It was plain to everybody that Britain could not stand that rate of loss, and the American people had to face the question whether they were willing to see the British Empire replaced by a German one. At least everybody whom Lanny knew said that was the question, and no use fooling yourself. The youth found it a hard problem to think about, and wished more than ever to have his father at hand. He read bits of the speeches which President Wilson made, and the notes which he wrote to the German government, and it seemed to him that the only way he could comply with his father’s orders was to start a new and determined campaign of sight reading at the piano.
The U-boats began sinking American ships; and then came the publication of an intercepted letter from the German government, inviting the Mexicans to enter the war on the German side, and promising them a handsome reward, including Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. That helped Americans to understand what the war was about, and there was a general movement of the country to get ready.
An exciting time for Americans in France, and for none more than Lanny. Would his father expect him to be neutral now? Or was he going to be free to feel the way everybody else did, and the way he wanted to—or at least thought he wanted to? Kurt Meissner seemed farther away, and the voices of Mozart and Beethoven grew fainter; France was all around, and its questioning was incessant: “Why don’t you Americans help us?” Lanny heard it so often that he didn’t go out any more, but became a sort of youthful hermit, swimming and fishing by himself, and reading books about other times and places. He wrote his father concerning these troubles, and added: “Tell me if America is coming in, and if so what I am to do.”
Then one day late in March came a cablegram—one of the old-style ones such as Lanny had not received for more than two years and a half. “Sailing for Paris tomorrow wish you to join me there will wire upon arrival Robert Budd.”
17
A Man’s World
I
Lanny spent a whole week thinking about submarines. It was the time when the German campaign reached its high point; they were sinking thirty thousand tons a day, and one of every four vessels which left the British Isles never returned. Lanny didn’t have to imagine a submarine rising from the sea—he had seen it. From eyewitnesses he had heard how torpedoes exploded, and people rushed into lifeboats, and men gave their lives to save women and children. Robbie was the sort of man who would do that, and Lanny felt as if he were tossing a coin every hour for his father’s life.
At last a telegram from Le Havre. Thank God, he was on land! He was writing; and next day Lanny received the most important letter of his young life. Robbie was proposing to take him to Connecticut!
“I think the time has come when you ought to know your own country,” wrote the father. “It appears certain that we are going into the war, and whatever part you take ought to be in America. My wife invites you to stay with us this summer; I will get you a tutor and you will study hard, and be able to enter prep school this fall and get ready for college.” That meant Yale, which was Robbie’s own college, and that of his forefathers for a hundred years or more.
There was a letter for Beauty also. Robbie hoped she would agree with him that a lad ought to have a chance to know his own people. Beauty had now had him to herself for thirty-two months—Robbie had an arithmetical mind. He said that if the war lasted, it would be better for Lanny to be in Connecticut, where Robbie could arrange for him to render service in the production of munitions. “You may put your mind at ease on one subject,” he wrote. “Lanny will not go into the trenches. He is too valuable to me, and I will be valuable to the government.” Bella gerant alii!
“What do you want to do?” asked the mother, after they had shared these letters.
“Well, of course, I’d like to see America,” said the youth; and the mother’s heart sank. Such a lovely safe nest she had made here, but of course he wouldn’t stay in it; the last thing in the world that men wanted appeared to be safety.
“I suppose I’ll have to give you up,” she said. “The cards are all stacked against a woman.”
“Don’t worry, Beauty, I’ll take good care of myself, and come back when the war’s over. I don’t think I’ll want to live anywhere but here.”
“You’ll meet some girl over there, and she’ll tell you what to do.”
“I’m going to get tough,” replied the boy; but he didn’t look it.
“I knew this had to come, Lanny. But I hoped Robbie would wait till the sea was safe.”
“Plenty of people are getting through; and he and I are pretty good swimmers.” Lanny thought for a moment, then added: “I wonder what he’s going to do about telling his friends the bad news about me.”
“He told his wife about us both before they were married. I imagine he’ll tell other people that you’re his son, and let it go at that. Don’t let it worry you.”
“If anybody doesn’t want me around,” said the boy, “I can always go somewhere else. Shall you miss me too terribly, Beauty?”
“It’ll be all right if I know you’re happy. I ought to tell you a bit of news that I’ve just learned—I’m going to have a baby.”
“Oh, gosh!” A wide smile spread over Lanny’s face. “That’s grand, Beauty! It will tickle Marcel, won’t it?”
“Frenchmen are like that,” she answered.
“All men are, aren’t they?” After a while he inquired: “Was it another accident, or did you decide to do it?”
“Marcel and I decided.”
“It’s a grand place to bring up a child, Beauty—I can tell you that.” He kissed her on both cheeks until she cried with happiness and sorrow mingled.
II
It seemed cruel that a youth should be so excited at the idea of leaving his mother; but he couldn’t help it, and she understood. To be with Robbie in Paris, and travel on a great steamer, and see that city of New York which he knew from motion pictures, and the marvelous plant of Budd’s, the economic foundation of his life. It was a center of his imaginings, a forge of Vulcan a million times magnified, a Fafnir and Fasolt cave where monstrous forces were generated. And to meet that mysterious family, so many of them that you couldn’t keep their names straight, and all different and queer. Robbie didn’t often talk about them, but behaved as if they were a dark secret. Or perhaps it was Lanny who was the dark secret!
He packed the few things he would take with him; that required only a couple of hours, and he was ready to go on the evening train. Beauty broke down and wept—it was such short notice. He was a mother’s darling; and who else would love him as she had? The world was cruel, so many wicked people in it, women especially—she understood their hearts, the cold and selfish ones, the gold diggers, the harpies! So many things she ought to have taught him, and now it was too late, he couldn’t remember them; he was crazy with eagerness to get out into that world which seemed to her so full of pain. She gave him many warnings, extracted many promises—and all the time aware that she was boring him a little.
Lanny had a good-by talk with Marcel, and this was more to the point. Marcel had left his family, respectable bourgeois in a provincial town; they had wanted him to be a lawyer, perhaps a judge, and instead he had come to Paris to dab paint on canvas. They gave him a small allowance, but didn’t pretend to like his work. “You are lucky,” Marcel said; “your parents are sympathetic, they’ll stand by you even if you don’t succeed. But don’t be surprised if you don’t like your relatives. Don’t bare your heart to the hawks.”
“What makes you say that?” asked the boy, puzzled.
“Rich people are pretty much the same all over the world. They believe in money, and if you don’t make money they think there’s something wrong with you. If you don’t see life as they do, they take it as a criticism, and right away you’re an outsider. If I were taking you to meet my family, that’s how I’d have to warn you.”
“Well, I’ll write and let you know what I find, Marcel.”
“If you like it, all right. I’m
just putting you on guard. You’ve had a happy life so far, everything has been easy—but it can hardly be like that all the way through.”
“Anyhow,” remarked the boy, “Robbie says that America’s going to help France.”
“Tell them to hurry,” replied the painter. “My poor country is bleeding at every vein.”
III
Lanny was seventeen, and had grown nearly a foot in those thirty-two months since he had seen his father. For many youths it is an awkward age, but he was strongly knit, brown with sunshine and red with well-nourished blood. He came running from the train to welcome Robbie, and there was something in the sight of him which made the man’s heart turn over. Flesh of my flesh-but better than I am, without my scars and my painful secrets! So Robbie thought, as the lad seized him and kissed him on both cheeks. There was a trace of down on Lanny’s lips, light brown and soft; his eyes were clear and his look eager.
He wanted to know everything about his father in the first moment. That grand rock of a man, that everybody could depend on; he would solve all the problems, relieve all the anxieties—all in the first moment! Robbie looked just the same as ever; he was in his early forties, and his vigor was still unimpaired; whatever clouds might be in his moral sky showed no trace. He looked handsome in brown tweeds, with tie and shoes to match; Lanny, whose suit was gray, decided at once that he would look better in brown.
“Well, what do you think about the war?” The first question every man asked then.
The father looked grave immediately. “We’re going in; not a doubt of it.”
“And are you going to support it?”
“What can I do? What can anybody do?”
It was nearing the end of March. Relations with Germany had been severed for many weeks, and President Wilson had declared a state of what he called “armed neutrality.” America was going to arm its merchant vessels, and in the meantime Germany was going on sinking them, day after day. Shipping was delayed, the vessels in American harbors were afraid to venture out.
“What can we do?” repeated Robbie. “The only alternative is to declare an embargo, and abandon our European trade entirely.”
“What would that do?”
“It would bring a panic in a week. Budd’s would have to shut down, and throw twenty thousand men out of work.”
Driving to their hotel in a horse-drawn cab, Robbie explained this situation. A large-scale manufacturing enterprise was geared to a certain schedule. A quantity of finished goods came off the conveyors every day, and was boxed and put into freight cars or trucks—or, in the case of Budd’s, which had its own river frontage, onto ships. Vessels were loaded and moved away, making room for others. If for any reason that schedule was interrupted, the plant would be blockaded, because its warehouses could hold only a few days’ output. The same thing would happen at the other end, because raw materials came on a fixed schedule—they had been ordered and had to be taken and paid for, but there was place to store only a limited supply; they were supposed to go through the plant and be moved on.
That, said Robbie, was the situation not merely with steel mills and munitions plants, but with meat packing and flour milling, making boots and saddles, automobiles and trucks, anything you could think of. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, American business had geared itself to the task of supplying the need of the nations of Europe. American finance had geared itself to taking and marketing their bonds. If all this were suddenly stopped, there would be such a breakdown as had never been known in the world before—“ten or twenty million men out of work,” declared the representative of Budd Gunmakers Corporation.
Lanny had heard many persons express disapproval of those who were making money out of this war; Kurt, and Rick, and Beauty, Sophie, Marcel, and M. Rochambeau. But when he listened to his father, all that vanished like mist before the morning sun. He saw right away that things had to be like this; if you were going to have machinery, and produce goods on a big scale, you had to do it in a fixed way. The artists and dreamers and moralists were just talking about things they didn’t understand.
At least that was the way it seemed until Lanny got off by himself. Then he began to have troubles in his thinking. Robbie was all for Budd’s, and defended the right of Budd’s to get all the business it could, and to keep its workers employed. But Robbie didn’t like Zaharoff, and had a tendency to resent the business that Vickers got. Robbie blamed Schneider-Creusot because it sold goods to neutral countries which resold them to Germany; he objected to the French de Wendels’ protecting their properties in Germany. But suppose that Budd’s had owned plants in Germany—wouldn’t Robbie be trying to take care of them, and pointing out the harm it would do if they were bombed?
In short, wasn’t there as much to be said for one set of businessmen as for another? As much for Germans as for British or French or Americans? Lanny felt in duty bound to be fair to his friend Kurt, and to Kurt’s family who had been so kind to him. He could not forget having heard Herr Meissner using these very same arguments about the need of German manufacturers to get raw materials and to win foreign markets, in order to keep their workers employed and their plants running on schedule. It was extremely puzzling; but Lanny didn’t say much about it, because for two years and a half he had been learning to keep his ideas to himself. In wartime it appeared that nobody wanted to see both sides of any question.
IV
Of course the father and son didn’t spend all their time discussing world politics. Lanny had to tell about Beauty and Marcel; about the painter’s wounds, and his way of life, and his work; about the new baby they were going to have, on purpose—a somewhat rare event nowadays, so Robbie remarked. And about Sophie and her Eddie Patterson and his ambulance driving; about Mrs. Emily and Les Forêts, and old M. Priedieu and how he had died; about Sept Chênes, and the war victims who were being re-educated, including Lanny’s gigolo, who would never jig again. And about Mr. Robin, and the letters to Kurt, and the little Robins, and the Jews, and didn’t Robbie like them, and why not? And about Rosemary—a large subject in herself; and Rick and his flying—as soon as Lanny learned that he was to have a few days in Paris he got off a card to Rick, on the chance that he might be able to get a day’s leave and visit his friend.
Robbie would ask questions, and Lanny would think of details he had left out. There was Marcel’s painting; he was getting better and better, everybody agreed; he was doing an old peasant woman who grew roses on the Cap, and had lost three sons, one after another, and it showed in her face, and still more in the portrait that Marcel was making of her. The one he had done of Beauty, called “Sister of Mercy,” was to be shown at a salon in the Petit Palais, and one of the things Lanny wanted to do was to find out about it. If Robbie went to view it he would find a new woman, one much more serious, and really sad. “Of course she’s not that way all the time,” added the boy; “but that’s how Marcel sees things. He can’t forgive fate for what it’s done to his face—nor for what it’s doing to France.”
Robbie also had things to tell. For the most part they had to do with business; for he was not one of those persons who have states of soul which require explanation. He had been making money hand over fist, and it kept him in good humor; he found it pleasant, not only for himself, but for many other people. He was troubled because Lanny’s wants were so modest in that regard; he seemed to think they ought to celebrate their reunion by buying something handsome. The only thing Lanny could think of was one of Marcel’s paintings to take to America. But Robbie didn’t think that would be such a good idea—no use to say anything about a stepfather right at the outset!
Lanny told how seriously Beauty was taking the re-education of the mutilés, and so Robbie sent her a check for a couple of thousand dollars, telling her she might use it for that purpose if she pleased. He added a friendly message for Mrs. Emily, knowing that Beauty would take it to her; in this way the money would win credit for Beauty with that socially powerful lady. Robbie explained th
is procedure, so that his son might learn how to make his way in the world. No use to have money unless you knew how to use it, and how to handle people. There were some to whom you gave it with a careless gesture, and others to whom you doled it out carefully.
Robbie remarked with a smile that there had been personal reasons for his opposition to America’s entering the war; Budd’s would now begin manufacturing for the United States government, and Robbie would get no commissions on that. “It will be a great satisfaction to my brother Lawford,” he added. “It has pained him to see me making more money than himself.”
Lanny was going to meet this brother, so the time had come for Robbie to tell about him. “He will be polite to you, but don’t expect him to be anything more, because nature hasn’t made him that way. He’s all right if you let him alone; but unfortunately I haven’t—not since the day I was born, and attracted too much attention in the nursery. I was better-looking than he, and mother made too much fuss over me.”
Robbie spoke playfully, but made it plain that there was something of a feud between his older brother and himself. When Robbie had come of age, he had offered to learn the selling end of the business, and the father had given him a chance, working on commission, plus an expense account. This latter had made much trouble, because Lawford objected to one item or another; when Robbie lost money to Captain Bragescu, his brother called it paying his gambling debts at the company’s expense!
“And then came this war,” said Robbie. “That was my good fortune, but surely not my fault. It resulted in my having an income two or three times his own—and he works hard running the plant, while I don’t have to do another lick of work in my life unless I feel like it.”
World's End Page 35
