Also he sent in a subscription to the
capitalist system, which had developed such marvelous powers of production and was unable
to use them; which left millions to starve while a few parasites fattened themselves in luxury.
This paper would lie on the table in his room, and Irma would see the prominent headlines
and say: "Oh, dear! Are you still reading that stuff?" It irritated her to be referred to as a
parasite and to have Lanny say: "But that's what we are," and go on to prove it.
Several of the workers' groups and labor unions had summer camps where their members
could spend a vacation. Lanny went to have a look at one of them, having the idea that he
ought to know the workers at first hand. But he made the mistake of taking his wife along,
which spoiled matters. Irma did her best, but she didn't know how to unbend. The place was
crowded, and mostly they were Jews; their dress was informal and their manners hearty; they
were having a good time in their own way, and didn't mind if it was different from her way;
they didn't look up to royalty, and didn't enjoy being looked at as a zoo. In short, as an effort to
bridge the social chasm the visit was a flop.
On the same South Shore of Long Island with the Barnes estate is the resort known as Coney
Island. Lanny had heard about it but had never seen it, and Irma had only vague memories
from a time in childhood when her father had taken her. On a hot Sunday afternoon the
perverse idea occurred to one of their smart crowd: "Let's go and see Coney!" It really was a
spectacle, they insisted; the world's premier slumming-tour—unless you went to Shanghai or
Bombay on one of those de luxe cruises.
Two motor-carloads of them drove to the resort, which is a long spit of land. It was hard to
find a place to park, and they had to walk a couple of miles; but they were young, and were
out for fun. There must have been a million people at the resort, and most of them crowded
onto the wide stretch of beach; it was barely possible to move about for the swarms of people
lying or sitting in the sand, sweltering in the blazing sunshine. If you wanted to know the
elementary facts about the human animal, here was the place to see exactly how fat they were,
or how skinny, how hairy, how bow-legged, how stoop-shouldered, how generally different
from the standards established by Praxiteles. You could discover also how they stank, what
raucous noises they made, what a variety of ill— odored foods they ate, and how utterly graceless
and superfluous they were.
To the fastidious Lanny Budd the worst thing of all was their emptiness of mind. They had
come for a holiday, and wanted to be entertained, and there was a seemingly endless avenue of
devices contrived for the purpose. For prices from a dime up you could be lifted on huge
revolving wheels, or whirled around sitting on brightly painted giraffes and zebras; you could
ride in tiny cars which bumped into one another, you could walk in dark tunnels which were a
perpetual earthquake, or in bright ones where sudden breezes whipped up the women's skirts
and made them scream; you could be frightened by ghosts and monsters—in short, you could
have a thousand fantastic things done to you, all expressive of the fact that you were an
animal and not a being with a mind; you could be humiliated and made ridiculous, but
rarely indeed on Coney Island could you be uplifted or inspired or taught any useful thing.
Lanny took this nightmare place as an embodiment of all the degradations which capitalism
inflicted upon the swarming millions of its victims. Anything to keep them from thinking.
Thus a young Pink; and he got himself into a red-hot argument with a carload of his young
companions, who had drawn their own conclusions from this immersion in carnality. Irma,
who monopolized a half-mile of ocean front, was disgusted that anyone should be content to
squat upon ten or a dozen square feet of it. Her childhood playmate, Babs Lorimer, whose
father had once had a "corner" in wheat, drew political conclusions from the spectacle and
wondered how anybody could conceive of the masses' having anything to say about the running
of government. "Noodles" Winthrop—his name was Newton—whose widowed mother collected a
small fraction of a cent from everyone who rode to Coney Island on a street railway, looked at
the problem biologically, and said he couldn't imagine how such hordes of ugly creatures had
survived, or why they desired to. Yet look at the babies they had!
X
With the members of Irma's immediate family Lanny found that he was getting along
surprisingly well. The domineering Fanny Barnes was set in her opinions, but for the most
part these had to do with questions of manners and taste and family position; she didn't give
much thought to politics and economics. Pride was her leading motive; she lived in the faith that
her Protestant Episcopal God had assigned to her family a specially precious strain of blood. She
