Пользователь - WORLD'S END

So the "love interest" in the story didn't require as much explaining as the younger man had anticipated. Robbie knew his former mistress from top to toe, as he said, and he had never imagined that she could live without a man. "Even if she tried, the men wouldn't let her," said he.

What he was interested in was trying to guess the chances of her finding happiness in this oddest and most unexpected of liaisons. He had met Kurt only a few times, in London five years back; what had he turned into, and what could Beauty have to offer him, apart from the arts of love? Lanny, of course, defended his friend ardently, and read his father the brief letters which had come from his mother in Spain, indicating her perfect happiness. Robbie said: "Of course, if they can hit it off together, it's all right with me. But don't count on it for too many years."

The father gave some of the news from home. Esther and the children were well and sent messages of affection; they lived uneventful lives over there. As happens in all large families, one or two old Budds had died and several new ones had made their entrance upon the scene. The family was having the devil's own time making over the plants. They had had to go into debt; but Robbie was hopeful, for the world was half a decade behind in every form of production except guns and shells, and there was sure to be a terrific boom as soon as order was restored.

"Then we're not going to sell out to Zaharoff?" said Lanny; and his father authorized him to bet his boots that it would not happen.

V

Of course Robbie wanted to hear about the Peace Conference. Nearly three months had passed since he had left, and Lanny hadn't been able to put the confidential things into letters. The father plied him with questions about those aspects which were important to a businessman. Was Wilson really going to stand by that preposterous guarantee which Clemenceau had wangled out of him? Were we really going to get ourselves tied up with Constantinople and Armenia? Were France and Britain likely to get anywhere with the scheme they had been trying to work from the outset, to tie up German reparations with the money they had borrowed from America for the prosecution of the war? To make the paying of their own just and lawful debts dependent upon their collections from Germany - and thus, in effect, get America to do their collecting for them!

Lanny replied that a lot of people at the Crillon were questioning whether either form of debts could ever be paid. Even if the Allies took all the livestock and the movable wealth out of Germany, they couldn't get more than a billion or two; the gold reserve was much less than anyone believed, and to take it would mean to destroy Germany as an industrial power, and hence her ability to pay anything more. Lanny quoted what Steffens had said, that every dollar the Allies collected would cost them a dollar-five. He talked a lot about Steffens and Bullitt, in many ways the most interesting men he had met.

Gradually the younger man began to notice a shift in the conversation. The father stopped asking what the Peace Conference had done, and began asking about what Lanny thought. Lanny, who wasn't slow-witted, caught the meaning: his father was worried about the sort of company he had been keeping. Lanny was in the position of a man who has been out in the woods or some place where he hasn't had the use of a mirror; now suddenly one was held up before him and he saw the way he looked. To put it plainly, the way he looked was pink with red spots - a most unpleasing aspect for a young gentleman of leisure and good family.

The change had happened so gradually - a little bit one day and next day another little bit in another part of his mind - that Lanny hadn't had time to become aware of it, and now couldn't believe it, wouldn't admit it. He imagined that his father must be misunderstanding him, and tried to explain himself - thereby making matters worse than they were before. He would cite things that Robbie himself had told: what the big businessmen had done to cause the war and to prolong it and to get advantages out of the settlement. The Crillon was full of talk about concessionnaires from every nation who were in Paris, pulling wires more or less openly, telling statesmen what to do to protect these coal mines or that oil territory. Grabbing this and threatening to grab that - surely Robbie must know that as well as anybody! Surely he must realize that these were the things which had wrecked the conference!

Yes, Robbie knew all that. Robbie knew that right now Britain and France were squabbling behind the scenes over the oil in Mesopotamia. Robbie knew as well as the Crillon that nothing in the world but fear of Germany would keep Britain and France from turning against each other in that dispute. Robbie knew that the two nations were still trying to hold on to Baku with its oil, and had even succeeded in having a vessel flying the American flag in the Caspian Sea, in the effort to overawe the Bolsheviks and keep them out of their own country's oil fields. And knowing all that - why was Robbie so disturbed when his son named the big oil promoters among the enemies of a sane peace?

There was a very special reason, which had to do with Robbie's crossing the ocean. Perhaps he had made a mistake in not mentioning it earlier in the conversation. An oil geologist whom he had known for many years, and who had worked for the big companies in the Near East, had come to Newcastle on purpose to interest him in a project for getting a concession in Eastern Arabia. After hearing his story, Robbie had got together a group of his friends, men who had made money out of Budd dividends and were looking for a place to invest it; they had formed a syndicate, and Robbie was here to work on the project, to interview representatives of the Arabs and pull wires with the British and French officials, as he knew so well how to do. Some Americans were going to get more than paper promises out of all the blood they had poured into the soil of France, and the billions of dollars' worth of food and clothing, oil and machinery, guns and shells and what not which they had ferried across the ocean to France and England!

VI

Robbie behaved like the battalion chief of a fire department who arrives on the scene and discovers that he has a dangerous conflagration on his hands; he sent in a second and a third alarm, brought up all his apparatus, and started to flood his incandescent son with arguments. Surely Lanny couldn't have watched modern war without realizing that oil was vital to a nation! Not a wheel in a Budd plant could turn without it; and what was going to become of America, what would be the good of dreams about liberty, democracy, or other sorts of ideals, if we failed to get our share of a product for which there was no substitute? All over the world the British were grabbing the territories in which there was any chance of oil; they were holding these as reserves and buying our American supply for immediate use - it was their deliberate policy.

"Look at Mexico!" exclaimed the father. "Right at our own doors they are intriguing, undermining us, freezing us out. Every official in the Mexican government is for sale and the British are there with the cash. That is 'law and order,' 'freedom of trade,' 'peace' - all those fine phrases! Everywhere an American businessman goes his British competitor is there with his government behind him - and we might as well quit and let them have the world. Fine phrases make pleasant week-end parties, Lanny, but they don't lubricate machinery."

"The Crillon is hoping to adjust such matters through the League of Nations," argued the son.

"Did anybody at the Crillon ever persuade the British to give up anything in the final showdown? And if you had an insider to advise you, you'd see that one demand after another is to protect the oil they have or to get more."