A MAN OF DESTINY
John Sebastian Faber had a suite of five rooms at the Savoy Hotel, and, as he said, he lived in four of them most of the time. The room which he did not occupy was devoted to three secretaries.
Gabrielle found him at his desk in an apartment which should have been a drawing-room. The windows looked out upon the Shot Tower and showed him the majesty of Westminster. There was a litter of American journals upon a round table at his back and copies of the English Times, much mutilated by cutting. He wore a black morning coat, and would have been called well-dressed by an American tailor.
His was the "clean-limbed" type of man who is such an excellent product of the sister nation—moderately tall, suggesting virility and immense nervous energy. Someone upon the ship said that he "snatched at life," and that was no untrue description of him. But he had also picked up a little sum of eleven millions sterling by the process, and that kind of snatching bears imitation.
A footman brought Gabrielle to the room, and Faber sprang up immediately, brushing back curly brown hair from his forehead. It was evident that he expected a somewhat protracted interview, for he wheeled a low chair near to his own before he held out his hand to her.
"Why, now, I'm glad to see you. Sit down right here and let us talk. A long way in from Hampstead, isn't it? Too hot, perhaps; well, then, we'll have the steam turned off."
"Oh, please!" she said, casting loose her grey furs—he had already regarded her from a man's first aspect and approved the picture—"I have been walking down the Strand and the air is so cold. It's delicious in here—and what roses!"
"Ah! that's where I blush. I always have roses wherever I go; didn't your lady from Banbury Cross do the same thing with the music? Well, I get as far off that as I can—most music. Wagner's good if you're up against a man. You never hear him crying 'Enuf.' Well, now, that's right. So you want me for the I.A.L.—or, rather, your father does. Why didn't he ask me on the ship?"
He swung back in his chair and looked her over from head to foot. She had always been a little afraid of the sensitive eyes, and they did not fail to magnetise her as heretofore. It was possible, however, to be very frank with such a man; she spoke with good assurance when she said:
"Oh! I suppose he didn't think of it."
"You mean that he didn't know enough about me? Why, that's fair. I dare say he heard my name for the first time that night I ran the charity concert for him. Guns and the gospel don't go well together, my dear lady, not in civilized parts. Your father won't want rifles until he goes to China to turn the great god Bud inside out. I'll let him have a consignment cheap when he's starting."
She thought it a little brutal, hardly the thing he should have said; but his good humour was invincible, and she forgave him immediately.
"The fact is," he ran on, "your father is a good man, Miss Silvester, and I'm a merchant. Where we come together is in admiring a certain fellow passenger who ran the ship and will run other ships. There we're on common ground. Now say what you like to me and I'll hear it, for I've just twenty minutes at your disposal, and you may count every one of them. To begin with the I.A.L.—does your father remember that I'm a gunmaker?"
She was vastly puzzled.
"I think he knows it in a vague way. The captain of the Oceanic said you were building the new American navy—is that quite true?"
"It would be in a prospectus. My house builds one of the new cruisers, and some of the destroyers. Guns are the bigger line. I've come to Europe to sell guns. Did they tell you that also?"
"Yes, I think everyone knows it."
"Then why come to me? Would you go to the keeper of a saloon and ask him to help you to put down the drink? He'd tell you that drink made George Washington, just as I tell you that guns made your Lord Nelson. Would the Admiral have joined your I.A.L.?"
"Oh," she said, with womanly obstinacy, "then you still think there is no alternative but war?"
He laughed and began to make holes with his pencil in the blotting pad before him.
"It's just as though you asked me if there were no alternative but human nature. Why isn't the world good right through? Why do murder and other crimes still exist on the face of the earth? Would a league suppress them—a decision at Washington that there should be no more sin? I guess not. If a man knocks me down before lunch, I may go to law with him; if it's after and there's been any wine, I'll possibly do my own justice and do it quick. War is as old as human nature, and if we are to believe that a God rules the world, we've got to believe also that man was meant to go to war. Shall I tell you that some of the noblest things done on this earth were done on the battlefield? You wouldn't believe me. Your father thinks George Washington a son of the devil, and Nelson a man of blood. I've heard that sort of thing from the platform, and it's turned me sick. Your I.A.L. is a league for the manufacture of lath-backed men. Do you think the world will be any better when every man turns the other cheek and honour has gone into the pot? If you do, well, I'm on the other side all the time. War may go, but it has got to change human nature first. Tell your father that, and ask him to think about it. I wonder what text he'd take if a troop of cavalry camped in his drawing-room to-night. Would the I.A.L. do much for him? Why, I think not."
She smiled at his wild images, and thought that she would demolish them simply.
"You speak in fables," she said, "it's like the nonsense in the panicky stories. There is no one in England nowadays who seriously believes in that kind of war. I do not think you can do so yourself. Now, really, did you ever see a battlefield in your life, Mr. Faber?"
He looked at her with eyes half shut.
"I was in Port Arthur the night the ships were struck. I saw the big fighting at Liaoyang. Go back farther and I'll tell you stories of Venezuela and the Philippines, which should be written down in red. I'm a child of war—my father died at a barricade in Paris three days before the Commune fell. A diamond of a man saved my mother and took her out to America, where I was born. There's war in the very marrow of my bones—I live for it as other men for women and children. Should you ask such a man to join such a League? I'll put it squarely to you. Now tell me the truth."
The intensity of the appeal startled her. The method of her life in the parsonage at Hampstead would have prompted a platitude of the platforms, some retort about the progress of humanity, and the need for social advance. But it seemed impossible to say such things to John Faber. Her courage ran down as ice before a fire; she was wholly embarrassed and without resource.
"Come," he repeated, "you owe me the admission. Should the request have been made to me?"
"No, indeed—and yet I will not say that anyone would be dishonoured by it."
"Did I suggest the contrary?"
"I think your idols false."
"They are the idols of human nature—not mine."
"We could say the same of the primitive savages. Why should we have advanced beyond the battle-axe and the club?"
"Not the political clubs—see here, is there any real advance when the knife goes deep enough? Suppose a thousand English women were butchered in China—or I'll make it Turkey—would your father be for the I.A.L.? If he were, the people would burn his pulpit!"
"It only means that we must educate."
"We're doing it all the time. Does education make your burglar sing psalms, or does it teach him to use oxygen for burning open the safe? I think nothing of education—that way. Who are the best educated people in Europe? The Germans. Are they coming in to the I.A.L.?"
"My father hopes that much may be done by the understanding between the ministers——"
He laughed rudely, brutally.
"All the sheep baaing together, and the wolf sharpening his teeth on the national grindstone. I've no patience to