“Then, come, why don't you! There were shepherds watching their pretty little flocks by night, but to leave a man watching the cold animal is a bit out. Come along!”—and O'Hara went.
He reached Petersburg twelve hours before Loveday, his reason for choosing that time being his knowledge that Frankl was in Petersburg, and with him Rebekah, Frankl being in a deal with the new-régime Minister of Finance.
For, as O'Hara had been asking himself the agonized question: “By what absolute finesse can I, just now, win Hogarth?” the mere presence of Rebekah in the same city with Hogarth drew him thither.
But the next day, when Loveday came, nothing had been done—no chance of tête-a-tête with Hogarth: and that day was O'Hara an anxious and tremulous man, living on the tip-toe and qui vive of lynx-eyed keenness.
The same night at a masque at the Palace of Peterhof Loveday got a chance of dialogue with Hogarth, they seated amid greenery and coloured gleams, Hogarth groomed to the glittering glass of his shoes, his legs stretched, arm akimbo; and presently Loveday led the talk to things of the sea. “What an extraordinary activity! The British Government launches the Peleus next Monday at Deptford—the first 28,000-ton war-boat; and seven cruisers on the slips. Then the French, Austro-German, Russian—”
“Ha!—I know. They won't build long”.
“Still the confidence?”
“You can only ask, my dear boy, because you do not yet see what a thing the battleship really is—much more than half a sham. The march of invention is from the complex to the simple: for simplicity is strength; but to the moment when I began to construct, naval construction had not followed this law: for from the old smooth-bores, aimed with tackle and quoin, to the present regime of electric wires, you have had a continual advance in complexity—always within the same little arc of thought—till now the most complex of things is a battleship; and if you ask me which is the weaker, a battleship or a watch, I answer a battleship—weak meaning liability to the injuries which they were built to resist. In such a case as that of the Maine, sunk at Havana, one might fancy that the task of naval constructors is to turn out a thing to sink with a minimum of trouble; and you remember the Camperdown and Victoria, how, playing about together, one happened to touch the other, when down plunged that other. These ships are a compromise between three motifs—speed, resisting attack, and attacking: and the first is so antagonistic to the second, and also to the third, that the net result is almost a Nonentity, or No-Thing. Nothing, in fact, could be more queer, unfounded, than these ships; and the future will look back upon them with pity. Hence the simple islands, following the law: and don't think t hat their efficacy is a thing riskier than arithmetic itself.”
“Good”, went Loveday. “But, Richard—captain your islands with decent men”.
“You have something on your mind: what is it?”