Lanny brought up the subject of Upper Silesia, and Armstrong said this was an illustration of the mistake the Allied powers made in trying to settle problems which properly belonged to the League. People would believe in the disinterestedness of a world body, but who could believe in the disinterestedness of France with regard to Poland? The latter country had a bad, reactionary government, hard to handle; they had grabbed Vilna from Lithuania—another question the League was trying to settle. In Silesia the Poles were demanding all the wealthier districts, and it was a complicated situation, because, however you did the dividing, you gave a lot of Germans to Poles and Poles to Germans; also the economic interests—wherever you drew a boundary line you broke up industries and brought ruin to great numbers of people. Too bad they couldn’t be moved across borders, like chessmen; all the Germans into Germany and all the Poles into Poland!
“What do you think will be the outcome?” asked Lanny.
“If the Allies can be induced to turn the question over to us, we’ll appoint a commission, and it will work out the best settlement it can. We have, of course, no means of enforcing decisions, except as the great powers are willing to back us.”
“Then,” asked Rick, “one can say that the League will work only so long as it serves the purposes of Britain and France?”
The young functionary wouldn’t answer that blunt question. “We’ll just try to show what we can do, and the nations will support us if we make it worth while.”
III
This serious and hard-working fellow introduced them to others of the same sort, and soon they were living en famille, as it were, with the League of Nations; an odd sort of colony of diplomats and secretaries gathered from a score of nations, inhabiting this ancient city with its stiff bourgeoisie for the most part devoted to moneymaking and the saving of their own souls by the method of doctrinal conformity. The League had purchased one of Geneva’s biggest hotels, the National, with its quota of lawns and horse-chestnuts, and a statue of a Negro girl thrown in. The beds and dressing-tables had been moved out and the rooms filled with filing-cabinets, typewriters, and multigraphing-machines. The officials and secretaries dined in the city’s restaurants and took their constitutionals on the avenues shaded with plane trees, but they were rarely invited to the homes of the citizens. Said Armstrong: “From what I hear we don’t miss much.”
The head nurse of this ugly duckling was a Scotch gentleman named Sir Eric Drummond, a caricaturist’s dream of a British bureaucrat; tall, thin, with fair hair, a long neck and prominent Adam’s apple; wearing, of course, a short black coat, a watch-chain, and dark-striped trousers, and carrying a black umbrella neatly rolled. He had had a dreadful time getting started, because nobody would send him any money; but he had gone patiently ahead, selecting with extraordinary discernment exactly the right sort of men to run what might some day become the biggest enterprise in the history of mankind.
Impossible not to sympathize with such efforts, and to respect the men who were making them. Lanny thought of that pitiful invalid, now a private citizen in Washington, from whose soul this League had sprung. Lanny had seen a picture of him, riding to the inaugural ceremony with his bland and well-fed successor; Wilson’s face drawn and haggard, the mask of a man suffering, not his own martyrdom, but that of his hopes and dreams. Here in Geneva he had planted a little acorn which had become a vigorous sprout. Would it live to be a great oak? If it did, the name of Woodrow Wilson would live on, while the names of his antagonists would be buried in the encyclopedias.
Such were the questions which Lanny and his friends debated in between their inquiries and interviews. Lanny had in mind the bitter scorn of his father and his uncle. Robbie Budd and Jesse Blackless were at one in their certainty that the League must collapse, and that it would be the struggle for markets and raw materials, the commercial rivalries of great states which would bring it down. Jesse hated that blind greed and the men who embodied it; Robbie, one of those men himself, took it as a basic law of nature, the condition upon which life was lived. Might it be that neither of them was entirely right, but that the greed of men might be gradually tamed and brought under the rule of law; that freedom might slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent?
Lanny had been reading a history of his own country, selected from several in the Eli Budd library. He had freshly in mind the loose Confederation which the thirteen colonies had formed while they were struggling for their freedom. It had served a temporary purpose, keeping them together until public opinion had time to form in favor of an enduring union. Might it not be that something of the same sort was happening here? Let the nations recover from their war psychosis and realize how much better it was to reason together than to fight, how much easier to produce goods with modern machinery than to take one another’s goods by force—then you might see a real Federation of the World such as Tennyson and other poets had sung.
IV
Lanny called up George D. Herron and was invited to bring his friends to tea. The Socialist exile lived in a beautiful villa called Le Retour, but he was one of the unhappiest men alive, and a very sick one, as Lanny well knew. His face was like marble, and his black beard and mustache were turning gray; he seldom had an hour without pain, but what troubled him most was the agony of civilization. Herron was literally dying of grief over the mass tragedy which he had witnessed in Paris. He had poured his anguish into a book called The Defeat in the Victory, which was soon to appear through an English publishing-house. Impossible to get it published in his native land, where everybody was done with Europe, forever and ever, amen.
Herron was a gracious and charming host. He had conceived a sort of fatherly affection for Lanny, doubtless still thinking of him as a possible convert. Because he had lived in Geneva since the beginning of the war, he was a mine of information about the place and its doings. He had read the world’s best literature in half a dozen languages, and so his conversation was that of a scholar as well as of a prophet.
Lanny told what his English friend had come for, so Herron talked about the League; it was a League of governments, not of peoples, and from none of the existing governments was any good thing to be expected. He said that the hope of the world now lay in its youth, which had the task of forging a new spiritual and intellectual sword for the overcoming of those greedy powers which ruled our society. While he said this the Socialist prophet looked into the eyes of two representatives of that youth, and seemed to be asking: “How well are you prepared for your task?”
Lanny mentioned the problem of Upper Silesia, and how it weighed upon him because of his German friend. That led Herron to talk about the experiences he had had with the Germans all through the war. It had been known that he was in touch with President Wilson, and was sending reports through the State Department, so the Germans assumed that he was authorized to negotiate with them—which wasn’t so. First the Socialists and the pacifists, and later on, as Germany’s situation became worse, the representatives of the government, came to Le Retour in an unceasing stream.
“They constituted,” said Herron, “a veritable clinic for the observation of the German mind; and my conclusion was that there is something inherently amiss in its make-up. The German, in his present stage of development, cannot think directly and therefore morally. He still moves, he still has his psychic being, collectively speaking, in what seems like prehuman nature. The German commonly reasons that whatever accomplishes his ends as an agent or citizen of the State is both mystically and scientifically justifiable. No matter how reprehensible the means, there is no responsibility higher than these ends that can claim his confidence.”
“Do you mean that this is the creed that every German has thought out?” It was Rick questioning.
“I mean it is the mental stuff of his motivation, whether conscious or unconscious. The sheer might that achieves the thing in view becomes his supreme good. You understand that I am speaking of a stream of visitors continuing over a period of three or four year
s. Each discussion, without regard to the messenger’s intellectual repute, or his high or low official degree, began with his assumption that Germany was misunderstood and wronged, even to the extent of a piteous martyrdom. If ever there was any grudging admission that Germany might have been remiss, it was because of deception practiced by jealous neighbors upon this too trustful, too childlike people. And always Germany must be preserved from discovering that the responsibility was hers. As an instance, an eminent and official German of high intellectual quality—a German whom I had long held in affectionate admiration—continually sought to show me that the war must be so ended as to save Germany from the humiliation of a confession. The preservation of Germany’s national pride, rather than the revelation of righteousness to her people, was basic in all this good man’s quest for a better German future. Well aware as he was of the historical abnormality of his race, admitting it candidly enough in our discussions, yet so thoroughly German was he that he could conceive no peace except one that would save Germany from self-accusation.”
V
All the time that Lanny Budd was listening to this pain-driven man, he had in the back of his mind a question which his father had asked after meeting him, at lunch in the Hotel Crillon: “For God’s sake, who is that nut?” Now Lanny tried to make up his own mind. “What is a ‘nut’? And why is he?” Certainly Herron had a mess of information, and had coordinated it into a definite system of thought. He was an absolutist; he formed certain standards of justice and truth-telling which he had derived from the prophets and saints of old, especially Jesus, and he tried to apply those standards to a world ruled by force and guile. Perhaps they didn’t apply to that world, and couldn’t ever be made to apply; Robbie avowed that they couldn’t—and perhaps that was the way to get along. But Herron refused to give up; he said, as Jesus had said: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Nobody paid much attention to this modern prophet, any more than to the old-time one. Manifestly, theirs was not the way to get along and be happy in this world.
Nothing had been done or was going to be done according to this prophet’s standards of righteousness. He said it himself, in words which had the ring of Isaiah and Jeremiah. When he learned that Lanny and Rick had attended the San Remo conference, he read from the proofs of his book about the doings there: “The Supreme Council, gambling in last chances, tosses Armenia to the Kurdish dogs and gaily stakes the destinies of three continents on the capture of new supplies of oil. The starving Poles, typhus-stricken and at risk of national extinction, march to the blackmailer’s music, stabbing Soviet Russia in the back while the British Prime Minister negotiates with that same Russia for a trader’s truce.”
A terrible thing to hear such words and not be able to contradict them! How pathetic seemed the labors of earnest and patient functionaries, putting a patch of plaster here and a bandage there on the body of the suffering world, when you listened to Herron’s fateful statement upon the four treaties which had ended the World War: “These are not peace, they are rather a pitiless provision for a military and predatory government of the world. They are pregnant with wars more destructive, both physically and spiritually, than history has yet registered, with the resultant prospect of a generation if not a century of tartarean tortures for the whole family of man.”
VI
The three friends came out from that interview in a sober mood, and discussed the various points Herron had raised. Rick, with his practical English sense, said that it was easy enough to condemn what the Peace Conference had done, but that didn’t get you very far; what you had to do was to have a shot at what could be done next and what forces you could make use of. Marie, with her logical French mind, detected what she said were inconsistencies in the prophet’s fervors. No one had ever presented a clearer indictment of those German qualities which made the race a menace to the peace of Europe, and Herron himself had called for the military defeat of Germanism; but he overlooked the plain fact that to achieve such a defeat you had to generate anger and determination in other peoples, and such feelings just cannot be turned off by a stopcock the day an armistice is signed.
“For fifty years,” said Marie, “we French have had the fear of German invasion, and who is going to rid us of it? How shall we be protected? Dr. Herron wants us to forgive, and let everything be as if there hadn’t been any war; but how can we be sure how that will work? Suppose the Germans take it as a sign of weakness? Suppose they see it as credulity? There are things for which they went to war, and which they’d still like to have. Suppose they take them?”
Difficult questions indeed; not to be answered that day, or for many days to come! Lanny drove Rick to another appointment, and the two lovers went for a walk on the lake front. They looked across the darkling water to the peak of Mont Blanc, changing from snow-white to pale pink and then to purple. They went on talking about George D. Herron, and when Lanny expressed sympathy for him, his friend asked with some anxiety: “Are you going to let yourself be drawn into that sort of extremism?”
He smiled and reassured her. “Pretty soon I’ll meet somebody who will argue the opposite, and I’ll find myself agreeing with him—at least part of the way. I suppose that to be a man of action one has to be able to see only one side, and be absolutely certain that it’s the whole truth.”
Inside himself Lanny was amused to see his amie mounting guard over him, keeping him out of trouble, just as Beauty did with Kurt. Were all women always trying to keep their men for themselves? His mind went back over the histories which he had read. How many married heroes could he recall?
VII
The day came when they had to leave. Rick said he had got stuff for more than one article, so they put him on the evening train, and then by the light of a large golden moon they set out along the river Rhone. They spent the night at Bourg, and by steady driving they reached the Chateau de Bruyne the following evening. There Lanny resumed that agreeable life into which he had already been initiated. The boys returned the next day, and were pleased to find that they were to have the companionship of this friendly young man, who would make music come alive for them, teach them various kinds of dancing, and tell them entertaining stories about Germany and England and Greece, and also a family of Puritan munitions makers who had helped to deliver la belle France.
Lanny still urged that Marie should tell the boys the truth about their relationship, or let him tell it; but Denis had been shocked by the suggestion, and he had a right to say no. These must be good Catholic boys; that is, they had to be taught to look upon sex as something inherently shameful and unclean; but also it would be something irresistibly fascinating—nature would see to that—and so they would find out about it in secret ways. Sooner or later, from the gossip of servants or other boys, they would learn about Lanny and their mother, and would be forced to choose between thinking less of their mother and thinking less of the religion they had been taught. At that time Marie would have to fight for herself; but she couldn’t do it now, and Lanny couldn’t urge it without causing a rift in the lute which was producing such pleasant music for him.
They lived, externally, a most proper life. They made a rule that they would never so much as touch hands except when they were in their own rooms with the doors locked. Everywhere else Lanny was a friend of the family, and when visitors came he met them if he wished, or stayed in a corner of the garden and read his books. He acquired a stack of music and played for hours, and Marie never tired of listening. They went into Paris for the various art shows, for theaters and opera, and occasionally Denis would join them; he was unobtrusive and they did their best to make him feel that he was not de trop.
Robbie Budd went to London again, and Lanny offered to pay him a visit, but Robbie wired that he would be in Paris in a couple of days; Lanny was glad, for of course he wanted his father to meet his amie. The amie looked forward to the occasion with feelings in which curiosity and trepidation were about equally balanced. Denis, mo
st perfect of gentlemen, said that he had heard about M. Budd, a very solid businessman, and would like nothing better than to welcome him as a week-end guest at the château.
“By heck,” exclaimed Robbie, when he heard the proposal, “that’s a new one on me!” But he was game. If he had been among the Turkomans and had been invited to eat boiling-hot lamb and rice with his fingers, he would have done so. Lanny was living in France, and if he had found a French lady to make him happy, it was all right with his father, who had given him an unorthodox start and could hardly blame him for following his stars.
Lanny came in and met the morning train, and drove his progenitor around while he attended to various business matters, and then in the cool of the evening drove him out to the château. Robbie had everything carefully explained to him in advance, and if he felt the least bit queasy he certainly didn’t let it show. He could see at one glance that Lanny had found a woman of charm, and he didn’t have to talk with her long to see that she had both culture and character. “I wouldn’t mind having a woman like that myself!” he said, and meant it as a compliment. As for Denis, he was the sort of man that Robbie enjoyed being with; a sensible fellow who had made his own way in the world, and knew what was going on and could exchange ideas about it. In short, an agreeable family, and a delightfully original way for a youth to spend a summer vacation. “But don’t say anything about it in Newcastle,” advised Lanny. The father replied: “God Almighty!”
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 21
