WORLD'S END

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

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

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

"Frenchmen are like that," she answered.

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

"Marcel and I decided."

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

"And are you going to support it?"

"What can I do? What can anybody do?"