I
IT WAS going to be some time before Lanny Budd would see his father again. The warring nations would have their “missions” in New York for the purpose of buying military supplies; Robbie's headquarters would be there, and he would make a great deal of money. The various governments would float bonds in the United States, and persons who believed in their financial stability would buy the bonds, and the money would be spent for everything that was needed by armies. Robbie explained these matters in his letters, and said that England and France had placed enough orders with Budd's to justify great enlargements of the plant.
Robbie wrote cautiously, being aware that mail would be read by the French censor. “Remember what I told you about your own attitude, and do not let anybody sway you from it. This is the most important thing for your life.” That was enough for Lanny; he did his best to resist the tug of forces about him. Robbie sent magazines and papers with articles that would give him a balanced view; not marking the articles — that would have made it too easy for the censor — but writing him a few days later to read pages so-and-so.
“One thing I was wrong about,” the father admitted. “This war is going to last longer than I thought.” When Lanny read that, the giant armies were locked in an embrace of death on the river Aisne; the French trying to drive the Germans still farther back, the Germans trying to hold on. They fought all day, and at night food and ammunition were brought up in camions and carts, and the armies went on fighting. Battles lasted not days but weeks, and you could hardly say when one ended and the next began. The troops charged and retreated and charged again, fighting over ground already laid waste. They dug themselves in, and when rain filled up the trenches they stayed in them, because it was better to be wet than dead.
It was the same on the eastern front also. The Russian steam roller had made some headway against the Austrians, but in East Prussia it had got stuck in the swampy lands about the Masurian Lakes. The Russians had been surrounded and slaughtered wholesale; but many had got away, and fresh armies had come up and they were pushing back and forth across the border, one great battle after another.
It was going to be that way for a long time — the fiercest fighting, inspired by the bitterest hatreds that Europe had known for centuries. Each nation was going to mobilize its resources from every part of the world; resources of man power, of money, of goods, and of intellectual and moral factors. Each side was doing everything in its power to make the other odious, and neither was going to have any patience with those who were lukewarm or doubting. A mother and son from America who wanted to keep themselves neutral would be buffeted about like birds in a thunderstorm.
II
Traveling by himself to a new post of duty, Marcel was free of censorship for a day or two. He wrote on the train and mailed in Paris an eloquent and passionate love letter, inspired by their recent day and night together. It filled Beauty with joy but also with anguish, for it told her that this treasure of her heart was going to one of the most terrible of all posts of danger. He was to receive several weeks of intensive training to enable him to act as observer in a stationary balloon.
He had suggested this post as one for which his career as a painter fitted him especially. His ability to distinguish shades of color would enable him to detect camouflage. He had studied landscapes from mountain tops, and could see things that the ordinary eye would miss. “You must learn to be happy in the thought that I shall be of real use to my country” — so he wrote, and perhaps really believed it, being a man. What Beauty did was to crumple the letter in her hands, and sink down with her face upon it and wet it with her tears.
After that there was little peace in Bienvenu. Beauty went about with death written on her face; Lanny would hear her sobbing in the night, and would go to her room and try to comfort her. “You chose a Frenchman, Beauty. You can't expect him to be anything else.” The boy had been reading an anthology of English poetiy, which Mr. Elphinstone had left behind when he went home to try to get into the army. Being young, Lanny sought to comfort his mother with noble sentiments expressed in immortal words. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”
So he quoted; but it only seemed to make Beauty mad. “What do you mean, 'honour'? It's nothing but the desire of powerful men to rule over others. It's a trick to get millions of people to follow them and die for their glory.”
Going about the house brooding, did Beauty Budd regret the choice she had made? If so, she didn't say it to Lanny. What she told him was that life was a thing too cruel to be endured. It could not be that there was a God — the idea was crazy. We were being mocked by some devil, or by a swarm of them — a separate devil in the heart of every man who sought to kill his fellows.
Beauty's good friend Sophie and her young man, Eddie Patterson, rallied to her support. They brought with them an elderly retired Swiss diplomat who bore the distinguished name of Rochambeau; having been behind the scenes of Europe most of his life, he was not to be deceived by any propaganda, and could not be offended by the antimilitarist utterances of a self-centered American lady. These four played bridge; they played with a kind of desperation, all day and most of the night, stopping only when Leese put a meal upon the table and tapped a little tune on the Chinese gongs that hung by the dining-room door. They played for very small stakes, but took their game with the utmost seriousness, having their different systems of play, and discussing each hand, what they had done and whether some other way might not have been better. They never mentioned, and they tried never to think, how men were being mangled with shot and shell while these fine points of bidding and leading and signaling were being settled.
A convenient arrangement for Lanny, because it set him free to read. Also he could play tennis with boys and girls of the near-by villas, and keep the household supplied with seafood. But he had to promise not to go sailing upon the bay, because of Beauty's fear that a German submarine might rise up without warning and torpedo the pleasure boats in the Golfe Juan.
III
Lanny kept up a correspondence with his friend Rick, and learned once more how difficult was going to be the role of neutral in this war. Rick said that the way the Germans were behaving in Belgium deprived them of all claim to be considered as civilized men. Rick hadn't been as much impressed by Kurt's long words as had Lanny, and he said that anyhow, what was the use of fancy-sounding philosophy if you didn't make it count in everyday affairs? Rick said furthermore that from now on America's safety depended on the British fleet, and the quicker the Americans realized it the better for them and for the world.
Lanny was at a disadvantage in these arguments, because he was afraid that if he repeated what his father had told him, the censor wouldn't allow the letter to pass. So he just mentioned what he was reading, and the sights he was seeing. The French had what was called an “aerohydro,” a plane that could land upon water, and one of them, having sprung an oil leak, had come down by the quay at Juan; Lanny had watched it being repaired, and then had seen it depart. It carried a machine gun, a Hotchkiss — Lanny knew all the types of guns, as other boys knew automobiles. Rick in return told about the London busses being made over into “transports” for troops, and about crowds of clerks and businessmen drilling in Hyde Park, still in their civilian clothes, and with only sticks for guns.
But Rick's principal interest was in the air. He wrote a lot about having met one of the fliers with whom they had talked at Salisbury Plain; this officer had fought a pistol duel in the sky, and had got his German. The British, too, were putting machine guns in their planes; but it was a problem, for most planes had the propeller in front, and that was where you wanted to shoot if you were following an enemy. The idea now was to shoot through the propeller, and the British had devised one with flanges which would turn aside whatever bullets struck its blades.
“That's the service I'm going into,” said Rick. “But I've promised the pater to wait until next year. The age requirement is eighteen, but a lot of the fellows do a little fibbing. I could, because I'm tall. It is hard to do any studying in times like these. No doubt it's easier for an American.”
Lanny corresponded also with Rosemary Codwilliger — pronounced Culliver. He always felt funny when he wrote that name; but he knew that many English names were queer, especially the fashionable ones; the owners carefully preserved this queerness as a form of distinction, as one way of showing that they didn't care a hang whether anybody agreed with them about the way to spell, or to pronounce, or to do anything else. It did not occur to Lanny that people like that might be difficult to get along with in other ways; all he remembered was that Rosemary was delightful to look at, and how sweet it had been to sit with his arms around her in the moonlight.
He didn't write anything about that. They exchanged placid and friendly letters that would make proper reading for both censors and parents. She said that her father was commanding a regiment somewhere in France, and that her mother's nephew, the Honorable Gerald Smithtotten, had been killed after holding the Conde Canal near Mons against seven enemy attacks. “This war is rather hard on our best families,” explained the daughter of Captain Codwilliger, “because they have to show themselves on the parapets or whatever it is, to set an example for the men. I want to take up nursing, but mother keeps begging me to finish this year's school. Mothers always think that we are a lot younger than we are really. Are American mothers like that?”
IV
Lanny could not help thinking about Kurt all the time, and wondering what he was doing and thinking. Of course Kurt would be patriotic. Would he blame Lanny for not taking the side of Germany? What reason would he give? Lanny wished he could find out; but of course no letters were allowed to come or go between countries at war.
One day it happened that Lanny was poking into a bureau drawer where he kept handkerchiefs and a fishing reel and some cartridges and photographs and old letters and what not.. He picked up a business card and read: “Johannes Robin, Agent, Maatschappij voor Electrische Specialiteiten, Rotterdam.” What a lot had happened in the world since Lanny had talked with that Jewish gentleman on the train last Christmas! “I wonder if I'll ever see him again,” the boy reflected.
He remembered that he had intended to write to Mr. Robin; and this brought another idea, that possibly the salesman of gadgets might be willing to mail a letter to Kurt for him. Lanny had learned, from the conversation of his mother's friends, that one could communicate with Germans in this way; it was against the law, but much business was still being carried on by way of neutral countries. “It couldn't do Mr. Robin any harm,” the boy decided, “because I won't say anything the censor can object to; I won't even need to say that I'm in France.”
He sat himself down and composed a letter to his friend in Germany. To set the German censors straight he began:
“My father has told me that it's an American's duty to keep neutral, and I am doing it. I don't want to lose touch with you, so I write to say that I am at home, and that my mother and I are well.
My father is back in Connecticut. I am studying hard, reading the best books I can get, and not forgetting the ideals of the nobler life. I am also practicing sight reading, although my piano technique is still mixed up. I have no teachers at present, but my mother has met a young American college man who came over on a cattle boat for the adventure and now thinks he may stay for a while because he has become interested in a young lady who lives near us. He may want to earn some money, so may teach me what he learned at college, if he has not forgotten it. Please give my sincere regards to all the members of your family, and write your affectionate friend, Lanny.”
Certainly that letter could do no injury to any nation at war; and Lanny wrote the salesman in Rotterdam, recalling their meeting on the train and hoping that this would find Mr. Robin well, and that his business had not been too greatly injured by the war. Lanny explained that here was a letter to the friend he had visited in Silesia. Mr. Robin was welcome to read the letter, and Lanny assured him that it contained no war secrets; Mr. Robin would be at liberty to test the paper with lemon juice or with heat — Lanny had been reading and hearing about spies and the way they operated. He hoped that this request would not embarrass Mr. Robin in any way; if it did, he was at liberty to destroy the letter; otherwise would he please mail it in a plain envelope addressed to Kurt Meissner at Schloss Stubendorf, Upper Silesia.
Lanny posted the two letters in the same envelope, and then waited. In due course came a reply from Mr. Robin, cordial as Lanny had expected. Mr. Robin was pleased to take his word about the letter, and would mail future letters if so desired. He recalled his fellow-traveler with pleasure and hoped to meet him again some day. No, the war had not injured his business; on the contrary, he had been able to expand it along new lines, not so different from those of Lanny's father. Mr. Robin told about his family; he had two little boys, one ten and the other eight, and he took the liberty of enclosing a snapshot, so that Lanny might feel that he knew them.
Lanny studied the picture, which had been taken in the summertime, and showed the family standing at the entrance to a pergola, with a Belgian shepherd dog lying on the ground in front of them. Mr. Robin had on an outing shirt with a soft collar such as Lanny himself wore; Mrs. Robin was stoutish and kind-looking, and the two little boys gazed soberly at Lanny, as if they had known that he was going to be seeing them, and wondered what sort of fellow he might be. They had dark wavy hair like their father, and large, gentle eyes; on the back their names were written, Hans and Freddi, and the information that the former played the violin and the latter the clarinet. Lanny thought once more that he liked the Jews, and asked his mother why they didn't know any. Beauty replied that she hadn't happened to meet them; Robbie didn't like them any too much.
A couple of weeks later came a letter postmarked Switzerland, without the name of any sender. It proved to be from Kurt — evidently he too had some friend whom he trusted. It was in the same cautious tone as Lanny's. “I am glad to hear about an American's attitude to present events. You will of course understand that my point of view is different. You are fortunate in being able to go on with your music studies. For me it has become necessary to make preparations for a more active career. Whatever happens, I will always think of you with warm friendship. My soul remains what it has always been, and I count upon yours. I will write you when I can and hope that you will do the same. The members of my family are well at present. All, as you can imagine, are very busy. Those who are at home join me in kindest regards. Kurt.”
Lanny showed this to his mother, and she agreed that Kurt must be preparing for some sort of military service. He was only sixteen, but then the Germans were thorough and began young. His brothers, no doubt, were in the fighting now. Lanny tried to read between the lines; that sentence about his friend's soul meant to tell him, over the censor's shoulder, that even though Kurt went to war, he would still believe in the importance of the ideal, and in art as an instrument for uplifting mankind. The war was not going to make any difference in their friendship.
V
Since Kurt was counting upon Lanny's soul, Lanny must be worthy of it. He decided that he spent too much time reading love stories, and should begin at once upon something uplifting. He was wondering what to choose, when he happened to hear M. Rochambeau, the retired diplomat, remark that the priests and bishops who were blessing the instruments of slaughter in the various nations were not very well representing the spirit of Jesus. Lanny reflected that he had seen many pictures of Jesus, and of Jesus's mother, and of apostles and angels and saints and what not, yet he knew very little about the Christian religion. Both his mother and his father had had it forced upon them in their youth, and hated it. But as a matter of art education, shouldn't Lanny read up on it?
He asked the white-haired and courtly ex-diplomat where he could find out what Jesus had said, and was reminded that the words were set down in some old books called the Gospels. M. Rochambeau didn't happen to own a copy, and Beauty's friends, of whom the boy made inquiry, found the idea amusing. Finally Lanny found in a bookstore a copy of this ancient work.
Winter was coming now. In Flanders and through northern France a million men were lying out in the open, in trenches and shell holes half full of filthy water which froze at night. They were devoured by vermin and half paralyzed by cold, eating bread and canned meat, when it could be brought to them over roads which had been turned into quagmires. All day and night bullets whistled above them and shells came down out of the sky, blowing bodies to fragments and burying others under loads of mud. The wounded had to lie where they fell until death released them, or night made it possible for their fellows to drag them back into the trenches.
And with this going on a few hundred miles away, Lanny was reading the story of Jesus, four times over, with variations. He was deeply touched by it each time, and wept over the way that poor man had been treated, and loved him for the kind and gentle things he had said. If somebody had happened along to speak for one of the religious sects — almost any of them — that person might have made a convert. As it was, Lanny had no one to consult but a worldly-wise ex-diplomat, who told him that if he wanted to follow Jesus he would have to do it in his own heart, because none of the churches were traveling in that path or near it.
So Lanny didn't go to church. Instead he studied arithmetic, algebra, and modern history with his new tutor, Jerry Pendleton, a happy-go-lucky fellow whom Beauty Budd had met in the way she met most persons, at a party for tea and dancing; she liked him because he had red hair, a gay disposition, and good manners. He had come to Europe with a chum, working their way, and had got caught, first by the war, and then by a mademoiselle whose mother conducted the pension at which he was staying. Instead of going back to finish his senior year in a fresh-water college, Jerry had lingered on, and a job as tutor presented itself as a happy solution of several problems.
The young man's account of education in the United States was not exactly favorable; he said that the main thing you learned was how to get along with other fellows, and with girls. He confessed, as Mr. Elphinstone had done, that he had forgotten all the subjects he was going to teach, but he and Lanny could read together, and there was that magnificent encyclopedia which could never go wrong. Jerry would at least keep the kid out of mischief — and at the same time Mrs. Budd could give him kindly advice about the most bewildering love affair he had ever run into. Mlle. Cerise, it appeared, was being brought up in French fashion, which meant that she couldn't see a young man without her mother being close by, and he couldn't even bring her to one of Mrs. Budd's tea parties without a chaperon. At home you took a girl motoring, or if you didn't have a car, you bicycled and had a picnic in the woods.; but here they were all nuns until after they were married — and then, apparently, you could pick them up in the gambling rooms at the casino.
“Not quite all of them,” said Beauty, beginning the education of her son's tutor.
VI
Once again, for a day, Marcel Detaze was free from the censor. He was on his way to his post of duty, and poured out his heart to his beloved. This time he didn't hide from her the dangers to which he was going. The hour had come when she had to steel her soul.
Marcel was gay, as always; that was the way you had to take life, if you didn't mean to let it get you down. Make a work of art of it; put your best into it; play your little part, and be ready to quit before the audience got tired of you. Marcel described a “sausage balloon” as a grotesque and amusing object, in rebellion against the men who had created it and obstinately trying to break out of their control. It was huge and fat, and assumed changing shapes, and danced and cavorted in the air. A net of cords imprisoned it, and a steel cable bound it to the earth. The cable was on a pulley, and two stout horses or oxen plodding across a field let the balloon up or pulled it down.
All this for the sake of an observer who sat in a bulletproof basket underneath the balloon, equipped with field glasses and measuring instruments, and a telephone set. It was his task to spy out enemy entrenchments, and the movements of troops and guns. He had to have a keen eyesight, and be trained to recognize the difference between branches growing on trees and the same when cut down and made into a screen for a heavy gun. He had to know Birnam Wood when it was removed to Dunsinane. Also, he had to be a man who had traveled to the fiords of Norway and the Isles of Greece without getting seasick; for the winds which blew off the North Sea would toss him around like a whole yachtful of soap kings — so wrote the painter, who had been sorry for poor Ezra Hackabury, but couldn't help finding him funny.
Of course such a balloon would be a target for the enemy. Airplanes would come darting out of the clouds at a hundred miles an hour, spitting fire as they came. “We have guns on the ground to stop them,” wrote Marcel; “guns with high-angle mountings designed especially to shoot at planes, but I fear they are not very good yet, and Lanny should tell his father to invent better ones for my protection. The shells from these guns make white puffs of smoke when they explode, so that the gunner can correct his aim. The English call the guns 'Archies,' and I am told that this comes from some music-hall character who said: 'Archibald, certainly not!' It is wonderful, the humor with which the English fellows take this messy business. I have had one as an instructor and he has explained their jokes to me. The heavy shells which make an enormous cloud of black smoke they call 'Jack Johnsons,' because of a Negro prize fighter who is dangerous. Also they call them 'black Marias' and 'coal boxes.' Doubtless there will be new names by the time I get to the front.”
Beauty broke down and couldn't read any more. It seemed to her horrible that men should make jokes about death and destruction. Of course they laughed so that they might not have to weep; but Beauty could weep, and she did. She was certain that her lover was gone forever, and her hopes died a new death every time she thought of him. Lanny, talking with M. Rochambeau, learned that his mother had cause for fear, because the job which Marcel had chosen represented just about the peak of peril in this war. A single correct observation followed by a well-placed shell might put a battery of guns out of action; so the enemy waged incessant warfare upon the stationary balloons. This far the French had managed to keep the mastery of the air, but the fighting was incessant and the death rate high. “Women must weep,” a poet in Lanny's anthology had said.
VII
Mrs. Emily Chattersworth wrote the news. Learning of the dreadful sufferings of the wounded after the great battle of the Aisne, she had lent the Château Les Forêts to the government for a hospital. Then she had been moved to go and see what was being done, and had been so shocked by the sight of mangled bodies brought in by the hundreds, and the efforts of exhausted doctors and nurses to help them, that she had abandoned her career as salonnière and taken up that of hospital director. Now she was helping to organize a society in Paris for the aid of the wounded and was asking all her friends for help and contributions. Would Beauty Budd do something? Mrs. Emily said that Marcel might some day be brought to Les Forêts; and of course that fetched Beauty. Despite her vow to economize and pay her debts, she sent a check to her friend.
Then Lanny began to observe a curious phenomenon. Having given her lover, and then her money, Beauty could no longer refuse to give her heart. So far she had been hating war; but now little by little she took to hating Germans. Of course she didn't know about Weltpolitik, and didn't try to discuss it; Beauty was personal, and recalled the hordes of Teutons who had come flocking to the Riviera in recent winters. The hotelkeepers had welcomed them, because they spent money; but Beauty hadn't welcomed them, because she loved the quiet of her retreat and they invaded it. The women were enormous and had voices like Valkyries; the men had jowls, and rolls of fat on the backs of their necks, and huge bellies and buttocks which they displayed indecently to the winter sunshine. They drank and ate sausages in public, made ugly guttural noises — and now, as it turned out, they had all the time been spying and intriguing, preparing huge engines of destruction and death!
Yes, Beauty decided, she hated all Germans; and this made for disharmony in the little island of peace which she had created at Bienvenu. Sophie didn't want to hate the Germans because it might start her Eddie off to be a hero, like Marcel. M. Rochambeau didn't want it because he was old and tired, and liable to heart attacks if he let himself get excited. “Dear lady,” he would plead, “we in this crowded continent have been hating each other for so many centuries — pray do not bring us any more fuel for our fires.” The retired diplomat's voice was gentle, and his manner that of some elderly prelate.
Lanny agreed that things were going to be harder for him if his mother became warlike. He would remind her of Kurt, and of great Germans like Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven, who belonged to all Europe. He would repeat to her the things which Robbie had told him — and of which the father kept reminding him, in carefully veiled language. When Beauty burst out that Robbie was thinking of the money he was going to make out of this war, Lanny was a bit shocked, and withdrew into himself. It wouldn't do to remind his mother that it was Robbie's money on which they were both living, and which she was giving to Mrs. Emily.
VIII
Jerry Pendleton was being a good companion. He liked to do the things that Lanny liked, and they climbed the hills and played tennis and swam and fished, and Jerry cultivated the mother of Mlle. Cerise by bringing in more seafood than the pension could consume. They enjoyed torch-fishing especially, and made themselves expert spearsmen, and got many a green moray, but never one as big as Captain Bragescu's. One night a strange adventure befell them — oddly enough the very thing that Beauty had been worried about, and for which everybody had laughed at her. It was to be that way all through the war; truth would outrun fiction, and if anybody said that a thing couldn't happen, then right away it did.
A still night, something not so common in the month of December, and two young fellows in fishing togs and sweaters, because it was cold in spite of the lack of wind. They had a torch set in the bow of the boat, blazing brightly, and were lying, one on each side, with their heads over the gunwales, looking down into the crystal-clear water. The sea growths waved gently to and fro, and it was like some enchanted land; the langoustes poked their heads out from the rocks, and fish idled here and there, many of them camouflaged, just like the Germans. Lanny thought about Marcel, doing the same kind of work, but high in the air instead of on top of the sea.
The Cannes lighthouse was flashing red and green. Not many lights on the shore, for the night life of the Golfe Juan was dimmed that winter. Not many sounds, just the murmur of distant traffic, and now and then the put-put of a motorboat. But suddenly a strange sort of splashing, the movement of a great bulk of water, and a series of waves rushing toward them, rocking their little boat so that they could no longer look into the depths. They stared toward the sound, shading their eyes from the torchlight, and gradually made out something, a dim shape. Impossible to believe it and equally impossible to doubt it — a round boxlike object arisen from the depths of the sea, and lying there, quite still!
“A submarine!” whispered Lanny; and his companion exclaimed: “Put out the torch!” Lanny was nearer, and grabbed it and plunged it into the water. A hissing sound, then silence and darkness, and the rowboat rocking in the swells.
The two listened, their hearts thumping. “They must have seen us,” Jerry whispered. They waited and wondered what to do. They had both read stories about submarines sinking vessels, and not even bothering to save the crews. This might be an enemy one, or again it might be French or British.
Sounds travel clearly over smooth water. They heard footsteps, people moving; then came splashing and, unmistakably, the sound of muffled oars. “They're coming after us!” exclaimed Lanny; and his tutor grabbed their oars and began to row for dear life for the shore, less than a hundred feet away.
Would the people on the submarine turn on a searchlight and open fire on them? It was something they both thought of, and they had a good right to be scared. But nothing of the sort happened. They got to the shore and crept out of the boat; then, safe behind rocks, they listened again, and heard the muffled oars, undoubtedly coming nearer — but a little farther down the shore. Very plainly they heard the rowing stop, and after a minute or less it began again — the boat, or whatever it was, was going back to the submarine.
“They came to get somebody,” whispered Jerry.
“Or else to put somebody ashore.”
“It must be an enemy. No French boat would behave like that.” A moment later the tutor added: “Somebody on shore may be looking for us.” That called for no argument, and the pair got up and started to climb toward the road.
“Look here,” whispered Jerry, suddenly; “this may be very serious, and we ought to tell the police or the military. If anybody was put ashore, he'd be armed, and he'd mean business.”
“That's right,” answered the younger boy, in a delightful state of excitement.
“Do you know where there'd be a telephone?”
“In almost any of the villas along the road.”
“Well, let's go quietly; and if anyone tries to stop us we'll bolt — you go one way and I'll go another. They can hardly get us both in the dark.”
They tiptoed down the road, and presently came to a house with lights, and asked permission to telephone the nearest police station. The police ordered them to wait right there, which they were glad to do, and meanwhile told their story to a family of English people who were greatly excited. A car with gendarmes arrived soon, and another with military men a little later. They took the Americans down to the shore and asked them a hundred questions. There was no sign of any submarine, only Lanny's boat, which the tide was about to float away. Launches came, and men searched the shore, finding no trace of anything — but would there have been, on those masses of rocks? The two young fellows managed to convince the authorities of their good faith, and one of the army men said that it must have been an Austrian submarine from the Adriatic.
That was all they said. A curtain of silence fell about the matter; nothing was published — but there was a lot of patrolling by torpedo boats and “aerohydros” in the neighborhood. M. Rochambeau, who knew about military matters, said that the enemy's purpose must have been to put ashore some important agent who was too well known to come in with a neutral passport. Doubtless he would have a place of refuge prepared. The secret service of the Allies would be trying to find out who he was and what he had come for.
Besides the open war of arms, there was this underground war of spying and sabotage always going on; both sides had their agents in all the services of the enemy, and were spending fortunes to corrupt and undermine. The French had gathered up the known enemy aliens in the Midi and interned them on the ile Ste.-Marguerite, which lay just offshore from Cannes, and had been the peaceful home of some fifty nuns, and a place where tourists came to sit under the big pine trees and have tea. But of course there must be many Germans at large in France, posing as Swiss, or Danes, or citizens of the United States, or what not; they would be watching troop movements, perhaps planning to blow up railroad bridges, or to put bombs upon merchant vessels, or even warships. If they were caught, you wouldn't hear anything about it; they would be taken to some military fortress, and stood against a wall blindfolded and shot through the heart.
IX
The dread news came for which Beauty had been waiting many weeks. It was written by a comrade of Marcel's, a “ground man” whom he had pledged to this duty. The comrade regretted to inform Madame Budd that her friend had been severely injured; his “kite balloon” had been attacked by two enemy planes, and had been hauled down, but not quickly enough; some fifteen meters above ground it had caught fire, and Marcel had leaped out, and had been badly smashed up, also burned. He had been taken to the base hospital at Beauvais, and the writer could not say as to his present condition.
After her first collapse, Beauty's one idea was to get to him; she couldn't stop sobbing, and was in the grip of a sort of convulsion of shuddering — but she must go, she must go — right now, come on! She wouldn't even wait to put clothes into a suitcase. She had visions of her lover mutilated, defaced — he would be in agony, he might be dying at that moment. “Oh, God, my God, help me, help my poor Marcel!”
It happened that Jerry and M. Rochambeau were in the house, as well as Lanny. They tried to comfort her, but what could they say? They tried to restrain her,but she wouldn't listen to reason. “You must find out if you can get on the train,” argued the diplomat. But her answer was that she would motor. “Then you must arrange to get essence” — but she said: “I'll find a way — I'll pay what it costs — you can always get things if you pay.”
“But, my dear lady, you may not be able to get near the town-it's in the war zone, and they never allow relatives or visitors.”
“I'll find a way. I'll go to Paris and lay siege to the government.”
“There are many persons laying siege to the government right now — including the Germans.”
“I'm going to help Marcel. I'll find a way — I'll take a job as nurse with Emily Chattersworth. She'll get me there somehow. Who will come with me?”
Lanny had learned to drive a car, but hardly well enough for this trip. Jerry Pendleton was a first-class driver, and knew how to fix carburetors and those other miserable devices that were always getting out of order. Jerry would go; and the terrified maids would rush to pile some clothes into suitcases — warm things, for Madame was declaring hysterically that if they wouldn't let her into the town she would sleep in the car, or in the open like the soldiers. None of her pretty things — but then she changed her mind, if she had to call on government officials she would have to look her best — nothing showy, but that simplicity which is the apex of art, and which costs in accordance. A strange thing to see a woman, so choked with her own sobs that she could hardly make herself understood, at the same time trying to decide what sort of dress was proper to wear in approaching the war minister of a government in such dire peril of its existence that it had had to move to a remote port by the sea!
Lanny packed his suitcase, taking a warm sweater and the overcoat he had worn in Silesia; a good suit also, because he too might have to interview officials. Beauty sent a wire to Mrs. Emily, asking her to use her influence; M. Rochambeau sent a telegram to an official of his acquaintance who could arrange it if any man could. “Only woman can do the impossible,” added the old gentleman, parodying Goethe.
They piled robes and blankets into the car, filling up the seat alongside Beauty, who sat now, a mask of horror, gazing into a lifelong nightmare. They drove to the pension where Jerry stayed, and he ran upstairs and threw some of his things into a bag. Downstairs were Mlle. Cerise and her mother and her aunt, all shocked by the news. The red-headed tutor grabbed the proper young French lady and kissed her first on one cheek and then on the other. “Adieu! Au revoir!” he cried, and fled.
“Ah, ces Américains!” exclaimed the mother.
“Un peuple tout a fait fou!” added the aunt.
It was practically an engagement.