During the composer’s time in Bienvenu his work had been full of bitterness and revolt, but since he had come home he had apparently managed to find courage and hope. He didn’t write program music, and Lanny didn’t ask what the new work was supposed to signify; indeed, he would rather not be told, for the military character of much of the music suggested it was meant for the Nazis. It pictured the coming of a deliverer, it portrayed the German people arising and marching to their world destiny; at its climax, they could no longer keep in march tempo, but broke into dancing; great throngs of them went exulting into the future, endless companies of young men and maidens, of that heroic and patriotic sort that Heinrich Jung and Hugo Behr were training.
The music didn’t actually say that, and every listener was free to make up his own story. Lanny chose to include youths and maidens of all lands in that mighty dancing procession. He remembered how they had felt at Hellerau, in the happy days before the war had poisoned the minds of the peoples. Then internationalism had not been a Schimpfwort, and it had been possible to listen to Schubert’s C-major symphony and imagine a triumphal procession shared by Jews and Russians, by young men and maidens from Asia and even from Africa.
Irma was much impressed by the welcome this music received. She decided that Kurt must be a great man, and that Beauty should be proud of having had such a lover, and of having saved him from a French firing-squad. She decided that it was a distinguished thing to have a private orchestra, and asked her husband if it wouldn’t be fun to have one at Bienvenu. They must be on the lookout for a young genius to promote.
Lanny knew that his wife was casting around in her mind for some sort of career, some way to spend her money that would win his approval as well as that of to point out that this was a difficult thing to do, for it was better to have no salon at all than to have a second-rate one, and the eminent persons who frequent such assemblages expect the hostess not merely to have read their books but to have understood them. It isn’t enough to admire them extravagantly—indeed they rather look down on you unless you can find something wrong with their work.
Now Lanny had to mention that musical geniuses are apt to be erratic, and often it is safer to know them through their works. One cannot advertise for one as for a butler or a chef; and suppose they got drunk, or took up with the parlor-maid? Lanny said that a consecrated artist such as Kurt Meissner would be hard to find. Irma remarked: "I suppose they wouldn’t be anywhere but in Germany, where everybody works so hard!"
V
Among the guests they had met at the Schloss was an uncle of their host, the Graf Oldenburg of Vienna. The Meissners had told them that this bald-headed old Silenus was in financial trouble; he always would be, it having been so planned by the statesmen at Paris, who had cut the Austro-Hungarian Empire into small fragments and left a city of nearly two million people with very little hinterland to support it. The Graf was a gentleman of the old school who had learned to dance to the waltzes of the elder Strauss and was still hearing them in his fancy. He invited Irma and Lanny to visit him, and mentioned tactfully that he had a number of fine paintings. Since it was on their way home, Lanny said: "Let’s stop and have a look."
It was a grand marble palace on the Ringstrasse, and the reception of the American visitors was in good style, even though the staff ot servants had been cut, owing to an outrageous law just passed by the city administration—a graduated tax according to the number of your servants, and twice as high for men as for women! But a Socialist government had to find some way to keep going. Here was a city with great manufacturing power and nowhere to export its goods. All the little states surrounding it had put up tariff barriers and all efforts at a customs union came to naught. Such an agreement with Germany seemed the most obvious thing in the world, but everybody knew that France would take it as an act of war.
An ideal situation from the point of view of a young art expert with American dollars in the bank! The elderly aristocrat, his host, was being hounded by his creditors, and responded promptly when Lanny invited him to put a price on a small-sized Jan van Eyck representing the Queen of Heaven in the very gorgeous robes which she perhaps was now wearing, but had assuredly never seen during her sojourn on earth.
Among Irma’s acquaintances on Long Island was the heiress of a food-packing industry; and since people will eat, even when they do nothing else, Brenda Spratt’s dividends were still coming in. She had appeared fascinated by Lanny’s accounts of old masters in Europe and his dealings in them; so now he sent her a cablegram informing her that she could obtain a unique art treasure in exchange for four hundred and eighty thousand cans of spaghetti with tomato sauce at the wholesale price of three dollars per case of forty-eight cans. Lanny didn’t cable all that, of course—it was merely his way of teasing Irma about the Long Island plutocracy. Next day he had a reply informing him at what bank he could call for the money. A genuine triumph of the soul of man over the body, of the immortal part over the mortal; and incidentally it would provide Lanny Budd with pocket-money for the winter. He invited his wife to state whether her father had ever done a better day’s business at the age of thirty-one.
The over-taxed swells of Vienna came running to meet the American heiress and to tell her brilliant young husband what old masters they had available. Irma might have danced till dawn every night, and Lanny might have made a respectable fortune, transferring culture to the land of his fathers. But what he preferred was meeting Socialist writers and party leaders and hearing their stories of suffering and struggle in this city which was like a head without a body. The workers were overwhelmingly Socialist, while the peasants of the country districts were Catholic and reactionary. To add to the confusion, the Hitlerites were carrying on a tremendous drive, telling the country yokels and the city hooligans that all their troubles were due to Jewish profiteers.
The municipal government, in spite of near-bankruptcy, was going bravely ahead with a program of rehousing and other public services. This was the thing of which Lanny had been dreaming, the socialization of industry by peaceful and orderly methods, and he became excited about it and wished to spend his time traveling about looking at blocks of workers' homes and talking to the people who lived in them. Amiable and well-bred people, going to bed early to save light and fuel, and working hard at the task of making democracy a success. Their earnings were pitifully small, and when Lanny heard stories of infant mortality and child malnutrition and milk prices held up by profiteers, it rather spoiled his enjoyment of stately banquets in mansions with historic names. Irma said: "You won’t let yourself have any fun, so we might as well go on home."
VI
It wasn’t much better at Bienvenu, as the young wife was soon to learn. The world had become bound together with ties invisible but none the less powerful, so that when the price of corn and hogs dropped in Nebraska the price of flowers dropped on the Cap d’Antibes. Lanny explained the phenomenon: the men who speculated in corn and hogs in Chicago no longer gave their wives the money to buy imported perfumes, so the leading industry of the Cap went broke. Leese, who ran Bienvenu, was besieged by nieces and nephews and cousins begging to be taken onto the Budd staff. There was a swarm of them already, twice as many as would have been employed for the same tasks on Long Island; but in the Midi they had learned how to divide the work, and nobody ever died from overexertion. Now there were new ones added, and it was a delicate problem, because it was Irma’s money and she was entitled to have a say. What she said was that servants oughtn’t to be permitted to bother their employers with the hard-luck stories of their relatives. Which meant that Irma still had a lot to learn about life in France!