The father gave some of the news from home. Esther and the children were well and sent messages of affection; they lived uneventful lives over there. As happens in all large families, one or two old Budds had died and several new ones had made their entrance upon the scene. The family was having the devil's own time making over the plants. They had had to go into debt; but Robbie was hopeful, for the world was half a decade behind in every form of production except guns and shells, and there was sure to be a terrific boom as soon as order was restored.
"Then we're not going to sell out to Zaharoff?" said Lanny; and his father authorized him to bet his boots that it would not happen.
V
Of course Robbie wanted to hear about the Peace Conference. Nearly three months had passed since he had left, and Lanny hadn't been able to put the confidential things into letters. The father plied him with questions about those aspects which were important to a businessman. Was Wilson really going to stand by that preposterous guarantee which Clemenceau had wangled out of him? Were we really going to get ourselves tied up with Constantinople and Armenia? Were France and Britain likely to get anywhere with the scheme they had been trying to work from the outset, to tie up German reparations with the money they had borrowed from America for the prosecution of the war? To make the paying of their own just and lawful debts dependent upon their collections from Germany - and thus, in effect, get America to do their collecting for them!
Lanny replied that a lot of people at the Crillon were questioning whether either form of debts could ever be paid. Even if the Allies took all the livestock and the movable wealth out of Germany, they couldn't get more than a billion or two; the gold reserve was much less than anyone believed, and to take it would mean to destroy Germany as an industrial power, and hence her ability to pay anything more. Lanny quoted what Steffens had said, that every dollar the Allies collected would cost them a dollar-five. He talked a lot about Steffens and Bullitt, in many ways the most interesting men he had met.
Gradually the younger man began to notice a shift in the conversation. The father stopped asking what the Peace Conference had done, and began asking about what Lanny thought. Lanny, who wasn't slow-witted, caught the meaning: his father was worried about the sort of company he had been keeping. Lanny was in the position of a man who has been out in the woods or some place where he hasn't had the use of a mirror; now suddenly one was held up before him and he saw the way he looked. To put it plainly, the way he looked was pink with red spots - a most unpleasing aspect for a young gentleman of leisure and good family.
The change had happened so gradually - a little bit one day and next day another little bit in another part of his mind - that Lanny hadn't had time to become aware of it, and now couldn't believe it, wouldn't admit it. He imagined that his father must be misunderstanding him, and tried to explain himself - thereby making matters worse than they were before. He would cite things that Robbie himself had told: what the big businessmen had done to cause the war and to prolong it and to get advantages out of the settlement. The Crillon was full of talk about
Yes, Robbie knew all that. Robbie knew that right now Britain and France were squabbling behind the scenes over the oil in Mesopotamia. Robbie knew as well as the Crillon that nothing in the world but fear of Germany would keep Britain and France from turning against each other in that dispute. Robbie knew that the two nations were still trying to hold on to Baku with its oil, and had even succeeded in having a vessel flying the American flag in the Caspian Sea, in the effort to overawe the Bolsheviks and keep them out of their own country's oil fields. And knowing all that - why was Robbie so disturbed when his son named the big oil promoters among the enemies of a sane peace?
