“But your attitude doesn’t give us any alternative whatever! Rather, it just gives us two perfectly ghastly alternatives.”
“Yeah.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
“Why? Must Americans forever go on thinking that there have to be two paths in life—one that leads to the gravy, and one that leads to hunger? Is there a cosmic rule that you always have to have a happy out? Can’t it be that, sometimes, you only have a choice between a whipping and a hanging? It not only can be—it is!”
“I can’t believe it.”
“We could have prevented it. So could England. We—and England—could have stopped the invasion of Manchuria. Ethiopia. The reoccupation of the Rhine. Anything like that. We didn’t. They didn’t. So—we’re going to payoff.”
“But the price is so out of scale with the mistake!”
Jimmie smiled at her. “You sound like my father. He wants to administer fate, too. He can tell you, to an inch and a penny, what is fair and what is unfair in the way life treats him. The dope! If you happen to drink a glass of water that you suspect isn’t very pure but that you figure won’t hurt you, and there was a cholera germ in the water and you die, that’s a hell of a price to pay for drinking a glass of bad water. But the ‘unfair’ scale of the disaster doesn’t make you live a day longer.”
Audrey drove off the road and under some pine trees. She stopped at a place where the trees opened on a bend in the river. At the bend, ice was breaking up and floating away on a fast-running central current. Across the river was a farm with a big, white barn and a lot of small, white outbuildings. Guernsey cows moved slowly against the browns of a hillside. A light wind came from the farm, smelling sweetly of it.
Audrey turned off the motor with a gloved hand, swung in her seat, drew up one foot, stabbed the lighter into the dashboard, fumbled in her yellow handbag for a cigarette, and reached for the lighter just as it popped out.