Пользователь - WORLDS END

• Название: WORLDS END
• Автор: Пользователь
• Жанр: Прочая старинная литература

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In the eastern sky the dark cloud continued to lower; and here, also, what the Allies did only made matters worse. The Big Four had recognized Admiral Kolchak as the future ruler of Siberia - a land whose need for a navy was somewhat restricted. This land-admiral had agreed to submit his policies to a vote of the Russian people, but meanwhile he was proceeding to kill as many of them as possible and seize their farms. The result was that the peasants went into hiding, and as soon as the admiral's armies moved on they came out and took back their farms. The same thing was happening all over the Ukraine, where General Denikin had been chosen as the Russian savior; and now another general, named Yudenich, was being equipped to capture Petrograd. They didn't dare to give these various saviors any British, French, or American troops, because of mutinies; but they would furnish officers, and armaments which were charged up as "loans," and which the peasants of Russia were expected to repay in return for being deprived of the land.

At any rate, that was the way Stef described matters to Lanny Budd; and Lanny found this credible, because Stef had been there and the others hadn't. The youth had gone to call on this strange little man, whose point of view was so stimulating to the mind. Lanny didn't tell his father about this visit, and quieted his conscience by saying, what use making Robbie unhappy to no purpose? Lanny wasn't ever going to become a Red - he just wanted to hear all sides and understand them. Robbie seemed to have the idea that the only way to avoid falling into the snares of the Reds was to refuse to have anything to do with them, or even to know about them. The moment you started to "understand" them - at that moment you were becoming tainted with their hateful infection?

II

There came a letter from Beauty, now viewing the art galleries and cabarets of Madrid. She was so, so happy; but her conscience was troubling her because of Baby Marceline, left motherless on the Riviera for so many months. To be sure, the servants adored her, and Beauty had asked friends to go and look her over; but still the mother worried, and wanted Lanny to run down and take her place. "You know my position," she pleaded. "I dare not leave our friend alone." Always she used the tactful phrase, "our" friend. If a woman wrote топ ami, that had a special meaning; but notre ami was chaste, even Christian, and took Lanny into the affaire.

There was much to be done at their home, Beauty informed him. The house needed very much to be redecorated, and it was fortunate that Lanny had such good taste; his mother would leave it to him, and be interested to see what new ideas he had acquired in two years of journeying about. Lanny decided that he would surprise her by building that extra studio. The many relatives of Leese would be summoned en masse; they were slow, but Lanny knew them and liked them, and they would work well for him.

This was something the youth could present to his father as a plausible substitute for a job in the oil industry. Robbie believed in buildings, as something you could see, and if need be could sell; he said to do the studio right, and he would pay for it. He added that Baby Marceline would probably be better off if Beauty would stay in Spain, or go back to Germany with Kurt; all she could do with a child was to spoil it. She would have done that with Lanny if Robbie hadn't put his foot down many times. Lanny said maybe she had anyhow.

The youth wanted to remain in Paris until his father was through. He was seeing the Crillon and all its affairs through a new pair of eyes. The men with whom Robbie was dealing were not the statesmen, but those who told the statesmen what to do. Yes, even the stiff-souled Presbyterian, the reformer to whom big business had been anathema - even he had become dependent upon the masters of money. A whole procиssion of them had been called over to Paris: prominent among them Lamont of the House of Morgan, whom Wilson had refused even to receive at the White House before the war. A score of such men had now become the President's confidential advisers on questions of reparations and the restoring of trade and finance.

Of course these businessmen were telling him to do the things which would enable them to go on making money, as they had been doing so happily before the war. The railroads were to be handed back to private management, and government controls over industry were to be abandoned. The Supreme Economic Council was to be scrapped, so that the scramble for raw materials could be resumed and Wall Street speculators could buy up everything in sight. To Robbie Budd all this was proof that the world naturally belonged to vigorous, acquisitive persons like himself. He was here to consult with others of his sort, and make certain that American diplomatic and naval authorities would co-operate with American oil men endeavoring to obtain their share of a product for which there was no substitute.

III

Johannes Robin came to Paris to consult his business associate. He brought with him a suitcase full of letters, contracts, and financial statements, and Lanny had lunch with the two, and listened while the Jewish enterpriser explained the various affairs in which he had been using Robbie's money. Things hadn't gone so well as he had hoped, because the delays in the peace settlement had held up transportation and credit. Meanwhile storage charges were eating up a share of the profits; but still, there would be goodly sums left, and Robbie professed himself as satisfied with what had been done.

They went upstairs to their suite, and Robbie settled down to look over the documents, with his associate explaining them. Lanny went along, because Mr. Robin said he had brought more snapshots of his family, also a present, a copy of Hansi's "Opus I," a violin etude; the copy made by the fifteen-year-old composer's own hands. Lanny sat down to study it and became absorbed; he had heard so much about that talented and hard-working lad who wanted to be his friend and adorer. He could see right away what had happened: Hansi had learned to perform a number of difficult technical feats on the violin, and in his composition he had been concerned to give himself an opportunity to do them all. But then, most performers' compositions are like that; you take it for granted, as you do the make-up and mannerisms of a "professional beauty."

Mr. Robin was so interested in Lanny's interest that he could hardly keep his mind on the business documents. When Lanny said: "That's a lovely theme just after the cadenza," the fond father turned pink with pleasure. "Can you really get it without hearing it?" he exclaimed; and of course Lanny was pleased to have his musical accomplishments admired. Perhaps the Jewish businessman knew that Lanny would be pleased - thus human relationships are complicated by the profit motive! Anyhow, Lanny promised to take the composition home with him and master the piano part, in preparation for the day when he and the young composer would play their first duet.

Robbie told his new associate about his plans to break into the oil game, and the latter said he would like to put his profits into that venture. Living in the land of Henri Deterding, he knew quite a lot about the oil business, and the two of them talked as equals in the fascinating game of profit-hunting. To Lanny they resembled two sleek and capable panthers which have met in the jungle and decided to work together for the quicker finding and bringing down of their prey. One had been born in a mud hut in Poland and the other in an aristocratic mansion in New England, but modern standardization had brought them to a point where they talked in shorthand, as it were - they understood each other without the need of completing a sentence. Lanny had a lot of fun teasing his father about it afterward, and trying to decide whether the new firm was to be known as Robbie and Robin, or Robin and Robbie. A delicate point in verbal aesthetics - or was it in social precedence? Of course, said the youth, when they had conquered the world and possessed its oil, they would be known as "R. & R." The Dutch partner in this combination said that as soon as peace was certain he was planning to move his office and family to Berlin. Hansi had learned about all he could in Rotterdam; and for the father there would be extraordinary opportunities of profit in Germany in the next few years. He would keep his Rotterdam office, and turn all his money into guilders and dollars. With the reparations settlement as it was, the mark was bound to lose value; the only way, short of repudiation, for Germany to reduce her internal debts. Incidentally, by inflation, she could collect large sums from foreigners, who believed in the mark and were buying it now. Johannes Robin said there was much argument among Dutch traders on this point, and of course fortunes would be made or lost on the guess. Robbie was inclined to agree with his new partner, but advised him that it would be safer to buy properties and goods, which would be thrown on the market for almost nothing in a collapse of the German money system.

IV

The ministry of the Socialist Scheidemann resigned; he wouldn't sign the treaty. Brockdorff-Rantzau wouldn't sign. But somebody had to sign, for it was clear that Germany had no other course. The new ministry sent word that it would bow to the inevitable; but still they didn't send anybody. President Wilson was impatient to return to Washington, where a special session of the new Congress had been waiting for him for more than a month. But the ceremony of signing had to be put off day after day. It was most annoying, and offensive to the dignity of the victorious Great Powers.

Lanny went to call on Lincoln Steffens at his hotel. After listening to his father and his father's new business associate, the youth wanted someone to tell him that the world wasn't created entirely to have money made out of it. Sitting in his little hotel room, confined by a cold, Stef said that the money-makers were having their own way everywhere; but the trouble was they couldn't agree among themselves, and kept flinging the world into one mess after another. So there were revolts; and the question was, would these revolts be blind, or would they have a program?

Stef told what had just happened to an artist friend of his, a brilliant cartoonist of Greenwich Village, the artists' quarter of New York. Robert Minor had gone in a fine state of enthusiasm to look at the new revolutionary Russia, and had then come to Paris. He visited the headquarters of the railwaymen, then threatening their strike, and told them what the Russians were doing. As a result, a couple of French flics had picked him up at his lodgings and taken him to the Prйfecture and grilled him for half a day; then they had turned him over to the American army authorities at Koblenz, who had held him prisoner in secret for several weeks. They had talked about shooting him; but he had managed to smuggle out word as to his whereabouts, and the labor press of Paris had taken up the case. It happened that "Bob's" father was a judge in Texas and an influential Democrat; so in the end the army authorities had turned their prisoner loose.

Lanny mentioned how his Uncle Jesse likewise had been questioned by the police, and had threatened them with publicity. Jesse had been sure they wouldn't jail an American just for making speeches.

"This was a special kind of speech," answered Stef. "Bob advised the railway men how to stop the invasion of the Black Sea by calling a strike on the railroads to Marseille."

"Yes, I suppose that's different," the youth agreed.

The muckraker asked whether Lanny hadn't been spied on himself. Lanny was surprised, and said he hadn't thought about it. Stef replied: "Better think!" He imparted a piece of news - that two of those members of the Crillon staff who had tried to resign had had dictographs put in their rooms - presumably by the Army Intelligence. This news worried Lanny more than he cared to let his friend know.

"How do you know a spy when you meet him?" he asked, and the other answered that often you didn't until it was too late. It was generally somebody who agreed with your pinkest ideas and went you one or two better. Lanny said he hadn't met anyone like that as yet - unless it was Stef himself!

This world observer, whose ideas were so hard to puzzle out, told some of his own experiences since his return from Russia. The Intelligence had thought it necessary to dog his footsteps continually. "There is a Captain Stratton - "

"Oh, yes!" broke in the youth. "I saw a lot of him at the Crillon."

"Well, he and another officer took the trouble to get the next table in a restaurant where I was dining with a friend. I saw that they were listening to our talk so I invited them over, and told them all about what I had learned in Russia, and had reported to Colonel House. I tried my best to convert them."

"Did you succeed?" asked Lanny, delighted.

"Well, they stopped following me. Maybe the reason was what President Wilson did a day or two later. I suppose he had heard that I was being shadowed, and he chose a tactful way to stop it. You understand, he has refused to see me and hear what I have to report on Russia; having made up his 'one-track mind' that he's not going to stop the war on the Soviets, he doesn't want to be upset by my facts. But he knows how I came to go to Russia, and he has no right to discredit me. I was one of a crowd of newspapermen waiting in the lobby of the hotel, when he passed through and saw me, and he came and bent over me and pretended to whisper something into my ear. He didn't say a word that I could make out; he just made murmurs. Of course his purpose was to tell everybody that I still had his confidence."

"So now you can be as pink as you please!" chuckled the other.

V

The German delegation arrived, and the much-postponed signing was set for the twenty-eighth of June. The signers were two subordinates, but the Allies were determined to make a ceremony of it. The setting was the great Hall of Mirrors of the Versailles palace, where the victorious Germans had established their empire forty-eight years earlier, and had forced the French to sign the humiliating peace surrendering Alsace-Lorraine. Now the tables were turned, and with all pomp and circumstance the two distressed German envoys would put their signatures to the statement that their country alone had been to blame for the World War.

Every tourist in France visits the Versailles palace, and wanders through the magnificent apartment where once the Sun King ate his meals and the population had the hereditary right to enter and stare at the greatest of all monarchs gulping his potage and at his queen and princesses nibbling their entremets. Lanny had been there with his mother and Kurt, motored by Harry Murchison, nearly six years back; that lovely October day stood out in his memory, and as he recalled it he had many strange thoughts. Suppose that on that day he had been able by some psychic feat to peer into the future and know that his German friend, adoring his mother, was to become her lover! Suppose that Beauty had been able to perform the feat and foresee what was going to happen to Marcel - would she have married Harry Murchison instead? Or suppose that the Germans, at the signing of the first Peace of Versailles, had been able to foresee the second!