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?”