"All of which the Government, meaning the people, will have given you and paid for," Simon observed sympathetically.
"Yes." Quennel accepted it quite directly and disarmingly. "We don't expect to do any profiteering at this time, and in any case the tax system wouldn't let us, but in the end we shall get our return — fundamentally in improved methods and increased capital values, which good management will turn back into income."
Simon made idle mosaics with a fork in the things on his plate; and presently he said: "How have you been making out with labor problems in your field?"
"We really don't have any labor trouble. All our plants are in the South, of course, where you get less of that sort of thing than anywhere else. Labor is always a bit of a problem in these days, but I honestly think it only boils down to knowing how to handle your employees? How about it, Walter? — that's your headache."
"Quenco pays as good wages as any other industry in our areas," Devan said ruggedly. "And I think we do as much to look after them as any other firm you can mention. You'd be surprised at what we do. We have our own health insurance, and our own group clinics — we organise all kinds of social and athletic clubs for them — we even build their homes and finance them."
"That," said the Saint, "is the sort of thing that makes some of the things one hears so puzzling."
"What things?"
"I mean some of the rumors — you must have heard them yourself — about your private Gestapo, and that kind of talk."
Devan smiled with his strong confident mouth.
"Of course we have our private plant investigators. You couldn't possibly handle thousands of employees like we have without them. But when they aren't looking for cases of petty larceny and organised laziness, which you have to contend with in any outfit as big as ours, they're mostly just keeping in touch with the morale of the staff. That's the only way we can really insure against trouble, by anticipating it before it comes."
"That's one of the crosses we have to bear," Quennel said. "I'd like to know any other company that hasn't been smeared with the same gossip."
"I suppose so," Simon agreed flexibly. "But it must be specially tough when there's an accident they can hang it on. Like those union organisers who got killed in the riot at Mobile last year, for instance."
Devan made a blunt admissive movement of his head.
"Things like that are bound to happen sometimes. It was too bad it had to be us. But some of our people have been with us a long time, and you'd be surprised what a strong feeling they've got about the company. When some cheap racketeering rabble-rousers come around trying to stir up trouble, they can't help getting sore, and then somebody may get hurt."
"After all," Quennel said, "we aren't fighting a war against Fascism to make the country safe for the Communists. We're fighting for liberty and democracy, and that automatically means that we're also fighting to preserve the kind of social stability that liberty and democracy have built up in this country."
"What particular kind of social stability were you thinking of?" Simon asked.
"I mean a proper and progressive relationship between Capital and Labor. I don't believe in Labor run wild. No sensible man does. Without any revolutions, we've been slowly improving the conditions and standards of Labor, but we haven't disrupted our economic framework to do it. We believe that all men were created free and equal, but we admit that they don't all develop equal abilities. Therefore, for a long time to come, there are bound to be great masses of people who need to be restrained and controlled and brought along gradually. We don't need storm troopers and concentration camps to do it, because we have a sound economic system which obtains the same results in a much more civilised way. But we do have to recognise, and we do tacitly recognise, that we can't do without a strong and capable executive class who know how to nurse these masses along and feed them their rights in reasonable doses."
There was a weird fascination, a hypnotic rationality about the discussion, in those terms and at that moment, with everything that was tied up with it and looming over it, which had a certain dreamlike quality that was weirder and worse because it was not a dream. But the Saint would not have let it break up uncompleted even if he could.
He said, in exactly the same way as he had listened: "I wonder if it's only what you might call the lower classes who need nursing along."
"Who else are you thinking of?"
"I'm thinking of what the same terminology would call the upper classes. I suppose — the people that you and I both spend a lot of our time with. I wonder, for instance, if they've got just as clear an idea that there's a war on and what it's all about."
"I should say they've got just as clear an idea."
"I wish I were so sure," said the Saint, out of that same detachment. "I've looked at them. I've tried to get a feeling about them. They buy War Bonds. They submit to having their sugar rationed. They wonder how the hell they're going to keep up with their taxes. They grumble and connive a bit about tires and gasoline. They read the newspapers and become barroom strategists. Some of them have been put out of business — just as some of them have found new bonanzas. Some of them have been closer to the draft than others. But it still isn't real."
"I think it's very real."
"It isn't real. Thousands of men dying in some bloody Russian swamp are just newspaper figures. Prisoners being tortured and mutilated and bayoneted in the Far East are just good horror reading like a good thriller from the library. They haven't been hurt themselves. It's going to be all right. The war is expensive and inconvenient, but it's going to be all right. It's all going to be taken care of eventually. That's what we pay taxes for."
"Everybody can't do the fighting," said Devan. "In these days it takes — I forget the exact statistics, but I read them somewhere — something like ten people working at home to keep one soldier at the front."
"But the people behind the lines have to feel just as sure as the soldier that they're in a war. They've got to feel that the whole course and purpose of their lives has been changed, just as his has — and you don't feel that just from getting by on one pound of sugar a week. They've got to have something that the people of England have got, because their war was never thousands of miles away. It's something that you only get from going hungry, and walking in the dark at night, and seeing things you've grown up with destroyed, and watching your friends die. That's when you know you're really in a war, whatever job you happen to be doing, and literally fighting for your life, and everything has to go into it. There isn't that feeling here yet. I think there are still too many people who sincerely think that all they have to do is root for the home team. I think there are still too many people who think you can fight total war on a basis of golf as usual every Saturday and nothing must be allowed to interfere with our dear old social stability. Particularly the people who ought to be leading in the opposite direction. Particularly," said the Saint carefully, "the wrong people."
Quennel made a slight impatient gesture.
"I can't think where you'd get that impression. Where have you been lately?"
"I was in Florida for a while. And then I was in New York for a couple of weeks."
"And in New York I suppose you go to El Morocco and 21 and places like that."
"I don't live there, but I've been to them. They seem to be doing all right."
Quennel raised his shoulders triumphantly.