Julian had one idea in his head, the cabinet minister had a great many; every one but Julian was leaving him alone to sort these ideas out. Julian spent the six hours in which they were flying to port in eradicating one by one every idea except his own.
The two men stood together, leaning over the ship's side. It was a clear summer evening, with a bloom upon the waters. The lights of the boats they passed—green and red and gold—were like glow-worms in a Southern night. The sea was very easy under them; it had little movement of its own, and parted like riven gauze to let the ship through.
"We can't let France go under," Julian pleaded. "Look at her, son—stripped, after 1870. How she's sprung up! But thin, you know—thin, like a gallant boy.
"Immoral small families? By Gad! how righteous comfortable people are! How could she help it? Look what she's had to carry—indemnities, cursed war burdens, and now the three-years service! But she's carried 'em. I know the French. I've Irish in me, and that helps me to value their lucidity. Lucidity's sense, you know, it ain't anything dressy or imaginative, it's horse-sense gone clean as lightning. The French are a civilized people. Go to Paris,—not the Paris of our luxury-rotted rich, who have only asked it to be a little private sink of their own,—but to a Frenchman's Paris. Well, you'll find him there, brain and a heart under it. And, good Lord, what nerve!
"I tell you we've got to get down to our own nerve. We've fatted it on the top, but the French haven't. They're like live wire, with no cover to it. They're the most serious people on earth, fire without smoke. It 'u'd be an unspeakable shame to help set that damned Prussian heel on them again. When it comes, it'll come as solid as the mountain that blotted out Messina, as solid and as senseless, and you'll let that happen because we aren't 'involved!' Good Heavens, man, don't sop yourself or your conscience with catchwords! If this war comes, and I feel in my bones it's on us, any man who isn't involved is a cur."
The cabinet minister interrupted him. He cleared his throat, and said that he was hopeful steps might be taken.
Julian flung himself upon the phrase.
"Of course they'll be taken," he shouted across the quiet, shadowy sea. "They're being taken every minute. Are we the only fellows who've got feet?
"What about strategic railways? Ever studied 'em? What about this spring's having seen Alsace and Lorraine white with camps? What about Tirpitz slipping his navy votes through the Reichstag, Socialists and all? I beg your pardon; it's not your department, of course. We've let a strip of sea as small as a South American river cut us off from the plain speech of other nations. What speech? My good sir, the plain speech of other nations is their acts. But it's no use raking up what we've slid over. We've the national habit of sliding, it's a gift like any other, and if you've a good eye for ice, it doesn't let you in. But what Liberal Government ever had a good eye for the ice in Europe. I'm speaking bitterly, but I'm a Liberal myself, and I've seen in odd places of the earth that it's no good going slap through an adverse fact, smiling. You disarm nothing but yourself."
"We are not," said the cabinet minister, who had a happy disposition and a strong desire not to be shaken out of it, "really tied up to any Balkan outbreak—I mean necessarily, of course. Other issues might come in. But I see no reason, my dear Sir Julian, why we should, in this very disagreeable crisis, not remind ourselves—and I am, like you, one of the greatest admirers of the French—that an entente is not an alliance. Political sympathy can do a great deal to affect these questions. I can imagine a very strong note—"