Пользователь - WORLDS END

Both British and French were bitter against the Americans, because they were not taking part in the war, but just making money out of it, and at the same time making objections to the blockade. Nearly all the Americans in France felt the same way, and were ashamed of their country. The conversation at Bienvenu was all along that line; and while Marcel was careful not to say anything in Lanny's presence, the boy knew that Marcel blamed Robbie because he was making money out of the French and at the same time withholding his sympathy from them. The painter was eaten up with anxiety all during the battle of Verdun; he would burst out with some expression of loathing for the "Huns," and Lanny wouldn't say anything, and it would appear that a chill had fallen in the home. The relationship of stepfather and stepson is a complicated one at best, and this wasn't the best.

The boy would go off and try to think out by himself the problems of the war. He would remember things that Robbie had told him about the trickery of Allied diplomacy. Right now it was being said in America that the Allies had made secret treaties dividing up the spoils of the war they hadn't won; worse yet, they had promised the same territory to different peoples. Robbie would send articles about such matters to his son, finding ways to get them by the censor - and the consequence of knowing about such things was that the boy no longer fitted anywhere in France.

IX

Marcel painted a picture of the poilu, the savior of la patrie. He tried to put into it all his love for the men with whom he had trained and fought. When he was done, he said it wasn't good enough, he hadn't got what he wanted; but his friends thought differently; the painting was shown at a salon in Paris, and made a hit, and was taken up and reproduced in posters. Beauty thought that her husband would get satisfaction out of that service to his country; but nothing could please him, it appeared. He didn't want to be a popular painter - and anyhow, art was futility in a time like this.

So came a crisis in the affairs of this married pair. How rarely does it happen that two human creatures, with all their differences, weaknesses, moods can get along without quarreling! Beauty was carrying her cross, in the best evangelical church fashion; she was pouring out her own redemptive blood in the secrecy of her heart. But she couldn't be happy in her tragic situation, and the bitterness which she repressed was bound to escape at some spots in her life. She couldn't restrain her annoyance at this contrary attitude of Marcel. Why should a man go to the trouble of making pictures, and then not want to have people see them, even quarrel with those who wanted a chance to admire them? Why was it necessary to say something contrary every time his work was praised? In vain did Lanny, budding young critic, try to make plain to his mother that a true artist is wrestling with a vision of something higher and better, and cannot endure to be admired for what he knows is less than his best.

Out of this clash of temperaments came a terrible thing: Lanny came home one evening from his love-making to find his mother lying on her bed sobbing. Her husband had broached to her the idea of going back into the army. He had the crazy notion that he ought to be helping to hold the line at Verdun; he was a trained man, and France needed every one. He was as good as ever, he in insisted; he could march, and had tried long walks to make sure. He could handle a gun - the only thing wrong was that he was ugly, but out there in mud and powder smoke who would care?

Beauty had had a fit of hysterics and called him some bad names, an ingrate, a fool, and so on. If she meant no more to him than that, he would have to go - but he would never see her again. "I did it once, Marcel, but I won't do it a second time."

She really meant it, so she declared to her son. She had reached the limit of endurance. If Marcel went, la patrie could take care of him next time in some soldiers' home. She said it with hardness in her face that was a new thing to Lanny; one does not wrestle with duty for long periods without going back to the moods and even the facial expressions of one's Puritan forefathers. But five minutes later Beauty broke down; her lips were trembling, and she was asking whether perhaps it was her impatience and lack of art sense which were making the painter dissatisfied with his lot.

So there was no peace in this woman's soul until midsummer, when the German attacks on the great fortress slowed up. By that time she had managed to get her man started upon another project - to paint a portrait of her. It is a use that every painter makes sooner or later of the woman he loves; if Marcel had it in him to do any portrait, she would be it. Beauty had changed, and what Marcel saw was the woman of anguish who had prayed to his soul, the woman of pity who talked to crippled soldiers and helped them to want to live.

She put on one of her nurse's uniforms and went over to the studio and sat for hours every day; an old story to her. Marcel painted her sitting in a chair with her hands folded, and all the grief of France in her face. "Sister of Mercy," he was going to call her; and Beauty didn't have to act, because of the terror in her heart. She couldn't tell what turn the next great battle might take. She could only urge Marcel to take his time and get it perfect; she wanted him to have something he really believed in - so that he would stay a painter instead of a poilu!

X

Lanny's young dream of love died early in the month of May, and it wasn't a merry month for him. At that time the thoughts of English people on the Riviera turned to their lovely green island with its chilly breezes. Furthermore it developed that Rosemary's father had to be examined by surgeons at home; he was brought to Marseille, and from there north, and Lanny never met him.

"Darling, we shall see each other again," said the girl. "You'll come to England, or I'll be coming here."

"I'll wait for you - always," said Lanny, fervently. "I want you to marry me, Rosemary."

She looked startled. "Oh, Lanny, I don't think we can marry. I wouldn't count on that if I were you."

The boy was startled in turn. "But why not?"

"We're much too young to think about it. I don't want to marry for a long time."

"I can wait, Rosemary."

"Darling, don't think about it, please. It wouldn't be fair to you." Seeing the bewilderment in his face, she added: "It would make my parents so terribly unhappy if I were to marry outside our own sort of people."

"But - but" - he had trouble in finding words. "Wouldn't it make them unhappy to know about our love?"

"They aren't going to know about that; and it's quite a different thing. Marriage is so serious; you have children, and property settlements, and all that bother; and there'd be the question whether our children were to be Americans or English. You might want to go to America to live- - "

"I'm really not much of an American, Rosemary. I've never been there, and may never go."

"You can't be sure; and my people wouldn't be sure. They'd make an awful fuss, I know."

"Many English people marry Americans," argued the boy. "Lord Eversham-Watson - I visited them, and they seemed quite happy."

"I know, darling, it's done; and don't have your blessed feelings hurt - you know I love you, and we've been so happy, and will be some more. But if we tie ourselves down, and get our families to arguing and all that - it would be a frightful bore."

Lanny was imperfectly educated in modern ideas, and couldn't get the thing clear in his mind. He wanted his adored one all the time, and couldn't imagine that she might not want him. Why was she so concerned about her family in this one matter, and so indifferent, even defiant, in others? He asked her to explain it, and she tried, groping to put into words things that were instinctive and unformulated. It appeared that young ladies of the English governing classes who joined the movement for equal rights wanted certain definite things, like being able to write M.P. after their names, and to have divorce on equal terms with men; but they didn't mean to interfere with the system whereby their families governed the realm. They accepted the idea that when the time came for marriage each should adopt some honored name with a peculiar spelling, and become the mistress of some beautiful old country house and the mother of future viscounts and barons, or at the least admirals and cabinet ministers.

"It mayn't be so easy to find an upper-class Englishman," remarked the boy; "the way they're getting killed off in this war."

"There'll be some left," answered the girl, easily. She had only to look in the mirror to know that she had special advantages.

Lanny pondered some more, and then inquired: "Is it because I don't take sides in the war?"

"That's just a bit of it, Lanny. It helps me to realize that we shouldn't be happy; our ideas are so different, and our interests. Whatever happens to England, I have to be for her, and so will my children when I have them."

"They are apt to go just so far and no farther," Beauty had told her son. When he parted from Rosemary Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver, it was with tears and sighs on both sides, and a perfectly clear understanding that he might have a sweet and lovely mistress for an indefinite time, provided that he would come where she was, and do what she asked him to do. When Lanny told his mother about it, and she told Marcel, the painter remarked that the boy had been used as a guinea pig in a scientific experiment. When he learned that the boy was unhappy, he added that scientific experiments were notconducted for the benefit of the guinea pigs.

l6

Business as Usual

1

WHEN the German army came to Les Forкts, old M. Priedieu, the librarian, had stayed to guard his employer's treasures. He had stood by, pale with horror, whОle drunken hussars cut the valuable pictures from the walls, rolled up the tapestries, dumped the venerable leather-covered chairs out of the windows, and swept the priceless books from the shelves in pure wantonness. They didn't do any physical harm to the white-haired old man, but they so wounded his sensibilities that he took to his bed, and a few days later died quietly in his sleep.

But his spirit lived on in Lanny Budd. All the boy's life he would remember what the grave old scholar had told him about the love of books. This was something that no misfortune or sorrow could take from a man, and its possessor had a refuge from all the evils of the world. Montesquieu had said that to love reading was to exchange hours of boredom for hours of delight; Laharpe had said that a book is a friend that never deceives. The librarian of Les Forкts had advised Lanny to seek the friendship of the French classic authors and let them teach him dignity, grace, and perfection of form.

Now misfortune and sorrow had come; love had dallied with Lanny Budd for a while and then tossed him away. The crisis found him without companionship, because Jerry Pendleton had come to an arrangement with his belle amie to wait for him, and had gone back to Kansas to complete his education. In this plight Lanny sought the friendship of one Jean Racine, who had died more than two hundred years previously but lived on by the magic of the printed page. He took disordered emotions and converted them into well-made dramas, in which exalted beings stalked the scene and poured out their sufferings in verses so eloquent that a youth of sixteen was moved to seek lonely places by the sea or in the forest and declaim them to tritons or hamadryads.