I got no further. The old man was choking with emotion—it was half wrath, half despair.
"Permit it? Can they stop it? Do they govern? Is it not kings and princes and royal houses and titled ministers, the tyrants of opinion, the caprice or the pride or the selfishness of aristocrats, that control everything?
"See, they prance by us, unseeing, unthoughtful, just living for themselves, and then when the crash comes—the crash they have prepared with their silly talk of national honor, national enlargement, national continuity, racial union, destiny, putting over it all a gorgeous light of promised glory—just as the heroes in a stage play walk and stand in the glare of the electric lantern from the gallery, uttering bombast—when the crash comes, they summon the troops, they dragoon the people, they empty the banks, they crack the whip of urgency, and, pointing to the flag, drive us in hecatombs to death.
"No, no, Alfred—the war will come. I have long felt its growing tremors. We cultivate revenge in our hearts, the Germans cultivate hate, the Cossacks conquest, the Austrians dynasty, the Englishmen trade-money, their assumed preeminence, and there have been cabals and understandings, and a jolt snaps the artifice of our pretended brotherhood and, with hoof and claw, we fly at each other's throats. Bah—vous verrez."
His rage had restored his strength, and he stumbled away muttering and gesticulating. I watched him going across the roadway in the light that danced with the swinging lanterns when the night wind from the distant shores blew more strongly. The disks and outlines of shadows imparted to him a peculiar effect of unsteadiness. I half thought he staggered.
I went back to the library. There I found Gabrielle leaning over the paper I had flung down at the old man's outburst, and reading of the assassination. She looked up as I returned, and her face was white, and in her eyes too I saw an awful consternation. I was impatient with this foolishness, and expostulated loudly.
"What, Gabrielle, are you too imbecile? Père Grandin is in a panic. Why? He sees us fighting already—just because the heir to a crown is shot. It's absurd—pas vraisemblable."
"Alfred, I think we should not be too sure. It all looks bad to me, and—if it comes. What?"
Her eyes dilated with terror.
"Why, Gabrielle, have we not prepared ourselves for just this! Besides we have allies now—it is not as it was in 1870. There is England, there is Russia. Sacre nom, it will be as when Greek meets Greek—not comme les vautours et les pigeons."