How Henry, after his recent experiences of cheap cafés, again enjoyed eating a meal fit for a gentleman. Radiant silver, napery like snow (for, in the old fashion still in use on the continent, Dr. Franchi had a fair linen cloth spread over his dinner-table; there is no doubt but that this extravagant habit gives an old-world charm to a meal), food and wines of the most agreeable, conversation to the liking of all three talkers (which is, after all, the most that can be said of any conversation), one of the loveliest views in Europe, and gentle night air—Henry was indeed fortunate. How kind, he reflected, was this ex-cardinal, who, having met him but once, asked him to such a pleasant entertainment. Why was it? He must try to be worthy of it, to seem cultivated and agreeable and intelligent. But Henry knew that he was none of these things; continually he had to be playing a part, trying to hide his folly under a pretence of being like other people, sensible and informed and amusing, whereas really he was more like an animal, interested in the foolish and fleeting impressions of the [moment. He] was not fit for a gentleman's dinner-table.
The conversation was of all manner of things. They spoke, of course, of the League.
“It has a great future,” said Dr. Franchi, “by saying which I by no means wish to underrate its present.”
“Rather capitalist in tendency, perhaps?” the correspondent of the British Bolshevist suggested. “A little too much in the hands of the major states?” But he did not really care.
“You misjudge it,” Dr. Franchi said. “It is a very fair association of equal states. A true democracy: little brothers and great, hand in hand. Oh, it will do great things; is, indeed, doing great things now. One cannot afford to be cynical about such an attempt. Anything which encourages the nations to take an interest in one another's concerns——”
“There has surely,” said Henry, still rather apathetically voicing his paper, “always been too much of that already. Hence wars. Nations should keep themselves to themselves. International impertinence ... it's a great evil. Live and let live.”
“You don't then agree that we should attempt a world-cosmogony? That the nations should be as brothers, and concern themselves with one another's famines, one another's revolutions, one another's frontiers? But why this curious insistence on the nation as a unit? Why select nationality, rather than the ego, the family, the township, the province, the continent, the hemisphere, the planet, the solar system, or even the universe? Isn't it just a little arbitrary, this stress we lay on nationalism, patriotism, love of one particular country, of the territories united fortuitously under one particular government? What is a government, that we should regard it as a connecting link? What is a race, that queer, far-flung thing whose boundaries march with those of no nation? And when we say we love a country, do we mean its soil, the people under its government, or the scattered peoples everywhere sharing some of the same blood and talking approximately the same tongue? What, in fact, is this patriotism, this love of country, that we all feel, and that we nearly all exalt as if it were a virtue? We don't praise egoism, or pride of family, or love of a particular town or province, in the same way. What magic is there in the ring that embraces a country, that we admire it as precious metal and call the other rings foolish or base? You will admit that it is a queer convention.”
“All conventions are queer, I think,” Henry said indifferently. “But there they are. One accepts them. It is less trouble.”
“It makes more trouble in the end, my young friend.... I will tell you one thing from my heart. If the League of Nations should fail, should go to pieces, it will be from excess of this patriotism. Every country out for its own hand. That has always been the trouble with the world, since we were hordes of savages grouped in tribes one against the other—as, indeed, we still are.”
“Well, zio mio,” said Miss Longfellow breezily, “if you don't look out for number one, no one else will, you may be dead sure. And then where are you? In the soup, sure thing. Nel zuppo!” She gave a gay, chiming, cuckooish laugh. A cheerful girl, thought Henry.