Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels), Page 2

The victim of the Nazis had been twenty-seven, and Lanny had corresponded with him since he was a little boy and had known him since he was a youth. In all those years Lanny had never known him to speak an unkind word or perform a dishonorable action. “He was as near to being perfectly good as one could ask of a human being; and I do not say that just because he is dead—I said it many times and to many people while he was living. He was an artist and a scholar. He knew the best literature of the land which he had made his own. He earned a doctoral degree at the University of Berlin, and he did this not for the honor nor yet for a livelihood, but because he wanted to know what the wisest men had learned about the causes and the cure of poverty.”

  Dr. Freddi Robin had called himself a Socialist. This was not the place for a political speech, Lanny said, but those who had known and loved him owed it to his memory to study his ideas and understand them, not letting themselves be confused by calumny. Freddi had been done to death by cruel forces which he himself had understood and had refused to bow to. Others also would have to learn about them, and find out how to save the world from hatreds and delusions which are the root of wars. If we would do this, we would be serving this dead man’s memory and be worthy to meet him in whatever future abode the Creator of us all may have prepared.

  That was all, and it wasn’t much of a speech. The Socialists had come expecting more, and some would have been glad to supply it if invited. But this was a Jewish funeral, centered upon two sobbing women. Those who knew the proper way to behave at funerals formed two parallel lines leading back to the cemetery gates, and as the chief mourners walked between these lines everyone recited a formula beginning “Hamokom yehanem,” meaning: “May God comfort you in the midst of all those who mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.” Just inside the gates of the cemetery stood the melamed with a collection-plate, and no one failed to drop in a coin. This was for charity, of great importance to every Jew. “Tzedaka tatzil mimavet,” recited Shlomo, meaning: “Charity delivereth from death.”

  Lanny stepped into the waiting taxicab, and when he reached Bienvenu he found servants at the porte-cochere of the house with several basins of clean water and towels. It was necessary for every person who attended the funeral to cleanse the hands before entering. This was supposed to be done in a special ritual way, by letting the water run three times from fingertips to elbows, but only the melamed knew this, and the reason—that evil spirits cannot pass running water and so can be kept from entering the house of mourning.

  After that the family and their friends sat down with the melamed and recited seven times certain passages from the Book of Lamentations. Then they ate the “meal of condolence,” which consisted of any non-alcoholic beverage, with bread and hard-boiled eggs, the last being symbols of life. Leah and Rahel Robin would eat these meals and none others over a period of seven days; wearing slippers, and with their dresses cut in such a way as to indicate that they had torn them in grief, they would sit on the floor or a low stool and read from the Book of Job. This is known as the shiv’ah, and during it they would receive consolatory visits and they and their friends would discuss only the virtues of the dear departed.

  For eleven months they would not dance or take part in any form of recreation. There was a Talmudic reason for this precise period—if you mourned a full year, it would imply that you thought the deceased had been a bad man and was in Gehenna, that is, hell; you didn’t quite wish to admit that, but you thought it wiser to take no chances, so you came as near to a year as propriety allowed. During this period the Kaddish must be recited every day for the benefit of the man’s soul, and there was only one member of this household who was expected to say it—the five-year-old son. The prayers of women do not count, so little Johannes must say this long prayer, of which he wouldn’t understand a single word.

  VI

  Lanny strolled about the grounds of Bienvenu, his home since he could remember. Always it seemed smaller after he had been visiting in chateaux and hotels particuliers, but he loved it and brought his smartest friends to it with pride. Now it was his duty to look things over and see what repairs might be needed to any of the three villas on the estate. He must consult with Leese, the Provencal woman who had risen from the post of cook to an informal sort of steward. It would be his duty to report matters to his mother, who was visiting in England, but would be coming back after Christmas to take her part in the gaieties of a new Riviera season. He played with the dogs, of which there were always too many, because nobody could bear to dispose of them.

  Lanny had a visit from Raoul Palma, a handsome young Spaniard—at least Lanny thought of him as young, just as he thought of himself. Hard to realize that Lanny was going to be thirty-five next month and that Raoul was past thirty! He wanted to get up a meeting in memory of Freddi Robin and wanted Lanny to come and make a good Socialist speech about him. But Lanny explained that his father was in Paris on one of his brief flying trips; also, Lanny had a wife and child in England whom he had been neglecting for the greater part of a year while getting his Jewish friends out of the clutches of Hitler and Goering. Lanny wrote a check to pay the cost of a hall, and told the grateful and attentive schoolmaster some of the things to say about Freddi.

  They talked about the progress of the school and about the political situation in France and other countries. That was the way a “parlor Pink” got his education and kept his contacts with the workers. Lanny apologized for his own way of life: as an art expert, advising the rich about the buying of paintings, he had a reason for traveling to all the cities and towns of this old and fear-tormented continent; as an American he was assumed to be a neutral in Europe’s quarrels, and it was the part of wisdom for him to keep that position. Thus he could meet the great ones, enjoy their confidence, and gain information which he could pass on quietly to working-class persons who could make use of it. The Spaniard was one of these; he had been born in a peasant hut and had been a humble clerk in a shoestore; but with a small subsidy from Lanny he had become a leader, attending conferences, making speeches, and furnishing news to the Socialist and labor press of the Midi.

  VII

  Raoul talked for a while about events in his native land, from which he had fled, driven by a cruel despotism which lined working-class rebels against the wall and shot them without ceremony. But three years ago the wretched King Alfonso had been dethroned; Spain had become a republic and its government had received an overwhelming vote of support from the people. Raoul Palma had been so excited he had wanted to go back, but Lanny had persuaded him that his duty lay with the school he had helped to build.

  Now it was just as well, for the teacher was deeply discouraged about his own country. It was the old tragic story of party splits and doctrinal disputes; the factions couldn’t agree on what to do, and the amiable elderly college professors and lawyers who composed the new government found it fatally easier to do nothing. The Spanish people continued to starve; and for how long would they rest content with the most well-meaning “Liberalism” which gave them neither bread nor the means of producing it?

  Lanny didn’t know Spain very well—only from stops on a yachting-cruise and a plane trip. But he knew the Spaniards here on the Riviera; they came to play golf and polo, to dance and gamble and flirt in the casinos, or to shoot pigeons, their idea of manly sport. They read no books, they knew nothing, but considered themselves far above the rest of mankind. Alfonso of the jimber-jaw and the unpleasant diseases liked to be amused, and when on holiday he had unbent with the rich Americans of this Coast of Pleasure. Lanny had played tennis with him, and wasn’t supposed to beat him, but had disregarded this convention. Now the ex-monarch was in Rome, intriguing with Mussolini to be restored to his throne.

  “You ought to go to Spain!” insisted Raoul. “You ought to know the Spanish workers—they haven’t all been killed. They have seen the light of modern ideas, and nothing will be able to blind them again.”

  Lanny replied that he had often thought of such a trip. “There are
pictures there I want to see and study. But it might be better to wait till you have got through expropriating the landlords, and then I can pick up a lot of bargains.”

  He said this with a smile, knowing that his friend would understand. Whenever the young organizer came to him for funds, Lanny would say: “I’ve just sold a picture, so I can afford it.” Or he’d say: “Wait till next week; I’ve got an oil princess in tow and expect to sell her a Detaze.” Raoul knew that in a storeroom on this estate were a hundred or more of the paintings of Lanny’s former stepfather, and whenever a purchaser came along, the Ecole des Travailleurs du Midi could have a mass meeting or a picnic with refreshments and speeches. But don’t say anything about Lanny’s part in it!

  VIII

  This was in October of 1934, and Adolf Hitler had held power in Germany for not quite two years. He was the man who dominated Lanny Budd’s thoughts; he was the new center of reaction in Europe, dangerous not merely because of his fanaticism, but also because he had in his hands the industrial power of Germany and was proceeding to turn it into military power. “It isn’t only what he has done to the Jews,” said the art expert. “He has done things much worse to the Socialists and to the whole labor movement in the Fatherland; but you don’t hear so much about it in the capitalist press of France.”

  They talked about this on their way into Cannes, where Lanny was taking the evening train for Paris. He drove his friend in the family car, with the chauffeur in the back seat to bring the car back. Lanny, who had met Hitler and heard him talk, warned Raoul that he was only half a madman and no fool whatever, but on the contrary a trickster of infinite cunning, who had managed to get the German people behind him by a program of radical social changes which he had no slightest intention of carrying out. “We can’t ignore him and his purposes,” the American insisted. “We can’t shut our eyes to him and go ahead with our plans just as if he didn’t exist. He is a reactionary and a slave-driver, and he has said in his book that his program requires the annihilation of France.”

  This was hard doctrine for Raoul Palma, an internationalist preaching disarmament and brotherhood. Here was his friend and patron insisting that the time for such ideas was past; nobody could trust Adolf Hitler in any agreement, and only prompt and united action could keep him from rearming Germany. Frenchmen of all parties had to get together on this program before it was too late. “But, Lanny,” objected the school director, “the French capitalists would rather have Hitler than have us!”

  “That’s because they don’t know Hitler,” was the reply.

  IX

  They talked about the disquieting state of the country in which they lived. The head of the French government was a round elderly gentleman wearing an old-fashioned white imperial; a former President of the Republic who had become Premier during a crisis in which nobody would trust anybody else. The mainspring of his being was a childish vanity, and he took delight in addressing the people of France over the radio as if they were his own progeny. But they were a stubborn brood, and by loud clamor had managed to keep Premier Doumergue from interpreting the constitution of the nation so that he could act independently of the Cabinet. What he wanted to do with his power was suspected by Raoul and confirmed by Lanny, who knew that the Premier of France held secret conferences with Colonel de la Roque, head of the Croix de Feu, the leading organization of the French Fascists.

  The American felt less anxiety about the situation because of the Foreign Minister, Louis Barthou, a Frenchman of the old school who had learned to distrust any and every sort of German and therefore was not to be fooled by Adolf Hitler’s wiles. This was a new point of view to Raoul, who looked upon Barthou as just one more politician and pointed to his reactionary utterances on domestic affairs; but Lanny felt sure he knew what was in the little round head with the high dome and the gray mustache and beard beneath. “He has some fine pictures and showed them to me, and a shelf of the books he has written—including lives of Danton and Mirabeau. You see he really knows the old revolutionary traditions.”

  “They all learn about them,” replied the skeptical schoolman; “the better to fool the workers and sell them out—exactly as Mirabeau did.”

  “Barthou will never sell out France to Germany. When I met him was before Hitler took power, but the little Gascon realized exactly what the Fuhrer meant. He said: ‘Hitler is the man who is going to dominate our political life for as long as he lives.’”

  Lanny reminded his friend of the “grand tour” which Barthou had recently made in the Balkans, to rally Yugoslavia and other states to an alliance against the new German counter-revolution. His success had been made plain by the effort the Nazis had made to bomb his train in Austria. “That’s the way you tell your friends nowadays,” added the American, and went on to point out that the determined little lawyer had been willing to drop his antagonism to the Soviet Union in the face of a greater peril; he had helped to bring Russia into the League of Nations last month and was working hard to prepare public opinion for a military alliance between that country and France.

  X

  The American was in a somber mood, the funeral having brought back to his mind all the horrors he had witnessed since the Nazi Fuhrer had seized the mastery of Germany. Lanny told of his meeting with Freddi Robin in Berlin, a fugitive from the Nazis, sleeping in the Tiergarten of in a shelter for the unemployed; then the broken and shuddering figure he had helped to carry across the boundary line between Germany and France, when at last it had pleased the fat General Goring to release his prey. Dreadful, unspeakably wicked men the Nazi chieftains were, and Lanny was haunted by the idea that it was his duty to give up all pleasures and all other duties and try to awaken the people of Western Europe to a realization of the peril in which they stood.

  So he spoke with repressed feeling; and then, when they reached the station, he bought an evening paper to read on the train. Glancing at its banner headlines he gave a cry. “LE ROI ALEXANDRE ET BARTHOU ASSASSINES!”

  Quickly Lanny’s eyes ran over the story, and he read the salient details to his friend. The King of Yugoslavia had come for a visit of state to France, to celebrate the signing of their treaty of alliance; he had landed at Marseille, and the Foreign Minister had met him at the dock. They had been driven in an open car into the city, through cheering throngs. In front of the stock exchange a man had run out from the crowd, shouting a greeting to the king, and before the police could stop him he had leaped upon the running-board and opened fire with an automatic gun, killing the king and fatally wounding Barthou, who tried to shield his guest.

  The crowd had beaten the assassin to death, in spite of the efforts of the police to save him. He had been identified as one of a Croatian terrorist organization; but Lanny said: “You’ll find the Nazis were behind him!” So it proved, in due course. The reactionary conspirators had been publishing a paper in Berlin, with funds obtained from the head of the foreign policy department of the Hitler party. The assassin had been traveling on a forged passport, obtained in Munich, and the weapon he had used bore the trademark of Mauser, the German munitions firm.

  Such was the new technique for the conquest of power. Fool those who were foolable, buy those who were buyable, and kill the rest. It was the third Nazi murder of foreign statesmen within a year. First, Premier Duca of Rumania had been shot to death. Then a band of gangsters had broken into the office of Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria, the Catholic statesman who had been responsible for the slaughter of the Socialist workers in Vienna and the bombardment of those blocks of model apartments which Lanny had so greatly admired. And now both signers of the Yugoslav-French agreement had been wiped out.

  “Good God!” exclaimed Raoul. “How much more will the people need to wake them up?”

  “A lot more, I’m afraid,” was Lanny’s heartsick reply. “You and I, Raoul, chose a bad time to be born!”

  2

  INDOCTUS PAUPERIEM PATI

  I

  In his youth Lanny had attended St
. Thomas’s Academy in Connecticut, and one of the subjects forced upon him was Latin. He had got so far as to translate several of the odes of Horace, and in his mind there remained a simile about a merchant whose vessels were wrecked, and he, “untaught to bear poverty,” refitted them and sent them forth again. Lanny thought of that when he sat at luncheon in the Hotel Crillon with another merchant, a Roman though he did not know it, and heard him planning with eagerness a new expedition of his ships. In nineteen hundred years the world had changed and now they were ships of the air, but that made little difference in the psychology of the merchant.

  Robbie Budd was entering his sixties, but was still driven by pride and ambition, still determined to prove that nothing could lick him. Five years ago the Wall Street crash had knocked him clean over the ropes, but he had picked himself up and wiped the blood out of his eyes and come in for round after round. The fact that his father had not named him as successor to the presidency of Budd Gunmakers Corporation, the fact that the great concern was no longer a Budd family affair, these blows might have finished a less sturdy fighter; but here was Lanny’s father ready to start all over again and show them the stuff he was made of. By “them” he meant his family, his friends, his business associates and rivals; more especially his older brother, who had fought him all his life for control of Budd’s, and the Wall Street banking crowd who had taken over the family name and the institution which for close to a century had been the family pride.

  Robbie’s contract as European representative of Budd Gunmakers still had more than a year to run, but Robbie was on the point of dropping it. He had been willing to work for his stern old Puritan father, but he couldn’t be happy serving a bunch of interlopers, no matter how greatly they valued his services and how careful they were of his feelings. Robbie was reviving the dream of his early years, of a magnificent new fabricating plant to be built on the Newcastle River above the Budd plant. The land was still there, and could be bought more cheaply than ever—for, whatever the New Deal had accomplished by the end of 1934, it hadn’t brought back land values and wasn’t likely to.