“Oh, anything. Tell ’em about being on the street in a fire. How it sounds when the guns are going. Anything with jive.”
His hands trembled slightly. “There was a child—one morning—four or five years old—blown up on a lamppost. Alive and conscious. Hanging—by its insides.”
The girl’s eyes became murky. She made her mouth firm. Her color ebbed and surged back. When, presently, she spoke, her voice was level again. “You go in for melodrama, Mr. Bailey.”
“Tossing bombs into people’s yards is ‘ melodramatic.’ The very point I wanted to avoid.”
She said, “Oh.”
They were all talking about the war, then. All but Jimmie. He supposed, at first, that they were trying to draw him out. For a while he didn’t listen. He ate slowly, enjoying the food, glancing sometimes at the lame girl, aware that she was pondering him when she thought she wouldn’t be detected. By and by he realized that they talked all the time about the war—as they were talking then. He began to listen.
“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.”