Пользователь - WORLDS END

The beautiful old buildings stood in a park having lawns and shade trees like an English estate. They were of dull old red brick with Boston ivy on the walls, making a safe home for millions of spiders and bugs. In one of the dormitories Lanny shared a comfortable room and bath with a cousin whom he had met on the tennis courts, but with whom he had little else in common.

Lanny had played with boys, but always a few at a time; he had never before been part of a horde. He discovered that a horde is something different, a being with a personality of its own. Being young and eager, he was curious about it, and every hour was a fresh adventure. He awoke to the ringing of an electric bell, went to breakfast to another ringing, and thereafter moved through the day as an electrically controlled robot. He acquired knowledge in weighed and measured portions; memorized facts and recited them, forgot many of them until the end of the month, relearned them for a "test," forgot them again until the end of a term, relearned them once more for "exam" - and then forgot them forever and ever, amen.

In addition to this part of his life, scheduled and ordained by the school authorities, the horde had its own life which it lived during off hours. This life centered upon three things: athletic prowess, class politics, and sex. If you could run, jump, or play football or baseball, your success was probable; if you could talk realistically about girls, that would help; if your family was notably rich and famous, and if you had Anglo-Saxon features, good clothes, and easy manners, all problems were solved. Entering the third year, Lanny was jumping into the midst of school politics, and had to be looked over and judged quickly. His cousin, belonging to a fashionable set, was ready to initiate him, and would be provoked if Lanny didn't display proper respect for the fine points upon which his friends based their judgments. "Be careful, or they'll set you down for a 'queerie,' " said this mentor.

VI

Robbie had asked Lanny not to play football, saying that he was too lightly built for this rough game. It was another of those cases in which the father expected him to be wiser than himself. Robbie didn't want Lanny to smoke or drink. He was willing for him to have a girl now and then, but wanted him to be "choosy" about it. He had wished Lanny to attend his grandfather's Bible class and his stepmother's church - even though Robbie himself wouldn't do it, and paid a price for refusing. All this was hard to fathom.

As it happened, Lanny could run, and liked to, and he was a good tennis player, so he would never be entirely a "queerie." But he had many handicaps to success at St. Thomas's. He had just come from abroad, and that made him an object of curiosity. He pronounced French correctly, which could only be taken as an affectation. He had read a great many books, and his masters discovered this fact and brought it out in class, hoping to waken a desire for culture in these "young barbarians all at play." That was hard on Lanny.

His first disillusionment came with the discovery that class sessions at St. Thomas's were rather dull. They consisted mainly of the recitation of lessons studied the night before, and if you had studied well, you were bored listening to other fellows who had studied badly, and you were only mildly entertained by their efforts to "get by" with a wisecrack. Rarely was there any intelligent discussion in class; rarely anything taught about which either masters or pupils were deeply concerned. They were preparing for college, and all instruction was aimed like a gun at a target; they learned names, dates, theorems, verb forms, rules, and exceptions - everything definite and specific, that could be measured and counted.

Lanny found that he was expected to assemble now and then with his cousin's "set." These were called "bull sessions," and there would be some talk about the prospects of beating Groton or St. Paul's at football, and some about the wire-pulling of a rival set; but sooner or later the talk would turn to sex. Lanny was no Puritan - on the contrary, he was here to study the Puritans; and what troubled him was that the element of mutuality or idealism appeared to be lacking in their relations with girls. Shrewd and observant young men of the world, they knew how to deal with "gold diggers," "salamanders," and other deadly females of the species. Both boys and girls appeared to regard the love market as they would later in life the stock market - a place where you got something for nothing.

One of the characteristics of the horde is that it does not allow you to be different; it persecutes those who do not conform to its ideas and obey its taboos. There was a sensitive younger lad named Benny Cartright, whose father was a well-known portrait painter; he found out that Lanny was interested in this subject, and would cling to him and ask yearning questions about the art world abroad. There was a son of Mrs. Bascome, well-known suffrage lecturer; this youth wore horn-rimmed spectacles and was opposed to war on principle. More than a year ago Robbie had told his son about the secret treaties of the Allies, in which they had distributed the spoils of war among themselves; now these treaties were published in the New York Evening Post, and this chap Bascome brought them to Lanny in the form of a pamphlet.

. So, despite his cousin's warnings, Lanny became more queer, and this was in due course reported back to the family. The grown-ups also were a horde, and watched the young and spied upon them - just as the masters in this school were expected to do. St. Thomas's had a "rule book," and your attention would be called to section nine, paragraph six; if you disregarded the warning, attention would be called more sternly, and if a third warning had no effect, you might be "sequestered."

Among the masters at St. Thomas's was one who taught English, a slender and ascetic young man who was trying to write poetry in his off hours. By accident he discovered that Lanny had not merely read the Greek dramatists but had visited that country. They talked about it after class, and from this developed a liking, and Lanny was invited to the master's room on several occasions. This was a form of queerness with which the horde had never before had to deal, and they didn't know quite what to make of it. They applied to it a rather awful term out of their varied assortment of slang; they said that Budd was "sucking up to" the somewhat pathetic Mr. Algernon Baldwin - who got only eight hundred dollars a year for his earnest labors in this school, and had an invalid mother to take care of.

VII

There came a cablegram from Juan, making a happy little jingle, though this was probably not intentional: "Girl both well Marcel." Later came a letter - since one could not count upon the cable these days. Beauty had a lovely little baby girl, and had named her Marceline. The painter was exceedingly proud of himself, after the fashion of fathers. He had persuaded Beauty to the unprecedented course of nursing the baby herself; a matter of hygiene and morality upon which he laid much stress. He had got the idea out of Rousseau.

Then came a letter from Mrs. Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson, announcing that she was the mother of a baby boy. Said Nina: "I won't say much about him, because everything about new babies has been said a million times already. I send a picture." So Lanny had a pair to set up on his bureau; he wrote to each of the mothers about the other, suggesting that they get in touch and start making a match.

Nina revealed that poor Rick had had another operation, his third; still hoping to get rid of pain in what was left of his knee. They were living at The Reaches. Sir Alfred was helping with war work, and riding around to places most of the time. They were saving food, because the submarine blockade was pinching England badly.

Lanny went home for Thanksgiving and read this letter to his father, who said that the submarines were being countered by the system of convoying ships. The U-boats didn't dare show themselves in the neighborhood of destroyers, because of the effectiveness of depth bombs. So with the help of the combined navies great fleets of vessels were crossing the Atlantic in safety. The top men at Budd's knew all about it, having to adjust their system of loading to the sailing dates of convoys.

Father and son talked also about the second Russian revolution, which had just occurred. The government of Kerensky, trying to go on with the war, had been overthrown by a group called Bolsheviks - a Russian word which nobody had ever heard before. These were out-and-out revolutionists, confiscating all property and socializing industry. Robbie said this overturn was the most terrible blow the Allies had yet received; it meant that Germany had won half the war, and the job of the United States had been doubled. "It may mean even more than that," he added. "Those forces of hatred and destruction exist everywhere, and they're bound to try the same thing in other countries."

"Do you suppose there are Bolsheviks in this country, Robbie?"

"Thousands of them; they're not all Russians, either. Your Uncle Jesse Blackless is some such crackpot. That's why I was determined he shouldn't get hold of you."

"You mean he's an active Red?"

"He used to be, and this may stir him up again. He may be behind these mutinies which have been happening in the French army."

"But that's crazy, Robbie. Don't they know the Germans would march straight in and take the country?"

"I suppose they figure that the same sort of agitation is going on among the German troops. If that fire once got to blazing, it might spread everywhere."

"Gosh! Do you suppose we have such people in Budd's?"

"If there are, they keep pretty quiet. Father and Lawford have ways to keep track of agitators."

"You mean we have spies?"

"Nobody can expect to run an industry unless he knows what's going on in it. This thing in Russia has set all the agitators crazy." Robbie thought for a moment, then added: "Those secret treaties of the Allies have put a powerful weapon into their hands. They say to the workers: 'Look what you're fighting for! Look what's being done to you!' "

"But you said that too, Robbie!"

"I know; but it's one thing for you and me to know such facts, and another for them to be in the hands of revolutionists and criminals."

"There's a chap in school who has a copy of those treaties and talks about them a lot. He says everything that you do."

"Watch out for him," replied the father - his sense of humor failing him for once. "Some older and shrewder persons may be using him. These are dangerous times, and you have to watch your step."

VIII

Lanny went back to school, and it wasn't long before he walked into the very trap against which his father had warned him. There was a Mrs. Riccardi, a well-to-do society lady of the town of Sand Hill who sometimes gave musicales in her home. She found out that Lanny had studied "Dalcroze," and begged him to come and tell her friends about it. Lanny brought Jack Bascome and Benny Cartright to this affair, and it wasn't long before Bascome was talking against the war to Mrs. Riccardi. He told her about the secret treaties, and gave her the pamphlet, and she passed it on to others. Of course rumors of this were bound to spread. The country was at war, and people who found fault with France and England were lending aid and comfort to the enemy, whether they realized it or not.

On a Sunday evening Lanny and his two "queeries," Benny and Jack, went by invitation to the home of this wealthy lady, and there was Mr. Baldwin, and another schoolmaster of aesthetic tastes, and several other persons, including a young Methodist preacher with the unfashionable name of Smathers. Lanny had never heard of him, but learned that he had been pastor of a church in Newcastle - in the working-class part of the city, known as "beyond the tracks." He was a gentle, mild-voiced person, and in the course of the evening Lanny learned that he had got into the newspapers when there had been a strike of the workers in the Budd plants, and he had helped to organize a relief kitchen for the wives and children, and had made speeches and been chased down an alley and clubbed by mounted police.