fixed policy never to permit one nation to become strong enough to dominate the Continent; regardless of which nation it might be, they would set themselves the task of raising some rival as a counterweight.

Wickthorpe disliked the Nazis and what they were doing, but he didn’t rave at them; he just said they were a set of bounders. He took it for granted that their fantastic promises had been made as a means of getting power. "Just politics," he said, and refused to be disturbed by the possibility that the bounders might mean what they said. The two Englishmen listened with interest to what Lanny had to tell about his meeting with Hitler, and asked him some questions, but at the end they were of the same opinion still.

"We’ve had so many wild men in our public life," said his lordship. "You and I are too young to remember how old John Burns used to rave in his speeches at Trafalgar Square, but my parents got up slumming parties to go and listen. Long afterward you could meet the old boy in the New Reform Club and hear him talk about it—in fact you could hardly get him to talk about anything else."

"He was a very strict teetotaler, but his face was as red as a turkey-cock’s wattles," added Catledge.

"Hitler doesn’t drink, either," said Lanny; but the others didn’t appear to attach any importance to that.

They went on to point out to Rick that the French imperialists were arrogant, and their diplomats had made a lot of trouble in Syria, Iraq, and other places. French bankers had a great store of gold, and made use of it in ways inconvenient to their rivals. Wickthorpe didn’t say that Hitler would serve to keep the French occupied, but his arguments made plain the general idea that you couldn’t entrust any one set of foreigners with too much power. It was even possible to guess that he wasn’t too heartbroken over what had happened in Wall Street during the past four years; because a large part of Britain’s prosperity depended upon her service as clearinghouse for international transactions, and it had been highly embarrassing to have the dollar prove more stable than the pound.

Wickthorpe and his cousin had it comfortably figured out what to be Hitler’s role in world affairs. Assuming that he was able to continue in power, he was going to fight Russia. He was the logical one to do this, because of his geographical position; for Britain this factor made it almost impossible. Lanny wanted to ask: "Why does anybody have to fight Russia?"—but he was afraid that would be an improper question.

Here sat this tall young lord, smooth-skinned, pink-cheeked, with his fair hair and little toy mustache; perfectly groomed, perfectly at ease; one couldn’t say perfectly educated, for there were many important things about which he knew nothing—science, for example, and the economics of reality as opposed to those of classical theory. He knew ancient Greek and Roman civilization, and Hebrew theology made over by the Church of England; he had recent world affairs at his fingertips. He possessed perfect poise, charm of manner, and skill in keeping to himself those thoughts which particular persons had no right to share. He was sure that he was a gentleman and a Christian, yet he took it for granted that it was his duty to labor and plan to bring about one of the most cruel and bloody of wars.

"You know, you might do quite a spot of trade with the Soviet Union," suggested Lanny, mildly. "They have the raw materials and you have the machines."

"Yes, Budd, but one can’t think merely about business; there are moral factors."

"But might not the Reds be toned down and acquire a sense of responsibility, just as well as the Nazis?"

"We can’t trust the blighters."

"I’m told that they meet their bills regularly. The Chase National gets along with them quite well."

"I don’t mean financially, I mean politically. They would start breaking into the Balkans, or India, or China; their agents are trying to stir up revolution all the time."

Lanny persisted. "Have you thought of the possibility that if you won’t trade with them, the Nazis may? Their economies supplement each other."

"But their ideologies are at opposite poles!"

"They seem to be; but you yourself say how ideologies change when men get power. It seems to me that Stalin and Hitler are self-made men, and might be able to understand each other. Suppose one day Stalin should say to Hitler, or Hitler to Stalin: See here, old top, the British have got it fixed up for us to ruin ourselves fighting. Why should we oblige them?"

"I admit that would be a pretty bad day," said young Lord Wickthorpe. He said it with a smile, not taking it seriously. When Rick pinned him down to it, he gave yet another reason why it was impossible to consider a large-scale deal with the Soviet Union—the effect it would have upon politics at home. "It would set up the Reds, and it might bring labor back into power."

Said Rick to Lanny, when they were alone: "Class is more than country!"

VIII

The Nazi program of repression of the Jews was being carried out step by step, which was going to be the Nazi fashion. Civil servants of Jewish blood were being turned out of their jobs and good Aryans of the right party affiliations put in their place. Jewish lawyers were forbidden to practice in the courts. "Jew signs" were being pasted or painted on places of business which belonged to the despised race. Beatings and terrorism were being secretly encouraged, for the purpose of driving the Jews out and depriving them of jobs and property. When such incidents were mentioned in the press they would be blamed upon "persons unknown masquerading as Stormtroopers."

But refugees escaping to the outside world would report the truth, and there was a ferment of indignation among the Jews of all countries; they and their sympathizers held meetings of protest, and a movement was started to boycott trade with Germany. The reaction in the Fatherland was immediate, and Johannes wrote about it—very significantly he wrote only to Lanny, never to his son, and mailed the letters unsigned and with no mark to identify them. It had been made a prison offense to give information to foreigners, and in his letters Johannes addressed Lanny as a German, and warned him not to tell anyone in Paris!

The boycott was worrying the business men of the country, and at the same time enraging the party leaders, and it was a question which point of view would prevail. Jupp Goebbels was calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany, and the result was a panic on the stock exchange—for some of the principal enterprises of the Fatherland were Jewish-owned, including the big department stores of Berlin. These were the concerns which the original party program had promised to "socialize," and now the ardent young S.A.'s and S.S.'s were on tiptoe to go in and do the job.

The Cabinet was having one of its customary rows over the question, so Johannes explained. The business magnates who had financed Hitler’s rise were coming down on him; how could they pay taxes, how could the government be financed, if rowdies were to-be turned loose to wreck business both at home and abroad? The result of this tug-of-war was a curious and rather comical compromise; the boycott which the party fanatics had announced to begin on the first day of April was to be carried on, but it was- to continue for only one business day of eight hours; then Germany would wait for three days, to see if there was a proper response from the foreign agents and Jewish vampires who had been so shamelessly lying about the Fatherland. If they showed repentance and abandoned their insolent threats, then Germany would in turn permit the Jewish businesses to continue in peace; otherwise they would be sternly punished, perhaps exterminated, and the blame would rest upon the Jewish vampires abroad.

This boycott was the idea of Dr. Goebbels—the Führer himself being busy with the reorganizing of the various state governments. On the evening before the event the crippled little dwarf with the huge wide mouth spoke to his party comrades at a meeting in a hall of the West End, and all over Germany the Stormtroopers listened over the radio. The orator called for a demonstration of "iron discipline"; there must be no violence, but all Jewish establishments would be picketed, and no German man or woman would enter such a place.

The day was made into a Nazi holiday. The Jews stayed at home, and the Brownshirts marched through all the cities and towns of the Fatherland, singing their song to the effect that Jewish blood must spurt from the knife. They posted "Jew signs" wherever there was a merchant who couldn’t prove that he had four Aryan grandparents. They did the same for doctors and hospitals, using a poster consisting of a circular blob of yellow on a black background, the recognized sign of quarantine throughout Europe; thus they told the world that a Jewish doctor was as bad as the smallpox or scarlet fever, typhus or leprosy he attempted to cure.

These orders were followed pretty well in the fashionable districts, but in poorer neighborhoods and the smaller towns the ardent Stormtroopers pasted signs on the foreheads of shoppers in Jewish stores, and they stripped and beat a woman who insisted on entering. That evening there was a giant meeting in the Tempelhof Airdrome, and Goebbels exulted in the demonstration which had been given to the world. The insolent foreigners would be awed and brought to their knees, he declared; and since most of the newspapers had by now been confiscated, the people could either believe that or believe nothing. The foreigners, of course, laughed; they knew that they weren’t awed, and the mass meetings and distribution of boycott leaflets went on. But the Nazi leaders chose to declare otherwise, and next day there was a washing of windows throughout Germany, and "business as usual" became the motto for both Aryans and non-Aryans.

IX

There were curious outgrowths of this anti-Semitic frenzy. An "Association of German National Jews" was formed, and issued a manifesto saying that the Jews were being fairly treated and there was no truth in the stories of atrocities; some leading Jews signed this, and the name of Johannes Robin was among them. Perhaps he really believed it, who could say? He had to read German newspapers, like everybody else; those foreign papers which reported the atrocities were banned. Perhaps he considered that the outside boycotts would really do more harm than good, and that the six hundred thousand native Jews in the Fatherland were not in position to offer resistance to a hundred times as many Germans. The Jews had survived through the centuries by bending like the willow instead of standing like the oak. Johannes didn’t mention the subject in his letters, either signed or unsigned. Was he a little ashamed of what he did?

It seemed to an American that a man could hardly be happy living under such conditions. Lanny wrote a carefully guarded letter to the effect that Hansi was giving important concerts and Irma various social events; they would be delighted to have the family present. Johannes replied that some business matters kept him from leaving just now; he bade them not to worry about the new decrees forbidding anyone to leave Germany without special passports, for he could get them for himself and family whenever he wished. He added that Germany was their home and they all loved the German people. That was the right sort of letter for a Jew, and maybe the statements were true, with a few qualifications.

The Nazis had learned a lesson from the boycott, even though they would never admit it. The brass band stage of persecution was at an end, and they set to work to achieve their purpose quietly. The weeding out of Jews, and of those married to Jews, went on rapidly. No Jew could teach in any school or university in Germany; no Jewish lawyer could practice; no Jew could hold any official post, down to the smallest clerkship. This meant tens of thousands of positions for the rank and file Nazis, and was a way of keeping promises to them, much easier than socializing industry or breaking up the great landed estates.

The unemployed intellectuals found work carrying on genealogical researches for the millions of persons who desired to establish their ancestry. An extraordinary development—there were persons who had an Aryan mother and a Jewish father, or an Aryan grandmother and a Jewish grandfather, who instituted researches as to the morals of their female ancestors, and established themselves as Aryans by proving themselves to be bastards! Before long the Nazis discovered that there were some Jews who were useful, so there was officially established a caste of "honorary Aryans." Truly it seemed that a great people had gone mad; but it is a fact well known to alienists that you cannot convince a madman of his own condition, and only make him madder by trying.

By one means or another it was conveyed to leading Jews that they had better resign from directorships of corporations, and from executive positions which were desired by the nephews or cousins of some Nazi official. Frequently the methods used were such that the Jew committed suicide; and while these events were not reported in the press, word about them spread by underground channels. That was the way with the terror; people disappeared, and rumors started, and sometimes the rumors became worse than the reality. Old prisons and state institutions, old army barracks which had stood empty since the Versailles treaty, were turned into concentration camps and rapidly filled with men and women; motor trucks brought new loads daily, until the total came near to a hundred thousand.

Lanny wrote again to say what a mistake his friends were making not to come and witness Hansi’s musical and Irma’s social triumphs. This time Johannes’s reply was that his business cares were beginning to wear on him, and that his physicians advised a sea trip. He was getting the Bessie Budd ready for another cruise, this time a real one; he wanted Hansi and Bess to meet him at one of the northern French ports, and he hoped that the Budds would come along— the whole family, Lanny and Irma, Mr. and Mrs. Dingle, Marceline and Baby Frances, with as many governesses and nurses as they pleased. As before, the cruise would be to whatever part of the world the Budd family preferred; Johannes suggested crossing the Atlantic again and visiting Newcastle and Long Island; then, in the autumn, they might go down to the West Indies, and perhaps through the Panama Canal to California, and if they wished, to Honolulu and Japan, Bali, Java, India, Persia—all the romantic and scenic and historic places they could think of. A university under Diesel power!

X

This made it necessary for Irma to come to a decision which she had postponed to the last moment. Was she going to take the palace for another year? She had got used to it, and had a competent staff well trained; also she was established as a hostess, and it seemed a shame to lose all this momentum. But, on the other hand, money was growing scarcer and scarcer. The dreadful depression—Lanny had shown her the calculations of an economist that it had cost the United States half a dozen times the cost of the World War. Thanks to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, interest payments on industrial bonds were being met, but many of Irma’s "blue chip" stocks were paying no dividends, and she was telling her friends that she was living on chocolate, biscuits, and Coca-Cola—meaning not that these were her diet, but her dividends.

She had Shore Acres on her hands with its enormous overhead; she had had to cut down on her mother, and the mother in turn had notified all the help that they might stay on and work for their keep, but there would be no more salaries. Even so, the food bill was large, and the taxes exorbitant—when were taxes not? Mrs. Barnes’s letters conveyed to her daughter a sense of near destitution.

"You don’t really care very much for this palace, do you, Lanny?" So asked the distressed one, lying in the pink satin splendor of the bed in which Madame de Maintenon was reputed to have entertained the Sun King.

"You know, dear, I don’t undertake to tell you how to spend your money."

"But I’m asking you."

"You know without asking. If you spend more money than you have, you’re poor, no matter what the amount is."

"Do you think if we come back to Paris after the depression, I’ll be able to start as a hostess again?"

"It depends entirely upon how much of your money you have managed to hold on to."

"Oh, Lanny, you’re horrid!" exclaimed the hostess.

"You asked for it," he chuckled.

Nearly a year had passed since the Queen Mother had seen her grandchild, and that was something to be taken into consideration. Her satisfaction would be boundless; and it would be a pleasure to meet all those New York friends and hear the gossip. Lanny could stand it if it wasn’t for too long. And what a relief to Uncle Joseph Barnes, trustee and manager of the Barnes estate, to know that his charge wouldn’t be drawing any checks for a year!

"Lanny, do you suppose that Johannes can really afford to take care of us all that time?"

"He could go alone if he preferred," replied the son of Budd’s. "As a matter of fact, I suspect the rascal has more money now than ever before in his life. He makes it going and coming; whether times are good or bad; whether the market goes up or down."

"How does he manage it, Lanny?"

"He’s watching all the time, and he keeps his money where he can shift it quickly. He’s a bull in good times and a bear in bad."

"It’s really quite wonderful," said Irma. "Do you suppose we could learn to do things that way?"

"Nothing would please him more than to teach us; but the trouble is you have to put your mind on it and keep it there."

"I suppose it would get to be a bore," admitted Irma, stretching her lovely arms and yawning in the pink satin couch of the Grand Monarque’s official mistress.

XI

The young couple ran down to Juan, and Irma and Beauty held a sort of mothers' conference on the problems of their future. Beauty was keen on yachting trips; she found them a distinguished mode of travel; she had learned her geography and history that way, and Irma might do the same. But the important thing was the safety they afforded. Beauty didn’t care how much Red and Pink talk her young people indulged in, provided that outside Reds and Pinks couldn’t get at them, to borrow their money, get them to start schools or papers or what not, and involve them in fights with Fascists and police. Carry them off to sea and keep them—and perhaps find some lovely tropical island where they could settle down and live in peace and harmony until the cycle of revolutions and counter-revolutions had been completed! Let the yacht serve as a supply ship to bring the latest musical compositions and whatever else they had read of; but no Communist or Socialist agitators, no Fascists or Nazis marching, shouting, brandishing guns and daggers! "Do you suppose they have mosquitoes in the South Seas?" inquired the soft pink Beauty Budd.

She persuaded Irma that this was the way to keep her temperamental husband happy and safe. Paris was a frightfully dangerous place right now; look at the way Jesse was carrying on, rushing about from one meeting to another, making hysterical speeches, calling the Nazis all the bad names in the French language! A copy of L’Humanité came every day to Bienvenu, and Beauty would look into it sometimes, thinking that it was her duty to keep track of her brother’s doings; it made her quail, for she knew what fury it would arouse in the Hitlerites, and she knew how many rich and important persons in France sympathized with them. The Croix de Feu, the Jeunesse Française and other groups were preparing to meet force with force; the great banks and other vested interests would surely not permit their power to be destroyed without a fight, and it would be far more bloody and terrible than what had happened in Germany. "Let’s get away from it," pleaded Beauty. "Stay until the storm blows over, and we can judge whether it’s safe to return."

Irma was persuaded, and they sat down and composed between them a letter to Nina, tactfully contrived to be read by Rick without giving him offense. There wasn’t any danger in England—at least, none that Rick would admit—and the word "escapist" was one of his strongest terms of contempt. To Rick the cruise was presented as an ideal opportunity to concentrate upon the writing of a new play. On Nina’s part it would be an act of friendship to come and make a fourth hand at bridge. To Alfy it would offer lessons in geography and history, plus a chance to fight out his temperamental differences with Marceline. If the parents didn’t want to take the youngster from school so early, he could cross to New York by steamer and spend the summer with the party.

They read this letter to Lanny, who said it was all right, but he could do better as concerned his chum. Lanny was cooking up in his head a marvelous scheme. He was guessing the psychology of a Jewish money-master who had just witnessed the seizing of his country by a bunch of gangsters. It was bound to have made a dent in his mind, and dispose him to realize that he and the other capitalists were living and operating inside the crater of a volcano. Lanny was planning to lay a subtle and well-disguised siege to one of the wealthiest of Jews, to persuade him that some form of social change was inevitable, and to get his help to bring it about in orderly fashion. It was the plan which Lanny had already discussed with Rick, to start a weekly paper of free discussion, not pledged to any party or doctrine, but to the general tendency towards co-operative industry conducted under the democratic process.

"We can have him to ourselves for several months, maybe for a year; and if we can persuade him to back us, we can do the job on a big scale and make a real go of it. Won’t you come and help? You can answer his questions so much better than I, and I believe you could put it through."

This was a greater temptation than any Utopian dreamer could resist. Rick said, "All right," and Lanny telegraphed the decision to Johannes. He was tempted to repeat the quotation from Tennyson’s Ulysses which he had used a few years ago on a similar occasion—"My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars, until I die." But he reminded himself that the Fatherland was now Hitlerland, and a sense of humor has never been a prominent German characteristic. What might not a Nazi party censor make out of eight or ten lines of English blank verse telegraphed from the French Riviera!