“Yes, dear, I am glad to hear you say so. She is wise and sensible and understands me very well.” He refrained from extreme praise, being wise himself in matters where “the sex” was concerned; his mother was a jealous goddess, and it wasn’t easy for her to see her place taken by another female—and especially one whom she hadn’t picked out. But it is the way of nature, and if Laurel was going to give Beauty another grandchild she would be forgiven for having once called Lanny a “troglodyte,” and caused Lanny’s mother to want to scratch her eyes out.
Essence being almost unobtainable, even to the rich, Beauty was driving herself in an ancient buggy with a middle-aged horse. They looked extremely odd trotting down the splendid Boulevard de la Croisette; they had almost the only vehicle, for traffic was confined to official cars. The small city was packed to the roofs with refugees; they walked in the two lanes of the wide drive, separated by palm trees; they sunned themselves in near nudity on the beach below. “The Côte d’Azur will never be the same again,” said Beauty Budd sadly. “But we take what we can get and are thankful to be alive.”
“Are you thinking of going back to the States?” the son inquired, and as he had guessed, she told him no. People of all nations had always been polite to her and she couldn’t bring herself to be afraid of either Germans or Italians. This was her home, and who could say that she had ever done any harm here?
XI
Always a pleasant thing to come back to Bienvenu, the lovely old place which had been Lanny’s home for as long as he could remember. It was his headquarters and repository; his books were here, his piano and accumulation of music scores, his treasures of one sort and another. It was always his dream that some day he would be able to live here again and do the things he really liked. But that couldn’t be so long as gangsters threatened mankind. Lanny had been forced to the conclusion that it couldn’t be until the world had been made over according to the principles of justice and co-operation.
Meantime here was a place of retreat, a shelter where the gangsters had not yet intruded. The dogs came running out, barking their welcome; following them came a lovely little dark-haired boy, Beauty’s grandson and Lanny’s nephew, whom they called Baby Marcel, but they would have to change that before long. He was the son of Marceline Detaze, and when she had divorced his father she had had his name legally changed to Marcel Detaze; an honored name, that of his grandfather, the French painter, long since dead. The little one remembered his Uncle Lanny from a year ago, with Beauty’s help, of course; Uncle Lanny had taught him dancing steps and would teach him more, and now he leaped into Uncle Lanny’s arms with a cry of delight.
And here came Beauty’s husband, her third, as she wished the world to believe, and it obligingly did so. Parsifal Dingle’s hair had grown snow-white, and if he had his way it would have grown long, for he was too busy with God to bother with barbers. But Beauty wouldn’t let him be any more eccentric than necessary, and now and then she would pin a sheet about his neck and trim him herself. It was so hard to get about nowadays that people revived the home industries, reverting to an earlier stage of culture. Parsifal was no trouble to anybody. He adored his beautiful wife—she was still that to him if not to herself—and he asked nothing but to sit in the court reading his “New Thought” books or to stroll about the grounds of the estate, keeping himself in tune with the Infinite. A more harmless man never lived, and he was always delighted to see Lanny, who shared his interest in psychic matters and would go over Parsifal’s notes and join in speculation concerning what had happened.
There was “Madame,” the elderly Polish woman who had lived on this estate ever since Parsifal had discovered her in a dingy “medium parlor” on Sixth Avenue in New York. At a time when bankers and brokers had been throwing themselves out of top-story hotel windows because they had lost everything in the world, this man of God had been busy with the next world, or, as he would say, the world in which yesterday, today, and forever are the same, and which is in us and around us, whether or not we choose to become aware of it. Madame Zyszynski didn’t have any ideas of her own on these abstruse matters, but she accepted whatever Parsifal said; she loved this kind gentleman as if he had been her father, and Lanny as if he had been her son.
XII
How delightful the son would have found it to stay here and teach Baby Marcel to dance and to swim, and let Beauty cut the hair of both of them, and let Madame summon the spirits from the vasty deep, and let Parsifal sit by as sage and interpreter, and as healer in case of need. Beauty would have pleaded for it, save that she had tried so often and knew that it was no use. There was something that called Lanny away, and it hadn’t taken her shrewd mind many years to guess what the thing must be. Always the call came by mail; there were letters postmarked Toulon which took him westward, and others from Geneva which took him northward. Beauty had studied the handwriting and guessed that the former came from Raoul Palma, whom she had known for twenty years or more as one of Lanny’s Leftist friends; the other writing she did not know, but it had peculiarities which were German, and she had noted that Lanny generally went into Germany after getting one of these letters.
She knew much more about this strange son than he guessed. She had become certain that he had never changed his political coloration, as he gave the world to understand; if he had, he would never have become a friend of Laurel Creston’s—to say nothing of marrying her. The idea that he was a secret Leftist terrified her, for she knew what danger it meant in times like these. The fact that he refused to take her into his confidence hurt her, but she had to accept his cryptic statement: “A promise is a promise, old darling.” She had kept these speculations hidden in the deepest corner of her mind, and even her best friends believed that she believed her son to be an art expert, traveling about the world only in search of beautiful paintings.
Beauty’s instructions were never to forward his mail, because of the uncertainty of his movements and of communications in wartime. She put the papers and magazines on a closet shelf and locked the letters up in her escritoire. There was a considerable packet after a whole year, and she didn’t make him ask for them, but put them into his hands without delay. He would not look at them in her presence, but would take them off to his study to read and perhaps answer. He would never entrust the replies to the postman who delivered mail at the estate every day, but would find some excuse to go into Cannes and there presumably drop them into an inconspicuous box. All this she had observed for years and had tactfully pretended to observe nothing.
Alone in his study, Lanny set aside a number of unimportant letters and tore open those which had to do with a P.A.’s job. There were three which had come from Raoul, all mailed in Toulon and signed with the code name “Bruges.” According to their practice, the text had to do solely with the purchase of paintings; when Raoul wrote that he had located an especially fine Meissonier, it meant that he had important news about the war; when he said that the painting could be purchased for eighty thousand francs, it meant that he wanted Lanny to bring him that amount of money. In the last of his letters, mailed over three months ago, “Bruges” said that he had been distressed to hear about M. Budd’s plane accident and hoped soon to hear of his recovery. That didn’t surprise Lanny, for the Budd family was well known in Juan-les-Pins and near-by Cannes, and Raoul had many friends in the neighborhood who could tell him what members of that family were doing.
There was only one letter from Bernhardt Monck, and that was six months old. He had discovered a fine work by the Swiss painter Hodler, and since this painter had done most of his work and attained most of his fame in Germany, Lanny could guess what that meant. Monck wanted only five thousand Swiss francs, but each of these was worth more than ten of the depreciated francs of Vichy. Lanny had no way to reach Monck by mail; he would have to go to Geneva, on chance that the old-time Social Democrat would still be doing research work in the public library there.
Raoul’s last letter said: “I am still employed by t
he bookstore.” So Lanny wrote a note to “M. Bruges” in care of the Armand Mercier bookstore, Toulon, saying: “I am home again, and much interested in what you tell about having come upon a Meissonier painting. The price is reasonable, if you are sure of its genuineness. Let me know at once if it is available, and I will come.” He added: “I don’t want to take any chance of finding that it has already been sold, as happened in the case of the Daumier drawings.” That was asking Raoul whether there was any chance of Lanny’s getting into trouble, as had happened to him on his last visit to Toulon.
According to Beauty’s expectation, Lanny came to her, saying: “I have to go into town to attend to some matters at the bank. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take the buggy, because I’ll buy some presents for our friends whom I have been neglecting.” The generous-hearted Lanny, so the friends would all think; but he didn’t fool his keen-minded mother, who had been Robbie Budd’s side-partner in munitions deals for a couple of decades and knew all there was to know about intrigue. She had observed this business of giving presents to people who needed them and to others who didn’t, and she had managed to figure out what it meant. Lanny must be needing money in small denominations which could not be traced through the bank, and this was his way of getting large bills changed. She had even noticed that his pockets were bulging when he came home! Now she said: “All right,” and didn’t offer him the pleasure of her company on the expedition. She knew that when he had got the money, he would be leaving shortly.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Up to the year 1938 there had been issued in European countries a total of 690 titles of the books of Upton Sinclair, and in India, China, and Japan a total of 57. The number of books cannot be estimated, but in Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union the total was over seven millions. I have no way of learning how many of these readers have survived the Great Blackout, but I take this opportunity to send to them my greetings and my hopes. May they succeed in building the new world, dedicated to the practice of democracy, both industrial and political, as I have tried to explain it in many books and pamphlets.
UPTON SINCLAIR
About the Author
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle(1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism, and the eleven novels in Pulitzer Prize-winning Lanny Budd series.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1947 by Upton Beale Sinclair
Cover design by Kat JK Lee
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2651-2
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Upton Sinclair, A World to Win
(Series: Lanny Budd # 7)
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