Пользователь - o 3b3e7475144cf77c

keep it porous.

What were you going to make out of such an episode? Was Mr. Hackabury really there? Was he

dead? Lanny hadn't heard from him for years. He sat down and wrote a letter, to be mailed

at Genoa, not mentioning anything about spirits, but saying that he was on his way to Naples,

planning to retrace the cruise of the yacht Bluebird, and did his old friend remember the drive

they had taken and the smells of the bay? And how was the man who raised angleworms making

out? Lanny added: "Let me know how you are, for my mother and I often talk about your

many kindnesses to us." He hoped that, if Ezra Hackabury was dead, some member of his

family might be moved to reply.

X

They went ashore at Genoa, to inspect that very ancient city. They had in Lanny a cicerone

who had wandered about the streets during several weeks of the Genoa Conference. A spice of

excite ment was added by the fact that he wouldn't be allowed to enter the country if he were

identified. But local officers would hardly know about that old-time misadventure, or cross-

question fashionable people coming ashore from a private yacht; they could hardly check

every tourist by the records of the Fascist militi in Rome.

No question was raised. Italy was a poor country, and visitors brought much-needed foreign

exchange; the richer they were, the more welcome—a rule that holds good in most parts of the

world. They engaged three cars and were driven about the town, which is crowded between

mountains and sea, and since it cannot float on the latter is forced to climb the former.

Ancient tall buildings jammed close together; churches having facades with stripes of white

and black marble, and inside them monotonous paintings of sorrowful Italian women with

infants in their arms. Before the shrines were wax images of parts of the body which had been

miraculously healed, displays not usually seen outside of hospitals. Mr. Dingle might have

been interested, but he had a deep-seated prejudice against the Catholic system, which he

called idolatrous. Mr. Hackabury had had the same idea.

Lanny showed them the old Palazzo di San Giorgio, where the conference had been held, a

dingy and depressing place, in keeping with the results of the assemblage. Lloyd George had

made the most inspiring promises of peace and prosperity to the representatives of twenty-

nine nations; after which, behind the scenes, the leaders had spent six weeks wrangling over

what oil concessions the Russians were to make to what nations. Lanny's father had been here,

trying to get a share; it had been his first fiasco, and the beginning of a chain of them for all

parties concerned. Instead of peace the nations had got more armaments and more debts.

Instead of prosperity had come a financial collapse in Wall Street, and all were trembling lest

it spread to the rest of the world.

XI

All this wasn't the most cheerful line of conversation for a sight seeing jaunt; so Lanny

talked about some of the journalists and writers whom he had met at this conference, and

forbore to refer to the tragic episode which had cut short his stay in Genoa. But later, when

Irma and Rahel had gone back to the yacht, he went for a stroll with Hansi and Bess, and they

talked about the Italian Syndicalist leader who had set them to thinking on the subject of social

justice. The young Robins looked upon Barbara Pugliese as a heroine and working-class

martyr, cherishing her memory as the Italians cherish that virgin mother whose picture they

never grow tired of painting. But the Fascist terror had wiped out every trace of Barbara's

organization, and to have revealed sympathy for her would have exposed an Italian to exile

and torture on those barren Mediterranean islands which Mussolini used as concentration camps.

When you talked about things like this you lost interest in ancient buildings and endlessly

multiplied Madonnas. You didn't want to eat any of the food of this town, or pay it any foreign

exchange; you wanted to shake its polluted dust from your feet. But the older people were here

to entertain themselves with sight-seeing; so, take a walk, climb the narrow streets up into the

hills where the flowers of springtime were thick and the air blew from the sea. These gifts of

nature were here before the coming of the miserable Fascist braggart, and would remain long

after he had become a stench in the nostrils of history. Try not to hate his strutting Blackshirts

with their shiny boots, and pistols and daggers in their belts; think of them as misguided children,

destined some day to pay with their blood for their swagger and bluster. "Father, forgive them,

for they know not what they do!"

And when you come down from the heights and get on board the yacht again, keep your

thoughts to your own little group, and say nothing to your elders, who have grown up in a

different world. You cannot convert them; you can only worry them and spoil their holiday.

Play your music, read your books, think your own thoughts, and never let yourselves be drawn

into an argument! Not an altogether satisfactory way of life, but the only one possible in times

when the world is changing so fast that parents and children may be a thousand years apart in

their ideas and ideals.

3

And Their Adoption Tried

I

TНЕ trim white Bessie Budd was among the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved

and sung, and where Lanny at the age of fourteen had fished and swum and climbed hills and

gazed upon the ruins of ancient temples. The yacht stole through the Gulf of Corinth and made

fast to a pier in the harbor of the Piraeus, now somewhat improved; the guests were motored to

the city of Athens, and ascended the hill of the Acropolis on little donkeys which had not been

improved in any way. They gazed at the most-famous of all ruins, and Lanny told them about

Isadora Duncan dancing here, and how she had explained to the shocked police that it was her

way of praying.

The Bessie Budd anchored in the Channel of Atalante, and the experienced Lanny let down

fishing-lines and brought up odd-appearing creatures which had not changed in sixteen years,

and perhaps not in sixteen million. The guests were rowed ashore at several towns, and drank

over-sweet coffee out of copper pots with long handles, and gazed at the strange spectacle of

tall men wearing accordion-pleated and starched white skirts like those of ballet-dancers. They

climbed the hills surmounted by ancient temples, and tried to talk in sign language to

shepherds having shelters of brush built into little cones.

History had been made in these waters between Lanny's visits. German submarines had

lurked here, British and French craft had hunted them, and a bitter duel of intrigue had been

carried on over the part which Greece was to play. The Allies had landed an army at Salonika,

and the Bessie Budd now followed in the wake of their transports; her guests were driven

about in a dusty old city of narrow crooked streets and great numbers of mosques with

towering minarets. The more active members of the party wandered over the hills where the

armies of Alexander had marched to the conquest of Persia; through which the Slavs had come in

the seventh century, followed by Bulgars, Saracens, Gauls, Venetians, Turks.

There are people who have a sense of the past; they are stirred by the thought of it, and by the

presence of its relics; there are others who have very little of this sense, and would rather play a

game of bridge than climb a hill to see where a battle was fought or a goddess was worshiped.

Lanny discovered that his wife was among these latter. She was interested in the stories he told

the company, but only mildly, and while he and Hansi were studying the fragments of a fallen

column, Irma would be watching the baby lambs gamboling among the spring flowers. "Oh, how

charming!" Observing one of them beginning to nuzzle its mother, she would look at her wrist-

watch and say: "Don't forget that we have to be back on board in an hour." Lanny would return

to the world of now, and resume the delights of child study which he had begun long ago with

Marceline.

II

When you live day and night on a yacht, in close contact with your fellow-guests, there isn't

much they can hide from you. It was Lanny's fourth cruise with a Jewish man of money, but

still he did not tire of studying a subtle and complex personality. Johannes Robin was not

merely an individual; he was a race and a culture, a religion and a history of a large part of human

society for several thousand years. To understand him fully was a problem not merely in

psychology, but in business and finance, in literature and language, ethnology, archaeology—a list

of subjects about which Lanny was curious.

This man of many affairs could be tender-hearted as a child, and again could state flatly that he

was not in business for his health. He could be frank to the point of dubious taste, or he

could be devious as any of the diplomats whom Lanny had watched at a dozen international

conferences. He would drive a hard bargain, and then turn around and spend a fortune upon

hospitality to that same person. He was bold, yet he was haunted by fears. He ardently desired

the approval of his fellows, yet he would study them and pass judgments indicating that their

opinion was not worth so very much. Finally, with his keen mind he observed these conflicts in

himself, and to Lanny, whom he trusted, he would blurt them out in disconcerting fashion.

They were sitting on deck after the others had gone to bed; a still night, and the yacht gliding

through the water with scarcely a sound. Suddenly the host remarked: "Do you know what this

show costs every hour?"

"I never tried to estimate," said the guest, taken aback.

"You wouldn't, because you've always had money. I figured it up last night—about a hundred

dollars every hour of the day or night. It cost me several hours' sleep to realize it."

There was a pause. Lanny didn't know what to say.

"It's a weakness; I suppose it's racial. I can't get over the fear of spending so much!"

"Why do you do it, then?"

"I force myself to be rational. What good is money if you hoard it? My children don't want it,

and their children won't know how to use it; and, anyhow, it mayn't last. I assume that I give my

friends some pleasure, and I don't do any harm that I can think of. Can you?"

"No," replied the other.

"Of course I shouldn't mention it," said the host, "but you like to understand people."

"We'd all be happier if we did," replied Lanny. "I, too, am conscious of weaknesses. If I

happened to be in your position, I would be trying to make up my mind whether I had a right

to own a yacht."

III

Lanny went to bed thinking about this "racial" peculiarity. When he had first met Johannes

Robin, the salesman had been traveling over Europe with two heavy suitcases full of electric

curling-irons and toasters, and a "spiel" about promoting international trade and the spread of

civilization. During the war he had made money buying magnetos and such things to be sold in

Germany. Then he had gone in with Robbie Budd and bought left-over supplies of the American