WORLD'S END

As the friends of Lanny Budd portrayed it to him, two evil creatures had been spewed up from the Russian cesspool, and had managed to seize power. They were still holding on to it - in spite of the fact that the newspapers reported Lenin as shooting Trotsky and Trotsky as poisoning Lenin about once a week. They had led the workers and peasants in a campaign of massacre, and the nobility and land owners of the Tsar's realm had fled, counting themselves lucky if they had a few jewels sewed up in the lining of their coats. Paris was full of these refugees, with pitiful and ghastly tales to tell; Lanny heard some of them, and his mother, in her incompetent way, made efforts to help the victims. It seemed to her sympathetic soul unbearable that people who had never had to work and so didn't know how to work should suddenly find themselves without money to pay for their meals. Robbie had to tell her more than once that his fortune was not equal to supporting the Russian aristocracy in the state to which it had been accustomed.

Of course Europe had to protect itself against this Red menace, said Lanny's friends; and so the Allied armies had established what they called a cordon sanitaire around the vast former empire of the Tsar. The Japanese and the Americans had seized Vladivostok and the eastern half of the Trans-Siberian railway. The British and Americans had occupied Archangel and Murmansk in the far North, blocking all commerce by that route. Along the European land front the Allied troops stood on guard, and French and British officers were busy organizing anti-Bolshevik Russians, and providing them with arms and money and sending them into the Ukraine, Russian Poland, and the Baltic provinces. This fighting had been going on for a year now, and each day Lanny read in the papers of "White" victories and was assured that soon the dreadful menace would be at an end.

But it was like a forest fire, whose sparks flew through the air; or perhaps a plague, whose carriers burrow underground and come up through rat-holes. The emissaries of the Bolsheviks would sneak through the sanitary cordon, and creep into the slums of some city of Central Europe, telling the hungry workers how the Russians had made a revolution, and offering to help do the same. The armies would catch many of them and shoot them; but there were always more. Even before the armistice, a Jewish "Red" by the name of Eisner had seized the government of Bavaria; in Berlin two others named Liebknecht and Luxemburg - the latter a woman, known as "Red Rosa" - were carrying on a war in the streets, seeking to take power from the Socialist government which had arisen in Germany after the overthrow of the Kaiser. In Hungary it was the same; a member of the nobility who called himself a Socialist, Count Karolyi, had given his estates in an effort to help the poor of that starving land, but now a Bolshevik Jew was leading a movement to unseat him and set up Soviets on the Russian pattern.

Always it was a Jew, people pointed out to Lanny; and this kindled to flame the anti-Semitic feeling always latent among the fashionable classes of Europe. "What did we tell you?" they would say. "The Jews have no country; they are seeking to undermine and destroy Christian society. It is a worldwide conspiracy of this arrogant people." Robbie said something along this line; and Lanny grinned and replied: "Be careful, you've got a Jewish partner now!"

Robbie made a wry face. His Anglo-Saxon conscience troubled him, and his aristocratic feelings resented the odor of the junk business. But Johannes Robin had bought a couple of hundred thousand hand grenades, and had already sold the powder before he had got it extracted. The prospects looked excellent; and Robbie Budd just couldn't bear to sit on a big pile of money and not make use of it - the use, of course, being to make more money.

VI

One day when Lanny went to lunch he found at his table a young army officer, introduced as Captain Stratton; handsome, well set up, as they all were, full of smartness and efficiency. Military uniforms were plentiful in the Crillon dining room, as all over Paris; someone had counted up the soldiers of twenty-six different nations to be found in the capital at that time. Captain Stratton was connected with the Intelligence Service of the army, and it -was his special task to watch out for any efforts of the Bolsheviks among the doughboys. It was a confidential subject, but the officer was in the midst of persons who had a right to know what was going on.