“It really is, Robbie,” put in the youth.
“Go on,” said Robbie, between his clenched teeth.
“Well, this morning a French labor leader came to me. You know the blockade of Germany is still going on, the war on the Soviet government is still going on—and both are products of French government policy.”
“You may assume that I have read the newspapers,” replied the father. “Kindly tell me what the police wanted with Lanny.”
“This labor man of course would like to have American support for a policy more liberal and humane. He brought me a bundle of leaflets presenting the arguments of the French workers, and asked if it wouldn’t be possible for my nephew at the Crillon to get these into the hands of Colonel House, so that he might know how the workers felt. I said: ‘My nephew has broken with the Crillon, because he doesn’t approve its policies.’ The answer was: ‘Well, he may be in touch with some of the staff there and might be able to get the documents to Colonel House.’ So I said: ‘All right, I’ll take them to him and ask him to try.’ I took them, and advised Lanny not to read them himself, but to get them to the right person if he had a chance.”
Lanny sat rigid in his seat, his mind torn between dismay and admiration. Oh, what a beautiful story! It brought him to realize how ill equipped he was for the career of an intriguer, a secret agent; all those hours he had spent in the silence of his cell—and never once had he thought of that absolutely perfect story!
“My friend told me how many of these leaflets had been printed and distributed in Paris, and I jotted down the figures on each one, thinking it might help to impress Colonel House. It appears the Préfecture found those figures highly suspicious.”
“Tell me how it happened,” persisted Robbie.
“When I left the hotel I got a glimpse of a man strolling past the window and looking into the lobby. He happened to be one of the flics who had picked me up several months back. I saw him enter the hotel, and I looked through the window and saw him and another man go into the elevator with Lanny. I waited until they came down and put him into a taxi. Then I set out to find you. I was afraid to go into the hotel, so I used the telephone. When I failed to find you, I sent you a note by messenger, and also a telegram, and then I decided to go to the Préfecture and try my luck. It was a risk, of course, because Lanny might have talked, and I couldn’t know what he had said.”
“You might have guessed that he would have told the truth,” said the father.
“I wasn’t that clever. What I did was to fish around, until they told me Lanny had confessed that he was a Red—”
“What?” cried Lanny, shocked.
“The commissaire said that himself; so I knew they were bluffing and that Lanny hadn’t talked. I told them my story and they held me a couple of hours while they ‘investigated.’ What they did, I assume, was to phone to Colonel House. Of course they consider that most everybody in the Crillon is a Red, but they can’t afford any publicity about it. That’s why they turned us loose with a warning.”
Robbie turned to his son. “Lanny, is this story true?”
The next few moments were uncomfortable for the younger man. He had never lied to his father in his life. Was he going to do it now? Or was he going to “throw down” his Uncle Jesse, who had come to his rescue at real danger to himself—and who had invented such a beautiful story? There is an old saying that what you don’t know won’t hurt you; but Lanny had been taught a different moral code—that you mustn’t ever lie except when you are selling munitions.
Great was the youth’s relief when his uncle saved him from this predicament. “One moment, Robbie,” he put in. “I didn’t say that story was true.”
“Oh, you didn’t?”
“I said I would tell you what I told the commissaire.”
The father frowned angrily. “I am in no mood for jokes!” he exclaimed. “Am I to know about this business, or am I not? Lanny, will you kindly tell me?”
“Yes, Robbie,” replied the youth. “The truth is—”
“The fault is entirely mine,” broke in Uncle Jesse. “I brought Lanny those papers for a purpose of my own.”
“He is going to try to take the blame on himself,” objected Lanny. “I assure you—”
“He can’t tell you the real story, because he doesn’t know it!” argued the painter.
“Nobody really knows it but me,” retorted Lanny. “Uncle Jesse only thinks he knows it.”
Robbie’s sense of humor wasn’t operating just then. “Will you two please agree which is going to talk?”
Said Lanny, quickly: “I think we’d all three better wait until we get back to the hotel.” He made a motion of the finger toward the taxi driver in front of them. To be sure, they were speaking English—but then the driver might have been a waiter at Mouquin’s on Sixth Avenue before the war. The two men fell silent; and Lanny remarked: “Well, I heard the guns. Has the treaty really been signed?”
V
When they were safely locked in their suite, Robbie got out his whisky bottle, which the flics hadn’t taken. He had been under a severe strain, and took a nip without waiting for the soda and ice; so did the painter. Lanny had been under a longer strain than either of them, but he waited for the ginger beer, for he wasn’t yet of age, and moreover he thought that his father was drinking too much, and was anxious not to encourage him. Meanwhile the youth strolled casually about the suite, looking into the bathroom and the closets and under the beds; he didn’t know just how a dictograph worked, but he looked everywhere for any wires. After the bellboy had departed, the ex-prisoner opened the door and looked out. He was in a melodramatic mood.
At last they were settled, and the father said: “Now, please, may I have the honor of knowing about this affair?”
“First,” said Lanny, with a grin, “let me shut Uncle Jesse up. Uncle Jesse, you remember the Christmas before the war, I paid a visit to Germany?”
“I heard something about it.”
“I was staying with a friend of mine. Better not to use names. That friend was in Paris until recently, and he was the man who came to call on you at midnight.”
“Oh, so that’s it!” exclaimed the painter.
“I gave him my word never to tell anybody. But I’m sure he won’t mind your knowing, because you’re likely to become his brother-in-law before long—you may be it now. Beauty and he are lovers, and that’s why she’s gone to Spain.”
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Jesse. And then again: “Oh, my God!” He was speaking English, in which these words carry far more weight than in French.
“I told Robbie about it,” Lanny continued, “because he has a right to know about Beauty. But I didn’t tell him about you, because that was your secret. May I tell him now?”
“Evidently he’s not going to be happy till he hears it.”
Lanny turned to his father. “I put my friend in touch with Uncle Jesse, and my friend brought money to help him stir up the workers against the blockade. I thought that was a worthy cause and I still think so.”
“You knew you were risking your life?” demanded the shocked father.
“I’ve seen people risking their lives for so long, it has sort of lost meaning. But you can imagine that I felt pretty uncomfortable this afternoon. Also, you can see what a risk Uncle Jesse took when he walked into that place.”
Robbie made no response. He had poured out the drinks for the red sheep of his former mistress’s family, but not an inch farther did he mean to go.
“You see how it was,” continued Lanny. “When my friend stopped coming, Uncle Jesse wanted to know why; he brought me some literature so that this friend might see what he had been doing. He asked me to pass it on if I got a chance, and I said I would. He suggested that I didn’t need to read it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t—I just said that I understood. Uncle Jesse has really been playing fair with you, Robbie. It was my friend and I who planned this whole scheme and brought it to him.”
“I hope
you don’t feel too proud of it,” said the father, grimly.
“I’m not defending myself, I’m trying to set you straight about Uncle Jesse. If I’ve picked up ideas that you don’t like, it hasn’t been from him, for he’s avoided talking to me, and even told me I couldn’t understand his ideas if I tried. I’m a parasite, a member of the wasting classes, all that sort of thing. What I’ve had explained has been by Alston, and Herron, and Steffens—”
“Whom you met in Jesse’s room, I believe!”
“Well, he could hardly refuse to introduce me to his friend when I walked in. As a matter of fact I’d have met Steffens anyway, because Alston’s friends talked a lot about his visit to Russia, and he was at the dinner where they decided to resign. So whatever I’ve done that was wrong, you must blame me and not Uncle Jesse. I don’t know whether he hasn’t any use for me, or whether he just pretends that he hasn’t, but anyhow that’s the way things have been between us.”
Said Robbie, coldly: “Nothing alters the fact that he came to this hotel and brought a swarm of hornets down on both of us. Look at my room!” Robbie pointed to his effects strewn here and there. “And my business papers taken by the police, and copies made, no doubt—and sold by some crook to my business rivals!” Robbie knew how such things were done, having done them.
“You are perfectly right,” said the painter. “It is my fault, and I am sorry as can be.”
“All that I want to know is that I don’t have to look forward to such things for the rest of my life. You are Beauty’s brother, and if you decide to behave yourself as a decent human being, I’m ready to treat you that way. But if you choose to identify yourself with the scum of the earth, with the most dangerous criminals alive—all right, that’s your privilege, but then I have to say: ‘Keep away from me and mine.’”
“You are within your rights.” Uncle Jesse spoke in the same cold tones as his not quite brother-in-law. “If you will arrange it with your son to keep away from me, you may be sure that I will never again invade his life, or yours.”
VI
That was a fair demand and a fair assent; if only those two could have let it rest there! But they were like two stags in the forest, which might turn away and walk off in opposite directions—but they don’t! Instead they stand and stare, paw the ground, and cannot get each other out of their minds.
The painter was moved to remark: “You may hang on to your dream of keeping modern thought from your son; but I assure you, Robbie, the forces against you are stronger than you realize.”
To which the man of business was moved to answer, with scorn: “Leave that to my son and me, if you please! When Lanny learns that ‘modern thought’ means class hate, greed, and murder, he may decide to remain an old-fashioned thinker like his father.”
“The fond father’s dream throughout the ages!” exclaimed the other, in a tone of pity, even more exasperating than one of ridicule. “Let my son be exactly like me in all things! Let him think exactly what I think—and so he will be perfect! But the world is changing, and not all the fathers leagued together can stop it, or keep the sons from knowing about it.”
“My son has his own mind,” said the father. “He will judge for himself.”
“You say that,” answered the revolutionist, “but you don’t feel nearly as secure as you pretend. Why else should you be so worried when someone presents a new idea to Lanny’s mind? Don’t you suppose he notices that? Don’t you suppose he asks himself what it means?”
That was touching Robbie Budd on the rawest spot in his soul. The idea that anybody could claim to know Lanny better than his father knew him! The idea that the youth might be hiding things, that doubts and differences might be lurking in his mind, that the replica of Robbie’s self might be turning traitor to him! In the father’s subconscious mind Lanny remained a child, a budding youth, something that had to be guarded and cherished; so the feelings that stirred the father’s soul were not so different from the jealous rage of the forest monarch over some sleek and slender doe.
“You are clever, Jesse,” said he; “but I think Lanny understands the malice in your heart.”
“I’m sorry I can’t call you clever,” retorted the other. “Your world is coming to an end. The thousands of your wage slaves have some other purpose than to build a throne for you to sit on.”
“Listen, Uncle Jesse,” interposed Lanny. “What’s the use of all this ranting? You know you can’t convince Robbie—”
But the stags brushed him aside; they weren’t interested in him any more, they were interested in their battle. “We’ll be ready for them any time they choose to come,” declared Robbie. “We make machine guns!”
“You’ll shoot them yourself?”
“You bet your life!”
“No!” said the painter with a smile. “You’ll hire other men, as you always do. And if they turn the guns against you, what then?”
“I’ll be on the watch for them! One of them was fool enough to forewarn me!”
“History has forewarned you, Robbie Budd, but you won’t learn. The French Revolution told you that the days of divine right were over; but you’ve built a new system exactly like the old one in its practical results—blind squandering at the top, starvation and despair at the bottom, an insanity of greed ending in mass slaughter. Now you see the Russian revolt, but you scorn to learn from it!”
“We’ve learned to shut the sons-of-bitches up in their rat-holes, and let them freeze and starve, or die of typhus and eat their own corpses.”
“Please, Robbie!” interposed the son. “You’re getting yourself all worked up—”
Said the painter: “Typhus has a way of spreading beyond national boundaries; and so have ideas.”
“We can quarantine disease; and I promise you, we’re going to put the right man in the White House, and step on your Red ideas and smash the guts out of them.”
“Listen, Robbie, do be sensible! You’re wasting an awful lot of energy.”
“Stay in France, Jesse Blackless, and spit your poison all over the landscape; but don’t try it in America—not in Newcastle, I warn you!”
“I’m not needed there, Robbie. You’re making your own crop of revolutionists. Class arrogance carries its own seeds of destruction.”
“Listen, Uncle Jesse, what do you expect to accomplish by this? You know you can’t convert my father. Do you just want to hurt each other?”
Yes, that was it. The two stags had their horns locked, and each wanted to butt the other, drive him back, beat him to the earth, mash him into it; each would rather die than give an inch. It was an old, old grudge; they had fought like this when they had first met, more than twenty years ago. Lanny hadn’t been there, Lanny hadn’t been anywhere then, but his mother had told him about it. Now it had got started again; the two stags couldn’t get their horns apart, and it might mean the death of one or both!
“You and your gutter-rats imagining you can run industry!” snarled Robbie.
“If you’re so sure we can’t, why are you afraid to see us try? Why don’t you call off your mercenaries that are fighting us on twenty-six fronts?”
“Why don’t you call off your hellions that are spreading treason and hate in every nation?”
“Listen, Uncle Jesse! You promised Robbie you’d let me alone, but you’re not doing it.”
“They don’t let anybody alone,” sneered the father. “They don’t keep any promises. We’re the bourgeoisie, and we have no rights! We’re parasites, and all we’re fit for is to be ‘liquidated’!”
“If you put yourself in front of a railroad train, it’s suicide, not murder,” said the painter, with his twisted smile. He was keeping his temper, which only made Robbie madder.
Said he, addressing his son: “Our business is to clear the track and let a bunch of gangsters drive the train into a ditch. History won’t be able to count the number they have slaughtered.”
“Oh, my God!” cried Uncle Jesse—he too addressing the youth. “H
e talks about slaughter—and he’s just finished killing ten million men, with weapons he made for the purpose! God Almighty couldn’t count the number he has wounded, and those who’ve died of disease and starvation. Yet he worries about a few counter-revolutionists shot by the Bolsheviks!”
VII
Lanny saw that he hadn’t accomplished anything, so he sat for a while, listening to all the things his father didn’t want him to hear. This raging argument became to him a symbol of the world in which he would have to live the rest of his life. His uncle was the uplifted fist of the workers, clenched in deadly menace. As for Robbie, he had proclaimed himself the man behind the machine gun; the man who made it, and was ready to use it, personally, if need be, to mow down the clenched uplifted fists! As for Lanny, he didn’t have to be any symbol, he was what he was: the man who loved art and beauty, reason and fair play, and pleaded for these things and got brushed aside. It wasn’t his world! It had no use for him! When the fighting started, he’d be caught between the lines and mowed down.
“If you kill somebody,” Uncle Jesse announced to the father, “that’s law and order. But if a revolutionist kills one of your gangsters, that’s murder, that’s a crime wave. You own the world, you make the laws and enforce them. But we tell you we’re tired of working for your profit, and that never again can you lead us out to die for your greed.”
“You’re raving!” said Robbie Budd. “In a few months your Russia will be smashed flat, and you’ll never get another chance. You’ve shown us your hand, and we’ve got you on a list.”
“A hanging list?” inquired the painter, with a wink at the son.
“Hanging’s not quick enough. You’ll see how our Budd machine guns work!”
Lanny had never seen his father in such a rage. He was on his feet, and kept turning away and then back again. He had had several drinks, and that made it worse; his face was purple and his hands clenched. A little more and it might turn into a physical fight. Seeing him getting started on another tirade, Lanny grabbed his uncle by the arm and pulled him from his seat. “Please go, Uncle Jesse!” he exclaimed. “You said you would let me alone. Now do it!” He kept on, first pulling, then pushing. The uncle’s hat had been hung on a chair, and Lanny took it and pressed it into his hand. “Please don’t argue any more—just go!”
World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 77