"Is an engagement nothing till you've got the ring on?" asked Julian, savagely. "Are you going to let down France, who's not very often, but has just lately, trusted us? If we do, let me tell you this: we shall deserve exactly what we shall get. And make no mistake about it; we shall get it. The channel ports, taken from a vindictive, broken France, used, as they ought to be used, dead against us. A little luck and a dark night, and I wouldn't give that for England."
Julian flung his lighted cigarette into the sea; a faint hiss, and the spark beneath them was sucked into darkness. Neither of the two men moved. Julian lit another cigarette, and the cabinet minister gazed down into the lightless sea. After a pause he said in a different voice:
"Look here, Verny, I've been impressed, devilish impressed, by what you've said; but have you considered what kind of force we've got? Picked men, I grant you, but, as you say yourself, when the Germans do come on, they'll come like half a mountain moving. What's the use of sending out a handful of grasshoppers to meet half a mountain?"
Julian laughed.
"Are you a great man on dog-fights?" he asked. "I've seen a bulldog, quite a small chap he was, bring down a Great Dane the size of a calf. The Dane had got a collie by the throat; friend of my little chap's, I fancy. He couldn't get at the Dane's throat, for fear of piling his weight on the collie; so he just stepped forward and took half a leg between his teeth, and buried his head in it. I heard the bone crack. The Dane tried to face it out,—he was a plucky fellow and the size of a house,—but after a bit he felt held down. So he wheeled round and seized the bull by a piece of back (the collie crawled off, he'd had enough, poor brute!), but the bull didn't stir. He went on cracking that bone; he gave the Dane all the back he wanted. Devil a bit he turned till the whole leg went like a split match, that hurled the Dane over, and I had to take Chang (that was his name) off, or he'd have finished him up. He'd just begun to enjoy the fight, with half his back chawed over!
"We've got a navy that'll do just that to Germany if we hold on long enough. Don't you forget it. It's pressure that tells against size—pressure on the right spot, and persistent."
The cabinet minister tried to say to himself that countries weren't like dogs; but he was a truthful man, and he thought that on the whole they were.
England rose up suddenly before them out of the darkness. They were coming into Plymouth Sound. The port lights held them steadily for a minute, and the steam yacht bustled soberly toward the docks.
"If your little lot sit down under this," said Julian, straightening his shoulders and holding the other man with his insistent eyes, "by God! I'll cut my throat and say, 'Here died a Briton whose country had lost its soul.'"
"Bit of Irish in him of course," murmured the cabinet minister as Julian swung away from him. "Still, I suppose what I shall say is that on the whole, taking everything into consideration, I think we should be wiser to support France."