The “Big Four” were meeting by themselves now, resolved to push things through and get done. A more oddly assorted quartet of bedfellows had rarely been chosen by political fate. Woodrow Wilson was a stiff and grave person, of principles which he held as divinely ordained. He kept his sense of humor for his private life; in public it was his function to deliver eloquent discourses in favor of righteousness, and at this there was no one in the world to rival him. He brought his great talent to every session and exercised it upon Georges Clemenceau, who sat hunched in his chair with eyes closed, the picture of agonized boredom; every few minutes the Tiger would open his heavy-lidded eyes and reply with any one of half a dozen French words, the equivalent of four-letter English words which every guttersnipe knew, but which few had ever seen in print.
This form of political argument was something hitherto inconceivable to the Presbyterian professor. He had been brought up to the idea that scholar and gentleman formed an inseparable combination; but here was a scholar who was perfectly content to be a blackguard and a rascal. His political career had been that of a Tammany Hall boss — so Robbie Budd had told his son. As Lanny didn't know much about New York City's political history, the father explained that forceful men of the people went into politics, their hearts bleeding for the wrongs of the poor; so they collected votes and built up a political machine, which they used to blackmail their way to fortune.
The Tiger, now seventy-eight, had seen a great deal of the world, but here was a phenomenon the like of which he had never encountered: a politician who in the presence of other politicians pretended to mean what he said in his speeches! At first Clemenceau had found it absolutely infuriating; he had raged and stormed, and there was a dreadful story going the rounds that he had struck the President in the face and that Lloyd George had had to separate them. You met people who declared that they knew this story was true; but how did they know it? Others reported that as the battles of the Big Four went on, the Tiger began to take a humorous attitude; at the end he had actually grown fond of this odd phenomenon, as one might of some human freak, a man with two heads or four arms.
The mediator in the battle was Lloyd George, one of those super-politicians who could be on both sides of every question. Lloyd George had begun as “a little squirt of a Welsh lawyer,” friend of the people and a terrifying demagogue. When he got power he had kept it by the device of selling titles of nobility to beer barons, press lords, and South African diamond kings. In his recent “khaki election” he had become the slave of a Tory majority, and he swung back and forth between what they told him to do and what he thought would please the public. He was gay and personally charming, and possessed what was called a “mercurial temperament” — meaning that he didn't mind saying the opposite of what he had said yesterday, if in the meantime he had found that he was in danger of losing votes. In this he was the twin brother of Orlando, the Italian Premier, a good-looking and amiable old gentleman whose one thought in all issues was to gain some advantage, however tiny, for his native land.
VIII
A terrifying world in which this duel of wills went on. The war upon the Soviets was continuing on a dozen fronts, but without notable success. A Red Hungary had been added to a Red Bavaria and an almost Red Berlin. The Poles were fighting the Ukrainians for the possession of Lemberg. The Italians were threatening to withdraw from the conference unless they were permitted to fight the Yugoslavs for the possession of Fiume. The Armenians were in Paris demanding freedom from the Turks, and the Turks were trying to settle the problem by killing the last Armenian before a decision could be reached. Not one, not a dozen, but a hundred problems like that, all being dinned into the ears of four bewildered and exhausted old men.
They wrangled over the question of Danzig and the proposed Polish Corridor to the sea. They decided it, and then, when the clamor rose louder, they undecided it and referred it back to the commission. So geographers and ethnographers and their assistants were summoned once more, and Lanny Budd lugged his portfolios into the high-ceilinged, overheated conference rooms at the Quai d'Orsay, and stood behind his chief for hours — there being not enough chairs for secretaries and translators. Lanny couldn't help but feel grave, for there was a consensus among the American experts that here was where the next war would start.
The real purpose of that corridor had by now become clear to all; the French were determined to put a barrier between German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials, which, if combined, might dominate Europe. So give the Poles access to the sea by driving a wedge through Germany, with Danzig for a port. But the trouble was that Danzig was a German city, and the proposed corridor was inhabited by more than two millions of that race. When this was brought to President Wilson's attention, he produced a report from Professor Alston, pointing out that this district had been Polish, but had been deliberately “colonized” by the Germans, by the method so well known in Europe of making the former inhabitants so miserable that they emigrated. At a conference with his advisers President Wilson said that this appeared to be a case where one principle conflicted with another principle. Alston reported this remark to Lanny, and the youth asked questions of his chief. Could two principles be principles when they contradicted each other? Apparently it was necessary for men to have such moral maxims; but there would seem to be something wrong when they betrayed you in an emergency. The highly conscientious gentlemen at the Crillon racked their brains for some way to prevent fighting in that corridor. Most of the scholars were inclined to sympathize with the Poles — perhaps on account of Kosciuszko, and because in their youth they had read a novel called Thaddeus of Warsaw. But, alas, their sympathies were weakened by the fact that the Poles were carrying on dreadful pogroms against the Jews; and if they were that sort of people, what were the chances for the two million Germans of the corridor? The time was Out of joint: O cursed spite, that ever college professors were born to set it right!