When anything happened, Julian's first instinct was to happen with it.
He had never been in the rear of a situation in his life. The blow of
the Austrian ultimatum reached him on a yacht in mid-channel. There was
a cabinet minister on board, for whose sake the yacht slewed round to
make her way swiftly back to port. Julian went directly to him.
"Look here," he said, "we've got to go in. You grasp that, don't you?"
Julian had one idea in his head, the cabinet minister had a great many;
every one but Julian was leaving him alone to sort these ideas out.
Julian spent the six hours in which they were flying to port in
eradicating one by one every idea except his own.
The two men stood together, leaning over the ship's side. It was a clear
summer evening, with a bloom upon the waters. The lights of the boats
they passed--green and red and gold--were like glow-worms in a Southern
night. The sea was very easy under them; it had little movement of its
own, and parted like riven gauze to let the ship through.
"We can't let France go under," Julian pleaded. "Look at her,
son--stripped, after 1870. How she's sprung up! But thin, you
know--thin, like a gallant boy.
"Immoral small families? By Gad! how righteous comfortable people are!
How could she help it? Look what she's had to carry--indemnities, cursed
war burdens, and now the three-years service! But she's carried 'em. I
know the French. I've Irish in me, and that helps me to value their
lucidity. Lucidity's sense, you know, it ain't anything dressy or
imaginative, it's horse-sense gone clean as lightning. The French are a
civilized people. Go to Paris,--not the Paris of our luxury-rotted rich,
who have only asked it to be a little private sink of their own,--but to
a Frenchman's Paris. Well, you'll find him there, brain and a heart
under it. And, good Lord, what nerve!
"I tell you we've got to get down to our own nerve. We've fatted it on
the top, but the French haven't. They're like live wire, with no cover
to it. They're the most serious people on earth, fire without smoke. It
'u'd be an unspeakable shame to help set that damned Prussian heel on
them again. When it comes, it'll come as solid as the mountain that
blotted out Messina, as solid and as senseless, and you'll let that
happen because we aren't '_involved_!' Good Heavens, man, don't sop
yourself or your conscience with catchwords! If this war comes, and I
feel in my bones it's on us, any man who isn't involved is a cur."
The cabinet minister interrupted him. He cleared his throat, and said
that he was hopeful steps might be taken.
Julian flung himself upon the phrase.
"Of course they'll be taken," he shouted across the quiet, shadowy sea.
"They're being taken every minute. Are we the only fellows who've got
feet?
"What about strategic railways? Ever studied 'em? What about this
spring's having seen Alsace and Lorraine white with camps? What about
Tirpitz slipping his navy votes through the Reichstag, Socialists and
all? I beg your pardon; it's not your department, of course. We've let a
strip of sea as small as a South American river cut us off from the
plain speech of other nations. What speech? My good sir, the plain
speech of other nations is their acts. But it's no use raking up what
we've slid over. We've the national habit of sliding, it's a gift like
any other, and if you've a good eye for ice, it doesn't let you in. But
what Liberal Government ever had a good eye for the ice in Europe. I'm
speaking bitterly, but I'm a Liberal myself, and I've seen in odd places
of the earth that it's no good going slap through an adverse fact,
smiling. You disarm nothing but yourself."
"We are not," said the cabinet minister, who had a happy disposition and
a strong desire not to be shaken out of it, "really tied up to any
Balkan outbreak--I mean necessarily, of course. Other issues might come
in. But I see no reason, my dear Sir Julian, why we should, in this very
disagreeable crisis, not remind ourselves--and I am, like you, one of
the greatest admirers of the French--that an entente is _not_ an
alliance. Political sympathy can do a great deal to affect these
questions. I can imagine a very strong note--"
"Is an engagement nothing till you've got the ring on?" asked Julian,
savagely. "Are you going to let down France, who's not very often, but
has just lately, trusted us? If we do, let me tell you this: we shall
deserve exactly what we shall get. And make no mistake about it; we
shall get it. The channel ports, taken from a vindictive, broken France,
used, as they ought to be used, dead against us. A little luck and a
dark night, and I wouldn't give _that_ for England."
Julian flung his lighted cigarette into the sea; a faint hiss, and the
spark beneath them was sucked into darkness. Neither of the two men
moved. Julian lit another cigarette, and the cabinet minister gazed down
into the lightless sea. After a pause he said in a different voice:
"Look here, Verny, I've been impressed, devilish impressed, by what
you've said; but have you considered what kind of force we've got?
Picked men, I grant you, but, as you say yourself, when the Germans do
come on, they'll come like half a mountain moving. What's the use of
sending out a handful of grasshoppers to meet half a mountain?"
Julian laughed.
"Are you a great man on dog-fights?" he asked. "I've seen a bulldog,
quite a small chap he was, bring down a Great Dane the size of a calf.
The Dane had got a collie by the throat; friend of my little chap's, I
fancy. He couldn't get at the Dane's throat, for fear of piling his
weight on the collie; so he just stepped forward and took half a leg
between his teeth, and buried his head in it. I heard the bone crack.
The Dane tried to face it out,--he was a plucky fellow and the size of a
house,--but after a bit he felt held down. So he wheeled round and
seized the bull by a piece of back (the collie crawled off, he'd had
enough, poor brute!), but the bull didn't stir. He went on cracking that
bone; he gave the Dane all the back he wanted. Devil a bit _he_ turned
till the whole leg went like a split match, that hurled the Dane over,
and I had to take Chang (that was his name) off, or he'd have finished
him up. He'd just begun to enjoy the fight, with half his back chawed
over!
"We've got a navy that'll do just that to Germany if we hold on long
enough. Don't you forget it. It's pressure that tells against
size--pressure on the right spot, and persistent."
The cabinet minister tried to say to himself that countries weren't like
dogs; but he was a truthful man, and he thought that on the whole they
were.
England rose up suddenly before them out of the darkness. They were
coming into Plymouth Sound. The port lights held them steadily for a
minute, and the steam yacht bustled soberly toward the docks.
"If your little lot sit down under this," said Julian, straightening his
shoulders and holding the other man with his insistent eyes, "by God!
I'll cut my throat and say, 'Here died a Briton whose country had lost
its soul.'"
"Bit of Irish in him of course," murmured the cabinet minister as Julian
swung away from him. "Still, I suppose what I shall say is that on the
whole, taking everything into consideration, I think we should be wiser
to support France."