“May I ask, are you being paid for this?”
“I was offered expense money, but I said I didn’t need it, and I’ve never taken any. Let me tell you, for your comfort, I’m not getting or sending military information. I’m really a sort of friend of the court; Hitler tells me what he wants said to the British and the French and ourselves. I say it, and they tell me what to reply, and I reply it.”
“There won’t be much of that going on, now that they’re fighting, Lanny.”
“I’m fairly sure you’re mistaken in that. My guess is they’ll go right on talking, even while they smash one another. The war’s got to end sometime, and meanwhile, both sides will be developing ideas. Each country has its friends in the enemy country, and they’re not going to lose contact. It may be that you yourself will have something you’d like to have said to Göring; you can be certain that Schneider will have, and also that Göring will be glad to hear it. Surely you don’t suppose the cartels will stop discussing deals back and forth—or that their messengers will be in any danger!”
“No, I suppose not, if you get backing of that sort—and if you don’t carry any papers that would incriminate you.”
“I carry no papers except my passport, and those concerned with my picture business, which serves as a cover. Everything else I carry in my head, and I have never put a line into the mail inside Germany.”
“You can’t put it into the mail in Britain or France now, on account of the censorship.”
“That has all been provided for. I am not at liberty to say how, but you can be sure that nothing ever bears my name, or anything that could identify me. I am careful to use a different kind of paper and envelopes for each report, and I never make carbon copies, or carry any envelopes or paper similar to the kind I have used in mailing a report.”
“All this interests me greatly, of course,” said the father. “I have had some vague idea of it, but I didn’t want to butt in.”
“I made a promise, and I had to keep it,” responded the son. He added, with a smile: “I have never made any report on your business, or anything that would concern you. Now that you are working for the government we are in the same boat. I have arranged that both of us are to have the privilege of traveling into the war zones whenever we wish. That is to be handled through the War Department, so that the airplane business will serve as my cover. If orders had been given to the State Department it would mean marking me as a government agent, and a lot of people would know about it; but if I’m representing Budd-Erling, that is what the Germans and everybody else would expect. I felt sure you wouldn’t mind my making use of you in this way. My information will really be of use to you, and there’s no reason why I can’t represent you in negotiations in London and Paris.”
“I don’t think I’ll be needing that,” replied the president of Budd-Erling. “They will be coming to me for what they want. But of course it’s all right for you to travel as my son, and to ask questions and bring me any news you get. I rely upon your discretion, now as always.”
IV
Hansi and Bess were about to set out on a concert tour, this time over the United States—no more Europe for God alone knew how long. Lanny went to stay with them, and drove them in to the city for a concert in Carnegie Hall. They played the César Franck sonata, which Hansi had played, with Lanny accompanying, at Sept Chênes, Emily Chattersworth’s estate near Paris; Bess had listened, open-mouthed with wonder, and that had been the beginning of their headlong love. Some fifteen years had passed, and they had played this composition in public a couple of hundred times, by their own estimate. To them it had secret meanings; and to Lanny, who knew every note of it, and shared all the secrets, it was gracious and yet sad music, and becoming more so.
This decade and a half of the Hansibesses had been years of stress and suffering for all humane and sensitive persons. Through it all this couple had worked and striven, having as their goal not merely the perfection of art, but the perfection of mankind—a stubborn material, less easy to shape and control than the vibrations of violin and piano strings. The world orchestra had refused to play as Hansi and Bess had dreamed; not brotherhood but raging hate, not trust but villainous intrigue, not peace but war, had been the program this orchestra had rendered. The couple had struggled on, firm in the faith that they knew the way of redemption for mankind. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, arise, ye wretched of the earth, for justice thunders condemnation, a better world’s in birth!”
So they had believed and so they had preached for fifteen years in perfect unison; but now, it appeared, even their harmony was being jangled. Bess was still the loyal Party member, determined, even fanatical; nothing the Party might do would ever shake her confidence, she would go on reciting the closing prophecy of the Communist hymn: “The international Party shall be the human race!” But Hansi, alas, was not so staunch; Hansi, gentle, kind, unwilling to hurt a fly, was tormented by the spectacle of his beloved Soviet Union playing what seemed to him the dreadful game of Machtpolitik. The deal with the Nazis, and the partition of Poland which he now saw going on, troubled his conscience, and he could not keep from voicing his anxiety. This musical pair were going to tour the three million square miles of Bess’s native land and Hansi’s adopted land, arguing about whether the end justifies the means, and what end, and what means, and where are you going to draw the line if you once admit the Jesuit doctrine that it may be necessary to do evil in order that good may result? The time would come before their tour was over when they would have to agree to read newspapers and listen to broadcasts and never to speak to each other about what they had learned; never to discuss events which they both considered the most important in the history of mankind.
All through the leftwing movement it was like that. Ralph Bates wrote: “I am getting off the train”—and his sentiments were echoed by thousands; everybody was arguing furiously, and marriages and lifelong friendships were broken. Some lost their faith and never regained it; some died brokenhearted, and some took their own lives. Verily it was, as Trudi Schultz had said, “a bad time to be born”!
V
Lanny moved into New York, and went to call on his friend Forrest Quadratt, in the latter’s Riverside Drive apartment lined with books and autographed photos and sketches. He found this registered Nazi propagandist in a state of feverish activity, working, so he declared, twenty hours a day. For this was the crisis of his labors, this was the hour of decision for the American people. The villainous conspiracy to repeal the Neutrality Act would mean, if it succeeded, the absolute certainty of America’s being drawn into the war. Manifestly, Germany would never consent to so-called neutrals serving as sources of munitions supply for her enemies; manifestly German submarines would have to attack all vessels going to Britain and France, for in these times all goods were war goods. When shooting was going on, the way to avoid getting hurt was to stay away from that neighborhood—wasn’t that plain to every sensible man?
Lanny Budd, son of a merchant of death, made haste to agree with this opinion; he told of his bitter arguments with his father, and how he had left his father’s home, perhaps never to return. Forrest Quadratt clutched at him eagerly, wanted him to make speeches in drawing-rooms, to send telegrams to Congressmen, to raise funds among the rich whom he knew. Lanny said No, he had never made a speech; his talent lay in consultations with important persons, in quiet words dropped here and there like seeds in soft and well-watered soil. He talked about Schneider and the de Bruynes, about Daladier and his marquise, about Reynaud and his Hélène, about Marceline and her young Herzenberg, about Kurt Meissner and Otto Abetz.
Lanny didn’t say: “I was in the Berghof the week before the war broke out.” No, nothing so crude. He would say: “The world will never know how long the Führer hesitated, and how reluctant he was to take the fatal step. I pledge you my word, I saw sweat of agony on his forehead while Keitel and Brauchitsch were pressing him for a decision, on account of the bad weather due in Poland ne
xt month.” Then, of course, Quadratt would start asking questions, and would drag the details out of this art expert who seemed so completely unaware of the importance of what he had to reveal. If the German propagandist could have had his way, he would have produced the son of Budd-Erling on a platform in Madison Square Garden, and had him tell that story to twenty thousand true American patriots, whom Quadratt could assemble by means of the innumerable organizations which he and his friends had established and financed in and near New York.
Having heard this most inspiring story, he talked freely in return. All true American patriots were working day and night like himself to keep the Neutrality Act on the statute books. They were calling meetings all over the country, and preparing to send out literally millions of congressional speeches through that happy franking privilege which they enjoyed; before they got through they would cause telegrams by the tens of thousands to come flooding in upon those Congressmen and Senators who had not heard the people’s voice or who refused to heed it. Only yesterday evening Quadratt had stepped from an airplane after flying to Detroit to present a new idea to Father Coughlin. It was the mothers of America who would suffer most in the event that America was dragged into a foreign war, and it was the mothers of America who were going to appeal to Congress to save their boys from this ghastly fate. Mothers’ organizations were going to spring up spontaneously all over the land, and embattled mothers were going to descend upon Congress the moment it assembled. This master propagandist smiled slyly as he pictured the screaming and wailing he would create in the offices of those statesmen who dared to support the administration program.
Of course Lanny didn’t have to assume that everything Forrest Quadratt told him was strictly and literally true; one didn’t have to assume that concerning any Nazi. But there could be no doubt that within this small head and behind these thick-lensed glasses there operated a cunning brain, almost as capable as that of the crooked little Doktor Juppchen in Berlin. Quadratt had, so he claimed, a mailing list of a hundred and fifty thousand names, and seldom a day passed that he didn’t write a speech for some Senator or Congressman to deliver. Then it would be printed as part of the Congressional Record, reprinted at a nominal cost by the Government Printing Office, and mailed out to these names, and to other lists supplied by Nazi or near-Nazi organizations scattered all over the country. In addition, Quadratt had a string of pamphlets in his own name, and various books published under pen names; the multiple author showed Lanny a row of them, and it was really funny. Quadratt is the German word for “Square”; but when this German-American crusader resorted to camouflage, he chose the most fashionable English names that ever came out of Ouida or Marie Corelli, and always three of them in a row—Percy Montmorency Raleigh, or Cecil Northumberland Oglethorpe. Lanny couldn’t keep from laughing, and his friend joined in, taking it as a compliment to his sagacity.
VI
Driving one of his father’s cars, and with General Göring’s paintings and others carefully wrapped and stowed in the back seat, Lanny set out on one of those tours by which he earned his comfortable living. He went first to visit his friends the Murchisons in Pittsburgh, driving through the Allegheny mountains at the most agreeable time of the year, when frugal Mother Nature was drawing back the precious chlorophyll into the twigs of the trees and turning the leaves bright yellow and red and orange. When he arrived in the great steel city he did not have to put up at a hotel or to hire a salesroom; he hung his wares in his friends’ drawing-room and they invited their friends to see them, and it was not a commercial but an artistic occasion. Lanny used no pressure, but talked instructively about the old masters who were represented, and left it for his auditors to grasp the fact that this sort of opportunity came rarely in a lifetime.
The prices were staggering; but then, what was money to a steel man or a steel man’s wife at this moment, when the two richest nations of the Old World were bidding for everything they had or could produce? The Pittsburghers had got over the brief flurry of concern which the embargo had caused; it was bound to be repealed—they had their lobbyists in Washington, and these competent gentlemen had already reported what they would be able to do. The pro-Nazis, reinforced by the Reds, would raise a terrific clamor, but would not be able to check the new tide of prosperity that was flooding into America. What did Mr. Budd think about it? The old masters from Florence and Seville were forgotten while Mr. Budd told what Hitler wanted and what England and France would be able to do.
Lanny’s next hosts were Margy’s whisky relatives in Louisville, and after that Sophie’s hardware relatives in Cincinnati: and after each visit his load was lighter and his purse heavier. From there his route was Cleveland to Detroit to Chicago, all of which cities had had their cultural opportunities increased by him in the past. When he reached the great metropolis of the porkpackers he had only one painting left, a charming Breton child in a quaint seventeenth-century costume. He had saved this for old Mrs. Fotheringay, whose mansion on the North Shore Drive was a sort of silent kindergarten. He had written her about this work of an unknown master, and whenever he got an offer for it he wrote her a playful note, just to keep her on the qui vive. When at last it was safe on her walls she considered that he had done her a great favor, for which the writing of a check for seven thousand dollars was a return hardly worth mentioning.
Incidentally, Lanny carried with him several examples of the work of Marcel Detaze. These were not for sale, at least not at present; they were going back to the Baltimore show, and Lanny told about this, and about Zoltan, and Zoltan’s project of bringing these paintings to other cities. If any city was to share this cultural opportunity, it was up to some of its citizens to form a group of sponsors of sufficient dignity and prestige. There is an art of painting, and there is an art of presenting paintings to those fortunate ones who have the money to buy.
There was keen rivalry among American money princes. They didn’t want just to have wealth; they wanted to be known to have it, and to be making intelligent use of it. If capitalist Holdenhurst and banker Wessels of Baltimore had got their names and pictures in the Sunpaper by patronizing the works of a Frenchman dead in defense of his country’s liberties, why shouldn’t whisky distiller Petries of Louisville and hardware manufacturer Timmons of Cincinnati do the same? Just a few telephone calls or a few orders to your secretary and the trick was done. Paintings insured for half a million dollars would be brought to your city in a big truck, and your friends would gather to look at them and thank you for the privilege, and if a few chose to buy, all right, it was a sound investment. You couldn’t eat your cake and have it, but you could look at your masterpiece and have it all your life!
VII
Lanny took the opportunity to renew his acquaintance with several of the important persons whom he had met with Forrest Quadratt. He paid another visit to the Ford home, and heard the richest man in the world pledge his fortune to the keeping of his country out of this most devilish war. Once before, the Flivver King had declared he would never make any sort of war goods, and he had been forced to break that resolution; but this time, nothing was going to change him, so he vowed. Incidentally Lanny met his son Edsel, a quiet, subdued fellow who did what his dominating father wished. His mother wanted him to have culture, so he had begun an art collection in a timid way. He took Lanny to see it, and it was one of the times when the grandson of Budd Gunmakers had need of all the tact which he had acquired from a lifetime of association with diplomats.
Very gently he told this middle-aged man who was still a youth in mind that the acquiring of a great art collection was one of the most difficult achievements in the world. Many who offered themselves as advisers were incompetent, and many of the dealers were the shrewdest of rascals. Lanny quoted the saying of the great art authority, Dr. Bode, that Rembrandt had painted seven hundred paintings during his lifetime and that ten thousand of them were in America. Lanny added that even when old masters were genuine they were not necessarily good, for there
were few painters who had not done mediocre work now and then. Having planted these little seeds, Lanny produced his Detazes, and delivered one of his suave lectures on the difference between sound art and fraudulent. When the evening was over he had given Zoltan’s address and obtained the promise of both Edsel and his mother to sponsor a Detaze show in Detroit during the winter.
Also, Lanny drove out to the village which had become famous all over America—Royal Oak, named for a reason which nobody seemed to know. He wanted to have a worthwhile report to make to Forrest Quadratt, so he listened for an hour while “Silver Charlie” poured his rage upon those servants of Satan who were planning to repeal the wise and righteous Neutrality Act in the cause of their filthy, bloodstained profits. The Shrine of the Little Flower and its adjoining offices were swarming like a hive of bees, and some editor employed by the fervent Father was taking the mental poison of Josef Goebbels in Berlin, paraphrasing it in the American idiom, and sending it out every week to the half-million readers of Social Justice. When his enemies pointed that out, it didn’t worry the man of God in the least. A strange kaleidoscopic moment of history, when the Nazis had stopped fighting the Communists and the Communists had stopped fighting the Nazis! But Charles Edward Coughlin, whose forefathers had come from Ireland, had one pillar of fire to guide him, one principle which could never fail—whatever hurt the British Empire must be pleasing to God.
Incidentally, the usually tactful Lanny Budd pulled what came near to being a “boner.” He remarked: “Quadratt told me about his recent visit to you. That was a wonderful idea he suggested.”
“What idea?” demanded the reverend propagandist.
“The idea of appealing to the mothers of America.”