“You'll meet some girl over there, and she'll tell you what to do.”
“I'm going to get tough,” replied the boy; but he didn't look it.
“I knew this had to come, Lanny. But I hoped Robbie would wait till the sea was safe.”
“Plenty of people are getting through; and he and I are pretty good swimmers.” Lanny thought for a moment, then added: “I wonder what he's going to do about telling his friends the bad news about me.”
“He told his wife about us both before they were married. I imagine he'll tell other people that you're his son, and let it go at that. Don't let it worry you.”
“If anybody doesn't want me around,” said the boy, “I can always go somewhere else. Shall you miss me too terribly, Beauty?”
“It'll be all right if I know you're happy. I ought to tell you a bit of news that I've just learned — I'm going to have a baby.”
“Oh, gosh!” A wide smile spread over Lanny's face. “That's grand, Beauty! It will tickle Marcel, won't it?”
“Frenchmen are like that,” she answered.
“ALL men are, aren't they?” After a while he inquired: “Was it another accident, or did you decide to do it?”
“Marcel and I decided.”
“It's a grand place to bring up a child, Beauty — I can tell you that.” He kissed her on both cheeks until she cried with happiness and sorrow mingled.
II
It seemed cruel that a youth should be so excited at the idea of leaving his mother; but he couldn't help it, and she understood. To be with Robbie in Paris, and travel on a great steamer, and see that city of New York which he knew from motion pictures, and the marvelous plant of Budd's, the economic foundation of his life. It was a center of his imaginings, a forge of Vulcan a million times magnified, a Fafnir and Fasolt cave where monstrous forces were generated. And to meet that mysterious family, so many of them that you couldn't keep their names straight, and all different and queer. Robbie didn't often talk about them, but behaved as if they were a dark secret. Or perhaps it was Lanny who was the dark secret!
He packed the few things he would take with him; that required only a couple of hours, and he was ready to go on the evening train. Beauty broke down and wept — it was such short notice. He was a mother's darling; and who else would love him as she had? The world was cruel, so many wicked people in it, women especially — she understood their hearts, the cold and selfish ones, the gold diggers, the harpies! So many things she ought to have taught him, and now it was too late, he couldn't remember them; he was crazy with eagerness to get out into that world which seemed to her so full of pain. She gave him many warnings, extracted many promises — and all the time aware that she was boring him a little.
Lanny had a good-by talk with Marcel, and this was more to the point. Marcel had left his family, respectable bourgeois in a provincial town; they had wanted him to be a lawyer, perhaps a judge, and instead he had come to Paris to dab paint on canvas. They gave him a small allowance, but didn't pretend to like his work. “You are lucky,” Marcel said; “your parents are sympathetic, they'll stand by you even if you don't succeed. But don't be surprised if you don't like your relatives. Don't bare your heart to the hawks.”
“What makes you say that?” asked the boy, puzzled.
“Rich people are pretty much the same all over the world. They believe in money, and if you don't make money they think there's something wrong with you. If you don't see life as they do, they take it as a criticism, and right away you're an outsider. If I were taking you to meet my family, that's how I'd have to warn you.”
“Well, I'll write and let you know what I find, Marcel.”
“If you like it, all right. I'm just putting you on guard. You've had a happy life so far, everything has been easy — but it can hardly be like that all the way through.”
“Anyhow,” remarked the boy, “Robbie says that America's going to help France.”
“Tell them to hurry,” replied the painter. “My poor country is bleeding at every vein.”
III
Lanny was seventeen, and had grown nearly a foot in those thirty-two months since he had seen his father. For many youths it is an awkward age, but he was strongly knit, brown with sunshine and red with well-nourished blood. He came running from the train to welcome Robbie, and there was something in the sight of him which made the man's heart turn over. Flesh of my flesh-but better than I am, without my scars and my painful secrets! So Robbie thought, as the lad seized him and kissed him on both cheeks. There was a trace of down on Lanny's lips, light brown and soft; his eyes were clear and his look eager.
He wanted to know everything about his father in the first moment. That grand rock of a man, that everybody could depend on; he would solve all the problems, relieve all the anxieties — all in the first moment! Robbie looked just the same as ever; he was in his early forties, and his vigor was still unimpaired; whatever clouds might be in his moral sky showed no trace. He looked handsome in brown tweeds, with tie and shoes to match; Lanny, whose suit was gray, decided at once that he would look better in brown.
“Well, what do you think about the war?” The first question every man asked then.
The father looked grave immediately. “We're going in; not a doubt of it.”
“And are you going to support it?”
“What can I do? What can anybody do?”
It was nearing the end of March. Relations with Germany had been severed for many weeks, and President Wilson had declared a state of what he called “armed neutrality.” America was going to arm its merchant vessels, and in the meantime Germany was going on sinking them, day after day. Shipping was delayed, the vessels in American harbors were afraid to venture out.
“What can we do?” repeated Robbie. “The only alternative is to declare an embargo, and abandon our European trade entirely.”
“What would that do?”
“It would bring a panic in a week. Budd's would have to shut down, and throw twenty thousand men out of work.”
Driving to their hotel in a horse-drawn cab, Robbie explained this situation. A large-scale manufacturing enterprise was geared to a certain schedule. A quantity of finished goods came off the conveyors every day, and was boxed and put into freight cars or trucks — or, in the case of Budd's, which had its own river frontage, onto ships. Vessels were loaded and moved away, making room for others. If for any reason that schedule was interrupted, the plant would be blockaded, because its warehouses could hold only a few days' output. The same thing would happen at the other end, because raw materials came on a fixed schedule — they had been ordered and had to be taken and paid for, but there was place to store only a limited supply; they were supposed to go through the plant and be moved on.
That, said Robbie, was the situation not merely with steel mills and munitions plants, but with meat packing and flour milling, making boots and saddles, automobiles and trucks, anything you could think of. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely, American business had geared itself to the task of supplying the need of the nations of Europe. American finance had geared itself to taking and marketing their bonds. If all this were suddenly stopped, there would be such a breakdown as had never been known in the world before — “ten or twenty million men out of work,” declared the representative of Budd Gunmakers Corporation.
Lanny had heard many persons express disapproval of those who were making money out of this war; Kurt, and Rick, and Beauty, Sophie, Marcel, and M. Rochambeau. But when he listened to his father, all that vanished like mist before the morning sun. He saw right away that things had to be like this; if you were going to have machinery, and produce goods on a big scale, you had to do it in a fixed way. The artists and dreamers and moralists were just talking about things they didn't understand.