IV
Jesse Blackless went on in this strain until he saw that he was hurting his sister without helping his cause. Then he remembered that he had come to advise her on the subject of the exhibition of her late husband’s paintings. He calmed down, and said that he had been thinking the matter over, and it would be better to wait until peace had been signed, when the newspapers would have more space to devote to painting. June would be a good month; the elderly vultures could hardly take that long to pick the bones of the German carcass. When Beauty answered that she couldn’t stay away from Baby Marceline, Jesse advised her to go home and come back. When she said she wanted to be with Lanny, her brother said that her problems were too complicated for any man to solve.
He arose to take his departure, signing to Lanny to follow him. In the passage he said: “My comrades have got the habit of coming to me for funds, and I don’t know what to tell them. Is your friend coming again?” What a sensation Lanny could have made if he had said that the friend had been in the adjoining room!
Having seen his uncle out of the building, Lanny went back and found Kurt talking to his mother. Kurt had heard the conversation, and made up his mind that he was no longer going to impose upon Beauty’s too great kindness. “You try to hide your fears,” he said; “but I know what a scandal it would make if the police were to arrest me here. I’m ashamed of myself for having stayed so long.”
“You may be going to your death,” protested Beauty.
“The worst of the storm has blown over. And anyhow it’s wartime, and I’m a soldier.”
There was another reason, which Lanny could guess. Kurt had written a letter to Switzerland and Lanny had mailed it for him. Now it was time for a reply to be at poste restante, and there was no keeping Kurt from going for it. “The letter will tell me a new place to report,” said he, “and no one else must take the risk of getting it.”
He thanked his two friends, and it was the old Kurt speaking, the man of conscience and exalted feelings. “I told you, Lanny, that life is a dedication; but neither of us knew how soon we’d have to prove it.”
There were tears in Beauty’s eyes. The poor soul was sending another man away to death! She was living again the partings with Marcel; and the fact that Kurt was fighting on the other side made no difference whatever. “Oh, God!” she exclaimed. “Will there never come a time on this earth when men stop killing one another?”
She tried to keep Lanny in the apartment, and he knew what that meant. The police might be waiting in the lobby of the hotel, and would get both of them! Lanny said: “I won’t go very far; just escort him outside and make it respectable!”
What Lanny wanted was to deliver his uncle’s message to Kurt; also to follow him at a safe distance and make sure of what happened at the post office. He watched his friend receive a letter and put it into his pocket and walk away. Lanny went to a telephone and told his mother that all was well. Then he returned to his safe job of trying to stop the fourteen little wars and one big one.
V
The Supreme Council decided to go ahead and complete the treaty with Germany, and ordered all the various commissions to deliver their reports and recommendations within a few days. That meant rush times for geographers, and also for secretaries and translators. Professor Alston’s French was now equal to all demands, and Lanny’s geography had improved to such an extent that he could pretty nearly substitute for his chief. There was work enough for both, and they hurried from place to place with briefcases and portfolios. A fascinating game they were playing, or rather a whole series of games—like the chess exhibitions in which some expert keeps a dozen contests in his head at the same time. In this case the chessboards were provinces and the pawns were national minorities comprising millions of human beings. Some games you were winning and some you were losing, and each was a series of surprises. At lunchtime and at dinner you compared notes with your colleagues; a busy chatter was poured out with the coffee, and human hopes were burned up with the cigarettes.
On the whole it was exhilarating, and contributed to the sense of importance of gentlemen whose domains had hitherto been classrooms with a score or two of undergraduates. Now they were playing parts in the great world. Their names were known; visitors sought them out; newspaper reporters waylaid them in lobbies and begged them for news. What a delicious thrill it gave to the nineteen-year-old Lanny Budd to say: “Really, Mr. Thompson, I’m not supposed to say anything about that; but if you will be careful not to indicate the source of your authority, I don’t mind telling you that the French are setting their war damages at two hundred billion dollars, and of course we consider that preposterous. Colonel House has said that they play with billions the way children play with wooden blocks. There’s no sense in it, because the Germans can never pay such sums.”
When Lanny talked like this he wasn’t being presumptuous, as you might imagine; rather he was following a policy and a technique. Over a period of two months and a half the experts had observed that confidential information leaked quickly to the French press whenever it was something to French advantage; the same was the case with the British—and now the Americans also were learning to have “leaks.” Trusted newspapermen had found out where to come for tips, and would carefully keep secret the sources of their treasures.
Lanny didn’t even have to have explicit instructions. He would hear his chief say to some colleague: “It mightn’t be a bad thing if the American people were to know that one of the great powers is proposing to get rid of a large stock of rancid pork by selling it to the Germans and replacing it with fresh pork from America.” Going out for a walk Lanny would run into Mr. Thompson of the Associated Press, and they would stroll together, and next day a carefully guarded secret of state would be read at twenty million American breakfast tables. A howl of protest would echo back to Paris, and Lanny’s chief would remark to his colleague: “Well, that story got out, it seems! I don’t know how it happened, but I can’t say I’m sorry.”
VI
In such ways the youth was kept so busy day and night that he had little time to think about his German friend. Beauty called up to ask if he had any news, and Lanny understood that his tenderhearted mother had taken another human fate into her keeping and had a new set of fears to mar her enjoyment of fashionable life in La Ville Lumière. Lanny made note how little politics really meant to a woman. Beauty had been an ardent pacifist so long as she was hoping to keep Marcel away from the fighting; she had been a French patriot so long as that seemed the way to get the war over; now, tormented by the image of Lanny’s friend being stood against a wall and shot, she was for letting bygones be bygones and giving the German babies food.
The youth didn’t have time to call upon his uncle, but he got a little note saying: “Your friend called again. Thanks.” That seemed to indicate that Kurt had got in touch with his organization and was carrying on as usual.
At one of the luncheons in the Crillon, Lanny met Captain Stratton, and brought up the subject of the spread of discontent in Paris. The intelligence officer said it was a truly alarming situation: a succession of angry strikes, and protest meetings every night in the working-class districts; incendiary speeches being made, and the city plastered with affiches containing all the standard Bolshevik demands—immediate peace, the lifting of the blockade, food for the workers, and the suppression of speculators.
“Aren’t those all reasonable demands?” asked Alston; and so came another installment of the controversy among the staff. The young captain said the demands might be reasonable enough, taken by themselves, but they were mere camouflage for efforts to overthrow the French government and seize the factories and the banks.
“But why not grant the reasonable demands?” asked Lanny’s chief. “Wouldn’t that weaken the hands of the agitators and strip off their camouflage?”
“That’s outside my province,” replied the other. “My job is to find out who the agitators are and keep track of what they’re plotting.”
The stoutish and pugnacious Professor Davisson broke in. “My guess is you’ll find they’re operating with German gold.”
“That’s what we assume,” replied the other. “But it’s not easy to prove.”
Said Alston: “My opinion is, you’ll find that German gold in the eye of Maurras and his royalists. The French masses are suffering and they have every reason in the world to complain and to agitate.”
Lanny smiled to himself. His chief called himself a “liberal,” and Lanny had been trying to make up his mind just what that meant. He decided that a liberal was a high-minded gentleman who believed the world was made in his own image. But unfortunately only one small part of it was deserving of such trust. He had been looking for such a spot, and the only one he had found was the tiny country of Denmark, whose delegates had come to the conference determined not to take on any racial minorities. Others were trying hard to persuade them to accept a chunk of Germany down to the Kiel canal; but they would have no land of which the population was not preponderantly Danish—and they would insist upon a plebiscite before they took even that. If only the whole of Europe had been “liberal” according to that formula, how simple all the problems would have been!
VII
President Wilson returned to Paris in the middle of March, one month after his leaving. There were no tumultuous receptions this time; the various peoples of the world had learned that he wouldn’t give them what they wanted, and couldn’t if he would. He came a beaten man; for the expiring Congress had left unpassed three vital appropriation bills, in order to make certain that he would have to summon a special session of the new Congress. He arrived at a Peace Conference which had laid all his Fourteen Points on the shelf, and also its own resolution of seven weeks earlier, whereby the Covenant of the League of Nations was to become a part of the peace treaty.
Wilson set his long Presbyterian jaw and went into a three-hour conference with the two head malefactors, Clemenceau and Lloyd George. When he came out from it he gave out a statement to the effect that the Covenant was a vital part of the treaty and would remain in. Then what a steaming and stewing, a bubbling and boiling of diplomatic kettles! Pichon, French Foreign Minister, issued a declaration to the effect that the Covenant would not have any place in the treaty; and when the reporters asked him about President Wilson’s statement, he said he hadn’t heard of it. There was a great scandal, and Clemenceau was forced to “throw down” his foreign minister and stop the publication of his communiqué. Then Lord Robert Cecil gave out a statement supporting Wilson’s side, and the clamor of the Tories forced Lloyd George to throw him down. So it went, back and forth; those elderly gentlemen met and argued until they were sick of the sound of one another’s voices. The shrill clamor penetrated to the attachés outside, and caused them to look at one another with anxious faces, or perhaps with mischievous grins.
The “Big Four” were meeting by themselves now, resolved to push things through and get done. A more oddly assorted quartet of bedfellows had rarely been chosen by political fate. Woodrow Wilson was a stiff and grave person, of principles which he held as divinely ordained. He kept his sense of humor for his private life; in public it was his function to deliver eloquent discourses in favor of righteousness, and at this there was no one in the world to rival him. He brought his great talent to every session and exercised it upon Georges Clemenceau, who sat hunched in his chair with eyes closed, the picture of agonized boredom; every few minutes the Tiger would open his heavy-lidded eyes and reply with any one of half a dozen French words, the equivalent of four-letter English words which every guttersnipe knew, but which few had ever seen in print.
This form of political argument was something hitherto inconceivable to the Presbyterian professor. He had been brought up to the idea that scholar and gentleman formed an inseparable combination; but here was a scholar who was perfectly content to be a blackguard and a rascal. His political career had been that of a Tammany Hall boss—so Robbie Budd had told his son. As Lanny didn’t know much about New York City’s political history, the father explained that forceful men of the people went into politics, their hearts bleeding for the wrongs of the poor; so they collected votes and built up a political machine, which they used to blackmail their way to fortune.
The Tiger, now seventy-eight, had seen a great deal of the world, but here was a phenomenon the like of which he had never encountered: a politician who in the presence of other politicians pretended to mean what he said in his speeches! At first Clemenceau had found it absolutely infuriating; he had raged and stormed, and there was a dreadful story going the rounds that he had struck the President in the face and that Lloyd George had had to separate them. You met people who declared that they knew this story was true; but how did they know it? Others reported that as the battles of the Big Four went on, the Tiger began to take a humorous attitude; at the end he had actually grown fond of this odd phenomenon, as one might of some human freak, a man with two heads or four arms.
The mediator in the battle was Lloyd George, one of those super-politicians who could be on both sides of every question. Lloyd George had begun as “a little squirt of a Welsh lawyer,” friend of the people and a terrifying demagogue. When he got power he had kept it by the device of selling titles of nobility to beer barons, press lords, and South African diamond kings. In his recent “khaki election” he had become the slave of a Tory majority, and he swung back and forth between what they told him to do and what he thought would please the public. He was gay and personally charming, and possessed what was called a “mercurial temperament”—meaning that he didn’t mind saying the opposite of what he had said yesterday, if in the meantime he had found that he was in danger of losing votes. In this he was the twin brother of Orlando, the Italian Premier, a good-looking and amiable old gentleman whose one thought in all issues was to gain some advantage, however tiny, for his native land.
VIII
A terrifying world in which this duel of wills went on. The war upon the Soviets was continuing on a dozen fronts, but without notable success. A Red Hungary had been added to a Red Bavaria and an almost Red Berlin. The Poles were fighting the Ukrainians for the possession of Lemberg. The Italians were threatening to withdraw from the conference unless they were permitted to fight the Yugoslavs for the possession of Fiume. The Armenians were in Paris demanding freedom from the Turks, and the Turks were trying to settle the problem by killing the last Armenian before a decision could be reached. Not one, not a dozen, but a hundred problems like that, all being dinned into the ears of four bewildered and exhausted old men.
They wrangled over the question of Danzig and the proposed Polish Corridor to the sea. They decided it, and then, when the clamor rose louder, they undecided it and referred it back to the commission. So geographers and ethnographers and their assistants were summoned once more, and Lanny Budd lugged his portfolios into the high-ceilinged, overheated conference rooms at the Quai d’Orsay, and stood behind his chief for hours—there being not enough chairs for secretaries and translators. Lanny couldn’t help but feel grave, for there was a consensus among the American experts that here was where the next war would start.
The real purpose of that corridor had by now become clear to all; the French were determined to put a barrier between German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials, which, if combined, might dominate Europe. So give the Poles access to the sea by driving a wedge through Germany, with Danzig for a port. But the trouble was that Danzig was a German city, and the proposed corridor was inhabited by more than two millions of that race. When this was brought to President Wilson’s attention, he produced a report from Professor Alston, pointing out that this district had been Polish, but had been deliberately “colonized” by the Germans, by the method so well known in Europe of making the former inhabitants so miserable that they emigrated. At a conference with his advisers President Wilson said that this appeared to be a case where one principle conflicted with another principle.
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br /> Alston reported this remark to Lanny, and the youth asked questions of his chief. Could two principles be principles when they contradicted each other? Apparently it was necessary for men to have such moral maxims; but there would seem to be something wrong when they betrayed you in an emergency. The highly conscientious gentlemen at the Crillon racked their brains for some way to prevent fighting in that corridor. Most of the scholars were inclined to sympathize with the Poles—perhaps on account of Kosciuszko, and because in their youth they had read a novel called Thaddeus of Warsaw. But, alas, their sympathies were weakened by the fact that the Poles were carrying on dreadful pogroms against the Jews; and if they were that sort of people, what were the chances for the two million Germans of the corridor? The time was out of joint: O cursèd spite, that ever college professors were born to set it right!
BOOK SIX
They Shall Reap the Whirlwind
32
I Have Seen the Future
I
Paris was dancing. It was a mania that had seized all “society”; in hotels and cafés, in private drawing rooms, wherever men and women met, they spent their time locked in one another’s arms, swaying and jiggling this way and that. These modern dances seemed to have been invented to spare the necessity of any skill, any art; if you knew how to walk, if you were sober enough so that you could stagger, then you could dance, and you did.
Lanny didn’t have much time for diversion, but his mother went out now and then, and when he called on her, she would tell about her adventures. More than once she had left the room because of disgusting things she had witnessed. Beauty’s world seemed to be coming to an end; that world of grace and charm for which she had spent so many years equipping herself. She had learned all the rules—and the result was she was out of date. Men no longer wanted coquetry or subtlety, elegance, even intelligence; they wanted young females to hug, and that was too cheap and easy, in the opinion of Beauty. She said that apparently the real horrors of war didn’t begin until it was over.
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