Пользователь - WORLD'S END

IX

A delicate situation between a devoted father and an equally devoted son: one calling for a lot of tact - and fortunately Lanny had been in the polite world long enough to acquire it. Never would he say a word against the oil industry; never would he argue, but let Robbie have his say. Lanny would think his own thoughts - one of the great privileges of man. He would lunch or dine with his father and meet some of the "big" men - interesting personalities, provided you entered into their world and didn't expect them to enter into yours. An oil magnate discussing the market prospects or the international situation might be an authority; but discussing a book or a play he wasn't so hot. Lanny would say that he had a date, and would go look at an art show or hear a concert.

He had told about these plans before they crossed the seas, so there could be no complaint. Robbie was a fair man, and wouldn't try to compel his son; Robbie's own father had made that mistake, with results which Robbie would never forget or forgive, and he was not going to repeat the offense. He had promised Lanny an allowance, what he would have had if he had been going through college. So long as he was improving himself and not wasting his life, he was free to choose his own course. Lanny did really mean to make something of his opportunities - even though he wasn't sure just what it was going to be. The world was so big, and there were so many things he wanted to see and to understand; so many interesting people, to start new ideas going in his mind!

He accepted an invitation to a week-end with Beauty's old friends, the Eversham-Watsons, and practiced riding and jumping some more, and learned about the gout from his lordship, and had an amusing time fencing off the efforts of Margy Petries to find out what his blessed mother was doing in Spain. No use trying to fool that eager chatterbox and manipulator of men - she knew it was a "romance" - she knew that Beauty Budd wasn't going to remain a widow - and who was it, some grandee of that land of castanets and cruelty? Lanny would just smile and say: "Beauty will tell you some day. Meanwhile, be sure that anything you guess will be wrong!"

He walked, and saw London at the beginning of the peace era. He knew what he was looking at now; he could recognize the signs of that poverty in the midst of luxury which was the plague of the modern world, and perhaps, as Stef thought, the seed of its destruction. He walked in Piccadilly and saw hordes of women peddling themselves, as in Paris - only they lacked the chic and esprit of the French. In the fashionable shopping streets he saw returned soldiers, hundreds of them, wandering listless and depressed; England had needed them, but now they peddled pencils, boxes o’ lights, any trifling objects that would keep them from being beggars within the meaning of the law. Prosperity was coming back, everybody insisted - but for these men it was a marshlight, flitting out of reach.

As in Paris, all the smart forms of play had been resumed with a rush. A horde of people had got money, and the newspapers assured them that the way to help the poor was to spend it fast. Benevolent souls, they labored hard to do their duty. They acquired new outfits of costly clothing, thus making work for seamstresses and tailors; they motored to the racetracks, thus making work for jockeys and trainers, for salesmen and chauffeurs of automobiles; they swarmed into the expensive restaurants, ordered lavishly, and tipped the waiters generously. To assist their efforts were shows and pageants, balls and festivals, events with historic names - "Wimbledon" and "Henley," a "Peace Ascot" and a "Victory Derby," a Cowes regatta coming for the first time in six years. There would be no "Courts," but there were six Royal Garden Parties at Buckingham Palace, gay and delightful affairs at which the ladies were forbidden to wear dйcolletй in the afternoons. In the days of Jane Austen it would have been proper, but the present Queen considered female arms and bosoms improper until after sundown.

Pearls were the gems of the day, and fashions were "anarchical"; dresses might be anything so long as skirts were short and waistlines nonexistent. Capes had come back; they were pleated, and large at the waist - built in imitation of barrels, so Margy Petries declared. The keynote of a day costume was plumes; not the curled ones, but lancer plumes, glycerined plumes, plume fringes, plume cascades, plume rosettes. Because of the great number of gas cases, which healed slowly if ever, many entertainments were given and costumes worn for the benefit of the crowded hospitals.

Lanny missed his mother, or some girl to enjoy the society game with him. He persuaded Nina and Rick to motor to town, and put them up at the hotel, and took them to see the Russian dancers - not Bolsheviks, but good, old-time Russians, doing La Boutique Fantasque, enacting can-can dancing dolls. Nina managed to persuade her husband to forget his pride and look at the spring exhibition of art from a wheel-chair. Lanny, having read what the critics had said in Paris, was able to talk instructively about the relative merits of the two displays. Altogether he managed to pass the time agreeably, until one day his father said: "I have to go to Paris for a while."

"That's on my way home!" answered Lanny.

37

Peace in Our Time

I

THE day that Lanny and his father arrived in France was the last day of the last extension of time allowed to the Germans, to say whether or not they were going to accept the terms imposed upon them. At least so the Allies declared, and at each of their outposts, fifty kilometers beyond the Rhine bridgeheads, their motorized columns were packed up and ready to start. They were going to advance thirty-five miles per day into Germany, so it was announced; and meanwhile in every drawing room and bistro in France the leading topic of discussion was: Will they sign or won't they?

An Austrian peace delegation had come, and a Bulgarian one, and were submitting with good grace to having their feathers pulled out while they were still alive. Not a squawk from them; but the Germans had been keeping up a God-awful clamor for six or seven weeks; all over their country mass meetings of protest, and Clemenceau remarking in one of his answers that apparently they had not yet realized that they had lost a war. Their delegation was kept inside their stockade and told that it was for their safety, some of them, traveling back and forth to Germany, were stoned, and for this Clemenceau made the one apology of his career.

The Social-Democrats were ruling the beaten country. It was supposed to have been a revolution, but a polite and discreet one which had left the nobility all their estates and the capitalists all their industries. It was, so Steffens and Herron had explained to Lanny, a political, not an economic revolution. A Socialist police chief was obligingly putting down the Reds in Berlin, and for this the Allies might have been grateful but didn't seem to be. Stef said they couldn't afford to let a Socialist government succeed at anything; it would have a bad effect upon the workers in the Allied lands. It was a time of confusion, when great numbers of people didn't know just what they wanted, or if they did they took measures which got them something else.

In the eastern sky the dark cloud continued to lower; and here, also, what the Allies did only made matters worse. The Big Four had recognized Admiral Kolchak as the future ruler of Siberia - a land whose need for a navy was somewhat restricted. This land-admiral had agreed to submit his policies to a vote of the Russian people, but meanwhile he was proceeding to kill as many of them as possible and seize their farms. The result was that the peasants went into hiding, and as soon as the admiral's armies moved on they came out and took back their farms. The same thing was happening all over the Ukraine, where General Denikin had been chosen as the Russian savior; and now another general, named Yudenich, was being equipped to capture Petrograd. They didn't dare to give these various saviors any British, French, or American troops, because of mutinies; but they would furnish officers, and armaments which were charged up as "loans," and which the peasants of Russia were expected to repay in return for being deprived of the land.