of Vienna. The Meissners had told them that this bald-headed old Silenus was in financial
trouble; he always would be, it having been so planned by the statesmen at Paris, who had cut
the Austro-Hungarian Empire into small fragments and left a city of nearly two million people
with very little hinterland to support it. The Graf was a gentleman of the old school who had
learned to dance to the waltzes of the elder Strauss and was still hearing them in his fancy. He
invited Irma and Lanny to visit him, and mentioned tactfully that he had a number of fine
paintings. Since it was on their way home, Lanny said: "Let's stop and have a look."
It was a grand marble palace on the Ringstrasse, and the reception of the American visitors
was in good style, even though the staff ot servants had been cut, owing to an outrageous law
just passed by the city administration—a graduated tax according to the number of your
servants, and twice as high for men as for women! But a Socialist government had to find
some way to keep going. Here was a city with great manufacturing power and nowhere to
export its goods. All the little states surrounding it had put up tariff barriers and all efforts at a
customs union came to naught. Such an agreement with Germany seemed the most obvious
thing in the world, but everybody knew that France would take it as an act of war.
An ideal situation from the point of view of a young art expert with American dollars in the
bank! The elderly aristocrat, his host, was being hounded by his creditors, and responded
promptly when Lanny invited him to put a price on a small-sized Jan van Eyck representing the
Queen of Heaven in the very gorgeous robes which she perhaps was now wearing, but had
assuredly never seen during her sojourn on earth.
Among Irma's acquaintances on Long Island was the heiress of a food-packing industry; and
since people will eat, even when they do nothing else, Brenda Spratt's dividends were still
coming in. She had appeared fascinated by Lanny's accounts of old masters in Europe and his
dealings in them; so now he sent her a cablegram informing her that she could obtain a unique
art treasure in exchange for four hundred and eighty thousand cans of spaghetti with tomato
sauce at the wholesale price of three dollars per case of forty-eight cans. Lanny didn't cable all
that, of course—it was merely his way of teasing Irma about the Long Island plutocracy. Next
day he had a reply informing him at what bank he could call for the money. A genuine triumph of
the soul of man over the body, of the immortal part over the mortal; and incidentally it would
provide Lanny Budd with pocket-money for the winter. He invited his wife to state whether her
father had ever done a better day's business at the age of thirty-one.
The over-taxed swells of Vienna came running to meet the American heiress and to tell her
brilliant young husband what old masters they had available. Irma might have danced till
dawn every night, and Lanny might have made a respectable fortune, transferring culture to
the land of his fathers. But what he preferred was meeting Socialist writers and party leaders
and hearing their stories of suffering and struggle in this city which was like a head without a
body. The workers were overwhelmingly Socialist, while the peasants of the country districts
were Catholic and reactionary. To add to the confusion, the Hitlerites were carrying on a
tremendous drive, telling the country yokels and the city hooligans that all their troubles
were due to Jewish profiteers.
The municipal government, in spite of near-bankruptcy, was going bravely ahead with a
program of rehousing and other public services. This was the thing of which Lanny had been
dreaming, the socialization of industry by peaceful and orderly methods, and he became
excited about it and wished to spend his time traveling about looking at blocks of workers'
homes and talking to the people who lived in them. Amiable and well-bred people, going to
bed early to save light and fuel, and working hard at the task of making democracy a success.
Their earnings were pitifully small, and when Lanny heard stories of infant mortality and child
malnutrition and milk prices held up by profiteers, it rather spoiled his enjoyment of stately
banquets in mansions with historic names. Irma said: "You won't let yourself have any fun, so
we might as well go on home."
VI
It wasn't much better at Bienvenu, as the young wife was soon to learn. The world had become
bound together with ties invisible but none the less powerful, so that when the price of corn
and hogs dropped in Nebraska the price of flowers dropped on the Cap d'Antibes. Lanny
explained the phenomenon: the men who speculated in corn and hogs in Chicago no longer gave
their wives the money to buy imported perfumes, so the leading industry of the Cap went
broke. Leese, who ran Bienvenu, was besieged by nieces and nephews and cousins begging to
be taken onto the Budd staff. There was a swarm of them already, twice as many as would have
been employed for the same tasks on Long Island; but in the Midi they had learned how to
divide the work, and nobody ever died from overexertion. Now there were new ones added, and
it was a delicate problem, because it was Irma's money and she was entitled to have a say. What
she said was that servants oughtn't to be permitted to bother their employers with the hard-luck
stories of their relatives. Which meant that Irma still had a lot to learn about life in France!
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!
IX
Amid this oddly assorted family Parsifal Dingle went on living his quietist life. He had the
firm faith that it was impermissible to argue with people; the only thing was to set an example,
and be certain that in due course it would have its effect. He took no part in any controversy,
and never offered an opinion unless it was asked for. He sought nothing for himself, because, he
said, everything was within him. He went here and there about the place, a friend of the
flowers and the birds and the dogs. He read a great deal, and often closed his eyes; you wouldn't
know whether he was praying or asleep. He was kind to everybody, and treated rich and poor
