WORLD'S END

Lanny smiled to himself. His chief called himself a "liberal," and Lanny had been trying to make up his mind just what that meant. He decided that a liberal was a high-minded gentleman who believed the world was made in his own image. But unfortunately only one small part of it was deserving of such trust. He had been looking for such a spot, and the only one he had found was the tiny country of Denmark, whose delegates had come to the conference determined not to take on any racial minorities. Others were trying hard to persuade them to accept a chunk of Germany down to the Kiel canal; but they would have no land of which the population was not preponderantly Danish - and they would insist upon a plebiscite before they took even that. If only the whole of Europe had been "liberal" according to that formula, how simple all the problems would have been!

VII

President Wilson returned to Paris in the middle of March, one month after his leaving. There were no tumultuous receptions this time; the various peoples of the world had learned that he wouldn't give them what they wanted, and couldn't if he would. He came a beaten man; for the expiring Congress had left unpassed three vital appropriation bills, in order to make certain that he would have to summon a special session of the new Congress. He arrived at a Peace Conference which had laid all his Fourteen Points on the shelf, and also its own resolution of seven weeks earlier, whereby the Covenant of the League of Nations was to become a part of the peace treaty.

Wilson set his long Presbyterian jaw and went into a three-hour conference with the two head malefactors, Clemenceau and Lloyd George. When he came out from it he gave out a statement to the effect that the Covenant was a vital part of the treaty and would remain in. Then what a steaming and stewing, a bubbling and boiling of diplomatic kettles! Pichon, French Foreign Minister, issued a declaration to the effect that the Covenant would not have any place in the treaty; and when the reporters asked him about President Wilson's statement, he said he hadn't heard of it. There was a great scandal, and Clemenceau was forced to "throw down" his foreign minister and stop the publication of his communique. Then Lord Robert Cecil gave out a statement supporting Wilson's side, and the clamor of the Tories forced Lloyd George to throw him down. So it went, back and forth; those elderly gentlemen met and argued until they were sick of the sound of one another's voices. The shrill clamor penetrated to the attaches outside, and caused them to look at one another with anxious faces, or perhaps with mischievous grins.

The "Big Four" were meeting by themselves now, resolved to push things through and get done. A more oddly assorted quartet of bedfellows had rarely been chosen by political fate. Woodrow Wilson was a stiff and grave person, of principles which he held as divinely ordained. He kept his sense of humor for his private life; in public it was his function to deliver eloquent discourses in favor of righteousness, and at this there was no one in the world to rival him. He brought his great talent to every session and exercised it upon Georges Clemenceau, who sat hunched in his chair with eyes closed, the picture of agonized boredom; every few minutes the Tiger would open his heavy-lidded eyes and reply with any one of half a dozen French words, the equivalent of four-letter English words which every guttersnipe knew, but which few had ever seen in print.

This form of political argument was something hitherto inconceivable to the Presbyterian professor. He had been brought up to the idea that scholar and gentleman formed an inseparable combination; but here was a scholar who was perfectly content to be a blackguard and a rascal. His political career had been that of a Tammany Hall boss - so Robbie Budd had told his son. As Lanny didn't know much about New York City's political history, the father explained that forceful men of the people went into politics, their hearts bleeding for the wrongs of the poor; so they collected votes and built up a political machine, which they used to blackmail their way to fortune.

The Tiger, now seventy-eight, had seen a great deal of the world, but here was a phenomenon the like of which he had never encountered: a politician who in the presence of other politicians pretended to mean what he said in his speeches! At first Clemenceau had found it absolutely infuriating; he had raged and stormed, and there was a dreadful story going the rounds that he had struck the President in the face and that Lloyd George had had to separate them. You met people who declared that they knew this story was true; but how did they know it? Others reported that as the battles of the Big Four went on, the Tiger began to take a humorous attitude; at the end he had actually grown fond of this odd phenomenon, as one might of some human freak, a man with two heads or four arms.