CHAPTER VII
Julian had spent thirty-two years—his mother included his first—in seeing what he wanted to do and doing it. He had never consulted anybody else, because he had always seen his way clearly, but he had made from time to time reports to his mother. He had been hostile to his father, who had opposed him weakly and sometimes unfairly till he died. Julian never felt disheartened or found any opposition in himself to what he wanted to do. Opposition in others he liked and overcame. Nothing in him warned him that love demands participation and resents exclusion.
On landing, he hurried to London, and went at once to see an old friend of his in the War Office.
"Look here, Burton," he said, "you remember 1911, don't you?"
Burton drew on the blotting-paper with a pencil; he was almost overwhelmingly cautious. If he had not been, many more serious things than caution would have been overwhelmed.
"I think," he said, "if I remember right, you went abroad."
Julian chuckled.
"I was a German navvy for six months," he said. "I ate like a German, I drank thirty bottles of beer at one sitting for a bet, and I lost my head and my temper in German. It seems as if the best thing I can do just now is to repeat the experiment."
"You did it at your own risk," Burton reminded him. "It was certainly serviceable, but we limited our communications with you as much as possible. If it should enter into your mind to do such a thing again, we should of course have no communication with you whatever. Also, you would need German papers—birth certificates, registrations. I really do not know at a time like this what you might not find necessary. The work, if you came back, would be invaluable."