World's End

by Upton Sinclair

  There was another hot spell in New York, and he looked at the crowds of steaming people. The women wore light and airy garments and the young ones tripped gaily; but all the men who wanted to be thought respectable had to wear hot coats, and Lanny pitied them and himself. It was the time of year when “everybody” was supposed to be out of town; but there was an enormous number of “nobodies,” and Lanny marveled how nature had managed it so that they all wanted to live. There were more Jews than anywhere else in the world and he might have satisfied his curiosity about that race if he had had time. There were great numbers of soldiers, and foreigners of every sort, so New York didn’t seem very different from Paris. He found a French restaurant and had his dinners there and felt at home; he wished his mother were with him—what a comfort to tell her about Gracyn and hear her wise comments!

  IX

  The young man went back to St. Thomas’s, and forgot his troubles in the pleasure of meeting his schoolfellows and hearing stories of where they had been and what they had done. He had a firm resolve to buckle down and make a record that would please his father and grandfather, and perhaps even his stepmother. It was pleasant to have your work cut up into daily chunks, duly weighed and measured, so that you knew exactly what you had to do and were spared all uncertainties and moral struggles.

  The Americans had begun their attack in the Argonne, a forest full of rock-strewn hills and deep ravines thick with brush, one of the most heavily fortified districts in the war zone, and considered by the Germans to be impregnable. The doughboys were hammering there, and fifty thousand of them would be killed or wounded in three weeks. It was the greatest battle in American history, and it was a part of Lanny’s life; his friends were in it, and his heart. There came now and then a post card from Jerry Pendleton—that fellow had been fighting every day and almost every night for a month and hadn’t been touched. Now he was back in a rest camp, enjoying the peace his valor won. Somehow Lanny couldn’t think of wounds and death in connection with Jerry; he was the wearer of some sort of Tarnhelm and would come out safe and whole to tell Lanny about it.

  Also a letter from Nina. She had a brother who had been in the fighting south of the Somme and had got what the British called a “blighty” wound, one that brought him home and kept him out of danger for a while. Rick had had his operation, and this time they really hoped for better results. There were even a few lines from Rick to prove it; nothing about wounds, of course, you’d never know if Rick was suffering. “Well, old top, it looks like Fritz is really in trouble. Moving out and no time to pack his boxes. Cheerio!”

  Beauty was always a dependable correspondent, and managed to smile through her tears. No word from Marcel yet. M. Rochambeau had written to friends in Switzerland, asking for information. M. Rochambeau said that Germany was cracking; discontent was breaking out everywhere inside the country. President Wilson’s propaganda was having a tremendous effect; his “Fourteen Points” left the German people no reason for fighting. Baby Marceline was thriving, and all the world agreed that she was the most beautiful baby in the Midi.

  Lanny knew, of course, that all this was an effort on his mother’s part to hide her grieving for Marcel. What was she going to do when the war was over? He had made up his mind that his stepfather was dead; and Beauty was not a person who could live alone. Sometimes he wondered, had he made a mistake in bringing about that marriage? What would he have done if he had known that Marcel was going to be a mutilé inside of one year and a corpse in less than four? Maybe she should have taken the plate-glass man after all!

  X

  The Allied armies continued their grinding advance. The Hindenburg line was cracked and the Germans forced to retreat. First Bulgaria collapsed, then Turkey, then Austria; there came a revolution in Germany and the Kaiser fled to Holland—all that series of dramatic events, culminating in the day when everybody rushed into the streets of American cities and towns, shouting and singing and dancing, blowing horns and beating tin pans, making every sort of racket they could think of. The war was over! There wasn’t going to be any more killing! No more bombs, shells, bullets, poison gas, torpedoes! The boys who were still alive could stay alive! The war to end war had been won and the world was safe for democracy! People thought all these things, one after another, and with each thought they shouted and sang and danced some more.

  Even at St. Thomas’s Academy, the place of good manners, there was a celebration. Lanny got his father on the telephone; they laughed together, and Lanny cried a little. He sent a cablegram to his mother and one to Rick. People were behaving the same way in France, of course. Even those cold and aloof beings, the gentlemen of England, were rushing out into the streets embracing strangers. It had been a tough grind for the people of that small island; they hadn’t been in such danger since the days of the Spanish Armada.

  A couple of weeks later came Thanksgiving Day and Lanny went home. One of the first things his father said was: “Well, kid, I guess I’m going to have to go back to Europe pretty soon. There’ll be a lot of matters to be cleared up.”

  Lanny’s first thought was: You can cross the ocean and enjoy it! You can walk on deck and look for whales instead of submarines!

  One needed time for that to sink in. Then he said: “Listen, Robbie—don’t be surprised. I want you to take me with you.”

  “You mean—to stay?”

  “I’ve thought it all over. I’ll be a lot happier in France. I can get much more of what I want there.”

  “Aren’t you happy here?”

  “Everybody’s been kind to me, and I’m glad I came. I had to know your people, and I wouldn’t have missed the experience. But I have to see my mother, too. And she needs me right now. I don’t think she’s ever going to see Marcel again.”

  “You could visit her, you know.”

  “Of course; but I have to think of one place as home, and that’s Juan.”

  “What about the business?”

  “If I’m going to help you, it’ll be over there. You’ll be going back and forth, and I’ll see as much of you one way as the other.”

  “You don’t care about going to college?”

  “I don’t think so, Robbie. I’ve asked people about it and it isn’t what I need. I was going through with it on account of the war, and to please you.”

  “Just what is it you want—if you know?”

  “It isn’t easy to put into words. More than anything else I want art. I’ve lived here a year and a half and I’ve heard almost no music. I haven’t seen any good plays—of course I might see them in New York, but I haven’t any friends there, all my best friends are in England and France.”

  “You’ll be a foreigner, Lanny.”

  “I’ll be a citizen of several countries. The world will need some like that.”

  “Just what exactly do you plan to do?”

  “I want to feel my way. The first thing is to stop doing all the things that I don’t want to do. I’m in a sort of education treadmill. I make myself like it, but all the time I know that I don’t; and if I dropped it and went on board a ship with you I’d feel like a bird getting out of a cage. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t want to loaf; but I’m nineteen, and I believe I can direct my own education. I want to have time to read the books I’m interested in. I want to meet cultured people, and know what’s going on in the arts—music, drama, painting, everything. Paris is going to be interesting right now, with the peace conference. Do you suppose you can manage to get me a passport? I understand they let hardly anybody go.”

  “I can fix that up all right, if you’re sure it’s what you want.”

  “I want to know what you’re doing, and I want to help you—I’ll be your secretary, run your errands, anything. To be with you and meet the people you meet—don’t you see how much more that’s worth to me than being stuck in a classroom at St. Thomas’s, hearing lectures on modern European history by some master who’s a child in comparison with you? Everything they have is out of books, and
I can get the same books and read them in a tenth of the time. I’ll wager you that on the steamer going across I can learn more modern European history than I’d get in a whole term in school.”

  “All right,” said the father. “I guess it’s no use trying to fit you into anybody else’s boots.”

  XI

  Lanny motored up to the school to pack his belongings, and say good-by to his masters and his fellow-pupils, who thought he was the luckiest youth in the state. Then he came home and started saying farewell to people at the country club and to the many members of the family. Most of all he wanted to see the Reverend Eli Budd; but fate had other plans about that. There came a telegram saying that the patriarch had passed away peacefully in his sleep, and that the funeral would be held two days later.

  Lanny motored up to Norton with Robbie and his wife and an elderly widowed cousin who was visiting them. The Budd tribe had assembled from all over New England—there must have been two hundred of them in the little Unitarian church, where the deceased had been the minister for fifty years of his life. The Budd men were all grave and solid-looking, all dressed pretty much alike, whether they were munitions magnates or farmers, bankers or clergymen. They listened in silence while the present minister extolled the virtues of the departed, and when they came outside, where the first snowflakes of the year were falling, the older ones agreed that the Budd line was producing no more great men. When the will was opened, everyone was puzzled because the old man had left his library to his great-grandnephew, Lanning Prescott Budd. Some of them didn’t know who that was, till the whisper went round that it was Robert Budd’s bastard, who was now going back to France and would probably take the books with him.

  Robbie had got the passports, and the steamer sailed two days later. The son went over to the office and said good-by to all the executives and secretaries who had been kind to him. He had had to see a good deal of his Uncle Lawford in the office, and he now went in and shook hands with that morose and silent man, who unbent sufficiently to say that he wished him well. Lanny called on his grandfather at his home, and the old gentleman, who had aged a lot under the strain of the war, didn’t make any attempt to seem cheerful. He said he didn’t know how Robbie could be expecting to drum up any more business in Europe now; they had munitions enough on hand to blow up the whole continent, and he wasn’t sure but what they might just as well do so.

  “There’s going to be hell to pay at home,” he warned. “All our workingmen have got too big for their breeches, and we’ve got to turn a lot of them off when we finish these government contracts. They’ve been watching that lunatic asylum in Russia, and they’ll be ready to try it here when they find we’ve nothing more to give them. Better take my advice and learn something about business, so you can take care of yourself in a dangerous time.”

  “I’m planning to stick close to my father, sir, and learn all that he’ll teach me.”

  “Well, if you listen to me you’ll forget all this nonsense about music and stage plays. There are temptations enough in a young man’s life without going out to hunt for them.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” said the youth, humbly. This was a rebuke, and he had earned it. “I don’t think there’ll be much pleasure-seeking in France for quite a while. They are a nation of widows and cripples, and most of the people I know are working hard trying to help them.”

  “Humph!” said Grandfather Samuel, who wasn’t going to believe anything good about France if he could help it. He went on to talk about the world situation, which was costing him a lot of sleep. Forces apparently beyond control had drawn America into the European mess, and it wasn’t going to be easy getting her out again. American businessmen would be compelled to sell more and more to foreigners. “We Budds have always been plain country people,” declared the grandfather. “Not many of us know any foreign languages, and we distrust their manners and their morals. We can use someone who knows them, and can advise us—that is, if it’s possible for anybody to live among them and not become as corrupt as they are.”

  “I’ll bear your advice in mind, sir,” replied the youth. “I have learned a great deal from my visit here, and I mean to profit by it.”

  That was all, but it was enough, according to the old gentleman’s code. He wouldn’t try to pin anyone down. Lanny had been to Bible class, and had had his chance at Salvation; whether he took it or not was up to him, and whatever he did would be what the Lord had predestined him to do. The Lord would be watching him and judging him—and so would the Lord’s deputy, the president of Budd Gunmakers.

  XII

  There remained the partings from Robbie’s own family. The two boys were sorry indeed to see him go, for he had been a splash of bright color in their precisely ordered lives. He found time for a heart-to-heart talk with Bess, the only person in Connecticut who shed tears over him. She pledged herself to write to him, and he promised to send her pictures of places in Europe where he went and of people he met. “Some day you’ll come over there,” he said; and she answered that Robbie would have to bring her, or she would come as a stowaway.

  As for Esther, she kissed him, and perhaps was really sorry. He thanked her with genuine affection; he felt that he had done wrong and was to blame for the coldness which had grown between them. He would always admire her and understand her; she would always be afraid of him.

  Father and son went to New York by a morning train. Robbie had business in the afternoon, and in the evening Lanny had another good-by to say. Through the newspapers he had been following the fortunes of a dramatic production called The Colonel’s Lady, which had opened in Atlantic City the beginning of October and had scored a hit; it had run there for two weeks, and had then had a successful opening at the Metropole Theater. Lanny wanted to see it, and Robbie said, sure, they’d both go. Their steamer had one of those midnight sailings which allow the pleasure-loving ones a last fling on the Great White Way.

  Lanny didn’t want to meet “Phyllis Gracyn”; he just wanted to see her act. He got seats for the show, for which one had to pay a premium. They were well down in front, but Gracyn probably didn’t see the visitors. They followed the fortunes of a French innkeeper’s daughter who was fascinated by the brilliance of an American “shavetail,” but wasn’t able to resist the lure of a French colonel, whose jealous wife involved him with a German spy in order to punish him. Out of this came an exciting melodrama, which was going to hold audiences in spite of peace negotiations.

  Lanny was interested in two things: first, the performance of Gracyn, which wasn’t finished by any means, but was full of energy and “pep”; and, second, the personality of the young American officer. Evidently the play was one of those which had been written at rehearsals, and Gracyn had had a part in it. Lanny had taught her, and she had taught the author and the young actor; so there were many touches in which Lanny recognized himself—mannerisms, phrases, opinions about the war, items about the French, their attitude to the doughboys and the doughboys’ to them. There were even a few third-hand touches of Sergeant Jerry Pendleton in this Broadway hit!

  “Well, you did a good job,” said Robbie. “Charge it up to education and don’t fall in love with any more stage ladies.”

  “I’ve made a note of it,” said the dutiful son.

  “Or else—note this: that if you’d had thirty thousand dollars, you might have licked the coffee merchant!”

  They were in the taxi on the way to the steamer; and Lanny grinned. “There’s an English poem supposed to be sung by the devil, and the chorus runs: ‘How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho, how pleasant it is to have money!’”

  “All right,” replied the father. “But you can bet that poet had money, or he wouldn’t have been sitting around making up verses.”

  On board the steamer; and one more farewell to say. Standing on the deck, watching the lights of the metropolis recede, Robbie pointed to an especially bright light across the bay and said: “The Statue of Liberty.”

  She had
come from France, and Lanny was going home. She waved her torch to him, as a sign that she understood how he felt.

  BOOK FIVE

  They Have Sown the Wind

  25

  The Battle Flags Are Furled

  I

  There was only one steamer a week to France at this time, and those who traveled on it were carefully selected persons, able to show that they had important business, of a kind the authorities approved. In theory, the world was still at war, and it was not intended that Americans should use the peace conference as a propaganda platform, or for sightseeing tours. But Robert P. Budd knew the people at the War and State Departments; they talked to him confidentially, and when he asked for passports they arranged it at once.

  The first thing Robbie did on a steamer was to study the passenger list. He was an extrovert; he liked to talk with people, all sorts, and especially those who were familiar with his hunting ground. There was no printed list in wartime, but he borrowed the purser’s list, and went over it with Lanny, and told him that this man was “in steel,” that one “in copper,” and a third represented a Wall Street banking group. Near the top he read: “Alston, Charles T.,” and remarked: “That must be old Charlie Alston, who was in my class at Yale. He’s a professor now, and has published a couple of books on the geography of Europe.”