Пользователь - WORLD'S END

The delegation arrived on the first of May, the traditional holiday of the Reds all over Europe. A general strike paralyzed all Paris that day: metro and trams and taxis, shops, theaters, cafes - everything. In the districts and suburbs the workers gathered with music and banners. They were forbidden to march, but they poured like a hundred rivers into the Place de la Concorde, and the staff of the Crillon crowded the front windows to watch the show. Never in his life had Lanny seen such a throng, or heard such deep and thunderous shouting; it was the challenge of the discontented, a voicing of all the sufferings which the masses had endured through four and a half years of war and as many months of peacemaking.

Lanny couldn't see his uncle in that human ocean, but he knew that every agitator in the city would be there. It was the day when they proclaimed the revolution, and would create it if they could. Captain Stratton had told how Marshal Foch was distributing close to a hundred thousand troops at strategic points. The Gardens of the Tuileries were a vast armed camp, with machine guns and even field-guns, and commanders who meant business. But with the example of Russia only a year and a half away, could the rank and file of the troops be depended on? Fear haunted everyone in authority throughout the civilized world on that distracted May Day of 1919.

VIII

Lanny Budd had come to be regarded by the Crillon staff as what they called half-playfully a "pinko." It amused them to say this about the heir of a great munitions enterprise. The rumor had spread that he had a full-fledged Bolshevik for an uncle; and hadn't he brought that avowed Red sympathizer, Lincoln Steffens, into the hotel dining room? Hadn't he been observed deep in conversation with Herron, apostle of free love and Prinkipo? Hadn't he tried to explain to more than one member of the staff that these wild men and women, marching and yelling, might be "the future"?

What the Crillon thought of the marchers was that they wanted to get into the streets where the jewelry shops were. The windows of these shops were protected by steel curtains for the day, but such curtains could be "jimmied," and doubtless many of the crowd had the tools concealed under their coats. None knew this better than the commander of the squadron of cuirassiers, in sky-blue uniforms decorated with silver chains, who guarded the line in front of the hotel. The cavalrymen with drawn sabers were stretched two deep across the Rue Royale, blocking the crowd off; there was a milling and moiling, shrieks of men and women mingled with sounds of smashing window glass. Lanny watched this struggle going on for what seemed an hour, directly under the windows of the hotel. He saw men's scalps split with saber cuts, and the blood pouring in streams over their faces and clothing. It was the nearest he had come to war; the new variety called the class struggle, which, according to his Uncle Jesse, would be waged for years or generations, as long as it might take.

The Crillon staff took sides on the question as to the seriousness of the danger. Of course if the Reds succeeded in France, the work done by the Peace Conference would be wiped out. If it succeeded in Germany, the war might have to be fought again. The world might even see the strange spectacle of the Allies putting another Kaiser on the German throne! But apparently that wasn't going to happen, for Kurt Eisner, the Red leader of Bavaria, had been murdered by army officers, a fate that had also befallen Liebknecht and "Red Rosa" Luxemburg in Berlin. The Social-Democratic government of Germany hated the Communists and was shooting them down in the streets; and this was rather confusing to American college professors who had been telling their classes that all Reds were of the same bloody hue.

Strange indeed were the turns of history! A government with a Socialist saddlemaker at its head was sending to Versailles a peace delegation headed by the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, member of the haughty old nobility who despised the German workers almost as much as he did the French politicians. He and his two hundred and fifty staff members were shut up in a stockade, and crowds came to look at them as they might at creatures in the zoo. The count hated them so that it made him physically ill. When he and his delegation came to the Trianon Palace Hotel to present their credentials, he became deathly pale, and his knees shook so that he could hardly stand. He did not try to speak. The spectacle was painful to the Americans, but Clemenceau and his colleagues gloated openly. "You see!" they said. "These are the old Germans! The 'republic' is just camouflage. The beast wants to get out of his cage."

34

Young Lochinvar

I

THE tall and stately Mrs. Emily Chattersworth was going shopping, and called at her friend Beauty's hotel rather early in the morning. "Such a strange thing has happened, my dear," said she. "Do you remember that young Swiss musician, M. Dalcroze?"

"Yes, very well," said Beauty, catching her breath.

"I had a visit last night from two officials of the Sыretй. It seems that they are looking for him."

"What in the world for, Emily?"

"They wouldn't tell me directly, but I could guess from the questions they asked. They think he's a German agent."

"Oh, my God!" exclaimed Beauty. Almost impossible to conceal the surge of her emotion. "How horrible, Emily!"

"Can you imagine it? He seemed to me such a refined and gentle person."

"What did they ask you, Emily?"

"Everything, to the remotest detail. They wanted to know how I met him and I gave them the letter he had written me. They wanted a description of him, height and weight and so on, which it's so difficult to remember. They wanted a list of the persons he had been introduced to at my home; they were much disturbed because I couldn't remember them all. You know how many persons I entertain - and I don't keep records."

"Did you give them my name?" asked Beauty, quickly.

"I'm happy to say I realized in time how that might point the ringer at the Crillon."

"Oh, thank you, Emily - thank you! Lanny's whole future might depend on it!" Beauty got herself together, and then rattled on: "Such an incredible idea, Emily! Do you really suppose it can be true?" A woman doesn't spend many years in fashionable society without learning how to conceal her emotions, or at any rate to give them a turn in a new direction.

"I don't know what to think, Beauty. What could a German be trying to do now? Blow up the Peace Conference with a bomb?"

"Didn't you tell me that M. Dalcroze talked a great deal about the evils of the blockade?"

"Yes; but it's no crime to do that, is it?"

"It would be for a German, I suppose. The French would probably shoot him for it."

"Oh, how sick I am of this business of killing people! I hear there were several hundred killed and wounded in those May Day riots. The papers don't give us the truth about anything any more!" The kind Mrs. Emily, whose hair had turned snow-white under the stress of war, went on to philosophize about the psychology of the French. They were suffering from shellshock. It was to be hoped that when this treaty was signed they would settle down and become their normal selves. "If they have the League of Nations to protect them - and surely it can't be possible that the American Congress will reject such a great and beneficent plan!"

Beauty controlled her trembling and added a few reflections, derived at second hand from Lanny's professors. After a decent interval she said: "You haven't any idea what's become of that young man?"

"Not a word from him since he left my house that night. I thought it very strange."

"I'll ask Lanny about him," suggested the mother. "He knows many musical people, and might find him. Do you suppose he's related to Jaques-Dalcroze?"