Also Bub told about conditions in Newcastle, where some kind of social change seemed impossible to postpone. There wasn’t enough activity in those great mills to pay for the taxes and upkeep, and there was actual hunger among the workers. The people had mortgaged their homes, sold their cars, pawned their belongings; families had moved together to save rent; half a dozen people lived on the earnings of a single employed person. So many New Englanders were proud and wouldn’t ask for charity; they just withdrew into a corner and starved. Impossible not to be moved by such distress, or to realize that something must be done to get that great manufacturing plant to work again.
Bub Smith had always been close to Robbie Budd, and so this change of mind appeared important. There was no secret about it, the man declared; he had told Mr. Robert how he felt, and Mr. Robert had said it would make no difference. Lanny thought that, too, was important; for some fifteen years or so he had been hoping that his father would see the light, and now apparently it was beginning to dawn. In a letter to Robbie he expressed his gratification; and Robbie must have had a smile!
V
The young people had their promised swim, diving off the rocks into that warm blue Mediterranean water. Afterward they sat on the shore and Bub lugged a couple of heavy boxes from the car, one containing Budd automatics and other weapons, the other containing several hundred rounds of ammunition. Bub had brought a liberal supply from Newcastle, enough to stave off a siege by all the bandits in France. He said the family ought to keep in practice, for they never knew when there might be an uprising of the Fascists or Nazis, and "we comrades" would be the first victims. He was shocked to learn that neither Hansi nor Freddi had ever fired a gun in his life, and hadn’t thought of the possible need. The ex-guard wanted to know, suppose their revolution went wrong and the other side appeared to be coming out on top?
He showed them what he would propose to do about it. He threw a corked bottle far out into the water, and then popped off the cork with one shot from an army service revolver. He threw out a block of wood and fired eight shots from a Budd .32 automatic, all in one quick whir, and not one of the shots struck the water; Bub admitted that that took a lot of practice, because the block jumped with every hit, and you had to know how far it would jump in a very small fraction of a second. He did it again to show them that it was no accident. He couldn’t do it a third time, because the block of wood had so much lead in it that it sank.
Lanny couldn’t perform stunts like that, but he was good enough to hit any Nazi, Bub said. All the targets were either Nazis or Fascists; for the guard had made up his mind that trouble was coming and no good fooling yourself. He wanted Hansi to learn to shoot, but Hansi said he would never use his bowing hand for such a nerve-shattering performance. Bess would have to protect him; she had learned to shoot when a child, and proved that she had not forgotten. Then it was Freddi’s turn, and he tried it, but had a hard time keeping his eyes open when he pulled the trigger. The consequences of this pulling upon a Budd automatic were really quite alarming, and to a gentle-souled idealist it didn’t help matters to imagine a member of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party in the line of the sights.
Lanny, who had been used to guns all his life, had no idea of the effect of these performances upon two timid shepherd boys out of ancient Judea. Hansi declared that his music didn’t sound right for a week afterward; while as for the younger brother, the experiment had produced a kind of moral convulsion in his soul. To be sure, he had seen guns being carried in Berlin and elsewhere by soldiers, policemen, S.S.'s and S.A.'s; but he had never held one in his hand, and had never realized the instantaneous shattering effect of an automatic. Calling the targets a portion of the human anatomy had been a joke to an ex-cowboy, but Freddi’s imagination had been filled with images of mangled bodies, and he kept talking about it for some time afterward. "Lanny, do you really believe we are going to see another war? Do you think you can live through it?"
Freddi even talked to Fanny Barnes about the problem, wondering if it mightn’t be possible to organize some sort of society to teach children the ideal of kindness, in opposition to the dreadful cruelty that was now being taught in Germany. The stately Queen Mother was touched by a young Jew’s moral passion, but she feared that her many duties at home would leave her no time to organize a children’s peace group in New York. And besides, wasn’t Germany the country where it needed to be done?
VI
Fanny set up a great complaint concerning the heat at Bienvenu; she became exhausted and had to lie down and fan herself and have iced drinks brought to her. But Beauty Budd, that old Riviera hand, smiled behind her embonpoint, knowing well that this was one more effort—and she hoped the last—to carry Baby Frances away. Beauty took pleasure in pointing out the great numbers of brown and healthy babies on the beaches and the streets of Juan; she pointed to Lanny and Marceline as proof that members of the less tough classes could be raised here successfully. Baby herself had developed no rashes or "summer complaints," but on the contrary rollicked in the sunshine and splashed in the water, slept long hours, ate everything she could get hold of, and met with no worse calamity than having a toe nipped by a crab.
So the disappointed Queen Mother let her bags be packed and stowed in the trunk of Lanny’s car, and herself and maid stowed in the back seat, from which she would do as much driving as her polite son-in-law would permit. On the evening of the following day they delivered her safely in London, and obtained for her a third-row seat on the aisle for the opening performance of The Dress-Suit Bribe, a play of which she wholly disapproved and did not hesitate to say so. Next day when most of the London critics agreed with her, she pointed out that fact to the author, who, being thirty-four years of age, ought to have sowed his literary wild oats and begun to realize the responsibilities he owed to his class which had built the mighty British Empire. The daughter of the Vandringhams and daughter-in-law of the Barneses was as Tory as the worst "diehard" in the House of Lords, and when she encountered a propagandist of subversion she wanted to say, in the words of another famous queen: "Off with her head!"—or with "his."
But not all the audience agreed with her point of view. The house divided horizontally; from the stalls came frozen silence and from the galleries storms of applause. The critics divided in the same way; those with a pinkish tinge hailed the play as an authentic picture of the part which fashionable society was playing in politics, an indictment of that variety of corruption peculiar to Britain, where privileges which would have to be paid for in cash in France or with office in America, go as a matter of hereditary right or of social prestige. In any case it was power adding to itself, "strength aiding still the strong."
It was the kind of play which is automatically labeled propaganda and therefore cannot be art. But it was written from inside knowledge of the things which were going on in British public life and it told the people what they needed to know. From the first night the theater became a battleground, the high-priced seats were only half filled but the cheap ones were packed, and Rick said: "It’s a question whether we can pay the rent for two or three weeks, until it has a chance to take hold."
Lanny replied: "We’ll pay, if I have to go and auction off some pictures." No easy matter raising money with hard times spreading all over the world; but he telephoned all the fashionable people he knew, begging them to see the play, and he cajoled Margy, Dowager Lady Eversham-Watson, to have a musicale and pay the Robin family a couple of hundred pounds to come and perform: the money to go for the play. Irma "chipped in," even though in her heart she didn’t like the play. As for Hansi, he wrote to his father, who put five hundred pounds to his son’s credit with his London bankers—a cheap and easy way to buy peace in his family, and to demonstrate once again how pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!