Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

Lanny telephoned his old friend Emily Chattersworth, who took care of the cultural activities of this part of the Riviera. Her drawing-room was much larger than any at Bienvenu, and people were used to coming there whenever a celebrity was available. Hansi Robin always played for her, and the fashionable folk who cared for music and the musical folk who were socially acceptable would be invited to Sept Chenes for a treat. Emily would send Hansi a check, and he would endorse it over to be used for the workers' educational project which was Lanny’s special hobby.

Just before sundown of that day Lanny and Irma sat on the loggia of their home, which looked out over the Golfe Juan, and watched the trim white Bessie Budd glide into the harbor of Cannes. They knew her a long way off, for she had been their home during the previous summer, and Lanny had taken two other cruises in her. With a pair of field-glasses they could recognize Captain Moeller, who had had a chance to marry them but had funked it. They could almost imagine they heard his large Prussian voice when it was time to slow down for passing the breakwater.

Next morning but one, Lanny drove into the city, with his little half-sister Marceline at his side and Irma’s chauffeur following with another car. The long blue express rolled in and delivered five of their closest friends, plus a secretary and a nursemaid in a uniform and cap with blue streamers, carrying an infant in arms. It was on account of this last that the cruise was being taken so early in the year; the two lactant mothers would combine their dairy farms, put them on shipboard, and transport them to delightful places of this great inland sea, famed in story.

Just prior to the World War, Lanny Budd, a small boy traveling on a train, had met a Jewish salesman of electrical gadgets; they had liked each other, and the stranger had given Lanny his card. This small object had lain in a bureau drawer; and if, later on, Lanny hadn’t happened to be rummaging in that drawer, how much would have been different in his life! He wouldn’t have written to Johannes Robin, and Johannes wouldn’t have come to call on him in Paris, and met Lanny’s father, and with the father’s money become one of the richest men in Germany. Lanny’s half-sister wouldn’t have met Hansi Robin, and shocked her family by marrying a Jewish musician. The yacht wouldn’t have been called the Bessie Budd, and wouldn’t have taken Lanny and his family on three cruises, and been the means of Lanny and Irma’s getting married in a hurry. They mightn’t have got married at all, and there wouldn’t have been any honeymoon cruise to New York, or any Baby Frances, or any floating dairy farm! In short, if that business card, "Johannes Robin, Agent, Maatschappij voor Electrische Specialiteiten, Rotterdam," had stayed covered up by Lanny Budd’s neckties and handkerchiefs most of Lanny’s life would have been missing!

Two happy members of the prosperous classes welcoming five of their intimate friends on the platform of a railroad station. Everybody there knew who the Budds were, and knew that when they hugged and kissed people, and laughed and chatted with them gaily, the people must be wealthy and famous like themselves. A pleasant thing to have friends whom you can love and appreciate, and who will love and appreciate you. Pleasant also to have villas and motorcars and yachts; but many people do not have them, and do not have many dear friends. They know themselves to be dull and undistinguished, and feel themselves to be lonely; they stand and watch with a sad envy the behavior of the fortunate classes on those few occasions when they condescend to manifest their feelings in public.

Johannes Robin was the perfect picture of a man who has known how to make use of his opportunities in this world. His black overcoat of the finest cloth lined with silk; his black Homburg hat; his neatly trimmed little black mustache and imperial; his fine leather traveling-bags with many labels; his manner of quiet self-possession; his voice that seemed to be caressing you—everything about him was exactly right. He had sought the best of both body and mind and knew how to present it to the rest of the world. You would never hear him say: "Look at what I, Johannes Robin, have achieved!" No, he would say: "What an extraordinary civilization, in which a child who sat on the mud floor of a hut in a ghetto and recited ancient Hebrew texts while scratching his flea-bites has been able in forty years to make so much money!" He would add: "I’m not sure that I’m making the best use of it. What do you think?" That flattered you subtly.

As for Mama Robin, there wasn’t much you could do for her in the way of elegance. You could employ the most skillful couturier and give him carte blanche as to price, but Leah, wife of Jascha Rabinowich, would remain a Yiddishe mother, now a grandmother; a bit dumpier every year, and with no improvement in her accent, whether it was Dutch or German or English she was speaking. All she had was kindness and devotion, and if that wasn’t enough you would move on to some other part of the room.

The modern practice of easy divorces and remarriages makes complications for genealogists. Lanny had grown tired of explaining about his two half-sisters, and had taken to calling them sisters, and letting people figure it out. The name of Marceline Detaze made it plain that she was the daughter of the painter who had been killed in the last months of the war; also it was possible to guess that Bessie Budd Robin was the daughter of Lanny’s father in New England. On that stern and rock-bound coast her ancestors had won a hard and honest living; so Bess was tall and her features were thin and had conscientiousness written all over them. Her straight brown hair was bobbed, and she wore the simplest clothes which the style- makers would allow to come into the shops. She was twenty-two and had been married four years, but had put off having children because of her determination to play accompaniments for Hansi in exactly the way he wanted them.

Very touching to see how she watched every step he took, and managed him exactly as her mother at home managed a household. She carried his violin case and wouldn’t let him pick up a suitcase; those delicate yet powerful fingers must be devoted to the stopping of violin strings or the drawing of a bow. Hansi was a piece of tone-producing machinery; when they went on tour he was bundled up and delivered on a platform, and then bundled up and carried to a hotel and put to bed. Hansi’s face of a young Jewish saint, Hansi’s soulful dark eyes, Hansi’s dream of loveliness embodied in sound, drove the ladies quite beside themselves; they listened with hands clasped together, they rushed to the platform and would have thrown themselves at his feet, to say nothing of his head. But there was that erect and watchful-eyed granddaughter of the Puritans, with a formula which she said as often as it was called for: "I do everything for my husband that he requires—absolutely everything!"

The other members of the party were Freddi Robin’s wife, and her baby boy, a month older than little Frances. Freddi was at the University of Berlin, hoping to get a degree in economics. Rahel, a serious, gentle girl, contributed a mezzo-soprano voice to the choir of the yacht; also she led in singing choruses. With two pianos, a violin, a clarinet, and Mr. Dingle’s mouth-organ, they could sail the Mediterranean in safety, being able to drown out the voices of any sirens who might still be sitting on its rocky shores.

If music be the food of love, play on! They were gathered in Lanny’s studio at Bienvenu, which had been built for Marcel and in which he had done his best work as a painter. There were several of his works on the walls, and a hundred or so stored in a back room. The piano was the big one which Lanny had purchased for Kurt Meissner and which he had used for seven years before going back to Germany. The studio was lined with bookcases containing the library of Lanny’s great-great-uncle. Here were all sorts of memories of the dead, and hopes of the living, with cabinets of music-scores in which both kinds of human treasures had been embodied and preserved. Hansi and Bess were playing Tchaikovsky’s great concerto, which meant so much to them. Hansi had rendered it at his debut in Carnegie Hall, with Bess and her parents in the audience; a critical occasion for the anxious young lovers.