Пользователь - WORLD'S END

Lanny listened to the conversation of these roommates, which was frank and explicit. To them the sight of a hundred women dancing on the stage stark naked, and painted or enameled all the hues of the rainbow, was something to stare at greedily and to gossip about afterwards. To Lanny, who had been used to nakedness or near it on the Riviera, this mass production of sex excitement was puzzling. He asked questions, and gathered that these young men had been raised in communities where the human body was mysterious and shocking, so that the wholesale exposure of it was a sensational event, like seeing a whole block of houses burn down.

To these young men the need for a woman was as elementary as that for food and sleep. Arriving in a new part of the world, they had looked about for likely females, and exchanged confidences as to their discoveries. They wanted to know about Lanny's love life, and when he told them that he had been twice jilted and was nursing a broken heart, they told him to forget it, that he would be young only once. He would go off and ponder what he had heard - in between his efforts to keep the Italians from depriving the Yugoslavs of their one adequate port.

"Take the good the gods provide thee!" - so had sung an English poet in the anthology which Lanny had learned nearly by heart. That seemed to apply to the English girl secretary, Penelope Selden, who enjoyed his company and didn't mind saying so. Lanny found that he was coming to like her more and more, and he debated the problem: what was he waiting for? Was he still in love with Rosemary? But that hadn't kept him from being happy with Gracyn. It was all very well to dream about a great and permanent love, but time passed and there was none in sight. Was he hoping that Rosemary might some day come back to the Riviera? But she was expecting a baby, the future heir to a great English title. Lanny had written to her from Paris, and had a nice cool friendly reply, telling the news about herself and their common friends. All her letters had been like that, and Lanny assumed it was the epistolary style of the English aristocracy.

He reviewed all over again the question of his sexual code, and that of his friends of the grand monde. The great and permanent love theory had gone out of fashion, if indeed it ever had been in fashion with anybody but poets and romancers. Rich and important persons made what were called marriages of convenience. If you were the son or daughter of a beer baron or diamond king, you bought a title; if you were a member of the aristocracy, you sold one, and the lawyers sat down and agreed upon what was called a "settlement." You had a showy public wedding, as a result of which two or three new members of your exclusive social set were brought into the world; then you had done your duty and were at liberty to amuse yourself discreetly and inconspicuously.

Was Lanny going to play second fiddle in some fashionable chamber concert? The invitation had been extended and never withdrawn. Assuming that he meant to accept, what about the interim? Live as an anchorite, or beguile his leisure with a refined and discreet young woman secretary? He was sure that if Rosemary, future Countess of Sandhaven, ever asked questions about what his life had been, it would be with curiosity as friendly and cool as her letters. Such were the agreeable consequences of that "most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century," popularly know as "birth control."

VI

The Big Four were deciding the destiny of the Adriatic lands and finding it the toughest problem yet. President Wilson had traveled to that warm country and been hailed as the savior of mankind; he had thrown kisses to the audience in the great Milan opera house, and had listened to the roaring of millions of throats on avenues and highways. He had got the impression that the emotional Italian people really loved him; but now he learned that there were two kinds of Italian people, and it was the other kind which had come to Paris: those who had repudiated their alliance with Germany and sold the blood and treasure of their land to Britain and France, in exchange for a signed and sealed promise of territories to be taken in the war. Now they were here, not to form a League of Nations, not to save mankind from future bloodshed, but to divvy the swag.

The British and French had signed the Treaty of London under the stress of dire necessity, and now that the danger was over they were not too deeply concerned to keep the bargain - on the general principle that no state ever wants to see any other state become more powerful. But they lacked an excuse for repudiating their promises, and regarded it as a providential event when a noble-minded crusader came from overseas, bearing aloft a banner inscribed with Fourteen Points, including the right of the small peoples escaping from Austrian domination not to be placed under some other domination. The British, who had repudiated the idea of self-determination for Cyprus, and the French, who had repudiated it for the Sarre, were enthusiastic about it for the Adriatic - only, of course, it must be President Wilson who would lay down the law.

The crusader from overseas did so; and Premier Orlando, that kindly and genial gentleman, wept, and Baron Sonnino scowled, and the whole Italian delegation stormed and raved. They said that Wilson, having lost his virtue on the Rhine and in the Polish Corridor, was now trying to restore it at the expense of the sacre egoismo of Italy. There were furious quarrels in the council halls, and the Italians packed up their belongings and threatened to leave, but delayed because they found that nobody cared.

In the early stages of this controversy the hotels and meeting places of the delegates had swarmed with charming and cultivated Italians whose pockets were stuffed with banknotes; anybody who had access to the Crillon might have expensive parties thrown for him and enjoy the most delicate foods and rarest wines. The Hotel Edouard VII, where the sons of sunny Italy had their headquarters, kept open house for the diplomatic world. Later, when the thunder clouds burst, they didn't sever friendships, but were heartbroken and made you understand that you and your countrymen had shattered their faith in human nature.

The dispute broke into the open in a peculiar way; the Big Three agreed that they would issue a joint statement opposing the Italian demands, and the American President carried out his part of the bargain, but Lloyd George and Clemenceau didn't, so the Americans were put in the position of standing alone against Italy. Wilson's picture was torn from walls throughout that country, and the face which had been all but worshiped was now caricatured sub specie diaboli. The Italian delegation went home, and the French were greatly alarmed; but the Americans all said: "Don't worry, they'll come back"; and they did, in a few days.

VII

Lively times for experts and their secretaries! Professor Alston would be summoned to President Wilson's study, where the elder statesmen were on their hands and knees, crawling over Susak or Shantung. There would come a call to Lanny, asking if he could hurry over to the Quai d'Orsay to bring an important document to some associate who was assisting in the final revision of the League of Nations Covenant. An extremely delicate situation there, because the American Congress had insisted upon a declaration that the League was never going to interfere with the Monroe Doctrine; this provision had to be slipped in as quietly as possible, for there were other nations having "regional understandings" which they would have liked to put into the Covenant, and there was danger of stirring them up.

A group of the professors would meet at lunch, and Lanny would hear gossip about arrangements being made for the reception of the German delegation, now summoned to Paris to receive the treaty. The Germans were to be regarded as enemies until the document had been signed; they were not allowed to wear uniforms, and all intercourse with them was forbidden under military law. They would have the Hotel des Reservoirs, and building and grounds were to be surrounded with a barbed-wire stockade. This, it was explained, was to keep the mob from invading the premises; but it would be difficult to keep the Germans from feeling that they were being treated like wild beasts.