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X

With the members of Irma's immediate family Lanny found that he was getting along

surprisingly well. The domineering Fanny Barnes was set in her opinions, but for the most

part these had to do with questions of manners and taste and family position; she didn't give

much thought to politics and economics. Pride was her leading motive; she lived in the faith that

her Protestant Episcopal God had assigned to her family a specially precious strain of blood. She

had the firm conviction that bearers of this blood couldn't do anything seriously wrong, and

she found ways to persuade herself that they hadn't. She had made up her mind to make the

best of this son-in-law whom fate had assigned to her, and presently she was finding excuses

for him. Did someone call him a Socialist? Well, he had been reared in Europe, where such

ideas didn't mean what they did in America. Hadn't some distinguished Englishman —Fanny

couldn't recall who it was—declared: "We are all Socialists now"?

For Lanny as a prince consort there was really quite a lot to be said. His manners were

distinguished and his conversation even more so. He didn't get drunk, and he had to be urged

to spend his wife's money. The uncertainty about his mother's marriage ceremony hadn't

broken into the newspapers, and he was received by his father's very old family. So the large and

majestic Queen Mother of Shore Acres set out to butter him with flattery and get from him

the two things she ardently desired: first, that he should help Irma to produce a grandson to be

named Vandringham; and second, that they should leave Baby Frances at Shore Acres to be

reared in the Vandringham tradition.

Uncle Horace, that pachyderm of a man who moved with such astonishing energy, proved to be

an equally complaisant relative. He had a sense of humor, with more than a trace of mischief in

it. He was amused to hear Lanny "razz" the American plutocracy, and especially those

representatives of it who came to the Barnes estate. The fact that he himself had been knocked

down and out had diminished his admiration for the system and increased his pleasure in

seeing others "get theirs." He chuckled at Lanny's Pinkish jokes, and took the role of an

elderly courtier "playing up" to a newly crowned king. Did he hope that Lanny might some

day persuade Irma to let him have another fling in the market? Or was he merely making sure

of holding onto the comfortable pension which she allowed him? Anyhow, he was good

company.

XI

The echoes of calamity came rolling from Germany to England. Trade was falling off,

factories closing, unemployment increasing; doubts were spreading as to the soundness of the

pound sterling, for a century the standard of value for all the world; investors were taking

refuge in the dollar, the Dutch florin, the Swiss franc. Rick told about the situation in his

country; boldness was needed, he said—a capital levy, a move to socialize credit; but no political

party had the courage or the vision. The Tories clamored to balance the budget at any cost, to

cut the dole, and the pay of the schoolteachers, even of the navy. It was the same story as

Hoover with his "rugged individualism." Anything to save the gold standard and the power of

the creditor class.

At the beginning of September the labor government fell. An amazing series of events—the

labor Prime Minister, Ramsay Mac-Donald, and several of his colleagues in the old Cabinet went

over to the Tories and formed what he called a "National" government to carry out the anti-

labor program. It had happened before in Socialist history, but never quite so dramatically, so

openly; Rick, writing about it for one of the leftist papers, said that those who betrayed the

hopes of the toiling masses usually managed to veil their sell-out with decorous phrases, they

didn't come out on the public highway to strip themselves of their old work-clothes and put on

the livery of their masters.

Rick was a philosopher, and tried to understand the actions of men. He said that the ruling

classes couldn't supply their own quota of ability, but were forced continually to invade the

other classes for brains. It had become the function of the Socialist movement to train and

equip lightning-change artists of politics, men who understood the workers and how to fool

them with glittering promises and then climb to power upon their shoulders. In Italy it had

been Mussolini, who had learned his trade editing the principal Socialist paper of the country. In

France no fewer than four premiers had begun their careers as ardent revolutionaries; the

newest of them was Pierre Laval, an innkeeper's son who had driven a one-horse omnibus for his

father, and while driving had read Socialist literature and learned how to get himself elected

mayor of his town.

For what had these men sold out their party and their cause? For cash? That played a part, of

course; a premier or prime minister got considerably more than a Socialist editor, and learned

to live on a more generous scale. But more important yet was power: the opportunity to

expand the personality, to impress the world, to be pictured and reported in the newspapers, to

hold the reins and guide the national omnibus. A thousand flatterers gather round the statesman,

to persuade him that he is indispensable to the country's welfare, that danger lies just ahead,

and that he alone can ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.

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

OCTOBERand 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