WORLD'S END

"Indeed," said the other. "I've been trying to figure out a way to let them know I was in town."

When Lanny knew him better he would understand such teasing remarks. As it was, he decided to be frank, and said: "You know how it is - they're a bit afraid of you."

"That's why I came to see your uncle," replied the journalist. "One man who might be interested to hear about the future."

"Stef has spent a whole week in the future," explained the uncle, with one of his twisted smiles.

Lanny took his seat on the cot, which had become familiar to him. Because it sank down in the middle it cut his knees, so presently he stretched out on it, leaning on one elbow. In this position he listened for an hour or more to an account of one of the great events of human history.

For a matter of seventeen months now Lanny had been hearing about the Bolshevik Revolution. Again and again he had been told how one-sixth of the. earth's surface had been seized by bloodthirsty ruffians, more cruel and cunning than any that had ever before plagued the earth. He had seen all the policies of his own country and a number of others based upon that certainty. The fact that his Uncle Jesse believed in and supported these devilish creatures merely meant that his uncle was "cracked" in some serious way, and must be dealt with as you "would with an inmate of a home for mental patients.

But here sat this correct-looking middle-aged gentleman, who had been sojourning among these Reds, and not merely hadn't had his throat cut or his watch stolen, but apparently hadn't even got his clothes wrinkled. He had an unusually pleasing voice and poured out the details of what he so oddly called "the future." Apparently this wasn't one of his jokes; he really thought the world was going to be like that. Lanny, who was going to live in the future, naturally wanted to know about it.

He learned that in this new world everybody would have to work. That didn't trouble him so much as it would have done three months earlier, for now he was working. As it happened, he was being paid by the state, so it didn't worry him to hear that this was the way among the Soviets. When he heard that the state was preparing and serving meals to workers in factories, it sounded very much like what was happening to him and the rest of the staff at the Crillon. In Russia, to be sure, they had only one meal a day, and that scanty; but "Stef" said that was due to five years of war and revolution, and to civil wars now going on over a front of ten thousand miles. What there was, all shared alike; that being the first principle of "Communism."

What, then, was the difference between America and Moscow? The "muckraker" said it was a question of who owned the state. In America the people were supposed to own it, but most of the time the big businessmen bought it away from them. "It is privilege which corrupts politics," was his phrase. He explained that among the Soviets it was soldiers and sailors, workers and peasants, who had seized power; capitalists had been abolished. Now there was war between these two kinds of states, and it looked as if it was going to be a war to the finish.

X

Lanny Budd was interested in this news, and no less in the envoy who brought it. What an eccentric little man, he thought. Why should a scholarly person, of breeding and presumably of means, take the side of those underworld figures against his own class? He took it only partly, as Lanny soon began to understand; there appeared to be a war between his heart and his head, and you could almost watch this conflict going on. Stef would become eager and excited, and then would check himself. "If I go too fast," he would say, "people won't listen to me. And, besides, I may be wrong." He would proceed to put some "ifs" and "buts" into his discourse.

Steffens was like Herron, a pacifist and a moralist first of all. He wanted a revolution, but one of the mind and spirit; he was pained by the thought that it might have to be bloody and violent. Did we want such an overturn in western Europe? Could we pay the price?

Jesse Blackless, for his part, was sure that we were going to pay it, whether we wanted to or not. There developed an argument between the two men, to which Lanny listened with close attention. The painter foretold how the Allied armies would continue to decay, and the Red movement would spread to Poland and Germany, and from there to Italy and France. The painter knew it was coming; he knew the very men who were preparing to do the job. Stef looked at Jesse's nephew with a twinkle in his little blue-gray eyes and said: "It's nice to have a religion, Budd. Saves all the trouble of having to think."