And then one of Zaharoff’s married daughters, who also had looked upon the son of Budd as a parti. And old M. Faure, rich importer of wines and olive-oil who had bought paintings of nude ladies from Zoltan. A traveling maharajah who bought ladies—but from another dealer! A Russian grand duke in exile; a crown prince from one of the Scandinavian lands; a couple of literary lions, so that you wouldn’t appear to be snobbish. Lanny had been a dear and hadn’t asked for any Reds or Pinks; they wouldn’t appreciate the honor, he said.
Irma wasn’t clever; but that is a quality for the "outs," whereas she was among the "ins." She was serene and gracious, and as she moved among this elegant company little shivers of happiness ran over her and she thought: "I am getting away with it; it is truly distingué"—this being one of the first French words she had learned. Lanny, thirty-two and world weary, thought: "How hard they all try to keep up a front and to be what they pretend!" He thought: "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players"—these being among the first words of Shakespeare he had learned.
He knew much more about these players than his wife did. He had been hearing stories from his father and his business friends, from his mother and her smart friends, from his Red uncle, from Blum and Longuet and other Pinks. This lawyer for the Comité des Forges who had all the secrets of la haute finance hidden in his skull; this financier, paymaster for the big banks, who had half the members of the Radical party on his list; this publisher who had taken the Tsar’s gold before the war and now was a director of Skoda and Schneider-Creusot! Who would envy these men their stage roles? The whole show was tolerable to the players only because of the things they didn’t know, or which they thrust into the back of their minds. Lanny Budd, treading the boards, playing acceptably his part as prince consort, enjoyed it with one-half his mind, while the other half wondered: how many of his guests could bear to dance if they knew what would be happening to them ten years from now?
12. Pleasure at the Helm
I
THE Dress-Suit Bribe was in rehearsal in London, and if Lanny could have had his own way, he would have been there to watch every moment. But Irma had her new white elephant on her hands, and had to get some use of it; several weeks would have to pass before she would feel justified in going away and leaving its staff of servants idle. Meanwhile, she must invite people to come, at any hour from noon to midnight. Supposedly she was doing it because she wanted to see them, but the real reason was that she wanted them to see her. And having offered them hospitality, she was under obligation to accept theirs; she would be forever on the go, attending social affairs or getting ready for future affairs.
Always she wanted company; and Lanny went along, because it had been his life’s custom to do what he didn’t want to do rather than to see a loved one disappointed and vexed. His wife was attaining her uttermost desire, she was standing on the apex of the social pyramid; and what could it mean to her to climb down and go off to London to watch a dozen actors and actresses rehearsing all day on an empty stage, the women in blouses and the men with their coats off on a hot day? The fact that one of these women was Phyllis Gracyn didn’t increase her interest, and Lanny mustn’t let it increase his too much!
He persuaded the young Robins to stay for a while; he much preferred their company to that of the fashionable folk. They would play music every morning, and at odd times when social duties permitted. Nothing was allowed to interfere with Hansi’s violin practice; it was his task to master one great concert piece after another—which meant that he had to fix in his head hundreds of thousands of notes, together with his own precise way of rendering each one. Nobody who lived near him could keep from being touched by his extraordinary conscientiousness. Lanny wished he might have had some such purpose in his own life, instead of growing up an idler and waster. Too late now, of course; he was hopelessly spoiled!
II
Sitting in the fine library of the Duc de Belleaumont, filled with the stored culture of France, Lanny had a heart-to-heart talk with his half-sister, from whom he had been drifting apart in recent years. She was one who had expected great things of him, and had been disappointed. It wasn’t necessary that he should agree with her, she insisted; it was only necessary that he should make up his mind about anything, and stick to it. Lanny thought that he had made up his mind as to one thing: that the Communist program, applied to the nations which had parliamentary institutions, was a tactical blunder. But it would be a waste of time to open up this subject to Bess.
She had something else she wanted to talk about: the unhappiness which was eating like a cancer into the souls of the members of the Robin family. They had become divided into three camps; each husband agreeing with his own wife, but with none of the other members of the family; each couple having to avoid mentioning any political or economic problem in the presence of the others. With affairs developing as they now were in Germany, that meant about every subject except music, art, and old-time books. Johannes read the Borsenzeitung, Hansi and Bess read the Rote Fahne, while Freddi and Rahel read Vorwarts; each couple hated the very sight of the other papers and wouldn’t believe a word that was in them. Poor Mama, who read no newspaper and had only the vaguest idea what the controversy was about, had to serve as a sort of liaison officer among her loved ones.
There was nothing so unusual about this. Lanny had lived in disagreement with his own father for the greater part of his life; only it happened that they both had a sense of humor, and took it out in "joshing" each other. Jesse Blackless had left home because he couldn’t agree with his father; now he never discussed politics with his sister, and always ended up in a wrangle with his nephew. The majority of radicals would tell you the same sort of stories; it was a part of the process of change in the world. The young outgrew their parents—or it might happen that leftist parents found themselves with conservative-minded children. "That will be my fate," opined the playboy.
In the Robin family the problem was made harder because all the young people took life so seriously; they couldn’t pass things off with teasing remarks. To all four of them it seemed obvious that their father had enough money and to spare, and why in the name of Karl Marx couldn’t he quit and get out of the filthy mess of business plus politics in which he wallowed? Just so the person who has never gambled cannot understand why the habitué hangs on, hell-bent upon making up his night’s losses; the teetotaler cannot understand the perversity which compels the addict to demand one more nip. To Johannes Robin the day was a blank unless he made some money in it. To see a chance of profit and grab it was an automatic reflex; and besides, if you had money you had enemies trying to get it away from you, and you needed more of it in order to be really safe. Also you got allies and associates; you incurred obligations to them, and when a crisis came they expected you to play a certain part, and if you didn’t you were a shirker. You were no more free to quit than a general is free to resign in the midst of a campaign.