“I know, darling, it's done; and don't have your blessed feelings hurt — you know I love you, and we've been so happy, and will be some more. But if we tie ourselves down, and get our families to arguing and all that — it would be a frightful bore.”
Lanny was imperfectly educated in modern ideas, and couldn't get the thing clear in his mind. He wanted his adored one all the time, and couldn't imagine that she might not want him. Why was she so concerned about her family in this one matter, and so indifferent, even defiant, in others? He asked her to explain it, and she tried, groping to put into words things that were instinctive and unformulated. It appeared that young ladies of the English governing classes who joined the movement for equal rights wanted certain definite things, like being able to write M.P. after their names, and to have divorce on equal terms with men; but they didn't mean to interfere with the system whereby their families governed the realm. They accepted the idea that when the time came for marriage each should adopt some honored name with a peculiar spelling, and become the mistress of some beautiful old country house and the mother of future viscounts and barons, or at the least admirals and cabinet ministers.
“It mayn't be so easy to find an upper-class Englishman,” remarked the boy; “the way they're getting killed off in this war.”
“There'll be some left,” answered the girl, easily. She had only to look in the mirror to know that she had special advantages.
Lanny pondered some more, and then inquired: “Is it because I don't take sides in the war?”
“That's just a bit of it, Lanny. It helps me to realize that we shouldn't be happy; our ideas are so different, and our interests. Whatever happens to England, I have to be for her, and so will my children when I have them.”
“They are apt to go just so far and no farther,” Beauty had told her son. When he parted from Rosemary Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver, it was with tears and sighs on both sides, and a perfectly clear understanding that he might have a sweet and lovely mistress for an indefinite time, provided that he would come where she was, and do what she asked him to do. When Lanny told his mother about it, and she told Marcel, the painter remarked that the boy had been used as a guinea pig in a scientific experiment. When he learned that the boy was unhappy, he added that scientific experiments were not conducted for the benefit of the guinea pigs.
16 Business as Usual
I
WHEN the German army came to Les Forêts, old M. Priedieu, the librarian, had stayed to guard his employer's treasures. He had stood by, pale with horror, while drunken hussars cut the valuable pictures from the walls, rolled up the tapestries, dumped the venerable leather-covered chairs out of the windows, and swept the priceless books from the shelves in pure wantonness. They didn't do any physical harm to the white-haired old man, but they so wounded his sensibilities that he took to his bed, and a few days later died quietly in his sleep.
But his spirit lived on in Lanny Budd. All the boy's life he would remember what the grave old scholar had told him about the love of books. This was something that no misfortune or sorrow could take from a man, and its possessor had a refuge from all the evils of the world. Montesquieu had said that to love reading was to exchange hours of boredom for hours of delight; Laharpe had said that a book is a friend that never deceives. The librarian of Les Forêts had advised Lanny to seek the friendship of the French classic authors and let them teach him dignity, grace, and perfection of form.
Now misfortune and sorrow had come; love had dallied with Lanny Budd for a while and then tossed him away. The crisis found him without companionship, because Jerry Pendleton had come to an arrangement with his belle amie to wait for him, and had gone back to Kansas to complete his education. In this plight Lanny sought the friendship of one Jean Racine, who had died more than two hundred years previously but lived on by the magic of the printed page. He took disordered emotions and converted them into well-made dramas, in which exalted beings stalked the scene and poured out their sufferings in verses so eloquent that a youth of sixteen was moved to seek lonely places by the sea or in the forest and declaim them to tritons or hamadryads.
Also Lanny won the friendship of a severe and stern spirit by the name of Pierre Corneille, who had made over the French theater, and had had no easy time of it in his life. The aristocratic personages who had sprung from his brain, full panoplied in pride and owing fealty to duty alone, reminded a sensitive youth that the life of man had never been easy, and that fate appeared to have other purposes than to feed pleasure to avid lips. Since one had to die sooner or later, let it be magnificently, to the accompaniment of verses that had the sweep of an orchestra:
After Lanny had read Le Cid and Horace and Cinna, he remembered the great hours he had spent among the Isles of Greece, and that these people also could be had in friendship by the magic of the printed word. M. Priedieu had told him about Sophocles, and Lanny got a French translation of the seven plays and read them aloud to his stepfather. Together they indulged in more speculation about the Greek view of life, which had begun with the worship of sensuous beauty and ended with a confrontation of dreadful and inexplicable doom. For what had this gay and eager people been brought into being on those bright and sunny shores, to leave behind them only broken marble columns, and a few thousand melodious verses embodying proud resignation and despair?
As a result of these influences, encountered at the most impressionable age, Lanny Budd became conservative in his taste in the arts. He liked a writer to have something to say, and to say it with clarity and precision; he liked a musician to reveal his ideas in music, and not in program notes; he liked a painter to produce works that bore some resemblance to something. He disliked loud noises and confusion, and obscurity cultivated as a form of exclusiveness. All of which meant that Lanny was out-of-date before he had got fairly started in life.
II
Inspired by sublime examples, the painter gave his stepson useful advice concerning love. It was good to do with it, but also good to be able to do without it. In this, as in other affairs, one must be master of one's self. There were a thousand reasons why love might fail, and one must have resources within and be able to meet the shocks of fate. Lanny knew that Marcel spoke with authority — this lover who had had to leave his love and go to war; this worshiper of beauty who now had to speak through a veil in order that his friends might not see his ugliness. When Marcel said that Lanny too might some day hear a call that would take him away from music and art and love — the youth trembled in the depths of his soul.
Lanny talked about these problems of love and happiness with his mother also. Strict moralists might have been shocked that Beauty was willing to know about her son's too early entanglement, and to sanction it; but her course had this compensation, that when the youth was in trouble, now or later, he came to her and had the benefit of her experience.
She tried now to explain to him things that she didn't understand very well herself. No, she didn't think that Rosemary was heartless; it was evident that the girl had taken up the ideas of older women, who perhaps had suffered too much in a man's world, and had revoked from it and gone to extremes in the effort to protect themselves. Beauty told her son that kind and good people frequently had to suffer for those who were not so. Just so Kurt Meissner and other kind and good Germans might suffer for those cruel and arrogant ones who had dragged the nation into an awful calamity.