Пользователь - WORLD'S END

Then a blue uniform, the one sight that could really bring an end to Lanny's terror. The London bobby didn't carry weapons, like the French gendarme, but he was a symbol of the Empire. Lanny waited until he got back his breath and could speak normally, then he approached and said: "Please, would you tell me how to get to the tube?"

The bobby had a large blue helmet, with a strap across his chin. He answered like an automaton: "First t'right, second t'left." He said it very fast, and when Lanny said: "I beg pardon?" he said it again, even faster than before.

The boy thought it over, and then dropped a delicate hint: "Please, might I walk with you if you're going that way?" It was obviously not the right accent for Whitechapel, and the "copper" looked him over more carefully, and then said: "Right you are, guv'nor."

They walked together in silent state. When they parted, Lanny wasn't sure if the symbol of the Empire would accept a tip, but he took a chance, and held out a shilling which he had denied to "Slicer." The symbol took it with one hand and with the other touched his helmet. "Kew!" said he. The visitor had already had it explained to him that this was the second half of "Thank you," doing duty for the whole.

VIII

Lanny decided to say nothing to his mother about his misadventure. It would only worry her, and do no good; he had learned his lesson, and wouldn't repeat the mistake. He brooded all by himself over the state of the people of East London. When he went to call for his mother at a tea party in Kensington Gardens, the sight of exquisite ladies on the greensward under the trees made him think of the families that were lying out on benches all night because they had no place to go. Instead of snow-white tulle and pink mousseline de soie, he saw filthy and loathsome rags; instead of the fragrant concentrations of the flower gardens of Provence, he smelled the stink of rotting bodies and the reek of gin.

They drove to Ascot on the second day of the races, the day of the gold vase. It was known as a "black and white" Ascot, because of the costumes decreed by the fashion dictators. He saw black and white striped taffeta dresses with black and white parasols to match. He listened to the chatter of his mother and her friends, commenting upon the fashion parade - froufrou hats, broche effects, corsage prolonged into polonaise, shot silk draped as tunic, butterfly wing confection, black lisere straw, poufs of tea-rose taffeta, bandeau hats and plume towers, cothurns of lizard-green suede - and all the while he would be seeing babies lying on benches with only rags to cover them. He watched the royal procиssion, the King and Queen riding across the turf amid thunderous cheers from the crowd, and he thought: "I wonder if they know about it!"

The person he took into his confidence was Rick; and Rick said that people knew if they chose to know, but mostly they didn't. He said those conditions were as old as England. The politicians talked about remedying them, but when they got elected they thought about getting elected again. He said it was a problem of educating those slum people; of raising the tone of the intellectual and art life of the country. He took Lanny to a matinee of a play by Bernard Shaw which was the rage that season, and dealt with a flower girl who talked just the sort of Cockney that Lanny had heard during his descent into hell. A professor of phonetics succeeded in correcting her accent, making her into a regular lady of Mayfair. It was most amusing - and it seemed to be in line with Rick's suggestion.

Kurt Meissner arrived, and he, too, was taken into the discussion.

Said Kurt: "We don't leave our poor to the mercies of the wage market. The Germans are efficient, and provide decent housing for the workers, and insurance against sickness, old age, and unemployment." Kurt was perhaps a little too well satisfied with conditions in his country, and too contemptuous of British slackness. Rick, who was willing to make any number of sarcastic remarks about his native land, wasn't so pleased to hear them from a foreigner. Rick and Kurt didn't get along so well in London as they had in Hellerau.

Lanny talked about the question of poverty with his mother also, and Beauty assured him that the kind English people were not overlooking the problem. He would soon see proof of it; the twenty-fourth of June was known as "Alexandra Day," and the fashionable ladies of England honored their Queen Mother by putting on their daintiest white frocks and hats with many flowers and going out on the streets of the cities to sell artificial pink roses for the benefit of the overcrowded hospitals. Lanny.saw his mother, the loveliest sight in Piccadilly Circus, taking in silver coins hand over fist; he had to drive three times in one of Lord Eversham-Watson's cars to keep her supplied with stock in trade. He hoped that he might be able to provide accommodations for all those babies who were sleeping outdoors on benches.

9

Green and Pleasant Land

I

THE home of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson was called "The Reaches," and was close to the Thames River some way below Oxford. It was a very old place, and not much had been done to modernize it, because, as Rick explained, his father was too poor; they had all they could do to keep the place, and not much left for their beloved arts. There was a little bit of everything in the architecture of the house: an old tower, a peaked roof with gables, mul-lioned windows, a crenelated wall, a venerable archway through which you drove to the porte-cochere. The structures were jammed one against another, and topping them all were chimney pots, sometimes three or four in a row. This meant that all the year except summer the maidservants were busy carrying coal scuttles; and since there was very little running water, when they had finished with scuttles they carried pails.

But, of course, in summertime everybody went to the river, crossing a beautiful sloping lawn under an archway of aged oaks. It was a new kind of swimming for Lanny, and he thought he could never get enough of it. The boys lived in bathing suits, and "punted" in a long flat-bottomed boat with a ten-foot pole. It was a nice friendly little river, neither wide nor deep. Boathouses lined it, and gaily decorated motorboats went by, and long thin shells, with oarsmen practicing for the coming races. It was a holiday thoroughfare, and there was laughter and singing; the three musketeers of the arts sang all the songs they knew.

Rick had a sister, two years older than himself, and therefore too old for either of the visitors; but she had friends with younger sisters, so there was a troop of English girls bright-cheeked and jolly, interested in everything the boys were doing, and sharing their sports. Lanny was just at the age where he was preparing to discover that girls were wonderful, and here they were.

Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson was a middle-aged gentleman, tall and slender, with handsome dark mustaches turning gray, sharp features, a hawk's nose, and keen dark eyes. He had a Spanish mother, and maybe a trace of Jewish blood, as Rick had said. He was a lover of all the arts and friend of all the artists. He knew many rich people, and acted as a sort of go-between for the bohemian world; telling the "swells" what was what in art and helping the struggling geniuses to find patrons. An impecunious playwright would bring him a blank-verse tragedy, and Sir Alfred would decide that it was a masterpiece, and would design a group of magnificent sets for it; then he would set out to find a backer, and when he failed he would declare that England was going to the dogs. He had very high standards, and would relieve his disappointments by composing sharp epigrams.

It was a free and easy world which he had made for himself within his castle. The most extreme opinions were freely voiced, and it was everybody's pride not to be shocked. But at the same time it would be better not to commit any lapse of table etiquette, and when you took off your bathing suit you put on the right sort of clothes. This made an odd mixture of convention and scorn for convention, and a boy with American parents had now and then to ask his friend for guidance. Rick would give it with an apology. "The older people try to be mod'n, but they really aren't quite up to it."