“If you don’t mention me, there’s no way it can get out. Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of my friend.”
Again a pause; and the bald-headed painter smiled one of his crooked smiles. “Perhaps you read in the papers how Lenin was in Switzerland when the Russian Revolution broke out, and he wanted very much to get into Russia. The German government wanted him there and sent him through in a sealed train. They had their reasons for sending him and he had his reasons for going. His reasons won out.”
Lanny got the point and smiled in his turn. The uncle thought for a while and then told him how, many years ago, there had been a big fuss in America over the fact that multimillionaires who had corrupted legislatures and courts were trying to win public favor by giving sums of money to colleges. It was called “tainted money,” and there was a clamor that colleges should refuse such donations. One college professor, more robust than the rest of the tribe, had got up in a meeting and cried: “Bring on your tainted money!” The painter laughed and said: “That’s me!”
30
Out of the Depths
I
On the fourteenth of February the Supreme Council ratified the Covenant of the League of Nations at a stately ceremony; and immediately thereafter President Wilson took the night train for Brest, to return to Washington for the closing sessions of Congress. He and his purple-clad lady walked on red plush carpets spread all the way to the train, between rows of potted palms Set out by a polite government. All official France attended to see him off; and thereafter it was as in a barn when the cat has departed and the mice come out to devour the stores of grain. The diplomats of the great states began helping themselves to German and Russian territory, and the reactionary newspapers of Paris declared with one voice that the foolish and utopian League was already dead and that the problems of Europe were going to be settled on a “realistic” basis.
Professor Alston said that this was the voice of Clemenceau, who controlled a dozen newspapers of the capital and could change their policies by crooking his finger. Alston and his friends were greatly depressed. What was the use of meeting all day and most of the night, wrestling over questions of fair play and “self-determination,” when it was evident that those who held the reins of power would not pay the least attention to anything you said? The French delegates now wore a cynical smile as they argued before the commissions; they had their assurance that their armies were going to hold the Rhineland and the Sarre, and that a series of buffer states were to be set up between Germany and Russia, all owing their existence to France, all financed with the savings of the French peasants, and munitioned by Zaharoff, alias Schneider-Creusot. France and Britain were going to divide Persia and Mesopotamia and Syria and make a deal for the oil and the laying of pipelines. Italy was to take the Adriatic, Japan was to take Shantung—all such matters were being settled among sensible men.
Lanny continued to attend sessions and listen to tedious discussions of imaginary boundary lines. His chief was called in to advise the American delegates on the commission which was trying to pacify the Italians and the Yugoslavs, who for a month or two had been taking pot-shots at one another. The revolting Yugoslav sailors had seized the Austrian war vessels, and the Italians wanted them, but the Yugoslav sailors wanted the Americans to take charge of them. The Italians were trying to seize Fiume, a city which hadn’t been granted to them even in the secret treaty. They were like the man who said he wasn’t greedy for land, he just wanted the land adjoining his own. They made a fuss, they interrupted proceedings, they blocked decisions on other questions—and how execrable was their accent when they tried to speak French!
A pathetic victim of this system of muddle was George D. Herron. He had been formally appointed a member of a delegation to travel to Prinkipo; but now President Wilson had set out for America without even taking the trouble to let him know that the project was dropped. The poor man, whose arthritis made moving about an ordeal, was left to spend his money and time holding preliminary consultations with various Russian groups in Paris; he would convince them one day and the French would unconvince them the next. The first hint he got that he had been laid on the shelf was when his friend Alston brought him a report that the President had appointed a mission which was already on its way to Moscow, to find out the situation and report.
Watching Herron and listening to him, Lanny learned how dangerous it was to have anything to do with unpopular ideas. The prophet was called a Red, when in truth he looked upon Bolshevism as his Hebrew predecessors looked upon Baal and Moloch. He had heard about Jesse Blackless and was worried for fear Lanny might be lured by the false faith of his uncle. He told the youth, in his biblical language, that dictatorship was a degradation of the soul of man, and that anyone who took that road would find himself in the valley of the shadow of death. Either Socialism must be the free, democratic choice of the people, or it would be something worse than the rule of Mammon which it sought to replace. Lanny promised very gravely that he would remember this lesson. Privately, he didn’t think he was going to need it.
II
The conspirator for charity expected every day to have a note from Kurt, but none came. He spent some time trying to figure out what Kurt would be doing, and wondering if it would be possible for a German spy in Paris to be apprehended and shot without anything getting into the papers. There were great numbers of persons of German descent living in Switzerland, in Holland and the Scandinavian countries, so it was possible for Germans to pass as citizens of these countries. All through the war German spies had been doing this, and there was no reason to imagine that they had all gone home when the armistice was signed. Kurt must be a member of such a group; and being young, he would have a superior who told him what to do.
When the weather was decent and Lanny had time, he liked to walk, to get the air of the overheated conference rooms out of his lungs. One of his walks took him to Montmartre, and he climbed the musty stairs of the old tenement, and found his uncle covered up on his cot to keep warm, absorbed in the reading of a workers’ newspaper. The first thing the uncle said was: “Well, by God, from now on I believe in Santa Claus!”
It really had happened: the knock on his door, the exchange of passwords, the package placed in his hands! He chuckled as if it was the funniest thing that had occurred to a Red agitator since the birth of Karl Marx. “Every sou has been honestly spent, so tell your friend to come again—the sooner the better!
“Did you notice the affiches?” continued the painter; and Lanny said he hadn’t seen any referring to the lifting of the blockade against Germany, but on the kiosks he had noticed in big red letters a call for a réunion that evening, to demand government action against the rise in food prices. “That is ours,” said the uncle. “We couldn’t post anything on behalf of Germany—the flics would be down on us before we got started. But they can’t prevent our defending the rights of French workers and returned soldiers.”
“As a matter of fact, Uncle Jesse,” asked the youth, “if they allow food to be exported into Germany, won’t that make it scarcer in France?”
“The Germans don’t want any food from France,” replied the other. “They can buy it from America. What we want the French government to do is to get after the middlemen and speculators who are holding food in warehouses and letting it spoil because they can make more when prices are high.”
Jesse Blackless launched upon an exposition of his political views. He had been a “syndicalist,” which meant that he supported the left-wing labor unions, whose aim was to take over industry for the workers. But recent events in Russia had convinced him that the Bolshevik program represented the way to victory, even though it might mean the surrender of some liberties for a time. “You have to have discipline if you expect to win any sort of war,” said the rebel painter. It was practically the opposite of what Herron had said.
Lanny really wanted to oblige his father; but how could he hold his present job without giving thought to the ideas of these B
olsheviks? In the Crillon people talked about them all the time. You couldn’t discuss the problems of any state or province of Central Europe without their being brought up. “If you don’t lend us money, if you don’t give us food, our people will go over to the Bolsheviks.… If you don’t give us guns, how can we put down the Bolsheviks? … If you take our territory away from us, we will throw ourselves into the arms of the Bolsheviks.” Such were the utterances in every conference room. Often it was a form of blackmail, and the French would resent it with fury. The ruling classes of Germany, Austria, and Hungary were playing up this fear in order to get out of paying for the ruin they had wrought in Europe. “All right!” the French would answer. “Go to Moscow or go to hell, it makes no difference to us.”
But this was a bluff. As soon as they had said it, the French would look at one another in fear. What if the Red wave were to spread in Poland, as it had spread in Hungary and Bavaria? If the Reds got the upper hand in Berlin, with whom would the Allies sign a treaty of peace? The Americans would ask this, and French and British diplomats didn’t know what to answer, and took out their irritation on the persons who asked the questions. They must be Reds, too!
III
“Would you like to come to the réunion tonight?” asked Uncle Jesse; and Lanny said he would if his duties left him a chance. “I won’t offer to take you,” said the other. “It’ll be better for the Crillon if you’re not seen with me.”
It happened that the staff at the Majestic was giving a dance that evening, and Lanny had a date with a fair-haired English secretary who reminded him of Rosemary. He thought she might find it romantic to take in a Red meeting, and do the dancing later. Lanny could call it a matter of duty, for he had told his chief about it and Alston had said: “Let me have a report on it.”
The salle was in a teeming working-class quarter, and apparently not large enough for the thousand or two who wanted to get in. Lanny and his young lady were among the fortunate ones, because they were recognized as foreigners, and people made way for them. The place was hazy with tobacco smoke, and up on the platform, among a dozen other men and women, Lanny saw his uncle. He saw no one else whom he knew, for these were not the sort of persons one met at Mrs. Emily’s teas. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals, art students, and others whom you could recognize by their garb, but for the most part those present were workers and returned soldiers, their faces haggard from long years of strain.
Lanny would be in a position to report to his chief that the workers of Paris were bitterly discontented with their lot. Hardly had the speakers got started before the shouting began, and he was a poor speaker indeed who could not cause some auditor to rise and shake his clenched right hand in the air and shout “à bas” somebody or something. There were no poor speakers, by that standard; they all knew their audience and how to work it into a fury, how to bring first murmurs and then hoots and jeers against bureaucrats and bemedaled militarists who feasted and danced while food was rotting in the warehouses and the poor in their dens were perishing of slow starvation.
Especial object of their hatred appeared to be Georges Clemenceau. Traitor, rat, Judas, were the mildest names they called him; for the “tiger of France” had been in his youth a communard, one of themselves, and had served a term in prison for his revolutionary activities. Now, like the other politicians, he had sold out to the capitalists, now he was a gang leader for the rich. Lanny was interested to discover that these workers knew most of the facts about Clemenceau which his father had been telling him. One of the speakers mentioned Zaharoff—and there was booing that might have brought a shudder to the Grand Officer. They knew about Clemenceau’s control of the press; when the speaker said that journalists were bought and sold in Paris like rotten fish the crowd showed neither surprise nor displeasure.
Lanny was surprised to discover that his uncle was an effective orator. The sardonic, crooked smile became a furious sneer, his irony a corroding acid that destroyed whatever it touched. The painter was there to see to it that the real theme of the evening was adequately covered; he pointed out that the workers of France were not the only ones who were being starved, the same fate was being deliberately dealt to the workers of Germany, Austria, Hungary. All the workers of Europe were learning that their fate was the same and their cause the same; all were resolving that never again would they fight one another, but turn their guns against the capitalist class, the author of their sufferings, the agent of their suppression, the one real enemy of the people throughout the world. The English girl, of course, didn’t know he was Lanny’s uncle, and after she had listened to his tirade for a while, she exclaimed: “Oh, what a vicious person!”
IV
Lanny told himself that he was observing this réunion professionally; he was going to make a report. Every day for seven weeks and more he had been translating reports, revising reports, filing reports. And now he was going to report on the sentiments of the working classes of Paris. Should he say that they no longer had any feelings of enmity against the sales boches, but that all their fury was turned against Clemenceau and his government? Hardly that—for it was obvious that this was a special group, who had come to listen to the sort of speeches they enjoyed. And even they were not unanimous. Every now and then there were cries of dissent; a man would leap up and shout contradictions and others would howl him down. More than once there was uproar and confusion, men seizing the impromptu orator and pulling him into his seat; if he resisted, there would be fist-fighting, and perhaps chairs wielded as a convenient weapon. It appeared that much of the opposition was organized; there were groups of protestants looking for trouble. They were the Camelots du Roi, the royalists of France; their inspirer a raging journalist named Maurras, who in the paper which he edited did not hesitate to call for riots and murders.
Lanny, as he listened, kept thinking of the French revolution. Jean Marat, “friend of the people,” living in the sewers of Paris to escape his enemies, had come forth to deliver just such speeches, denouncing the aristocrats and demanding their blood. Here too one saw the tricoteuses, grandmotherly-looking old women who sat knitting, and at the same time listening attentively; every once in a while one of them would open her mouth and scream: “Mort aux traîtres!”—and without missing a single stitch!
Lanny watched the faces. Sinister and dark they seemed, but full of pain, so that he was divided between fear and pity. He knew there were whole districts of Paris which were vast “cabbage patches,” in which the poor were housed in dingy, rotting buildings centuries old. They had suffered privations so that Zaharoff and his friends might have their war to the finish; and now, with production almost stopped and trade disorganized while diplomats and statesmen wrangled—could it be expected that they would not complain? Among those packed against the walls of the salle was a youth whose violent gestures caught Lanny’s attention. You could know that he was a workingman by the fact that he wore a corduroy suit and a cotton shirt with no collar or tie. His face was emaciated, unshaven, and unkempt, but there was a light in his eyes as of one seeing visions. He was so wrought up by the oratory that his lips kept moving, as if he were repeating the phrases he heard; his hands were clenched, and when at the end of a climax he shouted approval, he shook not one but both fists in the air.
Lanny tried to imagine what life must seem to a youth like that. He was about Lanny’s age, but how different in his fate! He wouldn’t know much about the forces which moved the world; he would know only suffering, and the fact that it was caused by those in authority, the rulers and the rich. Maybe that wasn’t the truth, but he would think it was, and Lanny would have a hard time contradicting him. The well-educated young Englishwoman, whose father was a stockbroker at home, had called Jesse Blackless a “vicious person”; and maybe he was that, but all the same, Lanny knew that what his uncle was saying was true. When he raged at the Clemenceau government because it had stopped in Berne a shipment of Red Cross medical supplies intended for the ailing children in Austria,
Lanny knew it had happened, and that Mr. Herbert Hoover, most conservative of businessmen, was uttering in the Hotel Crillon censure fully as severe—and far more profane.
When the meeting was over, Lanny saw the young workingman elbowing his way to the front. He went onto the stage and grabbed Jesse Blackless by the hands and shook them. The painter patted him on the back, and Lanny wondered, was this unkempt youth a friend of his uncle’s, a member of his group, or just a convert, or a prospect? Lanny continued to reflect upon it, only half hearing the shocked comments of Penelope Selden, his lady friend.
They got into a taxi to drive to the Majestic, and on the way she forgot politics and put her hand in his. They danced together in the onyx-lined ballroom; a gay and festive scene, with half the men and many of the women wearing uniforms. They too had suffered, and been under strain; they too needed relaxation from heavy duties, and it wasn’t fair to blame them for dancing. But Lanny was haunted by the faces of the angry workers; he was haunted by the millions of children who were growing up stunted and deformed, because of things which these dancing ladies and gentlemen had done and were still doing.
The young English girl, with soft brown hair and merry eyes and disposition, was pleasant to hold in your arms. Lanny held her for an hour, dancing with no one else; she made plain that she liked him, and he had got the impression that she would be his for the asking. So many of the women were in a reckless mood, in these days of deliverance from anxieties too greatly prolonged. Lanny couldn’t very well say to her: “I’ve had an unhappy love affair, and I’ve sworn off the sex business for a while.” What he said was: “Don’t you think maybe your chief could do something with Lloyd George, if he told him about this meeting, and what a fury the people are in? Really, you know, it’s a very bad state of affairs!”
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