WORLD'S END

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

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

15

_{Amor inter Arma}

I

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

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

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

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