"We don't bother them any more. We can't bother them any more," Georges replied. He paused, sipped, and then asked, "What do you think of Action Francaise?"
"It is good to see France feeling strong again. What ever else we are, we are still French, eh?" Lucien said, and his son nodded. He continued, "But to be strong, France has to get ready for war. I do not think this is good, not since I have seen war with my own eyes."
"Most Frenchmen have also seen war with their own eyes," his son said. "Those who have will not be eager to fight again, even if England goes the same way as France, which seems more likely every day."
"An eighteen-year-old in France will no more remember the Great War than an eighteen-year-old here," Lucien replied. "It is 1934 now. Come this summer, the war will have been over for seventeen years." He sipped at his applejack, wondering how that was possible.
But then Georges said, "Half a lifetime for me-oh, not exactly, but close enough. That truly seems unbelievable, but it is so. All the time of my manhood, I have lived since the war in the Republic of Quebec."
"So you have." Lucien also had trouble believing that, though it too was so. To keep from thinking about the passage of the years, he thought some more about how things were across the ocean. "England," he said musingly. "I don't love England-what Quebecois who grew up in Canada before the turn of the century could? But I don't hate her, either, not quite."
"Why not?" Georges asked. "I know plenty of men your age who do."
"Because I always feel that, bad as she was, she could have been much worse," Lucien replied after some thought. "She could have been like the Belgians in Africa, and made her name a stench among the nations. She didn't, and so I give her… some… credit."
"Ah, but would you rather be on her side or on the side of the United States?" Georges asked slyly.
"I would rather be on the side of Quebec, and of Quebec alone," Lucien said. But his son hadn't give him that choice, and he knew it.
F or some reason Nellie Jacobs couldn't fathom, her coffeehouse was full of men from the Confederate States one chilly February afternoon. Three or four of them had served in Washington during the war. By the cheerful way they reminisced, the CSA might have won the fight instead of losing it.
The fellow who'd led them here was a genial, middle-aged man named Robert E. Kent. He'd not only been in Washington, but insisted he'd been a regular at the coffeehouse. Nellie didn't remember him; she did her best not to remember men. But he remembered her and her doings altogether too well. "What ever happened to that pretty daughter of yours?" he asked. "You know, the one who was going to marry our officer."
"After the war, she married a U.S. veteran," Nellie said coolly. "Their son, Armstrong, will be twelve this year. They've got a little girl, too." Kent was named for a C.S. hero, her own grandson for one from the USA. She used Custer's middle name as a weapon against the genial Confederate.
Another man from south of the border said, "I saw a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, in here a while ago. Is that your daughter's daughter?"
"No," Nellie said. "Clara's my daughter. I married Hal Jacobs, who ran the cobbler's shop across the street. He died last year." She looked down at the counter as she said that. It still hurt. A young Italian fellow had bought the cobbler's shop. He looked to be running it into the ground. Watching that hurt, too.
"Sorry to hear it, ma'am," Robert E. Kent said politely. "He fixed my boots once or twice. He was right good at it."
He gave Hal the sort of impersonal praise he might have given a whore who'd pleased him. Maybe thinking of that particular comparison was what made Nellie ask, "Do you know what else he was good at?"
"No, ma'am," Kent said. Confederates were polite, sometimes even when Nellie wished they weren't.
She said, "He was good at finding out what you people were up to, that's what. He was a big part of the U.S. spy ring in Washington during the war-and so was I."
That proud announcement spawned a considerable silence from the Confederates. At last, Kent said, "Well, ma'am, you helped your country, same as we helped ours."
He was, to Nellie's way of thinking, too polite by half. She'd hoped to get a bigger rise out of him and his countrymen. What good was gloating if the people you were gloating over refused to acknowledge you were gloating? To cover her feelings, she poured herself a cup of coffee.
One of the other Confederates said, "Ma'am, your country won the last war, no doubt about it. That's one for you, and we can't deny it." His compatriots nodded. He went on, "You've got to remember, though, when Jake Featherston gets to be president of the CSA in a couple of weeks… well, tomorrow belongs to us."
Almost all of the Confederates, Robert E. Kent among them, nodded again. One man looked sour as vinegar. Nellie would have bet he hadn't voted for Featherston. The others, though… The others looked as if they were talking not about ordinary earthly politics, but about the Second Coming. Kent said, "He'll put us back on our feet, by heaven."
"And he'll put the niggers in their place," another man said. "If there's anything worse than an uppity nigger, I don't know what it is."
Still more nods. Nellie had the feeling she ought to listen carefully, then take what she heard across the street to Hal, just as she had during the Great War. But Hal wasn't there, never would be there any more. The Italian fellow who had the place now would think she was crazy if she burst in and started babbling about what the Confederates were saying in her coffeehouse. He might be right, too.
"You Yankees waited a long time before you finally whipped us," Robert E. Kent said. "You needed to build yourselves up, and you went and did it. Now we're the ones who have to do that."
"Why?" Nellie asked, as if she were still a spy trying to ease important information out of people and not simply a proprietor trying to get her customers to hang around and order more coffee and sandwiches. "What difference does it make? If we're going to stay at peace, who cares whether one side's built up and the other one isn't?"
Kent said, "Ma'am, I think there's two different kinds of peace. One's where this fellow's strong and that fellow's weak, and when this fellow says, 'This is how we'll do things,' they do 'em that way, on account of that fellow's got no choice. That there is what we've got nowadays. The other kind is where both fellows are strong, and neither one pushes the other one around because he knows he'll get pushed back. That there is what Jake Featherston is after, and I reckon he can get it."
They all nodded again. Even the one who plainly hated Featherston and the Freedom Party nodded. Nellie wondered what that meant. Probably that he might not have much use for the president-elect of the CSA, but that he despised the United States still more. Nellie had never known any Confederates who had much use for the USA, not even when they came up here to do business.
"Let me have another cup of coffee, ma'am, if you'd be so kind," Robert E. Kent said, "and if you could get me a ham and cheese sandwich to go with it, that'd be good." Three or four of the others ordered more food and drink, too. They had plenty of money-U. S. coins and greenbacks, not the scrip and brown Confederate banknotes they'd used during the war. Nellie was glad to take it from them, and they tipped generously. All in all, it was the best business day she'd had in weeks.
Even so, she wasn't sorry when they finally left. She wanted Confederates to know their country was weaker than the United States. She wanted them afraid of the USA. When she found them cocky instead, she worried. She'd seen the CSA bombard Washington in the Second Mexican War as a child and in the Great War when she was in the prime of life. She didn't want it to happen again when she was an old woman.