Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

Lanny replied: "Well, if they hadn’t, how would Germany have paid France any reparations at all?"

"She would have paid if she had been made to," replied Denis. He didn’t say how, and Lanny knew better than to pin him down. The men who governed France hadn’t learned much by their invasion of the Ruhr and its failure; they still thought that you could produce goods by force, that you could get money with bayonets. It was useless to argue with them; their fear of Germany was an obsession. And maybe they were right—how could Lanny be sure? Certainly there were plenty of men in Germany who believed in force and meant to use it if they could get enough of it. Lanny had met them also.

Denis wanted to know what was going to be the effect of the Wall Street collapse upon French affairs. The season was beginning, and many of the fashionable folk were not here. Would the tourists fail to show up this summer? A question of urgency to the owner of a fleet of taxicabs! Lanny said he was afraid that Paris would have to do what New York had done—draw in its belt. When Denis asked what Robbie thought about the prospects, Lanny reported his father’s optimism, and Denis was pleased, having more respect for Robbie’s judgment than for Lanny’s.

The Chateau de Bruyne was no great showplace like Balincourt and Les Forêts, but a simple country home of red stone; its title was a tribute to its age, and the respect of the countryside for an old family. It had been one of Lanny’s homes, off and on, for some six years. The servants knew him, the old dog knew him, he felt that even the fruit trees knew him. Denis, fils, had got himself a wife of the right sort, and she was here, learning the duties of a chatelaine; they had a baby boy, so the two young fathers could make jokes about a possible future union of the families. Chariot, the younger brother, was studying to be an engineer, which meant that he might travel to far parts of the earth; incidentally, he was interested in politics, belonging to one of the groups of aggressive French patriots. Lanny didn’t say much about his own ideas—he never had, for it had been his privilege to be the lover of Denis’s wife, but not the cor-rupter of his sons. All that he could hope for was to moderate their vehemence by talking about toleration and open-mindedness.

The two young men—one was twenty-four and the other a year younger—looked up to Lanny as to an abnormally wise and brilliant person. They knew about his marriage, and thought it a coronation. In this opinion their mother would have joined, for she had had a Frenchwoman’s thorough-going respect for property. The French, along with most other Europeans, were fond of saying that the Americans worshiped the dollar; a remark upon which Zoltan Kertezsi had commented in a pithy sentence: "The Americans worship the dollar and the French worship the sou."

Friendship is a delightful thing when you have had the good judgment to choose the right friends. Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson had come in the course of the years to be the most congenial of Lanny’s friends. It could be doubted whether the younger man would have had the courage to stick to so many unorthodox ideas if it hadn’t been for Rick’s support. The baronet’s son watched everything that went on in the world, analyzed the various tendencies, and set forth his understanding of them in newspaper articles which Lanny would clip and send to persons with whom he got into arguments. Not that he ever converted anybody, but he kept his cause alive.

Rick was only about a year and a half the elder, but Lanny was in the habit of deferring to him, which pleased Rick’s wife and didn’t altogether displease Rick. Whenever the Englishman wrote another play, Lanny was sure it was bound to make the long-awaited "hit." When it didn’t, there was always a reason: that Rick persisted in dealing with social problems from a point of view unpopular with those who bought the best seats in theaters. The young playwright was fortunate in having parents who believed in him and gave him and his family a home while he wrote the truth as he saw it.

Nearly thirteen years had passed since a very young English flier had crashed in battle, and been found with a gashed forehead and a broken and badly infected knee. In the course of time he had learned to live with his lameness. He could go bathing from the special landing-place which Lanny had had made for him at Bienvenu; and now the carpenter of the Bessie Budd bolted two handles onto the landing-stage of the yacht’s gangway, so that a man with good stout arms could lift himself out of the water without any help. He would unstrap his leg-brace, slide in, and enjoy himself just as if humanity had never been cursed with a World War.

Nina was her usual kind and lovely self, and as for Little Alfy— he had to be called that on account of his grandfather the baronet, but it hardly fitted him any more, for he had grown tall and leggy for his almost thirteen years. He had dark hair and eyes like his father’s, and was, as you might have expected, extremely precocious; he knew a little about all the various political movements, also the art movements, and would use their patter in a fashion which made it hard for you to keep from smiling. He had thin, sensitive features and was serious-minded, which made him the predestined victim of Marceline Detaze, the little flirt, the little minx. Marceline didn’t know anything about politics, but she knew some of the arts, including that of coquetry. Half French and half American, she also had been brought up among older people, but of a different sort. From the former Baroness de la Tourette, the hardware lady from Cincinnati, she had learned the trick of saying outrageous things with a perfectly solemn face and then bursting into laughter at a sober lad’s look of bewilderment. Apparently Alfy never would learn about it.

The families had planned a match for these two by cable as soon as they had appeared on the scene. The parents made jokes about it, in the free and easy modern manner, and the children had taken up the practice. "I’ll never marry you if you don’t learn to dance better," Marceline would announce. Alfy, peeved, would respond: "You don’t have to marry me if you don’t want to." He would never have the least idea what was coming next. One time her feelings would be hurt, and the next time she would be relieved of a great burden; but whichever it was, it would turn out to be teasing, and Alfy would be like a man pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp on a dark night.

There had been dancing in Marceline’s home ever since she was old enough to toddle about. So-called "society" dancing, Dalcroze dancing, Isadora Duncan dancing, Provencal peasant dancing, English and American country dancing—every sort that a child could pick up. Some kind of music going most of the time, and a phonograph and a radio so that she could make it to order. On the yacht, as soon as her lessons were finished, she would come running to where Hansi and Bess were practicing; she would listen for a minute to get the swing of it, then her feet would start moving and she would be dancing all over the saloon. She would hold out her hands to Lanny, and they would begin improvising; they had learned to read each other’s signals, and once more, as in the old Dalcroze days, you saw music made visible.

No wonder Marceline could dance rings all around a lad who knew only that somnambulistic walking in time to jazz thumping which prevailed in fashionable society. Alfy would try his best, but look and feel like a young giraffe caught in an earthquake. "Loosen up, loosen up!" she would cry, and he would kick up his heels and toes in a most un-English manner. The girl would give him just enough encouragement to keep him going, but never enough to let him doubt who was going to call the tune in their household.