World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny parted from his friend Alston, who was going to teach summer school—a humble professor once more, with no presumptuous ideas of guiding the destiny of states. He had had a great influence upon his secretary, and would not be forgotten. That is the consolation of professors.

  Lanny stayed resigned, and so was loose and alone in Paris. He no longer had the use of a room, paid for by the government; no more free meals, and no more honors. The doormen of the Crillon knew him, and would still let him in, but he became aware that persons who talked to him were a bit uneasy. It wasn’t quite the safe thing to do.

  More to his surprise, Lanny found the same sense of discomfort when he went to see his friend Fessenden. The American had understood, of course, that he was being used as a source of information, but he had assumed that the friendship was real, even so. Now the young Englishman wanted him to understand that it was really real, but Fessenden was dependent upon his career for a living—he wasn’t a playboy like Lanny, and couldn’t afford to get himself marked as a “pinko.” He was very busy now; but when the conference was over there would be time for sociability.

  Mrs. Emily invited the homeless youth to be her guest, and he was glad to accept. Here was a comfortable place to stay, and quiet friendship to smooth his ruffled plumage. His hostess was nearing sixty, and with her white hair was a dignified and impressive figure. In her home he met mostly French people; and oddly enough, cultivated Frenchmen paid very little attention to his revolt. The French are a well-insulated people, and seldom bother to know what is going on outside their own world unless it is forced upon them. Disputes and disagreements among the American staff? Yes, they are a rather violent people; their cinema reveals it; they still have wild Indians, don’t they? The French would shrug their shoulders.

  Lanny was a man of leisure, with time to stroll on the boulevards and watch the sights of a great city and reflect upon them. He himself didn’t realize to what extent his point of view had changed; how different his reflections from what they would have been a year ago. For example, the painful spectacle of the women of Paris. In the early days of the Peace Conference you hardly saw a spot on the Champs-Élysées where a person could sit that didn’t have a doughboy with a French girl in his lap; now, when the doughboys were disappearing, the competition among the women had become ravenous. Three or four would sight Lanny at once, and come to him swiftly, each looking ready to tear the eyes out of her rival; when he politely told them in good French that he was living a chaste life, their enmity to one another would vanish, and they would gaze mournfully after him, saying: “Oh, but life is hard for the women!”

  Six months ago, Lanny would have attributed all this to natural depravity, of a sort peculiar to the Gallic race; he would have recalled some phrases which M. Rochambeau had quoted from Tacitus, censuring the moral code of that race in its then barbaric state. But now Lanny had the phrases of Stef and his Uncle Jesse in his mind. His attention had been called to the fact that municipal authority under the stress of war had set the wages of French workingwomen at six francs per day; whereas to go into a restaurant and have a poor dinner would cost one of them at least seven. Yes, it was the stark, simple fact that hunger was driving them to sell their bodies; hunger was driving the poor of Europe to madness, and making the ferocious class struggles.

  What about the women of more prosperous classes, so many of whom were selling themselves for silk gowns, fur coats, and jeweled slippers? “Well,” Lanny could hear his uncle saying, “aren’t these the tools of their trade?” The gentle and refined scholars whom Woodrow Wilson had brought to Paris were appalled at the behavior of females who wore the clothes of ladies and had been expected to behave that way: females of all nations, American included, some of them in Red Cross costumes. In the Crillon order was maintained, but in other hotels they peddled themselves from door to door like book agents. The shocked professors repeated a story about the American Ambassador to Belgium, who was lodged in the ultra-magnificent Palace Hotel of Brussels, owned by the King of Spain. Said the ambassador to his friends: “It is the custom in European hotels to leave your boots outside the door, to be gathered up by the porter and polished in the early morning hours. So I have bought myself a pair of ladies’ shoes, and every night I place them outside my door along with my own boots!”

  VIII

  There were other aspects of life in Paris less depressing. There were theaters with more to show than troupes of naked women. There were concerts, to remind one that the life of the spirit still continued. Most interesting to Lanny was the spring salon in the Petit Palais. To think that in the midst of the last desperate agony of war, with several “Big Berthas” dropping shells into the city every twenty minutes, with food scarce and fuel unobtainable, more than three thousand men and women had sat at easels and maintained their faith that art could not be destroyed, but was and would remain the supreme achievement and goal of life!

  Lanny went to this show day after day. There were many kinds of paintings, many subjects, many techniques; he studied them, and tried to understand what the artist was telling him. Beauty had had three of Marcel’s last works brought to Paris, and they had been hung; Lanny now compared them with the work of other men, and confirmed his opinion that there was nothing better being shown. You could see how the crowds felt, for there were always people looking at Marcel’s work, and asking questions concerning the painter. Not many knew about him, but they were going to; that would be one of Lanny’s tasks, and his mother’s—when she came back from her new honeymoon.

  Lanny knew many of the artists at this show. Some came to the Cap and worked; for others Beauty had posed in her very young womanhood. They Came to see how their work was being received, and to compare it uneasily with work that might be better. Lanny talked with them, got their addresses, and went to visit their studios and talk shop. They were glad to welcome a rich young man who might be a customer, or could send others. As a stepson of Marcel Detaze and nephew of Jesse Blackless, he was an insider; they talked freely, and it was like old times. He had expected to find them all starving and was happy to hear that art activities had come back with an astonishing rush. The bourgeoisie had money and wanted portraits of their beautiful ladies and their eminent selves; they were planning palaces and villas and wanted them made elegant. Artists, eternal enemies of the bourgeois, spoke of them with condescension; another form of the class struggle.

  Beautiful things, always touched with sadness. Lanny would stop before a certain painting, and the thought would come to him: what would Marcel think of this? His stepfather’s spirit hovered at his shoulder, and would do so at every exhibition for the rest of his life; pointing out brushwork, atmosphere, composition, meaning, all the things that painting conveys to the trained intelligence. If Lanny was puzzled, he would wait and Marcel would tell him; if Lanny had a conclusion to announce, it would take the form of a dialogue with Marcel. So it is with impressions which form our childhood, and which we pass on to others in their turn.

  Kurt Meissner was here in Lanny’s thoughts, because they had attended a salon the year before the war; Rick, too, because they had attended the one of 1917. With these two friends Lanny was hoping to resume the life of art, in London, on the Riviera, all over Europe—when finally the statesmen had settled their squabbles and men could begin to think about the things that mattered. Lanny was in a mood of intense repugnance toward politics and everything that had to do with it. He had been on the inside, and never again would he believe in a statesman, never would a stuffed shirt or a uniform decorated with medals produce the slightest stir in his mind. Lanny’s dream was to build himself an ivory tower and invite his chosen friends; they would live gracious lives, such as you read about in the days of the Medicis, and the Esterhazys, and other patrons of the arts.

  The future patron had in his pocket a letter from Rick, begging him to come to England for a visit. Lanny had replied that he would do so as soon as he could arrange it. He had written to both his mother a
nd his father, telling them about his resignation and asking as to their plans. From Robbie the reply came in the form of a cablegram—the old familiar kind that had made life such an adventure: “Sailing for London steamer Ruritania meet me Hotel Cecil Monday.”

  36

  The Choice of Hercules

  I

  When Lanny left Paris, at the beginning of June, the Allies and the Germans were still exchanging notes about the treaty, and all the world was waiting to know, would they sign, or wouldn’t they? The railwaymen of France were threatening to tie up the country with a strike against low wages, long hours, and the high cost of living; so Lanny took his departure by plane, a new and adventurous way of traveling, if you had the price. This was one good thing that had come out of the war; air travel had become quick and easy, and top members of the British delegation found it swanky to fly to London in the morning, have lunch and a conference, and return to Paris in the afternoon.

  Private passengers paid eighty dollars for a one-way trip. You were bundled up in a heavy sheepskin coat and robe and wore a helmet with goggles. A marvelous sensation to feel yourself being lifted off the ground and see the earth falling away. What hath God wrought! The wind roared by at a hundred miles an hour, and the noise of the engine made it necessary to write a note to the pilot if you had anything to say. Down below were the farms of France, little checkerboards of green and brown and yellow. Then the Channel, made safe for traffic, the submarines having been surrendered to the English fleet. Fishing boats were tiny specks on the smooth blue and the heavy coal lighters trailed streamers of black smoke.

  When Lanny got off the train at the station near The Reaches, Rick and Nina were waiting in a little car, Nina driving; Rick could never drive because of his leg. He had it in a steel brace, but even with this support it pained him to walk, and now and then he would go white and have to lean against something. But he didn’t want anybody to help him; it was his own trouble and he would attend to it. Just oblige him by going on with the conversation, quietly and indifferently, English fashion.

  Lanny had expected to find his friend emaciated, but he was stouter than he had been. That was on account of the lack of exercise; he couldn’t go into the water, and the only form of work he could perform was to lie on his back and wave his arms, or raise himself to a sitting position—all of which was a bore. He couldn’t play the piano very well, because of the pedals. Most of the time he read, and he was exacting of his authors, also of people who came to talk with him. Nina said he had fretted himself near to death, but gradually he was learning to get along with what fate would allow him.

  A little more than two years had passed since Lanny had seen him, strong and confident, hopping into a railway car with a load of cigarettes and chocolate for the “corps wing.” Now you’d have thought ten times as many years had passed; his face was lined and melancholy and there were touches of gray in his wavy dark hair. But inside him was the same old Rick, proud and impatient, critical and exacting for himself as well as for others, yet warmhearted in his reserved way, generous and kind in actions even when he was fierce in words. He was pathetically glad to see Lanny, and right away on the drive began asking questions about the Peace Conference, what it had done, what it was going to do.

  Lanny could talk a lot about that and he found himself an important person, having been on the inside, and knowing things which the papers didn’t tell. Even Sir Alfred wanted to hear his story. In the twilight they sat on the terrace of that lovely old place, and friends came, young and old, whom Lanny had met five years ago. What strange things they had been through—and how little they had been able to guess!

  A basic question which they discussed at length: Could you by any possibility trust the Germans? Would they be willing to settle down, let bygones be bygones, take their part in a League of Nations, and help to build a sane and decent world? Or were they incurable militarists? If they got on their feet again, would they start arming right away, and throw the world into another Armageddon? Manifestly, the way you were going to treat them depended upon the answer to these questions. Lanny, having heard the subject debated from every possible angle, was able to appear very wise to these cultivated English folk.

  Some had had experience with Germans, before and during the war, and had come to conclusions. Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, pacifist and radical of five years back, had now become convinced that Germany would have to be split up, in order to keep her from dominating Europe. On the other hand Rick, who had done the fighting and might have been expected to hate the people who had crippled him, declared that the dumb politicians on both sides were to blame; the German and the English people would have to find a way to get rid of these vermin simultaneously. With his usual penetration, Rick said that the one thing you couldn’t do was to follow both policies at the same time. You couldn’t repress Germany à la française with your right hand, and conciliate her à l’américaine with your left. That, he added, was exactly what the dumb politicians were attempting.

  II

  Next day they went punting. Rick spread himself on cushions on the bottom of the boat, with Nina at his side, and Lanny took the long pole and walked them up the Thames. They recalled the boat races, which had been postponed for five years, but would be held again next month. They stopped under an overhanging tree and ate lunch, while Lanny told about his stay in Connecticut, and the great munitions industry and the trouble it was in; he told about Gracyn, whose play had run all winter in New York.

  Lanny thought how much better it would have been if he’d had the luck to find a girl like Nina, who so obviously adored Rick, and watched over him and waited on him day and night. They had a lovely little boy toddling about on the green lawns and Nina was expecting another. That was all Rick was good for, he said; to increase the population and make up for the losses of war. It wasn’t any fun making love without a kneejoint, but he could manage it as a patriotic duty. Nina didn’t make any objection to this form of conversation; it was the fashion among these young people, who went out of their way to say exactly what they meant.

  Rick told about his family’s affairs. When Lanny went for a walk he would discover that those old cottages which had shocked him had been razed and the ground planted to potatoes. A part of the estate had been sold to pay war taxes, and they might have to part with the whole thing if government didn’t let up on them. The poor fools who imagined they were going to make Germany pay for the war would pretty soon begin to realize that Germany had nothing to pay with, and wouldn’t do it if she could. Lanny agreed with that; he reported that the Crillon expected the Germans to sign with their fingers crossed and begin every possible method of evasion.

  They drifted back with the current. While Rick lay down to rest, the other two sat under a tree on the lawn, and Lanny made friends with the baby while Nina told about her life. She didn’t have to say that marriage and motherhood had agreed with her; her frail figure had filled out and her eager, intense manner had changed to one of repose. Rick’s exacting ways didn’t trouble her too greatly; she had learned to understand him, and managed him as an expert would a problem child. She counted herself fortunate, because she had love, which so many others had lost or had never found.

  “At least they can’t take him to war,” she said, and added: “Now that we women have got the vote, if we allow any more wars, we’ll deserve the worst that comes to us. Do you think women will get the vote in America?”

  Lanny answered that President Wilson had been strongly against it, as a federal measure; but it had been shown that he could be made to change his mind. “I have seen that happen,” said the youth, with a touch of malice.

  “What are you going to do with yourself?” Nina wanted to know. When he told her that he was trying to make up his mind, she said: “You can’t just drift around; if you do, some woman will get hold of you and make you miserable. Why don’t you come and live near here, and let Rick and me find you a wife?”

  He laughed and said he’d
have to find a way to earn his living first; he didn’t want to live on his father indefinitely. “Why don’t you and Rick come to the Riviera next winter, and let him stay outdoors in the sunshine?”

  “I don’t believe we’ll be able to afford any travel, Lanny.”

  “You’ll be surprised how cheaply you can live, if you don’t put on side. There are lots of little villas, and food will be cheap again when Europe settles down.” Lanny was figuring on bringing Kurt and Rick together again. Such a clever intriguer he was!

  III

  He had asked Rosemary if he might come to see her. She answered that she was expecting a baby in a couple of months, and was “a sight,” but if he could stand her she’d be delighted. Sir Alfred lent him the small car, and he drove for a couple of hours through the lovely English countryside, now at its best, and so peaceful you would think there had never been a war in the world: soft green meadows and fields of ripening grain, villages with broad commons and sheep grazing, great estates with parks, villas with well-kept hedges full of blossoms and singing birds. In most of those houses there would be gracious and kindly people, good to know; yes, maybe he would come to England—and learn to drive on the wrong side of the road without so much effort of mind.

  Rosemary was now the Honorable Mrs. Algernon Armistead Brougham, pronounced Broom, and she lived in what was called a “lodge,” a fairly large house on the estate of her husband’s grandfather. She enjoyed the scenery of a beautiful park without the trouble or expense of keeping it; an ideal environment for the incubating of a future member of the ruling class. The visitor was ushered into a sun parlor full of flowers and the song of a canary; presently Rosemary came in, wearing an ample robe of pink silky stuff, and looking so lovely that Lanny felt the blood start in warm currents all over him.