Of late it had become the fashion for successful statesmen to go to the Comédie Française for their favorites. This state-owned institution had been since its founding two and a half centuries ago a lure which drew the most beautiful and charming ingénues from all over France. On the stage they enacted roles of luxurious passion, and off-stage they enacted the same roles with even greater ardor—this being even more essential to their careers. Their eyes were turned in the direction of the prominent politicians, and especially the Cabinet ministers, who had the appointing of director and assistants, and whose word could determine the assignment of roles, of publicity in the press, and all the other desirabilities of la vie parisienne. Intrigues went on incessantly, shifts took place, and a great part of French public life was occupied with speculation concerning who was who and with whom.
Lanny was behind the times with that sort of news; but when Beauty came to Paris she hurried off to lunch with one of her smart friends and to tea with another; she would come back loaded up with information—and don’t call it “idle gossip,” for a deal in airplanes might depend upon the good disposition of one of these young creatures, and the first job of a businessman might be to go to the theater and see her in the embraces of some lover, and note the fine points of her technique. Nowhere in the world was acting more conscientiously rehearsed or traditions of the stage more religiously preserved, and if you understood these matters you were a person of culture, and knew how to flatter a popular actress and cause her to speak well of you to her patron. You might be ever so staid a family man from the land of the pilgrims’ pride, but you had sowed your one wild oat when you were young, and here was your shrewd and well-trained ex-mistress, knowing the great world of Paris and London and Berlin, and ready to take your arm and be escorted about a drawing-room, whispering information into your ear, and introducing you to exactly the right ones. It wouldn’t hurt you in the least to have this grand monde know that the mother of your son was still your friend; this monde would believe what in Newcastle, Connecticut, would be called “the worst,” but here it would be considered a touching instance of fidelity, which ladies of maturing years, trying to hold onto their lovers, would observe with envious sorrow.
Beauty would say: “That is Yvonne Roux; she is seen everywhere with Herriot. The one next to her, in cerise crêpe-de-chine, is Hélène Manet—she is always invited with Tardieu.” Later, on the ballroom floor: “You know Georges Mandel, I believe; that is Angelique Beaulieu he is dancing with—she also is a pensionnaire of the Comédie.” After they had taken a turn or two: “There is Mlle. Poussin with Yvon Delbos, the new Foreign Minister.” Robbie would observe a youngish man, tall and thin, pale and timid-looking. “He was a professor before he became a politician,” the well-informed Beauty would add. “He is believed to be very conscientious, and intends to marry her. Right now she is playing in one of the Molière comedies.”
There were wives present, also, and now and then Beauty could point out one in the same room with the amie. The contrast would be pathetic, not to say tragic, for the wives were what the politicians had been able to get when they were young and poor and had not the same range of choice. Now the wives had grown old along with their partners, and some of them were stout and some were gawky, and no art of dressmaker or cosmetician could conceal their defects. What heartaches they must suffer to see their life partners publicly disporting themselves with young hussies, and leaving the wives to such tenth-rate chances as they could find! There is an old song which tells about after the ball is over, after the dancers gone; many a heart is weary, many a heart is sad—and it might also have been recorded that many a husband is getting the very dickens from his wife.
V
In the library Lanny came upon a group of gentlemen and two or three ladies who preferred serious conversation. The center of the group was a shortish heavy-set man with dark overhanging eyebrows, dark straight hair beginning to thin, a long nose and a wide drooping mouth which gave him a somber, not to say melancholy appearance. Lanny knew him, because he had been a professor of philosophy in Nice, and one of the ornaments of Emily’s Riviera salon. In that drawing-room a tactful hostess had guided the conversation, calling upon this person and that and making sure that each had a chance to display his intellectual wares. But here was no such circumstance; here two or three persons had asked the writer, Jules Romains, what he thought about the situation of the country, and others had joined the group and stayed so long as they were interested. There was nothing unusual about this; Lanny had seen the same thing at one of Emily’s lawn parties at Les Forêts, where a troop of lovely ladies had listened spellbound while Anatole France poured out a flood of ironic wit; again in London, where Bernard Shaw had kept a roomful of people entertained for a full hour without one of them interrupting; again at the Genoa conference, where Frank Harris had produced a monologue about Shakespeare, like a stream of molten gold with rubies and emeralds and diamonds shining in it.
Here it was different, for this was a deadly serious man, delivering a message to a nation in serious trouble. M. Romains, now in his early fifties, was a voluminous writer, and among his output were volumes of plays and poems which were called “Rabelaisian,” a French way of permitting what in English would be called “off color.” But now he was at work upon a series of novels portraying the manners of his time; and in between these labors he was carrying on a crusade of a dignified and exclusive character to save his country, according to the best lights of one of her eminent philosophers and littérateurs. Here he was telling the story of his efforts to a dignified and exclusive audience; the sort of people who knew the inside workings of the machinery of statecraft, and set the switches and pulled the levers which determined the destiny of France.
M. Romains had taken many journeys in his country’s interest and at his own expense. He had talked with the statesmen of fourteen European lands. Three years ago he had traveled to Berlin and delivered a lecture under government auspices. Brownshirted leaders had been summoned from all over the land to hear him, and one of the top-flight Nazis had said to him: “You know, no private individual has ever been received like this in Berlin.” The philosopher-novelist had also been welcomed by the King of the Belgians, who had discussed frankly that country’s attitude to the gravely threatened war. As M. Romains told about these matters, you couldn’t doubt that he was patriotically in earnest, but also you couldn’t help feeling that he was intensely impressed by his own importance.
His plan was the one known as le couple France-Allemagne, and it meant reconcilation with Germany, by the simple method of giving the Nazis whatever they demanded. For example, he had had the idea that the Allies should have got out of the Saar without the formality of a plebiscite. Lanny happened to know that Briand had been trying to work out some compromise on this question as far back as ten years ago; but apparently M. Romains didn’t know that, and certainly it wasn’t up to Lanny to correct him on his facts. The philosopher-novelist seemed to have the idea that the Saar settlement had been a matter between France and Germany, and that the plebiscite had taken place under French military control, whereas the fact was it had been a League matter, and French troops had been withdrawn nine years before the plebiscite was held.
Among the members of that attentive audience was Kurt Meissner, who had met the Frenchman many years ago in Emily’s drawing-room. Evidently he had put his opportunity to good use, for it was just as if M. Romains had sat in a seminar conducted by the Wehrmacht’s agent, had absorbed the entire doctrine, and was now giving an oral dissertation to demonstrate what he had learned and get his degree. His discourse embraced the complete Nazi program for the undermining of the French republic: warm protestations of friendship; unlimited promises of peace; the sowing of distrust of all politicians and of the entire democratic procedure; and, above all else, fear of the Red specter. The Reds kept faith with nobody, their country was a colossus with feet of clay, their army a broken reed upon which France persisted in try
ing to lean. The republic had to choose between Stalin and Hitler; between an illusory military alliance and a secure and enduring peace.
The words burned Lanny’s tongue: “M. Romains, have you ever read Mein Kampf?” Of course, Lanny couldn’t say them; but he wondered, how would this somewhat self-conscious idol of the bourgeois world have replied? Lanny recalled the Max Beerbohm cartoon in which a drawing-room fop is asked if he has read a certain book, and replies: “I do not read books; I write them.”
VI
The next day Lanny drove his father to that same mansion, and they had a lunch in which a whole pheasant was put before each of them. Afterwards came a quiet chat in which two men of large affairs had a chance to develop their acquaintance. The munitions king of Europe spoke with frankness; he was gravely concerned about the state of his country, and the developments in military aviation which seemed about to put all other kinds of military equipment on the shelf. He didn’t speak to Robbie as a big man to a little man, but rather as one who might become little to another who was certain to become big. This was immensely flattering to the visitor, but Robbie wasn’t the one to swell up and burst; he knew what he had, and had worked many years to get it; also, he understood how business is conducted, and that when a big man invites you to his palace and offers you his finest old vintage wines, he wants something and wants it badly.
Robbie Budd was an associate of General Göring, and had been taken into the inside of the new German Air Force, and no injunction of secrecy had been laid upon him. Quite the contrary, it was Göring’s policy to frighten his opponents and get what he wanted without having to fight; therefore, technically equipped visitors were encouraged to come and look and then go out and talk. This was Robbie’s game, too, and had been ever since he had listened to his father’s instructions as a boy; the way to sell munitions was to go from one country to the next, and tell each how far ahead the others were. So Robbie laid the paint on thick, and Charles Prosper Eugène Schneider looked at the picture and shivered deep within his soul. Yes, even though he knew the game as well as the son of Budd Gunmakers, having been taught it by his father and grandfather—and he was older than Robbie.
France’s deadly rival had outdistanced her, and was leaving her hopelessly behind. Germany had become that which every gunmaker in the world had dreamed all his life, a country putting everything it had into armaments; reducing the wages and lengthening the hours of all its workers and bidding its munitions men to build all the plants they could, in the certainty that they would receive all the orders they could fill, and keep their machines going at full speed twenty-four hours every day, Sundays and holidays included. Most favored of all was the Air Force commander who, while he looked like a comic stage character and dressed like one, was at the same time one of the most competent executives in the modern world, driving his subordinates with a whiplash and getting the orders of his Führer carried out with utter loyalty and no scruples.
That was a nightmare, a nightmare, exclaimed Baron Schneider; it kept him awake night after night, seeing the calamity that hung over France. His miserable, incompetent government, hopelessly corrupt—who knew that better than the Baron, who had been buying it for half a century? But of course he didn’t say that to his visitors. What he said was denunciation of the wretched system of prototypes to which the French air ministry was committed; the economical illusion, the pinchpenny insanity of having models of the very best planes, and the means of making them quickly, and imagining that that was national security!
“You can’t fight battles with mating-jigs,” said Robbie, dryly.
“Of course not! And now these politicians have taken over my plants, having no idea how to pay for them and at the same time asking me how to run them! We have all this confusion and miserable wrangling—and right in the midst of the gravest peril our country has faced since Sedan.”
VII
What was it this badly worried monarch of munitions desired? Well, first of all he wanted Robbie to tell him the truth about the performance of the Budd-Erling P11, about which he had heard fabulous reports. When Robbie told him, he shook his head sorrowfully, saying that the best of the French prototypes, the Morane, couldn’t equal that. Then he wanted to make sure if Göring had these secrets, and what use he was making of them; Robbie could answer the first part of this question, but said he could only guess about the second; der dicke Hermann was wide awake and not missing any tricks. Robbie said he had given first chance to his own country, and then to the French and the British; he named the men he had approached and who had turned him down. “That left me no recourse but the Germans, if I wanted to keep in business.”
“Of course, of course,” said the Baron. “It is too bad you did not come to me. I had some power in my own country at that time. Now I am not allowed to do anything, or to own anything except bonds. I am supposed to be laid away upon a shelf. But being a man of action, I am not happy there, especially when I learn what Thyssen and Krupp von Bohlen and the rest of them are doing.”
The munitions king of Europe went on to explain that he could not persuade the French air ministry to buy enough planes of French manufacture, and it was even less possible to persuade them to buy foreign planes, for then to the reluctance of a semi-pacifist government to spend money would be added the opposition of great French private interests. It had been the idea of the Baron to buy personally a hundred or two of the very newest Budd-Erlings, and train men to fly them privately; then in case of an emergency he could present them to the army. But now had come this wretched exposé of the Cagoule, which the Baron took as an infringement of his personal privacy, just about as Robbie took the C.I.O. invasion. There was no helping it, of course; a sensational press was playing up every item it could unearth, and would rush to proclaim that the master of Le Creusot was setting up a private air force and training it, for the purpose of threatening Paris and forcing the government to obey his will.
“I have to think of myself as an outcast from my own country,” declared the great man, sadly. “I have to go abroad in order to save France from itself.” He explained that he still owned Skoda, which was in the town of Pilsen, and the Czechs still granted him the right to make goods and to buy and sell as he pleased. Would Robbie be willing to manufacture a hundred fighter planes for immediate delivery in Czechoslovakia, and would he go in on some sort of arrangement to send his experts to that country and assist in establishing a factory for the manufacture of Budd-Erlings?
Robbie of course was delighted to get a large order, and said that because of his sympathy with the Baron’s cause he would give it priority over everything else. He would be proud to be associated with so distinguished a concern as Skoda in the fabricating of planes, and would make the Budd-Erling patents available. But the Baron must understand that certain features of the Budd-Erling were protected by General Göring’s patents, which were not under Robbie’s control.
The Baron sighed and said it was too bad that the Germans had got ahead on everything; it looked as if the French would have to make friends with them, willynilly. “I have been talking on the subject with this well-informed son of yours. It is a question whether their Führer is a man whom we can trust. What do you think, M. Budd?”
“My son has had the advantage of knowing Herr Hitler personally,” replied Robbie, cautiously. “I have not.”
“Eh, bien, M. Lanny?”
Said Lanny: “Anyone would be assuming a grave responsibility who gave advice on that subject, M. le Baron. All that I can say is that you have to make up your mind to be either an ally or an enemy. It is not possible to be half-way between.”
“It is extraordinary what discretion this young man possesses, M. Budd, and what an insight into our French situation.”
Robbie was surprised, for he had never given his son credit for such valuable possessions. He remarked, deprecatingly: “Lanny has lived all over Europe, and has had unusual opportunities to hear opinions.”
“One can hear all sort
s of opinions in my drawing-room, M. Budd; the problem is to sort them out and select those which are sound. I should be glad if your son would come to see me now and then and tell me what he has learned; and this applies to you also, for I perceive that you are a man who has foreseen how the world is moving and has placed himself in a strategic position.”
That was high-class flattery, and not to be rejected. Robbie perceived that Baron Schneider, ten years older than himself, was looking for someone to carry burdens for him. He had intimated in a delicate way that he would expect to pay generously. Robbie said he would think over the proposals and be ready with definite offers in a couple of days; the Baron replied that he had no doubt they would be fair, and he would have his technical men work over the details and his lawyers assist in drawing up the papers. He sent his visitors away happy; Robbie remarking to his son: “This may prove the biggest thing that has ever come my way.”
VIII
Beauty Budd was still in Paris, and she wouldn’t have been herself if she hadn’t been thinking her own thoughts and scheming her schemes. The incomparable Lanny was involved with some woman, and was keeping her hidden, even from his adoring mother who had never failed to excuse everything he did. Manifestly, the reason could only be political; this woman, a German, was doing some of that dangerous underground work which had so frightened Irma and had caused the break-up of Lanny’s marriage. At present Lanny was heavyhearted and preoccupied, and what could it mean except that the woman was in trouble, and perhaps Lanny also? Could it be that she had gone back into Germany? Most probably so, for Lanny stayed in his apartment a lot, read endless newspapers, and played the piano in a restless and distracted way. Beauty knew him so well that she could tell his moods by what he played and how he played it. She was right in the same hotel, watching him like a hawk; she knew that he had been away only one night, and that certainly would not have been the case if the woman he loved had been available. He was much more assiduous than that, and accustomed to having what he wanted.