I
PARIS was dancing. It was a mania that had seized all “society”; in hotels and cafes, 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 She had learned all the rules — and the result was she was out of date.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.
Her old friends were scattered. Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette, had lost her lover in the last dreadful fighting on the Marne, and had gone back to visit her relatives in Ohio. Margy Eversham-Watson was at her country place in Sussex, his lordship having been struck with a bad attack of gout. Edna Hackabury, now Mrs. Fitz-Laing, was on the Riviera, waiting for her husband to return from a military expedition in the Near East. All these persons were unhappy in one way or another, and Beauty, who craved pleasure as a sunflower craves the light, seemed as if trying to flee from her world. A horrible world! She told Lanny how, sitting at dinner next to Premier Orlando, that genial statesman had declared himself displeased that so lovely a woman had waited eighteen years between children. In his family it was different, he gravely assured her; his wife never got up from her accouchement bed without being pregnant again.
More and more she was coming to rely upon Emily Chatters-worth, a tower of strength in times such as these. Emily had money enough and force of will enough to make a world of her own. Emily had learned the rules, and persons who didn't know them and obey them got no share of her hospitality. In her home you met intellectual people and heard serious talk of the problems of the day, as well as of literature and art and music. Beauty would remark sadly that she was coming to an age where it was necessary for her to be intellectual; she would go to one of Emily's soirees, and listen while more brilliant persons talked, and come home and tell Lanny whom she had met and what compliments they had paid her.
Lanny accompanied her when he could find time. He realized that Mrs. Emily was performing an important service in bringing people together in gracious ways. When the American delegates and advisers met the French, it was always for business, and too frequently the discussions ended with bitterness. But in the drawing room of a woman of the world they could discuss the same problems with urbanity and humor; their shrewd hostess would be watching, ready to help the conversation past a dangerous corner. Here the women came; and the Americans found it easier to like the French when they met their women.
Mrs. Emily was fond of Lanny Budd, who from childhood had learned to behave in a drawing room. She considered him extraordinarily fortunate in his present role, and permitted him to bring members of the staff to her affairs without special invitation, an honor she granted to few. She came to have lunch with his friends at the Crillon, and this too was a distinction. Professor Alston remarked that many women had money, but few knew how to use it; if there were more persons like Emily Chattersworth in the world there wouldn't be so many like Jesse Blackless.
II
The British and the French were taking unto themselves those portions of Asia Minor which had oil, phosphates, and other treasures, or through which oil pipelines had to travel to the sea. Since the Fourteen Points had guaranteed the inhabitants of these lands the mastery of their own destinies, the subtle statesmen had racked their vocabularies to find some way of taking what they wanted while seeming not to. They had evolved a new word, or rather a new meaning for an old word, which was “mandate.” The scholars at the Crillon had an anecdote with which to divert their minds from sorrowful contemplations. Some diplomat newly arrived in Paris had inquired: “What's going to be done about New Guinea and the Pacific islands?” and the answer was: “They are to be administered by mandatories.” “Who is Mandatories?” inquired the newcomer.
Mister Mandatories — or was it Lord Mandatories? — was going to take over Syria and Palestine and Iraq, the Hejaz and Yemen and the rest of those hot lands which had been promised to the people of the young Emir Feisal. The brown replica of Christ had taken off his multicolored silk robes, his turban and veil, and put on the ugliest of black morning coats, in the hope of impressing the Peace Conference with his civilized condition — but all in vain. Behind the scenes Grand Officer ZaharofF had spoken, and Clemenceau was obeying; Henri Deterding, master of Royal Dutch Shell, had spoken, and Lloyd George was obeying.
One portion of the former Turkish empire had no oil or other mineral treasures of consequence; it had only peasants, who were being slaughtered daily by Turkish soldiers, as they had been off and on, mostly on, for ages. To stop this slaughter there was needed another Mandatory — a kind, idealistic, high-minded Mandatory, who cared nothing about oil nor yet about pipelines, but who loved poor peasants and the simple life. The British and French brought forward a proposal in the name of humanity and democracy: an elderly gentleman named Uncle Samuel Mandatory was to take charge of Armenia, and doughboys singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” would drive out the Turks and keep them out.
This proposal was sprung, and President Wilson promised to consider it and give his decision promptly. There was a rush call to the staff for everything they had on Armenia, and a hundred reports on history, geography, language, population, resources, production, trade, government, had to be dug out and read, digested, summarized, headlined, so that a busy statesman could get the whole thing in his mind in ten minutes' reading. Professor Alston had to do his part, and Lanny had to help — which was the reason he missed a musical evening at Mrs. Emily's town house.
Beauty attended; and shortly before midnight she telephoned her son at the hotel. “Lanny, the most amazing thing has happened.”
He knew from the tone of her voice that she was upset. “What is it?”
“I can't tell you over the phone. You must come here.”
“But I'm not through with my job.”
“Isn't it something that can wait till morning?”
“It's for the Big Boss himself.”
“Well, I must see you. I'll wait up.”
“Any danger?” His first thought, of course, was of Kurt.
“Don't try to talk now. Come when you can.”
III
So Lanny rather stinted the Armenians, and maybe let more of them die. So many poor peasants were dying, in so many parts of the world — there came a time when one just gave up. He omitted from his report some of the Armenian charges and some of the Turkish admissions, and slipped into his big trench coat, ran downstairs, and hopped into a taxi.
His fair blond mother was waiting in one of those bright-colored silk dressing gowns from China — this time large golden dragons crawling clockwise round her. She had taken to smoking under the strain of the past year, and evidently had done it a lot, for the air in the room was hazy and close. Beauty deserved her name almost as much as formerly, and never more so than when tenderness and concern were in her sweet features. After opening her door she looked into the passage to see if anyone had followed her son, then led him into her boudoir before she spoke.
“Lanny, I met Kurt at Emily's!”
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed the youth.
“The first person I saw, standing at her side.”
“Does she know who he is?”
“She thinks he's a musician from Switzerland.”
“Who brought him?”
“I didn't ask. I was afraid to seem the least bit curious.”
“What was he doing?”
“Meeting influential Frenchmen — at least that's what he told me.”
“You had a chance to talk to him?”
“Just a moment or two. When I went in and saw him, I was pretty nearly bowled over. Emily introduced him as M. Dalcroze. Imagine!”
“What did you say?”
“I was afraid my face had betrayed something, so I said: 'It seems to me I have met M. Dalcroze somewhere.' Kurt was perfectly calm — he might have been the sphinx. He said: 'Madame's face does seem familiar to me.' I saw that he meant to carry it off, so I said: 'One meets so many people,' and went on to explain to Emily why you hadn't come.”
“And then?”
“Well, I strolled on, and old M. Solicamp came up to me and started talking, and I pretended to listen while I tried to think what to do. But it was too much for me. I just kept quiet and watched Kurt all I could. By and by Emily called on him to play the piano and he did so — very well, I thought.”
“Whatever he does he does well.”
Beauty went on to name the various persons with whom she had observed their friend in conversation. One was the publisher of one of the great Paris dailies; what could a German expect to accomplish with such a man? Lanny didn't try to answer, because he had never told his mother that Kurt was handling money. She continued: “Toward the end of the evening I was alone with him for just a minute. I said: 'What are you expecting to accomplish here?' He answered: 'Just meeting influential persons.' 'But what for?' 'To get in a word for our German babies. I pledge you my honor that I shall do nothing that can bring harm to our hostess.' That was all we had time for.”
“What do you mean to do?”
“I don't see what I can do. If I tell Emily, I am betraying Kurt. If I don't tell her, won't she feel that I've betrayed her?”
“I'm afraid she may, Beauty.”
“But she didn't meet Kurt through us.”
“She met him because I told him about her, and he found some way to get introduced to her under a false name.”
“But she won't ever know that you mentioned her.”
“We can't tell what she'll know. We're tying ourselves up in a knot of intrigue and no one can guess what new tangles may develop.”
A look of alarm appeared on the mother's usually placid features. “Lanny, you're not thinking that we ought to give Kurt up!”
“Telling Mrs. Emily wouldn't be quite the same as giving him up, would it?”
“But we promised him solemnly that we wouldn't tell a soul!”
“Yes, but we didn't give him permission to go and make use of our friends.”
A complicated problem in ethics, and in etiquette too! They discussed it back and forth, without getting very far. Lanny said that Mrs. Emily had expressed herself strongly against the blockade of Germany; she would, no doubt, be deeply sympathetic to what Kurt was doing, even while she might disapprove his methods.
The mother replied: “Yes, but don't you see that if you tell her you make her responsible for the methods. As it is, she's just a rich American lady who's been deceived by a German agent. She's perfectly innocent, and she can say so. But if she knows, it's her duty to report him to the authorities, and she's responsible for what may happen from now on.”
Lanny sat with knitted brows. “Don't forget,” he remarked, “you're in that position yourself. It ought to worry you.”
Said Beauty: “The difference is that I'd be willing to lie about it; but I don't believe Emily would.”
IV
When in doubt, do nothing — that seemed to be the wise rule. They had no way to communicate with Kurt, and he didn't make any move to enlighten them. Was he arguing the same way as Beauty, that what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them? It was obvious that in trying to promote pro-German ideas among highly placed persons in Paris he was playing a desperately dangerous game, and the fewer dealings he had with friends the better for the friends.
Many ladies in fashionable society become amateur psychologists, and learn to manipulate one another's minds and to extract information without the other person's knowing what they are after — unless, perchance, the other person has also become an amateur psychologist. Beauty went to see her friend in the morning; and of course it was natural for her to refer to the handsome young pianist, to comment on his skill, and to ask where her friend had come upon him. Emily explained that M. Dalcroze had written that he was a cousin of an old friend in Switzerland who had died several years ago, and that he had come to Paris to study with one of the great masters at the conservatory.
“I asked him to come and play for me,” said the kindly hostess. “He's really quite an exceptional person. He plans to be a composer and has studied every instrument in the orchestra — he says that you have to be able to play them if you are going to compose for them.”
“How interesting!” said Beauty, and she wasn't fibbing. “Where is he staying?”
“He tells me he's with friends for a few days. He's getting his mail at poste restante.”
Said the guileless friend: “I only had a chance for a few words with him, but I heard him talking with someone about the blockade of Germany.”
“He feels deeply about it. He says it is sowing the seeds of the next war. Of course, being an alien, he can't say much.”
“I suppose not.”
“It's really a shocking thing, Beauty. The more I hear about it the more indignant I become. I was talking to Mr. Hoover the other day; he has been trying for four months to get permission for a small German fishing fleet to go out into the North Sea — but in vain.”
“How perfectly ghastly!” exclaimed Lanny's mother.
“I am wondering if I shouldn't get some influential French people to come here some evening and hear Mr. Hoover tell about what it means to the women and children of Central Europe.”
“I've thought of the same idea, Emily. You know Lanny talks about that blockade all the time. The people at the Crillon are so wrought up about it.”
“Our French friends just can't bring themselves to realize that the war is over.”
“Or perhaps, as Professor Alston says, they're fighting the next one. We women let the men have their way all through, but I really think we ought to have something to say about the peace.”
“I know just how you feel,” said the grave Mrs. Emily, who had had Beauty weeping on her shoulder more than once during the days of Marcel's long-drawn-out agony.
“Let's you and me take it up, Emily, and make them let those women and children have food!” It was farther than Beauty had meant to go when she set out on this visit; but something in the deeps of her consciousness rose up unexpectedly. A woman with a loving nature may try her best to dance and be merry while other women are bearing dead babies, and while living babies are growing up with twisted skeletons; but all of a sudden comes a rush of feeling from some unknown place and she finds herself exclaiming, to her own surprise: “Let's do something!”
V
The discussions among the four elder statesmen were continuing day and night and reaching a new pitch of intensity. They were dealing with questions which directly concerned France; and the French are an intense people — especially where land or money is involved. There was one strip of land which was precious to the French beyond any price: the left bank of the river Rhine, which would save them from the terror which haunted every man, woman, and child in the nation. They wanted the Rhineland; they were determined to have it, and nothing could move them; they could argue about it day and night, forever and forever, world without end; they never wearied — and they never gave up.
Also they demanded the Sarre, with its valuable coal mines, to make up for those which the Germans had deliberately destroyed. The French had suffered all this bitter winter; other winters were coming, and who were going to suffer — the French, or the Germans who had invaded France, blown towns and cities to dust and rubble, carried away machinery and flooded mines? The French army held both the Sarre and the Rhineland, and General Foch was omnipresent at the Peace Conference, imploring, scolding, threatening, even refusing to obey Clemenceau, his civilian chief, when he saw signs of weakening on this point upon which the future of la patrie depended.
The British Prime Minister very generously took the side of the American President in this controversy. Alston said it was astonishing how reasonable Lloyd George could be when it was a question of concessions to be made by France. England was getting Mesopotamia and Palestine, Egypt and the German colonies; Australia was getting German New Guinea, and South Africa was getting German Southwest Africa. All this had been arranged by the help of the blessed word “mandatory,” plus the word “protectorate” in the case of Egypt. But where was the blessed word that would enable the French to fortify the west bank of the Rhine? That was not to be found in any English dictionary.
Lanny got an amusing illustration of the British attitude through his friend Fessenden, a youth who was gracious and likable, and infected with “advanced” ideas. Lanny had been meeting Fessenden off and on for a couple of months, and they had become one of many channels through which the British and Americans exchanged confidences. Among a hundred other questions about which they chatted was the island of Cyprus, which Britain had “formally” taken over from Turkey early in the war. What were they going to do with it? “Self-determination of all peoples,” ran the “advanced” formula; so of course the people of Cyprus would be asked to whom they wished to belong. Young Fessenden had been quite sure that this would be done; but gradually he became less so, and the time came when he avoided the subject. When it became apparent that the island was “annexed” for good, young Fessenden in a burst of friendship confessed to Lanny that he had mentioned the matter to his chief and had been told to stop talking nonsense. If the British let the question of “self-determination” be raised, what would become of Gibraltar, and of Hong Kong, and of India? A young man who wanted to have a diplomatic career had better get revolutionary catchwords out of his head.
VI
Such was the atmosphere in which Mrs. Emily Chattersworth and her friend Beauty Detaze set out to change French opinion on the subject of the blockade. They had resolved upon getting persons influential in French society to gather in Mrs. Emily's drawing room and hear an appeal from Mr. Herbert Hoover, who had been in charge of Belgian relief and now had been put in charge of all relief by the Supreme Council. The persons whom Mrs. Emily planned to invite were many of them intimate friends, frequenters of her salon for years; but when she broached this proposal to them, they were embarrassed, and certain that it couldn't be done.
They would start to explain to her, and it would turn into an argument. The blockade was cruel, no doubt, but all war was cruel, and this was part of the war. The Germans hadn't signed the peace, and the blockade was a weapon to make them sign; so the army chiefs said, and in wartime a nation took the advice of its general staff. Yes, it might be that German babies were dying; but how many French babies had died in the war, and how many French widows would have no more babies as a result of the German invasion? The famous critic who had been Mrs. Emily's lover for a decade or more told her that every German baby was either a future invader of France, or else a mother of future invaders of France; and when he saw the look of dismay on her face he told her to be careful, that she was falling victim to German propaganda. It didn't make any difference whether one got this propaganda direct from Germans, or from Americans who had been infected with it across the seas.
Such was the mood of the people of France. Those two or three friends who were sympathetic told Mrs. Emily that her action would be misunderstood, and that her future career as a salonnière would be jeopardized. As soon as the treaty was signed something would doubtless be done; but few French people, unless they were tainted with Bolshevist ideas, would attend an assemblage where pro-German arguments were to be voiced. The French were grateful for American help, but people who lived in safety three thousand miles away shouldn't presume to give advice about the problems which France faced every day and every hour.
The fact was that the French regarded the Peace Conference as an intrusion, and they watched all foreigners suspiciously. One of Mrs. Emily's friends asked her: What did she really know about the tall and severe young musician who looked so much like a German and spoke with a trace of German accent? He had been discussing the blockade in her drawing room, and more than one person had made note of it. “Enemy ears are listening!” Mrs. Emily mentioned this warning to her friend Beauty, as an example of the phobias which tormented people in Paris. Beauty said, yes, it was really pitiful.
VII
The four elder statesmen met in the morning in President Wilson's study and in the' afternoon at the headquarters of the Supreme Council at Versailles. Members of their staffs accompanied them and waited in anterooms; sometimes they were summoned to the presences, but most of the time were forgotten for hours on end. The proceedings of the Big Four were supposed to be completely secret; only one secretary was present. The meeting place became a whispering gallery, with awe-stricken subordinates pricking their ears for every sound, watching the expressions and gestures of those who emerged from the holy place.
The slightest anecdotes spread like wildfire among the staff. Marshal Foch had come rushing out of the chamber, his face red, his eyes dark with storm. He would never go back there, never, never! — so he shouted. Frightened members of his staff whispered to him, begged him, implored him; finally he went back. Professor Elderberry, whose specialty was Semitic dialects, and who had been on a “field commission” to Palestine, had witnessed Lloyd George and Clemenceau in a near fracas. Wilson had interposed, his outstretched arms between them, exclaiming: “I have never seen two such unreasonable men.” Lanny, waiting outside for his chief, saw Clemenceau coming out in a rush and being helped into the big gray fur-lined overcoat which protected his chilly old bones. “How are things going?” someone asked, and the Premier of France replied: “Splendidly. We disagreed about everything.”
Professor Alston, summoned to one session, described to his colleagues the curious spectacle of four elderly gentlemen who had spread a big map on the floor and were crawling round on their hands and knees, looking for bits of territory which they were going to assign to one nation or another. They were ignorant on many points of geography, and invented names for foreign places when they couldn't remember the right names; when the right ones were given they forgot, and went on using their inventions. Alston was violating no confidence in telling this, for Lloyd George had asked in Parliament: “How many members ever heard of Teschen? I don't mind saying that I never heard of it.” Now, having heard of it, he took it from Austria and divided it between the Czechs and the Poles.
For ten days they had wrangled over the French and German boundary and got nowhere. They were exhausted, their tempers badly frayed. The peoples too were becoming hysterical; for where news was lacking rumor took its place. All parties continued to whisper the things they wanted to have believed, and the dozen Paris papers which Clemenceau controlled were denouncing the American President, lampooning him, cartooning him with shocking bitterness. Wilson was ill equipped for a struggle such as this; he was gentle, courteous, anxious to oblige people, and could hardly be brought to realize the nature of the forces being mobilized against him.
Clemenceau had his formula, from which he never varied: “This — or France has lost the war.” Of course the President didn't want France to lose the war; he didn't want the responsibility of causing it to happen. He just hadn't realized what an inferno he was coming into. Many of his staff now urged him to go home; others begged him to take the American people into his confidence, telling them the real situation. He might not get what he wanted, but at least he would save his ideals intact and give the peoples of the world a glimpse of the forces that were wrecking Europe.
VIII
George D. Herron, distressed over these developments, left his home in Geneva and returned to Paris. He saw the President and afterwards told Alston and Lanny about it. Wilson was a sick man, paying the penalty of his temperament. As Herron explained it, he was lacking as an executive. “He knows how to judge himself, but not others; he knows how to drive himself, but not others; he can't trust anyone to write his speeches and memoranda, or even to typewrite them. The result is that he's overwhelmed. He and he alone is the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and the number of matters he has to consider and decide are more than can be got into one human brain.”
What troubled the President in this crisis was the fear of seeing Europe fall prey to Bolshevism. The French assured him that this would happen; and might it not be true? The American staff had prepared a map, with terrifying large red arrows pointing into Lithuania, Prussia, Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, Georgia. If Wilson were to break off negotiations and take the American army home, the Germans might refuse to sign the peace treaty, the war might start again, and revolts might follow in Paris and even in Britain.
A young member of the Crillon staff had been picked by the President and sent to Moscow. “Bill” Bullitt was his name, and he had taken with him a journalist friend, once famous as a “muckraker.” In the days when Lanny had been a toddler on the beach at Juan, this man had been traveling over the United States probing into political corruption, interviewing “bosses” and their big-business paymasters. Latterly his work had been forgotten, and Lanny had never heard the name of Lincoln Steffens until he was told that the “Bullitt mission” had set out for the land of the Reds.
They had come back with surprising news. Lenin wanted peace, and was ready to pay almost any price for it. He would give up all Siberia and the Urals, the Caucasus, Archangel, and Murmansk, even most of the Ukraine and White Russia. He would recognize all the White governments. But, alas, President Wilson had a severe headache that evening, and Colonel House also was ill. Bullitt saw Lloyd George first and told him the terms; Wilson, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was so angry at this slight that he wouldn't see Bullitt, he wouldn't hear of peace with wicked Bolsheviks. And Lloyd George stood up in the House of Commons and denied that he had ever known anything about the Bullitt mission!
All this suited the French, who didn't want peace under any circumstances. They were being beaten, but dared not admit it. They were having to back out of the Ukraine; their armies were becoming unreliable — this dreaded new kind of war, fought not merely with guns but with ideas. War-weary soldiers listened, and began to whisper that maybe this was the way to end matters. There were mutinies in the French fleet in the Black Sea, and when Colonel House was asked by newspapermen about Odessa, he replied: “There's no more Odessa. The French are clearing out.” British troops, ordered to embark at Folkestone for Archangel, refused to go on board. No use to look for such events in newspapers, whether British or American; but the staff at the Majestic knew, and Fessenden gossiped to Lanny with wide-open startled eyes. “For God's sake, what's-going to happen next?”
IX
Lanny kept thinking he ought to hear from Kurt; but no word came. He wondered about his Uncle Jesse, whether he was getting more money and what he was doing with it. Having a couple of hours off one afternoon, Lanny yielded to the temptation and turned his steps in the direction of Montmartre.
It was the first day of April; bright sunlight, blue sky, fleecy white clouds; crocuses blooming in the gardens, daisies in the grass of the parks; the trees just far enough in the bud to show a pastel green. The poor frightened world was coming out of the winter of war; Lanny, climbing the hill, carried a thought which by now had become his familiar companion: Why, oh, why did men have to make their lives so ugly? What evil spell was upon them that they wrangled and scolded, hated and feared?
He climbed the stairs in the dark hallway which hadn't yet learned that winter was over. He knocked on his uncle's door, and a voice called: “Come in”; he did so, and saw there was a visitor, seated in the extra chair from which a load of books and papers had been dumped. He was a short, compactly built man with brown hair and small gray imperial and mustache trimmed neatly; a rather square face with glasses, and small blue-gray eyes with many wrinkles around them, giving him a quizzical appearance. The visitor was plainly but neatly dressed, and you would have taken him for a small businessman, or perhaps a college professor. Said Uncle Jesse: “This is Lincoln Steffens.”
Lanny was surprised', also pleased, and showed it. “I've been hearing about you at the Crillon!”
“Indeed,” said the other. “I've been trying to figure out a way to let them know I was in town.”
When Lanny knew him better he would understand such teasing remarks. As it was, he decided to be frank, and said: “You know how it is — they're a bit afraid of you.”
“That's why I came to see your uncle,” replied the journalist. “One man who might be interested to hear about the future.”
“Stef has spent a whole week in the future,” explained the uncle, with one of his twisted smiles.
Lanny took his seat on the cot, which had become familiar to him. Because it sank down in the middle it cut his knees, so presently he stretched out on it, leaning on one elbow. In this position he listened for an hour or more to an account of one of the great events of human history.
For a matter of seventeen months now Lanny had been hearing about the Bolshevik Revolution. Again and again he had been told how one-sixth of the. earth's surface had been seized by bloodthirsty ruffians, more cruel and cunning than any that had ever before plagued the earth. He had seen all the policies of his own country and a number of others based upon that certainty. The fact that his Uncle Jesse believed in and supported these devilish creatures merely meant that his uncle was “cracked” in some serious way, and must be dealt with as you would with an inmate of a home for mental patients.
But here sat this correct-looking middle-aged gentleman, who had been sojourning among these Reds, and not merely hadn't had his throat cut or his watch stolen, but apparently hadn't even got his clothes wrinkled. He had an unusually pleasing voice and poured out the details of what he so oddly called “the future.” Apparently this wasn't one of his jokes; he really thought the world was going to be like that. Lanny, who was going to live in the future, naturally wanted to know about it.
He learned that in this new world everybody would have to work. That didn't trouble him so much as it would have done three months earlier, for now he was working. As it happened, he was being paid by the state, so it didn't worry him to hear that this was the way among the Soviets. When he heard that the state was preparing and serving meals to workers in factories, it sounded very much like what was happening to him and the rest of the staff at the Crillon. In Russia, to be sure, they had only one meal a day, and that scanty; but “Stef” said that was due to five years of war and revolution, and to civil wars now going on over a front of ten thousand miles. What there was, all shared alike; that being the first principle of “Communism.”
What, then, was the difference between America and Moscow? The “muckraker” said it was a question of who owned the state. In America the people were supposed to own it, but most of the time the big businessmen bought it away from them. “It is privilege which corrupts politics,” was his phrase. He explained that among the Soviets it was soldiers and sailors, workers and peasants, who had seized power; capitalists had been abolished. Now there was war between these two kinds of states, and it looked as if it was going to be a war to the finish.
X
Lanny Budd was interested in this news, and no less in the envoy who brought it. What an eccentric little man, he thought. Why should a scholarly person, of breeding and presumably of means, take the side of those underworld figures against his own class? He took it only partly, as Lanny soon began to understand; there appeared to be a war between his heart and his head, and you could almost watch this conflict going on. Stef would become eager and excited, and then would check himself. “If I go too fast,” he would say, “people won't listen to me. And, besides, I may be wrong.” He would proceed to put some “ifs” and “buts” into his discourse.
Steffens was like Herron, a pacifist and a moralist first of all. He wanted a revolution, but one of the mind and spirit; he was pained by the thought that it might have to be bloody and violent. Did we want such an overturn in western Europe? Could we pay the price?
Jesse Blackless, for his part, was sure that we were going to pay it, whether we wanted to or not. There developed an argument between the two men, to which Lanny listened with close attention. The painter foretold how the Allied armies would continue to decay, and the Red movement would spread to Poland and Germany, and from there to Italy and France. The painter knew it was coming; he knew the very men who were preparing to do the job. Stef looked at Jesse's nephew with a twinkle in his little blue-gray eyes and said: “It's nice to have a religion, Budd. Saves all the trouble of having to think.”
A curious experience to Lanny to hear Bolshevism referred to as a “religion,” even in jest. But he understood when the reporter described the wave of fervor which had seized upon the people of Russia, victims of many centuries' oppression, sunk in unspeakable degradation — and now suddenly finding themselves masters of a mighty empire, and setting to work to make it into a workers' and peasants' co-operative. People were hungry, they were ragged, half-frozen all winter, but in their eyes was a feverish light and in their hearts was hope, vision, a dream of the future. From the unformed, unregarded mass, from soldiers and sailors and factory workers and peasants, had come new leadership, new statesmanship. . . .
Steffens had talked for hours with Lenin: that studious, shrewd little man who had watched the storm gathering and seized the proper hour to strike. “From now on we proceed to build Socialism,” he had said quietly, the day after the coup. As Steffens described him, he knew more about the Allied statesmen than they new about themselves. He understood the forces confronting the Soviets; and while the bourgeois world sent armies against him, he would send fanatics, men and women who hated capitalism so much that they were willing to give their lives to undermine and destroy it. “Men like your Uncle Jesse,” said Stef, with his sly smile; and Lanny understood, even better than Stef could have imagined.
Lanny was sorry that he had to leave. He summoned his courage and asked if Mr. Steffens would have lunch with him at the Crillon. The other advised him to think it over for a day and then call him. “Colonel House is the only other member of the staff who would have the courage to invite me just now!”
XI
The young fellow who had attempted to kill Clemenceau had been tried and sentenced to death, but the Premier had been persuaded to commute his sentence. The one who had killed Jaurès had been held in prison for nearly five years, because the authorities were afraid to try him during wartime. Now the trial was held, and the lawyers who defended him did so by seeking to prove that Jaurès had been disloyal to his country. So it became in effect a trial of the Socialist leader, and he was found guilty, while the assassin, whose name, oddly enough, was Villain, was acquitted.
The result was a mighty demonstration of protest by the workers of Paris, culminating in a parade in which the red flag was carried for the first time since the armistice. Lanny stood on the street corner and watched it go by, in company with his new friend Steffens. Each of them had his thoughts and did not say them all. Lanny saw his Uncle Jesse marching in the front ranks, looking very determined — but doubtless quaking inside, because no one knew if the police would try to stop the parade, and it might be a killing matter if they did. The nephew thought: “Kurt had something to do with this”; and again: “I wonder if he's watching.”
The same crowd that Lanny had observed at the réunion; the same sort of persons, and in many cases no doubt the same individuals: men and women, hungry, undernourished from childhood, with pale faces set in grimmest hatred. Lanny knew more about them now; he knew that they meant blood, and so did their opponents. The submerged masses were in revolt against their masters and sworn to overturn them. A few weeks ago Lanny would have thought it was a blind revolt, but now he knew that it had eyes and directing brains.
He noticed how few of the marchers looked about them, or paid any attention to the watching crowds. They stared before them with a fixed gaze. Lanny remarked this to his companion, who replied: “They are looking into the future.”
“Do you really want it, Mr. Steffens?” Lanny asked him.
“Only half of me wants it,” replied the muckraker. “The other half is scared.” He meant to say more, but his words were drowned by the menacing thunder of the “Internationale”:
Arise, ye pris'ners of starvation,
Arise, ye wretched of the earth;
For justice thunders condemnation, A better world's in birth.