Пользователь - WORLDS END

Rosemary was blond, with features regular and a manner gentle and serene. In many ways she reminded Lanny of his mother, and perhaps that was why she had drawn him so strongly. He was a mother's boy, used to being told what to do, and Rosemary was prepared to deal with him on that basis - it was, apparently, what they all meant by "women's rights." Anyway, they sat in a remote and well-shadowed part of the garden, with arms around each other; and it seemed unavoidable that they should talk of intimate matters. Lanny told about love problems which puzzled him, and Rosemary imparted ideas which she had gathered from a weekly journal called the Freewoman.

When Lanny had listened to Kurt Meissner's expositions of German philosophy, he had attributed it all to Kurt's wonderful brain; so now he thought that Rosemary had worked out the theory of sexual equality for herself. Of course he was deeply impressed, and at first rather frightened. But after these ideas had been discussed for two or three evenings, they no longer seemed so strange; the boy who had become a man within the last year began to wonder whether all those words about freedom and happiness might possibly apply to him and his lovely friend. This had an alarming effect; a wave of excitement swept over him, and his teeth began to chatter and his hands to shake uncontrollably.

"What's the matter, Lanny?" asked the girl.

He didn't dare to answer at first, but finally he told her: "I'm afraid maybe I'm falling in love with you." It was all as if it had never happened in the world before.

"Well, why not, Lanny?" she asked, gently.

"You mean - you really wouldn't mind?"

"You know I think you are a very dear boy."

So he kissed her on the lips - the first time he had ever done that. They sat clasped together, and a clamor arose in him. He pressed her to him, and when she submitted, he began to fondle her more and more intimately. He knew then that the experience had come to him about which he had heard everybody talking, and which had been such a mystery in his thoughts.

The girl stayed his trembling hands. "You mustn't, Lanny. It wouldn't be safe." Then she whispered: "I'll have to go to the house first, and get something."

So they got up and walked. Lanny found his knees shaking, which perplexed him greatly. It must be what the French novelists call la grande passion! He waited some distance from the house while Rosemary went in - as it happened, there was company and no one paid any heed to her. Presently she came back, and they lost themselves in a secluded part of the garden, and there she taught him those things about which he had been so curious. At first his agitation was painful, but presently he was dissolved in a flood of bliss, which seemed to justify the theories of the "new women." If he was happy and she was happy, why should the vague and remote "world" of their elders concern itself with their affairs?

VI

It wasn't long before Lanny told his mother about this affair. Impossible not to, because she asked pointed questions, and it would have been hurting her feelings to evade. Beauty's reaction to the disclosure was a peculiar one. She had been what you might call a practicing feminist, but without any theories; she had had her own way about love, but always with the proper feeling that she was doing wrong. It was hard to explain, but that feeling seemed necessary; you knew it was wrong, and that made it right. But to assert that it was right was a shocking boldness. And when a girl was only seventeen!' "Was she virgin?" asked Beauty, and added with distaste: "Certainly she didn't act like it." Lanny didn't know and couldn't make inquiries.

Beauty couldn't altogether dislike Rosemary, but she never got over the idea that there was something alarming about her - a portent of a new world that Beauty didn't understand. The mother's feeling was that her dear little boy had been seduced, and that he was much too young. She took the problem to her husband, but failed to get him excited. "Nature knows a lot more about that than you do," said the painter, and went on painting.

Springtime again on the Riviera, to Lanny the most delightful he had ever known. The flesh of woman was revealed to him, and the discovery transfused everything else in his life. The world and every common sight to him did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. Now for the first time he knew what music was about, and poetry, and dancing, not to mention the birds and the butterflies. The flowers had the colors of Rosemary, and she had their perfume. She was to him a being of magic, and when he was with her he never wanted to take his eyes from her, and when he wasn't with her he wished he was.

Of course he couldn't be with her all the time; because "what would people say?" The "world" did matter after all, it appeared. Cool and serene, Rosemary took charge. Lanny must go on with his studying, and not make her feel that she was a bad influence. When they boated and swam and played tennis, they must be with other young people, for appearance' sake; and the same in the evening-there must be some sort of pretext, a dance, a party, a sail - the young people all understood that, they all had the same desires, and would stroll away in couples, casually and innocently. They protected one another, a conspiracy of the new against the old.

Did Rosemary succeed in fooling her mother and her aunt? In those early days of the revolt of youth the old were in a peculiar state of emotional paralysis. They didn't dare to know; it was too awful to let themselves know - and yet of course they did. They would look at the young with fright in their eyes, and seldom dare to speak - for what could they say? Rosemary had given her answer in advance - she wanted to go out and earn her own living. Girls were nursing, they were; even getting jobs in munitions factories, wearing black overalls and filling shells with explosives. They were going out on the streets delivering tirades, calling on men to enlist, pinning white feathers on those who looked as if they ought to. And the things they were reading, and left around the house, careless of who might see them!

It had been prior to the outbreak of the war that Rosemary had fallen under the spell of one of those suffragettes - a teacher, it was. Still a child, with pigtails down her back, she had walked into the National Gallery with a hand ax concealed under her skirt, and at a prearranged signal had passed it to one of those notorious women who hadn't dared bring it in herself, because she was known and might be searched. And that not a crazy whim or a lark, but a means of reforming the world! Something they took up as a religion, for which they were willing to die! You might put them in jail, but they would only try to starve themselves to death; you wanted to say to the devil with them and let them do it, but you didn't dare.

VII

The German high command had made up its collective mind that in order to win the war they had to break through on the western front, and they had picked the fortress of Verdun as the place. This was the head of the original French defenses, the part which had not given way; a complex of fortifications covering various heights along both banks of the river Meuse. Now that the war had been going on for a year and a half, the technique of taking such fortifications had become well settled. You had to bring up enough heavy guns, and pile enough ammunition behind them, to reduce the enemy entrenchments to dust and rubble; then you put down what was called a "creeping barrage" of shells which exploded in small fragments, to destroy the men who had been hiding underground and who came up after your heavy bombardment. The "creeping barrage" moved forward, just ahead of your lines of infantry, which could thus advance in comparative safety, and take what was left of the trenches, an operation known as "mopping up." The enemy would have line after line of trenches, and you had to repeat this same procedure and hope to break through finally and turn a "war of position" into a "war of movement."

To stop such an attack, the French gunners had to be better than the Germans, and have more shells. The French airmen had to keep the mastery and bring in more information as to what was happening. But more than anything else, the plain everyday poilu had to crawl into his rabbit warrens, and those of him who were left alive had to pop up at the right moment, and hide in whatever shell holes might be left and shoot enough of the advancing Germans to discourage the rest. That was all there was to it, you just had to outstay the enemy. When you had fired all your cartridges, you got more from a dead comrade in the same shell hole. If the night passed and nobody brought you food, you starved. If it rained, you lay in the mud, and if the mud froze, you tried to keep your hands alive so that you could shoot.

The Verdun area covered a hundred square miles or so, and during the fighting it was turned into a chaos of shell craters and nothing else. Places like Fort Douaumont were taken and retaken a half-dozen times, and the living fought among the dead of both sides. The main battle began in February of 1916 and lasted until July without cessation, and after that off and on for a year. The Germans brought sixty-four divisions, which was more than a million men. The French fired more than ten million shells from field guns, and nearly two million from medium and heavy guns.

The German Crown Prince was in command, and that was one more reason for the French wanting to win. The whole world watched and waited while the armies staggered back and forth. A break-through might mean the German conquest of France, and nobody knew that better than the poilu; he invented for himself a chant, which became a sort of incantation, a spell to rouse the souls of men perishing of wounds and exhaustion, who yet would kill one more enemy before dying. "Passeront pas, passeront pas!" they sang or gasped. "They shall not pass."

VIII

Such were the events some three hundred miles to the north of Lanny Budd while he was playing with love in springtime. He couldn't keep the war from troubling his conscience, but there was nothing he could do about it - especially not so long as he was under pledge to keep neutral. He was the one person of that sort he knew. Eddie Patterson was now driving an ambulance behind the lines at Verdun, and so his Sophie no longer had any motive for not hating the Germans, and she was hating them. All Lanny could say was: "Excuse me, I promised my father not to talk about the war."

Budd's were now making small arms and ammunition in large quantities, and exclusively for the Allies. There was no way to make any for the Germans; the British blockade was too tight, and anyhow the British and French were on hand to buy everything you could produce, paying top prices on the nail. The big Wall Street banks took British and French bonds and sold them to the American public, and Budd's got the cash. Under Robbie's contract he was entitled to a commission on every deal. He would spend this money freely and gaily, as always; but he was a stubborn fellow, and nobody was going to get him to say that any nation of Europe - and that included the British Empire - was ever right about anything. Robbie had been on the inside, and knew they were all wrong.

Out of this came the first little rift between Lanny and his girlfriend. Rosemary wasn't satisfied to have him hold his tongue; she began to pin him down and ask what he really thought. When he repeated his formula, she wanted to know: "What are you, a man or a dummy? Do you have to think everything your father thinks? If I thought what my parents think, would I be here with you?" Lanny was troubled, because he had taken it for granted that this delightful young woman was as gentle as she looked. But apparently a sharp tongue was part of the equipment of every "feminist," and first among "women's rights" was the right to tell her man what she thought of him.