At this critical moment came the picture business; something new, something exciting to both lovers, something they could do in harmony. It provided excuses for traveling and seeing new places, for meeting important people; it provided abundance, even luxury, for both of them—and it is a sad fact about most humans that if we have abundance and luxury for ourselves, it is easier to put off doing something about the troubles of other people. This new activity of Lanny’s brought applause from nearly everybody he knew; even his Red uncle smiled indulgently and called it a harmless way for a playboy to pass his time. “It surely makes no difference which of two bloated parasites owns a painting, and if in the process of exchanging you collect some of their cash—well and good!” Uncle Jesse didn’t add that he and his friends would come around and try to get a share, to pay the perpetual deficits of their party press.
Robbie Budd, of course, was tickled to death by the development. It didn’t make any difference to him how his firstborn made money; any way would serve to establish sound habits and teach a youngster to take care of himself. Robbie promised to spread the word in Newcastle that Lanny had become one of the leading art experts of the Continent; he would talk up old masters as a form of investment second only to oil. He would be sending over a string of customers and orders—perhaps Lanny’s stepmother would be the first! Could Lanny suggest any paintings that would relieve the austerity of Esther’s walls?
Also there was Johannes Robin—had Lanny written the boys about his good fortune? Yes, Lanny had done so, and they had replied, begging him to come to Berlin and set up in business. Many of the aristocracy and other depressed classes were selling their art-works; many of the Schieber were buying. “Let me know if you have anything good,” the Jewish trader had scrawled on the bottom of a letter.
“He’ll buy anything you offer, just to please you,” was Robbie’s opinion. But Lanny didn’t care to do business on that basis.
VIII
The budding expert decided to take his new profession seriously and make a success of it. He would study the books on art and make elaborate notes. He would drive into Paris and see what the dealers were offering, and familiarize himself with the prices current. He would keep a little notebook in his pocket and jot down the various items. Following the suggestion of his businesslike father, he started a cardfile on the various painters, where their works could be found, and the prices; also a cardfile of the persons he met who might become purchasers or sellers; their names and addresses, interests and tastes—anything about them that might be of use at some particular moment. In course of time these files would acquire a considerable size, and be worth their weight in diamonds to their owner.
Both dealers and painters were glad to meet Lanny Budd and to talk shop with him. He looked like money, and it was obvious that he knew moneyed people; word spread that he was the stepson of Marcel Detaze, a pre-war painter in whose work there appeared to be quite a boom. Critics were mentioning it, and dealers had inquiries and didn’t know what to say. They would ask Lanny, and he would say that Detaze was being handled by Zoltan Kertezsi. Lanny and his mother had decided that this was the wise way to deal with their problem. Zoltan really understood Marcel’s work, he had started the boom, and his steady pressure to keep it going would be worth more than the commission they would pay him. All would-be customers who wrote or came to Bienvenu were told that Zoltan Kertezsi was the sole authorized agent.
The Hungarian came often to the Château de Bruyne that summer, and the happy sounds of his fiddle were heard in its drawing-room. He adopted Lanny as his pupil, filled him up with information and wise counsel, and threw several opportunities his way. In one of the aristocratic French homes to which Marie took Lanny was a Drouais, a perfect gem of a Drouais, a portrait of a gaily dressed, exquisite little noble lady with a round face, and dimples in her rose-pink cheeks, and the funniest little twinkle in her bright brown eyes—a picture so full of life that you felt you were sitting in the room with her, and might kiss the tips of her little pink fingers. Zoltan had sold several works of the French master, and didn’t even have to see this one; Lanny’s delight was enough, and Zoltan wrote to a client in Boston who was making a great collection, and in due course came a cablegram saying that six hundred thousand francs were at his disposal at Morgan, Harjas et Cie.
So Lanny and Zoltan went together and bought the picture for five hundred and fifty thousand francs, and divided the commission. Lanny had another small fortune, and the two pals came home and played the Kreutzer Sonata to tell the world how cheerful they felt. Lanny began to figure what he was going to do with all this money. Said he to Zoltan: “I’ll come on an old master that’s really a bargain, and I’ll buy it for myself, with no commission!” said Zoltan: “Find some new painter, a coming genius, and buy him up and put him in the storeroom along with Marcel, and you can live on him the rest of your days.”
“And grow fat like M. Faure!” added Lanny—referring to an importer of wines and olive oil who came to look at a picture, and would sit in a chair and study the work for a long while, and gradually his eyelids would droop and he would have a little nap, and wake up with a start. You mustn’t notice what had happened, for he would sometimes buy the picture to make it all right. He was a very kindly old gentleman and a pleasant customer to deal with; he liked drinking scenes and nude ladies, and that made it easy to please him.
Zoltan said he had several customers with peculiarities of one sort or another; one old Jewish lady, a friend of his mother, had raised half a dozen children and now had a dozen or more grandchildren, and would buy paintings of babies—nothing else. Zoltan had sold her a handsome Scotchman by Raeburn, thinking to seduce her imagination; but no, some other dealer had come along with a couple of Romney babies, and had persuaded her to trade a picture worth thousands of pounds for one worth half as many. Lanny had never heard so many funny stories as Zoltan told.
IX
That summer was the climax of the agony of Germany. In the effort to maintain the passive resistance of the Ruhr she printed and spent some three and a half trillions of marks; and it is a strange law of the process of inflation that the effect exceeds the cause many times over. By the end of May of that year one American cent would buy fifteen hundred marks, and by the end of July it would buy ten thousand. Abroad, this process was called “the mark swindle,” and it was estimated that Germany had taken more than a billion dollars out of America alone; but the speculators had got a great part of it, and the firm of “R and R” was among the successful.
In September Germany gave up. Impossible to feed her population any longer. The miners and steelworkers of the Ruhr would go back to work under French supervision. It was a time of triumph for Poincaré and his supporters; they proclaimed it as a vindication of their policy and an assurance of peace at last. Lanny wasn’t sure, but he was glad of any chance of reconcilement, and accepted politely the assurances of Marie’s husband. When he drove her to the Riviera he believed that their happiness was again secure.
But right away in Bienvenu there began to appear one of those little clouds no bigger than a man’s hand. Beauty had written to her son that Kurt was in a terrible state of agitation over what was happening in his Fatherland, and that she again was in dread about him. Lanny hoped that the surrender would settle this trouble, but he discovered that Kurt was one of those Germans who weren’t going to surrender. Terrible letters had come from Kurt’s home; he didn’t want to show them to his friend, he didn’t want to talk about the subject, but just to lock it up in his heart and brood over it; his music became more and more somber, and in Beauty’s heart a worm of fear gnawed unceasingly. Some day her lover would decide that music wasn’t enough, and would go back to fight for his country’s liberation!
Five years and a half had passed since the forces of nature and the accidents of man had thrown Beauty and Kurt into each other’s arms. Assuredly it was one of the oddest of couplings, yet it had worked out unexpectedly well. So long as Kurt w
anted nothing but to go off by himself and invent new combinations of musical sounds, Bienvenu and its mistress offered a wellnigh perfect solution of life’s problems. Beauty had her home to run, and her baby to bring up, and when her social impulses became overwhelming, she could dress herself and go to parties with no worse penalty than some playful teasing by her lover. It had become the accepted practice that once during each winter Emily Chattersworth would get up a recital and invite the most distinguished persons, who would be duly impressed, and thus the respectability of the liaison would be maintained: Beauty Budd’s lover was a great artist, a future celebrity mewing his mighty youth. Visitors who came to the home rarely saw him; he would be busy with his work, and they had to make the best of that. When they did see him he was clean, his hair was trimmed, and his manners were impeccable. Many a rich woman wished she might have such a handsome and serviceable male, who would stay at home and “behave himself”—that is, would have no eyes for any younger woman.
X
But time passes, and all things change, and apparently no happiness is without its enemies. After three years of living in the same house for months at a time, Beauty’s lover and Lanny’s amie had come to the point where they could manage it only by never opening their mouths in each other’s presence. They respected each other, and didn’t want to quarrel; but they were France and Germany, and one was at the other’s throat. At the table it became the rule that no political subject was ever touched on, even remotely; nothing that anybody had read in the paper, nothing that Robbie or Rick had written. Several intimate friends understood this, and helped to keep the rule; then they would go away and speculate as to how long this strange tension could continue. Little by little they began to notice that when Marie was at table Kurt was apt to be absent, and vice versa. Marie was finding more excuses to be with her aunt, and Lanny would go there to visit her.
Then came another serpent creeping into this Eden. The thing that Beauty and Marie and all Lanny’s friends were so happy about, the wonderful new easy-money profession that he had discovered—that failed to satisfy the ethical sense of his mother’s beloved; it was the commercializing of art, which to the austere German artist was the profanation of a sanctuary. Very certainly Kurt wasn’t commercializing his art; he couldn’t, if he wanted to—for how could any music publisher continue to put a price on musical works and, when he had sold them, discover that the proceeds wouldn’t buy food for his employees, to say nothing of buying more paper? The fact that Kurt, who was producing original work, stood no chance of getting any reward for it, while Lanny, who produced nothing, was having fantastic sums of money dumped into his lap—that situation mirrored the economic and moral decay of Europe at the end of the year 1923.
Nor was the trouble remedied by the fact that Lanny, out of the kindness of his heart, kept clamoring to be allowed to put up money for the publishing of his friend’s work. That was charity, and Kurt was thinking about justice. To him the situation was a symbol of the oppression of the Fatherland, the crushing of the spiritual impulses of a great people by the three plutocratic empires which called themselves democracies and which had obtained the mastery of the modern world. Lanny and his mother and father represented one of these empires, Rick represented another, and Marie the third, and Kurt didn’t want to live by the charity of any of them; he didn’t want to talk about it with any of them, and did so only when Lanny questioned him, and tried to console him or to argue with him. Lanny insisted that this was only a temporary condition, and that time would remedy it; but Kurt didn’t believe in time, he believed in human effort, and he said: “If the German soul is ever set free, it will be because Germans set it free.”
Lanny had to go and explain all this to his mother, and they had to make new rules for keeping the peace in their safe warm nest. They mustn’t talk too much about making money out of art; they mustn’t exult about “deals,” or about the price that a new Detaze had brought. Also, they must not force Zoltan Kertezsi upon Kurt, because Kurt said he didn’t care for merchants of beauty. Only after he had said this did Kurt realize that it wouldn’t sound very kind to his patron and friend, Lanny Budd.
18
Into This Wild Abyss
I
The two Robin boys were always trying to devise ways to be of use to their Lanny Budd in his new profession. They didn’t see him often, because during the time when he was at Bienvenu they were busy with their studies, and during the holidays he was at the Château de Bruyne, where he couldn’t invite them, they being at that susceptible age where they were not supposed to know about sexual irregularities. But now had come this new development—Lanny was a businessman, and so was Papa Robin, and in the course of his activities as money-lender Papa acquired a great deal of information as to the affairs of important persons. He was glad to help such persons, because he was a good-hearted fellow; but he charged them ten percent interest, the prevailing rate in Germany, and of course he made them give adequate security.
As it happened, they sometimes owned valuable paintings, and offered these as security. And how was a businessman to be sure what they were really worth? Papa Robin needed expert advice, he said. Did he really need it, or did he just pretend to need it, in order to do a favor for the handsome and socially prominent son of Robbie Budd, who played accompaniments so delightfully for Papa’s darling boys? Lanny would never be sure about that; it was more easy money that would be laid in his lap.
At first he said he was too busy to come to Berlin, which looked like a dignified way of saying that the offer was too small for his attention; Papa had made a cheap bid, and had been properly rebuked. So naturally he was called upon to do better; the two boys wrote again, saying that one of the deposed noblemen of Germany was in serious financial straits; he had a palace near Berlin and another in Munich, and both were filled with art treasures, of which many had to be sold; of course it had to be done in strict privacy, for such people don’t let their troubles be advertised. Papa had lent this gentleman a lot of money, so Papa had something to say about the sales, and if Lanny and his friend Mr. Kertezsi would come and give their time to the matter, it would be a great favor to Papa, and there would be really large sums of money for all concerned.
Lanny forwarded this letter to Zoltan, who was then in London, and Zoltan wrote a business letter to Johannes Robin, laying down very stiff terms; he and Lanny would have to be put in exclusive charge of the selling, and would receive a ten-percent commission on all sales they might arrange. The offer was accepted, and an agreement was signed by Johannes Robin, and by Prince Hohenstauffen zu Zinzenburg, who couldn’t help himself, for it was a polite and refined sort of foreclosure. Zoltan wired Lanny to meet him in Munich, to help pluck the fine feathers out of the German goose on its way down the staircase of history. He actually wired that, and wasn’t arrested for lèse-majesté!
It was the beginning of November, a delightful time of the year in Bavaria; why not have a family holiday? If we’re going to make so much money, let’s get some fun out of it! Beauty hadn’t had a trip for a long time, and Marie hadn’t been anywhere except back and forth between the Riviera and Seine-et-Oise. If two pairs of lovers went, they couldn’t get into each other’s way; Kurt could attend the concerts and opera, and interview music publishers, while Beauty and Marie could have tea with the deposed Princess Hohenstauffen zu Zinzenburg. They would go on to Berlin and see the sights—doubtless it wasn’t altogether pleasant in Germany just now, but it was surely educational, something that you could tell your children and your grandchildren about; it might never happen again that a great nation would have its currency entirely devalued, and you could exchange one French franc for the price of a diamond ring. Lanny said this for the benefit of Marie—and when Kurt wasn’t in the room.
All during that year Kurt had been receiving literature of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party, sent by Heinrich Jung, son of the Oberförster of Schloss Stubendorf. This young enthusiast had the dream of maki
ng a convert out of one who was looked upon in his home community, as a future musical genius. And right at this juncture Heinrich wrote a letter full of portentous hints: “Great events are due in a few days. I am not allowed to tell about it, but history will be made. You will learn from your newspapers that our labors have not been in vain.”
Of course both Lanny and Kurt could guess what that meant—the Nazis were going to attempt their long-planned uprising. Could they succeed, as Mussolini had done, or would they fail, like Kapp? Kurt decided that he would like to be on hand; and Beauty decided at once that she would go along to keep him out of mischief. Marie came to the same decision. Was it just to watch Lanny, or was she making a genuine effort to be interested in his ideas? Could she endure the sight of Germans? Could she feel sorry for them in their dreadful plight? The human heart is a complex of motives, and Marie de Bruyne, torn between passionate love and passionate hatred, could perhaps not have sorted out the different forces which took her to the land of her hereditary foe.
II
Lanny sent an airmail letter to Rick, telling him of the program and inviting him to help spend some of the money that grew so abundantly on trees. Lanny quoted the words of Heinrich, and interpreted them; surely if a coup d’état was going to be attempted, it ought to be good for an article. The one which Rick had written, “Upper Silesia after the Settlement,” had made a good impression, especially at Stubendorf, where it had been translated and published locally. Lanny wrote: “Come and help us to hold Kurt down. Those Nazis will be swarming about him, and Beauty will want to scalp every last one of them.”