He put his arm round his wife’s waist as he spoke. Still holding her hands in one of his, he led her from the room. Her head drooped against his shoulder as they went out.
“I suppose that means,” said Gorman, “that he’s going to stick it out and see the thing through. It will be infernally awkward for him. I don’t think he realises how nasty it will be. He hasn’t considered that side of it.”
“A man doesn’t consider that side of things,” I said, “when he’s up against it as Ascher is.”
“Well, I’ll do my best about the naturalisation papers. That’ll be some help.”
“It’s very hard to be sure,” I said, “but I’m inclined to think that Ascher is right.”
“He’s utterly wrong,” said Gorman. “A man’s country ought to come first always. You don’t understand that because you’re denationalised; because, as you say yourself, you have no country. But it’s true, whether you understand it or not.”
“When I think of that business of his,” I said, “the immense complexity of it, the confidence of thousands of men in each other, all resting at last on a faith in the integrity of one man, or rather of a firm—the existence of such a business, world-wide, international, entirely independent of all ties of race, nationality, language, religion, in a certain sense wider than any of these—it’s a great, human affair, not English nor German, not the white man’s nor the yellow man’s, not Christian nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan, just human. Ascher owes some kind of loyalty to a thing like that. It’s a frightfully complicated question; but on the whole I think he is right.”
Gorman was not listening to me. He had ceased, for the time, to be interested in Ascher’s decision. I tried to regain his attention.
“Ascher says,” I said, “that there is such a thing as the honour of a banker, of a financier.”
That ought to have roused Gorman to a contradiction; but it did not.