Пользователь - WORLD'S END

"If it's a league that France and England make, it will be a league to hold Germany down."

Lanny saw that it wouldn't do any good to argue. For a German officer, as for a French one, it was still war. "We Americans are doing everything in our power," he declared. "It just takes time for passions to cool off."

"What you Americans should have done was to keep out of it. It wasn't your fight."

"Maybe so, Kurt. I wasn't for going in, and now most of our men at the Crillon are doing their best to reconcile and appease. Do what you can to help us."

"How can we do anything when we're not allowed near your so-called 'conference'?"

A hopeless situation! Lanny looked at his watch, recalling that there would be an Armenian gentleman waiting for him at the hotel. "My time isn't my own," he explained, and rose to go.

Kurt rose also. But Beauty interposed. "Kurt, you oughtn't to go out until after dark!"

"I came before dark," he replied.

"I don't want you to go out with Lanny," she pleaded. "Why risk both your lives? Please wait, and I'll go with you." She couldn't keep the trembling out of her voice, and her son understood that for her too the war was still being fought. "I want to talk to you about Emily Chattersworth," she added; "she and I are hoping to do something."

"All right, I'll wait," said Kurt.

IV

The deadlock among the Big Four continued; until one day came a rumor that shook the Hotel Crillon like an earthquake: President Wilson had ordered the transport George Washington to come to France at once. That meant a threat to break off the conference and go back to his own country, which so many thought he never should have left. Like other earthquakes, this one continued to rumble, and to send shivers through many buildings and their occupants. Denials came from Washington that any such order had been received. Then it was rumored that the British had held up the President's cablegram for forty-eight hours. Had they, or hadn't they? And did Wilson mean it, or was it a bluff?

Anyhow, it sufficed to send the French into a panic. Clemenceau came hurrying to the President's sickroom to inquire, and to apologize and try to patch matters up. Even though he had called the stiff Presbyterian "pro-German," he couldn't get along without him, and his departure would mean calamity. A whole train of specters haunted the French: the Germans refusing to sign, war beginning again, and revolution spreading to both countries!

They resumed meeting in the President's room, and patched up a series of compromises. They decided to let the French have the Sarre for fifteen years, during which time they could get out the coal and keep their industries going until their own mines were repaired. Then there would be a plebiscite, and the inhabitants would choose which country they preferred. The Rhineland would go back to Germany after fifteen years, permanently demilitarized. Marshal Foch went on the warpath again, and it wasn't long before he and his friends were trying to start a revolt of the French population in the Rhineland, to form a government and demand annexation to la patrie.

It was easy to understand the position of a man who had spent his life learning to train armies and to fight them. Now he had the biggest and finest army ever known in the world; troops from twenty-six nations, and more races and tribes than could be counted. Two million Americans, fresh and new, magnificent tall fellows, Utopian soldiers, you might call them - and now they were being taken away from their commander, he wasn't going to be allowed to .use them! The generalissimo had worked out detailed plans for the conquest of Bolshevism in Russia, and in Central Europe, wherever it had shown its ugly head; but the accursed politicians were turning down these plans, demobilizing the troops and shipping them home! The voluble little Frenchman was behaving like one demented.

Three sub commissions had been studying the question of reparations, but all in vain; so finally they decided to dodge the issue of fixing the total amount. Germany was to pay five billion dollars in the first two years, and after that a commission would decide how much more. Another job for the League of Nations! Woodrow Wilson was having his heart's desire, the League and the treaty were being tied together so that no one could pry them apart. But Clemenceau had his way on one basic point - Germany was not to be admitted to the League.

This last decision filled the American advisers with despair. They had been working day and night to devise an international authority which might bring appeasement to Europe, and now it was turning into just what Kurt had called it, a League to hold Germany down! There were rumors that the President was going even farther and granting the French demand for an alliance, a promise by England and America to defend her if she was again attacked. President Wilson had given way on so many points that Alston and others of the "liberal" group were in despair about him. All agreed that any such alliance would be meaningless, because the American Senate would never ratify it.

V

All day long and most of the night Lanny listened to arguments over these questions. He was not just a secretary, carrying out orders;.he was concerned about every step that was being taken, and his chief dealt with him on that basis, pouring out his hopes and fears. Lanny had the image of Kurt Meissner always before him, and he pleaded Kurt's cause whenever a chance arose. He couldn't say: "I have just talked with a friend who lives in Germany and has told me about the sickness and despair." He would say, more vaguely: "My mother has friends in Germany, and gets word about what is happening. So does Mrs. Chattersworth."

These, of course, were grave matters to occupy the mind of a young man of nineteen. With him in the hotel suite were two other secretaries, both college graduates and older than he. They also carried portfolios, and filed reports, and made abstracts, and kept lists of appointments, and interviewed less important callers, and whispered secrets of state; they worked overtime when asked to, and when they grumbled about low pay and the high cost of cigarettes, it was between themselves. But they didn't take to heart the task of saving Europe from another war, nor even of protecting Armenians from the fury of Turks. They enjoyed the abundant food which the army commissary provided, mostly out of cans - and found time to see the night life which was supposed to be characteristic of Paris, but in reality was provided for foreign visitors.

Lanny listened to the conversation of these roommates, which was frank and explicit. To them the sight of a hundred women dancing on the stage stark naked, and painted or enameled all the hues of the rainbow, was something to stare at greedily and to gossip about afterwards. To Lanny, who had been used to nakedness or near it on the Riviera, this mass production of sex excitement was puzzling. He asked questions, and gathered that these young men had been raised in communities where the human body was mysterious and shocking, so that the wholesale exposure of it was a sensational event, like seeing a whole block of houses burn down.

To these young men the need for a woman was as elementary as that for food and sleep. Arriving in a new part of the world, they had looked about for likely females, and exchanged confidences as to their discoveries. They wanted to know about Lanny's love life, and when he told them that he had been twice jilted and was nursing a broken heart, they told him to forget it, that he would be young only once. He would go off and ponder what he had heard - in between his efforts to keep the Italians from depriving the Yugoslavs of their one adequate port.

"Take the good the gods provide thee!" - so had sung an English poet in the anthology which Lanny had learned nearly by heart. That seemed to apply to the English girl secretary, Penelope Selden, who enjoyed his company and didn't mind saying so. Lanny found that he was coming to like her more and more, and he debated the problem: what was he waiting for? Was he still in love with Rosemary? But that hadn't kept him from being happy with Gracyn. It was all very well to dream about a great and permanent love, but time passed and there was none in sight. Was he hoping that Rosemary might some day come back to the Riviera? But she was expecting a baby, the future heir to a great English title. Lanny had written to her from Paris, and had a nice cool friendly reply, telling the news about herself and their common friends. All her letters had been like that, and Lanny assumed it was the epistolary style of the English aristocracy.

He reviewed all over again the question of his sexual code, and that of his friends of the grand monde. The great and permanent love theory had gone out of fashion, if indeed it ever had been in fashion with anybody but poets and romancers. Rich and important persons made what were called marriages of convenience. If you were the son or daughter of a beer baron or diamond king, you bought a title; if you were a member of the aristocracy, you sold one, and the lawyers sat down and agreed upon what was called a "settlement." You had a showy public wedding, as a result of which two or three new members of your exclusive social set were brought into the world; then you had done your duty and were at liberty to amuse yourself discreetly and inconspicuously.

Was Lanny going to play second fiddle in some fashionable chamber concert? The invitation had been extended and never withdrawn. Assuming that he meant to accept, what about the interim? Live as an anchorite, or beguile his leisure with a refined and discreet young woman secretary? He was sure that if Rosemary, future Countess of Sandhaven, ever asked questions about what his life had been, it would be with curiosity as friendly and cool as her letters. Such were the agreeable consequences of that "most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century," popularly know as "birth control."

VI

The Big Four were deciding the destiny of the Adriatic lands and finding it the toughest problem yet. President Wilson had traveled to that warm country and been hailed as the savior of mankind; he had thrown kisses to the audience in the great Milan opera house, and had listened to the roaring of millions of throats on avenues and highways. He had got the impression that the emotional Italian people really loved him; but now he learned that there were two kinds of Italian people, and it was the other kind which had come to Paris: those who had repudiated their alliance with Germany and sold the blood and treasure of their land to Britain and France, in exchange for a signed and sealed promise of territories to be taken in the war. Now they were here, not to form a League of Nations, not to save mankind from future bloodshed, but to divvy the swag.

The British and French had signed the Treaty of London under the stress of dire necessity, and now that the danger was over they were not too deeply concerned to keep the bargain - on the general principle that no state ever wants to see any other state become more powerful. But they lacked an excuse for repudiating their promises, and regarded it as a providential event when a noble-minded crusader came from overseas, bearing aloft a banner inscribed with Fourteen Points, including the right of the small peoples escaping from Austrian domination not to be placed under some other domination. The British, who had repudiated the idea of self-determination for Cyprus, and the French, who had repudiated it for the Sarre, were enthusiastic about it for the Adriatic - only, of course, it must be President Wilson who would lay down the law.

The crusader from overseas did so; and Premier Orlando, that kindly and genial gentleman, wept, and Baron Sonnino scowled, and the whole Italian delegation stormed and raved. They said that Wilson, having lost his virtue on the Rhine and in the Polish Corridor, was now trying to restore it at the expense of the sacre egoismo of Italy. There were furious quarrels in the council halls, and the Italians packed up their belongings and threatened to leave, but delayed because they found that nobody cared.