World's End

by Upton Sinclair

  III

  Rick hadn’t seen Beauty or Kurt since the outbreak of the war, and Nina had never met either of them. So there were greetings to be exchanged and curiosities to be satisfied. Little Alfy was set down in front of Baby Marceline, who gazed at him with wide brown eyes and one finger in her mouth; he took command, as he would throughout life: seeing the dogs, he toddled after them, and Marceline followed. He was going to be a baronet and a member of the English ruling classes, and Marceline was going to have a half-share of Bienvenu, a valuable property; also of whatever her father’s paintings might bring. As soon as they were born Lanny had written the two mothers, bidding them start matchmaking, and in their minds they had done so; now when their eyes met there was appraisal, not merely of each other, but of the future of two families.

  Lanny and Rick and Kurt at Hellerau had dubbed them selves the three musketeers of the arts. “When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” So they had asked, and here was the answer. There had been plenty of thunder and lightning, but now the uproar had died away, there was a rainbow in the sky, and a heavenly melody floating in the air, as you hear in the William Tell overture—or preferably in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, since Kurt Meissner will tell you that Rossini’s music is somewhat meretricious. It will be to music of the highest quality that these three musketeers march forward into life, resolutely, in spite of defeats and disappointments. When Rick hears fate knocking at the door in four thundering notes it will not tell him that he is growing deaf, but that he is a cripple for life; and with the help of art he will learn to take these blows of fate and make a scherzo out of them, and in the end perhaps a triumphal march.

  After lunch Lanny drove the new family over to their temporary home, which he had stocked up with tinned goods enough for an African safari. There was one of Leese’s able-bodied relatives to act as maid-of-all-work; one of her orders would be to carry Rick’s typing machine out to a rustic table every morning when the weather was fair. There he would sit alone, and his rage against human stupidity would fan itself white hot, and molten words would pour from the typewriter, all but burning the pages. Strange as it might seem, the more he lashed the damned human race the better they liked it; such was the mood of the time—all thinking men agreed that the peoples of Europe had made fools of themselves, and it was proof of advanced views to abuse the “old men,” the “brass hats,” the “patrioteers,” the “merchants of death.”

  It was as if you had been on a terrible “bat” the night before, and had got into a row with your best friend and blacked both his eyes. Next morning you were apologetic, and willing to let him have the best of all the arguments. So it was that both Lanny and Rick dealt with their German friend; the Englishman talked as if it was really quite embarrassing to have won a war, and of course what he wrote about British bungling pleased Kurt entirely—only he found it difficult to understand how British editors were willing to pay money for it!

  IV

  One of the consequences of Rick’s coming was that the subject of world politics was brought back into the family conversation. Lanny had deliberately put the subject out of his mind, and tried tactfully to have Kurt do the same. Kurt got no newspapers from home, and when members of his family wrote to him, they put the envelope in a second envelope addressed to Lanny Budd, so as to avoid attracting attention. But now came Rick, bringing with him the custom which prevailed in his father’s home of discussing public affairs at all hours of the day and night. Rick took a couple of newspapers and half a dozen weeklies, and would lie propped up in bed reading and making notes. The war, however many bad things it had done, had brought it about that British politics were French politics and German politics and Russian politics and American politics. All the nations of the earth had been thrown into one stew-pot, there to simmer slowly. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble!

  So Lanning Prescott Budd descended the steps of his ivory tower and pushed open its gold-embossed doors and thrust out his delicately chiseled nose. Instantly it was assailed by the odors of a colossal charnel-pit, a shell-hole as big as the crater of a volcano, filled with the mangled flesh and bones of millions of human beings. His ears, carefully schooled to the appreciation of exquisite music, were stunned by the screams of dying populations, the wails of starving children, the imprecations of the frustrated, the moans of the hopeless. Before his eyes stretched a prospect of desolation; shell-blasted fields, skeleton trees without a leaf, buildings that were smoke-blackened walls, their empty windows like human faces with eyes picked out by birds of prey.

  The Turks were still slaughtering Armenian peasants. Civil war was still raging in Russia, the Whites now being driven in rout to all points of the compass. In Siberia a freight-train loaded with Reds was wandering aimlessly upon an eight-thousand-mile track, the locked-in prisoners perishing of starvation and disease. The Polish armies, invading Russia, were still dreaming of world empire. The White Finns were killing tens of thousands of Red Finns. The Rumanians were killing Red Hungarians. There were insurrections and mass strikes in Germany, a plague of labor revolts in France and Britain, millions unemployed in every great nation, famine everywhere in Europe, flu in the western half and typhus in the eastern.

  When, in the middle of 1919, President Wilson and his staff had left the Peace Conference, that body had stayed on to settle the destinies of Austria and Hungary and Bulgaria and Turkey. It was still holding sessions, with despairing peoples waiting upon its decisions; when these were announced they were generally out of date, because events had moved beyond them. The British and French statesmen were agreed that Italy should not have Fiume, but an Italian poet with a glory complex had raised a revolt and seized the city. All Statesmen agreed that the Bolshevik madness must be put down, but meanwhile it throve and spread, and mountains of supplies which the Allies had furnished to the White generals were being captured and used by the Reds. The statesmen decided that Turkey should lose most of her empire, but the Turks dissented and retired into their mountains, and who had an army to go after them? The French had seized the land of poor Emir Feisal—all but those parts which had oil; the British had these, and there was a bitter wrangle, and it looked as if the alliance which had won the war would break up before it finished dividing the spoils.

  British statesmen had promised to make a world fit for heroes to live in, and now Rick’s version was that they had made one it needed heroes to live in. Lying on the table in Lanny’s study was one of Eli Budd’s volumes, the poetry of an old-time New Englander who had been one of the patron saints of Rick’s grandmothers, but to Rick himself was no more than a name. Rick was moved by curiosity to dip into the volume, and he happened upon A Psalm of Life, which was to be found in all school readers. The crippled aviator declared that it “griped his guts”; anybody could write “doggerel” like that, and to prove it he composed on the spot a revised version:

  Tell me not, ye wishful thinkers,

  That the spirit reigns supreme,

  And man’s hoping is a token

  Of the mortal’s valid dream.

  The modern psalmist went on to tell the world how he had “seen the Brute in action,” and his conclusion was:

  I have wakened from a nightmare

  To a living death by day;

  All my dreams a tabulation

  Of the price my hope must pay.

  V

  On the first day of every month, unless it was Sunday, the businesslike Robert Budd dictated a letter to his son—a good, satisfying letter telling about the family and the business, and never failing to include some advice to the boy about taking care of himself, and learning to spend money wisely, and not letting women get too much hold on him. Lanny had saved these communications over a period of years, and if he had published them, judiciously expurgated, they might have made a New England equivalent of the letters of Lord Chesterfield.

  The family in Connecticut was thriving, as it always had, and meant to;
they were solid people. Lanny’s two half-brothers were in St. Thomas’s; they could enter younger than Lanny, because they had been trained according to a system. Lanny’s half-sister Bess, who adored his memory, was reading a book he had recommended and struggling to play a piano piece he had mentioned. Esther Budd, his stepmother, was marshaling the ladies of Newcastle for the relief of war victims in Armenia and Poland. The President of Budd Gunmakers Corporation was showing his age, but could by no means be induced to relax his grip upon affairs; he had inherited a great institution and was determined to pass it on to his heirs in better condition than he had received it.

  They were going to save the business, Robbie assured his son; they were making the dangerous transformation of their activities, and instead of machine guns and carbines and automatic revolvers, cartridges and hand grenades and time fuses, were producing a great variety of implements of peace. No easy task finding markets for new products, but they would do better in the boom which was surely on the way. But what a tragedy for America, and how it would some day regret the dismantling of its vitally important munitions industry! Lanny understood that to his father there was a loss of dignity and prestige, even a personal humiliation, in having to turn from the fashioning of beautiful, shining, deadly machine guns to the monotonous multiplication of frying pans, tack hammers, and freight elevators. It was possible to feel romantic about the Budd gun, which was the best in the world and had proved it in the rock-strewn thickets of the Meuse-Argonne; but who the hell wanted to hear about hardware?

  However, the great plant had to go on; wages had to be earned, and taxes and upkeep, and dividends if possible. The world had munitions enough to last a decade, and the pacifists were in the saddle in America; the hallelujah shouters were proclaiming that the war to end war had been won and the world made safe for democracy. There was no philanthropist to subsidize and save an American munitions industry, built at breakneck speed by heroic labors. Far from appreciating this service, the nation had turned upon its benefactors and was calling them profiteers and merchants of death. Robbie Budd was a deeply offended munitions salesman, and the more so because his oldest and best-loved son had taken up with these critics and no longer desired to follow in his father’s footsteps. Robbie never referred to this, but Lanny knew what was in his heart.

  However, Robbie was a businessman, and the customer is always right. The customer didn’t want machine guns, he wanted automobile parts and bicycles and gadgets of a thousand sorts, and Budd’s would oblige him at mass-production prices. Also the customer would want oil, and Robbie, having many connections in Europe, had picked up a good thing in that line, and had let his friends and innumerable cousins in on it, and now was concerned to prove himself a businessman in his own right, not merely a son of Budd’s. He had come to London twice during the fall and winter, and had been too busy to go down to Juan; Lanny had protested and pleaded, and so in the month of March Robbie cabled that he was on his way to Paris, and that nothing should interfere with a holiday. This sort of cablegram always marked a red-letter day in Lanny’s young life. Moralists might scold about blood and profits, but none of them could deny that Robbie Budd was good company.

  VI

  The foreign representative of Budd Gunmakers had known for some time that he had got himself an odd sort of extra family, and he was curious to see what had been happening to it of late. Impossible to imagine a more unlikely tie-up than the butterfly. Beauty and the grave and punctilious artillery officer turned spy! Add to it Lanny, product of a sexual irregularity, who didn’t mind his fate, but seemed to have decided that the moralists were out of step with him. So many families were breaking up and recombining, wasn’t it more sensible to leave everyone free to move without notice?

  Father and son went for a long walk, as was their custom. Robbie was in his middle forties and had been leading a sedentary life all winter; for the first time in Lanny’s experience he puffed a bit on the hills, but he didn’t like to admit it and went on talking. He was a hearty, solid man, with brown eyes and hair—when he went swimming you saw the hair growing all over his chest. He liked having a good time, but underneath he was greatly worried about the world, which was in what he called a god-awful mess. People in Europe had been fighting for so long, they seemed to have forgotten what productive labor was. Lanny knew that his father’s mind had watertight compartments in it, and there was no use mentioning the difficulty of combining peaceful industry with the mass production and marketing of instruments of slaughter. What Lanny had to do was to let his father talk, and when he couldn’t agree, say nothing. All through the war, both in France and in New England, Lanny had had to practice the art of keeping his thoughts to himself, and at the Peace Conference he had perfected his technique.

  He described the life of Beauty and Kurt, who were getting along surprisingly well. Beauty was much in love with her man, and had got over being embarrassed about it; Kurt was a good influence because he kept her at home—he wouldn’t let her spend money on him, so she didn’t spend it on herself. You could see Kurt’s musical stature growing, Lanny said; and Robbie listened politely, but without much enthusiasm. Robbie had been to Yale, and had got vaccinated with culture, but it hadn’t “taken”; he knew a lot of college songs and popular stuff, but left highbrow music to those who pretended to understand it. Maybe Lanny did; in any case, his father was satisfied if it kept him happy and out of mischief.

  One important question: Was Kurt having much to do with Germans? Lanny answered: “No. What could he do, anyhow?” The father didn’t know, but he said there would be war of one sort or another between France and Germany so long as those two nations existed. And certainly Bienvenu must not become a secret headquarters of the Germans.

  They went back and had a swim with the family. There was a boat-landing with steps, and on the bottom step Lanny had had two iron handles fastened for Rick. If there were no strangers present to embarrass him he would unstrap his leg brace, and with his two arms and one good leg would help himself down into the water, where he could float around and swim with his hands. Nobody must offer to help him, or take any notice of his troubles, just let him alone and in his own way he would work them out. Meanwhile, observe the blue sky and the varicolored houses, the gray rocks and green hills of the Golfe Juan. Robbie, who had seen Rick in Paris just before he went out to his near-death, had admired his grit then and admired it now. He told Lanny that was one fellow who must have help whenever he needed it.

  Also Robbie saw Beauty in her tight bathing suit, and had a good time describing in exaggerated language the ravages of embonpoint upon her charms. Beauty and the cream pitcher were a standing joke in that family. You might have thought it in dubious taste while millions of babies were perishing of slow malnutrition. If Beauty had had one of those little ones before her, she would have starved herself to feed it; but the little ones were in the newspapers, while the cream pitcher was on the table four times a day, including teatime. Also there was Leese, whose arts were a perpetual conspiracy against the figures of ladies who came to Bienvenu. Bouillabaisse with butter floating on top, rissoles fried in olive oil, sugary fruit pátês with curlicues of whipped cream—so it went, and Beauty would tell herself she was just tasting this or that, and would go on until there was no more taste on her palate.

  VII

  In the evening the family sat in front of a log fire, for the nights were chilly. Mrs. Emily had been invited to join them, and they talked about the state of the world, concerning which various members of the group had special information.

  Robbie told about America. President Wilson had come home from his peacemaking to find the country wholly indisposed to ratify the commitments he had made. He had spent his last reserves of health upon a tour of the nation; then a paralytic stroke had laid him low and he was a helpless invalid. If you were willing to believe Robbie Budd, the executive branch of the United States government now consisted of an elegant lady who owned a jewelry business, and whom Lanny had
seen in Paris wearing a gorgeous purple gown and a purple hat with plumes; a navy doctor whom the President had raised to the rank of admiral; and a secretary whom Robbie described by a term of depreciation common among the ruling classes of New England—“Irish Catholic.” The President saw no one, and this triumvirate of amateurs decided what papers he was permitted to read and sign. The Constitution of the United States might be the most perfect instrument which had ever emanated from the brain of man, but it had its oversights, and one was a failure to provide what was to happen when a president had a paralytic stroke.

  However, it was an election year. In three months the Republican party would name its candidate; no college president, but someone who understood American business and its needs. The money to elect him would be forthcoming—Robbie knew where it was coming from—and in a little less than a year America would confront the world as a new-born nation, no longer to be trifled with in international affairs. Robbie didn’t think that, Robbie told it, and the others listened respectfully.

  The talk turned to the state of France, and here they heard a salonnière who numbered men of affairs among her friends. Clemenceau, the Tiger, had won the war but lost the peace—at least in the estimation of the Robbie Budds of France—and he had been ousted. There was a new premier, Millerand, and now it appeared that he too was yielding to the blandishments of Lloyd George. They were likely soon to have Poincaré, which meant simply that the war with Germany would be resumed in one form or another. Nobody in Europe was in a mood to think of mercy—save only the Germans! It was a very sad picture that Emily Chattersworth drew.