fight without money and that
credit would go and the thing would stop before it had begun, pretty
well. I don't know anything about that sort of thing, but the arguments
strike me as absolutely sound."

Otway was waiting with fidgety impatience. "I've heard all that. I don't
give a damn for it. Of course you don't know anything about it. No one
does. Least of all those writing chaps. It's all theory. Every one
thought that with modern this, that and the other you were as safe on
the last word in liners as in your own bedroom. Then comes along that
_Titanic_ business in April, and where the hell are you with your modern
conditions? Fifteen hundred people done in. I tell you it isn't that
things that used to happen can't happen now; it's simply that they'll
happen a million times worse. What's the good of theories when you've
got facts? Look at the things there've been with Germany just this year
alone. Old Haldane over in Germany in February for 'unofficial
discussions', Churchill threatening two keels to one if the German Navy
law is exceeded. That was March. In April the Germans whack up their
Navy Law Amendment, twelve more big ships. That chap Bertrand Stewart
getting three and a half years for espionage in Germany; and two German
spies caught by us here,--that chap Grosse over at Winchester Assizes,
three years, and friend Armgaard Graves up at Glasgow, eighteen months.
An American cove at Leipzig taking four years' penal for messing around
after plans of the Heligoland fortifications. Those five yachting chaps
in July arrested for espionage at Eckernforde. War, too, skits of it.
Turkey and Italy hardly done when all these Balkan chaps set to and
slosh Turkey. Have you seen to-day's papers? I'll bet you they'll send
Turkey to hell at Kirk Kilisse or thereabouts before the week's out."

He had been ticking these points off on his fingers, much astonishing
Sabre by his marshalling of scattered incidents that had been merely
rather pleasing newspaper sensations of a couple of days. He presented
the ticked-off fingers bunched up together. "There, there's concrete
facts for you, Sabre. Can you say things aren't tightening up? Why, if
war--_when_ war comes people will look back on this year, 1912, and
wonder where in hell their eyes were that they didn't see it. What are
they seeing?--" He threw his fingers apart. "None of these things. Not
one. All this doctors and the Insurance Bill tripe, Marconi Inquiry,
_Titanic_, S