This Red foreign-trade expert conducted a sort of kindergarten class for the benefit of a businessman from far-off New England. He explained the viewpoint of his government as to the difference between Tsarist obligations and those which the Bolsheviks themselves might incur for the rebuilding of their country. The oil of the Caucasus they considered a heritage to be preserved and worked for the national benefit. If foreign concerns were willing to help in getting out this oil, concessions would be granted for reasonable periods, and all agreements would be strictly kept. Foreign engineers and skilled workers would be welcomed, but insofar as Russian labor was employed, the labor laws of the Soviet Union would have to be conformed to. The Soviets desperately needed oil, but they also needed the contentment and enlightenment of their long-oppressed people.
Robbie brought into play those arts which he had spent so many years in acquiring. He explained that he was an “independent,” not controlled by any of the great oil trusts. He took it for granted that this would count in his favor; but the Russian suavely explained that this was a misconception of the Soviet attitude—they did not object to big organizations, but rather preferred dealing with them because they were generally more responsible. “What you Americans call independence, Mr. Budd, we Communists call anarchy; we think that the more quickly industry is integrated and rationalized, the more quickly will it be ready for social ownership.”
So Robbie had to hustle and think up a new line of sales talk. He assured Mr. Krassin that he represented responsible people with large amounts of capital. The Russian asked how long a lease they would expect, and intimated that Lloyd George’s idea of ninety years would hardly be pleasing to Moscow; twenty years would be better. When Robbie said that was hardly time enough to get the full benefit of development work, the Russian suggested that the government should pay the value of the investment, or part of it, at the end of the lease. They had a discussion as to whether they would pay the value of the field, or only of the money put in. Robbie said that, according to American ideas, one acquired the ownership of the oil that was in the ground; but the Russian idea was that this oil belonged to the people, and that lessors could expect payment only for the value of wells and machinery.
To Robbie Budd life hardly seemed worth living on terms such as those. As he and his son were driving home he said: “That gives me a pain in the neck—about the people owning the oil. The people will never touch it—a bunch of politicians have got control and mean to hold onto it.”
Lanny had an impulse to say: “You believe in a government, Robbie; and what can any government be but politicians?” But that was the kind of remark the younger man had learned not to make; it would only mean a tiresome argument and do no good. Say some polite nothing, and let Robbie have it his way.
III
Through Steffens Lanny met a number of left-wing intellectuals. They too were here as “observers”; they wrote stories about international affairs for newspapers and magazines of the various warring Communist and Socialist and labor groups. They sat around in the cafes and argued till all hours, and exchanged ideas and information with sympathetic journalists of the various nations. Some had been to Russia, and regarded this experiment as the one really important thing in the world. The first whom Lanny met was a big, amiable ex-minister, Albert Rhys Williams, who had had adventures which do not often fall to the lot of a man of God. He had summed them up in the titles of two books, In the Claws of the German Eagle and Through the Russian Revolution. He was friendly with the Soviet delegates and their staff, gave them advice, and tried to explain them to those “bourgeois” journalists who would listen.
There was a tall, extremely handsome, fawnlike man with a soft, caressing voice and prematurely gray hair: Max Eastman, editor of a New York magazine; the Liberator. It had been the Masses, but the government had suppressed it during the war and indicted and tried its editors. Max had fallen very much in love with a gay young woman on the Russian staff, and was threatening to follow her back home. There was a liberal and pacifist editor named Villard, not able to find much encouragement in anything that was going on here. There was an English editor, Frank Harris—at least, Lanny thought he was English, but learned that he was a Central European who claimed to have been born in Ireland, and had worked as a cowboy in the Far West of America. A fiery-looking man with a heavy black mustache, he was the possessor of a golden tongue, and when he talked about Shakespeare or Jesus you would have thought you were listening to the great one in person; but then the talk would turn to someone against whom Harris had a grudge, and he would pour out such malignancy that you shrank in dismay.
Present also was an American-Jewish sculptor by the name of Jo Davidson; a short, broad fellow with a spreading black beard, quick dark eyes, and deft fingers. He journeyed where the great were to be found and made portrait busts of them. The Russians were preoccupied, much worried men, and Davidson had to get them at whatever they were doing, receiving visitors, eating their lunch, shaving themselves. They didn’t know that he understood Russian, and talked intimately among themselves; Jo went ahead and modeled their features and kept their secrets.
Lanny made the discovery that “celebrities” had highly developed egos. They had fought their way up in the world, and hadn’t done it by being polite; they had sharp and well-developed spines, claws, and stingers. They were convinced of their own importance, and expected and received deference from plain nobodies whom they met. There was no one of whose unimportance they were more certain than a rich man’s son, and for the honor of their acquaintance they permitted him to pay for the food and drinks. Frank Harris even tried to borrow a large sum of money from him, which fortunately Lanny didn’t have; he was asked if he couldn’t get it from his father, and took refuge in the statement that his father disapproved of the company he was keeping.
There were few things these intellectual battlers agreed about, but one was everywhere taken for granted, and that was the evilness of oil as an influence in international affairs. Wherever you smelled it there were treachery, corruption, and violence. Nor in discussing this matter did any of the left-wingers consider it necessary to spare the feelings of the son of Robbie Budd. If he didn’t agree with them, what was he doing in their crowd? If he couldn’t bear the truth, let him stay with his own! Lanny tried to do so, but made the discovery that he preferred the harsh and ugly truth to the polite evasions he met with among the “respectable” people.
IV
Walter Rathenau had become the Foreign Minister of the German republic. He had a difficult problem in Genoa, for a huge reparations payment was falling due at the end of May, and no moratorium had been granted; on the contrary, Poincaré was declaring that “sanctions” were going to be applied without fail. The Germans were trying to induce the British to intercede, but couldn’t even get at them, everybody being occupied with the squabble over Baku and Batum. The Russians couldn’t accomplish anything either, so of course it was natural that the two outcasts of the conference should combine forces. On the sixth day a bombshell was exploded under all Genoa, and the report of it was heard wherever cables or wireless reached. The Germans and Russians had got together at the near-by town of Rapallo and signed a treaty of amity; they agreed to drop all reparations claims against each other, and to settle all future disputes by arbitration.
This treaty seemed harmless enough on its face, but then nobody at Genoa took anything as meaning what it was said to mean. The general belief was that there must be secret military clauses to the agreement, and this enraged the Allied diplomats. Russia had the natural resources and Germany the manufacturing power, and if these two were combined they could dominate Europe. It was the thing the German diplomats were always dropping hints about, and the German general staff was believed to be plotting it. Hadn’t the German government brought Lenin and the rest of the Red agents into Russia in a sealed train, and turned them loose to wreck the Tsar’s government and take Russia out of the war? By that maneuver the Kaiser had alm
ost won, and here was another trick of the same sort!
The reactionaries hardened their hearts, and the liberals were unhappy, seeing the failure of all efforts at reconciliation. What a tragedy! lamented Villard. The German autocracy was dead, and here was a republic, an oppressed people trying to learn self-government, but nobody would help them, give them any chance to survive! To this the left-wingers replied by mockery. What did capitalism care about a republic? Capitalism was autocracy in industry; that was its essence; it didn’t want to help anybody to survive, it wanted to make profits out of human need. The oil men were running this conference, and to them republic or kingdom was all the same—so long as they could get concessions and protect their monopolies throughout the world.
Cynical and cruel-sounding, but there was Lanny Budd’s father coming to him to prove that the cynics had it right. “Between you and me,” said Robbie, “I think there’s a lot more to this Rapallo deal than anyone admits. It means that the Germans are going to get the oil.”
“But, Robbie, the Germans haven’t capital enough to run their own industry!”
“Don’t you fool yourself, the big fellows have money. Do you imagine that Rathenau hasn’t got it?”
Lanny couldn’t say. He could only wonder, while his father went on to spill what was in his mind. He wanted Lanny to go to the German minister at once, and explain to him that his father was representing a big American syndicate, and might be able to make some useful suggestions to the German delegation.
Lanny didn’t want to do it the least bit. He had been trying to be a young idealist, and now Rathenau would think he was just one more schemer. But Lanny couldn’t say that—it would be making his father another schemer. He tried feebly to explain that Rathenau was a hard-pressed and exhausted man. Lanny had seen him and knew that it was so.
Said the father: “Don’t be childish! One of the things he’s exhausted by is trying to get oil for Germany. Now he has the inside track with these Russians, and nothing ought to please him more than to fix up a deal by which American capital would be made available to them both.”
So Lanny phoned one of the secretaries whom he had come to know at Bienvenu, and an appointment was arranged. He met that much-harassed statesman again—and, oh, such a tragic face! It seemed that the Jews were born to suffer, and it became their features; at any rate it made them look more like Jews. This man whom the Prussian aristocrats scorned was carrying all their burdens for them, expiating their sins, pleading for mercy with the foes they had so wantonly affronted. He was the scapegoat for another people—the Jews not being allowed even that luxury for themselves!
But it appeared that Robbie was right. Rathenau was a businessman, used to talking to businessmen. He said that he would be very glad to hear what Mr. Budd had to say; he made an appointment for that very day, and he and Robbie spent an hour in conference. It must have been important, because Robbie didn’t tell his son much about it, but had his secretary, who had hired another car, drive him at once to “Monty.” Lanny was left behind, because he had a date to take Rick to a press conference at the Palazzo di San Giorgio, where Lloyd George was going to answer the questions of newsmen concerning Rapallo, and what it meant, and what would be the attitude of the British government to a rapprochement between German Socialists and Russian Communists.
V
It became Lanny’s singular duty to drive his father several times to the Soviet hotel at Santa Margherita. Elaborate negotiations were under way, and before they were over, Lanny had met all the heads of the delegation and many of the subordinates; he heard stories of the revolution they had made, and had their hopes and their fears explained to him. He watched with amusement his father’s growing surprise at the qualities he kept discovering in Bolshevik leaders. Remarkable men, Robbie was forced to admit; their wits had been sharpened in a school of bitter struggle and suffering. The American hadn’t expected to find genuine idealism combined with worldly cunning—in fact he hadn’t considered it possible for such a combination to exist in human beings. Least of all had he expected to meet scholarly persons, with whom he was interested to engage in theoretical discussions.
Chicherin, Soviet Foreign Commissar, was a former aristocrat who had been trained for diplomacy in the Tsar’s school. He had many of the characteristics which one found in Englishmen of that class; he was tall and stoop-shouldered, sensitive and shy, careless in his dress and absent-minded like some funny old college professor. He lived in his work, hating to trouble anybody, and trying to do all the work, even to the sharpening of his lead-pencils. He turned night into day, and appointments with him were apt to be for two or three o’clock in the morning; even so, he would be unavoidably late and would apologize profusely.
In the meantime Robbie and his son would chat with Rakovsky, Bulgarian-born revolutionist, and his wife, who had been a Russian princess and was now a Communist who used a lorgnette! Both of these were clever talkers, and Robbie said he didn’t see how Russia could ever be industrialized while she had so many of these. Rakovsky, discovering the fog of ignorance concerning the Soviet Union which en shrouded Genoa, went to the university and obtained the use of a large lecture hall, and there every afternoon he explained Bolshevik ideas of history to whoever might wish to come. He spoke perfect French, being a graduate of a Paris medical school and having written a book on French culture. The journalists of that country were annoyed to hear him discuss their history, and they would rise and heckle him, but quickly discovered that he knew things about the French Revolution which they hadn’t heard before. It was one of those European halls in which the lecturer is down in a pit, and the seats for the audience are in tiers in front and on both sides of him; it wasn’t long before the place was packed to the doors—the journalists of all nations were deserting the conference and coming to listen to Rakovsky.
All this was a liberal education for Lanny, and he hoped it might be for his father; but these hopes were not realized. Robbie’s mind was on his expected concession, and on the long reports he was sending to Zaharoff, and his code messages to interested parties in Paris and London and New York. What Robbie wanted to know about these Bolsheviks was, would they keep their word and, no less important, would they keep power? That was what the businessmen had such a hell of a time making up their minds about. For four years and a half they had been betting that these fanatics, half idealists and half criminals, would be swept away; but somehow, unaccountably, they were managing to hang on. This imposed upon an American businessman an annoying task, that of understanding a new philosophy, a new economic system, a new code of ethics. In this Robbie’s son was helpful to him, and might have been more so if only the son could have kept his head and drawn the line at the proper point; but the young idiot kept taking these fellows seriously, and this upset Robbie and made it hard for him to keep his mind on his work.
There was in the group a rolypoly Jew known as “Papa” Litvinov; round-faced, florid, fond of good living, a hearty, rough-and-ready sort of fellow who might have been boss of a construction camp in the Far West. Robbie employed men like that, and knew how to laugh and jolly them along; if he could have had Litvinov to run the Caucasus oil-field, he would have felt certain of getting out the stuff. It was this man’s duty to explain to the would-be concessionaire the labor code of the Soviet Union; that was very important to Robbie, so he listened closely and asked many questions, all from the point of view of a businessman, thinking: “Shall I be able to get any work out of them on that basis?” But there was Lanny, thinking: “How fine for the workers! They can be self-respecting men under such a code!” He would say something like that to the Russian, and the latter would beam with pleasure and start off on a long discourse that had to do with labor, psychology instead of production costs of crude oil at the pipeline terminus. Robbie would feel himself in the position of Alice through the Looking-Glass.
VI
Lanny was present at a luncheon which his father gave to the American ambassador, Mr. Child,
whom between themselves they always called “Cradle.” He was a smooth-faced, boyish-looking man, talkative, and greatly impressed with the service he was rendering his country by seeing that its businessmen got their share of whatever was being distributed at Genoa. The luncheon took place in a cabinet particulier of Robbie’s hotel, and present also was an admiral of the navy who had been assigned to assist Mr. Child as “observer.” This elderly gentleman was doubtless well trained to observe enemy ships upon the sea, but he knew nothing at all about the oil business, and was certainly not a competent observer of the machinations of Robbie Budd.
The father had warned Lanny under no circumstances to drop any hint as to Robbie’s connections; he was an “independent,” representing an American syndicate, and that was all. The author of popular fiction, to whom words came easily, told what he knew about the conference, what it was doing about oil, and what the Americans wanted it to do; this included a great deal which A. C. Bedford, the big Standard man, would certainly not have wished to have communicated to a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and Knight Commander of the Bath.
Again Lanny was being disillusioned. He had always had business put before’ him as a matter of patriotism; all his young life, when Robbie had talked about his activities, he had been increasing the wealth of America and providing jobs for American workingmen. Budd’s was an American munitions plant, and in building it Robbie was providing for American security. Now America must have oil for its ships abroad wherever they were traveling; and so on. But here was this “independent,” in secret alliance with Deterding, the Dutch-Englishman, and with Zaharoff, the Greek citizen of all countries in which he owned munitions plants; and Robbie Budd was intriguing as hard as he could to thwart the efforts of the American ambassador and the companies he was backing! However much you might dislike Standard Oil, it was an American concern, no less so because it was privately owned. Neither the American people nor the government was going to own Robbie’s concession; Robbie’s associates and backers were going to own it, and Robbie himself was going to run it.