She sat down limply, helplessly. All her scintillating vitality, that lived and drew its light from the brilliant surface of life, seemed drained out of her; while he to whom all her ambitions were but toys and trifles, who yawned and blinked at those great parties, except in so far that they delighted her, was transformed into a vivid, glowing personality, when problems of money and business and credit occupied him.
“But war?” she repeated. “War between England and Germany? It is inconceivable! What on earth could a quarrel arise over? What is it all about?”
“I do not say it is necessarily war between England and Germany,” said he. “I say only that Germany is mobilizing: she is striking a match—indeed, she has struck it. Will she blow it out, or will she hold it to light the paper which will light the sticks, which will cause the coal to burn? I used to have to light the fire in the office in the morning thirty years ago, and do you think I did not look how the flame spread? I had to build the fire also, and I knew how to make it catch light most easily. The paper flamed, and the sticks caught the fire if they were dry. And, good God, Europe is like a dry stick to-day. Anything will make it catch fire, and just because Russia and France and this damned little island hate Germany! And why do they hate her? Because they fear her splendid power. There is the sword wrapped round with the olive-branch. Let them beware of making her take off the olive-branch, and show the steel. Who knows what the power of Germany is? Not I, not the Kaiser, not anybody——”
“But war between England and Germany?” she wailed again. “How can you believe it, with the Emperor so friendly? What is it about?”
He interrupted impatiently.
“Heart’s beloved,” he said in his accustomed formula, “do not go on like that. ‘What is it about?’ you asked me. It is about Serbia and Russia, and France and England and Germany. It is about the world, not less than that! You would not even attend if I tried to tell you. As for its being inconceivable, it is just the inconceivable that always happens. At least the man who does not take the inconceivable into his reckonings is a very poor financier. It was inconceivable that your little Japan should win a war against that great sprawling Russia. But had I not foreseen and betted on the inconceivable, we should not, you and I, be in Curzon Street, but in that little flat in West Kensington, with—with a gramophone! Take it from me there is going to be war. Will England come in? I don’t know; I have got to think. But Germany is preparing for war. Whom is she preparing to fight? Not Serbia, but that brown bear that backs Serbia. And if she fights the brown bear, what of France? And if——”
He gnawed his nails in silence a moment, and his mind flew back to the question as to how he personally, his money and his credit would be affected.
“Luckily my interests in Germany are widely distributed,” he said. “I can realize a million or so without attracting much attention. That I must certainly do. God! I wish I could be in Berlin for ten minutes. I would give ten thousand pounds a minute for ten minutes in Berlin. And yet I know all I want to know. I have the data that matter!”
He paused opposite her, and his mind was distracted from the problems which she could not follow, to the problem of her, and all that her life meant to her.
“All that is nothing to you, Aline,” he said. “My dearest, I would never let you want anything that money can buy. But now for our sympathies: where do our sympathies lie? Is it ‘Deutschland über Alles’ for us, or is it England über Deutschland? Answer me that! I speak to you now: I do not just ask you to listen while I talk to myself. If the worst comes to the worst what are we? What do we stand for? Are you going to be English, or are you going to be German? If German, let us not pause: let us walk under the limes in Berlin....”