WORLD'S END

At Genoa the ladies departed, and their places were taken by a Jewish gentleman with handsome dark eyes and wavy dark hair, carrying two large suitcases full of household gadgets. He spoke French and English of a sort, and he too was romantic, but in an oddly different way. The ladies from the land of lumber had been brought up where everything was crude and new, so their interest was in the old things of Europe, the strange types of architecture, the picturesque costumes of peasants. But this Jewish gentleman - his name was Robin, shortened from Rabinowich - had been brought up among old things, and found them dirty and stupid. His job was to travel all over this old Europe selling modern electrical contraptions.

"Look at me," said Mr. Robin; and Lanny did so. "I was raised in a village near Lodz, in a hut with a dirt floor. I went to school in another such hut, and sat and scratched my legs and tried -to catch the fleas, and chanted long Hebrew texts of which I did not understand one word. I saw my old grandmother's head split open in a pogrom. But now I am a civilized man; I have a bath in the morning and put on clean clothes. I understand science, and do not have any more nonsense in my head, such as that I commit a sin if I eat meat and butter from the same dish. What I earn belongs to me, and I no longer fear that some official will rob me, or that hoodlums will beat me because my ancestors were what they call Christ-killers. So you see I am glad that things shall be new, and I do not have the least longing for any of the antiquities of this continent."

It was a novel point of view to Lanny; he looked out of the car window and saw Europe through the eyes of a Jewish "bagman." The nations were becoming standardized, their differences were disappearing. An office building was the same in whatever city it was erected; and so were the trams, the automobiles, the goods you bought in the shops. Said the salesman of electrical curling irons: "If you look at the people on this train, you will see that they are dressed much alike. The train itself is a standard product, and by means of it we travel from town to town selling products which are messengers of internationalism."

Lanny told where he was going, and how Kurt Meissner said that art was the greatest of international agents. Mr. Robin agreed with that. Lanny mentioned that he had a van Gogh in the dining room of his home, and it developed that Mr. Robin lived in Holland, and knew about that strange genius who had been able to sell only one painting in his whole lifetime, though now a single work brought hundreds of dollars. Said Mr. Robin: "How I wish that I knew such a genius now alive!"

This salesman of gadgets was a curious combination of shrewdness and naivete. He would have got the better of you in a business deal, and then, if you had been his guest, he would have spent twice as much money on you. He was proud of how he had risen in the world, and happy to tell a little American boy all about it. He gave him his business card and said: "Come arid see me if you ever come to Rotterdam." When he took up his heavy cases and departed,

Lanny thought well of the Jews and wondered why he didn't know more of them.

III

From Vienna the traveler enjoyed the society of a demure and sober little Frдulein a year or two younger than himself; she was returning from her music studies in Vienna, and had eyes exactly the color of bluebells and a golden pigtail at least two inches in diameter hanging down her back. Such a treasure was not entrusted to the chances of travel alone, and Frдulein Elsa had with her a governess who wore spectacles and sat so stiff and straight and stared so resolutely before her that Lanny decided to accompany Sienkie-wicz to Poland of the seventeenth century, and share the military exploits of the roistering Pan Zagloba and the long-suffering Pan Longin Podbipienta.

But it is not easy to avoid speaking to people who are shut up in a little box with you all day long. With true German frugality the pair had their lunch, and it was difficult to eat it and not offer their traveling companion so much as one or two Leibnitzkeks. Lanny said politely: "No, thank you," but the ice was broken. The governess asked where the young gentleman was traveling to, and when he said he was to spend the holidays at Schloss Stubendorf, a transformation took place in her demeanor. "Ach, so?" cried she, and was all politeness, and a comical eagerness to find out whose guest he was to be. Lanny, too proud of himself to be a snob, hastened to say that he did not know the Graf or the Grafin, but had met the youngest son of the comptroller-general and was to be the guest of his family.