I
THE Peace Conference had begun its sessions. They had long debates as to whether they should debate in the English language or the French, and finally decided that they would use both, and have everything translated back and forth. They had a bitter controversy over the question whether they were going to try the Kaiser for his crimes; they had solemnly announced that they would do so, but the Kaiser was in Holland, which wouldn't give him up, and gradually the debate petered out — there were so many more urgent problems. Their armies were costing several million dollars a day, and so many women wanted their men back home!
President Wilson had set it as the first item on his program to establish a League of Nations and get it going. Everything else depended upon that, for without it you couldn't be sure that any arrangements you made would last a year. Premier Clemenceau had publicly sneered at the idea; what he believed in was the “balance of power” — which meant a group of nations strong enough to lick Germany. He and the President were now meeting daily, testing out each other's sparring power; meanwhile the American professors had to live upon scraps of gossip. Was it the Premier or the President who had been frowning when they emerged from the conference room that day?
The guessing grew hot when the problem of a League of Nations was assigned to a commission. That, obviously, represented Clemenceau's effort to shelve and forget it. But Wilson countered by appointing himself as one of the American members of the League of Nations Commission. Naturally he became chairman of it, since it was his idea and his hobby; when he began attending its daily sessions, he hadn't time to attend any other sessions, and so Clemenceau was left to fume and fret. The Americans rubbed their hands with delight. The Big Chief was really going to fight!
Everybody in the American staff began talking League. Even those who were supposed to be busy on other assignments couldn't keep their fingers out of the pie. Such a colossal enterprise, the most momentous in history! The poet Tennyson had sung about “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,” and all these professors had learned the verses in school. How much of sovereignty was each nation to part with? What representation was each to have? Should the little ones have equal power with the big ones? And what about the colonial peoples? What about the national minorities?
President Wilson had a draft of the League somewhere among his baggage. Several members of “The Inquiry” had their drafts. The British, having an “Inquiry” of their own, had prepared a layout, of which a prominent feature was that each of the British dominions should count as a separate nation and have its own delegates. The French had a plan, of which the most important feature was an international army, to make sure that Germany could never again invade France. All these plans had to be put together, in spite of their being incompatible.
II
Lanny Budd had been assigned to a room on the top floor of the Crillon, on the courtyard, along with two other secretaries. But after a couple of weeks the three were moved out to a near-by hotel, to make room for more important persons who kept arriving from America. However, Lanny still had his meals in the hotel dining room, because Professor Alston wanted him. Under the regulations he was allowed to have one guest each day. He would invite his father to meet the staff and convince himself that they were not so tender-minded as they had been imagined. He would give his mother a chance to exercise her charms upon a susceptible group of gentlemen a long way from home and not having much opportunity to enjoy feminine society.
It had been only a little more than six months since Marcel had disappeared into the furnace of war; but Beauty's grief was less, because, as she explained to Lanny, she had suffered so much of it in anticipation. This suffering had given her dignity, without depriving her of those weapons of earlier days. She was still on the good side of forty, and deducted a couple of years more in her thoughts about herself. She couldn't very well deduct more, with a son seated at her side, several inches taller than herself!
Beauty was far too much a woman of the world to pretend to knowledge before these professors; she chose the line of calling herself an ignoramus and deploring her wasted youth. “Oh, Professor Alston,” she would exclaim, “do make these wonderful ideas of yours work, so that we women in Europe won't have a nightmare pouncing down on us every generation!” It was an old practice of hers, in dealing with the male sex, to ask each about his own work, listen attentively, and express admiration. This proved as effective with scholars as with those of higher station, and Beauty might have eaten all her meals at the expense of the United States government if she had cared to accept the invitations showered upon her.
She told these learned ones about her friend Emily Chattersworth, and many of them knew the name; the older ones remembered the banking scandal, back in the bad old days when pirates had sailed the high financial seas. Mrs. Emily had rented a town house, and had teas every Thursday, and a salon on a modest scale on Sunday evenings; with her permission, Beauty invited Lanny's chief, and he went, and met important people: a member of the French cabinet, or a general just returned from service in Salonika; an English statesman who had flown from London that afternoon, or a Russian grand duke who had escaped from the Bolsheviki by way of Siberia and Manchuria. A youth who had access to social opportunities such as these was considered an unusually good secretary.
III
One of the persons whom Lanny saw most frequently was George D. Herron. This prophet of the new day came to see Alston, and they talked, and Lanny listened. Herron seemed to take a fancy to the youth, perhaps thinking of him as a possible convert. They sat on a bench by the embankment of the Seine, and the older man interpreted the events of the time in accordance with his peculiar ideas.
The only Socialist Lanny had met so far was that editor who had taken such unfair advantage of a boy's indiscretion. It appeared that Herron had called himself a Social-Democrat a couple of decades ago, and had helped to found the Socialist party in the United States; but the war had brought a violent reaction, and Social-Democracy was now in his mind a part of “Germanism,” the archenemy of the soul of man. It based itself upon materialism, denying freedom and respect for the personality. Herron's vision was of a society transformed by brotherhood and love; he found those qualities embodied in Jesus, and that was why he called himself a Christian Socialist, even while rejecting the dogmas of the churches.
On this subject he talked with the fervor of the prophets of old. For him all thinking led to the basic question whether mankind could be saved from sliding into an abyss of barbarism, a new Dark Age of materialism and hate. The late war had brought us close to the edge, and new wars now on the horizon might carry us over. He pointed to the fall of empires throughout history; what was there to save us from a similar fate? Only a vision of spiritual things which a few great souls had caught, and for the sake of which they had martyred themselves and must continue to do so.
To this tormented soul the League of Nations represented the one hope of preserving justice and peace in the world, so that the higher faculties of man might survive and be propagated. In the spring of the previous year he had written President Wilson an urgent letter on behalf of the project, and a considerable correspondence had resulted. In Paris, Wilson showed him his draft of the League, and asked his suggestions. This was known to the advisory staff, who looked upon this strange interloper with a mingling of curiosity and alarm. Perhaps he wasn't a scandalous person, but all America believed him to be that — and what would America say as to the sort of company its college professors were keeping in Paris?
It happened that Robbie Budd came to lunch and sat at table with Herron, Alston, and Lanny. The black-bearded prophet was in his most apocalyptic mood. Said he: “The salvation of the world from Germanism depends upon the salvation of Germany from her ancient barbarian self. The final value of our military success, the proof that we are worthy of it, must lie in its redemptive power. We have won a victory over the German people and we have now to win the German people to that victory. What we do must be infused by such spiritual purpose as will enable the German people to see the divine reason for it, and to enter co-operatively into the judgments and workings of that reason.”
When Lanny had been alone with his new acquaintance, listening to such words, he had been much impressed; but now he heard them through the ears of his skeptical father and they made him wriggle uncomfortably. Robbie was a self-contained man, and knew how to keep quiet when he wanted to; but when he was alone with his son, he exclaimed: “My God, who is that nut?” When Lanny told him that the fervid orator was one of President Wilson's trusted advisers, Robbie was ready to go home and tell America that it was being governed from a lunatic asylum. The United States Senate — now safely under control of the Republican party — ought to send a committee to Europe to take charge of the peace-making!
Of course Robbie couldn't expect to keep his son in cotton wool. Lanny was in the world now and had to meet crackpots and fanatics along with sane businessmen. But at least he was going to have his father's advice. In detail, and with as much conscientiousness as any Christian Socialist, Robbie explained that the ruling class of Germany had tried to grab the trade privileges of the British Empire, and had failed. They would try again whenever they got the chance; it was life or death for one group or the other, and would continue to be that so long as men used steel in making engines, and coal and oil — not hot air — to run them with. Lanny listened, and decided that his father was right, as always.
IV
It was a time of strain and anguish, and really it wasn't easy to know what to think or do. Lanny had shared in his own soul the griefs of the people of France and could understand their dread of a wicked government which had inflicted them. For Lanny the soul of France was embodied in the memories of his stepfather; and always he tried to imagine, what would Marcel have felt about the peace-making and the various problems which kept arising in connection with it?
One thing seemed certain: Marcel would not have approved the deliberate starving of women and children. The Germans had assumed that the blockade would be lifted when they signed the armistice; but the French had no such thought. Nothing was to go into Germany until she had accepted and signed the peace terms which France meant to lay down. But the treaty wasn't ready yet, and meanwhile children were crying with hunger.
To the members of the American delegation this seemed an atrocious thing. They protested to the President, and he in turn to Clemenceau — but in vain. Herbert Hoover, who had been feeding the Belgians, wanted also to feed the defeated peoples; he did finally, as a great concession, get the right to send a relief mission to Austria — but nothing to Germany. Marshal Foch stood like a block of concrete in the pathway. Lanny saw him coming out from the conference room where this issue was fought over; a stocky little man with a gray mustache, voluble, talking with excited gestures, demanding his pound of flesh. He was commander-in-chief of the Allied armies and he gave the orders. A singular thing — he was a devout Catholic, went every morning to mass, and kneeled to a merciful redeemer who had said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” Little French children, of course; no little German children!
This was one of the things which tormented Herron. He talked incessantly about a “Carthaginian peace,” such as the Romans had imposed when they razed a great city to the ground and drove its population into exile. If France imposed a peace of vengeance upon Germany, it would mean that “Germanism” had won the war; it would mean that France had adopted Germany's false religion, and that the old France of the Revolution, the France of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” was no more. The black-bearded prophet suffered so over the hunger of the blockaded peoples that he couldn't eat his own food.
He would come to the Crillon to consult with Alston, whom he trusted because he had known him as a lad. A sense of agonized impotence possessed him; to see the world drifting to shipwreck, and know what ought to be done, but be helpless to get it done; to give advice and have it accepted — but not acted upon. To see intrigue, personal jealousy, factional strife, blocking the hopes of mankind. There was all that sort of thing at the Crillon, of course; there were those who had the President's ear, and others who sought to get it, and pulled wires and flattered and fawned. There were some who were not above repeating scandals and raking up old tragedies. “Of course I'm a marked man,” said Herron. “I cannot be recognized publicly; but that doesn't change the fact that I know Europe better than any of those whom the President is meeting.”
V
Many times in these days Lanny had occasion to recall the words which the Graf Stubendorf had spoken, concerning “the dark cloud of barbarism in the eastern sky.” In five years that cloud had spread until it threatened to cover the firmament; it was of the hue of Stygian midnight, and its rim was red and dripping a bloody rain. No longer the Russian Tsar with his Cossacks and their whips, no longer Pan-Slavism with its marching hosts, but the dread Bolshevism, which not only formed armies, but employed a new and secret poison which penetrated the armies of its enemies, working like a strong acid, disintegrating what it touched. A good part of the secret conferences going on in Paris had to do with this peril and how to meet it. There were some who thought it made no difference what decisions the Peace Conference took, because it was all going to be swept away in a Red upheaval throughout Central Europe.
As the friends of Lanny Budd portrayed it to him, two evil creatures had been spewed up from the Russian cesspool, and had managed to seize power. They were still holding on to it — in spite of the fact that the newspapers reported Lenin as shooting Trotsky and Trotsky as poisoning Lenin about once a week. They had led the workers and peasants in a campaign of massacre, and the nobility and land owners of the Tsar's realm had fled, counting themselves lucky if they had a few jewels sewed up in the lining of their coats. Paris was full of these refugees, with pitiful and ghastly tales to tell; Lanny heard some of them, and his mother, in her incompetent way, made efforts to help the victims. It seemed to her sympathetic soul unbearable that people who had never had to work and so didn't know how to work should suddenly find themselves without money to pay for their meals. Robbie had to tell her more than once that his fortune was not equal to supporting the Russian aristocracy in the state to which it had been accustomed.
Of course Europe had to protect itself against this Red menace, said Lanny's friends; and so the Allied armies had established what they called a cordon sanitaire around the vast former empire of the Tsar. The Japanese and the Americans had seized Vladivostok and the eastern half of the Trans-Siberian railway. The British and Americans had occupied Archangel and Murmansk in the far North, blocking all commerce by that route. Along the European land front the Allied troops stood on guard, and French and British officers were busy organizing anti-Bolshevik Russians, and providing them with arms and money and sending them into the Ukraine, Russian Poland, and the Baltic provinces. This fighting had been going on for a year now, and each day Lanny read in the papers of “White” victories and was assured that soon the dreadful menace would be at an end.
But it was like a forest fire, whose sparks flew through the air; or perhaps a plague, whose carriers burrow underground and come up through rat-holes. The emissaries of the Bolsheviks would sneak through the sanitary cordon, and creep into the slums of some city of Central Europe, telling the hungry workers how the Russians had made a revolution, and offering to help do the same. The armies would catch many of them and shoot them; but there were always more. Even before the armistice, a Jewish “Red” by the name of Eisner had seized the government of Bavaria; in Berlin two others named Liebknecht and Luxemburg — the latter a woman, known as “Red Rosa” — were carrying on a war in the streets, seeking to take power from the Socialist government which had arisen in Germany after the overthrow of the Kaiser. In Hungary it was the same; a member of the nobility who called himself a Socialist, Count Karolyi, had given his estates in an effort to help the poor of that starving land, but now a Bolshevik Jew was leading a movement to unseat him and set up Soviets on the Russian pattern.
Always it was a Jew, people pointed out to Lanny; and this kindled to flame the anti-Semitic feeling always latent among the fashionable classes of Europe. “What did we tell you?” they would say. “The Jews have no country; they are seeking to undermine and destroy Christian society. It is a worldwide conspiracy of this arrogant people.” Robbie said something along this line; and Lanny grinned and replied: “Be careful, you've got a Jewish partner now!”
Robbie made a wry face. His Anglo-Saxon conscience troubled him, and his aristocratic feelings resented the odor of the junk business. But Johannes Robin had bought a couple of hundred thousand hand grenades, and had already sold the powder before he had got it extracted. The prospects looked excellent; and Robbie Budd just couldn't bear to sit on a big pile of money and not make use of it — the use, of course, being to make more money.
VI
One day when Lanny went to lunch he found at his table a young army officer, introduced as Captain Stratton; handsome, well set up, as they all were, full of smartness and efficiency. Military uniforms were plentiful in the Crillon dining room, as all over Paris; someone had counted up the soldiers of twenty-six different nations to be found in the capital at that time. Captain Stratton was connected with the Intelligence Service of the army, and it — was his special task to watch out for any efforts of the Bolsheviks among the doughboys. It was a confidential subject, but the officer was in the midst of persons who had a right to know what was going on.
He talked interestingly about his work. He said that the slum denizens were in a state close to madness, with hunger, the fever of war, and the vision of sudden power. It couldn't be said that they were without training for power, for they had a sort of discipline of their own; in fact, they had a whole culture, which they called “proletarian,” and which was to replace our present culture, called “bourgeois.” A truly frightening thing, said the officer, who before the war had been a rising young architect in Chicago. “I was never afraid of the Huns,” he declared, “but I admit that I'm afraid of these Reds.”
Just recently, he went on to tell, he had come upon evidence of the activities of a press on which had been printed leaflets addressed to the denizens of the Paris slums, calling upon them to rise against the profiteers and seize the food which was in the depots, and which the bureaucrats were refusing to release. The captain had one of these leaflets with him; it ended with a string of slogans followed by exclamation points, and was signed by the Conseils des Ouvriers de St.-Denis. “They don't say Soviets,” remarked the officer. “But that's what the word means.”
Then even more startling news: he expected to have proof that these agitators were preparing an appeal to the American troops to break ranks and go home. These troops had enlisted to oust the Kaiser, and why should they stay to hold the workers of Europe in slavery to landlords and money barons? It was a plausible argument.
“Surely you're going to stop that!” exclaimed one of the professors.
“We'll have to,” replied the officer. “But it's a bit awkward, because the fellow who is most active in the matter happens to be an American.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Well, my God, if you arrest an American Red in Paris, you can't keep it away from the newspapers; then all the agitators at home will be swarming like hornets.”
Professor Davisson, who specialized in the Balkan languages, and had just come back from a mission to the Bulgarian front, expressed the opinion that the unprintable scoundrel ought to be dealt with by military law at once. To this Alston interposed a question: “What's the use of having licked the Germans if you have to sacrifice American free speech in the procèss?”
“Do you think that free speech means the right to overthrow the government which protects your free speech?” demanded Davisson “Free speech doesn't overthrow governments,” answered the other. “It's the lack of free speech.”
“You mean you'd let Bolsheviks incite our troops to mutiny?”
“They wouldn't get anywhere, Davisson — not unless there was something wrong with what the army was doing.”
So they argued, and got rather hot about it, as men were apt to do these days; until one of them, wishing to dissipate the storm clouds, asked of Captain Stratton: “What sort of fellow is it that's printing the leaflets?”
“He calls himself a painter, but I don't know if he works at it. He's lived most of his life over here, and I guess he's absorbed what the Reds call their 'ideology.”
“Budd knows a lot of painters here,” said Lanny's employer. “What's the man's name?”
“I don't think I'm at liberty to tell that,” replied the captain. “Perhaps I shouldn't have said as much as I have.”
“It'll all be confidential,” said Professor Davisson, and the others nodded their confirmation. As for Lanny, he kept up a pretense of interest in his food, and prayed that nobody would notice the blood that had been stealing into his cheeks and throat, and even, so he felt, to the roots of his hair.
VII
When the party broke up, Lanny said to his chief: “I wish you'd take me upstairs to your room for a minute. There's something important I want to tell you.” When they were alone, he explained: “I can't be sure, but I think the man Captain Stratton was talking about is my uncle, Jesse Blackless.”
“The heck you say!” exclaimed the startled professor.
“I thought you ought to know right away, because it might prove embarrassing if it comes out.”
Lanny told briefly about this “red sheep” of his mother's family. “There aren't apt to be two American painters who are such active Reds. I know he's in Paris now, because he came to see my mother, to advise her about the best way to arrange for an exhibition of my stepfather's paintings.”
“Well, well!” said the professor. “A trifle awkward, I must admit.”
“It could be terribly so. I'm afraid there's nothing for me but to quit before the story breaks.”
The older man smiled. “No, you don't get off so easily! I assure you, I need you too badly. We'll work out some other solution.”
“But what can it be?”
“Let me think. Do you suppose you could get hold of this uncle of yours?”
“I suppose he'll have left his address with my mother.”
“Well, we'll have to be quick, before the army people grab him.”
“What do you want to do with him?”
“First, we'll have a talk with him and see what his ideas are, and how much he knows. Then I thought it might be well to take him to Colonel House, and possibly to the President.”
Lanny could only stare, wondering if he had heard aright.
“You see,” explained his chief, noting his expression, “there are two ways to deal with social discontent — one is to throw it into jail and the other is to try to understand it. The President has had to do some of the former under the stress of war, but I'm sure that in his heart he much prefers understanding. Right now, I happen to know that he's deadlocked with the French over the question of what's to be done about Russia. Can you keep a really important secret?”
“I've been keeping a lot of them, Professor.”
“I had a tip this morning which I believe to be straight — that the President is thinking of moving for a conference with the Bolsheviks at some neutral place. So you see, it might be in order for Colonel House or someone who represents him to get in touch with these people, to find out what their attitude would be. Do you suppose you could find your uncle today?”
“First I'd have to get my father's consent,” replied the youth. “I gave him my word that I'd not have anything to do with my uncle. That was five or six years ago, and he mayn't feel the same now.”
“Tell him it's an order from the boss,” smiled Alston.
VIII
Needless to say, Robbie Budd didn't like it a bit when his son brought him that proposition. Lanny couldn't tell the whole story, being under orders regarding the “Intelligence” aspect of it; he could only say that the peace experts wanted to talk with some Bolsheviks, to know what concessions they were willing to make. To the salesman of armaments it seemed an outrage that any government should be willing to do anything with such scoundrels but shoot them; however, Lanny pointed out that the Allied troops were clamoring to go home, and statesmanship required that some compromise should be worked out. So quickly was a youth of nineteen catching the official tone!
Robbie didn't smile, for he wished his son to take his duties seriously. “All right,” said he. “But I want you to know, I'll be damned unhappy if I see you getting mixed up with that blatherskite Jesse.”
“Don't worry,” answered Lanny. “This is a job, and I want to do it as capably as I can, and maybe it'll take me to the President.”
Beauty gave her brother's address, up on the Butte Montmartre, where painters and other irregular people lived. Beauty scented a mystery in her son's inquiry and it was cruel to have to put her off; but Lanny just said that one of the professors was interested in painting and might buy something. No use trusting any secrets to Madame Detaze, veuve!
Taking the address to his chief, Lanny said: “I've been thinking this matter over and it occurs to me that it may be awkward if I don't tell my uncle about the army people. If later they should jump on him — he'd be sure to think I'd been helping to trap him or something.”
“I've thought of that also,” replied the other. “I'm going with you to see him, and then I'll have a frank talk with Captain Stratton. If the Crillon is interested in the man, Intelligence will lay off, of course.”
The taxis were back from the war and were being driven about the streets of Paris by homicidal maniacs. Lanny and his chief were whirled down the Rue Montmartre, and Lanny pointed out the window of the restaurant through which Jaurès had been shot. Alston said that the French authorities might have been glad to have the help of that great orator now, while their workers were seething with discontent. The cab whirled round a corner and down a crooked street — another “cabbage patch,” with crowded old buildings. It was one of the rare days when the sun shone in January, and slatternly women were leaning out of windows, and swarms of children playing all but under the wheels of the taxi.
Lanny explained to his chief that Uncle Jesse didn't have to live in such a place, for he enjoyed a modest income from an inheritance. Apparently he wanted to be close to the people. Alston said there were men like that; sometimes they were saints, and sometimes a bit crazy, and sometimes both.
IX
“Entrez,” called Jesse Blackless, at their knock. He was sitting in an old dressing gown by the open window, working on a manuscript. Beside him was a table, looking like the one which Lanny remembered in the cabin on the Riviera; the remains of a meal, a tobacco pouch and a bad-smelling pipe, a great quantity of books and papers which apparently were never moved or dusted. The canvas cot which served as a bed was unmade, and there was an open book on the floor beside it, as if it had been laid there when the reader was ready to go to sleep. An overcoat thrown over a chair, an umbrella on it — in short, general disorder and the absence of the feminine touch. There were unframed paintings on the walls, but no easel and no smell of paint. Apparently Uncle Jesse had given up art for politics.
He looked startled when his nephew came in, followed by a strange gentleman. He put his manuscript away in a hurried manner and his eyes moved to the door, as if he expected a couple of gendarmes might follow.
“Hello, Uncle Jesse,” said the youth.
“Hello,” returned the other, not rising.
“Uncle Jesse, this is Professor Alston, my chief at the Crillon.”
“How do you do?” said the painter; but he didn't offer to shake hands, and he didn't say: “Have a seat” — which, indeed, would have been difficult, since the only extra chair was piled with papers. His manner said: “What's this?”
“Uncle Jesse,” explained Lanny, “Professor Alston asked me to bring him to you because he has an important proposition to put and he hopes you'll be kind enough to hear it.”
The painter, of course, knew that his nephew had been avoiding him for years and that this had been at Robbie's orders. He knew also that the youth had taken a job with the peace-makers. He looked over the mild and bespectacled professor, whose physical vigor hadn't improved much under the strain of hard work in damp and chilly Paris. There was no abatement of the uncle's hostile manner as he said: “All right. What is it?”
Frankly, but at the same time tactfully, the scholar explained the efforts of the American commission to bring at least a partially sane peace out of an insane war. President Wilson was being opposed, not merely by all the jealousies and greeds and fears of Europe, but by the reactionary elements at home, the big-money interests and our newly awakened militarism. Just now there was a crisis over the subject of Russia and a decision might be taken at any hour. The President wanted to get the warring factions together in a council hall; while the French and British military men wanted invasions on a big scale.
“I don't know whether you have heard it or not,” said Alston, “but Winston Churchill is in Paris now, for the purpose of urging a real war to put down Bolshevism. Foch has been demanding it from the day of the armistice, and the whole French General Staff is with him. Clemenceau is beginning to waver — and of course Lloyd George wavers all the time.”
“What's the use of telling all this to me?” questioned Uncle Jesse.
The professor looked about him uneasily, and asked: “May I sit down? I have not been well.”
The painter knew that he hadn't been a gentleman, and he stood up. “Have my chair,” he said.
“This is all right,” replied the other, and sat on the edge of the cot. Lanny pushed some books aside and rested on a corner of the table.
“Mr. Blackless, nobody in our staff at the Crillon wants any more war; and there's a group of us who are convinced that concessions have to be made and an armistice brought about in Russia before there can be any real peace. That doesn't mean that we are sympathetic to Bolshevism, but it does mean that we have studied the forces which brought on the revolution, and we don't consider it possible to set back the clock of history. My own position is entirely that of a scientist — ”
“What sort of a scientist?”
“I am a geographer and ethnologist, but just now I have been set the task of finding out what some of the peoples of Europe want.”
“You have your hands full, Professor.”
“No doubt of that; and I have the right to ask for the help of every well-meaning man.”
“What leads you to think that I am well-meaning?”
“I think it of every man, Mr. Blackless, until he shows me otherwise. I assume that you don't want to see any more war in Europe.”
“You assume incorrectly, Professor.”
“You do want war?”
“I tell the workers to fight for their rights, and I hope they will do so until they have overthrown the capitalist system.”
“But surely you can't think that the Russians can defeat the Allied armies, if they decide seriously to fight!”
“My answer is that if the Allied armies believed they could defeat the Russians, they'd be fighting right now. I take your visit as a sign that the Allied leaders are beginning to find out what the rank and file of their troops are thinking and saying. Lloyd George and Clemenceau will have to face it, and even Foch and the lineal descendant of the Duke of Marlborough.”
So Lanny and his employer knew that they had found a real Bolshevik; one who could tell President Wilson exactly what was in the hearts of men and women who were risking their lives trying to make revolutions throughout Europe!
X
Jesse Blackless appeared to be showing the effects of mental strain. The lines around his eyes were more plentiful and those at the sides of his mouth more deeply graven. He was balder than ever, but the bare scalp wasn't so bronzed — he had, presumably, been living in cities and wearing a hat. He was even more gaunt and his voice seemed hoarse, as if he had been talking a lot. Doubtless he had much to say to proletarians, as he called them; but with bourgeois persons like Lanny and his chief he didn't care to be bothered — or so his manner seemed to say. He didn't argue, he told you, and there came that disagreeable twist of the mouth. Lanny had always disliked this strange man, and did now; but he had to admit that he had convictions and stood by them.
Just now the painter was convinced that the Bolsheviks had Central Europe in their grasp. He announced it defiantly; but Alston, who had inside knowledge, stopped him with the remark: “That is all right for a stump speech or a manifesto; but are you sure it's the attitude of Lenin? Mightn't it be that he'd like a little time to collect his forces?”
The painter eyed his visitor sharply, and decided to take a different tone. “Just what is it you propose, Professor?”
“First, that you should understand me. I know you are suspicious, and doubtless you have reason in many cases. But you waste time if you suspect me. I am a scholar who doesn't like bloodshed and has come over here to help make peace. In this visit to you I have no authority from anybody. I came on my own impulse, when Lanny told me about his uncle. Knowing the situation at the Crillon, I thought some of my superiors might like to confer with you.”
“A fine time I'd have explaining to my friends if I took up with the Crillon!”
“Don't your friends trust you, Mr. Blackless?”
“A certain distance; but not that far!”
“There's no reason why you shouldn't tell them in advance that you are going, and why. There is nothing secret about my visit. You will see that I ask you no questions — who your associates are, or anything of that sort. I take it for granted that you may know where to find some persons who are in touch with the Bolsheviks and could discuss with us the basis for a conference.”
“Suppose I should go to the Crillon and not come out again?”
The professor smiled. “Be reasonable, Mr. Blackless. Undoubtedly the French military authorities know your address, and can come here just as well as I can. That goes for the Americans also. I can't give you any guarantees — except that anything that happens to you won't be of my doing. On the other hand, if the Crillon should invite you to come and talk to them, it would certainly be a bona-fide invitation to a conference and would confer immunity upon you for the time being.”
Said Jesse Blackless: “I think the man you need to talk with is Sazonov.” This was the former Foreign Minister of the Tsar, now in Paris, and the remark was, of course, a sneer.
“We don't have to go to any of the Whites,” replied Alston, patiently. “They come to us in droves. They tell us they will have nothing to do with assassins and bloody-handed murderers, and so on. They demand that we give them unlimited arms and money so that they can crush the Reds. That happens to be the idea of the military men, including some of the Americans, I am sorry to say. But fortunately it is the civil authorities who have the decision. Trust me, Mr. Blackless, and help me to get your point of view before the Council of Ten, right now while the subject is up for settlement.”
“You mean, it's your idea that the Bolsheviks shall come to Paris and sit down with the Whites?”
“Not in Paris — Clemenceau would never allow that. It would be somewhere close to Russia, and far from here.”
“You think the Whites would come?”
“I'll put it crudely, Mr. Blackless, as you seem to prefer. The Allies are the paymasters.”
Uncle Jesse smiled one of his crooked smiles. “And you imagine that we would give up to the Whites — is that it?”
“At a conference, Mr. Blackless, both sides have to give up something, unless the conference is to fail. But first there has to be a conference — that is the most difficult point.”
The painter considered for a while longer. Finally he said: “All right, Professor. I'll talk to some other persons, and let you hear from me in a few hours.”