World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny listened to the conversation of these roommates, which was frank and explicit. To them the sight of a hundred women dancing on the stage stark naked, and painted or enameled all the hues of the rainbow, was something to stare at greedily and to gossip about afterwards. To Lanny, who had been used to nakedness or near it on the Riviera, this mass production of sex excitement was puzzling. He asked questions, and gathered that these young men had been raised in communities where the human body was mysterious and shocking, so that the wholesale exposure of it was a sensational event, like seeing a whole block of houses burn down.

  To these young men the need for a woman was as elementary as that for food and sleep. Arriving in a new part of the world, they had looked about for likely females, and exchanged confidences as to their discoveries. They wanted to know about Lanny’s love life, and when he told them that he had been twice jilted and was nursing a broken heart, they told him to forget it, that he would be young only once. He would go off and ponder what he had heard—in between his efforts to keep the Italians from depriving the Yugoslavs of their one adequate port.

  “Take the good the gods provide thee!”—so had sung an English poet in the anthology which Lanny had learned nearly by heart. That seemed to apply to the English girl secretary, Penelope Selden, who enjoyed his company and didn’t mind saying so. Lanny found that he was coming to like her more and more, and he debated the problem: what was he waiting for? Was he still in love with Rosemary? But that hadn’t kept him from being happy with Gracyn. It was all very well to dream about a great and permanent love, but time passed and there was none in sight. Was he hoping that Rosemary might some day come back to the Riviera? But she was expecting a baby, the future heir to a great English title. Lanny had written to her from Paris, and had a nice cool friendly reply, telling the news about herself and their common friends. All her letters had been like that, and Lanny assumed it was the epistolary style of the English aristocracy.

  He reviewed all over again the question of his sexual code, and that of his friends of the grand monde. The great and permanent love theory had gone out of fashion, if indeed it ever had been in fashion with anybody but poets and romancers. Rich and important persons made what were called marriages of convenience. If you were the son or daughter of a beer baron or diamond king, you bought a title; if you were a member of the aristocracy, you sold one, and the lawyers sat down and agreed upon what was called a “settlement.” You had a showy public wedding, as a result of which two or three new members of your exclusive social set were brought into the world; then you had done your duty and were at liberty to amuse yourself discreetly and inconspicuously.

  Was Lanny going to play second fiddle in some fashionable chamber concert? The invitation had been extended and never withdrawn. Assuming that he meant to accept, what about the interim? Live as an anchorite, or beguile his leisure with a refined and discreet young woman secretary? He was sure that if Rosemary, future Countess of Sandhaven, ever asked questions about what his life had been, it would be with curiosity as friendly and cool as her letters. Such were the agreeable consequences of that “most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century,” popularly know as “birth control.”

  VI

  The Big Four were deciding the destiny of the Adriatic lands and finding it the toughest problem yet. President Wilson had traveled to that warm country and been hailed as the savior of mankind; he had thrown kisses to the audience in the great Milan opera house, and had listened to the roaring of millions of throats on avenues and highways. He had got the impression that the emotional Italian people really loved him; but now he learned that there were two kinds of Italian people, and it was the other kind which had come to Paris: those who had repudiated their alliance with Germany and sold the blood and treasure of their land to Britain and France, in exchange for a signed and sealed promise of territories to be taken in the war. Now they were here, not to form a League of Nations, not to save mankind from future bloodshed, but to divvy the swag.

  The British and French had signed the Treaty of London under the stress of dire necessity, and now that the danger was over they were not too deeply concerned to keep the bargain—on the general principle that no state ever wants to see any other state become more powerful. But they lacked an excuse for repudiating their promises, and regarded it as a providential event when a noble-minded crusader came from overseas, bearing aloft a banner inscribed with Fourteen Points, including the right of the small peoples escaping from Austrian domination not to be placed under some other domination. The British, who had repudiated the idea of self-determination for Cyprus, and the French, who had repudiated it for the Sarre, were enthusiastic about it for the Adriatic—only, of course, it must be President Wilson who would lay down the law.

  The crusader from overseas did so; and Premier Orlando, that kindly and genial gentleman, wept, and Baron Sonnino scowled, and the whole Italian delegation stormed and raved. They said that Wilson, having lost his virtue on the Rhine and in the Polish Corridor, was now trying to restore it at the expense of the sacre egoismo of Italy. There were furious quarrels in the council halls, and the Italians packed up their belongings and threatened to leave, but delayed because they found that nobody cared.

  In the early stages of this controversy the hotels and meeting places of the delegates had swarmed with charming and cultivated Italians whose pockets were stuffed with banknotes; anybody who had access to the Crillon might have expensive parties thrown for him and enjoy the most delicate foods and rarest wines. The Hotel Edouard VII, where the sons of sunny Italy had their headquarters, kept open house for the diplomatic world. Later, when the thunder clouds burst, they didn’t sever friendships, but were heartbroken and made you understand that you and your countrymen had shattered their faith in human nature.

  The dispute broke into the open in a peculiar way; the Big Three agreed that they would issue a joint statement opposing the Italian demands, and the American President carried out his part of the bargain, but Lloyd George and Clemenceau didn’t, so the Americans were put in the position of standing alone against Italy. Wilson’s picture was torn from walls throughout that country, and the face which had been all but worshiped was now caricatured sub specie diaboli. The Italian delegation went home, and the French were greatly alarmed; but the Americans all said: “Don’t worry, they’ll come back”; and they did, in a few days.

  VII

  Lively times for experts and their secretaries! Professor Alston would be summoned to President Wilson’s study, where the elder statesmen were on their hands and knees, crawling over Susak or Shantung. There would come a call to Lanny, asking if he could hurry over to the Quai d’Orsay to bring an important document to some associate who was assisting in the final revision of the League of Nations Covenant. An extremely delicate situation there, because the American Congress had insisted upon a declaration that the League was never going to interfere with the Monroe Doctrine; this provision had to be slipped in as quietly as possible, for there were other nations having “regional understandings” which they would have liked to put into the Covenant, and there was danger of stirring them up.

  A group of the professors would meet at lunch, and Lanny would hear gossip about arrangements being made for the reception of the German delegation, now summoned to Paris to receive the treaty. The Germans were to be regarded as enemies until the document had been signed; they were not allowed to wear uniforms, and all intercourse with them was forbidden under military law. They would have the Hotel des Réservoirs, and building and grounds were to be surrounded with a barbed-wire stockade. This, it was explained, was to keep the mob from invading the premises; but it would be difficult to keep the Germans from feeling that they were being treated like wild beasts.

  The delegation arrived on the first of May, the traditional holiday of the Reds all over Europe. A general strike paralyzed all Paris that day: métro and trams and taxis, shops, theaters, cafés—everything. In the districts and s
uburbs the workers gathered with music and banners. They were forbidden to march, but they poured like a hundred rivers into the Place de la Concorde, and the staff of the Crillon crowded the front windows to watch the show. Never in his life had Lanny seen such a throng, or heard such deep and thunderous shouting; it was the challenge of the discontented, a voicing of all the sufferings which the masses had endured through four and a half years of war and as many months of peacemaking.

  Lanny couldn’t see his uncle in that human ocean, but he knew that every agitator in the city would be there. It was the day when they proclaimed the revolution, and would create it if they could. Captain Stratton had told how Marshal Foch was distributing close to a hundred thousand troops at strategic points. The Gardens of the Tuileries were a vast armed camp, with machine guns and even field-guns, and commanders who meant business. But with the example of Russia only a year and a half away, could the rank and file of the troops be depended on? Fear haunted everyone in authority throughout the civilized world on that distracted May Day of 1919.

  VIII

  Lanny Budd had come to be regarded by the Crillon staff as what they called half-playfully a “pinko.” It amused them to say this about the heir of a great munitions enterprise. The rumor had spread that he had a full-fledged Bolshevik for an uncle; and hadn’t he brought that avowed Red sympathizer, Lincoln Steffens, into the hotel dining room? Hadn’t he been observed deep in conversation with Herron, apostle of free love and Prinkipo? Hadn’t he tried to explain to more than one member of the staff that these wild men and women, marching and yelling, might be “the future”?

  What the Crillon thought of the marchers was that they wanted to get into the streets where the jewelry shops were. The windows of these shops were protected by steel curtains for the day, but such curtains could be “jimmied,” and doubtless many of the crowd had the tools concealed under their coats. None knew this better than the commander of the squadron of cuirassiers, in sky-blue uniforms decorated with silver chains, who guarded the line in front of the hotel. The cavalrymen with drawn sabers were stretched two deep across the Rue Royale, blocking the crowd off; there was a milling and moiling, shrieks of men and women mingled with sounds of smashing window glass. Lanny watched this struggle going on for what seemed an hour, directly under the windows of the hotel. He saw men’s scalps split with saber cuts, and the blood pouring in streams over their faces and clothing. It was the nearest he had come to war; the new variety called the class struggle, which, according to his Uncle Jesse, would be waged for years or generations, as long as it might take.

  The Crillon staff took sides on the question as to the seriousness of the danger. Of course if the Reds succeeded in France, the work done by the Peace Conference would be wiped out. If it succeeded in Germany, the war might have to be fought again. The world might even see the strange spectacle of the Allies putting another Kaiser on the German throne! But apparently that wasn’t going to happen, for Kurt Eisner, the Red leader of Bavaria, had been murdered by army officers, a fate that had also befallen Liebknecht and “Red Rosa” Luxemburg in Berlin. The Social-Democratic government of Germany hated the Communists and was shooting them down in the streets; and this was rather confusing to American college professors who had been telling their classes that all Reds were of the same bloody hue.

  Strange indeed were the turns of history! A government with a Socialist saddlemaker at its head was sending to Versailles a peace delegation headed by the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, member of the haughty old nobility who despised the German workers almost as much as he did the French politicians. He and his two hundred and fifty staff members were shut up in a stockade, and crowds came to look at them as they might at creatures in the zoo. The count hated them so that it made him physically ill. When he and his delegation came to the Trianon Palace Hotel to present their credentials, he became deathly pale, and his knees shook so that he could hardly stand. He did not try to speak. The spectacle was painful to the Americans, but Clemenceau and his colleagues gloated openly. “You see!” they said. “These are the old Germans! The ‘republic’ is just camouflage. The beast wants to get out of his cage.”

  34

  Young Lochinvar

  I

  The tall and stately Mrs. Emily Chattersworth was going shopping, and called at her friend Beauty’s hotel rather early in the morning. “Such a strange thing has happened, my dear,” said she. “Do you remember that young Swiss musician, M. Dalcroze?”

  “Yes, very well,” said Beauty, catching her breath.

  “I had a visit last night from two officials of the Sûreté. It seems that they are looking for him.”

  “What in the world for, Emily?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me directly, but I could guess from the questions they asked. They think he’s a German agent.”

  “Oh, my God!” exclaimed Beauty. Almost impossible to conceal the surge of her emotion. “How horrible, Emily!”

  “Can you imagine it? He seemed to me such a refined and gentle person.”

  “What did they ask you, Emily?”

  “Everything, to the remotest detail. They wanted to know how I met him and I gave them the letter he had written me. They wanted a description of him, height and weight and so on, which it’s so difficult to remember. They wanted a list of the persons he had been introduced to at my home; they were much disturbed because I couldn’t remember them all. You know how many persons I entertain—and I don’t keep records.”

  “Did you give them my name?” asked Beauty, quickly.

  “I’m happy to say I realized in time how that might point the finger at the Crillon.”

  “Oh, thank you, Emily—thank you! Lanny’s whole future might depend on it!” Beauty got herself together, and then rattled on: “Such an incredible idea, Emily! Do you really suppose it can be true?” A woman doesn’t spend many years in fashionable society without learning how to conceal her emotions, or at any rate to give them a turn in a new direction.

  “I don’t know what to think, Beauty. What could a German be trying to do now? Blow up the Peace Conference with a bomb?”

  “Didn’t you tell me that M. Dalcroze talked a great deal about the evils of the blockade?”

  “Yes; but it’s no crime to do that, is it?”

  “It would be for a German, I suppose. The French would probably shoot him for it.”

  “Oh, how sick I am of this business of killing people! I hear there were several hundred killed and wounded in those May Day riots. The papers don’t give us the truth about anything any more!” The kind Mrs. Emily, whose hair had turned snow-white under the stress of war, went on to philosophize about the psychology of the French. They were suffering from shellshock. It was to be hoped that when this treaty was signed they would settle down and become their normal selves. “If they have the League of Nations to protect them—and surely it can’t be possible that the American Congress will reject such a great and beneficent plan!”

  Beauty controlled her trembling and added a few reflections, derived at second hand from Lanny’s professors. After a decent interval she said: “You haven’t any idea what’s become of that young man?”

  “Not a word from him since he left my house that night. I thought it very strange.”

  “I’ll ask Lanny about him,” suggested the mother. “He knows many musical people, and might find him. Do you suppose he’s related to Jaques-Dalcroze?”

  “I asked him that. He told me no.”

  “Well, I’ll see if Lanny can find him.”

  “But why, Beauty? Isn’t it better not to know, under the circumstances?”

  “Then you wouldn’t want to give him up?” inquired the devious one.

  “Surely not—unless I knew he had committed some serious crime. The war is over, so far as I am concerned, and I’ve not the least interest in getting anybody shot. Let the Sûreté find him if they can.”

  “Are you satisfied that they believed
your story, Emily?”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t,” was the great lady’s reply. She was a most dignified person, and did not have to assume this role. “Apparently they knew all about me, and they talked as if they were gentlemen. They are high officials, I am sure.”

  “Of course they’d find out how to approach you, Emily. But they probably don’t tell anybody all they know, and they might take it for granted that you wouldn’t either.”

  “What on earth are you driving at, Beauty?”

  “Well, Lanny keeps telling me how the French are always calling the Crillon staff ‘pro-German’; and if there should be German agents in Paris trying to make propaganda on behalf of lifting the blockade, wouldn’t it please the French to be able to tie them up with us?”

  “What a witch you are!” exclaimed her friend. “You look so innocent and trusting and then you talk like a Sherlock Holmes!”

  “Well, Lanny told me the other day that since I have no money I have to develop brains.”

  “I wonder what Lanny is thinking about me!” reflected the salonmère; and in their laughter Lanny’s mother found a chance to hide the nervous tension under which she was laboring.

  II

  Beauty declined to have lunch with her friend, saying that she wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t dress. As soon as the visitor had departed, she called the Crillon, and said: “Come at once, Lanny. Tell the professor your mother is ill.”