Part 16

“How far do you think it possible,” she ventured to ask, “for one mind, or for a group of minds, to act subconsciously upon the mind of another person, without coming into direct contact with it, in order to control its actions?”

“An interesting speculation!” Wygram spoke with the simple candor of one very much a master of his subject. “I think myself the science--and as one happens to know, a dark and terrible science it is, which the East has already brought to an uncanny perfection--of imposing one’s will upon the will of another is being developed to a point which threatens some very ugly developments.”

“That is just what one feels oneself,” said Helen.

“Only the other day,” said Wygram, “I was called in by the New York police to help in a terrible case which has made a great impression over there. It was that of a man, otherwise presumably sane, who committed a perfectly senseless and illogical crime because a deadly enemy, an expert practitioner of the new science, had been able to tamper with the mind of that man subconsciously while he slept.”

“How dreadful!”

Wygram agreed that the speculations opened up by a fact so sinister were not pleasant. “The whole world is on the down grade,” he said. “Man has played things up too high. For many years he has been dealing with unclean things--subtle poisons, high explosives, black magic. But to my mind this new science which has come out of the East is the worst of all, because it is by far the most elusive.”

“Can it be used, do you suppose, on a large scale?”

“The fear is that it can be,” said Wygram, “and that it will be. An unlucky signalman the other day at Hellington had a lapse of memory. The London express ran into a goods train that was being shunted out of a siding. Such a thing, in normal circumstances, should never occur. By reason of it, sixteen people were killed and sixty-eight injured. Among the killed were the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Judge of the High Court. Accident, says the world. A rub of the green, say the directors of the railway company. Fate, say the newspapers. Call it what you will, but at the point the perverted mind of man has now reached, who shall say what the real cause was? Perhaps a certain very distinguished Chinese thinker now in this country might be able to throw a new light on a terrible occurrence.” At the look of horror in the eyes of the woman at his side, Wygram paused. “Mind you,” he said, “one does not for a moment accept all the implications that such a theory may open up. Let the possibility be advanced just for what it is worth. And I think”--his voice grew very gentle--“it would have been kinder, and perhaps wiser, not to have advanced such a possibility at all.”

“Your studies have made you pessimistic,” said Helen, hoping this was a straw to which she might cling.

“Yes, I quite think so,” Wygram agreed. “Every mind becomes subdued to that in which it works. But I do feel that human life was never exposed to so many hidden perils as to-day.”

“One feels that, too,” said Helen. “Indeed,”--she shivered slightly--“the truth of that somehow strikes to one’s marrow.”

As she spoke, she was sharply aware that the man at her side was looking at her with a grave curiosity.

“Forgive the question,” he said, in his soft voice, “if it should seem impertinent,--but do you say that as a private member of the community, or as the wife of a man to whom so many eyes now turn in the hope that he may be able to do a great and much needed work for us all?”

Girt by the thought that Saul Hartz was at another table and that no fragment of their talk was likely to reach his ear, Helen confessed that she was now haunted, not so much on her own account as on that of her husband, by a great fear.

Something in her manner seemed to impress Wygram deeply. “Tell me,” he said, in a voice hardly above a whisper, “just what it is that you fear in regard to him in the near future?”

“It is too vague to be put into words,” said Helen, anxiously. But again she shivered, and again Wygram looked at her with his questioning eyes.

He forbore, however, from pressing the point further. So sharp was her distress that he gave the subject an adroit turn, and did not refer to it again. But this talk, all the same, made a profound impression upon Helen.

Next morning she breakfasted early, at the beck of a strong desire to catch the first possible train. London, her home, her husband were calling her. A second night of very little sleep had made Cloudesley and its surroundings almost intolerable. She was oppressed by a sense of being urgently needed elsewhere. Hour by hour, a conviction had gained strength in her mind that something was about to happen to John.

Perhaps “the something” had happened already. Who could say? An obsession seized her that such was the case. At all events, the breaking of his engagement for the week-end, without being able to give a reason, a proceeding altogether unlike him, lent color to this new and harsh belief. Both Hartz and Wygram, men whose every word meant much, had dropped more than one hint that her husband was in the toils of ineluctable fate.

Helen could not hope for peace of mind until she was back in Brompton Square. And soon after half past eight, as she crossed the hall to the car which was to take her to the station, with every thought fixed upon getting away from this hive of unpleasant memories, a simple thing happened which yet seemed to add tenfold to her fears.

Wygram, who was just coming down to breakfast, intercepted her at the foot of the stairs. “Good-by, my dear Mrs. Endor,” he said, in a cordial tone. And then in one much lower, but of vital urgency, “Take care of your husband. The world has need of him. And if in the course of the next few days you feel you must have a friend whom you can really trust, please remember your compatriot, George Hierons, who, I believe, is still in London. It may be, of course, that the need will not arise. Sincerely one hopes it may not. But if it does, consult him. Again, good-by!”

These cryptic words did not lessen Helen’s alarm. More than ever she was convinced that something had happened or was about to happen to the man she loved.

XLVIII

It was within a few minutes of one o’clock when Helen reached Brompton Square. Of the maid who opened the door she inquired eagerly for Mr. Endor.

The fever of her mind was such that it felt a keen relief from the mere fact of John being in his room at work. She flew to him. But the feeling of joy left her the moment she entered the room. He was pacing heavily up and down in a way that brought to her mind a wild animal in a cage. His hands were clenched behind him, and his eyes, rather weird in their intensity, lent a look of strangeness to a haggard face.

So strong was the thrall upon him that even Helen’s sudden appearance in the room did not cause him to throw it off. She could hardly bear to see his face. It was that of a man whose nerves had been deranged by the sight of a ghost. Indeed, when he stopped at last and turned towards Helen, there was something in that face which seemed to drive the blood from her heart.

“Darling!” she gasped as her hands clasped his coat, “tell me--tell me what _is_ the matter? Why do you look like that? What awful thing has happened?”

He did not answer. She repeated the question with a tenser anxiety. “What _is_ the matter? Do tell me!”

It was impossible for him to do so. In the urgency of the moment he did what he could to keep back the truth. But at the best, it was a lame, clumsy, half-hearted effort.

“You think you may have caught a slight chill motoring into the country yesterday?” An explanation so feeble could but add fuel to Helen’s incredulity. Something far beyond that poor excuse was called for by those wild eyes and ashen cheeks.

“Not that I’m really ill,” he managed to say. But the voice was not his. Hollow, spectral, thin, it might have been a ghost’s.

She knew that he was ill indeed. Eyes of despair, now palpably shrinking from contact with hers, told her too clearly that he was suffering from a grave malady. Moreover she knew he was trying his utmost to conceal the fact from her.

Suddenly her eye lit on a sheet of foolscap lying on the carpet. In the agitation of the moment it had drifted, no doubt, from his writing table. It was covered with recent writing which had been left to dry.

As Helen picked up this document, she glanced at it, almost without a thought of what she did. A swift intuition told her that this was no ordinary paper.

He had been making his will!

“Why not?” He tried for a light and whimsical inflection, with which to turn aside that startled accusation. The failure to achieve it was complete. In fact, it was so complete that in the ear of Helen it sounded rather ghastly.

“Something awful has happened,” she said. “I feel sure of it.”

The alarm in her eyes, her note of fierce conviction, was becoming too much for him. Even if he owed it to her to carry the thing off bravely, in a fashion that would spare her infinite pain, he soon began to realize that in his present shattered state such a task was beyond him.

For the time being, she was stronger than he. Face to face with death he had made up his mind to accept it with stoicism, but the importunity of the woman he adored overcame him now. At first, he had been fully determined to tell her nothing. The concealed rock which had shattered a fine career should remain undisclosed. But he saw that it would be inhuman to meet death in silence and in secrecy, even had such a course been feasible.

How much should he tell? That was his problem. She was his wife, and had a right to know all. He had made, it was true, certain solemn vows. But these, as he now saw, had been entered upon in an evil hour. Therefore, he must break these vows and pay for the privilege with his life. But the question remained, how much would it be expedient to tell her?

One fact he did not doubt. Enemies, terrible and implacable, would be ranged against him. And if they should once suspect that their secrets had been divulged to Helen, her life, too, would not be worth a moment’s purchase.

In spite of that, however, embarked on his strange story, he found it beyond his power to withhold any material detail. It became a sheer impossibility to choose or select. All had to be known, once the die was cast. Listening in grief and horror to a narrative of events which began with John’s rooted conviction that the world was now at grips with a terrible evil, Helen was yet able in some measure to impose her will upon the man she loved. A deep instinct told her that the only hope of saving his life lay with her; and if so frail a chance was to be fruitful, she must acquaint herself with all the strands of the coil in which he was involved.

XLIX

At the end of a story which, halting and fragmentary as it was, took some time to tell, Helen felt shattered. Deprived of the power to act or to think consecutively, all the force of a strong will was needed to sustain her. The awful Nemesis which had overtaken a phase of passing weakness in a good and brave man struck at her heart; but in the end it was perhaps as much as anything the sense of Fate’s injustice that roused her fighting spirit.

With all the facts of the case before her, and once the control of her nerves had been regained, Helen soon made up her mind. Be the cost what it might, her husband’s life should not be thrown away. By nature and temperament a woman of action, she was accustomed to reach quick and bold decisions. And in the moment her resolve was taken it was fortified by a sudden recollection of Wygram’s final words. “If, in the course of the next few days, you feel you must have a friend whom you can really trust, please remember your compatriot, George Hierons, who, I believe, is still in London.”

Such words seemed truly prophetic. And as they came back to Helen’s mind, she was upheld by a deep faith that John and she were not to be abandoned in this hour of strife against the powers of darkness. Providence was surely at their side. It was working for them. Counsel and sympathy had come to her mysteriously, but she recognized the source whence it sprang. Behind the phenomena of appearances there was somewhere a Friend. And that Friend, whoever, whatever it might be, she felt was going to help them now.

Luncheon was a miserable and belated meal. For both it was but a hollow pretense. They were in such a febrile state of anxiety that the mere presence of food was almost unbearable. But seated at the table, crumbling bread and sipping water, Helen was able to do a certain amount of thinking. At the end of this Barmecide feast, when she rose and left the dining room, a kind of plan was already taking shape in her mind.

All the facts of the case, which with infinite difficulty she had been able to drag out of John, were now more or less clear. They were marshaled in definite order, they fell into a logical scheme. It now remained for her to act without an instant’s delay upon the data she had so painfully gathered. And yet to move at all in such a matter called for rare courage, high devotion.

At his wife’s entreaty, Endor went down to the House of Commons as soon as luncheon was over. Her clear good sense, upon which he now leaned heavily, saw that for him in so terrible a crisis the paramount need was to keep at work. She divined that the only chance he had of holding on to the will was to occupy himself as much as possible. In such a crisis any form of brooding or inaction would be fatal.

For her, anything of that kind would be fatal, too. She must not look before or after. It was like crossing an abyss on a narrow plank. Her resolve taken, her plan formed, one pang of indecision might paralyze a nerve upon which all chance of safety depended. And she must act without an instant’s delay.

She listened for the click of the front door. And then from the discreet ambush of the charming new curtains of that singularly pleasant room, in which so lately as two days ago, each individual object had been a thing of delight, she watched her husband’s tall and picturesque figure disappear round the corner of the Square into the Brompton Road. Then she went to the telephone at once and rang up Freeman’s Hotel.

It seemed an age before her demand to speak with Mr. Hierons could be met. A voice was not sure whether Mr. Hierons was now staying at the hotel, but it would find out. He had been away some days and the voice rather fancied that he had not yet returned. Minutes passed. And then in the midst of a baffled impotence that was almost a fever now, to Helen’s unspeakable relief, a tone she faintly recognized said, “Are you there?”

George Hierons was speaking. If Mrs. Endor cared to come round at once to the hotel he would be glad to wait in for her.

L

On the way to Freeman’s Hotel in a taxi, Helen did her best to remember that she still lived and moved and had her being in twentieth century London. She tried hard to keep all the simple and familiar realities before her mind. Everything looked so oddly different now from what it had done less than three hours ago when she had driven west from St. Pancras station, that such a ritual seemed necessary. She was plunged in a state of affairs whose fantastic horror it was hardly possible for a mind so sane as hers to exaggerate. It was like living in a nightmare, except that it was much more vivid. But when everything around, the rattle of the taxi, the London mud, the raw air, had convinced her that she was truly awake, she might have bartered her immortal soul to believe otherwise.

George Hierons, who was living _en suite_, received Helen in his own private sitting room. He greeted her with a cordial tenderness which could only have sprung from the regard of an honest and a good man. Yet hardly a glance was needed to tell her that not a little of her own acute distress was shared by a true friend.

The face of George Hierons was that of a highly sensitive man who was suffering acutely. His visitor was struck by a tragic change in his appearance. Eyes and cheeks had deep hollows, their lines a look of age that mere years did not warrant; and underlying a strong and beautiful face was a torment of pain, stifled and repressed, that Helen could not bear to see.

She had the courage to begin with a conventional remark. But Hierons at once made clear that there was no need to withhold anything. He took her hands gently in his own.

“You have done a wise thing in coming to see me,” he said without a word of preface. “Tell me just how much you know.”

Helen hesitated. John had revealed much as to the workings of the Society, but he had been careful not to disclose the names of its members. She had strong reason to suspect that Hierons belonged to it, but until she was quite sure it would be the height of folly to lay her cards on the table.

“You may tell me all,” he said, reading her thoughts without difficulty. “I was with the Council so recently as half past eleven this morning--if it is any satisfaction to you to know that.”

“That is to say you belong?”

“Yes,” he said, again taking her hands.

She could not hide the look of frank horror that came into her eyes. Her impulse was to draw away from him as if he had been a thing unclean. Man of fine perceptions as he was, he yielded instantly to her emotion, not trying to combat it, but stepping back a pace with a slight bow.

“You see,” he said in a low voice, “the stake we play for is the highest there is. All that we do, all that we have done, all that we hope to do, is dictated by the faith that the peace of the world depends upon us.”

“Do you still believe that?” asked Helen, looking at him steadily.

He did not answer at once.

With an insurgency of feeling, an odd tightening of her throat and breast, she repeated her question.

“Yes,” he said. “That is still our position.”

“You honestly think,” said Helen, “that evil can be met with evil? You think that murder can prevent murder?”

“In certain extreme cases,” said Hierons, “we hold that view. The Church has failed, Christianity is a back number, one after another the higher moral sanctions are going by the board. Human society is very sick indeed. Only a desperate remedy can save it.”

Helen looked bleakly at Hierons. But she didn’t speak.

“The root of the trouble,” Hierons went on, “is that it is still in the power of certain people, of one man if you like, to unchain forces more terrible than the earth has yet known. This unlucky planet of ours is entering upon a new phase. Unless steps, drastic and immediate, are taken to bring under control those who now govern it, the human race may soon be faced with a catastrophe beside which all its other catastrophes--and Heaven knows what they have been in the immemorial past!--may appear of small account.”

The grim intensity of her countryman’s earnestness kept Helen silent. He paused a few seconds that she might say something, but she chose not to speak.

“I intend to take you fully into my confidence,” said Hierons with the childlike simplicity of a great mind. “Our Society which we believe to include the flower of the world’s creative wisdom takes no narrow or partial view. It sees the human race now at the mercy of a particular type of brain and that type is peculiarly ignoble. It sees other and finer types, developed on lines less grossly material, with but little chance against this archetype whose gospel is the cynical application of brute force. The weaker or more delicate types--so far as our Society can read world tendencies--are fighting a losing battle with their backs against the wall. In other words, so far as this unhappy time is concerned, Evil is stronger than Good.”

“Hasn’t it always been so?” said Helen.

“More or less, I agree. But human ingenuity has now entered a phase which is a direct menace to evolution itself. Never has it been so imperative that those who do evil for the love of evil should be brought under control.”

“Surely,” said Helen, “that control can only be acquired by invoking the spirit of Right.”

“True. And our Society, odd as the fact may seem to the uninitiate, exists for that very purpose.”

Helen’s face showed a frank incredulity. “You would have one believe,” she said, with a thrill of horror in her voice, “that people are murdered secretly in the name of the Most High?”

“Murder is a harsh word. But as you say,” Hierons went on in a stern, solemn tone, “the Society’s every act is dictated by the aim it has in view. ‘God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.’”

“To me,” said Helen with a little gasp of horror, “that sounds very like blasphemy.”

“No, no!” said Hierons. “Consider the problem the world has now to face. It is all very well to say that faith will move mountains, but when Good is being done inevitably to death by the massed forces of Evil, it is for those of us who dare to believe that the world may yet be saved for mankind to use to the best of our skill what weapons the stronger power may have left us.”

“Or to put it in another way,” said Helen, who was following a singular argument closely, “believing as your Society does that this earth of ours is now ruled by the spirit of Evil, in order to restore the balance of power it is necessary in the most literal fashion to break the Sixth Commandment.”

“Yes,” said Hierons. “But only in the last resort. And such are the basic conditions which now govern the world that no other alternative is left to the Friends of Peace. Let us take a concrete instance. Saul Hartz has the power with the terrible machine he controls to bring about war between Britain and America. And the best informed people firmly believe that he will do so.”

“But why should he? The power of the Universal Press is almost as great in one country as in the other.”

“True. And there’s the rub. The American Senate has recently decided to take strong action against the International Newspaper Ring. Certain trust laws, more or less obsolete, are going to be revived and rigidly enforced. The Colossus is now in a position to fight them and is preparing to do so. And say the wise, so that his will may prevail, he must presently force a fratricidal conflict which may plunge the entire world in darkness.”

“You really feel,” gasped Helen, “that he has that power?”

“Undoubtedly. All the strings are in his hand. He has brought to perfection the art of fouling public opinion at its source. And rather than this ‘unthinkable’ war--his favorite newspaper phrase!--shall come to pass, with hell loose in the very air we breathe, with famine and pestilence on every continent, and damage irreparable to all forms of organic life, it were better, say the wise, for the human race to close down altogether.”

“But surely all this is surmise?”

“Would that one might think so. For those who have eyes to see, the designs of the Colossus in 19-- are just as clear as were those of Wilhelm II in the years prior to 1914. That is why the Society of the Friends of Peace is determined at all costs to remove Saul Hartz before a second and greater disaster overtakes this unlucky world.”

Helen was silent. Extremists, tinged with fanaticism, these people might be, but as Hierons presented the facts of the case, and once granting its premises, there was no gainsaying the hard logic of the whole matter.

LI

A solemn pause followed. And then Hierons, with rather an air of taking the bit between his teeth, went suddenly on:

“Fate has ordained that your husband shall do a thing which we, his friends and co-workers, humbly believe to be the will of God.”

“That may be your view,” said Helen. “It may be the view of your Society. But it is not my husband’s. And he is quite ready to give his own life rather than take, as he believes unlawfully, the life of another man.”