Lanny showed them the old Palazzo di San Giorgio, where the conference had been held, a dingy and depressing place, in keeping with the results of the assemblage. Lloyd George had made the most inspiring promises of peace and prosperity to the representatives of twenty-nine nations; after which, behind the scenes, the leaders had spent six weeks wrangling over what oil concessions the Russians were to make to what nations. Lanny’s father had been here, trying to get a share; it had been his first fiasco, and the beginning of a chain of them for all parties concerned. Instead of peace the nations had got more armaments and more debts. Instead of prosperity had come a financial collapse in Wall Street, and all were trembling lest it spread to the rest of the world.
XI
All this wasn’t the most cheerful line of conversation for a sightseeing jaunt; so Lanny talked about some of the journalists and writers whom he had met at this conference, and forbore to refer to the tragic episode which had cut short his stay in Genoa. But later, when Irma and Rahel had gone back to the yacht, he went for a stroll with Hansi and Bess, and they talked about the Italian Syndicalist leader who had set them to thinking on the subject of social justice. The young Robins looked upon Barbara Pugliese as a heroine and working-class martyr, cherishing her memory as the Italians cherish that virgin mother whose picture they never grow tired of painting. But the Fascist terror had wiped out every trace of Barbara’s organization, and to have revealed sympathy for her would have exposed an Italian to exile and torture on those barren Mediterranean islands which Mussolini used as concentration camps.
When you talked about things like this you lost interest in ancient buildings and endlessly multiplied Madonnas. You didn’t want to eat any of the food of this town, or pay it any foreign exchange; you wanted to shake its polluted dust from your feet. But the older people were here to entertain themselves with sight-seeing; so, take a walk, climb the narrow streets up into the hills where the flowers of springtime were thick and the air blew from the sea. These gifts of nature were here before the coming of the miserable Fascist braggart, and would remain long after he had become a stench in the nostrils of history. Try not to hate his strutting Blackshirts with their shiny boots, and pistols and daggers in their belts; think of them as misguided children, destined some day to pay with their blood for their swagger and bluster. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!"
And when you come down from the heights and get on board the yacht again, keep your thoughts to your own little group, and say nothing to your elders, who have grown up in a different world. You cannot convert them; you can only worry them and spoil their holiday. Play your music, read your books, think your own thoughts, and never let yourselves be drawn into an argument! Not an altogether satisfactory way of life, but the only one possible in times when the world is changing so fast that parents and children may be a thousand years apart in their ideas and ideals.
3. And Their Adoption Tried
I
TНЕ trim white Bessie Budd was among the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung, and where Lanny at the age of fourteen had fished and swum and climbed hills and gazed upon the ruins of ancient temples. The yacht stole through the Gulf of Corinth and made fast to a pier in the harbor of the Piraeus, now somewhat improved; the guests were motored to the city of Athens, and ascended the hill of the Acropolis on little donkeys which had not been improved in any way. They gazed at the most-famous of all ruins, and Lanny told them about Isadora Duncan dancing here, and how she had explained to the shocked police that it was her way of praying.
The Bessie Budd anchored in the Channel of Atalante, and the experienced Lanny let down fishing-lines and brought up odd-appearing creatures which had not changed in sixteen years, and perhaps not in sixteen million. The guests were rowed ashore at several towns, and drank over-sweet coffee out of copper pots with long handles, and gazed at the strange spectacle of tall men wearing accordion-pleated and starched white skirts like those of ballet-dancers. They climbed the hills surmounted by ancient temples, and tried to talk in sign language to shepherds having shelters of brush built into little cones.
History had been made in these waters between Lanny’s visits. German submarines had lurked here, British and French craft had hunted them, and a bitter duel of intrigue had been carried on over the part which Greece was to play. The Allies had landed an army at Salonika, and the Bessie Budd now followed in the wake of their transports; her guests were driven about in a dusty old city of narrow crooked streets and great numbers of mosques with towering minarets. The more active members of the party wandered over the hills where the armies of Alexander had marched to the conquest of Persia; through which the Slavs had come in the seventh century, followed by Bulgars, Saracens, Gauls, Venetians, Turks.
There are people who have a sense of the past; they are stirred by the thought of it, and by the presence of its relics; there are others who have very little of this sense, and would rather play a game of bridge than climb a hill to see where a battle was fought or a goddess was worshiped. Lanny discovered that his wife was among these latter. She was interested in the stories he told the company, but only mildly, and while he and Hansi were studying the fragments of a fallen column, Irma would be watching the baby lambs gamboling among the spring flowers. "Oh, how charming!" Observing one of them beginning to nuzzle its mother, she would look at her wrist-watch and say: "Don’t forget that we have to be back on board in an hour." Lanny would return to the world of now, and resume the delights of child study which he had begun long ago with Marceline.
II
When you live day and night on a yacht, in close contact with your fellow-guests, there isn’t much they can hide from you. It was Lanny’s fourth cruise with a Jewish man of money, but still he did not tire of studying a subtle and complex personality. Johannes Robin was not merely an individual; he was a race and a culture, a religion and a history of a large part of human society for several thousand years. To understand him fully was a problem not merely in psychology, but in business and finance, in literature and language, ethnology, archaeology—a list of subjects about which Lanny was curious.
This man of many affairs could be tender-hearted as a child, and again could state flatly that he was not in business for his health. He could be frank to the point of dubious taste, or he could be devious as any of the diplomats whom Lanny had watched at a dozen international conferences. He would drive a hard bargain, and then turn around and spend a fortune upon hospitality to that same person. He was bold, yet he was haunted by fears. He ardently desired the approval of his fellows, yet he would study them and pass judgments indicating that their opinion was not worth so very much. Finally, with his keen mind he observed these conflicts in himself, and to Lanny, whom he trusted, he would blurt them out in disconcerting fashion.