第55章

Julian, on, the morning following his visit to the Prime Minister, was afflicted with a curious and persistent unrest. He travelled down to the Temple land found Miles Furley in a room hung with tobacco smoke and redolent of a late night.

"Miles," Julian declared, as the two men shook hands, "I can't rest."

"I am in the same fix," Furley admitted. "I sat here till four o'clock. Phineas Cross came around, and half-a-dozen of the others. I felt I must talk to them, I must keep on hammering it out. We're right, Julian. We must be right!"

"It's a ghastly responsibility. I wonder what history will have to say."

"That's the worst of it," Furley groaned. "They'll have a bird's-eye view of the whole affair, those people who write our requiem or our eulogy. You noticed the Press this morning?

They're all hinting at some great move in the West. It's about in the clubs. Why, I even heard last night that we were in Ostend.

It's all a rig, of course. Stenson wants to gain time."

"Who opened these negotiations with Freistner?" Julian asked.

"Fenn. He met him at the Geneva Conference, the year before the war. I met him, too, but I didn't see so much of him. He's a fine fellow, Julian - as unlike the typical German as any man you ever met."

"He's honest, I suppose?"

"As the day itself," was the confident reply. "He has been in prison twice, you know, for plain speaking. He is the one man in Germany who has fought the war, tooth and nail, from the start."

Julian caught his friend by the shoulder.

"Miles," he said, - "straight from the bottom of your heart, mind - you do believe we are justified?"

"I have never doubted it."

"You know that we have practically created a revolution - that we have established a dictatorship? Stenson must obey or face anarchy."

"It is the voice of the people," Furley declared. "I am convinced that we are justified. I am convinced of the inutility of the prolongation of this war."

Julian drew a little sigh of relief.

"Don't think I am weakening," he said. "Remember, I am new to this thing in practice, even though I may be responsible for some of the theory."

"It is the people who are the soundest directors of a nation's policy," Furley pronounced. "High politics becomes too much like a game of chess, hedged all around with etiquette and precedent.

It's human life we want to save, Julian. People don't stop to realise the horrible tragedy of even one man's death - one man with his little circle of relatives and friends. In the game of war one forgets. Human beings - men from the toiler's bench, the carpenter's bench, from behind the counter, from the land, from the mine - don khaki, become soldiers, and there seems something different about them. So many human lives gone every day; just soldiers, just the toll we have to pay for a slight advance or a costly retreat. And, my God, every one of them, underneath their khaki, is a human being! The politicians don't grasp it, Julian.

That's our justification. The day that armistice is signed, several hundred lives at least - perhaps, thousands - will be saved; for several hundred women the sun will continue to shine.

Parents, sweethearts, children - all of them - think what they will be spared!"

"I am a man again," Julian declared. "Come along round to Westminster. There are many things I want to ask about the Executive."

They drove round to the great building which had been taken over by the different members of the Labour Council. The representative of each Trades Union had his own office, staff of clerks and private telephone. Fenn, who greeted the two men with a rather excessive cordiality, constituted himself their cicerone.

He took them from room to room and waited while Julian exchanged remarks with some of the delegates whom he had not met personally.

"Every one of our members," Fenn pointed out, "is in direct communication with the local secretary of each town in which his industry is represented. You see these?"

He paused and laid his hand on a little heap of telegraph forms, on which one word was typed.

"These," he continued, "are all ready to be dispatched the second that we hear from Mr. Stenson that is to say if we should hear unfavourably. They are divided into batches, and each batch will be sent from a different post-office, so that there shall be no delay. We calculate that in seven hours, at the most, the industrial pulse of the country will have ceased to beat."

"How long has your organisation taken to build up?" Julian enquired.

"Exactly three months," David Sands observed, turning around in his swing chair from the desk at which he had been writing. "The scheme was started a few days after your article in the British.

We took your motto as our text `Coordination and cooperation.'"

They found their way into the clubroom, and at luncheon, later on, Julian strove to improve his acquaintance with the men who were seated around him. Some of them were Members of Parliament with well-known names, others were intensely local, but all seemed earnest and clear-sighted. Phineas Cross commenced to talk about war generally. He had just returned from a visit with other Labour Members to the front, although it is doubtful whether the result had been exactly in accordance with the intentions of the powers who had invited him.

"I'll tell you something about war," he said, "which contradicts most every other experience. There's scarcely a great subject in the world which you don't have to take as a whole, and from the biggest point of view, to appreciate it thoroughly. It's exactly different with war. If you want to understand more than the platitudes, you want to just take in one section of the fighting.

Say there are fifty Englishmen, decent fellows, been dragged from their posts as commercial travellers or small tradesmen or labourers or what-not, and they get mixed up with a similar number of Germans. Those Germans ain't the fiends we read about.