Пользователь - o 3b3e7475144cf77c

Now Lanny had to mention that musical geniuses are apt to be erratic, and often it is safer to

know them through their works. One cannot advertise for one as for a butler or a chef; and

suppose they got drunk, or took up with the parlor-maid? Lanny said that a consecrated artist

such as Kurt Meissner would be hard to find. Irma remarked: "I suppose they wouldn't be

anywhere but in Germany, where everybody works so hard!"

V

Among the guests they had met at the Schloss was an uncle of their host, the Graf Oldenburg

of Vienna. The Meissners had told them that this bald-headed old Silenus was in financial

trouble; he always would be, it having been so planned by the statesmen at Paris, who had cut

the Austro-Hungarian Empire into small fragments and left a city of nearly two million people

with very little hinterland to support it. The Graf was a gentleman of the old school who had

learned to dance to the waltzes of the elder Strauss and was still hearing them in his fancy. He

invited Irma and Lanny to visit him, and mentioned tactfully that he had a number of fine

paintings. Since it was on their way home, Lanny said: "Let's stop and have a look."

It was a grand marble palace on the Ringstrasse, and the reception of the American visitors

was in good style, even though the staff ot servants had been cut, owing to an outrageous law

just passed by the city administration—a graduated tax according to the number of your

servants, and twice as high for men as for women! But a Socialist government had to find

some way to keep going. Here was a city with great manufacturing power and nowhere to

export its goods. All the little states surrounding it had put up tariff barriers and all efforts at a

customs union came to naught. Such an agreement with Germany seemed the most obvious

thing in the world, but everybody knew that France would take it as an act of war.

An ideal situation from the point of view of a young art expert with American dollars in the

bank! The elderly aristocrat, his host, was being hounded by his creditors, and responded

promptly when Lanny invited him to put a price on a small-sized Jan van Eyck representing the

Queen of Heaven in the very gorgeous robes which she perhaps was now wearing, but had

assuredly never seen during her sojourn on earth.

Among Irma's acquaintances on Long Island was the heiress of a food-packing industry; and

since people will eat, even when they do nothing else, Brenda Spratt's dividends were still

coming in. She had appeared fascinated by Lanny's accounts of old masters in Europe and his

dealings in them; so now he sent her a cablegram informing her that she could obtain a unique

art treasure in exchange for four hundred and eighty thousand cans of spaghetti with tomato

sauce at the wholesale price of three dollars per case of forty-eight cans. Lanny didn't cable all

that, of course—it was merely his way of teasing Irma about the Long Island plutocracy. Next

day he had a reply informing him at what bank he could call for the money. A genuine triumph of

the soul of man over the body, of the immortal part over the mortal; and incidentally it would

provide Lanny Budd with pocket-money for the winter. He invited his wife to state whether her

father had ever done a better day's business at the age of thirty-one.

The over-taxed swells of Vienna came running to meet the American heiress and to tell her

brilliant young husband what old masters they had available. Irma might have danced till

dawn every night, and Lanny might have made a respectable fortune, transferring culture to

the land of his fathers. But what he preferred was meeting Socialist writers and party leaders

and hearing their stories of suffering and struggle in this city which was like a head without a

body. The workers were overwhelmingly Socialist, while the peasants of the country districts

were Catholic and reactionary. To add to the confusion, the Hitlerites were carrying on a

tremendous drive, telling the country yokels and the city hooligans that all their troubles

were due to Jewish profiteers.

The municipal government, in spite of near-bankruptcy, was going bravely ahead with a

program of rehousing and other public services. This was the thing of which Lanny had been

dreaming, the socialization of industry by peaceful and orderly methods, and he became

excited about it and wished to spend his time traveling about looking at blocks of workers'

homes and talking to the people who lived in them. Amiable and well-bred people, going to

bed early to save light and fuel, and working hard at the task of making democracy a success.

Their earnings were pitifully small, and when Lanny heard stories of infant mortality and child

malnutrition and milk prices held up by profiteers, it rather spoiled his enjoyment of stately

banquets in mansions with historic names. Irma said: "You won't let yourself have any fun, so

we might as well go on home."

VI

It wasn't much better at Bienvenu, as the young wife was soon to learn. The world had become

bound together with ties invisible but none the less powerful, so that when the price of corn

and hogs dropped in Nebraska the price of flowers dropped on the Cap d'Antibes. Lanny

explained the phenomenon: the men who speculated in corn and hogs in Chicago no longer gave

their wives the money to buy imported perfumes, so the leading industry of the Cap went

broke. Leese, who ran Bienvenu, was besieged by nieces and nephews and cousins begging to

be taken onto the Budd staff. There was a swarm of them already, twice as many as would have

been employed for the same tasks on Long Island; but in the Midi they had learned how to

divide the work, and nobody ever died from overexertion. Now there were new ones added, and

it was a delicate problem, because it was Irma's money and she was entitled to have a say. What

she said was that servants oughtn't to be permitted to bother their employers with the hard-luck

stories of their relatives. Which meant that Irma still had a lot to learn about life in France!

The tourists didn't come, and the "season" was slow—so slow that it began to stop before it got

started. The hotelkeepers were frightened, the merchants of luxury goods were threatened

with ruin, and of course the poor paid for it. Lanny knew, because he went on helping with that

Socialist Sunday school, where he heard stories which spoiled his appetite and his enjoyment of

music, and troubled his wife because she knew what was in his thoughts—that she oughtn't to spend

money on clothes and parties while so many children weren't getting enough to eat.

But what could you do about it? You had to pay your servants, or at any rate feed them, and

it was demoralizing if you didn't give them work to do. Moreover, how could you keep up the

prices of foods except by buying some? Irma's father and uncles had fixed it firmly in her mind

that the way to make prosperity was to spend; but Lanny seemed to have the idea that you

ought to buy cheap foods and give them to the poor. Wouldn't that demoralize the poor and

make parasites of them? Irma thought she saw it happening to a bunch of "comrades" on the

Riviera who practically lived on the Budd bounty, and rarely said "Thank you." And besides,

what was to become of the people who raised the more expensive foods? Were they going to

have to eat them?

Life is a compromise. On Sunday evening Lanny would go down into the Old Town of Cannes

and explain the wastes of the competitive system to a group of thirty or forty proletarians: