"I've made him care! I've made him build on me! And can't you see"—she seemed to arraign Napier's own loyalty as she stood there under the hall light, vehement, unhappy—"can't you see Julian needs his friends now as he never did before?" In the little pause her excitement mounted. "And besides that, Julian's right about the war. And you are wrong. Oh, why are you!" she cried out of the aching that comes of conflict between love of a person and hate of his creed.
They heard a taxi stop. She caught up her gloves. "Do you know what I kept thinking at dinner? It's what I always think when people talk like Sir William, about letting the war go on for Kitchener's three mortal years. I kept thinking that Julian won't ever come here again. And what a pity it was! Unless you—do come and hear him, Gavan, with me! To-morrow afternoon. Please!"
"I'd do most things for you," he said; "not that."
And then he went and did it. At least, he went alone.
Had the authorities not believed that outside the narrow—so narrow as to be negligible—limits of the League for a Negotiated Peace, no general notice would be taken of so unpopular an enterprise, the open-air meeting would have been interdicted. The authorities had not reflected that unpopularity, if only it is great enough, is as sure a draw as its opposite.
Napier left the taxi and let himself be carried along in the human current to a place opposite that part of the improvised platform where a speaker stood facing the people. The thick-set figure of the ex-member of Parliament stood in a storm of booing, of derisive shouts and groans that ultimately drowned his appeal.
No sooner had they howled him down than a much younger man stood up there facing the crowd. Julian. He spoke for a good twenty minutes. His boyishness, and that something of moral passion that compelled you to listen to Julian, held the people quiet through the earlier minutes, and held them muttering and threatening up to the bursting of the storm.
His voice reached Napier tired and hoarse:
"You don't believe the Germans were encircled in a band of iron? You don't believe they hadn't sufficient outlet for their immense capacities? Oh, no; the commercial greed of other nations didn't hem them in! Tell me, then, what's behind this vast discovery of German activity in lands not their own? What about the difficulty even in England of combing them out of commerce, out of clubs, even out of Parliament? What about the hold they have in Sweden and Holland; in Genoa; in South America, not to speak of the United States? Now, notice. No other nation has so disseminated itself about the globe in practical activities. What's the reason? Can you answer that? Wrong. The reason is that energy must go somewhere. The Germans weren't to have colonies; they weren't to have seaports, not openly. So they took them in the only way left. They took them by a vast, silent effort that has sown the German broadcast over the world."