WORLD'S END

In the early stages of this controversy the hotels and meeting places of the delegates had swarmed with charming and cultivated Italians whose pockets were stuffed with banknotes; anybody who had access to the Crillon might have expensive parties thrown for him and enjoy the most delicate foods and rarest wines. The Hotel Edouard VII, where the sons of sunny Italy had their headquarters, kept open house for the diplomatic world. Later, when the thunder clouds burst, they didn't sever friendships, but were heartbroken and made you understand that you and your countrymen had shattered their faith in human nature.

The dispute broke into the open in a peculiar way; the Big Three agreed that they would issue a joint statement opposing the Italian demands, and the American President carried out his part of the bargain, but Lloyd George and Clemenceau didn't, so the Americans were put in the position of standing alone against Italy. Wilson's picture was torn from walls throughout that country, and the face which had been all but worshiped was now caricatured sub specie diaboli. The Italian delegation went home, and the French were greatly alarmed; but the Americans all said: "Don't worry, they'll come back"; and they did, in a few days.

VII

Lively times for experts and their secretaries! Professor Alston would be summoned to President Wilson's study, where the elder statesmen were on their hands and knees, crawling over Susak or Shantung. There would come a call to Lanny, asking if he could hurry over to the Quai d'Orsay to bring an important document to some associate who was assisting in the final revision of the League of Nations Covenant. An extremely delicate situation there, because the American Congress had insisted upon a declaration that the League was never going to interfere with the Monroe Doctrine; this provision had to be slipped in as quietly as possible, for there were other nations having "regional understandings" which they would have liked to put into the Covenant, and there was danger of stirring them up.

A group of the professors would meet at lunch, and Lanny would hear gossip about arrangements being made for the reception of the German delegation, now summoned to Paris to receive the treaty. The Germans were to be regarded as enemies until the document had been signed; they were not allowed to wear uniforms, and all intercourse with them was forbidden under military law. They would have the Hotel des Reservoirs, and building and grounds were to be surrounded with a barbed-wire stockade. This, it was explained, was to keep the mob from invading the premises; but it would be difficult to keep the Germans from feeling that they were being treated like wild beasts.

The delegation arrived on the first of May, the traditional holiday of the Reds all over Europe. A general strike paralyzed all Paris that day: metro and trams and taxis, shops, theaters, cafes - everything. In the districts and suburbs the workers gathered with music and banners. They were forbidden to march, but they poured like a hundred rivers into the Place de la Concorde, and the staff of the Crillon crowded the front windows to watch the show. Never in his life had Lanny seen such a throng, or heard such deep and thunderous shouting; it was the challenge of the discontented, a voicing of all the sufferings which the masses had endured through four and a half years of war and as many months of peacemaking.

Lanny couldn't see his uncle in that human ocean, but he knew that every agitator in the city would be there. It was the day when they proclaimed the revolution, and would create it if they could. Captain Stratton had told how Marshal Foch was distributing close to a hundred thousand troops at strategic points. The Gardens of the Tuileries were a vast armed camp, with machine guns and even field-guns, and commanders who meant business. But with the example of Russia only a year and a half away, could the rank and file of the troops be depended on? Fear haunted everyone in authority throughout the civilized world on that distracted May Day of 1919.

VIII

Lanny Budd had come to be regarded by the Crillon staff as what they called half-playfully a "pinko." It amused them to say this about the heir of a great munitions enterprise. The rumor had spread that he had a full-fledged Bolshevik for an uncle; and hadn't he brought that avowed Red sympathizer, Lincoln Steffens, into the hotel dining room? Hadn't he been observed deep in conversation with Herron, apostle of free love and Prinkipo? Hadn't he tried to explain to more than one member of the staff that these wild men and women, marching and yelling, might be "the future"?