WORLD'S END

I

THE 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.

II

The explanation of all this was obvious. Beauty Budd was a social being, who could not live without the stimulus of rivalry. When she was going out among people, she would be all keyed up, and when food was put before her, she would be so absorbed in conversation that she would take only absentminded nibbles. But when she was shut up in the house alone, or with people upon whom she did not need to “make an impression,” then, alas, she had time to realize that she was hungry. Not even the thought of a world at war, and the sufferings of millions of men, could save her from that moral decline.

There were friends she might have seen; but in the tumult of fear which had seized the world she preferred to keep to herself. All the Americans in France were hating the Germans; but Beauty hated war with such intensity that she didn't care who won, if only the fighting would end. As for Lanny, he was doing what his father advised, keeping himself neutral. This being the case, they couldn't even speak to their own servants about the terror that was sweeping down upon Paris.

Lanny had to be “society” to his adored mother. He would invite her to a the dansant; putting a record on the phonograph, and letting her show him the fine points of the fashionable dances. He in turn would teach her “Dalcroze,” and make her do “plastic counterpoint”; she would be required to “feel” the music, and they would experiment and argue, and have a very good time. Then he would invite her to a concert, in which they would be both performers and audience; they would play duets, and he would make her work at it. No fun just playing the same things over; if you were going to get anywhere you had to be able to read. He would put a score before her and exhort and scold like a music master.

When Beauty was exhausted from that, he wouldn't let her lie down by the box of chocolates; no, it was time for their swim. When she got into her suit, he would walk behind her to the beach and survey the shapely white calves, and worry her by saying: “They are undoubtedly getting thicker!” The water was warm, and Beauty would want to float and relax, and let him swim around her; but no again, he would challenge her to a race along the shore. He would splash and make her chase him. But he never did succeed in persuading her to put on Robbie's goggles and sink down among the fishes.

They would read aloud, taking turns. Beauty couldn't concentrate upon a book very long, she was too restless — or else too sleepy. But when she had someone to read to her, that was a form of social life. She would interrupt and talk about the story, and have the stimulus of another person's reactions. In course of the years many books had accumulated in the house; friends had given them, or Beauty had bought them on people's recommendation, but had seldom found time to look at them. But now they would enjoy the company of M. France, whom they had met so recently. Lanny found Le Lys Rouge on the shelves, a fashionable love story treated with touches of the worldling's playful mockery. It had been his popular success, and proved a success with Beauty. It took her back to the happy days, the elite of the world enjoying the impulses of what they politely termed their hearts — the glands having not as yet been publicly discovered. Without difficulty Beauty saw herself in the role of a heroine who had become involved with three men, and couldn't figure out what to do. Having visited in Florence, she recalled the lovely landscapes, and they discussed the art treasures and art ideas in the book.

Lanny remembered that M. Priedieu, the librarian, had spoken about Stendhal. A copy of La Chartreuse de Parme had got onto the shelves, they had no idea how. Once more Beauty saw herself as a heroine, a woman for whom love excused all things. She was enraptured by detailed and precise analysis of the great passion. “Oh, that is exactly right!” she would exclaim, and the reading would stop while she told Lanny about men and women, and how they behaved when they were happy in love, or when they were sad; of different types of lovers, and what they said, and whether they meant it or not; how it felt to be disappointed, and to be jealous, and to be thwarted; how love and hatred became mixed and intertangled; the part that vanity played, and love of domination, and love of self, and love of the world and its applause. Beauty Budd had had a great deal of experience, and the subject was one of unending fascination.

Perhaps not all moralists would have approved this kind of conversation between a mother and a son. But she had told Lanny in Paris that if they came back to Juan, he would be a French boy. So he would have to know the arts of love, if only to protect himself. There were dangerous kinds of women, who could wreck the happiness of a man, old or young, and care not a flip of the fan about it. One should know how to tell the good ones from the bad — and generally, alas, it was not possible until it was too late.

There was another purpose, too; Beauty was defending herself, and Marcel, and Harry, or rather what she had done to Harry. Perhaps her conscience troubled her, for she talked often about the plate-glass man, and what might be happening to him in Pittsburgh. Love was bewildering, and many times you wouldn't be happy if you did and wouldn't be if you didn't. You might make a resolve to go off by yourself and have nothing more to do with love; but men had refused to let Beauty do it, and some day soon women would be refusing to let Lanny do it.

After which they would go back to Henri Beyle, soldier, diplomat, and man of the world, who had written under the pen name of Stendhal, and who would tell them how love had fared in the midst of the last World War — just a hundred years earlier, not so long ago in Europe's long story.

III

There came post cards from Marcel Detaze; he was well, busy, and happy to know they were safe at home. He was not permitted to say where he was, but gave the number of his regiment and battalion. The censoring of mail was strict, but no censor in France would object to a painter's declaring that he loved his beautiful blond mistress or to her replying that the sentiments were reciprocated. Beauty fed her soul upon these messages — plus Robbie's assurance that the war couldn't last more than three or four months. Maybe Marcel wasn't going to see any fighting; he would come home with a story of interesting adventure, and life would begin again where it had left off.

Everybody they had met in Paris, and everybody they met now, was confident that the French armies were going to hold the Germans while the Russian steam roller hurtled over Prussia and captured Berlin. The French military authorities had been so confident that they had planned a giant movement of their forces through Alsace and Lorraine; they would break the German lines at the south, then, sweeping north, cut the communications of the enemy advancing through Belgium and northern France. The papers told about the beginning of this counterattack and what it was intended to do; then suddenly they fell silent, and the next reports of fighting in this district came from places in France. Those who understood military affairs knew what this meant — that the armies of la patrie had sustained a grave defeat.

As to what was happening farther north, not all the censorship in the land could hide the facts from the public. One had only to take a map and mark on it the places where fighting was reported, and he would see that it was the German steam roller which was hurtling — and at the rate of ten or twenty miles a day. The little Belgian army was fighting desperately, but was being swept aside; its forts were being pulverized by heavy artillery, and towns and villages in the path of the invasion were being wrecked and burned. The still smaller British army which had been landed at the Channel ports was apparently meeting the same fate. The Kaiser was on his way to Paris!

IV

There came a letter from Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette. That very lively lady had been having an adventure, and wrote about it in detail — being shut up in a room in a fourth-class hotel in Paris, much bored with nothing to do. She had gone to spend the month of August with friends at a country place on the river Maas, which flows through the heart of Belgium. Sophie was a nonpolitical person, entirely devoted to having a good time; she rarely looked at newspapers, and when she heard people talking about war threats, she paid no attention, being unable to take seriously the idea that anybody would disturb the comfort of a person of her social posi_T tion.

The ladies she was visiting shared her attitude. News traveled slowly in the country; and when at last they heard that the Germans had crossed the frontier, they did not worry; the army would be going to France, and it might be interesting to watch it pass. Only when they heard the sound of heavy guns did they realize that they might be in danger, and then it was too late; a troop of Uhlans with long lances came galloping up the driveway, and the automobiles and horses on the place were seized. Soon afterward arrived several limousines, and elegant officers descended, and with bowing and heel-clicking informed the ladies of the regrettable need to take the château for a temporary staff headquarters. They all had wasp waists, and wore monocles, long gray coats, gold bracelets, and shiny belts and boots; their manners were impeccable, and they spoke excellent English, and seemed to be well pleased with a lady who was introduced as Miss Sophie Timmons from the far-off state of Ohio.

Her friends had suddenly realized that under the law, being married to a Frenchman, she was French and might be interned for the period of the war. That night she sent her maid to the village and succeeded in hiring a cart and an elderly bony white horse; taking only a suitcase, she and the maid and a peasant driver had set out toward Brussels. There was fighting everywhere to the south and east of them, and the roads were crowded with refugees driving dogcarts, trundling handcarts, or carrying their belongings on their backs. More than once they had had to sit for long periods by the roadside to let the German armies pass, and the woman's letter was full of amazed horror at the perfection of the Kaiser's war machine. For a solid hour she watched motorized artillery rolling by: heavy siege guns, light field-pieces, wicked-looking rapid-firers; caissons, trucks loaded with shells, and baggage trains, pontoon trains, field kitchens. “My dear, they have been getting ready for this all our lifetime!” wrote the Baroness de la Tourette.

She watched the marching men in their dull field-gray uniforms, so much more sensible than the conspicuous blue and red of the French. The Germans tramped in close, almost solid ranks, forever and ever and ever — in one village they told Sophie of an unbroken procèssion for more than thirty hours. “And so many with cigars in their mouths!” she wrote. “I wondered, had they been pillaging the shops.”

The fugitives slept in their cart for fear it might be stolen; and after two days and nights they reached Brussels, which the Germans had not yet taken. From there they got to Ostend, where the British were landing troops, and then by boat to Boulogne, and to Paris by train. “You should see this city!” wrote Sophie. “Everybody has gone that can get away. The government has taken all the horses and trucks. Maybe the taxicabs have been hired by refugees — I'm hoping that a few will come back. All the big hotels are closed — the men employees are in the army. The Place de la Concorde is full of soldiers sleeping upon straw. The strangest thing is that gold and silver coins have disappeared entirely; they say people are hoarding them, and you can't get any change because there's only paper money. I am waiting for a chance to come south without having to walk. I hope the Germans do not get here first. It would be embarrassing to meet those officers again!”

V

When Marcel departed to join the army, he had brought the keys of his cottage to the servants at Bienvenu and left them for Madame Budd. The servants being French, the occasion had not been casual; they had wept and called upon God to protect him, which in turn had brought tears to the eyes of Monsieur. He had said that it was pour la patrie, and that they should take care of the precious Madame, if and when she returned; after those wicked Germans had been driven from the soil of France, they would all live happy forever after, as in the fairy tales.

Leese and Rosine of course knew all about the love affair. To them it was romance, delight, the wine and perfume of life; they lived upon it as women in the United States were learning to live upon the romances, real and imaginary, of the movie stars of Hollywood. Beauty's servants talked about it, not merely among themselves, but with all the other servants of the neighborhood; everybody watched, everybody shared the tenderness, the delight; everybody said, what a shame the young painter was so poor!

Now Beauty received a card from Marcel, saying that, if anything should happen to him, he wanted her to have his paintings. “I don't know if they will ever be worth anything,” he wrote; “but you have been kind to them, while to my relatives they mean nothing. Perhaps it might be well to move them to your house, where they would be safer. Do what you please about this.”

Beauty, watching for every hint in his messages, clasped her hand to her heart. “Lanny, do you suppose that means he's going to some post of danger?”

“I don't know why it should,” said the boy. “We have our own paintings insured, and certainly we ought to take care of his.”

Beauty had been going to the little house and sitting there, remembering the times when she had been so happy, and reproaching herself because she had not appreciated her blessings. Now she went with Lanny to carry out Marcel's commission. There were more than a hundred canvases, each tacked upon a wooden frame, and stacked in a sort of shed-room at the rear of the house. One by one Lanny brought them out and studied them — all those aspects of Mediterranean sea and shore which he knew better than anything else. He exclaimed over the loveliness of them; he was ready to set himself up as an art critic against all the world. Beauty wiped the tears from her eyes and exclaimed over the wickedness of a war that had taken such a lover, and stopped such work, and even made it impossible for Sophie to come to the Riviera unless she walked! There was a group of paintings from the trip to Norway. Lanny had never seen these or heard of them, for it had been before he was told about Marcel. The boy had heard so much about this cold and shining country, and here it was by the magic of art. Here was more than fiords and mountains and saeters and ancient farmhouses with openings in the roofs instead of chimneys; here was the soul of these things, old, yet forever new, so long as men loved beauty and marveled at its self-renewal. Here, also, was Greece with its memories, and Africa with its grim desert men, muffled and silent. The Bluebird was being made over into a hospital ship right now; but its two cruises with the soap king would live — “well, as long as I do,” said Lanny.

VI

The whereabouts of Marcel was supposed to be a secret, upon the preserving of which the safety of la patrie depended. But when you take thousands of young men from a neighborhood and put them into encampments not more than a hundred miles away, it soon becomes what the French call un secret de Polichinelle, something which everybody knows. The truck drivers talked when they came to the towns for supplies, and pretty soon Leese and Rosine were able to inform the family that the painter's regiment was on guard duty in the Alpes Maritimes.

Italy had declared for neutrality in this war; but it could not be forgotten that she had been a member of the so-called Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. There was a powerful Italian party known as the Triplicists, who wanted to carry out the pledges, and in these days of quick political overturns France dared not leave her Provencal border unguarded. So Marcel had for a while what the British called a “cushy” job. But the trouble was that as the menace of the German steam roller increased, more and more men were being grabbed up and rushed to the north. Right away Beauty decided that she must visit that camp. She didn't wait to write, not knowing if the censor would let such a letter pass; she would just go to the place and lay siege to whatever authorities might be in command. Beauty had arts which she trusted, but which could not be exercised by mail.

The difficulty lay with transportation. They had their car, but Pierre Bazoche was in the army — oddly enough he was a sergeant, and gave orders to the beloved of his former employer. This seemed to the employer among the atrocities of war, but it amused Lanny, and he was sure it wouldn't worry Marcel. Pierre was a capable fellow, and his orders were doubtless proper.

Leese could always find among her innumerable relatives a man or woman to do anything that was needed, and she now produced an elderly truck driver of the flower farms of the Cap d'Antibes, who could be spared for this journey of romantic interest. He was washed and made presentable in Pierre's uniform, and managed to solve the problem of getting the essence, which had suddenly grown scarce and high in price, being needed in huge quantities to move the troops and guns for the saving of Paris.

Lanny sat in the front seat and made friends with old Claude Santoze, who was dark and hook-nosed, and doubtless descended from the Saracen invaders. His black hair was grizzling, and he had half a dozen children at home, but he wanted nothing so much as a chance to fight, and wanted to talk about the war and what Lanny knew about it. The youngster put on the mantle of authority, having a purpose of his own, which was to persuade Claude to say that a boy so intelligent and sensible was old enough to learn to drive a car, and that he, Claude, was willing for a suitable fee to take the time off to teach him.

Having accomplished this much, Lanny moved into the back seat and began a campaign with his mother. He could sail a boat, and run a motorboat, and why was a car any different? Like all boys of his time, Lanny was fascinated by machinery, and listened to the talk of motor owners and drivers and asked all the questions he dared. Now even the women of France were learning to drive, and surely the son of Robbie Budd, maker of machines, ought to be allowed to try. So in the end Beauty said yes; it was one of her characteristics that she found it so hard to say anything else.

VII

They were traveling up the valley of the river Var, amid scenery which took their minds off their troubles. Before many hours they were winding along the sides of mountains, and could only hope that the descendant of the Saracens was as alert as he looked. The chill of autumn was in the air, and the wind blew delightful odors from the pine forests. They were in what seemed a wilderness, when they came suddenly upon the encampment; Beauty was surprised, for she had taken it for granted that soldiers in wartime slept like rabbits in holes in the ground. She had not realized that they would have a town, with excellent one-story wooden buildings and regular streets laid out.

The exercising of feminine charm was going to be difficult. There was a barrier across the road, and the men on duty could not be cajoled into raising it for a car whose occupants had no credentials. The lady would have to submit her request in writing; so they drove back to a tiny village which had what called itself an auberge, and Beauty hired the only two bedrooms it contained. There she penned a note-could you guess to whom? Respectfully and with due formality she addressed herself to Sergeant Pierre Bazoche — the bright idea having occurred to her that a person of rank might be able to pull more wires than a humble private, even though a man of genius. Beauty informed the sergeant that she was the fiancée of Private Detaze, and requested the sergeant's kind offices to obtain a leave of absence for the private.

Lanny handed this in at the barrier, and after that there was nothing to do but wait. It was dark before the answer came, in the shape of the sergeant himself, looking distinguished in his long blue coat and baggy red pants, but not presuming on his new status. He lifted his kepi and bowed, and said that he was delighted to see them both. Like everybody else, his first wish was to know about the terrible events in the north; could it be that Paris was in danger? Could it be that the capital had been moved to Bordeaux? Only afterwards did he mention the matter which was so close to Beauty's heart. Nothing could be done that night, but he was taking steps to arrange matters in the morning so that Madame's wishes might be granted.

How were Beauty and her son going to spend an evening in that wretched village, with only a few huts of woodsmen and charcoal burners, and only candles in their rooms? Lanny had an original suggestion, fitting his own disposition: why not sit in the public room and talk with whoever might come in? The possibility of such a proceeding would never have crossed the mind of Beauty Budd; but the boy argued they would be nothing but peasant fellows, with whom he had chatted off and on all his days. If there was a lady in the room, they would surely mind their conversation. They would sip their wine, play their dominoes, sing their songs. If they were soldiers, they would want to be told about the war, like Pierre. They were Marcel's comrades, and one of them might some day save his life.

That settled it. Beauty decided that she wanted to know them all! So the two had their supper at one of the rough wooden tables in the little drinking place; fried rabbit and onions and dried olives and bread and cheese and sour wine. When they were through they did not leave, but called for a set of dominoes; and when the soldiers came straggling in — what a sensation! Lanny talked with them, and the whisper passed around: “Des Américains!” Ah, yes, that accounted for it; in that wonderful land of millionaires and cinema stars it must be the custom for rich and divinely beautiful blond ladies to sit in public rooms and chat with common soldiers. Before long Lanny revealed why they were there, and the sensation was magnified. Sapristi! C'est la fiancée de Marcel Detaze! II est peintre! II est bon enfant! C'est un diable heureux!

It happened just as Lanny said it would; they all wanted to know about the war. Here were rich people, who had traveled, had been in Paris when the war broke out — what had they seen? And a friend who had been in Belgium — what had she seen? Was it true, Madame, that the Germans were cutting off the hands of Belgian children? That they were spearing babies upon their bayonets and carrying them on the march? Beauty reported that her friend had not mentioned any such sights. She did not express opinions of her own. They were not there to make pro-German propaganda, nor to excite disaffection among the troops!

VIII

In the course of the next morning came Marcel; young, erect, and happy, walking upon air. He caught Beauty in his arms and kissed her, right there in front of an audience, including Lanny, and mine host with long gray mustaches, and several mule teams with drivers, all grinning. Romance had come to the Alpes Maritimes! The men could not have been more interested if it had been a company of movie stars to put them into a picture.

The military life agreed with Marcel; why shouldn't it? asked he — in that bracing mountain air, at the most delightful season of the year, living outdoors, marching and drilling, eating wholesome food, and not a care in the world, except the absence of his beloved. “Re-gardez!” he cried, and pointed to the mountains. “I will have something new to paint!” He showed Lanny the far snowy peaks, and the valleys filled with mist. “There's a new kind of atmosphere,” he said, and wanted to start on it right away. He had just come from sentry duty; on that mountain to the east he paced back and forth many hours at a stretch; it was good, because it gave him time to think and to work out his philosophy of life — and of love, he added. When Beauty spoke of danger, he laughed; he and the Italian sentries exchanged cigarettes and witticisms — “Jokes and smokes,” said Marcel, who was brushing up his English.

They had lunch in the auberge, and Marcel was like all the other soldiers, he wanted to talk about nothing but the war. “Did you bring me any papers?” Yes, Lanny had had that kind thought, and Marcel wanted to see them at once. The boy could see that his mother's feelings were hurt; the painter could actually look at an old newspaper when he had Beauty Budd in front of him! But that's what has to be expected, thought she. “Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'Tis woman's whole existence.”

Worse than that: before the lunch was over, Marcel revealed that he wasn't content with this idyllic existence in the mountains; he was pining to get up to the north, into the hell of death and destruction. He undertook to defend this attitude, even though he saw that it brought tears to the eyes of his beautiful blond mistress. “La patrie est en danger!” It was the war cry of the French Revolution, and now, more than a hundred years later, it was shaking the soul of Marcel Detaze. How could any Frenchman know that the goose-step was trampling the banks of the river Marne, only a few miles from Paris, and not desire to rush there, and interpose his body between the most beautiful city in the world and the most hateful of enemies?

Lanny knew that they wanted to be alone; their every glance revealed it, and he said that he would take a walk and see all he could of those grand mountains. Marcel pointed to the west and said: “All France is that way.” Then he pointed to the east and added: “All that is forbidden.”

So Lanny walked to the west, and when he was tired he sat and talked to a shepherd on a hillside; he drank the clear icy water of a mountain stream, and saw the trout darting here and there, and a great bird, perhaps an eagle, sailing overhead, and large grouse called capercaillie whirring through the pine forests. When he came back, toward dark, he saw by the faces of the lovers that they were happy, and by the quivering gray mustaches of the aubergiste and the smiles of his stout wife that all the world loved a lover. Madame had prepared a sort of wedding cake for the occasion, and it was washed down with wine by mule drivers and soldiers who sang love songs, for all the world like a grand opera chorus. “Nous partons, courage; courage aux soldats.”

IX

When they got home again they found that the Baroness de la Tourette had returned to Cannes; she and her maid had managed to crowd into a train, sitting up the whole night — but that was a small matter after the hardships they had been through. Sophie had tales to tell about Paris under what had so nearly been a siege. The German army of invasion had come swinging down on the city, turning like the spokes of a wheel with far-off Verdun as the hub. But when they got close to Paris they veered to the east, apparently planning to enclose the French armies at Verdun and the other fortifications. The minds of their commanders were obsessed by the memory of Sedan; if they could make such a wholesale capture, they could end this war as they had ended the last.

There is around Paris a convergence of waters known as “the seven rivers”; gentle streams, meandering through wooded lands with towns and villages along the banks, and many bridges. The Marne flows into the Seine just before it enters the city at the east. It was along the former river that the German von Kluck contemptuously exposed the right wing of his army; and General Gallieni assembled all the taxicabs and trucks in a great metropolis, rushed his reserves to the front, and hurled them against the enemy forces.

You saw hardly any young men in Paris during those fateful days of the battle of the Marne. The older men and women and children listened to the thunder of the guns that did not cease day or night; they sat upon the parapets of the river, and saw the wreckage of trees and buildings, of everything that would float, including the bodies of dead animals — the human bodies were being fished out before they got into the city. Overhead came now and then a sight of irresistible fascination, an aeroplane soaring, spying out the troop movements, or possibly bringing bombs. The enemy plane was known as a Taube — an odd fantasy, to turn the dove of peace into a cruel instrument of slaughter. Already they had dropped explosives upon Antwerp and killed many women and children. Nevertheless, curiosity was too great, and everywhere in the open places you saw crowds gazing into the sky.

The sound of the guns receded, and by this the people knew that one of the great battles of history had been fought and won. But they did not shout or celebrate; Paris knew what a victory cost, and waited for the taxicabs to bring back their loads of wounded and their news about the dead. The Germans were thrown back upon the Aisne, thirty miles farther north; so the flight of refugees from Paris stopped — and at last it became possible for a lady of title to get to the Riviera without having to walk.

With Sophie came Eddie Patterson, her amiable friend whose distinction in life was that he had chosen the right grandfather. The old gentleman had once engineered through the legislature of his state a franchise to build a railroad bridge; now he drew a royalty from the railroad of one cent for every passenger who crossed the river. Eddie was an amateur billiard player with various medals and cups, and was also fond of motorboating. He talked of giving his fastest boat to the French government to be used in hunting submarines; he would soon see it cruising the Golfe Juan day and night with a four-pounder gun bolted onto the bow.

Eddie Patterson was a slender and rather stoop-shouldered fellow who talked hardheadedly, and had never given any indication of having a flighty mind; but now he had somehow worked himself into a furious rage against the Germans and was talking about volunteering for some kind of service. Sophie was in a panic about it, and of course appealed for the help of her friend Beauty Budd, who agreed with her that men were crazy, and that none of them ever really appreciated a woman's love.

At any hour of the day or night Sophie and Eddie would get into an argument. “All that talk about German atrocities is just propaganda,” the baroness would announce. “Haven't I been there and seen? Of course the Germans shoot civilians who fire at them from the windows of houses. And maybe they are holding the mayors of Belgian towns as hostages; but isn't that always done in wartime? Isn't it according to international law?” Sophie talked as if she were a leading authority on the subject, and Eddie would answer with an impolite American word: “Bunk!” After listening to a few such discussions, Lanny made up his mind that neither of them really knew very much about it, but were just repeating what they read in the papers. Since there were hardly any but French and English papers to be had, a person like himself who wanted to be neutral had a hard time of it.

X

What women have to do is to keep their restless and frantic men entertained. So Lanny would be pressed into service to take Eddie Patterson fishing, or tempt him into roaming the hills to explore ancient Roman and Saracen ruins. But truly it was impossible to get away from the war anywhere in France.

Once they stopped to watch the distilling of lavender, high up on a wind-swept plateau. There were odd-looking contrivances on wheels, with an iron belly full of fire, and a rounded dome on top from which ran a long spout, making them look like fantastic birds. A crew of women and older men were harvesting the plants, tending the fires, and collecting the essence in barrels. Pretty soon Lanny was talking with them, and they became more concerned to ask him questions than to earn their daily bread. Americans were rich and were bound to know more than poor peasants of the Midi. “What do you think, Messieurs? Will les Allemands be driven from our soil? And how long will it take? And what do you think the Italians will do? Surely they could not attack us, their cousins, almost their brothers!”

On Lanny's own Cap d'Antibes the principal industry was growing flowers for perfumes, and in winter this is done under glass. It was estimated that there were more than a million glass frames upon that promontory; and naturally those people who owned them were troubled to hear about bombs being dropped from the sky, and about strange deadly craft rising from the sea and launching torpedoes. Such things sounded fabulous, but they must be real, because often you could see war vessels patrolling, and now and then a seaplane scouting, and there were notices in all public places for fishermen and others to report at once any unusual sight on the sea.

Now came the flower growers, wanting to talk about les affaires. What did these foreign gentry think about the chances of enemy bombing of the Cap? What would be the effect, supposing that a stray torpedo were to hit the rocks? Would it have force enough to shatter those million glass frames? And what did it mean that people who were supposed to be civilized, who had come to the Riviera by the tens of thousands, as the Germans had done — many great steamers loaded with them every winter — should now go away and repay their hosts in this dreadful manner?

There came a letter from Mrs. Emily Chattersworth, who had fled from Les Forêts when the Germans came near, and after the great battle had returned to see what had become of her home. “I suppose I can count myself fortunate,” she wrote, “because only half a dozen shells struck the house, and they were not of the biggest. Apparently they didn't get their heavy guns this far, and the French retired without offering much resistance. The Uhlans came first, and they must have had an art specialist with them, because they packed up the best tapestries and most valuable pictures, and took them all. They dumped a lot of furniture out of the windows — I don't know whether that was pure vandalism or whether they were planning to build breastworks. They did use the billiard table for that purpose, setting it up on edge; it didn't work very well, for there are many bullet holes through it. They used the main rooms for surgical work, and just outside the window are piles of bloody boots and clothing cut from the wounded. They raided the cellars, of course, and the place is a litter of broken bottles. In the center of my beautiful fleur-de-lis in the front garden is a shell hole and a wrecked gun caisson with pieces of human flesh still sticking to it.

“But what breaks my heart is the fate of my glorious forests.There was a whole German division concealed in them, and the French set fire to the woods in many places; the enemy came out fighting and were slaughtered wholesale. The woods are still burning and will never be the same in our lifetime. The stench from thousands of bodies which have not yet been found loads the air at night and is the most awful thing one could imagine. I do not know if I can ever endure to live in the place again. I can only pray that the barbarians will not have a second chance at it. The opinion of our friends here is that they are through and will be entirely out of France in another month or two.”

So there was more ammunition for Eddie Patterson! One by one the militarists among the Americans were joining up; some in the Foreign Legion, others in the ambulance service, many women for hospital work. The French aviation service was popular among the adventurous-minded young men — but to Sophie this was the most horrible idea of all, for those man-birds were hunting one another in the skies, and the casualties among them were appalling. In the first days all France had been electrified by the deed of one flier, who had driven his plane straight through the gasbag of a Zeppelin, and out at the other side. The mass of hydrogen had exploded and the huge airship had crashed, an inferno of flame; the aviator, of course, had shared its fate.

Beauty Budd would fling her arms about her boy and cry: “Oh, Lanny, don't ever let them get you into a war!” And then one day she received a letter which made her heart stand still:

“Chérie: Your visit shines as the most precious jewel of my memory. The news which I have to tell will make you sad, I fear — but be courageous for my sake. Your coming was the occasion of my having the opportunity to make the acquaintance of my commandant, and being able to volunteer for special service. I am being sent elsewhere to receive training, concerning which it is not permissible for me to write. For the present you may address me in care of l'Ecole Superieure d'Aeronautique at Vincennes.

“Your love is the sunshine of my life, and knows neither clouds nor night. I adore you. Marcel.”

I

IT WAS going to be some time before Lanny Budd would see his father again. The warring nations would have their “missions” in New York for the purpose of buying military supplies; Robbie's headquarters would be there, and he would make a great deal of money. The various governments would float bonds in the United States, and persons who believed in their financial stability would buy the bonds, and the money would be spent for everything that was needed by armies. Robbie explained these matters in his letters, and said that England and France had placed enough orders with Budd's to justify great enlargements of the plant.

Robbie wrote cautiously, being aware that mail would be read by the French censor. “Remember what I told you about your own attitude, and do not let anybody sway you from it. This is the most important thing for your life.” That was enough for Lanny; he did his best to resist the tug of forces about him. Robbie sent magazines and papers with articles that would give him a balanced view; not marking the articles — that would have made it too easy for the censor — but writing him a few days later to read pages so-and-so.

“One thing I was wrong about,” the father admitted. “This war is going to last longer than I thought.” When Lanny read that, the giant armies were locked in an embrace of death on the river Aisne; the French trying to drive the Germans still farther back, the Germans trying to hold on. They fought all day, and at night food and ammunition were brought up in camions and carts, and the armies went on fighting. Battles lasted not days but weeks, and you could hardly say when one ended and the next began. The troops charged and retreated and charged again, fighting over ground already laid waste. They dug themselves in, and when rain filled up the trenches they stayed in them, because it was better to be wet than dead.

It was the same on the eastern front also. The Russian steam roller had made some headway against the Austrians, but in East Prussia it had got stuck in the swampy lands about the Masurian Lakes. The Russians had been surrounded and slaughtered wholesale; but many had got away, and fresh armies had come up and they were pushing back and forth across the border, one great battle after another.

It was going to be that way for a long time — the fiercest fighting, inspired by the bitterest hatreds that Europe had known for centuries. Each nation was going to mobilize its resources from every part of the world; resources of man power, of money, of goods, and of intellectual and moral factors. Each side was doing everything in its power to make the other odious, and neither was going to have any patience with those who were lukewarm or doubting. A mother and son from America who wanted to keep themselves neutral would be buffeted about like birds in a thunderstorm.

II

Traveling by himself to a new post of duty, Marcel was free of censorship for a day or two. He wrote on the train and mailed in Paris an eloquent and passionate love letter, inspired by their recent day and night together. It filled Beauty with joy but also with anguish, for it told her that this treasure of her heart was going to one of the most terrible of all posts of danger. He was to receive several weeks of intensive training to enable him to act as observer in a stationary balloon.

He had suggested this post as one for which his career as a painter fitted him especially. His ability to distinguish shades of color would enable him to detect camouflage. He had studied landscapes from mountain tops, and could see things that the ordinary eye would miss. “You must learn to be happy in the thought that I shall be of real use to my country” — so he wrote, and perhaps really believed it, being a man. What Beauty did was to crumple the letter in her hands, and sink down with her face upon it and wet it with her tears.

After that there was little peace in Bienvenu. Beauty went about with death written on her face; Lanny would hear her sobbing in the night, and would go to her room and try to comfort her. “You chose a Frenchman, Beauty. You can't expect him to be anything else.” The boy had been reading an anthology of English poetiy, which Mr. Elphinstone had left behind when he went home to try to get into the army. Being young, Lanny sought to comfort his mother with noble sentiments expressed in immortal words. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”

So he quoted; but it only seemed to make Beauty mad. “What do you mean, 'honour'? It's nothing but the desire of powerful men to rule over others. It's a trick to get millions of people to follow them and die for their glory.”

Going about the house brooding, did Beauty Budd regret the choice she had made? If so, she didn't say it to Lanny. What she told him was that life was a thing too cruel to be endured. It could not be that there was a God — the idea was crazy. We were being mocked by some devil, or by a swarm of them — a separate devil in the heart of every man who sought to kill his fellows.

Beauty's good friend Sophie and her young man, Eddie Patterson, rallied to her support. They brought with them an elderly retired Swiss diplomat who bore the distinguished name of Rochambeau; having been behind the scenes of Europe most of his life, he was not to be deceived by any propaganda, and could not be offended by the antimilitarist utterances of a self-centered American lady. These four played bridge; they played with a kind of desperation, all day and most of the night, stopping only when Leese put a meal upon the table and tapped a little tune on the Chinese gongs that hung by the dining-room door. They played for very small stakes, but took their game with the utmost seriousness, having their different systems of play, and discussing each hand, what they had done and whether some other way might not have been better. They never mentioned, and they tried never to think, how men were being mangled with shot and shell while these fine points of bidding and leading and signaling were being settled.

A convenient arrangement for Lanny, because it set him free to read. Also he could play tennis with boys and girls of the near-by villas, and keep the household supplied with seafood. But he had to promise not to go sailing upon the bay, because of Beauty's fear that a German submarine might rise up without warning and torpedo the pleasure boats in the Golfe Juan.

III

Lanny kept up a correspondence with his friend Rick, and learned once more how difficult was going to be the role of neutral in this war. Rick said that the way the Germans were behaving in Belgium deprived them of all claim to be considered as civilized men. Rick hadn't been as much impressed by Kurt's long words as had Lanny, and he said that anyhow, what was the use of fancy-sounding philosophy if you didn't make it count in everyday affairs? Rick said furthermore that from now on America's safety depended on the British fleet, and the quicker the Americans realized it the better for them and for the world.

Lanny was at a disadvantage in these arguments, because he was afraid that if he repeated what his father had told him, the censor wouldn't allow the letter to pass. So he just mentioned what he was reading, and the sights he was seeing. The French had what was called an “aerohydro,” a plane that could land upon water, and one of them, having sprung an oil leak, had come down by the quay at Juan; Lanny had watched it being repaired, and then had seen it depart. It carried a machine gun, a Hotchkiss — Lanny knew all the types of guns, as other boys knew automobiles. Rick in return told about the London busses being made over into “transports” for troops, and about crowds of clerks and businessmen drilling in Hyde Park, still in their civilian clothes, and with only sticks for guns.

But Rick's principal interest was in the air. He wrote a lot about having met one of the fliers with whom they had talked at Salisbury Plain; this officer had fought a pistol duel in the sky, and had got his German. The British, too, were putting machine guns in their planes; but it was a problem, for most planes had the propeller in front, and that was where you wanted to shoot if you were following an enemy. The idea now was to shoot through the propeller, and the British had devised one with flanges which would turn aside whatever bullets struck its blades.

“That's the service I'm going into,” said Rick. “But I've promised the pater to wait until next year. The age requirement is eighteen, but a lot of the fellows do a little fibbing. I could, because I'm tall. It is hard to do any studying in times like these. No doubt it's easier for an American.”

Lanny corresponded also with Rosemary Codwilliger — pronounced Culliver. He always felt funny when he wrote that name; but he knew that many English names were queer, especially the fashionable ones; the owners carefully preserved this queerness as a form of distinction, as one way of showing that they didn't care a hang whether anybody agreed with them about the way to spell, or to pronounce, or to do anything else. It did not occur to Lanny that people like that might be difficult to get along with in other ways; all he remembered was that Rosemary was delightful to look at, and how sweet it had been to sit with his arms around her in the moonlight.

He didn't write anything about that. They exchanged placid and friendly letters that would make proper reading for both censors and parents. She said that her father was commanding a regiment somewhere in France, and that her mother's nephew, the Honorable Gerald Smithtotten, had been killed after holding the Conde Canal near Mons against seven enemy attacks. “This war is rather hard on our best families,” explained the daughter of Captain Codwilliger, “because they have to show themselves on the parapets or whatever it is, to set an example for the men. I want to take up nursing, but mother keeps begging me to finish this year's school. Mothers always think that we are a lot younger than we are really. Are American mothers like that?”

IV

Lanny could not help thinking about Kurt all the time, and wondering what he was doing and thinking. Of course Kurt would be patriotic. Would he blame Lanny for not taking the side of Germany? What reason would he give? Lanny wished he could find out; but of course no letters were allowed to come or go between countries at war.

One day it happened that Lanny was poking into a bureau drawer where he kept handkerchiefs and a fishing reel and some cartridges and photographs and old letters and what not.. He picked up a business card and read: “Johannes Robin, Agent, Maatschappij voor Electrische Specialiteiten, Rotterdam.” What a lot had happened in the world since Lanny had talked with that Jewish gentleman on the train last Christmas! “I wonder if I'll ever see him again,” the boy reflected.

He remembered that he had intended to write to Mr. Robin; and this brought another idea, that possibly the salesman of gadgets might be willing to mail a letter to Kurt for him. Lanny had learned, from the conversation of his mother's friends, that one could communicate with Germans in this way; it was against the law, but much business was still being carried on by way of neutral countries. “It couldn't do Mr. Robin any harm,” the boy decided, “because I won't say anything the censor can object to; I won't even need to say that I'm in France.”

He sat himself down and composed a letter to his friend in Germany. To set the German censors straight he began:

“My father has told me that it's an American's duty to keep neutral, and I am doing it. I don't want to lose touch with you, so I write to say that I am at home, and that my mother and I are well.

My father is back in Connecticut. I am studying hard, reading the best books I can get, and not forgetting the ideals of the nobler life. I am also practicing sight reading, although my piano technique is still mixed up. I have no teachers at present, but my mother has met a young American college man who came over on a cattle boat for the adventure and now thinks he may stay for a while because he has become interested in a young lady who lives near us. He may want to earn some money, so may teach me what he learned at college, if he has not forgotten it. Please give my sincere regards to all the members of your family, and write your affectionate friend, Lanny.”

Certainly that letter could do no injury to any nation at war; and Lanny wrote the salesman in Rotterdam, recalling their meeting on the train and hoping that this would find Mr. Robin well, and that his business had not been too greatly injured by the war. Lanny explained that here was a letter to the friend he had visited in Silesia. Mr. Robin was welcome to read the letter, and Lanny assured him that it contained no war secrets; Mr. Robin would be at liberty to test the paper with lemon juice or with heat — Lanny had been reading and hearing about spies and the way they operated. He hoped that this request would not embarrass Mr. Robin in any way; if it did, he was at liberty to destroy the letter; otherwise would he please mail it in a plain envelope addressed to Kurt Meissner at Schloss Stubendorf, Upper Silesia.

Lanny posted the two letters in the same envelope, and then waited. In due course came a reply from Mr. Robin, cordial as Lanny had expected. Mr. Robin was pleased to take his word about the letter, and would mail future letters if so desired. He recalled his fellow-traveler with pleasure and hoped to meet him again some day. No, the war had not injured his business; on the contrary, he had been able to expand it along new lines, not so different from those of Lanny's father. Mr. Robin told about his family; he had two little boys, one ten and the other eight, and he took the liberty of enclosing a snapshot, so that Lanny might feel that he knew them.

Lanny studied the picture, which had been taken in the summertime, and showed the family standing at the entrance to a pergola, with a Belgian shepherd dog lying on the ground in front of them. Mr. Robin had on an outing shirt with a soft collar such as Lanny himself wore; Mrs. Robin was stoutish and kind-looking, and the two little boys gazed soberly at Lanny, as if they had known that he was going to be seeing them, and wondered what sort of fellow he might be. They had dark wavy hair like their father, and large, gentle eyes; on the back their names were written, Hans and Freddi, and the information that the former played the violin and the latter the clarinet. Lanny thought once more that he liked the Jews, and asked his mother why they didn't know any. Beauty replied that she hadn't happened to meet them; Robbie didn't like them any too much.

A couple of weeks later came a letter postmarked Switzerland, without the name of any sender. It proved to be from Kurt — evidently he too had some friend whom he trusted. It was in the same cautious tone as Lanny's. “I am glad to hear about an American's attitude to present events. You will of course understand that my point of view is different. You are fortunate in being able to go on with your music studies. For me it has become necessary to make preparations for a more active career. Whatever happens, I will always think of you with warm friendship. My soul remains what it has always been, and I count upon yours. I will write you when I can and hope that you will do the same. The members of my family are well at present. All, as you can imagine, are very busy. Those who are at home join me in kindest regards. Kurt.”

Lanny showed this to his mother, and she agreed that Kurt must be preparing for some sort of military service. He was only sixteen, but then the Germans were thorough and began young. His brothers, no doubt, were in the fighting now. Lanny tried to read between the lines; that sentence about his friend's soul meant to tell him, over the censor's shoulder, that even though Kurt went to war, he would still believe in the importance of the ideal, and in art as an instrument for uplifting mankind. The war was not going to make any difference in their friendship.

V

Since Kurt was counting upon Lanny's soul, Lanny must be worthy of it. He decided that he spent too much time reading love stories, and should begin at once upon something uplifting. He was wondering what to choose, when he happened to hear M. Rochambeau, the retired diplomat, remark that the priests and bishops who were blessing the instruments of slaughter in the various nations were not very well representing the spirit of Jesus. Lanny reflected that he had seen many pictures of Jesus, and of Jesus's mother, and of apostles and angels and saints and what not, yet he knew very little about the Christian religion. Both his mother and his father had had it forced upon them in their youth, and hated it. But as a matter of art education, shouldn't Lanny read up on it?

He asked the white-haired and courtly ex-diplomat where he could find out what Jesus had said, and was reminded that the words were set down in some old books called the Gospels. M. Rochambeau didn't happen to own a copy, and Beauty's friends, of whom the boy made inquiry, found the idea amusing. Finally Lanny found in a bookstore a copy of this ancient work.

Winter was coming now. In Flanders and through northern France a million men were lying out in the open, in trenches and shell holes half full of filthy water which froze at night. They were devoured by vermin and half paralyzed by cold, eating bread and canned meat, when it could be brought to them over roads which had been turned into quagmires. All day and night bullets whistled above them and shells came down out of the sky, blowing bodies to fragments and burying others under loads of mud. The wounded had to lie where they fell until death released them, or night made it possible for their fellows to drag them back into the trenches.

And with this going on a few hundred miles away, Lanny was reading the story of Jesus, four times over, with variations. He was deeply touched by it each time, and wept over the way that poor man had been treated, and loved him for the kind and gentle things he had said. If somebody had happened along to speak for one of the religious sects — almost any of them — that person might have made a convert. As it was, Lanny had no one to consult but a worldly-wise ex-diplomat, who told him that if he wanted to follow Jesus he would have to do it in his own heart, because none of the churches were traveling in that path or near it.

So Lanny didn't go to church. Instead he studied arithmetic, algebra, and modern history with his new tutor, Jerry Pendleton, a happy-go-lucky fellow whom Beauty Budd had met in the way she met most persons, at a party for tea and dancing; she liked him because he had red hair, a gay disposition, and good manners. He had come to Europe with a chum, working their way, and had got caught, first by the war, and then by a mademoiselle whose mother conducted the pension at which he was staying. Instead of going back to finish his senior year in a fresh-water college, Jerry had lingered on, and a job as tutor presented itself as a happy solution of several problems.

The young man's account of education in the United States was not exactly favorable; he said that the main thing you learned was how to get along with other fellows, and with girls. He confessed, as Mr. Elphinstone had done, that he had forgotten all the subjects he was going to teach, but he and Lanny could read together, and there was that magnificent encyclopedia which could never go wrong. Jerry would at least keep the kid out of mischief — and at the same time Mrs. Budd could give him kindly advice about the most bewildering love affair he had ever run into. Mlle. Cerise, it appeared, was being brought up in French fashion, which meant that she couldn't see a young man without her mother being close by, and he couldn't even bring her to one of Mrs. Budd's tea parties without a chaperon. At home you took a girl motoring, or if you didn't have a car, you bicycled and had a picnic in the woods.; but here they were all nuns until after they were married — and then, apparently, you could pick them up in the gambling rooms at the casino.

“Not quite all of them,” said Beauty, beginning the education of her son's tutor.

VI

Once again, for a day, Marcel Detaze was free from the censor. He was on his way to his post of duty, and poured out his heart to his beloved. This time he didn't hide from her the dangers to which he was going. The hour had come when she had to steel her soul.

Marcel was gay, as always; that was the way you had to take life, if you didn't mean to let it get you down. Make a work of art of it; put your best into it; play your little part, and be ready to quit before the audience got tired of you. Marcel described a “sausage balloon” as a grotesque and amusing object, in rebellion against the men who had created it and obstinately trying to break out of their control. It was huge and fat, and assumed changing shapes, and danced and cavorted in the air. A net of cords imprisoned it, and a steel cable bound it to the earth. The cable was on a pulley, and two stout horses or oxen plodding across a field let the balloon up or pulled it down.

All this for the sake of an observer who sat in a bulletproof basket underneath the balloon, equipped with field glasses and measuring instruments, and a telephone set. It was his task to spy out enemy entrenchments, and the movements of troops and guns. He had to have a keen eyesight, and be trained to recognize the difference between branches growing on trees and the same when cut down and made into a screen for a heavy gun. He had to know Birnam Wood when it was removed to Dunsinane. Also, he had to be a man who had traveled to the fiords of Norway and the Isles of Greece without getting seasick; for the winds which blew off the North Sea would toss him around like a whole yachtful of soap kings — so wrote the painter, who had been sorry for poor Ezra Hackabury, but couldn't help finding him funny.

Of course such a balloon would be a target for the enemy. Airplanes would come darting out of the clouds at a hundred miles an hour, spitting fire as they came. “We have guns on the ground to stop them,” wrote Marcel; “guns with high-angle mountings designed especially to shoot at planes, but I fear they are not very good yet, and Lanny should tell his father to invent better ones for my protection. The shells from these guns make white puffs of smoke when they explode, so that the gunner can correct his aim. The English call the guns 'Archies,' and I am told that this comes from some music-hall character who said: 'Archibald, certainly not!' It is wonderful, the humor with which the English fellows take this messy business. I have had one as an instructor and he has explained their jokes to me. The heavy shells which make an enormous cloud of black smoke they call 'Jack Johnsons,' because of a Negro prize fighter who is dangerous. Also they call them 'black Marias' and 'coal boxes.' Doubtless there will be new names by the time I get to the front.”

Beauty broke down and couldn't read any more. It seemed to her horrible that men should make jokes about death and destruction. Of course they laughed so that they might not have to weep; but Beauty could weep, and she did. She was certain that her lover was gone forever, and her hopes died a new death every time she thought of him. Lanny, talking with M. Rochambeau, learned that his mother had cause for fear, because the job which Marcel had chosen represented just about the peak of peril in this war. A single correct observation followed by a well-placed shell might put a battery of guns out of action; so the enemy waged incessant warfare upon the stationary balloons. This far the French had managed to keep the mastery of the air, but the fighting was incessant and the death rate high. “Women must weep,” a poet in Lanny's anthology had said.

VII

Mrs. Emily Chattersworth wrote the news. Learning of the dreadful sufferings of the wounded after the great battle of the Aisne, she had lent the Château Les Forêts to the government for a hospital. Then she had been moved to go and see what was being done, and had been so shocked by the sight of mangled bodies brought in by the hundreds, and the efforts of exhausted doctors and nurses to help them, that she had abandoned her career as salonnière and taken up that of hospital director. Now she was helping to organize a society in Paris for the aid of the wounded and was asking all her friends for help and contributions. Would Beauty Budd do something? Mrs. Emily said that Marcel might some day be brought to Les Forêts; and of course that fetched Beauty. Despite her vow to economize and pay her debts, she sent a check to her friend.

Then Lanny began to observe a curious phenomenon. Having given her lover, and then her money, Beauty could no longer refuse to give her heart. So far she had been hating war; but now little by little she took to hating Germans. Of course she didn't know about Weltpolitik, and didn't try to discuss it; Beauty was personal, and recalled the hordes of Teutons who had come flocking to the Riviera in recent winters. The hotelkeepers had welcomed them, because they spent money; but Beauty hadn't welcomed them, because she loved the quiet of her retreat and they invaded it. The women were enormous and had voices like Valkyries; the men had jowls, and rolls of fat on the backs of their necks, and huge bellies and buttocks which they displayed indecently to the winter sunshine. They drank and ate sausages in public, made ugly guttural noises — and now, as it turned out, they had all the time been spying and intriguing, preparing huge engines of destruction and death!

Yes, Beauty decided, she hated all Germans; and this made for disharmony in the little island of peace which she had created at Bienvenu. Sophie didn't want to hate the Germans because it might start her Eddie off to be a hero, like Marcel. M. Rochambeau didn't want it because he was old and tired, and liable to heart attacks if he let himself get excited. “Dear lady,” he would plead, “we in this crowded continent have been hating each other for so many centuries — pray do not bring us any more fuel for our fires.” The retired diplomat's voice was gentle, and his manner that of some elderly prelate.

Lanny agreed that things were going to be harder for him if his mother became warlike. He would remind her of Kurt, and of great Germans like Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven, who belonged to all Europe. He would repeat to her the things which Robbie had told him — and of which the father kept reminding him, in carefully veiled language. When Beauty burst out that Robbie was thinking of the money he was going to make out of this war, Lanny was a bit shocked, and withdrew into himself. It wouldn't do to remind his mother that it was Robbie's money on which they were both living, and which she was giving to Mrs. Emily.

VIII

Jerry Pendleton was being a good companion. He liked to do the things that Lanny liked, and they climbed the hills and played tennis and swam and fished, and Jerry cultivated the mother of Mlle. Cerise by bringing in more seafood than the pension could consume. They enjoyed torch-fishing especially, and made themselves expert spearsmen, and got many a green moray, but never one as big as Captain Bragescu's. One night a strange adventure befell them — oddly enough the very thing that Beauty had been worried about, and for which everybody had laughed at her. It was to be that way all through the war; truth would outrun fiction, and if anybody said that a thing couldn't happen, then right away it did.

A still night, something not so common in the month of December, and two young fellows in fishing togs and sweaters, because it was cold in spite of the lack of wind. They had a torch set in the bow of the boat, blazing brightly, and were lying, one on each side, with their heads over the gunwales, looking down into the crystal-clear water. The sea growths waved gently to and fro, and it was like some enchanted land; the langoustes poked their heads out from the rocks, and fish idled here and there, many of them camouflaged, just like the Germans. Lanny thought about Marcel, doing the same kind of work, but high in the air instead of on top of the sea.

The Cannes lighthouse was flashing red and green. Not many lights on the shore, for the night life of the Golfe Juan was dimmed that winter. Not many sounds, just the murmur of distant traffic, and now and then the put-put of a motorboat. But suddenly a strange sort of splashing, the movement of a great bulk of water, and a series of waves rushing toward them, rocking their little boat so that they could no longer look into the depths. They stared toward the sound, shading their eyes from the torchlight, and gradually made out something, a dim shape. Impossible to believe it and equally impossible to doubt it — a round boxlike object arisen from the depths of the sea, and lying there, quite still!

“A submarine!” whispered Lanny; and his companion exclaimed: “Put out the torch!” Lanny was nearer, and grabbed it and plunged it into the water. A hissing sound, then silence and darkness, and the rowboat rocking in the swells.

The two listened, their hearts thumping. “They must have seen us,” Jerry whispered. They waited and wondered what to do. They had both read stories about submarines sinking vessels, and not even bothering to save the crews. This might be an enemy one, or again it might be French or British.

Sounds travel clearly over smooth water. They heard footsteps, people moving; then came splashing and, unmistakably, the sound of muffled oars. “They're coming after us!” exclaimed Lanny; and his tutor grabbed their oars and began to row for dear life for the shore, less than a hundred feet away.

Would the people on the submarine turn on a searchlight and open fire on them? It was something they both thought of, and they had a good right to be scared. But nothing of the sort happened. They got to the shore and crept out of the boat; then, safe behind rocks, they listened again, and heard the muffled oars, undoubtedly coming nearer — but a little farther down the shore. Very plainly they heard the rowing stop, and after a minute or less it began again — the boat, or whatever it was, was going back to the submarine.

“They came to get somebody,” whispered Jerry.

“Or else to put somebody ashore.”

“It must be an enemy. No French boat would behave like that.” A moment later the tutor added: “Somebody on shore may be looking for us.” That called for no argument, and the pair got up and started to climb toward the road.

“Look here,” whispered Jerry, suddenly; “this may be very serious, and we ought to tell the police or the military. If anybody was put ashore, he'd be armed, and he'd mean business.”

“That's right,” answered the younger boy, in a delightful state of excitement.

“Do you know where there'd be a telephone?”

“In almost any of the villas along the road.”

“Well, let's go quietly; and if anyone tries to stop us we'll bolt — you go one way and I'll go another. They can hardly get us both in the dark.”

They tiptoed down the road, and presently came to a house with lights, and asked permission to telephone the nearest police station. The police ordered them to wait right there, which they were glad to do, and meanwhile told their story to a family of English people who were greatly excited. A car with gendarmes arrived soon, and another with military men a little later. They took the Americans down to the shore and asked them a hundred questions. There was no sign of any submarine, only Lanny's boat, which the tide was about to float away. Launches came, and men searched the shore, finding no trace of anything — but would there have been, on those masses of rocks? The two young fellows managed to convince the authorities of their good faith, and one of the army men said that it must have been an Austrian submarine from the Adriatic.

That was all they said. A curtain of silence fell about the matter; nothing was published — but there was a lot of patrolling by torpedo boats and “aerohydros” in the neighborhood. M. Rochambeau, who knew about military matters, said that the enemy's purpose must have been to put ashore some important agent who was too well known to come in with a neutral passport. Doubtless he would have a place of refuge prepared. The secret service of the Allies would be trying to find out who he was and what he had come for.

Besides the open war of arms, there was this underground war of spying and sabotage always going on; both sides had their agents in all the services of the enemy, and were spending fortunes to corrupt and undermine. The French had gathered up the known enemy aliens in the Midi and interned them on the ile Ste.-Marguerite, which lay just offshore from Cannes, and had been the peaceful home of some fifty nuns, and a place where tourists came to sit under the big pine trees and have tea. But of course there must be many Germans at large in France, posing as Swiss, or Danes, or citizens of the United States, or what not; they would be watching troop movements, perhaps planning to blow up railroad bridges, or to put bombs upon merchant vessels, or even warships. If they were caught, you wouldn't hear anything about it; they would be taken to some military fortress, and stood against a wall blindfolded and shot through the heart.

IX

The dread news came for which Beauty had been waiting many weeks. It was written by a comrade of Marcel's, a “ground man” whom he had pledged to this duty. The comrade regretted to inform Madame Budd that her friend had been severely injured; his “kite balloon” had been attacked by two enemy planes, and had been hauled down, but not quickly enough; some fifteen meters above ground it had caught fire, and Marcel had leaped out, and had been badly smashed up, also burned. He had been taken to the base hospital at Beauvais, and the writer could not say as to his present condition.

After her first collapse, Beauty's one idea was to get to him; she couldn't stop sobbing, and was in the grip of a sort of convulsion of shuddering — but she must go, she must go — right now, come on! She wouldn't even wait to put clothes into a suitcase. She had visions of her lover mutilated, defaced — he would be in agony, he might be dying at that moment. “Oh, God, my God, help me, help my poor Marcel!”

It happened that Jerry and M. Rochambeau were in the house, as well as Lanny. They tried to comfort her, but what could they say? They tried to restrain her,but she wouldn't listen to reason. “You must find out if you can get on the train,” argued the diplomat. But her answer was that she would motor. “Then you must arrange to get essence” — but she said: “I'll find a way — I'll pay what it costs — you can always get things if you pay.”

“But, my dear lady, you may not be able to get near the town-it's in the war zone, and they never allow relatives or visitors.”

“I'll find a way. I'll go to Paris and lay siege to the government.”

“There are many persons laying siege to the government right now — including the Germans.”

“I'm going to help Marcel. I'll find a way — I'll take a job as nurse with Emily Chattersworth. She'll get me there somehow. Who will come with me?”

Lanny had learned to drive a car, but hardly well enough for this trip. Jerry Pendleton was a first-class driver, and knew how to fix carburetors and those other miserable devices that were always getting out of order. Jerry would go; and the terrified maids would rush to pile some clothes into suitcases — warm things, for Madame was declaring hysterically that if they wouldn't let her into the town she would sleep in the car, or in the open like the soldiers. None of her pretty things — but then she changed her mind, if she had to call on government officials she would have to look her best — nothing showy, but that simplicity which is the apex of art, and which costs in accordance. A strange thing to see a woman, so choked with her own sobs that she could hardly make herself understood, at the same time trying to decide what sort of dress was proper to wear in approaching the war minister of a government in such dire peril of its existence that it had had to move to a remote port by the sea!

Lanny packed his suitcase, taking a warm sweater and the overcoat he had worn in Silesia; a good suit also, because he too might have to interview officials. Beauty sent a wire to Mrs. Emily, asking her to use her influence; M. Rochambeau sent a telegram to an official of his acquaintance who could arrange it if any man could. “Only woman can do the impossible,” added the old gentleman, parodying Goethe.

They piled robes and blankets into the car, filling up the seat alongside Beauty, who sat now, a mask of horror, gazing into a lifelong nightmare. They drove to the pension where Jerry stayed, and he ran upstairs and threw some of his things into a bag. Downstairs were Mlle. Cerise and her mother and her aunt, all shocked by the news. The red-headed tutor grabbed the proper young French lady and kissed her first on one cheek and then on the other. “Adieu! Au revoir!” he cried, and fled.

“Ah, ces Américains!” exclaimed the mother.

“Un peuple tout a fait fou!” added the aunt.

It was practically an engagement.

I

THE little town of Beauvais lies about fifty miles to the north of Paris. It is something over a thousand years old, and has an ancient cathedral, and battlements now made into boulevards. It was like Paris, in that the Germans had got there almost, but not quite. Its inhabitants had heard the thunder of guns, and were still hearing it, day and night, a distant storm where the sun came up. Thunderstorms are capricious, and whether this one would return was a subject of hourly speculation. People studied the bulletins in front of the ancient Hotel de Ville and hoped that what they read was true.

To keep the storm away, everybody was working day and night. The Chemin de Fer du Nord passed through the town, which had become a base: soldiers detraining, guns and ammunition being unloaded, depots established to store food and fodder and pass them up to the front, everything that would be needed if the line was to hold and the enemy be driven back. No use to expect comfort in such a place; count yourself lucky that you were alive.

Beauty Budd was here because she belonged to that class of people who are accustomed to have their own way. She had met cabinet ministers at tea parties and salons, she had given a generous check for the aid of the French wounded, she bore the name of a munitions family now being importuned to expand their plant and help to save la patrie. So when she appeared at the door of an official, the secretary bowed and escorted her in; the official said: “Certainly, Madame,” and signed the document and had it stamped.

So the car with the red-headed college boy chauffeur had been passed by sentries on the edge of Beauvais, and the harassed authorities of the town did their best to make things agreeable for a lady whose grief added dignity to her numèrous charms. “Yes, Madame, we will do our best to find your friend; but it will not be easy, because we have no general records.” There was another battle going on; the grumbling guns were making hundreds of new cases every hour, and they were dumped here because there was no time to take them farther.

“We will go ourselves and search,” said Madame; and when they told her that all the buildings in the town which could be spared had been turned into hospitals, she asked: “Can you give me a list?” The boys drove her to one place after another, and she would stand waiting while a clerk looked through a register of the living and another of the dead; her hands would be clenched and her lips trembling, and the two escorts at her side would be ready to catch her if she started to fall.

At last they found the name of Marcel Detaze; in a dingy old inn, so crowded with cots in the corridors that there was barely room to get through. It was Milton's “Stygian cave forlorn, 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.” Beauty Budd, accustomed to every luxury, was plunged into this inferno, ill-lighted, clamorous with cries and groans, stinking of blood and suppurating wounds and disinfectants. Ambulances and carts were unloading new cases on the sidewalk; sometimes they were dead before a place could be found for them, and then they were carted to open graves outside the city.

II

Marcel was alive. That was all Beauty had asked for. They could not tell her much about him. His legs had been broken and had been set. His back was injured, they didn't know how badly. He doubtless had internal injuries. His burns had been dressed; very painful, of course, but they did not think he would be blind. “We have no time, Madame,” they said. “We do not sleep, we are exhausted.”

Beauty could see that it was true; doctors and nurses and attendants, all were pale and had dark rings under their eyes, and some of them staggered. “C'est la guerre, Madame.” “I know, I know,” said Beauty.

They took her to where he lay upon a cot, with a dozen other men in the same room. There would have been no way of recognizing him; his head was a mass of bandages, only an opening for his mouth and nose, and these appeared to be open sores. She had to kneel by him and whisper: “Is it you, Marcel?” He did not stir; just murmured: “Yes.” She said: “Darling, I have come to help you.” When she put her ear to his lips, she heard faintly: “Let me die.” There was something wrong with his voice, but she made out the words: “Don't try to save me. I would be a monster.”

Beauty had never been taught anything about psychology; only what she had picked up by watching people she knew. She had never heard of a “death-wish,” and if anyone had spoken of autohypnosis she would have wondered if it was a gadget for a motorcar. But she had her share of common sense, and perceived right away that she had to take command of Marcel's mind. She had to make him want to live. She had to find what might be an ear under the mass of bandages, make sure that the sounds were going into it, and then say, firmly and slowly:

“Marcel, I love you. I love your soul, and I don't care what has happened to your body. I mean to stand by you and pull you through. You have got to live for my sake. No matter what it costs, you must stand it, and see it through. Do you hear me, Marcel?”

“I hear you.”

“All right then. Don't say no to me. You must do it because I want you to. For the sake of our love. I want to take you away from here, and nurse you, and you will get over this. But first you have to make up your mind to it. You have to want to live. You have to love me enough. Do you understand me?”

“It is not fair to you —”

“That is for me to say. Don't argue with me. Don't waste your strength. You belong to me, and you have no right to leave me, to deprive me of your love. I don't care what you say, I don't want to hear it — I want you. Whatever there is of you that the doctors can save — that much is mine, and you must not take it from me. You can live only if you try to, and I ask you to do that. I want your promise. I want you to say it and mean it. I have to go out and make arrangements to take you to Paris; but I can't go till I know that you will fight, and not give up. You told me to have courage, Marcel. Now I have it, and you have to repay me. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“I want your promise. I want to know that if I go out to get help, you will fight with everything that's in you to keep alive, to keep your hope and courage, for my sake, and for our love. There's no use talking about love if you're not willing to do that much for it. Answer me that you will.”

She put her ear to the opening again, and heard a whisper: “All right.” She touched him gently on the shoulder, not knowing what part of him might be a wound, and said: “Wait for me. I'll come back just as quickly as I can make arrangements. Anything else I can do?”

“Water,” he said. She didn't know how to give it to him, for she was afraid to lift his head, and she had no tube, and no one to ask. She dipped her handkerchief into a glass and squeezed a little into his mouth, and kept that up until he said it was enough.

III

The doctors made no objection to having a patient taken off their hands. They said he couldn't be crowded into an automobile, that would surely kill him; and there was no ambulance available. It was a question of making changes in Beauty's own car, one of the new and fashionable kind called a “limousine,” a square black box. It might be possible to take out two of the seats, the right-hand ones, and make a place to lay a narrow mattress on the floor. Then Jerry made a suggestion — why not put a board platform on top of the two seats, with a mattress on that?

They drove to a garage; there was nobody but the wife of the proprietor and an elderly mechanic, both greatly startled by the idea of cutting out a piece of the back of a luxury car, so that a wounded soldier could be slid into it. The windshield was large, and the mechanic thought he might be able to remove that. Beauty said: “Break it if necessary. We can have it replaced in Paris.” Jerry took the proprietress aside and spoke magic words: “C'est I'ami de cette belle dame.”

“Ah, c'est I'amour!” That explained everything, and they went to work with enthusiasm. Love will find out the way! They managed to get the windshield off without too great harm, and they put some boards together and made a platform, and the proprietress brought an old mattress, and Lanny worked at it with his pocket knife, cutting it down to the right size. “Ah, ces Américains!”

While all this was being done, Beauty was out looking for a telephone, to call a surgeon she knew in Paris, and arrange for Marcel to be received at a private hospital. When she got back, the platform was in place, and the mattress on top of it, a reasonably good place for a wounded man to lie for the time it would take to get him to the big city.

Two tired attendants carried the patient down and slid him onto the mattress without damage. Beauty distributed money to everyone who helped them, and Jerry gave them cigarettes, which they wanted even more at the moment. It was dark when they set out, but no matter — Marcel was alive, and Beauty sat in the rear seat, which brought her head about level with his ear, and for two hours she whispered: “Marcel, I love you, and you are going to live for my sake.” She found a thousand variations of it, and Lanny listened, and learned things about love. He was in a cramped position — they had taken out some of the bags and tied them onto the rear of the car, and Lanny was squatting on the floor at his mother's knees, underneath Marcel's mattress. He couldn't see anything, but he could hear, and he learned that love is not all pleasure, but can be agony and heartache, martyrdom and sacrifice. He learned what the clergyman was talking about in the marriage service: “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”

IV

The human body is a complicated engine with many miles of elastic pipes large and small. In order that the engine may develop the maximum horsepower per pound of weight, the pipes are made of fragile materials, and the framework which encloses and supports them is porous and brittle. When you take such a contraption fifty feet up in the air and explode a mass of hydrogen gas above it, and let it crash onto hard ground, you produce in a second or two results which surgeons and nurses may need a long time to remedy.

There were no physicians in Paris who were not overworked, and no hospital which was not crowded; but the lady with the magical name of Budd used her influence, and Robbie, getting the news by cable from his son, replied: “Spare no expense.” So Marcel was X-rayed and investigated, and his burns were treated according to the modern technique of cleaning away damaged tissues. After several days of watching, the doctors said that he would live, if he did not become discouraged by the ordeals he would have to undergo, and if his amour propre was not too greatly wounded by the certainty of looking like a scarecrow.

It was up to Beauty. She could have that scarecrow if she wanted it, and she did. There were no more thoughts about Pittsburgh now; she had made her bed and she would lie in it — right here in a private room in a maison de santé. She got herself some nurse's uniforms and made a job of it; the people of the place were only too glad, having plenty to do without this difficult case. She had a cot in one corner of the room, and for weeks hardly ever left it; she took no chance of Marcel's amour propre breaking loose and causing him to throw himself out of the window. She would be right there, to keep reminding him that he belonged to her, and that her property sense was strong.

Troops of little demons came and sat upon the metal bars which made the head and foot of Marcel's bed. His physical eyes were swathed in bandages, but he saw them plainly with his mind's eye. Some had round shaven heads with Pickelhauben on; some had sharp-pointed mustaches which they twisted and turned up at the ends; others were just regular devils with horns and red tails. They came in relays, and pinched the painter's wounded flesh and poked needles into it; they twisted his broken joints, they pulled and strained his damaged pipes — in short, they gave him no peace day or night. The sweat would stand out on him — wherever he had enough skin left for that to happen. He would writhe, and do his best not to groan, because of that poor woman who sat there in anguish of soul, talking to him when he couldn't listen, trying to help him when there wasn't any help. When you are in pain you are alone.

There were the burns that kept having to be dressed; there were bones that had been set wrong and had to be broken again; he was always being transported to the operating room for more probing and poking. The doctors could give him opiates, of course, but there was a limit, if they intended to keep him alive. He just had to stand it; he had to learn to live with pain and make a game of it. The doctors would help him by making jokes, and letting him make them. He took to calling them “plumbers,” and threatening to get an American one, because the French ones didn't know their business. They answered that they would know it a lot better before this war was over. Beauty could hardly stand such jokes, but she toughened herself. “C'est la guerre”

V

The youth and his youthful tutor had rooms in a hotel near by. The walls had white wainscoting and pink flowered silk above it, and the chairs were upholstered to match. The elevators looked as if they were made of gold, and were of open grillwork, so that you could watch people rising up or sinking down. An elderly official in a grand uniform set the front doors to revolving for them, and young women musicians in red coats and gold braid played Hungarian dances while they ate their meals. It was a life of unimaginable luxury for Jerry Pendleton, whose father owned a couple of drug stores in a town of Kansas.

They got some books and faithfully studied every morning. After lunch they walked, and looked at pictures and the other sights of Paris, and then went to relieve Lanny's mother so that she could have a nap. The pair were a comfort to Marcel; for men have to be together, it appears; they just can't stand women all the time. Men understand why you have to get out into the world, in spite of danger and death. When Marcel was able to listen, he enjoyed hearing about American college life, including football; and about a trip on a cattle boat, and then tramping over Europe, sleeping in haystacks. He wished that he had thought of something so original when he was a youth.

Also, of course, he had to know about the war. Beauty had hoped never to hear of it again, but she had to read the news to him, and learn to think about strategy instead of broken bodies. Those two armies had locked themselves together, like wild stags which have got their horns caught and are doomed to butt each other around the forest until both of them drop. All that bitter winter the armies would thrust here and yield there, until gradually they got settled down into the earth. The Germans constructed an elaborate set of entrenchments, line behind line; to the defense of these lines they would bring up everything they had, and Britain and France would do the same on the other side of “no man's land.” Each army was frantically getting ready for the spring “push” that was to end the war — so the experts all said, only they differed as to what the ending would be.

Winters in Paris are disagreeable, and people of means do not stay if they can help it. But Beauty hardly ever went out, and the boys didn't mind, because they were young and everything was new and delightful. They saw motion pictures, French and American; they went to plays, and Jerry improved his French. They had a piano in their suite — for Robbie wrote that he was making a pile of money, and Lanny might have anything he wanted, provided he did not smoke or drink or go with prostitutes.

Friends came to see Beauty and Marcel: Emily Chattersworth, very serious now, completely wrapped up in the affairs of her blesses; Sophie and her Eddie, she trying so hard to keep her man entertained and hoping that the sight of poor Marcel might teach him the cruelty and wickedness of fighting. But it didn't work that way; men seemed to be drawn to death like moths into the flame; they thought of vengeance rather than of safety. Lanny wrote to Rick, telling what had happened, and it surely did not act as a deterrent with the English boy; he longed all the more to get up there in the air and hunt a Taube.

The time came when the sufferer's burns were healed enough so that the bandages could be taken off. That was a time of fresh trials for Beauty — the doctors had to warn her, she must be prepared for the worst, and not let Marcel see any trace of horror in her face. He wouldn't have a mirror, but of course he would put his fingers to his face and feel what was there. His friends must help him get used to it, and make him believe that it made no difference to them.

Beauty, who had been named for her looks, and valued hers and others' very high among the gifts of life, had chosen a man who possessed fine blond hair and mustaches, grave, melancholy features, and an expression of romantic tenderness. Now he had no hair at all, just a red scalp, and his face was a flaming scar. His lips were gone on one side, so that he could only make a pretense at articulating the letters b and p. Out of the gaping wound his teeth grinned hideously, and the gum of the lower jaw was all exposed. Some day a facial surgeon might replace the lip, so the doctors assured him. Fortunately his eyesight was uninjured, but one of his upper eyelids was gone, and most of his ears.

Beauty had to go and look at that mask, and smile affectionately, and say that it didn't matter a bit. Marcel's right hand was well enough to be kissed, and that was where she kissed him. Since he liked so much to make jokes, she told him that she would take up needlework, like other old ladies, and learn to patch up his skin. Seriously she insisted that it was his soul she cared about, and that wasn't changed. After saying all this, she went off to the little room which she had to dress in, and there wept hysterically, cursing God and the Kaiser.

Lanny and Jerry, duly warned, went in armed with cheerfulness. “Well, do you think you can stand me?” asked the victim; and Lanny said: “Don't be silly, Marcel. You know we'd like you in sections if you came that way.”

Jerry added: “I read an article about what the surgeons are doing, making new faces. Gosh, it takes your breath away!”

“They've taken away pretty nearly everything but my breath,” replied the painter.

Lanny said: “They've left your eyes and your hands, and you'll go back to the Cap and paint better than ever.” That was the way to talk!

VI

What was Beauty going to make of this blow which fate had dealt her? She believed in happiness and talked about it as a right. A minister's daughter, raised in a stuffy, uncultured home, she had learned to loathe incessant droning of hymns and preaching of tiresome duty; she had fled from it, and still avoided every mention of its symbols. But suddenly all those hated things had sprung as it were out of the earth, had seized her and bound her with chains which there could be no breaking.

Lanny was all tenderness and kindness, and when she wanted to weep he was there to console her. In his presence she wept for Marcel; he never knew that she went alone and wept for herself. Over and over she fought this bitter battle. No use trying to get away from it — her bridges were burned. She couldn't desert this wreck of a man, and whatever happiness she found would have to be by his side. She who was so dainty had had to accustom herself to blood and stenches; and now she would have to eat and sleep and walk and talk in the presence of what ordinary people see only in nightmares.

Even from her devoted son she must hide her rage at this fate. Even to herself she was ashamed to admit that she regretted her bargain and dreamed of a happiness she might have had in a far-off land of plenty and peace. She had to force herself to be loyal to her choice; but this moral compulsion was associated in her mind with a dull and stolid religion, full of phrases which seemed to have been designed to take the gaiety and charm out of existence. Mabel Blackless, seventeen years old and bursting with the joy of life, hadn't wanted to lay her burdens at the foot of the cross, or to have any redeeming blood spilled for her; she had wanted to see Paris, and had borrowed money and run away to join her brother.

And now it seemed that she was back where she had come from; teaching herself to carry the cross. Her best friends mustn't know about it, because if they did they would pity her, and to be pitied was unendurable. She must tie herself down once for all! In that mood she went out one day and told her story to the maire of the arrondissement, and arranged for him to come to the hospital. She went back and told Marcel what she had done, and refused to hear any of his objections, pretending to have her feelings hurt by them. With two of the nurses for witnesses, they were married under the French civil law.

Did Marcel guess what was in her heart? She had to fight him, and lie vigorously; how else would he be persuaded to go on living? She and her son and her son's tutor had to make real to themselves the game they played. It wasn't hard for Lanny, because art counted for so much with him; also, it was wartime, and everybody was full of fervors, and wounds were a medal or badge of glory. The marriage made Beauty a “respectable woman” for the first time; but oddly enough it meant a social comedown, the name of Budd being one of power. She would have to get busy and boost Marcel's paintings, and make herself “somebody” again!

VII

The first thing was to contrive something for him to wear over his face. Hero or no hero, he couldn't bear to let anybody look at that mask of horror. He would cover the top of his head with a skullcap, and across his forehead would hang a close-fitting silk veil, with small holes for eyes and nose. Beauty went out and got some pink silk lingerie material, but he wouldn't wear pink; he wanted gray, so that it wouldn't show the dust; they compromised on white when Beauty said that she would make a lot of them and wash them with her own hands. She made a pattern, and after that had something to keep her fingers busy while she sat by his bedside.

It was springtime before he was able to move about, and they took him back to Juan in the car, making a two-day journey of it, so as not to put any strain on him. He looked not so bad with his skullcap and veil; the world was getting used to the sight of mutilés — and not yet tired of them. Jerry supported him on one side and Lanny on the other, and they got him into Bienvenu without mishap.

Oh, the glory of that sunshine in the little court; the almost overpowering scent of orange blossoms and jasmine in the evening, and the song of the nightingales! Here were three women to adore him and wait upon him, and nobody to disturb him; here Beauty meant him to spend the rest of his days in peace, and paint whatever wonderful things he might have in him.' She was going to give up all her frivolous life — save only such contacts as might help in a campaign to win recognition for genius.

There were just a few painter friends Marcel wanted to see, and these would come to him, and bring their work for him to look at — or if it was too big, Lanny would bring it in the car. The patient was soon able to sit up and read, and there were plenty of books and magazines. Often they read aloud; Jerry came and tutored Lanny, and Marcel would listen and improve his English. They had music; and when he grew stronger he walked about the place. The furies of pain would never let him entirely alone, but he learned to outwit them. He was a more silent man than he used to be; there were things going on inside him about which he did not tell and did not wish to be asked by anyone.

VIII

The military deadlock at the front continued. All winter long the Allies had spent their forces trying to take trenches defended by machine guns — a weapon of which the Germans had managed to get the biggest supply. It was something that Robbie Budd had helped to teach them — and which he had tried in vain to teach the French and British. He couldn't write freely about it now, but there were hints in his letters, and Lanny knew what they meant, having been so often entertained by his father's comic portrayals of the British War Office officials with whom he had been trying to do business. So haughty they were, so ineffable, almost godlike in their self-satisfaction — and so dumb! No vulgar American could tell them anything; and now dapper young officers strolled out in front of their troops, waving their swagger sticks, and the German sharpshooters knocked them over like partridges off tree limbs. It was sublime, but it wasn't going to win this war of machines.

All the nations had come to realize that they were facing a long struggle. Old M. Rochambeau, who came often to see Beauty and her husband, used a terrible phrase, “a war of attrition.” It was like the game of checkers in which you had one more man than your enemy, so every time you swapped with him, you increased your advantage. “Yes, dear lady,” said the ex-diplomat, in answer to Beauty's exclamation of horror, “that is the basis on which military strategy is being calculated, and no one stops to ask what you or I think about it.”

Man power plus manufacturing power was what would count. Britain had sacrificed her little professional army in order to save the Channel ports, and now she was rushing a new army into readiness, a volunteer army of a million men. There would be a second million, and as many more as needed; they would be shipped to some part of the fighting line, and swapped for Germans, man for man, or as near to it as possible.

The Turkish politicians had been bought into the war on the German side; which meant that the Black Sea was shut off, and nothing could be sent into Russia's southern ports. So a British expedition had been sent to take the Dardanelles. Rick informed Lanny that a cousin of his was going as a private in one of these regiments; Rosemary wrote that her father had been promoted to the rank of colonel, and was to command this same regiment. Rosemary had extracted a promise from her mother to be allowed to study nursing after one more year, and perhaps she would some day be on one of those ships. She promised that she would wave to Lanny as she went by!

It wasn't long before Italy was bought by the Allies, and that was important to people who lived in Provence. It lifted a fear from their souls, and freed the regiments guarding the southeastern border. “You see,” said Marcel to his wife, “I saved a few months by volunteering!” It had been a sore point, that he had gone out of his way to get himself smashed up. Now she could congratulate herself that it had been done quickly!

IX

Marcel's paintings had been stored in the spare room of the villa, and now he would set them up one by one and look at them. He wanted to see what sort of painter he had really been, in those days that now seemed a different lifetime. Lanny and Jerry and M. Rochambeau would join him, and make comments, more or less expert. Lanny and his tutor thought they were marvelous, but the painter took to shaking his head more and more. No, they weren't much; it was too easy to do things like that; there was no soul in them. Lanny protested; but the old diplomat said: “You've become a different man.”

It was something which happened now and then to painters, poets, musicians. Sometimes it amounted to a transformation. Verdi had changed his style entirely in his middle years; Tolstoy had decided that his greatest novels were useless, even corrupting. Van Gogh had painted everything gloomy and grim in Holland, and then had come to the Midi and exploded in a burst of color. “You will start work all over,” said the old gentleman; “find some new way to say what you feel.”

People who didn't understand art — people like Marcel's wife, for example — were going to have an unhappy time while he was groping his way into that new stage of life. He became restless and discontented; he found fault with everybody and everything; his life had come to nothing. He took to going out at night, when people couldn't stare at his mask, and wandering about the roads on the Cap. Beauty was exasperated, but she dared not show it; she was haunted by the idea that if she made him unhappy he might try to get back into the army, or else in some fit of melancholia he might seek to release her from her burden by jumping off the rocks. She had never forgotten Lanny's suggestion of that possibility, at the time when she was thinking about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She ordered built for her genius a little studio in an out of the way corner of the place; north light, and all modern conveniences, including a storeroom for his canvases; the whole place of stone, entirely fireproof. She got him a new easel, and a pneumatic cushion for his chair, to spare his sore bones. There was everything ready for him — everything but his own spirit. He would go to the place and sit and brood. He would spend much time stretching canvases on frames, and would sit and dab paint on them, and finally would take them out behind the studio and burn them, saying that he was no good any more. What he wanted to say couldn't be said in any medium known.

Blazing hot summer had come. It was before the Riviera had been discovered as a summer resort, but Lanny, now fifteen, went about all day in bathing trunks and loved it. Marcel sat in his studio in the same costume — with nobody to look at his scarred and battered body. He had taken to staying by himself; he painted or read all day, and ate his meals alone, and only came out after dark: Then he would take a long walk, or if there were visitors he cared about, he would sit on the veranda in the dark with them. Or he would sit alone and listen to Lanny playing the piano.

X

The war had lasted a year. Some thought it was a stalemate, and others thought that Germany was winning. She held her line in France, and let the Allies waste themselves pounding at it while she broke the Russian armies. She had launched gas warfare, a new device filling the world with dismay. She was answering the British blockade by submarine warfare; British waters were a “military area,” and all vessels in them liable to be sunk without warning.

In May had come the attack upon the Lusitania, the incident which excited the greatest horror in the United States. This great passenger liner, with more than two thousand persons on board, was passing the Irish coast in a calm sea: two o'clock in the afternoon, and the passengers had come from lunch, and were walking the decks, or playing cards, reading or chatting, when a submarine rose from the depths and launched a torpedo, blowing a hole in the huge vessel's side. The sea rushed in and sank her in a few minutes, drowning some twelve hundred persons, including more than a hundred babies.

When Americans read about the sinking of merchant vessels, British or neutral, and the drowning of the crews, they didn't know any of the people, and their imagination didn't have much to take hold of. But here were people “everybody” knew — society people, rich people, some of them prominent and popular — writers like Justus Miles Forman and Elbert Hubbard, theatrical people like Charles Frohman and Charles Klein, millionaires like the Vanderbilts. Their friends had gone to the pier in New York to see them off, or to the pier to welcome them — and then they read this horror story. When the boatloads of survivors were brought in, the papers of the world were filled with accounts of families torn apart, of fathers and mothers giving their lives to save their little ones, of quiet heroism and serenity in the face of death.

Americans in France felt the shock even more intensely, for nearly everyone had friends, American or English, on board. Two of Mrs. Emily's oldest friends had given their lives to save children not their own. The sister of Edna Hackabury, now Mrs. Fitz-Laing, was among those of whom no word was heard. Beauty counted half a dozen persons of her acquaintance on the passenger list, and found only two on the list of survivors. Not much of the spirit of “neutrality” was left in the minds of ladies and gentlemen who discussed such matters over their afternoon tea.

Thus America was dragged into the center of the world debate. President Wilson protested, and the German government answered that submarines could not give warning without risking destruction, and manifestly could not take off passengers and crew. The Lusitania had carried cartridges — so Germany charged, and the British denied it, and how was the truth to be known? The Germans agreed to sink no more such vessels, but they did not keep the promise. All passenger vessels carried cargo, and most merchant vessels carried passengers, and how could a submarine under war conditions make certain? The Germans demanded that President Wilson should resist the British attempt to starve the German people and should insist that American ships be allowed to carry to Germany food which Germany had bought and paid for. When President Wilson wrote letters denouncing German barbarity, the Allies were delighted; when he wrote letters denouncing British violations of American trade rights, all sympathizers with the Allies denounced him.

For a year Robbie had kept writing to his son, never failing to warn him against losing his head. Robbie was determined that no Budd should be drawn into Europe's quarrels; Budds were businessmen, and did not let themselves be used to pull anybody's chestnuts out of the fire. Robbie had been on the inside, and knew that every one of these nations was thinking about its own aggrandizement. Twice it happened that an employee was coming to France, and Robbie took the trouble to write a long letter and have it mailed in Paris, so that it wouldn't be opened by a censor. “Study and think and improve your mind, and keep it clear of all this fog of hatred and propaganda.” Lanny did his best to obey — but it is not pleasant to differ from everybody you meet.

XI

For several months Marcel worked at his painting and burned up everything he produced. Lanny got up the courage to protest, and got his mother to back him. One day when he was at the studio he began begging to be allowed to see what was on the easel, covered up with a cloth. He was so much interested in his stepfather's development that he could learn even from his failures. “Please, Marcel! Right now!”

The painter said it was nothing, just a joke; he had been avoiding an hour of boredom. But that made Lanny beg all the harder — he was bored too, he said. So finally Marcel let him take off the cloth. He looked, and laughed out loud, and was so delighted that he danced around.

Marcel had painted himself lying on that bed in the hospital, head swathed in bandages, two frightened eyes looking out; and all around him on the bed crowded the little furies of pain, as he had watched them for so many months. It happened that Mr. Robin had sent Lanny a copy of a German weekly magazine, containing pictures of some of the national heroes, and Marcel had turned them into a swarm of little demons with instruments of torture in their claws. There was the stiff Prussian officer with his lean face, sharp nose, and monocle; there was Hindenburg with his shaven head and bull's neck; there was the Kaiser with his bristling mustaches; there was the professor with bushy beard and stern dogmatic face. The whole of German Kultur was there, and it was amazing, the different kinds of malice that Marcel had managed to pack into those faces, and still keep them funny.

Lanny argued harder than ever. If it gave him so much pleasure, why shouldn't the family share it? So they took it up to the house, where Jerry did a war dance, and M. Rochambeau forgot his usual gravity, and even Beauty laughed. Lanny said it ought to be shown somewhere, but Marcel said, nonsense, it was just a caricature, he didn't wish to be known as a cartoonist. But the elderly diplomat came to Lanny's support; he said there was a lot of German propaganda all over the world, and why shouldn't the French use their genius for ridicule? The four of them wrung this concession from the stubborn man of art — they might have a photograph of it and send copies to their friends.

They got a real photographer and had a big one made, and wrote on the bottom of the negative: “Soldier in Pain.” Lanny sent one to his father, and one to Rick — whose father was now in charge of precautions against spies and saboteurs in his part of England. Beauty sent one to several of her friends; and the first thing she knew came a telegram from Mrs. Emily, saying that one of the big weekly papers in Paris offered two hundred francs for the right to reproduce the painting. When this magazine appeared there came a cablegram from one of the big New York newspapers offering a hundred dollars for the American rights; and on top of that a concern which was making picture post cards asked Marcel's price to let them use it.

The New York paper came out with a story about the painter, saying that he had been in an air crash, and this was his own experience. Marcel was annoyed for a while; he hated that sort of publicity. But to Beauty it was marvelous; it set everybody to talking about her husband, and visitors came to the house again, and she had an excuse to get out her pretty clothes. She had a vision of her husband becoming a famous and highly paid magazine illustrator; but Marcel said, to hell with it, and jammed his red silk skullcap down on his head and stalked off to the studio to brood there. So Beauty had to run to him, and fall on her knees and admit that she was a cheap and silly creature, and that Marcel was to paint whatever he wanted, and needn't see a single one of the curiosity seekers — they would disconnect the bell at the gate if he wished it.

However, Lanny managed to get his way about one thing; Marcel promised not to burn any more of his work. On this point the boy collected historical facts from painter friends and retailed them to his stepfather. “We have all Michelangelo's sketches, and Leonardo's, and Rembrandt's, and Rodin's — so we can follow their minds, and learn what they were thinking and trying. We learn from what they rejected as well as from what they kept.” So it was agreed that everything Marcel did from that time on was to be put away on shelves in the storeroom; and, furthermore, Lanny might be allowed to see something now and then — but no more publicity.

I

JUST before Christmas, Mrs. Emily Chattersworth returned to Cannes, and opened her winter home. She needed a rest, so she told her friends; but she didn't take it for long. There were too many wounded French soldiers all over the Midi; tens of thousands of them, and many as bad as Marcel. The casino at Juan — a small place at that time-had been turned into a hospital, as had all sorts of public buildings throughout France. But there was never room enough, never help enough. Frenchwomen, who as a rule confined their activities to their own homes, were now organizing hospitals and relief depots; and of course they were glad to have help from anyone who would give it.

So it wasn't long before Mrs. Emily was agitating and organizing, making her American friends on the Riviera ashamed of wasting their time playing bridge and dancing; she told them stories about men deprived of hands and feet and eyes and what not, and facing the problem of how to keep alive. In the end, impatient of delays, Mrs. Emily turned her own home into an institution for what was called “re-education”: teaching new occupations to men so crippled they could no longer practice their former ones. A man who had lost his right hand would learn to do something with a hook, and men who had lost their legs would learn to make baskets or brooms. Mrs. Emily moved herself into what had been a maid's room, and filled up her whole mansion with her “pupils,” and when that wasn't enough, put up tents on her lawns.

The wife of Marcel Detaze was especially exposed to this vigorous lady's attacks. “Don't you care about anybody's husband but your own?” Beauty was ashamed to give the wrong answer, and after she had made sure that Marcel was occupied with his painting, Lanny would drive her up to Sept Chênes, as the place was called, and give what help she could. She didn't know how to make brooms or baskets, and as a “re-educator” she wasn't very much, but she was the world's wonder when- it came to uplifting the souls of men. Suffering had dealt kindly with her, and added a touch of mystery to her loveliness, and when she came into the room all the mutilés would stop looking at brooms and baskets, and if she said something to a poor devil he would remember it the rest of the day. After what she had been through with Marcel, she didn't mind seeing scars of war, and she learned to get the same thrill which in the old days she had got from entering a ballroom and having “important” people stare at her and ask who she was.

It was good for Lanny too, because the world he was going to live in was not to be composed exclusively of “important” persons, manifesting grace and charm at enormous expense. Going to Mrs. Emily's was a kind of “slumming” which not even Robbie could have objected to; and Lanny had an advantage over his mother in that he knew Provencal, and could chat with these peasants and fishermen as he had done all his life. Several of them were the same persons he had known, fathers or older brothers of the children he had played with.

And oddest circumstance of all — Lanny's gigolo! That happy and graceful dancing man whom he had picked up in Nice, and who had come to Bienvenu and spent an afternoon playing the piccolo flute and demonstrating the steps of the farandole! Here he was, drawing a harsh breath now and then, because he had got trapped in a dugout full of fumes from a shell; and surely he would never dance again, because his right leg was gone just below the hip. Instead he was learning to carve little dancing figures out of wood, and when he was through with that form of education, he would go back to his father's farm, where there was wood in plenty, and the organization which Mrs. Emily had formed would try to sell his toys for the Christmas trade. M. Pinjon was the same kindly and gentle dreamer that Lanny recalled, and the boy had the satisfaction of seeing his mother willing to talk to him now, and hearing her admit that he was a good creature, who doubtless had done no harm to anyone in his life.

II

One of Mrs. Emily's bright ideas was that men who had hands and eyes but no feet might learn to paint. Of course it was late in life for them to begin, but then look at Gauguin, look at van Gogh — you just could never tell where you might find a genius. Might it not be possible for Marcel to come now and then and give a lesson to these pitiful souls?

Marcel was coming to care less and less for people. Even the best of them made him aware of his own condition, and it was only when he was alone and buried in his work that life, was bearable to him. But he heard Beauty talking for hours at a time about Emily Chattersworth, and of course this work came close to his heart. He too was a mutilé, and a comrade of all the others. He couldn't teach anything, because he couldn't talk; even Mrs. Emily had a hard time understanding him, unless Beauty sat by and said some of the words over again. But he offered to come and entertain them by making sketches on a blackboard — for example, those little German devils that seemed to amuse people. Somebody else might explain and comment on the work as he did it.

So they drove up to Sept Chênes one evening. Mrs. Emily had set up a blackboard, and had got one of her patients to do the talking, a journalist who had lost the fingers of his right hand and was learning to write with his left. He was an amusing talker, and Marcel with his skullcap and veil was a figure of mystery. He was clever and quick at sketching, and his Prussian devils made the audience roar. The deaf ones could see them, and the blind ones could hear about them. If the lecturer missed a point, Marcel would write a word or two on the board. It wasn't long before the men were shouting what they wanted next, and Marcel would draw that. He had been at the front long enough to know the little touches that made things real to his comrades.

He drew a heroic figure of the poilu. Poil means your hair, and is a symbol of your power. The poilu was a mighty fellow, and wore a red military kepi, with a depression in the round top like a saucer. When Marcel drew a rough wooden cross in a field, and hung one of those battered caps on top of it, every man in the room knew what that meant, for he had seen thousands of them. The poilu wore a long coat, and when he was marching he buttoned back the front flaps to make room for his legs, so when you saw that, you knew he was on the march. If his face was set grimly, you knew he was going to say: “Nous les aurons,” that is: “We'll have them, we'll get them.”

What he was going to get was the boche. That was another word of the war. The British called him “Jerry,” and the Yanks, when they came along, would call him “Heinie,” and sometimes “Fritzie”; but to the poilu he was le boche, and when Marcel drew him, he made him not ugly or hateful, just stupid and discouraged, and that too seemed right to anciens combattants. When Marcel desired to draw something hateful, it wore a long coat to the ankles, tightly drawn in at the waist, and a monocle, and a gold bracelet, and an expression of monstrous insolence.

III

That visit was important to the painter because it gave him a place to go. With these poor devils he need never be ashamed, never humiliated. He would return now and then to entertain them; or he would go and just talk with them, or rather, let them talk to him. One of them had been with Marcel's own regiment in the Alpes Maritimes, and from him Marcel learned that his comrades had been moved to the front in the Vosges mountains, and what had happened to them there.

The men wouldn't talk to strangers about the war; it was too terrible, it would discourage people. But among themselves it was all right, and Marcel's mutilated face was a passport to all hearts. He heard about winter fighting in heavy snow, with the trenches only a few yards apart, so that you could hear the enemy talking, and shout abuse and defiance at him; if you lifted your cap an inch above the parapet, it would be riddled with bullets in a second or two. Shelling was incessant, day and night, and hand grenades were thrown; only a few sentries stayed to watch, while the rest hid in dugouts underground. Great tracts in the forest had been reduced to splinters, and in the poste de secours, a shelter dug half under the hillside, a dozen doctors had been killed in the course of a year. No going about at all in the daytime; yet you could hear the church bells ringing in a village behind the lines. One of the stories was about a man who picked up an old hand organ in one of the buildings wrecked by shells, and brought it up one rainy night to one of the cagnas, or dug-outs, and stood outside in the rain playing it, and men began singing, hundreds of them all over the place, even with the shells falling around. “Sidi Brahim,” they sang.

Among other things, Lanny learned what had happened to his mother's former chauffeur and handy man, Sergeant Pierre Bazoche. He had taken part in one of those innumerable attempts that came to nothing. Line after line of men had charged across an exposed place on a hillside, and just lay where they fell. There was no way to get to them; those who were not killed at once died slowly — but in any case they stayed all winter, and the smell of them made an invisible cloud that drifted slowly over the trenches, sometimes to the poilus and sometimes to the boches.

After talks like that Marcel would go back and paint. He made a painting that he called “Fear,” and for a while he didn't want anybody to see it; perhaps it was a confession of something in himself. He was so proud, so serene, and full of ardor for his beloved France — could it be that he had ever been terrified? The truth is that this complicated arrangement of pipes and tissues that comprise a man is so fragile, so soft and easily damaged, that nature has provided an automatic impulse to protect it. There are parts of it that can hurt so abominably — and in truth you would have difficulty in naming any part that you would care to have struck by a little steel cylinder moving at the rate of half a mile per second. The boches had this same feeling, and many Catholics among them carried on their persons magic formulas containing detailed specifications. “May God preserve me against all manner of arms and weapons, shot and cannon, long or short swords, knives or daggers, or carbines, halberds, or any thing that cuts or pierces, against thrusts of rapiers, long and short rifles, or guns, and suchlike, which have been forged since the birth of Christ; against all kinds of metal, be it iron or steel, brass or lead, ore or wood.” The poor devils lay dead upon the field with these prayers in their pockets.

Marcel painted a dim, mysterious form, the upper part of a human being, you couldn't be sure whether it was man or woman; it was shrouded in a sort of dark hood, and you saw only the face, and at first only the eyes, which had a faint glow, and were staring at you with a look that seized your own. The face was not distorted, the expression was subtler than that, it was a soul which had been acquainted with fear for a long time; and not just a physical fear, but a moral horror at a society in which men inflicted such things upon one another.

At least, that is what M. Rochambeau said after he had looked at the picture for a long time. He said it was quite extraordinary, and certainly none of the persons who saw it ever forgot it. But Marcel put it away. He said it wasn't a picture for wartime — not until the enemy could see it too!

IV

The British had failed in their efforts to take the Dardanelles, largely because they couldn't decide whether the taking was worth the cost. Now they were starting an advance from Salonika, a harbor in the north of Greece. That country had a pro-German king, and those beautiful islands which the Bluebird had visited had become lurking places of submarines seeking to destroy British commerce and the troopships which came heavily loaded from India and Australia. The entire Mediterranean was the scene of unresting naval war, and Lanny didn't need to look at war maps, because he had been to the places and had pictures of them in his eager mind.

When he and Jerry went fishing they watched every ship that passed — and there were great numbers — knowing that at any moment there might be an explosion and a pillar of black smoke. They never happened to see that, but they heard firing more than once, and ran to a high point of the Cap and with field glasses watched a sinking ship, and saw motorboats hurrying out to bring off survivors. Up and down the coast people told stories of hospital ships sunk with all on board, of loaded troopships torpedoed, of submarines rammed, or sunk by a well-aimed shot, or getting entangled in the chains and nets now set in front of harbors.

The fighting at Gallipoli had one important consequence for Lanny. The father of Rosemary Codwilliger was wounded, and in a hospital in Malta; this made the mother decide to spend the winter on the Riviera, where he could join her when he was able to be moved. “She says she's in need of a rest,” wrote the girl, “but I think it's to get me out of the notion of nursing. She's afraid I'll get to know people outside our social circle.”

The family wanted a quiet place, Rosemary added, and it happened that the Baroness Sophie had a little villa on the Cap, not the one she lived in. Lanny sent a snapshot of it to the girl, and as a result her family rented the place and set a date for their arrival; the mother, a widowed aunt, Rosemary herself, and her father whenever the doctors and the submarines would let him.

Lanny was sixteen now, and old enough to know that he was interested in girls. This grave and sweet English lass had captured his imagination, and he looked back upon the river Thames and its green and pleasant land as one of his happiest memories. He had met other girls on the Riviera, and had swum and boated and danced with them, but principally they interested him because they reminded him of Rosemary.

A year and a half had passed, and now she was coming, and Lanny hoped to be included in her social circle. His mother was a respectable married woman, and his stepfather had all but given his life in the war which was England's. Lanny had never met Rosemary's mother or aunt, but he hoped for success with them as in the case of the Frau Doktor Hofrat von und zu Nebenaltenberg — who now, by the way, was among the Germans interned on the ile Ste.-Marguerite, which Lanny could view from the veranda of his home.

The boy had told his mother about the English girl and how much he liked her; it would have been cruelty to withhold such news from Beauty, to whom it was the most interesting of subjects. She warned him not to expect too much from the English, because they were a peculiar people, rigidly bound by their own conventions. With Americans they were apt to go so far and no farther.

Just now Beauty had another love affair on her hands, that of Jerry Pendleton, who clamored for advice about French girls. He was finding in one of them such an odd mixture of fervor and reserve; and such a complication of mothers and aunts! Did Mrs. Detaze think that an American could be happy with a French wife? And would such a wife be happy in America? The situation was complicated by the fact that Jerry didn't know what he wanted to do with himself. He had come away fully determined to escape the drug store business; he dreamed of being a newspaperman, perhaps a foreign correspondent. But what would he do with a wife under those circumstances? Lanny's tutor, torn between his destinies, was much like Beauty having to choose between Pittsburgh and the Cap d'Antibes. Lanny's lessons suffered during the discussions — but he could always go and read the encyclopedia.

V

The three ladies and a maid arrived, and Lanny was at the train to meet them and take them to the villa. He had the keys, and knew the place and showed it to them. He had lived on the Cap all his life, and could tell them about the shops and services and other practical matters. Also he knew about servants — the innumerable relatives of Leese were available and the ladies had only to choose. The most exclusive English family could hardly reject the assistance of such a polite and agreeable youth.

Mrs. Codwilliger was a tall, thin-faced lady from whom Lanny might have learned how Rosemary would look when she was forty; but he didn't. She and her sister, tall and still thinner, were the daughters of Lord Dewthorpe, and estimated themselves accordingly. But when Lanny's mother offered to call, they could not say no; and when they heard the romantic story of the painter who stayed in his studio alone, never appearing in public without a veil, their deep English instincts of self-sufficiency were touched. When Lanny offered to lend them several of his stepfather's seascapes to remedy the rather crude taste in art of the baroness, they had to admit that the habitability of their home had been increased.

Rosemary was a year older than Lanny, which meant that she was now a young lady. As it happened, she was a very grand one, belonging to a set which managed to impress other people — they “got away with it,” to use the American slang. The youth was prepared to worship her at a distance. But they strolled off, and sat where they could see the moonlight flung across the water in showers of brilliant fire. There was a distant sound of music from the great hotel — all the lovely things which they remembered on the banks of the Thames.

So Lanny was moved, very timidly, to draw closer to this delightful being, and she did not seem to mind. When he gently touched her hand she did not draw it away, and presently they resumed, quite naturally and simply, the relation they had had in the old days. He put his arm about her, and after a while he kissed her, and they sat dissolved in the well-remembered bliss. But this time it did not stop at the same point.

Rosemary Codwilliger was a friend and admirer of that ardent suffragette, Miss Noggyns, who had so upset Kurt Meissner at The Reaches with the coming of the war these redoubtable ladies had dropped their agitation, but they expected to have their demands granted before the war was over; and what were they going to do with their new freedom? That they would go into Parliament, attend the universities, and move into all the professions — such things went without saying. But what would they do about love and sex and marriage? What would they do about the so-called “double standard,” which permitted men to have premarital sex relations without social disgrace, but denied that privilege to women?

Obviously, there were two alternatives. Women could adopt the double standard, or they could demand that men conform to the single standard. It soon appeared that the latter was very difficult, whereas the former was easy. The subject was made more complex by the possibility that not all women were alike; what might be pleasing to some might not be to all. In magazines, pamphlets, and books of the “feminist” movement these questions were vehemently debated, and the ideas were tried out by numbers of persons, with results not always according to schedule.

Rosemary's young mind was a ferment of these theories. First of all, she had been taught, you must be frank. You couldn't be so with the old people, of course; but young people in love, or thinking of being in love, had to be honest with each other and try to understand each other; love had to be a give and take, each respecting the other's personality, and so on. The problems of sex had apparently been changed by the discovery of birth control, which Mr. Bernard Shaw called “the most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century.” Since you no longer needed to have babies, the question to be considered was whether love would bring happiness to the lovers.

Rosemary was blond, with features regular and a manner gentle and serene. In many ways she reminded Lanny of his mother, and perhaps that was why she had drawn him so strongly. He was a mother's boy, used to being told what to do, and Rosemary was prepared to deal with him on that basis — it was, apparently, what they all meant by “women's rights.” Anyway, they sat in a remote and well-shadowed part of the garden, with arms around each other; and it seemed unavoidable that they should talk of intimate matters. Lanny told about love problems which puzzled him, and Rosemary imparted ideas which she had gathered from a weekly journal called the Freewoman.

When Lanny had listened to Kurt Meissner's expositions of German philosophy, he had attributed it all to Kurt's wonderful brain; so now he thought that Rosemary had worked out the theory of sexual equality for herself. Of course he was deeply impressed, and at first rather frightened. But after these ideas had been discussed for two or three evenings, they no longer seemed so strange; the boy who had become a man within the last year began to wonder whether all those words about freedom and happiness might possibly apply to him and his lovely friend. This had an alarming effect; a wave of excitement swept over him, and his teeth began to chatter and his hands to shake uncontrollably.

“What's the matter, Lanny?” asked the girl.

He didn't dare to answer at first, but finally he told her: “I'm afraid maybe I'm falling in love with you.” It was all as if it had never happened in the world before.

“Well, why not, Lanny?” she asked, gently.

“You mean — you really wouldn't mind?”

“You know I think you are a very dear boy.”

So he kissed her on the lips — the first time he had ever done that. They sat clasped together, and a clamor arose in him. He pressed her to him, and when she submitted, he began to fondle her more and more intimately. He knew then that the experience had come to him about which he had heard everybody talking, and which had been such a mystery in his thoughts.

The girl stayed his trembling hands. “You mustn't, Lanny. It wouldn't be safe.” Then she whispered: “I'll have to go to the house first, and get something.”

So they got up and walked. Lanny found his knees shaking, which perplexed him greatly. It must be what the French novelists call la grande passion! He waited some distance from the house while Rosemary went in — as it happened, there was company and no one paid any heed to her. Presently she came back, and they lost themselves in a secluded part of the garden, and there she taught him those things about which he had been so curious. At first his agitation was painful, but presently he was dissolved in a flood of bliss, which seemed to justify the theories of the “new women.” If he was happy and she was happy, why should the vague and remote “world” of their elders concern itself with their affairs?

VI

It wasn't long before Lanny told his mother about this affair. Impossible not to, because she asked pointed questions, and it would have been hurting her feelings to evade. Beauty's reaction to the disclosure was a peculiar one. She had been what you might call a practicing feminist, but without any theories; she had had her own way about love, but always with the proper feeling that she was doing wrong. It was hard to explain, but that feeling seemed necessary; you knew it was wrong, and that made it right. But to assert that it was right was a shocking boldness. And when a girl was only seventeen!' “Was she virgin?” asked Beauty, and added with distaste: “Certainly she didn't act like it.” Lanny didn't know and couldn't make inquiries.

Beauty couldn't altogether dislike Rosemary, but she never got over the idea that there was something alarming about her — a portent of a new world that Beauty didn't understand. The mother's feeling was that her dear little boy had been seduced, and that he was much too young. She took the problem to her husband, but failed to get him excited. “Nature knows a lot more about that than you do,” said the painter, and went on painting.

Springtime again on the Riviera, to Lanny the most delightful he had ever known. The flesh of woman was revealed to him, and the discovery transfused everything else in his life. The world and every common sight to him did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. Now for the first time he knew what music was about, and poetry, and dancing, not to mention the birds and the butterflies. The flowers had the colors of Rosemary, and she had their perfume. She was to him a being of magic, and when he was with her he never wanted to take his eyes from her, and when he wasn't with her he wished he was.

Of course he couldn't be with her all the time; because “what would people say?” The “world” did matter after all, it appeared. Cool and serene, Rosemary took charge. Lanny must go on with his studying, and not make her feel that she was a bad influence. When they boated and swam and played tennis, they must be with other young people, for appearance' sake; and the same in the evening-there must be some sort of pretext, a dance, a party, a sail — the young people all understood that, they all had the same desires, and would stroll away in couples, casually and innocently. They protected one another, a conspiracy of the new against the old.

Did Rosemary succeed in fooling her mother and her aunt? In those early days of the revolt of youth the old were in a peculiar state of emotional paralysis. They didn't dare to know; it was too awful to let themselves know — and yet of course they did. They would look at the young with fright in their eyes, and seldom dare to speak — for what could they say? Rosemary had given her answer in advance — she wanted to go out and earn her own living. Girls were nursing, they were; even getting jobs in munitions factories, wearing black overalls and filling shells with explosives. They were going out on the streets delivering tirades, calling on men to enlist, pinning white feathers on those who looked as if they ought to. And the things they were reading, and left around the house, careless of who might see them!

It had been prior to the outbreak of the war that Rosemary had fallen under the spell of one of those suffragettes — a teacher, it was. Still a child, with pigtails down her back, she had walked into the National Gallery with a hand ax concealed under her skirt, and at a prearranged signal had passed it to one of those notorious women who hadn't dared bring it in herself, because she was known and might be searched. And that not a crazy whim or a lark, but a means of reforming the world! Something they took up as a religion, for which they were willing to die! You might put them in jail, but they would only try to starve themselves to death; you wanted to say to the devil with them and let them do it, but you didn't dare.

VII

The German high command had made up its collective mind that in order to win the war they had to break through on the western front, and they had picked the fortress of Verdun as the place. This was the head of the original French defenses, the part which had not given way; a complex of fortifications covering various heights along both banks of the river Meuse. Now that the war had been going on for a year and a half, the technique of taking such fortifications had become well settled. You had to bring up enough heavy guns, and pile enough ammunition behind them, to reduce the enemy entrenchments to dust and rubble; then you put down what was called a “creeping barrage” of shells which exploded in small fragments, to destroy the men who had been hiding underground and who came up after your heavy bombardment. The “creeping barrage” moved forward, just ahead of your lines of infantry, which could thus advance in comparative safety, and take what was left of the trenches, an operation known as “mopping up.” The enemy would have line after line of trenches, and you had to repeat this same procedure and hope to break through finally and turn a “war of position” into a “war of movement.”

To stop such an attack, the French gunners had to be better than the Germans, and have more shells. The French airmen had to keep the mastery and bring in more information as to what was happening. But more than anything else, the plain everyday poilu had to crawl into his rabbit warrens, and those of him who were left alive had to pop up at the right moment, and hide in whatever shell holes might be left and shoot enough of the advancing Germans to discourage the rest. That was all there was to it, you just had to outstay the enemy. When you had fired all your cartridges, you got more from a dead comrade in the same shell hole. If the night passed and nobody brought you food, you starved. If it rained, you lay in the mud, and if the mud froze, you tried to keep your hands alive so that you could shoot.

The Verdun area covered a hundred square miles or so, and during the fighting it was turned into a chaos of shell craters and nothing else. Places like Fort Douaumont were taken and retaken a half-dozen times, and the living fought among the dead of both sides. The main battle began in February of 1916 and lasted until July without cessation, and after that off and on for a year. The Germans brought sixty-four divisions, which was more than a million men. The French fired more than ten million shells from field guns, and nearly two million from medium and heavy guns.

The German Crown Prince was in command, and that was one more reason for the French wanting to win. The whole world watched and waited while the armies staggered back and forth. A break-through might mean the German conquest of France, and nobody knew that better than the poilu; he invented for himself a chant, which became a sort of incantation, a spell to rouse the souls of men perishing of wounds and exhaustion, who yet would kill one more enemy before dying. “Passeront pas, passeront pas!” they sang or gasped. “They shall not pass.”

VIII

Such were the events some three hundred miles to the north of Lanny Budd while he was playing with love in springtime. He couldn't keep the war from troubling his conscience, but there was nothing he could do about it — especially not so long as he was under pledge to keep neutral. He was the one person of that sort he knew. Eddie Patterson was now driving an ambulance behind the lines at Verdun, and so his Sophie no longer had any motive for not hating the Germans, and she was hating them. All Lanny could say was: “Excuse me, I promised my father not to talk about the war.”

Budd's were now making small arms and ammunition in large quantities, and exclusively for the Allies. There was no way to make any for the Germans; the British blockade was too tight, and anyhow the British and French were on hand to buy everything you could produce, paying top prices on the nail. The big Wall Street banks took British and French bonds and sold them to the American public, and Budd's got the cash. Under Robbie's contract he was entitled to a commission on every deal. He would spend this money freely and gaily, as always; but he was a stubborn fellow, and nobody was going to get him to say that any nation of Europe — and that included the British Empire — was ever right about anything. Robbie had been on the inside, and knew they were all wrong.

Out of this came the first little rift between Lanny and his girlfriend. Rosemary wasn't satisfied to have him hold his tongue; she began to pin him down and ask what he really thought. When he repeated his formula, she wanted to know: “What are you, a man or a dummy? Do you have to think everything your father thinks? If I thought what my parents think, would I be here with you?” Lanny was troubled, because he had taken it for granted that this delightful young woman was as gentle as she looked. But apparently a sharp tongue was part of the equipment of every “feminist,” and first among “women's rights” was the right to tell her man what she thought of him.

Both British and French were bitter against the Americans, because they were not taking part in the war, but just making money out of it, and at the same time making objections to the blockade. Nearly all the Americans in France felt the same way, and were ashamed of their country. The conversation at Bienvenu was all along that line; and while Marcel was careful not to say anything in Lanny's presence, the boy knew that Marcel blamed Robbie because he was making money out of the French and at the same time withholding his sympathy from them. The painter was eaten up with anxiety all during the battle of Verdun; he would burst out with some expression of loathing for the “Huns,” and Lanny wouldn't say anything, and it would appear that a chill had fallen in the home. The relationship of stepfather and stepson is a complicated one at best, and this wasn't the best.

The boy would go off and try to think out by himself the problems of the war. He would remember things that Robbie had told him about the trickery of Allied diplomacy. Right now it was being said in America that the Allies had made secret treaties dividing up the spoils of the war they hadn't won; worse yet, they had promised the same territory to different peoples. Robbie would send articles about such matters to his son, finding ways to get them by the censor — and the consequence of knowing about such things was that the boy no longer fitted anywhere in France.

IX

Marcel painted a picture of the poilu, the savior of la patrie. He tried to put into it all his love for the men with whom he had trained and fought. When he was done, he said it wasn't good enough, he hadn't got what he wanted; but his friends thought differently; the painting was shown at a salon in Paris, and made a hit, and was taken up and reproduced in posters. Beauty thought that her husband would get satisfaction out of that service to his country; but nothing could please him, it appeared. He didn't want to be a popular painter — and anyhow, art was futility in a time like this.

So came a crisis in the affairs of this married pair. How rarely does it happen that two human creatures, with all their differences, weaknesses, moods can get along without quarreling! Beauty was carrying her cross, in the best evangelical church fashion; she was pouring out her own redemptive blood in the secrecy of her heart. But she couldn't be happy in her tragic situation, and the bitterness which she repressed was bound to escape at some spots in her life. She couldn't restrain her annoyance at this contrary attitude of Marcel. Why should a man go to the trouble of making pictures, and then not want to have people see them, even quarrel with those who wanted a chance to admire them? Why was it necessary to say something contrary every time his work was praised? In vain did Lanny, budding young critic, try to make plain to his mother that a true artist is wrestling with a vision of something higher and better, and cannot endure to be admired for what he knows is less than his best.

Out of this clash of temperaments came a terrible thing: Lanny came home one evening from his love-making to find his mother lying on her bed sobbing. Her husband had broached to her the idea of going back into the army. He had the crazy notion that he ought to be helping to hold the line at Verdun; he was a trained man, and France needed every one. He was as good as ever, he in insisted; he could march, and had tried long walks to make sure. He could handle a gun — the only thing wrong was that he was ugly, but out there in mud and powder smoke who would care?

Beauty had had a fit of hysterics and called him some bad names, an ingrate, a fool, and so on. If she meant no more to him than that, he would have to go — but he would never see her again. “I did it once, Marcel, but I won't do it a second time.”

She really meant it, so she declared to her son. She had reached the limit of endurance. If Marcel went, la patrie could take care of him next time in some soldiers' home. She said it with hardness in her face that was a new thing to Lanny; one does not wrestle with duty for long periods without going back to the moods and even the facial expressions of one's Puritan forefathers. But five minutes later Beauty broke down; her lips were trembling, and she was asking whether perhaps it was her impatience and lack of art sense which were making the painter dissatisfied with his lot.

So there was no peace in this woman's soul until midsummer, when the German attacks on the great fortress slowed up. By that time she had managed to get her man started upon another project — to paint a portrait of her. It is a use that every painter makes sooner or later of the woman he loves; if Marcel had it in him to do any portrait, she would be it. Beauty had changed, and what Marcel saw was the woman of anguish who had prayed to his soul, the woman of pity who talked to crippled soldiers and helped them to want to live.

She put on one of her nurse's uniforms and went over to the studio and sat for hours every day; an old story to her. Marcel painted her sitting in a chair with her hands folded, and all the grief of France in her face. “Sister of Mercy,” he was going to call her; and Beauty didn't have to act, because of the terror in her heart. She couldn't tell what turn the next great battle might take. She could only urge Marcel to take his time and get it perfect; she wanted him to have something he really believed in — so that he would stay a painter instead of a poilu!

X

Lanny's young dream of love died early in the month of May, and it wasn't a merry month for him. At that time the thoughts of English people on the Riviera turned to their lovely green island with its chilly breezes. Furthermore it developed that Rosemary's father had to be examined by surgeons at home; he was brought to Marseille, and from there north, and Lanny never met him.

“Darling, we shall see each other again,” said the girl. “You'll come to England, or I'll be coming here.”

“I'll wait for you — always,” said Lanny, fervently. “I want you to marry me, Rosemary.”

She looked startled. “Oh, Lanny, I don't think we can marry. I wouldn't count on that if I were you.”

The boy was startled in turn. “But why not?”

“We're much too young to think about it. I don't want to marry for a long time.”

“I can wait, Rosemary.”

“Darling, don't think about it, please. It wouldn't be fair to you.” Seeing the bewilderment in his face, she added: “It would make my parents so terribly unhappy if I were to marry outside our own sort of people.”

“But — but” — he had trouble in finding words. “Wouldn't it make them unhappy to know about our love?”

“They aren't going to know about that; and it's quite a different thing. Marriage is so serious; you have children, and property settlements, and all that bother; and there'd be the question whether our children were to be Americans or English. You might want to go to America to live —”

“I'm really not much of an American, Rosemary. I've never been there, and may never go.”

“You can't be sure; and my people wouldn't be sure. They'd make an awful fuss, I know.”

“Many English people marry Americans,” argued the boy. “Lord Eversham-Watson — I visited them, and they seemed quite happy.”

“I know, darling, it's done; and don't have your blessed feelings hurt — you know I love you, and we've been so happy, and will be some more. But if we tie ourselves down, and get our families to arguing and all that — it would be a frightful bore.”

Lanny was imperfectly educated in modern ideas, and couldn't get the thing clear in his mind. He wanted his adored one all the time, and couldn't imagine that she might not want him. Why was she so concerned about her family in this one matter, and so indifferent, even defiant, in others? He asked her to explain it, and she tried, groping to put into words things that were instinctive and unformulated. It appeared that young ladies of the English governing classes who joined the movement for equal rights wanted certain definite things, like being able to write M.P. after their names, and to have divorce on equal terms with men; but they didn't mean to interfere with the system whereby their families governed the realm. They accepted the idea that when the time came for marriage each should adopt some honored name with a peculiar spelling, and become the mistress of some beautiful old country house and the mother of future viscounts and barons, or at the least admirals and cabinet ministers.

“It mayn't be so easy to find an upper-class Englishman,” remarked the boy; “the way they're getting killed off in this war.”

“There'll be some left,” answered the girl, easily. She had only to look in the mirror to know that she had special advantages.

Lanny pondered some more, and then inquired: “Is it because I don't take sides in the war?”

“That's just a bit of it, Lanny. It helps me to realize that we shouldn't be happy; our ideas are so different, and our interests. Whatever happens to England, I have to be for her, and so will my children when I have them.”

“They are apt to go just so far and no farther,” Beauty had told her son. When he parted from Rosemary Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver, it was with tears and sighs on both sides, and a perfectly clear understanding that he might have a sweet and lovely mistress for an indefinite time, provided that he would come where she was, and do what she asked him to do. When Lanny told his mother about it, and she told Marcel, the painter remarked that the boy had been used as a guinea pig in a scientific experiment. When he learned that the boy was unhappy, he added that scientific experiments were not conducted for the benefit of the guinea pigs.

I

WHEN the German army came to Les Forêts, old M. Priedieu, the librarian, had stayed to guard his employer's treasures. He had stood by, pale with horror, while drunken hussars cut the valuable pictures from the walls, rolled up the tapestries, dumped the venerable leather-covered chairs out of the windows, and swept the priceless books from the shelves in pure wantonness. They didn't do any physical harm to the white-haired old man, but they so wounded his sensibilities that he took to his bed, and a few days later died quietly in his sleep.

But his spirit lived on in Lanny Budd. All the boy's life he would remember what the grave old scholar had told him about the love of books. This was something that no misfortune or sorrow could take from a man, and its possessor had a refuge from all the evils of the world. Montesquieu had said that to love reading was to exchange hours of boredom for hours of delight; Laharpe had said that a book is a friend that never deceives. The librarian of Les Forêts had advised Lanny to seek the friendship of the French classic authors and let them teach him dignity, grace, and perfection of form.

Now misfortune and sorrow had come; love had dallied with Lanny Budd for a while and then tossed him away. The crisis found him without companionship, because Jerry Pendleton had come to an arrangement with his belle amie to wait for him, and had gone back to Kansas to complete his education. In this plight Lanny sought the friendship of one Jean Racine, who had died more than two hundred years previously but lived on by the magic of the printed page. He took disordered emotions and converted them into well-made dramas, in which exalted beings stalked the scene and poured out their sufferings in verses so eloquent that a youth of sixteen was moved to seek lonely places by the sea or in the forest and declaim them to tritons or hamadryads.

Also Lanny won the friendship of a severe and stern spirit by the name of Pierre Corneille, who had made over the French theater, and had had no easy time of it in his life. The aristocratic personages who had sprung from his brain, full panoplied in pride and owing fealty to duty alone, reminded a sensitive youth that the life of man had never been easy, and that fate appeared to have other purposes than to feed pleasure to avid lips. Since one had to die sooner or later, let it be magnificently, to the accompaniment of verses that had the sweep of an orchestra:

After Lanny had read Le Cid and Horace and Cinna, he remembered the great hours he had spent among the Isles of Greece, and that these people also could be had in friendship by the magic of the printed word. M. Priedieu had told him about Sophocles, and Lanny got a French translation of the seven plays and read them aloud to his stepfather. Together they indulged in more speculation about the Greek view of life, which had begun with the worship of sensuous beauty and ended with a confrontation of dreadful and inexplicable doom. For what had this gay and eager people been brought into being on those bright and sunny shores, to leave behind them only broken marble columns, and a few thousand melodious verses embodying proud resignation and despair?

As a result of these influences, encountered at the most impressionable age, Lanny Budd became conservative in his taste in the arts. He liked a writer to have something to say, and to say it with clarity and precision; he liked a musician to reveal his ideas in music, and not in program notes; he liked a painter to produce works that bore some resemblance to something. He disliked loud noises and confusion, and obscurity cultivated as a form of exclusiveness. All of which meant that Lanny was out-of-date before he had got fairly started in life.

II

Inspired by sublime examples, the painter gave his stepson useful advice concerning love. It was good to do with it, but also good to be able to do without it. In this, as in other affairs, one must be master of one's self. There were a thousand reasons why love might fail, and one must have resources within and be able to meet the shocks of fate. Lanny knew that Marcel spoke with authority — this lover who had had to leave his love and go to war; this worshiper of beauty who now had to speak through a veil in order that his friends might not see his ugliness. When Marcel said that Lanny too might some day hear a call that would take him away from music and art and love — the youth trembled in the depths of his soul.

Lanny talked about these problems of love and happiness with his mother also. Strict moralists might have been shocked that Beauty was willing to know about her son's too early entanglement, and to sanction it; but her course had this compensation, that when the youth was in trouble, now or later, he came to her and had the benefit of her experience.

She tried now to explain to him things that she didn't understand very well herself. No, she didn't think that Rosemary was heartless; it was evident that the girl had taken up the ideas of older women, who perhaps had suffered too much in a man's world, and had revoked from it and gone to extremes in the effort to protect themselves. Beauty told her son that kind and good people frequently had to suffer for those who were not so. Just so Kurt Meissner and other kind and good Germans might suffer for those cruel and arrogant ones who had dragged the nation into an awful calamity.

That was another problem with which Lanny wrestled frequently. Was Europe really going to be another Greece, and destroy itself by internecine wars? Would travelers some day come to Juan and to Cannes, and see the remains of lovely villas like Bienvenu and splendid palaces like Sept Chênes, and dig in the ruins and speculate concerning the lives of those who had built them, and the hostile fate which had driven them upon a course of self-destruction?

Lanny had written several times to Kurt, through the kind agency of the Jewish salesman of electrical gadgets, now engaged in buying from the United States such devices as magnetos for automobiles and airplanes, and reshipping them to Germany. Lanny wrote Kurt about the tenderness of Racine and the stern pride of Corneille and the moral sublimity of Sophocles; and Kurt replied that his friend was fortunate in being able to devote himself to these lofty themes. He, Kurt Meissner, was now taking up practical duties, and soon would be engaged in what he considered the most important work in the world. Lanny had no difficulty in understanding that his German friend was going into the war, and didn't wish, or perhaps wouldn't be allowed, to say where or when or how.

Lanny had to think of Kurt as fighting, and he had to do the same for Rick, who had finished his final year of school and was soon to have his heart's desire. “Sophocles is fine,” wrote the English youth on a post card, “but I am reading Blériot” — that being the type of airplane the British were using. Rick didn't say where he was, but Rosemary had brought news about him, and Lanny knew that his friend was in touch with that Captain Finchley whom they had met at the review on Salisbury Plain, and was expecting to go to the camp which this officer now commanded. Lanny knew that the training was intensive and quick, for the need of the Allies for young fliers was desperate. A cousin of Rosemary's had been sent out after only some twenty hours of practice flying, and on his very first flight in France had been shot down by a German outfit. Kurt and Rick were going to fight each other; and suppose they were to meet up in the air!

Lanny took upon himself the duty of serving, at least in his own thoughts, as mediator between these two. It was obvious that when such high-minded youths disagreed so bitterly, there must be truth on both sides and a middle ground where sooner or later they would have to meet. This cruel war must come to an end, and when it did, there would be needed a friend who could speak to both of them and bring them together again.

III

No easy matter to keep that attitude, surrounded as Lanny was with persons whose hatred of Germans kept heating itself up like a furnace fire. Lanny would try to make a compromise by saying that the German rulers were wicked men, while the poor German people were deceived; but his mother said, no, they were a bloodthirsty race, they rejoiced in the infliction of suffering; you could never have got English sailors to send ships to the bottom and leave women and children to drown. Lanny saw that it was useless to argue; he went on playing the music of Mozart and Beethoven, who spoke directly to his soul. He knew they were not bloodthirsty, and neither were the people who had loved and cherished them and made them part of a national tradition.

No, there was something wrong with the world's thinking, and the young fellow's expanding mind kept trying to find out what it was. He wished very much that he might have the help of his father, whom he had not seen for two years. He was often tempted to write and ask Robbie to come to him; but he remembered the deadly submarines lurking all around France and Britain, and he would write: “I'm getting along O.K., and we'll have a lot to talk about when this is over.”

Everybody was saying that it was bound to be over in a few months more. Never had wishes been father to so many thoughts. Each new offensive was going to be the final break-through; the Germans would be driven out of France, and the morale of the deceived people would crack. The German authorities kept saying the same thing, except that it was the French line that would crack, and Paris that would be taken. Both sides went on calling their young men, training them as fast as possible, and rushing them into the line; manufacturing enormous quantities of shetfs and using them in earth-shaking bombardments to prepare for infantry attacks. The battle of Ypres was opened by the British firing a hundred and ten million dollars' worth of ammunition.

The Germans had offered poison gas as their contribution to the progress of military science; and now it was the British turn to have a new idea. Early in the war an English officer had realized the impossibility of making infantry advances against machine guns, and had thought of some kind of steel fortress, heavy enough to be bulletproof, and moving on a caterpillar tread, so that it could go over shell holes and trenches. With a fleet of those to clean out machine-gun nests, it might at last be possible to restore the “war of movement.”

It was nearly a year before the British officer could get anything done about his idea; and when after another year it was tried, it wasn't tried thoroughly; there weren't enough tanks and they weren't used as he had planned. All that fitted in exactly with the picture of the British War Office which Robbie had sketched for his son long before the conflict started.

Since Lanny couldn't talk about these matters with his father, he took M. Rochambeau as a substitute. This fine and sensitive old gentleman represented a nation which had maintained its freedom for four hundred years in the heart of warring Europe. It was because of the mountains, he said; and also because they were so fortunate as not to have any gold or oil. M. Rochambeau had surveyed Europe from a high watchtower; he pointed out that most of the Swiss were German-speaking, and French and Germans there had learned to live together in peace, and some day Europe must profit by their example. There would have to be a federation of states like the Swiss cantons, with a central government having power to enforce law and order. This was a vital idea, and Lanny stowed it away among others which he would need.

IV

Three years had passed since Robert Budd had forbidden Lanny to talk with his Uncle Jesse Blackless, and during that period the painter had come perhaps half a dozen times to call upon his sister. When Lanny happened to encounter him, the boy said a polite “How do you do, Uncle Jesse?” and then betook himself elsewhere. He had no reason to be particularly interested in this rather odd-looking relative, and never thought about him except when he showed up. There were so many worthwhile things in the world that Lanny did no more than wonder vaguely what might be so shocking and dangerous about his uncle's ideas.

Jesse and Marcel knew each other. Marcel didn't think much of Jesse as a painter, but they had friends in common, and both were interested in what was going on in the art world. So now when the older man came he went down to Marcel's studio and sat for a while, and Lanny went fishing or swimming.

Did Robbie's prohibition against his son's talking with Uncle Jesse include also talking about him? It was a subtle point of law, which Lanny would have asked Robbie about if it had been possible. On one occasion, after Jesse had called, the stepfather remarked: “Your uncle and your father ought to meet each other now. They could get along much better.”

Lanny had to say something, so he asked: “How come?”

“They feel the same way about the war. Jesse can't see any difference at all between French and Germans.”

“I don't think that's exactly true of Robbie,” said the boy, hesitatingly — for he didn't like to talk about his father in this connection. He added: “I've never understood my uncle's ideas, but I know how Robbie despises them.”

“It's a case of extremes meeting, I suppose,” remarked the other. “Jesse is an out-and-out revolutionist. He blames all the trouble on big financiers trying to grab colonies and trade. He says they use the governments for their own purposes; they start wars when they want something, and stop them when they've got it.”

“Well, it looks like this one might have run away with them,” commented the boy.

“Jesse says not so,” replied the other. “He thinks the British oil men want Mesopotamia, and they've promised Constantinople to Russia, and Syria to France. Also they want to sink the German fleet. After that their oil will be safe, and they'll make peace.”

“Do you believe anything like that, Marcel?”

The voice that came from behind the white silk veil had a touch of grimness. “I'd hate having to think that I'd had my face burned off to help Royal Dutch Shell increase the value of its shares!”

V

Lanny wrote to his father: “I am finding it hard to think as you want me to.” And of course Robbie understood that. He had met Americans returned from France, and seen how bitter they were against the Germans; he knew how many of the young fellows had joined the French Foreign Legion, or the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of American fliers fighting for France. One day Lanny received a long typewritten letter from his father, postmarked Paris. He understood that it had been brought across by some friend or employee.

“If I were with you,” wrote the father, “I could answer all the things that people are telling you. As it is, I have to ask you to believe that I have the answers. You know that I have sources of information and do not say that I know something unless I do. I am making this emphatic because your happiness and indeed your whole future may be at stake, and I could never forgive myself if you were to get caught in the sticky flypaper which is now being set for the feet of Americans. If I thought there was any chance of this happening to you I would come at once and take you away.”

After that solemn preamble, the head of the European sales department of Budd Gunmakers went on to remind his son that this was a war of profits. “I am making them myself,” he said. “Budd's couldn't help making them unless we gave the plant away. People come and stuff them into our pockets. But I don't sell them the right to do my thinking for me.

“Germany is trying to break her way to the east, mainly to get oil, the first necessity of modern machine industry. There is oil in Rumania and the Caucasus, and more in Mesopotamia and Persia. Look up these places on the map, so as to know what I'm telling you. England, Russia, and France all have a share, while Germany has none. That's what all the shooting is about; and I am begging you to paste this up on your looking glass, or some place where you will see it every day. It's an oil man's war, and they are all patriotic, because if they lose the war they'll lose the oil. But the steel men and the coal men have worked out international cartels, so they don't have to be patriotic. They have ways of communicating across no man's land, and they do. I'm a steel man, and they talk to me, and so I get news that will never be printed.”

What the steel men were doing, Robbie explained, was selling to both sides, and getting the whole world into their debt. Robbie's own income for this year of 1916 would be five times what it had been before the war, and the profits of the biggest American powder and chemical concern would be multiplied by ten. “The gentleman whom you met with me in Monte Carlo is keeping very quiet nowadays; he doesn't want to attract attention to what he is doing, which is stuffing money into all the hiding places he can find. I would wager that his profits before this slaughter is over will be a quarter of a billion dollars. He has put himself in the same position as ourselves — he couldn't help making money if he wanted to.”

But that wasn't all. These international industrialists had taken entire charge of the war so far as their own properties were concerned. The military men were allowed to destroy whatever else they pleased, but nothing belonging to Krupp and Thyssen and Stinnes, the German munitions kings who had French connections and investments, or anything belonging to Schneider and the de Wendels, masters of the Comite des Forges, who had German connections and investments. Any army man who attempted to win the war by that forbidden method would be sent to some part of the fighting zone that was less dangerous for the steel kings and more dangerous for him.

Said the father: “I could tell you a hundred different facts which I know, and which all fit into one pattern. The great source of steel for both France and Germany is in Lorraine, called the Briey basin; get your map and look it up, and you will see that the battle line runs right through it. On one side the Germans are getting twenty or thirty million tons of ore every year and smelting it into steel, and on the other side the French are doing the same. On the French side the profits are going to Francois de Wendel, President of the Comite des Forges and member of the Chamber of Deputies; on the other side they are going to his brother Charles Wendel, naturalized German subject and member of the Reichstag. Those huge blast furnaces and smelters are in plain sight; but no aviators even tried to bomb them until recently. Then one single attempt was made, and the lieutenant who had charge of it was an employee of the Comite des Forges. Surprisingly, the attempt was a failure.”

Robbie went on to explain that the same thing was happening to the four or five million tons of iron ore which Germany was getting from Sweden; the Danish line which brought this ore to Germany had never lost a vessel, in that service or any other, and the Swedish railroads which carried the ore burned British coal. “If it hadn't been for this,” wrote the father, “Germany would have been out of the war a year ago. It's not too much to say that every man who died at Verdun, and everyone who has died since then, has been a sacrifice to those businessmen who own the newspapers and the politicians of France. That is why I tell you, if you are going to be patriotic, let it be for the American steel kings, of whom you may some day be one. Don't be patriotic for Schneider and the de Wendels, nor for Deterding, nor for Zaharoff!”

VI

Lanny kept that letter and studied it, and thought about it as hard as he knew how. He did not fail to note the curious thing that Marcel had commented upon, the similarity of his father's views with those of the outlawed uncle. The uncle and the father agreed upon the same set of facts, and they even drew the same conclusion — that nobody ought to be patriotic. The point where they split was that Robbie said you had to stuff your pockets, because you couldn't help it; whereas Uncle Jesse — Lanny wasn't sure what he wanted, but apparently it was to empty Robbie's pockets!

Lanny took this letter to his mother, and it threw her into a panic. Politics and high finance didn't mean much to her, but she thought about the effect of such news upon her husband, and made Lanny promise not to mention it to him. Just now he was putting the finishing touches on his “Sister of Mercy,” and was much absorbed in it. If the French weren't winning the war, at least they weren't losing it, so Marcel 'could be what his wife called “rational.” As it happened, it was in that Briey district that he had been sitting in a kite balloon, surveying those blast furnaces and smelters which were the source of the enemy's fighting power. He had been praying for the day when France might have enough planes to destroy them. If now the terrible idea was suggested to him that la patrie had the power, but was kept from using it by traitors, who could guess what frenzy might seize him?

So Lanny took the letter to his adviser in international affairs, M. Rochambeau. This old gentleman represented a small nation which was forced to buy its oil at market prices, and had never engaged in attempts to despoil its neighbors; therefore he could contemplate problems of high finance from the point of view of the eighth and tenth commandments. When Lanny expressed his bewilderment at the seeming agreement between his conservative father and his revolutionary uncle, the retired diplomat answered with his quiet smile that every businessman was something of a revolutionist, whether he knew it or not. Each demanded his profits, and sought the removal of any factor that menaced his trade or privileges.

Lanny, whose mind was questioning everything and wondering about his own relation to it, was thinking a great deal about whether he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and become the munitions king of America, or whether he wanted to play around with the arts. And now he heard this old gentleman, who knew the world and met it with suavity, point out the difference between business and art. One might look at a Rembrandt picture, or hear a Beethoven symphony, without depriving others of the privilege; but one couldn't become an oil king without taking oil away from others.

Said Lanny: “My father argues that the businessman creates wealth without limit.”

Replied the other: “The only thing that I have observed to be without limit is the businessman's desire for profits. He has to have raw materials, and he has to have patents, and if he has too many competitors, his profits vanish.”

“But Robbie argues that if he invents a machine gun” — the boy stopped suddenly, as if doubting his own argument.

“Every invention has an intellectual element,” conceded the other. “But the machine gun is obviously intended to limit the privileges and possessions of other men. Just now it is being used by the oil kings to make it impossible to get any oil except on their terms. And isn't that a sort of revolution?”

Having thus disposed of Robert Budd as a “Red,” the elderly ex-diplomat went on to deal with him as a pacifist; remarking, with the same gentle smile, that it had been long since kings were men of brawn, riding at the head of their retainers and splitting skulls with a battle-ax. The invention of machinery had produced a new kind of men, who sat in offices and dictated orders which put other men at work. If they felt that their interests required war they would have it; but they themselves would remain safe.

“Do you know any Latin?” asked M. Rochambeau; and when the answer was no, he quoted a verse of the poet Ovid, beginning: “Let others make war.” The old gentleman suggested that these words might serve one of the great munitions families on its coat of arms. “Bella gerant alii!” He was too polite to name the Budd family, but Lanny got the point, and reflected that if his father had heard this conversation, he might have put M. Rochambeau on the prohibited list along with Uncle Jesse!

VII

Rosemary was back in England, and wrote now and then, letters cool and casual as herself. “I enjoyed our meeting so much,” she said — just like that! You could hear Miss Noggyns or some other of those feminist ladies telling her: “Don't take it too seriously. That's the way women are made to suffer. Let the men do the suffering!”

So Lanny learned his own lessons. Don't wear your heart on your sleeve; don't make yourself too cheap. Among the fashionable young people at Juan was an American girl who gave evidence of being willing to console him; she was pretty, and svelte, as they all kept themselves, and her silks and satins and lawns and what not were cut to the latest pattern; she cast seductive glances at a handsome playmate, just emerged into manhood and conscious of it, blushing easily, and with strange messages flashing along his nerves. The world was at war, and nothing was certain, and young and old were learning to take their pleasures as they found them.

But Lanny had dreams of shining and wonderful things in love. He thought it over, and told his mother about this too willing miss, and Beauty asked: “Is she interested in what you are thinking? Does she say anything that appeals to you especially?” When the boy admitted that she hadn't so far, Beauty said: “Then what will you talk about? How will you keep from being bored?”

So he would go off and lose himself in his piano practice. He could find highly exciting things in music and poetry. His anthology contained a poem by Bobby Burns, who spoke with authority concerning sexual prodigality: “But, och! it hardens a' within, An' petrifies the feelin'.” Lanny resolved to wait awhile, and maybe Rosemary would find that she missed him more than she had expected.

She wrote about Rick, who had finished his training and left for France. He had had two days' leave and had come home, looking splendid in his khaki uniform. He had been so happy at getting what he wanted. Not a word about sadness in going away, and Lanny understood that there hadn't been many words — that was the English way. “Cheerio! Business as usual!”

A few days later a card came from Rick himself. No address on it, except the number of his unit in the Royal Flying Corps. “Fine setup here. Wish I could write you all about it. Jolly lot of fellows. Hope I can keep up with them. Write me the news. How's old Sophocles? And when are the Americans coming in? Rick.”

Lanny could picture these jolly fellows in their camp a few miles behind the lines. It would be about the same as the one he had visited on the rolling Salisbury Plain. Eager young chaps with cheeks of bright red; smooth-shaven, except for now and then a dapper little mustache; no “side,” provided you belonged in the right class; taking whatever came with a laugh; willing to die a hundred deaths but not to shed one tear. The English magazines were full of pictures of them, some smiling, some grave, all handsome; each with a string of old English names: “Lieutenant Granville Fortescue Somers, R.F.C. Killed in action, Vimy. Oct. 17, 1916.” So it went.

VIII

There was mourning all around Lanny Budd; women in black everywhere on the streets. Women in terror, trembling every time they heard a knock at the door; afraid to look at a newspaper with its stories of wholesale slaughter. Poor Sophie de la Tourette was visiting Sept Chênes to help re-educate the victims; not really caring much about them, but feeling that she had to do something, because Eddie was doing something, everybody was doing it, you had to or you'd go crazy.

Letters came from the ambulance driver; his baroness brought them to Beauty, and Lanny had a chance to read them. The exciting occupation was having an unexpected effect upon a rather dull young American whose only previous achievements had been in billiard matches and motorboat races. He wanted Sophie to share his adventures, and wrote quite vivid prose.

He was sleeping in a half-demolished barn, and the French peasants' manure pile had become a leading feature of his life, the least unpleasant of the smells of war. He was living on bully beef, and a can of chicken from Chicago made a holiday. In front of him were the French trenches, and behind him the French artillery, and he tried to count the number of shots per minute, but it couldn't be done because they overlapped. You were on duty for a twenty-four-hour stretch, and the ambulance would be ordered out at any moment of the day or night. You drove without lights, in mud anywhere from three inches to three feet deep, and you heard all the familiar jokes about seeing a cap lying in the road and stooping to pick it up, and finding that there was a man under it, walking to town, or perhaps riding horseback. Keeping an ambulance right side up on such a road was really a lot of fun, and trying to see the shell holes at night made you wish you had a pet cat along. Sometimes the shell holes were made especially for your ambulance, and that was something you made bets about with your brancardier. You wore a helmet, “just in case.”

“Have you seen Old Bill?” inquired Eddie, and enclosed one of Captain Bairnsfather's cartoons, with which the English at the front were teaching themselves to laugh at calamity. “Old Bill” was a Cockney with a large mustache and a serious expression; he was shown crouching in a shell hole with bombs going off all around him, and saying to his companion, angrily: “Well, if you knows of a better 'ole, go to it.” And there was the elderly colonel who had come home for a brief leave and found that he couldn't get along outside the trenches. He had had one dug in his garden, and was sitting out in it on a rainy night, half covered with water, and with an umbrella over his head.

That was the sporting way to take war. The Americans living in France became ashamed of themselves and of their country. You just couldn't stay amid all that grief and desperate agony, and go on playing cards and dancing, going to the dressmaker and the hairdresser as you had done in the old days. It grew harder and harder for Lanny, and now and then he would find himself thinking: “I'll have to ask Robbie to turn me loose.”

He helped himself a little by reading German books and playing German music, and remembering Kurt and the other warmhearted people he had met at Schloss Stubendorf. He hadn't heard from Kurt for quite a while, and could only wonder, did it mean that he had gone to the front and been killed, or had he too become disgusted with Americans — because they didn't do anything to stop the Allied blockade which was starving the women and children of the Fatherland? Lanny wrote another letter, in care of Mr. Robin, and received a reply from the oldest of the two little Robins:

“Dear Mister Lanny Budd: My papa has maled the letter that you sended. I am lerning to right the English but not so good. I have the picture that you sended my papa and feel that I know you and hope that I meat you when no more it is war. Yours respectful Hansi Robin. P.S. I am twelve and I practice now Beethoven's D-major romance for violin.”

IX

The end of the year 1916 was a time of bitter discouragement for the Allied cause. Rumania had come into the war and been conquered. Russia was practically out, and Italy had accomplished little. The French armies were discouraged by having been too many times marched into barbed-wire entanglements and mowed down by machine guns. And on top of all that came the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. The German high command had made up their minds that even if America came in, the destruction of Allied commerce would be so great that Britain would be brought to her knees before America could do anything effective. At the end of January notice was given that all shipping in British and French waters, and in the Mediterranean, was subject to attack without warning. In January the total destruction of shipping was 285 000 tons; in the following April it rose to 852 000.

It was plain to everybody that Britain could not stand that rate of loss, and the American people had to face the question whether they were willing to see the British Empire replaced by a German one. At least everybody whom Lanny knew said that was the question, and no use fooling yourself. The youth found it a hard problem to think about, and wished more than ever to have his father at hand. He read bits of the speeches which President Wilson made, and the notes which he wrote to the German government, and it seemed to him that the only way he could comply with his father's orders was to start a new and determined campaign of sight reading at the piano.

The U-boats began sinking American ships; and then came the publication of an intercepted letter from the German government, inviting the Mexicans to enter the war on the German side, and promising them a handsome reward, including Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. That helped Americans to understand what the war was about, and there was a general movement of the country to get ready.

An exciting time for Americans in France, and for none more than Lanny. Would his father expect him to be neutral now? Or was he going to be free to feel the way everybody else did, and the way he wanted to — or at least thought he wanted to? Kurt Meissner seemed farther away, and the voices of Mozart and Beethoven grew fainter; France was all around, and its questioning was incessant: “Why don't you Americans help us?” Lanny heard it so often that he didn't' go out any more, but became a sort of youthful hermit, swimming and fishing by himself, and reading books about other times and places. He wrote his father concerning these troubles, and added: “Tell me if America is coming in, and if so what I am to do.”

Then one day late in March came a cablegram — one of the old-style ones such as Lanny had not received for more than two years and a half. “Sailing for Paris tomorrow wish you to join me there will wire upon arrival Robert Budd.”

I

LANNY spent a whole week thinking about submarines. It was the time when the German campaign reached its high point; they were sinking thirty thousand tons a day, and one of every four vessels which left the British Isles never returned. Lanny didn't have to imagine a submarine rising from the sea — he had seen it. From eyewitnesses he had heard how torpedoes exploded, and people rushed into lifeboats, and men gave their lives to save women and children. Robbie was the sort of man who would do that, and Lanny felt as if he were tossing a coin every hour for his father's life.

At last a telegram from Le Havre. Thank God, he was on land! He was writing; and next day Lanny received the most important letter of his young life. Robbie was proposing to take him to Connecticut!

“I think the time has come when you ought to know your own country,” wrote the father. “It appears certain that we are going into the war, and whatever part you take ought to be in America. My wife invites you to stay with us this summer; I will get you a tutor and you will study hard, and be able to enter prep school this fall and get ready for college.” That meant Yale, which was Robbie's own college, and that of his forefathers for a hundred years or more.

There was a letter for Beauty also. Robbie hoped she would agree with him that a lad ought to have a chance to know his own people. Beauty had now had him to herself for thirty-two months — Robbie had an arithmetical mind. He said that if the war lasted, it would be better for Lanny to be in Connecticut, where Robbie could arrange for him to render service in the production of munitions. “You may put your mind at ease on one subject,” he wrote. “Lanny will not go into the trenches. He is too valuable to me, and I will be valuable to the government.” Bella gerant alii!

“What do you want to do?” asked the mother, after they had shared these letters.

“Well, of course, I'd like to see America,” said the youth; and the mother's heart sank. Such a lovely safe nest she had made here, but of course he wouldn't stay in it; the last thing in the world that men wanted appeared to be safety.

“I suppose I'll have to give you up,” she said. “The cards are all stacked against a woman.”

“Don't worry, Beauty, I'll take good care of myself, and come back when the war's over. I don't think I'll want to live anywhere but here.”

“You'll meet some girl over there, and she'll tell you what to do.”

“I'm going to get tough,” replied the boy; but he didn't look it.

“I knew this had to come, Lanny. But I hoped Robbie would wait till the sea was safe.”

“Plenty of people are getting through; and he and I are pretty good swimmers.” Lanny thought for a moment, then added: “I wonder what he's going to do about telling his friends the bad news about me.”

“He told his wife about us both before they were married. I imagine he'll tell other people that you're his son, and let it go at that. Don't let it worry you.”

“If anybody doesn't want me around,” said the boy, “I can always go somewhere else. Shall you miss me too terribly, Beauty?”

“It'll be all right if I know you're happy. I ought to tell you a bit of news that I've just learned — I'm going to have a baby.”

“Oh, gosh!” A wide smile spread over Lanny's face. “That's grand, Beauty! It will tickle Marcel, won't it?”

“Frenchmen are like that,” she answered.

“ALL men are, aren't they?” After a while he inquired: “Was it another accident, or did you decide to do it?”

“Marcel and I decided.”

“It's a grand place to bring up a child, Beauty — I can tell you that.” He kissed her on both cheeks until she cried with happiness and sorrow mingled.

II

It seemed cruel that a youth should be so excited at the idea of leaving his mother; but he couldn't help it, and she understood. To be with Robbie in Paris, and travel on a great steamer, and see that city of New York which he knew from motion pictures, and the marvelous plant of Budd's, the economic foundation of his life. It was a center of his imaginings, a forge of Vulcan a million times magnified, a Fafnir and Fasolt cave where monstrous forces were generated. And to meet that mysterious family, so many of them that you couldn't keep their names straight, and all different and queer. Robbie didn't often talk about them, but behaved as if they were a dark secret. Or perhaps it was Lanny who was the dark secret!

He packed the few things he would take with him; that required only a couple of hours, and he was ready to go on the evening train. Beauty broke down and wept — it was such short notice. He was a mother's darling; and who else would love him as she had? The world was cruel, so many wicked people in it, women especially — she understood their hearts, the cold and selfish ones, the gold diggers, the harpies! So many things she ought to have taught him, and now it was too late, he couldn't remember them; he was crazy with eagerness to get out into that world which seemed to her so full of pain. She gave him many warnings, extracted many promises — and all the time aware that she was boring him a little.

Lanny had a good-by talk with Marcel, and this was more to the point. Marcel had left his family, respectable bourgeois in a provincial town; they had wanted him to be a lawyer, perhaps a judge, and instead he had come to Paris to dab paint on canvas. They gave him a small allowance, but didn't pretend to like his work. “You are lucky,” Marcel said; “your parents are sympathetic, they'll stand by you even if you don't succeed. But don't be surprised if you don't like your relatives. Don't bare your heart to the hawks.”

“What makes you say that?” asked the boy, puzzled.

“Rich people are pretty much the same all over the world. They believe in money, and if you don't make money they think there's something wrong with you. If you don't see life as they do, they take it as a criticism, and right away you're an outsider. If I were taking you to meet my family, that's how I'd have to warn you.”

“Well, I'll write and let you know what I find, Marcel.”

“If you like it, all right. I'm just putting you on guard. You've had a happy life so far, everything has been easy — but it can hardly be like that all the way through.”

“Anyhow,” remarked the boy, “Robbie says that America's going to help France.”

“Tell them to hurry,” replied the painter. “My poor country is bleeding at every vein.”

III

Lanny was seventeen, and had grown nearly a foot in those thirty-two months since he had seen his father. For many youths it is an awkward age, but he was strongly knit, brown with sunshine and red with well-nourished blood. He came running from the train to welcome Robbie, and there was something in the sight of him which made the man's heart turn over. Flesh of my flesh-but better than I am, without my scars and my painful secrets! So Robbie thought, as the lad seized him and kissed him on both cheeks. There was a trace of down on Lanny's lips, light brown and soft; his eyes were clear and his look eager.

He wanted to know everything about his father in the first moment. That grand rock of a man, that everybody could depend on; he would solve all the problems, relieve all the anxieties — all in the first moment! Robbie looked just the same as ever; he was in his early forties, and his vigor was still unimpaired; whatever clouds might be in his moral sky showed no trace. He looked handsome in brown tweeds, with tie and shoes to match; Lanny, whose suit was gray, decided at once that he would look better in brown.

“Well, what do you think about the war?” The first question every man asked then.

The father looked grave immediately. “We're going in; not a doubt of it.”

“And are you going to support it?”

“What can I do? What can anybody do?”

It was nearing the end of March. Relations with Germany had been severed for many weeks, and President Wilson had declared a state of what he called “armed neutrality.” America was going to arm its merchant vessels, and in the meantime Germany was going on sinking them, day after day. Shipping was delayed, the vessels in American harbors were afraid to venture out.

“What can we do?” repeated Robbie. “The only alternative is to declare an embargo, and abandon our European trade entirely.”

“What would that do?”

“It would bring a panic in a week. Budd's would have to shut down, and throw twenty thousand men out of work.”

Driving to their hotel in a horse-drawn cab, Robbie explained this situation. A large-scale manufacturing enterprise was geared to a certain schedule. A quantity of finished goods came off the conveyors every day, and was boxed and put into freight cars or trucks — or, in the case of Budd's, which had its own river frontage, onto ships. Vessels were loaded and moved away, making room for others. If for any reason that schedule was interrupted, the plant would be blockaded, because its warehouses could hold only a few days' output. The same thing would happen at the other end, because raw materials came on a fixed schedule — they had been ordered and had to be taken and paid for, but there was place to store only a limited supply; they were supposed to go through the plant and be moved on.

That, said Robbie, was the situation not merely with steel mills and munitions plants, but with meat packing and flour milling, making boots and saddles, automobiles and trucks, anything you could think of. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, American business had geared itself to the task of supplying the need of the nations of Europe. American finance had geared itself to taking and marketing their bonds. If all this were suddenly stopped, there would be such a breakdown as had never been known in the world before — “ten or twenty million men out of work,” declared the representative of Budd Gunmakers Corporation.

Lanny had heard many persons express disapproval of those who were making money out of this war; Kurt, and Rick, and Beauty, Sophie, Marcel, and M. Rochambeau. But when he listened to his father, all that vanished like mist before the morning sun. He saw right away that things had to be like this; if you were going to have machinery, and produce goods on a big scale, you had to do it in a fixed way. The artists and dreamers and moralists were just talking about things they didn't understand.

At least that was the way it seemed until Lanny got off by himself. Then he began to have troubles in his thinking. Robbie was all for Budd's, and defended the right of Budd's to get all the business it could, and to keep its workers employed. But Robbie didn't like Zaharoff, and had a tendency to resent the business that Vickers got. Robbie blamed Schneider-Creusot because it sold goods to neutral countries which resold them to Germany; he objected to the French de Wendels' protecting their properties in Germany. But suppose that Budd's had owned plants in Germany — wouldn't Robbie be trying to take care of them, and pointing out the harm it would do if they were bombed?

In short, wasn't there as much to be said for one set of businessmen as for another? As much for Germans as for British or French or Americans? Lanny felt in duty bound to be fair to his friend Kurt, and to Kurt's family who had been so kind to him. He could not forget having heard Herr Meissner using these very same arguments about the need of German manufacturers to get raw materials and to win foreign markets, in order to keep their workers employed and their plants running on schedule. It was extremely puzzling; but Lanny didn't say much about it, because for two years and a half he had been learning to keep his ideas to himself. In wartime it appeared that nobody wanted to see both sides of any question.

IV

Of course the father and son didn't spend all their time discussing world politics. Lanny had to tell about Beauty and Marcel; about the painter's wounds, and his way of life, and his work; about the new baby they were going to have, on purpose — a somewhat rare event nowadays, so Robbie remarked. And about Sophie and her Eddie Patterson and his ambulance driving; about Mrs. Emily and Les Forêts, and old M. Priedieu and how he had died; about Sept Chênes, and the war victims who were being re-educated, including Lanny's gigolo, who would never jig again. And about Mr. Robin, and the letters to Kurt, and the little Robins, and the Jews, and didn't Robbie like them, and why not? And about Rosemary — a large subject in herself; and Rick and his flying — as soon as Lanny learned that he was to have a few days in Paris he got off a card to Rick, on the chance that he might be able to get a day's leave and visit his friend.

Robbie would ask questions, and Lanny would think of details he had left out. There was Marcel's painting; he was getting better and better, everybody agreed; he was doing an old peasant woman who grew roses on the Cap, and had lost three sons, one after another, and it showed in her face, and still more in the portrait that Marcel was making of her. The one he had done of Beauty, called “Sister of Mercy,” was to be shown at a salon in the Petit Palais, and one of the things Lanny wanted to do was to find out about it. If Robbie went to view it he would find a new woman, one much more serious, and really sad. “Of course she's not that way all the time,” added the boy; “but that's how Marcel sees things. He can't forgive fate for what it's done to his face — nor for what it's doing to France.”

Robbie also had things to tell. For the most part they had to do with business; for he was not one of those persons who have states of soul which require explanation. He had been making money hand over fist, and it kept him in good humor; he found it pleasant, not only for himself, but for many other people. He was troubled because Lanny's wants were so modest in that regard; he seemed to think they ought to celebrate their réunion by buying something handsome. The only thing Lanny could think of was one of Marcel's paintings to take to America. But Robbie didn't think that would be such a good idea — no use to say anything about a stepfather right at the outset!

Lanny told how seriously Beauty was taking the re-education of the mutilés, and so Robbie sent her a check for a couple of thousand dollars, telling her she might use it for that purpose if she pleased. He added a friendly message for Mrs. Emily, knowing that Beauty would take it to her; in this way the money would win credit for Beauty with that socially powerful lady. Robbie explained this procedure, so that his son might learn how to make his way in the world. No use to have money unless you knew how to use it, and how to handle people. There were some to whom you gave it with a careless gesture, and others to whom you doled it out carefully.

Robbie remarked with a smile that there had been personal reasons for his opposition to America's entering the war; Budd's would now begin manufacturing for the United States government, and Robbie would get no commissions on that. “It will be a great satisfaction to my brother Lawford,” he added. “It has pained him to see me making more money than himself.”

Lanny was going to meet this brother, so the time had come for Robbie to tell about him. “He will be polite to you, but don't expect him to be anything more, because nature hasn't made him that way. He's all right if you let him alone; but unfortunately I haven't — not since the day I was born, and attracted too much attention in the nursery. I was better-looking than he, and mother made too much fuss over me.”

Robbie spoke playfully, but made it plain that there was something of a feud between his older brother and himself. When Robbie had come of age, he had offered to learn the selling end of the business, and the father had given him a chance, working on commission, plus an expense account. This latter had made much trouble, because Lawford objected to one item or another; when Robbie lost money to Captain Bragescu, his brother called it paying his gambling debts at the company's expense!

“And then came this war,” said Robbie. “That was my good fortune, but surely not my fault. It resulted in my having an income two or three times his own — and he works hard running the plant, while I don't have to do another lick of work in my life unless I feel like it.”

V

Just before Lanny left the Riviera a world-shaking event took place — the Russian revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar. Everybody was speculating as to what it meant, and what would be its effect upon the war. Most people in France believed it would help the Allies; the Russians would fight harder, now that they were free. But Robbie said that Russia was out, because of graft, incompetence, and the breakdown of her railroads. He said that freight had been landed from hundreds of steamers at Archangel in the far north, and at Vladivostok on the Pacific, and there was no way to get it to the war zones. Tens of millions of dollars' worth of goods was piled along the railroad tracks for miles, without more than a single tarpaulin to cover the boxes. Included in the stacks were Budd machine guns, and of course they were rusting and would soon be useless; meanwhile the Russian peasant-soldiers were expected to defend themselves with clubs and march to the attack with five men to one rifle.

“What is going to happen,” said Robbie, “is breakdown and chaos; the country may be pillaged, or the Germans may take it. The German troops will be moved to the west, and may well be in Paris before the Americans can raise an army or get it across the ocean. That is what the German General Staff is reckoning on.”

The father revealed the purpose which had brought him to Europe. The War Department of the United States government had sent an emissary to the president of Budd's, asking him to consider proposals for the licensing of Budd patents to various firms such as Vickers and Schneider, which were working day and night making munitions for the Allied governments. Under such licenses they would be permitted to make Budd machine guns, Budd anti-aircraft guns, and so on, paying a royalty to be agreed upon. If America should enter the war, Budd's itself would no longer be in position to manufacture for European nations, and it was desirable that our Allies should have the benefit of Yankee ingenuity and skill.

This question of patent licensing had been a subject of controversy inside the Budd organization for years. Foreign governments were always proposing it, offering handsome royalties. Robbie had opposed the policy, while Lawford had favored it, and each had labored to persuade the father to his point of view. The older brother insisted that it was dangerous to expand the plant any further; they would have to borrow money — and then some day the pacifists would impose a scheme of disarmament, Budd's wouldn't be able to meet its obligations, and some Wall Street banking syndicate would gobble it up. Robbie, on the other hand, argued that European manufacturers would make the most generous offers and sign on as many dotted lines as you prepared for them; but who was going to watch them, and know how many shell fuses they really made?

Lanny got from this a clearer realization of the situation between his father and his oldest uncle. The uncle was morose and jealous, and a dispute which had begun in the nursery had been transferred to the office of the company. Lawford opposed everything that Robbie advocated, and attributed selfish motives to him; as for Robbie, he seemed convinced that the chief motive of the brother's life was not to let Robbie have his way in anything. Now the War Department had stepped in and given Lawford a victory. Licenses would be issued to several European munitions firms, and in order to salve Robbie's feelings, his father had sent him to do the negotiating.

VI

Robbie telephoned to the home of Basil Zaharoff, which was on the Avenue Hoche. Lanny was in the room and heard one-half the conversation; the munitions king said something which caused Robbie to smile, and reply: “Yes, but he's not so little now.” Robbie turned his eyes on Lanny as he listened. “Very well,” he said. “He'll be happy to come, I'm sure.”

The father hung up the receiver and remarked: “The old devil asked if I had that very intelligent little boy with me. He says to bring you along. Want to go?”

“Do I!” exclaimed the intelligent little boy. “But what does he want with me?”

“Don't let your vanity be flattered. We've got something he wants, and he'd like to make it a social matter, not one of business. Watch him and see how an old Levantine trader works.”

“Doesn't he have an office?” inquired the boy.

“His office is where he happens to be. People find it worth while to come to him.”

Lanny dressed for this special occasion, and late in the afternoon of a day which promised spring they drove to 53, Avenue Hoche, just off the Parc Monceau. It was one of a row of stately houses, with nothing to make it conspicuous; a home for a gentleman who didn't want to attract attention to himself, but wanted to stay hidden and work out plans to appeal to other men's fears and greeds. A discreet and velvet-footed man in black opened the door, and escorted them into the reception room, which had furniture and paintings in excellent taste — no doubt the duquesa's. Presently they were invited to a drawing room on the second floor, where the first thing they saw was an elaborate silver tea service ready for action. The windows were open, and a soft breeze stirred the curtains, and birds sang in trees just outside. Presently the munitions king entered, looking grayer and more worn — one does not make a quarter of a billion dollars without some cares.

He had hardly finished greeting them when a lady entered behind him. Had she heard the story of the boy who had had such an odd idea about helping his father's business? Or was it the special importance of the contracts which Robert Budd was bringing? Anyhow, here she came, and Zaharoff said: “The Duquesa de Villafranca,” with a tone of quiet pride. The duquesa bowed but did not give her hand; she said, very kindly: “How do you do, Messieurs?” and seated herself at the tea table.

She had been only seventeen when she had met this munitions salesman, and they had been waiting twenty-seven years for her lunatic husband to die. She was a rather small and inconspicuous person, gracious, but even more reserved than her companion. His blue eyes were watching the visitors, and her dark eyes for the most part watched him. She had the olive complexion of a Spaniard, and wore a teagown of purple, with a double rope of pearls nearly to her waist. “You have had a dangerous journey, M. Budd,” she remarked.

“Many men are facing danger these days, Madame,” replied Robbie.

“Do you think that your country will help us to end this dreadful war?”

“I think so; and if we come in, we shall do our best.”

“It will have to be done quickly,” put in the munitions king; to which Robbie answered that large bodies took time to get in motion, but when they moved, it was with force.

They talked about the military situation. Zaharoff set forth the extreme importance to civilization of overcoming the German menace. He told about what he had done to set up Venizelos in Greece and bring that country in on the side of the Allies; he didn't say how much money he had spent, but that he had moved heaven and earth.

“Greece is my native land,” he said. “Love of Greece has been the first passion of my life, and hatred of Turkish cruelty and fanaticism has been the second.” As he talked about these matters his voice trembled a little, and Lanny thought, was all that playacting? If so, it was a remarkable performance. But Robbie told him afterward that it was genuine; the munitions king did really hate the Turks, and had spent millions buying newspapers and politicians, pulling wires against King Constantine and his German wife. Zaharoff had gone in for oil, and wanted Mesopotamia for his British companies. He used his money for things which the Allied governments wanted done, but which were too discreditable for them to do directly.

VII

Presently they were talking about President Wilson, who had said that Americans were “too proud to fight,” and had been reelected with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Robbie explained the Presbyterian temperament, which would find some high moral basis for whatever it decided to do, and would then do it under divine direction. Now this President was talking about “war for democracy,” and Zaharoff asked if that was supposed to be a moral slogan.

Robbie replied: “The founders of our nation didn't believe in democracy, M. Zaharoff, but it is supposed to be good politics now.”.

“Well, I should want to write the definition somewhat carefully.” The old man smiled one of those strange smiles, in which his watchful eyes never took part.

“It is playing with fire,” said the other, unsmiling. “We have seen in Russia what it may lead to, and not even Wilson wishes the war to end that way.”

“God forbid!” exclaimed the munitions king; and no one could doubt the sincerity of that.

When you are having a lady of ancient lineage to pour tea for you, it is necessary to pay some attention to her. So presently Robbie remarked: “That is a lovely tea service you have, Duquesa.”

“It is an heirloom of my family,” replied Maria del Pilar Antonia Angela Patrocino Simon de Muguiro y Berute, Duquesa de Marqueni y Villafranca de los Caballeros.

“I had a gold one,” put in the host. “But I have given it to the government, to help save the franc.”

Was there just the trace of a frown on the gentle visage of the Spanish king's cousin? She had been laboring for a quarter of a century to make a gentleman out of a Levantine trader; and perhaps it cannot be done in one lifetime; perhaps in the midst of wars and revolutions one must excuse lapses from a much-burdened mind.

After they had had their tea, the old man remarked: “And now about that matter of business, Mr. Budd.”

The hostess rose. “I am sure you gentlemen don't want an audience for your conference,” she said; and added sweetly to Lanny: “Wouldn't you like to come and see my beautiful tulips?”

Of course Lanny went, and so lost his chance to observe the old trader in action. He was taken into a fine garden, and introduced to a pair of snow-white poodles, beautifully groomed and shaved to resemble lions. He learned about the tulips, which were just unfolding their beauties: the bizarres, which are yellow marked with purple and red; the bybldemen, which are white marked with violet or purple; also a new kind from Turkestan. The Dutch people had cultivated them for centuries, and once they had been the basis of a great financial boom.

“Do you really love flowers?” asked the duquesa; and Lanny told about Bienvenu, and the court full of daffodils and bougainvillaea where he did his reading. He was used to ladies with titles, and not awed by them. He suspected that one who had the munitions king for a companion didn't feel entirely safe or happy, so he was moved to be kind. He mentioned Mrs. Emily, and found that the duquesa knew her, and had aided her war work; so Lanny told what she was doing at Sept Chênes, and added the story of M. Pinjon, the gigolo, which the duquesa found sympathique. She remarked that she would like to send a present to that poor man; since he played the flute, perhaps he might like to have a good one.

Time passed, and the two men of business did not appear. Lanny didn't want to be a nuisance to his hostess, who must have other things to do than to entertain a casually met youth. He told her he was used to getting along by himself, and she offered to take him to the library. He had seen many large rooms in fine homes, having walls lined with volumes de luxe which were rarely touched save to be dusted. The munitions king's were all behind glass, but on the table were magazines, and he said he would be happy with those. So the gentle lady excused herself. Lanny understood that she was far too rich to ask him to call again; and besides, maybe this was all just a matter of business, as Robbie had said!

VIII

At last the two emerged from their conference; both suave as ever — but you couldn't tell anything from that. The father and son strolled down the street, and Lanny said: “Well, what happened?”

Robbie answered, with one of his grins: “I thought he was going to cry, but he didn't quite.”

“Why should he cry?” The boy knew that he was supposed to be naive, so that his father would have the fun of telling it.

“I hurt his feelings by suggesting that we should require observers in the Vickers plants, to check their production under our licenses.”

“Is he going to let you?”

“He said it was a very serious matter to admit strangers to a munitions factory in wartime. I answered that they wouldn't be strangers very long; he would know how to become acquainted with them.” Robbie began to laugh; he enjoyed nothing more than such a battle over property rights — especially when he held the good cards close to his chest. “They really need our patents,” he said; “and, believe me, they won't get them without paying. Why should they?”

Lanny didn't know any reason, and said so.

“Well, the old devil thought he knew a number of them. He was horrified at the schedule of royalties I put before him; he said he had been given to understand that America wanted to help the Allies, not to bleed them to death, or drive them to bankruptcy. I said I hadn't heard of any bankruptcies among the hundred and eighty Vickers companies in England, or the two hundred and sixty of them abroad. He said they had cut their prices to the bone as a patriotic duty to the British and French governments. I told him it was generally understood that his companies were getting the full twenty percent profit allowed them by British law.

You can see it wasn't a conversation for a duquesa to hear. Was she nice to you?”

“Very,” said Lanny. “I liked her.”

“Oh, sure,” said the father. “But you can't like the consort of a wolf beyond a certain point.”

Lanny saw that his father was not going to like Basil Zaharoff under any circumstances. He said so, and Robbie replied that a wolf didn't want to be liked; what he wanted was to eat, and when it was a question of dividing up food with him, you had to have a sharp-pointed goad in hand. “We have paid out good American money, financing inventions and perfecting complicated machines. We're not going to give those secrets to Zaharoff, not even in return for a tea party and a smile from a duquesa. We're going to have our share of the profits, paid right on the barrel-head, and I'm sent here to tell him so, and to put before him a contract which our lawyers have constructed like a wolf trap. I said that very politely, but in plain language.”

“And what did you decide?”

“Oh, I left him the contracts, and he'll weep over them tonight, and tomorrow morning I'm to see his French factotum, Pietri, and he'll plead and argue, and demand this change and that, and I'll tell him to take it as it's written, or the Allies can get along with a poorer grade of machine guns.”

“Will they, Robbie?”

“Just stick by me the next few days, son, and learn how we businessmen pull wires. If they turn down my contracts, I know half a dozen journalists in Paris and London who will make a story out of it for a reasonable fee. I can find a way to have the merits of the Budd products brought to the attention of a dignified and upright member of Parliament, who wouldn't take a bribe for anything, but will endeavor to protect his country against the greed of munitions magnates and the bungling of War Office bureaucrats.”

IX

Robbie's next conference was with Bub Smith, the ex-cowboy with the broken nose who had come down to Juan three or four years previously and demonstrated the Budd automatic for Captain Bragescu. Bub had given up his job in Paris to work for Robbie, and had made a couple of trips to America in spite of the submarines. It was he who had brought letters for Lanny into France.

Now Robbie told his son that Bub had proved himself an “ace” at confidential work, and was going to have the job of keeping track of the lessees of Budd patents. “Of course Zaharoff himself is a man of honor,” said Robbie, with a smile. “But there's always the possibility that some of the men who run his companies might be tempted to try tricks. Bub is to watch the French plants for me.”

“Can one man keep track of them all?” asked the youth.

“I mean that he'll be the one to watch the watchers.”

Robbie went on to explain that it wasn't possible to carry on an industry without workers; and there were always some of these glad to give information in exchange for a pourboire. Bub would build an organization for knowing what was going on in munitions factories.

“Isn't it a rather dangerous job?” asked Lanny. “I mean, mayn't they take him for a spy?”

“He'll have a letter from me, and the embassy will identify him.”

“And won't the munitions people find out about him?”

“Oh, sure. They know we're bound to watch them.”

“That won't hurt their feelings?”

Robbie was amused. “In our business you don't have feelings — you have cash.”

I

A TELEPHONE call for Lanny at the Crillon. He answered, and let out a whoop. “Where are you? Oh, glory! Come right up.” He hung up the receiver. “It's Rick! He got leave!” Lanny rushed out to the lift, to wait for his friend; grabbed him and hugged him, then held him off at arm's length and examined him. “Gee, Rick, you look grand!”

The young flying officer had grown to man's stature. His khaki uniform was cut double in front, making a sort of breastplate of cloth; on the left breast was a white badge, indicating that he had a flying certificate, and high up on both sleeves were eagle wings. His skin was bronzed and his cheeks rosy; flying hadn't hurt him. With his wavy black hair cut close and a brown service cap on top he was a handsome fellow; and so happy over this visit — they were going to see Paris together, and Paris was the world!

“Gee, Rick, how did you manage it?”

“I had done some extra duty, so I had it coming.”

“How long have you got?”

“Till tomorrow night.”

“And how is it, Rick?”

“Oh, not so bad.”

“You've been fighting?”

“I've got two boches that I'm sure of.”

“You havent been hurt?”

“I had one spill — turned over in mud; but fortunately it was soft.”

Lanny led him to the room, and Robbie was glad to see him, of course; he set up the drinks, and Rick took one — they all drank in the air force, too much, he said, it was the only way they could keep going. Lanny drank soda, but said nothing about it. He sat, devouring that gallant figure with his eyes; so proud of his friend, thinking that he, Lanny, would never do anything as exciting and wonderful as that; his father wouldn't let him, his father wanted him to stay at home and make munitions for other men to use. But at least he could hear about it, and live it vicariously. He asked a stream of questions, and Rick answered casually, not much about himself, but about the squadron and what they were doing.

Of course Rick knew what was in his younger friend's mind, the adoration, the hero-worship; and of course it pleased him. But he wouldn't give a sign of it, he'd take it just as he took the job; nothing special, all in the day's work.

Rick could tell now what the censor wouldn't let him put on paper. He was stationed with General Allenby's Third Army, which lay in front of Vimy Ridge. He belonged to what was called the “corps wing,” the group of fliers who served a particular body of troops. Observation planes equipped with two-way radios, or with photographic apparatus, went out to observe enemy positions, and fighting planes went along to protect them. Rick flew a machine known as a “Sopwith one-and-a-half strutter.” It was a single-seater, such planes being lighter and faster, and the competition of the German Fokkers had forced it. Both sides now had what were called “interrupter gears”; that is, the action of the machine gun was synchronized with the propeller, so that the stream of bullets went through the whirling blades without hitting. So you didn't have to aim your gun, but just your plane; your job was to get on the other fellow's tail, and see him straight through your sights, and then cut loose. You would see two fighting planes maneuvering for position, darting this way and that, diving, rolling over, executing every sort of twist and turn. That sight was seen over Paris pretty nearly every day, and Lanny hadn't missed it.

His friend told many things about this strange new job of fighting in the air. In the sector where he flew, it was hard to distinguish the trenches, for the entire ground was a chaos of shell-craters. He flew at a speed of ninety miles an hour, and at a height of twelve hundred and fifty feet. When you came down suddenly from that height, you had headache, earache, even toothache, but it all passed away in three or four hours. The most curious thing was that you could hear the whine of the bullet before it reached you, and if you ducked quickly you might dodge it. Somehow that gave Lanny the biggest thrill of anything he had heard about the war; a mile and a half a minute, a quarter of a mile above the earth, and playing tag with bullets!

II

England and France were getting ready for the big spring “push”; everybody knew where it was to be, but it was a matter of good form not to name places. “Be silent,” read the signs all over Paris; “enemy ears are listening.” Rick said the air push was on all the time; the two sides were struggling incessantly for mastery. The English had held it pretty much through 1916; now it was a local matter, varying from place to place and from week to week. The Fokkers were fast, and their men fought like demons. The problem of the English was to train fliers quickly enough; they were used up faster than they could be sent across.

Rick stopped after he had said that; for it wasn't good form to reveal anything discouraging. But now and then he would mention a name. “Aubrey Valliance — you remember that fellow with the straw-colored hair you raced with, swimming? He was downed last week, poor chap. We don't know what happened — he just didn't come back.” Lanny got the picture of those bright-cheeked English schoolboys, eighteen or nineteen, some younger, having told a fib about their ages. They would volunteer, and have a few tests of eyesight and sense of balance, and then be rushed to a training camp, listen to a few lectures, go up a few times with an instructor to be taught the rudiments, then go up alone and practice this and that, maybe a week, maybe less, thirty hours of flying, or even as-few as twenty — and then off to France.

“Replacements,” they were called; half a dozen would arrive in a truck at night and be introduced to their fellows; you hardly had time to remember their names. They would look on the bulletin board and see themselves scheduled to fly at dawn. They would have a drink, and a handshake, or maybe a salute. They would say: “Very good, sir,” and step into their seats; the propellers would begin to roar, and away they would go, one after another. Maybe eight would go out, and only six would come back; you would wait, and listen, trying not to show your concern; after a certain period there was no use thinking about them any more, for the plane had only so much petrol, and no way to get any more. If the chap was down in enemy territory, you wouldn't know whether he was alive or dead; unless he had put up an extra-good fight, in which case an enemy flier might bring a bundle containing his boots and cap and pocketbook, and drop them onto the camp.

“Don't you ever get afraid, Rick?” asked Lanny. That was after Robbie had gone out to keep his engagements, and the two were alone.

Rick hesitated. “I guess I do; but it's no good thinking about. You've a job to do, and that's that.”

Lanny recalled Mrs. Emily Chattersworth's mother, that very old lady who had told about the American Civil War. One of her stories had to do with a young Confederate officer whose knees were shaking before a battle, and someone accused him of being scared. “Of course I'm scared,” he said; “if you were half as scared as I am you'd have run away long ago.”

Rick said that was about it. He said that now and then there was some youngster whose nerves came near to breaking, and you had to figure out how to buck him up and get him started. The hardest job was that of the ground officer who had to send chaps out, knowing they weren't fit; but there was no choice, they had to keep up with the Germans. Apparently things weren't any better with them, because the score was about even. You'd soon know if they had the edge.

III

The pair went for a walk on the boulevards. Paris in wartime; every sort of uniform you could imagine, and Rick pointing them out to his friend: English Tommies out for a lark; Australians and New Zealanders, tall fellows with looped-up hats; Highlanders in kilts — the Germans called them “ladies from hell”; Italians in green; French zouaves with baggy knee-pants; African colonials, who fought fiercely, but looked bewildered in a great city. The poilus had a new uniform of gray-blue; the picturesque kepi rouge and the baggy red pants had offered too good a target.

The two had lunch together; war bread, and very small portions of sugar, but anything else you could pay for. It was a special occasion, and Lanny wanted to spend all he had. He liked to be seen with this handsome young officer; his pacifist impulses weakened when put to such a test. He talked about Kurt, wishing he might be with them, instead of being on the other side of no man's land — or perhaps up in the air, fighting Rick! “I know he's in the army, but I've no idea where,” said Lanny.

“We wouldn't get 'along so well,” said the Englishman. “I always had the idea that German culture was a lot of wind and bluff.” Rick went on like that at some length, saying that the reputation of Goethe was due to the fact of the Germans' wanting so badly to have a world poet; Goethe wasn't really so much. Lanny listened, thinking his own thoughts. If Kurt were here, would he say that Shakespeare was a barbarian, or something like that? It was going to take a long time to wipe the bitterness of this war out of the hearts of men. If America came in, what would happen to Lanny's own heart?

There is a saying: “Speak of angels and they flap their wings.” The two friends came back from their stroll, and there was a letter for Lanny with a Swiss stamp on it, forwarded from Juan. “Kurt!” he exclaimed, and opened it quickly. His eyes ran over it. “He's been wounded!” Then he read aloud:

“Dear Lanny: It has been a long time since I have written. I have been very busy, and circumstances do not permit me to unbosom myself. Please believe that our friendship is not going to be ended, even by the news which I now read from abroad. I am now in hospital. It is not serious and I hope soon to be well again. It may not be possible for me to write for some time, so this is just to say Hello, and hope that you will not let anything interrupt your musical studies and the reading of the world's great poets. Ever your friend, Kurt.”

The envelope showed that it had been opened by the censor. It was always a gamble whether any particular sentence might cause a letter to be destroyed. You had to read between the lines. The “news from abroad” of course meant America's coming into the war — which seemed certain, President Wilson having summoned a special session of Congress to meet in a few days. Kurt was telling Lanny that he hoped he wouldn't take part in fighting Germany.

“We mustn't let ourselves hate him, Rick,” said the American.

The other answered: “The fighting men don't hate one another — not very often. What we hate is the damnable Kultur which has produced all these atrocities; also the rulers who impose it upon a credulous people.”

Lanny could accept that; but would Kurt accept it? That was going to be a problem!

IV

Robbie was in the midst of conferences with the representatives of a half a dozen armaments concerns; but he found an hour to go with the pair to the exposition at the Petit Palais. It was a matter of amour propre with the French that not even a world war should stop the development of genius in their country; art lovers would come to see what was new in taste and culture even though bombs might be raining upon them from the sky. The younger painters of France were most of them putting camouflage on guns and ships; but they had found time for sketches of war scenes. The older ones had gone on with their work, like Archimedes making scientific discoveries during the siege of Syracuse.

Battle pictures, of course, had always been found in every salon. Painters loved to portray thrilling conflicts: horses trampling men, sabers flashing, carbines spitting flame. Now there was a new kind of war, hard to know how to deal with. So much of it was fought at long distances, and with great machines — and how were you to make them dramatic? How were you to keep a picture of an airplane or a machine gun from looking like a photograph in L'Illustration? A general on horseback was an established figure of la gloire; but what could you do with a man in a tank or a submarine?

The answer of Marcel Detaze had been to go off in solitude and paint the figure of a woman in sorrow. Whether men were mutilated by sabers or by shrapnel made little difference to the wives and sweethearts of France; so said this young painter, and apparently the art lovers agreed with him. “Sister of Mercy” had been hung in an excellent position, and there were always people standing in front of it, and their faces showed that Marcel had conveyed something to their souls. Lanny listened to their comments, and little thrills crept up and down his spine. Even Robbie was moved; yes, the fellow had talent, you didn't have to be a “highbrow” to be sure of it.

Too bad that Beauty couldn't be on hand to share the sensation. She would have taken her friends, and stood and listened to what the crowds were saying; presently somebody would have glanced at her, and then at the picture, and then back at her again, in excitement and a little awe, and the blood would have started climbing to Beauty's cheeks, and even to her forehead; it would have been one of life's great moments. Call it vanity, but she was like that; “professional beauties” were amateur actresses, performing upon a larger stage with the help of newspapers and illustrated magazines. “I'll send her a ticket and tell her to come,” said Robbie, who found her foibles diverting.

A further idea occurred to him, and he said to his son: “Do you remember what Beauty once told you about a painting that made my father angry?” Yes, that was one of the things Lanny wasn't going to forget — not in this incarnation! He said so, and Robbie inquired: “Would you be interested to see it?”

The youth was staggered. Somehow the idea seemed rather horrible. And with Rick along too! But he told himself that this was an old-fashioned attitude, unworthy of a connoisseur of art. Surely Rick would feel that way about it. So Lanny replied: “I would, of course.”

“I've been told where it was. If it's been sold, maybe you can find out where it's gone.” Robbie gave the name of one of the fashionable dealers on the Rue de la Paix, and told him to ask for the “Lady with a Blue Veil,” by Oscar Deroulé. “You don't have to say that you know anything about it,” added the father.

The two fellows set out. Lanny had to make some explanation, for of course Rick would recognize the portrait. Lanny couldn't say that he was an illegitimate son, and that this painting was to blame for it — no, that would be too much for even the coldest-blooded connoisseur! He said: “My mother posed for several painters when she was young, and I guess my father thinks I'm old enough to know about it now.”

“Well, you surely can't blame the painters,” was Rick's consoling reply.

V

The decorous and black-clad picture dealer found nothing out of the way in the fact that two young gentlemen wanted to see the “Lady with a Blue Veil” by Oscar Deroule. It was his business to show pictures; a clerk went down some stairs and brought it up, and set it on a stand for them to look at, and then went to attend to another customer. So they had it to themselves, and no need to repress their feelings. “Oh, my God!” exclaimed Rick; and Lanny's heart hit him several blows underneath his throat.

There was Mabel Blackless, as she was in those days, just ripened into womanhood, a creature of such loveliness as made men catch their breath. The painter who had done her was a lover of the flesh, and had set himself to exploiting its lusciousness; the creams and whites and pinks, the velvety texture, the soft curves, the delicately changing shadows. Beauty was seated upon a silk-covered couch, half supported by one arm. There was a light blue veil across her hips, and the shower of her hair fell over one shoulder, half hiding a breast; she was in bright sunlight, and the fine strands gleamed like gold — not such an easy thing for a painter to get.

These were the modern days — they always are — and when a woman went swimming at Juan, she put on a fairly light bathing suit, and when it was wet it clung tightly, so really there wasn't so much in the picture that Lanny didn't know already. One thing he had never seen was her breasts, with nipples of delicate pink; he couldn't help thinking: “So that is where I was nourished!” He thought: “God, what a strange thing life is!” He confronted once more that most bewildering of ideas: “I was her accident! If it hadn't happened, where would I have been?”

He looked at the date in the corner of the painting; it was 1899, and he knew it was just before Robbie had come along and started him upon his strange journey into the present. Now, by the magic of art, the son could stand and look at the past; but no magic would enable him to look into the future, and know what he was going to do with his own power to create life. Were there baby souls waiting in the unknown, for him to decide whether or not they were to be?

His friend saw how deeply stirred he was; the blood had a way of mounting into Lanny's cheeks, just as you saw recorded in the portrait of his mother. Rick tried to ease him down by discussing the work from the technical point of view. Finally he allowed himself to remark: “If I owned that painting I don't think I'd ever marry. I'd expect too much!”

Lanny's reply was: “I think I'm the one who ought to own it.” He recalled his father's wish to buy him something; and now he knew what it was going to be. When the dealer rejoined them he inquired: “What is the price of this painting?”

The man looked at him, and then pretended to look on the back of the painting. The artist was not a well-known one, and the price was thirty-two hundred francs, or six hundred and forty dollars. “I will take it,” Lanny said. “I will pay you two hundred francs down, and if you send the painting to the Hotel Crillon this evening, I will have the rest.” The dealer knew then that he should have asked a higher price, but it was too late.

When Lanny told his father what he had done, the latter was much amused. “Do you want to take it to America?”

Lanny laughed in turn. “I thought Beauty and I ought to have it. I'll send it to her, and she can stick it away with Marcel's work.”

“It's a queer sort of a present,” said Robbie, “but if it's what you want, O.K. There are half a dozen paintings of Beauty somewhere in the world, and you might hunt them up.” Then the shrewd businessman added: “Buy options for two years, and you'll get some bargains that'll surprise you. The franc has been pegged, but it won't hold after the war!”

VI

The tongues of the two young men were loosened and they talked about love. Lanny told of his happiness with Rosemary, now almost a year past. He didn't have a right to say how far they had gone — but he found that Rosemary had told Rick's sister, and she in turn had told Rick. These young people had few secrets; their “emancipation” took the form of voluminous talk, and it was a mark of enlightenment to employ the plainest words.

When Lanny said he hadn't been able to be interested in any other girl, Rick told him it was hard luck that he had aimed too high. “I mean,” he added, hastily, “from the English point of view. Her family puts on a lot of side. Of course, it's all bally rot; perhaps we'll sack the lot of them before this war is over.”

Lanny told what his father had said to Zaharoff, that it might end as it had in Russia; to which Rick replied in his free and easy way that he'd take his chances with a new deal. He informed his friend that the Codwilliger family was planning for Rosemary to marry the oldest grandson of the very old Earl of Sandhaven; the grandson was the future heir, since his father had been killed in the same siege of Gallipoli where Rosemary's father had been wounded. Lanny could see how useless it was for him to hope — that is, of course, from the English point of view. He gathered the impression that he had been greatly honored by having had the future mother of an earl for a temporary sweetheart.

It was Rick's turn to open his heart. “I've been meaning to tell you, Lanny — I'm married.”

“What?” cried the other, amazed.

“The night before I left for France. It's quite a long story. If you want to hear it — ”

“Oh, do I, Rick!”

The baronet's son had come to London to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps, and at the home of one of his school friends had met a girl just his age, a student at a college not far from his training camp. They had hit it off together, and used to meet whenever Rick had free time. “We talked about love,” he said, “and I told her I'd never had a girl. Of course all the chaps want to have one before they go to the front — and all the girls want to have them, it seems. She said she'd try it with me, and we were both quite happy — only of course there wasn't very much time.”

Rick paused. “And then?” said Lanny.

“Well, I knew I was going across in a week or so; and Nina — her name is Nina Putney — told me she wanted to have a baby. I mightn't come back — lots of the fellows have been downed on their first flight.”

“I know,” said Lanny.

“I said: 'What will you do, alone?' And she said: 'I know what I want. I can take care of it somehow.' She has a sister who's an interior decorator, and would take her in. You know people don't pay so much attention to illegitimacy in wartime; they make excuses. And Nina broke down — she said she had to have something to remember me by. I couldn't very well say no.”

“Is she going to have it?”

“So she writes me.”

“You married her before that?”

“I thought I ought to tell the pater; if he was going to have a grandchild, he'd want to be sure about it. He looked up the family and found out they were all right — I mean, what he calls all right-so then he said we ought to get married. So we got a special license and went over to the church, the night before I reported for duty.”

“Oh, Rick, what a story! Do you think she's a girl you'll be happy with?”

“I suppose we've as good a chance as most couples. Nina's game, and says she'll never hold me to it. She swears she wasn't trying to rope me in, and if I ever say it, she'll drop me flat.” The young flying officer smiled a rather wry smile.

“You're supposed to be something of a catch, aren't you, Rick — I mean from the English point of view?”

Rick could talk about the social position of the Codwilliger family, but not of the Pomeroy-Nielsons. “The pater says we'll lose The Reaches if they keep piling war taxes on him. And what price a baronet if you have to live in lodgings?”

VII

Lanny was excited, of course. He wanted to know about Nina, and what she looked like — Rick had a little picture, which showed a slender, birdlike person with an eager, intense expression. Lanny admired her, and Rick was pleased. Lanny asked what she was studying, and about her family — her father was a barrister, but not a successful one; she would be one of these new women who had careers of their own, kept their own names, and so on. None of this clinging sort.

Lanny said that his father was taking him to London soon. Could he meet her? Rick said: “Of course.”

“Could I give her a present, do you suppose? Would she like some picture that we could pick up for her?”

“You'd better wait,” laughed the other, “and see what happens to me. If I'm put out, you'd better give her a baby basket.”

“I'll give her both!” Lanny had recently become aware of the fact that his father had a pile of money.

“No Caliph of Bagdad business!” countered his friend. “You pick out a book that may keep her from being lonely, and write something in it, so she can remember you when you marry an oil princess in Connecticut.”

“There isn't any oil in Connecticut, Rick.”

“Well, nutmegs then. Your father says it's called the Nutmeg State. You'll make a whole crop of new princesses out of this war. They'll be bored, and they'll be crazy about you because you speak French, and dance, and have culture — you'll rank with a marquis or a Russian grand duke in exile.”

Lanny was amused by this picture of himself in New England. He wanted to say: “They'll find out that I'm a bastard.” But his lips were sealed.

Half a day, a night, and another day; never had thirty hours moved with such speed! They went to the Comedie Française, and sat in a box; they had a meal at midnight, and Robbie ordered an extra bottle of wine. They strolled on the boulevards in the morning, luxuriating in the sunshine, watching the crowds and gazing at the fine things for sale. Lanny bought a stock of chocolates, the one thing Rick admitted the chaps in the air force would appreciate. They picked up an old-fashioned open carriage with a bony but lively horse, and were driven about the Bois and the main boulevards, looking at historic buildings and remembering what they could of events. Rick knew a little about everything; he had all his old assurance, his worldly manner which impressed his younger friend so greatly.

Robbie came back to the hotel, feeling good, because Zaharoff's factotum had given way, and the other companies were giving way, and Robbie was collecting signatures on dotted lines. Lanny had to ask him not to be too exultant until Rick was gone. “You know how it is, he's giving his life, maybe, while we're making money.”

“All right,” said the salesman, with one of his chuckles. “I'll be good; but you tell Rick that if his old man wants to sell The Reaches, you'll buy it!” No use asking Robbie to shed any tears over the English aristocracy. They had had their day, and now the American businessmen were to have theirs. Gangway!

However, Robbie was very decent when the time for parting came. He had a big package delivered to Rick's room, and told him not to open it until he got back to camp. He told Lanny it contained cigarettes; the baronet's son would be the darling of the corps wing for a time. Robbie shook hands with him, and said “Cheerio,” in the approved English fashion.

Lanny went to the train, and had tears in his eyes, he just couldn't help it. It would have been very bad form for Rick to have them; he said: “Thanks, old chap, you've been perfectly bully to me.” And then: “Take care of yourself, and don't let the subs get you.”

“Write me a post card every now and then,” pleaded Lanny. “You know how it is, if I don't hear from you, I'll worry.”

“Don't do that,” said Rick. “Whatever comes, that's what comes.” It was the nearest a modern man could approach to having a philosophy.

“Well, look out for the Fokkers — get them first!”

“Right-o!” The whistle blew, and Rick bolted, just in time for the train and for the honor of the Royal Flying Corps. Lanny stood, with tears flowing freely. “Good-by, Rick! Good-by!” His voice died into a sort of sob as the train moved on, and the face of Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson disappeared, perhaps forever. That was the dreadful thing about wartime, you couldn't part from anybody without the thought: “I'll probably not see him again!”

VIII

The youth kept talking about this depressing idea until it worried his father. “You know, kid,” he remarked, “you just can't be too soft in this world. It's painful to think of people getting killed, and I don't know the answer, except that maybe we put too much value on human life; we try to make more out of it than nature allows. This is certain, if you're too sensitive, and suffer too much, you wreck your own happiness, and maybe your health, and then what are you worth to yourself or anybody else?”

That was something to think about, and the youngster put his mind on it. What was the use of practicing the arts, of understanding and loving them, if you didn't dare let yourself feel? Manifestly, the purpose of art was to awaken feelings; but Robbie said you had to put them to sleep, or at any rate retire into a cave with them. Build yourself like a tortoise, with a hard shell around you, so that the world couldn't get hold of you to make you suffer!

Lanny voiced that, and the reply was: “Maybe it's a bad time for art right now. As I read history I see these periods come pretty frequently and last a long time, so you have to arm yourself somehow; unless, of course, you want to be a martyr, and die on a cross, or something like that. It makes good melodrama, or maybe great tragedy, but it's doggone uncomfortable while it's happening.”

They were in their room, packing to leave for England; and Robbie said: “Sit down and let me tell you something I heard today.” He lowered his voice, as if he thought that someone might be hiding in their room. Enemy ears are listening!

“Your friend is going off to fight the German Fokkers, and you're unhappy because they may get him. He's told you the Fokkers are fast and light, and that helps them, and may doom him. Do you know why they are so fast and light?”

“He says they're putting aluminum into them.”

“Exactly. And where do they get it? What's it made from?”

“It's made out of bauxite, I know.”

“And has Germany got any?”

“I don't know, Robbie.”

“Few people know things like that; they don't teach them in the schools. Germany has very little, and she wants it badly, and pays high prices for it. Do you know who has it?”

“Well, I know that France has a lot, because Eddie Patterson drove me to the place where it's being mined.” Lanny remembered this trip to a town called Brignolles, back from the coast; the reddish mineral was blasted from tunnels in a mountain, and brought down to the valley in great steel buckets rolling on a continuous wire cable. Lanny and his friend had been admitted to the place and had watched the stuff being dumped into lines of freight cars. It had been Lanny's first actual sight of big industry — unless you included the perfume factories in Grasse, where peasant women sat half buried in millions of rose leaves, amid an odor so powerful that a little of it sent you out with a headache.

Robbie went on with his story. “To make bauxite into aluminum takes electric power. Those lines of freight cars that you saw were taken to Switzerland, which has cheap power from its mountain streams. There the aluminum is made; and then it goes — can you guess?”

“To Germany?”

“It goes to whatever country bids the highest price for it; and Germany is in the market. So if your friend is brought down by a faster airplane, you'll know the reason. Also you'll know why your father keeps urging you not to tear your heart out over this war.”

“But, Robbie!” The son's voice rose with excitement. “Something ought to be done about a thing like that!”

“Who's going to do it?”

“But it's treason!”

“It's business.”

“Who are the people that are doing it?”

“A big concern, with a lot of stockholders; its shares are on the market, anybody can buy them who has the money. If you look up the board of directors, you'll find familiar names — that is, if you follow such things. You find Lord Booby, and you say: 'Zaharoff!' You see the Due de Pumpkin, and you say: 'Schneider,' or perhaps 'de Wendel.' You see Isaac Steinberg, or some such name, and you say: 'Rothschild.' They have their directors in hundreds of different companies, all tied together in a big net — steel, oil, coal, chemicals, shipping, and, above all, banks. When you see those names, you might as well butt your brains out against a stone wall as try to stop them, or even to expose them — because they own the newspapers.”

“But, Robbie,” protested the youth, “doesn't it make any difference to those men whether the Germans take France?”

“They're building big industry, and they'll own it and run it. Whatever government comes in will have to have money, and will make terms with them, and business will go on as it's always done. It's a steam roller; and what I'm telling my son is, be on it and not under it!”

IX

The English and the French had made for themselves a sort of chicken run across the English Channel; a wide lane, fenced with heavy steel netting hung from two lines of buoys, and protected by mines. Back and forth through that lane went the troopships, the hospital ships, the freighters, the packet boats with passengers. Up and down the lines patrolled torpedo boats and destroyers, mine sweepers and trawlers; lookouts swept the sea with glasses, and gunners stood by their quick-firers, ready at a moment's notice to swing them into action. Overhead were airplanes humming, and silver blimps slowly gliding. The submarine campaign was at its peak, and the Allies were going back to the ancient system of convoys for merchant ships. They were doing it here, with fleets of slow-moving vessels laden with coal for France, escorted by armed trawlers.

At night the destroyers raced up and down, their searchlights flashing, making the scene bright almost as day. But the packet boats showed no lights, and passengers were not allowed on deck; you went on board after dark, and were escorted to your stateroom, and advised to sleep with your clothes on, and be sure to practice adjusting the life preserver which was overhead in your berth. Your porthole was sealed tightly with a dark cover, and to open it or show a light was a prison offense. You heard the sounds of departure, and felt the vibration of the screw and the tossing of the vessel. You slept, if your nerves were sound, and when you woke up you were in England, if your luck was reasonably good.

London in wartime was full of bustle, serious but not afraid. “Never say die,” was the motto. England would follow her usual rule of losing every battle but the last. The theaters and the cinemas were crowded. Everybody was at work, both men and women; hours were long and wages high; the people of the slums had enough to eat for the first time in their lives. Lanny wondered: was that the solution to the problem of poverty and unemployment — to put everybody at work trying to blow some other people up?

Robbie had important men waiting to see him. There was no way for Lanny to help him; no more codes or ciphers now — whatever cablegrams you sent had to be in plain words, and signed by your full name; better not use any words the censor didn't know, and not too many figures. Robbie told a story about a man who tried to cable that he had purchased 12 462 873 sables; the military intelligence department got busy to find out how he had managed to get more sables than there were in the world.

Lanny had two young ladies to call on. Rosemary first, of course. She had got her heart's desire, and was working as a nurse. They called her a “student,” but there wasn't much difference in these days, you went right to work, and learned by doing. She was in a big hospital which until recently had been a school. Her hours were long, and leave was hard to get; but when you are the granddaughter of an earl, you can manage things in England, even in wartime.

Toward sundown he went to meet her, expecting to see her in a nurse's costume of white; but she had changed to a blue chiffon dress and a little straw hat with blue cornflowers in it. The sight of her started something to tingling inside him. How lovely life could be, even with death ruling the world!

They walked in a near-by park, and she tried her best to be cool and matter of fact. But there was something between her and this young American that wasn't easy to control. They sat on a bench, and Lanny looked at her, and saw that she was afraid to meet his eyes, and that her lips were trembling.

“Have you missed me a little, Rosemary?”

“More than a little.”

“I haven't been able to think about anybody else.”

“Let's not talk about it, Lanny.”

So he chatted for a while, telling her about Rick's brief holiday in Paris. He talked about his coming trip to America, and the reasons for it. “My father says we're surely coming into the war.” Congress was then in session, and a fierce debate was going on; there might be a vote at any hour.

“Better late than never,” replied Rosemary. The English in those days had become extremely impatient with the letter-writing of President Wilson.

“You mustn't blame me for it,” said he. “But if we do come in, things will change quickly.” He waited a reasonable time, then asked, with a smile: “If we do, Rosemary, will that make any difference in the way your parents feel about us colonials?”

“All that's so complicated, Lanny. Let's talk about nice agreeable things.”

“The nicest agreeable thing I know is sitting on a park bench with the twilight falling about her and an evening star right in front of her eyes, and I haven't the least desire to talk about anything else. Tell me, darling: has there been any other man in your heart in the past eleven months?”

“There are hundreds of them, Lanny. I'm trying to help our poor boys back to life — or ease them out of it not too horribly.”

“I know, dear,” he said. “I've lived in the house with a war casualty for more than two years. But one can't work all the time, surely; one has to have a little fun.”

Lanny didn't know England very well. He knew that the “lower orders” lay around in the parks in broad daylight; but just how dark did it have to be for a member of the nobility to permit a young man to take her hand, or put his arm around her on a park bench? He tried gently, and she did not repel him. Presently they were sitting close together, and the old mysterious spell renewed itself. Perhaps an hour passed; then he said: “Can't we go somewhere, Rosemary?”

Robbie had said: “Take her to one of the cheaper hotels; they don't ask questions.” Robbie was practical on the subject of sex, as upon all others. He said there were three things a young fellow had to look out for: he mustn't get any girl into trouble; he mustn't get mixed up with any married woman unless he was sure the husband didn't care; and he mustn't get any disease. When Lanny had reassured him on these points, he said: “If you don't show up tonight, I won't worry.”

X

So Lanny and Rosemary went strolling; and when they came to a place where they weren't apt to meet any of their fashionable friends, they went in, and he registered as Mr. and Mrs. Brown, and paid in advance, and no questions were asked. When they lay in the embrace which was so full of rapture for them both, they forgot the sordid surroundings, they forgot everything except that their time was short. Lanny was going out to face the submarines on the open ocean, and Rosemary was going to France, where the screaming shells paid no heed to a red cross on a woman's arm.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a flying.” Thus the English poet. The German has said: “Pflücket die Rose, Eh' sie verblüht.” So there was one thing about which the two nations could agree. In countless cheap hotels in Berlin, as in London, the advice was being followed; and the wartime custom was no different in Paris — if you could accept the testimony of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had stood on the field of Eylau, observing the heaps of the slaughtered and remarking: “One night in Paris will remedy all that.”

Their happiness was long-enduring, and nothing in the outside world was permitted to disturb it. Not even loud banging noises, all over the city — one of them very close by. Lanny made a joke of it: “I hope that's not some morals police force after us.” The girl explained that those were anti-aircraft warnings, made by “maroons,” a kind of harmless bomb made of heavy paper wrapped with twine.

They lay still in the dark and listened. Presently came louder explosions, and some of them were near, too. “Anti-aircraft guns,” said Rosemary; she knew all the sounds. There came dull, heavy crashes, and she told him those were the bombs. “You don't have to worry unless it's a direct hit.”

“You surely can't worry if it is,” said Lanny. It was his first time under fire, and he wanted to take it in the English manner.

“About as much risk as in a thunderstorm,” said Rosemary. “The silly fools think they can frighten us by wrecking a house here and there and killing half a dozen harmless people in their beds.”

“I suppose those'll be planes?” asked the youth.

“From occupied Belgium. The Zepps have stopped coming entirely.”

The uproar grew louder, and presently there was a sharp cracking sound, and some of the glass in the window of their room fell onto the floor. That was getting sort of close! “A piece of shrapnel,” said Rosemary. “They don't have much force, because the air resistance stops them.”

“You know all about it!” smiled Lanny.

“Naturally; I help to fix people up. I'll have some new cases in the morning.”

“None tonight, I hope, dear.”

“Kiss me, Lanny. If we're going to die, let it be that way.”

The uproar died away even more suddenly than it had come; they slept awhile, and early in the morning, when they got up, Lanny found a fragment of a shell near the broken window. It wasn't much more than an inch square, but had unpleasantly jagged edges. He said: “I'll keep it for a souvenir, unless you want it.”

“We get plenty of them,” replied the student nurse.

“Maybe it's a Budd.” He knew, of course, that the British were using Budd shrapnel. “I'll see if my father can tell.”

“They gather up the pieces and use them again,” explained Rosemary.

That was her casual way. She told him to phone her or wire her as to when he would be sailing. She didn't know if she could get another leave, but she would try.

They went outside, and heard newsboys shouting, and saw posters in large letters: “U.S.A. in War!” “America Joins!” While the scion of Budd Gunmakers had been gathering rosebuds with the granddaughter of Lord Dewthorpe, the Senate of the United States had voted a declaration to the effect that a condition of war already existed between that country and Germany.

XI

It was a pleasant time to be in London. There were celebrations in the streets, and the usually self-contained islanders were hunting for some American, so that they could shake him by the hand and say: “Thanks, old chap, this is grand, we're all brothers now, and when will you be coming over?” Lanny asked his father if this would help him in getting contracts; Robbie said they'd expect him to give the patents now — but no such instructions had come from Newcastle, Connecticut!

Lanny went to call on Nina Putney, still a student in college in spite of being married. He took her to lunch, and they had a long talk. She was a brunette, slender and delicate, with sensitive, finely cut features. She seemed more like a French girl than an English one; she was like Lanny, eager and somewhat impetuous; she said what she felt, and then perhaps wished she hadn't. The two could get along easily, because they shared the same adoration, and wanted to talk about it.

Nina told about her meeting with the most wonderful of would-be fliers, whose dream had since come true. He might be in the air now — oh, God, at this moment he might be in a death duel with one of the German Fokkers, so light and fast because they were made of aluminum manufactured in Switzerland from French bauxite! Lanny didn't tell the young bride about that; but a shadow hung over their meeting, and what could he say? He couldn't deny the mortal danger, or that it would last, day after day. No comfort that an airman came back alive, because he would be going out again so soon.

Business as usual! Lanny and Nina promised to write to each other, for Rick's sake, and she would tell him whatever news she got. America would hurry up, and this dreadful war would be won, and they would all live happy ever after. So, good-by, Nina, and take good care of that baby, and you're to have a basket, and remember, Budd's will stand back of you!

Robbie said he'd have all his affairs wound up in a couple of days, and no use to linger and be a target even for Budd shrapnel. He had engaged a stateroom, and Lanny, the lady-killer, might gather as many rosebuds as possible in that brief interim. He phoned to Rosemary, and she said, yes, she'd get away once more, even if they fined her for it. They went to the same hotel and got the same room — the pane of glass patched with brown paper. Once more they were happy, after the fashion that war permits — amor inter arma; concentrating on one moment, refusing to let the mind roam or the eye peer into the future.

In the morning, clinging to him, the girl said: “Lanny, you've been; a darling, and I'll never forget you. Write me, and let me know how things go, and I'll do the same.”

No more than that. She wouldn't talk about marriage; she would go on patching broken English bodies, and he would visit the home of his fathers, and come back as a soldier, or perhaps to sell armaments — who could say? “Good-by, dear; and do help us to win!”

So Lanny was through; and it was a good time to be leaving. The British were beginning their spring offensive, which would be drowned in mud and hung on barbed wire and mowed down by machine guns in the usual depressing way. The French had a new commander, Nivelle, and he would lead them into a slaughter that would bring the troops to the verge of mutiny. Away from all that!

They took a boat train at night, and went on board a steamship in darkness and silence. They knew they were being towed out into a harbor, and that tugs were pulling steel nets with buoys out of the way. But they couldn't see a thing, because the deck was covered with a shroud of burlap. They sat outside for a long while, listening to the sounds of the sea and conversing in whispers; not much chance to sleep, and nothing you could do. Everyone tried hard to seem unconcerned. Some men shut themselves up in their cabins and drank themselves insensitive; others played cards in the saloon and pretended not to care about death.

“Westward the star of empire takes its way,” said Robbie. He was telling his son that they were off to God's country, the place to stay in, to believe in. He was telling him not to miss the granddaughter of an earl too much; there were plenty of delightful democratic maidens at home. He was saying that Europe was worn out; it would owe all its money to America, and collecting it would be fun. Yes, they were sitting pretty — unless by chance there should come a pale streak of foam out there on the starlit ocean, and a shattering explosion beneath them!