The tourists didn’t come, and the "season" was slow—so slow that it began to stop before it got started. The hotelkeepers were frightened, the merchants of luxury goods were threatened with ruin, and of course the poor paid for it. Lanny knew, because he went on helping with that Socialist Sunday school, where he heard stories which spoiled his appetite and his enjoyment of music, and troubled his wife because she knew what was in his thoughts—that she oughtn’t to spend money on clothes and parties while so many children weren’t getting enough to eat.
But what could you do about it? You had to pay your servants, or at any rate feed them, and it was demoralizing if you didn’t give them work to do. Moreover, how could you keep up the prices of foods except by buying some? Irma’s father and uncles had fixed it firmly in her mind that the way to make prosperity was to spend; but Lanny seemed to have the idea that you ought to buy cheap foods and give them to the poor. Wouldn’t that demoralize the poor and make parasites of them? Irma thought she saw it happening to a bunch of "comrades" on the Riviera who practically lived on the Budd bounty, and rarely said "Thank you." And besides, what was to become of the people who raised the more expensive foods? Were they going to have to eat them?
Life is a compromise. On Sunday evening Lanny would go down into the Old Town of Cannes and explain the wastes of the competitive system to a group of thirty or forty proletarians: French and Provencal, Ligurian and Corsican, Catalan and even one Algerian. On Monday evening he would take his wife and mother to Sept Chenes and play accompaniments for a singer from the Paris opera at one of Emily’s soirees. On Tuesday he would spend the day helping to get ready for a dinner-dance at Bienvenu, with a colored jazz band, Venetian lanterns with electric lights all over the lawns, and the most fashionable and titled people coming to do honor to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes. Yes, there were still some who had money and would not fail in their economic duty! People who had seen the storm coming and put their fortune into bonds; people who owned strategic industries, such as the putting up of canned spaghetti for the use of millions who lived in tiny apartments in cities and had never learned how to make tomato sauce!
VII
Robbie Budd came visiting that winter. He had some kind of queer deal on; he was meeting with a former German U-boat commander who had entered the service of a Chinese mandarin, and this latter had been ousted and now wanted Budd machine guns so as to get back. He had got the support of some bankers in French IndoChina, but they didn’t want to buy French munitions, for fear of publicity—a shady affair all round, but Robbie explained with a grin that one had to pick up money where one could these days. No chance to sell any of the products of peace in Europe now!
He told the same stories of hard times which his son had heard in Berlin and Vienna. There were breadlines in all the American cities, and on street corners one saw men, and some women, stamping their feet and holding out apples in their half-frozen hands. The price of apples having slumped, this was a way to get rid of them; a nickel apiece, Mister, and won’t you help a poor guy get a cup of coffee? There was no way to count the unemployed, but everybody agreed that the number was increasing and the situation was terrible. Robbie thanked God for the Great Engineer whom he had helped to elect President; that harassed man was standing firm as a rock, insisting that Congress should balance the budget. If it was done, business would pick up in the end. It always had and always must.
Robbie had paid off one-half of the notes which he had given to Lanny, Beauty, and Marceline as security for the money turned over to him during the Wall Street panic. He had invested a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the three of them in United States government bonds, and now tried to persuade them to shift it to stocks. They discussed the matter for an hour or so, sitting in front of a blazing fire of cypress wood in the drawing-room of the home. Beauty wavered, but Lanny said "No," and said it again and again.
"Look where steel is now!" exclaimed the father.
"But," argued the younger man, "you said exactly the same thing when you were here last time. You were sure it couldn’t go lower."
He took his father on a tour of the civilized world. Where was there a nation that had money to buy American steel? Britain, France, Germany—all could make more than they could market, and the smaller nations were kept going only by the fears of their creditors. Here was Robbie, himself a steel man, reduced to selling to Chinese mandarins and South American revolutionists! Russia wanted steel desperately, but had to learn to make it for herself because she had no foreign exchange and nobody would trust her. "And you talk about steel coming back!" exclaimed the son.
Robbie couldn’t answer, but neither could he change. He knew that Lanny got his ideas out of his Pink and Red papers—which he kept in his own study, so as not to offend the eyesight of his relatives and friends. All these papers had a vested interest in calamity; but they couldn’t be right, for if so, what would become of Robbie’s world? He said: "Have it your way; but mark what I tell you, if only Hoover can hold out against inflationary tendencies, we’ll be seeing such a boom as never was in the world before."
VIII
Lanny returned to the delights of child study. Truly a marvelous thing to watch a tiny organism unfolding, in such perfect order and according to schedule. They had a book which told them what to expect, and it was an event when Baby Frances spoke her first word two full weeks ahead of time, and a still greater thrill when she made her first effort to get up on her feet. All, both friends and servants, agreed that they had never seen a lovelier female infant, and Lanny, with his imaginative temperament, fell to speculating as to what might become of her. She would grow up to be a fine young woman like her mother. Would it be possible to teach her more than her mother knew? Probably not; she would have too much money. Or would she? Was there any chance of a benevolent revolution on the Viennese model, compelling her to do some useful work?
He had the same thought concerning his half-sister, who was ripening early in the warm sunshine of the Midi and in the pleasure-seeking of its fashionable society. Marceline was going to be a beauty like her mother; and how could she fail to know it? From earliest childhood she had been made familiar with beauty-creating and beauty-displaying paraphernalia: beauty lotions, beauty creams, beauty powders and paints, all put up in such beautiful receptacles that you couldn’t bear to throw them away; clothing designed to reveal beauty, mirrors in which it was to be studied, conversation concerning the effects of it upon the male for whom it was created. Self-consciousness, sex-consciousness were the very breath of being of this young creature, paused on tiptoe with excitement, knowing by instinct that she was approaching the critical period of her life. The prim Miss Addington was troubled about her charge, but Beauty, who had been that way herself, took it more easily. Lanny, too, had been precocious at that age, and so could understand her. He would try to teach her wisdom, to moderate her worldly desires. He would talk about her father, endeavoring to make him effective as an influence in her life. The pictures made him a living presence, but unfortunately Marceline did not know him as a poor painter on the Cap, working in a pair of stained corduroy trousers and an old blue cap. She knew him as a man of renommé, a source of income and a subject of speculation; his example confirmed her conviction that beauty and fame were one. To receive the attentions of other persons was what she enjoyed. Important persons, if possible—but anyone was better than no one!