“No, thanks,” said Robbie, coldly. “He's a bit out of my line.” He led the conversation to the chances of British intervention in the expected war. He had his reasons for wanting to know about that; it would be worth many hundred-franc notes to Budd Gunmakers.
After dinner father and son strolled along the boulevards and looked at the crowds. When they got to the Crillon, there was another cablegram. Lanny began insisting that he wasn't at all tired; surely he could work till bedtime, and so on — when the telephone rang, and Robbie answered. “What?” he cried, and then: “Mon Dieu!” and: “What will that mean?” He listened for a while, then hung up the receiver and said: “Jaurès has been shot!”
It was the boy's turn to exclaim and question. “Right where we left him,” said the father. “Fellow on the street pushed the window curtains aside and put a couple of bullets into the back of his head.”
“He's dead?”
“So Pastier reports.”
“Who did it, Robbie?”
“Some patriot, they suppose; somebody who thought he was going to oppose the war.”
“What will happen now?”
Robbie shrugged his shoulders, almost as if he had been a Frenchman. “It's just one life. If war starts, there'll be a million others. C'est la guerre, as the French say. Pastier says that Germany's expected to declare war on Russia tomorrow; and if so, France is in.”