Пользователь - WORLD'S END

Could Lanny pray? He wasn't sure. He had listened to the Reverend Mr. Saddleback praying and had been inclined to take the procedure with a trace of humor. But now he would be glad to have anybody's help to keep Rick alive.

Esther, of course, was much affected by what had happened; in this crisis their two so different natures came to a temporary understanding. Her pride was humbled, and she had to admit that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in her philosophy. If something in Rick's soul had been able to travel from France to Connecticut, why might not something from Lanny's go back to France? As it happened, prayers for the sick and afflicted were in accord with the doctrines of Esther's church; so why should not the congregation be requested to pray for a wounded English officer - especially since their own boys were not yet being killed?

"Spare no expense in helping Rick," cabled the practical Robbie. "Keep me advised by wire." He arranged for Nina to have unlimited credit for cabling - you can do that kind of thing when you are one of the princes of industry. Nina replied that her husband was in a base hospital abroad, and she could not get to him; they just had to wait - and pray.

It was some time before she herself knew the story and could write it to Lanny. The English troops had been making an attack, and Rick had been assigned to the defense of another plane which was doing "contact flying" - that is, observing the advance of the troops, and sending information by wireless so that the artillery barrage could keep just in front of them. Rick had been attacked by three German planes and had been shot through the knee; he was forced to make a landing behind the enemy's lines, and his plane overturned - that was when he had got the gashed forehead. The attack being under way, the Germans had not found him; he had dragged himself into a shell hole and hidden, and for two days and nights had lain, conscious only part of the time, hoping that the British might advance and find him. This had happened - but meantime his wound had become infected, and he was suffering dreadfully; it was a question whether his leg could be saved, or whether he could survive having it amputated.

VIII

Men were being killed by thousands every day; but still the work of the world had to go on. Lanny had to wipe the tears from his eyes, shut from his mind the thought of his friend's suffering, and acquire information about the conquests of King Alexander the Great. Hosts of men had been mutilated in those wars; not with machine-gun bullets, but with arrows and spears, just as painful, and as liable to cause infection. All history was one river of blood - and who could live if he spent his time weeping upon its banks?

Lanny had managed to become interested in his job. He was young, and nothing could be entirely a bore. Mr. Harper came every day and heard him recite, and was pleased with his progress, and told Esther, so the youth enjoyed a glow of satisfaction. He was making good; he was taking the curse off himself - and he was getting an education. "Drink deep," a poet had sung of the Pierian spring. Here in America it had been dammed and piped, and the water was metered and duly paid for at a fixed price; you turned a spigot, and drew so many quarts at a time, and when you had drunk it five days a week for ten weeks, that was called a "unit." Ancient history, one unit; medieval history, one unit; algebra one, geometry one; elementary French two, advanced French three, and so on.

Lanny read the announcement, made by the Yale authorities, that the university would now require military training. The slogan "For God, for Country, and for Yale" would become "Yale for God and Country." But Robbie said not to worry, this war wasn't going to last forever, and after Yale had won it, everything could go on as before. Mr. Harper insisted that a unit would always be a unit; it was the indestructible particle of the educational world. So Lanny memorized the dates of Charles Martel the Hammer, and of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire.

No more apparitions came to him. He learned by the more expensive medium of the cable that Rick was still alive; then that he had been brought to England; then that he was having an operation, and then a second - he was going to be one of those cases which constitute a sort of endowment for surgeons and hospitals. Lanny, of course, had written Nina all about his vision; Rick admitted that when he had crashed he had thought about Lanny - because Lanny was so afraid of crashes, and had told him about Marcel's.

Later on Nina wrote that Rick was back at his father's home, and she was helping to take care of him. "Write him affectionate things and cheer him up," she said. The knee is a difficult place to heal, and if Rick was ever to walk again, it would be with a steel brace on his leg. Poor, proud, defiant, impatient aesthete, he was going to be a pitiful, nerve-shaken cripple; his wife would be one of those devoted souls - millions of them all over Europe - who were glad to get even part of a husband back again, and have that much safe from the slaughterman's ax.

IX

Every time Lanny went swimming or boating, he saw great towering iron chimneys, pouring out billowing clouds of smoke. At night, if he sat on the front porch, he saw down the vista of the elm trees a dull red glare in the sky. That was Budd's; that was the plant, the source of all Lanny's good things, and one of the places where the war was being won. From earliest childhood he had listened to discourses about its functions and ownership - those precious pieces of paper called stock certificates, which guaranteed safety and comfort to whoever held them, and to his children and his children's children. Robbie, man of business and of money, had been wont to preach little sermons, playful yet serious; he would see a ragged old beggar slouching along in rain or snow, and would say: "There, but for the plant, go you!"

Of course Lanny wanted to see it, and Robbie promised to arrange it. As soon as they heard the proposal, Junior and Percy put in their clamors; they had seen it before, but no one could see it enough. And then Bess, loudest of all - why did she have to be left out of everything? Bess had heard about votes for women, and declared that she believed in them from now on. Hadn't she just had her tenth birthday party, and got better marks than either of her brothers in school? The father said, all right, he would have one of his secretaries take Saturday morning off and escort the four of them.

They drove through the great steel gates of the plant, guarded now by armed men, for there had been explosions in American munitions plants, and German agents were known to be active. They were led from one huge building to another, and saw white-hot steel being poured from giant ladles amid blinding showers of sparks; they saw golden ingots being rolled into sheets, or cut by screaming saws, or pounded and squeezed in huge presses. The clatter and clamor was deafening to a stranger. Their escort said that munitions were noisy at two periods of their career, the beginning and the end; he said that men got used to both, sooner or later. The foreman on the floor could tell in a moment if anything went wrong, because one of the familiar sounds was missing or out of tune.

They were taken through rooms as big as railroad sheds, in which traveling cranes overhead brought heavy parts, and electric motor trucks brought other parts, and men working in long lines assembled heavy machine guns, which were on wheels. A gallery ran about the rooms, from which you could look down upon the crowded floor, and it seemed a place of hopeless confusion; but the secretary assured them that every motion made by one of those human ants had been studied for weeks in a laboratory, and that the movements of each piece of machinery were timed to the second.