Пользователь - WORLD'S END

"But a secretary has to know shorthand and typing, doesn't he?"

"Your knowledge of languages and of European ways would count far more with me."

"Don't you think I'm rather young for such a task?"

"You are older than you look. The main thing is that I can trust you. I couldn't pay you what you would consider an adequate salary - "

"Oh, I wouldn't let you pay me, Professor Alston!"

"I'll try to get the department to foot the bill. But in any case I would insist upon your being paid. It'll be one of those all day and most of the night jobs that one does because they're urgent, and because they're interesting. You'd meet a lot of important people, and you'd be on the inside of affairs. I should think it ought to be worth a year in college."

"It sort of takes my breath away," said Lanny. "It would be the first time I ever earned anything."

"What do you suppose your father would say?"

"He wants me to meet people; but he's all the time hoping I'll begin to take hold of the munitions business."

"Well, there's a competition between your father's business and mine right now." The professor was smiling.

"My father won't fight you," replied Lanny, seriously; "but he'll wait, feeling sure that the forces on his side will lick you."

"Perhaps I'd better be the one to put the proposal to him," said the professor. "I don't want him to think I'm trying to steal his son."

Robbie was broader-minded about it than they had foreseen. He saw the advantages which such an opening would give to Lanny. That was the way young Englishmen began their careers in politics and diplomacy; and Robbie wasn't afraid of his son's being led astray by the peace-makers. He said that the same men who made the peace would be making the next war, and Lanny would have a chance to meet and know them. "I'm going to be all over Europe during the next couple of months," added the wise father. "I'll tell you things and you can tell me things."

Lanny thought about that. "Listen, Robbie. If I'm going to be on the payroll of the government, I'll have to work for it, and there may be things I can't tell."

The other was amused. "That's O.K. by me," he said, in the slang of the day. "But this job won't last forever, and when it's done, we'll join forces again."

V

Lanny took the job. Because he liked his new boss, he became not merely secretary, but male nurse, valet, and handyman; he helped the professor to get his things packed, and to get on board the boat train, and to get to his hotel. Oddly enough, the one which Robbie had always patronized, the Crillon, had been taken by the United States government for the use of the Peace Commission and its advisers. Lanny and his professor could have rooms there, but Robbie couldn't - not for love or money. A symbol of the new order of things, under which businessmen were being ousted from the seats of authority and replaced by scholars in politics!

Lanny found himself, with hardly any warning, thrust into the midst of a beehive, or antheap, or whatever simile best indicates a great number of creatures in a state of violent activity. It has always been the practice of scholars and specialists to meet in congresses and conventions, and they always feel that what they are doing is of vital importance; but it may be doubted if any group of such persons had ever before had such good reason to hold this conviction. Some fifty American scholars, plus librarians and custodians of documents and typists and other assistants, several hundred persons in all, had been appointed to remedy the evils of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia, which had been accumulating for no one could say how many hundreds of years. All the world had been told that the evils were to be remedied, and all but a few skeptical ones believed it, and waited in suspense for the promises to be kept. The fate of hundreds of millions of persons for an indefinite future might depend upon the advice which these scholars would give; so the learned ones carried in their souls a colossal burden of responsibility, and never in the history of mankind had so much conscientiousness been crowded into one structure as was to be found at the junction of the Rue Royale and the Place de la Concorde at Christmas time of the year 1918.

The first few hours for Lanny Budd were a blur of faces, names, and handshakes. He met so many persons that he gave up trying to keep them in mind. But quickly they began to sort themselves out. Professor Alston's immediate associates were eager to tell him all that had happened during the two or three weeks he had lost. Alston informed them that Lanny was to be his confidant, and so he had a front seat at the rising of the curtain upon the fateful last act of the great world melodrama.

The art work of the ages to which this production most nearly approached was the story of Daniel in the lions' den. The title role was taken by the scholar from Princeton, and the scholars from Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and other institutions were gathered in his train, striding with bold miens but quaking hearts into an arena filled with British lions, and with tigers, hyenas, jackals, crocodiles, and other creatures whose national affiliations had better not be specified. Each of these creatures had jaws dripping with blood, and under its claws lay other creatures, equally fierce, but now torn, bleeding, and near to death.

Such was the aspect of the world at the conclusion of the greatest of recorded wars, and the task of Daniel and his associates and advisers was to persuade the victorious ones to abandon at least a part of the prey they had seized, and permit it to be hospitalized and have its wounds attended and be set upon its feet again, under solemn pledges to abandon its predatory ways and live thereafter in a millennial state of brotherhood and legality. If into this description there creeps a trace of mockery, it is due to the fact that Robbie Budd was sojourning at the Hotel Vendфme not far away, meeting his son at intervals, and hearing his description of the academic gentlemen and their activities. If it had been an assemblage of steel, oil, and munitions manufacturers meeting to apportion the trade of the world, Robbie would have taken its decisions with seriousness; but to his mind there was something inherently comical about any large group of college professors. The kindest comparison he could make was to the behavior and conversation of a flock of elderly hens in a chickenhouse when the fox comes sneaking round at night.

VI

When Lanny got to know the members of the American staff, he found that some were according to his father's imagining, but the little group of Alston's intimates had a point of view which included Robbie's far more than Robbie's included theirs. They were informed concerning munitions manufacturers and salesmen, and the part which these played in the beginning and continuing of wars. They knew it so well that they were a bit uneasy at the idea of having their intimate conversations listened to by a son of Budd's, They had to sound him out and watch his reactions for a while before they would completely trust him.

Besides academic persons the staff included a number of young men of independent means who were playing at politics and diplomacy in what they were pleased to consider the "people's cause." Lanny discovered that these fellows knew about Zaharoff, and the de Wendels, and the Briey Basin, which had come out of the war without any serious bombing. They knew about the politicians and propagandists both official and unofficial who now surrounded them. Their conversation was full of jokes about being flimflammed and bamboozled and hoodwinked, short-changed or sold a gold brick or a gross of green spectacles. They watched suspiciously every person who approached them, and received a compliment as if it might be a loaded hand grenade. Many had their wives with them, and these helped to mount guard.