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needed more of it in order to be really safe. Also you got allies and associates; you incurred
obligations to them, and when a crisis came they expected you to play a certain part, and if
you didn't you were a shirker. You were no more free to quit than a general is free to
resign in the midst of a campaign.
The tragedy is that people have lovable qualities and objectionable ones, impossible to
separate. Also, you have grown up with them, and have become attached to them; you may
be under a debt of gratitude, impossible to repay. If the young Robins were to lay down the
law: "Either you quit playing at Großkapital in Germany, or we move out of your palace and
sail no more in your yacht"—they might have had their way. But how much would have been left
of Johannes Robin? Where would they have taken him and what would they have done with
him? Lanny had put such pressure on his father in the matter of playing the stock market,
and had got away with it. But in the case of Johannes it was much more; he would have had
to give up everything he was doing, every connection, associate, and interest except his
children and their affairs. Said Lanny to Bess: "Suppose he happened to dislike music, and
thought the violin was immoral—what would you and Hansi do about it?"
"But nobody could think that, Lanny!"
"Plenty of our Puritan forefathers thought it; I've a suspicion that Grandfather thinks it right
now. Very certainly he thinks it would be immoral to keep business men from making money, or
to take away what they have made."
So Lanny, the compromiser, trying to soothe the young people, and persuade them that they
could go on eating their food in the Berlin palace without being choked. Including himself,
here were five persons condemned to dwell in marble halls—and outside were five millions, yes,
five hundred millions, looking upon them as the most to be envied of all mortals! Five dwellers
begging to be kicked out of their marble halls, and for some strange reason unable to persuade the
envious millions to act! More than a century ago a poet, himself a child of privilege, had called
upon them to rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number; but still the many slept
and the few ruled, and the chains which were like dew retained the weight of lead!
III
The dowager queen of Vandringham-Barnes had gone down to Juan in order to be with the
heir apparent. A dreadful thing had happened in America, something that sent a shudder of
horror through every grandmother, mother and daughter of privilege in the civilized
world. In the peaceful countryside of New Jersey a criminal or gang of them had brought a
ladder and climbed into the home of the flyer Lindbergh and his millionaire wife, and had
carried off the nineteen-month baby of this happy young couple. Ransom notes had been
received and offers made to pay, but apparently the kidnapers had taken fright, and the
body of the slain infant was found in a near-by wood. It happened that this ghastly discovery
fell in the same week that the President of the French republic was shot down by an assassin
who called himself a "Russian Fascist." The papers were full of the details and pictures of both
these tragedies. A violent and dreadful world to be living in, and the rich and mighty ones
shuddered and lost their sleep.
For a full generation Robbie Budd's irregular family had lived on the ample estate of
Bienvenu and the idea of danger had rarely crossed their minds, even in wartime. But now it was
hard to think about anything else, especially for the ladies. Fanny Barnes imagined kidnapers
crouching behind every bush, and whenever the wind made the shutters creak, which
happened frequently on the Cote d'Azur, she sat up and reached out to the baby's bed, which
had been moved to her own room. Unthinkable to go on living in a one-story building, with
windows open, protected only by screens which could be cut with a pocket-knife. Fanny wanted
to take her tiny namesake to Shore Acres and keep her in a fifth-story room, beyond reach of
any ladders. But Beauty said: "What about fire?" The two grandmothers were close to their
first quarrel.
Lanny cabled his father, inquiring about Bub Smith, most dependable of bodyguards and
confidential agents. He was working for the company in Newcastle, but could be spared, and
Robbie sent him by the first steamer. So every night the grounds of Bienvenu would be
patrolled by an ex-cowboy from Texas who could throw a silver dollar into the air and hit it
with a Budd automatic. Bub had been all over France, doing one or another kind of secret
work for the head salesman of Budd Gunmakers, so he knew the language of the people. He
hired a couple of ex-poilus to serve as daytime guards, and from that time on the precious mite
of life which was to inherit the Barnes fortune was seldom out of sight of an armed man.
Lanny wasn't sure if it was a good idea, for of course all the Cap knew what these men were
there for, and it served as much to advertise the baby as to protect her. But no use telling that
to the ladies!
Bub came by way of Paris, so as to consult with Lanny and Irma. He had always been a pal of
Robbie's son, and now they had a confidential talk, in the course of which Bub revealed the fact
that he had become a Socialist. A great surprise to the younger man, for Bub's jobs had been
among the most hardboiled, and Bub himself, with his broken nose and cold steely eyes, didn't
bear the appearance of an idealist. But he had really read the papers and the books and knew
what he was talking about, and of course that was gratifying to the young employer. The man
went down to the Cap and began attending the Socialist Sunday school in his free time,
becoming quite a pal of the devoted young Spaniard, Raoul Palma.
That went on for a year or more before Lanny discovered what it was all about. The bright
idea had sprung in the head of Robbie Budd—to whom anarchists, Communists, and
kidnapers were all birds of a feather. Robbie had told Bub that this would be a quick and easy
way to get in touch with the underworld of the Midi; so before stepping onto the steamer,
Bub had got himself a load of Red literature, and all the way across had been boning up as if
for a college entrance examination. He had "passed" with Lanny, and then with Raoul and the
other comrades, who naturally had no suspicions of anybody coming from Bienvenu. It was
somewhat awkward, because Bub was also maintaining relations with the French police; but
Lanny didn't know just what to do about it. It was one more consequence of trying to live in
the camps of two rival armies getting ready for battle.
IV
Hearing and thinking so much about the Lindbergh case had had an effect upon Irma's
maternal impulses; she decided that she couldn't do any more traveling without having at least
a glimpse of Baby. She proposed that they hop into the car and run down to Bienvenu—the
weather was hot there, and they could have a swim, also. The young Robins hadn't seen
Baby for more than a year; so come along! Hansi had been motored to Paris by Bess, in her
car; now the couples "hopped" into two cars, and that evening were in Bienvenu, with Irma
standing by the bedside of her sleeping darling, making little moaning sounds of rapture and
hardly able to keep from waking the child.
The next two days she had a debauch of mother emotions, crowding everything into a short
time. She didn't want anybody else to touch the baby; she washed her, dressed her, fed her,
played with her, walked with her, talked to her, exclaimed over every baby word she managed to
utter. It must have been bewildering to a twenty-seven-month child, this sudden irruption into
her well-ordered life; but she took it serenely, and Miss Severne permitted some rules to be
suspended for a brief period.
Lanny had another talk with Bub Smith, keeper of the queen's treasure and sudden convert
to the cause of social justice. Bub reported on his experiences at the school, and expressed his
appreciation of the work being done there; a group of genuine idealists, he said, and it was a
source of hope for the future. Lanny found it a source of hope that an ex-cowboy and
company guard should have seen the light and acknowledged his solidarity with the workers.
Also Bub told about conditions in Newcastle, where some kind of social change seemed
impossible to postpone. There wasn't enough activity in those great mills to pay for the taxes
and upkeep, and there was actual hunger among the workers. The people had mortgaged their
homes, sold their cars, pawned their belongings; families had moved together to save rent; half a
dozen people lived on the earnings of a single employed person. So many New Englanders were
proud and wouldn't ask for charity; they just withdrew into a corner and starved. Impossible
not to be moved by such distress, or to realize that something must be done to get that great
manufacturing plant to work again.
Bub Smith had always been close to Robbie Budd, and so this change of mind appeared
important. There was no secret about it, the man declared; he had told Mr. Robert how he felt,
and Mr. Robert had said it would make no difference. Lanny thought that, too, was important;
for some fifteen years or so he had been hoping that his father would see the light, and now
apparently it was beginning to dawn. In a letter to Robbie he expressed his gratification; and
Robbie must have had a smile!
V
The young people had their promised swim, diving off the rocks into that warm blue
Mediterranean water. Afterward they sat on the shore and Bub lugged a couple of heavy boxes
from the car, one containing Budd automatics and other weapons, the other containing several
hundred rounds of ammunition. Bub had brought a liberal supply from Newcastle, enough to
stave off a siege by all the bandits in France. He said the family ought to keep in practice, for
they never knew when there might be an uprising of the Fascists or Nazis, and "we comrades"
would be the first victims. He was shocked to learn that neither Hansi nor Freddi had ever
fired a gun in his life, and hadn't thought of the possible need. The ex-guard wanted to
know, suppose their revolution went wrong and the other side appeared to be coming out
on top?
He showed them what he would propose to do about it. He threw a corked bottle far out
into the water, and then popped off the cork with one shot from an army service revolver. He
threw out a block of wood and fired eight shots from a Budd .32 automatic, all in one quick
whir, and not one of the shots struck the water; Bub admitted that that took a lot of practice,
because the block jumped with every hit, and you had to know how far it would jump in a
very small fraction of a second. He did it again to show them that it was no accident. He
couldn't do it a third time, because the block of wood had so much lead in it that it sank.
Lanny couldn't perform stunts like that, but he was good enough to hit any Nazi, Bub said.
All the targets were either Nazis or Fascists; for the guard had made up his mind that trouble
was coming and no good fooling yourself. He wanted Hansi to learn to shoot, but Hansi said
he would never use his bowing hand for such a nerve-shattering performance. Bess would have
to protect him; she had learned to shoot when a child, and proved that she had not forgotten.
Then it was Freddi's turn, and he tried it, but had a hard time keeping his eyes open when he
pulled the trigger. The consequences of this pulling upon a Budd automatic were really quite
alarming, and to a gentle-souled idealist it didn't help matters to imagine a member of the
National Socialist German Workingmen's Party in the line of the sights.
Lanny, who had been used to guns all his life, had no idea of the effect of these
performances upon two timid shepherd boys out of ancient Judea. Hansi declared that his
music didn't sound right for a week afterward; while as for the younger brother, the experiment
had produced a kind of moral convulsion in his soul. To be sure, he had seen guns being
carried in Berlin and elsewhere by soldiers, policemen, S.S.'s and S.A.'s; but he had never held
one in his hand, and had never realized the instantaneous shattering effect of an automatic.
Calling the targets a portion of the human anatomy had been a joke to an ex-cowboy, but
Freddi's imagination had been filled with images of mangled bodies, and he kept talking about it
for some time afterward. "Lanny, do you really believe we are going to see another war? Do
you think you can live through it?"
Freddi even talked to Fanny Barnes about the problem, wondering if it mightn't be possible
to organize some sort of society to teach children the ideal of kindness, in opposition to the
dreadful cruelty that was now being taught in Germany. The stately Queen Mother was touched
by a young Jew's moral passion, but she feared that her many duties at home would leave her no
time to organize a children's peace group in New York. And besides, wasn't Germany the
country where it needed to be done?
VI
Fanny set up a great complaint concerning the heat at Bienvenu; she became exhausted and
had to lie down and fan herself and have iced drinks brought to her. But Beauty Budd, that old
Riviera hand, smiled behind her embonpoint, knowing well that this was one more effort—and
she hoped the last—to carry Baby Frances away. Beauty took pleasure in pointing out the
great numbers of brown and healthy babies on the beaches and the streets of Juan; she
pointed to Lanny and Marceline as proof that members of the less tough classes could be
raised here successfully. Baby herself had developed no rashes or "summer complaints," but on
the contrary rollicked in the sunshine and splashed in the water, slept long hours, ate everything
she could get hold of, and met with no worse calamity than having a toe nipped by a crab.
So the disappointed Queen Mother let her bags be packed and stowed in the trunk of Lanny's
car, and herself and maid stowed in the back seat, from which she would do as much driving
as her polite son-in-law would permit. On the evening of the following day they delivered her
