In return he was free to tell all that he had learned about Germany and France, and everything in America except one public figure. He could tell about the Budds and their affairs, and the way things were going in Newcastle—even about Robbie’s having been put on the dole! But he forbore to mention the two young women who had entered his life, because he knew what Nina would say about each; it would be a waste of time, since he couldn’t mention his job of presidential agent, which dominated his life and determined his attitude to the subject of love and marriage. In Zurich he found a bookstore which had the Bluebook on sale, and he bought a copy and read “Aryan Journey” aloud to his friends, saying that he believed “Mary Morrow” to be the pen name of a woman he had once met on the Riviera. They confirmed his high opinion of the story.
XIV
They had such a good time that Lanny would have liked that summer to last forever—except that it would have been such a convenience to Adolf Hitler and his Wehrmacht! Lanny felt it his duty to telephone Hess once more, and learned that the Deputy was still dubious about the wisdom of having an American visitor at the Berghof. Things were getting worse instead of better; Washington insisted upon committing one provocation after another. “You know how it is, Lanny; the Führer doesn’t blame you, but the very name of your country excites him, and I am afraid it wouldn’t be pleasant for you.”
“I understand,” replied Lanny. “I am sad about it.” As a matter of fact he was the opposite, for he took it as permission to extend his holiday. “Why not drive down to Juan?” he asked. “Beauty will be tickled to death to see you—poor soul, she’s been spending the summer there, missing all the fancy doings of London and Biarritz and Cowes.”
Why not?—when you have a comfortable car, an expert chauffeur, and a princely purse at your disposal! “I’ll drive you to Paris whenever you say,” Lanny volunteered, and he telephoned to Beauty to make sure there was room at Bienvenu. There were two guest houses, but most of the time they were rented to friends. There had never been such crowds at the Riviera; it was astonishing how much money there was, and how many people showed up with bank accounts which they were prepared to exchange for bales of francs.
They drove southward from Lake Lucerne, climbing into the high mountains through a narrow pass much exposed to avalanches. This was the famous St. Gotthard, site of a monastery more than once de stroyed. When they reached the top of the grade Lanny reminded them of the verses of Heine, telling how he had come to that point, climbing from Italy, and had paused to listen to Germany snore—“sleeping down there in the tender care of thirty-six monarchs”! Heine, the rebel, had disliked the little German principalities of his time and the stuffy personages who ruled them. “What would he have said of Hitler and his Gauleiters?” wondered Rick.
The road going down was incredibly winding and full of hairpin turns. Somewhere underneath it was a railroad tunnel, nearly ten miles long; the Swiss had chunked it with dynamite, that and the other priceless treasure, the Simplon. “Be sure they are guarding them day and night,” Lanny said; “the one hold they have on the Nazis.”
The hot lands of Italy appeared, spreading like a panorama. The car rolled down until presently it was at Milan in the plains. When Lanny had to get somewhere, he would drive all day and night; but this was a holiday, and they stopped to look at the Brera, and at what was left of Leonardo’s Last Supper after the restorers had got through with it. Then to Genoa, where many years ago there had been an international conference attempting to solve the problems of Europe; Robbie Budd had been there, trying to get an oil concession from the Bolsheviks, while Zaharoff stayed in Monte Carlo putting up the money and pulling the strings. In a Genoa tenement Lanny had come upon the body of Barbara Pugliese, beaten by the Blackshirts, and it was there that he had first sworn enmity to the loathesome Fascismo.
Presently it was San Remo, where there had been an earlier conference, and where he and Rick together had first laid eyes on an editor named Benito Mussolini, renegade Socialist taking the money of the class enemy to slander and denounce his former friends. That had been the tragic fate of the workers in all modern lands, to educate and train members of their own class to lead and help them, and then see these leaders sell out to the exploiters and become the worst of betrayers, the most cruel mockers of the people’s hopes. Lanny and Rick and Nina, who had never belonged to the working class, might have said that this was none of their troubles, but they chose to be grieved at the spectacle of the vileness of which human nature was capable.
Then it was France, and the familiar highway along the Côte d’Azur. Mentone, Monte Carlo, Nice, Antibes, and then the fisher village of Juan-les-Pins, now grown into a famous resort and crowded with tourists summer and winter and summer again. The real-estate agents still begged Madame Budd—so they called her, without regard to her later marriages—to let them sell just a small corner off the estate; but she had to tell them that it was legally fixed so that she couldn’t if she wished—Monsieur “Robair” Budd had saved her all worry on that subject.
The wanderers rolled into the familiar drive, and the family dogs came barking with delight. Parsifal Dingle, white-haired and rosy-cheeked, came out to greet them; Beauty met them in the drawing-room, where the glare of the midsummer sun did not advertise the awful fact that she was getting on toward sixty. There was José, the lame butler whom Lanny had met in Spain; he had helped Alfy Pomeroy-Nielson to make his escape from the Fascists, and this meant that Alfy’s father and mother would give him a cordial greeting, and a most handsome tip when they departed. There was Marceline’s little son, now toddling about and beginning to put words together. Soon it would be time for Lanny to begin teaching him to dance!
Lanny had said to his friends: “Beauty never misses a chance to throw a party; but you know how it is, I have made most of this Riviera crowd think that I am a near-Fascist like themselves. The Spaniards, especially, know what the Axis is doing and planning; so I can’t afford to advertise the fact that I have Leftist friends.” Rick’s reply was: “We meet quite enough of the wrong sort at home.”
So they told their hostess that they wanted to rest and not have to dress up; they went sailing and fishing, as they had done when they were boys, and when they met fashionable people they carefully kept off the subject of politics. Nina and Beauty had a baby to talk about—and really it was surprising to see how a one-time professional beauty had settled down and become domestic, to say nothing of spiritual. Until there came an engraved invitation to a reception in honor of the Grand Duke Vladimir, who since the death of Cyril was greeted as the future Tsar of all the Russias; then Beauty Budd would be like some elderly fire-engine horse which had been put out to pasture, but hears the alarm bell ring and jumps the fence and goes galloping in front of the hook-and-ladder truck.
XV
Also, there was Madame Zyszynski. Ordinarily, Rick didn’t go in for that sort of thing, but for ten years he and Nina had been listening to Lanny’s stories—indeed even longer than that, for it had been during the World War that Lanny had had a vision of Rick lying wounded after an airplane crash. Now Rick himself tried a “sitting”; and perhaps it was his skepticism, but the spirits passed him by, or at any rate those that came were not known to him and it was a great bore. Nina tried it, and had messages from a gray-haired old gentleman who said he was her Great-Uncle Paul; but Nina had never heard of him, and it was a question of making notes of what he said and then writing to members of her family. Lanny said he was afraid that Madame’s powers might be waning; she was pretty old, and maybe Tecumseh was getting old, too—he was supposed to have lived a couple of hundred years as a spirit, but perhaps he hadn’t talked all that time.
However, Lanny had learned that psychic research is a tedious business at best, and whenever he had a spare hour he would say: “I’ll have a try with Madame.” The one-time Polish servant would toddle down to his studio where no one would disturb them; she would sit in the easy chair which was like home, and close her
eyes and go into that strange trance which the most learned psychologists did not understand. Lanny would sit perfectly silent, pencil in hand and notebook on lap, inwardly praying that the Iroquois chieftain wouldn’t quarrel with him this time, and that Sir Basil Zaharoff would lay off.
But no, there was no getting rid of the one-time munitions king, who seemed to have things on his conscience. Was it that he had been so secretive in his lifetime, and was now trying to make up for it? Or was it just that Lanny had been curious about him, and that Lanny’s subconscious mind was still playing with the “mystery man of Europe”? Anyhow, here he came: “that old fellow with the guns going off all round him,” as Tecumseh called him. “He wants to talk to you himself. He wants you to pay careful attention.”
“I always paid attention to whatever Sir Basil had to say,” replied Lanny, soothingly; and then came a quavering voice which might have been that of the Knight Commander of the Bath and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor—or might have been that of any other very old man:
“Lanny, I want you to pay a thousand pounds to a man named Ambrose Volonsky in Monte Carlo. You won’t have any trouble in finding him. He insisted that I promised it to him, and maybe I did—my memory is not so good here. Promise me that you will attend to that for me.”
“But,” objected the son of Budd-Erling, “where am I to get all that money, Sir Basil?”
“Tell one of my nieces about it; she will pay it for me.”
“But will she believe me, Sir Basil?”
There was no answer, only a great sigh. “He has faded away,” said Tecumseh. “Never have I known such an old man for worrying himself and other people. Are you going to pay that money—ha, ha, ha!” The old stone-age man burst into laughter; he had a keen sense of humor where other people’s troubles were concerned.
Lanny didn’t think he would ever pay that money. One of Zaharoff’s nieces, when last heard of, was living in Istanbul, trying to take care of all the stray dogs of that dog-ridden city. The other was married and lived in Paris. Lanny couldn’t remember her names, because she had about a score of them. He doubted if either of these ladies would remember having met him, or if they would pay out a thousand pounds on the word of a spiritualist medium. But he made note of the name Ambrose Volonsky, resolving to look him up the next time he passed through Monte Carlo. If he existed, he might have a story to tell.
XVI
A long pause usually meant the end of the séance. But Lanny never spoke first—he had learned to treat the chieftain like royalty, and permit him to decide what was to be done. And suddenly came one of those bolts out of the blue that reward the researcher for weeks of waiting. The deep voice of the “control” declared: “There is an old lady here; she has a lace collar on, and a kerchief over her head. She says her name is Marjorie, and she is the grandmother of Laurel. Do you know a Laurel?”
“Yes, I know one.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
“I know where she was a month or so ago.”
“The old lady says: ‘I don’t like what she is doing. I am worried about her.’ Is she in any trouble?”
“She might be.”
“The old lady says: ‘You helped to get her into the trouble. You are an evil influence for her.’ She wants you to let Laurel alone.”
“Laurel has a special name for me. Does the old lady know what it is?”
“She says she does not want to talk to you. You got Laurel into trouble and you should get her out. She has tears in her eyes. She says that her people did not behave like that, the ladies of their family—they stayed at home and did not go gadding about the world and getting their names into print.”
“That is all true,” conceded the evil influence; “but Laurel was gadding before ever I heard of her. Ask the grandmother where she lived.”
“She says it was an old house on the Eastern Shore. Now the roof leaks and one of the pillars of the veranda has fallen down.”
“What was the name of the place?” Lanny always tried to get evidential details.
“It was called Fairhaven; the old Kennan place. Laurel was born there, and she should go back there and have the roof fixed and the piano tuned. Tell her that; if she will come here the grandmother will tell her. But you are to let Laurel alone; you should not break up families and homes the way you do. When a man is married he should stay married and take care of his own children and not other people’s.”
So that was that. Tecumseh rang off, so to speak; Madame groaned a few times, then opened her eyes, sighed wearily, and asked Lanny in a husky whisper if he had got anything worth while. He always told her Yes, whether or no, for that kept her contented, and she had earned that small reward. She was a good medium, and Lanny had learned that they are scarce articles, and should be cherished and indulged in their whims. Whether they are foretellers of some power which mankind is gaining, or throwbacks to some old power which mankind is losing, Lanny could never make up his mind, and there was nobody able to tell him.
But certainly they were something real and worthy of attention. Time after time it kept happening to Lanny Budd, until he could no longer doubt that the trance mind of this old Polish woman had access to anything that was in his mind, and, stranger yet, to the minds of his friends. Of course it might turn out that Laurel Creston’s maternal grandmother was not named Marjorie Kennan and had not lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; but experience had taught Lanny that it might be so, and if it was, then either Madame had been able to reach out to the mind of Laurel Creston, or else Lanny had absorbed from Laurel’s mind facts which his conscious mind had surely not possessed. This, of course, was the theory which Tecumseh called “that old telepathy”; what it amounted to was that there must be a pool of mind-stuff, like an ocean, into which the medium’s mind could take a dip; and certainly that took a lot of believing.
Lanny found himself thinking about the charge that he had been breaking up homes. As a matter of strict fact, he had never broken up a home; but what he had done would seem like that to an old Southern lady who wore a kerchief and a “bertha.” Very certainly she would have thought the son of Budd-Erling an “evil influence”; but how on earth would she have known that he had got Laurel “into trouble”? Lanny hoped she hadn’t made any mistake as to the nature of this trouble, for he wouldn’t care to have any gossip going the rounds in the spirit world. He reflected that Laurel herself didn’t know that he had had anything to do with getting her into trouble; only two persons in the whole world knew that, himself and Monck. He decided that he wouldn’t be in any hurry to bring the short-story writer into contact with Madame, to have that dangerous idea put into her mind!
16
Where Angels Fear to Tread
I
As when a mountain is in labor, and mighty forces pent within it struggle to burst forth, the surface trembles, and quakings like sea waves rush from the center; there are rumblings and creakings, and great cracks spreading, and steam and sulphurous fumes escaping; people who dwell upon the slopes of that mountain are terrified, and hasten to their shrines with gifts to propitiate the angry gods; but many cannot believe that the foundations of the home in which they were born are crumbling, and that the vines they have planted may be buried under hot ashes or consumed by flowing lava; they mock at their neighbors who pack up their goods and leave the district; there are excited arguments as to what the gods of the mountain may intend and who or what may have offended them.
So now it was on the Côte d’Azur, the playground of Europe. People wanted to play polo and bridge, to wine and dine, to dance and gossip and make love, and to do nothing but these things; but rumors would come, of threats and preparations for war, and they would start exclaiming: “How inconvenient! How inexcusable!” Lanny would escort his mother to a reception in honor of the Grand Duke Vladimir, and talk with the Duque d’Alba and learn that Hitler was asking Spain to pay a part of her debt to him by the rushing of large shipments of tungsten, and by allowing Ger
man technicians to construct submarine pens in Spanish Atlantic ports. From a Yugoslav lumber magnate he would learn that this country had just rejected a demand from the Axis for the right to use its railways and military centers in case of war; the reserves of that small country had been summoned for maneuvers, to be held close to the Austrian and Italian borders.
And so on and so on, wherever you went in smart society. All strictly hush-hush, of course; it mustn’t be allowed to get into the papers—but these were the people who had a right to know what was coming, and to get themselves and their possessions out of the path of the red-hot rushing lava. The wife of an Estonian Embassy official, sunning her shapely brown limbs on the beach at Juan, remarked to Lanny that her holiday might be suddenly terminated; her husband had written that their tiny nation was about to be sold in a deal between Stalin and Hitler. “We have our own dictators and need none from abroad,” added the lady. It would serve for a bon mot in the summer season.
Kurt Meissner had an aunt who lived on the Riviera on account of her health; Lanny had known her since boyhood, and had kept up the acquaintance because at her home he met influential Junker personalities. Now he attended one of her Kaffeeklatsche, and was treated as a person of distinction because he had been received at Berchtesgaden. He listened to Prussian officials’ wives scolding at the enemies of their country; he agreed amiably with everything they said, and in return had the privilege of hearing the wife of a retired Reichswehr general assure the widow of the Court-Counsellor von und zu Nebenaltenberg that there was no occasion for anxiety, for the German armies had been secretly mobilizing and there were now more than a million troops on the eastern border and as many more on the west. Lieb’ Vaterland magst ruhig sein!