“To cease their aggression. Back up out of Indo-China. Get off the Chinese mainland. Call off that Manchukuo farce, and free Manchuria.”
“In other words,” said Kirby, “give up all hope of becoming a major power, and accept a military defeat which nobody’s inflicted on them.”
“We can lick them at sea.”
“Do we have an army to drive them out of Asia?”
“No.”
“Then don’t we have our gall, ordering them out?”
Pug looked at Kirby under thick eyebrows, his head down on his chest. The humidity was giving him a headache, and he was very tired. “Look, militarist fanatics have taken charge there, Kirby. You know that. Slant- eyed samurais with industrial armaments. If they ever break loose and win southeast Asia, you’ll have a yellow Germany in the Pacific, with unlimited manpower, and most of the oil and rubber in the world. We have to maneuver while we can, and fight if we must. The President’s freezing order is a maneuver. Maybe he’ll work out some deal with them.”
“Appeasement,” Kirby said.
“Exactly, appeasement. We’ve been appeasing them right along with the oil shipments. So far they haven’t attacked south and they haven’t hit Russia in the back. I think the president’s just feeling his way, day by day and week by week.”
“Why doesn’t he declare war on Germany?” Kirby said. “Why this interminable pussyfooting about convoys? Once Russia collapses, the last chance to stop Hitler will be gone.”
“I can tell you why Roosevelt doesn’t declare war on Germany, mister,” spoke up the taxi driver in a rough, good-humored Southern voice, not looking around.
“Oh? Why?” said Kirby.
“Because he’d be impeached if he tried, that’s why, mister. He knows goddamned well that the American people aren’t going to war to save the Jews. He glanced over his shoulder. Blue eyes twinkled in a friendly fat face, smiling jovially. “I have no prejudices. I’m not prejudiced against the Jews. But I’m not prejudiced for them, either. Not enough to send American boys to die for them. That’s not unreasonable, is it?”
“Maybe you’d better look where you’re driving,” said Pug.
The cabbie subsided.
“It’s a nice spot,” Kirby said. They were on the back porch and Pug was pouring martinis. The house stood on a little knoll, topping a smooth lawn and a ravine of wild woods. A fresh breeze smelling of wet leaves and earth cooled the porch.
“Rhoda likes it.”
They drank in silence.
“How about that cabbie?” said Kirby.
“Well, he said it straight out. It’s been said on the Senate floor often, in double-talk.”
Kirby emptied his glass, and Pug at once refilled it.
“Thanks, Pug. I’m having unusual feelings these days. I’m starting to suspect that the human race, as we know it, may not make it through the industrial revolution.”
“I’ve had a bad day myself,” Pug said, as the scientist lit his pipe.
“No,” Kirby said, slowly waving out the thick wooden match, “let me try to put this into words. It’s occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines. Possibly the Germans and the Japanese are really adapting better to the new environment. Their successes suggest that. Also the way their opponents keep stumbling and crumbling. We may be having a Darwinian change in society. Authoritarian rule may be best suited to urban machine life — armed bosses indifferent to mercy or probity, keeping order by terror, and ready to lie and kill as routine policy. After all, most of the machines aren’t a hundred years old. The airplane isn’t forty years old. And democracy’s still a fragile experiment.” Kirby paused to drain his glass. “You called the Japanese industrial samurais. That rang the bell. They’ve starved themselves, stripped their country, to build or buy machines, and they’ve jumped out of nowhere to center stage of history. The Nazi or samurai idea may just make more sense in a changed world, Pug. It this merely martini talk, and is there any left in that jug?”
“There’s plenty,” said Pug, pouring, “and more where it came from. I’m feeling better by the minute. It’s nice on this porch.”
“It’s marvellous,” said Palmer Kirby.
“Why don’t you stay for dinner?” Pug said. “What else do you have to do?”
“I don’t like to impose on you.”
“I’m having chops, potatoes, and a salad. It’s just putting on a couple more chops. Let me tell the cook.”
“All right, Pug. Thanks. I’ve done a lot of eating alone lately.”
“Be back in a minute,” said Victor Henry, taking the jug. He brought it back full and tinkling.
“I put off dinner,” he said. “Give us a chance to relax.”
“Suits me,” said Kirby, “though from the mood I’m in and the size of that jug, you may have to lead me to the dining room.”
“It’s not far,” Pug said, “and the furniture has few sharp edges.”
Kirby laughed. “You know, about the first thing your very sweet wife Rhoda said to me was that I drank too much. At the dinner she gave me in Berlin. You remember, when you had to fly back to see the President. I was in a bad mood, and I did swill a lot of wine fast. She brought me up short.”
“That was rude. The amount a man drinks is his own business,” said Pug. “Not to mention that on occasion my proud beauty has sort of a hollow leg herself.”
“Say, you mix a hell of a good martini, Pug.”
“Kirby, what you were saying before, you know, is only this wave-of-the-future stuff that the Lindberghs have been peddling.”
“Well, Lindy’s the type of the new man, isn’t he? Flying an ocean by himself in a single-motor plane! He pointed the way to much that’s happened since.”
“He’s not a liar and murderer.”
“Only the bosses need be, Henry. The rest, including the scientific and mechanical geniuses like Lindy, and the wheelhorses like me, merely have to obey. That’s obviously what’s been happening in Germany.”
“I’ll tell you, Kirby,” Pug said, swirling his glass and feeling very profound, “there’s nothing new about such leaders. Napoleon was one. He had his propaganda line, too, that weakened the foe before he fired a shot. Why, he was bringing liberty, equality, fraternity to all Europeans. So, he laid the continent waste and made it run with blood for a dozen years or so, until they got wise to him and caught him and marooned him on a rock.”
“You think that’ll happen to Hitler?”
“I hope so.”
“There’s a difference. Napoleon had no machines. If he had had airplanes, telephones, tanks, trucks, machine guns — the whole industrial apparatus — don’t you think he might have clamped a lasting tyranny on Europe?”
“I’m not sure. I happen to have a low opinion of Napoleon. Napoleon sold Jefferson nearly a million square miles of prime land, you know — our whole Middle West, from Louisiana to the Rockies and the Canadian border — for fifteen million dollars. Fifteen million! It figured out to four cents an acre for real estate like Iowa and Nebraska. And Minnesota, with all that iron ore. Colorado with its gold and silver. Oklahoma with its oil. I don’t see how anybody, even a Frenchman, can figure Napoleon as a genius. He was a bloodthirsty ass. If he’d sent just one of his smaller armies over here to protect that territory — just a couple of divisions to hold the Louisiana territory, instead of wandering around Europe slaughtering and looting — and a few thousand Frenchmen to colonize the land, there’s little doubt that France would be the world’s greatest power today. Instead of what she is, a raped old bag.”
“I can’t say that has occurred to me before,” Kirby said, smiling at the phrase. “It’s probably fallacious.”
“What’s happening with uranium?” Victor Henry said.
Kirby’s smile turned wary. “Is that why you’re plying me with martinis?”
“If martinis can loosen you up about uranium, let it happen first with an officer in War Plans, and thereafter don’t drink martinis.”
