Пользователь - WORLDS END Страница 71

All he had to do was to be as tactful as the munitions king himself. He didn't need to say: "I accept your offer and will betray my trust." No, no; his speech would have been: "I appreciate your position, and how greatly you are inconvenienced by the blundering of the diplomats. If at any time I have information that will be of use to you, I'll be most happy to bring it - of course purely as an act of friendship, and without any thought of reward." That was the way Robbie hired his agents - those of the high class, who got the biggest pay.

XII

Such things were being done all the time in the great world; and why didn't Lanny accept? Was it because he knew how his father despised Zaharoff? Not entirely; for Lanny's father despised President Wilson, yet Lanny had come to think that President Wilson was in many ways a great man; not equal to his present tasks, perhaps, but far better than the politicians with whom he was dealing. Lanny was coming to think highly of many of the Crillon staff; he had even permitted himself to have good thoughts about the Bolsheviks he had met, although his father couldn't find words enough to denounce them.

Was it because he wasn't impressed by the young ladies? He couldn't say that, because he hadn't seen enough of them; and young ladies are always interesting to investigate, at the least. You met them everywhere you turned here in Paris, where so many of the young men were in the ground with white crosses over them, or else living in barracks along the German frontier, or in Salonika and Odessa and Syria and Algiers - so many places you couldn't keep track of them.

Was it perhaps because Lanny had in his heart an image of an English girl with broad brow and smooth, straw-colored hair and a gentle manner reminding him of his mother? That girl was married now to the young nobleman in the British War Office. Did she love her husband? Was she going to be a true and faithful wife? Or would she continue getting her ideas from "free women"? Lanny knew that the women had at last got the ballot in Britain, so Rosemary wouldn't have to carry any more hatchets into the National Gallery. When she wrote, it was one of her brief, uncommunicative letters; he would have to go and see her, before he would know how to think about her in the future.

Nobody could have been more polite than Lanny to his elderly host. He said that nobody really knew whether there was going to be any Prinkipo conference; the French were working against it - Lanny smiled inwardly, well knowing that Zaharoff was one of the hardest of the workers.

"There's no doubt," the youth added, "that President Wilson means what he says, the American troops are going to find a way to withdraw from the fighting." And when Zaharoff brought up another subject, he replied: "I really don't know what's going to happen at Batum. The British can't seem to make up their minds. Have you heard the bad news as to the troubles of the French in the Ukraine?"

All that was sparring, of course; and Zaharoff knew it. He knew what it meant when Lanny explained that, unfortunately, on the few occasions when he did get advance news of the Crillon's intentions, it was always confidential, and so his lips were sealed. The munitions king realized that he had wasted his afternoon. He didn't show any signs of irritation, but brought the interview politely to a close and parted from the youth on terms which would make it possible for the duquesa to invite him again.

But she didn't; and Lanny didn't see those shy and well-bred young ladies for quite a while - until he met one of them as the wife of an English ship owner who was said to be helping Zaharoff secretly re-arm Germany. He learned that the other one had married a nobleman and gone to live in Constantinople, where she had become celebrated for the protection she offered to the pariah dogs of that city. The wheel of fate had made a circle, and a portion of Zaharoff's fortune had returned to the place from which it had made its not so creditable start!

29

A Friend in Need

I

THE Supreme Council was now going ahead under full steam. They were hearing the claims of the small nationalities, and it was proving a tedious procиss. As the Americans reported it, Dmowski, presenting the case of Poland, began with the fourteenth century at eleven o'clock in the morning, and reached 1919 at four in the afternoon. Next day came Benes to present the claims of the Czechs, ahd he began a century earlier and finished an hour later.

Professor Alston had to be there, for no one could say at what moment an American commissioner might beckon to him and ask some question; Lanny had to be there, because of the heavy portfolios, and also because the professor's French couldn't cope with the outbursts of Clemenceau, who used not merely the slang of the boulevards, but that of the underworld - many of his ejaculations being so obscene that Lanny was embarrassed to translate them and the recorders of the proceedings had to be told to expurgate them.

A weary, weary ordeal! You couldn't lounge or tilt back in a frail gilded chair a couple of hundred years old; you had to sit stiff and motionless and tell yourself it was a history lesson. But did you want to know all that history? Lanny would close his eyes and remember the beach at Juan, the blue water sparkling in the sunshine, and the little white sailboats all over the Golfe. He would summon up the garden with the masses of bougainvillaea in bloom; he would remember the piano, and yearn over those boxes of books which he had had shipped from the home of Great-Great-Uncle Eli and which some day he was going to have the delight of unpacking. Did he really want to be a person of distinction, live in the grand monde and submit to endless, unremitting boredom?

He would open his eyes and watch the faces of the old men who were here deciding the destinies of the nations. Clemenceau sat shrunken into a little knot, the hands with the gray gloves folded over his stomach, the heavy lids covering his weary brown eyes. Was he asleep? Maybe so,' but he had an inner alarm clock, for the moment anyone said anything against the interests of his beloved patrie he was all alert, bristling like the tiger he was named for. The pink, cherubic Lloyd George quite frankly dozed; he told one of the Americans that two things had kept him alive through the ordeal of the war - naps were one and the other was singing Welsh hymns.

Woodrow Wilson was unsparing of himself, and as the weeks passed his health caused worry to his associates. He was attending these Council sessions all day, and in the evenings the sessions of the League of Nations Commission. He was driving himself, because he had to sail on the fourteenth of February to attend the closing sessions of the Congress, and he was determined to take with him the completed draft of the Covenant of the League. A thousand cares and problems beset him and he was getting no sleep; he became haggard and there began a nervous twitching of the left side of his face. Lanny, watching, him, decided never to. aspire to fame.

The oratory became intolerable, so the Council picked out the talkers, and appointed them on what was called the "Clarification Commission," where they could talk to one another. Altogether there were appointed fifty-eight commissions to deal with the multiplicity of problems, and these commissions held a total of 1646 sessions. But that didn't remedy the trouble, because all the commissions had to report - and to whom? Where was the human brain that could absorb so many details? Hundreds of technical advisers assembling masses of information and shaping important conclusions - and then unable to find a way to make their work count!

All the problems of the world had been dumped onto the shoulders of a few elderly men; and the world had to crumble to pieces while one after another of these men broke down under the strain. There was that terrible influenza loose in Paris, striking blindly, like another war. It was the middle of winter, and winds came storming across the North Sea, tempered somewhat by the time they got to Paris, but laden with sleet and snow. It would cover the mansard roofs and pile up on the chimney pots; it didn't last many hours, and then the streets would be carpeted with slush, and the miasma that rose from it bore germs which had been accumulating through a thousand years of human squalor.

II

Early in February the Bolshevik government announced its willingness to send delegates to the Prinkipo conference. That put it up to President Wilson to act, if he was going to stand by his project. A few days later Alston told his secretary an exciting piece of news: the President had decided to name two delegates, one an American journalist, William Allen White, and the other Alston's old-time mentor, George D. Herron!

The official announcement was made a day or two later and raised a storm of protest from the "best" people back home. The New York Times led off with an editorial blast exposing the Socialist ex-clergyman's black record; the Episcopal bishop of New York followed suit, and the church people and the women's clubs rushed to the defense of the American home. It was bad enough to propose sitting at a council table with bloody-handed thugs and nationalizers of women; but to send to them a man who shared their moral depravity was to degrade the fair name of Columbia the Gem of the Ocean. All this was duly cabled and printed in Paris, and reinforced the efforts of the Quai d'Orsay to torpedo the Prinkipo proposal.

Herron, who had gone back to his home in Geneva, now returned to Paris, deeply stirred by the opportunity which had come to him. No longer would he have to sit helpless and watch the world crumble. He saw himself arbitrating this ferocious class war which had spread over one-sixth of the globe and was threatening to wreck another huge section of Europe. He was busy day and night with conferences; the newspaper men swarmed about him, asking questions, not merely about Russia and the Reds, but about free love in relation to the Christian religion, and whatever else might make hot news for the folks at home.

The Socialist prophet was all ready to go to work. But how was he to do it? He had never held an official position, and came to Alston for advice. How did one set about working for a government? Where did one go? If he was to set out for Prinkipo, presumably he would have a staff, and an escort, and some funds. Where would he get them?

Alston advised him to see Mr. Lansing. That was easy, because the Secretary of State didn't have much to do in Paris. Formal and stiff, his feelings had been mortally wounded because so few persons paid attention to him. But he didn't want the attention of Socialist prophets; he looked on Herron as on some strange bird. He was as cold as the snowy night outside, as remote as the ceiling of his palatial reception room with the plaster cupids dancing on it. He had received no instructions about the conference, didn't approve of it, and was sure it would prove futile.

President Wilson was driven day and night trying to get ready for his departure, and Herron could find nobody who knew or cared about the musical-comedy place called Prinkipo. The Supreme Council had passed a resolution, but unless there was someone to fight for it and keep on fighting, it would be nothing but so many words. Alston explained the intrigues of the French as he knew them. Herron, a simple man to whose nature deception was foreign, was helpless against such forces. People fought shy of him, perhaps because of the scandal freshly raked up, but mainly because he was believed to sympathize with the Reds. In a matter like that it was safer to lie low - and let Marshal Foch and Winston Churchill have their way.

III

Over at the Hotel Majestic was the British staff, almost as large as the American; and from the outset they had been coming over to make friends. The Americans did their best to keep on their guard, but it was difficult when they found how well informed and apparently sincere the Englishmen were. They had such excellent manners and soft agreeable voices - and, furthermore, you could understand what they said! A Frenchman, or a European speaking French, talked very rapidly, and was apt to become excited and wave his hands in front of you; but the well-chosen words of a cultivated Oxford graduate slid painlessly into your mind and you found yourself realizing how it had come about that they were the managers of so large a portion of the earth. If a territory was placed in the hands of such men, it stood a chance to be well governed; but what would happen if the Italians got it - to say nothing of the Germans or the Bolsheviks!

The British members of commissions of course had young secretaries and translators carrying heavy portfolios, and Lanny met them. They reminded him of Rick and those jolly English lads with whom he had punted on the Thames. One of them invited him to lunch at their hotel, an ornate structure which seemed to be built entirely of onyx; the dining room was twice as big as the Crillon's, and in it you saw the costumes of every corner of the empire on which the sun never set. The English youth, whose name was Fessenden, had been born in Gibraltar, and was here because of his fluent Spanish and French. He was gay, and had the usual bright pink cheeks, and Lanny exchanged eager confidences with him; each was "pumping" the other, of course, but that was fair exchange and no robbery.

What was this business about Prinkipo? Lanny told how anxiously Dr. Herron was trying to find out. The English youth said his government hadn't appointed any delegates, so presumably they thought it was going to fizzle. One more of those "trial balloons." Fessenden's chief had said that the only way it might be made to work would be for President Wilson to drop everything else and go there and put it through. But of course he couldn't do that. "Don't you think perhaps he's a bit too afraid of delegating authority? One man just can't make so many decisions by himself."

That was the talk all over Paris; three of the peace commissioners were figureheads, and Colonel House had been weakened by an attack of flu. That was no secret, and Lanny admitted it.

"All of us," said the Englishman, "at least all the younger crowd, were hoping Wilson could put it over. Now we're a bit sick about it."

Lanny answered cautiously. "One hears so many things, one doesn't know what to believe."

"But there are definite things that you can be sure of. It seems as if your President just doesn't know enough about Europe; he does things without realizing what they mean. At the outset he agreed to let the Italians have the Brenner! Shouldn't he have asked somebody about that before he spoke? Of course it's important for the defense of Italy, but if you're going to distribute the world on the basis of strategic needs, where will you stop?"

"I don't know much about the Brenner," admitted Lanny.

"It's a pass inhabited almost entirely by German people; and what is going to happen to them when the Italians take them over? Will they be compelled to send their children to Italian schools, and all that sort of rot?"

Lanny smiled, and said: "Well, you know it wasn't we who signed that treaty with the Italians."

"True enough," admitted Fessenden. "But then it wasn't we who brought up those Fourteen Points!"

That was why it was a pleasure to meet the English; you could speak frankly, and they didn't flare up and deliver orations. It was true they wanted the Americans to pull some chestnuts out of the fire for them, but it was also true that they would meet you halfway in an effort to be decent. The best of them had really hoped that the American President was going to bring in a new order and were saddened now as they discovered how ill equipped he was for the tremendous task.