So, in a couple of hours, he would exchange rain and penetrating chill for warm sunshine. Some wit had called the Riviera “a sunny place for shady characters,” and that had been painfully true, but was less so now. The idle rich and those who preyed upon them had fled from the fighting, and only a few had come back. The famed waterfront of Cannes was hardly to be recognized, the fashionable hotels having been taken over by the Air Force for its overstrained flyers. They were all over the Boulevard de la Croisette in bathing trunks, and they ate in the dining-rooms in their clean white undershirts, a sight contrasting comically with the waiters in proper black ties and tails.
Lanny hadn’t notified his wife, for in these days planes were faster than telegrams. At the Cannes airport he strolled again, carrying his bag, his heavy overcoat over his arm. “Anybody going east?” And quickly the driver of a jeep took him in. The little car rolled swiftly along the wide boulevard lined with double rows of palm trees. There were hotels and mansions on one side, and beaches dotted with bright-colored umbrellas on the other. Lanny was happy to see that there had been little destruction; the Americans had landed to the east of Cannes, and the ships had concentrated their fire upon the few military Installations. The workshops of Europe were being destroyed, but its playground had survived.
II
Just beyond the town is the Cap d’Antibes, and Juan-les-Pins, in Lanny’s boyhood a tiny fishing village, now a tourist resort with its own showy casino and other means of parting you from your money. The road led along the rocky shore and came to the little beach, where Lanny had played with the fisherboys, and the wrought-iron gates of Bienvenu with the spiky agave plants on each side. Lanny said, “Thank you, soldier,” and got out. (Tips were not in order.) He opened the gates and went in. There were no dogs to rush and welcome him; he would never know what had become of them and wondered if they had been eaten. The villa of Bienvenu had been occupied by the Vichy militia; the house was dingy and unpainted, the grounds untended, but all that could be remedied as soon as the war was over.
Laurel was living in the villa with one woman servant, whose peasant family lived up in the hills and considered the positions at Bienvenu their hereditary property. When Laurel opened the door and saw her husband she gave a cry, louder than she would have considered proper. But like so many other women in these days, she had a husband who went off to places where bombs were falling and men were being horribly mutilated; so first she exclaimed, and then she fell into his arms and began to weep. She tried to wipe her eyes and said she felt foolish. He told her that this was a stolen leave and that he would soon be recalled. She held him off and looked at him, to be sure he was all there. They were both wearing uniforms and looked strange and a trifle amusing to each other.
She told him the news of the neighborhood, which had been his home ever since he could remember. The Midi, like the rest of France, had withstood a four-year siege of hunger, cold, and terror. The Nazis had wielded this three-thonged whip over them, with the help of renegade Frenchmen, and the rest of the people hated the renegades with a fury beyond description. Laurel had done her best to describe it in the articles she had written for her magazine. She had a carbon copy, and it was a husbandly duty as well as a pleasure to read it at once. She had been out among the people, collecting their stories, the sort which become legends and are told by firesides for generations.
There was a woman known as “Catherine,” recuperating here in Cannes, who had become a legend already. She had helped a total of sixty-eight American and British flyers and secret agents to escape from the enemy—many of them persons who had been under sentence of death. The Nazis had known all about her—except who she was. There were countless people of the underground who lived two lives, hardworking and respectable by day and criminal by night. There were fishermen who had carried men out, hidden under their nets, or even wrapped up in them; there were peddlers of fish or vegetables who carried in their carts radio sending sets by which messages were sent and appointments made for meeting such fugitives at sea. The enemy had detecting devices by which they could instantly locate the spot from which such messages came, but before they could get to the spot the cart would have moved and been safely hidden.
But often the plans had gone awry, and there were stories of failure and martyrdom. Women whose husbands and sons had been tortured to death hated the collaborateurs even more than they hated the Nazis; they would have torn these wretches limb from limb if the victorious armies had not intervened. As it was, many had been hunted down and shot or hanged in the first turbulent days. Now the rest were being tried, and the trials were public spectacles; the women came and sat with their knitting, reincarnations of the tricoteuses of the Revolution of a century and a half ago.
III
“What on earth are you going to do with that money?” asked Laurel; it was a subject that might last them the rest of their lives. Lanny told the ideas that had been floating through his mind, and Laurel told hers. They decided that they would have to see the estate of Sept Chênes, a part of the bequest. There was a caretaker on the place, and Laurel had talked with him by telephone but had not taken time for the trip. In France now you did no more traveling than was necessary. There were busses, but they were dingy and fearfully crowded; they ran on charcoal, and when they came to a hill the power was apt to give out, and you had to wait while more was generated.
Lanny walked to the village and succeeded in renting a bicycle for a week. (The franc, which had been worth twenty cents before World War I, was now worth only two, and so a dollar would buy pretty nearly anything in Juan.) The servant put up a lunch for them, and bright and early next morning they set out, not forgetting to strap their coats in front, for if clouds came up, or if they stayed until late, it would be cold on the heights. They rode through Cannes, a half-empty city, and along one of the well-paved roads leading into the hills. They pushed their bikes up the slopes, and rested now and then, looking down upon the sights which had been Lanny’s joy since childhood: the beautiful estates that were like parks, the tier below tier of red-roofed villas, with orchards of olives, almonds, and oranges, the last now with golden fruit; the white city, with its yacht harbor, all the vessels now gray-painted for war; and beyond that the blue sea in which Lanny Budd had swum and fished from childhood, and over which he had been transported upon many strange errands, all the way from Gibraltar to Palestine, and from Tunis to Toulon.
He would have liked to tell his wife the most recent of these adventures: how he had been secretly landed at night on the shore close to Cannes, in an effort to persuade his friend Charlot de Bruyne, a capitaine of the Légion Tricolore, to come over to the Allied side. Laurel had learned of the tragic ending of that effort. She had taken Lanny out behind the garage of Bienvenu and shown him the spot where Charlot had been led by his comrades and shot to death; he had fallen against the wall, and the stains of his blood had not yet been washed away. But Lanny didn’t say that he had had any part in that tragedy; he didn’t tell how he had climbed to safety in these heights and from them had watched the approach of the huge Allied armada, surely one of the most remarkable spectacles of history. To have told these things would have been only to frighten a sensitive woman and provide her imagination with raw material for future anxiety. Lanny wasn’t supposed to go on any more secret missions, but Laurel wouldn’t believe that; she would know that if he were sent he would keep the fact from her and lie to her as part of his duty.
IV
They continued climbing. Here and there were the wrecked carcasses of trucks and tanks which had been dumped off the roads; they had been hit by bombs or shells, or had broken down and been shoved out of the way. Trees had been splintered, and some houses showed gaping wounds. Repairs were difficult because materials could not be had.
The travelers came to the gates of the fine estate of Sept Chênes, which means Seven Oaks, but two of them had died of a mysterious disease. Emily Chattersworth had lived here through her last years, h
aving sold her much larger estate northwest of Paris, and later her Paris town house. She had taken the former step partly at Lanny’s urging, because he was so sure that a second world war was coming. The Germans had looted Les Forêts in the first war, and repeated the performance as Lanny foretold, but it was a new owner who met the loss and would have the task of collecting indemnity.
Wherever Emily lived she had continued her role of what the French call a salonnère, that is, a woman who has not merely wealth but also intelligence, and who makes her home a gathering place for intellectual persons interested in some field—art or literature, science or philosophy, politics or economics, or possibly a little of all these. A salonnière is more than a hostess; she is like the conductor of an orchestra, the chairman of an assembly, Distinguished persons come to her home not merely to enjoy good food and drink and elegant surroundings, but because they meet others of their own sort and spend an evening according to long-established rules of social life in France. The hostess tactfully sees to it that everybody has a chance to be heard, that dangerous subjects are dropped, difficult moments safely passed, and courtesy, wit, and élan continuously maintained.
This is a difficult art for a foreigner to learn, but Emily had devoted her long widowhood to it. So it had come about that Lanny Budd had a hundred delightful memories of this gracious mansion; from youth on he had sat discreetly, never speaking unless spoken to, listening to Anatole France and Bernard Shaw, Paul Valéry and Romain Rolland, Auguste Rodin and Isadora Duncan, Blasco-Ibáñez and Henri Bergson—an odd assortment, but all of them persons of esprit, having something to say and knowing how to say it well. Emily’s salon was called “liberal”; she invited the “free thinkers,” in the broad sense of that phrase; she did not invite the dull aristocracy or the filthy rich, the reactionaries or the religious with closed minds. These had their own salons and turned up their noses at the American, calling her an interloper and a sensation seeker.
Now she had passed on the torch to her near-foster son. Lanny, who was conscientious, would carry it as best he could, although looking forward to the prospect with dismay. He had several times refused to take a regular job under F.D.R., pleading that he had no training in administration and didn’t know how to give orders. Now he would have the spending of a million dollars, and as soon as word got about he would be besieged by people who wanted to take his orders, or perhaps to give orders for him or even to him. There would be publicity, something he had always avoided and which had been poison to a secret agent. He would have to attend committee meetings, read and sign documents, listen to grievances, and decide who was right and who was wrong in clashes of temperament—oh, dear, oh, dear!
Emily had met Laurel only in the last few years; but she had liked her and approved her as a wife for Lanny. She revealed that in the will, by providing that in the event of Lanny’s death, Laurel would carry out the obligation. Now Lanny would lean upon her heavily. So far, they managed to agree in their beliefs; but Lanny couldn’t help thinking, suppose they should fail to agree about the best way to end war in the world?
Laurel Creston was the quietest-appearing person you could imagine; she had been brought up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, very strictly, and her ideas of what was proper conduct for a gentlewoman were fixed; she had never made a scene or raised her voice in public in all her life. She was rather small, had gentle brown eyes, and an appearance of submissiveness that was deceptive; when she walked alongside the tall and handsome Lanny everybody thought her insignificant. She was content to have it that way, for she too had been a secret agent of a sort, writing against the Nazis with a pen full of acid so strong that it withered them up. She had used a nom de plume not merely so that she might gather material, but in order to protect her husband from suspicion and death in a torture dungeon.
When you knew her you were astonished to discover what a dynamo was working inside that small head and what energy was driving it. Laurel Creston had had to make herself a writer, whereas Lanny Budd had just naturally grown up as a playboy, doing whatever he wanted to do, which was to learn something new every day about a strange and fascinating world. Lanny was easygoing, whereas Laurel was developing more and more determination, and especially where war was concerned; she had never hated it more than when she was wearing the uniform of a WAC officer. It was she who generated most of the ideas as to how to slay the monster; it was she who drove Lanny to take various tiresome legal steps—right away, quickly, before he was called to new duties.
V
Old Mr. Satterlee having carried his legal learning across the ocean, Lanny had to go and consult a French avocat in Cannes, to make sure that the will had been properly entered for probate. He had to identify himself legally and sign a variety of documents. He had to get a stenographer and dictate a letter to his father in Newcastle, Connecticut, telling that wise man of affairs the news and charging him to have his law firm in New York make sure that a copy of the will had been duly filed there. Most of the fortune existed in the form of bonds and “blue chip” stocks in the vaults of one of the great Wall Street banks; the heavy steel doors of those vaults moved so easily that a child’s finger might open them, but before anything could start them a great quantity of legal red tape would have to be unwound.
All that was duty, and the grown-up playboy did it patiently, thinking all the while how pleasant the world would be when the task was completed and there was no more war. This called for some imagining, now while the greatest war of all history was at its dreadful climax and there was no part of the globe where men were not either fighting or manufacturing war goods and training others for the battle-fronts. One front all the way from the North Sea to the Alps, another across Italy, and the longest of all from the White Sea down to the Black, with ten million men in a death struggle in snow and arctic cold. Not to mention all the fronts in China and Burma, and some thousands of islands and millions of square miles of water in the Western Pacific! All that war going on day and night, and you read about it twice a day in the papers, and listened to news about it over the radio when you could get near one; you speculated and discussed, and found it hard indeed to think consecutively about anything else.
Now you were going to end all that cruelty and waste! You were going to find a way to reach people, to persuade them to listen and to act upon what you said. People who spoke a hundred different languages and cherished ten thousand sacred and wholly delusive notions! Free men in the American Army, who had been taught how to handle jeeps and bazookas, radar and jet engines, but who had been taught almost nothing about what they were fighting for. Lanny told his wife of a GI in North Africa who had remarked, “First the Japs attack us and then we attack the Germans; I don’t get it.” And one in France who had attended Christian Front meetings in New York and who remarked, “We are fighting the wrong guys.”
The best of all stories of American military education was one that Laurel had read in Ernie Pyle’s newspaper column. A week or so after D-day Ernie had observed an ack-ack gunner sitting on a heap of sand and reading a copy of Stars and Stripes, the Army paper. Ernie met all the men he could, so he got up a conversation with this one, and was asked, “Where is this here Normandy beachhead that it talks about here?” The newspaperman looked at the gunner, to make sure that he wasn’t spoofing. Then he said, “Why, you’re sitting on it.” The gunner replied in astonishment, “Well, I’ll be damned! I never knowed that.”
VI
The Allied armies were carrying on two great offensives, one in the Saar, which had reached the Rhine over a long stretch, and the other in the north, across the River Roer, aimed at Cologne. The latter had not done so well, perhaps because it was facing heavier forces, and also because the weather was so bad that the lighter planes, designed to bomb enemy communications, were grounded most of the time. Studying the map he always carried, Lanny realized that this was one more of those blind slugging matches which comprised a war of attrition. The Americans could stand them because they
had more reserves than the enemy.
It was the second week in December, the worst time, when the ground is waterlogged and not yet frozen hard; trucks sank up to their hubcaps when they ventured off the paving. Exhausted men slept where they dropped, with no chance to dry their clothing, and trench feet and frostbite crippled both armies. Lanny had seen these miseries in the field, and Laurel in the hospitals, and each day of the fighting built up their hatred of war. The man was troubled in conscience because he was living in Riviera sunshine and having food brought to him by the peasant family who had performed that service in Bienvenu for forty years and had no idea of letting rationing regulations interfere with their accumulation of dollars.
The expected summons came in the form of a telegram from Monuments: “An interesting project has come up and you can be in on it if you come at once.” That was equivalent to a command. The art expert threw his few belongings into a bag, took his overcoat on his arm, and thumbed an Army ride. He didn’t have to thumb a plane, for all he had to do was to show his telegram to the airport officer, and he had a seat assigned to him, a cushioned seat this time. As a special favor he was set down at Versailles and made his way to the Grand Monarque’s stables just as the sun was going down behind dark rain clouds. There could be meaner weather than Paris in December, but you would have to go to London to find it.
The first person he encountered in the office was Peggy Remsen, niece of Lanny’s stepmother, Esther Remsen Budd. Peggy was a lovely young woman with a New England conscience; she had not been content to be a social butterfly but had studied diligently to equip herself to become the curator of a museum. She had never dreamed that it might be her fate to go to Europe and act as a curator of its greatest art treasures. She was in a state of delight, but also of vexation, because of a rule that women would not be permitted close to the fighting front. It was a man’s world, scolded this great-granddaughter of the Puritans, and Lanny agreed, adding that the men were making such a mess of it he would be willing to let the women have a try.