I
THE little town of Beauvais lies about fifty miles to the north of Paris. It is something over a thousand years old, and has an ancient cathedral, and battlements now made into boulevards. It was like Paris, in that the Germans had got there almost, but not quite. Its inhabitants had heard the thunder of guns, and were still hearing it, day and night, a distant storm where the sun came up. Thunderstorms are capricious, and whether this one would return was a subject of hourly speculation. People studied the bulletins in front of the ancient Hotel de Ville and hoped that what they read was true.
To keep the storm away, everybody was working day and night. The Chemin de Fer du Nord passed through the town, which had become a base: soldiers detraining, guns and ammunition being unloaded, depots established to store food and fodder and pass them up to the front, everything that would be needed if the line was to hold and the enemy be driven back. No use to expect comfort in such a place; count yourself lucky that you were alive.
Beauty Budd was here because she belonged to that class of people who are accustomed to have their own way. She had met cabinet ministers at tea parties and salons, she had given a generous check for the aid of the French wounded, she bore the name of a munitions family now being importuned to expand their plant and help to save la patrie. So when she appeared at the door of an official, the secretary bowed and escorted her in; the official said: “Certainly, Madame,” and signed the document and had it stamped.
So the car with the red-headed college boy chauffeur had been passed by sentries on the edge of Beauvais, and the harassed authorities of the town did their best to make things agreeable for a lady whose grief added dignity to her numèrous charms. “Yes, Madame, we will do our best to find your friend; but it will not be easy, because we have no general records.” There was another battle going on; the grumbling guns were making hundreds of new cases every hour, and they were dumped here because there was no time to take them farther.
“We will go ourselves and search,” said Madame; and when they told her that all the buildings in the town which could be spared had been turned into hospitals, she asked: “Can you give me a list?” The boys drove her to one place after another, and she would stand waiting while a clerk looked through a register of the living and another of the dead; her hands would be clenched and her lips trembling, and the two escorts at her side would be ready to catch her if she started to fall.
At last they found the name of Marcel Detaze; in a dingy old inn, so crowded with cots in the corridors that there was barely room to get through. It was Milton's “Stygian cave forlorn, 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.” Beauty Budd, accustomed to every luxury, was plunged into this inferno, ill-lighted, clamorous with cries and groans, stinking of blood and suppurating wounds and disinfectants. Ambulances and carts were unloading new cases on the sidewalk; sometimes they were dead before a place could be found for them, and then they were carted to open graves outside the city.
II
Marcel was alive. That was all Beauty had asked for. They could not tell her much about him. His legs had been broken and had been set. His back was injured, they didn't know how badly. He doubtless had internal injuries. His burns had been dressed; very painful, of course, but they did not think he would be blind. “We have no time, Madame,” they said. “We do not sleep, we are exhausted.”
Beauty could see that it was true; doctors and nurses and attendants, all were pale and had dark rings under their eyes, and some of them staggered. “C'est la guerre, Madame.” “I know, I know,” said Beauty.
They took her to where he lay upon a cot, with a dozen other men in the same room. There would have been no way of recognizing him; his head was a mass of bandages, only an opening for his mouth and nose, and these appeared to be open sores. She had to kneel by him and whisper: “Is it you, Marcel?” He did not stir; just murmured: “Yes.” She said: “Darling, I have come to help you.” When she put her ear to his lips, she heard faintly: “Let me die.” There was something wrong with his voice, but she made out the words: “Don't try to save me. I would be a monster.”
Beauty had never been taught anything about psychology; only what she had picked up by watching people she knew. She had never heard of a “death-wish,” and if anyone had spoken of autohypnosis she would have wondered if it was a gadget for a motorcar. But she had her share of common sense, and perceived right away that she had to take command of Marcel's mind. She had to make him want to live. She had to find what might be an ear under the mass of bandages, make sure that the sounds were going into it, and then say, firmly and slowly:
“Marcel, I love you. I love your soul, and I don't care what has happened to your body. I mean to stand by you and pull you through. You have got to live for my sake. No matter what it costs, you must stand it, and see it through. Do you hear me, Marcel?”
“I hear you.”
“All right then. Don't say no to me. You must do it because I want you to. For the sake of our love. I want to take you away from here, and nurse you, and you will get over this. But first you have to make up your mind to it. You have to want to live. You have to love me enough. Do you understand me?”
“It is not fair to you —”
“That is for me to say. Don't argue with me. Don't waste your strength. You belong to me, and you have no right to leave me, to deprive me of your love. I don't care what you say, I don't want to hear it — I want you. Whatever there is of you that the doctors can save — that much is mine, and you must not take it from me. You can live only if you try to, and I ask you to do that. I want your promise. I want you to say it and mean it. I have to go out and make arrangements to take you to Paris; but I can't go till I know that you will fight, and not give up. You told me to have courage, Marcel. Now I have it, and you have to repay me. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“I want your promise. I want to know that if I go out to get help, you will fight with everything that's in you to keep alive, to keep your hope and courage, for my sake, and for our love. There's no use talking about love if you're not willing to do that much for it. Answer me that you will.”
She put her ear to the opening again, and heard a whisper: “All right.” She touched him gently on the shoulder, not knowing what part of him might be a wound, and said: “Wait for me. I'll come back just as quickly as I can make arrangements. Anything else I can do?”
“Water,” he said. She didn't know how to give it to him, for she was afraid to lift his head, and she had no tube, and no one to ask. She dipped her handkerchief into a glass and squeezed a little into his mouth, and kept that up until he said it was enough.
III
The doctors made no objection to having a patient taken off their hands. They said he couldn't be crowded into an automobile, that would surely kill him; and there was no ambulance available. It was a question of making changes in Beauty's own car, one of the new and fashionable kind called a “limousine,” a square black box. It might be possible to take out two of the seats, the right-hand ones, and make a place to lay a narrow mattress on the floor. Then Jerry made a suggestion — why not put a board platform on top of the two seats, with a mattress on that?
They drove to a garage; there was nobody but the wife of the proprietor and an elderly mechanic, both greatly startled by the idea of cutting out a piece of the back of a luxury car, so that a wounded soldier could be slid into it. The windshield was large, and the mechanic thought he might be able to remove that. Beauty said: “Break it if necessary. We can have it replaced in Paris.” Jerry took the proprietress aside and spoke magic words: “C'est I'ami de cette belle dame.”
“Ah, c'est I'amour!” That explained everything, and they went to work with enthusiasm. Love will find out the way! They managed to get the windshield off without too great harm, and they put some boards together and made a platform, and the proprietress brought an old mattress, and Lanny worked at it with his pocket knife, cutting it down to the right size. “Ah, ces Américains!”
While all this was being done, Beauty was out looking for a telephone, to call a surgeon she knew in Paris, and arrange for Marcel to be received at a private hospital. When she got back, the platform was in place, and the mattress on top of it, a reasonably good place for a wounded man to lie for the time it would take to get him to the big city.
Two tired attendants carried the patient down and slid him onto the mattress without damage. Beauty distributed money to everyone who helped them, and Jerry gave them cigarettes, which they wanted even more at the moment. It was dark when they set out, but no matter — Marcel was alive, and Beauty sat in the rear seat, which brought her head about level with his ear, and for two hours she whispered: “Marcel, I love you, and you are going to live for my sake.” She found a thousand variations of it, and Lanny listened, and learned things about love. He was in a cramped position — they had taken out some of the bags and tied them onto the rear of the car, and Lanny was squatting on the floor at his mother's knees, underneath Marcel's mattress. He couldn't see anything, but he could hear, and he learned that love is not all pleasure, but can be agony and heartache, martyrdom and sacrifice. He learned what the clergyman was talking about in the marriage service: “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
IV
The human body is a complicated engine with many miles of elastic pipes large and small. In order that the engine may develop the maximum horsepower per pound of weight, the pipes are made of fragile materials, and the framework which encloses and supports them is porous and brittle. When you take such a contraption fifty feet up in the air and explode a mass of hydrogen gas above it, and let it crash onto hard ground, you produce in a second or two results which surgeons and nurses may need a long time to remedy.
There were no physicians in Paris who were not overworked, and no hospital which was not crowded; but the lady with the magical name of Budd used her influence, and Robbie, getting the news by cable from his son, replied: “Spare no expense.” So Marcel was X-rayed and investigated, and his burns were treated according to the modern technique of cleaning away damaged tissues. After several days of watching, the doctors said that he would live, if he did not become discouraged by the ordeals he would have to undergo, and if his amour propre was not too greatly wounded by the certainty of looking like a scarecrow.
It was up to Beauty. She could have that scarecrow if she wanted it, and she did. There were no more thoughts about Pittsburgh now; she had made her bed and she would lie in it — right here in a private room in a maison de santé. She got herself some nurse's uniforms and made a job of it; the people of the place were only too glad, having plenty to do without this difficult case. She had a cot in one corner of the room, and for weeks hardly ever left it; she took no chance of Marcel's amour propre breaking loose and causing him to throw himself out of the window. She would be right there, to keep reminding him that he belonged to her, and that her property sense was strong.
Troops of little demons came and sat upon the metal bars which made the head and foot of Marcel's bed. His physical eyes were swathed in bandages, but he saw them plainly with his mind's eye. Some had round shaven heads with Pickelhauben on; some had sharp-pointed mustaches which they twisted and turned up at the ends; others were just regular devils with horns and red tails. They came in relays, and pinched the painter's wounded flesh and poked needles into it; they twisted his broken joints, they pulled and strained his damaged pipes — in short, they gave him no peace day or night. The sweat would stand out on him — wherever he had enough skin left for that to happen. He would writhe, and do his best not to groan, because of that poor woman who sat there in anguish of soul, talking to him when he couldn't listen, trying to help him when there wasn't any help. When you are in pain you are alone.
There were the burns that kept having to be dressed; there were bones that had been set wrong and had to be broken again; he was always being transported to the operating room for more probing and poking. The doctors could give him opiates, of course, but there was a limit, if they intended to keep him alive. He just had to stand it; he had to learn to live with pain and make a game of it. The doctors would help him by making jokes, and letting him make them. He took to calling them “plumbers,” and threatening to get an American one, because the French ones didn't know their business. They answered that they would know it a lot better before this war was over. Beauty could hardly stand such jokes, but she toughened herself. “C'est la guerre”
V
The youth and his youthful tutor had rooms in a hotel near by. The walls had white wainscoting and pink flowered silk above it, and the chairs were upholstered to match. The elevators looked as if they were made of gold, and were of open grillwork, so that you could watch people rising up or sinking down. An elderly official in a grand uniform set the front doors to revolving for them, and young women musicians in red coats and gold braid played Hungarian dances while they ate their meals. It was a life of unimaginable luxury for Jerry Pendleton, whose father owned a couple of drug stores in a town of Kansas.
They got some books and faithfully studied every morning. After lunch they walked, and looked at pictures and the other sights of Paris, and then went to relieve Lanny's mother so that she could have a nap. The pair were a comfort to Marcel; for men have to be together, it appears; they just can't stand women all the time. Men understand why you have to get out into the world, in spite of danger and death. When Marcel was able to listen, he enjoyed hearing about American college life, including football; and about a trip on a cattle boat, and then tramping over Europe, sleeping in haystacks. He wished that he had thought of something so original when he was a youth.
Also, of course, he had to know about the war. Beauty had hoped never to hear of it again, but she had to read the news to him, and learn to think about strategy instead of broken bodies. Those two armies had locked themselves together, like wild stags which have got their horns caught and are doomed to butt each other around the forest until both of them drop. All that bitter winter the armies would thrust here and yield there, until gradually they got settled down into the earth. The Germans constructed an elaborate set of entrenchments, line behind line; to the defense of these lines they would bring up everything they had, and Britain and France would do the same on the other side of “no man's land.” Each army was frantically getting ready for the spring “push” that was to end the war — so the experts all said, only they differed as to what the ending would be.
Winters in Paris are disagreeable, and people of means do not stay if they can help it. But Beauty hardly ever went out, and the boys didn't mind, because they were young and everything was new and delightful. They saw motion pictures, French and American; they went to plays, and Jerry improved his French. They had a piano in their suite — for Robbie wrote that he was making a pile of money, and Lanny might have anything he wanted, provided he did not smoke or drink or go with prostitutes.
Friends came to see Beauty and Marcel: Emily Chattersworth, very serious now, completely wrapped up in the affairs of her blesses; Sophie and her Eddie, she trying so hard to keep her man entertained and hoping that the sight of poor Marcel might teach him the cruelty and wickedness of fighting. But it didn't work that way; men seemed to be drawn to death like moths into the flame; they thought of vengeance rather than of safety. Lanny wrote to Rick, telling what had happened, and it surely did not act as a deterrent with the English boy; he longed all the more to get up there in the air and hunt a Taube.
The time came when the sufferer's burns were healed enough so that the bandages could be taken off. That was a time of fresh trials for Beauty — the doctors had to warn her, she must be prepared for the worst, and not let Marcel see any trace of horror in her face. He wouldn't have a mirror, but of course he would put his fingers to his face and feel what was there. His friends must help him get used to it, and make him believe that it made no difference to them.
Beauty, who had been named for her looks, and valued hers and others' very high among the gifts of life, had chosen a man who possessed fine blond hair and mustaches, grave, melancholy features, and an expression of romantic tenderness. Now he had no hair at all, just a red scalp, and his face was a flaming scar. His lips were gone on one side, so that he could only make a pretense at articulating the letters b and p. Out of the gaping wound his teeth grinned hideously, and the gum of the lower jaw was all exposed. Some day a facial surgeon might replace the lip, so the doctors assured him. Fortunately his eyesight was uninjured, but one of his upper eyelids was gone, and most of his ears.
Beauty had to go and look at that mask, and smile affectionately, and say that it didn't matter a bit. Marcel's right hand was well enough to be kissed, and that was where she kissed him. Since he liked so much to make jokes, she told him that she would take up needlework, like other old ladies, and learn to patch up his skin. Seriously she insisted that it was his soul she cared about, and that wasn't changed. After saying all this, she went off to the little room which she had to dress in, and there wept hysterically, cursing God and the Kaiser.
Lanny and Jerry, duly warned, went in armed with cheerfulness. “Well, do you think you can stand me?” asked the victim; and Lanny said: “Don't be silly, Marcel. You know we'd like you in sections if you came that way.”
Jerry added: “I read an article about what the surgeons are doing, making new faces. Gosh, it takes your breath away!”
“They've taken away pretty nearly everything but my breath,” replied the painter.
Lanny said: “They've left your eyes and your hands, and you'll go back to the Cap and paint better than ever.” That was the way to talk!
VI
What was Beauty going to make of this blow which fate had dealt her? She believed in happiness and talked about it as a right. A minister's daughter, raised in a stuffy, uncultured home, she had learned to loathe incessant droning of hymns and preaching of tiresome duty; she had fled from it, and still avoided every mention of its symbols. But suddenly all those hated things had sprung as it were out of the earth, had seized her and bound her with chains which there could be no breaking.
Lanny was all tenderness and kindness, and when she wanted to weep he was there to console her. In his presence she wept for Marcel; he never knew that she went alone and wept for herself. Over and over she fought this bitter battle. No use trying to get away from it — her bridges were burned. She couldn't desert this wreck of a man, and whatever happiness she found would have to be by his side. She who was so dainty had had to accustom herself to blood and stenches; and now she would have to eat and sleep and walk and talk in the presence of what ordinary people see only in nightmares.
Even from her devoted son she must hide her rage at this fate. Even to herself she was ashamed to admit that she regretted her bargain and dreamed of a happiness she might have had in a far-off land of plenty and peace. She had to force herself to be loyal to her choice; but this moral compulsion was associated in her mind with a dull and stolid religion, full of phrases which seemed to have been designed to take the gaiety and charm out of existence. Mabel Blackless, seventeen years old and bursting with the joy of life, hadn't wanted to lay her burdens at the foot of the cross, or to have any redeeming blood spilled for her; she had wanted to see Paris, and had borrowed money and run away to join her brother.
And now it seemed that she was back where she had come from; teaching herself to carry the cross. Her best friends mustn't know about it, because if they did they would pity her, and to be pitied was unendurable. She must tie herself down once for all! In that mood she went out one day and told her story to the maire of the arrondissement, and arranged for him to come to the hospital. She went back and told Marcel what she had done, and refused to hear any of his objections, pretending to have her feelings hurt by them. With two of the nurses for witnesses, they were married under the French civil law.
Did Marcel guess what was in her heart? She had to fight him, and lie vigorously; how else would he be persuaded to go on living? She and her son and her son's tutor had to make real to themselves the game they played. It wasn't hard for Lanny, because art counted for so much with him; also, it was wartime, and everybody was full of fervors, and wounds were a medal or badge of glory. The marriage made Beauty a “respectable woman” for the first time; but oddly enough it meant a social comedown, the name of Budd being one of power. She would have to get busy and boost Marcel's paintings, and make herself “somebody” again!
VII
The first thing was to contrive something for him to wear over his face. Hero or no hero, he couldn't bear to let anybody look at that mask of horror. He would cover the top of his head with a skullcap, and across his forehead would hang a close-fitting silk veil, with small holes for eyes and nose. Beauty went out and got some pink silk lingerie material, but he wouldn't wear pink; he wanted gray, so that it wouldn't show the dust; they compromised on white when Beauty said that she would make a lot of them and wash them with her own hands. She made a pattern, and after that had something to keep her fingers busy while she sat by his bedside.
It was springtime before he was able to move about, and they took him back to Juan in the car, making a two-day journey of it, so as not to put any strain on him. He looked not so bad with his skullcap and veil; the world was getting used to the sight of mutilés — and not yet tired of them. Jerry supported him on one side and Lanny on the other, and they got him into Bienvenu without mishap.
Oh, the glory of that sunshine in the little court; the almost overpowering scent of orange blossoms and jasmine in the evening, and the song of the nightingales! Here were three women to adore him and wait upon him, and nobody to disturb him; here Beauty meant him to spend the rest of his days in peace, and paint whatever wonderful things he might have in him.' She was going to give up all her frivolous life — save only such contacts as might help in a campaign to win recognition for genius.
There were just a few painter friends Marcel wanted to see, and these would come to him, and bring their work for him to look at — or if it was too big, Lanny would bring it in the car. The patient was soon able to sit up and read, and there were plenty of books and magazines. Often they read aloud; Jerry came and tutored Lanny, and Marcel would listen and improve his English. They had music; and when he grew stronger he walked about the place. The furies of pain would never let him entirely alone, but he learned to outwit them. He was a more silent man than he used to be; there were things going on inside him about which he did not tell and did not wish to be asked by anyone.
VIII
The military deadlock at the front continued. All winter long the Allies had spent their forces trying to take trenches defended by machine guns — a weapon of which the Germans had managed to get the biggest supply. It was something that Robbie Budd had helped to teach them — and which he had tried in vain to teach the French and British. He couldn't write freely about it now, but there were hints in his letters, and Lanny knew what they meant, having been so often entertained by his father's comic portrayals of the British War Office officials with whom he had been trying to do business. So haughty they were, so ineffable, almost godlike in their self-satisfaction — and so dumb! No vulgar American could tell them anything; and now dapper young officers strolled out in front of their troops, waving their swagger sticks, and the German sharpshooters knocked them over like partridges off tree limbs. It was sublime, but it wasn't going to win this war of machines.
All the nations had come to realize that they were facing a long struggle. Old M. Rochambeau, who came often to see Beauty and her husband, used a terrible phrase, “a war of attrition.” It was like the game of checkers in which you had one more man than your enemy, so every time you swapped with him, you increased your advantage. “Yes, dear lady,” said the ex-diplomat, in answer to Beauty's exclamation of horror, “that is the basis on which military strategy is being calculated, and no one stops to ask what you or I think about it.”
Man power plus manufacturing power was what would count. Britain had sacrificed her little professional army in order to save the Channel ports, and now she was rushing a new army into readiness, a volunteer army of a million men. There would be a second million, and as many more as needed; they would be shipped to some part of the fighting line, and swapped for Germans, man for man, or as near to it as possible.
The Turkish politicians had been bought into the war on the German side; which meant that the Black Sea was shut off, and nothing could be sent into Russia's southern ports. So a British expedition had been sent to take the Dardanelles. Rick informed Lanny that a cousin of his was going as a private in one of these regiments; Rosemary wrote that her father had been promoted to the rank of colonel, and was to command this same regiment. Rosemary had extracted a promise from her mother to be allowed to study nursing after one more year, and perhaps she would some day be on one of those ships. She promised that she would wave to Lanny as she went by!
It wasn't long before Italy was bought by the Allies, and that was important to people who lived in Provence. It lifted a fear from their souls, and freed the regiments guarding the southeastern border. “You see,” said Marcel to his wife, “I saved a few months by volunteering!” It had been a sore point, that he had gone out of his way to get himself smashed up. Now she could congratulate herself that it had been done quickly!
IX
Marcel's paintings had been stored in the spare room of the villa, and now he would set them up one by one and look at them. He wanted to see what sort of painter he had really been, in those days that now seemed a different lifetime. Lanny and Jerry and M. Rochambeau would join him, and make comments, more or less expert. Lanny and his tutor thought they were marvelous, but the painter took to shaking his head more and more. No, they weren't much; it was too easy to do things like that; there was no soul in them. Lanny protested; but the old diplomat said: “You've become a different man.”
It was something which happened now and then to painters, poets, musicians. Sometimes it amounted to a transformation. Verdi had changed his style entirely in his middle years; Tolstoy had decided that his greatest novels were useless, even corrupting. Van Gogh had painted everything gloomy and grim in Holland, and then had come to the Midi and exploded in a burst of color. “You will start work all over,” said the old gentleman; “find some new way to say what you feel.”
People who didn't understand art — people like Marcel's wife, for example — were going to have an unhappy time while he was groping his way into that new stage of life. He became restless and discontented; he found fault with everybody and everything; his life had come to nothing. He took to going out at night, when people couldn't stare at his mask, and wandering about the roads on the Cap. Beauty was exasperated, but she dared not show it; she was haunted by the idea that if she made him unhappy he might try to get back into the army, or else in some fit of melancholia he might seek to release her from her burden by jumping off the rocks. She had never forgotten Lanny's suggestion of that possibility, at the time when she was thinking about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She ordered built for her genius a little studio in an out of the way corner of the place; north light, and all modern conveniences, including a storeroom for his canvases; the whole place of stone, entirely fireproof. She got him a new easel, and a pneumatic cushion for his chair, to spare his sore bones. There was everything ready for him — everything but his own spirit. He would go to the place and sit and brood. He would spend much time stretching canvases on frames, and would sit and dab paint on them, and finally would take them out behind the studio and burn them, saying that he was no good any more. What he wanted to say couldn't be said in any medium known.
Blazing hot summer had come. It was before the Riviera had been discovered as a summer resort, but Lanny, now fifteen, went about all day in bathing trunks and loved it. Marcel sat in his studio in the same costume — with nobody to look at his scarred and battered body. He had taken to staying by himself; he painted or read all day, and ate his meals alone, and only came out after dark: Then he would take a long walk, or if there were visitors he cared about, he would sit on the veranda in the dark with them. Or he would sit alone and listen to Lanny playing the piano.
X
The war had lasted a year. Some thought it was a stalemate, and others thought that Germany was winning. She held her line in France, and let the Allies waste themselves pounding at it while she broke the Russian armies. She had launched gas warfare, a new device filling the world with dismay. She was answering the British blockade by submarine warfare; British waters were a “military area,” and all vessels in them liable to be sunk without warning.
In May had come the attack upon the Lusitania, the incident which excited the greatest horror in the United States. This great passenger liner, with more than two thousand persons on board, was passing the Irish coast in a calm sea: two o'clock in the afternoon, and the passengers had come from lunch, and were walking the decks, or playing cards, reading or chatting, when a submarine rose from the depths and launched a torpedo, blowing a hole in the huge vessel's side. The sea rushed in and sank her in a few minutes, drowning some twelve hundred persons, including more than a hundred babies.
When Americans read about the sinking of merchant vessels, British or neutral, and the drowning of the crews, they didn't know any of the people, and their imagination didn't have much to take hold of. But here were people “everybody” knew — society people, rich people, some of them prominent and popular — writers like Justus Miles Forman and Elbert Hubbard, theatrical people like Charles Frohman and Charles Klein, millionaires like the Vanderbilts. Their friends had gone to the pier in New York to see them off, or to the pier to welcome them — and then they read this horror story. When the boatloads of survivors were brought in, the papers of the world were filled with accounts of families torn apart, of fathers and mothers giving their lives to save their little ones, of quiet heroism and serenity in the face of death.
Americans in France felt the shock even more intensely, for nearly everyone had friends, American or English, on board. Two of Mrs. Emily's oldest friends had given their lives to save children not their own. The sister of Edna Hackabury, now Mrs. Fitz-Laing, was among those of whom no word was heard. Beauty counted half a dozen persons of her acquaintance on the passenger list, and found only two on the list of survivors. Not much of the spirit of “neutrality” was left in the minds of ladies and gentlemen who discussed such matters over their afternoon tea.
Thus America was dragged into the center of the world debate. President Wilson protested, and the German government answered that submarines could not give warning without risking destruction, and manifestly could not take off passengers and crew. The Lusitania had carried cartridges — so Germany charged, and the British denied it, and how was the truth to be known? The Germans agreed to sink no more such vessels, but they did not keep the promise. All passenger vessels carried cargo, and most merchant vessels carried passengers, and how could a submarine under war conditions make certain? The Germans demanded that President Wilson should resist the British attempt to starve the German people and should insist that American ships be allowed to carry to Germany food which Germany had bought and paid for. When President Wilson wrote letters denouncing German barbarity, the Allies were delighted; when he wrote letters denouncing British violations of American trade rights, all sympathizers with the Allies denounced him.
For a year Robbie had kept writing to his son, never failing to warn him against losing his head. Robbie was determined that no Budd should be drawn into Europe's quarrels; Budds were businessmen, and did not let themselves be used to pull anybody's chestnuts out of the fire. Robbie had been on the inside, and knew that every one of these nations was thinking about its own aggrandizement. Twice it happened that an employee was coming to France, and Robbie took the trouble to write a long letter and have it mailed in Paris, so that it wouldn't be opened by a censor. “Study and think and improve your mind, and keep it clear of all this fog of hatred and propaganda.” Lanny did his best to obey — but it is not pleasant to differ from everybody you meet.
XI
For several months Marcel worked at his painting and burned up everything he produced. Lanny got up the courage to protest, and got his mother to back him. One day when he was at the studio he began begging to be allowed to see what was on the easel, covered up with a cloth. He was so much interested in his stepfather's development that he could learn even from his failures. “Please, Marcel! Right now!”
The painter said it was nothing, just a joke; he had been avoiding an hour of boredom. But that made Lanny beg all the harder — he was bored too, he said. So finally Marcel let him take off the cloth. He looked, and laughed out loud, and was so delighted that he danced around.
Marcel had painted himself lying on that bed in the hospital, head swathed in bandages, two frightened eyes looking out; and all around him on the bed crowded the little furies of pain, as he had watched them for so many months. It happened that Mr. Robin had sent Lanny a copy of a German weekly magazine, containing pictures of some of the national heroes, and Marcel had turned them into a swarm of little demons with instruments of torture in their claws. There was the stiff Prussian officer with his lean face, sharp nose, and monocle; there was Hindenburg with his shaven head and bull's neck; there was the Kaiser with his bristling mustaches; there was the professor with bushy beard and stern dogmatic face. The whole of German Kultur was there, and it was amazing, the different kinds of malice that Marcel had managed to pack into those faces, and still keep them funny.
Lanny argued harder than ever. If it gave him so much pleasure, why shouldn't the family share it? So they took it up to the house, where Jerry did a war dance, and M. Rochambeau forgot his usual gravity, and even Beauty laughed. Lanny said it ought to be shown somewhere, but Marcel said, nonsense, it was just a caricature, he didn't wish to be known as a cartoonist. But the elderly diplomat came to Lanny's support; he said there was a lot of German propaganda all over the world, and why shouldn't the French use their genius for ridicule? The four of them wrung this concession from the stubborn man of art — they might have a photograph of it and send copies to their friends.
They got a real photographer and had a big one made, and wrote on the bottom of the negative: “Soldier in Pain.” Lanny sent one to his father, and one to Rick — whose father was now in charge of precautions against spies and saboteurs in his part of England. Beauty sent one to several of her friends; and the first thing she knew came a telegram from Mrs. Emily, saying that one of the big weekly papers in Paris offered two hundred francs for the right to reproduce the painting. When this magazine appeared there came a cablegram from one of the big New York newspapers offering a hundred dollars for the American rights; and on top of that a concern which was making picture post cards asked Marcel's price to let them use it.
The New York paper came out with a story about the painter, saying that he had been in an air crash, and this was his own experience. Marcel was annoyed for a while; he hated that sort of publicity. But to Beauty it was marvelous; it set everybody to talking about her husband, and visitors came to the house again, and she had an excuse to get out her pretty clothes. She had a vision of her husband becoming a famous and highly paid magazine illustrator; but Marcel said, to hell with it, and jammed his red silk skullcap down on his head and stalked off to the studio to brood there. So Beauty had to run to him, and fall on her knees and admit that she was a cheap and silly creature, and that Marcel was to paint whatever he wanted, and needn't see a single one of the curiosity seekers — they would disconnect the bell at the gate if he wished it.
However, Lanny managed to get his way about one thing; Marcel promised not to burn any more of his work. On this point the boy collected historical facts from painter friends and retailed them to his stepfather. “We have all Michelangelo's sketches, and Leonardo's, and Rembrandt's, and Rodin's — so we can follow their minds, and learn what they were thinking and trying. We learn from what they rejected as well as from what they kept.” So it was agreed that everything Marcel did from that time on was to be put away on shelves in the storeroom; and, furthermore, Lanny might be allowed to see something now and then — but no more publicity.