XIV
So there they were, in a car, the same in which they had had their innocent yet dangerous petting-party. What would happen this time? Would Lanny drive the lady properly and directly to her home, only a mile or so away? Or would he meander, and proceed slowly? If he went to the wooded point by the river bank, it would be symbolical, and Miss Hoyle had indicated that she liked symbolism in art. The weather was cold, but not unpleasantly so, especially in a closed car.
Little shivers were running over Lanny Budd. He was afraid of what he might do—and with good reason, as it turned out. He had been looking at an attractive woman for several hours, and now suddenly she was available. Automatically his hand went out, and did what it had done on the previous occasion—laid itself gently on hers.
But the next development was not according to the book—at least, not Lanny’s book. The lady’s hand was withdrawn, not suddenly or violently, but, as you might say, with delicacy and consideration. It moved, and in the dark Lanny couldn’t see where to. There fell a pause in the conversation.
“Have I offended you?” he asked, considerately.
“No,” was the reply. “I do not take offense so easily. But I try not to make the same mistake twice.”
“You are sure it was a mistake?”
“Aren’t you, Mr. Budd? I gathered as much, from the fact that you didn’t return.”
“I admit that I didn’t behave very well,” he replied, humbly. “But I have been traveling——” He stopped, as a sort of admission that it wasn’t a very complete excuse.
Suddenly she laughed. “Would you like me to tease you?” she inquired. “Are you familiar with the art known as coquetry?”
“I have observed it in action,” he replied, in a tone more serious than the question called for. He had been taken off balance.
“I would let you have my hand, and then withdraw it and let you search for it. By and by I would let you kiss me, but not so freely as I did on a previous occasion; then suddenly I would begin to laugh, and make a joke of the situation. I would make it impossible for you to be sure whether you had gone too far or not; I would have you bewildered, and at the same time possessed by curiosity. What sort of woman am I, and what do I mean, and how far will I go? Do you think you would care for that?”
“Frankly, I can’t imagine that I would, Miss Hoyle.”
“No man can imagine it; but it happens to them all the time. Maybe you are no different from the other men: you do not develop your full powers except in the pursuit. Maybe that is the way to rouse and stimulate you; the woman who is too easy to attain, who throws herself into your arms, inspires you only with boredom and repugnance. Can that be true of one so cultivated and gracious?”
Lanny was greatly embarrassed. “Dear lady,” he said, “I see that I have caused you pain.”
“Some pain, dear gentleman, I do not deny. But perhaps that is the only way we women can learn about men. What you have done is to make me into a good and earnest feminist. You have caused me to think hard and truly about the lot of my sisters in a man-made world. I am quite on fire with the realizations that have come to me.”
“You mean that I have taught you to hate men?”
“Not at all; you have taught me to love women. I do not blame either sex, because I know that nature had put these differences into our hearts. But it is a man’s world, and the lordly creature condescends to notice, and then walks out when he is bored.”
“You make me aware of having been most inconsiderate, Miss Hoyle,” said the scion of the Budds, with surprising humility.
“I do not want to embarrass you, and I am not coquetting, but speaking out of newly acquired wisdom. You are not the sole cause of the transformation in my mind. I will entrust you with a confidence, if you promise to respect it.”
“Most certainly.”
“When you departed and did not return, I was terribly humiliated. I felt that I had been the toy of a moment. But I am not a toy; I am an adult woman.”
“I was away because of urgent duties, Miss Hoyle.”
“The postal service was still working. But that is not what I am speaking of. I broke down and confided in my mother, who is a wise and kind woman, and was beautiful in her time. She told me the secret of her life—that my father had deserted her for another woman. This was when I was a small child, and I was told that my father was dead, and I always believed it. So you see, you are not the only man who exercised his privilege to sample and reject too casually. Sex cannot be casual. A woman may give the best she has, but when she reaches the age when her charms begin to fade, she confronts with terror the possibility that the man will feel the need of fresh stimulations, and will leave her with an empty heart and perhaps an empty home. What do you, as a man, suggest as a remedy for this form of tragedy?”
“I don’t know,” admitted the son of Budd-Erling; “unless you women stand together, and succeed in teaching men some ideals of loyalty.”
“The feminist movement got off on the wrong track,” said the town librarian. “It took up the foolish notion that women should imitate the casual relationship between the sexes which men have always found to be to their advantage.”
XV
This turned out to be a long drive, and for the driver a stimulating experience, the exploration of a new type of woman soul. He had met a number of “feminists,” especially in his youth, when they had been raging. Rosemary, granddaughter of Lord Dewthorpe, had been one, and she had had her solution of the sex problem, which was to take it in masculine fashion, as a biological necessity, and never let it worry her. Trudi had been a feminist, too, but had never called herself that, because the abolition of economic servitude had seemed to her so much more important. Trudi had believed in love as a partnership in working for social justice, which would solve all problems.
But Priscilla Hoyle believed in love as a spiritual expansion, a means of escaping from the limitations of the individual ego; as she explained it to Lanny he wondered if he had not been missing something all these years that he had spent in the playgrounds of Europe. He thought of the five women he had loved so far, and decided that the one who had come nearest to agreeing with Miss Hoyle was Marie de Bruyne; she was the one who had given him the most, over a period of six years. Lanny was deeply touched by this memory, and ventured to lay his hand on his companion’s once more—this time in brotherly kindness.
But again she drew it away, saying: “Let us not play with fire.”
“Are you quite sure that I couldn’t add anything to your life?” he inquired, and she answered, without coquetry: “I am quite sure that you could, but also that you wouldn’t want to for very long. I have thought it over and realized the gulf between us. Your world and mine are like two billiard balls which touch but never come together. You have your habits and tastes, your friends in your grand monde—and what could I give you? A few hours of pleasure, of thrills, perhaps, and then you would know that you had made a mistake—and I would know it before you did; indeed, I would know it before I started, and I would hate myself and you for such conduct.”
So there it was; she turned him down. For him it was a novelty, and just a little humiliating. To be sure, Gracyn had turned him down, for a thirty-thousand-dollar start on Broadway; Rosemary had turned him down to become a countess, and he suspected that Irma had done the same. But all three of these women had been his for a time, whereas this woman wouldn’t even let him kiss her again. She suggested that it was getting late, and that her mother might be worried, and his stepmother, also.
So he drove her to the modest cottage where he had delivered her once before; and when she got out there came an unexpected flash of humor. She gave him her hand, and said: “If you were in France now, you would know what to do—n’est-ce pas, monsieur?” So he kissed her hand, gently and respectfully, and it seemed to him a quite lovely hand, which he hated to let go.
Lanny drove away experiencing pangs of conscience. Here, it seemed to him, was a woman who
se personality embodied those ideal things which he craved. It pleased him not at all to have her thinking that he considered the town librarian as his social inferior; but he was not at liberty to give her the slightest hint of his democratic sentiments. He had to tell himself once more that a presidential agent was something less than a man, and could never be a satisfactory husband. Incidentally, he reminded himself of a basic principle having to do with the motorcar—that when the car is in motion, the driver should keep his two hands firmly gripped upon the steering wheel.
24
A House Divided
I
When Lanny Budd had last visited the town of his forefathers it had been like all the rest of the nation, a jumble of contradictory opinions, but almost to a man united on one slogan, which was: “Never again!” If Europe chose to plunge into another war, that was Europe’s privilege; but the good old U.S.A. was going to keep out, and any man who suggested otherwise was a public enemy, and probably a paid agent of some foreign interest. Everybody in Newcastle had agreed on that, from the president of Budd-Erling to the bootblack on the corner of Dock and Main streets. “America is going to keep out of the next war!”
But now, in a few days, what a sea change! The government had placed an embargo upon the export of arms, ammunition, and implements of war to all the belligerent nations, and to the town of Newcastle that was like clapping an extinguisher upon a candle. The principal support of the town was the century-old and constantly growing industry of Budd Gunmakers. After the last war its immense plant had been converted to the making of everything from frying pans to elevators; but in recent years the gunmaking had been resumed and had become once more the principal industry of the town. Large shipments had been going to both Britain and France—and now down had come the extinguisher! One ship, heavily loaded, had passed out of the river and into the Sound, and was passing Montauk Point when a government cutter had come racing after it, flashing signals and ordering its return. Now those goods were back in the company’s warehouses, and half a dozen departments of the plant were shut down, and their workers sitting at home, waiting for their relief applications to be acted upon by the WPA.
It wasn’t so bad with Robbie Budd, because he had a backlog of U.S. government orders. But a part of those planes had been destined for Britain and France, and now they wouldn’t go, and Robbie had sent a telegram to the War Department, demanding to know if new orders would be placed, otherwise he would cut down his operations from three shifts to one. Several telephone calls per day were following up that notice—brass hats being what they were, and no bureaucrat being capable of making a prompt decision about anything.
It was not merely the workers and the executives of Newcastle who had been living on French and British money; it was the grocery and department-store employees, the doctors and lawyers and bankers, and likewise the farmers for miles around who brought their products into town to feed this population. The extinguisher cut off their supply of financial oxygen; and according to the principles of economic determinism they all began to think hard and to revise their ideas about the world they lived in and the policies of their government. Arguments went on in every home and on every street corner, and the confusion in one small city became many times confounded.
The old New England stock was what its name implied in its speech, manners, and sentiments; it believed in free institutions and disapproved of the Nazis, except as they might be needed to hold down the Communists in Russia. Now that the Nazis had made a deal with Russia, the old-time New Englanders had no further use for them, and argued vehemently that the so-called “Neutrality Act” favored Germany, which couldn’t get any American goods anyhow. Their arguments were supported by the Poles, who had their share of the town’s immigrant population. It was opposed by the Irish Catholics, whose greatest pleasure in life was inflicting harm upon the British Empire. The Irish all turned into fighting pacifists, and were joined by the Germans and most of the Italians, also the French-Canadians, who were Catholics before they were French.
II
Lanny listened to this babel of opinions, and compared the hometown of his forefathers to a mess of eggs which had been broken and dropped into a frying pan and beaten up, but had not yet begun to solidify into an omelet. However, there was a hot fire under the pan, the hottest ever built in this world. All day and half the night the people of Newcastle heard by voice and read on the printed page the horrible details of the destruction of an unoffending nation in a period of eighteen days: armies being slaughtered and driven in rabble rout; cities turned into blazing infernos or heaps of rubble; fleeing civilians bombed and machine-gunned on roads; invading barbarians bringing with them whole trainloads of scientists, especially educated for the wiping out of a national culture. On the streets of this small New England city men stared at one another and exclaimed: “My God, what does this mean to us? And what will it mean if they do it to France and England? Maybe this Neutrality Act was a mistake after all!”
Few of them were willing to abandon their determination to keep out of the war; but they became ingenious in figuring out devices whereby they might sell Budd Gunmakers and Budd-Erling products without incurring risk—or at any rate net too much risk. Britain and France had plenty of ships; why not make them come in their own ships and get the goods, and thus reduce the chances of mishaps at sea? We could give Germany assurances that American ships would carry only non-war goods; such ships would be plainly marked, and so there could be no excuse for torpedoing them. And then there was the question of credits, whereby we had got so badly stuck the last time. Britain and France had plenty of gold; also they had the securities of American corporations, to say nothing of railroads in the Argentine and other properties all over the world. Why not make them turn these over? Put the selling of munitions on a strictly cash-and-carry basis, thus combining the saving of civilization with a sound business deal!
Such had become the orthodox opinion among the well-to-do in Newcastle; and the unorthodox would cry: “Aha! The same merchants of death, planning to turn human blood into profits!” These eccentric persons apparently had the idea that the manufacture of munitions ought to be carried on at a business loss; or did they think that profits ought to be permitted only to Nazi merchants of death? The orthodox would ask with bitter sarcasm, and the fat would be in the fire. The arguments would continue until the arguers were no longer on speaking terms, and perhaps that would continue for the rest of their lives-such being the custom in New England feuds. There were elderly Budds who had not entered the same room at the same time for more than half a century—family funerals alone excepted.
Word spread with the speed of lightning—over the telephone—that Lanny had been in Europe, and had talked with Hitler and Daladier and Chamberlain. So everybody wanted to meet him and hear his story. They wanted not merely his facts, but his opinions; and this was awkward for a P.A., who couldn’t expect anybody to believe that he was wholly absorbed in the marketing of old masters at a time like this. He had to get a new “spiel”; he would say: “The problem is so complicated, I really don’t know what to think. We shall just have to wait until the situation clarifies itself.” That sounded like a statesman and impressed the judicious. The others were satisfied to tell Lanny what they thought.
III
One who had the right to know everything was Lanny’s father, and their conference in Robbie’s study was not so different from the one they had had in the Hotel Crillon a quarter of a century ago. Robbie could never give up the dream that his firstborn might come into the business and help him. Manifestly, Lanny couldn’t continue his migratory habits in submarine-infested waters; and what could be more important to a patriotic citizen than to see his country abundantly equipped with fast and deadly fighter planes? These were weapons of defense, since their range was short and they had to be based at home; therefore they deserved the admiration and respect of every pacifist, humanitarian, idealist—whatever it was that Robbie Budd’s firstborn calle
d himself at the present alarming moment.
Lanny couldn’t very well insist that he planned to go on risking his life at sea or in the air in order to add a few more old masters to American collections. Robbie would have said: “How do you expect to get passports?” If his son had replied: “I want you to tell the War Department that I am aiding Budd-Erling abroad,” the father would hardly have judged that a proper request.
Lanny would have to take his father into his confidence, at least in part. Since Robbie himself was working for the government, it could hardly trouble him to know that his son was doing the same. Lanny said, very gravely: “What I am going to tell you is not to be mentioned to a soul, not even to Esther. I am under a promise myself, and it is a serious matter. The information I have been gathering in Europe during the last couple of years has been turned over to someone in authority, and is being made use of in an important way. I have just offered to quit, and have been asked to continue. The request was put in such a way that I couldn’t refuse. More than that I am not free to tell, and you must never give the slightest hint of even this much.”
“That’s a pretty serious matter,” was the father’s comment. “Are you planning to go into Germany in wartime?”
“I’ll be guided by circumstances. The secret has been well kept, and I think I’ll be all right.”