The Second Fiddle Part 5

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 s.h.i.+p's side. It was a clear summer evening, with a bloom upon the waters. The lights of the boats they pa.s.sed--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 s.h.i.+p 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 d.a.m.ned 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 gra.s.shoppers 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 G.o.d!

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."

CHAPTER VII

Julian had spent thirty-two years--his mother included his first--in seeing what he wanted to do and doing it. He had never consulted anybody else, because he had always seen his way clearly, but he had made from time to time reports to his mother. He had been hostile to his father, who had opposed him weakly and sometimes unfairly till he died. Julian never felt disheartened or found any opposition in himself to what he wanted to do. Opposition in others he liked and overcame. Nothing in him warned him that love demands partic.i.p.ation and resents exclusion.

On landing, he hurried to London, and went at once to see an old friend of his in the War Office.

"Look here, Burton," he said, "you remember 1911, don't you?"

Burton drew on the blotting-paper with a pencil; he was almost overwhelmingly cautious. If he had not been, many more serious things than caution would have been overwhelmed.

"I think," he said, "if I remember right, you went abroad."

Julian chuckled.

"I was a German navvy for six months," he said. "I ate like a German, I drank thirty bottles of beer at one sitting for a bet, and I lost my head and my temper in German. It seems as if the best thing I can do just now is to repeat the experiment."

"You did it at your own risk," Burton reminded him. "It was certainly serviceable, but we limited our communications with you as much as possible. If it should enter into your mind to do such a thing again, we should of course have no communication with you whatever. Also, you would need German papers--birth certificates, registrations. I really do not know at a time like this what you might not find necessary. The work, if you came back, would be invaluable."

Julian nodded.

"Don't you bother yourself about papers," he said. "I've been in a German consular office, and I've got a German birth-certificate. It's one of the things I do particularly well. As long as they're not suspicious they won't ram the papers home, and I don't propose to let them get suspicious. I shall be Caesar's wife. Three years of Heidelberg have oiled my throat to it. My mother tells me I often speak English in a hearty German voice. My idea is to go out as soon as possible, through Belgium. They'll strike there, I feel pretty sure, and I'll come back the same way--October to November, if I can. You can put about that I 'm off to the Arctic Ocean. If I'm not back by Christmas, don't expect me.

I shall have no communication with any one until my return."

Burton smiled.

"My dear Julian," he said, "one moment. I have not yet congratulated you upon your engagement. I do so with all my heart. But do you intend to tell Miss Young? She may not like the Arctic Ocean or she may expect you to fight. She will also, no doubt, look for some communication from you; and, as you very rightly a.s.sert, there can be no communication whatever with anybody until you return."

Julian hunched up his shoulders and whistled.

"She's the pick of women," he said softly. "Leave her to me."

"It's all going to be left to you," said Burton, gravely. "If you live, you'll get no apparent acknowledgment; if you die, no one will ever know how. I do not say this to dissuade you,--there are too many things we want to know,--but when I saw the announcement of your engagement in the paper, I said, 'Well, we've lost him.'"

Julian rose, and walked to the window. Until that moment he had not given Marian a thought. He was full of a lover's images of her, but he had not connected them with what he was going to do. He remembered what Marian's inconspicuous-looking little friend had said to her, "honest as crystal, equable, strong."

Then he turned back to his friend.

"You haven't lost me," he said steadily. "After all, if we're up against anything at all, Burton, we're up against a pretty big thing. I must do exactly what is most useful. Of course I'd rather fight. One likes one's name to go down and all that, and I'd like to please Marian; but the point, both for her and for me, will be the job."

"Ah," said Burton. "Then if you'll just come with me, I'll take you to a fellow who will let you know what we want particularly just now to find out. You're quite right as far as we are concerned; but it's not fair to rush a man into our kind of fight. It's not like any other kind. It's risks without prizes."

"What you get out of a risk," said Julian, with a certain gravity, "is a prize."