“Napoleon,” his father was saying, “tried the same thing, on the same people, the same way, and for the same reasons. And Hitler will have to write off just as much as Napoleon did, in the end. History, I keep telling some of my inflammable neighbors, repeats itself. Russia—winter—and Waterloo.”
“Exactly.” A man who wore a pince-nez beamed sagaciously above his shirt front.
“The parallel is precise. Any first-rate dictator can conquer Europe. Europe needed a conquering. Needed central organization. Of course, Nazi methods will necessarily have to be followed up by sound business methods. No popinjay can run a big business like unified Europe. Not that I favor Hitler, but I never did like all those little separate nations and I do favor central authority.”
“Except,” a thin, dark woman said, “when it’s central in Washington.”
Everybody laughed. The man with the pince-nez laughed too. “Napoleon had, essentially, the same ideas as Hitler. Actually, I’m against Hitler.” He beamed at Jimmie for praise. Jimmie was unresponsive. “Yes, one hundred per cent against. Don’t like his looks, or his voice. Cheap dunce. I’d have been against Napoleon, too, I suppose. Pushing pigmy. All wars are purely economic, and I think we can safely leave this one to General Winter and General Scorch-the-Earth. If we could only plant that idea in Washington!”
He chuckled. “Emergency!” His voice was scornful. “Do you see any emergency here, Jimmie?”
Jimmie thought that he was going to leave the table. He found himself sitting still, however, and thinking. Finally he drew an uneven breath. “I—I’ve heard people, in England, talking about the parallel between Napoleon and Hitler. We all know a lot about Hitler. Not enough, but a lot. But is anybody here able to tick off Napoleon’s plans for Europe? I mean, the way we can tick off Hitler’s?”
Nobody said anything.
Jimmie looked at the tablecloth, nodding. “Can anybody here say, off-hand, how much time passed between the retreat from Moscow and Waterloo?”
There was silence.
“Was Napoleon exiled by the English the first time, or the second—and who beat him both times? And where?”
Jimmie’s father said, “What’s the idea of this ‘Information, Please’?”
The lean young man went on: “Who was Talleyrand? Certainly, someone—”
The dark woman at the other end of the table said, “Well, a premier. The premier of…” Her voice trailed off.
Jimmie grinned slightly. “I just meant to make it clear that you do a lot of learned talking. But you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about! My whole point.”
“Don’t be rude,” his mother said sharply. “We know perfectly well what we’re talking about!”
He looked from face to face. “You don’t know the peace aims of Napoleon, or where he fought, or when, or against whom, or for what. Except in the haziest way. But you conclude Napoleon was like Hitler. Napoleon took a horse and foot army into Russia more than a hundred years ago. Hitler went in last June, with tanks and planes. But you conclude the result is going to be the same! I just want you to realize—at least for a moment, if that’s all you can—that nothing you are saying tonight means anything real at all. It’s just—so much rubbish.”
There was another silence. They looked angrily at Jimmie. Mr. Bailey finally laughed. “Well, Jimmie, you may be able to show us up on a few details of history. But you don’t need to talk like the London propaganda office! We’re wise to propaganda, over here.”
People said, “We certainly are,” and, “I suppose he’s another, trying to drag us into Europe’s quarrels.” Things like that.
When a chance came, Jimmie hotly replied, “Napoleon was hardly a ‘detail’ of history, even if you don’t know about him! Hitler is no detail, either.” But he soon gave up.
The waiters were serving individual filets mignons. The room seemed even more giddily unreal. Full of shiny, hateful people, champing on their food and making a cackling unison of vocal nothing. They were even talking about Napoleon again, when he had made it dear that they had no intellectual right to discuss Napoleon until they read enough to understand what they were talking about. But they wouldn’t read. They’d just go on talking.
“Don’t you know,” said the girl at his side, “that it’s very poor form to show people their ignorance?”
“It’s the kind of ignorance,” he said, “that can rook them.”
“Do you think it will?”
“If they don’t think. It might.”
“Just what, then, is the German staff plan for conquering Muskogewan?”
“Shall I tell you some more about the bombs?”
“Airplanes,” she answered, “can’t cross the Atlantic and return.”
“That was last year.”
“And even if they can, Muskogewan is more than a thousand miles from any coast.”
“Shall we talk about something on which our information is relatively equal?”
“Our prejudices—you mean?”
He looked at her. “I said—information.”
The girl blushed.
Waiters rolled back a series of frosted-glass doors. The private dining room was thus included in the main salon of the club. More people—perhaps two hundred—were sitting at tables, over the middles and the ends of dinners, and over highballs, and planter’s punches, and even cocktails. The lights went down. A conical spot found the center of the dance floor and a master of ceremonies skidded into it, dragging a microphone. He began to make jokes.
Jimmie rose from the table, without apology, and walked through the smoke-tangled murk. There were men in the billiard room—talking about the war. From somewhere underneath the building he heard the roll and crash of bowling. He found an alcove off the foyer. It contained a few chairs and tables—and no people. He sat down and shut his eyes.
“You were pretty grim, you know,” a husky voice said.
He looked up. She was standing in front of him, deliberately close to him; her golden dress had been poured over her molten and dripped heavily from her hips and her arms. “I—I—oh, well. Sit down.” She sat down. Jimmie thought for a while. “Look. You can explain it, maybe, Miss—Whatever your name is.”
“Audrey.”
“Audrey. I thought, in England, that America had raised billions, and turned over its factories, and become the arsenal of democracy, and I thought there were a few dissenters. Lindbergh. Wheeler. I understood that we went into the last war as if it was fun. I knew people weren’t—ecstatic—about things now. But everybody goes at me as if I had a thriller to tell. South African big-game story. And whenever I seem to show that I’m about to speak out for England people start throwing words as if they were dishes, before they hear me.”
“You’ll get over it,” Audrey said. “You’ve obviously been too close to things. Lost your perspective. I could see that you despised them. After a while, though, you’ll like them. You’ll begin to understand our attitude. You’ll get your courage back.”
He sat up stiffly. “Get my courage back?”
“Certainly. Oh, I suppose you have plenty of the bravura kind left—for going outdoors in raids—all that. But I mean the courage to face the fact that the world is just going to change—and the sooner we Americans get used to the idea, the better.” She lifted one shoulder prettily. “I can read you, Jimmie. Put it this way. You’ll find out enough from these really sound people to be able to give up your loyalties to the old Europe. The rotten old Europe.”