The Lanny Budd Novels: Between Two Worlds; by Upton Sinclair.

The few years after the first world war that were of some peace, in this volume - second book in the series, World's End.
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The title of the second in the series is from Matthew Arnold verses 

"“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born.”" 


This volume continues from where the World's End left off, it's now peace and time for people to find their lives, love, mates, work, roles. Between Two Worlds deals mostly with this on the level of characters in forefront, while the historic events and personages are woven into the story in background, often meeting.

Wonder if U.S. was shocked at the love stories described by the author, or did they disapprove severely but put it all in the file labelled European ways, and made a note to keep clear?

But one very distinct use made of one of the said love stories, French upper class style, comes later in the book, when Lanny is travelling in Italy for privacy with his inamorata. This love story begins almost immediately, after Beauty and Kurt are settled for present. Lanny gets Bienvenu ready with a separate studio for Kurt who is serious about music, and Beauty brings him back from Spain.

"Lanny was relieved to find that Kurt did not carry the late international unhappiness into the realm of art; he was willing to listen to English and French and even to Italian music. But he had severe standards; he liked music that was structurally sound and hated that which was showy. Presently Lanny began to note that it was the great German composers who had the desired qualities and the foreign ones who lacked them. Lanny said nothing about this, because he was trying so hard to please his friend.

"They had been able to get only a small upright piano in Spain, but still he had been able to extract a tremendous racket from it. From watching him rather than from listening, Beauty had come to understand that he was trying to find something to take the place of the war; trying to vent his rage and despair, his love for his own people, his grief at their humiliation and defeat. Watching his face while he played, Beauty lived through her agonies with Marcel, and then those with Kurt, shifting back and forth between the German soul and the French."

"All three of the great B’s of German music, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, were calling to Kurt Meissner to carry on their tradition. Lanny talked about them with such intensity of feeling that the German was deeply touched. The new Kurt of political bitterness seemed to fade and dissolve, and the old Kurt of moral fervor and devotion came back to life. When in the twilight they descended the slope, it seemed to Lanny that the war was really over and the soul life of Europe beginning again."

Rick was crippled in war, had a wife and son, but worked at writing, and began successfully.

"The baronet’s son, brilliant and versatile, was also trying his hand at poetry. His own severest critic, he wouldn’t send any of it to Lanny. Nobody could possibly publish it, he declared, because it was so bitter. He was one of those many heroes who were not satisfied with what they had accomplished by their sacrifices and were questioning the whole universe to know who was to blame. Was it the stupid old men who had sat in the council chambers and sent the young men out to be drowned in mud and blood? Was it all mankind, which was able to invent and build machines but not to control them? Was it God, who had made men wrong—and why? Rick quoted four lines from a poem he called After War:

""Are nations like the men they make?
Or was it God who fashioned men?
O God, who willed the clay awake,
Will now to sleeping clay again!"

"It happened that in London, at the home of Lady Eversham-Watson, Lanny had met a magazine editor, and, without telling Rick, he sent the poem After War and was delighted when the editor offered to publish it and pay two guineas.

"Kurt agreed that the verses were good; and Jerry Pendleton, sarcastic fellow, remarked—not in the presence of Kurt—that any German would be glad to hear that an Englishman regretted having licked him. Jerry was one doughboy who had no sorrows over the Versailles treaty, and declared that “Old Whiskers,” as he irreverently called Kaiser Wilhelm, was a lot better off sawing cordwood at Doom."

Rick's son Alfy is few days older to Lanny's half sister Marceline, and Lanny has told the two mums to matchmake, before they meet when Rick brings his family to Juan-Les-Pins at Lanny's invitation.

"Rick’s typing machine out to a rustic table every morning when the weather was fair. There he would sit alone, and his rage against human stupidity would fan itself white hot, and molten words would pour from the typewriter, all but burning the pages. Strange as it might seem, the more he lashed the damned human race the better they liked it; such was the mood of the time—all thinking men agreed that the peoples of Europe had made fools of themselves, and it was proof of advanced views to abuse the “old men,” the “brass hats,” the “patrioteers,” the “merchants of death.”

"It was as if you had been on a terrible “bat” the night before, and had got into a row with your best friend and blacked both his eyes. Next morning you were apologetic, and willing to let him have the best of all the arguments. So it was that both Lanny and Rick dealt with their German friend; the Englishman talked as if it was really quite embarrassing to have won a war, and of course what he wrote about British bungling pleased Kurt entirely—only he found it difficult to understand how British editors were willing to pay money for it!"

"Rick took a couple of newspapers and half a dozen weeklies, and would lie propped up in bed reading and making notes. The war, however many bad things it had done, had brought it about that British politics were French politics and German politics and Russian politics and American politics. All the nations of the earth had been thrown into one stew-pot, there to simmer slowly. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble!

"The Turks were still slaughtering Armenian peasants. Civil war was still raging in Russia, the Whites now being driven in rout to all points of the compass. In Siberia a freight-train loaded with Reds was wandering aimlessly upon an eight-thousand-mile track, the locked-in prisoners perishing of starvation and disease. The Polish armies, invading Russia, were still dreaming of world empire. The White Finns were killing tens of thousands of Red Finns. The Rumanians were killing Red Hungarians. There were insurrections and mass strikes in Germany, a plague of labor revolts in France and Britain, millions unemployed in every great nation, famine everywhere in Europe, flu in the western half and typhus in the eastern.

"When, in the middle of 1919, President Wilson and his staff had left the Peace Conference, that body had stayed on to settle the destinies of Austria and Hungary and Bulgaria and Turkey. It was still holding sessions, with despairing peoples waiting upon its decisions; when these were announced they were generally out of date, because events had moved beyond them. The British and French statesmen were agreed that Italy should not have Fiume, but an Italian poet with a glory complex had raised a revolt and seized the city. All Statesmen agreed that the Bolshevik madness must be put down, but meanwhile it throve and spread, and mountains of supplies which the Allies had furnished to the White generals were being captured and used by the Reds. The statesmen decided that Turkey should lose most of her empire, but the Turks dissented and retired into their mountains, and who had an army to go after them? The French had seized the land of poor Emir Feisal—all but those parts which had oil; the British had these, and there was a bitter wrangle, and it looked as if the alliance which had won the war would break up before it finished dividing the spoils."

Robbie visited.

"You could see Kurt’s musical stature growing, Lanny said; and Robbie listened politely, but without much enthusiasm. Robbie had been to Yale, and had got vaccinated with culture, but it hadn’t “taken”; he knew a lot of college songs and popular stuff, but left highbrow music to those who pretended to understand it. Maybe Lanny did; in any case, his father was satisfied if it kept him happy and out of mischief.

"One important question: Was Kurt having much to do with Germans? Lanny answered: “No. What could he do, anyhow?” The father didn’t know, but he said there would be war of one sort or another between France and Germany so long as those two nations existed. And certainly Bienvenu must not become a secret headquarters of the Germans."

"Robbie, who had seen Rick in Paris just before he went out to his near-death, had admired his grit then and admired it now. He told Lanny that was one fellow who must have help whenever he needed it."

"On the center table lay newspapers telling with shocked headlines that the French and British armies had occupied Constantinople, which was threatened with revolution and might plunge the world into another war. When one said “another war” one didn’t count the dozen or so small wars which were going on all the time, and which one had come to take for granted; one meant another war involving one’s own land; one meant—horror of horrors—a war in which the late Allies might be fighting against each other!"

"The old Turkish Empire had collapsed, and a new Turkey was going to be born, with all the benefits of modern civilization, such as oil wells and tanks and pipelines, not to mention copper mines in Armenia and potash works on the Dead Sea. The only question was, which benevolent nation was going to have the pleasure of conferring these blessings upon the Turks? (This wasn’t Robbie’s phrase; it was Rick’s rephrasing.) The British had got hold of all the oil, but the French had got Syria and the Hejaz and were trying to control the routes of the pipelines; behind the scenes there was a furious quarrel going on, with screaming and calling of names in the nasal French language.

"Now suddenly came this coup d’état in Constantinople. The benighted Turks didn’t want to accept benefits from either Britain or France, but wanted to dig their own oil wells and keep the oil; so the quarreling friends were obliged to act together in spite of their wishes. Lloyd George was talking about a holy war, in which the Christian Greeks would put down the heathen Turks; but what effect would that have upon the several hundred millions of Moslems who lived under the union Jack or near it?

"Robbie pointed out that a certain Greek trader by the name of Basil Zaharoff had just been made Knight Commander of the Bath in England, a high honor rarely extended to aliens; Zaharoff controlled Vickers, the great munitions industry of Britain, and had saved the Empire at a net profit which people said was a quarter of a billion dollars—though Robbie Budd considered the figure exaggerated. Zaharoff was a friend of Lloyd George, and was reported to be one of his financial backers, which was only natural, considering how much money a politician had to have and how much governmental backing an international financier had to have. Zaharoff’s hatred of the Turks was one passion of his life that he didn’t have to hide."

Robbie now had Zaharoff as a partner in his oil venture in Arabia, and he took Lanny along for a meeting at Monte Carlo.

"He defended the right of the Greek peoples to recover the lands taken long ago by the Turks, and said that he was insisting that the Allies should put the Turks out of Europe for good and all. Once more Lanny sat behind the scenes of the world puppet-show and saw where the strings led and who pulled them.

"He learned that the strings reached even to that far-off land of liberty which he had been taught to consider his own. The munitions king wanted to know about the prospects of the election of a Republican president of the United States; he knew the names of the prominent aspirants, and listened attentively while Robbie described their personalities and connections. When Zaharoff heard that the Budd clan expected to have a voice in selecting a dependable man, he remarked: “You will be needing funds and may call on me for my share. Robbie hadn’t expected that, and said so, whereupon the master of Europe replied: “When I invest my money in an American company, I become an American, don’t I?” It was a remark that Lanny would never forget.”

Robbie discussed Lanny's need of a match as he departed.

"Budding females were trained for the marriage market, they were dressed for it, they learned to walk and talk and dance and flirt for it. In the presence of their highly developed arts the unhappy male creature was as helpless as a moth in a candle-flame. “You’re going to have a hard time finding one who will please Beauty,” said Robbie, with a smile; “but all the same, don’t fail to have her advice, because that’s her department.”

"“What I want,” said Lanny, “is to learn something worth while, and meet some woman who is interested in the same things.”

"“It can happen,” said Robbie. “But most of the time what the woman is thinking about is making you think she’s interested. And if you’re fooled it can play the devil with your life.”"

"The Duchesse de Meuse-Montigny was giving a very grand garden-party; and since Beauty’s costumes were all hopelessly out of date she went in to Nice and had M. Claire fit her with something worthy of the occasion. Lanny was supplied with a light worsted suit of that spring’s cut. ....  It was just after a devastating war, when young males were scarce and young females ravenous. Inside the white marble palace a colored band was thumping, and Lanny would take the would-be brides in his arms one by one, sampling their charms symbolically, and Beauty would watch out of the corner of her eye and ask questions about the one in pink organdy or the one in white tulle with yellow shoulder-bows, and seldom be satisfied with what she learned.

"What did she expect? Well, obviously, any woman who aspired to marry Lanny Budd had to be beautiful. How could he endure to have her about the house otherwise? She had to be rich—not just comfortably, but something super and solid, no fly-by-night fortune based on speculation. There were heiresses all over the place, and why not cultivate them? Lanny had told Beauty of Tennyson’s Northern Farmer, and she endorsed his formula: “Doänt thou marry fur munny, but goä wheer munny is!” Also, it would be safer if the chosen one belonged to an established family, and could prove it by Debrett. Finally, she would have to be clever, almost a bluestocking, otherwise how could she keep from boring Lanny? Even his own mother couldn’t do that!"

Emily Chattersworth invited him to lunch with a partner of her late husband and his wife, accompanied by a pretty and young niece rich in her own right.

"She was a pleasant enough girl, and Lanny could imagine himself pitching in and making himself agreeable and perhaps winning her; then he would be fixed for life, he wouldn’t ever have to work. But it didn’t seem to him like much fun, and the girl was entitled to better luck, though she would probably not have it. How many men were there who could come that close to several million dollars in one lump and not think it was cheap at the price? Such things subjected human nature to too great a strain!"

There was another friend of the hostess at lunch, Marie.

"Madame de Bruyne said that she was sorry to have to bother her friend to send her home. So of course it was Lanny’s duty to offer to drive her.

"“Oh, but I live far to the west of Cannes,” said the French lady with the sad brown eyes.

"“I like to drive,” Lanny replied. It was kind of him, and Mrs. Emily knew that he was always kind—it explained why she was taking the trouble to find him a rich wife."

They connected on levels of mind and spirit.

"He had met society ladies who would pretend to have read any book you mentioned; but when this one didn’t know something she asked about it and listened to what you said."

"It seemed that he had never met anyone with whom he shared such quick understandings; their ideas fitted together like mortised joints in a well-built house. When he played happy music she forgot her grief, and their spirits danced together over flower-strewn meadows. When he played MacDowell’s An Old Trysting Place, her eyes were misty, and she did not have to talk. Lanny thought: “I have found a friend!”"

Beauty asked about the heiress and wasn't pleased about Marie being there.

"“She doesn’t talk much. She’s one of the saddest-looking women I ever saw. She’s grieving over a brother that she lost in the war.”

"“She has more than that to worry about,” remarked Beauty.

"“What else?”

"“Emily says her husband is one of those elderly men who have to have virgins.”

"“Oh!” exclaimed Lanny, shocked.

"“And she isn’t a virgin,” added Beauty, with unnecessary emphasis."

"“You had a talk with her?”

"“I drove her home, and played the piano for her. I met her aunt, Madame Scelles.”

"“She’s the widow of a professor at the Sorbonne.”

"“I knew they were cultivated people,” said Lanny. “They have very refined manners.”

"“For heaven’s sake be careful!” exclaimed the mother. “There’s nothing more dangerous than an unhappily married woman. Remember, she’s as old as your mother.”

"Lanny chuckled. “As old as my mother admits!”"

Beauty confronted Lanny and asked if he was in love with Marie, which put the thought in his head - so strangely enough, or perhaps it's common, the older generation points out what they consider danger and the younger, not having noticed it till then, promptly dives in. Lanny discovered that he was in fact in love and convinced Marie that her feelings need not cause shame.
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Rick was asked by an editor to go to San Remo and write about a conference, and Lanny drove him.

"It was all so familiar to Lanny Budd, it was as if he had had an elaborate nightmare and now was starting it all over again. When he made this remark to a journalist from America, the man advised him to get used to this nightmare, because he would be riding it several times every year for how long nobody could say. The nations would be wrangling and arguing over the Versailles treaty until they were at war again. Newspaper men are notoriously cynical.

"The Senate of the United States having refused to ratify the treaty or to join the League of Nations, Lanny’s country had no representative at San Remo, not even an unofficial observer. But of course the American press had a large delegation, and among these were men whom Lanny had come to know in Paris, where he had served as a sort of secret pipeline through which news was permitted to leak. These men were under obligations to him, and greeted him cordially and took him and his aviator friend into their confidence. Lanny had advised Rick to say nothing about his proposed article, but to make his way with Americans on his war record, and with his compatriots on the basis of being the son of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, Bart. Rick wouldn’t be violating any confidences, because these correspondents were cabling “spot news” for various deadlines, and by the time a magazine article could appear they would be off on some other assignment."

They met the other secretaries Lanny knew.

"Rick remarked what a pleasant place the statesmen had picked out for themselves; whereupon Fessenden chimed in: “Did you hear what Lloyd George said to the premiers? A red-hot one! ‘Well, gentlemen, we are in the Garden of Eden, and I wonder who will play the snake!’”

"The San Remo conference had assembled amid direful forebodings. Many bitter disputes had arisen among the former Allies: over the remains of the Turkish Empire—Constantinople and Armenia, Syria and Palestine, the Hejaz, and especially Mesopotamia with its treasure of oil, vital alike to British, French, and Italian navies; over Russia and its Bolshevik government, and the war against it which had collapsed; over the cordon sanitaire, and Poland invading Russia and most of her neighbors at the same time; over German reparations and how they were to be shared; above all, over the new French invasion of the Rhineland, and the risk that France was taking of dragging Europe into another war.

"There had recently been an attempted revolt of German reactionaries, known as the “Kapp Putsch.” It had been put down by a general strike of the German workers, and there had followed a Communist revolt in the Ruhr, and the Socialist government of Germany had sent in troops to put that down. The move was a technical violation of the treaty of Versailles, and the French army had promptly seized a couple of German towns on the far side of the Rhine. Were they going to conquer their ancient enemy all over again, and were they expecting to get British sanction? This was the question these budding diplomats discussed with solemn faces. They told of the firm resolve of their chiefs that the French must be made to back down, and allow trade to be resumed and the German people to be saved from starvation and chaos.

"To Lanny it seemed an odd thing to hear these official persons saying the very things for which the liberals on the American staff had been called “Pinkos” and troublemakers. So rapidly had opinion changed under the pressure of events! The British were now giving all their efforts to trying to get blockades lifted and trade started. But the French still lived under the shadow of a dreadful fear. Was German militarism to be allowed to come back? And if it did, would France again have Britain’s help? With the French it was dominate or be dominated—and the moment they took to dominating, the British would begin giving help to the Germans, raising them up as a counter-force to France."

Interesting detail:-

"While Rick lay propped up on the bed making notes of what he had heard, Lanny would go out and wander through the narrow streets where old pirates from Africa had charged up the hills, slaughtering the inhabitants or dragging them off in chains."

Thus the earliest known records of Arab slavers using human detergent to whitewash their future generations. For these pirates could only be from coastal North Africa, and Arabs.

Lanny liked to know opinions from the other side, and drove Rick to a trattoria where workers dined.

"It might have been difficult for a stiff young Englishman, brought up in the public school tradition, to get into the confidence of such a person; but Lanny made it easy for him. He bought an extra bottle, and when others perceived that free wine and free conversation were available, they moved over to listen and take part. Horny dark fists were clenched and raucous voices proclaimed that a change was coming in Italy, and soon; what the workers had done in Russia was not so bad as le gazzette capitaliste had made it seem. Already many of the factories in Milan and Turin and other cities were in the hands of the workers, who would be running them for themselves and not for the padroni."

Lanny recognises Barbara Pugliese, whose companion has deliberately insulted a heavy set man at the table next to them, and Rick wanting to meet her, they go find them in another eatery close by; Barbara informs them about the goon whom her companion insulted, someone poor whom her comrades had taken pity on.

"Lanny mentioned that they had been witnesses of the recent fracas, and Barbara’s face lost all its gentleness. “That is the most abominable little wretch that I have met upon this earth!” she told them. “When I first knew him in Milan, where I was an official of the party, he was a poor waif who came to meetings, a sick beggar who haunted our headquarters to sponge upon the kindness of members. Now and then someone would give him food—just because it is impossible to eat with any satisfaction while a starving dog is cringing by the table. You cannot imagine the misery of this ragged and homeless one, lamenting the hopelessness of his fate, the worthlessness of himself, the pains he suffered from syphilis—this, I imagine, would not be considered quite good taste in England?”

"“Rather not,” said Rick, to whom the question was addressed.

"“We of the party of course have to allow for the degradation of the workers. It is our duty to lift them up and teach them, and so we aided this poor Benito—the name is Spanish and means ‘Blessed One’ and is freely bestowed by pious mothers. So we taught the favorite of heaven the philosophy of brotherhood and solidarity, and he proved to be quick at learning phrases and using them in speeches. It was not long before he was addressing the workers, denouncing all capitalists and clamoring that their throats should be cut. There was only one person in the world to whom he could not give courage, and that was his mournful self. There is a pun I used to make upon his name, which is Mussolini. I would leave out one of the s’s. The Italian word muso means—I cannot recall the French word, but it is when a child has his feelings hurt, and he will not play, but makes a face very ugly—”

"“Boudant,” supplied Lanny, and added for Rick’s benefit: “Pouting.”

"“That is it,” said Barbara. “And so Benito Musolini means Blessed Little Pouter. In that way I would try to tease him out of his self-pity—and you see how in the end I succeeded. His poor thin cheeks have filled out, he wears well-tailored clothes and orates in the trattoire.”

"“How does he manage this?” inquired Rick, thinking of his “human interest.”

"“He became the editor of the Socialist paper in Milan; and when the British agents or French came to him he took their gold. The paper changed its tone overnight; and when the party kicked him out, he got more gold to start a paper of his own and to denounce his former comrades as traitors to la patria. Now he is here getting material for articles about the conference. He is all for the sacro egoismo; he preaches to the starving workers the glory of holding Fiume and seizing the Dalmatian coast, and that it is their sublime destiny to help fill a sea of blood upon which the Italian navy may sail to world empire. Never has there been such a transformation in a man—you should see him on the platform, how he has learned to thrust out his chin and swell up his chest—our Blessed Little Pouter.”

"“You are making a better pun than you know,” put in Lanny. “There is a kind of pigeon which swells up its chest in such a way, and by a strange chance is called a pouter.”

"The woman was delighted, and told her friend about it—uno Colombo! He laughed with glee, and learned to say it in English—Benito Musolini—Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon!"

Rick talked to Barbara about what she thought of current situation, and she elucidated about need of coal that British woukdnt supply, so trade with Russia was essential.

"They discussed the theories of syndicalism, or labor-union control of industry. Barbara hated every form of government; She would trust no politicians, whatever label they gave themselves. Rick pointed out that in Russia the workers had a strong government; syndicalism appeared to have merged with Bolshevism, which put everything into the hands of the state. Barbara attributed this to the civil war, which was really an invasion of Russia by the capitalist nations. Government control of industry might be a temporary necessity, but she didn’t like it. Rick ventured the guess that if she were to go to Russia she mightn’t find what she expected.

"The woman rebel had one argument to which she would return. Could the workers make a worse mess of the world than their masters had done? Look at what they had made of Europe! One more such holocaust and the Continent would be a wilderness inhabited by savages wearing skins and hiding in caves. “Capitalism is war,” declared Barbara Pugliese; “its peace is nothing but a truce. If once the workers own the tools of production, they do not produce for profit, but for their own use, and trade becomes free exchange and not a war for markets.”

"“I have to admit,” said the interviewer, “that our British labor movement seems to have the sanest program at present.” Lanny found that a startling opinion to come from a baronet’s son. Was Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson turning into a Pink? And if he did, what would Robbie make of it?"

Rick wrote his article while Lanny played tennis with Fessenden and others.

"When Rick worked, he worked like one possessed, and Lanny read the manuscript page by page and kept his friend cheered by extravagant praises.

"Really it was a first-class article, written by a man who had been behind the scenes and hadn’t been fooled by official propaganda. Rick described the loveliness of the background of the conference; was it the region referred to by the hymn-writer, where “every prospect pleases, and only man is vile”? Here were flower-covered hills, roads lined with palm trees, hedges of roses and oleanders, cactus gardens and towering aloes; and here were elderly politicians whose minds were labyrinths full of snares for the feet of even their friends and allies. Rick cited official statements which had gone all over the earth and which were at a variance with facts. He showed how the old men used words to take the place of realities, until for their peace of mind they had to force themselves to believe their own propaganda.

"The French wanted to weaken Germany, while the British wanted to raise Germany so that they could trade with her: that in one sentence was what all the conferring was about. They had effected a compromise by which they were going to do both at the same time. Privately they admitted that the Versailles treaty was unenforceable, but they solemnly told the world that it was not to be revised; they would “interpret” it—which was another word. They would bluff, and overlook the fact that no one heeded their bluffs. They had announced that they would not discuss the question of Russia, and the next day they proceeded to discuss it. They denounced Germany for not having delivered coal to France, but at the same time they pledged France to take no action about it. The French were helping to drive the Turks from Constantinople, but at the same time they were arming the Turks against the British; gun-running and smuggling were going on all along the Arabian coasts, and wherever else any traders saw a chance for profit."

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Rick's two articles were praised by the editor, published, and were paid for, ten pounds each.

"This happy outcome gave the American a fresh understanding of the English people and their peculiar ways. It just hadn’t seemed possible to him that an English magazine would publish such an indictment of English policy and procedure. That they paid for it, and held out the promise of a career to the man who wrote it, was something to be graven in one’s memory. You might paint the crimes of the British Empire as black as you pleased, but you would never say anything worse than Britons themselves would never say any-proclaiming in public meetings; and little by little the opinions of that “saving remnant,” the agitation which they maintained, would penetrate the case-hardened minds of elder statesmen, and British policy would be brought into line with the conscience of humanity."

Another conference, at Spa. Lanny and Rick went, dropping Nina and Alfy at channel crossing.

"A new stage of world reconstruction was beginning at this ancient center of healing, for here came representatives of the new Socialist government of Germany. It must be admitted that they looked much like the old-time Prussians, and from their buccal cavities emerged the same guttural sounds; but they were speaking for a republic, and declaring their desire to serve the whole German people, not just a military caste. They expected no cordiality, and their expectations were fulfilled; ... The main grievance was that the Allies could not be persuaded to fix the amount of the indemnities, and thus the Germans could not know where they stood in any business affairs. Rick was prepared to concede that, but the official answerer of questions went on to contend that the treaty of Versailles was so bad that it justified the Germans in refusing to comply with any of the terms that did not seem fair to them. The young Englishman’s patience gave out, and he asked: “What do you want the Allies to do—fight the war over again?” It seemed to Lanny that the method of “conference” didn’t always work as the liberals expected!"

"Another subject which was causing embittered controversy was the failure of the Germans to surrender war materials to the Allies as the treaty had provided. Concerning this there could be no argument—at least from the Allies’ point of view. Unless the war was to be fought over again, for what did Germany need heavy guns and bombing planes? In vain would suave confidential agents whisper into the ears of Allied staff members that German armies might be needed to put down the subhuman Bolshevist conspiracy that was establishing itself in eastern Europe. The French wanted this done, but by their own allies, the Poles and other border peoples; they wouldn’t let any Russian territories be occupied by Germans—their cordon sanitaire was double-fronted, to keep Germans from going east as well as to keep Russians from coming west."

Lanny went west, and drove with Marie to Brittany and Loire, the honeymoon being first happiness for Marie. They brought their families into know, planning meeting when her son's returned to school. Kurt was happy being a composer, Beauty and Marceline in his discipline. Kurt read from the library bequeathed by Eli Budd to Lanny.

"Kurt said that Americans pursued metaphysical activities in the same way that they hunted wild Indians in their forests, each man picking out his own tree or rock and aiming his own gun. Said Lanny: “I suppose the German philosophers march in well-ordered ranks, thinking in unison and armed with government subsidies.” Kurt laughed, but all the same he thought that was the way to set about any undertaking, military or metaphysical."

"He received letters from his family that would leave him in a state of depression for days. The situation in Germany was appalling; there appeared to be an almost complete absence of necessities, and no way to get industry or trade started. The government could exist only by printing paper money, and as a result retail prices were six or eight times what they had been before the war. In Stubendorf it wasn’t so bad, because this was an agricultural district, and crops were in the ground, and some harvested; so the Meissners had food. But the workers in the towns were starving, and there was chaos in most of Upper Silesia, which didn’t know whether it was Polish or German, so people who should have been at work were arguing and fighting over the forthcoming plebiscite. There were “polling police,” half German and half Polish, supposed to be keeping order, but much of the time they were fighting among themselves. There was that terrible Korfanty, half patriot and half gangster, who was inciting the Poles; in August he tried to seize the whole of Upper Silesia by force, and there was a state of disorder for several weeks. To Herr Meissner, comptroller-general of Schloss Stubendorf, order was the breath of life, and to Herr Meissner’s son it was gall in the mouth to read of indignities which his father and family were suffering at the hands of a people whom they regarded as sub-human."

Johannes Robin called from Cannes and was invited to visit and lunch.

"Kurt said he had no prejudice against Jews when they were great moral philosophers like Spinoza or joyous musicians like Mendelssohn, but he didn’t care for those who coined money out of the needs of his people. However, it was necessary to take the visitor into the secret of Kurt’s identity, for of course he would remember the name, and could hardly fail to penetrate the disguise of a Swiss music-teacher."

"They sat down to a lunch upon which Leese had expended her talents, and the guest started in right away to say what happiness his elder son had derived from a short violin composition of Kurt’s which Lanny had taken the trouble to copy out and send to Rotterdam. Hansi had played it at a recital at the conservatory, where many had inquired concerning its author. Then Kurt knew that he was dealing with no ordinary money-grubber, and he listened while Mr. Robin told about his wonderful first-born, who was now sixteen, and possessed such fire and temperament that he was able to draw out of pieces of dead wood and strips of pig’s intestines the intensest expressions of the soul of man.

"That darling Hansi, about whom Lanny had been hearing for seven years, had grown tall but very thin, because he worked so hard that it was difficult to bring him to meals; he had large soulful eyes and wavy black hair, in short, the very picture of an inspired young musician. “Oh, M. Dalcroze”—so Kurt was addressed in the household—“I wish that you might hear him and play with him! And you, Lanny—he talks about nothing so often as when shall he meet Lanny Budd, and do I think that Lanny Budd will like him, even though he is Jewish and so many people have prejudices against his race.”

"“Listen, Mr. Robin,” the long-talked-of Lanny Budd remarked, on the impulse of the moment, “why don’t you let those two boys come to see us?”

"“Oh, but I would be delighted!” replied the father.

"“What are they doing now?”

"“Now they are in the country, where we have a lovely place. But Hansi will practice every day. In September they go back to school.”

"“In September I have an engagement too,” said Lanny.

"“But why not let them come now and spend a week or two with us?”

"“Would you really like to have them?” The Jewish gentleman looked from Lanny to Lanny’s mother, and each could see the gratification in his dark eyes.

"“I am sure it would give us all great pleasure,” said Beauty, to whom “company” was as a summer shower to a thirsty garden.

"“We have a lot of violin music that we should like to know better,” put in Kurt. “I make a stab at it, but it is not like really hearing it.”

"“If I would telegraph to them, they would be starting tomorrow.”

"“The sooner the better,” said Lanny. “Tell them to fly.”

"The father turned pale at the thought. “Never would I take such a chance with the two most precious of beings to me! I cannot tell you, Madame Budd, what those two lads mean to me and my wife. For whatever I do in this world I make the excuse that Hansi and Freddi will make it worth while that I have lived.” Beauty smiled gently and told him that she knew the feeling well. He was a very nice man, she decided, in spite of that one trouble for which he couldn’t be blamed."

Lanny talked with him later about business.

"“You cannot imagine how many unlikely things are required by an army,” explained Johannes Robin. “Can you suggest to me any patriotic organization which might be wishing to purchase an edition of twenty-five thousand lives of the one-time President, William McKinley?”

"“I regret that I cannot think of one at the moment,” replied Lanny, gravely."

"Your father is troubled that I persist in selling German marks; in America he gets the propaganda which the Germans are putting out—you understand the situation?”

"“I haven’t been watching the money-market, Mr. Robin.”

"“You would not, being an art lover, and for that I honor you. But I explain that all over the world are people of German race who have money, and love the Fatherland, and the Fatherland needs help, but how can the help be given? If these Germans can be persuaded to invest in the Fatherland’s paper money, life may continue at home. So the government gives out news to the effect that prosperity is beginning, that Germany is coming back with a rush, that there will be no more paper marks, that the mark has reached its lowest point—and so they sell plenty more marks. But they do not sell them to Johannes Robin—on the contrary, I sell millions and millions to Germans for delivery in three months, and when the time comes I buy them for half what I am due to receive. This troubles your father, because he considers it a risk. Tell him to trust me and I will make him a really rich man, not just one of the medium fellows!”

"“I’ll tell him what you say, Mr. Robin,” said Lanny; “but I know that my father always prefers to invest in real things.”

"“He is wise in that he keeps his money in dollars, and when the mark is really down we will go into Germany and buy great manufacturing concerns for a few thousands each.’ I will take you, Lanny, and we will buy old masterpieces of painting for the price of a good dinner.”

"“I wouldn’t know what to do with them,” said Lanny. “I have a storeroom full of the paintings of Marcel Detaze which we ought to sell.”

"“Oh, take my advice and do nothing yet!” exclaimed the shrewd man of business. “Now everything is in a slump, but in a short time things will get started again, and there will be such a boom as no man has ever dreamed of. Then your father and I will be riding on top of the wave.”"

Lanny received the Robin boys Hansi and Freddi.

"Lanny remembered how thrilled he had been, how the whole earth had taken on hues of enchantment, when he had traveled to Kurt Meissner’s home and seen a great castle with its snow-covered turrets gleaming in the early morning sun. Now came little Freddi Robin, at that same age of fourteen. He and his brother were seeing the Côte d’Azur for the first time, and semi-tropical landscapes were as magical to them as snow had been to Lanny. Trees laden with oranges and lemons, bowers of roses and cascades of purple bougainvillaea, rocky shores with blue water turning green in the shallows—all these sights brought cries of wonder, and then anxiety as to whether one was being too demonstrative in the presence of Anglo-Saxon reticence. Everybody at Bienvenu liked them at once; impossible not to, they were so gentle, so sweet-tempered and anxious to please. They spoke acceptable English, French, and German, as well as their native Dutch. Their eager conscientiousness was evident, and persons who knew the harsh world were touched by the thought of what these boys might be made to suffer."

Lanny played a duet with Hansi.

"“I am sorry to be so nervous. I have wanted so much to do this. Now I am afraid I may stumble.”

"“You are less likely to stumble than I,” said Lanny, comfortingly. “I have heard this sonata, but I have never seen the score. Let us agree to pardon each other.”

"Little Freddi had his hands clenched tightly and also his lips, and could give no comfort to anybody. But Kurt and Beauty, who were sitting by, said reassuring things, and presently Hansi got himself together; he raised his bow and nodded, and Lanny began. When the violin came in, a tender and questioning melody floated onto the air, and Kurt, the real musician of the family, started inwardly, for he knew tone when he heard it, he knew feeling and élan. This music was restless and swiftly changing, it pleased and then became vehement; its fleeting forms were the perpetual miracle of life, something new unfolding itself, discoveries being made, vistas of experience being opened. The frail lad forgot his anxieties and played as if he and his violin were one being. When the sonata came to its climax in a long and well-executed trill, Kurt exclaimed: “Oh, good!” which meant a tremendous lot, coming from him. Lanny, who had been raised in France, jumped up and grabbed Hansi and gave him a hug. The lad had tears in his eyes; it was such a moment as doesn’t come often, even to the emotional tribe of the music-makers.

"Kurt asked for something else, and Hansi brought out a violin and piano arrangement of Wieniawski’s Second Concerto. Lanny knew that Kurt disliked the Poles above all the other tribes of men; but the artist is above prejudice, and Hansi executed these fireworks with great éclat. The Romance wept and wailed, and when they came to the allegro con fuoco and the molto appassionato, then indeed Lanny had to get a hump on him, as the saying is. He missed some of the notes, but never failed to get the first in every bar, and he was there at the finish. An exhilarating race, and they wound up with a grand flourish, red in the face and proud of themselves.

"Politeness required that they should hear Freddi also. He insisted that he wasn’t anything compared to his brother, but they wanted him to play his clarinet, and Hansi produced the score of Haydn’s Gypsy Rondo, part of a trio. Kurt took the piano this time, and Lanny listened to gaily tripping music out of the eighteenth century, when it seemed easier to be contented with one’s lot in life. Lanny was proud of these two charming lads, and certain that they would be loved by all good people. He saw that his mother was pleased with them. Some day she would be taking them to play for Mrs. Emily, and they would be invited to give a recital at Sept Chênes, where all the rich and famous persons on the Riviera would hear them. Such is the pathway to fame."

Barbara Pugliese visited, and the boys were transported hearing her during tea after they had played music.

"“Then you don’t think the Bolsheviks are wicked?” exclaimed Hansi Robin. “The Bolsheviks are trying to end poverty and war, the two greatest curses of mankind. Can that be wicked?”

"“But they kill so many people!”

"“Always through history you find slaves revolting, and they are put down with dreadful slaughter. You find that any killing done by the slaves is small compared with what the masters do. The capitalist system, which is the cause of modern war, has destroyed thirty million people by battle, starvation, and disease; what moral claims can it have after that?”

"“But can’t people be persuaded to be kind to one another?” This from the gentle Freddi.

"“No one can say that we of the working people haven’t tried. We have pleaded and explained, we have tried to educate the whole people; we have built a great system of cooperatives and workers’ schools, paid for with our very life-blood. But the masters, who fear us and hate us, are doing their best to destroy all these things.”

"So it went, until Lanny thought: “Mr. Robin wouldn’t like this any better than my father!”"

Jesse was in Cannes and unwell, Barbara said, so Lanny drove Beauty to meet her brother, but Jesse came and they missed him. He met Kurt and Robin boys.

"Jesse wasn’t sure what Kurt’s political views were, but to look at him he was a German aristocrat. So the painter explained that Germany was now listed among the down-and-outs; the British and French empires had her there and meant to keep her there. For a long time to come, the international workers would be the natural allies of the Fatherland; in left-wing labor throughout Europe lay the one hope of freedom for the German people. Jesse explained to the lads what the Versailles peace treaty meant to its victims, and why the Reparations Commission was still refusing to fix the amount of the indemnities. That must mean, and was meant to mean, bankruptcy for Germany, loss of her foreign trade, and slow, inevitable starvation for the masses.

"At the outset of the talk Kurt had the belief that Jesse didn’t know who had brought him the money. But everything the painter said was so directly to the point that finally Kurt decided he must have made a clever guess. Kurt had heard a lot about this Red sheep of his lady-love’s family, and was glad to hear what he had to say. It wasn’t even necessary to ask questions to help the conversation along; the two eager lads provided all the cues. They drank in the speaker’s every word, and what he was doing to them was a matter he had no time to consider. Jesse set forth the grim facts which were making revolutions in many parts of Europe, and he explained them according to the system of thought which he called “dialectical materialism.”"
................................................................................................ 


At this point, the stage is mostly set, with key characters in place front stage, and world events about to take place where story proceeds by some of them being involved. A few more major characters come in later, as the story proceeds, but the key personae that come in hereafter are historical, and those are all here, interacting with Lanny Budd directly or otherwise. 

Lanny's love life, for example, isn't finalised with Marie de Bruyne, and his mother's friend Emily Chattersworth does get to succeed as matchmaker.

Wonder if the first volume, World's End, was written as a single book, and the idea of continuing the same characters for the events thereafter came later.
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Lanny is established as part of a menage-a-trois with Marie and can take her to Geneva when invited by Rick to attend the League congerence, and speaks to George D. Herron.

"Lanny mentioned the problem of Upper Silesia, and how it weighed upon him because of his German friend. That led Herron to talk about the experiences he had had with the Germans all through the war. It had been known that he was in touch with President Wilson, and was sending reports through the State Department, so the Germans assumed that he was authorized to negotiate with them—which wasn’t so. First the Socialists and the pacifists, and later on, as Germany’s situation became worse, the representatives of the government, came to Le Retour in an unceasing stream.

"“They constituted,” said Herron, “a veritable clinic for the observation of the German mind; and my conclusion was that there is something inherently amiss in its make-up. The German, in his present stage of development, cannot think directly and therefore morally. He still moves, he still has his psychic being, collectively speaking, in what seems like prehuman nature. The German commonly reasons that whatever accomplishes his ends as an agent or citizen of the State is both mystically and scientifically justifiable. No matter how reprehensible the means, there is no responsibility higher than these ends that can claim his confidence.”

"“Do you mean that this is the creed that every German has thought out?” It was Rick questioning.

"“I mean it is the mental stuff of his motivation, whether conscious or unconscious. The sheer might that achieves the thing in view becomes his supreme good. You understand that I am speaking of a stream of visitors continuing over a period of three or four years. Each discussion, without regard to the messenger’s intellectual repute, or his high or low official degree, began with his assumption that Germany was misunderstood and wronged, even to the extent of a piteous martyrdom. If ever there was any grudging admission that Germany might have been remiss, it was because of deception practiced by jealous neighbors upon this too trustful, too childlike people. And always Germany must be preserved from discovering that the responsibility was hers. As an instance, an eminent and official German of high intellectual quality—a German whom I had long held in affectionate admiration—continually sought to show me that the war must be so ended as to save Germany from the humiliation of a confession. The preservation of Germany’s national pride, rather than the revelation of righteousness to her people, was basic in all this good man’s quest for a better German future. Well aware as he was of the historical abnormality of his race, admitting it candidly enough in our discussions, yet so thoroughly German was he that he could conceive no peace except one that would save Germany from self-accusation.”"

Afterwards, walking on lakefront with Lanny,

"“For fifty years,” said Marie, “we French have had the fear of German invasion, and who is going to rid us of it? How shall we be protected? Dr. Herron wants us to forgive, and let everything be as if there hadn’t been any war; but how can we be sure how that will work? Suppose the Germans take it as a sign of weakness? Suppose they see it as credulity? There are things for which they went to war, and which they’d still like to have. Suppose they take them?”"
................................................................................................    


Denis de Bruyne invited Lanny to bring his father for a visit when he was in Paris. They got along.

"Denis explained the situation. Britain had her vast overseas empire and her world trade; she would soon grow rich again, and that was what she was thinking about. But France lay with her most productive provinces in ruins, her people unemployed, and her hereditary enemy refusing to give up her arms, saying, in effect: “Come and get them!” Refusing to meet the reparations bill, deliberately destroying her financial system in order to ruin her rival, and repeating that offer which drove French businessmen frantic—to pay in goods, while French workers stayed idle and French businessmen got no profits!

"Time after time, France would be invited to conferences, where the “Welsh wizard” would turn loose his oratorical blandishments; he would take the side of the Germans and persuade the French to give up this and give up that; to let history’s greatest robber get away unscathed, with most of his loot safely stowed away in his fastnesses. “Honteux!” exclaimed Denis de Bruyne, and pounded his fist on the arm of his chair as he called the roll of these conferences of dishonor—San Remo, Hythe, Spa, Brussels, Paris, London. “Il faut en finir!” cried the “Nationalist.”

"While Robbie was there, early in August, another conference was called in Paris; an emergency one, as they were all coming to be. Imagine, if you could, the rosy little cherub with the lion’s mane ensconced with all his staff in the Hotel Crillon, wining and dining the innkeeper’s son, treating him as a social equal—and persuading him that the only way to settle the question of Upper Silesia was to refer it to the League of Nations! Playing upon those sentiments politely called “humanitarian,” though to Denis de Bruyne they were the cheapest and most disgusting of a demagogue’s stocks in trade. Talking about German “rights” to territory which every historian knew had been seized by the Prussian Frederick and which now was absolutely vital to Poland—and to France, if she was to have an ally on the eastern front to hold the ruthless Prussians in check. But of course England didn’t want France to be strong on the Continent; she was setting Germany up as a rival—the “balance of power” policy!"
................................................................................................    


Robbie is getting richer through Johannes Robin who has moved to Berlin.

"“I had a letter from the boys,” remarked Lanny. “They are happy about being in Berlin, it’s such a wonderful city, and Hansi will have great teachers at the Conservatory.”

"“If things work out the way that doggone Jew says, he’s going to own half the town before he’s through.”

"“I’m afraid the Germans won’t like him for it,” remarked Lanny, dubiously. “They call such people Schieber.”

"“Well, if properties are for sale, he surely has a right to buy them. And of course if things get too hot, he can move back to Holland.”"

And thus the stage is set.
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Lanny accompanies Kurt on a visit to his home in Silesia and pays for it, and visits Robin family in Berlin on the way while Kurt visits his brother Emil. Unlike the previous trip that was fairy tale, this one is fraught with poverty visible. Lanny is invited by Robbie's fraternity brother, who is charge de affairs in Berlin, for dinner at the club where important men come, and they meet Rathenau.

"“An extraordinary personality,” said the American, after Rathenau had left the table. “He really understands the present situation, and it would be well if his advice were taken. The propertied classes of Germany are called upon to make sacrifices which hurt, and the fact that Rathenau is a Jew makes them even less willing to be ruled by him.”

"“He doesn’t look like a Jew,” commented Lanny.

"“That happens with many of that race. But the Junkers know him, and will never forgive him because he is working with the Social-Democrats—even though it’s in an effort to save them and their country.”"

They cross border, Stubendorf is now in Poland.

"Afterward Kurt quoted to his friend a saying that when you went east from Germany you were in half-Asia. The signs of it were rutted roads, dilapidated houses, vermin, and superstition."

At Stubendorf

"Already in Berlin Lanny had discovered a peculiar fact, and here he found it confirmed—the Germans didn’t seem to blame the Americans, they liked and admired them, and were sure that they had come into the war through a misunderstanding due to the subtlety of British propaganda. Now the Americans realized their mistake and were trying to atone for it, and the Germans would help them by explaining how right they had been."

Author's prejudices show, in the protagonist or his close associates - parents, friends, ... - despite his, The author's, scrupulous attempts at being fair, especially when he is not aware of them as prejudices. 
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The next conference is in Cannes, and Lanny finds Barbara Pugliese near his home, driven out of Cannes along with her host family who thereby lost work, by police. She is told by friends to delay return to Italy. 

"“Have you not heard what is going on in Italy? The employers are hiring gangs of ruffians to beat the friends of the people’s cause, and often to murder them. Hundreds of our devoted workers have fallen victims to these bravi."

Thus the author reintroduces rise of fascism, and of course of its progenitor, in Italy. He is at Cannes too and Rick sees a story, so he and Lanny go meet him. 

"The founder of Fascismo was launched upon one of his orations. He had been delivering them once a week in his paper, ever since the war. He had been delivering them to his squadristi, the young men of Italy who had been trained in war and had been promised wealth and glory but had not got them, and were now organizing to help themselves. Their leader’s ideas were a strange mixture of the revolutionary syndicalist anarchism whose formulas had been the mental pabulum of his youth, and the new nationalism which he had learned from the poet-aviator d’Annunzio and his Fiume raiders. If you could believe Barbara, the blacksmith’s son had collected large sums of money for the support of the poet and had used them for his own movement. The ego of Benito Mussolini would bear no rival near the throne." 

"He explained his belief that violence is a sign of virility, and that any society in which it does not have its way is bound to degenerate. “I see that you have been reading Sorel,” ventured Rick. 

"“I do not have to go to Sorel for knowledge,” replied Mussolini, with a thrust of his jaw. “I was a pupil of Pareto, in Lausanne.” 

"Rick asked him about the application of violence in the daily affairs of the Italian workers, and the leader made no bones about admitting that he and his fasci di combattimento were using it in abundance. “Italy has been kept in chaos by the Reds for three years, and we are giving them doses of their own medicine.”"

"“To be sure,” countered the other. “But that is what the Russians say also. You have different ends, but your means are the same. To us Englishmen it appears that your means will determine your ends in the long run.” 

"“You watch us,” said the founder of Fascismo. “We will show you something about a long run. My successor has not been born yet.”"

The author has interwoven delicately the intricacies of politics in the personal lives and relationships of Lanny and other forefront stage characters, with historic figures standing and moving as looming shadows or lights. A conference, a meeting, a humanitarian act threatens the relationship structures as it can in life. 

Now, Marie excused herself from taking part in efforts by Beauty on behalf of Germany; they understood perfectly, Beauty deciding Marie is a French nationalist. Later along in the story, perhaps in the next volume, Lanny is divorced by a heiress he married, because he saved life of a poor German hunted by nazis. 

"Rick was the only one who got anything real out of Cannes. He wrote a coldly ironical article about the conference, and it was published. He wrote also an account of Fascismo and the interview with its founder, but this Rick’s editor rejected; the article was well written, he reported, but that Italian bounder didn’t seem of enough importance to justify the space." 

Next conference, Genoa, and Robbie was present too, it was about oil, and Russians were involved as well. Lanny helped Robbie with arranging a meeting with Russians via Lincoln Steffens. 

"Walter Rathenau had become the Foreign Minister of the German republic. He had a difficult problem in Genoa, for a huge reparations payment was falling due at the end of May, and no moratorium had been granted; on the contrary, Poincaré was declaring that “sanctions” were going to be applied without fail. The Germans were trying to induce the British to intercede, but couldn’t even get at them, everybody being occupied with the squabble over Baku and Batum. The Russians couldn’t accomplish anything either, so of course it was natural that the two outcasts of the conference should combine forces. On the sixth day a bombshell was exploded under all Genoa, and the report of it was heard wherever cables or wireless reached. The Germans and Russians had got together at the near-by town of Rapallo and signed a treaty of amity; they agreed to drop all reparations claims against each other, and to settle all future disputes by arbitration. 

"This treaty seemed harmless enough on its face, but then nobody at Genoa took anything as meaning what it was said to mean. The general belief was that there must be secret military clauses to the agreement, and this enraged the Allied diplomats. Russia had the natural resources and Germany the manufacturing power, and if these two were combined they could dominate Europe. It was the thing the German diplomats were always dropping hints about, and the German general staff was believed to be plotting it. Hadn’t the German government brought Lenin and the rest of the Red agents into Russia in a sealed train, and turned them loose to wreck the Tsar’s government and take Russia out of the war? By that maneuver the Kaiser had almost won, and here was another trick of the same sort!"

Robbie met Russian officials. 

"He watched with amusement his father’s growing surprise at the qualities he kept discovering in Bolshevik leaders. Remarkable men, Robbie was forced to admit; their wits had been sharpened in a school of bitter struggle and suffering. The American hadn’t expected to find genuine idealism combined with worldly cunning—in fact he hadn’t considered it possible for such a combination to exist in human beings. Least of all had he expected to meet scholarly persons, with whom he was interested to engage in theoretical discussions. 

"Chicherin, Soviet Foreign Commissar, was a former aristocrat who had been trained for diplomacy in the Tsar’s school. He had many of the characteristics which one found in Englishmen of that class; he was tall and stoop-shouldered, sensitive and shy, careless in his dress and absent-minded like some funny old college professor. He lived in his work, hating to trouble anybody, and trying to do all the work, even to the sharpening of his lead-pencils. He turned night into day, and appointments with him were apt to be for two or three o’clock in the morning; even so, he would be unavoidably late and would apologize profusely. 

"In the meantime Robbie and his son would chat with Rakovsky, Bulgarian-born revolutionist, and his wife, who had been a Russian princess and was now a Communist who used a lorgnette! Both of these were clever talkers, and Robbie said he didn’t see how Russia could ever be industrialized while she had so many of these. Rakovsky, discovering the fog of ignorance concerning the Soviet Union which en shrouded Genoa, went to the university and obtained the use of a large lecture hall, and there every afternoon he explained Bolshevik ideas of history to whoever might wish to come. He spoke perfect French, being a graduate of a Paris medical school and having written a book on French culture. The journalists of that country were annoyed to hear him discuss their history, and they would rise and heckle him, but quickly discovered that he knew things about the French Revolution which they hadn’t heard before. It was one of those European halls in which the lecturer is down in a pit, and the seats for the audience are in tiers in front and on both sides of him; it wasn’t long before the place was packed to the doors—the journalists of all nations were deserting the conference and coming to listen to Rakovsky." 

They met the U.S. ambassador, Child. 

"The ambassador went on to tell a story which he thought would amuse Mr. Budd, who came from New England. A couple of Italian anarchists in Massachusetts had recently been convicted of a payroll hold-up and murder, and sentenced to death. Mr. Child searched his memory and recalled the names, Sacco and Vanzetti."

Upton Sinclair's later work, titled Boston, is about this. He is elaborate about the complete lack of fair trial and more. 

"Mr. Child confirmed Mussolini’s claims as to the character of the movement. “Everywhere I see these young blackshirts marching I get the feeling of clean-cut, vigorous youth, conscious of its reforming mission.” 

"“Aren’t they sometimes rather violent?” asked Lanny. 

"“Well, but you have to consider the provocation. It seems to me we’re going to need a movement like that at home, if the Reds go on extending their activities as they are doing.""

Therein the complete turnabout by U.S., especially by some such as Dulles, post WWII in saving all but top few of war criminals and generally other nazis and fascists of most of Europe, despite a detailed, thorough and shocking beyond all imagination information regarding their inhuman acts. 
............................................................................................... 


Lanny had written to Barbara Pugliese and found an urchin in his hotel lobby holding the letter, saying she was very unwell.  Lanny found her alive, very badly beaten up by fascists, and drove her to France, informing Robbie who sent his man Bub Smith to protect him. They got her in a private hospital across border, fortunately with a doctor not sympathetic with fascists, and Lanny informed people, and waited. 

"He slept, and then walked for a while, thinking about his life and what this new crisis meant to him. He had made certain that there were forces in the world which he hated with all his heart and wanted to fight; but just what they were, and how he could recognize them—that would take a bit of study.

"He decided that he wanted to talk to Rick, and telephoned his friend, who said that he had had all he needed of Genoa, and came by train and joined Lanny that evening. Uncle Jesse arrived from the other direction, so there were three social philosophers, with nothing to do but argue—for the poor gray-haired old woman still lay unconscious, and it would do no good to her or them to sit and look at her smashed face."

"Two days passed, and they were in the midst of an argument in Lanny’s hotel room when a message came from the hospital: Barbara Pugliese was dead. They had to arrange for a funeral; a conspicuous and public one, as a matter of propaganda, a demonstration of working-class protest. The news of Barbara’s fate had been published in labor papers, and several journalists and labor leaders came; they took the body to Nice, and the coffin was placed on a truck draped with flowers, and thousands of workingmen and women marched behind it, carrying banners and signs denouncing the vicious Fascismo. Uncle Jesse had managed to keep his nephew’s name out of the affair, and nobody paid any attention to a well-dressed young American and an English journalist, the latter limping painfully with the procession. 

"At the grave the throng stood with bared heads and listened to eloquent tributes. A bald-headed American painter told the story of a life consecrated to the cause of the humble and oppressed. Never had this heroic woman flinched from any duty or sacrifice; she had the courage of a lion with the sweetness of a child. Tears came into the orator’s eyes as he told of their long friendship, and then rage shook his voice as he denounced the Italian blackshirts. His nephew listened, and agreed with every word he said—and at the same time was ill at ease to find himself in such a company and in such a mood. He looked at these dark, somber people, unfashionably dressed, their faces distorted by violent passions; they were not his kind of people, and he was afraid of them—yet something drew him to them!"

Thus the course of his future.  He was disgusted with politics, and kept away from the next conference, which was at Hague, not a little due to women around him being as afraid as Robbie that he'd go left, and instead went with Marie to Paris.

"Settled in the comfortable menage of the Chateau de Bruyne, reading, practicing the piano, playing tennis with two happy youths, enjoying the society of a lovely and devoted woman, Lanny knew that he was among the most fortunate of men. He tried to keep himself in a mood of gratitude, but on the twenty-fifty of June of that year 1922 he picked up a morning newspaper and read that Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister of the German Republic, being driven to his office in a large open car, had been startled by a smaller car rushing up beside him, with two men in it wearing leather jackets and helmets; one of them had produced a repeating-gun and fired five bullets into the minister’s body, and immediately afterward the other had thrown a hand-grenade into the car.

"They had done that because he was a Jew, and was presuming to manage the affairs of Germany and to seek appeasement with both France and Russia. They had done it because it was a violent and cruel world, in which men would rather hate than understand one another, would rather do murder than fail to have their own way. To Lanny it seemed the most dreadful thing that had happened yet, and he bowed his face in his arms to hide his tears. He would never forget his memories of that kind and gentle man, the wisest he had found among the statesmen, the best heart and the best brain that Germany had had in this crisis. To Lanny it was as if he heard the tolling of a bell of doom; the best were going down and the worst were coming to the top in this corrupt and unhappy civilization.

"Jesse Blackless had taken up his painting again, perhaps in despair concerning the human race. He had come to Paris and set up housekeeping with a young woman who worked on the Communist newspaper L’Humanité.

"Lanny had declared his independence, and the form it took was to visit his Communist uncle and meet some of these dangerous and yet fascinating personalities. It was Lanny’s form of a “spree”; vicious or not, according to your point of view—but he told himself that he wanted to understand the world he lived in, and to hear all opinions about it. Maybe he was fooling himself, and it was just a seeking of sensation, a playing with fire, with what the Japanese police authorities call “dangerous thoughts.” Certainly it was a mistake if he wished to remain an ivory-tower dweller, for a bull in a china shop can do no greater damage than one idea inside a human psyche."

"The Russian thesis was that there was no way this change could be brought about except by the overthrow and destruction of that bourgeois state which was the policeman of the exploiting classes. This thesis apparently applied to a land like Russia, whose people had never known free institutions; but did it apply equally to France and Britain and America, which had enjoyed the use of the ballot for long periods? This was an important question, because if you were applying the Russian technique to countries where it didn’t fit, you might be making a costly blunder.

"When Lanny suggested this to Uncle Jesse’s friends, they laughed at him and said he had a bourgeois mind; but he wanted to hear all sides, and took to reading Le Populaire, the organ of the Socialists. These disagreed violently with the Communists, and each called the other bad names, which seemed to Lanny the great tragedy of the workers’ movement; he thought they had enemies enough among the capitalist class, without dividing among themselves. Yet he was forced to realize that if you believed revolutionary violence to be necessary, you were apt to be violent in advocating it; while if you believed in peaceable methods—well, apparently the men of violence would force you to be violent against them!"

"Robbie Budd didn’t get the concessions upon which he had expended such efforts. All the oil men were vexed, and all the governments; the dream of the bourgeois world, to solve its problems at the expense of Russia, wasn’t working out. The Bolsheviks were in danger of losing their temporary status of genial conversationalists and resuming that of diabolical monsters. Robbie went back home without seeing his son again, and without giving him any further warning about his conduct. Could it be that the father had thought it over, and was really going to try to let him have his freedom, as Lincoln Steffens had suggested?

"In the month of August the Greek army in the heart of the Anatolian hills sustained a terrible defeat, and fled in rout to Smyrna on the coast, where the Turkish cavalry followed them, driving them into the sea and slaughtering tens of thousands. “Our friend on the Avenue Hoche has lost his concessions,” wrote Robbie, and explained that Standard would probably get them from the Turks. “Also the stock of his Banque de la Seine has fallen from 500 to 225.” Rick, at home in England, reported an underground convulsion in politics. For the first time it was being asked publicly what was the connection between the Prime Minister and the mysterious Greek trader who had become Europe’s armament king. Presently it was asked in the House of Commons—which meant that the newspapers could repeat it. This was like taking Sir Basil by the scruff of his crimson velvet robe and dragging him into the glare of a spotlight, something which Lanny knew would cause him intense distress."

"In this autumn there came an event whose importance in the history of Europe was realized only gradually. The workers of Italy called a general strike in protest against the permitted cruelties of the blackshirts; the strike failed because the workers had no arms and were powerless against unlimited violence. In this hour of confusion the Fascisti took their opportunity and began to assemble; their editor, that Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon at whom Lanny and Rick had laughed, sounded his slogans of glory and summoned his youth to the building of a new Roman Empire.

"The American ambassador, “Cradle,” played an important part in these events, and was so proud of it that he came home and boasted about it in print. Mussolini came to the embassy and had tea with him, and charmed him so greatly that he defended the dictator and everything he did from that time on. A new government, to have any success, has to have funds, and the editor was seeking support for a movement to restore law and order to his strike-ridden land. Surely an Italy without labor unions, without the co-operatives which deprived businessmen of their profits, ought to be a sound investment! The ambassador thought so, and persuaded the great House of Morgan to promise a loan of two hundred million dollars to the government which Mussolini was planning. Let no one say that America wasn’t doing its part in building defenses against the Reds!

"There were said to be a hundred and sixty thousand former army officers in Italy, most of them out of jobs and in need of funds. Many had joined the Fascisti, and they now led the “March on Rome” which skilled propaganda would make into a heroic episode. Their founder did not walk with them, but traveled more quickly and safely in a sleeping-car. Eight thousand dusty and bedraggled youths could, of course, have accomplished nothing without the acquiescence of police and army. The pint-sized king with the democratic sympathies was told that his cousin had joined the Fascisti and was ready to take his throne unless he obeyed orders; therefore he refused to sign the order declaring a state of seige, and the blackshirts entered the capital unopposed.

"That “cheap actor” whom Lanny and Rick had interviewed in Cannes now made his appearance before his sovereign, wearing a black shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and a sash of the Fiume colors, and was invited to form a government; later he appeared before the Parlamento and told them that he was the master. No longer was it difficult for him to play the pouter pigeon, for he had had several years’ practice in thrusting out his jaw and expanding his chest. The name of Benito Mussolini was flashed around the world, and that interview which Rick had peddled in vain among British editors now suddenly became “spot news.” Rick dug it out and rewrote it with fresh trimmings, and his editor paid for it gladly."

"The Socialists, the pacifists, and even the harmless co-operators were shot in their beds or hunted in the mountains; and meanwhile the new ruler in whose honor this Roman holiday was celebrated would stand before the Chamber of Deputies and solemnly ordain: “There shall be no reprisals.”

"Lanny knew what was happening in Italy, because he was continually meeting victims of it. That was the heritage which his friend Barbara Pugliese had left him; she had told some of her friends about this generous-hearted American youth, and now they had his address. Lanny remembered what his father had said about the practice of hobos in the United States; he had got a mark on his gatepost, and there would be no way ever to get it rubbed out!"

"Lanny had been able to hide his Red literature, but he tried in vain to hide his Red refugees. It got so that Beauty and Marie worried every time he went to Cannes, for fear that he was meeting some evil companions; it could hardly have been worse if he had been suspected of having another mistress! The people in the village were talking about it, and Beauty was afraid the police authorities might take cognizance. France was a free republic, and proud of its reputation as a home for the oppressed of other lands; all the same, no police like to have swarms of Reds pouring into a country over all the mountain passes and even in rowboats. Beauty could never forget that she herself was a suspected person, living with a German whose past would not bear investigation."

Next conference, Lausanne.

"In order to punish the French for having aided the Turks, the British had recognized the Emir Feisal as ruler of Syria; at long last a promise was partly kept, and that dark brown replica of Christ whom Lanny had met and admired during the Peace Conference would come into a part of his own—but not the part with the oil! Tom Lawrence, the blue-eyed, sandy-haired young British agent, had changed his name and was Aircraftsman Shaw, blacking the boots of some minor officer at home.

"Lanny hadn’t planned to go to Lausanne; but the conference adjourned for the Christmas holidays, and there were Robbie and Rick available. The former had business in Berlin; also, Kurt was planning to spend another Christmas at Stubendorf, and Marie was going north to be with her boys. So Lanny, with the Fortunatus purse of his father, laid out a journey for himself and his friends. He and Kurt would escort Marie to Paris, and then go to Lausanne and pick up Robbie and Rick and take them to Berlin, where Lanny and Rick would visit the Robins, and Kurt his brother; then Kurt and Lanny and Rick would go to Stubendorf—Rick’s first visit to that place. They would come back to Lausanne and leave Rick for the second stage of the conference, while Lanny and Kurt proceeded to Paris to pick up Marie again.

"A jolly thing to plan journeys with the help of a selfrenewing purse! You and your friends would be transported from country to country, would talk to the people, gather the news, visit operas and theaters and art-shows; ride on fast and comfortable trains, stop at de luxe hotels, eat food novelties in the most elegant restaurants, have all your burdens carried for you, and by the magic of a pocketful of paper money see everybody smiling, obsequious, and delighted. But pay no attention to the signs of bitter poverty on the way; half-starved children begging for bread, women selling their bodies for it—and now and then a Red being hanged or beaten into insensibility!"

"The Russians were there, still trying for their loan, and dangling an empty oilcan in front of the noses of Robbie Budd and others. Deterding and the rest of the big fellows had agreed upon a boycott; they had formed an organization called the Groupement, pledging themselves to buy no Russian oil, and now they were waiting to see who would break it first. Robbie predicted that it would be Deterding himself; and sure enough, within two or three months he had bought seventy thousand tons of kerosene and taken an option for another hundred thousand. He had thought, so naively, that the agreement applied only to crude!

"Berlin would have a poor Christmas this year. The mark stood at nearly one thousand to the dollar, and all but the very rich were poor. Everybody was fear-stricken, for the quarrel with France had come to a crisis; the reparations payments were long since overdue, the coal deliveries in arrears, and there was that round, pasty-faced Poincaré with his jaws clenched, determined to move in and seize the Ruhr, industrial heart of the Reich, without which half the Germans would starve. Rick, eager journalist, wanted to interview people of all classes and write an article after he came out; he found them glad to talk to him, for the hymn of hate had been forgotten and they thought of Britons as friends and protectors against French avarice.

"Lanny and Rick went to stay with the Robins. Comfort and safety in that warm nest, and Papa Robin a mine of information about everything that was going on, political and economic. Trust a Schieber to know! The hard-working man of affairs was troubled by the bad name which people gave him, and defended himself with vigor. It wasn’t he who was going to invade the Ruhr and drive the mark still lower; all he did was to know it was going to happen. People who believed that it wouldn’t happen were eager to buy marks for future delivery; if Johannes didn’t sell them, others would, and what difference would it make?"

Hansi and Freddi Robin had grown, and excelled in music.

"Lanny had written to the boys about Barbara, and now he told them details of that dreadful story, and saw horror in their faces and the tears in their eyes. Their abhorrence of the blackshirts was instinctive, and their sympathy with the rebel refugees complete; they had none of that inner conflict which Lanny perceived in himself. Was it because they were members of a persecuted race, with ancient memories of exile deeply buried in their souls? Or was it that they were more completely artists than Lanny? The artist is by nature, one might say by definition, an anarchist. He lives in the freedom of his own imagination, and represents the experimental element of life. If “authority” should intervene and tell him what to think or to feel, the experiment would not be tried, the brain-child would be born dead.

"To the sons of Johannes Robin it seemed the most natural thing in the world to accept those ideas which so greatly troubled the son of Robbie Budd. Of course it was wrong that some should be born to privilege while others did not have enough to eat. Of course it was right that the disinherited should protest and try to change the ancient evils of the world. Who would not demand food when he was starving? Who would not fight for liberty when he was oppressed? Who could fail to hate cruelty and injustice, and cry out for it to be ended? So asked Hansi, and Freddi knew that his adored elder brother must be right."

Emil went to Stubendorf with them, and spoke, Rick questioned him.

"Emil’s fear of what the French would do was conditioned by what he himself had been taught to do under similar circumstances.

"They talked about Italy, and the Prussian officer’s viewpoint of events there provoked a lively argument. Emil spoke of the Fascist “revolution,” and when Rick objected to that term he said: “Call it a ‘counter-revolution’ if you choose, but names don’t alter the fact that it’s a natural reaction against the futilities of so-called democracy. The people attempt a task which is beyond their powers, the governing of a modern state, and they are brought to a plight where they are glad to have a strong man get them out of it. The strong man studies the people, understands them better than they understand themselves, and promises them everything they want; he constructs a program with an appeal which they are powerless to resist. Say that he’s ‘fooling them,’ if you wish, but even so, he gets control, and having once got it, he keeps it—because modern weapons are so efficient that those who have them are masters, provided they are not afraid to use them. The machine gun and the airplane bomb with poison gas promise mankind a long era of firm government.”

"Such was Emil Meissner’s interpretation of Fascism; and he revealed the interesting fact that a movement not unlike it had been under way in Germany ever since the end of the war. It was a native product—never would you hear a Prussian staff officer admit that virile and scientific Germans might learn anything from degenerate and soft Italians! The movement called itself the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party, and its center was in Munich; one of its leaders was General Ludendorff, who next to Hindenburg was regarded as the nation’s greatest war leader. This new party promised the German people deliverance from humiliation, and it was spreading with great rapidity. If it took the form of fresh opposition to France and Britain, these nations would have only the stupidity of their own statesmen to blame. So declared this stiff yet passionate Prussian officer."

Here on, we know the major events. The beauty of the author's work here is portraying them.

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"Among Kurt’s friends in the village was a lad named Heinrich Jung, son of that Oberforster who provided them with an escort whenever they wished to go hunting. Heinrich, it appeared, was studying forestry in Munich, and had joined the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party about which Emil had told. Since Rick was so interested, Kurt brought the lad up to the house and had him talk—something that was not difficult, for his movement was a proselytizing one, and he knew its formulas by heart. He was nineteen, and sturdily built; war and famine hadn’t hurt him, for he had got both food and schooling in Stubendorf. He had extraordinarily bright blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and pale hair over which the barber ran the clippers once a month. Heinrich performed conscientiously all his duties to the Fatherland, which included explaining the new creed to two visitors of Aryan blood like himself. He and his partisans were known as “Nazis,” because that was the German pronunciation of the first two syllables of the word “National.”"

"Usurers and profiteers were to suffer the death penalty, a paid army was to be abolished, and lying newspapers suppressed; on the other hand, there was to be higher education for all good Germans, and for youth every benefit and advantage they could imagine. The blue eyes of Heinrich Jung shone like those of a young archangel as he invited the two Aryan strangers to give their support to this redemptive enterprise.”

"“This looks like the seed of a new revolution,” said the impressionable Lanny to his English friend, when they were alone in their room.

"“Maybe so,” replied the more critical journalist, “but to me it sounds like the old Pan-Germanism dressed up in a new stage costume.”

"“But, Rick, can they get the young people wrought up as Heinrich is, and then not do any of the things they have promised?”

"“Political slogans are like grain scattered to draw birds into a snare. Find out who’s putting up the money for a political party, and then you know what it will do.”

"Lanny, enthusiastic himself, couldn’t take a cynical view of the enthusiasms of other young persons. “They really have inspired that lad with a lot of high ideals, Rick; I mean loyalty, self-sacrifice, devotion to duty.”

"“But isn’t that what every master wants of his servants? The Kaiser preached it long before the war. What you have to do, Lanny, is to look into Pan-Germanism. They talk about the superiority of the Aryan race, the making over of the world, and all that, but at bottom it’s no more than the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad, so that Germany can get the oil of Mosul; it means colonies in Africa, which aren’t of any economic use to Germany, but have harbors which can be fortified and serve as hiding-places for submarines to cut the life-lines of Britain.”

"“Maybe you’re right,” admitted Lanny, “but don’t say any of that before Kurt, for he wouldn’t take it very well.” Lanny, still working at his self-appointed task of keeping Britain and Germany reconciled!"

Heinrich accompanied them since they were returning via Munich, and offered to introduce them to people.

"The place was called the Braunhaus, for everything of the Nazis had to be brown, as that of the Fascists was black; let no one say the Germans were imitating anyone!"

"The visitors were fortunate in having arrived in Munich on the day of a great meeting in the Burgerbraukeller, and if they would attend they would learn all about the movement, and would hear a speech by “Adi.” This was short for Adolf, the great orator of the party; his last name was Schicklgruber, but this was rarely mentioned, it not being considered a very dignified name."

They heard the speech.

"These enemies were many, and the orator hated and cursed them in turn and in combination. They were Britain and France and Poland; they were the Reds inside and outside of Germany; they were the international bankers; they were the Jews, that accursed race which was poisoning the blood of all Aryan peoples, infecting the German soul with pessimism, cynicism, and unfaith in its own destiny. Adi seemed to have got his enemies all mixed up together, for the Reds were Jews and the international bankers were Jews, and it was the Jews who controlled Wall Street and the London City and the Paris bourse; apparently he thought that the same Jews had brought Bolshevism to Russia; they were in control of the world’s finances and at the same time were starving the German, people for the purpose of forcing them into the clutches of the Reds!"

"When they came out, and were safe in their taxi, Lanny said: “Well, is that the German Mussolini?”

"Rick replied: “No; I don’t think I’ll ever have to write about Herr Schicklgruber!”

"He talked along that line, but when he finished, Kurt said, quietly: “You are making a mistake. You could write a very important article about that man and that speech. He is confused, but so are the German people. Also he is desperate—and they are that, too. Believe me, he is not to be overlooked.”"
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Lanny was in charge of Marcel's paintings and to help him sell, Emily Chattersworth introduced Lanny to an art expert, Zoltan Kertezsi, and thus began his introduction to art profession as connoisseur, expert, etc., with an auction of a selected work by Marcel at Christie's, London.  He happens to meet Harry Murchison who had pursued Beauty to marry her, now with a sensible wife, and Gracyn Phillips who is now appearing in London, and they were interested, but Marcel's work gets an even more flying start to fame. Meanwhile Adella Murchison asked Lanny to acquire an El Greco for them, and insisted he be paid. 

"“Perhaps,” said Zoltan, “you never stopped to figure out the effect of the war upon this business. Europe has had to turn over most of its gold to America, and still owes it God only knows how many billions. One way that debt is being paid is with old masters. American millionaires are coming over here in droves to buy art, and there are literally thousands of rascals and parasites working day and night to persuade them to accept trash. Don’t you see that here is a useful career for a man who has instinctive taste, and also the tact, or social prestige, or whatever you wish to call it, so that he knows how to convince others that he is honest?”" 
................................................................................................  


Rick's play was critical success.

"The French had moved into the Ruhr and a new war had begun, a strange and puzzling kind, never before tried; blockade and slow strangulation applied to one of the greatest industrial districts in the world. The Germans, helpless as regards military force, were trying a policy of non-co-operation. The workers simply laid down their tools and did nothing; and what could the enemy do? They couldn’t bring in French labor and work the coal mines, because the machinery was complicated, and, moreover, the mines were among the most dangerous, the control of firedamp being a special technique which the Germans had been learning for centuries.

"So everything just remained in a state of paralysis; the Germans shipped in food, barely enough to keep their workers alive, and printed mountains of paper money to pay for it. Robbie Budd had learned from his partner in Berlin that the government was permitting Stinnes and the other Ruhr magnates to print money to pay their own workers, an absolutely unprecedented action. Of course it could have only one effect: the mark was now tumbling in an avalanche; the firm of “R and R,” which had foreseen this, was making money faster than if they owned the printing-presses themselves.

"British statesmanship, the most conservative in the world, looked upon all this with horror. Downing Street had explicitly disapproved the French invasion, and the alliance seemed about at its last gasp. France was isolated on the Continent—unless you chose to count Poland, which Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson and his friends mostly didn’t. They thought that Poincare was leading the country straight to ruin. France simply didn’t have the numbers or the resources to dominate Europe; the old trouble against which Clemenceau had railed—the fact that there were twenty million too many Germans—was still unremedied, and the seizure of the Ruhr wasn’t going to alter that. Not even the most rabid French patriot would propose to starve all those workers to death, and putting Krupp and his directors into jail, as the French had done, wasn’t going to kill even one German."

"Lanny held his peace to the best of his ability. But Denis knew that his young visitor had recently been in Germany, and couldn’t resist questioning him. Wasn’t it true that the Germans had hidden great quantities of arms, and that they were insulting and sometimes even abusing the Allied commissioners who were supposed to find and destroy them? Yes, Lanny had to admit that this was true; he had heard about thousands of rifles walled up in vaults in the monasteries of Catholic Munich; but he was forced to add that he didn’t see how the French could ever get these except by invading the country, and did forty million people have the military force to garrison and hold down sixty million? If they tried it, could they stand the expense, or would they bankrupt themselves? Was it possible to run modern industry by force, in the Ruhr or anywhere else?"

"Lanny, motoring his sweetheart to Juan, carried with him the uncomfortable certainty that she too was a Nationalist; she believed all those things which her husband had told her about France and the outside world. She considered Kurt Meissner one of the few good members of a cruel race which was bent upon the subjection of la patrie; she considered Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson one of the few cultured members of a nation of shopkeepers which was willing to set the Prussian monster on its feet again as a counterforce to keep France from becoming prosperous and powerful. She believed these things because they had been taught to her from childhood, and because they were in all the newspapers she saw.


"There was no use trying to change her mind about any such matters; Lanny had tried it and discovered that he caused her distress. She considered that her lover was credulous, because of his generous temperament, his impulse to believe that other people were as good as himself. She considered that he was being misled by German and British propaganda, and by his faith in his friends. Worse yet, his sympathy for the poor and afflicted led him into the trap of the Reds, and that was something which filled Marie with terror. She tried not to voice it, but kept it locked in her heart; she would watch her lover, and note the little signs of what he was feeling and thinking, and often the image of him which she constructed in her mind was more alarming than the reality."

"The war of the Ruhr continued; a war of starvation, of slow decay; a war carried on within the countless cells of millions of human bodies. How long could they endure the steady weakening, the fading away of their powers? There comes a time when an underfed man can no longer labor, a time when he can no longer walk, no longer stand up, no longer move his arms, his tongue. The women bear their children dead, and those already born acquire distended stomachs and crooked bones; they cease to run and play, but sit listlessly staring ahead, or crawl away into some dark corner where their wailing will not be punished. Nature, more merciful than statesmen, usually steps in at one of these stages, and sends the victim some germs of pneumonia or of flu, and puts an end to his misery.

"It was a war also of ideas, of propaganda; cries of anguish mixed with those of hate. To the fastidious Lanny Budd it seemed like a fight between two fishwives in the marketplace, screaming, cursing, tearing each other’s hair. It was something hardly to be dignified by the name of politics; just a squabble over great sums of money and the means of making more. Lanny, by right of birth, was privileged to know about it, and his father explained that on the one side were Stinnes and Thyssen and Krupp, the great Ruhr magnates, and on the other side the de Wendels and other French steel men, who had got the iron ore of Lorraine and now wanted the coal and coke of the Ruhr so as to work it cheaply.


"Robbie Budd was in Lausanne again; or back and forth between there and London and New York. The great conference was still going on—and that was another squabble over property, the oil and other natural resources hidden in the Turkish land. ... The Russians were attending the conference, for they had rights to defend in the Black Sea, and were still hoping for loans. One of their delegates was Vorovsky, with whom Lanny and his father had talked at Genoa, and whom Lanny remembered vividly; a thin, ascetic intellectual with wistful gray eyes, a soft brown beard, and the delicate, sensitive hands of a lover of art like Lanny himself. Now an assassin shot him dead in a cafe; and in due course a jury of moral businessmen would acquit the killer, thus informing the other Whites in Switzerland that it was open season for Bolshevik diplomats."

Ruhr problem continued, even as Lanny had a flying start to his career as art expert.

"“France can starve Germany into bankruptcy,” said Robbie, “but France will get nothing out of it, and will only cripple both countries. The plain truth is that France hasn’t the economic resources to support the military role that her pride forces her to play. The part of wisdom would be to accept her position as a second-class power and tie her fortunes to those of the British Empire; but she may put off doing this until it’s too late, and the British offer of an alliance may not be renewed.”"

And while everyone else was happy about Lanny's flying start in his new profession, Kurt was discontented.

"Beauty’s lover and Lanny’s amie had come to the point where they could manage it only by never opening their mouths in each other’s presence. They respected each other, and didn’t want to quarrel; but they were France and Germany, and one was at the other’s throat."

"The thing that Beauty and Marie and all Lanny’s friends were so happy about, the wonderful new easy-money profession that he had discovered—that failed to satisfy the ethical sense of his mother’s beloved; it was the commercializing of art, which to the austere German artist was the profanation of a sanctuary. Very certainly Kurt wasn’t commercializing his art; he couldn’t, if he wanted to—for how could any music publisher continue to put a price on musical works and, when he had sold them, discover that the proceeds wouldn’t buy food for his employees, to say nothing of buying more paper? The fact that Kurt, who was producing original work, stood no chance of getting any reward for it, while Lanny, who produced nothing, was having fantastic sums of money dumped into his lap—that situation mirrored the economic and moral decay of Europe at the end of the year 1923.

"Nor was the trouble remedied by the fact that Lanny, out of the kindness of his heart, kept clamoring to be allowed to put up money for the publishing of his friend’s work. That was charity, and Kurt was thinking about justice. To him the situation was a symbol of the oppression of the Fatherland, the crushing of the spiritual impulses of a great people by the three plutocratic empires which called themselves democracies and which had obtained the mastery of the modern world. Lanny and his mother and father represented one of these empires, Rick represented another, and Marie the third, and Kurt didn’t want to live by the charity of any of them; he didn’t want to talk about it with any of them, and did so only when Lanny questioned him, and tried to console him or to argue with him. Lanny insisted that this was only a temporary condition, and that time would remedy it; but Kurt didn’t believe in time, he believed in human effort, and he said: “If the German soul is ever set free, it will be because Germans set it free.”"
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The Robin boys had their father ask Lanny's help in his business, and they all set out for a trip to Bavaria where he was to see art collection of Prince Hohenstauffen zu Zinzenberg who was in debt to Johannes Robin. 

"All during that year Kurt had been receiving literature of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party, sent by Heinrich Jung, son of the Oberförster of Schloss Stubendorf. This young enthusiast had the dream of making a convert out of one who was looked upon in his home community, as a future musical genius. And right at this juncture Heinrich wrote a letter full of portentous hints: “Great events are due in a few days. I am not allowed to tell about it, but history will be made. You will learn from your newspapers that our labors have not been in vain.” 

"Of course both Lanny and Kurt could guess what that meant—the Nazis were going to attempt their long-planned uprising. Could they succeed, as Mussolini had done, or would they fail, like Kapp? Kurt decided that he would like to be on hand; and Beauty decided at once that she would go along to keep him out of mischief. Marie came to the same decision. Was it just to watch Lanny, or was she making a genuine effort to be interested in his ideas? Could she endure the sight of Germans? Could she feel sorry for them in their dreadful plight? The human heart is a complex of motives, and Marie de Bruyne, torn between passionate love and passionate hatred, could perhaps not have sorted out the different forces which took her to the land of her hereditary foe."

"Lanny sent an airmail letter to Rick, telling him of the program and inviting him to help spend some of the money that grew so abundantly on trees. Lanny quoted the words of Heinrich, and interpreted them; surely if a coup d’état was going to be attempted, it ought to be good for an article. The one which Rick had written, “Upper Silesia after the Settlement,” had made a good impression, especially at Stubendorf, where it had been translated and published locally. Lanny wrote: “Come and help us to hold Kurt down. Those Nazis will be swarming about him, and Beauty will want to scalp every last one of them.”" 

"On the day that Lanny and his friend arrived in Munich one dollar would buy 625,000,000 marks, and the next day it would buy a billion and a half. On no day did it go backward, and when they left, a dollar was worth seven trillion marks.

"Impossible not to pity the distracted people who had to live in the midst of such a cyclone. Employers paid their workers for a half-day at noon, so that they could rush out and buy some food before it was out of their reach. People bought whatever they could find in the shops, regardless of whether they had any use for it; so long as it had value it could be sold later on. In the midst of such confusion a foreigner moved like an enchanted being; his status was that upon which the fancy of all races and times has been exercised—he had the lamp of Aladdin, the purse of Fortunatus, the touch of Midas, the Tarnhelm which rendered him invisible so that he could walk into any shop and take whatever he wanted. Omnipotence places a heavy strain upon human character, and not all visitors to the Fatherland made wise use of their magic. To put it briefly, many proved themselves to be the vultures which the Germans called them behind their backs."

"Meanwhile Rick had arrived, and he and Kurt set forth to investigate the activities of the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party. They found quickly that Heinrich Jung hadn’t exaggerated the situation, for all Bavaria was in turmoil. .... In one nation after another, first Russia, then Hungary and Greece and Turkey and Italy, it had been shown that vigorous, determined men might seize power, and the followers of these men might become officials, persons of importance and of fame. It had been shown right here in Munich by the Reds; and now a new group was going to try it, with the newest of slogans, the most timely and potent: Deutschland erwache! Germany awake! 

"That was how it appeared to the visiting British journalist; but of course to twenty-year-old Heinrich Jung it meant the deliverance of Germany from the heel of the oppressor, the casting out of the money-changers from the temple, the setting free of honest German labor—the young Nazi’s doctrines seemed as pink as his cheeks, and Rick laughed and said that the longer he talked the redder both became."

"That evening there was a mass meeting in the same Burger-braukeller where they had heard Adi speak in January. This time it was a meeting of the Bavarian monarchists, who were also planning a revolt against Berlin. Heinrich Jung was very insistent that the visitors should attend this meeting—he practically told them that the Nazis meant to attempt some sort of coup; so the four friends went, and they saw plenty of history. Promptly on the second of eighty-thirty, Adolf Hitler burst into the hall, followed by steel-helmeted men, some of them pushing Maxim guns. Hitler rushed to the platform and took possession of it, delivering one of his wild tirades and telling the audience that the National Socialist regime had begun. At the point of his revolver he forced the monarchist leaders to pledge their allegiance to his kind of revolution, and to order their troops to obey him."

This was the meeting where hell broke loose. Next morning they marched with Heinrich Jung and his selected nazis, with Beauty insisting on joining to keep kurt safe. 

"There wasn’t much cheering, for apparently the working people on the streets at that hour didn’t know what it was all about. The troop marched to the Capuchin convent, under whose five-foot walls great stores of rifles had been buried. All night the monks had held torches while the arms were being carried out and distributed to the storm troopers. Ammunition had been stored in the vaults of one of the city’s great banks; a peculiar circumstance, in view of the party program concerning the money-changers. But nobody stopped to think about that, save only the skeptical Britisher; the eager young Nazis were busy getting their share of cartridges from the truck which suddenly put in appearance. Their guns were loaded, and then it was real war."

They marched, and stopped at a bridge. Visitor's party retired to a cafe for breakfast. 

"Kurt insisted that for a people beaten and depressed as the Germans were it was important to have their courage and hopes restored, to be made to believe that they were a race with a world destiny. Rick replied that all this talk about racial superiority was “the bunk”; a half-cracked Englishman by the name of H. S. Chamberlain had put that bug into the Kaiser’s ear—the Kaiser, half cracked himself, had circulated the book all over Germany, and it had spawned a whole library of rubbish, some of which this poor Schicklgruber creature had picked up.

"Rick insisted that he knew just the type: you could hear a score of them ranting in Hyde Park any Sunday afternoon. One shouted that Britain was being bankrupted by the upkeep of the royal family, the next clamored that it was belief in God which was wrecking civilization; one would tell you that money must be abolished, and the next that Esperanto offered the only way of understanding among the peoples. Many of these poor devils slept in flophouses and old men’s homes, exactly as Adi had done, wearing out their own vocal cords and the eardrums of their fellow inmates."

Then comes the rest of Beerhall Putsch. As people were shot, Beauty screamed, dragged Kurt to the taxi with Rick and Marie, and they sped. 
...............................................................................................  

Lanny did well professionally on the trip, they returned via Vienna, and his fame grew in Cote d'Azur, with more experiences. Easter at Chateau de Bruyne, Robbie was visiting Paris.

"Denis de Bruyne pointed out something which Lanny had heard in Germany, but of which the significance had not been made clear to him. All during the “mark swindle” the great German industries had been required to keep their workers employed and had received government credits for that purpose. They had set the workers to rebuilding and expanding plants; so now, having wiped out her debts both internal and external, the Germans were starting afresh with the most modern productive machinery in the world. What chance would the French stand in international trade, with their still-ruined factories, mills, and mines? It really seemed that the Germans were more capable than their foes. You could say, as Denis did, that it was because they were without moral or business scruples; that made you hate them more—but it didn’t make your peril any less! 

"Denis had the idea that the United States ought to recognize this situation and put her moral and financial power behind France. But Robbie had to tell him the painful fact that this was out of the question; any American statesman who advocated it would be quickly retired to private life. This was a world in which you had to look out for yourself, and the very word “idealism” now gave Americans what they crudely called “a pain in the neck.” Europe would have to find a method of paying her debts to America before she asked for any more favors."

U.S. had a new president. 

"“Cautious Cal” was the name of the new President, and by the easy method of saying nothing he made it possible for the newspapers to build him into a “strong silent statesman.” In reality, Robbie said, he liked to go down into the basement of the White House and keep track of the groceries that were being used. This suited Robbie and his big business friends, for he let them run the country and didn’t meddle with what he didn’t understand."

"All through the post-war depression Robbie had argued with his father against the entire making over of the Budd plants; Robbie’s oldest brother, Lawford, had wanted to drop arms-making, but now, as usual, Robbie was proved to be right! Already he was picking up small orders for various sorts of arms; Dutch traders were buying them and smuggling them into Germany by the network of canals which ran into that country. Also France was making new armament loans to Poland, and to the Little Entente, a new coalition to hold off the Russians on the east and to attack Germany if she should attack France. “Just as soon as business picks up there’s bound to be a boom,” said Robbie; “and we shall get our share, believe me.” 

"“But,” argued the son, “what about those huge stocks that were left over after the war?” 

"The father smiled. “We have had engineers and technicians at work for five years, and so have Vickers, Schneider, everybody. We have a new machine gun that fires two hundred more rounds per minute than the old one, and reaches a thousand yards farther. The old guns will be all right for South America or China, but not for a modern war. The same thing will apply to grenades, fuses, bombsights; everything that America is going to use in the next war will have to be made new—and not far ahead of the war, either!”"
...............................................................................................


Zoltan Kertezsi sent Lanny to Italy on business, and Lanny drove Marie to Paris first before they set out to Italy. He met an American journalist in Paris and was invited to a party where he met Leon Blum again, and Jean Longuet who was a grandson of Karl Marx.  

"Longuet had written an article on the recent Italian elections, which the Fascists had carried by a reign of terror; this was to appear in Le Populaire next morning, and Lanny promised to read it. The Socialist deputies of Italy were in a desperate struggle against the increasing tyranny, and Longuet said that Daniel in the lions’ den was nothing for courage compared to them, because Daniel had the Lord to trust in, while Matteotti and his comrades had only the moral sentiments of their half-strangled people. Said the lawyer-editor: “There is something in each of us which makes us willing to die rather than consent to evil. Whatever that is, it lifts us above the brutes and makes it possible to have hope for the human race.” Lanny said that if that was Socialism, he was ready to enroll his name."

Lanny got letters of introduction from friends at home to various old families of Italy, and drove with Marie to Rome. 

"The last time Lanny had made that journey had been ten years earlier, in company with old Mr. Hackabury, creator and proprietor of Bluebird Soap. So now this highly original character traveled along with them, and his amusing remarks were repeated to Marie. At San Remo they stopped off for a call on Lincoln Steffens, who now had a young wife and a baby, and was very proud of both. Stef had retired from politics for a while, in somewhat the same mood as Lanny. He had tried to change the world, and couldn’t, so let’s wait and see what the stubborn critter was going to do for itself! 

"When they came to the valley of the river Arno, they traveled up it to Florence and paid another call—this time on George D. Herron. He had moved to Italy because he couldn’t endure to meet all the people who came to see him in Geneva—especially Germans—to ask how he had come to be so cruelly deceived about Woodrow Wilson! The father of the League of Nations had just died, broken in both body and spirit, and poor Herron was in much the same state; the two visitors agreed that he couldn’t last much longer. A saddening thing to see what the world did to those idealistic souls who tried to improve it. A warning to Lanny, which his companion hinted at tactfully." 
................................................................................................    


"Lanny ought to have presented his various letters at once, before people went away to the seashore or the mountain lakes. But he had been deeply impressed by his talk with Longuet and the article he had read about the Italian Socialists; he knew that the new Parliament had just opened, and he could read enough Italian to learn from the newspapers that the country was in a political fever at the moment. Ever since the days of the Paris Peace Conference, Lanny had had a hankering to observe history from the inside, and he bethought himself who there was in Rome that might take him behind the scenes of this political show. The first thing he did after getting himself and his friend settled comfortably was to telephone to a newspaperman; taking the precaution to do this from the lobby of the hotel, so as not to worry his amie—so he told himself. She wanted to rest after the trip, and would wait until the cool of the evening before going out.  

"The man was Pietro Corsatti, American-born Italian correspondent of one of the New York newspapers; Lanny had met him at San Remo, and again at Genoa, and knew that he was open-minded and free-spoken."

They launched at a trattoria frequented by foreign newspapermen. 

"It appeared that the American newspapermen were divided about fifty-fifty on the subject of Mussolini; some thought he was a man of destiny, and others were equally sure that he was a “four-flusher,” a “flat tire.” Discussing him in a public place like this, you didn’t use either his name or title; he was “Mr. Smith”—perhaps because that had been his father’s occupation. Lanny’s companion warned him that in this aged town there were as many spies as there were statues of saints, and one did not speak freely even in bed with one’s mistress." 

"There had been a general election for members of Parliament in the previous month, and Mr. Smith’s followers had won a majority. They had got it, Corsatti declared, by the most vicious repression; the opposition leaders had been beaten, and many of their followers killed; the police and the Fascist Militia, some of whom called themselves “Savages,” had turned the election campaign into a farce. Mr. Smith had just made his appearance before the new Parliament, clad in a costume which the journalist said was suited to “a Gilbert and Sullivan Admiral of the Queen’s Navee.” In his speech he had remarked: “You of the opposition complain that you were restrained from holding free electoral meetings. What of that? Such meetings are of no avail, anyway.” 

"The program was to have the Parliament validate these frauds, three hundred and twenty of them all in one lump. The “Verification Committee on Mandates” had put such a proposal before the Chamber, and it was to be debated that afternoon. 

"“Longuet urged me to hear Matteotti,” said the visitor. “Do you suppose he will speak?” 

"“He will unless they prevent him,” replied the journalist, and Lanny asked: “Do you suppose I could get in?” 

"“I’ll see if I can take you into the press gallery with me. Can you call yourself the correspondent of any paper?”" 

"“I imagine Longuet would be glad if I’d send him a story.” 

"“That wouldn’t be so good—a Socialist paper. You don’t want to put a label on yourself. But five lire will do a lot in Rome.”"

And this following, remembered four decades after reading, such was the shock of the aftermath.  
................................................................................................    


"They took a taxi to the Palazzo di Montecitorio with the obelisk in front of it, where the Chamber of Deputies meets. At the door the correspondent took his young friend by the arm, and said to the doorman: “Il mio assistente.” At the same time he slipped him five lire, and they went in, as Corsatti phrased it, “on a greased skidway.” Lanny had a front seat to watch the making of history in a scene of bitter and furious strife. 

"Giacomo Matteotti was the Socialist party secretary and leader of its forces in the Parliament. He was then close to forty, but slender and youthful in appearance, with a sensitive, rather mournful face. Corsatti said that frequently he wore a frank, boyish smile, but he had no chance to show it that day. Lanny agreed with Longuet’s remark that Daniel’s stunt in the lions’ den was easy compared to what this Italian idealist was doing. He didn’t rave, or call names, but spoke in a quiet, firm voice, giving his people the facts as to what had been happening in their country during the past two years. Every promise to labor had been broken, while the inheritance taxes had been abolished at the behest of the rich. The financial statements of the nation had been deliberately falsified; there had been no reduction of expenditures, but on the contrary an orgy of stealing. The intimate associates of the head of the state were smuggling arms into Yugoslavia, they were oil corruptionists, they were terrorists who had stolen an election by vicious cruelty and now presented themselves in the Chamber to have their crimes officially sanctified. 

"Such was the substance of Matteotti’s speech. He was not content with vague charges; every time he made an assertion he went into details as to places, dates, and sums of money. Evidently he had been delving deeply, and he had a mass of papers before him, indicating that he was in position to go on for hours. The alleged criminals sat before him, and their reaction was the most appalling demonstration of mass fury that Lanny had ever heard. The Fascist deputies, about two-thirds of the Chamber, would leap to their feet, shake their clenched fists, and literally shriek with rage. Murder was in their aspect and murder in their cries; the frail orator blanched before this blast, but he did not yield, and as soon as he could be heard he went on with his implacable arraignment. What was spoken in this Chamber would become a matter of record, and sooner or later could be got to the people. 

"This continued for two hours—until it seemed that the Fascist regime was crumbling there before everyone’s eyes. Mussolini’s followers shouted insults and imprecations, and one of their orators rushed to the opposition side and bellowed into their faces: “Masnada!”—that is, band of scoundrels. Somehow—Lanny’s eye wasn’t quick enough to follow the events—a fight started, and in a twinkling it was a free-for-all, in which everybody jumped on anybody of whom he disapproved. That was the last that Lanny saw of the Italian Parlamento, for his friend whispered: “I have to get this story off!” and he went, his assistente following."

Lanny met Matteotti, who was of landowning caste and a lawyer, and editor of a newspaper, at his office, and they talked. 

"Lanny mentioned his experience with Barbara Pugliese. “Poor soul!” exclaimed the Socialist. “I knew her well; we had many a conflict in party gatherings. One cannot help sympathizing with people who are driven to desperation by their sufferings, but it is a tragic blunder to brandish an empty gun. Now we face the consequences of the unwise tactics of these extremists; I have the agonizing task of urging our people to keep their hands down, to take their beatings, to die without resistance, if and whenever it pleases our foes to kill them. Such has been the destiny of the wage-slaves throughout the centuries, and the roll of our martyrs is far from complete.”"

Matteotti invited Lanny to visit his home and meet his family. 

"“You understand,” continued the other, “in the next few days I have to complete my unfinished speech. If they prevent my doing so, we must try to find some other way to get the facts to the outside world.” He put into the visitor’s hands a book which he had published, A Year of Fascist Domination, in which he had listed more than two thousand murders and other crimes of violence which Mussolini’s partisans had committed. “We shall be glad of any help which you can give us in making these things known,” said Matteotti, and Lanny promised to do what he could. 

"“Remember this, whatever happens,” continued the other; “they cannot kill our cause. The workers will learn what we have tried to teach them, and there will be a new generation with more wisdom and courage than ours.” 

"“Surely not more courage!” exclaimed Lanny, and added: “God help you!” He hadn’t been able to make up his mind on the subject of God, but he had to say some word to this sorely tried soul."

"In Mussolini’s paper, the Popolo d’Italia, which Mussolini couldn’t get the people of Italy to read in spite of being their Prime Minister, Lanny observed pretty broad hints of violence against the opposition. Said the head of the state: “Matteotti made a speech of an outrageously provocative nature which should deserve some more concrete reply than the epithet of masnada which Signor Giunta flung at him.” Corsatti said that this was Mussolini’s way. He would call for violence, he would give secret instructions for violence, and then when violence resulted, he would be shocked, and would say that he couldn’t control the ardor of his followers. 

"The Socialist secretary spoke again in the Chamber, and came into direct conflict with the Prime Minister. Day after day this went on. Said the Socialist Gennari: “We are just out of prison, and we are ready to go back there for the sake of what we believe.” Said Mussolini, amid shouts and uproar: “You would have got a charge of lead in your backs. We do not lack courage, as we will show you. There is still time and we shall show you sooner than you think.”
................................................................................................    


Lanny was called to telephone, tenth of June, as he launched with Marie, with wife of Matteotti asking him to help, he was kidnapped publicly.  He rushed to the trattoria.  

"They asked him a score of questions, most of which he couldn’t answer; but one thing they got: Dumini! Oh, yes, they knew about him; one of the most notorious of Mussolini’s associates. In the days before the March on Rome he had boxed the ears of a girl who wore a red carnation, the Socialist symbol, and when her mother and brother protested he had shot them both dead. “And it was he who kidnaped Mazzolani!” exclaimed Corsatti. “Carried him off in a car and forced him to drink castor oil.” 

"“And Forni!” put in the others. That was a crime of the recent electoral campaign, the victim being a candidate for Parliament. It was what Mussolini had meant when he admitted that free electoral meetings had been prevented. 

"“What can we do?” asked Lanny, in anguish. 

"“Not much,” replied Corsatti. “I’m afraid it’s all up with your friend.” “What we have to do is to get the story,” said one of the others. 

"“If we let the outside world know, there will be repercussions, and that may do some good.” 

"“But then it will be too late!” 

"“Probably so. It doesn’t take long to club a man to death—especially if you shoot him first.”"

Lanny talked to Longuet, but was kidnapped before his telegram to Rick was sent, and taken to fascist militia head office. He was questioned and threatened. 

"What was actually happening Lanny found out later on. Marie hadn’t stopped to telephone to the Prince, but had taken a taxi to the American Embassy. The ambassador wasn’t in, but she had talked with the chargé d’affaires, who didn’t need to be told that there was a munitions firm known as Budd Gunmakers in Connecticut, or that Robert Budd was a backer of the Republican party. Being a woman of the world, Marie knew how to present the case of an overemotional young art lover who had listened to an eloquent orator and been moved by an impulse of hero-worship. The chargé smiled and said that once upon a time he had been young himself. He promised that if Lanny got into any trouble owing to his too sympathetic nature, the Embassy would assure the Italian government that he was both well connected and harmless. The chargé hadn’t heard the news about Matteotti; he said that it was unfortunate, but of course as a diplomatic official he was compelled to preserve an attitude of aloofness from Italian affairs. 

"So when Lanny was brought back into the office of Generalissimo Balbo there was no more “rough stuff.” The official contented himself with saying: “Mr. Budd, the Italian government is under the necessity of requesting you to remove yourself from this country at once.” 

"Said Lanny: “I am entirely willing to comply with that request.” 

"“Where do you wish to go?” 

"“To my home on the French Riviera.” 

"“There is a train this evening, and you will take it.” 

"“You have perhaps overlooked the fact that I am motoring.” 

"“Oh, you have a car?” 

"“I have. Also I have a friend with me.” 

"“A lady friend, I believe?” 

"“Si.” Lanny wondered if he was going to have to refuse to answer questions about Marie; but he didn’t. Said the Generalissimo of the National Militia: “You and your lady friend will start this afternoon. What is the size of your car?” 

"“It carries five passengers.” 

"“These two militi will ride in the rear seat and see you over the border. You will not be permitted out of their sight until you are across.” 

"“It is going to be rather crowded, because we have considerable luggage.” 

"“You will have to find some way to strap the luggage on, or else have it forwarded. The men will ride with you.” 

"“It wouldn’t be possible for them to follow in a separate car?” 

"“I see no reason why the Italian government should be put to that expense.” 

"“If that is the difficulty, you might permit me to pay the cost of an extra car.” 

"The Generalissimo thought for a moment. Was he afraid that a fast driver might leave the militi behind? Anyhow, he answered, coldly: “The arrangement would not be satisfactory. You will take the men to the border in your car. And you will leave at once.”

They were verbally tortured on the way, with abuses, and threats to Marie, until they didn't stop for dinner before the goons pleaded. Lanny drove through night, and managed to arrive earlier than expected by reporters, giving him time to send off telegrams to Rick and to Zoltan, and Beauty, and talk to Longuet. But this scandal was what the French drew the line at, and Marie left him. Clandestine meetings in Paris were ok, but appearing together in society, meeting people, no. 
................................................................................................    


Fascist newspapers were claiming Matteotti had escaped to Vienna.  

"The story of Giacomo Matteotti proved to be a long-drawn-out serial. The unfortunate deputy was never seen alive, and cries were heard in the Parlamento: “The government is an accomplice!” Mussolini had to drop his tale that his opponent had fled to Vienna, and stated in the Chamber that Matteotti had evidently been abducted, but that no one knew where he was. However, the car was traced by its license number, and the names of Dumini and four other criminals became known. Public clamor forced their arrest, and they were supposed to take their punishment like gentlemen, but they weren’t that; three confessed that they had committed the crime at the order of Mussolini. Shivers of terror ran through the regime, and the uproar in the Chamber was such that for a few days it seemed possible that Fascismo might fall. 

"The five ruffians had taken their victim to a dense wood a few miles from Rome. They said that they might have spared his life if he had pleaded for it, but he had been “fresh.” What he had said was: “You cannot kill my cause. My children will be proud of their father. The proletariat will bless my cause.” So they had beaten him to death, mutilated his corpse, and left it unburied. His dying words had been: “Long live Socialism!” 

"Such were the stories which came out of Rome during the next couple of weeks. Later on the murderers escaped, except Dumini, who was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. He served about two years and then they let him out. He was heard to remark: “If they gave me seven years they ought to have given the President thirty.” So they arrested him again. He denied that by “the President” he had meant Mussolini, but the judges wouldn’t believe him, and sentenced his bold tongue to fourteen months and twenty days additional."

"“Take it easy, son!” wrote Robbie, patiently. “The world is a tough old nut, and uncounted millions of men have broken their teeth upon it.” The father went on to point out that despotisms had existed upon the continent of Europe farther back than any archaeologist had been able to trace; and doubtless there had never yet been a tyrant who hadn’t been able to provide moral sanctions satisfactory to himself." 
................................................................................................    


Lanny went with Rick to Geneva for the next conference and met the crowd. 

"Lanny found that his adventure in Rome had turned him into a personality; he had made the headlines, and was no longer a playboy. Men didn’t have to agree with his ideas, they might tell him he was a “D.F.” to imagine he could buck the Fascists, but all the same he had ideas and had stood up for them, so they respected him." 

"The statesmen were working over a thing which was to be called the “Geneva Protocol.” The real initiator of it was France, and its purpose was to enable her to back out of the Ruhr without too great admission of failure. Robbie wrote to his son that Marianne had got hold of a bull by the tail, a trying position for a lady; she wanted guarantees that the bull wouldn’t turn around too quickly when she let go. According to the Protocol all the nations would agree to apply “sanctions” against any nation which attacked a neighbor; it was another effort to remedy the condition of which Clemenceau had complained, those twenty million too many Germans in Europe."

"The Versailles treaty had set up a row of little states between Russia and Germany, made out of territories taken from both those countries. So long as the little states endured, France was comparatively safe; but who was going to protect them? France couldn’t do it alone, and the British navy couldn’t get there. But British money could arm them, and Zaharoff had the plants to make the arms. Of course Robbie Budd didn’t fail to point that out to his son, and Lanny showed the letter to Rick. Was that what Herriot meant when he clamored for “security” as well as “arbitration”? MacDonald insisted that arbitration was enough, and he drew a picture of “the League of Nations looked up to, not because its arm is great but because its mind is calm and its nature just.” Were those samples of the phrases which the Prime Minister of Labor used because they brought applause, but which he didn’t know how to relate to reality? Suppose somebody came along who wasn’t either calm or just, and didn’t respect those qualities?"
...............................................................................................    


Zoltan Kertezsi proposed, and set up, an exhibition of Marcel's work, and it was a success. Budd family from Connecticut visited Paris while it was on, and Robin boys were in Paris, too, and Hansi played. Hansi and Bess fell in love, and this was a strong pairing for life, not a flight of fancy. Hansi confessed to to Lanny, and Lanny spoke to Bess, in confidence - Esther Budd could see the pair in love, but couldn't object, since neither gave any ground for objection! 

Upton Sinclair's romance is total and complete in the classical sense, involving not merely love affairs, but far wider and deeper. Paradoxically that is precisely and in this case very conveniently why his protagonist doesn't have the classical romantic love story, but every other kind of involvement. He can appreciate every good quality in any person, and doesn't limit his view of opposite gender to physical and utilitarian qualities, but is a noble soul and wouldn't hurt anyone. On the other hand if such a young man found a perfect and complete romance early in life, his circle would possibly be limited, or risk a tragic outcome, since he is to be involved in much to come.

So while Lanny has a series of involvements where he is perfectly involved and faithful while it goes on, despite other options (as every man always has), they end sooner or later with a good reason that isn't his fault, or the other people's either. Until, that is, the author has him ready to settle for good, and finds a partner appropriate enough, despite risks.

And almost as if to counterbalance Lanny finding happiness in a perfect match, that is where the traditional exotic rose garden romance of this couple, Hansi and Bess, has a turn. But that is a long way off, come cold war era.
................................................................................................  

"The new Tory government of England rejected the Geneva Protocol, which had been planned to bring peace to Europe by the method of boycotting aggressor states. The British gave several reasons, the most important being that the United States refused to pledge its support to the program. If the aggressor could buy all he needed from one great country, the other countries would be depriving their businessmen of profitable trade to no purpose. That statement set everybody in the States to debating; the Wilsonites, of whom there were many, insisted that their country was betraying the hopes of mankind. The crippled champion of internationalism had been in his grave more than a year, but his arguments lived on, and Lanny listened and as usual saw both sides of a complicated question. 

"Robbie Budd came over on some of his many affairs. He was the plumed knight of isolationism, riding at the head of the procession with a pennon on his lance. He said that both Britain and France were stumbling in the march of history, and might soon fall out. They were adhering “to antiquated methods in industry and refusing to modernize their plants. America, on the other hand, renewed its machinery every decade, and could turn out goods faster and better than any other nation. All we had to do was to arm ourselves and be ready to meet all comers, but keep out of other people’s quarrels. Let them destroy themselves if they wanted to; on that basis the world would be ours. 

"Robbie worshiped a deity known as laissez faire. Let manufacturers everywhere produce what goods they pleased and offer them in whatever market they could find; let government keep its hands off, and the intelligent men of the United States would make prosperity permanent. In the old days there had been crises and panics, but Robbie said that modern technology had solved that problem; mass production of goods at ever-cheapening prices was the answer to everything. Employers could afford to pay high wages, money would buy more and more, the workers would attain an ever-higher standard of living. The solution of this problem was America’s; no other nation could approach her, and the one thing she had to fear was political demagogues throwing monkey-wrenches into the machinery. Robbie said he didn’t know why that name had been given to a useful tool, but it fitted the politicians who presumed to meddle with the production and distribution of goods. 

"Fortunately, the country had that most admirable of presidents, that strong silent statesman who never interfered with anything, but was happy to stroll through the power-plant and listen to the rich humming of the dynamos. Nobody was going to get Cautious Cal into any sort of foreign entanglement, no one was going to get him to stop any American oil man or munitions man from selling his products wherever in the world he could find a customer with the cash. The Vermont country storekeeper’s son was going to sit tight in the comfortable mansion which the government provided him and save all he could of the $6125 per month which would fall due to him, up to and including the fourth day of March 1929. To Robbie Budd that was equivalent to saying that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world." 

"A delightful thing to have such a father—and a temptation to agree with him on matters of business and finance. Very certainly the system of laissez faire was vindicating itself so far as it concerned Lanny Budd’s own affairs. That system was pouring thousands of rich people into the playground of Europe, their pockets bulging with more money than they knew how to spend; quite literally bulging, for Lanny met men who thought nothing of carrying a hundred thousand-franc notes in a billfold, and when he asked one of them why he did it, the answer was: “Well, I might want to invite you to lunch.” If these people had any culture at all—and many of them did—it was the easiest thing in the world to seduce them with the prestige of great paintings. Lanny’s position became that of the fisherman on the rivers of Oregon during the latter part of the month of July; catching salmon becomes a labor, not a sport, and one never wants to see or smell or taste another fish."

Demand for Marcel's work went up, no matter how much prices were raised. 

"Lanny had so much money that he didn’t know what to do with it, and had to ask his father’s advice. To Robbie that was a delightful experience; to have this playboy, of whose future on its practical side he had begun to despair, come of his own free will and ask how to invest a hundred thousand dollars that he had earned without a stroke of help from his father—well, that was something to go home and tell to the old man of the Budd tribe! Robbie sat down and made out a schedule of what he called a “portfolio,” a list of gilt-edged stocks and bonds which his son was to acquire. Robbie took as much interest in it as if it had been one of those crossword puzzles which had become the rage. He wanted to explain it to Lanny item by item—A. & P., A. T. & T., A. T. & S. F.—as if Lanny could ever remember all those initials! The son wrote a check on his bank in Cannes, the father sent a cablegram, and, by the magic which American businessmen had contrived, all those valuable pieces of paper were in a vault in Lanny’s name before he had gone to sleep that evening. Robbie estimated that his son would enjoy an income of more than seven hundred dollars a month for the rest of his days, and without ever doing anything but signing his name. How could anybody question the soundness of a world in which such a miracle could be wrought? 

"Yet Lanny couldn’t keep himself from performing that unreasonable mental action. No longer an innocent child, he looked about him at the idlers of this Côte d’Azur and they had ceased to appear glamorous. He saw gambling and drinking and assorted vice, and what seemed to him an orgy of foolish and profitless activity. He saw swarms of parasites preying upon the rich, getting their money by a thousand devices, few of them so harmless as persuading them to purchase old masters. He saw, too, the signs of poverty and strain; when he went into the great cities he was made sick by the spectacle of human degradation, and he had too much brains to be able to salve his conscience by giving a coin to a beggar now and then, as some of his kind-hearted friends would do. 

"The spacious drawing-room of Bienvenu was cool on hot days, and a generous open fire kept it warm on cold nights. In it were courtesy, kindness, love, and every kind of beauty that the skills of men had been able to create: oriental rugs of rich harmonious colors on the floor, inspired paintings on the walls, long shelves full of masterpieces of literature old and new, the music of a piano, a phonograph, and the newly devised radio at command. But outside, waves of human misery beat against the foundations and winds of social rage howled about the eaves. The ladies of this house cried to Lanny: “Why have we worked so hard to make safety and comfort for you, only to see you go out into the midst of storm and danger? Is it because we haven’t done our duty? Is it lack of devotion or of charm on our part that you wish to throw yourself into a chaos of clamoring greeds and hates?”"

Thus now the stage is complete with the his profession that gives him reason to travel, meet people of wealth and access to power, and the dilemma Lanny must deal with, on many levels. 
...............................................................................................  

  
"Cannes was thought of as a playground for the rich; a city of lovely villas and gardens, a paradise of fashionable elegance. Few stopped to realize what a mass of labor was required to maintain that cleanliness and charm: not merely the servants who dwelt on the estates, but porters and truckdrivers, scrubwomen and chambermaids, kitchen-workers, food-handlers; and scores of obscure occupations which the rich never heard about. These people were housed in slum warrens, that “cabbage patch” where Lanny’s Red uncle had taken him to meet Barbara Pugliese. The ladies and gentlemen of fashion didn’t know that such places existed; they could hardly believe you when you told them—and they wouldn’t thank you for having told them.

"If the slums of the Riviera were ever to be razed and decent housing provided, it could only be through the action of the workers themselves; the rich wouldn’t make any move unless they were forced: The question was whether it was to be done by the method which the world had seen in Russia and didn’t like so well, or whether it could be carried out by orderly democratic process, such as the workers of Vienna and other Socialist cities were proceeding to apply. Which way you chose determined whether you called yourself a Communist or a Socialist; whether your opponents named you Red or Pink. Raoul Palma, idealist and something of a saint, persisted in advocating the patient and peaceful way. His hobby was what he called “workers’ education”; he wanted to get the tired laborers to come to school at night and learn the rudiments of modern economic theory: just how their labor was exploited and just what they could do about it. He wanted a Socialist Sunday school, to which the workers’ children might come and learn those facts which were not taught in schools conducted by their masters."

Here hidden in plain sight is a prejudice the author shares with not only his nation but most of the West. They forget, and are unable to see, subjects or vanquished  of colonial conquered lands as humans not only on par but possibly, often, superior in everything other than brutal killing weaponry. And they are unable to see that Russian revolution, or the French for that matter, differ from American revolution or U.S. war of independence only in not involving such colonising of another land and vanquished original residents forgotten as humans on par.

Caste systems of Europe including Britain thus survived in their original lands despite the revolutionary systems of equality and opportunities for all men - that is, those of European ancestry; others didn't get recognition till much later, often but not always before women - precisely because the two systems were parallel in lands separated by the big pond.

In asia, of course, there was no pretense of equality. Churchill was honoured with Nobel prize despite his deliberately starving millions of farmers and other rural people to death, and not only writing in favour thereof but turning away the ships filled with grain that FDR sent for aid to India, when they arrived at Australia. U.S. wasn't seen with horror when the explicit written policy instructing "let India go" (starve to death, all of them) was public knowledge, yet false propaganda against India continues almost on par with that against Jews by church, despite theft of knowledge from India every day for decades in applications for patents in U.S. to things known to India for millennia and used commonly in most homes.
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The author has gone on and on about starving children and poor of Germany, and unfair demands for war reparation by France, along with similar and much worse problems in Russia merely making allied powers refrain from helping since they won't deal with Bolsheviks. Here are two contradictory quotes not too far separated:- 

"Germany did really feed her children, and care for her aged, and build decent homes for the workers, all of which practices Beauty praised ardently—never dreaming that they had anything to do with the dreaded Socialism." 

And, apart from the constant references to Kurt despising Johannes Robin because he made money while post WWI German starvation was going on,  

"Thus in one way or another Kurt was meeting Germans. They had been coming back to the Riviera, and now with the new spirit of peace there arrived German steamers, brand-new and beautiful models of what a steamer should be, full of large and well-fed passengers desiring to put on bathing-suits and expose their fat ruddy necks and shaven bullet-heads to the semi-tropical sun. They brought with them rolls of money which had mysteriously become more stable and desirable than the franc; with it they could eat French food and drink French wines and put up at the best hotels; French waiters would serve them, and French couturiers would labor diligently but for the most part vainly to make their women chic."

Now those tourist from Germany on Cote d'Azur were definitely not Jewish! So most of that not paying reparations was as much fraud as refusing to give up armaments by hiding them in Catholic monasteries and claiming France was unreasonable! As for the previous quote, Germany has had policies actively, financially supporting large scale reproduction by German people, while the same people look at France and talk of Germany needing the land that France has - although they no longer use the term 'lebensraum' when speaking to non Germans in English on a train through France to Paris in 2001! 
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Lanny accompanied Kurt to Berlin and visited Robin family, where Johannes Robin gave him carte blanche to buy art for his home. Hansi hadn't informed his parents about Bess, though, for caution. 

"While Lanny was there a cablegram arrived from New York with thrilling tidings: Hansi was engaged to make an appearance in Carnegie Hall during the month of April; they would pay him five hundred dollars, the first money he had ever earned in his life. When they were alone, Hansi looked at his friend with a frightened expression and said: “Bess will be eighteen!” 

"“All right,” smiled the other; “why not?” 

"“What shall I do, Lanny?” 

"“Stand up to them. Get it clear in your head that they’re just human beings like yourself; they’re only great because they think they are.” 

"“How I wish you’d come with me!” exclaimed the young virtuoso. 

"“Don’t let them bluff you, Hansi. You’ll find their bark is a lot worse than their bite!”"

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Here on the narrative takes a turn to Lanny getting personal introductions to people within Nazi hierarchy, swiftly right to the top from Heinrich Jung right up to Hitler. 

"The truth was that Lanny had found the first portion of Adi’s book extremely hard reading. It was called Mein Kampf—that is to say, My Fight, or if you wished to take it symbolically, My Struggle. But its author had no idea of taking it that way; his book was a declaration of implacable and unceasing war upon the world as at present organized and run. Mein Hass would have been a better title, it seemed to Lanny, or perhaps Meine Hassen, for Hitler had so many hates that if you read off the list of them it became a joke. Lanny saw him as Rick had explained him: the poor odd-jobs man, the artist manqué, the dweller in flophouses who craved ideas and read all sorts of stuff; it was jumbled up in his head, the true and the false hopelessly confused, but everything believed with a fury of passion that came close to the borderline of insanity. Lanny was no psychiatrist, but it seemed to him that here was an indivisible combination of genius and crackpot. Lanny had never before encountered such a mind, but he accepted Rick’s statement that you could find them in every refuge for the derelict, or hear them by the dozens in Hyde Park, London, on any Sunday afternoon.

"The author of Mein Kampf had a dream of a tall, long-headed, long-limbed, vigorous man with blond hair and blue eyes whom he called “the Aryan.” This seemed funny, because Hitler himself was an average-sized dark man of the round-headed Alpine type. His dream Aryans didn’t exist in Europe; for the Germans, like all the other tribes, were mixed as thoroughly as a broth which has been stewing on a hot fire for a thousand years. Hitler had got his emotions out of Wagner’s Siegfried mythology, plus a bit of Nietzsche, who had gone insane, and of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who didn’t have to go. This provided him with reasons for hating all the other varieties of mankind. He hated the yellow ones as a kind of evil gnomes; he hated the Russians, calling them sub-human; he hated the French because they were lewd and decadent; he hated the British because they ruled the seas and blockaded Germany; he hated the Americans because they believed in democracy. Most of all he reviled the Jews, obscene caricatures of human beings who had crept into Germany and corrupted her heart and brain, and had got so much of her property away from her, and filled so large a share of the professions, crowding out the noble blond Aryans.

"The Jews must be driven from the Fatherland and ultimately from the world. The Jews were the international bankers who had a stranglehold upon the poor; the Jews were Marxist revolutionists who wanted to destroy all Aryan institutions. That they could be both these things at the same time didn’t surprise Adi because he himself could believe and be all sorts of opposite and incompatible things. He loathed the Marxists because they laughed at his Aryan myth and all others. He hated the people with money because he had never had any. He hated the department stores because they took the trade away from the little merchants, his kind of people. He hated the Catholics because they were internationalists and not German; he hated the Protestants because they taught the Christian ideals of brotherhood and mercy instead of the noble Aryan ideals of racial supremacy and world domination."

And Upton Sinclair's missing the obvious is due to disdain for India, where both the term "Aryan" and the symbol Swastika were borrowed from, but given completely false meanings and connotations that had nothing to do with the real meanings of the names, terms, symbol. Aarya is a Sanskrit word just as Swastika is; the former literally has to do with Light, and is used as epithet for the civilised, righteous, regardless of any physical colours of skin or eyes or hair; the latter, used in India routinely for home protection and welcome, literally means "well-being symbol" and is one of the several occult symbols (such as the six-pointed star), and may not be used inappropriately as nazis used it without the disaster they wrought turning on the perpetrators.

This mistake of borrowing from an ancient culture while maintaining disdain for the said culture due to having colonised the land and people by brute force is as common a stupidity as the disdain bestowed on women, especially rape victims, by cultures of West that are mainly abrahmic in thinking; but the shame belongs to the brute, not the victim, and this is still not understood in cultures that either consider women fair game for any male, or worship bullies and right to weapons whether of mass destruction, or used exclusively for murder of humans; that covers unfortunately the two chief later abrahmic religions and U.S..
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Kurt was converted by the book, or had never needed it. Pan-Germanism was older than kaiser Wilhelm and had roots older than Germany turning to east instead of Jerusalem, massacring everyone up to Russian borders, wiping out Prussian people and language, homesteading and repopulating until Europe and the world almost completely all but forgot Prussia was once another nation, different people.  

"Lanny retired into himself and faced some painful facts. Kurt hated Jews; no use trying to deny that any longer. Lanny had observed that Kurt always found some other reason for disapproving of Jews, but it was always about Jews that he gave these reasons. Year after year Kurt had refused to go to the home of a Schieber who was profiting out of the sufferings of the German people. All right, Lanny could understand that feeling; but what about his cousin of the Meissners who showed up for the Weihnachtsfest and mentioned casually in the course of the meal that he had had the forethought to sell marks all through the inflation? “Foreigners were losing money,” he said, “and why shouldn’t a German get some?” Kurt didn’t leave the table or show any diminution of cordiality to this blond Nordic Schieber. Lanny said nothing; he was a guest and not a censor of Nordic morality."

"“Aren’t you afraid of the government officials?” asked Lanny. 

"“What can they do?” challenged Heinrich. “We aren’t breaking any laws.” 

"“You’re getting ready to break them, aren’t you?” 

"The other smiled. “How are they going to prove that?” 

"“But it’s all here in the book,” argued Lanny, pointing to Heinrich’s copy. “They don’t read books; and anyhow they wouldn’t believe it.” 

"“You expect the movement to grow, and if it does, people will certainly read the book. Does Hitler expect to convert the masses with a book in which he explains his contempt for them and shows how easy it is to fool them? He says it’s all right to tell them a lie if it’s a big enough one, for they will think you wouldn’t have nerve enough for that. To me it just doesn’t make sense.” 

"“That’s because you’re intelligent,” replied Heinrich. “You’re an Aryan, and you ought to join our movement and become one of our leaders.”"

Lanny went via Dresden and Munich with Zoltan Kertezsi and Kurt. 

"Almost impossible to resist him when he became inspired; he was simple and unaffected, but then something would rise up and take possession of him and he would become the very soul of the Fatherland. “At least that’s the way it seems to a German,” Kurt added, in an effort to be fair. 

"Lanny said: “Yes; but we’re all trying to get peace right now, and surely Hitler isn’t going to make it any easier.” 

"“It’s no good fooling ourselves,” replied his friend. “If they really want peace with Germany, they’ll have to make it possible for our people outside the Fatherland to get back in.” 

"It made Lanny a little sick to hear that. He knew the answers, having heard every possible point of view threshed out during six months of the Peace Conference. If you returned Stubendorf to Germany, what about the Poles who lived in that district? For the most part these were poor, so they didn’t count for very much, at least not in the estimation of the Germans. But if you made the transfer, then right away the Polish agitators would start working among them, and you would have the same old fight in reverse; it would be Hitler versus Korfanty to the end of time. 

"Lanny had definitely made up his mind not to argue. He said: “I don’t know the solution, Kurt. But let’s try to approach it in the spirit of open-mindedness, not of fanaticism.” He wanted to add “like Adi,” but he withheld the words. 

"In his heart Lanny was thinking: “Kurt is turning into a Nazi! And what is that going to mean?” The American remembered how vigorously his father had warned him, after their misadventure in Paris, that Kurt couldn’t stay in Bienvenu and go on with his activities as a German agent. For years Kurt hadn’t met any of his countrymen in France, but now he was beginning again, and would they be trying to use him as they had done before? Maybe it was snobbery on Lanny’s part, but it seemed to him that agents of Hitler would be far worse than agents of the Kaiser!"
..............................................................................................    

Marie had cancer, and the two parts of her life promptly closed ranks around her at this juncture, so Lanny was together with her family till the end and had promised her to watch over her sons, who it turned out had known about them for years.

Hansi gave his concert in N.Y. and was a great success, and Bess argued successfully with her mother, making her invite the Robin boys home if she had to wait to marry. But Esther found that this changed the balance, Hansi became celebrity of every strata in her hometown and his eight to ten hour practice sessions an informal continuous concert that people were stopping on her patio, lawn or steps to listen to. She had to give in to Bess and let them marry, with a proper wedding at home, and they arrived by invitation from Lanny to spend honeymoon at Juan Les-Pins, which became a musical session with Kurt and lanny. Bess was taught by Kurt so she could accompany Hansi.
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"Less than forty miles from Juan was the Italian border, and within it a new form of society was being brought to birth. You might love it or you might hate it, but you couldn’t be indifferent to it. Benito Mussolini, that Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon, had been proclaimed il Duce di Fascismo, and was making it necessary that you either adored him or wanted to overthrow him. His government was following in the path which all one-man governments are forced by their nature to tread. Having procured the murder of Matteotti, he was threatened by the vengeance of Matteotti’s friends and followers, so he had to put these out of the way. He could not permit the agitation, the discussion of this notorious case in his realm, so he was driven to outlaw the opposition, and have its leaders slugged and shot, or seized and immured on barren sunbaked islands of the Mediterranean. 

"There was one continuous reign of terror, with thousands of people seeking safety in flight, trying to get into France by climbing through wild mountain passes or by rowing in little boats at night. They would arrive destitute, having had to flee with no more than the clothes they had on their backs, and sometimes these would have been torn to rags; many refugees had been beaten bloody, or mutilated, or wounded by bullets. They were pitiable objects, pleading for help in the name of that cause to which they had consecrated their lives: the cause of justice, of truth, of human decency. They appealed to Lanny Budd because he had been the friend of Barbara Pugliese and a public defender of Matteotti; they appealed to Raoul Palma as a leader of Socialist workers’ groups, a conspicuous comrade; and of course Raoul would call up Lanny and tell him—for what could a few poverty-stricken toilers do in the face of such mass need? Lanny lived in a rich home, he was known to be making large sums of money, and how could he shut his ears to the cries of these heroes and martyrs, saints of the new religion of humanity? “For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not!” 

"The balance of opinion in Bienvenu had shifted on this issue; Marie, who had been Beauty’s chief ally, was heard no more; instead there were Hansi and Bess, who were worse even than Lanny. Two sensitive, emotional young things, without any discretion whatever, without knowledge of the world, of the devices whereby charlatans and parasites prey upon the rich. If Hansi and Bess could have had their way they would have thrown open the gates of the villa and turned it into a refugee camp for the victims of Fascism; they would have had former Socialist editors and members of the Parlamento sleeping on cots in the drawing-room, and a continuous breadline at the kitchen door. Being guests, they couldn’t do those things; but they gave away all their money, and wrote or telegraphed their parents for more, telling the most dreadful stories about the deeds of this black reaction. Such stories were hard for the parents to believe or understand, for the newspapers and magazines which they read were portraying Mussolini as a great modern statesman, builder of magnificent new morale in Italy, the man who was showing the whole world the way of deliverance from the dreadful Red Menace. 

"The worst of the matter was the moral support which the young idealists gave to the always pliable Lanny. They dinned their convictions into his ears, they swept him away with their fervor. To these exalted souls the thing called “social justice” was axiomatic, something beyond dispute; they took it for granted that all good people must agree with them about the wickedness of what was going on in Italy. Bess had come from a new land, where cruelty wasn’t practiced; at any rate, if it was, nobody had ever let her know about it. Beauty saw that she had to step carefully in her opposition, lest she forfeit all that regard which she had been so happy to gain. 

"Nor could she expect much help from Kurt. To be sure, he disliked and distrusted the Reds and Pinks; the movement of National Socialism which he favored was pledged to exterminate them just as ruthlessly as Fascism was doing. But the Nazis were Germans, and Kurt was interested in German problems; he took no part in French politics, and concerning Italian politics he followed the advice of a distinguished personality by the name of Dante Alighieri—to do his work and let the people talk. Kurt and Lanny had an old understanding, that the Idea precedes the Thing, and now Kurt would remind his friend of it. He would say to Bess: “You remember that you weren’t going to let anything interfere with your piano practice.” He would say to Hansi: “The violin is an extremely complicated instrument, and if you expect to master it you will have to keep not merely your fingers but also your mind on it.” 

"Quiet rebukes such as these would bring the young people to their senses for a time; but they did not diminish the disturbances in the world outside or the knocking at the gates of Bienvenu. Poor Beauty found herself back in the position of the early settlers of her New England homeland, with hordes of a new and more dangerous kind of Red Indian lurking outside her little fort and shooting arrows of poisoned propaganda into the minds and souls of her loved ones."

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Emily Chattersworth invited him to Paris, Hansi and Bess had left for Berlin. She was trying to help him find a suitable match.

"Mrs. Emily had been fishing also. Lanny found a telegram at his hotel summoning him to lunch next day. “I have a catch for you,” it read, and Lanny replied that he would be on hand. At Christie’s, and at the Vente Drouot in Paris, they set up pictures on an easel; at an auction of horses they trotted them out into the ring; while in the marriage market, the practice was that they came to lunch and you looked at them across the table and sampled their conversation. Always with decorum, pretending that it was a casual affair and that your mind was entirely absorbed in the conversation. Lanny was appreciative of the kindness of an old friend, and would do anything he could to oblige her—except marry some girl whom he didn’t especially care about!"

Emily did find someone young, beautiful and very wealthy, very innocent and almost made a match, but just before Lanny met Olivie Hellstein again he heard from Rosemary and Robbie both, so he left for England. Affair with Rosemary was resumed.

"Lanny was pleased to serve as informant for this solid and vigorous father, reporting on the various capitals which he visited. What did Denis de Bruyne think about the prospects in France? Lanny reported that Denis was greatly distressed over the situation. Poincaré had been brought back, in an effort to save the franc, but Denis said that the prestige of the country was greatly impaired. Here too the ideas of disarmament had made inroads; they took the form of a line of defensive works all the way from the Swiss to the Belgian borders, in the hope of keeping the Germans out. That would be cheaper than a first-class army; but it wouldn’t get France any coking coal for the Lorraine iron ore!

"Then Robbie asked what Kurt’s friends were saying. He didn’t want Kurt using Bienvenu as a center of espionage, but he didn’t mind if Lanny used it as a center of counterespionage! Robbie reported that the Nazis were smuggling in more and more small arms to be used in their street-fighting against the Communists. The significant fact was that these fellows had so much money. Cash on the barrelhead! Bub Smith was directly in touch with their agents in Holland and had made several deals, which helped to keep up the courage of Budd’s at home.

"This gave the watchful father an opportunity for a little sermon, likely to be of use to a young man playing about with Reds and Pinks. Obviously, these National Socialists were taking somebody’s money; and what did it mean? The situation was the same with each and every one of the demagogues and agitators: no matter what fancy labels they gave themselves, no matter how freely their hearts bled for the poor, the time arrived when they couldn’t pay the rent for their headquarters, and they came cap in hand to some great industrialist, banker, or politician having access to the public till, and said: “I have some power; what’s it worth to you?” They made a deal, and from that time on the movement became a trap for the millions of poor boobs who came to meetings, shouted and sang, put on uniforms and marched, and let themselves be used to bring a new set of rascals into power."

"Robbie was to fly from London all the way to Aden below the Red Sea. He was going to have a look at that oil property which had been doing so well, but now wasn’t. He and his associates suspected that some of his rivals might be interfering with production; no end to the tricks in this highly competitive game! He wanted to meet some of the desert sheiks who were the neighbors of his property, and make up his mind how best to deal with them; their prices for “protection” were going rather high. Robbie said it was like Chicago, where a fellow named Al Capone had to be seen if you wanted to do any sort of business.

"All this promised to be interesting, and Lanny was invited to go along. Ten years ago he would have jumped at the chance; now he was tied up with Rosemary, and had engagements in Berlin and other places. He wasn’t a playboy any more, but a man with affairs of his own, and Robbie was glad for that to be so, and didn’t urge him. Lanny said he’d go if his father really needed him—but Robbie answered no, Bub Smith was going and he would be well protected. Lanny eased his conscience by promising to ask questions while in Germany, and report all he could learn about the Nazis.

"Robbie said: “What I’d like to know is whose money they are spending for Budd automatics and daggers.”

"“Daggers?” echoed Lanny, much surprised.

"“Yes,” replied the other. “They tell us they are most useful in street-fighting.”"
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Lanny visited The Reaches, Rick's home, and met other guests.

"Mr. Cunnyngham learned that Lanny had come from France, and so took him into the conversation. What was the matter with those Nationalists? Lanny explained their neurosis on the subject of Germany. And did the plain people of France feel like that? Lanny said no, but they felt that they had been let down by the war. The average Frenchman had an urgent desire to re-establish the foyer. Also he wanted real disarmament—a peace that could be trusted. He was provoked by the idea that the English used the Germans as a counter-weight against the French. He felt contempt for the Americans, who had come into the war so late, yet thought that they had won it; who wanted their money back—as if it hadn’t been America’s war, too!

"The talk moved on to Germany. Lanny told his new friend about the Nazis, but found that no member of the British governing class could be persuaded to concern himself with people of that sort. There would always be fanatics, and they would always be yellin’ and makin’ speeches; let the blighters blow their heads off. Mr. Cunnyngham told of troubles he had experienced in India. Cows were sacred, even though they blocked the streets and made them filthy; crocodiles were sacred, even though they ate the babies. The Hindu fanatics insisted on breakin’ up the sacred processions of the Mohammedans, and vice versa—they were always havin’ shindies in the streets, and the British had to bring up native soldiers armed with long sticks called lathis and beat them over the heads. In India these things were centuries old and you couldn’t change them; but this fellow Hitler with his notions couldn’t get anywhere in a country as enlightened as Germany. Let him fight the Reds—that was all to the good.""

Thus the prejudice based in racism that almost allowed Germany to annihilate human civilisation, because West disdained India and ascribed enlightenment to Germany.

"Here on one of the fashionable shopping-streets of this fabulously rich capital—on Regent Street, where the great ladies descended from their limousines to enter jewelers’ and couturiers’—here you saw war veterans still grinding hand-organs or rattling collection boxes. England had just had a coal strike that had become a general strike and had looked desperately menacing; it had been starved out, and so bitterness and hate were in the faces of the people, and misery and depression could not be hid. All that a rich man needed to be happy was to have no heart. If he had one, then all the gifts which fortune showered upon him might turn to dust and ashes in his hands."
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Lanny visited Robin home, with Beauty who was visiting too. 

"Hansi had made his first public appearance in Berlin with success, and Lanny thought he had never seen two human beings so happy as his half-sister and her bridegroom. Apparently Bess was never going to tire of listening to the music of the violin, clarinet, and piano, and had been working loyally at her own job—she had a teacher who came every day, and a study of her own in which to pound away to her heart’s content. She wished that Kurt might see how much progress she had made. Lanny didn’t tell her the true reason, but said that when Kurt came to Berlin he was occupied with his business affairs and with his brother and friends. 

"For how long would it be possible to keep hidden from a keen-eyed girl the painful facts about this Europe which she had adopted as her home? Not long, Lanny feared, for she was determined to know all about it; she read the incendiary pamphlets of which her husband had a supply, and Lanny saw Socialist and Communist magazines and newspapers in her study. It couldn’t have escaped her attention that the Jews were the objects of bitter dislike among large sections of German people. Would she discover how the fashionable ones whom Beauty brought to the house despised the Schieber, their host, and resented the fact that he was able to live in a palace and to decorate it with masterpieces of art? Sooner or later Bess would have to learn that Lanny’s friend and Beauty’s lover tolerated Hansi only because he was a genius, and refused to tolerate Hansi’s father on any terms."

Here the stage is set for the holocaust about to begin.

"Where had they got the money for all this? If you asked them, they would say that the German people were contributing their pfennigs, out of devotion to the Fatherland and the Fuhrer; but Johannes Robin said that it was well known in financial circles that Thyssen and his associates of the steel cartel had taken over the financing of the movement."

Krupp did so, enough to be avoided in U.S. post WWII by those that cared. 
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Kurt finally left to settle down at Stubendorf with a bride selected by his parents. Beauty had friends surround her. Johannes Robin had bought a yacht and she joined the party travelling to fjords. Lanny once again met Isadora Duncan who was visiting the French Riviera.

"Lanny joined them and listened to an account of what had happened in France one night while Lanny had been on board the yacht in the North Sea—the night of August 22, 1927, when Sacco and Vanzetti had died. Lanny recalled the first time this case had been mentioned in his hearing, by Ambassador “Cradle” during the Genoa conference. Since then it had become an international scandal, and when the Italians were executed there had been mobs marching in all the cities of Europe, and many American embassies and consulates had had their windows smashed."

She died within a couple of days after this meeting.

"Since Kurt Meissner had passed out of Beauty’s life she had taken her position as a perfectly respectable Franco-American lady, widow of a painter whose work was winning the esteem of the most distinguished critics. There was no longer any blot upon her escutcheon; she could even be a chaperon! Rosemary invited her to visit at Sandhaven Manor, and she came for a week-end, arriving conspicuously with her son and her pretty little daughter, and being conspicuously driven away again. After that the most prudish Victorian could have cherished no doubts concerning the relationship between the mistress of the manor and the handsome young American who was conducting her education in the arts."
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Upton Sinclair here reintroduced something that was brought in in World's End , when Lanny saw Rick at foot of his bed in Connecticut and knew there was something not well, and later found that this was when Rick had crashed. The educated, fashionable and upper strata of West at this time were not as much in grip of religion as before, before and were consequently rediscovering things that had been barred - extra sensory perception (ESP), seances and mediums, spirit and more. 

He introduces all this for the general purpose of Lanny Budd with his open mind and spirit of inquiry, but it's very useful in later volumes, and pertinent since the German leader of this era indulged - and more - in much. 

Here it is brought in in form of Parsifal Dingle, a pensioner from Iowa settled in Cannes, whom the family meets because an ex tutor of Lanny is married to the daughter of the pension owner.  He had healed Marceline's governess Miss Addington and Rosemary's daughter, and said it was done by God. 

"Here on the Riviera were a number of well-trained professional gentlemen engaged in God’s service, and she had met several of them, both Catholic and Protestant, and found them agreeable men of the world, good conversationalists and judges of food and wine. It had been tacitly understood that they kept God for those special occasions when they performed His rites in church, and you were free to attend if you cared to, but no priest or clergyman had ever been heard to mention the name of God on any social occasion; everyone whom Beauty knew would have considered it something in the nature of a faux pas. 

"So this idea of a God whom you carried around with you was something entirely new and decidedly startling."

Beauty tries matchmaking, but he wasn't interested in the governess, and when asked, told Beauty it was her. 

"Beauty had to tell someone about that most embarrassing episode, and she chose her son. First he said: “Well, I’ll be damned!” Then he thought it over and added: “But, darling, you can’t blame him; it’s the price you pay for being irresistible.” 

"“It’s really most painful,” complained the mother. “How am I going to meet the man after this?” 

"“Oh, you don’t need to make so much out of it. You have had plenty of broken-hearted suitors around you.” 

"“But, Lanny, a man of that class!” 

"“Class?” inquired the young Pink. 

"“He’s about the same class as my maternal grandfather, I’d imagine.” 

"“But, I mean—a man of no culture.” 

"“He’s got a lot of culture, it seems to me; only it’s different from ours; not so smart, but a lot cleaner, if I’m any judge.” 

"“I didn’t know you thought so highly of him, Lanny.” 

"“Well, I think he’s earned our respect. We don’t have to agree with his ideas, but we can admit that he’s honest and kind—and that’s more than I can say for some of the men you have been stepping out with.”"

"“Lanny, I just couldn’t face the idea of being known as Mrs. Dingle!” 

"“Let it be a sort of morganatic marriage; take him as a prince consort. Your friends will go on calling you Beauty Budd, and the servants and tradespeople calling you Madame Detaze. Why should anyone change?”"

So Beauty, begun as a rebel against her father the preacher, having been a model, and a consort to three very different men - Robbie with rich inheritance of Budd gunmakers and Connecticut society and business career, Marcel Detaze who left a wealthy family to be a painter and a soldier and has given her official status with fame and wealth to come, and Kurt who brought music with discipline to the home but left to be German and serve Nazi regime - now has finally met a match in an informal man of god who has as much friendly goodness as her. 

Rosemary left, circumstances entailed the family move to serve the empire. The author had most likely brought this sweetheart of early teens back in Lanny's life to smooth over transition, from the love lost to death but unforgettable, to a suitable marriage that will ease him with one career onto another. Lanny went to teach workers. 

"Beauty had managed to get into her head the distinction between Red and Pink, and which was worse. It was just before Christmas, and she wrote to Nina, begging her and Rick to come immediately after New Year’s, so that Lanny might have somebody to tell his troubles to. Also she wrote to Emily, telling her what had happened, and asking about her plans. Now was the time to put an end to this business of Lanny’s living with other men’s wives and raising other men’s children! Out of the kindness of her heart Emily had forgiven the playboy’s rejection of her last effort; she wrote that she was coming, and that Irma Barnes also was coming, and what would Beauty say to her as a possible daughter-in-law? 

"What Beauty would say would have taken a whole mail-pouch to carry it. She started saying it viva voce, first to Sophie and then to Margy, who arrived to occupy the “cottage” as soon as Rosemary’s children had been sent to England. These three knew that they had to move with caution, owing to Lanny’s peculiar Pink attitude; the moment he heard that anyone had a great deal of money he began finding fault with that person and shying away from him or her. So there must not be the faintest hint that anybody was thinking that he might fall in love with Irma Barnes, or even that he might meet her; he must just begin hearing about her charms, about the sensation she had made in New York, about her interest in intellectual things—in short, everything except that she was the legally established possessor of twenty-three million dollars in her own right!" 

"In her letter Emily Chattersworth explained, among other details, that the maternal grandmother of this matrimonial prize had belonged to one of the old New York families, and had been at school with Emily; she had been a guest at Les Forêts on various occasions. So now it had been arranged that Irma was to visit Sept Chênes for a week or two, until she had a chance to look about and judge where and how she wished to live. If during that period a fastidious young art expert saw fit to call and pay his respects, he would have the inside track over the other suitors. If his sense of dignity forbade him to do so, perhaps he might condescend to be at home when Emily brought the young lady to call upon his mother."

Emily Chattersworth had a talk with Lanny. 

"“You come to lunch and meet Irma and her mother, and I’ll let them know that you’re one caller who isn’t interested in her fortune.” 

"“I wonder,” said the young man, promptly. “I have been quite entertained, thinking what I’d do if I had a fortune like that. I’ve decided that I’d set up a foundation to study the effects of stockmarket speculation upon wages and the cost of living!”"
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Kurt wrote to congratulate Beauty and sent a photograph of his firstborn, a son.

"Rick looked at the photo of the bald little Aryan, and said: “I suppose they’ll be having one every year for the glory of the Fatherland.” He added: “Birth control is an important discovery, but it may prove a trap for the more progressive nations if the backward ones refuse to adopt it.”

"“Is Germany a backward nation?” inquired Lanny, with a grin.

"“It’ll be one very soon if those Nazis have their way. Women become brood-mares, and babies become soldiers to march out and conquer those decadent peoples who dream of being let alone.”"
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The courtship of Irma Barnes by Lanny, despite the obvious obstacles for Lanny,  and for the author because he doesn't fit in the fortune hunter crowd that surrounds her, takes quite an author to make it as real and yet so very engaging. And the engaging quality keeps on through the unusual wedding, post wedding and honeymoon trip across Atlantic, and well into Irma deciding about her own home and more. 
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The wedding and honeymoon were spring and summer of 1929. With their respective new spouses, Lanny and Beauty arrived in N.Y. where Zoltan Kertezsi had now acquired a larger, more prestigious place for exhibition of Marcel's works. 

"Also a letter from Lincoln Steffens, who was in San Francisco, writing his autobiography. Stef wrote notes to his friends in a tight little script that was as good as a crossword puzzle; if you once got going you might have quite a run of luck, but if you stopped for any single word you were lost. Stef said he had just met his little boy after quite an interval and found it exciting. He advised Lanny to have a boy as soon as possible. He said that he had known J.P. very well in the old days, and was indebted to him for taking him on the inside of the “merger racket.” He concluded by saying: “If you are in the market, take my advice and get out, for the tower is now so high and leaning so far that one more stone may send it toppling. You are too young to remember the panic of 1907, but after it was over a friend of mine explained it by saying: ‘Somebody asked for a dollar.’ Wall Street is in a condition now where it would break if somebody asked for a dime.” 

"Lanny wasn’t “in the market”; he was in pictures and matrimony, and that was enough. He forwarded this letter to his father, with a transcription written on the back. Robbie’s reply was: “Just to show how much I think of your Red friend’s judgment, I have purchased another thousand shares of telephone stock. It was up to 304 and I got it at 287 and a half, which looks mighty good to me!” 

"That was the way they all felt, and the way they were acting; it was a phenomenon currently known as the “Great Bull Market,” and people laughed at you if you tried to restrain them. Everywhere you went they were talking about stocks; everywhere they told about profits they had made, or were going to make next week. There was a “Translux,” a device by which the ticker figures were shown on a translucent screen, in nearly every branch broker’s office; such an office was to be found in most of the hotels where the rich gathered, and you would see crowds of men and women watching the figures. If it were during market hours, one after another would hurry off to a telephone to give an order to his broker. It was the same in every city and town; hardly one without a broker’s office, and market quotations were given over the radio at frequent intervals. Farmers and ranchers were phoning their buying and selling orders; doctors and lawyers and merchants, their secretaries and errand boys, their chauffeurs and bootblacks—all were following the market reports, reading what the newspapers told them, eavesdropping for “tips” or following their “hunches.” The country had got used to hearing about “five-million-share days” on the stock exchange, and took that for “prosperity.”"

Lanny went for a walk in Manhattan, N.Y. - the description by the author, lovely! - and found the school set up by George D. Herron, and talked to people. 

"The day after Lanny’s slumming expedition was Saturday, the nineteenth of October. The Detaze exhibition had been running for ten days, and was such a success that they were continuing it for another full week." 

Lanny found the stock market slumping and called Robbie to suggest he get out, but to no avail. Here the author introduces another character who will become important as the series proceeds. 

"Irma and Mrs. Fanny were going to a musical comedy matinee, so Lanny had a “bite” with his mother and Mr. Dingle, who dropped in now and then at the show, but carefully kept out of everybody’s way. If the man of God knew that a stock market existed, he never let on; he told them that he had found what he believed was an extraordinary medium: another of the poor and lowly, a Polish woman who sat in a dingy little parlor upstairs over a Sixth Avenue delicatessen shop, and charged you only two dollars for a seance, no matter how long it lasted. She wore a dingy Mother Hubbard wrapper, and her voice was frequently made inaudible by elevated trains roaring madly past the window; but her “control,” an Iroquois Indian speaking with a powerful man’s voice, declared that all the spirits of Parsifal Dingle’s deceased relatives and friends were standing by, and Parsifal declared that they told him things which he himself had forgotten. If spirits were really there, it was important; possibly even more so than the question of whether the agent representing the Taft family would purchase two of the highest-priced Detaze seascapes." 
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"Parsifal Dingle had his own ideas of the difference between what was imaginary and what was real in this world. Mr. Dingle had made up his mind that his spirit was eternal, and on that basis the importance of what happened to it here and now could be mathematically determined. What was the relation of twenty-four hours to eternity? Or of threescore years and ten to eternity?"

"To his wife he said gently: “I have learned through Madame Zyszynski that Marcel is waiting for you.” 

She was convinced enough by her visit to tell Lanny to go, but he instead got a message from Marie in French, which no one there spoke, so it wasn't written correctly. Lanny sounded it out, and it was a private joke he shared with Marie and her family. 

October 24th, 1929 Lanny was taken by Joseph Barnes, Irma's uncle and manager trustee to her fortune appointed by her father, to wall street. 

"The floor was crowded; every eye was on the great clock; you could see the hand slowly moving, and when it neared the moment, people seemed to hold their breath. Suddenly there was the crash of a gong; then—Lanny had read many times about “pandemonium breaking loose,” but the first time he ever saw it was at ten o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth of October in the year 1929. More than twelve hundred men leaped into action at the same instant, all yelling at the top of their lungs. The sound of it shot up to the visitors’ gallery, hit the high ceiling and bounced back, and from that time on there were millions of sound waves, clashing, mingling, beating one another to pieces. It was like no other volume of sound in the world; it couldn’t be compared to a stormy ocean, because there are different waves and you hear each one, but you never heard any particular shout, no matter how loud it might be. The medley did not diminish while Lanny stayed in the gallery, and when he went out into the street he heard it there, though all doors and windows of the building were closed, the ventilation being from the roof."

"Twenty thousand shares of some “blue-chip” stock which is selling at 400 is eight million dollars, and that is big business on any trading-floor in the world. It couldn’t be the bootblacks and messenger boys, the maidservants and farmers’ wives who traded through the “odd lot” houses; it could only be the great banks seeking to protect their position, the operators who had got a fright, the investment trusts, of which there were five hundred, grown overnight like mushrooms, all assuring the public that their function was to “stabilize the market” and protect investors by spreading their holdings among the best stocks. Now they were dumping their stocks, and it was a panic."

Lanny helped Robbie by giving all his own money, and visited him with Irma. She had insisted her uncle Horace Vandringham get out and stay out of stock market gamble of playing margins, and Fannie said the same to Robbie, which Robbie agreed. Irma's business manager Slemmer vanished with her cash, and she was safe only due to strict rules of her father followed by her uncle Joseph Barnes. They decided to return to Juan Les-Pins and bring along Madame Zyszynski. Lanny visited Newcastle. 

"Lanny went to say good-by to his grandfather, who was failing, and who said: “My boy, you will probably not see me again in this world.” Lanny would have liked to tell him about his research into the next one, but he knew that it wasn’t entirely orthodox, and so wouldn’t please the president of Budd Gunmakers. And anyhow, it might be only telepathy! But Lanny thought, what a funny thing; the good Christians were all taught to believe that your soul survived, and yet they ridiculed the suggestion that after a soul had got settled in the beyond, it might have a desire to get in touch with those whom it had left behind. Didn’t they really believe what their church taught them? Or did they think that the souls would forget everything? If a soul did forget, what would be left of it?"

Tuesday 29th was the worst, and Wednesday Lanny left with his entourage. Robbie had driven to town with Esther. 

"When the time came for the partings, those who were sailing threw down rolls of colored paper tape, holding one end, so that they made lines connecting them with the friends on shore. When the steamer was warped from the pier these lines were broken, and all felt sad. You stood waving and shouting, but mostly you couldn’t make the right person hear you. The Budds all had tears in their eyes, for they had been through strenuous hours. Beauty had rarely been so happy, for at the last moment Esther had pressed her hand and said: “I have misunderstood you all my life, and I am sorry.”"
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