WORLD'S END

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

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

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

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

"He says they're putting aluminum into them."

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

"It's made out of bauxite, I know."

"And has Germany got any?"

"I don't know, Robbie."

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

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

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

"To Germany?"

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

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

"Who's going to do it?"

"But it's treason!"

"It's business."

"Who are the people that are doing it?"

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

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

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

IX