WORLD'S END

Clemenceau had been driving from his home, and as his limousine turned into the Avenue du Trocadйro, a young worker wearing corduroy clothing had stepped from behind a kiosk and fired eight or ten shots at him. Two had struck the elderly premier, one in the shoulder and one in the chest; it was believed that a lung had been penetrated, and there seemed little chance of life for a man of seventy-eight, a diabetic, weakened by four years of terrific strain.

"Well, that's the end of peace-making," said Alston. The staff agreed that it would mean a wave of reaction in France and the suppression of left-wing opinion.

But the old man didn't die; he behaved in amazing fashion - with a bullet hole in his lung he didn't want even to be sick. Reports came in every few minutes; the doctors were having a hard time persuading him to lie down; he could hardly speak, and a bloody foam came out of his mouth, but he wanted to go on holding conferences. The Tiger indeed; a hard beast to kill! Of course he became the hero of France and people waited hour by hour for bulletins as to his fate.

A messenger brought in newspapers with accounts of the affair. The assassin had been seized by the crowd, which mauled him and tried to kill him; the papers gave pictures of him being held by a couple of gendarmes who had protected and saved him. His name was Cottin, and he was said to be a known anarchist; the photographs showed a frail, disheveled, frightened-looking young fellow. Lanny studied them, and a strange feeling began to stir in him. "Where have I seen that face?" As in a lightning flash it came to him: the youth whom he had watched in the salle while Jesse Blackless was making his speech! No doubt about it, for Lanny had watched the face off and on for an hour, taking it as a symbol of the inflamed and rebellious masses.

Lanny's last glimpse of the young worker had been on the platform, with Uncle Jesse patting him on the back. Lanny had wondered then, and wondered now with greater intensity, did that mean that he was a friend of the painter, or merely an admirer, a. stranger moved by his speech? Was this attempted killing the kind of political warfare that Uncle Jesse favored, whether publicly or secretly? Lanny remembered what his father had said, that syndicalism was for practical purposes the same as anarchism. Now Uncle Jesse had said that he had adopted the theories of the Bolsheviks. Did this by any chance include taking pot-shots at one's opponents on the street?

Decidedly a serious question for a youth getting launched upon a diplomatic career! To be sure, his chief had told him to go to the meeting and report; but nobody had told him to go secretly to the home of a syndicalist-Bolshevik conspirator and arrange for him to receive ten thousand francs of German money to be used in stirring up the workers of Paris to commit assassinations. Of course nobody at the meeting had directly advised the killing off of unsatisfactory statesmen, but it was an inference readily drawn from the furious denunciations poured upon the statesmen's heads. The orators might disclaim responsibility, but certainly they must know the probable result of such speeches.

Lanny's thought moved on from his uncle to his intimate friend. How much had Kurt known, and how far was he responsible for what had happened? It had become clear to Lanny that Kurt's money was being used for a lot more than the lifting of the blockade of Germany. Uncle Jesse had explained by saying that the police wouldn't allow a meeting on behalf of Germans, so the subject had to be brought in under camouflage. Lanny hadn't thought about the matter long before realizing that he had been extremely naive. The obvious way to relieve French pressure on Germany was to frighten France with the same kind of Bolshevist disturbances that were taking place throughout Central Europe. Kurt and his group were here for that, and they were using camouflage just as Uncle Jesse was.

VIII

A lot of complications to occupy the thoughts of a secretary supposed to be marking for his chief's attention a dozen conflicting reports on the proper boundary between the city of Fiume, inhabited by tumultuous Italians, and its suburb Susak, on the other side of a creek, inhabited by intransigent Yugoslavs! Lanny sat with a stack of documents before him: American, British, and French recommendations, and translations of Italian charges and Yugoslav countercharges. He sat with wrinkled brows, but it wasn't over these problems. He was saying to himself: "What does Kurt think about assassination of statesmen as a means of influencing national decisions? And would he be willing to use me for such a purpose?" Lanny's sense of fair play compelled him to add that Kurt had given him warning. Kurt had said: "Forgive me if I am not a friend at present. My time is not my own, nor my life."