Пользователь - WORLDS END

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 Prйfecture 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.