Irma’s answer was: “Don’t be absurd, Lanny. You are a gentleman, and gentlemen don’t enlist, they apply for commissions.”
“But I don’t know anything about fighting, Irma!”
“It would take you no longer to learn to be an officer, and then you might have a career. Ceddy would arrange it for you gladly. Promise me that you won’t do anything without consulting him. It would be false heroics, and people would take it as reflecting on us; they would be certain that we must have quarreled, or something.” It was a complicated world, and you found it out when you married an heiress and brought a little rich girl into the world, and then became a sort of left-handed lord of a castle!
Lanny said: “All right.” He wasn’t clear in his own mind, and couldn’t be until he had talked with F.D.R. and been released from his obligations.
XII
As it turned out, getting to America wasn’t any longer the simple matter of putting down some banknotes on the counter of a travel agency. Half the Americans in London had suddenly decided that they wanted to get home, and boatloads more were being dumped onto the British Isles from all the northern and western ports of the Continent. Lanny applied at several places and was told that everything was sold out for two months ahead. As grandson of Budd Gunmakers he had learned in boyhood that you didn’t give up under such circumstances; you took thought and availed yourself of the thing known as “privilege.” You went to some friend of your family and got introduced to the president of the steamship company; or you consulted your banker or your family lawyer, and a quiet word was spoken, a button was pressed or a wire pulled.
Lanny might have got word to President Roosevelt, but that would have involved revealing his secret. He might have applied to Ceddy or Gerald and asked a favor in return for the information he had brought; but he hated the idea of troubling either of those harassed men. He attempted to telephone his father, but discovered that all transatlantic wires were stopped except for government business.
What he did was to pay a call on Mr. Stafforth, of the legal firm of Stafforth and Worthingham, who had been his father’s London solicitors for the matter of thirty years, and who had once before aided Robbie’s son, by telling him how he could get married to Irma Barnes without waiting for the banns to be posted and read in church for three Sundays as required by English law. This legal gentleman was tall, baldheaded, stoop-shouldered and wrinkled, but still alert, and he listened respectfully while an American whom he had known from a youth explained that his father was now making the fastest fighter plane in the world for the United States army, and that the British army was secretly getting a part of this product; that Lanny had been on the Continent getting for his father information of a character so confidential that it could not be trusted to cable transmission. Surely Mr. Stafforth wouldn’t need for Lanny to emphasize the importance of the airplane industry to the British Empire in this crisis; and Mr. Stafforth replied that he had no such need.
“Would you like to fly?” he inquired; and Lanny replied that nothing would please him more, but he had been told that the Clipper service, which had been inaugurated a few weeks ago, had been booked some months ahead, even before the threat of war had come to a thunderhead.
“I think they may perhaps have reserved a few accommodations,” replied the Englishman. It was a long sentence for him. “I’ll ring you at your hotel within the hour.”
“If it costs anything extra, I’ll of course be glad to pay,” put in the scion of privilege.
“I don’t think it will.”
Lanny went back to the Savoy, which, like all the big hotels, was something of a madhouse. In the latest extra newspaper he read that the Germans were sweeping over Poland and claimed to have put out of business every airfield in the country. Of course that might not be true. The Poles were calling for help, but how could Britain or France get fighter planes to Poland, and where would they land if all the bases were destroyed or in German hands?
The telephone rang, and it was Mr. Stafforth. “There is a place reserved for you on the Clipper tomorrow morning, Mr. Budd. You are to call at the office at once and make the payment. No extra charge.”
“Oh, thank you so much!” exclaimed an impulsive American.
“Not at all; a pleasure. My compliments to your father.” A lawyer to the rich knows exactly what to say, and how to take care of himself in a world where the race is usually to the swift and the battle to the strong!
XIII
Lanny went and paid his money and got his ticket—no questions asked. Then he hunted up Rick, and they had lunch together in a quiet place where nobody knew them. Rick was so relieved that his country’s honor was safe that he had almost forgotten the possibility that his country’s military position might be unsafe. England had always won her wars, except those two unnecessary ones with Lanny Budd’s homeland. The less said about them the better; they had really been civil wars, family arguments, and not the same as fights with Spanish and Dutch and French, Russians and Germans and whatever else had come along through the centuries.
Later in the day, after a lengthy wait, Lanny succeeded in getting his mother on the telephone. He was curious to know what had been happening to Laurel Creston and her newly discovered mediumship; but he wouldn’t make the mistake of calling Laurel—no, indeed! Beauty Budd must be first in that household. Lanny told his plans, and promised to deliver messages to Robbie and others. “Oh, the poor Poles!” exclaimed the mother. But she wasn’t worried as to herself; the Germans would never get to Juan, and if they did they would be polite, for Beauty had so many influential friends in Berlin. She was going to stay right at home and practice holding the thought of universal love, in the certainty that ultimately it would spread to other minds and mankind would abandon the insanity of war.
Casually Lanny added: “By the way, how is Miss Creston getting along?” So he learned that her performances were quite remarkable, and that Parsifal was deeply interested. No time for more, because there was a limit imposed on long-distance calls. “So long!” Lanny said. “I’ll cable you from New York.”
He decided that the days of luxurious motoring were at an end, so far as the old continent was concerned; a terrible thing to contemplate, having to travel on trains, like hoi polloi, but so it must be. Lanny might have shipped his car to Robbie, or put it in storage at the castle; but he had been deeply moved, and decided that he would rather do his bit for England and provide an extra staff car for the expeditionary force which no doubt was getting ready. He wouldn’t make the gift himself, for that might attract attention, and there were no doubt many Nazi spies in England. He gave Rick a bill of sale for the car, and told him to make the gift in his own name.
XIV
An interesting experience to be in London those first days of war. The authorities had not been so completely asleep as outsiders had thought; the streets were full of constables, the new ones still in “cits” but wearing armbands, and all with “tin hats.” There were swarms of new firemen in dark blue uniforms, and great numbers of taxicabs now had trailers, supplied with pumps, hoses, axes and rope ladders. Every block had its air-raid wardens, and here and there you came upon trucks loaded with sand and empty sacks, and volunteers eagerly working to fill the sacks and pile them against the sides of public buildings and monuments.
Lanny pitched in and helped for a while, because it was a way tomeet the people and hear what they thought. In the last war the cry had been: “Are we down’earted?”—but this time nobody appeared to think of that possibility. What they thought was: “That ole ’Itler has gone and done it now, and this is goin’ to be the end of ’im.” Everybody was comforted by the presence of great sausage balloons in the sky, many hundreds of them all over the city. They were held by steel cables which were supposed to keep enemy planes from diving low and taking accurate aim; they shone like silver in the sunshine and waved slowly in the breeze as if they were dancing a sarabande.
Most of the people had been provided with
gas masks, which were of all sizes, some even for infants. Many people expected that ole ’Itler to use poison gas at the outset, and there were even reports that he was doing so in Poland. Lanny, who was leaving so soon, didn’t bother to get a mask; he guessed that Göring wouldn’t spare any planes to bomb London until he had finished with his Polish objectives, and perhaps not until he had given the appeasers time to do their undercover work in Britain and France.
Strange it was when night came, to see a great city completely “blacked out.” Every place of amusement was closed, and Piccadilly Circus was as quiet as the village of Wickthorpe. The busses had faint spots of light, and pedestrians carried shaded torches; the traffic signals were dim red and green crosses. After you had bumped into a few lampposts and railings, and had dashed across a couple of thoroughfares at the risk of your life, you decided that this would be a good night to shut yourself in your room and read a book.
XV
Next morning the scion of privilege packed his bags and took an express to Bristol. From there a plane flew him to a tiny village on the west coast of Ireland, known as Foynes. There on the water lay the great two-decked silver airship known as a Clipper. A launch took him to it and he found himself in a spacious cabin with comfortable chromium and leather seats and all the comforts of home. Presently the engines began to whir and the great contraption slid over the water and rose into the air. Higher and higher, until the gray Atlantic below looked like a vast sheet of paper with tiny wrinkles on it. It was so quiet in the cabin that you could chat with the other sons and daughters of privilege; or you could ring for drinks, iced or hot, or cards, or checkers—anything within reason, including a can to vomit in if the weather was rude and the vessel was rocked too violently.
Rough or smooth made little difference to the powerful engines, or to the trained pilot and his navigator. Once the Yankee Clippers had rounded the horn to the China Seas, and now their namesakes would sail through all the airs of the world. They had come in the nick of time, and were destined to a burst of development such as Tennyson had dreamed:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.
23
Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd
I
Lanny had taken it for granted that he would have to wait a while before he could see the “Governor” in this crisis of world history. He pictured the great man as besieged by a hundred problems, and when he got Baker on the telephone from New York he said: “Tell the Chief I am at his disposal. I’ll wait here or in Washington, as he prefers.” But when Lanny called the second time he was told: “You are wanted at once. Take the first plane and report.” Lanny suggested that there might be difficulty in getting a plane, and the reply was: “I will arrange it. Go to the La Guardia airport and say it is government business and give your number.”
War was going to make a difference in America! Lanny had no psychic powers and could not foresee the word “priority,” but he recognized the phenomenon as soon as he met it. At the airport on Long Island he spoke the magic words and was referred to a special desk. There he said: “Reservation to Washington; number 103.” An envelope containing his ticket was handed to him, and when he asked the price he was told that it had been paid for. Half an hour later he was in the air—reading comfortably, in the latest New York “extra,” reports of the annihilation of cities and the machine-gunning of civilians in flight and of peasant women working in the fields. War was making a difference in Europe, also!
That night Lanny was taken by the familiar route, and found the great man in his high-ceilinged bedroom full of gay prints and family photographs. He appeared tired, but ready as ever for a chat. Lanny’s reports had been deliberately made bare and emotionless, but that didn’t have to be true of his conversation. He had come right out of the heart of the thunderstorm, and the pattern of every lightning bolt was impressed on his mind. First Berlin, then Berchtesgaden, then Paris, then London—the President wanted to hear about each place and how the people had behaved and how the leading characters had looked and what they had said. He might be ever so conscientious and bowed down with responsibilities, but he would not lose his sense of drama, and this was the greatest show yet enacted upon the stage of history.
After he had got the facts, he wanted opinions. Poland was lost, of course; the British and French would be blamed for not helping, but that would be silly, because they were powerless. Would Hitler attack them as soon as he had finished Poland? Lanny didn’t think so. Hitler would give his Fifth Column every chance to work; he didn’t want to fight France and Britain the least bit, and he would argue with them publicly, and tempt and cajole their statesmen behind the scenes. From his point of view it was crazy of France and Britain to insist on fighting over Poland. Said Lanny: “Adi is at a disadvantage because he doesn’t understand moral sentiments. He is like a boor in a drawing-room, who doesn’t realize how he shocks people by bad manners.”
Said F.D.: “He has surely shocked me!”
II
A P.A. had no right to ask questions, but the President chose to tell him things, and wanted his advice; he wanted everybody’s advice in this unprecedented crisis. He had proclaimed an embargo against the warring nations, as the law required, but he believed that it would now be possible to persuade Congress to repeal that ill-advised enactment. He said, more than once: “We are not going to get into this war.” He had said it over the radio, and Lanny had heard snatches of the speech at Wickthorpe. Now F.D. added: “I hate to be a Pollyanna. What do you think?”
Lanny replied: “I was satisfied with your statement that we would be neutral in action but didn’t have to be neutral in thought.”
“I am getting the devil for that, of course. They say I have reversed Wilson’s policy.”
“You have had more provocation than Wilson. Hitler is a far more dangerous man than the Kaiser.”
“Exactly! Between you and me, we shall have to act on the conviction that the British fleet is a bulwark of the Western Hemisphere.”
It was what Lanny had been urging, ever since his first meeting with this great man; but he was too tactful to mention the fact. “We can afford to wait,” he ventured. “Hitler will give us plenty of provocation, and all you will have to do is to point out to the people the meaning of his actions.”
The embargo proclamation, issued that day, declared a “limited emergency.” The President smiled as he told how this had troubled the lawyers, who had never heard of precisely such a formula. He was going to put up funds to bring Americans back from Europe in a hurry, and he was going to “increase the armed forces”—to Lanny in the privacy of his bedroom he added: “Good and plenty, you can bet!” He told about the arguments which had occurred over the question whether or not he should include Canada in the embargo. If he did, it would hurt Canada; if he didn’t, it would hurt the feelings of the British government. F.D. chuckled as he told how he had telephoned the Canadian Premier, and the reply had been to let the British do the suffering! But a couple of days later the President changed his mind and included Canada.
III
“Really, Governor,” protested Lanny, “I am taking an awful lot of your sleeping time.”
“The most important thing hasn’t been settled. What are you planning to do now?”
“I thought that if you would release me, I’d try to get into the British army.”
“You don’t tell me! What put that into your head?”
“Well, that’s the way I feel. I want to do something.”
“But you are doing something for me!”
“I don’t see how I can be of muc
h use now. I doubt if the Germans will let me in, and even if they do, the French would hardly let me return from Germany to France.”
“Even in Britain and France, your usefulness would be greater now than ever. You can keep in touch with the appeasers, and find out what the Nazis are proposing to them. You might even go into Switzerland and meet some of the Germans there.”
“But I could no longer mail you reports; the French and British censors would surely stop them.”
“We might take Bill Bullitt into the secret and let you report to him.”
“I have every confidence in Bill, but very little in an embassy. It is always surrounded by spies, and there are secretaries and telephone operators and servants and what not. In wartime I can’t afford a slip.”
“You can use your code name and number and mail your reports to Bill in a double envelope. He can forward the inside envelope to me in a diplomatic pouch without knowing who is the writer.”
“That might work for a while. You’d have to make the same arrangement with somebody in London.”
“Joe Kennedy is a terribly pessimistic soul,” remarked the smiling President. “He takes his ambassadorial duties hard, and is certain that this is the end of the world. He called me on the telephone just after the British decided to enter the war, and I almost saw his tears. Do you know him?”
“I have met him at two or three social events, but only casually.”
“The Irish are goodhearted, but emotional. I had to pat him on the back—at three thousand miles’ distance.” Then, with a sudden change of mood: “All right, Lanny. Can it be considered settled?”