The General's bushy eyebrows frowned still more sternly.
"Well, then, Count Golm," he cried, "I avow myself openly as the most determined opponent of your project! I consider it as strategically useless, and I hold it to be scientifically impracticable."
"Two reasons, either of which, if well founded, would be absolutely crushing," answered the Count, smiling ironically. "As to the first, I bow, of course, to such an authority, although we need not always have a war with a non-naval power like France, but might possibly have one with a naval power like Russia for instance, and should then find a harbour facing the enemy very necessary. But as to the practicability, General; there, with all submission, I think I may put in a word in my amphibious capacity of a country gentleman living by the sea. Our sand, however heavy it makes the roads, to the great inconvenience of ourselves and the President, is a capital material for a railway embankment, and will prove good ground for the foundation of our harbour walls."
"Until you come to the places where we should have to build on piles," said the President, who, on the General's account, felt himself bound to speak.
"Such places may occur, I allow," cried the Count, who, in spite of the other men's exasperating opposition, at any rate had now the satisfaction of seeing all other conversation at the table silenced, and he alone for the moment speaking. "But what do you prove by that, excepting that the making of the harbour may take some months or years longer, and cost some few hundred thousands, or, for aught I know, millions more? And what would that signify in a work which, once completed, would be an invincible bulwark against every enemy that threatens us from the East?"
"Excepting one!" said Reinhold.
The Count had never supposed that this fellow would interfere in the conversation. An angry flush rose to his brow; he cast a dark look at the new opponent, and asked, in a short, contemptuous tone:
"And what might that be?"
"The tide coming in with a storm!" answered Reinhold.
"We are too much used in this country to storms and high tides to fear the one or the other," said the Count, with forced calmness.