WORLD'S END

I

THE city of Newcastle, Connecticut, lies at the mouth of the Newcastle River, and has a comfortable harbor, not muddy except in springtime. It has a highway bridge across the harbor, and beyond it a railroad bridge, both having “draws” so that ships may go up. The Budd plant lies above the bridges, and has a railroad spur running into it. Above the plant are salt marshes, which the progenitor of the family had the forethought to buy for a few dollars an acre. Everybody called him crazy at the time, but as a result of his forethought his descendants had both land and landings, by the simple procèss of putting a steam dredge at work running channels into the marsh and piling earth on both sides. In the year 1917 you could not have bought an acre of this salt marsh for ten thousand dollars.

As a result, the city had only one direction in which to grow; which meant that rents were high and working-class districts crowded. The families which had owned farms in that direction had either sold them, and moved away and been forgotten, or else they had leased the land, in which case they constituted the aristocracy of Newcastle, owning stock in banks and department stores, water and gas and electric companies, street railways and telephones. As a further result, Newcastle had remained a small city, and many of the workers in Budd's lived in near-by towns and came to the plant on “trolley cars.”

In fact only a small part of Budd's itself was at Newcastle. Farther up the river were dams, and here the company made cartridges and fuses. The dams had locks, and motor barges took raw materials up and brought finished products down. This enabled Lanny's grandfather to say that he disapproved of the modern tendency toward congestion in great cities. Also it enabled him to get much cheaper labor.

In the state of Ohio, once known as the “Western Reserve” and settled largely by people from Connecticut, the Budds had a powder plant. In the state of Massachusetts they had recently bought a six-story cotton mill with a dam and power plant, the concern having gone into bankruptcy because of competition in Georgia and the Carolinas; this plant was now making hand grenades. In a somewhat smaller furniture factory they were setting up a cartridge plant. In the salt marshes of Newcastle ground was being made for new structures which would enable them to double their output of machine guns. So it went; the government was advancing the money to concerns which had the skill and could turn out instruments of war quickly.

All these deals had been arranged and plans laid months in advance, and many contracts were signed before war had been declared or funds voted by Congress. By the time Lanny arrived at Newcastle, all the men of the Budd family were under heavy pressure, working day and night, and talking about nothing but the war and the contribution they were making to it. Nearly everyone in the town was in the same mental state, and this afforded an opportunity for a stranger to slip in unobserved, and have time to adjust himself to an unknown world. Nobody would bother him; indeed, unless he made a noise they would hardly know he was there.

II

Until recently Robbie and his family had occupied an old Colonial house in the residential part of Newcastle. But there was a transformation going on all over New England. Motorcars had become so dependable, and hard-surfaced roads so good, that it was getting to be the fashion to buy a farm and turn it into a country estate; your friends did the same, and collectively built a country club with a golf course, and thus had the advantages of town and country life. You got blooded rams, bulls, and boars; you produced milk and strawberries and asparagus. You were called a “gentleman farmer,” and not merely had fresh air, space, and privacy, but you tried to make it pay, and if you succeeded you bragged to all your friends.

The population of such districts consisted of a “gentry,” and a great number of tenants and servants, all contented and respectable, and all voting Tory, though it was called “Republican.” What Lanny saw of “New” England turned out to be much like Old England. The scenery resembled that “green and pleasant land,” where he had enjoyed long walks in the springtime three years ago. There were country lanes and stone walls and small streams with mill dams, and old farmhouses and churches that were shown as landmarks. To be sure, some of the trees were different, high-arching white elms and flowering dogwood soon to be in party costume; also, the dialect of the country people was different — but these were details.

The new house of the Robbie Budds stood at the head of an archway of elms more than a hundred years old. The farmhouse originally on the spot had been moved to one side and made into a garage with chauffeur's and gardener's quarters above. A new house had been built, modern inside, but keeping the “old Colonial” pattern. It had two stories and a half, and what was called a “gambrel” roof, starting at a steep pitch, and, when it got halfway up, finishing at a flatter pitch. In front of the house were big white columns which went above the second story; at one side were smaller columns over a porte-cochere.

Inside, the house was plain, everything painted white. The furniture was of a sort Lanny had never seen before; it also was “old Colonial,” and he was to hear conversation about it, and learn the difference between “highboys” and “lowboys,” and what a “court cupboard” was, and a “wing-chair,” and a “ball and claw.” Everything in the house had its proper place and to move it was bad manners. This had been explained to Lanny by his father; Esther had strict ideas of propriety. He should not play the piano loudly, at least not without asking if he would disturb anyone. He would make things easier if he would go to church with the family. Above all, he must be careful not to speak plainly about anything having to do with the relationship of men and women; Esther tried her best to be “modern” but she just couldn't, and it was better not to put any strain upon her. Lanny promised.

III

He had seen pictures of her, so he knew her when he saw her standing at the head of the stairs, with the big grandfather's clock behind her. It was an important moment for her as well as for him, and both of them realized it. She was becoming a stepmother, one of the most difficult of human relationships; she was taking a stranger into her perfectly ordered home, one from a culture foreign to hers and greatly suspected. He was young and he was weak, yet he had a power which could not be disregarded, having entered her husband's life ahead of her and sunk deep roots into his heart.

Esther Remson Budd was thirty-five at this time. She was a daughter of the president of the First National Bank of Newcastle, a Budd institution. She had lived most of her life in the town, and her ideas of Europe were derived from a summer of travel with teachers and members of her class in a young ladies' finishing school. She was one of the most conscientious of women, and gave earnest thought to being just and upright. She was not cold, but made herself seem so by subjecting to careful consideration everything she did and said. She was charitable, and active in the affairs of the First Congregational Church, in which her father-in-law taught a men's Bible class every Sunday morning. She guided her three children lovingly but strictly, and did her best to use wisely the powers which wealth and social position gave her.

To Esther at the age of twenty-one Robbie Budd had been a figure of romance. He went abroad frequently, met important people, and came home with contracts, the report of which spread widely — for hardly a person in that town could prosper except as Budd's prospered, and when Robbie sold automatics to Rumania, the merchants of Newcastle ordered a fresh stock of goods, and Esther's father bought her an electric coupe, a sort of showcase to drive about town in. Everybody she knew wanted her to marry Robbie; most of the girls had tried and failed, and knew there was some mystery, some story of a broken heart.

The time came when Robbie took Esther for a long drive and told her about the mysterious woman in France, the artists' model who had been painted in the nude by several men — a strange kind of promiscuity, wholly outside the possibilities of Newcastle, which in its heart was still a Puritan village. There was a child, but the woman refused to marry him and wreck his life. He had ended the unhappy affair, which was then about five years old; he had done so because he saw it preyed upon his father's mind, it could not possibly be fitted into the lessons imparted to the men's Bible class. Robbie would ask Esther to marry him, but only after she knew about this situation, and understood that he had a son and would not disown him.

The two families were working busily to make this match. Did the president of Budd's give his friend, the president of the First National Bank, some hint of the problem? Or did the latter guess what might have happened to a handsome and wealthy young businessman in Paris? Anyhow, Esther's father had a talk with her, of a sort unusual in Puritan New England. He told her the facts of life as concerning future husbands. Among the so-called “eligible” men of the town, those slightly older than herself and able to support her in the position to which she had been accustomed, she would have difficulty in finding one who had not had to do with some woman. The difference between Robbie Budd and most others was that they didn't consider it necessary to tell their future brides about the wild oats they had sown.

Esther asked for time to think all this over, and in the end she and Robbie were married. It had been thirteen years now, and they had three children, and Esther was as near to happiness as any of the “young matrons” she knew. Robbie played golf while his wife went to church, and he drank more liquor than she considered wise; but he was indifferent to the charms of the country club's seductresses, he let her have her way entirely with the children, and he gave her more money than she had use for. On the whole she could count herself a fortunate wife.

But now came this one wild oat of her husband, to be transplanted into her garden and to grow there. She was compelled to face the circumstances which had brought this about. If Lanny was going into an army, it obviously ought to be the American army; and if he came to America, and was denied his father's home, that would be a repudiation and an affront. To say that Robbie had had a previous marriage in France was one of those conventional lies that were hardly lies at all. Women would smile behind their fans, and whisper; but after all there has to be a statute of limitations on scandals.

IV

So Esther was standing at the top of the white-paneled staircase with the grandfather's clock behind her. She was tall and rather slender; she held herself erect, and was quiet and grave in manner. She had straight brown hair, drawn back from a high forehead in defiance of fashion's edicts. Her nose was a little too long and thin, but the rest of her features were regular and her smile kindly. Her brown eyes appraised Lanny, and she kissed him on the cheek. She had made up her just mind that she was going to treat him exactly like her own children, and Robbie had told Lanny that he was to call her “Mother.”

She took him into her sitting room to get acquainted. He liked to talk, and was eager and friendly about it. He had been on a steamship which had been in peril of the submarines; he told how the passengers had behaved when they had struck a floating ice cake. He had been in London when it was bombed, and had a bit of shrapnel which had come through the window of a hotel room. (Of course he didn't say who had been in that room with him.) Esther, listening and watching, decided that he was intelligent, and if anything went wrong it could be explained to him. The load upon her mind grew lighter.

She took him to his room, which was in the rear. It was small, but had its own bath, and was alongside the rooms of her two boys. The walls were of pale blue, and the blankets on the single bed were the same. The rug in front of it was made by winding a long soft rope of braided rags into a spiral; his new mother explained that this was a “round-rug,” and was an antique. She showed him the “highboy” in which he was to keep his shirts and such belongings. Esther knew the story of each old piece of furniture, which she had “picked up” on trips here and there in the country. Each of these adventures was important to her. As an art lover, Lanny could see that the pieces were well proportioned, and they must have been well made to be in use after a hundred years.

Outside it was warm, and the window of the room was open. There was a cherry tree close by, getting ready to bloom. A bird was singing in it with extraordinary vigor, and Lanny commented on this. Esther said it was a mocking-bird which came every season, and had arrived only a few days ago; not many of them reached New England. Lanny told about the nightingale which made its nest in the court at Bienvenu, and was treated as a member of the family. He had tried to write out all the notes it had sung, and now he would do the same for the mocking-bird. His new mother said this task would keep him busy. The mocking-bird said: “Kerchy, kerchy, kerchy, kerchy.” Then it stopped and caught its breath and said: “You pay. You pay. You pay.”

V

For months thereafter one of Lanny's adventures would be meeting his relatives. First came his two half-brothers, who attended a private school in town, and were taken every morning and called for in the afternoon. Robert junior was twelve, and Percy eleven; they were handsome boys, who knew how to move quietly about a well-ordered home. Of course they were curious about this new arrival from foreign parts. They took him out at once to show him their Belgian hares; also Prince, their fine German shepherd dog, which they called a “police dog,” and which Lanny knew as an “Alsatian.” Prince was formally introduced, and looked the newcomer over warily, smelled him thoroughly, and finally wagged his tail. That was important.

Then came Bess, who was nine; her school was near by, but she had a singing lesson that afternoon, and the chauffeur went for her after he had brought the boys. Bess was like her mother, tall for her years and slender, with the same thin nose and sober brown eyes. But she had not yet learned restraint; eagerness transformed her features. When she heard that Lanny had been where the submarines were she cried: “Oh, tell us about it!” She hung on every word, and Lanny found himself a young Marco Polo. “Oh, what did you do?” And: “What did you say?” And: “Weren't you dreadfully frightened?”

Lanny relived his own childhood through this half-sister. She asked him questions about his home and what he did there; about the war and the people he knew who had been in it; about the Christmas-card castle in Germany; about Greece, and the ruins, of which there were pictures in her school; about England, and the boat race, and the poor girl who hadn't had enough to eat, and the aviator who at this moment might be up in the air shooting at German planes with a machine gun — was it made by Budd's?

Not one detail escaped her; she would prove it if he left anything out the next time he told the story. And the teller became her hero, her idol; it was a case of love at first sight. He played the piano for her, he showed her how to dance “Dalcroze,” and taught her the words of old songs. He made the French language come alive for her. The hour in the distant future when Bessie Budd first had to admit that this wonderful half-brother of hers was anything less than perfect would mark one of the tragedies of her stormy life.

VI

Comically different was Lanny's first meeting with his grandfather, Samuel Budd, which took place by appointment on the second evening after his arrival. Robbie escorted him to the old gentleman's home; impossible to subject a youth to such an ordeal alone. On the way the father told him what to do; not to talk too much, but to answer questions politely, and listen attentively. “It would have been better for me if I had always followed those rules,” he said, with a trace of bitterness.

Robbie was driving and they were alone; so he could speak frankly, and it was time to do so. “People are what circumstances have made them, and they don't change very much after they are grown. Your grandfather is a stubborn person, as much so as the bricks of which his house is built, and you might as well butt your head against one as the other.”

“I don't want to butt him,” said the boy, both amused and worried. “Tell me exactly what to do.”

“Well, the first thing is to get clear that you are the fruit of sin.”

From this remark Lanny realized that the quarrel which had wrecked his mother's life and separated him from his father was still going on, and that the wounds of it were festering in Robbie's heart. “Surely,” the youth protested, “he can't blame me for what happened then!”

“He will tell you about visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”

“Who says that, Robbie?”

“It's somewhere in the Old Testament.”

Lanny thought and then asked: “Just what does he want me to do?”

“He'll tell you that himself. All you have to do is to listen.”

Another pause. Finally the son was moved to say: “I suppose he didn't want me to come to Newcastle?”

“He has agreed to accept you as one of his grandsons. And I think it is important that he should be made to do it.”

“Well, whatever you say. I want to please you. But if you're doing it for my sake, you don't have to.”

“I'm doing it for my own,” said the other, grimly.

“It's been so many years, Robbie. Doesn't that count with him at all?”

“In the sight of the Lord a thousand years are as a day.”

Most of the persons Lanny had met in his young life never said anything about the Lord, except as a metaphor or an expletive. Several had said in his hearing that they didn't believe any such Being existed. But now the thought came to Lanny that his father differed from these persons. Robbie believed that the Lord existed, and he didn't like Him.

VII

The president of Budd Gunmakers Corporation had been born in a red brick mansion on the residence boulevard which skirted the edge of Newcastle. He had lived in it all his life, and meant to die in it, regardless of automobiles, country clubs, and other changes of fashion. His butler had been his father's butler, and wasn't going to be changed, even though he was becoming tottery. There were electric lights in the house, but they were hung in old chandeliers. The hand-carved French walnut bookcases were oiled and polished until they shone, and behind their glass doors Lanny caught glimpses of books which he would have liked to examine. He knew this was a very old mansion, and that political as well as business history had been made in it; but it seemed strangely ugly and depressing.

The master was in his study, the ancient butler said, and Robbie led his son at once to the room. At a desk absorbed in some papers sat a man of seventy, solidly built and heavy, as if he did not exercise; partly bald, and having a considerable tuft of whitish gray hair underneath his chin, a style which Lanny had never seen before. He wore gold spectacles, and had creases between his heavy gray eyebrows, which gave him a stern expression, cultivated perhaps for business purposes. From his desk it appeared that he had carried home with him the burden of winning a war.

“Well, young man?” he said, looking up. He did not rise, and apparently didn't plan even to shake hands.

But to Lanny it seemed that a gentleman ought to shake hands with his grandfather when he met him for the first time; so he went straight to the desk and held out his hand, forcing the other to take it. “How do you do, Grandfather?” he said; and as the answer appeared to come slowly he went on: “I have heard a great deal about you, and I'm happy to meet you at last.”

“Thank you,” said the old gentleman, surprised by this cordiality.

“Everybody has been most kind to me, Grandfather,” continued Lanny, as if he thought his progenitor might be worrying about it.

“I am glad,” said the other.

Lanny waited, and so did the old man; they gazed at each other, a sort of duel of eyes. Robbie had told him not to talk; but something came to Lanny suddenly, a sort of inspiration. This old munitions maker wasn't happy. He had to live in an ugly old house and be burdened day and night with cares. He had an enormous lot of power which other people were trying to get away from him, and that made him suspicious, it forced him to be hard. But he wasn't hard; underneath he was kind, and all you had to do was to be kind to him, and not ask anything from him.

Lanny decided to follow that hunch. “Grandfather,” he announced, “I think I am going to like America very much. I liked England, and I've been surprised to find everything here so much like England.”

“Indeed, young man?”

“The best part of England, I mean. I hope I shan't see anything like their terrible slums.”

The elderly industrialist rose to the bait. “Our working people are getting double wages now. You will see them wearing silk socks and shirts, and buying themselves cars on the installment plan. They will soon be our masters.”

“I was told the same thing in England, sir. People complain about the taxes there. The owners of the great estates say that they are going to have to break them up. Do you think that will happen in this country?”

“Apparently we plan to finance our share of the war by means of loans,” replied the president of Budd's. “It is a dangerous procedure.”

“M. Zaharoff talked about that. He doesn't seem to object to war loans of any size. Maybe it is because he is getting so large a share of the proceeds.”

“Ahem! Yes,” said the grandfather. “I am happy to say that Budd's have not conducted their affairs on the same fly-by-night basis as Zaharoff.”

The art of conversation is highly esteemed in France, and Lanny had acquired it. He had heard the worldly-wise Baroness de la Tourette declare that the one certain way to interest a man was to get him to talking about his own affairs. A beginning having been made in this case, Lanny went on to remark: “I find that Budd's have a very good reputation abroad, sir.”

“Humph! They want our products just now.”

“Yes, sir; but I mean with persons who are disinterested.”

“Who, for example?”

“Well, M. Rochambeau. He spent a good part of his life in the Swiss diplomatic service, so he's very well informed. He has been most helpful to me during the two and a half years that I haven't been seeing Robbie. Anything I didn't understand about world affairs he was always land enough to explain to me.”

“You were fortunate.”

“Yes, Grandfather. Before that there was M. Priedieu, the librarian at Mrs. Chattersworth's château. He helped to form my literary taste.”

“What books did he give you, may I ask?”

“Stendhal and Montaigne, Corneille and Racine, and of course Moliere.”

“All French writers,” said the deacon of the First Congregational Church. “May I inquire whether any of your advisers ever mentioned a book called the Bible?”

“Oh, yes, sir. M. Rochambeau told me that I should study the New Testament. I had some difficulty in finding a copy on the Riviera.”

“Did you read it?”

“Every word of it, sir.”

“And what did you get out of it?”

“It moved me deeply; in fact it made me cry, four different times. You know it tells the same story four times over.”

“I am aware of it,” said the old gentleman, dryly. “Have you read the Old Testament?”

“No, sir; that is one of the unfortunate gaps in my education. They tell me you are conducting a Bible class.”

“Every Sunday morning at ten o'clock. I am dealing with the First Book of Samuel, and would be pleased to have my grandson enroll.”

“Thank you. I will surely come. M. Rochambeau tells me that the best Jewish literature is found in the Old Testament.”

“It is much more than Jewish literature, young man. Do not forget that it is the Word of Almighty God, your heavenly Father.”

VIII

All that time Robbie Budd had been sitting in silence, occupied with keeping his emotions from showing in his face. Of course he knew that this youngster had had a lot of practice in dealing with elderly gentlemen. Colonels and generals, cabinet ministers, senators, diplomats, bankers, they had come to Bienvenu, and sometimes it had happened that a boy had to make conversation until his mother got her nose powdered; or perhaps he had taken them for a sail, or for a walk, to show them the charms of the Cap. All this experience he had now put to use, apparently with success; for here sat the leader of the men's Bible class of the First Congregational Church of Newcastle, Connecticut, who was supposed to be saving the world for democracy, and had before him a portfolio of important papers contributory to that end; but he put his heavy fist on them, and set to work to save the soul of a seventeen-year-old bastard from a semi-heathen part of the world where you had difficulty in finding a copy of the sacred Word of God.

To this almost-lost soul he explained that the Scripture was a source, not merely of church doctrine, but of church polity; and that officers of the church — including Deacon Budd — were to be thought of as exemplars of Christian doctrine, from whom others might understand the nature of Conversion and the reality of Salvation. The deacon reached into the corner of his desk and produced a small pamphlet, yellowed with age, entitled A Brief Digest of the Boston Confession of Faith. “This,” said he, “was composed by your great-great-grandfather for popular use as a simple statement of our basic faith. In it you will find clearly set forth that central truth of our religion — that there is no Salvation save in the blood of the Cross. For that guilt incurred by Adam's sin passed on into humanity together with the colossal iniquity of the accumulated sins through the ages has made all men hopelessly evil in God's sight, and deserving His just punishment of spiritual death. Outraged by human sin, the wrath of God has only been appeased by the atoning blood shed by His Son upon the Cross, and only by faith in the blood of Christ can any man find Salvation. No righteousness of life, no good deeds or kindly words, no service of fellow-men can offer any hope of Salvation. It is belief in that redeeming blood poured out on Calvary that alone can win God's forgiveness and save us from eternal death. I recommend the pamphlet as your introduction to the study of the true Old Gospel.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” said Lanny. He was deeply impressed. As in the case of Kurt explaining the intricacies of German philosophy, Lanny could not be sure how many of these striking ideas had been created by his remarkable progenitors.

Having thus performed his duty as a guardian of sound doctrine, the old gentleman allowed himself to unbend. “Your father tells me that you had a pleasant voyage.”

“Oh, yes,” replied the youth, brightening. “It couldn't have been pleasanter — except for the collision with an iceberg. Did Robbie tell you about that?”

“He overlooked it.”

“It was such a small iceberg, I suppose it would be better to speak of it as a cake of ice. But it gave us quite a bump, and the ship came to a stop. Of course everybody's mind had been on submarines from the moment we left England, so they all thought we had been torpedoed, and there was a panic among the passengers.”

“Indeed?”

“The strangest thing you could imagine, sir. I never saw people behave like that before. The women became hysterical, especially those in the third class. Those that had babies grabbed them up and rushed into the first-class saloon, and they all piled their babies in the middle of the floor. No one could imagine why they did that; I asked some of them afterwards, and they said they didn't know; some woman put her baby there, and the rest of them thought that must be the place for babies, so they laid them down there, and the babies were all squalling, and the women screaming, some of them on their knees praying, and some clamoring for the officers to save them — so much noise that the officers couldn't tell them that it was all right.”

“A curious experience. And now, young man, may I ask what you plan to do with yourself in this new country?”

“Surely, Grandfather. Robbie wishes me to prepare for St. Thomas's, and he's going to get me a tutor.”

“Do you really intend to work?”

“I always work hard when I get down to it. I wanted to be able to read music at sight, and I have stayed at it until I can read most anything.”

“These are serious times, and few of us have time for music.”

“I'm going to learn whatever my tutor wishes, Grandfather.”

“Very well; I'll look to hear good reports.”

There was a pause. Then the old man turned to his son. “Robert,” said he, “I've been looking into this vanadium contract, and it strikes me as a plain hold-up.”

“No doubt,” said Robbie. “But we're getting our costs plus ten percent, so we don't have to worry.”

“I don't like to pass a swindle like this on to the government.”

“Well, the dealers have their story. Everybody's holding up everybody all along the line.”

“I think you'd better go down to New York and inquire around.”

“If you say so. I have to go anyhow, on account of that new bomb-sight design.”

“It seems to be standing the tests?”

They went on for quite a while, talking technical details. Lanny was used to such talk, and managed to learn something. In this case he learned that an elderly businessman who got his church doctrine and polity from eighteen hundred years ago, and his chin whiskers and chandeliers from at least a hundred years ago, would change a bomb-sight or the formula for a steel alloy the moment his research men showed him evidence of an improvement.

At last the grandfather said: “All right. I have to get back to work.”

“You're carrying too much of a load, Father,” ventured Robbie. “You ought to leave some of these decisions to us young fellows.”

“We'll be over the peak before long. I'll hold up this vanadium deal for a day, and you run up to New York. Good-by, young man” — this to Lanny — “and see that you come to my Bible class.”

“Surely, Grandfather,” replied the youth. But already the elder's eyes were turning toward that pile of papers on his desk.

The other two went out and got into the car, and Robbie started to drive. Lanny waited for him to speak; then he discovered that the vibration of the seat was not from the engine, but was his father shaking with laughter.

“Did I do the right thing, Robbie?”

“Grand, kid, perfectly grand!” Robbie shook some more, and then asked: “Whatever put it into your head to talk?”

“Did I say too much?”

“It was elegant conversation — but what made you think of it?” “Well, I'll tell you. I just decided that people aren't kind enough to each other.” The father thought that over. “Maybe it was worth trying,” he admitted.

I

NORMAN HENRY HARPER was the name of Lanny's tutor. He didn't in the least resemble the elegant and easygoing Mr. Elphinstone, nor yet the happy-go-lucky Jerry Pendleton. He was a professional man, and performed his duties with dignity. He prepared young men to pass examinations. He already knew about the examinations; he found out about each young man as quickly as possible, and then, presto — A plus B equals C — the young man had passed the examination. To the resolution of this formula Mr. Harper devoted his exclusive attention; his equipment and procedure were streamlined, constructed upon scientific principles, as much so as a Budd machine gun.

Nor was this comparison fantastic; on the contrary, the more you considered it, the more apposite it appeared. Experts on military science had been writing for decades about the perpetual war going on between gunmakers and armorplate makers; and in the same way there were educators, whose business it was to cram knowledge into the minds of youth, and there was youth, perversely resisting this procèss, seeking every device to “get by.”

The educators had invented examinations, and the students were trying to circumvent them. Being provided by their parents with large sums of money, it was natural that they should use it to get expert help in this never-ceasing war. And so had developed the profession of tutoring.

This was America that Lanny had come to live in, and he wanted to know all about it. He listened to what Mr. Harper said, and afterwards put his mind on it and tried to figure out what it meant. A young man wanted to get into “prep school” as quickly as possible, in order that he might get through “prep school” as quickly as possible, in order that he might get into college as quickly as possible, in order that he might get out of college as quickly as possible. Mr. Harper didn't say any of that — for the reason that it didn't need saying. If it wasn't so, what was he here for?

Mr. Harper was about forty years of age, a brisk and businesslike person who might have been one of the Budd salesmen; he was getting bald, and plastered what hairs were left very carefully over the top of his head. For about half his life he had been studying college entrance examinations. It would be an exaggeration to say that he could tell you every question which had been asked in any college of the United States during twenty years; but his knowledge approached that encyclopedic character. He knew the personalities of the different professors, and what exam questions they had used for the last few years, and so he could make a pretty good guess what questions were due for another turn. He would hold up his hand in the middle of a conversation; no, no use to know that, they never asked anything like that.

Just recently had come a revolution in Mr. Harper's profession. The educational authorities had got together and set up a body called the College Entrance Examination Board, which was going to hold uniform examinations all over the country, good for any college the student might select. There were a quarter of a million college students, and six times as many high school students, so of course they had to be handled on a mass-production basis. It was part of the procèss of standardizing America; everybody was eating corn flakes out of the same kind of package, and all students of the year 1917 were going to get into college because they had read Washington Irving's Alhambra and George Washington's Farewell Address.

Lanny Budd was, so Mr. Harper declared, the most complicated problem he had ever tackled; he became quite enthusiastic over him, like a surgeon over an abdominal tumor with fascinating complications. From the point of view of the College Entrance Examination Board, Lanny quite literally didn't know anything. One by one the youth brought his burnt offerings and his wave offerings to the educational high priest and saw them rejected. Music? No, there are no credits for music. Greek dramatists? They teach those after you get into college, if at all. The same with Stendhal and Montaigne and Corneille and so on. Moliere, now, they use Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme — are you sure you remember the plot? Advanced French will count three units out of the fifteen you must have-but are you sure you can pass advanced French?

“Well, I've spoken French all my life,” said Lanny, bewildered.

“I know; but you won't be asked to speak it, and very few of your examiners could understand you if you did. How do you say 'a tired child'?”

“Un enfant fatigué.”

“And how do you say 'a beautiful day'?”

“Un beau jour.”

“Well, now, why do you put one adjective ahead of the noun and the other after it?”

The uneducated youth looked blank. “I really don't know,” said he. “I just do it.”

“Exactly. But the examination paper will ask you to state the rule, or give the list of exceptions, or whatever it may be. And what will you do?”

“I guess I'll have to go back to France,” said Lanny.

II

Mr. Harper decided that by heroic efforts it might be possible for this eccentric pupil to be got ready for the third year of prep school in the fall. Private academies were not so crowded as public high schools, and were better able to handle exceptional cases. But the first thing was to buckle down to plane and solid geometry, and to ancient and medieval history. Yes, said Mr. Harper, Sophocles and Euripides might help, but what really counted was facts. If a candidate were to tell a board of examiners that the Greek spirit was basically one of tragedy, how would they know whether he was spoofing them? But if he said that the naval battle of Salamis was won in the year 480 B.C. by the Athenian Themistocles, there was something that couldn't be faked.

“All right,” Lanny said, “I'll go to it.” That was what his father wanted, and his grandfather, and his stepmother; that was the test of character, the way to get on in America. So he put his textbooks on the little table by the open window of his room, with the door shut so that nobody would disturb him, and set to work to ram the contents of those books into his mind — names, places, and dates, and no foolish unprofitable flights of the imagination; rules, formulas, and facts, and no superfluous emotions of pity or terror.

The only company he had was the mocking-bird. This slender and delicate creature, gray with a little white, liked to sit on the topmost spray of the cherry tree and pour out its astonishing volume of song. A mystery when it slept; for no matter how late Lanny might work, it was singing in the moonlight, and if he opened his eyes at dawn, it was already under full steam. It imitated the cries of all the other birds; it said “meeauw” like the catbird, and “flicker, flicker, flicker,” like the big yellow-hammer. But mostly it improvised. Of course it said no words, because it couldn't form the consonants; but as you listened you were impelled to make up words to correspond to its rhythm and melody. Sometimes they came tripping fast: “Sicady, sicady, sicady, sicady.” Then the singer would stop, and and say very deliberately: “Peanuts first. Peanuts first.”

Lanny was so determined to make good that he wanted to study all the time; but Esther wouldn't have that. In the middle of the afternoon, after Mr. Harper had come and heard him recite and had laid out the next day's work — then he must quit, and go with the other young people for tennis, and for what he now learned to call a “swim” instead of a “bathe.” Five days in the week he could work, mornings and evenings; and on Saturdays there would be a picnic, or a sailing party, and in the evening a dance. He had so many cousins of all degrees that he wouldn't have to go out of the family for company and diversion.

They were an astonishing lot of people, these Budds. The earlier generations had married young, and the women had accepted all the children the Lord had sent them — ten, or sometimes twenty, and then the women would die off, and the men would start again. In these modern days, of course, everything was changed; one or two children was the rule, and a woman like Esther, who had three, felt that she had gone out of her way to serve the community. But still there were a great many Budds, and others with Budd for their first or middle name. Grandfather Samuel had six daughters and four sons living; Samuel's oldest brother, a farmer, was still thriving at the age of eighty, and had had seventeen children, and most of them still alive, preaching and practicing the Word of the Lord their God, that their days might be long in the land which the Lord their God had given them.

Most of those who were not preaching the Word were employed by Budd Gunmakers Corporation in one capacity or another, and just now were working at the task of making the days of the Germans as short as possible. The Germans had their own God, who was working just as hard for his side — so Lanny read in a German magazine which the kind Mr. Robin took the trouble to send him. How these Gods adjusted matters up in their heaven was a problem which was too much for Lanny, so he put his mind on the dates of ancient Greek and Roman wars.

III

On Sunday mornings the earnest student would dress himself in a freshly pressed palm beach suit and panama hat, and at five minutes before ten o'clock would be among those who thronged into the First Congregational Church. This building occupied a prominent position on the central “square” of Newcastle; a large, two-story structure, built of wood and painted white, with a high-pitched roof and rows of second-story windows resembling those of a private residence. What told you it was a church was the steeple which rose from the front center; a square tower, with a round cylinder on top of that, then a smaller cube and then a very sharp and tall pyramid on that. Topping all was a lightning rod; but no cross — that would have meant idolatry, the “Whore of Babylon” — in short, a Catholic church. There were stairs inside the steeple, and windows so that you could look out as you climbed. Robbie said the original purpose was so that the townsmen could keep watch against the Pequot Indians; but there was a twinkle in his eye, so Lanny wasn't sure.

The men's Bible class was one of the features of Newcastle life. It is not in every town that you can meet the leading captain of industry face to face once a week, and have a chance to ask him a question. So many took advantage of this opportunity that the class was held in the main body of the church. Many of the leading businessmen attended, most of the Budd executives old and young, and everyone who hoped ever to be an executive. It was a business as well as a cultural event.

Did the teacher of this remarkable class have any cynical ideas as to what caused so many hard-working citizens of his town to give up their golf and tennis and listen to the expounding of ancient Jewish morality and Swiss and Scottish theology? Doubtless he did, for his faith in his Lord and Master did not extend to the too many children of this Almighty One. It was enough for Samuel Budd that they came; having them at his mercy for one hour, he pounded the sacred message into them. If they did not take their chance, it was because the Lord had predestined them to everlasting damnation, for reasons which were satisfactory fo Him and into which no mortal had any business trying to pry. If they chose to sit with blank faces and occupy their minds with how to get a raise in salary, or how to get their wives invited to the Budd homes, or what make of new car they were going to purchase — that also had been arranged by an inscrutable Divine Providence, and all that a deacon of the stern old faith could do was to quote the texts which the Lord had provided, together with such interpretations as the Holy Spirit saw fit to reveal to him at ten o'clock on Sunday morning.

IV

The regular service followed the men's Bible class; which meant that the ladies had an extra hour in which to curl their hair and set on top of it their delicate confections of straw and artificial flowers. The war hadn't changed the fashions, nor the fact that there were fashions; all that elegance which had fled from Paris and London was now in Newcastle. The chauffeurs drove back to the homes for the ladies, and they entered with primness and piety, but now and then a sidelong glance to be sure that gentlemen standing in the sunshine on the steps were properly attentive.

That little heathen, Lanny Budd, had never attended a church service before, except for a wedding or a funeral; but he did not reveal that fact. The rule was the same as for a dinner party: watch your hostess and do what she does. He stood up and sang a hymn, from a book which Esther put into his hand, the number of the hymn having been announced twice by the minister. Then he bowed his head and closed his eyes while the Reverend Mr. Saddleback prayed. “Thou knowest, O Lord,” was his opening formula; after which he proceeded to tell the Lord many things which the Lord knew, but which the congregation presumably didn't. Also he asked the Lord to do many things for the congregation, and it seemed to Lanny that the Lord must know about these already.

A well-trained choir sang a florid and elaborate anthem, this being Newcastle's substitute for grand opera. A collection was taken up, and Grandfather Budd passed the plate among the richest pew holders up front, and kept an eagle eye upon the bills which they dropped in. Finally Mr. Saddleback preached a sermon. Lanny had hoped that he would explain some of the difficult points of Fundamentalist doctrine, but instead he explained the will of the Lord with regard to Kaiser Wilhelm and his Kultur. “And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you.” The Reverend Mr. Saddleback turned his pulpit into a Sinai, and thundered such awful words, and they seemed a direct message to Budd Gunmakers Corporation, which in the spring of that year 1917 had enlisted all its lathes and grinding machines, its jigs and dies and other tools, in the allied services of the United States government and the Lord God Almighty.

V

Lanny took time off to write letters home and tell his mother and Marcel how things were going with him. To cheer them up he went into detail about the martial fervors which surrounded him. Beauty sent him affectionate replies, and told him that Marcel was painting a portrait of Emily Chattersworth, and wouldn't let her pay him for it; it was his thanks for what she was doing for the poilus. Marcel was in a state of increasing suspense and dread, because of the failure of the French offensive in Champagne, in which his old regiment had been nearly wiped out. Beauty couldn't say much about it, but doubtless Robbie would have inside news; and he did.

Also Lanny wrote to Rick and to his wife. From the former he had a cheerful post card, beginning “Old Top,” as usual. From Nina he learned that Rick had made a dangerous forced landing, but fortunately behind the English lines; he was a highly skilled flier now, what they called an “ace.” Also Nina said that the baby was real and was making itself known. She told him about her examinations, and he told about those for which he was being prepared. In his letters he permitted himself to have a little fun with them.

He wrote the Robin boys in the same strain, and they told him about their school work, which for some strange reason they loved. He wondered if it was a characteristic of the Jews that they enjoyed hard labor; if so, it gave them an unfair advantage over other races. Lanny found that they bore that reputation in Newcastle; they had little stores in the working-class districts of the town, and kept them open until late hours, and now and then were fined for selling things on the Sabbath — the Puritan Sabbath, that is. They sent their children to the schools, where they persisted in winning prizes; there were so many of them crowding into Harvard that they had been put on an unadmitted quota. Members of the New England aristocracy would say to their complacent sons: “If you don't buck up and work, I'll send you to Harvard to compete with the Jews.” Lanny wrote that to the Robins, knowing that it would make them chirp.

The salesman of electrical apparatus in Rotterdam forwarded another of Lanny's letters to Kurt; a very careful one, in which Lanny told all about his studies, but didn't mention the U.S.A. He just said: “I have gone to visit my father's home. Write me there.” Kurt knew about Newcastle; and in due course a letter came, by way of Switzerland, as usual. Kurt said that he was well, and had gone back to his duties, and was glad to hear that his friend was keeping his mind on matters of permanent interest and benefit. That was all; but Lanny could read between those lines, and understand that even though Kurt was now fighting America, he didn't want Lanny to be fighting Germany!

Midsummer; and Nina wrote again. Rick had had a week's leave, and had come home; she had been to The Reaches with him — and, oh, so happy they had been! So happy they might be all their lives, if only this cruel slaughter would end! The baronet and his wife had been kind to her, and Rick was a darling — they had boated and bathed and played croquet. And the heavenly nights, with music on the river, and starlight trembling on the water, and love in their hearts! It all came over Lanny in a wave of melancholy longing; he too had had love in his heart, and had it still — but the granddaughter of Lord Dewthorpe was the poorest of correspondents, and her letters were skimpy, matter of fact, and wholly lacking in charm. Taking care of wounded men all day left one tired and unromantic, it appeared. Old England had had too much of war, and now it was New England's turn.

VI

Perhaps the letter from Nina, and Lanny's continual thinking about it, may have had something to do with the strange experience which befell him a few nights later. When Lanny went to bed he was tired in both mind and body, and usually fell asleep at once, and rarely wakened until the maid tapped on his door. But now something roused him; at least, he insisted that he was awake, fully awake, and no amount of questioning by others could shake his certainty. He lay there, and it seemed that the first faint gray of dawn was stealing into the room — just enough light so that you could know it was a room, and that there were objects in it. The mocking-bird hadn't noticed the light, and the crickets had gone to sleep, and the stillness caught Lanny's attention; it seemed abnormal.

Then a weird feeling began to steal over him. Something was happening, he didn't know what it was, but fear of it began to stir in his soul, and his skin began to creep and draw tight, so it seemed. Lanny stared into the darkness, and it appeared to be taking form, and he began to wonder whether the light was daylight or something else; it seemed to be shaping itself into a mass at the foot of his bed, and the mass began to move, and suddenly Lanny realized it was Rick. A pale gray figure, just luminous enough so that it could be clearly seen; Rick in his flier's uniform, all stained with mud. On his face was a grave, rather mournful expression, and across his forehead a large red gash.

It came to Lanny in a sort of inner flash: Rick is dead! He raised his head a little and stared at the figure, and a cold chill went over him, and his teeth began to chatter, and his eyes popped wide, trying to see better. “Rick!” he whispered, half under his breath; but maybe that was a mistake, for right away the figure began to fade. Lanny cried again, half in fright and half in longing: “Rick! Speak to me!”

But the pale form faded away — or rather it seemed to spread itself over the room, and when it did, Lanny could see that it was the beginning of dawn and that objects were slowly looming in the room. All at once the mocking-bird tuned up and the other little birds outside began to say: “Cheep, cheep,” and “Twitter, twitter.” Lanny lay sick with horror, saying to himself soundlessly: “Rick is dead! Rick is dead!”

He did not go to sleep again. He lay till the sun was nearly up, and then put on his clothes and went into the garden and walked up and down, trying to get himself together before he had to meet the rest of the family. He tried to argue with himself; but there was no making headway against that inner voice. It was the first great loss of his life. He had to wrestle it out with himself — and he knew that he hated this war, and all wars, now and forever; just as Beauty had done in the beginning, and as Robbie still did in the depths of his heart, though he had stopped saying it.

VII

Impossible that Robbie and Esther should not notice his distraught condition. He said that he had slept badly — he didn't want to discuss the matter before the children. But after they had gone to their play he told his father and stepmother. As he had expected, Esther hated the idea. Hers was a practical mind and her beliefs in supernormal phenomena were limited to those which had been ratified and approved by biblical exegesis. The visit of Emmaus was all right, because it was in the Bible; but for there to be an apparition in the year 1917 — and in her home! — that could be nothing but superstition. Only Negroes, and maybe Catholics, let themselves be troubled by such notions. “You just had a dream, Lanny!” insisted his father's wife.

“I was exactly as wide awake as I am right now,” he answered. “I feel sure something dreadful has happened to Rick.”

He wanted to cable Nina; and Robbie said he would send it — his name being known would speed matters with the censors. He promised to attend to it the moment he reached the office, and to prepay a reply, because Nina didn't have much money. “What news about Rick?” he sent; and in course of the afternoon his secretary called the house and read Lanny the reply: “Rick reported well last week's letter.”

Of course, Lanny said, that didn't tell him anything. He insisted upon a second message being sent, with reply prepaid: “Advise immediately if trouble.” For two days Lanny waited, doing his utmost to keep his mind upon his studies, so as not to forfeit the respect of his stepmother and her friends. Then came another cablegram from Nina: “Rick badly hurt great pain may not live prayers.”

Somehow it was that last word which broke Lanny down and made him cry like a baby. He was quite sure that Nina was not a religious person; she was looking forward to being a scientist — but now the same thing had happened to her that had happened to Beauty in those dreadful hours when Marcel's life hung upon a thread. She was praying; she was even moved to cable for Lanny's help!

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

They walked through long rooms like corridors, in which such things as time fuses for anti-aircraft shells were made. Women and girls sat at a table which the children thought must surely be the longest in the world; on top of it was an endless belt, gliding silently. The object being manufactured started from nothing, and each worker added a bit, or maybe just turned a screw, until, at the far end, the completed products were slid onto trays, and taken by truck to a part of the plant where shrapnel shells were loaded. That place was remote, and visitors were not permitted there — not even members of the family.

Lanny was interested in time fuses, but still more interested in women and girls. He saw that they all wore uniforms, and that the motions of their hands were swift and unvarying; most of them never took their eyes from the job, and if they did, it was only for the fraction of a second — even when there was a good-looking young man in the line of vision. They were riveted to this task for seven hours and forty minutes every day, with twenty minutes for lunch, and Lanny wondered what it did to their minds and bodies. The secretary assured him that all this had been studied by experts, and the speed of the belt precisely adjusted so that no one would become weary. It was a pleasant thing to hear, but Lanny would have been interested to ask the girls.

Of course he might have gone out at night, in the parts of the town where the picture theaters and the bright lights were, and it would have been easy to “pick up” one of them and get her to talking. But Lanny wasn't roaming the streets at night; he was studying and earning credits with his family, as well as with St. Thomas's prep school. All he would know about the Budd plant was what a friendly but discreet young secretary saw fit to tell him. This was wartime, and every department was working in three eight-hour shifts. Those who couldn't stand the pace went elsewhere.

X

Lanny took his ideas and impressions home and thought them over in his leisure hours. He was proud of that large institution which his forefathers had built; he understood Robbie's dream, that some day his oldest son might become the master of it. Lanny put the question to himself: “Do I want to do that?” The time to decide was now; for what was the sense of shutting himself up in a room and learning the dates of old wars if his business was going to be with new ones?

It seemed to him that, if he meant to become a maker of munitions, he ought to go into the plant and begin learning from his father and his overburdened grandfather all about steel and aluminum and the new alloys which were being created in the laboratories; about slow-burning and quick-burning powders, and the ways of grinding which made the subtle differences; the various raw materials, their prices and sources of supply; money, and how it was handled and kept; and, above all, men, how to judge them, how to get out of them the best work they were capable of performing. This was the education which a captain of industry had to acquire. It was grim, tough work, and it did something to those who undertook it.

First of all Lanny ought to make up his mind on the subject of war. Did he agree with his father that men would go on righting forever and ever, because that was their nature and nothing could change it? Did he agree with his grandfather that God had ordained every war, and that what happened on this earth was of little importance compared with eternity? Was he going to adopt either of those beliefs — or just drift along, believing one thing when his father talked to him, and another when he saw Rick's image at the foot of the bed?

One thing seemed plain: if you were going to be happy in any job, you had to believe in that job. Robbie said it was enough to know that the money was coming in; but Lanny was watching his father more closely, and becoming sure that he was far from happy. Robbie was by nature sociable, and liked to say what he thought; but now he kept silence. His heart was unwarmed by all this blaze of patriotic excitement which possessed the country, the newspapers full of propaganda, the streets blaring music and the oratory of “four-minute men” and salesmen of “liberty bonds.” The airplanes were going to be driven by “liberty motors,” and you ate “liberty steak” and “liberty cabbage” instead of hamburgers and sauerkraut. Robbie hated such nonsense; he hated still more to see the country and its resources being used for what he said were the purposes of British imperialism.

This attitude didn't make for contentment either in his work or in his home. As it happened, Robbie's wife was growing more martial-minded every day; she was believing the atrocity stories, putting her money into liberty bonds, helping to organize the women of Newcastle for community singing, for rolling bandages, nursing, whatever doings were called for by patriotic societies and government officials. It happened that President Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and that Esther's mother was the daughter of one. Esther read the President's golden words and believed every one of them; when Robbie would remark that the British ruling classes were the shrewdest propagandists in the world, a sudden chill would fall at the breakfast table.

I

LANNY didn't meet his grandfather again for quite a while. He saw him in church, but made no attempt to catch his eye; just dropped his dollar bill into the plate and knew that his good deed had been credited for that day. The old gentleman was absorbed in the task which the Lord had assigned him, and he stayed in his big mansion, with an old-maid niece to run it, and rarely went anywhere except to his office. But he managed to keep track of the members of his big family, and if they were doing anything of which he disapproved, he let them know it. “Silence means consent,” remarked Robbie, with a smile.

He added: “I showed him Mr. Harper's report on your progress.”

“What did he say?”

“He grunted and said you were a clever lad, but a chatterbox. Of course that's not to be taken too seriously. It's not according to his nature to give praise.”

Lanny met others of his uncles and aunts; sometimes in church, sometimes when they came to the house and stayed to meals. Robbie would tell him about these people — always when the two were alone, because Robbie's view of his relatives was often touched with mischief. They were a cranky lot; an old family which had had money for generations and could indulge their whims however extravagant. Some were satisfied to stay in harness, and make more money, even though they had no need of it; but others took up special duties, such as endowing missionaries and having the Bible translated into Torgut or Bashkir or some other unlikely language; or exploring the river Orinoco and bringing home black orchids; or traveling to Southern Arabia and making friends with a sheik, and purchasing blooded horses to drive about town and to breed from.

Great-Uncle Theophrastus Budd came calling on his way home from a convention of reformers. He was the eldest of the brothers of Grandfather Budd, and was known as a philanthropist; his cause was euthanasia, which meant the painless ending of the lives of the aged. He was getting pretty aged himself, and Robbie said that his heirs were waiting for him to practice what he preached. Great-Aunt Sophronia, an old maid, lived in an ancient house with many cats, and when Lanny went to call at her request, he found her in the attic with a dustcloth over her hair, sorting out family treasures in an old trunk. She had found moths in it and was hunting them with a fly-spat, and invited Lanny to help her, which he did, and found it a pleasant diversion. This old lady had a sense of humor, and told her new grandnephew that some years ago she had lost interest in life, and had found to her surprise that this had made her quite happy.

These odd people had a way of quarreling bitterly and never making up. Uncle Andrew Budd and his wife had lived in the same house for thirty years and never spoken. Cousin Timothy and Cousin Rufus couldn't agree upon the division of their family farm, so they had cut it in halves and lived as neighbors, but did not visit. Aunt Agatha, Robbie's eldest sister, went off and took up residence in a hotel, and forbade the clerk at the desk ever to announce any person by the name of Budd. That was New England, Robbie said; a sort of ingrown place, self-centered, opinionated, proud.

II

One whom Lanny met only in the most formal manner was his Uncle Lawford. The meeting took place in church, where members of the family would exchange greetings in the aisles, or as they walked to their cars. When an occasion arose, Esther said: “Lawford, this is banning, Robbie's son.” And Uncle Lawford shook hands and inquired: “How do you do?” — politely, as became two children of the Lord meeting in His holy place. That was all.

He was a peculiar-looking man, heavily built, with broad square shoulders and rather short bandy legs. He was close to fifty, and his gray hair was thin on top; he had a square bulging forehead, and on his face a look that Robbie said was “sour,” but to Lanny it seemed as if someone had just said something to hurt Uncle Lawford's feelings. Robbie said that was perhaps the case; Lawford couldn't stand the least opposition in anything, and Robbie's way of making jokes annoyed him beyond endurance.

These two might have let each other alone, but business affairs wouldn't permit that. Every policy that Robbie advocated was opposed by the older brother. The father had the final say, and if he came to Robbie's view, Lawford would withdraw into himself. He was “vice-president in charge of production,” and was vigilant and competent, but he took the job as a dog does a bone — going off into a corner by himself, and growling at any other dog that comes near.

Lanny said: “If I had anything to do with Budd's, I'd be bound to run into him, wouldn't I?”

“I'm afraid so; but I'd back you, and I think we'd win.”

“Suppose Grandfather Budd should die — how would that work out?”

“It'll be up to the stockholders; there'll be a hunt for proxies.”

“Do members of the family own most of the stock?”

“Not outright, the plant's grown too big. But we have enough to keep control, especially with our friends in the town.” Lanny went off and thought about all that. To follow his father's occupation would mean to take up these ancient grudges and make himself the object of these festering hates. Did he want to do it? Or did he want to hurt his father by refusing to do it?

III

Important to the youth was his meeting with his Great-Great-Uncle Eli Budd, youngest and only surviving uncle of Grandfather Samuel. He lived in a town of the interior called Norton, and was eighty-three, and still hale. He sent word that he wanted to meet his new kinsman, and since he was the head of the family, his wish was a command. Lanny was to motor there on Saturday morning, and come back on Sunday evening; and Esther told him not merely how to behave, but where on the trip he would see a famous old “overhang” house, and an old mill which Esther's grandfather had built, and a churchyard with the headstone of the progenitor of all the Budds. “The churchyards are among the most interesting places in New England,” said Lanny's stepmother.

The main street of the village of Norton was broad, and deeply shaded with great elms; its residences were white, and none had fences or hedges, but stood in a continuous well-kept lawn, with elms and oaks and maples averting the summer's glare. They were dignified old houses with well-proportioned Colonial doorways, and no unseemly noises ever disturbed their peace inside or out. In one of them the old gentleman lived with his second wife, some thirty years younger than himself, and one unmarried daughter — there were many such in New England, because so many of the young men went away. The family lived frugally, upon a small income, because this retired preacher valued independence more than anything else in the world. “The Budds will all tell you how to live if you will let them,” he said to Lanny, with a dry smile.

He was a man of more than six feet, his frame slender and unbowed. His hair was snow-white and long, his face smooth-shaven, with a large Roman nose and deeply graven lines about the mouth. His neck was long and the cords stood out on it, and the skin was like withered brown parchment. But his eyes were still keen, and his step though slow was steady. He had learned how to live, and to limit his desires and keep his spirit serene.

Lanny felt as soon as he entered the house that here was a place ruled by love. Great-Great-Aunt Bethesda was a Quaker, gentle, quiet, like a little gray dove. She said: “Has thee had a pleasant trip?” — and this was something new to Lanny, and awakened his curiosity. He knew that the old gentleman was a Unitarian, and that this had been a scandal in its time, and still was to Grandfather Samuel, and perhaps to Stepmother Esther. One glance about was enough to tell him that Eli was a scholar, for the walls were lined with books that had been read and lived with.

Sitting in this patriarch's study, Lanny was invited to talk about himself, and didn't mind doing it. He was able to guess what would interest his relatives: the natural beauty of the place where he had lived, and the cultivated persons he had met, especially the old ones, such as M. Anatole France, and M. Priedieu, and M. Rochambeau. Eli Budd questioned him about his reading; and when Lanny named names, he didn't say: “All French writers.” He had read them himself, and made comments on them, and was able to discover from Lanny's remarks that he had understood what was in them.

Between these two there took place that chemical procèss of the soul whereby two become one, not gradually, but all at once. They had lived three thousand miles apart, yet they had developed this affinity. The seventeen-year-old one told his difficulties and his problems, and the eighty-three-year-old one renewed his youth, and spoke words which seemed a sort of divination. Said he:

“Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.”

Great-Great-Uncle Eli was a “transcendentalist,” having known many of the old New England group. There is something in us all, he said, that is greater than ourselves, that works through us and can be used in the making of character. The central core of life is personality. To respect the personality of others is the beginning of virtue, and to enforce respect for it is the first duty of the individual toward all forms of government, all organizations and systems which men contrive to enslave and limit their fellows.

IV

Youth and age went out and strolled in the calm of twilight, and again in the freshness of the morning. They sat and ate the frugal meals which two gentle ladies prepared for them. But most of the time they just wanted to sit in the book-walled study and talk. Lanny had never heard anyone whose conversation satisfied him so completely, and old Eli saw his spirit reborn in this new Budd from across the sea.

Lanny told about his mother, and about Marcel; about Rick and his family, and about Kurt; he even told about Rosemary, and the old clergyman was not shocked; he said that customs in sexual matters varied in different parts of the world, and what suited some did not suit others. “The blood of youth is hot,” he said, “and impatience sets traps for us, and prepares regrets that sometimes last all our lives. The important thing is not to wrong any woman — and that is no easy matter, for women are great demanders, and do not scruple to invade the personality.” Great-Great-Uncle Eli smiled, but Lanny knew he was serious.

Free-thinker that this old man was, he was nevertheless a product of the Puritan conscience, and wanted men and women to become pure in heart. As Lanny listened, he began to recall a certain afternoon upon the heights by the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Port. His friend Kurt Meissner had not merely voiced the same ethical ideas, but had justified them by the same metaphysical concepts. Lanny mentioned that to the ex-clergyman, who said there was nothing strange about it, because New England transcendentalism had stemmed directly from German philosophical idealism. Interesting to see a son of New England bringing home another load of it, a century later!

Eli bade Lanny have the courage of his vision. Without it men would be dull clods, and life would become blind greed and empty pleasure-seeking. “God save the Budds if they were never anything but munitions makers and salesmen!” exclaimed Eli; and these words pierced to the center of Lanny's being. When the time came for him to depart, this gentle yet hardy old man gave him a volume of Emerson's, essays inscribed by that great teacher's fine and sensitive hand. Emerson had been merely a name to Lanny; but he promised to read the book, and did so.

V

Lanny drove up to Sand Hill, where St. Thomas's Academy is situated, and took his examinations with success. The fact that the name of Budd was signed to all his papers was not supposed to have anything to do with his passing; nor the fact that one of the school's largest brownstone buildings had been paid for out of the profits which Budd Gunmakers had derived from the American Civil War, and another from the profits of the Spanish-American War. St. Thomas's was a part of the Budd tradition; and the family's right to send its sons there was hereditary. Lanny asked his father about the matter of his not being quite properly a Budd, and Robbie said he had entered him as his son, and that was that; it wasn't the custom to send over to France for marriage certificates.

The beautiful old buildings stood in a park having lawns and shade trees like an English estate. They were of dull old red brick with Boston ivy on the walls, making a safe home for millions of spiders and bugs. In one of the dormitories Lanny shared a comfortable room and bath with a cousin whom he had met on the tennis courts, but with whom he had little else in common.

Lanny had played with boys, but always a few at a time; he had never before been part of a horde. He discovered that a horde is something different, a being with a personality of its own. Being young and eager, he was curious about it, and every hour was a fresh adventure. He awoke to the ringing of an electric bell, went to breakfast to another ringing, and thereafter moved through the day as an electrically controlled robot. He acquired knowledge in weighed and measured portions; memorized facts and recited them, forgot many of them until the end of the month, relearned them for a “test,” forgot them again until the end of a term, relearned them once more for “exam” — and then forgot them forever and ever, amen.

In addition to this part of his life, scheduled and ordained by the school authorities, the horde had its own life which it lived during off hours. This life centered upon three things: athletic prowess, class politics, and sex. If you could run, jump, or play football or baseball, your success was probable; if you could talk realistically about girls, that would help; if your family was notably rich and famous, and if you had Anglo-Saxon features, good clothes, and easy manners, all problems were solved. Entering the third year, Lanny was jumping into the midst of school politics, and had to be looked over and judged quickly. His cousin, belonging to a fashionable set, was ready to initiate him, and would be provoked if Lanny didn't display proper respect for the fine points upon which his friends based their judgments. “Be careful, or they'll set you down for a 'queerie,'” said this mentor.

VI

Robbie had asked Lanny not to play football, saying that he was too lightly built for this rough game. It was another of those cases in which the father expected him to be wiser than himself. Robbie didn't want Lanny to smoke or drink. He was willing for him to have a girl now and then, but wanted him to be “choosy” about it. He had wished Lanny to attend his grandfather's Bible class and his stepmother's church — even though Robbie himself wouldn't do it, and paid a price for refusing. All this was hard to fathom.

As it happened, Lanny could run, and liked to, and he was a good tennis player, so he would never be entirely a “queerie.” But he had many handicaps to success at St. Thomas's. He had just come from abroad, and that made him an object of curiosity. He pronounced French correctly, which could only be taken as an affectation. He had read a great many books, and his masters discovered this fact and brought it out in class, hoping to waken a desire for culture in these “young barbarians all at play.” That was hard on Lanny.

His first disillusionment came with the discovery that class sessions at St. Thomas's were rather dull. They consisted mainly of the recitation of lessons studied the night before, and if you had studied well, you were bored listening to other fellows who had studied badly, and you were only mildly entertained by their efforts to “get by” with a wisecrack. Rarely was there any intelligent discussion in class; rarely anything taught about which either masters or pupils were deeply concerned. They were preparing for college, and all instruction was aimed like a gun at a target; they learned names, dates, theorems, verb forms, rules, and exceptions — everything definite and specific, that could be measured and counted.

Lanny found that he was expected to assemble now and then with his cousin's “set.” These were called “bull sessions,” and there would be some talk about the prospects of beating Groton or St. Paul's at football, and some about the wire-pulling of a rival set; but sooner or later the talk would turn to sex. Lanny was no Puritan — on the contrary, he was here to study the Puritans; and what troubled him was that the element of mutuality or idealism appeared to be lacking in their relations with girls. Shrewd and observant young men of the world, they knew how to deal with “gold diggers,” “salamanders,” and other deadly females of the species. Both boys and girls appeared to regard the love market as they would later in life the stock market — a place where you got something for nothing.

One of the characteristics of the horde is that it does not allow you to be different; it persecutes those who do not conform to its ideas and obey its taboos. There was a sensitive younger lad named Benny Cartright, whose father was a well-known portrait painter; he found out that Lanny was interested in this subject, and would cling to him and ask yearning questions about the art world abroad. There was a son of Mrs. Bascome, well-known suffrage lecturer; this youth wore horn-rimmed spectacles and was opposed to war on principle. More than a year ago Robbie had told his son about the secret treaties of the Allies, in which they had distributed the spoils of war among themselves; now these treaties were published in the New York Evening Post, and this chap Bascome brought them to Lanny in the form of a pamphlet.

So, despite his cousin's warnings, Lanny became more queer, and this was in due course reported back to the family. The grown-ups also were a horde, and watched the young and spied upon them — just as the masters in this school were expected to do. St. Thomas's had a “rule book,” and your attention would be called to section nine, paragraph six; if you disregarded the warning, attention would be called more sternly, and if a third warning had no effect, you might be “sequestered.”

Among the masters at St. Thomas's was one who taught English, a slender and ascetic young man who was trying to write poetry in his off hours. By accident he discovered that Lanny had not merely read the Greek dramatists but had visited that country. They talked about it after class, and from this developed a liking, and Lanny was invited to the master's room on several occasions. This was a form of queerness with which the horde had never before had to deal, and they didn't know quite what to make of it. They applied to it a rather awful term out of their varied assortment of slang; they said that Budd was “sucking up to” the somewhat pathetic Mr. Algernon Baldwin — who got only eight hundred dollars a year for his earnest labors in this school, and had an invalid mother to take care of.

VII

There came a cablegram from Juan, making a happy little jingle, though this was probably not intentional: “Girl both well Marcel.” Later came a letter — since one could not count upon the cable these days. Beauty had a lovely little baby girl, and had named her Marceline. The painter was exceedingly proud of himself, after the fashion of fathers. He had persuaded Beauty to the unprecedented course of nursing the baby herself; a matter of hygiene and morality upon which he laid much stress. He had got the idea out of Rousseau.

Then came a letter from Mrs. Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson, announcing that she was the mother of a baby boy. Said Nina: “I won't say much about him, because everything about new babies has been said a million times already. I send a picture.” So Lanny had a pair to set up on his bureau; he wrote to each of the mothers about the other, suggesting that they get in touch and start making a match.

Nina revealed that poor Rick had had another operation, his third; still hoping to get rid of pain in what was left of his knee. They were living at The Reaches. Sir Alfred was helping with war work, and riding around to places most of the time. They were saving food, because the submarine blockade was pinching England badly.

Lanny went home for Thanksgiving and read this letter to his father, who said that the submarines were being countered by the system of convoying ships. The U-boats didn't dare show themselves in the neighborhood of destroyers, because of the effectiveness of depth bombs. So with the help of the combined navies great fleets of vessels were crossing the Atlantic in safety. The top men at Budd's knew all about it, having to adjust their system of loading to the sailing dates of convoys.

Father and son talked also about the second Russian revolution, which had just occurred. The government of Kerensky, trying to go on with the war, had been overthrown by a group called Bolsheviks — a Russian word which nobody had ever heard before. These were out-and-out revolutionists, confiscating all property and socializing industry. Robbie said this overturn was the most terrible blow the Allies had yet received; it meant that Germany had won half the war, and the job of the United States had been doubled. “It may mean even more than that,” he added. “Those forces of hatred and destruction exist everywhere, and they're bound to try the same thing in other countries.”

“Do you suppose there are Bolsheviks in this country, Robbie?”

“Thousands of them; they're not all Russians, either. Your Uncle Jesse Blackless is some such crackpot. That's why I was determined he shouldn't get hold of you.”

“You mean he's an active Red?”

“He used to be, and this may stir him up again. He may be behind these mutinies which have been happening in the French army.”

“But that's crazy, Robbie. Don't they know the Germans would march straight in and take the country?”

“I suppose they figure that the same sort of agitation is going on among the German troops. If that fire once got to blazing, it might spread everywhere.”

“Gosh! Do you suppose we have such people in Budd's?”

“If there are, they keep pretty quiet. Father and Lawford have ways to keep track of agitators.”

“You mean we have spies?”

“Nobody can expect to run an industry unless he knows what's going on in it. This thing in Russia has set all the agitators crazy.” Robbie thought for a moment, then added: “Those secret treaties of the Allies have put a powerful weapon into their hands. They say to the workers: 'Look what you're fighting for! Look what's being done to you!'”

“But you said that too, Robbie!”

“I know; but it's one thing for you and me to know such facts, and another for them to be in the hands of revolutionists and criminals.”

“There's a chap in school who has a copy of those treaties and talks about them a lot. He says everything that you do.”

“Watch out for him,” replied the father — his sense of humor failing him for once. “Some older and shrewder persons may be using him. These are dangerous times, and you have to watch your step.”

VIII

Lanny went back to school, and it wasn't long before he walked into the very trap against which his father had warned him. There was a Mrs. Riccardi, a well-to-do society lady of the town of Sand Hill who sometimes gave musicales in her home. She found out that Lanny had studied “Dalcroze,” and begged him to come and tell her friends about it. Lanny brought Jack Bascome and Benny Cartright to this affair, and it wasn't long before Bascome was talking against the war to Mrs. Riccardi. He told her about the secret treaties, and gave her the pamphlet, and she passed it on to others. Of course rumors of this were bound to spread. The country was at war, and people who found fault with France and England were lending aid and comfort to the enemy, whether they realized it or not.

On a Sunday evening Lanny and his two “queeries,” Benny and Jack, went by invitation to the home of this wealthy lady, and there was Mr. Baldwin, and another schoolmaster of aesthetic tastes, and several other persons, including a young Methodist preacher with the unfashionable name of Smathers. Lanny had never heard of him, but learned that he had been pastor of a church in Newcastle — in the working-class part of the city, known as “beyond the tracks.” He was a gentle, mild-voiced person, and in the course of the evening Lanny learned that he had got into the newspapers when there had been a strike of the workers in the Budd plants, and he had helped to organize a relief kitchen for the wives and children, and had made speeches and been chased down an alley and clubbed by mounted police.

Of course Lanny ought to have known better than to ask questions of such a man. The man tried to avoid answering them, saying that he didn't wish to give offense to a member of the Budd family; but that was a challenge to Lanny's integrity; he had to declare that he couldn't possibly be offended by the truth. So Mr. Smathers said, all right, if he asked for it he could have it. The other members of the company gathered round to hear what this “radical” young minister might have to say to a son and heir of Budd Gunmakers.

What Mr. Smathers said was that Budd's didn't allow their workers to organize. They had refused to let the strikers speak on the streets and had suppressed their papers; they had had the town council pass a law forbidding the distribution of handbills. Later on they had shut down the strike headquarters and had the leaders arrested on various charges. They had brought in an army of guards, whom they had made into “deputy sheriffs,” and provided with arms and ammunition — made by the Budd workers for their own undoing. So the strike had been broken, and now no one could talk union in any Budd plant; workers who breathed a word of it were instantly fired.

Could all that be true? asked Lanny; and the Reverend Mr. Smathers replied that everybody in Newcastle knew that it was true. The businessmen justified it by saying that it was necessary to keep the workers from being led into violence. “What that means,” said the minister, “is that large-scale private industry will destroy what we in America call political democracy, and our liberties are doomed. It seems to me that is something about which American citizens ought to be making up their minds.”

Lanny could only thank Mr. Smathers for speaking frankly, and say that he had lived abroad, and hadn't even heard about the strike, which had taken place in the summer of 1913, while he was at Hellerau. Strange to think of such things going on at the very time that he was learning to enact the role of one of Gluck's furies! Such a graceful and charming fury he had been — and taking it for granted that tragic and cruel things happened only in operas and dramas, and that you were doing your duty to mankind when you learned to enact them beautifully!

Lanny didn't tell Mr. Smathers how his father had admitted to him that Budd's maintained a spy system. Nor did he say what he knew about his Uncle Lawford, who had had the handling of that strike. A somber person was this “vice-president in charge of production”; both he and the president of the company would know that whatever they did to protect Budd's and its profits was the will of the Almighty, and that whoever opposed them was an agent of Satan — or perhaps of Lenin and Trotsky, two personal devils who had suddenly leaped onto the front pages of American newspapers.

IX

Of course those who had been present that evening went out and talked about it. From the point of view of a hostess it had been a great success; people would be eager to come to a home where such dramatic incidents took place. The reports spread in ever-widening circles, and did not follow the laws which govern sound and water waves, but grew louder and bigger as they traveled. So came a new experience for the new pupil of St. Thomas's Academy.

One morning he was called from class to the office of the headmaster, Mr. Scott. This gentleman was tall and gray-haired, firm but kind in manner. With him were two severe-looking gentlemen whose clothes made them known as persons of importance. One was large and heavy, with scanty hair, and was introduced as Mr. Tarbell; Lanny learned afterwards that he was an important banker from the state capital, chairman of the board of trustees of the school. The other was a young businessman of the keen, go-getter type, an official in one of the big insurance companies. Mr. Pettyman was his name, and he also was a trustee.

Lanny was quickly made aware that this was a grave occasion. They had come, said the headmaster, to make inquiries about Mr. Baldwin, concerning whom certain reports were being circulated they wished Lanny to tell them all he knew about this master.

The request brought the blood to Lanny's cheeks. “Mr. Baldwin is a gentleman of the very highest type,” he said, quickly. “He has been most kind to me, and has given me a great deal of help.”

“I am pleased to hear you say that,” replied the headmaster. “Is there anything you could report that would do him harm?”

“I'm quite sure there is not, sir.”

“Then I know you will be glad to answer any questions these gentlemen may ask you.”

Lanny wasn't exactly glad, but he realized at once that if he hesitated, or seemed to be lacking in frankness, it would be taken as counting against his friend.

Mr. Tarbell, the banker, spoke in a slow and heavy voice. “It is being reported that Mr. Baldwin has talked in a way to indicate that he is out of sympathy with the war. Has he said anything of the sort to you?”

“Do you mean privately, or in class?”

“I mean either.”

“In class I have never heard him mention the war. Privately he has sometimes agreed with things I have said to him.”

“What have you said to him?”

“I have said it's a war for profits, and that for this reason I find it hard to give it any support.”

“What reason can you have for saying that it's a war for profits?”

“I have seen the evidence, sir.”

“Indeed! Who has shown it to you?”

“My father, for one.”

The banker from Hartford appeared taken aback. “Your father has said that in so many words?”

“He has said it a hundred times. He wrote it to me continually while I was living in France. He warned me on no account to let myself forget that it's a war to protect big French and British interests, and that many of them are trading with the enemy, and protecting their own properties to the injury of their country.”

“Ahem!” said Mr. Tarbell. Words seemed to have failed him.

“And what is more,” persisted Lanny, “Zaharoff admitted as much in my presence.”

“Who is Zaharoff?”

It was Lanny's turn to be surprised. “Zaharoff is the richest man in the world, sir.”

“Indeed! Is he richer than Rockefeller?”

“He controls most of the armament plants of Europe, and my father says this war has made him the richest man in the world. Now he is keen for the war to continue — 'jusqu'àè bout,' he said. My father had a letter from Lord Riddell the other day, saying that was Zaharoff's phrase.”

“And this man admits that his motive is profits?”

“Not in those words, sir, but it was the clear sense of many things he said.”

“You know him personally, you mean?”

“I was in his home in Paris last March, with my father, and they talked about the war a great deal, as businessmen and makers of munitions.”

X

The banker dropped the embarrassing subject of a war for profits. He said it had been reported that Mr. Baldwin had attended a social gathering in Sand Hill, at which there had been a great deal of Bolshevik talk by a notorious preacher named Smathers. Had Lanny been there? Lanny said he had been at Mrs. Riccardi's, if that was the place that was meant. He had heard no such talk; he had come away thinking that the Reverend Mr. Smathers was a saint, which was something different from a Bolshevik, as he understood it.

“But didn't he criticize Budd Gunmakers Corporation and its conduct of the strike?”

“He told what had happened — but only after I had asked him to.”

“Do you accept what he told you?”

“I have in mind to ask my father about it, but I haven't seen him since that time.”

“Did Mr. Baldwin take any part in that conversation?” “I don't recall that he did. I think he listened, like most of the others.”

“And did he say anything to you about it afterwards?” “No, sir. He was probably afraid of embarrassing me.” “Did he know that Mr. Smathers was to be there?” “I have no idea about that, sir. I was invited by Mrs. Riccardi, and I didn't know who else was coming.”

“There were other pupils of St. Thomas's present?” “Yes, sir.” “Who were they?”

Lanny hesitated. “I would rather not say anything about my fellow-pupils, sir. I have said that I would tell you about Mr. Baldwin.” The young go-getter, Mr. Pettyman, took up the questioning. He wanted to know about the master's ideas, and what was the basis of Lanny's intimacy with him. Lanny replied that Mr. Baldwin was a lover of poetry, and had written some fine verses, and had given them to Lanny to read. He had lent him books. What books? Lanny named a volume of Santayana. It was a foreign-sounding name, and evidently Mr. Pettyman hadn't heard of it, so Lanny mentioned that the writer had been a professor of philosophy at Harvard.

In a kind and fatherly way the banker reminded the impetuous lad that the nation was at war. “Our boys are going overseas to die in a cause which may not be perfect — but how often do you meet absolute perfection in this world? There has never been a war in which some persons didn't profiteer at the expense of the government. The same thing happened in the Civil War, but that didn't keep it from being a war to preserve the Union.”

“I know,” said Lanny. “My father has told me about that also. He says that was how J. P. Morgan made the start of his fortune by selling condemned rifles to the Union government.”

So ended the questioning of Lanny Budd. He didn't realize what an awful thing he had said until later, when he told his father about it, and Robbie manifested surprise mixed with amusement. Mr. Tarell's great bank was known as a “Morgan bank,” and the House of Morgan was just then the apex of dignity and power in the financial world — it was handling the purchases of the Allied governments, expending about three thousand million dollars of their money in the United States!

I

LANNY came home for Christmas. The war was not allowed to interfere with this festival; a big tree was set up in the home, and elaborate decorations were hung. Everybody spent a lot of time thinking what presents to give to relatives who obviously didn't need anything. Lanny, a stranger, sought the advice of his stepmother, and they went to the town's largest bookstore and tried to guess what sort of book each person might care for. By this method the well-to-do got reading matter enough to occupy their time for the rest of the year.

Lanny remembered his Christmas at Schloss Stubendorf, where people ate enormously, but were frugal in other spending. Here in New England it was the other way around — it wasn't quite good form to stuff your stomach, but Yankee ingenuity had been expended in devising toys to please the children of the rich, and adults were swamped under a flood of goods incredibly perfect in workmanship. On Christmas morning the base of the tree was piled with packages wrapped in multicolored paper and tied with ribbons. Pipes and cigars, bedroom slippers, silk dressing gowns, neckties — these were standard for the men — while ladies received jewels, wristwatches, silk stockings, veils and scarves, handbags and vanity cases, elaborately decorated boxes of chocolates and candied fruits — everyone had such quantities of these things that it was rather a bore opening parcels, and you could read in their faces the thought: “What on earth am I going to do with all this?”

Robert junior and Percy were two friendly and quite normal boys, living rather repressed lives at home. Esther considered all forms of extravagance as bad taste, and tried to teach this to her children; but she was fighting the current of her time, in which everything grew more elaborate and expensive, and a vast propaganda for spending was maintained by thousands of interested agencies. Here came this flood of goods, bearing the cards of uncles and aunts and cousins and school friends and even employees; the boys became surfeited, and couldn't really appreciate anything.

Lanny had his share of goods and of bewilderment. Good heavens, three sweaters — when already he had several hanging in his clothes closet! More neckties, more handkerchiefs, more hair brushes; an alligator-skin belt that was too heavy for comfort; newly published books that some clerk in a store had said would appeal to a youth. And in the midst of all that superfluity, a gift from Great-Great-Uncle Eli — a much worn copy of Thoreau's Walden, appearing as misplaced as its author would have been in this fashionable company. Henry David Thoreau, telling you how to live in a hut on a diet of cornmeal mush and beans, in order to have your spirit free and your time not in pawn to commercialism! Old New England and new New England met in the Budd family drawing room, and neither was much interested in the other.

II

Lanny had sent his great-great-uncle the handsomest book he could find in the local store, a “de luxe” copy of Don Quixote with the Dore illustrations. There came now an invitation to spend a week-end with the old gentleman, and to bring Bess along. Esther wasn't entirely pleased by the intimacy between her daughter and her stepson, but Lanny promised to drive very, very carefully on the snow-covered roads, and Bess was so thrilled and Robbie so pleased that the mother couldn't forbid the visit.

Between Lanny and his stepmother lay a temperamental gulf that nothing could ever bridge. Lanny was guided by his love of beauty, whereas Esther had to think carefully about everything she felt or did, and bring it into conformity with rigid standards. A few times in the afternoon she had come in to find her stepson playing the piano in a loud and extravagant manner, completely absorbed in it; Esther had stood and listened, uneasy in her mind. She had never heard such music, at least not in a drawing room, and to her it was disorderly and unwholesome. Impossible to believe that anyone could let himself go like that and not sooner or later misbehave in other ways.

Bess with her excitability had been something of a “problem child” to her mother; and now came this youth from abroad to stimulate that tendency. Bess would listen to his playing with a rapt expression, as if transported to some strange land where her mother had never been. Bess wanted to play like Lanny, she wanted to dance like him — and wear a one-piece bathing suit in a drawing room while doing it! She chattered about the places her romantic half-brother had visited, the people he had met, the sights he had seen, the stories he told her. Books on child training which Esther conscientiously read all agreed that you shouldn't be saying “Don't! Don't” — and so Esther didn't. But uneasiness troubled her heart.

On that lovely winter ride, snugly wrapped in fur robes, Lanny told the child about the wonderful old gentleman she was going to meet. Great-Great-Uncle Eli had once helped slaves to escape; his friend Thoreau had gone to jail for refusing to pay taxes to a slave-catching government, and when the poet Emerson had come and asked: “Henry, what are you doing here?” Henry had answered: “Waldo, what are you doing out of here?” Some of them had gone to live in a colony called Brook Farm, in order to be independent and have more wholesome lives. “What is a colony?” demanded Bess; and then: “Oh, what fun! Are there any colonies now? Could we go and live in one, do you suppose?”

These two reincarnations of New England idealism arrived in the village of Norton in the proper mood to appreciate their venerable relative. The sweet little Quaker wife and the spinster daughter made them at home, and Bess sat for hours at the old man's feet. She couldn't understand all his long words, but she knew that what he said was good. When the two young people drove home again they had this new bond between them, as if some ancient prophet had anointed them with holy oil.

III

The last winter of the war was the darkest and most dreadful. For three years and a half all the ingenuities of man and the resources of science had been devoted to the ends of destruction. Both sides now had many kinds of poison gases: some which penetrated the clothing and tormented the skin, some which destroyed the lungs, some which blinded men, or made them vomit unceasingly. These gases were put into shells, and whole battlefronts were drenched with them. The Germans had flame throwers, which killed the man who used them as well as those in front. The British and French had tanks, “big Willies” and “little Willies,” which advanced in front of the troops, spitting fire and death.

The poet's vision had come to reality, and there rained a ghastly dew from the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue. Squadrons of swift righting craft darted here and there; they swooped from the clouds and machine-gunned the marching troops; they raided behind the lines and dropped bombs upon railroads and ammunition dumps. The Zepps were fought with explosive bullets, and so great was the peril that the crews of two vessels destroyed them at home in order to avoid going out in them.

Everything had become bigger and more deadly than ever before. The Germans constructed enormous siege guns, known as “Big Berthas,” and set them up in a forest behind Laon, and were firing shells into Paris from a distance of seventy-five miles. At first people had refused to believe such a thing possible; but now they were being fired every twenty minutes, and on Good Friday one of their shells struck a church and killed and wounded nearly two hundred persons, many of them women and children.

For the U-boats there were depth bombs, and nets across all the principal harbors and channels. The Americans were furnishing seventy thousand mines, which were being laid in a chain across the northern entrance to the North Sea, from the Orkney Islands to the coast of Norway, a distance of nearly three hundred miles. That made one for every twenty feet. Also the British had devised the “Q-boats” — old tramp steamers with concealed armor sent out to wander in the danger zones. A submarine would rise and open fire with shells — for they tried to save their torpedoes for bigger craft. Some of the men of the “Q-boat,” the “panic-crew,” would take to the boats; the “sub” would come closer to complete her job — and suddenly portions of the steamer sides would drop down, disclosing six-inch guns which would open deadly fire.

America was getting ready, upon a scale and with a speed never before known in history. You could feel the spirit of the country hardening in the face of world-wide danger. People talked about the war to the exclusion of everything else; even at St. Thomas's, even at the “bull sessions,” the fellows discussed what was going on, and what part they hoped to have in it. The draft age was twenty-one, but you could volunteer younger, and now and then some upper classman would pack up his belongings and move to an officers' training camp.

Lanny was now eighteen, and his father worried over the possibility that his emotional temperament might take fire. Whenever the youth came home over Sunday, Robbie would sound him out to see if the bacteria of propaganda had found lodgment in his mind; if so, he would be subjected to a swift prophylaxis. “Did you ever hear of Lord Palmerston?” the father would inquire. “He was Prime Minister of England during our Civil War, and he said: 'England has no enduring friendships. She only has enduring interests.'”

Robbie and Esther didn't agree about England, or about America either, and Robbie's rule was to let her say anything she pleased, uncontradicted. He did the same thing with his friends; of course they all knew that he had special opportunities to get information, and their curiosity was aroused, but all he would say was that he made weapons for those who wanted to fight and had the cash. Now and then old Samuel would caution his son: “Tend to business and let fools shoot off their mouths.” No one ever found out what the president of Budd Gunmakers thought about this war; all they knew was that he made munitions twenty-four hours every day, including the Lord's.

As a result of all this Lanny wasn't entirely happy through the war period. People weren't satisfied to let you think your own thoughts; they considered it their duty to probe you, to cross-examine you, and if you were wrong to try to set you right. At school the fellows decided that Lanny was lacking in appreciation of the land where his fathers died; his fashionable cousin told him so, and they agreed to have different roommates the following year. At the same time Lanny was deprived of the companionship of Mr. Baldwin, for the young master had been advised to confine his teaching to the subject of literature, and to avoid contacts with his pupils outside the classroom.

IV

There came a letter which gave Lanny an extraordinary thrill. The envelope was addressed by typewriter, with no sender's name, but with a United States stamp and a New York postmark; inside was a long missive from Kurt Meissner! At first Lanny wondered, had Kurt come to New York; but then he realized that his friend must have known somebody in a neutral country who was coming.

Anyhow, here was a real letter, the first Lanny had had from Germany since the outbreak of the war. Kurt gave the news about himself and his family. He was a captain of artillery, and had been twice wounded, once with a bullet through the thigh, and the second time having pieces of ribs torn out by a shell fragment. He was not at liberty to give the name of his unit or where it was stationed; only that he was writing from a billet in a town behind the front, while having a few days' recuperation. All three of his brothers had been in the war; one had been killed during the early invasion of East Prussia, and another was now at home recovering from a wound. Kurt's father had an important government post. His sister had married an officer, and was a widow with two babies.

Kurt told about the state of his soul, which was uncomplicated, and oddly like that of Marcel and of Rick. The country was at war, and it was necessary for a man to put aside everything else, and to help to overcome an arrogant and treacherous foe. Kurt said he was as much interested in music and philosophy as ever, but his duties as an artillery officer left him little time to think about these subjects. After the Fatherland had emerged victorious, as surely it must and would, he would hope to hear that his American friend had been able to go on with his studies.

This led to the main purpose of the letter, which was to plead with Lanny to resist the subtle wiles of the British propaganda machine. Kurt wasn't afraid that his friend might get physically hurt, for it was obvious that the British would be driven into the sea and the French would lose Paris long before the Americans could take any effective part in this war. But Kurt didn't want his friend's mind distorted and warped by the agents of British imperialism. These people, who had grabbed most of the desirable parts of the earth, now thought they had a chance to destroy the German fleet, build their Cape-to-Cairo railroad, keep the Germans from building the Berlin-to-Bagdad railroad, and in every way thwart the efforts of a vigorous and capable race to find their place in the sun.

It was to be expected that France would hate Germany and make war upon her, because the French were a jealous people, and thought of Germans as their hereditary enemies; they were pursuing their futile dream of getting Alsace-Lorraine with its treasures of coal and iron. But Englishmen were blood kinsmen to the Germans, and their war upon Germany was fratricide; the crime of using black and brown and yellow troops to destroy the highest culture in Europe would outlaw its perpetrators forever. Now the desperate British militarists were spending their wealth circulating a mass of lies about Germany's war methods and war aims; what a tragedy that Americans, a free people, with three thousand miles of ocean between them and Europe's quarrels, had swallowed all this propaganda, and were wasting their money and their labor helping Britain to grab more territory and harness more peoples to her imperial chariot!

Lanny took that letter to his father, and they read it together, and Robbie pointed out how its arguments resembled those which you could read every day in the Newcastle Daily Courier — but with everything turned around! Each saw his own side, and was blind to the other fellow's. “You write Kurt and tell him that you are going on with your studies,” said the father; and added: “Phrase it carefully, because you can't tell who may read a letter nowadays.”

V

Now and then Lanny would write to his mother, reciting his adventures in the land of the pilgrims' pride: all the strange kinds of people he was meeting, and how different it was from Provence. Knowing how Beauty was interested in human beings, he went into detail about his stepmother: a good woman, but so inhibited — a word Lanny had learned from the conversation of Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette, who was very different from Esther Remson Budd, and would have been a scandal if she had ever come to Newcastle. Lanny left no doubt that he preferred Juan as a home, but he was doing his job here as his father wished.

Beauty wrote once or twice a month, nice gossipy letters. Baby Marceline was thriving upon her natural diet, and Beauty herself was well, and as happy as one could expect to be in these sad days. More and more widows on the streets, more and more mutilés for Emily Chattersworth to crowd into her place. Prices were rising, and fear was universal — Beauty said she couldn't write all the alarming things that were reported. Everywhere an American went he heard one question: “When are your soldiers coming?” The Germans were preparing an enormous offensive by which they hoped to end the war; and poor France had scraped the bottom of the national pot for man power. There just weren't any more young men, hardly any middle-aged ones; you didn't see them on the streets, you didn't see them in the fields. “Oh, Lanny, I am praying to God it may be over before you grow up!”

Marcel would send a message, or scribble a line or two on the bottom of the page. Marcel didn't discuss the war, or his own problems; he would say something about the state of Lanny's soul: “Remember you are an artist, and don't let the Puritans frighten you.” He would say: “I am painting a chasseur parting from his mother; it looks like this” — and he would give a little pencil sketch. He would say: “Seine Majestät is worried,” and make a comic drawing of the figure most hated in France. Lanny treasured these sketches, and showed them to his father, but not to anyone else. His stepmother would of course disapprove of his having a stepfather; if Lanny's mother had been a woman with a sense of propriety she would have expiated her sin by living a celibate life.

But Beauty had been born without that sense. Beauty had a husband of a sort, and was making the most of him. She talked about his work upon every occasion, fought for it, and intrigued to get it shown and recognized — a custom in France, and possibly not unknown in other lands. When some critic called Marcel Detaze a painter with a future, Beauty purchased all the copies of that paper she could find, and cut out the article and sent it to her friends. Marcel still didn't care for being “promoted,” but his wife had won the right to do what she could.

Her main struggle was to keep him from going back into the army. She would say, over and over: “The Americans are coming, Marcel! They are making a real army! They mean to finish it!” She would find things in the British and American papers and magazines and bring them to him. She wrote to Robbie, asking him to tell her what was going on, in such a way that Marcel would be convinced, and so be willing to stay at home and leave the saving of France to men who didn't happen to be geniuses.

VI

The new masters of Russia, the Bolsheviks, made peace with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, an action regarded as treason by almost everybody in the Allied lands. It set the Germans free in the east, and enabled them for the first time to have an actual superiority of numbers on the western front. Their long-prepared offensive was launched in the middle of March; first against the British on the Somme, a front of nearly fifty miles. They brought up masses of artillery, and mountains of smoke shells and gas shells; they overwhelmed the British and drove them back with a loss of some three hundred thousand men. They attacked again farther north, and pushed the weakened British lines almost to the sea. Then they fell upon the French, and drove them again to the river Marne, close to Paris, as in the early days of the war.

This desperate fighting lasted for about three months, and all that while the French people lived in an agony of suspense, waiting hour by hour for news of the collapse which seemed inevitable. Frenchmen and Britons were dying by hundreds every hour, sometimes by thousands; and hopes were dying even faster — among them those of poor, tormented Beauty.

The first news came to Lanny by mail; no use to cable, since there was nothing to be done. “Marcel has gone,” wrote the mother. “He stole away at night, leaving a letter on my pillow. I made it too hard for him, I suppose; he couldn't face any more scenes. Do not worry about me, I have got myself together. I've been living this over and over for the past two years, and never really believed I could escape it. Now I don't torment myself with hope; now I know I shall never see him again. They will take him into the army, and he will die fighting. I have to reconcile myself to the fact that one cannot have happiness in these times.

“Of course I have little Marceline,” the letter went on. “That is why she was brought into the world, because in my secret heart I knew what was coming. I am still nursing her, but I have been going over to Sept Chênes every afternoon. There are such pitiful cases. I don't know what to think about the war, or what to expect. It seems impossible that the Germans can ever be driven out of France. Shall I have to watch the spectacle of American boys coming over and being sacrificed for nothing? Have I got to live to see my only son drawn into it? Am I going to hear the same phrases from you that I listened to from Marcel's lips?”

While Lanny was reading that letter, he knew that Marcel must be in the thick of the fighting. He was a trained man, and the fact that part of his face was gone wouldn't count in a time like this. They would give him a uniform and a gun, assign him to a regiment, and put him into one of the camions that were being rushed to the front.

And so it turned out. Marcel wrote letters to his wife, full of quiet certainty and peace; he was doing the thing that he had to do, that he was made to do. He wrote about the sights he had seen in Paris; about the men in his outfit, some too old and some too young, some veterans just out of hospital. He wasn't allowed to tell where he was going, but presently he was there, and the boche was in front of him, and still advancing, and had to be stopped.

And that was the end. There came no more letters. The enemy advanced, and was not stopped — at least not yet. Of course there remained the possibility that Marcel might have been taken prisoner; his friends had to wait until the war was over, and then wait some more; but they never heard from him. Later on Lanny made inquiries, and learned that Marcel's company had been defending one of those trenches which had been turned into shell holes; presumably he had stayed there, firing his rifle as long as he could hold it and see the enemy. He had been buried in an unmarked grave, along with many of his comrades; his dust would enrich the soil of la patrie, and his soul would inspire new generations of Frenchmen with a love of beauty, and with pity for the blunders and sorrows of mankind.

VII

Lanny came home for a week-end, and found a surprise letter. He had failed to let Jerry Pendleton know he was in the United States, so the letter had crossed the ocean and come back. His old tutor had been picked in one of the early drafts and trained in Camp Funston. Now he was a sergeant, a machine-gun expert giving special training to a group in Camp Devens and expecting soon to move on, to a destination not supposed to be mentioned in soldiers' letters. But Jerry said: “I'm going to see Cerise if I have to bust a gut” — which wasn't exactly keeping military secrets!

Lanny was greatly excited, for he had heard a lot about Camp Devens; it was where some of his classmates had gone, and others were planning to go at the end of the term. It was in Massachusetts, some three hours' drive from Newcastle. “Oh, Robbie, can't I go and see him? Right away, before he sails!”

“Send a wire and find out if he's still there,” said the father. Lanny did so, and the reply came in a jiffy: “Delighted advise coming quickly visitors one to five any day.” Jerry, economical fellow, had got in his exact ten words.

Lanny was all in a fuss. He must go the next day, which was Sunday. Wouldn't Robbie go with him? Jerry Pendleton was a grand chap, and perhaps was using the Budd gun, and might be able to tell Robbie things. The father said, all right, they'd make an excursion of it. Esther said to take the boys. Of course Bess started her clamor, and Robbie said: “Send Jerry a telegram to prepare tea for five!”

New England was beautiful at that time of year; the spring flowers up in the woods, and the trees a shimmering pale green. The rivers ran brown with floods from the distant hills, but the bridges were strong, and most of the roads were paved. The young people chattered with excitement, having heard a lot about this marvelous “cantonment,” as it was officially called. There were sixteen of them scattered over the United States, and they had grown like the beanstalk in the fairy tale — last June there had been nothing, and two months later there had been accommodations, complete with all modern improvements, for six or seven hundred thousand men.

They arrived at the gates of the new city at one, and found their host waiting for them. The army was proud of its great feat, and visitors were made welcome. Jerry was bronzed by the sun and seemed taller, certainly he was broader, and a fine advertisement for military training; handsome in his khaki uniform with leggings and his service hat with a flat brim and strap. He was serious, and proud of the place, showing it off as if he owned it. It was a regular city, with avenues named A, B, C, and cross streets 1, 2, 3. Its buildings were mostly one-story, all alike, of unpainted pine siding; there were fourteen hundred buildings in Camp Devens, and the stuff had all been cut to a pattern. Jerry said that when the carpenters got going they aimed to make a record of one building every hour, and boasted of a world's record when they averaged one every fifteen minutes.

Now forty thousand doughboys swarmed all over the place: keen, clean-cut fellows, all smooth-shaven — and all having had chicken and mashed potatoes for their Sunday dinner. Another world's record was being made, an army without liquor; since it had put in the plumbing before anything else, there wasn't any disease and wasn't going to be. All this the machine-gun expert told them while standing on the running board of the car, guiding Robbie through the traffic of trucks, motorcycles, and mule wagons which were like old prairie schooners with khaki tops.

Jerry took them to his own building, which he said he had in strict privacy with some thirty other men. The long room had a low ceiling, and a pleasant smell of fresh pinewood. Everything was as clean as in a hospital; the cots were of black steel and the floors were swept and scrubbed daily. Jerry showed them the messroom, where they had better food than most of the men had ever seen in their lives. He took them to the drill grounds, where you could watch thousands of men exercising — “and believe me, we get plenty of it,” said the red-headed sergeant.

“Yes,” he added, “the machine guns are Budd's.” He took them to the place where he gave instruction with real trenches, and rocks and trees and brush for cover. Jerry showed some of the drill, and sang a doughboy song: “Keep your head down, Fritzie boy!”

He and Robbie had technical details to talk about, while the young people stood and listened in awe. Yes, it was a grand gun; Jerry doubted if anybody in Europe had one as good. “I've studied some of them,” he explained. “I have to teach something about them, because a soldier never knows what he may run into on the battlefield.”

This man's army was learning fast, and it was going to do the job. Its training was all for attack, the sergeant affirmed. “We aren't going over there to sit in trenches. We teach the men how to capture positions, and to go on from there to the next one.”

“The Germans have pretty good machine guns,” cautioned Robbie.

“We expect to flatten them out with artillery, and then get them with hand grenades. There's one thing they lack, and that's a lifetime's practice at throwing a baseball. Most of our fellows can land a grenade onto a target the first throw. Every time you hit the nigger you get a good seegar!” Jerry grinned, and added: “I don't know if you ever went to a county fair in Kansas.”

VIII

All the time Lanny kept thinking: “Marcel ought to be here and see this!” — a thought which had a tendency to diminish the pleasure of his visit. It was gratifying to meet an old friend, and find him bronzed and handsome, astonishingly matured and full of vigor; but when you thought how he might be three months from now — like Marcel, or Rick, or Lanny's gigolo — the crowded cantonment took on a different aspect. They watched those proud, upstanding fellows marching on the drill ground, and Lanny saw a troubled look on his half-sister's face, and guessed that she was thinking the same thoughts. She was only ten years old, but children always know when there is dissension in a home, and Bess understood how her father felt about this war, and how Lanny felt.

On their way home the two boys prattled gaily about the wonders they had seen. They were Budds, and made machine guns, and in their fancy used them freely. They had learned to make sounds in imitation of the weapon's chatter, and as the car rolled along they discovered solid ranks of Germans charging out of some farmer's woodlot, and mowed them down without the slightest qualm. They wanted to know all about the men they had seen being entrained from the cantonment; what embarkation camp they were taken to, and what kind of transports they boarded, the time it took to get to France, the chances of a submarine sinking them.

Their father didn't worry about them, because they were too young to get into this mess. But he wanted to be sure that Lanny hadn't been seduced by all the glamour. Making war is an ancient practice of mankind, and it is always impressive to see a job done with vigor and speed. So Robbie waited for something to come out of his eldest's thoughtful mood; and when it did, he got a pleasant surprise.

Said Lanny: “Do you suppose that when school's over you could find me some job in the plant for the summer?”

“What sort of a job, son?”

“Anything where I could be useful, and learn something about the business.”

“You really think that would interest you?”

“Well, everybody's doing something, and a fellow doesn't feel comfortable just to be playing round.”

“If you make a good record at school, Lanny, nobody's going to question your right to a summer vacation.”

“If they knew how little real work I have to do, they might. And if you're going to tell a draft board that I'm needed to make munitions, hadn't I better know something about it?”

“It'll be two years and a half before you have to consider that problem.”

“I read that they're thinking of lowering the draft age. So if you don't want me in, you'd better get busy and fix up an alibi.”

“We'll think about it,” replied the father; and added, with a smile: “It would make something of a hit with the president of Budd's!”

I

EXAMINATIONS came at St. Thomas's, and Lariny passed with good grades, and checked off his list several subjects about which he would never have to think again.

He had now spent fourteen months in Connecticut; and during that period more than a million Americans had been ferried across to France. Jerry Pendleton and fifty thousand other sergeants were ready to try out the idea that German machine-gun nests could be wiped out by baseball players throwing Budd hand grenades. During the fourteen months' period the plants had been working day and night without let-up. Smoke billowed from their chimneys, the workers toiled like swarms of ants, and the products were piled by the million in warehouses in France and behind the fighting front. The doughboys had had a sort of tryout at the battle of Cantigny, and now were being moved into position to stop the German advance on Paris.

Such was the news in the papers when Lanny sat down to discuss with his father the problem of how to spend the summer. He still wanted to go into the plant; and when Robbie asked his ideas, he said: “Why shouldn't I take a job like anybody else, and see how it feels to put in an eight-hour day?”

“Beginning at the bottom of the ladder?” smiled the father.

“Isn't that the accepted way?”

“Accepted by the fiction editors. You'd be set down in one corner of one room, and learn six motions of your hands, and do them say eight hundred times a day for three months. You would learn that it is very fatiguing.”

“I thought I might learn something about the people I was working with.”

“You'd learn that nine out of ten of them don't know anything but their six motions, and don't care about those. You'd learn that they are making a lot of money, and don't know what to do with it except to buy fancy shirts and socks and a second-hand car. You can learn all that by going down on Center Street any evening.”

This was discouraging. “I didn't like to suggest going into the office, Robbie, because I don't know anything, and I saw that everybody was so busy.”

“Both those things are true. But, first, tell me what's in your mind. Do you want to become a Budd executive, and live out by the country club? Or would you rather learn my business in Europe? In other words, do you want to make munitions or sell them?”

“I thought I ought to know both jobs, Robbie.”

“You have to know something about both if you're going to know either; but they are highly specialized, and you have to concentrate. It's like choosing your major and minor subjects when you go to college.”

“Well, you're asking if I want to be with you, or with Uncle Lawford. You know what I'll say to that.”

“Then why not start in my office, and see everything in the plant from there, as I do?”

“Can you make sure I won't get in the way?”

“I'll make mighty darn sure of it,” said the father. “If you get in my way, I'll tell you, and if you get in other people's way, they'll tell you.”

“That's fair enough.”

“All right then; here's my idea for the summer: have a desk in my room, and sit there and study munitions instead of sines and cosines or the names of English kings. When I interview callers you listen, and when I dictate letters, you get the correspondence and follow it back until you understand the deal. Study contracts and specifications, prices and discounts; get the blueprints, and what you don't understand ask me about. Learn the formulas for steel, and when you know enough to understand what you're seeing, go down to the shop and watch the procèss. When you know the parts of a gun, take it apart and see if you can put it together again. Go to the testing grounds and watch it work — all sorts of things like that.”

Lanny listened in a glow. “Gee, Robbie, that's too much!”

“How far you get will depend on you. This much ought to be certain — in three months you'll know whether you're really interested and want to go on. Is that a deal?”

“You bet it is!”

“I'll tell my secretaries to give you whatever papers you ask for, and you'll make it your business to turn them back to the person you got them from. You mustn't touch the files yourself, because there can't be any blundering in them. If there's anything else you want, ask me, because everybody in the place is working under heavy pressure, and they wouldn't like you if you tripped them up. One thing you know already — you won't ever breathe a word to anybody about what you learn on this job.”

II

For a while Lanny was like a sailorman who has dug up an old chest full of Spanish doubloons and jewels; he couldn't get enough of looking at them and running them through his hands. All those mysterious things that he had heard his father discussing with army officers and ministers of war were now unveiled to him. One of the first that came along was a lot of reports from the firms abroad that had leased Budd patents for the duration of the war; also the secret reports that Bub Smith was sending on the same subject. It was like being turned loose amid the private papers of Sherlock Holmes! Lanny dreamed of the day when he might be able to call Robbie's attention to some discrepancy in the reports of Zaharoff's companies, something that Robbie himself had overlooked in the rush of affairs. But he never had that luck.

His new job brought him the honor of an invitation to dine at his grandfather's. He and Robbie went together, and the old gentleman said: “Well, young man, I hear you have kept your promise.” Just that, and no more.

They talked about the war developments, and ate a New England boiled dinner served by an old-maid servant under the direction of an old-maid relative. Later in the evening the grandfather said: “Well, young man, you have attended my Bible class. Have you learned anything?” Lanny said that he had; and at once the other launched on a discourse having to do with the one certainty of Salvation through Faith. He talked for five minutes or more; and then he turned to Robbie and remarked: “Well, number 17-B gun seems to be holding up pretty well in France.”

Lanny was so absorbed in his new researches that he wanted to get to the office early, and wanted to stay at night when something kept his father. But Esther intervened again, and Robbie agreed — a growing youth ought not to work more than an eight-hour day, and Lanny ought to get some tennis and a swim in the pool at the country club before dinner. So it was ordered; and so the way was prepared for another stage in a young man's expanding career.

The Newcastle Country Club had purchased two large farms and built a one-story red brick clubhouse, close enough to town so that businessmen could motor out now and then for a round of golf before dinner on summer evenings. Besides the Budd people, there were officials of other manufacturing concerns, of utilities and banks and the bigger stores; several doctors and lawyers, the local newspaper publisher, and a few gentlemen of no special calling. The ladies came in the afternoon to play bridge, and in the evenings there were dances, and now and then some entertainment to relieve the boredom of people who knew one another too well. When you have lived all your life in a town, it may seem dull and commonplace; but when you are young, and a stranger, the commonest varieties of gossip take on the aspect of lessons in human nature.

There were several “sets” in this club: groups of persons who considered themselves superior to others, whether because they were richer, or because their families were older, or because they drank less, or because they drank more. There were a few who regarded themselves as clever; they were younger, and had the ideas called “modern.” Since the western part of Connecticut is a suburb of New York, there were “smart” people, who did what they pleased and made cynical remarks about the “mores” of their grandfathers. You couldn't very well keep them out of a club, because some of them belonged to the “best” families.

Of course such a group would be interested in a handsome youth who had lived abroad, and spoke French fluently, and could talk about Cannes and Paris and London, Henley and Ascot and Long-champs. He played the piano, he danced well, and if he did not smoke or drink, that made him all the more an object of curiosity; the bored ladies imagined that he must be virginal, and they made themselves agreeable, and worried because he insisted upon staying in a dull office and couldn't be lured away for a tête-à-tête.

It was the practice of the club to give dramatic performances during the summer, in an open-air theater built in a woodland glade. There was a “dramatics committee,” and hot arguments as to what sort of plays should be given. The smart crowd wanted modern things, full of talk about sex; the conservatives demanded and got something sentimental and sweet, suitable for the young people. In view of the conditions prevailing, they had given a war play called Lilac Time, which had been the success of the previous season in New York.

This summer everybody was supposed to be absorbed in war work. The businessmen went to their offices early and stayed late. The women spent their spare time rolling bandages, knitting socks and sweaters, or attending committee meetings where such activities were planned. But there were a few whom these efforts did not satisfy; perhaps their hearts were not in the killing of their fellow human beings, or in arousing the killing impulse in others. One could not say this, in the midst of all the patriotic fervors; what one said was that the cultural life of the community must not be allowed to lapse altogether, and that overworked executives who were forgoing their customary month of vacation ought to have some gracious form of entertainment.

So it was that the dramatics committee had summoned its courage and undertaken a production of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, which provides a variety of outdoor diversions and has charming music. The committee cast about for players suited to the various roles, and invited Lanny to become one of two lovelorn gentlemen who wander through a forest in the neighborhood of Athens. No one on the committee knew that Lanny himself had been a lovelorn gentleman for a couple of years. He still was — for only a few days ago he had received a letter from his erstwhile sweetheart, mentioning casually in the course of other news that she was about to be married to the grandson of the Earl of Sandhaven, who had been recalled from the “Mespot” front and was now attached to the War Office in London.

Lanny said he didn't think he'd have time to rehearse a play; but the committee assured him that the work would be done in the evening — of necessity, since the part of the Duke of Athens was to be played by a stately vice-president of the First National Bank, and the part of Bottom was entrusted to a member of the town's busiest law firm. Lanny's family gave their approval, and thereafter he dined at the club with other members of the cast, and on the stage of the open-air theater he alternately pursued and repulsed a beautiful damsel whose father managed the waterworks of the city of Newcastle. To his rival for her favor he recited:

“Lysander, keep thy Hermia; I will none: If e'er I loved her, all that love is gone.”

Lanny could say this well, because he had only to imagine that Lysander was the heir to an English earldom, and that Hermia's last name was Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver.

III

America is the land of mass production and standardization; whatever it is that you want done, you will find somebody ready to do it according to the latest improved methods — if you have the price. If you want to raise funds for charity by means of amateur theatricals, you will discover that there are firms which specialize in showing you exactly how to do it. They will send you a director to take charge; they will rent you scenery and costumes, or provide experts to make them; they will advise you what play to give, and if you choose a modern one they will arrange about the copyright; they will have tickets and programs printed — in short they will do everything to smooth the development of whatever histrionic talent may be latent in Osawatomie, Kansas, or Deadwood Gulch, South Dakota.

The director of the Newcastle Country Club production of A Midsummer-Night's Dream came from New York; a tall young man of aesthetic appearance, wearing spectacles, and hair a bit longer than was usual in the town. He had an absentminded manner and a habit of making oddly humorous remarks. He took a liking to Lanny, and told him about a part of New York called Greenwich Village, where young people interested in the arts forgathered, writing plays on a little oatmeal and producing them on a shoestring. Walter Hayden was a discreet person, who valued his job, and never exercised his sense of humor upon anything in Newcastle; but he made general remarks to Lanny about the odd position of a stage director whose actors were all rich people accustomed to doing what they pleased, so that only by the exercise of patience and tact could things be got a little less than terrible.

After the first two or three rehearsals, there began to spread in the polite assemblage an uneasy sense that something was lacking in the Newcastle Country Club version of A Midsummer-Night's Dream. One of the “swank” young matrons found an opportunity to draw Lanny aside and ask whether he did not think it barely possible that Adelaide Hitchcock was less than completely adapted to the role of Puck? Adelaide was a lovely young girl with a wealth of wavy brown hair and large soulful brown eyes which turned quite often in the direction of Lanny Budd. She had a shapely figure, and everything that was needed to make a fairy, so long as she stood silent and motionless; but when she spoke her lines there was no life in them, and when she came onto the stage it was as a young lady entering a drawing room, and not in the least as a dancing sprite, the incarnation of mischief.

Now if Lanny had been more at home in Connecticut, he would have stopped to reflect that the Hitchcock family was prominent in his father's city, and that Adelaide's mother was first cousin to Lanny's stepmother. But he was thinking about art, and he said that in his opinion Adelaide with wings on her shoulders would make a great addition to the train of Queen Titania; but for the part of Puck they needed a boy or girl who could act; and if it was a girl, it ought to be one with a boyish figure, without hips.

They talked about various members of the younger set and couldn't think of anybody. Lanny asked if there wasn't some teacher of dancing in the town who could make a suggestion; then suddenly Mrs. Jessup recalled that she had seen a play given by the students at the high school, and in it was a girl who had “stolen the show” by the extraordinary verve of her acting. Lanny said: “Why don't you bring her here and let the members meet her?” Again he showed that he was not at home in Connecticut; for in this old-fashioned city the daughters of the aristocracy did not attend the free high schools, and girls who attended these schools were rarely invited to country clubs.

Mrs. Jessup went off to find this girl, whose name was Gracyn Phillipson and whose mother was an interior decorator, having a little shop and her living rooms above it. Before Mrs. Jessup went, she told her friends that Lanny had made the suggestion, thus giving him full credit for what happened. Later on it would be said that she was an “intriguer,” and had manipulated matters to this end; but how could Lanny know about that?

IV

Gracyn Phillipson came to the club late the next afternoon, and Lanny was there as he had promised. One glance, and you could see that she was made for the role of Puck; a tiny, slender figure, with no hips that you would notice; a quick, eager manner, a voice full of laughter, and feet that danced of themselves. To be sure she was a brunette, and Lanny had somehow thought of fairies as blond; but when you came to consult the authorities, you couldn't find anything definite on the point.

Several of Mrs. Jessup's smart friends, having been told that Lanny Budd was interested in this young lady, had assembled to meet her. As the quickest way to bring out her “points,” someone asked her to dance. A record was put on the phonograph, and of course it was up to a gallant youth to escort her onto the floor. If he had been discreet, he would have found some other partner for her and would have sat and studied her with a cold professional eye. But Lanny had a weakness for dancing, and it may be that the intriguers were taking advantage of that.

Anyhow, there were the two young persons on the floor, and an extraordinary thing happened. Lanny hadn't had a real dance since coming to the land of the pilgrims' pride, and he had missed it. The dancing that was done at the club was so subdued that it amounted to little more than taking a lady in your arms and walking about the room with her, backing her for a while and then reversing and letting her back you. People did this to the pounding of ragtime music which exercised a hypnotic effect, so that you might have been watching a roomful of automatons, electrically controlled so that they didn't bump into one another as they wove here and there.

But if you are young and full of fire you can dance fast and freely to any music. You can take three steps while others are taking one; you can bend and turn and leap — in short you can express the joy that is in you. And if you have in front of you a girl who is the very soul of motion, who watches you with excitement in her eyes, and reads in your face what you are going to do — that is something to wake you up and get you going. A few tentative steps, a few quick words, and the two bodies were swaying together, they were bringing grace and charm into being — they were creating a dance.

The watching ladies of course had seen dancing on the stage; there was a thing known as “society dancing,” all the rage just then. But that dancing was carefully rehearsed; whereas these two young creatures had never seen each other before, and you could see that they were inventing something to express their pleasure in the meeting. It was stimulating, indeed it was almost improper — and that is what it became when the story started on its thousand-legged way through the city of Newcastle.

Was Gracyn Phillipson really what she seemed to Lanny that afternoon? Did joy really bubble up in her like water in a mountain spring? Lanny gave no thought to the question, and would have had no means of getting the answer. If Gracyn was acting — well, it meant that she was an actress. And surely nobody was expecting her to write A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

After the dancing there was tea, and this alert young creature revealed that it was the hope of her life to get on the stage. Mrs. Jessup had told her about the play that the club was producing, and she said that she would be tremendously honored by a chance to appear in it. Yes, she knew a little about the part of Puck; she had loved Shakespeare since childhood. Miss Phillipspn didn't exactly say that she carried an assortment of Shakespearean roles about in her head; and of course there was the possibility that she had sat up most of the night learning Puck.

Anyhow, when Mrs. Jessup said: “Could you give us an idea of how you would do it?” the answer came promptly: “I'd be glad to, if it wouldn't bore you.” No shyness, no inhibition; she was an actress. Right there in the main room of the clubhouse, with other ladies sipping tea or playing bridge, and gentlemen passing through with their golf bags, Gracyn Phillipson enacted the scene in which Puck replies to the orders of King Oberon to torment the lovers: “My fairy lord, this must be done with haste.”

Presently came the place where Demetrius enters, wandering in the forest. Lanny being Demetrius, Gracyn gave him a sign, and he recited his challenge to his rival. Puck answered in the rival's voice, taunting him:

“Thou coward, art thou bragging to the stars, Telling the bushes that thou look'st for wars, And wilt not come?”

Gracyn managed to produce the voice of an angry man from somewhere in her throat. She put such energy and conviction into the playful scene that ladies at the tables put down their tea cups or cards, and gentlemen rested their golf bags against the wall and stood and listened. Everybody could see at once that this was an actress; but why on earth was she exhibiting herself at the Newcastle Country Club?

V

Rumor with its thousand tongues took up the tidings that Robbie Budd's son had interested himself in a high-school girl, and was trying to oust Adelaide Hitchcock from the role of Puck and to put his protégée in her place. He had had this protégée at the club and had danced with her and played a scene with her, and now the dramatics committee was requested to give her a chance to show what she could do. Lanny was calling it a matter of “art”; the thousand tongues each said that word with a different accent, indicative of subtle shadings of incredulity and amusement. “Art, indeed! Art, no less! Art, if you please! Art, art — to be sure, oh, yes, naturally, I don't think!”

The rumor came to Adelaide Hitchcock in the first half-hour. She rushed to her mother in tears. Oh, the insult, the humiliation-making her ridiculous before the whole town, ruining her for life! “I told them I was no actress; but they said I could do it, they made me go and learn all those silly verses and take all that trouble getting fitted with a dress!”

Of course the mother hastened to the telephone and called her cousin. “What on earth is this, Esther? Has your stepson gone out of his mind? What a scandal — bringing this creature to the club and making a spectacle of himself before the world?”

Esther had made a strict resolve that if ever there was anything serious to be said to Lanny, it would be said by his father; so now she told Robbie what she had heard. She took the precaution of adding: “Better not mention me. Just say that you've heard it.”

Robbie led his son to his study after dinner and said: “What's this about you and an actress, kid?”

Lanny was astonished by the speed with which rumor could operate, with the help of a universal telephone system. “Gosh!” said he. “I never met the girl till this afternoon, and I never heard of her till yesterday.”

“Who told you about her?”

“Mrs. Chris Jessup.”

“Oh, I see!” said the father. “Tell me what happened.”

Lanny told, and it was interesting to compare notes and discover how a tale could grow in two or three hours. Robbie couldn't keep from laughing; then he said: “It would be better if you didn't have anything to do with this fight. You see, Molly Jessup and Esther have been in each other's hair of late; it had to do with the chairmanship of some committee or other.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Robbie! I had no idea of that.”

“It's the kind of thing you get in for the moment you have anything to do with women's affairs. Just sort of lay off this Miss Pillwiggle, or whatever her name is, and let the women fight it out.”

“It'll be rather awkward,” said the young man. “I've expressed the opinion that she can act; and now people will be asking me about it, and what shall I say?”

“Well, of course, I wouldn't want you to violate your artistic conscience,” replied the father, gravely. “But it seems to me that when you find you've spilled some fat into a hot fire, you're justified in stepping back a bit.”

It was Lanny's turn to laugh. Then he said: “Strictly between you and me, Robbie, Adelaide is a stick.”

“Yes, son; but there are many kinds of sticks, and she's an important one.”

“A gold stick?”

“More than that — a mace of office, or perhaps a totem.”

VI

The dramatics committee assembled, and Miss Gracyn Phillipson, alias Pillwiggle, showed how she would propose to enact the role of Puck, alias Robin Goodfellow. After the demonstration had been completed, the committee asked the advice of Mr. Walter Hayden, and this experienced director of the rich replied that it was his practice to leave such decisions to the members; he would give his professional opinion only upon formal request. This having been solemnly voted, Mr. Hayden said that Miss Adelaide Hitchcock was endowed with gifts to make a very lovely fairy with wings on her shoulders; whereas Miss Phillipson was an actress and something of a find, who might some day reflect credit upon her native city.

Adelaide declined to put wings on her shoulders, and went away in a huff, declaring that she would never darken the doors of the country club again. The rehearsals went forward, and every evening for the next ten Lanny watched Gracyn Phillipson manifest enraptured gaiety upon the dimly lighted stage of a woodland theater. Every evening he staggered about in mock confusion, seeking to capture her, and crying:

“Nay, then, thou mock'st me. Thou shalt buy this dear, If ever I thy face by daylight see.”

He hardly knew her as a human being; he was under the spell of the play, a victim of enchantment, and she the fairy creature who poured into his eyes the magic juice which transformed the world. “But, my good lord, I wot not by what power! — ”

The long-awaited evening came, and Gracyn was trembling so that she was pitiful. But the moment she danced onto the stage something took hold of her — “I am that merry wanderer of the night!” She swept through the part in triumph, and lifted an amateur performance into something unique. The audience gave her a polite ovation.

Then next day — and the spell was broken. Lanny was an apprentice salesman of armaments, and Gracyn was a poor girl whose mother kept a shop and lived over it. The members of the club had had an evening's diversion, the Red Cross had got a thousand dollars, Lanny had made some enemies and Gracyn some friends; at least so she thought, but she waited in vain for another invitation to the club, and the painful realization dawned upon her that it took more than talent to crash those golden gates.

It was too bad that Lanny had to justify the gossips. Now that it was no longer a question of “art,” he had no excuse for seeing this young female. But he was interested enough to come and take her driving in his car, and investigate her as a human being. He discovered a quivering creature devoured by ambition, a prey alternately to hopes and fears. She wanted to get on the stage; how was it to be done? Go to New York, of course. Mr. Hayden had promised her introductions; but wasn't that just politeness? Didn't he do that to young actresses in every town he visited? Already he was on another job — and doubtless telling a stage-struck amateur that she had talent.

So far in Newcastle Lanny had lived a restricted life and hadn't met a single person outside his own class. But the impulse to get interested in strangers was still alive in him; and now he met Gracyn's friends, a group of young people with feeble and pathetic yearnings for beauty, and having no idea where to find it. Several were working in factories during the summer months, earning money to go to college; others had taken commercial courses in school, and now were taking jobs in offices, knowing themselves doomed to the dull round of business life. Most of them had never seen a great painting, or a “show” except vaudeville and cheap “road shows,” or heard music except jazz dances and the bellowing of a movie theater organ.

And now came Lanny Budd, an Oberon, master of magic. Lanny could sit at the little upright piano in the Phillipson home and, without stopping to think for a moment, could cause ecstasy to flow out of the astonished instrument; could weave patterns of beauty, build towering structures of gorgeous sound. He would play snatches of Chabrier's Espana — and Gracyn, who knew nothing about Spanish dancing except for pictures of girls with tambourines, would listen and catch the mood. She would say: “Play it again”; the young people would pull the chairs out of the way and she would make up dance steps while he watched her over his shoulder. Among the country-club crowd everybody had so much and was bored with everything; whereas here they had so little and were so pathetically grateful for a crumb of culture and beauty.

VII

Lanny took to being out frequently in the evening; and of course the watchful Esther did not fail to make note of it. Once more, she would say nothing to her stepson but only to his father. Robbie didn't feel the same way about a young man enjoying his evenings, provided he had done his job during the day; but Robbie understood his wife and tried to please her, and said he would speak to the boy.

What he said was: “I hope you're not getting in too deep with that girl, Lanny.”

“Oh, it's quite innocent, I assure you, Robbie. Her mother sits in one room and paints watercolor designs for house decorations; I play the piano and Gracyn dances and her young friends watch. Then we make cheese sandwiches, and twice we've had beer, and felt bohemian, really devilish.”

“Couldn't you do that with some of our own crowd?”

“It just happens that I haven't met any of them who take my music or dancing seriously.”

“They are a rather frozen-up lot, I suppose.”

“The trouble with most of them is they have no conversation.”

Robbie repressed a smile, and asked: “Aren't you ever alone with the girl?”

“I've taken her driving two or three times; that's the only way she'd ever see the country. But we talk about the theater; I've told her books to study, and she has done it. Her whole heart is set on being an actress.”

“It's a dog's life for a woman, son.”

“I suppose so; but if you're really in love with art, you don't mind hard work.”

“What usually happens is that a woman thinks she's in love with art, but really it's with a man. You mustn't get her into trouble.”

“Oh, no, Robbie; it won't be anything like that, I assure you. I've made up my mind that I'm through with love until I've got my education, and know what I want to be and do. I had some talk with Mr. Baldwin, my master at St. Thomas's, and he convinced me that that's the wisest way to live.”

“Maybe so,” said the cautious father; “but sometimes the women won't let you, and it's hard to say no. You find you've got your foot in a trap before you realize it.”

So Lanny had to go off and consider in his mind: was he the least bit in love with Gracyn Phillipson, or she with him? He was sure that if he had been thinking of falling in love, he'd have chosen some girl like Adelaide, who was soft and warm, and obviously made to melt in your arms. It would have been a wiser choice, because his parents would have been pleased, and her parents, and they would have a lovely church wedding with bridesmaids and orange blossoms and yards and yards of white veils spread all around her like a pedestal. But he hadn't been thinking about love, he had been interested in acting, and in music and dancing and poetry and the other arts that Shakespeare had woven into an immortal fairy tale. Gracyn was boylike and frank and interested in the same things, and they had made a pleasant friendship on that basis.

If she'd been thinking about anything else, she'd have let him know it. Or would she? She was an actress; and might it be that she was acting the part of boylike frankness? Acting is a tricky business, and a woman might fool herself as well as others. Gracyn wanted a start in life, and could surely not be unaware of the fact that Lanny might give it to her. His father could get her a start if he chose to take the trouble. Gracyn must have thought of this; and would she think that Lanny was careless and indifferent to her needs? Would she be too proud to hint at it, or take advantage of their friendship? If so, she must be a fine person, and Lanny was putting her to a severe test.

VIII

He took her driving the next evening, that being the only way she could ever see the country. They followed the river drive, and a full moon was strewing its showers of light over the water; fireflies were flickering, and the world was lovely, as well as mysterious. Over in France the doughboys had begun their long-expected drive, and the newspapers were full of their exploits; which lent a strange quality to any happiness you felt — as if it were something you had no right to, and that might disappear while you held it in your hands.

“Gracyn,” said Lanny, “I've been thinking that if you're going to get a job this season, you ought to be in New York now, while the managers are getting their fall productions ready.”

“I know, Lanny; but I can't!”

“What I thought was, I'd ask my father to back you to the extent of a trip there. He saw your performance and liked it a lot.”

“Oh, Lanny!” The girl caught her breath. “Oh, I couldn't let you do that!”

“It wouldn't break him.”

“I know — but I haven't the right — ”

“You can call it a loan. Anybody starting in business borrows money and pays it back out of his earnings. You surely won't fail to earn something; and it would make me happy if I could help you.”

“Oh, Lanny, what a darling you are!”

“You'll do it, then?”

“How could I say no?”

“I haven't asked him, you understand; but he's never refused to do anything within reason.”

“Lanny, I'll work so hard — I'll have one reason more for making good!”

“I know you'll work; the chances are you'll work too hard and do yourself up.”

The road passed a wooded point, and came to an open spot with a tiny bay. “Oh, Lanny, how lovely!” whispered the girl. “Stop for a bit.”

They drew up by the roadside, as young couples were doing along ten thousand rivers and streams of America. They sat looking over the water, strewn with shimmering bright jewels; and Gracyn put her hand on Lanny's and murmured: “Lanny, you are the kindest, sweetest man I've ever known.”

“It's easy for me to be generous with money I don't have to earn,” said he.

She answered: “I don't mean only that. I mean a lot, lot more than that.”

He felt her hand trembling, and a strange feeling which he had learned to know began to steal over him. When she leaned toward him he put his arm about her. They sat so for quite a while; until at last the girl whispered: “Lanny, let me tell you how I feel.”

She waited, as if it were a question; he answered: “Yes, dear, of course.”

“I think you are the best person I've ever known, and I'll do anything I can to make you happy — anything in this world. You have my promise that I'll never ask anything of you, never make any claim upon you — never, never!”

So there was Lanny mixed up with the sex problem again. His father had said: “It's hard to say no.” Lanny found that it was impossible.

I

THERE had come a post card from Sergeant Jerry Pendleton in France. “We are ready. Everything fine. Watch our smoke!” And right after that the big news began to come in. The Americans hit the spearhead of the German advance on Paris, at a little village called Château-Thierry, difficult for doughboys to pronounce. The Americans furnished two divisions for the great attack at Soissons, which caught the Germans on the flank, and cut the supply lines of their advancing armies. The same fellows that Lanny had met and talked with; they had been training for a new kind of fighting, to attack and keep on attacking, and take machine-gun nests in spite of losses — and now they were doing it! In the few days of that battle the Germans sent in seven divisions to stop the First Division of the Americans, and when they failed, their leaders knew that the tide of the war had turned.

From that time on there was one battle that went on day and night for three months. The fifty thousand sergeants led their million and a quarter men, and the machine guns mowed some of them down and left them crumpled and writhing on the ground-but others got close, and threw their hand grenades and silenced the guns. After three days of such attacks, one of the battalions from Camp Devens, a thousand strong, came out with two hundred men unwounded. But they had taken the positions.

People read about these exploits with pride and exultation, or with shuddering and grief, according to their temperaments. Lanny, who knew more about war than anybody else he met, was of two moods in as many minutes. A poet had expressed his state of mind in alternating verses:

At the country club Lanny had met officers who were now in France, directing this all-summer and autumn battle, and he was proud of these stern, capable men and the job they were doing. As the poet had said:

A letter from Nina: “It is so dreadful, the way poor Rick has to suffer. I do not know how he can stand it. They are going to have to take out another piece of bone. Perhaps they ought to take the whole leg, but the doctors are not able to agree about it.” And then one from Beauty, with words of apology for the tear stains which marred it. These were the days when she was waiting in vain for some message from Marcel; she had to pass a still longer period, clinging to the hope that he might have been captured, and that she would get word through the organization in Switzerland which exchanged lists of prisoners.

One day there came in Lanny's mail a carefully wrapped package from France, and when he opened it, there was a charming little figure of a dancing man carved in wood. M. Pinjon, the gigolo, was back in his native village and wished to greet and thank his old friend. He didn't suggest that Lanny might interest some rich Americans in giving little dancing men as Christmas gifts; but of course Lanny knew how happy the poor cripple would be if this were done. Kind-hearted persons would take duties like this upon themselves — even while they knew how pathetically futile it was.

II

Gracyn Phillipson didn't take the trip to New York; at least not right away. The morning after her understanding with Lanny she received a letter from Walter Hayden. He had meant his praise, it appeared. He was at the town of Holborn, thirty or forty miles away, about to direct a show for the Red Cross ladies there. It was a war play, and had a “fat” part for a leading lady; the committee were dubious about their local talent, and Hayden had told them about his “find” in Newcastle. They couldn't pay any salary, but would guarantee her fifty dollars' expenses for two weeks if she cared to come. It would be a chance for her to have Hayden's direction in a straight dramatic role, and the experience might be very helpful to her. The girl was wild with delight, and phoned Lanny that she was leaving by the first train.

So now the youth had another art project to be absorbed in. When he finished his study of contracts and specifications for Budd fuses furnished to the United States navy, he did not go to the country club to play tennis, but motored to Holborn and took Gracyn Phillipson to dinner — an inexpensive procedure, since she was too excited to eat. Then he drove her to the hot little “opera house” where the rehearsals were held, and watched the work, and criticized and made suggestions, and drove home late at night. On Saturday afternoon he went and stayed overnight and on Sunday took her to the beach.

This again was supposed to be “art”; and again the gossips wouldn't believe it. It was too bad that there had to be truth in their worst suspicions. There are persons who believe in the ascetic life, and when their stories of renunciation are told, as in Browning's Ring and the Book, they make noble and inspiring literature. But Lanny Budd had been brought up under a different code, and his leading lady also had ideas of her own. On the stage she was acting a part of conventional “virtue,” and pouring intense feeling into it; but when she and Lanny were alone, she embraced him with ardor, and did not trouble to fit these two codes to each other.

Lanny felt free and happy, so long as he was in Holborn; but when he started on the long drive back to the home of Esther Remson Budd, a chill would settle over his spirit, and when he put his car in the garage and stole softly up to his room, he felt like a burglar. His stepmother didn't wait up for him, but she knew the worst — and, alas, the worst was true. She never said a word to him about it, but as the days passed, their relationship grew more and more formal. Esther saw herself justified in everything she had feared when she had let this bad woman's son into her home; he had that woman's blood and would follow her ways; he belonged in France, not in New England — at any rate not in her home, making it a target for the arrows of scandal. From that time on Esther would count the days to the latter part of September, when Lanny would be going back to school.

The thing made for unhappiness between her and her husband also. Robbie didn't feel as she did; Robbie had met the girl, and thought she was the right sort for Lanny to have at this stage of his life. He couldn't say that to Esther, of course; he had to pretend that he didn't know what was going on — at the same time knowing that Esther didn't believe him.

III

This interlude with Gracyn was a strange experience for Lanny. She was a “daughter of the people,” and his acquaintance with these had been limited to servants and his childhood playmates in France. She had hardly any tradition of culture; her mother had been a clerk who had married her employer late in his life and inherited his small business. Gracyn had gone through school as Lanny was doing, bored with most subjects and forgetting them overnight. She had lived through four years of world war and it had become known to her that America was helping England and France to fight Germany; but she hadn't got quite clear about Britain and England, she didn't know which side Austria was on, and if you had mentioned Bulgaria and Bougainvillaea, she couldn't have told which was which. She was all the time pulling “boners” like that, and never minded if you laughed. “Don't expect me to know about anything but acting,” she would say.

When she was a child in school she had posed in some tableaux, representing “Columbia,” and “Innocence,” and so on, and it had set her imagination on fire; she had discovered a way of escape from the harassments of daily life, with a mother always in debt and very rarely a good substantial meal on the table. She found that she could lose herself in a world of imagination, full of beautiful, rich, and delightful people — “like you, Lanny,” she said. She had driven her childhood friends to act in stories which she made up and in which she played the princess, the endangered and adored one. She haunted the local “opera house,” to which traveling companies now and then came; she learned that sometimes they would use a child to walk across the stage in a crowd scene, or to be dressed up and petted by some actress playing the mother. Thus she had watched plays from the wings, absorbed in the story, and, no matter how humble her part, she had lived it.

She was passionate and intense in whatever she did; making love to her was like holding a live bird in your hand and feeling the throbbing of its heart. Her emotions came like waves rolling on the ocean, sweeping a boat along; but they passed quickly and were succeeded by another kind of waves. Lanny would become aware that she was no longer loving him, but was thinking about love to be enacted on the stage. It would be one of the principal things she had to do, of course; and while she did it she would start to talk about it from the technical point of view. She had studied the fine points of the actresses she had been able to see; also the favorites of the motion picture screen, and Lanny found it startling in the midst of a tête-à-tête to be told that Gloria Swanson heaved her bosom thus and so when she was manifesting passion, and the audiences seemed to like it, but Gracyn thought it was rather overdone, and what did Lanny think?

It was unfortunate that two great crises had come piling into the life of this highstrung creature at the same time: the arrival of her Prince Charming, and the dawning of her stage career. It made too much excitement to be packed into one small female frame, and she seemed likely to burst with it. As it happened, the career part had a time-schedule that could not be altered; she had to be on hand for rehearsals, and she had to know her lines and every detail of her “business” as the exacting Mr. Hayden ordered it. So love-making had to be put off to odd moments, and food and sleep were neglected almost entirely.

Lanny had to put up with many things which his fastidious friends would have found “vulgar.” He had to keep reminding himself all the time that Gracyn was poor; that she had had no “advantages”; that things which he took for granted were entirely new and strange to her. It was desire for independence which made her want to eat in cheap “joints,” and to stay in a lodging-house room which not merely had no conveniences, but was dingy, even dirty. If she talked a great deal about money, that, too, was part of her fate, for money governed her chance to act, to travel, to know the world and be received by it. If she seemed ravenous for success, lacking in poise and dignity — well, as Lanny drove back to his luxurious home, he would reflect that the founder of Budd's must have had some lust for success, some intensity of concentration upon getting his patents, raising his working capital, driving his labor, finding his customers, getting his contracts signed. Because Lanny's progenitor had fought like this, Lanny himself could be gracious and serene, and look upon the still-struggling ones with astonishment mildly tinged with displeasure.

Lanny came to realize that he was not merely a lover and a possible backer; he was a model, a specimen of the genus “gentleman” in the technical sense of the word. He was the first that Gracyn had had a chance to know and she was making full use of her opportunity. She watched how he ate, how he dressed, how he pronounced words; she put him through interrogatories about various matters that came up. What was “Ascot”? Where was “the Riviera”? She had heard of Monte Carlo, because there was a song about a man who broke the bank there. She knew that the fashions came from “gay Paree,” but she didn't know why it was called that, and was surprised to be told that the French pronounced the name of their capital city differently from Americans. Indeed, this seemed so unlikely that she wondered if Lanny wasn't making fun of her!

IV

The role which had been put before this stage-struck girl was one for which her Prince Charming was oddly equipped to give help. It was an English play, the leading lady being a war nurse in a base hospital in France. She was a mysterious person, and the interest of the play depended upon the gradual disclosure that she was a lady of high station. She became the object of adoration of a young wounded officer whom she nursed back to recovery; but she did not yield to his love, and the audience was kept in suspense as to the reason until the last act, when an officer who turned up at the hospital was recognized as the husband who had deserted her several years back. Of course her sense of duty prevailed — otherwise the play would not have been chosen by a group of society ladies of this highly moral town of Holborn. The handsome young adorer went back to the trenches in sorrow, and one learned from the play that war affords many opportunities to exhibit self-renunciation.

“Are there really women who would behave like that?” Gracyn wanted to know. Lanny said, yes, he was quite sure of it; nine-tenths of the ladies who saw the play would at least think that it was their duty to behave like that and would shed genuine tears of sympathy. He said that his stepmother would be one of them; and right away Gracyn wanted to know all about Esther Remson Budd.

Still more important, she had to have information about the manners of an English lady, a being entirely remote from her experience. Lanny was moved to tell her that he had known an English war nurse whose grandfather was an earl, and who was soon to marry the grandson of another. Straightway Rosemary began to be merged with Esther in the dramatic role — a very odd combination. Gracyn, of course, had a nose for romance, and after she had asked a score of questions about Rosemary — where Lanny had met her, and how, and what he had said and what she had said — she asked him pointblank if he and the girl hadn't been lovers, and Lanny didn't think it worth while to deny this. The revelation increased his authority and prestige.

He wouldn't let Gracyn tell Walter Hayden about this aspect of the matter. But the director knew that Lanny had lived abroad and possessed a treasure of knowledge about fashionable life. Together they pumped him and built the production on his advice — costumes, scenery, business, dialect, everything. The young society man of Holborn who took the part of the “juvenile” — that is, the wounded officer who fell in love — became Rick with his wounded leg, plus a few touches of Lanny himself. The French officer who lay in the next bed took on the mannerisms of Marcel Detaze. The comic hospital servant acquired a Provencal accent like Leese, the family cook at Bienvenu. Gracyn Phillipson received the “juvenile's” lovemaking with all the ardor of Rosemary Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver; but instead of being a “free woman” she became the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God of Wordsworth's “Ode to Duty.” That part of her was Esther Remson Budd; and she was so sorrowful, so highminded, so eloquent, that some of the ladies of the college town of Holborn had tears in their eyes even at rehearsals.

So Lanny became a sort of assistant director, and gave an education as well as receiving one. He lived a double life, one lobe of his brain full of stage business, and the other full of munitions contracts and correspondence. He left the office at five, and was in Holborn by six, had supper with Gracyn and sometimes with Hayden, attended the rehearsal, and was back in bed by midnight. He saw the play growing under his hands and it was a fascinating experience, enabling him to understand the girl's hunger for a stage career. He told his father about it, and Robbie was sympathetic and kept his uneasiness to himself. He surely didn't want his son drawn into that disorderly and hysterical kind of life; but he told himself that every youngster has to have his fling and it would be poor tactics trying to force him.

V

The great day in the evening drew near. The frightened amateur players had rehearsed a good part of the previous night; but Lanny hadn't been able to stay for that, he had to leave them to their fate. He invited several of his friends to the show; Robbie promised to bring others, but Esther politely alleged a previous engagement. Rumors had spread concerning the dramatic “find,” and the wealth and fashion of one Connecticut valley was on hand; the Red Cross would have another thousand dollars with which to buy bandages and medicines.

Lanny had thought he knew Gracyn Phillipson by now, but he was astonished by what she did that evening. Every trace of fright and uncertainty was left in the wings like a discarded garment; she came upon the stage a war nurse, exhausted with her labors and aching with pity, yet dignified and conscious of her social position. All the incongruous elements had been assembled into a character — it might not have satisfied an English lady of society, but it met New England ladies' ideas of such a person. They believed in her noble love for the young officer, and when she made her sorrowful renunciation their hearts were wrung.

The actress had shifted her names around, and appeared on the playbill as “Phyllis Gracyn.” The director considered that better suited for the electric signs on Broadway, for which he now felt sure that it was destined. Lanny listened to the excited questions of people about him: “Who is she? Where does she come from? How did they find her?” When the show was over, they crowded behind the scenes to meet and congratulate her. Lanny didn't try to join them; she had told him to go home — all she wanted was to crawl into bed in her lodging-house room and sleep a full twenty-four hours.

When he heard from her again she was in New York. Walter Hayden had advised her to come without delay. She wouldn't have to bother Lanny for money, because she had saved the greater part of her fifty dollars. She would write him as soon as she had something to tell. As he knew, she wasn't much at letter-writing; she was always running into words that she wasn't sure about.

Lanny returned to the armaments business and found it now lacking in glamour. He had satisfied the first rush of curiosity, and had discovered that contracts are complicated and that when you have read too many they become a blur in your mind; at least that was the case with him, though apparently not with his father. Lanny kept thinking about speeches in the play, and the way Gracyn had said them. They had got all mixed up in his mind with Rosemary, Rick, and Marcel; and it made him sad.

He went back to tennis and swimming at the country club. He had become a figure of romance in the eyes of the debutantes and the smart young matrons; he had had an affair with a brilliant young actress and might still be having it. More than one of them gave signs of being willing to “cut her out,” but Lanny was absent-minded. It was August, and the papers reported a heat wave in New York; how was that frail little creature standing it? She was meeting this manager and that, she wrote; hopes were being held out to her; she would have good news soon. But not a word about love! Did she think that the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God might be opening Lanny's mail?

The war kept haunting him. Every time he went home he looked for a cablegram about Marcel; but nothing came. He thought about the monstrous battle line, stretched like a serpent across north eastern France; the mass deeds of heroism, the mass agony and death. The newspapers fed it to you, twice every day; you break fasted on glory and supped on grief:

VI

September, and there came an ecstatic letter from Gracyn. She had a part; a grand part; something tremendous; her future was assured. Unfortunately, she couldn't tell about it; she was pledged to keep it a strict secret. “Oh, Lanny, I am so happy! And so grateful to you. I'd never have made the grade if it hadn't been for you. Forgive me if I don't write more. I have a part to learn. I am going to be a success and you'll be proud of me.”

So that was that; very mysterious, and a trifle disconcerting to a young man in love. A week passed, ten days, it was almost time to go back to school. Lanny found that he was glad, for it wasn't comfortable living in Esther's home when he knew that she didn't want him and was watching him all the time, anxious when he made the children happy, when he had too much influence over them. He knew that he had ruined himself with his stepmother and that nothing he could do would ever restore him to her favor.

All right; he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb; he decided suddenly that he wanted to see the great city of New York. He had had only a few hours there on his arrival, and only one trip with his father the previous summer. He hadn't seen the great bridges, the art galleries, the museums — to say nothing of the theatrical district, where many new plays were being got ready. He mentioned it to his father, who said all right. He sent his trunk to the school by express and packed a suitcase and took a morning train to the metropolis.

He had the bright idea that he would surprise Gracyn; so he took a taxi to the address to which he had been writing. He found it was a poor lodging house — and that she had moved from there a month ago, leaving no address. Her mail was being forwarded by the post office; but at the post office they wouldn't give the address — he would have to write her a letter and wait for a reply. After thinking it over he decided to call Walter Hayden's office. The director was away on an assignment, but his secretary said, yes, she knew about Phyllis Gracyn, she was rehearsing at the Metropole Theater — she had the leading part in The Colonel's Lady, a new play by somebody who was apparently somebody, although Lanny had never heard the name.

He drove to the theater. You don't have to send in your card during rehearsals; one of the front doors is apt to be unlocked, and you can walk in and look around. Lanny did so. Since the auditorium was dark no one paid any attention to him; he took a seat in back and watched.

Gracyn was on the bare stage with perhaps a dozen other persons, mostly men: a director, a couple of assistants, a property boy, and so on — Lanny was familiar with the procedure by now. The place was hot, and all the men were in their shirtsleeves and mopped their foreheads frequently. Gracyn was sitting in a chair watching the work; when her cue came she would get up and go through a scene.

Another war play; the men sat at small tables and it became apparent that they were supposed to be doughboys in a wine shop somewhere behind the lines. Gracyn was a French girl, daughter of the proprietor — her father scolded her for being too free with the soldiers. When he went off she teased them and some of her lines were a trifle crude — evidently it was a “realistic” play. The doughboys sang songs, one of them “Madelon,” in translation. “She laughs — it is the only harm she knows.”

Gracyn was doing it with great spirit. Oh, yes, she could act! Lanny had never seen the American boys in France, but he recalled the scene with the French soldiers when he and his mother motored to see Marcel. He thought: “I could have given the director a lot of help.” But they wouldn't let Gracyn tell what she was doing. And yet the secretary at Hayden's place had known about it and had told it freely. Very strange!

VII

Lanny didn't want to disturb her. He waited until the rehearsal was over and she was about to leave. Then he came down the aisle, saying: “Hello, Gracyn.”

She was startled. “Lanny! Of all people! Where on earth did you come from?”

“Out of a taxi,” he said.

“How did you find me?”

“Your secret appears to have leaked.”

She came into the auditorium to join him. She led him back, away from the others, and sat down. “Darling,” she said, swiftly, “I have something that's dreadfully hard to tell you. I couldn't put it on paper. But you have to know right away.” She caught her breath and said: “I have a lover.”

“A what?” he exclaimed. When he took in the meaning of her words, he said: “Oh, my God!”

“I know you'll think it's horrid, but don't be too mean to me. I couldn't help it. It's the man who's putting up the money for the show and giving me this part.”

The youth had never been so stunned in all his life. He was speechless; and the girl rushed on:

“I had a chance, Lanny; I might never have had another. He's a big coffee merchant, who happened to see my performance in Holborn. He lives in New York and he invited me to come. He offered to take me to a good manager and find me a part — right away, without any waste of time. What could I say, Lanny?”

The youth remembered his mother's phrase. “You paid the price?”

“Don't be horrid to me, Lanny. Don't let's spoil our friendship. Try to see my side. You know I'm an actress. I told you I didn't know anything else, I didn't care about anything else — I wanted to get on the stage, and I'm doing it.”

“There isn't any honest way?”

“Please, darling — use your common sense. This is New York. What chance does a girl stand? I'd have tramped the heels off my shoes going to managers' offices, and they wouldn't even have seen me. I'd have called myself lucky to get a part with three lines — and I'd have spent a month or two rehearsing, going into debt for my board while I did it. The play might have failed the first week, and I'd have twenty dollars, maybe thirty, to pay my debts with. Believe me, I've talked to show girls these few weeks, and I know what the game is.”

“Well, it's all right,” he said. “I wish you success, and the highest salary on Broadway.”

“Don't sneer at me, Lanny. Life has been easy for you. You were born with a gold spoon in your mouth, and you've no right to scorn a poor girl.”

“I'll do my best to remember it. Thanks for telling me the truth.”

“I'd have told you before, Lanny; but it was so hard. I hate to lose you for a friend.”

“I'm afraid you have done so,” he said, coldly. “Your angel might be jealous.”

“I know it's a shock, darling. But you know so little about the stage world. Somebody had to give me a start. You couldn't have done it — you surely know that.”

Said he: “It may interest you to hear that I was thinking of asking you to marry me.”

Did this startle her? If so, she was a good actress. “I haven't failed to consider that. But you have to go to school, and then to college — that's five years, and in that time I'd be an old woman.”

“My father would have helped me to marry, if I'd asked him.”

“I know, dear, but can't you understand? I don't want to be a wife, I want to be an actress! I couldn't think of settling down and having babies, and being a society lady — not in Newcastle, not even in France. I want to have a career — and what sort of a life would it be for you, tagging along behind a stage celebrity? Would you enjoy being called Mister Phyllis Gracyn?”

He saw that she had thought it all out; and, anyhow, it was too late. No good saying any unkind words. “All right, darling,” he said — it was the stage name. “I'll be a good sport, and wish you all the luck there is. I'm only sorry I couldn't give you what you needed.”

“No, Lanny dear,” she said. “It's thirty thousand dollars!” And there wasn't any acting in what she put into those words!

VIII

The sun was going down as Lanny climbed onto the top of one of the big Fifth Avenue busses, which for a dime took you uptown, and across to Riverside Drive, and up to where the nation had built a great granite tomb for General Grant, in the shape of a soap box with a cheese box on top. Part of the time Lanny looked at the crowds on the avenue, and at sailboats and steamers on the river; the rest of the time he thought about the strange adventure into which he had blundered. He decided that he wasn't proud of it, and wouldn't tell anybody, excepting of course Robbie, and perhaps Rick or Kurt if he ever saw them again.

He told himself that he had made himself cheap. That little tart-well, no, he mustn't call her names — she had her side, she had her job to do and might do it well. But he mustn't let himself blunder like that again; he must know more about a woman before he threw himself into her arms. A man had to have standards; he must learn to say no. Lanny thought about the number of times he had said yes to Gracyn Phillipson, and in such extravagant language. He writhed with humiliation.

He didn't want to go home in that mood, and he didn't want to go to school ahead of time, so he put up at a hotel, and spent his time in the museums and art galleries. He looked at hundreds of paintings — and all the nudes were Gracyn, except those that were Rosemary. He told himself with bitterness that they were all for sale, whether for thirty-thousand-dollar shows on Broadway, or for three dollars, the price of the pitiful painted ones who hunted on that Great White Way in the late hours of the evening. Rosemary's price would be a title and a country estate, but she was being sold just the same; it didn't matter that the bargain would be solemnized by a bishop in fancy costume, and proclaimed by pealing chimes in St. Margaret's. Would he ever meet one that didn't have her price? And how would he know her — since they were all so hellishly clever at fooling you?

There was another hot spell in New York, and he looked at the crowds of steaming people. The women wore light and airy garments and the young ones tripped gaily; but all the men who wanted to be thought respectable had to wear hot coats, and Lanny pitied them and himself. It was the time of year when “everybody” was supposed to be out of town; but there was an enormous number of “nobodies,” and Lanny marveled how nature had managed it so that they all wanted to live. There were more Jews than anywhere else in the world and he might have satisfied his curiosity about that race if he had had time. There were great numbers of soldiers, and foreigners of every sort, so New York didn't seem very different from Paris. He found a French restaurant and had his dinners there and felt at home; he wished his mother were with him — what a comfort to tell her about Gracyn and hear her wise comments!

IX

The young man went back to St. Thomas's, and forgot his troubles in the pleasure of meeting his schoolfellows and hearing stories of where they had been and what they had done. He had a firm resolve to buckle down and make a record that would please his father and grandfather, and perhaps even his stepmother. It was pleasant to have your work cut up into daily chunks, duly weighed and measured, so that you knew exactly what you had to do and were spared all uncertainties and moral struggles.

The Americans had begun their attack in the Argonne, a forest full of rock-strewn hills and deep ravines thick with brush, one of the most heavily fortified districts in the war zone, and considered by the Germans to be impregnable. The doughboys were hammering there, and fifty thousand of them would be killed or wounded in three weeks. It was the greatest battle in American history, and it was a part of Lanny's life; his friends were in it, and his heart. There came now and then a post card from Jerry Pendleton — that fellow had been fighting every day and almost every night for a month and hadn't been touched. Now he was back in a rest camp, enjoying the peace his valor won. Somehow Lanny couldn't think of wounds and death in connection with Jerry; he was the wearer of some sort of Tarnhelm and would come out safe and whole to tell Lanny about it.

Also a letter from Nina. She had a brother who had been in the fighting south of the Somme and had got what the British called a “blighty” wound, one that brought him home and kept him out of danger for a while. Rick had had his operation, and this time they really hoped for better results. There were even a few lines from Rick to prove it; nothing about wounds, of course, you'd never know if Rick was suffering. “Well, old top, it looks like Fritz is really in trouble. Moving out and no time to pack his boxes. Cheerio!”

Beauty was always a dependable correspondent, and managed to smile through her tears. No word from Marcel yet. M. Rochambeau had written to friends in Switzerland, asking for information. M. Rochambeau said that Germany was cracking; discontent was breaking out everywhere inside the country. President Wilson's propaganda was having a tremendous effect; his “Fourteen Points” left the German people no reason for fighting. Baby Marceline was thriving, and all the world agreed that she was the most beautiful baby in the Midi.

Lanny knew, of course, that all this was an effort on his mother's part to hide her grieving for Marcel. What was she going to do when the war was over? He had made up his mind that his stepfather was dead; and Beauty was not a person who could live alone. Sometimes he wondered, had he made a mistake in bringing about that marriage? What would he have done if he had known that Marcel was going to be a mutilé inside of one year and a corpse in less than four? Maybe she should have taken the plate-glass man after all!

X

The Allied armies continued their grinding advance. The Hindenburg line was cracked and the Germans forced to retreat. First Bulgaria collapsed, then Turkey, then Austria; there came a revolution in Germany and the Kaiser fled to Holland — all that series of dramatic events, culminating in the day when everybody rushed into the streets of American cities and towns, shouting and singing and dancing, blowing horns and beating tin pans, making every sort of racket they could think of. The war was over! There wasn't going to be any more killing! No more bombs, shells, bullets, poison gas, torpedoes! The boys who were still alive could stay alive! The war to end war had been won and the world was safe for democracy! People thought all these things, one after another, and with — each thought they shouted and sang and danced some more.

Even at St. Thomas's Academy, the place of good manners, there was a celebration. Lanny got his father on the telephone; they laughed together, and Lanny cried a little. He sent a cablegram to his mother and one to Rick. People were behaving the same way in France, of course. Even those cold and aloof beings, the gentlemen of England, were rushing out into the streets embracing strangers. It had been a tough grind for the people of that small island; they hadn't been in such danger since the days of the Spanish Armada.

A couple of weeks later came Thanksgiving Day and Lanny went home. One of the first things his father said was: “Well, kid, I guess I'm going to have to go back to Europe pretty soon. There'll be a lot of matters to be cleared up.”

Lanny's first thought was: You can cross the ocean and enjoy it! You can walk on deck and look for whales instead of submarines!

One needed time for that to sink in. Then he said: “Listen, Robbie — don't be surprised. I want you to take me with you.”

“You mean — to stay?”

“I've thought it all over. I'll be a lot happier in France. I can get much more of what I want there.”

“Aren't you happy here?”

“Everybody's been kind to me, and I'm glad I came. I had to know your people, and I wouldn't have missed the experience. But I have to see my mother, too. And she needs me right now. I don't think she's ever going to see Marcel again.”

“You could visit her, you know.”

“Of course; but I have to think of one place as home, and that's Juan.”

“What about the business?”

“If I'm going to help you, it'll be over there. You'll be going back and forth, and I'll see as much of you one way as the other.”

“You don't care about going to college?”

“I don't think so, Robbie. I've asked people about it and it isn't what I need. I was going through with it on account of the war, and to please you.”

“Just what is it you want — if you know?”

“It isn't easy to put into words. More than anything else I want art. I've lived here a year and a half and I've heard almost no music. I haven't seen any good plays — of course I might see them in New York, but I haven't any friends there, all my best friends are in England and France.”

“You'll be a foreigner, Lanny.”

“I'll be a citizen of several countries. The world will need some like that.”

“Just what exactly do you plan to do?”

“I want to feel my way. The first thing is to stop doing all the things that I don't want to do. I'm in a sort of education treadmill. I make myself like it, but all the time I know that I don't; and if I dropped it and went on board a ship with you I'd feel like a bird getting out of a cage. Don't misunderstand me, I don't want to loaf; but I'm nineteen, and I believe I can direct my own education. I want to have time to read the books I'm interested in. I want to meet cultured people, and know what's going on in the arts — music, drama, painting, everything. Paris is going to be interesting right now, with the peace conference. Do you suppose you can manage to get me a passport? I understand they let hardly anybody go.” “I can fix that up all right, if you're sure it's what you want.” “I want to know what you're doing, and I want to help you — I'll be your secretary, run your errands, anything. To be with you and meet the people you meet — don't you see how much more that's worth to me than being stuck in a classroom at St. Thomas's, hearing lectures on modern European history by some master who's a child in comparison with you? Everything they have is out of books, and I can get the same books and read them in a tenth of the time. I'll wager you that on the steamer going across I can learn more modern European history than I'd get in a whole term in school.” “All right,” said the father. “I guess it's no use trying to fit you into anybody else's boots.”

XI

Lanny motored up to the school to pack his belongings, and say good-by to his masters and his fellow-pupils, who thought he was the luckiest youth in the state. Then he came home and started saying farewell to people at the country club and to the many members of the family. Most of all he wanted to see the Reverend Eli Budd; but fate had other plans about that. There came a telegram saying that the patriarch had passed away peacefully in his sleep, and that the funeral would be held two days later.

Lanny motored up to Norton with Robbie and his wife and an elderly widowed cousin who was visiting them. The Budd tribe had assembled from all over New England — there must have been two hundred of them in the little Unitarian church, where the deceased had been the minister for fifty years of his life. The Budd men were all grave and solid-looking, all dressed pretty much alike, whether they were munitions magnates or farmers, bankers or clergymen. They listened in silence while the present minister extolled the virtues of the departed, and when they came outside, where the first snowflakes of the year were falling, the older ones agreed that the Budd line was producing no more great men. When the will was opened, everyone was puzzled because the old man had left his library to his great-grandnephew, Lanning Prescott Budd. Some of them didn't know who that was, till the whisper went round that it was Robert Budd's bastard, who was now going back to France and would probably take the books with him.

Robbie had got the passports, and the steamer sailed two days later. The son went over to the office and said good-by to all the executives and secretaries who had been kind to him. He had had to see a good deal of his Uncle Lawford in the office, and he now went in and shook hands with that morose and silent man, who unbent sufficiently to say that he wished him well. Lanny called on his grandfather at his home, and the old gentleman, who had aged a lot under the strain of the war, didn't make any attempt to seem cheerful. He said he didn't know how Robbie could be expecting to drum up any more business in Europe now; they had munitions enough on hand to blow up the whole continent, and he wasn't sure but what they might just as well do so.

“There's going to be hell to pay at home,” he warned. “All our workingmen have got too big for their breeches, and we've got to turn a lot of them off when we finish these government contracts. They've been watching that lunatic asylum in Russia, and they'll be ready to try it here when they find we've nothing more to give them. Better take my advice and learn something about business, so you can take care of yourself in a dangerous time.”

“I'm planning to stick close to my father, sir, and learn all that he'll teach me.”

“Well, if you listen to me you'll forget all this nonsense about music and stage plays. There are temptations enough in a young man's life without going out to hunt for them.”

“Yes, Grandfather,” said the youth, humbly. This was a rebuke, and he had earned it. “I don't think there'll be much pleasure-seeking in France for quite a while. They are a nation of widows and cripples, and most of the people I know are working hard trying to help them.”

“Humph!” said Grandfather Samuel, who wasn't going to believe anything good about France if he could help it. He went on to talk about the world situation, which was costing him a lot of sleep. Forces apparently beyond control had drawn America into the European mess, and it wasn't going to be easy getting her out again. American businessmen would be compelled to sell more and more to foreigners. “We Budds have always been plain country people,” declared the grandfather. “Not many of us know any foreign languages, and we distrust their manners and their morals. We can use someone who knows them, and can advise us — that is, if it's possible for anybody to live among them and not become as corrupt as they are.”

“I'll bear your advice in mind, sir,” replied the youth. “I have learned a great deal from my visit here, and I mean to profit by it.”

That was all, but it was enough, according to the old gentleman's code. He wouldn't try to pin anyone down. Lanny had been to Bible class, and had had his chance at Salvation; whether he took it or not was up to him, and whatever he did would be what the Lord had predestined him to do. The Lord would be watching him and judging him — and so would the Lord's deputy, the president of Budd Gunmakers.

XII

There remained the partings from Robbie's own family. The two boys were sorry indeed to see him go, for he had been a splash of bright color in their precisely ordered lives. He found time for a heart-to-heart talk with Bess, the only person in Connecticut who shed tears over him. She pledged herself to write to him, and he promised to send her pictures of places in Europe where he went and of people he met. “Some day you'll come over there,” he said; and she answered that Robbie would have to bring her, or she would come as a stowaway.

As for Esther, she kissed him, and perhaps was really sorry. He thanked her with genuine affection; he felt that he had done wrong and was to blame for the coldness which had grown between them. He would always admire her and understand her; she would always be afraid of him.

Father and son went to New York by a morning train. Robbie had business in the afternoon, and in the evening Lanny had another good-by to say. Through the newspapers he had been following the fortunes of a dramatic production called The Colonel's Lady, which had opened in Atlantic City the beginning of October and had scored a hit; it had run there for two weeks, and had then had a successful opening at the Metropole Theater. Lanny wanted to see it, and Robbie said, sure, they'd both go. Their steamer had one of those midnight sailings which allow the pleasure-loving ones a last fling on the Great White Way.

Lanny didn't want to meet “Phyllis Gracyn”; he just wanted to see her act. He got seats for the show, for which one had to pay a premium. They were well down in front, but Gracyn probably didn't see the visitors. They followed the fortunes of a French innkeeper's daughter who was fascinated by the brilliance of an American “shavetail,” but wasn't able to resist the lure of a French colonel, whose jealous wife involved him with a German spy in order to punish him. Out of this came an exciting melodrama, which was going to hold audiences in spite of peace negotiations.

Lanny was interested in two things: first, the performance of Gracyn, which wasn't finished by any means, but was full of energy and “pep”; and, second, the personality of the young American officer. Evidently the play was one of those which had been written at rehearsals, and Gracyn had had a part in it. Lanny had taught her, and she had taught the author and the young actor; so there were many touches in which Lanny recognized himself — mannerisms, phrases, opinions about the war, items about the French, their attitude to the doughboys and the doughboys' to them. There were even a few third-hand touches of Sergeant Jerry Pendleton in this Broadway hit!

“Well, you did a good job,” said Robbie. “Charge it up to education and don't fall in love with any more stage ladies.”

“I've made a note of it,” said the dutiful son.

“Or else — note this: that if you'd had thirty thousand dollars, you might have licked the coffee merchant!”

They were in the taxi on the way to the steamer; and Lanny grinned. “There's an English poem supposed to be sung by the devil, and the chorus runs: 'How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho, how pleasant it is to have money!'”

“All right,” replied the father. “But you can bet that poet had money, or he wouldn't have been sitting around making up verses.”

On board the steamer; and one more farewell to say. Standing on the deck, watching the lights of the metropolis recede, Robbie pointed to an especially bright light across the bay and said: “The Statue of Liberty.”

She had come from France, and Lanny was going home. She waved her torch to him, as a sign that she understood how he felt.