World's End

by Upton Sinclair

  The salesman of electrical apparatus in Rotterdam forwarded another of Lanny’s letters to Kurt; a very careful one, in which Lanny told all about his studies, but didn’t mention the U.S.A. He just said: “I have gone to visit my father’s home. Write me there.” Kurt knew about Newcastle; and in due course a letter came, by way of Switzerland, as usual. Kurt said that he was well, and had gone back to his duties, and was glad to hear that his friend was keeping his mind on matters of permanent interest and benefit. That was all; but Lanny could read between those lines, and understand that even though Kurt was now fighting America, he didn’t want Lanny to be fighting Germany!

  Midsummer; and Nina wrote again. Rick had had a week’s leave, and had come home; she had been to The Reaches with him—and, oh, so happy they had been! So happy they might be all their lives, if only this cruel slaughter would end! The baronet and his wife had been kind to her, and Rick was a darling—they had boated and bathed and played croquet. And the heavenly nights, with music on the river, and starlight trembling on the water, and love in their hearts! It all came over Lanny in a wave of melancholy longing; he too had had love in his heart, and had it still—but the granddaughter of Lord Dewthorpe was the poorest of correspondents, and her letters were skimpy, matter of fact, and wholly lacking in charm. Taking care of wounded men all day left one tired and unromantic, it appeared. Old England had had too much of war, and now it was New England’s turn.

  VI

  Perhaps the letter from Nina, and Lanny’s continual thinking about it, may have had something to do with the strange experience which befell him a few nights later. When Lanny went to bed he was tired in both mind and body, and usually fell asleep at once, and rarely wakened until the maid tapped on his door. But now something roused him; at least, he insisted that he was awake, fully awake, and no amount of questioning by others could shake his certainty. He lay there, and it seemed that the first faint gray of dawn was stealing into the room—just enough light so that you could know it was a room, and that there were objects in it. The mocking-bird hadn’t noticed the light, and the crickets had gone to sleep, and the stillness caught Lanny’s attention; it seemed abnormal.

  Then a weird feeling began to steal over him. Something was happening, he didn’t know what it was, but fear of it began to stir in his soul, and his skin began to creep and draw tight, so it seemed. Lanny stared into the darkness, and it appeared to be taking form, and he began to wonder whether the light was daylight or something else; it seemed to be shaping itself into a mass at the foot of his bed, and the mass began to move, and suddenly Lanny realized it was Rick. A pale gray figure, just luminous enough so that it could be clearly seen; Rick in his flier’s uniform, all stained with mud. On his face was a grave, rather mournful expression, and across his forehead a large red gash.

  It came to Lanny in a sort of inner flash: Rick is dead! He raised his head a little and stared at the figure, and a cold chill went over him, and his teeth began to chatter, and his eyes popped wide, trying to see better. “Rick!” he whispered, half under his breath; but maybe that was a mistake, for right away the figure began to fade. Lanny cried again, half in fright and half in longing: “Rick! Speak to me!”

  But the pale form faded away—or rather it seemed to spread itself over the room, and when it did, Lanny could see that it was the beginning of dawn and that objects were slowly looming in the room. All at once the mocking-bird tuned up and the other little birds outside began to say: “Cheep, cheep,” and “Twitter, twitter.” Lanny lay sick with horror, saying to himself soundlessly: “Rick is dead! Rick is dead!”

  He did not go to sleep again. He lay till the sun was nearly up, and then put on his clothes and went into the garden and walked up and down, trying to get himself together before he had to meet the rest of the family. He tried to argue with himself; but there was no making headway against that inner voice. It was the first great loss of his life. He had to wrestle it out with himself—and he knew that he hated this war, and all wars, now and forever; just as Beauty had done in the beginning, and as Robbie still did in the depths of his heart, though he had stopped saying it.

  VII

  Impossible that Robbie and Esther should not notice his distraught condition. He said that he had slept badly—he didn’t want to discuss the matter before the children. But after they had gone to their play he told his father and stepmother. As he had expected, Esther hated the idea. Hers was a practical mind and her beliefs in supernormal phenomena were limited to those which had been ratified and approved by biblical exegesis. The visit of Emmaus was all right, because it was in the Bible; but for there to be an apparition in the year 1917—and in her home!—that could be nothing but superstition. Only Negroes, and maybe Catholics, let themselves be troubled by such notions. “You just had a dream, Lanny!” insisted his father’s wife.

  “I was exactly as wide awake as I am right now,” he answered. “I feel sure something dreadful has happened to Rick.”

  He wanted to cable Nina; and Robbie said he would send it—his name being known would speed matters with the censors. He promised to attend to it the moment he reached the office, and to prepay a reply, because Nina didn’t have much money. “What news about Rick?” he sent; and in course of the afternoon his secretary called the house and read Lanny the reply: “Rick reported well last week’s letter.”

  Of course, Lanny said, that didn’t tell him anything. He insisted upon a second message being sent, with reply prepaid: “Advise immediately if trouble.” For two days Lanny waited, doing his utmost to keep his mind upon his studies, so as not to forfeit the respect of his stepmother and her friends. Then came another cablegram from Nina: “Rick badly hurt great pain may not live prayers.”

  Somehow it was that last word which broke Lanny down and made him cry like a baby. He was quite sure that Nina was not a religious person; she was looking forward to being a scientist—but now the same thing had happened to her that had happened to Beauty in those dreadful hours when Marcel’s life hung upon a thread. She was praying; she was even moved to cable for Lanny’s help!

  Could Lanny pray? He wasn’t sure. He had listened to the Reverend Mr. Saddleback praying and had been inclined to take the procedure with a trace of humor. But now he would be glad to have anybody’s help to keep Rick alive.

  Esther, of course, was much affected by what had happened; in this crisis their two so different natures came to a temporary understanding. Her pride was humbled, and she had to admit that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in her philosophy. If something in Rick’s soul had been able to travel from France to Connecticut, why might not something from Lanny’s go back to France? As it happened, prayers for the sick and afflicted were in accord with the doctrines of Esther’s church; so why should not the congregation be requested to pray for a wounded English officer—especially since their own boys were not yet being killed?

  “Spare no expense in helping Rick,” cabled the practical Robbie. “Keep me advised by wire.” He arranged for Nina to have unlimited credit for cabling—you can do that kind of thing when you are one of the princes of industry. Nina replied that her husband was in a base hospital abroad, and she could not get to him; they just had to wait—and pray.

  It was some time before she herself knew the story and could write it to Lanny. The English troops had been making an attack, and Rick had been assigned to the defense of another plane which was doing “contact flying”—that is, observing the advance of the troops, and sending information by wireless so that the artillery barrage could keep just in front of them. Rick had been attacked by three German planes and had been shot through the knee; he was forced to make a landing behind the enemy’s lines, and his plane overturned—that was when he had got the gashed forehead. The attack being under way, the Germans had not found him; he had dragged himself into a shell hole and hidden, and for two days and nights had lain, conscious only part of the time, hoping that the British might advance and find
him. This had happened—but meantime his wound had become infected, and he was suffering dreadfully; it was a question whether his leg could be saved, or whether he could survive having it amputated.

  VIII

  Men were being killed by thousands every day; but still the work of the world had to go on. Lanny had to wipe the tears from his eyes, shut from his mind the thought of his friend’s suffering, and acquire information about the conquests of King Alexander the Great. Hosts of men had been mutilated in those wars; not with machine-gun bullets, but with arrows and spears, just as painful, and as liable to cause infection. All history was one river of blood—and who could live if he spent his time weeping upon its banks?

  Lanny had managed to become interested in his job. He was young, and nothing could be entirely a bore. Mr. Harper came every day and heard him recite, and was pleased with his progress, and told Esther, so the youth enjoyed a glow of satisfaction. He was making good; he was taking the curse off himself—and he was getting an education. “Drink deep,” a poet had sung of the Pierian spring. Here in America it had been dammed and piped, and the water was metered and duly paid for at a fixed price; you turned a spigot, and drew so many quarts at a time, and when you had drunk it five days a week for ten weeks, that was called a “unit.” Ancient history, one unit; medieval history, one unit; algebra one, geometry one; elementary French two, advanced French three, and so on.

  Lanny read the announcement, made by the Yale authorities, that the university would now require military training. The slogan “For God, for Country, and for Yale” would become “Yale for God and Country.” But Robbie said not to worry, this war wasn’t going to last forever, and after Yale had won it, everything could go on as before. Mr. Harper insisted that a unit would always be a unit; it was the indestructible particle of the educational world. So Lanny memorized the dates of Charles Martel the Hammer, and of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire.

  No more apparitions came to him. He learned by the more expensive medium of the cable that Rick was still alive; then that he had been brought to England; then that he was having an operation, and then a second—he was going to be one of those cases which constitute a sort of endowment for surgeons and hospitals. Lanny, of course, had written Nina all about his vision; Rick admitted that when he had crashed he had thought about Lanny—because Lanny was so afraid of crashes, and had told him about Marcel’s.

  Later on Nina wrote that Rick was back at his father’s home, and she was helping to take care of him. “Write him affectionate things and cheer him up,” she said. The knee is a difficult place to heal, and if Rick was ever to walk again, it would be with a steel brace on his leg. Poor, proud, defiant, impatient aesthete, he was going to be a pitiful, nerve-shaken cripple; his wife would be one of those devoted souls—millions of them all over Europe—who were glad to get even part of a husband back again, and have that much safe from the slaughterman’s ax.

  IX

  Every time Lanny went swimming or boating, he saw great towering iron chimneys, pouring out billowing clouds of smoke. At night, if he sat on the front porch, he saw down the vista of the elm trees a dull red glare in the sky. That was Budd’s; that was the plant, the source of all Lanny’s good things, and one of the places where the war was being won. From earliest childhood he had listened to discourses about its functions and ownership—those precious pieces of paper called stock certificates, which guaranteed safety and comfort to whoever held them, and to his children and his children’s children. Robbie, man of business and of money, had been wont to preach little sermons, playful yet serious; he would see a ragged old beggar slouching along in rain or snow, and would say: “There, but for the plant, go you!”

  Of course Lanny wanted to see it, and Robbie promised to arrange it. As soon as they heard the proposal, Junior and Percy put in their clamors; they had seen it before, but no one could see it enough. And then Bess, loudest of all—why did she have to be left out of everything? Bess had heard about votes for women, and declared that she believed in them from now on. Hadn’t she just had her tenth birthday party, and got better marks than either of her brothers in school? The father said, all right, he would have one of his secretaries take Saturday morning off and escort the four of them.

  They drove through the great steel gates of the plant, guarded now by armed men, for there had been explosions in American munitions plants, and German agents were known to be active. They were led from one huge building to another, and saw white-hot steel being poured from giant ladles amid blinding showers of sparks; they saw golden ingots being rolled into sheets, or cut by screaming saws, or pounded and squeezed in huge presses. The clatter and clamor was deafening to a stranger. Their escort said that munitions were noisy at two periods of their career, the beginning and the end; he said that men got used to both, sooner or later. The foreman on the floor could tell in a moment if anything went wrong, because one of the familiar sounds was missing or out of tune.

  They were taken through rooms as big as railroad sheds, in which traveling cranes overhead brought heavy parts, and electric motor trucks brought other parts, and men working in long lines assembled heavy machine guns, which were on wheels. A gallery ran about the rooms, from which you could look down upon the crowded floor, and it seemed a place of hopeless confusion; but the secretary assured them that every motion made by one of those human ants had been studied for weeks in a laboratory, and that the movements of each piece of machinery were timed to the second.

  They walked through long rooms like corridors, in which such things as time fuses for anti-aircraft shells were made. Women and girls sat at a table which the children thought must surely be the longest in the world; on top of it was an endless belt, gliding silently. The object being manufactured started from nothing, and each worker added a bit, or maybe just turned a screw, until, at the far end, the completed products were slid onto trays, and taken by truck to a part of the plant where shrapnel shells were loaded. That place was remote, and visitors were not permitted there—not even members of the family.

  Lanny was interested in time fuses, but still more interested in women and girls. He saw that they all wore uniforms, and that the motions of their hands were swift and unvarying; most of them never took their eyes from the job, and if they did, it was only for the fraction of a second—even when there was a good-looking young man in the line of vision. They were riveted to this task for seven hours and forty minutes every day, with twenty minutes for lunch, and Lanny wondered what it did to their minds and bodies. The secretary assured him that all this had been studied by experts, and the speed of the belt precisely adjusted so that no one would become weary. It was a pleasant thing to hear, but Lanny would have been interested to ask the girls.

  Of course he might have gone out at night, in the parts of the town where the picture theaters and the bright lights were, and it would have been easy to “pick up” one of them and get her to talking. But Lanny wasn’t roaming the streets at night; he was studying and earning credits with his family, as well as with St. Thomas’s prep school. All he would know about the Budd plant was what a friendly but discreet young secretary saw fit to tell him. This was wartime, and every department was working in three eight-hour shifts. Those’ who couldn’t stand the pace went elsewhere.

  X

  Lanny took his ideas and impressions home and thought them over in his leisure hours. He was proud of that large institution which his forefathers had built; he understood Robbie’s dream, that some day his oldest son might become the master of it. Lanny put the question to himself: “Do I want to do that?” The time to decide was now; for what was the sense of shutting himself up in a room and learning the dates of old wars if his business was going to be with new ones?

  It seemed to him that, if he meant to become a maker of munitions, he ought to go into the plant and begin learning from his father and his overburdened grandfather all about steel and aluminum and the new alloys which were being created in the laboratories; abo
ut slow-burning and quick-burning powders, and the ways of grinding which made the subtle differences; the various raw materials, their prices and sources of supply; money, and how it was handled and kept; and, above all, men, how to judge them, how to get out of them the best work they were capable of performing. This was the education which a captain of industry had to acquire. It was grim, tough work, and it did something to those who undertook it.

  First of all Lanny ought to make up his mind on the subject of war. Did he agree with his father that men would go on fighting forever and ever, because that was their nature and nothing could change it? Did he agree with his grandfather that God had ordained every war, and that what happened on this earth was of little importance compared with eternity? Was he going to adopt either of those beliefs—or just drift along, believing one thing when his father talked to him, and another when he saw Rick’s image at the foot of the bed?

  One thing seemed plain: if you were going to be happy in any job, you had to believe in that job. Robbie said it was enough to know that the money was coming in; but Lanny was watching his father more closely, and becoming sure that he was far from happy. Robbie was by nature sociable, and liked to say what he thought; but now he kept silence. His heart was unwarmed by all this blaze of patriotic excitement which possessed the country, the newspapers full of propaganda, the streets blaring music and the oratory of “four-minute men” and salesmen of “liberty bonds.” The airplanes were going to be driven by “liberty motors,” and you ate “liberty steak” and “liberty cabbage” instead of hamburgers and sauerkraut. Robbie hated such nonsense; he hated still more to see the country and its resources being used for what he said were the purposes of British imperialism.