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 Bolsheviks? 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 intellecttuals, 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 traitres/” — 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!”
V
Lieutenant Jerry Pendleton showed up in Paris, having got a week's leave. He had won promotion in the Argonne Forest by the method of being luckier than other sergeants of his outfit. In his new uniform he looked handsome and dignified, and Lanny at first thought he was the same gay and buoyant red-head from whom he had parted back at Camp Devens. But soon he noticed that Jerry had a tendency to fall silent, and there would come a brooding, somber look. Apparently going to war did something to a man. Lanny had been expecting to be entertained with accounts of hairbreadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach; but his former tutor said: “Let's not talk about it, kid. All I want is to go home and try to forget.”
“Aren't you going down to see Cerise?”
“I haven't enough time.”
Lanny knew that wasn't true, for Jerry could have taken the night express and been in Cannes in the morning. The youth let the subject drop; but later, after he had told about his misadventure with Gracyn in Connecticut, the lieutenant warmed up and revealed what was troubling his mind. “The plain truth is, I just don't like the French. I'm sore at the whole damn country.”
“What have they done to you?”
“It's just that we're so different, I guess. I'm always stumbling on things I dislike. I realize I don't know Cerise very well, and I'm never going to be allowed to know her until I've married her; and then what will I find out?”
“My mother married a Frenchman, and they were very happy.”
“Your mother lived here a long time and probably knew how to choose. I've seen so many things in France that I want to get away from. Manure-piles!”
Lanny laughed. Having spent nearly all his life in France, he assumed that this national institution was necessary to the agricultural procèss. But Jerry said they ordered things differently in Kansas; everything there was clean and agreeable, even the hogs. Lanny was amused, because when Jerry Pendleton had first made his appearance on the Riviera he had described his home state as a dull, provincial place, and had earnestly desired not to go back and help run two drug stores.
But now what a change! “I fought to save these people,” said the lieutenant of a machine-gun company, “and now I have to bite every franc to see if it's made of lead.”
“That can happen anywhere in Europe,” replied his friend.
“It doesn't happen in Koblenz,” declared the other, emphatically. He was part of the army which had gone into the Rhineland to guard the bridgeheads pending the signing of a treaty. Jerry's brigade was covering a semicircle of German territory, some forty miles in diameter on the far side of the river, and his company had been quartered for three months in a tiny village where they had every opportunity to know the population. The lieutenant himself was billeted in a farmhouse where everything was so neat, and the old couple so kind, so patient and humble, grateful for the tiniest favor — it was exactly as Kurt had told Lanny it would be, the doughboys had learned that the Germans were not the Huns they had been pictured. More and more the Americans were wondering why they had had to fight such people, and how much longer they were going to have to stay and blockade them from the rest of the world.
The Rhineland is a rich country and produces food and wine in abundance; but it had been just behind the fighting front for four years and the retreating German armies had carried off all they could. Now the people were living on the scantiest rations and the children were pale and hollow-eyed. The well-fed Yanks were expected to live in houses with undernourished children and pregnant women and never give them food. There were strict orders against “fraternizing with the enemy”; but did that include stuffing half a load of bread into your overcoat pocket and passing it out to the kids?
And what about the Fräuleins, those sweet-faced, gentle creatures with golden or straw-colored braids down their backs, and white dresses with homemade embroidery on the edges? Their fellows had been marched back into the interior of Germany, and here were handsome upstanding conquerors from the far-off prairie states, with chocolates and canned peaches and other unthinkable delicacies at their disposal. Lieutenant Pendleton chuckled as he told about what must surely have been the oddest military regulation ever issued in the history of warfare; the doughboys had been officially informed that entering into intimate relations with German Fräuleins was not to be considered as “fraternizing” within the meaning of the army regulations!
“Is that why you've lost interest in Cannes?” asked Lanny, with a grin.
“No,” said Jerry, “but I'll tell you this. If somebody doesn't hurry up and make up his mind about peace terms, a lot of our fellows are just going to take things into their own hands and go home — and their Fräuleins with them. What's the matter with these old men in Paris, Lanny?”
“I'll introduce you to some of them,” answered the youth, “and you can find out for yourself.”
VI
Jerry Pendleton having lunch at the Crillon; a piece of luck that rarely fell to the lot of a “shavetail,” even one who had fought through a war! It would be something to tell at the officers' mess in the Rhineland; it would be something to tell to his grandchildren in Kansas, in days when all this was in the history books — the “First World War.”
Lanny sat at table with his chief, because meals were times for confidential chats and informal reports, and perhaps for helping to translate the excited French of somebody who wanted more territory for his tiny state. A young officer on leave from the front might hear things that would give him a jolt — for these college professors had opinions of their own, and did not hesitate to bandy about the most exalted names.
The young lieutenant was asked to what unit he belonged and what service he had seen. When he said that he had been through the Meuse-Argonne — well, it was no great distinction, for more than a million others could say the same, not counting fifty thousand or so who would never speak of that, or anything else. The conversation turned to that six weeks' blood-bath, hailed as a glory in the press at home. What was the real truth about it? Had Foch wished to set the Americans a task at which no army could succeed?
Had he been punishing General Pershing for obstinacy and presumption?
The young lieutenant learned that from the hour when the first American division had been landed in France there had been a war going on between the American commander-in-chief and the British and French commands, backed by their governments. It had been their idea that American troops should be brigaded in with British and French troops and used to replace the wastage of their battles; but Pershing had been determined that there should be an American army, fighting under the American flag. He had declared this purpose and hung onto it like any British bulldog. But the others had never given up; they had used each new defeat as an excuse for putting pressure; they had pulled every sort of political wire and worried every American who had any authority or influence.
So, by the summer of 1918, they had managed to acquire a pretty-complete dislike of the jimber-jawed Missouri general. When Baker, Secretary of War, had visited England, Lloyd George had tactfully suggested that President Wilson should be requested to remove Pershing; to which the secretary had replied coldly that the American government was not in need of having anyone decide who should command American troops. Clemenceau had written a long letter to Foch, insisting that he should appeal to President Wilson to remove Pershing, on the ground that he had proved himself incompetent to handle armies in battle. Alston said he had seen a copy of that letter, though he wasn't at liberty to tell who had shown it to him. What more likely than that the generalissimo of all the Allied forces had said to himself: “Well, if this stubborn fellow is determined to have his own way, we'll give him something to do that will keep him busy.”
After listening to such conversation, Lanny and his friend strolled down the Champs-Élysées, between the mile-long rows of captured cannon, and for the first time and the last the lieutenant was moved to “open up” to his friend. “My God, Lanny!” he exclaimed. “Imagine fifty thousand lives being wiped out because two generals were jealous of each other!”
“History is full of things like that,” remarked the youth. “Ten thousand men march out and die because the king's mistress has been snubbed by an ambassador.”
The ex-tutor went on to pour out the dreadful story of the Meuse-Argonne, a mass of hills and rocks covered with forest and brush. “Of course that's all gone now,” said Jerry, “because we blasted every green thing from a couple of hundred square miles; we even blew off the tops of some of the hills. The Germans had been working for four years making it a tangle of wire, with machine guns hidden every few yards, and dugouts and concrete shelters. We were told to go and take such and such places, no matter what the cost, and we took them — wave after wave of men, falling in rows. I saw a man's head blown off within three feet of me, and I wiped his brains out of my eyes. We had whole regiments that just ceased to exist.”
“I heard about it,” said Lanny.
“You might, because you met insiders; but the folks at home haven't the remotest idea, and won't ever be told. Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting. There was nothing else you could do, because you were in there and the only way out was forward. The hell of it was that the roads ran crossways to our line of advance, so there was never any way to get in supplies except on men's backs. You took a position, and flopped down into a shell hole, and there you lay day and night, with shells crashing around you and bullets whining just over your head. The rain drenched you and near froze at night, and you had no food, and no water but the rain you caught in your tin hat; all around were men groaning and screaming, and nothing to do but lie there and die. That's modern war, by God, and if they give me any more of it, I'm going to turn Bolo.”
“Be careful how you say it, Jerry,” warned his friend. “There really are Bolos, you know, and they're working in our army.”
“Well, tell those old fellows at the Crillon to hurry up and settle it and send us home, or my outfit will turn Bolo without anybody having to do any work at all.”
VII
Next morning Lanny had his light French breakfast and went to Alston's, office. He was standing by the latter's desk, going over their schedule for the day, when in came Professor Davisson; the big, stout man was hurrying, greatly excited. “Clemenceau's been shot!”
“What?” exclaimed Alston, starting up.
“Anarchist got him as he was on his way here to see House.”
“Is he dead?”
“Badly hurt, they say.”
Others of the staff came in; the building was like an ants' nest when something upsets it. Everybody's plans were bowled over; for what was the use of holding conferences and making reports, when the whole thing would have to be done over? If the Tiger died, Poincaré would take his place; and the professors who had been scolding Clemenceau now had a sickening realization that he was a man of genius and a statesman compared with his probable successor, a dull pasty-faced lawyer who came from Lorraine, and therefore had drunk in hatred of Germany with his mother's milk. If Poincaré got the reins of power in his hands there would be no more talk of compromises, but a straight-out campaign to cripple Germany forever.
Clemenceau had been driving from his home, and as his limousine turned into the Avenue du Trocadéro, a young worker wearing corduroy clothing had stepped from behind a kiosk and fired eight or ten shots at him. Two had struck the elderly premier, one in the shoulder and one in the chest; it was believed that a lung had been penetrated, and there seemed little chance of life for a man of seventy-eight, a diabetic, weakened by four years of terrific strain.
“Well, that's the end of peace-making,” said Alston. The staff agreed that it would mean a wave of reaction in France and the suppression of left-wing opinion.
But the old man didn't die; he behaved in amazing fashion — with a bullet hole in his lung he didn't want even to be sick. Reports came in every few minutes; the doctors were having a hard time persuading him to lie down; he could hardly speak, and a bloody foam came out of his mouth, but he wanted to go on holding conferences. The Tiger indeed; a hard beast to kill! Of course he became the hero of France and people waited hour by hour for bulletins as to his fate.
A messenger brought in newspapers with accounts of the affair. The assassin had been seized by the crowd, which mauled him and tried to kill him; the papers gave pictures of him being held by a couple of gendarmes who had protected and saved him. His name was Cottin, and he was said to be a known anarchist; the photographs showed a frail, disheveled, frightened-looking young fellow. Lanny studied them, and a strange feeling began to stir in him. “Where have I seen that face?” As in a lightning flash it came to him: the youth whom he had watched in the salle while Jesse Blackless was making his speech! No doubt about it, for Lanny had watched the face off and on for an hour, taking it as a symbol of the inflamed and rebellious masses.
Lanny's last glimpse of the young worker had been on the platform, with Uncle Jesse patting him on the back. Lanny had wondered then, and wondered now with greater intensity, did that mean that he was a friend of the painter, or merely an admirer, a. stranger moved by his speech? Was this attempted killing the kind of political warfare that Uncle Jesse favored, whether publicly or secretly? Lanny remembered what his father had said, that syndicalism was for practical purposes the same as anarchism. Now Uncle Jesse had said that he had adopted the theories of the Bolsheviks. Did this by any chance include taking pot-shots at one's opponents on the street?
Decidedly a serious question for a youth getting launched upon a diplomatic career! To be sure, his chief had told him to go to the meeting and report; but nobody had told him to go secretly to the home of a syndicalist-Bolshevik conspirator and arrange for him to receive ten thousand francs of German money to be used in stirring up the workers of Paris to commit assassinations. Of course nobody at the meeting had directly advised the killing off of unsatisfactory statesmen, but it was an inference readily drawn from the furious denunciations poured upon the statesmen's heads. The orators might disclaim responsibility, but certainly they must know the probable result of such speeches.
Lanny's thought moved on from his uncle to his intimate friend. How much had Kurt known, and how far was he responsible for what had happened? It had become clear to Lanny that Kurt's money was being used for a lot more than the lifting of the blockade of Germany. Uncle Jesse had explained by saying that the police wouldn't allow a meeting on behalf of Germans, so the subject had to be brought in under camouflage. Lanny hadn't thought about the matter long before realizing that he had been extremely naive. The obvious way to relieve French pressure on Germany was to frighten France with the same kind of Bolshevist disturbances that were taking place throughout Central Europe. Kurt and his group were here for that, and they were using camouflage just as Uncle Jesse was.
VIII
A lot of complications to occupy the thoughts of a secretary supposed to be marking for his chief's attention a dozen conflicting reports on the proper boundary between the city of Fiume, inhabited by tumultuous Italians, and its suburb Susak, on the other side of a creek, inhabited by intransigent Yugoslavs! Lanny sat with a stack of documents before him: American, British, and French recommendations, and translations of Italian charges and Yugoslav countercharges. He sat with wrinkled brows, but it wasn't over these problems. He was saying to himself: “What does Kurt think about assassination of statesmen as a means of influencing national decisions? And would he be willing to use me for such a purpose?” Lanny's sense of fair play compelled him to add that Kurt had given him warning. Kurt had said: “Forgive me if I am not a friend at present. My time is not my own, nor my life.”
Of course the attempt on Clemenceau would rouse the French police and military to vigorous action. They would begin a round-up of the associates of the anarchist youth; they would subject them to inquisition, trying to find out if there had been a conspiracy, and if there was danger to other statesmen. No doubt they had spies in Uncle Jesse's movement and must know of his sudden appearance with a large sum of money. Perhaps they had him already and were questioning him about the source of those funds! Lanny was sure that his uncle wouldn't “give him away”; but still, he got a sudden realization how close to a powder magazine he had been walking. Yes, modern society was something dangerous and insecure, and a youth who strolled blandly along, feeling safe because he was well dressed and his father was rich — such a youth might see the earth open up in front of him and masses of searing flame shoot out into his face. Lanny decided that for the present he would repress his curiosity as to the relationship between his uncle and the anarchist Cottin; also that if he should meet his friend Kurt Meissner again he would be extremely reserved and cautious.
IX
Two days passed, and Clemenceau didn't die, but on the contrary was announcing that he would be back on the job of peace-making in half a week. Then one afternoon in Lanny's mail he found a note reading: “Meet me at the same place, same time. Sam.”
Professor Alston was to advise some American delegates on the Fiume problem that evening. They probably wouldn't get through by eleven o'clock; but Lanny had been working faithfully, and felt justified in asking to be excused at five minutes before the hour. Wrapped in his warm trench overcoat, which had a detachable sheepskin lining, and wearing a waterproof hat against the driving rain, the youth strolled out of the hotel, across the wide avenue, and past the great gun which Kurt had once used to blow entrenchments and poilus to Kingdom Come. The German officer came from the other direction and fell in beside him, and they walked between the rows of monstrous engines rusting in the rain. “Well, Kurt?” said Lanny, seeing that his friend didn't speak at once.
“I have no right to call on you,” said the other, at last. “But I'm in danger, and I thought.you might wish to know it.”
“What is it?”
“The police have raided the group with whom I have been working. I went last night to the place where I stay. I always make it a practice to walk on the other side of the street, looking for a window signal indicating that everything is all right. I saw a police van drawn up in front and they were taking people out of the house. I walked on, and I've been walking the streets most of the time since. I don't know any place to go.”
Lanny didn't need to be told how serious this danger was. “Have you any reason to think the police know about you?”
“How can I tell what they know? I'm sure my leader won't talk, and we never kept any papers in the place. But one can never be sure what has happened in this business.”
“I've been watching the newspapers. There's been nothing in them.”
“The police would surely not make anything public about spies.”
“How long have you been at this work, Kurt?”
“Only since the armistice. I got into it because of you.”
“Of me?”
“My father has a friend in Switzerland — the man who used to forward my letters to you. After the armistice he asked me to come and see him. He told me he had been doing government work, and offered me an important duty to help the Fatherland. I accepted.”
“How many others of your people know about you?”
“I don't know for certain. The other side may have had a spy among us. It's the attempt on Clemenceau that has stirred them up, of course.”
“You must tell me the truth about that, Kurt. It's been worrying me a lot.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whether you had anything to do with that attack.”
“Oh, my God, Lanny! What put that idea into your head?”
“Well, I have realized that you are trying to stir up revolt here. And it's fair to assume that some of your agents would be in touch with people like that anarchist.”
“I don't know whether they are or not, Lanny, but, granting it, we have nothing to gain by such an attempt. It has set us back, it may have ruined everything. I assure you my associates are not fools. Would they want to put Poincaré in power?”
“I can have your word of honor, Kurt, that you and your people had nothing to do with that attack?”
“You have that absolutely.”
“It's a mighty serious matter for me, you know.”
“I understand that fully. That's why I walked the streets all day, trying to make up my mind to call upon you. I'm not sure that I have the right to, and if you decline to touch the matter, I'll not blame you.”
“I want to help you, Kurt, and I will.”
“You know what would happen if you were caught aiding an enemy agent.”
“I'm willing to take a chance on that — provided I know that neither you nor your friends have been destroying life or property.”
“The truth is, Lanny, I have no idea what they did before the armistice. I suppose they were doing everything they could to help the Fatherland. But now they are trying to soften the French government by promoting political opposition. We have such troubles to deal with at home, and why shouldn't the French have their share?”
“That's all right with me,” said the French-American, with a grin.
X
They had come to the embankment of the Seine, and were walking along the quais, close together, talking low, with wind and pelting rain to absorb their voices. When a passer-by came, they fell silent until he was gone. Lanny was thinking busily: “What shall I do? Kurt can't stay out on a night like this.” Already the rain was turning to sleet.
“Let's get down to the problem,” he said. “I can't take you to my rooms, because I share them with two other fellows. I can't take you to my uncle, because the police may have him already.”
“That is true.”
“Wherever we go, we'll have to take somebody into our confidence. It wouldn't be decent to introduce you under a false name. One can't play a trick like that on one's friends.”
“I suppose hot.”
“I believe Mrs. Chattersworth would be sympathetic, but she has so much company, and you'd have to meet people, otherwise the servants would think it strange.”
“The servants will make trouble anywhere.”
“I might get a car and drive you down to Juan; but the servants know you, and have heard my mother and me talking about you during the war.”
“That's out.”
“I thought of Isadora Duncan, who's in Paris. She's an internationalist and has queer people around her all the time. But the trouble is, she's irresponsible. They say she's drinking — the war just about drove her crazy.”
There was a pause while he thought some more. “I believe our best guess is my mother. She's not very good at keeping secrets, but she'd surely keep this one because it means danger for me also.”
“Where is she?”
“In an apartment in a small hotel. Most of the time she's invited out to meals, but she has breakfast sent to her rooms. She has no servant except a maid, and could find some excuse to get rid of her. That's the one way I can think of to get you hidden.”
“But, Lanny, would your mother be willing to have a strange man in her apartment?”
“You aren't a stranger; you're my friend, and my mother knows how dear you are to me. It would be inconvenient, of course; but it's a matter of life or death.”
“But don't you see, Lanny — the hotel people would be sure that she had a lover. There couldn't be any other assumption.”
“They don't pay so much attention to that in Paris; and Beauty knows what it is to be gossiped about. You see, she lived with Marcel for years before they were married. All her friends know that story, and you might as well know it too.”
“I only saw your mother for a few hours, Lanny, but I thought she was a wonderful person.”
“She's been through a lot since then, and it's left her.sort of distracted and at loose ends. She's only recently got reconciled to the idea that she's never going to see her husband again. Now she's figuring how the world may be persuaded to recognize his genius. He really had it, Kurt.”
The gusts of icy rain were blowing into their faces from across the river, and Lanny turned into a side street. “The hotel is up here,” he said.
“You mean to take me there without telling her?”
“I'll phone and make sure she's alone. She won't want you left out in this rain, that I know. Tomorrow the three of us will have to figure out some way to get you out of France.”