“I only saw your mother for a few hours, Lanny, but I thought she was a wonderful person.”
“She's been through a lot since then, and it's left her.sort of distracted and at loose ends. She's only recently got reconciled to the idea that she's never going to see her husband again. Now she's figuring how the world may be persuaded to recognize his genius. He really had it, Kurt.”
The gusts of icy rain were blowing into their faces from across the river, and Lanny turned into a side street. “The hotel is up here,” he said.
“You mean to take me there without telling her?”
“I'll phone and make sure she's alone. She won't want you left out in this rain, that I know. Tomorrow the three of us will have to figure out some way to get you out of France.”
In the Enemy's Country
I
PRESIDENT WILSON was back in the United States, taking up the heaviest of all his burdens, that of persuading the American people to accept his League of Nations. He had wrought them into a mood of military fervor, and the war had ended too suddenly. In the November elections, a few days before the armistice, they had chosen a majority of reactionary Republicans, determined to have no more nonsense about idealism but to think about America first, last, and all the time. President Wilson invited the opposition chieftains to a dinner party, and they came, but neither good food nor moral fervor moved them from their surly skepticism. Wilson had, so he told the world, a “one-track mind.” Now he was traveling on that track, and the Senate leaders were digging a wide and deep ditch at the end of it.
Of course the election results were known in Paris, and were one of the factors undermining the President's position. Both Lloyd George and Clemenceau had consulted their people and had their full consent to the program of “making Germany pay.” Their newspapers were taunting the American President with the fact that his people were not behind him; now they printed the news about his failures in Washington, and on that basis went ahead to remake the world nearer to their hearts' desire.
Already they had fourteen little wars going — one for each of the Fourteen Points, said Professor Alston, bitterly. They were getting ready for the really big war, the Allied invasion of Russia. The blockade was screwed down tighter than ever; the Allies refused to lift it even from Poland and the new state of Czechoslovakia, for fear that supplies might get into Germany, or that Red agents might get out through the cordon sanitaire.