That was the way the Peace group had come into being. The programme had been very carefully planned with the best expert advice. It had been budgeted to spend two hundred thousand a year for five years; apparently it might be able to run longer and to spend more, for contributions kept coming in. There were so many people wanting peace!
2 KNOW YOUR MONEY
I
The Budds were one of the old families of Connecticut, and their name was known all over the world because of the guns they made. Lanny had known about those guns as soon as he was old enough to know anything, and he had learned to use the smaller ones when he was a young boy. His father, Robbie Budd, had been the European salesman of the company, and in Paris he had loved an artist’s model whom he had called Beauty because she deserved the compliment. He hadn’t married her because his stern old Puritan father back home had received in an anonymous envelope a photograph of her portrait in the nude, and had told his son that if he married such a woman he would be disinherited.
But Robbie had allowed Beauty to say that she was married, and he had set her up in a lovely estate on the French Riviera, where he came to visit her several times every year. When later on, at his father’s urging, he had married the daughter of the president of the First National Bank of Newcastle, Connecticut, he gave it out that he had divorced the painter’s model.
It was not until Lanny was seventeen and America entered the First World War that Robbie took him home to meet the family and be made respectable. Esther Budd, Robbie’s wife, was a conscientious daughter of the Puritans; she had done her best to win Lanny’s affection and respect and had done so. She had three children of her own: two sons, who were by now middle-aged businessmen taking over their father’s affairs little by little; and a daughter, Bessie Remsen Budd, who was called Bess by everyone. When she was seventeen her mother had taken her to Europe, and in Paris at the home of Mrs Chattersworth she had listened to the violin playing of Hansi Robin, then a brilliant and ardent youth. Bess had found it the most wonderful music she had ever heard, and she had been fascinated by this young genius.
A year later he had come to America to make his debut in Carnegie Hall, and he had been invited to Esther’s home. She had been really shocked by that uproar in her drawing room—she knew it was great art, but it belonged in the concert hall, not in a private home. But the whole town had been in a frenzy of excitement about it. Bess and Hansi had fallen desperately in love, and what was the daughter of the Puritans to do about it? She wouldn’t for the world have admitted to anti-Semitic feeling, but she could certainly admit that she hadn’t looked forward to such an exuberant husband for her daughter. Bess had pleaded and wept; she had been giving all her time to improving her piano playing, so that she might some day become Hansi’s accompanist as well as his wife. There had been nothing for the mother to do but give way and have the marriage in her home.
That had been nearly a quarter of a century ago, and in that time the fates had dealt to the couple their due quota of good fortune and bad. The Nazis had grabbed Hansi’s younger brother, Freddi, and tortured him in the Dachau concentration camp, and handed him over to Lanny Budd only when he was near to death. They had grabbed Hansi’s father and robbed him of his fortune, so that now he was working as the sales agent for Budd-Erling Aircraft. Hansi and Bess had played together on tour after tour in every civilised country of the world. They had two sons who were hoping to be musicians like their parents. Those were good things and would have made most people happy; but one thing was not so good—the daughter of Robbie Budd and Esther Remsen Budd of Newcastle, Connecticut, had been for many years an active member of the Communist party of America, and was growing more bitter and more outspoken with every year.
II
Hansi Robin was to play with the Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall; and that was a place of memories for the son of Budd-Erling. He had heard Paderewski play here and Chaliapin sing, and seen Isadora Duncan dance on flitting bare feet. To recall them brought melancholy feelings—‘Eheu fugaces!’ Lanny had the fancy that the molecules which composed these walls must have been affected by the vibrations, and perhaps these effects endured; some day might come awizard scientist who would devise a way to detect them—and what a time he would have sorting them out!
The name of the hall brought back to Lanny’s mind an elderly Scotsman whom he had met somewhere in London in his early youth: a smallish man with twinkling grey eyes and white beard closely trimmed. True to his type, he had been frugal and had saved his pennies; he had become a steel master and had saved his dollars, until he had some three or four hundred million of them. In his old age he had sold out his properties for that amount of cash to the only man in the world who could have paid it—J. P. Morgan, who controlled all the credit in Wall Street and wanted to form a steel trust and fix prices.
Andrew, canny as ever, had looked about him for a way to buy the greatest amount of post mortem publicity. He had built this fine concert hall in New York, thus compelling every music lover to speak his name frequently. He had scattered twenty-five hundred and five libraries over the world, and upon each of them had engraved his name, and inside had hung a portrait of himself. You could say this for Andrew—he was more intelligent than the youth who fired the Ephesian dome or the Egyptian king who set a couple of hundred thousand slaves to dragging huge blocks of stone across the desert to build a pyramid.
It was a decorous audience. They had come to have a gracious inner experience, each one alone. They sat waiting, and if they spoke at all it was in low tones. The musicians came out on the platform, one or two at a time, took their seats, and began making their mysterious little noises, each on his own. That was individualism, and presently there was a hush, and the conductor came out and took his stand on the podium, tapped with his little baton, and after that it was co-operation, a social product known as the ‘Oberon Overture’, a creation of the purest delight.
When its melodies died away the conductor walked off the stage and presently came back escorting a tall black-clad gentleman, carrying a violin. In this year 1946 Hansi Robin was forty-one years old; his hair, which had been black, now showed touches of grey. Lanny had first known him as a lad lost in the wonders of music, flitting from one composition to the next like a humming bird over a bed of flowers. Hansi’s younger brother had played the clarinet, and Lanny had seen them as two shepherd lads out of ancient Judea, chanting the holy psalms of their race: ‘Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice: and let men say among the nations, The Lord reigneth. Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof; let the fields rejoice, and all that is therein. Then shall the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the Lord, because he cometh to judge the earth. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever’.
The mercy of the Lord had been manifested in a strange way to Hansi Robin, German-born Jew. The Lord had turned loose a herd of wild beasts in that civilised land, and they had seized some six million of the Lord’s chosen people, poisoned them, and turned their bodies into fertiliser for the fields. They had done this to most of Hansi’s relatives and friends, and had almost done it to his brother and his father. The horror of the experience had graven deep lines in the musician’s face, never to be removed; it had become a mask of sorrow, and he rarely smiled. There was something priestlike about his aspect as he stood acknowledging the welcome of the audience with slow inclinations of his head.
The hall fell silent, the conductor tapped his desk, and the orchestra swept into the opening notes of the Beethoven concerto. Hansi must have played that masterwork many hundreds of times since his boyhood. Lanny had heard him play it a score of times and knew every note of it. Hansi’s execution was perfect, his tone clear. In the slow movement all his grief wailed, and to those who knew him it was a heart-rending utterance.
But sorrow never lasts to the end of a Beethoven composition. He was the defier of fate, the great yea-sayer, and presently the music was like the wind runnin
g over a meadow of flowers, superlative happiness infinitely multiplied. ‘O youths and maidens, in song delighting, come dance and play and pleasure with me’—Hansi and Lanny had agreed upon these words as conforming to the theme. To listen to it was to be reborn in courage, hope, and joy; to be uplifted to a splendid climax and go out with spirit renewed. Such was the meaning of the applause; people were trying to tell Hansi Robin that they loved both him and Beethoven, and that both were to go on living forever. In these modern days the double miracle was commonplace; there were not merely Beethoven’s printed notes, but Hansi Robin’s recording, which you could buy in a music store for a few dollars.
III
After the concert was over, Lanny and Laurel and Hansi’s nephew Freddi took the musician to a café and tried to get him to eat, because he would never eat anything before a concert, and afterward he was exhausted, depressed from the reaction of the excitement. There had been a time when Bess had done this service for him; she would never have dreamed of letting him go to a concert alone. But now she had some committee meeting, a higher duty. She was on so many committees that her name had become a sort of Red talisman when you saw it you would say to yourself, ‘Aha! Another Communist front!’
The four friends sat at a table in the little café, in the portion of New York known as Yorkville. Hansi had before him a wienerschnitzel and a glass of milk. Now and then he sipped the latter absent-mindedly and put a piece of the meat into his mouth. He was very sad and did not try to hide it; if your friends cannot help you any other way, at least they can let you be sad.
‘Lanny’, he said, ‘I am afraid I am going to have to get another accompanist. Bess no longer has the time to practise, and we can’t learn anything new. You know, a performer nowadays can’t get along on just the Beethoven and the Mendelssohn and the Tchaikovsky’.
‘Have you told Bess?’ inquired Bess’s brother, and the answer was, ‘Many times, but it only leads to a quarrel. She has her mission, and it is no longer the same as mine. Don’t mind if I talk about it; you are the only people I can be frank with’.
Laurel asked, ‘Do you suppose it would do any good if I appealed to her?’
‘Not a bit. She is saving the world and no longer has any use for people who aren’t. She knows how I dislike her friends, so she doesn’t bring them to the house very often. She meets them outside—and that means I’m alone a good part of the time’. Hansi sat brooding, then added as if in haste, ‘Understand, I don’t mean she is having an affair. I don’t think she feels the need of love any more; she is satisfied with hate’.
‘The Communists live on hate’, Lanny assented.
‘In the old days, Lanny, I went to several of their conventions with Bess. They were open to the public then. I had read that the old-time Russian peasants were known as the “dark people”, but I decided that those Reds I watched were the ones who really deserved the name. I don’t refer to their complexions—I am no blond myself. I mean their souls. They are full of suspicion and couldn’t carry on any kind of discussion without attributing base motives to one another. I suppose that is why in Russia they cannot settle any problem except by killing their opponents’.
‘Or putting them in a concentration camp’, suggested Laurel.
‘It comes to the same thing. I am tormented by the thought that we are going to have another war, and that I’m going to have to see my wife in a concentration camp. Do you suppose it is coming, Lanny?’
Said Lanny, ‘The Communists are all for peace, of course; but the capitalists and imperialists of the whole world are going to force war upon them’. Irony is a dangerous form of utterance, but Lanny could be sure that none of these three friends would miss his meaning.
IV
The development of this conflict had been slow and had passed through various stages. When Hansi and his younger brother had come to visit Lanny at Bienvenu, his home on the French Riviera, Hansi had been sixteen. He had listened to Lanny’s ideas of peace and brotherhood based upon the principles of social justice; a gentle idealist, he had taken fire and thereafter called himself a Socialist. Bessie Budd had met him when she was very young, and she had taken fire in her turn and had carried the ideas to her own extreme. She had made up her mind that the capitalist class would never voluntarily give up its mastery of industry, and so she had become a Communist.
Lanny always said that this was because of her Puritan ancestry and upbringing. She had to be fanatical about what she believed, and she had to force others to agree with her. Hansi loved her and had been willing to be forced. He had never joined the party, but he had played at concerts for it and had been willing for Bess to give a good part of their earnings to the cause. Then had come the Spanish Civil War, and this crisis forced the radicals, of all shades of pink and red, to unite against the horrors of nazi-fascism. But, watching that war, Hansi saw the Communists wrecking the cause by their determination to rule and oust all others. Also, he had learned about the dreadful purges in the Soviet Union.
Then had come the deal between Stalin and Hitler. Lanny had got some information and had foreseen it. He had hinted as much to Bess, and she had flown into a rage with him for even suggesting such a vile idea. ‘You talk like a Fascist!’ she had exclaimed—and that was the worst thing she could think of to say. So, when the deal was actually announced, Bess had to turn one of those somersaults which the Communists learn in their intellectual gymnasium. She followed the party line and began making excuses for the deal, saying that Stalin had learned that the Allies were about to make one, and he had been smart and jumped the gun on them.
That was where the real quarrel started; for, to Hansi Robin, Hitler was the murderer, the beast, and to compromise with him was unthinkable. The husband and wife argued until they could no longer stand the sound of each other’s voices. They could live together only upon the basis of never mentioning the subject which was nearest to the hearts of both. But then had come another sudden development, like a sponge wiping the slate clean before their eyes. Hitler had attacked Stalin, and Stalin had automatically become an ally of the Allies. Once more the Soviet Union was the friend of democracy and peace, and once more it became necessary for all shades of red, pink, and lily-white to get together and give aid, both material and intellectual, to the Russians.
Hansi and Bess in their enthusiasm had gone to Russia to give their kind of help—beautiful music. They had lived in Russia for almost two years, but it hadn’t worked out as they expected. Bess, the true party member, could be trusted in part; but Hansi, the Socialist, could not be trusted at all. Patriotism, nationalism, had become the party line. Put none but Russians on guard! A Socialist heretic could not open his mouth without saying something wrong. In the concert hall the crowds would welcome him with tumultuous applause, but the ordinary Russians would not dare invite him into their homes. To have anything to do with a foreigner was to come under suspicion; and then at two or three o’clock in the morning would come the visit of the secret police and the indiscreet person would disappear from sight.
Hansi had learned Russian, and he listened to the conversation of his wife’s party friends. He had come back to America convinced that Red communism and Nazi fascism were identical twins, the only difference being in the colour of the shirts they wore. Their doctrines were different, but the techniques, the practices, were the same, and it was these latter which counted in the long run.
‘All you have to do’, he said to these three trusted friends, ‘is to study the goals for which the old-time Tsardom fought its wars. Then in the newspapers you watch Stalin making the very same demands: ports on the Baltic, access to the Adriatic, control of the Dardanelles, possession of the oil in Persia, and warm-water ports on the Pacific—Dairen and Port Arthur. All these the Tsars considered their birthright; and Stalin set Sergei Eisenstein to making a moving picture glorifying Ivan the Terrible, the most murderous of all the old-time Tsars’.
Lanny responded, ‘It worries us all’. He was mild about it
because he too had a problem in his home. Laurel had become somewhat fanatical on the subject of peace. It was not that she loved the Soviet Union, but that she feared to hate it, or to let anyone else hate it. And Lanny didn’t want to say anything to excite her—at least not until that new baby was safely launched into the world. Laurel was thirty-nine and might never be able to have another.
V
Early the next morning Freddi drove Lanny to La Guardia Airport. Laurel wouldn’t go along; she couldn’t bear to watch a plane take off, knowing that it was carrying the most precious freight in the whole world. The plane was so slow in starting—so agonizingly slow—and it seemed to wait until the last fraction of a second before lifting itself off the ground. Laurel’s heart would stop beating, and that wasn’t the proper thing for a double-burdened heart to do. She preferred to stay at home and imagine it all.
But with world-traveller Lanny Budd it was an old story. He settled himself in his seat, strapped himself tight, and hardly bothered to look out of the window; he was more concerned to look in the morning paper and see what Stalin was going to do about Turkey and the Dardanelles. When he was through with that he started on a pamphlet Turner had given him; it was issued by the Treasury Department and was called Know Your Money. Lanny had torn off the title page so that no one would know what he was reading, and when he had thoroughly digested the contents he would get rid of the pamphlet. The subject was a new one for him, and he fixed all the details in his memory.