It was something which happened now and then to painters, poets, musicians. Sometimes it amounted to a transformation. Verdi had changed his style entirely in his middle years; Tolstoy had decided that his greatest novels were useless, even corrupting. Van Gogh had painted everything gloomy and grim in Holland, and then had come to the Midi and exploded in a burst of color. “You will start work all over,” said the old gentleman; “find some new way to say what you feel.”
People who didn't understand art — people like Marcel's wife, for example — were going to have an unhappy time while he was groping his way into that new stage of life. He became restless and discontented; he found fault with everybody and everything; his life had come to nothing. He took to going out at night, when people couldn't stare at his mask, and wandering about the roads on the Cap. Beauty was exasperated, but she dared not show it; she was haunted by the idea that if she made him unhappy he might try to get back into the army, or else in some fit of melancholia he might seek to release her from her burden by jumping off the rocks. She had never forgotten Lanny's suggestion of that possibility, at the time when she was thinking about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She ordered built for her genius a little studio in an out of the way corner of the place; north light, and all modern conveniences, including a storeroom for his canvases; the whole place of stone, entirely fireproof. She got him a new easel, and a pneumatic cushion for his chair, to spare his sore bones. There was everything ready for him — everything but his own spirit. He would go to the place and sit and brood. He would spend much time stretching canvases on frames, and would sit and dab paint on them, and finally would take them out behind the studio and burn them, saying that he was no good any more. What he wanted to say couldn't be said in any medium known.
Blazing hot summer had come. It was before the Riviera had been discovered as a summer resort, but Lanny, now fifteen, went about all day in bathing trunks and loved it. Marcel sat in his studio in the same costume — with nobody to look at his scarred and battered body. He had taken to staying by himself; he painted or read all day, and ate his meals alone, and only came out after dark: Then he would take a long walk, or if there were visitors he cared about, he would sit on the veranda in the dark with them. Or he would sit alone and listen to Lanny playing the piano.
X
The war had lasted a year. Some thought it was a stalemate, and others thought that Germany was winning. She held her line in France, and let the Allies waste themselves pounding at it while she broke the Russian armies. She had launched gas warfare, a new device filling the world with dismay. She was answering the British blockade by submarine warfare; British waters were a “military area,” and all vessels in them liable to be sunk without warning.
In May had come the attack upon the Lusitania, the incident which excited the greatest horror in the United States. This great passenger liner, with more than two thousand persons on board, was passing the Irish coast in a calm sea: two o'clock in the afternoon, and the passengers had come from lunch, and were walking the decks, or playing cards, reading or chatting, when a submarine rose from the depths and launched a torpedo, blowing a hole in the huge vessel's side. The sea rushed in and sank her in a few minutes, drowning some twelve hundred persons, including more than a hundred babies.
When Americans read about the sinking of merchant vessels, British or neutral, and the drowning of the crews, they didn't know any of the people, and their imagination didn't have much to take hold of. But here were people “everybody” knew — society people, rich people, some of them prominent and popular — writers like Justus Miles Forman and Elbert Hubbard, theatrical people like Charles Frohman and Charles Klein, millionaires like the Vanderbilts. Their friends had gone to the pier in New York to see them off, or to the pier to welcome them — and then they read this horror story. When the boatloads of survivors were brought in, the papers of the world were filled with accounts of families torn apart, of fathers and mothers giving their lives to save their little ones, of quiet heroism and serenity in the face of death.
Americans in France felt the shock even more intensely, for nearly everyone had friends, American or English, on board. Two of Mrs. Emily's oldest friends had given their lives to save children not their own. The sister of Edna Hackabury, now Mrs. Fitz-Laing, was among those of whom no word was heard. Beauty counted half a dozen persons of her acquaintance on the passenger list, and found only two on the list of survivors. Not much of the spirit of “neutrality” was left in the minds of ladies and gentlemen who discussed such matters over their afternoon tea.
Thus America was dragged into the center of the world debate. President Wilson protested, and the German government answered that submarines could not give warning without risking destruction, and manifestly could not take off passengers and crew. The Lusitania had carried cartridges — so Germany charged, and the British denied it, and how was the truth to be known? The Germans agreed to sink no more such vessels, but they did not keep the promise. All passenger vessels carried cargo, and most merchant vessels carried passengers, and how could a submarine under war conditions make certain? The Germans demanded that President Wilson should resist the British attempt to starve the German people and should insist that American ships be allowed to carry to Germany food which Germany had bought and paid for. When President Wilson wrote letters denouncing German barbarity, the Allies were delighted; when he wrote letters denouncing British violations of American trade rights, all sympathizers with the Allies denounced him.
For a year Robbie had kept writing to his son, never failing to warn him against losing his head. Robbie was determined that no Budd should be drawn into Europe's quarrels; Budds were businessmen, and did not let themselves be used to pull anybody's chestnuts out of the fire. Robbie had been on the inside, and knew that every one of these nations was thinking about its own aggrandizement. Twice it happened that an employee was coming to France, and Robbie took the trouble to write a long letter and have it mailed in Paris, so that it wouldn't be opened by a censor. “Study and think and improve your mind, and keep it clear of all this fog of hatred and propaganda.” Lanny did his best to obey — but it is not pleasant to differ from everybody you meet.