Even Robbie was surprised by the recent picking up of his business, and wanted Lanny to tell him what had happened in the world. Only four or five months since the Prime Minister of Britain had come home with tears of joy in his eyes and told his people that it was “peace for our time,” and here, all at once, the governments of Europe had been seized by a mad impulse to increase their military aviation!
Lanny said: “They’ve got onto Hitler at last.”
“You think the British mean to fight him?”
“They’ve got to make a stand somewhere, and they’ve pretty nearly reached the point. The Cabinet is split, and different members wobble this way and that; but even a near-Fascist like Beaverbrook has decided that they can’t go on making concessions forever.”
This was the service Lanny could render to his father, as a sort of world scout and prognosticator. Robbie was like a farmer who knows how to plant and tend crops, but needs to be told whether the demand for wheat is going to increase or decrease, and whether it will be better to sell the corn at once or use it to fatten hogs. Robbie’s business involved the ordering of a great variety of materials, and the hundreds of gadgets which went into a fighter plane, all of them increasing in complexity. They had to arrive at his fabricating plant precisely on time—otherwise everything else would be held up. Orders had to be placed far in advance and could rarely be canceled; so, truly, he was gambling, staking everything he had achieved so far upon his ability to guess what the ruling groups of a half dozen great countries would be doing six months from now.
It was no job for a grandfather; but this one seemed to be thriving under the burden. He was a hearty, solid man, with only his gray hair to indicate his age. He had just had a checkup by his doctors and was limiting himself to a cocktail before lunch and another before dinner, and one cigar after each of these meals. He was proud of his ability to obey these stern orders; he was a sensible man and put first things first, so he never tired of declaring. What he put first wasn’t making large sums of money; he had been touchy on that point all his life, and had been wont to explain it to his idealistic son on the slightest provocation. What came first was the protection of their homeland, God’s own country, the greatest in the world, the freest and best. What Robbie sold to Europe was just a by-product; what really counted was the tools and the know-how, which Robbie was keeping. Someday America would want planes for defense and want them in a hurry, and there Budd-Erling would be, in a safely protected spot, ready for the job.
As a boy Lanny had believed all that; as a young man he had decided that it was “the bunk”; but now he had come back to agreement with his father—at least so far as concerned the importance of getting fighter planes built. Instead of making toplofty remarks and going off to look at paintings or listen to concerts, Lanny was pleased to accompany his father everywhere, act as chauffeur and social secretary, help him to meet the right people, and then sit and listen, now and then putting in a shrewd word to guide the conversation. These were valuable services, and Lanny could have come into the firm and had a generous salary if he had wanted it; but he made plenty of money, so he said—more than the government would let him keep. This last was taken for a slap at the New Deal, and was the kind of conversation pleasing to the rich and powerful.
V
Lanny watched this well-poised eupeptic man, washing up after his long journey and getting ready for his business forays. Lanny remembered a saying of Clemenceau, the “Tiger,” that you could always tell the men of the Right—they were not merely stupid, they were the wickedest. Was Robbie stupid? Certainly not by ordinary standards; he was shrewd, well informed within his self-chosen limits, and he had a sense of humor that made him a good companion. But he was like a man who builds a house to suit himself and then goes inside and shuts the door and locks it and will not open for any knock. Robbie Budd refused to be bothered by the greater part of the universe. If anybody, including Lanny, played music above the grade of college songs, he would sit still and think about his business problems. He appreciated art to the extent that a painting looked like the thing it was supposed to represent; but the finer qualities meant little to him, and that little because Lanny had explained them like a schoolteacher. He had no religion, he never looked at the stars, and the mysteries of being born and dying concerned him hardly at all.
Was Robbie wicked? That again depended upon the standard of judgment. Merely to ask the question caused Lanny to wince, and throughout past years had cost him much mental suffering. Lanny loved his father, and in boyhood had adored him; now his attitude was full of contradictions, clashes of ideas and emotions, a secret war that went on internally whenever they met: admiration mixed with disgust, curiosity mixed with boredom, affection mixed with anger.
In his own eyes Robbie Budd was a sound and well-balanced man, a useful citizen and master of affairs who had demonstrated his capacity to direct the labors of thousands of other men. He had earned that right, and his attitude was, by God, let anybody try to take it away from him! He considered that the New Deal was trying to do this, and he was ready in his own phrase to fight it to hell and back. How far he would go in this fight was something he had perhaps not thought out, but when he came to Paris he found no difficulty in doing business with men who had gone so far as to organize and help to finance a secret murder society. If Lanny had mentioned the fact that the Cagoulards had taken the Rosselli brothers, editors of an Italian anti-Fascist newspaper of Paris, out into the woods and beaten them to death, Robbie would have answered coldly: “Well, they asked for it.”
Circumstances had made Robbie, with his own hearty co-operation, a “merchant of death.” He had begun selling munitions as soon as he had come out of Yale, which had been some four and forty years ago. His grim old Puritan father had provided him with a complete set of intellectual and moral defenses, supported by numerous texts from ancient Jewish Scripture. Robbie had forgotten the texts, but had taken up the selling techniques and improved upon them; now he was a merchandising machine, and no longer admitted to his mind any idea that this was not the highest destiny of man. He called it patriotism, common sense, the nature of life, which he hadn’t made and which nobody could change. Criticism of it he would repudiate with quiet contempt, which would turn to annoyance if the argument was pressed hard.
VI
Robbie told the news from home and then listened to what there was from Bienvenu, not very much. (A French philosopher had said: “Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.”) Then, without preliminaries, Robbie started telling the purposes of this trip, the principal one being to visit Berlin and have it out with Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Reichsminister and Reichsmarshal. Robbie was far from satisfied with the outcome of a deal he had made with the old-time robber baron; the men whom Göring had sent to Newcastle were getting everything the Budd-Erling plant had, but those whom Robbie had sent to Berlin were ill-satisfied with what they had been allowed to see and learn, and one of them had tipped Robbie off that a delicate approach had been made to find out if it was possible to buy him. All that, was exactly what Lanny had expected and had warned his father about; but he didn’t mention that now, having in the meantime become the fat Marshal’s art expert and friend.
Robbie said he was just about fed up with the Nazis; they didn’t play the game according to American rules. He had decided that the relations he had established with Baron Schneider in Paris were likely to prove more profitable in the long run; but the situation was complicated, and Robbie was eager to hear what data his son had picked up. He listened attentively and asked many questions. Schneider was going to make Budd-Erling planes in Czechoslovakia, and that meant, of course, that in case of war Göring would get both planes and plant. Robbie wouldn’t worry about that, for he had got cash, and as a businessman he had to take the stand that he had nothing to do with Europe’s quarrels and it made no difference who won the next war. But if Germany should succeed in breaking the Maginot Line, then Schneider would be “out” as a cus
tomer, and Robbie might wish that he had kept his friendship with Der Dicke, no matter how big a rascal he was.
Lanny said, well, if Germany invaded France, Britain would certainly have to come in, and in that event there would be a tight blockade, and Göring might have trouble in getting any Budd-Erling planes, or in paying what he might owe. Robbie didn’t like the British, on account of their being too-forceful trade competitors, and their military men very stiff and stand-offish; but he agreed with Lanny’s remark that it was the British fleet which would help to keep the Nazis away from Long Island Sound.
Lanny argued that in the event of war in Europe involving Britain, Robbie wouldn’t have to worry, because it would mean that the American government would have to start buying planes for its own protection, and the Budd-Erling plant would be kept busy to capacity. Robbie’s answer was: “It may be; but I have so little faith in our brass hats, and their ability to foresee anything, that I’ll not stake the future of our plant upon them. What I’m told right now is that the French government has been sufficiently scared, and that I may get a cash order from them at once. If so, I’ll be in a position to talk turkey to the fat Hermann.”
VII
So that was the scheme on which they went to work. Robbie had cabled the Baron of his coming, and now Lanny phoned to the secretary and was invited to come with his father to dine. They got out their evening clothes and had them pressed; since it was raining, they went in a taxi, so that Lanny wouldn’t have the problem of parking his car. They entered the mansion, in which on previous occasions they had met a great company; this time there were no other guests, and three men were served in solemn state by a butler and a footman in livery.
Charles Prosper Eugène Schneider was in his early seventies. He was dapper, elegant, extremely French, and might have been taken for a dandy by one who didn’t understand this people. He wore a trim little gray mustache, and spoke English with a sort of mincing voice; but Robbie knew him well, and had never made any mistake about him; he was a man of power, one of the greatest in the world. He had been carefully trained for his job by his father and his grandfather before him, and had taken the family’s steel and munitions property and expanded it into an empire. He owned not merely the huge Le Creusot works, those at Chantiers, and the Tréfileries du Havre; he controlled the still larger Skoda works in Czechoslovakia; altogether he owned or controlled some four hundred heavy industry plants at home and in various parts of Europe; he was one of the directing brains of the Comité des Forges, the real government of France.
Outside, he was all courtesy, serenity, and charm; but inside, he was worry and strain, which it was hard for him to conceal in a conversation with friends from overseas. He was bitterly contesting in the courts the moves which had been taken by the Blum government for the nationalizing of Le Creusot; he hated it so that he had walled off the privately owned portion of his plant from the portion which had been taken over by the government, so that there might be no communication between the two.
And foreign affairs worried him even more, for his training had not included the managing of either Bolsheviks or Nazis, two monstrous forces which had developed in his world, the former causing the latter, and each warring against the other. For more than two decades the Baron and his associates had been trying to undermine the empire of Lenin and Stalin, without success; for more than a decade they had been watching the rise of Hitler, wondering if this was the proper answer, hoping and fearing alternately, or even simultaneously, trying to make up their minds and disagreeing, even quarreling among themselves. It was a set of problems without parallel in history, so far as Eugène had read it—and he had read a great deal, he said.
France had one age-old trouble, which had been summed up in a sentence by the shrewd old Clemenceau: there were too many Germans. Forty million Frenchmen, facing eighty millions of the hereditary foe, if you included those which Hitler had taken or was clamoring to take under his dominion. France had Britain for an ally, but Britain was a sea power, and could not put on the Continent an army large enough to even the balance. France had been saved last time by her ally on the east, but now that ally had been ruined by the cancer of Bolshevism. The struggle inside France was between the Left, which had made an alliance with the Reds, and the Right, headed by the Comité des Forges, which wanted to break up this alliance, make friends with Germany, and join her in putting the Reds down for good.
Such was the situation. But now the most awful doubt had assailed the soul of Europe’s uncrowned munitions king. Suppose he had been making a mistake! Suppose Hitler refused to be a friend of the French steelmasters! Suppose he was worse than the Bolsheviks, and refused to fight them! Here he was, chewing up Czechoslovakia, and apparently planning to chew up Poland; and suppose he came to some sort of understanding with the Bolsheviks—where would Britain and France be then? It was this sort of nightmare which destroyed the sleep of Baron Schneider of Schneider-Creusot, put lines of care into his face, and threatened him with stomach ulcers.
VIII
Something had to be done, the great man declared. The army mobilization of the previous September, preceding the Munich settlement with Hitler, had cost France eight billions of francs; that had to be made up in taxes, and where were they to come from? Labor was in revolt against the increase in the cost of living, and the abolition of the forty-hour work week; there had been desperate strikes in the airplane industry, where France most needed loyalty and efficiency. The Baron and his friends had been clamoring for a “strong” government, which would tolerate no nonsense, and Premier Daladier had got from the Chamber the right to govern “by decree.” He had crushed the strikes by the method of mobilizing the strikers, with the result that labor had been driven to fury and was practicing sabotage, a sort of dull, slow civil war going all the time. Internal enemies were eating out the heart of France, at the very time that her external foes were menacing her life.
The Baron would not have betrayed these torments, except to his intimates; but these visitors came from a happier land overseas, one which had managed to preserve a little of the old-time prosperity. Perhaps they could see the problem through fresh eyes, and throw some gleam of light upon it. Que faire, que faire? Robbie Budd had to tell him that things were by no means so rosy at home; there was an evil thing called the New Deal, and the country was now facing a crisis and perhaps another panic. America’s only advantage lay in the fact that a great ocean lay between her and any possible enemy.
The munitions king of Europe revealed items of news which had not got into the American press, at least not in such form that it had caught Robbie Budd’s attention. Mussolini was demanding portions of French North Africa—actually meaning it, apparently, and threatening to seize them. “That graceless wretch!” exclaimed the Baron. “We of the Right gave him money to help him into power and have fought for him and sustained him over a period of seventeen years; we supported his claim to Abyssinia, we let him have his way in Spain—and now he turns upon us! He must have a ‘Munich’ of his own, and at the expense of la patrie!”
Ingratitude, thou marblehearted fiend! Robbie Budd had experienced it, though never upon such a cosmic scale. He expressed sympathy, so warm that the Frenchman replied by entrusting him with another confidence: he was making plans to start work upon a great munitions plant in Canada. A dethroned monarch of guns and tanks might wish to have at least one principality left to him!
“There is, as you doubtless know, Monsieur Budd, a little enclave of France in that vast land. Its people are still loyal to our Catholic faith, and not corrupted by the cynicism and perversities of their unhappy motherland. It is no longer possible to foresee what lies ahead for my country, but I feel certain that no enemy can reach to a plant in Sorel, Quebec. You agree with me, messieurs?”
Robbie said: “You can count upon the fact that we ourselves would have to protect it in case of its being threatened.”
IX
Baron Schneider’s mind was in a state of un
certainty on many subjects, but there was one to which he came back again and again—France must have more airplanes. At this moment, he revealed, she had some sixteen hundred first-line planes, while Germany had three times as many; Robbie Budd substantiated this. During the present year of 1939, the Baron continued, France expected to produce about twenty-five hundred combat planes of all types—“and again Germany will beat us three to one—is it not so?”
“My information is that Göring expects to produce from nine hundred to a thousand planes every month this year.” Robbie wasn’t breaking any confidence when he said this, for he knew that the fat Marshal hoped to get what he wanted by terrifying his enemies.
“Eh, bien? We must have more without delay; and that means American planes.” Robbie knew that it meant Budd-Erlings, for the munitions king had made investigations and satisfied himself that Robbie had the fastest single-seater pursuit plane in the world, and with a few changes it could meet French requirements.
“Just what can you do for us, Monsieur Budd?” They talked about time schedules, and then the host said: “I have been carrying on a little campaign, and I want you to meet some of my friends.” There was to be a dinner in this palace, three days hence, a stag dinner, much like that which Schneider had given for Lanny a year ago. The same men would come, to meet both father and son: François de Wendel, senator of France and head of the great mining trust; Max David-Weill, representing the most powerful banking group in France; René Duchemin, of the chemical trust; Ernest Mercier, the electrical magnate; and so on.