WORLD'S END

The munitions industry was shot to pieces, reported the salesman. Budd's had been forced to close down; all that magnificent plant which had been like a beehive - its chimneys were empty and its gates were locked. "But I thought we still had contracts with the government!" exclaimed the youth. The father answered that it didn't pay to run big plants for a few orders, and they had canceled the contracts on the basis of part payments.

"But what will all those working people do, Robbie?"

"I hope they saved their money. For us the war ended too soon. Nobody could foresee that Germany, was going to collapse like that."

"We still have those fine new plants, haven't we?"

"What are plants if you can't run them? They're just a drain; upkeep, insurance, and taxes - the government soaks you as hard whether you're making anything or not."

"I never thought of that," confessed Lanny.

"Your grandfather isn't thinking about anything else very much."

Robbie was sending home long reports, mostly without a gleam of hope. There were plenty of people who wanted to go on fighting, but where were they to get the money? Who would want to finance new wars? And, anyhow, the fighting would be done with munitions already manufactured. There were mountains of it piled up all over France, and on the Italian front, and the Balkan front, and the Palestine front - everywhere you looked on the map. It could be bought for almost anything you wanted to offer.

"I've been trying to interest Father in buying some as a speculation," added Robbie. "But he says we're not going into the junk business. I can't very well do it myself while I'm the European sales agent of our firm."

In Lanny's mind was a vision of that depressing old Colonial house in Newcastle, with a worried and overworked businessman sitting at a desk piled high with papers - and having in one drawer a bundle of pamphlets setting forth the Confession of Faith of his grandfather. "What does he expect to do, Robbie?"

"We've got to figure out ways to turn some of the plants to peacetime uses. And that's going to cost a lot of money."

"Well, we made it, didn't we?"

"Most of it was distributed as dividends, and people aren't going to put it back in unless we can show them new ways of making profits."

"Surely, Robbie, there's going to be a demand for every sort of goods! People are clamoring for them all over."

"It doesn't matter how much they clamor, unless they've got money. The ones that have money daren't risk it when there's so much uncertainty - and when those in authority can't make up their minds about anything. We've got a President who spent his time studying Latin and Greek and theology when he ought to have been learning the elements of finance and credit."

Robbie said that Clemenceau and Lloyd George were every bit as ignorant about economic questions; he wanted businessmen and financiers called in to advise. With one-third of Europe in revolution, and another third hanging on the brink; with tens of millions of people not knowing where to get their next day's bread; with trade disorganized, railways broken down, river transport sunk, harbors blockaded, and millions of men still kept out of production, liable to revolt and go home, or to start shooting one another - the man to whom they all looked for guidance had brought a shipload of specialists in geography and history and international law, and only a handful who knew finance, production, or trade.

VII

The telephone rang in Lanny's room, and he heard a voice, speaking English with a decided foreign accent: "Can you guess?" Someone in a playful mood; he kept on talking, and Lanny, who had heard so many kinds of accents in his young life, tried his best to think, but nothing stirred in his memory. "Five years ago," said the stranger. "On a railroad train." Lanny groped in his mind. "I got on at Genoa," said the voice; and suddenly a light dawned, and the youth cried: "Mr. Robin!"

"Johannes Robin, Maatschappij voor Electrische Specialiteiten, Rotterdam - at your service!" chuckled the voice.

"Well, well!" said Lanny. "What are you doing here?"

"A little business, which will be a secret until I see you."

"And how are the boys?"

"Fine, Lanny, fine - do I call you Lanny, even though you are grown up to a young gentleman?"

"You bet you do, Mr. Robin. I'll never forget the favors you have done me." In the course of the last four years Mr. Robin had mailed six or eight letters to Kurt in Germany, one of them only a week or two previously. That was how the trader knew that Lanny was in Paris, and his address.

Of course Lanny wanted to see that friend, even busy as he was with all the affairs of Europe. "I'm going to have lunch with my father," he said. "Wouldn't you like to join us?"

"Sure, I like to meet your father," said the dealer in electrical gadgets. Lanny told him where to come.