World's End

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny’s fancy moved on to that peaceful Côte d’Azur, with sunshine and blue water, and air always warm, except at night, or when the mistral blew. There were a lot of fashionable goings-on, noise and distraction, gambling and vice, and doubtless it would be worse since the war; but you didn’t have to bother with it, you could go your way and let the wasters go theirs. In the living room was a piano, good enough when it had been tuned, and a great stack of music which Lanny had played through and would like to tackle again. He had been to concerts, and heard new music which he would try out. In the storeroom of the studio were all but a few of Marcel’s paintings; and now, fresh from an exhibition, Lanny would view his stepfather’s work all over again and compare it with what he had seen. Also there were a score or so of wooden cases, containing the books which his Great-Great-Uncle Eli had willed to him; Lanny promised himself an adventure unpacking these and having shelves made for them. He hadn’t liked New England any too well, but he thought he might come to know it better through its poets and sages than through its country club gentry and munitions makers.

  He had it planned out in detail. His mother and his new stepfather would come back from Spain as soon as it was safe, and they would build another studio for Kurt on the other side of the grounds—if both of them were going to tootle and tinkle they would want as much distance between them as possible. Some day Rick and Nina would come to visit them; and—still farther in the future—Rosemary would come. Lanny remembered the spot where they had sat in the darkness and watched the lights over the water and listened to the distant music from the casino orchestra; the thought of it sent little shivers coursing up and down his nerves. “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen, Die hat einen Andern erwählt!”

  IX

  A delicate situation between a devoted father and an equally devoted son: one calling for a lot of tact—and fortunately Lanny had been in the polite world long enough to acquire it. Never would he say a word against the oil industry; never would he argue, but let Robbie have his say. Lanny would think his own thoughts—one of the great privileges of man. He would lunch or dine with his father and meet some of the “big” men—interesting personalities, provided you entered into their world and didn’t expect them to enter into yours. An oil magnate discussing the market prospects or the international situation might be an authority; but discussing a book or a play he wasn’t so hot. Lanny would say that he had a date, and would go look at an art show or hear a concert.

  He had told about these plans before they crossed the seas, so there could be no complaint. Robbie was a fair man, and wouldn’t try to compel his son; Robbie’s own father had made that mistake, with results which Robbie would never forget or forgive, and he was not going to repeat the offense. He had promised Lanny an allowance, what he would have had if he had been going through college. So long as he was improving himself and not wasting his life, he was free to choose his own course. Lanny did really mean to make something of his opportunities—even though he wasn’t sure just what it was going to be. The world was so big, and there were so many things he wanted to see and to understand; so many interesting people, to start new ideas going in his mind!

  He accepted an invitation to a week-end with Beauty’s old friends, the Eversham-Watsons, and practiced riding and jumping some more, and learned about the gout from his lordship, and had an amusing time fencing off the efforts of Margy Petries to find out what his blessed mother was doing in Spain. No use trying to fool that eager chatterbox and manipulator of men—she knew it was a “romance”—she knew that Beauty Budd wasn’t going to remain a widow—and who was it, some grandee of that land of castanets and cruelty? Lanny would just smile and say: “Beauty will tell you some day. Meanwhile, be sure that anything you guess will be wrong!”

  He walked, and saw London at the beginning of the peace era. He knew what he was looking at now; he could recognize the signs of that poverty in the midst of luxury which was the plague of the modern world, and perhaps, as Stef thought, the seed of its destruction. He walked in Piccadilly and saw hordes of women peddling themselves, as in Paris—only they lacked the chic and esprit of the French. In the fashionable shopping streets he saw returned soldiers, hundreds of them, wandering listless and depressed; England had needed them, but now they peddled pencils, boxes o’ lights, any trifling objects that would keep them from being beggars within the meaning of the law. Prosperity was coming back, everybody insisted—but for these men it was a marshlight, flitting out of reach.

  As in Paris, all the smart forms of play had been resumed with a rush. A horde of people had got money, and the newspapers assured them that the way to help the poor was to spend it fast. Benevolent souls, they labored hard to do their duty. They acquired new outfits of costly clothing, thus making work for seamstresses and tailors; they motored to the racetracks, thus making work for jockeys and trainers, for salesmen and chauffeurs of automobiles; they swarmed into the expensive restaurants, ordered lavishly, and tipped the waiters generously. To assist their efforts were shows and pageants, balls and festivals, events with historic names—“Wimbledon” and “Henley,” a “Peace Ascot” and a “Victory Derby,” a Cowes regatta coming for the first time in six years. There would be no “Courts,” but there were six Royal Garden Parties at Buckingham Palace, gay and delightful affairs at which the ladies were forbidden to wear décolleté in the afternoons. In the days of Jane Austen it would have been proper, but the present Queen considered female arms and bosoms improper until after sundown.

  Pearls were the gems of the day, and fashions were “anarchical”; dresses might be anything so long as skirts were short and waistlines nonexistent. Capes had come back; they were pleated, and large at the waist—built in imitation of barrels, so Margy Petries declared. The keynote of a day costume was plumes; not the curled ones, but lancer plumes, glycerined plumes, plume fringes, plume cascades, plume rosettes. Because of the great number of gas cases, which healed slowly if ever, many entertainments were given and costumes worn for the benefit of the crowded hospitals.

  Lanny missed his mother, or some girl to enjoy the society game with him. He persuaded Nina and Rick to motor to town, and put them up at the hotel, and took them to see the Russian dancers—not Bolsheviks, but good, old-time Russians, doing La Boutique Fantasque, enacting can-can dancing dolls. Nina managed to persuade her husband to forget his pride and look at the spring exhibition of art from a wheel-chair. Lanny, having read what the critics had said in Paris, was able to talk instructively about the relative merits of the two displays. Altogether he managed to pass the time agreeably, until one day his father said: “I have to go to Paris for a while.”

  “That’s on my way home!” answered Lanny.

  37

  Peace in Our Time

  I

  The day that Lanny and his father arrived in France was the last day of the last extension of time allowed to the Germans, to say whether or not they were going to accept the terms imposed upon them. At least so the Allies declared, and at each of their outposts, fifty kilometers beyond the Rhine bridgeheads, their motorized columns were packed up and ready to start. They were going to advance thirty-five miles per day into Germany, so it was announced; and meanwhile in every drawing room and bistro in France the leading topic of discussion was: Will they sign or won’t they?

  An Austrian peace delegation had come, and a Bulgarian one, and were submitting with good grace to having their feathers pulled out while they were still alive. Not a squawk from them; but the Germans had been keeping up a God-awful clamor for six or seven weeks; all over their country mass meetings of protest, and Clemenceau remarking in one of his answers that apparently they had not yet realized that they had lost a war. Their delegation was kept inside their stockade and told that it was for their safety; some of them, traveling back and forth to Germany, were stoned, and for this Clemenceau made the one apology of his career.

  The Social-Democrats were ruling the beaten country. It was supposed to have been a
revolution, but a polite and discreet one which had left the nobility all their estates and the capitalists all their industries. It was, so Steffens and Herron had explained to Lanny, a political, not an economic revolution. A Socialist police chief was obligingly putting down the Reds in Berlin, and for this the Allies might have been grateful but didn’t seem to be. Stef said they couldn’t afford to let a Socialist government succeed at anything; it would have a bad effect upon the workers in the Allied lands. It was a time of confusion, when great numbers of people didn’t know just what they wanted, or if they did they took measures which got them something else.

  In the eastern sky the dark cloud continued to lower; and here, also, what the Allies did only made matters worse. The Big Four had recognized Admiral Kolchak as the future ruler of Siberia—a land whose need for a navy was somewhat restricted. This land-admiral had agreed to submit his policies to a vote of the Russian people, but meanwhile he was proceeding to kill as many of them as possible and seize their farms. The result was that the peasants went into hiding, and as soon as the admiral’s armies moved on they came out and took back their farms. The same thing was happening all over the Ukraine, where General Denikin had been chosen as the Russian savior; and now another general, named Yudenich, was being equipped to capture Petrograd. They didn’t dare to give these various saviors any British, French, or American troops, because of mutinies; but they would furnish officers, and armaments which were charged up as “loans,” and which the peasants of Russia were expected to repay in return for being deprived of the land.

  At any rate, that was the way Stef described matters to Lanny Budd; and Lanny found this credible, because Stef had been there and the others hadn’t. The youth had gone to call on this strange little man, whose point of view was so stimulating to the mind. Lanny didn’t tell his father about this visit, and quieted his conscience by saying, what use making Robbie unhappy to no purpose? Lanny wasn’t ever going to become a Red—he just wanted to hear all sides and understand them. Robbie seemed to have the idea that the only way to avoid falling into the snares of the Reds was to refuse to have anything to do with them, or even to know about them. The moment you started to “understand” them—at that moment you were becoming tainted with their hateful infection!

  II

  There came a letter from Beauty, now viewing the art galleries and cabarets of Madrid. She was so, so happy; but her conscience was troubling her because of Baby Marceline, left motherless on the Riviera for so many months. To be sure, the servants adored her, and Beauty had asked friends to go and look her over; but still the mother worried, and wanted Lanny to run down and take her place. “You know my position,” she pleaded. “I dare not leave our friend alone.” Always she used the tactful phrase, “our” friend. If a woman wrote mon ami, that had a special meaning; but notre ami was chaste, even Christian, and took Lanny into the affaire.

  There was much to be done at their home, Beauty informed him. The house needed very much to be redecorated, and it was fortunate that Lanny had such good taste; his mother would leave it to him, and be interested to see what new ideas he had acquired in two years of journeying about. Lanny decided that he would surprise her by building that extra studio. The many relatives of Leese would be summoned en masse; they were slow, but Lanny knew them and liked them, and they would work well for him.

  This was something the youth could present to his father as a plausible substitute for a job in the oil industry. Robbie believed in buildings, as something you could see, and if need be could sell; he said to do the studio right, and he would pay for it. He added that Baby Marceline would probably be better off if Beauty would stay in Spain, or go back to Germany with Kurt; all she could do with a child was to spoil it. She would have done that with Lanny if Robbie hadn’t put his foot down many times. Lanny said maybe she had anyhow.

  The youth wanted to remain in Paris until his father was through. He was seeing the Crillon and all its affairs through a new pair of eyes. The men with whom Robbie was dealing were not the statesmen, but those who told the statesmen what to do. Yes, even the stiff-souled Presbyterian, the reformer to whom big business had been anathema—even he had become dependent upon the masters of money. A whole procession of them had been called over to Paris: prominent among them Lamont of the House of Morgan, whom Wilson had refused even to receive at the White House before the war. A score of such men had now become the President’s confidential advisers on questions of reparations and the restoring of trade and finance.

  Of course these businessmen were telling him to do the things which would enable them to go on making money, as they had been doing so happily before the war. The railroads were to, be handed back to private management, and government controls over industry were to be abandoned. The Supreme Economic Council was to be scrapped, so that the scramble for raw materials could be resumed and Wall Street speculators could buy up everything in sight. To Robbie Budd all this was proof that the world naturally belonged to vigorous, acquisitive persons like himself. He was here to consult with others of his sort, and make certain that American diplomatic and naval authorities would co-operate with American oil men endeavoring to obtain their share of a product for which there was no substitute.

  III

  Johannes Robin came to Paris to consult his business associate. He brought with him a suitcase full of letters, contracts, and financial statements, and Lanny had lunch with the two, and listened while the Jewish enterpriser explained the various affairs in which he had been using Robbie’s money. Things hadn’t gone so well as he had hoped, because the delays in the peace settlement had held up transportation and credit. Meanwhile storage charges were eating up a share of the profits; but still, there would be goodly sums left, and Robbie professed himself as satisfied with what had been done.

  They went upstairs to their suite, and Robbie settled down to look over the documents, with his associate explaining them. Lanny went along, because Mr. Robin said he had brought more snapshots of his family, also a present, a copy of Hansi’s “Opus I,” a violin étude; the copy made by the fifteen-year-old composer’s own hands. Lanny sat down to study it and became absorbed; he had heard so much about that talented and hard-working lad who wanted to be his friend and adorer. He could see right away what had happened: Hansi had learned to perform a number of difficult technical feats on the violin, and in his composition he had been concerned to give himself an opportunity to do them all. But then, most performers’ compositions are like that; you take it for granted, as you do the make-up and mannerisms of a “professional beauty.”

  Mr. Robin was so interested in Lanny’s interest that he could hardly keep his mind on the business documents. When Lanny said: “That’s a lovely theme just after the cadenza,” the fond father turned pink with pleasure. “Can you really get it without hearing it?” he exclaimed; and of course Lanny was pleased to have his musical accomplishments admired. Perhaps the Jewish businessman knew that Lanny would be pleased—thus human relationships are complicated by the profit motive! Anyhow, Lanny promised to take the composition home with him and master the piano part, in preparation for the day when he and the young composer would play their first duet.

  Robbie told his new associate about his plans to break into the oil game, and the latter said he would like to put his profits into that venture. Living in the land of Henri Deterding, he knew quite a lot about the oil business, and the two of them talked as equals in the fascinating game of profit-hunting. To Lanny they resembled two sleek and capable panthers which have met in the jungle and decided to work together for the quicker finding and bringing down of their prey. One had been born in a mud hut in Poland and the other in an aristocratic mansion in New England, but modern standardization had brought them to a point where they talked in shorthand, as it were—they understood each other without the need of completing a sentence. Lanny had a lot of fun teasing his father about it afterward, and trying to decide whether the new firm was to be known as Robbie and Robi
n, or Robin and Robbie. A delicate point in verbal aesthetics—or was it in social precedence? Of course, said the youth, when they had conquered the world and possessed its oil, they would be known as “R. & R.”

  The Dutch partner in this combination said that as soon as peace was certain he was planning to move his office and family to Berlin. Hansi had learned about all he could in Rotterdam; and for the father there would be extraordinary opportunities of profit in Germany in the next few years. He would keep his Rotterdam office, and turn all his money into guilders and dollars. With the reparations settlement as it was, the mark was bound to lose value; the only way, short of repudiation, for Germany to reduce her internal debts. Incidentally, by inflation, she could collect large sums from foreigners, who believed in the mark and were buying it now. Johannes Robin said there was much argument among Dutch traders on this point, and of course fortunes would be made or lost on the guess. Robbie was inclined to agree with his new partner, but advised him that it would be safer to buy properties and goods, which would be thrown on the market for almost nothing in a collapse of the German money system.

  IV

  The ministry of the Socialist Scheidemann resigned; he wouldn’t sign the treaty. Brockdorff-Rantzau wouldn’t sign. But somebody had to sign, for it was clear that Germany had no other course. The new ministry sent word that it would bow to the inevitable; but still they didn’t send anybody. President Wilson was impatient to return to Washington, where a special session of the new Congress had been waiting for him for more than a month. But the ceremony of signing had to be put off day after day. It was most annoying, and offensive to the dignity of the victorious Great Powers.