young people from absorbing a psychopath's view of the world. Lanny Budd, approaching his
thirty-second birthday, wondered if the time hadn't come to stop playing and find some job to
do. But he kept putting it off, because jobs were so scarce, and if you took one, you deprived
somebody else of it—someone who needed it much more than you!
10
I
OCTOBERand early November are the top of the year in the North Atlantic states. There is
plenty of sunshine, and the air is clear and bracing. A growing child can toddle about on lawns
and romp with dogs, carefully watched by a dependable head nurse. A young mother and
father can enjoy motoring and golf, or going into the city to attend art shows and theatrical
first nights. Irma had been taken to the museums as a child, but her memories of them were
vague. Now she would go with an expert of whom she was proud, and would put her mind on it
and try to learn what it was all about, so as not to have to sit with her mouth shut while he
and his intellectual friends voiced their ideas.
This pleasant time of year was chosen by Pierre Laval for a visit to Washington, but it wasn't
because of the climate. The Premier of France came because there were now only two entirely
solvent great nations in the world, and these two ought to understand and support each other.
Germany had got several billion dollars from America, but had to have more, and France didn't
want her to get them until she agreed to do what France demanded. The innkeeper's son was
received with cordiality; excellent dinners were prepared for him, and nobody brought up
against him his early Socialistic opinions. Robbie Budd reported that what Laval wanted was for
the President to do nothing; to which Robbie's flippant son replied: "That ought to suit
Herbert Hoover right down to the ground."
A few days later came the general elections in Britain. Ramsay MacDonald appealed to the
country for support, and with all the great newspapers assuring the voters that the nation had
barely escaped collapse, Ramsay's new National government polled slightly less than half the
vote and, under the peculiarities of the electoral system, carried slightly more than eight-
ninths of the constituencies. Rick wrote that Ramsay had set the Labor party back a matter of
twenty-one years.
Robbie Budd didn't worry about that, of course; he was certain that the rocks had been
passed and that a long stretch of clear water lay before the ship of state. Robbie's friend
Herbert had told him so, and who would know better than the Great Engineer? Surely not the
editors of Pink and Red weekly papers! But Lanny perversely went on reading these papers,
and presently was pointing out to his father that the British devaluation of the pound was
giving them a twenty per cent advantage over American manufacturers in every one of the
world's markets. Odd as it might seem, Robbie hadn't seen that; but he found it out by cable,
for the Budd plant had a big hardware contract canceled in Buenos Aires. One of Robbie's scouts
reported that the order had gone to Birmingham; and wasn't Robbie hopping!
II
Mr. and Mrs. Lanny Budd took passage on a German steamer to Marseille; a spick-and-span,
most elegant steamer, brand-new, as all German vessels had to be, since the old ones had been
confiscated under the treaty of Versailles. One of the unforeseen consequences of having
compelled the Germans to begin life all over again! Britain and France didn't like it that their
former foe and ever-present rival should have the two fanciest ocean liners, the blue-ribbon
holders of the transatlantic service; also the two most modern warships—they were called
pocket-battleships, because they weren't allowed to weigh more than ten thousand tons each,
but the Germans had shown that they could get pretty nearly everything into that limit.
This upstart nation was upstarting again, and outdistancing everybody else. The Germans
filled the air with outcries against persecutions and humiliations, but they had gone right
ahead borrowing money and putting it into new industrial plant, the most modern, most
efficient, so that they could undersell all competitors. You might not like Germans, but if you
wanted to cross the ocean, you liked a new and shiny boat with officers and stewards in new
uniforms, and the cleanest and best table-service. They were so polite, and at the same time so
determined; Lanny was interested in talking with them and speculating as to what made them
so admirable as individuals and so dangerous as a race.
Right now, of course, they were in trouble, like everybody else. They had the industrial plant,
but couldn't find customers; they had the steamships, but it was hard to get passengers! The
other peoples blamed fate or Providence, economic law, the capitalist system, the gold standard,
the war, the Reds—but Germans everywhere blamed but one thing, the Versailles
