Rick sent his friend a bunch of clippings, showing how the man who had once lost his seat in the House of Commons for his convictions had now become the hero and darling of those who had unseated him. The entire capitalist press had rallied behind him, praising his action as the greatest of public services. "He will find that he is their prisoner," wrote Rick. "He can do nothing but what they permit; he can have no career except by serving them."
Rick mailed this letter; but before the steamer reached New York, the cables brought word that the prisoner of the Tories had failed. Britain was off the gold standard, and the pound sterling had lost about twenty per cent of its value! It happened to be the twenty-first of September, a notable day in Wall Street history, for it marked two years from the high point of the big bull market. In those two years American securities had lost sixty per cent of their value; and now came this staggering news, causing another drop! "Look where steel is now!" said Lanny Budd to his father over the telephone.
XII
In the midst of this world chaos Pierre Laval, innkeeper’s son, paid a visit to Germany to see what could be done for that frantic government. The boy driver had grown up into a short, stocky man with black hair always awry, with somber, rather piratical features and a thick black mustache. He had made a lot of money, a tremendous aid to a political career. Of his Socialist days he kept one souvenir: he always wore the little four-in-hand wash ties which had been the fashion in his youth, and had been cheap because he could wash them himself. In France it was well for a statesman to retain some proletarian eccentricity; that he sold out his convictions mattered less, for the people had become so cynical about public men that they hoped only to find the least dishonest.
With Laval traveled Aristide Briand, his Foreign Minister, another innkeeper’s son and another Socialist who had changed his mind. He had been a member of twenty-one cabinets—which had required not a little flexibility. But he had labored with genuine conviction to make peace between France and Germany. Now he was an old man, bowed and gray; the glorious organ voice was broken and the strong heart was soon to break. He was still pleading for peace, but he was the prisoner of Laval; and anyhow it was too late. Ancient hatreds and fears had prevailed, and now Germany was in a desperate plight, and France in a worse one, but couldn’t realize it.
A curious whim of history: Briand meeting with Hindenburg! The washerwoman’s child and the East Prussian aristocrat; old-time enemies, now both nearing their graves; each thinking about his country’s safety, and helpless to secure it. Der alte Herr talking about the menace of revolution in Germany; not the respectable kind which would put the Kaiser’s sons on the throne, but a dangerous gutter-revolution, an upsurge of the Lumpenproletariat, led by the one-time odd-job man, the painter of picture postcards, the "Bohemian corporal" named Schicklgruber. Briand demanding the dropping of the Austro-German customs-union project, while Hindenburg pleaded for a chance for his country to sell goods.
Briand denouncing the Stahlhelm and the new pocket-battleships, while Hindenburg complained that France was not keeping her promise to disarm. Hindenburg begging for loans, while Briand explained that France had to keep her gold reserve as the last bulwark of financial security in Europe. No, there wasn’t much chance of their getting together; the only one who could hope to profit by the visit was the aforesaid "Bohemian corporal," whose papers were raving alike at the French visitors and at the German politicians who licked their boots to no purpose.
Adolf Hitler Schicklgruber wouldn’t attack Hindenburg, for Hindenburg was a monument, a tradition, a living legend. The Nazi press would concentrate its venom upon the Chancellor, a Catholic and leader of the Center party, guilty of the crime of signing the Young Plan which sought to keep Germany in slavery until the year 1988. Now Hoover had granted a moratorium, but there was no moratorium for Brüning, no let-up in the furious Nazi campaign.
Lanny Budd knew about it, because Heinrich Jung had got his address, presumably from Kurt, and continued to keep him supplied with literature. There was no one at Shore Acres who could read it but Lanny himself; however, one didn’t need to know German, one had only to look at the headlines to know that it was sensational, and at the cartoons to know that it was a propaganda of cruel and murderous hate. Cartoons of Jews as monsters with swollen noses and bellies, of John Bull as a fat banker sucking the blood of German children, of Marianne as a devouring harpy, of the Russian bear with a knife in his teeth and a bomb in each paw, of Uncle Sam as a lean and sneering Shylock. Better to throw such stuff into the trash-basket without taking off the wrappers.
But that wouldn’t keep the evil flood from engulfing Germany, it wouldn’t keep millions of young people from absorbing a psychopath’s view of the world. Lanny Budd, approaching his thirty-second birthday, wondered if the time hadn’t come to stop playing and find some job to do. But he kept putting it off, because jobs were so scarce, and if you took one, you deprived somebody else of it—someone who needed it much more than you!
10. Conscience Doth Make Cowards
I
OCTOBER and early November are the top of the year in the North Atlantic states. There is plenty of sunshine, and the air is clear and bracing. A growing child can toddle about on lawns and romp with dogs, carefully watched by a dependable head nurse. A young mother and father can enjoy motoring and golf, or going into the city to attend art shows and theatrical first nights. Irma had been taken to the museums as a child, but her memories of them were vague. Now she would go with an expert of whom she was proud, and would put her mind on it and try to learn what it was all about, so as not to have to sit with her mouth shut while he and his intellectual friends voiced their ideas.
This pleasant time of year was chosen by Pierre Laval for a visit to Washington, but it wasn’t because of the climate. The Premier of France came because there were now only two entirely solvent great nations in the world, and these two ought to understand and support each other. Germany had got several billion dollars from America, but had to have more, and France didn’t want her to get them until she agreed to do what France demanded. The innkeeper’s son was received with cordiality; excellent dinners were prepared for him, and nobody brought up against him his early Socialistic opinions. Robbie Budd reported that what Laval wanted was for the President to do nothing; to which Robbie’s flippant son replied: "That ought to suit Herbert Hoover right down to the ground."
A few days later came the general elections in Britain. Ramsay MacDonald appealed to the country for support, and with all the great newspapers assuring the voters that the nation had barely escaped collapse, Ramsay’s new National government polled slightly less than half the vote and, under the peculiarities of the electoral system, carried slightly more than eight-ninths of the constituencies. Rick wrote that Ramsay had set the Labor party back a matter of twenty-one years.
Robbie Budd didn’t worry about that, of course; he was certain that the rocks had been passed and that a long stretch of clear water lay before the ship of state. Robbie’s friend Herbert had told him so, and who would know better than the Great Engineer? Surely not the editors of Pink and Red weekly papers! But Lanny perversely went on reading these papers, and presently was pointing out to his father that the British devaluation of the pound was giving them a twenty per cent advantage over American manufacturers in every one of the world’s markets. Odd as it might seem, Robbie hadn’t seen that; but he found it out by cable, for the Budd plant had a big hardware contract canceled in Buenos Aires. One of Robbie’s scouts reported that the order had gone to Birmingham; and wasn’t Robbie hopping!