Пользователь - WORLD'S END

"But Italy has some sort of a treaty with Germany and Austria. Doesn't she have to help them fight?"

"Italy has just announced that she will take a 'defensive attitude.' Robbie says that means they'll wait, and see which side offers them the most. That's bound to be England, because she has money."

"Our friends all talk about going back to America. It'll be lonely at Juan."

"Maybe for you," said the boy. "But you know how it is - I never did see enough of my mother. We could read, and play music, and swim, and wait for Marcel to come back." Lanny stopped, not being sure if it was fair for him to mention that aspect of the matter.

The mother's voice trembled as she said: "He may never come back, Lanny."

"There's a chance, of course. But Robbie says the war won't last long. And Marcel may never see any fighting - Robbie thinks the Provencal regiments will be kept on the Italian border, at least till they're sure what Italy's going to do. And then again, Marcel might come back wounded, and we'd both want to take care of him. It wouldn't be nice to know that he was hurt, and in need of help, and we couldn't give it."

"I know, Lanny, I know." The tears were starting again in the beautiful blue eyes. "That's what has been tearing my heart in half." She sat with her hands clasped tightly together, and the boy watched her lips trembling. "That's really what you want to do, isn't it, Lanny?"

"You asked me to tell you."

"I know. I couldn't decide it all by myself. If I do what you say, I may be a forlorn and desolate old woman. You won't get tired of me?"

"You can bet I won't."

"And you'll stand by Marcel? You'll help us, whatever hard things may come?"

"Indeed I will."

"You'll be a French boy, Lanny - not an American."

"I'll be a bit of everything, as I am now. That hasn't hurt me." He tried to conceal his joy, but didn't succeed altogether. "You really mean it, Beauty?"

"I mean it. Or, rather, I'll let you mean it for me. I'm a weak and foolish woman, Lanny. I oughtn't to have got into this jam at all. You'll have to take charge of me and make me behave myself."

"Well, I've wanted to sometimes," admitted the youngster. He wasn't sure whether he ought to laugh or cry. "Oh, Beauty, I really think it's the right thing to do!"

"All right, I'll believe you. I'll have to write a note to Harry. I just haven't the courage to see him again."

"That's all right - he ought to stop worrying you. He really hasn't any claim to you."

"He has, Lanny - more than you can guess. But I'll tell him it's all over - and we'll never see Pittsburgh."

"I can get along without so much smoke," declared the boy.

"I think I'd better tell Robbie first," said the mother. "Maybe he can help to break the shock to Harry. He'll tell him I'm not really as good as I look!"

"Harry won't suffer so much," said the young man of the world. "There'll be plenty of girls on the steamer willing to marry him."

"He's a dear, kind fellow, Lanny - you're not in a position to appreciate him. I'll write him, and he can sail tomorrow, and you and I will go to Juan right away. I'll save and pay my debts, and give up trying to shine in society - do you think there'll ever be any more society in Europe, Lanny?"

So it was settled at last; and so it was done. Robbie and Harry sailed the next day - with nobody to see them off. Beauty was packing up her many belongings, with the help of the maid whom she had engaged for her Paris sojourn, but whom she was not taking to the Riviera. Lanny was helping all he could, and writing a letter to Rick, and also one to Marcel, which he hoped would some day be delivered by the postal service of the French army. The army was rather preoccupied on that particular day - since it happened to be the one which the Kaiser's troops had chosen for the invading of Luxembourg and France.

BOOK THREE

Bella Gerant Alii

12

Loved I Not Honour More

1

TНЕ August sun on the Riviera is a blinding white glare and a baking heat. In it the grapes ripen to deepest purple and olives fill themselves to bursting with golden oil. Men and women born and raised in the Midi have skins filled with dark pigments to protect them, and they can work in the fields without damage to their complexions. But to a blond daughter of chill and foggy New England the excess of light and heat assumed an aspect hostile and menacing; an enemy seeking to dry the juices out of her nerves, cover her fair skin with scaly brown spots, and deprive her of those charms by which and for which she had been living.

So Beauty Budd had to hide in the protection of a shuttered house, and have an electric fan to blow away the heat from her body. She rarely went out until after sundown, and since there was no one to look at her during the day, she yielded gradually to the temptation of not taking too much trouble. She would wear her old dressing gowns to save the new ones, and let her son see her with hair straggling. She got little exercise, there being nothing for her to do in a. house with servants.

The result was that terror which haunts the lives of society ladies, the monster known as embonpoint, a most insidious enemy, who keeps watch at the gates of one's being like a cat at a gopher hole. It never sleeps, and never forgets, but stays on the job, ready to take advantage of every moment of weakness or carelessness. It creeps upon you one milligram at a time - for the advances of this enemy are not measured in space but in avoirdupois. With it, everything is gain and nothing loss; what it wins it keeps. The battle with this unfairest of fiends became the chief concern of Beauty's life, and the principal topic of her conversation in the bosom of her family.

No use looking to the government for help. During the course of the war the inhabitants of the great cities would be rationed, and those of whole countries such as Germany and Britain; but over the warm valleys of the Riviera roamed cattle, turning grass into rich cream, and there were vast cellars and caves filled with barrels of olive oil, and new supplies forming in billions of tiny black globes on the gnarled and ancient trees. Figs were ripening, bees were busy making honey - in short, war or no war, a lady who received a thousand dollars' worth of credit every month in the invulnerable currency of the United States of America could have delivered at her door unlimited quantities of oleaginous and saccharine materials.

Nor could the trapped soul expect help from the servants who waited upon her. Leese, the cook, was fat and hearty, and Rosine, the maid, would become so in due course, and both of them were set in the conviction that this was the proper way for women to be. "C'est la nature," was the formula of all the people of the South of France for all the weaknesses of the flesh. They looked with dismay upon the fashion of Anglo-Saxon ladies to keep themselves in a semi-starved condition under the impression that this was the way to be beautiful; they would loudly insist that the practice was responsible for whatever headache, crise de nerfs, or other malaise such ladies might experience. Leese fried her fish and her rice in olive oil, and her desserts were mixed with cream; she would set a little island of butter afloat in the center of each plate of potage, and crown every sort of sweet with a rosette or curlicue of fat emulsified and made into snow-white bubbles of air. If she was asked not to do these things, she would exercise an old family servant's right to forget.

So in desperation Beauty turned to her son. "Lanny, don't let me have so much cream!" she would cry. She adopted the European practice of hot milk with coffee; and Lanny would watch while she poured a little cream over her fresh figs, and would then keep the pitcher on his side of the table. "No more now," he would, say when he caught her casting a glance at the tiny Sevres pitcher. But the boy's efforts were thwarted by the mother's practice of keeping a box of chocolates in her room. She would nibble them between meals; and very soon it became evident that the cunning monster of embonpoint could utilize the bean of a sterculiaceous tree exactly as well as the mammary secretion of Bos domestica. Beauty would be in a state of bewilderment about it. "Why, I hardly eat anything at all!" she would exclaim.