Part 16

"Well--" Hugo swept his memory back over his career--"so many things, father. It's hard to recite one's own--"

"I know. But I'm your father, and my ears ache to hear."

"I saved a man pinned under a wagon. I saved a man from a shark. I pulled open a safe in which a man was smothering. Many things like that. Then--there was the war."

"I know. I know. When you wrote that you had gone to war, I was frightened--and happy. Try as I might, I could not think of a great constructive cause for you to enter. I had to satisfy myself by thinking that you could find such a cause. Then the war came. And you wrote that you were in it. I was happy. I am old, Hugo, and perhaps my nationalism and my patriotism are dead. Sides in a war did not seem to matter. But peace mattered to me, and I thought--I hoped that you could hasten peace. Four years, Hugo. Your letters said nothing. Four years. And then it stopped. And I understood. War is property fighting property, not David fighting Goliath. The greatest David would be unavailing now. Even you could do little enough."

"Perhaps not so little, father."

"There were things, then?"

Hugo could not disappoint his father with the whole formidable truth. "Yes." He lied with a steady gaze. "I stopped the war."

"You!"

"After four years I perceived the truth of what you have just said. War is a mistake. It is not sides that matter. The object of war is to make peace. On a dark night, father, I went alone into the enemy lines. For one hundred miles that night I upset every gun, I wrecked every ammunition train, I blew up every dump--every arsenal, that is. Alone I did it. The next day they asked for peace. Remember the false armistice? Somehow it leaked out that there would be victory and surrender the next night--because of me. Only the truth about me was never known. And a day later--it came."

The weak old man was transported. He raised himself up on his elbows. "You did that! Then all my work was not in vain. My dream and my prayer were justified! Oh, Hugo, you can never know how glad I am you came and told me this. How glad."

He repeated his expression of joy until his tongue was weary; then he fell back. Hugo sat with shining eyes during the silence that followed. His father at length groped for a glass of water. Strength returned to him. "I could ask for no more, son. And yet we are petulant, insatiable creatures. What is doing now? The world is wicked. Yet it tries half-heartedly to rebuild itself. One great deed is not enough--or are you tired?"

Hugo smiled. "Am I ever tired, father? Am I vulnerable?"

"I had forgotten. It is so hard for the finite mind to think beyond itself. Not tired. Not vulnerable. No. There was Samson--the cat." He was embarrassed. "I hurt you?"

"No, father." He repeated it. Every gentle fall of the word "father" from his lips and every mention of "son" by his father was rare privilege, unfamiliar elixir to the old man. His new lie took its cue from Abednego Danner's expressions. "My work goes on. Now it is with America. I expect to go to Washington soon to right the wrongs of politics and government. Vicious and selfish men I shall force from their high places. I shall secure the idealistic and the courageous." It was a theory he had never considered, a possible practice born of necessity. "The pressure I shall bring against them will be physical and mental. Here a man will be driven from his house mysteriously. There a man will slip into the limbo. Yonder an inconspicuous person will suddenly be braced by a new courage; his enemies will be gone and his work will progress unhampered. I shall be an invisible agent of right--right as best I can see it. You understand, father?"

Abednego smiled like a happy child. "I do, son. To be you must be splendid."

"The most splendid thing on earth! And I have you to thank, you and your genius to tender gratitude to. I am merely the agent. It is you that created and the whole world that benefits."

Abednego's face was serene--not smug, but transfigured. "I yearned as you now perform. It is strange that one cloistered mortal can become inspired with the toil and lament of the universe. Yet there is a danger of false pride in that, too. I am apt to fall into the pit because my cup is so full here at the last. And the greatest problem of all is not settled."

"What problem?" Hugo asked in surprise.

"Why, the problem that up until now has been with me day and night. Shall there be made more men like you--and women like you?"

The idea staggered Hugo. It paralyzed him and he heard his father's voice come from a great distance. "Up in the attic in the black trunk are six notebooks wrapped in oilpaper. They were written in pencil, but I went over them carefully in ink. That is my life-work, Hugo. It is the secret--of you. Given those books, a good laboratory worker could go through all my experiments and repeat each with the same success. I tried a little myself. I found out things--for example, the effect of the process is not inherited by the future generations. It must be done over each time. It has seemed to me that those six little books--you could slip them all into your coat pocket--are a terrible explosive. They can rip the world apart and wipe humanity from it. In malicious hands they would end life. Sometimes, when I became nervous waiting for the newspapers, waiting for a letter from you, I have been sorely tempted to destroy them. But now--"

"Now?" Hugo echoed huskily.

"Now I understand. There is no better keeping for them than your own. I give them to you."

"Me!"

"You, son. You must take them, and the burden must be yours. You have grown to manhood now and I am proud of you. More than proud. If I were not, I myself would destroy the books here on this bed. Matilda would bring them and I would watch them burn so that the danger would go with--" he cleared his throat--"my dream."

"But--"

"You cannot deny me. It is my wish. You can see what it means. A world grown suddenly--as you are."

"I, father--"

"You have not avoided responsibility. You will not avoid this, the greatest of your responsibilities. Since the days when I made those notes--what days!--biology has made great strides. For a time I was anxious. For a time I thought that my research might be rediscovered. But it cannot be. Theory has swung in a different direction." He smiled with inner amusement. "The opticians have decided that the microscope I made is impossible. The biochemists, moving through the secretions of such things as hippuric acid in the epithelial cells, to enzymes, to hormones, to chromosomes, have put a false construction on everything. It will take hundreds, thousands of years to see the light. The darkness is so intense and the error so plausible that they may never see again exactly as I saw. The fact of you, at best, may remain always no more than a theory. This is not vanity. My findings were a combination of accidents almost outside the bounds of mathematical probability. It is you who must bear the light."

Hugo felt that now, indeed, circumstance had closed around him and left him without succour or recourse. He bowed his head. "I will do it, father."

"Now I can die in peace--in joy."

With an almost visible wrench Hugo brought himself back to his surroundings. "Nonsense, father. You'll probably get well."

"No, son. I've studied the progress of this disease in the lower orders--when I saw it imminent. I shall die--not in pain, but in sleep. But I shall not be dead--because of you." He held out his hand for Hugo.

Some time later the old professor fell asleep and Hugo tiptoed from the room. Food was sizzling downstairs in the kitchen, but he ignored it, going out into the sharp air by the front door. He hastened along the streets and soon came to the road that led up the mountain. He climbed rapidly, and when he dared, he discarded the tedious little steps of all mankind. He reached the side of the quarry where he had built the stone fort, and seated himself on a ledge that hung over it. Trees, creepers, and underbrush had grown over the place, but through the October-stripped barricade of their branches he could see a heap of stones that was his dolmen, on which the hieroglyph of him was inscribed.

Two tears scalded his cheeks; he trembled with the welter of his emotions. He had failed his father, failed his trust, failed the world; and in the abyss of that grief he could catch no sight of promise or hope. Having done his best, he had still done nothing, and it was necessary for him to lie to put the thoughts of a dying man to rest. The pity of that lie! The folly of the picture he had painted of himself--Hugo Danner the scourge of God, Hugo Danner the destroying angel, Hugo Danner the hero of a quick love-affair that turned brown and dead like a plucked flower, the sentimental soldier, the involuntary misanthrope.

"I must do it!" he whispered fiercely. The ruined stones echoed the sound of his voice with a remote demoniac jeer. Do what? What, strong man? What?

XXI

Now the winds keened from the mountains, and snow fell. Abednego Danner, the magnificent Abednego Danner, was carried to his last resting-place, the laboratory of nature herself. His wife and his son followed the bier; the dirge was intoned, the meaningless cadence of ritual was spoken to the cold ground; a ghostly obelisk was lifted up over his meagre remains. Hugo had a wish to go to the hills and roll down some gigantic chunk of living rock to mark that place until the coming of a glacier, but he forbore and followed all the dark conventions of disintegration.

The will was read and the bulk of Hugo's sorry gains was thrust back into his keeping. He went into the attic and opened the black trunk where the six small notebooks lay in oilpaper. He took them out and unwrapped them. The first two books were a maze of numbered experiments. In the third a more vigorous calligraphy, a quivering tracery of excitement, marked the repressed beginning of a new earth.

He bought a bag and some clothes and packed; the false contralto of his mother's hymns as she went about the house filled him with such despair that he left after the minimum interval allowed by filial decency. She was a grim old woman still, one to whom the coming of the kingdom to Africa was a passion, the polishing of the coal stove a duty, and the presence of her unfamiliar son a burden.

When he said good-by, he kissed her, which left her standing on the station platform looking at the train with a flat, uncomprehending expression. Hugo knew where he was going and why: he was on his way to Washington. The great crusade was to begin. He had no plans, only ideals, which are plans of a sort. He had told his father he was making the world a better place, and the idea had taken hold of him. He would grapple the world, his world, at its source; he would no longer attempt to rise from a lowly place; he would exert his power in the highest places; government, politics, law, were malleable to the force of one man.

Most of his illusion was gone. As he had said so glibly to his father, there were good men and corrupt in the important situations in the world; to the good he would lend his strength, to the corrupt he would exhibit his embattled antipathy. He would be not one impotent person seeking to dominate, but the agent of uplift. He would be what he perceived life had meant him to be: an instrument. He could not be a leader, but he could create a leader.

Such was his intention; he had seen a new way to reform the world, and if his inspiration was clouded occasionally with doubt, he disavowed the doubts as a Christian disavows temptation. This was to be his magnificent gesture; he closed his eyes to the inferences made by his past.

He never thought of himself as pathetic or quixotic; his ability to measure up to external requirements was infinite; his disappointment lay always (he thought) in his spirit and his intelligence. He went to Washington: the world was pivoting there.

His first few weeks were dull. He installed himself in a pleasant house and hired two servants. The use to which he was putting his funds compensated for their origin. It was men like Shayne who would suffer from his mission. And such a man came into view before very long.

Hugo interested himself in politics and the appearance of politics. He read the _Congressional Record_, he talked with everyone he met, he went daily to the Capitol and listened to the amazing pattern of harangue from the lips of innumerable statesmen. In looking for a cause his eye fell naturally on the problem of disarmament. Hugo saw at once that it was a great cause and that it was bogged in the greed of individuals. It is not difficult to become politically partisan in the Capitol of any nation. It was patent to Hugo that disarmament meant a removal of the chance for war; Hugo hated war. He moved hither and thither, making friends, learning, entertaining, never exposing his plan--which his new friends thought to be lobbying for some impending legislation.

He picked out an individual readily enough. Some of the men he had come to know were in the Senate, others in the House of Representatives, others were diplomats, newspaper reporters, attachés. Each alliance had been cemented with care and purpose. His knowledge of an enemy came by whisperings, by hints, by plain statements.

Congressman Hatten, who argued so eloquently for laying down arms and picking up the cause of humanity, was a guest of Hugo's.

"Danner," he said, after a third highball, "you're a sensible chap. But you don't quite get us. I'm fighting for disarmament--"

"And making a grand fight--"

The Congressman waved his hand. "Sure. That's what I mean. You really want this thing for itself. But, between you and me, I don't give a rap about ships and guns. My district is a farm district. We aren't interested in paying millions in taxes to the bosses and owners in a coal and iron community. So I'm against it. Dead against it--with my constituency behind me. Nobody really wants to spend the money except the shipbuilders and steel men. Maybe they don't, theoretically. But the money in it is too big. That's why I fight."

"And your speeches?"

"Pap, Danner, pure pap. Even the yokels in my home towns realize that."

"It doesn't seem like pap to me."

"That's politics. In a way it isn't. Two boys I was fond of are lying over there in France. I don't want to make any more shells. But I have to think of something else first. If I came from some other district, the case would be reversed. I'd like to change the tariff. But the industrials oppose me in that. So we compromise. Or we don't. I think I could put across a decent arms-limitation bill right now, for example, if I could get Willard Melcher out of town for a month."

"Melcher?"

"You know him, of course--at least, who he is. He spends the steel money here in Washington--to keep the building program going on. Simple thing to do. The Navy helps him. Tell the public about the Japanese menace, the English menace, all the other menaces, and the public coughs up for bigger guns and better ships. Run 'em till they rust and nobody ever really knows what good they could do."

"And Melcher does that?"

The Congressman chuckled. "His pay-roll would make your eyes bulge. But you can't touch him."

Hugo nodded thoughtfully. "Don't you think anyone around here works purely for an idea?"

"How's that? Oh--I understand. Sure. The cranks!" And his laughter ended the discussion.

Hugo began. He walked up the brick steps of Melcher's residence and pulled the glittering brass knob. A servant came to the door.

"Mr. Danner to see Mr. Melcher. Just a moment."

A wait in the hall. The servant returned. "Sorry, but he's not in."

Hugo's mouth was firm. "Please tell him that I saw him come in."

"I'm sorry, sir, but he is going right out."

"Tell him--that he will see me."

The servant raised his voice. "Harry!" A heavy person with a flattened nose and cauliflower ears stepped into the hall. "This gentleman wishes to see Mr. Melcher, and Mr. Melcher is not in--to him. Take care of him, Harry." The servant withdrew.

"Run along, fellow."

Hugo smiled. "Mr. Melcher keeps a bouncer?"

An evil light flickered in the other's eyes. "Yeah, fellow. And I came up from the Pennsy mines. I'm a tough guy, so beat it."

"Not so tough your ears and nose aren't a sight," Hugo said lightly.

The man advanced. His voice was throaty. "Git!"

"You go to the devil. I came here to see Melcher and I'm going to see him."

"Yeah?"

The tough one drew back his fist, but he never understood afterwards what had taken place. He came to in the kitchen an hour later. Mr. Melcher heard him rumble to the floor and emerged from the library. He was a huge man, bigger than his bouncer; his face was hard and sinister and it lighted with an unpleasant smile when he saw the unconscious thug and measured the size of Hugo. "Pulled a fast one on Harry, eh?"

"I came to see you, Melcher."

"Well, might as well come in now. I worked up from the mines myself, and I'm a hard egg. If you got funny with me, you'd get killed. Wha' daya want?"

Hugo sat down in a leather chair and lit a cigarette. He was comparatively without emotion. This was his appointed task and he would make short shrift of it. "I came here, Melcher," he began, "to talk about your part in the arms conferences. It happens that I disagree with you and your propaganda. It happens that I have a method of enforcing my opinion. Disarmament is a great thing for the world, and putting the idea across is the first step toward even bigger things. I know the relative truths of what you say about America's peril and what you get from saying it. Am I clear?"

Melcher had reddened. He nodded. "Perfectly."

"I have nothing to add. Get out of town."

Melcher's eyes narrowed. "Do you really believe that sending me out of town would do any good? Do you have the conceit to think that one nutty shrimp like you can buck the will and ideas of millions of people?"

Hugo did not permit his convictions to be shaken. "There happen to be extenuating circumstances, Melcher."

"Really? You surprise me." The broad sarcasm was shaken like a weapon. "And do you honestly think you could chase me--me--out of here?"

"I am sure of it."

"How?"

Hugo extinguished his cigarette. "I happen to be more than a man. I am--" he hesitated, seeking words--"let us say, a devil, or an angel, or a scourge. I detest you and what you stand for. If you do not leave--I can ruin your house and destroy you. And I will." He finished his words almost gently.

Melcher appeared to hesitate. "All right. I'll go. Immediately. This afternoon."

Hugo was astonished. "You will go?"

"I promise. Good afternoon, Mr. Danner."

Hugo rose and walked toward the door. He was seething with surprise and suspicion. Had he actually intimidated Melcher so easily? His hand touched the knob. At that instant Melcher hit him on the head with a chair. It broke in pieces. Hugo turned around slowly.

"I understand. You mistook me for a dangerous lunatic. I was puzzled for a moment. Now--"

Melcher's jaw sagged in amazement when Hugo did not fall. An instant later he threw himself forward, arms out, head drawn between his shoulders. With one hand Hugo imprisoned his wrists. He lifted Melcher from the floor and shook him. "I meant it, Melcher. And I will give you a sign. Rotten politics, graft, bad government, are doomed." Melcher watched with staring eyes while Hugo, with his free hand, rapidly demolished the room. He picked up the great desk and smashed it, he tore the stone mantelpiece from its roots; he kicked the fireplace apart; he burst a hole in the brick wall--dragging the bulk of a man behind him as he moved. "Remember that, Melcher. No one else on earth is like me--and I will get you if you fail to stop. I'll come for you if you squeal about this--and I leave it to you to imagine what will happen."

Hugo walked into the hall. "You're all done for--you cheap swindlers. And I am doom." The door banged.

Melcher swayed on his feet, swallowed hard, and ran upstairs. "Pack," he said to his valet.

He had gone; Hugo had removed the first of the public enemies. Yet Hugo was not satisfied. His approach to Melcher had been dramatic, terrifying, effective. There were rumours of that violent morning. The rumours said that Melcher had been attacked, that he had been bought out for bigger money, that something peculiar was occurring in Washington. If ten, twenty men left and those rumours multiplied by geometrical progression, sheer intimidation would work a vast good.

But other facts disconcerted Hugo. In the first place, his mind kept reverting to Melcher's words: "Do you have the conceit to think that one person can buck the will of millions?" No matter how powerful that person, his logic added. Millions of dollars or people? the same logic questioned. After all, did it matter? People could be perjured by subtler influences than gold. Secondly, the parley over arms continued to be an impasse despite the absence of Melcher. Perhaps, he argued, he had not removed Melcher soon enough. A more carefully focused consideration showed that, in spite of what Hatten had said. It was not individuals against whom the struggle was made, but mass stupidity, gigantic bulwarks of human incertitude. And a new man came in Melcher's place--a man who employed different tactics. Hugo could not exorcise the world.

A few days later Hugo learned that two radicals had been thrown into jail on a charge of murder. The event had taken place in Newark, New Jersey. A federal officer had attempted to break up a meeting. He had been shot. The men arrested were blamed, although it was evident that they were chance seizures, that their proved guilt could be at most only a social resentfulness. At first no one gave the story much attention. The slow wheels of Jersey justice--printed always in quotation marks by the dailies--began to turn. The men were summarily tried and convicted of murder in the first degree. A mob assaulted the jail where they were confined--without success. Two of the mob were wounded by riot guns.

A meeting was held in Berlin, one in London, another in Paris. Moscow was silent, but Moscow was reported to be in an uproar. The trial assumed international proportions overnight. Embassies were stormed; legations from America were forced to board cruisers. Strikes were ordered; long queues of sullen men and women formed at camp kitchens. The President delivered a message to Congress on the subject. Prominent personages debated it in public halls, only to be acclaimed and booed concomitantly. The sentence imposed on two Russian immigrants rocked the world. In some cities it was not safe for American tourists to go abroad in the streets. And all the time the two men drew nearer to the electric chair.

It was then that Hugo met Skorvsky. Many people knew him; he was a radical, a writer; he lived in Washington, he styled himself an unofficial ambassador of the world. A small, dark man with a black moustache who attended one of Hugo's informal afternoon discussions on a vicarious invitation. "Come over and see Hugo Danner. He's something new in Washington."

"Something new in Washington? I shall omit the obvious sarcasm. I shall go." Skorvsky went.

Hugo listened to him talk about the two prisoners. He was lucid; he made allowances for the American democracy, which in themselves were burning criticism. Hugo asked him to dinner. They dined at Hugo's house.

"You have the French taste in wines," Skorvsky said, "but, as it is to my mind the finest taste in the world, I can say only that."