Invitations to Sept Chênes were usually accepted, so there were a hundred or so of Europe’s most eminent, and Kurt played his own compositions—not too long ones, his friends had cautioned him. It was music in the old tradition, yet its content was new; if there were any in position to understand what an ex-artillery officer was trying to say, they learned that life had given him chaos and grief, and that he had wrestled with them in agony of soul and tried to make some order and beauty out of them. What most of those present got was that he made a tremendous racket and gave them very few tunes that they could carry off and whistle. However, it was plain that a man had to work hard to bring all that out of a piano, to say nothing of composing it. It might be that he was really a genius, and it wouldn’t do to guess wrong, so they applauded cordially and the evening was a success.
Beauty Budd—who was said to be his mistress—was never more lovely or more happy. After all the honors had been done she wrapped him in a warm overcoat and blanket and took him home in a closed car, and there he stripped off his cold clammy things and got into a hot bath, and while he lay there, she rattled away about all the famous persons who had been present, and what this one and that one had said to her, and to Emily and Nina and Marie and Sophie. It would take Kurt’s amoureuse a full week to collect all the gossip and retail it to the family.
IV
Before the Cannes conference had broken up it had called another to be held at Genoa early in April; and Rick said that he would have to attend this. As it happened to be Easter time, Marie was planning to go north to be with her boys. She had decided that she didn’t care for conferences, she didn’t like the sort of people she met there or the things they said about France. But she knew that Lanny enjoyed them, and felt that it was his duty to help his friend, so she told him that he was not to miss it on her account. Lanny was in something of a quandary; but the matter was settled by a cablegram from Robbie, saying that he was on his way to Genoa and would be in Juan in a few days. Dates with Robbie took precedence over everything else because they were so scarce.
Robbie Budd was putting on weight. He had passed mid-forty, and no longer played polo or any such violent game; he said that during the winter he had got most of his exercise by letting a masseur knead and punch him. When he arrived at Juan he was as eager as a boy to get into the water, and Lanny saw once more that sturdy hairy frame which had so delighted him all through his childhood and youth. The postwar bathing-suits were getting scantier every season, and you could see a lot of Beauty, who was proud of her slimness; Lanny teased her by telling Robbie that all the credit for it belonged to Kurt. A piano virtuoso also cut a good figure in a bathing-suit, but Kurt would never leave off the upper part because of the caved-in place in his side where the pieces of ribs had been shot away.
Lanny was curious as to why his father was troubling to attend one of these international diplomatic affairs. They went for a long sail together and, thus protected from prying ears, Robbie revealed a curious situation: he was going Bolshevik! Of course in a strictly proper, business way, but even so it represented a tremendous condescension for him and his “syndicate,” those friends who had put money into oil with him and were now making a good thing of it in spite of the depression. One feature which distinguished this Genoa conference from the preceding ones was that the Germans and Russians had been invited to attend on equal terms with the Allies. It was Lloyd George’s dream of a general and complete pacification of Europe, a conference to end conferences; the Russians were going to be taken back into the family of business nations, and it would mean rich pickings for whoever was first on the ground and had the energy to break through the barriers.
“So,” said the man of guns and oil, “your Red friends may be of some use to themselves, if they know which side their bread is buttered on. Do you know whether Lincoln Steffens will be at Genoa?”
“I had a note from him,” admitted Lanny; “but he didn’t say. He was in the States.”
“I saw him at the Washington conference; a queer-looking duck. If he should come to Genoa I’d like to meet him.”
Lanny was embarrassed. He was quite sure that “Stef” wouldn’t want to be used in an oil game; but it would be difficult to explain this to Robbie, who would probably think it was just naivete on his son’s part. Lanny devoted himself to asking questions, and trying to get the inside of this startling development.
According to Robbie’s information, the Russians were in a desperate plight; their industry had been destroyed in the civil war, and how were they ever to get it started again? Millions of people had died of outright starvation during the past winter, and how were peasants” without plows or horses going to get grain planted this spring? There was that huge oil-field in the Caucasus, one of the richest in the world; it was pretty much a wreck, and obviously the Bolsheviks couldn’t get drilling-tools and pipes and tank-cars except from those industrial nations which made them. There was some kind of big deal being planned—the field was to be turned over to an international consortium, the Russians getting a share of the oil. Robbie didn’t know the details—it was Standard Oil which had the inside track and had got the State Department behind it—but he was going to get the whole story before he had been very long in Genoa, and he had the idea that he’d find some back door that he could jimmy open, or some hole big enough for a little fellow to crawl through.
These phrases were Robbie’s own, and indicated to his son that they were going to the ancient Italian city on a burglary expedition, and that the son was to have an opportunity to serve as a “fingerman” or something of that sort. The United States was now under a regime of Prohibition, which meant that gentlemen like Robbie Budd had to buy their liquor from bootleggers, and these latter were becoming wealthy and powerful, and developing a culture and language of their own. Lanny had never met any of them, but there existed a machinery whereby their slang was spread throughout the civilized world with extraordinary speed. There was a cinema in Cannes which showed American movies, and any evening that Lanny felt the need of recreation he could enter for a couple of francs, and acquire from the “titles” the very latest up-to-the-minute phrases of Broadway and Forty-Second Street. So now he understood that his father was going to Genoa to get the “right dope” and to “muscle in” on the “racket” of the “big shot”—who in this particular melodrama went by the name of “Standard.”
V
The expedition set out, Lanny driving his father in the front seat and Rick in the rear with the luggage. They were going to stop off in “Monty” for a conference with Zaharoff, and Lanny was seeking in his mind for a tactful way to convey to Rick the fact that Robbie couldn’t invite him in. But the most punctilious of Englishmen volunteered: “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t go in, because some day I may want to write about Zaharoff, and if I met him through you my hands would be tied.” So Rick sat in the car and read an English magazine; when he was tired of that he strolled to the edge of the embankment, and looked down upon the tiers of house-roofs and the bay, and listened to the sounds of the pigeon-shooting below.
In the previous year the old Greek trader had put on a white satin undercoat and trunk-hose, a plumed hat and white boots with red tops, and a crimson velvet robe lined with white, and had been formally inducted as a Knight Commander of the Bath; so now you addressed him as “Sir Basil.” They were going to find a badly worried old bathing-master, Robbie said, for the Washington conference had knocked the props from under armament shares, and Vickers had suffered worst of all. They had turned to the making of elevators and freight-cars and oil-pipe and a thousand things, like Budd’s; but where could you find anybody with money to buy them? The world’s masters had come to such a desperate pass that they were even thinking of lending money to Bolsheviks—of course on their promise to forget their evil doctrines!
The ex-army officer secretary ushered them into Sir Basil’s study, which had a window-box where some of the duquesa’s tulips were performing their annual duty, each according
to the laws of its being and heedless of all the others. Their master, of whose existence they knew nothing, was performing according to the laws of his being, which required him to plot and scheme day and night, spreading vast networks of intrigue in order to acquire pieces of engraved paper certifying to his ownership of properties in many parts of the world. A strange and mystifying thing called “power,” which caused hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of men to obey his will, even though few of them had ever seen him and most had never heard his name.
Did it make him happy? Did it make a bybloem happy to select certain chemicals from rich garden soil and construct a blossom of pure white with great purple streaks? The young philosopher decided that there must be something in the tulip which brought satisfaction when it achieved exactly the right shade, and there must be something in an old Greek trader that stirred with pleasure when he put one more engraved certificate into a security box. But certainly this did not affect his features, which showed heavy strain, or his voice, which, though always gentle, was full of complaint about what was happening to his interests throughout the world. He was glad to see Robbie Budd and also his son, in whom he still saw the bright little boy who had stolen his letter and then apologized so gamely; but he had no sooner got them seated and served with drinks than he began lamenting the awful plight of the people of his homeland, who had got themselves launched upon a military adventure in the heart of the Anatolian hills, and no man alive could tell what the outcome was to be.
You could take whatever view you pleased of that Greco-Turkish war, which had now been going on for nearly two years. You could call the Turks semi-savages, and point to their hideous slaughters of Armenians and of Greeks wherever they got them in their power; thus you could think of the Greeks as emissaries of civilization—and if you happened to be one of them, and to be the richest man in Europe, with great arms plants in scores of different places, you could pour out tens of millions of dollars and keep their armies fed and supplied in the heart of Turkey, even after they had lost a great battle. But Robbie professed to know about the concessions which Zaharoff had been promised in return for all the Greek bonds he was buying, so to the American this was just one more business venture—and one that had gone sour. Hadn’t the old devil begun his career as a salesman of armaments by going to his Greek government and persuading it to buy a Nordenfeldt submarine, and then going to the Turkish government and persuading it to acquire two submarines in order to be safe from the Greeks?
But of course Robbie didn’t give any hint of all this in a business conference. He listened with sympathy while Zaharoff lamented the split between the British and the French over the Greco-Turkish issue. Zaharoff was a Grand Officer of the Legion d’Honneur as well as a Knight Commander of the Bath, and he desired amity between the two great Allies, the pillars of Christian civilization, as he called them; but the Poincaré government was persisting in arming the Turks, and in spite of Lloyd George’s promises the British government took only a half-hearted interest—in short, they left the conquest of Turkey to their Knight Commander, who had spent a good half of his fortune on a private war and, if it weren’t for his oil interests, would now actually be hard pressed for cash.
VI
All this, presumably, to explain why Zaharoff was intent on getting more oil as quickly as possible. Robbie had his own reasons for wanting some, and so the two men of affairs got down to business. Zaharoff didn’t mention, as he had on previous occasions, that Robbie’s son must be careful and not talk about his father’s affairs; that went without saying, Lanny having now attained his full majority and being here presumably as his father’s lieutenant. Zaharoff talked about the various interests which would be represented at Genoa—you’d have thought it was going to be an oil conference instead of a political one. Deterding’s men would be there, and Zaharoff named them, and explained his relationship with Deterding, who was Royal Dutch Shell and could be trusted a certain distance, but no farther. Anglo-Persian would be there, and Deterding was trying to get hold of its shares which the British government held, but Zaharoff had a clear understanding with both Lloyd George and Curzon, the British Foreign Minister, that the Dutchman wasn’t going to get them. Standard would be there, in the person of an A. C. Bedford, and Robbie probably knew their crowd better than Zaharoff did—but it turned out that Zaharoff was the one who knew everybody better.
In short, the old Greek trader had all the data and had saved Robbie the need of taking notes by having the data typed out. He showed papers which he couldn’t possibly have come by honestly, and this was taken for granted between the two as they talked; there would be more acquiring of papers and bribing of servants and so on at Genoa. Lanny learned something that his father had neglected to mention, that among those present would be the ex-cowboy Bub Smith, whom Robbie had used to demonstrate the Budd guns, and who had been his secret man watching Zaharoff’s companies during the war. Whether Zaharoff knew that wasn’t mentioned, and apparently it wouldn’t have mattered—Bub was a dependable man, and was going to watch some very tricky ones in Genoa.
Among them, Lanny gathered, was the American ambassador to Italy; his name was Child, and he was a novelist—Lanny recalled having read several of his short stories in magazines. Why had President Harding appointed a flighty literary fellow to this high diplomatic post? There must be some reason, and Robbie would find it out, for he had letters to him. “But don’t let him get any hint about me,” said Sir Basil, and Robbie said: “Of course not.” The ambassador, going officially as an “observer,” would doubtless have a staff, and Robbie would find a way to get next to some of them.
Lanny became somewhat uncomfortable as this long interview proceeded; he perceived that his father had become Zaharoff’s “man,” and that the latter was making no bones about giving him orders. Quite a difference from the time, eight or nine years ago, when the armaments king had suggested Vickers’ buying out Budd’s, and Robbie had graciously replied that Budd’s might prefer to consider buying out Vickers! What had happened to make the difference? Was it the hard times, which had hit Budd’s so hard and made profits scarcer? Had Zaharoff held out such rewards that Robbie and his associates couldn’t refuse them? Had Robbie got in deeper than he intended, and was he now caught in the spider’s web? He seemed quite at ease and satisfied with what he was doing, but Lanny knew that he was proud and wouldn’t reveal his troubles if he had any. Whatever happened, Robbie must think that Lanny thought his father a great businessman and master of everything he touched!
Zaharoff was making plain the supreme importance of what was to be done at Genoa. Two years previously, at San Remo, Britain and France had agreed to the dividing of the Mosul oil, and Zaharoff had been in on both portions; but later on, after President Harding had come in, America, in the shape of Standard, had “muscled in” and grabbed a share. That must surely not be allowed to happen again! Zaharoff and Deterding and their associates—which included Robbie Budd’s syndicate—were going to get whatever was obtainable of the oil of Baku and Batum, and Zaharoff was going to be sitting right here, pulling the strings and making sure that nothing was overlooked. He was going to have a courier coming every day to bring him news, and there was to be a code which Robbie was to keep on his person—apparently the old spider had sat and devised that code looking at the duquesa’s flower-box, for Deterding the Dutchman was to be “Bybloem,” and Lloyd George was to be “Bizarre,” which is another variety of tulip. The old rascal had a sense of humor, too, for Viscount Curzon of Kedleston was to be “Ineffable,” and Richard Washburn Child, United States Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Italy, was “Cradle!”
VII
The gossips told a story about how this conference had come to be called in a city of Italy. Someone had suggested it under the French name of Genes, and Lloyd George had understood this to mean Geneva, and had consented accordingly: a neutral city, the home of the League of Nations. Only after arrangements had been
made did he discover that Geneva is Genève, and that his conference was to be held under the auspices of a people which was far from international in its mind, and in a city crowded and far from comfortable for elder statesmen!
Genoa is a really old Mediterranean city. It has a fine harbor, which was used before the memory of mankind, but it has very little land, because the Ligurian Alps come crowding down to the sea, and the streets and alleys of the town have to go scrambling up them on steep stairways, and over bridges where there are ravines. So the buildings are tall, even the old ones, and crowded together, and there are many parts of the city where vehicles cannot go. Fortunately for Rick, the Palazzo di San Giorgio, where the conference met, was down near the harbor; a dark, melancholy Gothic building six or seven centuries old, which had long been the home of the Bankers’ Guild of the city.
Twenty-nine nations of Europe had been invited to the gathering. The Italian government had taken charge of the occasion and commandeered all the hotels, but Robbie had brought a secretary and sent him on ahead to make arrangements, so everything was comfortable for the little party. There was Bub, the funny-looking fellow with the broken nose that he had never bothered to have fixed; he was full of important news, and went into a huddle with his boss while Lanny drove Rick to the Casa della Stampa, the club set apart for journalists. Rick had only to present his credentials, and he and his friend were admitted, and there were all the old gang and a lot of newcomers; greetings and introductions being exchanged, and gossip going at full blast.
International conferences had by now become an institution; this was number seven on Lanny’s list, if you counted two in Paris and one in Geneva. For him they were a delightful spectacle, a refined sort of Roman holiday in which you were spared the sight and smell of blood, though you knew it was being shed freely. For the journalist it was hard work, but also sport, a hunting expedition in which each dreamed of bagging a creature with a priceless pelt known as a “scoop.” Each news-hunter tried to get as much as he could from the others and give as little; but since the only way to get was to give, there was a torrent of talk.