It was the top of the season in Green Spring Valley; the trees had on their bright new costumes, and the rolling hills were green to match. The little brook which ran through the Holdenhurst estate sang gaily, and the fish leaped in the little pond in which you could catch your own breakfast if you had the notion. The red brick mansion appeared to have had its walls washed, and the white woodwork had been freshly painted, as if in Lanny’s honor.
Certainly it was that way in the heart of Lizbeth—not the paint, but the honor. The smiles were fresh, and the gleam in the lovely brown eyes. She had grown more mature in the two and a half years Lanny had known her; he had to admit that nobody could be nicer to be with. Her whole manner seemed to say: “What is the matter with me?” His manner would have been churlish indeed if it had not responded: “Nothing whatever, my dear.”
The most pathetic thing you could imagine; she had evidently been trying to figure the matter out, why it was that her beau idéal and ideal beau was behaving so abnormally. She had decided, perhaps with the aid of her father, that she was frivolous and ignorant, whereas he was a serious and learned gentleman. He read books and thought about the problems of the world; and how could she interest him with chatter about the parties she had been to, and what the members of her “younger set” had said and done? She had decided to try to be worthy of him; she was listening every day to radio commentators on what was happening in the world, and she was looking at the war maps in the newspapers, to learn where Bulgaria was, and Abyssinia, and Libya, and all the other queer-sounding places. More significant yet, she had employed a lady teacher from one of the art schools, and they had been going to lectures on art and visiting the Baltimore galleries together. Les Femmes Savantes!
Now she wanted, not to display this learning, but just to have it certified by a real authority. Instead of taking Lanny to the Country Club to show him off to her smart friends, she drove him in to the galleries and invited him to turn loose that flow of discourse which had earned him over a period of some eighteen years close to half a million dollars. It was the best way in the world to make an impression on him; it was like saying: “I am ready to be whatever you want; and if you marry me you won’t be dragged to dinner dances, but will have time to meditate and rehearse what you are going to say to Mr. Winstead or Mrs. Ford the next day!”
Lanny found it deeply touching; and of course it made him think about her. Why on earth had she chosen him, over the many swains who were besieging her from every noon to every midnight? It must have been a case of that alarming thing called love at first sight. Since she had met him at Emily Chattersworth’s luncheon at Sept Chênes she had apparently never wavered in her determination that he was the man for her. Then he had had more than twice her years, and as they stood at this moment he had almost exactly twice. He had a previous marriage to his discredit, and would make her a stepmother—but apparently she was too young to realize the perils of that relationship. No, Irma Barnes in her eyes had been a selfish woman who had wanted to become a countess, and it couldn’t possibly have been any fault of the kind and genial and wise Lanny Budd.
This kind and genial and wise one had sat in at enough family scenes to be able to imagine what had gone on in the Holdenhurst family: the efforts of the parents to dissuade her, and her counter arguments, her defense of a much-traveled and widely read man who knew all the great people of the earth and was so much more interesting than anybody who had ever lived in this overgrown port on an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay—famous for oysters and shad and deviled crabs, but less so for musicians and poets and painters, and never for dukes and duchesses! Lanny had never seen Lizbeth in a tantrum, but he could guess that she had a fountain of tears; and then, when she had got her own way with two fond unhappy parents, she would wipe her eyes and emerge as the debutante heiress, waiting for her chosen Prince Charming to step from his horseless chariot.
VI
Lanny told himself that his predicament was owing to the uncomfortable business of politics, and to the war that was going on in the world, not merely the war between Germany and Britain, with the United States as a lend-lease adjunct, but the class war that was rending modern society, and of which the armed conflict was but an early stage. Lanny had pledged his faith and his hopes to the workers, the disinherited of the earth. And where would the daughter of Reverdy Johnson Holdenhurst stand in that battlefield? Would she follow him there as humbly and as cheerfully as she accepted his judgments concerning Rembrandt and Turner, van Gogh and Matisse and the rest? Or would she be horrified and outraged, as Irma had been? Would she weep and exclaim: “You have cheated me! You should have told me! It was my right to know!”
Of course it was her right; it is every woman’s right to know what she is marrying, and what her future life is to be. Lanny couldn’t tell her; but in his imagination, he could go through a number of scenes in which he told her. In most of them, she assured him that she would follow him in whatever he believed to be right, regardless of its effect upon herself and her fortune. But even that didn’t satisfy him, for before he had asked Irma to marry him he had told her that he was a Socialist, and she had said that that didn’t worry her. Irma had been at that time just about Lizbeth’s age—far too young to realize what it would mean to be the wife of a well-to-do friend of the workers, a “parlor Pink” as they were derisively called.
It meant having unpresentable friends who had the right to come to your home at all hours of the day and night, sometimes fleeing from the police, and invariably wanting money for “the cause.” Many of them were far from being pure idealists; on the contrary, they were jealous and embittered personalities who would bite the hand that was in the act of feeding them. It took a lot of social insight to understand the system which had produced these distorted souls. Was it possible to imagine Lizbeth Holdenhurst as ever possessing such understanding?
In one of these imaginary scenes Lanny explained matters to her, and she told him frankly that she didn’t think she could stand that sort of life; she hadn’t been trained for it, and she didn’t like dirty and ill-bred people—especially when they promised to deprive her of her money and reduce her to their own level of servantless and undignified commonness. But she respected Lanny’s right to try to reduce himself to that level if he wished, and she promised to keep secret the fact that he was doing it. He went off—still in his imagination—wondering if she would keep this promise. Might she not decide that he was a traitor to his class, an enemy of public safety who deserved to be exposed? Might she not at the least decide that it was her right to explain to her parents the sudden change in her attitude and hopes? There is nothing more humiliating to a rich and somewhat spoiled daughter of privilege than to be turned down by a man; and was it human to imagine that Lizbeth would keep hidden from her most intimate friends the fact that it was she who had turned Lanny down?
The standard accepted way to worm the truth out of secret agents is with a woman; and Lanny Budd, who prided himself upon being a super-spy, so high-brow, so haughty, was about to fall for the cheapest and commonest of enemy devices. He decided, for the tenth or twelfth time, that he was playing with fire in a powder barrel; he must stop driving with this daughter of the Holdenhursts, looking at pictures with her, playing tennis with her, even talking to her; he must stop showing human interest in her or kindness to her! And straightway his imagination carried him off into a scene in which he told her that he couldn’t see her again, that he could never marry her, nor even tell her why. She burst into tears and flung herself into his arms and told him that she could not live without him, that if he left her she would kill herself, or go into an Episcopal nunnery. There had been many such scenes in Lanny’s imagination, and it was getting quite dangerous; he was convinced that the real one might break at any moment, and how the devil would he meet it?
VII
He had a long talk with Reverdy, and told him about conditions in Europe and in Britain; what Hitler and Göring and Hess had said, and what Lanny
thought the Hess flight meant—but not saying that Hess had told him. Hitler was undoubtedly going to invade Russia next month—but again Lanny didn’t say that Hitler had admitted it. The P.A. had learned a lesson in Toulon, and another from Mr. Fordyce, and from now on wouldn’t talk quite so freely in polite society, wouldn’t be quite so brilliant, such a shining mark for underground partisans and B4 agents and other people on his own side!
It was safe for him to tell this Baltimore capitalist that it was going to be a long war, and that nobody was making a mistake in putting money into fighter planes. A huge war machine was going to be constructed, the greatest the world had ever seen; America was going to become the great arsenal of democracy—never knowing who had invented that phrase! Lanny had come to understand his host by now, and was not deceived by his manner of placid indolence, or by his valetudinarian talk. Before Reverdy went off on one of those half-year sea jaunts, he made sure where every dollar of his money was placed and what work it was going to perform in his absence. Quietly, carefully, he studied market conditions and world prospects, and made up his mind and placed his investments.
He had devised an armor-clad device for thwarting the income-tax laws, by dividing his fortune among a carefully selected group of his future heirs, some forty of them; they owned the securities and received the income, but did not have the use of it; they left it for Reverdy to reinvest for their benefit after his death. By this means a supposedly retired semi-invalid accomplished two purposes: he avoided the higher tax schedules, the so-called surtaxes, which he considered outright confiscation, a devilish device to break down the “private-enterprise system” in America; and he kept for himself the control of more fluid capital than any other person he knew, or whom Robbie Budd or Lanny knew. As a rule it was only banks and insurance companies that disposed of so much money nowadays.
This yacht-sailing bank and insurance company was turning the money over to Budd-Erling Aircraft. All summer long he would study its reports, balance sheets, contracts, payrolls, bank statements—everything; then for the winter he could go off in peace of mind, receiving only a few cablegrams at ports where he put in. This arrangement served both men, for it reduced the amount of government funds which Robbie had to accept, and both were united in fearing the Roosevelt administration as much as, if not more than, they feared the Nazis. In his youth Lanny had made jokes about the firm of “R and R,” consisting of his father and Johannes Robin; now the firm had come to life again, only this time it was Robbie and Reverdy! And always it had made money faster than any other firm of which the son had knowledge.
VIII
Lanny made excuses—he hadn’t seen his father yet, and he had picture business which must be completed without delay. Reverdy respected such excuses, even if his daughter didn’t. Without taking a chance of being alone with Lizbeth again, the art expert took the train to New York and from there to Newcastle. He shut himself up in his father’s study and revealed everything he knew that would be of any use to that “merchant of death.” Lanny wasn’t going to tell a single person in America about his Toulon adventure, nor about his pre-knowledge of Hess’s flight, nor of the part which B4 had played therein. But he could say it was certain that Hess had come seeking peace with Britain; and he could say that the Wehrmacht was moving to the east, and what for. He could say that Britain was going to stick, beyond any question; that Churchill’s position was secure, the appeasers having been driven underground. He could say that the R.A.F. had won out, and that Britain wasn’t going to be invaded within any foreseeable time. The war was going on and on, and every dollar that Britain could scrape up would go into it, and every pound of steel and explosives that America would furnish on lend-lease or lease-lend. That was all the President of Budd-Erling Aircraft needed to enable him to eat heartily and sleep soundly.
He would, of course, like to have his firstborn marry the right girl. He and Esther must have talked it over in advance and decided that they had said all they could; now they just asked how he had found matters in Green Spring Valley, and when he said that everybody was well and seemed reasonably happy, and that he had taken Lizbeth to art galleries to look at paintings, they knew that he hadn’t popped the question, and they didn’t ask further. He was going to stick around for a while, he said; he had brought two small paintings with him and had offers of others. He would use the car, if it was all right. The father said: “Always.”
Lanny had to see the new plant, of course, and express his pride in it. Such an amazing country, in which new factories arose like Jack’s beanstalk or the products of Aladdin’s lamp; buildings standardized, built in sections all uniform, prefabricated and put together by gangs of men with riveting machines and welding torches—three gangs, working around the clock, at night by glaring electricity. The men and women appeared from nowhere, as if they, too, were products of Aladdin’s wonderful lamp; they crowded themselves into somebody’s attic, or fixed up somebody’s cow shed or chicken house, or worked overtime and constructed homes out of old pieces of tin and tar paper. Robbie said that getting them wasn’t as simple as it sounded; he had agents at work, north, south, east, and west, telling people of the wonders of airplane fabrication—you had just one little thing to do and you could learn it in an hour or two, and you got around two dollars an hour even while being shown.
IX
Also, there was the matter of Esther Remsen Budd’s niece; such a lovely young woman, and rich as cream, and she was going to learn to be an art expert and run a museum, not because she hoped thereby to catch Lanny, but because she thought every woman ought to have a career and not be an idler and parasite. Of course it was from Lanny that she had got the idea of old masters as a profession; but she had dug up for herself information about the wonderful Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard where they turned out art experts on the production line, just as Robbie turned out Budd-Erling 17Ks—that being the Army’s new designation. Not quite so fast, of course; there wasn’t the same demand for museum directors as for fighter planes, but it was part of the same American efficiency.
Lanny could imagine his father and his stepmother discussing this case, too. Since he obviously wasn’t going to marry Lizbeth, it would surely be all right to let Peggy Remsen have her chance. But there mustn’t be any hint that anybody had this idea; they must be all wrapped up in old masters, and perhaps Lanny would drive Peggy to New York and escort her through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which she knew well but could always know better. For that reason it would be worth while for her to take a couple of days off from school, and let Esther invite her to lunch while Lanny was there, and see what the signs were. That is the way the marriage market is conducted in refined and elegant circles; there are no schools where it is taught, but ladies manage somehow to get a sound education in it, and conducting it is the first business of all mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. “Doänt thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!”
If Lanny wanted to visit his father’s home and drive one of his father’s cars—or indeed if he didn’t want to be a hermit entirely—he had to play his hand in this game. He was as nice as could be to Peggy, who had everything that a modern young woman ought to have—looks and clothes, manners and speech, even a sense of humor. When her watchful aunt suggested that Lanny might give her the benefit of his point of view on what the Metropolitan contained as against what it ought to contain, Lanny felt duly honored, and they made an extensive date; he would drive her to New York next morning, and they would spend the day in the museum, then have dinner and go to a show, and he would put her on the night train for Boston. After the lunch, when Esther got her stepson off by himself, she pressed a fifty-dollar bill into his hand and wouldn’t take it back. This was her party, she insisted; she had planned it, and he would have to buy Peggy’s ticket and sleeping-car berth, as well as all the other expenses. “Isn’t she a nice girl?” asked the aunt, and when translated into good society it meant: “Why don’t you marry her?”
Marry, marry, marry
! Nobody would let Lanny alone! Here was a young woman with whom it might be a pleasure to look at paintings, provided she would be content with that. She had been well drilled, and her opinions were those generally received, but she was open-minded and could be taught; it was a pleasure to stroll with her through the long galleries of New York’s immense treasury of art. This museum as a rule bought the works of dead artists, and that was a way of playing safe; they had to pay higher prices, but avoided bad guesses, and perhaps it paid in the long run. Lanny would ask his companion’s opinion of this work and that, and then would gently suggest a new point of view and observe her reaction. Even though she might never become a museum curator, she would be a collector and a patron, so it was worth while to guide her and give her courage to use her own judgment.
But did lady curators and art patrons have to be married? Apparently so! Lanny could be sure that Esther had discussed him as a possible match, and that Peggy was looking him over and searching his mind, just as he was doing with hers. Life was real and life was earnest in New England, and the arts of painting and drama were vain things except as they contributed to the founding of a family and the bringing of a new generation into the world. If Lanny thought that he could be a good pal to his stepmother’s niece and never contemplate matrimony, he would find that he had made the same mistake as in the case of Lizbeth Holdenhurst.
He played the perfect gentleman and poured out the treasures of his knowledge. He fed her and took her to a proper play, not so easy to find in New York. Of course it dealt with love and marriage, and they discussed it in the light modern manner. Lanny said: “I was married once, you know; my former wife is now a countess, which suits her much better.” When his companion asked: “And how does it suit you?” he replied: “We have a lovely little daughter, and when I go to visit the Castle, we talk about the child, and about world politics—never about the past.” It was a gracious way of dodging, and Peggy had sense enough to observe it. She would call him “impenetrable,” and decide that he was an intriguing personality.