I
THE day that Lanny and his father arrived in France was the last day of the last extension of time allowed to the Germans, to say whether or not they were going to accept the terms imposed upon them. At least so the Allies declared, and at each of their outposts, fifty kilometers beyond the Rhine bridgeheads, their motorized columns were packed up and ready to start. They were going to advance thirty-five miles per day into Germany, so it was announced; and meanwhile in every drawing room and bistro in France the leading topic of discussion was: Will they sign or won't they?
An Austrian peace delegation had come, and a Bulgarian one, and were submitting with good grace to having their feathers pulled out while they were still alive. Not a squawk from them; but the Germans had been keeping up a God-awful clamor for six or seven weeks; all over their country mass meetings of protest, and Clemenceau remarking in one of his answers that apparently they had not yet realized that they had lost a war. Their delegation was kept inside their stockade and told that it was for their safety, some of them, traveling back and forth to Germany, were stoned, and for this Clemenceau made the one apology of his career.
The Social-Democrats were ruling the beaten country. It was supposed to have been a revolution, but a polite and discreet one which had left the nobility all their estates and the capitalists all their industries. It was, so Steffens and Herron had explained to Lanny, a political, not an economic revolution. A Socialist police chief was obligingly putting down the Reds in Berlin, and for this the Allies might have been grateful but didn't seem to be. Stef said they couldn't afford to let a Socialist government succeed at anything; it would have a bad effect upon the workers in the Allied lands. It was a time of confusion, when great numbers of people didn't know just what they wanted, or if they did they took measures which got them something else.
In the eastern sky the dark cloud continued to lower; and here, also, what the Allies did only made matters worse. The Big Four had recognized Admiral Kolchak as the future ruler of Siberia — a land whose need for a navy was somewhat restricted. This land-admiral had agreed to submit his policies to a vote of the Russian people, but meanwhile he was proceeding to kill as many of them as possible and seize their farms. The result was that the peasants went into hiding, and as soon as the admiral's armies moved on they came out and took back their farms. The same thing was happening all over the Ukraine, where General Denikin had been chosen as the Russian savior; and now another general, named Yudenich, was being equipped to capture Petrograd. They didn't dare to give these various saviors any British, French, or American troops, because of mutinies; but they would furnish officers, and armaments which were charged up as “loans,” and which the peasants of Russia were expected to repay in return for being deprived of the land.
At any rate, that was the way Stef described matters to Lanny Budd; and Lanny found this credible, because Stef had been there and the others hadn't. The youth had gone to call on this strange little man, whose point of view was so stimulating to the mind. Lanny didn't tell his father about this visit, and quieted his conscience by saying, what use making Robbie unhappy to no purpose? Lanny wasn't ever going to become a Red — he just wanted to hear all sides and understand them. Robbie seemed to have the idea that the only way to avoid falling into the snares of the Reds was to refuse to have anything to do with them, or even to know about them. The moment you started to “understand” them — at that moment you were becoming tainted with their hateful infection?
II
There came a letter from Beauty, now viewing the art galleries and cabarets of Madrid. She was so, so happy; but her conscience was troubling her because of Baby Marceline, left motherless on the Riviera for so many months. To be sure, the servants adored her, and Beauty had asked friends to go and look her over; but still the mother worried, and wanted Lanny to run down and take her place. “You know my position,” she pleaded. “I dare not leave our friend alone.” Always she used the tactful phrase, “our” friend. If a woman wrote mon ami, that had a special meaning; but notre ami was chaste, even Christian, and took Lanny into the affaire.
There was much to be done at their home, Beauty informed him. The house needed very much to be redecorated, and it was fortunate that Lanny had such good taste; his mother would leave it to him, and be interested to see what new ideas he had acquired in two years of journeying about. Lanny decided that he would surprise her by building that extra studio. The many relatives of Leese would be summoned en masse; they were slow, but Lanny knew them and liked them, and they would work well for him.
This was something the youth could present to his father as a plausible substitute for a job in the oil industry. Robbie believed in buildings, as something you could see, and if need be could sell; he said to do the studio right, and he would pay for it. He added that Baby Marceline would probably be better off if Beauty would stay in Spain, or go back to Germany with Kurt; all she could do with a child was to spoil it. She would have done that with Lanny if Robbie hadn't put his foot down many times. Lanny said maybe she had anyhow.
The youth wanted to remain in Paris until his father was through. He was seeing the Crillon and all its affairs through a new pair of eyes. The men with whom Robbie was dealing were not the statesmen, but those who told the statesmen what to do. Yes, even the stiff-souled Presbyterian, the reformer to whom big business had been anathema — even he had become dependent upon the masters of money. A whole procèssion of them had been called over to Paris: prominent among them Lamont of the House of Morgan, whom Wilson had refused even to receive at the White House before the war. A score of such men had now become the President's confidential advisers on questions of reparations and the restoring of trade and finance.
Of course these businessmen were telling him to do the things which would enable them to go on making money, as they had been doing so happily before the war. The railroads were to be handed back to private management, and government controls over industry were to be abandoned. The Supreme Economic Council was to be scrapped, so that the scramble for raw materials could be resumed and Wall Street speculators could buy up everything in sight. To Robbie Budd all this was proof that the world naturally belonged to vigorous, acquisitive persons like himself. He was here to consult with others of his sort, and make certain that American diplomatic and naval authorities would co-operate with American oil men endeavoring to obtain their share of a product for which there was no substitute.
III
Johannes Robin came to Paris to consult his business associate. He brought with him a suitcase full of letters, contracts, and financial statements, and Lanny had lunch with the two, and listened while the Jewish enterpriser explained the various affairs in which he had been using Robbie's money. Things hadn't gone so well as he had hoped, because the delays in the peace settlement had held up transportation and credit. Meanwhile storage charges were eating up a share of the profits; but still, there would be goodly sums left, and Robbie professed himself as satisfied with what had been done.
They went upstairs to their suite, and Robbie settled down to look over the documents, with his associate explaining them. Lanny went along, because Mr. Robin said he had brought more snapshots of his family, also a present, a copy of Hansi's “Opus I,” a violin etude; the copy made by the fifteen-year-old composer's own hands. Lanny sat down to study it and became absorbed; he had heard so much about that talented and hard-working lad who wanted to be his friend and adorer. He could see right away what had happened: Hansi had learned to perform a number of difficult technical feats on the violin, and in his composition he had been concerned to give himself an opportunity to do them all. But then, most performers' compositions are like that; you take it for granted, as you do the make-up and mannerisms of a “professional beauty.”
Mr. Robin was so interested in Lanny's interest that he could hardly keep his mind on the business documents. When Lanny said: “That's a lovely theme just after the cadenza,” the fond father turned pink with pleasure. “Can you really get it without hearing it?” he exclaimed; and of course Lanny was pleased to have his musical accomplishments admired. Perhaps the Jewish businessman knew that Lanny would be pleased — thus human relationships are complicated by the profit motive! Anyhow, Lanny promised to take the composition home with him and master the piano part, in preparation for the day when he and the young composer would play their first duet.
Robbie told his new associate about his plans to break into the oil game, and the latter said he would like to put his profits into that venture. Living in the land of Henri Deterding, he knew quite a lot about the oil business, and the two of them talked as equals in the fascinating game of profit-hunting. To Lanny they resembled two sleek and capable panthers which have met in the jungle and decided to work together for the quicker finding and bringing down of their prey. One had been born in a mud hut in Poland and the other in an aristocratic mansion in New England, but modern standardization had brought them to a point where they talked in shorthand, as it were — they understood each other without the need of completing a sentence. Lanny had a lot of fun teasing his father about it afterward, and trying to decide whether the new firm was to be known as Robbie and Robin, or Robin and Robbie. A delicate point in verbal aesthetics — or was it in social precedence? Of course, said the youth, when they had conquered the world and possessed its oil, they would be known as “R. & R.” The Dutch partner in this combination said that as soon as peace was certain he was planning to move his office and family to Berlin. Hansi had learned about all he could in Rotterdam; and for the father there would be extraordinary opportunities of profit in Germany in the next few years. He would keep his Rotterdam office, and turn all his money into guilders and dollars. With the reparations settlement as it was, the mark was bound to lose value; the only way, short of repudiation, for Germany to reduce her internal debts. Incidentally, by inflation, she could collect large sums from foreigners, who believed in the mark and were buying it now. Johannes Robin said there was much argument among Dutch traders on this point, and of course fortunes would be made or lost on the guess. Robbie was inclined to agree with his new partner, but advised him that it would be safer to buy properties and goods, which would be thrown on the market for almost nothing in a collapse of the German money system.
IV
The ministry of the Socialist Scheidemann resigned; he wouldn't sign the treaty. Brockdorff-Rantzau wouldn't sign. But somebody had to sign, for it was clear that Germany had no other course. The new ministry sent word that it would bow to the inevitable; but still they didn't send anybody. President Wilson was impatient to return to Washington, where a special session of the new Congress had been waiting for him for more than a month. But the ceremony of signing had to be put off day after day. It was most annoying, and offensive to the dignity of the victorious Great Powers.
Lanny went to call on Lincoln Steffens at his hotel. After listening to his father and his father's new business associate, the youth wanted someone to tell him that the world wasn't created entirely to have money made out of it. Sitting in his little hotel room, confined by a cold, Stef said that the money-makers were having their own way everywhere; but the trouble was they couldn't agree among themselves, and kept flinging the world into one mess after another. So there were revolts; and the question was, would these revolts be blind, or would they have a program?
Stef told what had just happened to an artist friend of his, a brilliant cartoonist of Greenwich Village, the artists' quarter of New York. Robert Minor had gone in a fine state of enthusiasm to look at the new revolutionary Russia, and had then come to Paris. He visited the headquarters of the railwaymen, then threatening their strike, and told them what the Russians were doing. As a result, a couple of French flics had picked him up at his lodgings and taken him to the Préfecture and grilled him for half a day; then they had turned him over to the American army authorities at Koblenz, who had held him prisoner in secret for several weeks. They had talked about shooting him; but he had managed to smuggle out word as to his whereabouts, and the labor press of Paris had taken up the case. It happened that “Bob's” father was a judge in Texas and an influential Democrat; so in the end the army authorities had turned their prisoner loose.
Lanny mentioned how his Uncle Jesse likewise had been questioned by the police, and had threatened them with publicity. Jesse had been sure they wouldn't jail an American just for making speeches.
“This was a special kind of speech,” answered Stef. “Bob advised the railway men how to stop the invasion of the Black Sea by calling a strike on the railroads to Marseille.”
“Yes, I suppose that's different,” the youth agreed.
The muckraker asked whether Lanny hadn't been spied on himself. Lanny was surprised, and said he hadn't thought about it. Stef replied: “Better think!” He imparted a piece of news — that two of those members of the Crillon staff who had tried to resign had had dictographs put in their rooms — presumably by the Army Intelligence. This news worried Lanny more than he cared to let his friend know.
“How do you know a spy when you meet him?” he asked, and the other answered that often you didn't until it was too late. It was generally somebody who agreed with your pinkest ideas and went you one or two better. Lanny said he hadn't met anyone like that as yet — unless it was Stef himself!
This world observer, whose ideas were so hard to puzzle out, told some of his own experiences since his return from Russia. The Intelligence had thought it necessary to dog his footsteps continually. “There is a Captain Stratton — ”
“Oh, yes!” broke in the youth. “I saw a lot of him at the Crillon.”
“Well, he and another officer took the trouble to get the next table in a restaurant where I was dining with a friend. I saw that they were listening to our talk so I invited them over, and told them all about what I had learned in Russia, and had reported to Colonel House. I tried my best to convert them.”
“Did you succeed?” asked Lanny, delighted.
“Well, they stopped following me. Maybe the reason was what President Wilson did a day or two later. I suppose he had heard that I was being shadowed, and he chose a tactful way to stop it. You understand, he has refused to see me and hear what I have to report on Russia; having made up his 'one-track mind' that he's not going to stop the war on the Soviets, he doesn't want to be upset by my facts. But he knows how I came to go to Russia, and he has no right to discredit me. I was one of a crowd of newspapermen waiting in the lobby of the hotel, when he passed through and saw me, and he came and bent over me and pretended to whisper something into my ear. He didn't say a word that I could make out; he just made murmurs. Of course his purpose was to tell everybody that I still had his confidence.”
“So now you can be as pink as you please!” chuckled the other.
V
The German delegation arrived, and the much-postponed signing was set for the twenty-eighth of June. The signers were two subordinates, but the Allies were determined to make a ceremony of it. The setting was the great Hall of Mirrors of the Versailles palace, where the victorious Germans had established their empire forty-eight years earlier, and had forced the French to sign the humiliating peace surrendering Alsace-Lorraine. Now the tables were turned, and with all pomp and circumstance the two distressed German envoys would put their signatures to the statement that their country alone had been to blame for the World War.
Every tourist in France visits the Versailles palace, and wanders through the magnificent apartment where once the Sun King ate his meals and the population had the hereditary right to enter and stare at the greatest of all monarchs gulping his potage and at his queen and princesses nibbling their entremets. Lanny had been there with his mother and Kurt, motored by Harry Murchison, nearly six years back; that lovely October day stood out in his memory, and as he recalled it he had many strange thoughts. Suppose that on that day he had been able by some psychic feat to peer into the future and know that his German friend, adoring his mother, was to become her lover! Suppose that Beauty had been able to perform the feat and foresee what was going to happen to Marcel — would she have married Harry Murchison instead? Or suppose that the Germans, at the signing of the first Peace of Versailles, had been able to foresee the second!
Only about a thousand persons could be admitted to witness the ceremony, and Lanny Budd was not among the chosen ones. If he had cared very much he might have been able to wangle a ticket from his Crillon friends, whom he still met at Mrs. Emily's and other places. But he told himself that he had witnessed a sufficiency of ceremonies to last the rest of his days. No longer had he the least pleasure in gazing upon important elderly gentlemen, each brushed and polished by his valet from the tips of his shoes to the roof of his topper. The colonel from Texas wore this symbol of honorificabilitudinitas on occasions where etiquette required it, but he carried along his comfortable Texas sombrero in a paper bag, and exchanged head-coverings as soon as the ceremony was completed. Nothing so amusing had happened in Paris since Dr. Franklin had gone about town without a wig.
The important thing now was that the much-debated document would be signed and peace returned to the world. Or would it? On the table in his hotel room lay newspapers in which he could read that the treaty to be signed that day left France helpless before the invading foe; and others which insisted that it was a document of class repression, designed to prepare the exploitation of the workers of both Germany and France. Lanny had read both, and wished there was some authority that would really tell a young fellow what to believe!
VI
The telephone rang: the office of the hotel announcing “Monsieur Zhessie Bloc-less” — accent on the last syllable. Lanny didn't want to have his uncle come up, because that would look like intimacy, so displeasing to Robbie if he should happen to return. “I'll be down at once,” he said.
In the lobby of the marble-walled Hotel Vendéme he sat and exchanged family news with his relative who didn't fit the surroundings, but looked like a down-at-heels artist lacking the excuse of youth. Uncle Jesse wanted to know, first, what the devil was Beauty doing in Spain? When Lanny answered vaguely, he said: “You don't have to hide things from me. I can guess it's a man.”
But Lanny said: “She will tell you when she gets ready,” and that was that.
More urgently the painter was interested to know what had become of that mysterious personage who had paid him three silent midnight visits. At the risk of seeming uncordial, Lanny could only say again that his lips were sealed. “But I fear he won't visit you any more,” he said. “You know about the public event which is to happen today.”
“Yes, but that isn't going to make any difference,” insisted the other. “It doesn't mean a thing.” They were speaking with caution,
and the painter kept glancing about to be sure no one was overhearing. “Your friends are still going to be in trouble. They are going to have to struggle — for a long, long time.”
“Maybe so,” said Lanny; “and it may be they'll call on you again. But as matters stand, I'm not in a position to inquire about it, and that's all I can say.”
The uncle was disappointed and a trifle vexed. He said that when the owners of hunting forests put out fodder for the deer in winter, the creatures got the habit of coming to the place and thereafter didn't scuffle so hard for themselves. Lanny smiled and said he had observed it in the forests of Silesia; but when it was a question of scuffling or starving, doubtless they would resume scuffling.
“Well,” said the painter, “if you happen to meet your friend, give him these.” He took a little roll of papers from the breast pocket of his coat. “These are samples of the leaflets we have printed. I've marked on each one the number of copies distributed, so he can see that none of his fodder has been wasted.”
“All right,” said Lanny. “I'll give them to him if I see him.” He put the papers into his own pocket, and sought for another topic of conversation. He told of visiting Stef and how Stef had a cold. He repeated some of the muckraker's stories about espionage on the Reds.
“I, too, have tried the plan of chatting with the flics,” said the painter. “But I've found no idealism in their souls.”
Lanny repeated the question he had asked of Stef. “How do you recognize a flic?”
“I wouldn't know how to describe them,” replied the other. “But when you've seen a few you know the type. They are always stupid, and when they try to talk like one of us it's pathetic.”
There was a pause. “Well, I'll get along,” said Jesse. “Robbie may be coming and I don't want to annoy him. No need to tell him that I called.”
“I won't unless he asks me,” replied the nephew.
“And put those papers where he won't see them. Of course you can read them if you wish, but the point is, I'm not giving them to you for that purpose.”
“I get you,” said Lanny, with a smile.
VII
The youth saw his visitor part way to the door and then went to the apparatus you called a “lift” when you were talking to an Englishman, an “elevator” to an American. At the same moment a man who had been sitting just across the lobby, supposedly reading a newspaper but in reality watching over the top of it, arose from his seat and followed. Another man, who had been standing in the street looking through the window, came in at the door. Lanny entered the elevator and the first man followed him and said to the operator: “Attendez.” The second man arrived and entered and they went up.
When they reached Lanny’s floor he stepped out, and so did the other two. As soon as the operator had closed the door, one man stepped to Lanny's right and the other to his left and said in French: “Pardon, Monsieur. We are agents of the Sûreté.”
Lanny's heart gave a mighty thump; he stopped, and so almost did the heart. “Well?” he said.
“It will be necessary for you to accompany us to the Préfecture.” The man drew back the lapel of his coat and showed his shield.
“What is the matter?” demanded the youth.
“I am sorry, Monsieur, it is not permitted to discuss the subject. You will be told by the commissaire.”
So, they were after him! And maybe they had him! Wild ideas of resistance or flight surged into his mind; it was the first time he had ever been arrested and he had no habit pattern. But they were determined-looking men, and doubtless were armed. He decided to preserve his position as a member of the privileged classes. “You are making a very silly mistake,” he said, “and it will get you into trouble.”
“If so, Monsieur will pardon us, I trust,” said the elder of the two. “Monsieur resides in this hotel?”
“I do.”
“Then Monsieur will kindly escort us to his room.”
Lanny hesitated. His father's business papers were in that room and Robbie certainly wouldn't like to have them examined by strangers. “Suppose I refuse?” he inquired.
“Then it will be necessary for us to take you.”
Lanny had the roomkey in his pocket, and of course the two men could take it from him. He knew that they could summon whatever help they needed. “All right,” he said, and led them to the room and unlocked the door.
The spokesman preceded him and the other followed, closed the door, and fastened it; then the former said: “Monsieur will kindly give me the papers which he has in his pocket.”
Ah, so they had been watching him and Uncle Jesse! Lanny had read detective novels, and knew that it was up to him to find some way to chew up these papers and swallow them. But a dozen printed leaflets would make quite a meal, and he lacked both appetite and opportunity. He took them out and handed them to the flic, who put them into his own pocket without looking at them. “You will pardon me, Monsieur” — they were always polite to well-dressed persons, Lanny had been told. Very deftly, and as inoffensively as possible, the second man made certain that Lanny didn't have any weapon on him. In so doing he discovered some letters in the youth's coat pocket, and these also were transferred to the pockets of the elder detective. Lanny ran over quickly in his mind what was in the letters: one from his mother — fortunately she had been warned, and wrote with extreme reserve. One from Rosemary, an old one, long-cherished — how fortunate the English habit of reticence! One from his eleven-year-old half-sister — that was the only real love letter.
Lanny was invited to sit down, and the younger flic stood by, never moving his eyes from him. Evidently they must be thinking they had made an important capture. The elder man set to work to search the suite; the escritoire, the bureau drawers, the suitcases — he laid the latter on the bed and went through them, putting everything of significance into one of them. This included a thirty-eight automatic and a box of cartridges — which of course would seem more significant to a French detective than to an American.
If Lanny had been in possession of a clear conscience, he might have derived enjoyment from this opportunity to watch the French police chez eux, as it were. But having a very uneasy conscience indeed, he thought he would stop this bad joke if he could. “You are likely to find a number of guns in my father's luggage,” he remarked. “That is not because he shoots people, but because he sells guns.”
“Ah! Votre père est un marchand d'armes!” One had to hear it in French to get a full sense of the flic's surprise.
“Mon père est un fabricant d'armes” replied Lanny, still more impressively. “He has made for the French government a hundred million francs' worth of arms in the past five years. If he had not done so, the boches would be in Paris now, and you would be under the sod, perhaps.”
“Vraiment, Monsieur!” exclaimed the other, and stood irresolute, as if he hadn't the nerve to touch another object belonging to a person who might possibly be of such importance. “What is it that is the name of your father?” he inquired, at last.
“His name is Robert Budd.”
The other wrote it down, with Lanny spelling the letters in French. “And Monsieur's name?”
The youth spelled the name of Lanning, which a Frenchman does not pronounce without considerable practice. Then he remarked: “If you examine that gun, you will see that it has my father's name as the fabricant.”
“Ah, vraiment?” exclaimed the detective, and took the gun to the window to verify this extraordinary statement. Evidently he didn't know what to do next, and Lanny thought that his little dodge had worked. But when the detective took the bundle of leaflets from his pockets and began to examine them; and so of course Lanny knew that the jig was up. He hadn't looked at the papers, but he knew what would be in them. “Workingmen of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to gain!” The flic put the papers back into his pocket, and went on piling Robbie's papers into a suitcase. “It is a matter which the commissaire will have to determine, Monsieur.”