“I’m going back to England,” Jimmie said, after a while. “This chapter is washed up. There won’t be a lab for me to work in—here—for a long while—”
“You could help in redesigning the plant, Jimmie! I’ve already started jamming through the priorities. We’ll get material—and right now!”
“Lots of men can do that. The redesigning. Nope. I’m going back.”
“Mmmm. I don’t need to say—we’ll miss you.”
“Thanks.”
After a pause his father said, “What is it, Jimmie? What have they got—we haven’t? The British?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Dad. Not—with you feeling the way you do.”
“You might try.”
Jimmie smiled. “I couldn’t even begin to try!” But he did. “They were stuffy—class-conscious, contemptuous of other people. All that has been boiled out of them.
They’ve got the beginnings of some new kind of living. Being there exhilarates you without making you feel fatuous, if you can understand that. You know you’re with a bunch of people who are in the groove, and you don’t care about anything else. Whether you die doesn’t matter at all. They’ve got the high symbol of living for all the people everywhere—right in their laps! At the moment the demand of that symbol is to kill Germans. That’s simple; that’s essential; and everything else has to wait. You just realize all the time—that there is ‘ everything else.’ It’s enough to realize. Leaving them is like leaving a sacred place.”