Пользователь - o 3b3e7475144cf77c Страница 5

of what he called "New Thought," and then he would wander about the garden, looking at the

flowers and the birds, and perhaps giving them a treatment—for they too had life in them and

were products of love. Bienvenu appeared to contain everything that Mr. Dingle needed, and

he rarely went off the estate unless someone invited him.

The strangest whim of fate, that the worldly Beauty Budd should have chosen this man of

God to accompany her on the downhill of life! All her friends laughed over it, and were

bored to death with her efforts to use the language of "spirituality." Certainly it hadn't kept her

from working like the devil to land the season's greatest "catch" for her son; nor did it keep

her from exulting brazenly in her triumph. Beauty's religious talk no more than Lanny's

Socialist talk was causing them to take steps to distribute any large share of Irma's unearned

increment. On the contrary, they had stopped giving elaborate parties at Bienvenu, which was

hard on everybody on the Cap d'Antibes—the tradesmen, the servants, the musicians, the

couturiers, all who catered to the rich. It was hard on the society folk, who had been so scared

by the panic and the talk of hard times on the way. Surely somebody ought to set an example

of courage and enterprise—and who could have done it better than a glamour girl with a whole

bank-vault full of "blue chip" stocks and bonds? What was going to become of smart society if its

prime favorites began turning their estates into dairy farms and themselves into stud cattle?

V

There came a telegram from Berlin: "Yacht due at Cannes we are leaving by train tonight

engage hotel accommodations. Bess." Of course Lanny wouldn't follow those last instructions.

When friends are taking you for a cruise and paying all your expenses for several months, you

don't let them go to a hotel even for a couple of days. There was the Lodge, a third house on

the estate; it had been vacant all winter, and now would be opened and freshly aired and dusted.

Irma's secretary, Miss Featherstone, had been established as a sort of female major-domo and

took charge of such operations. The expected guests would have their meals with Irma and

Lanny, and "Feathers" would consult with the cook and see to the ordering of supplies.

Everything would run as smoothly as water down a mill-race; Irma would continue to lie in the

sunshine, read magazines, listen to Lanny play the piano, and nurse Baby Frances when one of

the maids brought her.

Lanny telephoned his old friend Emily Chattersworth, who took care of the cultural activities

of this part of the Riviera. Her drawing-room was much larger than any at Bienvenu, and

people were used to coming there whenever a celebrity was available. Hansi Robin always

played for her, and the fashionable folk who cared for music and the musical folk who were

socially acceptable would be invited to Sept Chenes for a treat. Emily would send Hansi a check,

and he would endorse it over to be used for the workers' educational project which was Lanny's

special hobby.

Just before sundown of that day Lanny and Irma sat on the loggia of their home, which

looked out over the Golfe Juan, and watched the trim white Bessie Budd glide into the harbor of

Cannes. They knew her a long way off, for she had been their home during the previous

summer, and Lanny had taken two other cruises in her. With a pair of field-glasses they could

recognize Captain Moeller, who had had a chance to marry them but had funked it. They could

almost imagine they heard his large Prussian voice when it was time to slow down for passing

the breakwater.

Next morning but one, Lanny drove into the city, with his little half-sister Marceline at his

side and Irma's chauffeur following with another car. The long blue express rolled in and

delivered five of their closest friends, plus a secretary and a nursemaid in a uniform and cap

with blue streamers, carrying an infant in arms. It was on account of this last that the cruise was

being taken so early in the year; the two lactant mothers would combine their dairy farms,

put them on shipboard, and transport them to delightful places of this great inland sea, famed

in story.

Just prior to the World War, Lanny Budd, a small boy traveling on a train, had met a Jewish

salesman of electrical gadgets; they had liked each other, and the stranger had given Lanny his

card. This small object had lain in a bureau drawer; and if, later on, Lanny hadn't happened

to be rummaging in that drawer, how much would have been different in his life! He

wouldn't have written to Johannes Robin, and Johannes wouldn't have come to call on him in

Paris, and met Lanny's father, and with the father's money become one of the richest men in

Germany. Lanny's half-sister wouldn't have met Hansi Robin, and shocked her family by

marrying a Jewish musician. The yacht wouldn't have been called the Bessie Budd, and wouldn't

have taken Lanny and his family on three cruises, and been the means of Lanny and Irma's

getting married in a hurry. They mightn't have got married at all, and there wouldn't have

been any honeymoon cruise to New York, or any Baby Frances, or any floating dairy farm! In

short, if that business card, "Johannes Robin, Agent, Maatschappij voor Electrische

Specialiteiten, Rotterdam," had stayed covered up by Lanny Budd's neckties and handkerchiefs

most of Lanny's life would have been missing!

VI

Two happy members of the prosperous classes welcoming five of their intimate friends on the

platform of a railroad station. Everybody there knew who the Budds were, and knew that when

they hugged and kissed people, and laughed and chatted with them gaily, the people must be

wealthy and famous like themselves. A pleasant thing to have friends whom you can love and

appreciate, and who will love and appreciate you. Pleasant also to have villas and motorcars and

yachts; but many people do not have them, and do not have many dear friends. They know

themselves to be dull and undistinguished, and feel themselves to be lonely; they stand and watch

with a sad envy the behavior of the fortunate classes on those few occasions when they

condescend to manifest their feelings in public.

Johannes Robin was the perfect picture of a man who has known how to make use of his

opportunities in this world. His black overcoat of the finest cloth lined with silk; his black

Homburg hat; his neatly trimmed little black mustache and imperial; his fine leather traveling-

bags with many labels; his manner of quiet self-possession; his voice that seemed to be caressing

you—everything about him was exactly right. He had sought the best of both body and mind

and knew how to present it to the rest of the world. You would never hear him say: "Look at

what I, Johannes Robin, have achieved!" No, he would say: "What an extraordinary civilization,

in which a child who sat on the mud floor of a hut in a ghetto and recited ancient Hebrew texts

while scratching his flea-bites has been able in forty years to make so much money!" He

would add: "I'm not sure that I'm making the best use of it. What do you think?" That

flattered you subtly.

As for Mama Robin, there wasn't much you could do for her in the way of elegance. You

could employ the most skillful couturier and give him carte blanche as to price, but Leah, wife of

Jascha Rabinowich, would remain a Yiddishe mother, now a grandmother; a bit dumpier every

year, and with no improvement in her accent, whether it was Dutch or German or English she

was speaking. All she had was kindness and devotion, and if that wasn't enough you would

move on to some other part of the room.

The modern practice of easy divorces and remarriages makes complications for genealogists.

Lanny had grown tired of explaining about his two half-sisters, and had taken to calling them

sisters, and letting people figure it out. The name of Marceline Detaze made it plain that she was

the daughter of the painter who had been killed in the last months of the war; also it was possible

to guess that Bessie Budd Robin was the daughter of Lanny's father in New England. On that

stern and rock-bound coast her ancestors had won a hard and honest living; so Bess was tall

and her features were thin and had conscientiousness written all over them. Her straight

brown hair was bobbed, and she wore the simplest clothes which the style- makers would allow

to come into the shops. She was twenty-two and had been married four years, but had put off

having children because of her determination to play accompaniments for Hansi in exactly the

way he wanted them.

Very touching to see how she watched every step he took, and managed him exactly as her

mother at home managed a household. She carried his violin case and wouldn't let him pick up

a suitcase; those delicate yet powerful fingers must be devoted to the stopping of violin strings

or the drawing of a bow. Hansi was a piece of tone-producing machinery; when they went on tour

he was bundled up and delivered on a platform, and then bundled up and carried to a hotel

and put to bed. Hansi's face of a young Jewish saint, Hansi's soulful dark eyes, Hansi's dream of

loveliness embodied in sound, drove the ladies quite beside themselves; they listened with hands

clasped together, they rushed to the platform and would have thrown themselves at his feet, to say

nothing of his head. But there was that erect and watchful-eyed granddaughter of the Puritans,

with a formula which she said as often as it was called for: "I do everything for my husband

that he requires—absolutely everything!"

The other members of the party were Freddi Robin's wife, and her baby boy, a month older

than little Frances. Freddi was at the University of Berlin, hoping to get a degree in economics.

Rahel, a serious, gentle girl, contributed a mezzo-soprano voice to the choir of the yacht; also

she led in singing choruses. With two pianos, a violin, a clarinet, and Mr. Dingle's mouth-organ,

they could sail the Mediterranean in safety, being able to drown out the voices of any sirens

who might still be sitting on its rocky shores.

VII

If music be the food of love, play on! They were gathered in Lanny's studio at Bienvenu,

which had been built for Marcel and in which he had done his best work as a painter. There

were several of his works on the walls, and a hundred or so stored in a back room. The piano

was the big one which Lanny had purchased for Kurt Meissner and which he had used for seven

years before going back to Germany. The studio was lined with bookcases containing the

library of Lanny's great-great-uncle. Here were all sorts of memories of the dead, and hopes of

the living, with cabinets of music-scores in which both kinds of human treasures had been

embodied and preserved. Hansi and Bess were playing Tchaikovsky's great concerto, which

meant so much to them. Hansi had rendered it at his debut in Carnegie Hall, with Bess and her

parents in the audience; a critical occasion for the anxious young lovers.

Next evening they went over to Sept Chenes to meet a distinguished company, most of the

fashionable people who had not yet left the Cote d'Azur. The whole family went, including Irma

and Rahel. Since it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Bienvenu, the young nursing mothers

might have three hours and a half of music and social life; but they mustn't get excited. The

two of them heartened each other, making bovine life a bit more tolerable. The feat they were

performing was considered picturesque, a harmless eccentricity about which the ladies gossiped;

the older ones mentioned it to their husbands, but the younger ones kept quiet, not wishing to

put any notions into anybody's head. No Rousseau in our family, thank you!

Hansi and Bess played Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, a composition which audiences welcome

and which has to be in the repertoire of every virtuoso: a melancholy and moving andante over

which the ladies may sigh; a scherzando to which young hearts may dance over flower-strewn

meadows. It was no holiday for Bess, who wasn't sure if she was good enough for this

fastidious company; but she got through it all right and received her share of compliments.

Lanny, who knew the music well, permitted his eyes to roam over the audience, and wondered

what they were making of it, behind the well-constructed masks they wore. What to them was

the meaning of these flights of genius, these incessant calls to the human spirit, these unremitting

incitements to ecstasy? Whose feet were swift enough to trip among these meadows? Whose

spring was high enough to leap upon these mountain-tops? Who wept for these dying worlds?

Who marched in these triumphal processions, celebrating the birth of new epochs?

The thirty-year-old Lanny Budd had come to understand his world, and no longer cherished

any illusions concerning the ladies and gentlemen at a soiree musicale. Large, well-padded

matrons who had been playing bridge all afternoon, and had spent so many hours choosing the

fabrics, the jeweled slippers, the necklaces, brooches, and tiaras which made up their splendid

ensemble—what fairy feet did they have, even in imagination? What tears did they shed forthe

lost hopes of mankind? There was Beauty's friend, Madame de Sarce, with two marriageable

daughters and an adored only son who had squandered their fortune in the gambling-palaces.

Lanny doubted if any one of the family was thinking about music.

And these gentlemen, with their black coats and snowy shirt-fronts in which their valets had

helped to array them—what tumults of exultation thrilled their souls tonight? They had all

dined well, and more than one looked drowsy. Others fixed their eyes upon the smooth bare

backs of the ladies in front of them. Close to the musicians sat Graf Hohenstauffen, monocled

German financier, wearing a pleased smile all through the surging finale; Lanny had heard

him tell Johannes Robin that he had just come from a broker's office where he had got the