On this subject he talked with the fervor of the prophets of old. For him all thinking led to the basic question whether mankind could be saved from sliding into an abyss of barbarism, a new Dark Age of materialism and hate. The late war had brought us close to the edge, and new wars now on the horizon might carry us over. He pointed to the fall of empires throughout history; what was there to save us from a similar fate? Only a vision of spiritual things which a few great souls had caught, and for the sake of which they had martyred themselves and must continue to do so.
To this tormented soul the League of Nations represented the one hope of preserving justice and peace in the world, so that the higher faculties of man might survive and be propagated. In the spring of the previous year he had written President Wilson an urgent letter on behalf of the project, and a considerable correspondence had resulted. In Paris, Wilson showed him his draft of the League, and asked his suggestions. This was known to the advisory staff, who looked upon this strange interloper with a mingling of curiosity and alarm. Perhaps he wasn’t a scandalous person, but all America believed him to be that—and what would America say as to the sort of company its college professors were keeping in Paris?
It happened that Robbie Budd came to lunch and sat at table with Herron, Alston, and Lanny. The black-bearded prophet was in his most apocalyptic mood. Said he: “The salvation of the world from Germanism depends upon the salvation of Germany from her ancient barbarian self. The final value of our military success, the proof that we are worthy of it, must lie in its redemptive power. We have won a victory over the German people and we have now to win the German people to that victory. What we do must be infused by such spiritual purpose as will enable the German people to see the divine reason for it, and to enter co-operatively into the judgments and workings of that reason.”
When Lanny had been alone with his new acquaintance, listening to such words, he had been much impressed; but now he heard them through the ears of his skeptical father and they made him wriggle uncomfortably. Robbie was a self-contained man, and knew how to keep quiet when he wanted to; but when he was alone with his son, he exclaimed: “My God, who is that nut?” When Lanny told him that the fervid orator was one of President Wilson’s trusted advisers, Robbie was ready to go home and tell America that it was being governed from a lunatic asylum. The United States Senate—now safely under control of the Republican party—ought to send a committee to Europe to take charge of the peace-making!
Of course Robbie couldn’t expect to keep his son in cotton wool. Lanny was in the world now and had to meet crackpots and fanatics along with sane businessmen. But at least he was going to have his father’s advice. In detail, and with as much conscientiousness as any Christian Socialist, Robbie explained that the ruling class of Germany had tried to grab the trade privileges of the British Empire, and had failed. They would try again whenever they got the chance; it was life or death for one group or the other, and would continue to be that so long as men used steel in making engines, and coal and oil—not hot air—to run them with. Lanny listened, and decided that his father was right, as always.
IV
It was a time of strain and anguish, and really it wasn’t easy to know what to think or do. Lanny had shared in his own soul the griefs of the people of France and could understand their dread of a wicked government which had inflicted them. For Lanny the soul of France was embodied in the memories of his stepfather; and always he tried to imagine, what would Marcel have felt about the peace-making and the various problems which kept arising in connection with it?
One thing seemed certain: Marcel would not have approved the deliberate starving of women and children. The Germans had assumed that the blockade would be lifted when they signed the armistice; but the French had no such thought. Nothing was to go into Germany until she had accepted and signed the peace terms which France meant to lay down. But the treaty wasn’t ready yet, and meanwhile children were crying with hunger.
To the members of the American delegation this seemed an atrocious thing. They protested to the President, and he in turn to Clemenceau—but in vain. Herbert Hoover, who had been feeding the Belgians, wanted also to feed the defeated peoples; he did finally, as a great concession, get the right to send a relief mission to Austria—but nothing to Germany. Marshal Foch stood like a block of concrete in the pathway. Lanny saw him coming out from the conference room where this issue was fought over; a stocky little man with a gray mustache, voluble, talking with excited gestures, demanding his pound of flesh. He was commander-in-chief of the Allied armies and he gave the orders. A singular thing—he was a devout Catholic, went every morning to mass, and kneeled to a merciful redeemer who had said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” Little French children, of course; no little German children!
This was one of the things which tormented Herron. He talked incessantly about a “Carthaginian peace,” such as the Romans had imposed when they razed a great city to the ground and drove its population into exile. If France imposed a peace of vengeance upon Germany, it would mean that “Germanism” had won the war; it would mean that France had adopted Germany’s false religion, and that the old France of the Revolution, the France of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” was no more. The black-bearded prophet suffered so over the hunger of the blockaded peoples that he couldn’t eat his own food.
He would come to the Crillon to consult with Alston, whom he trusted because he had known him as a lad. A sense of agonized impotence possessed him; to see the world drifting to shipwreck, and know what ought to be done, but be helpless to get it done; to give advice and have it accepted—but not acted upon. To see intrigue, personal jealousy, factional strife, blocking the hopes of mankind. There was all that sort of thing at the Crillon, of course; there were those who had the President’s ear, and others who sought to get it, and pulled wires and flattered and fawned. There were some who were not above repeating scandals and raking up old tragedies. “Of course I’m a marked man,” said Herron. “I cannot be recognized publicly; but that doesn’t change the fact that I know Europe better than any of those whom the President is meeting.”
V
Many times in these days Lanny had occasion to recall the words which the Graf Stubendorf had spoken, concerning “the dark cloud of barbarism in the eastern sky.” In five years that cloud had spread until it threatened to cover the firmament; it was of the hue of Stygian midnight, and its rim was red and dripping a bloody rain. No longer the Russian Tsar with his Cossacks and their whips, no longer Pan-Slavism with its marching hosts, but the dread Bolshevism, which not only formed armies, but employed a new and secret poison which penetrated the armies of its enemies, working like a strong acid, disintegrating what it touched. A good part of the secret conferences going on in Paris had to do with this peril and how to meet it. There were some who thought it made no difference what decisions the Peace Conference took, because it was all going to be swept away in a Red upheaval throughout Central Europe.
As the friends of Lanny Budd portrayed it to him, two evil creatures had been spewed up from the Russian cesspool, and had managed to seize power. They were still holding on to it—in spite of the fact that the newspapers reported Lenin as shooting Trotsky and Trotsky as poisoning Lenin about once a week. They had led the workers and peasants in a campaign of massacre, and the nobility and land owners of the Tsar’s realm had fled, counting themselves lucky if they had a few jewels sewed up in the lining of their coats. Paris was full of these refugees, with pitiful and ghastly tales to tell; Lanny heard some of them, and his mother, in her incompetent way, made efforts to help the victims. It seemed to her sympathetic soul unbearable that people who had never had to work and so didn’t know how to work should suddenly find themselves without money to pay for their meals. Robbie had to tell her more than once that his fortune was not equal to supporting the Russian aristocracy in the state to which it had been accustomed.
Of course Europe had to
protect itself against this Red menace, said Lanny’s friends; and so the Allied armies had established what they called a cordon sanitaire around the vast former empire of the Tsar. The Japanese and the Americans had seized Vladivostok and the eastern half of the Trans-Siberian railway. The British and Americans had occupied Archangel and Murmansk in the far North, blocking all commerce by that route. Along the European land front the Allied troops stood on guard, and French and British officers were busy organizing anti-Bolshevik Russians, and providing them with arms and money and sending them into the Ukraine, Russian Poland, and the Baltic provinces. This fighting had been going on for a year now, and each day Lanny read in the papers of “White” victories and was assured that soon the dreadful menace would be at an end.
But it was like a forest fire, whose sparks flew through the air; or perhaps a plague, whose carriers burrow underground and come up through rat-holes. The emissaries of the Bolsheviks would sneak through the sanitary cordon, and creep into the slums of some city of Central Europe, telling the hungry workers how the Russians had made a revolution, and offering to help do the same. The armies would catch many of them and shoot them; but there were always more. Even before the armistice, a Jewish “Red” by the name of Eisner had seized the government of Bavaria; in Berlin two others named Liebknecht and Luxemburg—the latter a woman, known as “Red Rosa”—were carrying on a war in the streets, seeking to take power from the Socialist government which had arisen in Germany after the overthrow of the Kaiser. In Hungary it was the same; a member of the nobility who called himself a Socialist, Count Karolyi, had given his estates in an effort to help the poor of that starving land, but now a Bolshevik Jew was leading a movement to unseat him and set up Soviets on the Russian pattern.
Always it was a Jew, people pointed out to Lanny; and this kindled to flame the anti-Semitic feeling always latent among the fashionable classes of Europe. “What did we tell you?” they would say. “The Jews have no country; they are seeking to undermine and destroy Christian society. It is a worldwide conspiracy of this arrogant people.” Robbie said something along this line; and Lanny grinned and replied: “Be careful, you’ve got a Jewish partner now!”
Robbie made a wry face. His Anglo-Saxon conscience troubled him, and his aristocratic feelings resented the odor of the junk business. But Johannes Robin had bought a couple of hundred thousand hand grenades, and had already sold the powder before he had got it extracted. The prospects looked excellent; and Robbie Budd just couldn’t bear to sit on a big pile of money and not make use of it—the use, of course, being to make more money.
VI
One day when Lanny went to lunch he found at his table a young army officer, introduced as Captain Stratton; handsome, well set up, as they all were, full of smartness and efficiency. Military uniforms were plentiful in the Crillon dining room, as all over Paris; someone had counted up the soldiers of twenty-six different nations to be found in the capital at that time. Captain Stratton was connected with the Intelligence Service of the army, and it was his special task to watch out for any efforts of the Bolsheviks among the doughboys. It was a confidential subject, but the officer was in the midst of persons who had a right to know what was going on.
He talked interestingly about his work. He said that the slum denizens were in a state close to madness, with hunger, the fever of war, and the vision of sudden power. It couldn’t be said that they were without training for power, for they had a sort of discipline of their own; in fact, they had a whole culture, which they called “proletarian,” and which was to replace our present culture, called “bourgeois.” A truly frightening thing, said the officer, who before the war had been a rising young architect in Chicago. “I was never afraid of the Huns,” he declared, “but I admit that I’m afraid of these Reds.”
Just recently, he went on to tell, he had come upon evidence of the activities of a press on which had been printed leaflets addressed to the denizens of the Paris slums, calling upon them to rise against the profiteers and seize the food which was in the depots, and which the bureaucrats were refusing to release. The captain had one of these leaflets with him; it ended with a string of slogans followed by exclamation points, and was signed by the Conseils des Ouvriers de St.-Denis. “They don’t say Soviets,” remarked the officer. “But that’s what the word means.”
Then even more startling news: he expected to have proof that these agitators were preparing an appeal to the American troops to break ranks and go home. These troops had enlisted to oust the Kaiser, and why should they stay to hold the workers of Europe in slavery to landlords and money barons? It was a plausible argument.
“Surely you’re going to stop that!” exclaimed one of the professors.
“We’ll have to,” replied the officer. “But it’s a bit awkward, because the fellow who is most active in the matter happens to be an American.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Well, my God, if you arrest an American Red in Paris, you can’t keep it away from the newspapers; then all the agitators at home will be swarming like hornets.”
Professor Davisson, who specialized in the Balkan languages, and had just come back from a mission to the Bulgarian front, expressed the opinion that the unprintable scoundrel ought to be dealt with by military law at once. To this Alston interposed a question: “What’s the use of having licked the Germans if you have to sacrifice American free speech in the process?”
“Do you think that free speech means the right to overthrow the government which protects your free speech?” demanded Davisson.
“Free speech doesn’t overthrow governments,” answered the other. “It’s the lack of free speech.”
“You mean you’d let Bolsheviks incite our troops to mutiny?”
“They wouldn’t get anywhere, Davisson—not unless there was something wrong with what the army was doing.”
So they argued, and got rather hot about it, as men were apt to do these days; until one of them, wishing to dissipate the storm clouds, asked of Captain Stratton: “What sort of fellow is it that’s printing the leaflets?”
“He calls himself a painter, but I don’t know if he works at it. He’s lived most of his life over here, and I guess he’s absorbed what the Reds call their ‘ideology.’”
“Budd knows a lot of painters here,” said Lanny’s employer. “What’s the man’s name?”
“I don’t think I’m at liberty to tell that,” replied the captain. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said as much as I have.”
“It’ll all be confidential,” said Professor Davisson, and the others nodded their confirmation. As for Lanny, he kept up a pretense of interest in his food, and prayed that nobody would notice the blood that had been stealing into his cheeks and throat, and even, so he felt, to the roots of his hair.
VII
When the party broke up, Lanny said to his chief: “I wish you’d take me upstairs to your room for a minute. There’s something important I want to tell you.” When they were alone, he explained: “I can’t be sure, but I think the man Captain Stratton was talking about is my uncle, Jesse Blackless.”
“The heck you say!” exclaimed the startled professor.
“I thought you ought to know right away, because it might prove embarrassing if it comes out.”
Lanny told briefly about this “red sheep” of his mother’s family. “There aren’t apt to be two American painters who are such active Reds. I know he’s in Paris now, because he came to see my mother, to advise her about the best way to arrange for an exhibition of my stepfather’s paintings.”
“Well, well!” said the professor. “A trifle awkward, I must admit.”
“It could be terribly so. I’m afraid there’s nothing for me but to quit before the story breaks.”
The older man smiled. “No, you don’t get off so easily! I assure you, I need you too badly. We’ll work out some other solution.”
“But what can it be?”
“Let me think. Do y
ou suppose you could get hold of this uncle of yours?”
“I suppose he’ll have left his address with my mother.”
“Well, we’ll have to be quick, before the army people grab him.”
“What do you want to do with him?”
“First, we’ll have a talk with him and see what his ideas are, and how much he knows. Then I thought it might be well to take him to Colonel House, and possibly to the President.”
Lanny could only stare, wondering if he had heard aright.
“You see,” explained his chief, noting his expression, “there are two ways to deal with social discontent—one is to throw it into jail and the other is to try to understand it. The President has had to do some of the former under the stress of war, but I’m sure that in his heart he much prefers understanding. Right now, I happen to know that he’s deadlocked with the French over the question of what’s to be done about Russia. Can you keep a really important secret?”
“I’ve been keeping a lot of them, Professor.”
“I had a tip this morning which I believe to be straight—that the President is thinking of moving for a conference with the Bolsheviks at some neutral place. So you see, it might be in order for Colonel House or someone who represents him to get in touch with these people, to find out what their attitude would be. Do you suppose you could find your uncle today?”
“First I’d have to get my father’s consent,” replied the youth. “I gave him my word that I’d not have anything to do with my uncle. That was five or six years ago, and he mayn’t feel the same now.”
World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 55
