“Very well, gentlemen,” he said, “let it be war.  Perhaps we’d better let this be the end of our deliberations.”

Graveling rose slowly to his feet.  His face was filled with evil things.  He pointed to Maraton.

“There’s a word more to be spoken!” he exclaimed.  “There’s more behind this scheme of Maraton’s than he’s willing to have us understand!  It looks to me and it sounds to me like a piece of dirty, underhand business.  I’ll ask you a question, Maraton.  Were you at the Ritz Hotel one night about two months ago, with the ambassador of a foreign a country?”

“I was,” Maraton admitted coolly.

Graveling looked around with a little cry of triumph.

“It’s a plot, this; nothing more nor less than a plot!” he declared vigorously.  “What sort of an Englishman does he call himself, I wonder?  It’s the foreigners that are at the bottom of the lot of it!  They want our trade, they’d be glad of our country.  They’ve bribed this man Maraton to get it without the trouble of fighting for it, even!”

Maraton moved towards the door.  Holding it open, he turned and faced them.

“Before I came,” he said, “I hoped that you might be men.  I find you just the usual sort of pigmies.  You call yourselves people’s men!  You haven’t mastered the elementary truths of your religion.  What’s England, or France, or any other country in the world, by the side of humanity?  Be off!  I’ll go my own way.  Go yours, and take your little tinsel of jingoism with you.  Whenever you want to fight me, I shall be ready.”

“And fight you we shall,” Peter Dale thundered, “mark you that!  There’s limits, even to us.  The Government of this country mayn’t be all it should be, but, after all, it’s our English Government, and there is a point at which every man has to support it.  The law is the law, and so you may find out, my friend!”

They filed out.  Maraton closed the door after them.  He was alone.  He threw open the window to get rid of the odour of tobacco smoke which still hung about.  The echo of their raucous voices seemed still in the air.  These were the men who should have been his friends and associates!  These were the men to whom he had the right to look for sympathy!  They treated him like a dangerous lunatic.  Their own small interests, their own small careers were threatened, and they were up in arms without a moment’s hesitation.  Not one of them had made the slightest attempt to see the whole truth.  The word “revolution” had terrified them.  The approach of a crisis had driven their thoughts into one narrow focus:  what would it mean for them?