Part 5

“Ha, Norton, good-morning!” It was a wrench for the Colossus to break his reverie, but with an effort he managed to do so.

Norton, typical product of the large public school and the old university, bowed slightly. He was able to hide the urbane irony of his race, and that was all. With the air of a man at some pains to conceal the fact that his tongue is in his cheek he waited for the august Chief of the U. P. to speak again.

“Are you up in this Garland business?”

It was second nature with Saul Hartz to weigh his words. He took pains to adjust them to every fresh mind with whom he was brought in contact. In his daily intercourse with all sorts and conditions of people he prided himself upon the faculty of saying neither too little nor too much.

“One only knows,” Norton answered, “that about twelve o’clock last night he fell down dead as he entered the Cosmopolitan.”

“No more than that?” The careless tone, the veiled eyes took all significance out of the question.

Such was the limit of Norton’s knowledge of the matter, except that Mr. Gage had given him to understand that he was required to write a leader on the subject whose scope the Chief himself would indicate.

Saul Hartz made no immediate comment on this rather dry answer. He seemed oddly silent and constrained. For the first time in Norton’s knowledge of him there was a look of indecision in his face. Suddenly he said with a change of key so curious as to be a little startling to one who knew him so well: “I’ve changed my mind. We’ll postpone this Garland leader.” He hesitated an instant, and then his voice changed again. “Tell Mr. Gage I would like a further word with him.” It was that tone of the high potentate which was apt secretly to amuse men like Norton who were constitutionally incapable of reverence.

The editor of the _Planet_ obeyed the summons at once. He seemed a bundle of nerves as he came into the room. But his relief was keen when he was curtly informed that for the time being the Garland affair was to stand in abeyance.

“Your resignation, I take it, will not appear to-morrow in large pica on page eight,” said the Colossus with a gleam of frost.

“Not unless you hold me to it.” The look in the large, dark, oriental eyes had an almost canine pathos. Bennet Gage would not have been at all surprised had the despot done so.

“No, carry on, my friend.” The words of the Colossus were light, but a grim mouth belied them. “I quite think we shall have to put all the cards on the table, but this may not be the moment. Before taking a definite line, it may be well to hear what the coroner’s jury has to say on the subject. In the meantime, we had better get to know whether Scotland Yard’s keeping anything up its sleeve.”

“Verity can be trusted there, I think.”

“I hope so.” Saul Hartz, as he spoke, took the black-sealed envelope from the table before him and slipped it into his coat pocket. A weaker man would have been impelled to take Gage into his confidence. But the self-faith of the Colossus stood foursquare against every shock. He was even ready to despise himself for allowing such a piece of “mumbo jumbo” to upset his plans. The fact remained that it had; but so far as he could he was determined to minimize the effect and to conceal the cause.

“You had better make this to-morrow’s first article.”

As the Chief spoke, he opened a drawer in his writing table and took out a printer’s galley proof, with a number of corrections in his own forcible hand. “Instead of ‘The Chinese Situation,’ I’ve headed it ‘Plain Words to the Celestial Empire,’ and you’ll see I’ve gingered it up generally. And Fuller might follow on in the _Mercury_ with ‘A Straight Tip to John Chinaman.’”

The editor cast an acute eye over the Chief’s flamboyance. “A shade on the strong side, aren’t we?” But his tone had lightened considerably. To the mind of Bennet Gage the mysterious death of an American labor leader was a far more significant matter than a calculated affront to several hundred million people.

“The stronger the better,” was the curt answer of the Colossus. “I have very good reasons.”

Mr. Gage did not question that.

“They can be bullied to any amount, dear souls!” The Chief smiled sardonically. “And a little demonstration of our power is called for just now. Every newspaper’s first duty is to impress the groundlings. But even that is not our real aim.” With an abrupt laugh, which to Bennet Gage had a meaning far deeper than mere irony, he suddenly dismissed the subject.

What an enigma the man was! That thought obsessed the mind of the editor of the _Planet_ as he went out of the room.

XVI

After Mr. Gage had gone, Saul Hartz sat some time at his table in deep thought. Then he began to pace the room slowly and heavily, in a state of indecision quite alien to his character. Finally, by pressing the bell once, he summoned Helen Sholto from the next room, issued a few brief but clear directions in regard to the pile of letters on his table, taking care, however, as he did so, to assure himself that the most important one was in his coat pocket. And then putting on overcoat and hat he affirmed his intention of lunching at the Imperium Club and the probability of a return to the Office about four o’clock.

Mr. Hartz’s slow walk from Fleet Street along the Strand across Trafalgar Square was without real incident until he reached Pall Mall. At various points along the route it was illuminated by flaming news bills, his own and his rivals’, proclaiming “Mysterious Death of Famous Labor Leader.” At the very dangerous corner, however, where the Carlton Hotel debauches from the Haymarket, and where more than one recognized ornament of human society has paid toll to Moloch in his modern guise, the Colossus came within an ace of being cut off.

A mechanical contrivance propelled by a simian shape in oilskins and a peaked cap, one of Plato’s two-legged animals without feathers, crashed round the fatal corner almost at the precise instant that Saul Hartz, fathoms deep in thought, incautiously left the pavement. How he managed to escape being run over was purely a matter for the ironical deities who had his affairs in hand. Escape he did, however. And so rudely had his powerful mind been summoned to the needs of the moment that he was able to observe that the engine of destruction was armed fore and aft with placards, bearing the single word

GARLAND

The contraption itself was painted a flaming yellow, the sign manual of the Universal Press, and surmounting it like a halo was its world-famous motto:

FIRST WITH THE NEWS AS USUAL

Perhaps the first emotion to arise in the outraged being of the Colossus was regret that he had not recovered quickly enough from his shock to take the number of this friend of progress. It would have been pleasant to deal with the creature in due season; but if such a feeling was ever there, it was superseded immediately by a sense of pride. As usual, the U. P. was living up to itself. The efficiency of the grim monster that had been created by his severely practical genius was ruthless, astonishing, without a flaw. Only a very little reflection was needed for the mind of Saul Hartz to set the incident in true perspective. The achievement of this obscure servant of the U. P. was not a matter for censure. To dash round the Haymarket corner at midday without warning, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, was praiseworthy in the highest degree. Feats such as that, on an ever-ascending plane, without a thought for the rights of others, had enabled the U. P. to declare, as usual, a dividend for the last financial year of one hundred per cent, free of tax.

Difficult as it was to know why at that moment the mangled form of the Colossus was not on its way in a wheeled ambulance to Charing Cross Hospital, he was not a man to yield to an isolated fact of experience. By the time he had passed through Jermyn Street and had made the perilous crossing to Swan & Edgar’s corner, this minor incident was as if it had not been. The mind of Saul Hartz was now engulfed in a far more potent thing.

Near the entrance of the Piccadilly Hotel he stopped and took from an inner pocket a small address book bound in red leather. Memory reinforced, he went on as far as the Albany and halted finally at a door towards the Vigo Street end of that quaint caravansary.

The knock of the Colossus was answered at once by a creature slightly more odd than his surroundings. A pure bred Egyptian in a neat gray flannel suit, surmounted by a taboosh, opened the door and greeted the visitor with a gravely impassive smile. The man, slight of form, lustrous of feature, had an aloof dignity; he had, moreover the noetic subtlety of a very old civilization.

“Mr. Wygram in? Give him my card, will you?”

In the presence of such forceful, deliberate authority the smile of the janitor became a bow. Mr. Hartz produced a card. “Tell him, please, a very urgent matter.”

The man bowed again. Saul Hartz took this further obeisance as an invitation to enter. With cat-footed elegance the Egyptian silently bore the card to his master.

XVII

Saul Hartz had not long to wait. Almost immediately the Egyptian reappeared. Without speaking a word he contrived to make clear that Mr. Wygram would receive his visitor.

The Colossus was ushered at once into the presence of a remarkable personage. A man about forty years old was seated cross-legged on the ground, after the fashion of the East, in a room hardly less exotic. Its cushions, rugs and curtains evoked the Orient as surely as the tchibouk its occupant was contemplatively sucking and the fumes of the pungent-scented Arabian tobacco which filled the whole place. The man who sat on a cushion on the richly carpeted floor wore a burnoose, slippers and a turban. In every detail of surroundings and pose he recalled a very different scene, but the dark-eyed, close-shaven face, in spite of a withdrawn look which lent it a subtle asceticism, was too fair of skin to suggest an exclusively eastern type.

The keenly penetrating Hartz who had never seen this man before, was a little taken aback by the sight he presented. Almost the first thought that entered the visitor’s mind was that he had to do with an obvious charlatan. The trappings of the East superimposed upon the contours of the West did not inspire confidence. Yet the reputation of this man Wygram was such as to make it impossible to dismiss him lightly. Humbug he might be, yet no one could have earned such a name throughout the world, or rather the underworld of high affairs, without being the possessor of qualities which placed him entirely beyond the range of ordinary people.

All the same a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic found it hard to dissemble a secret pang which was more than disappointment if less than disgust, as he confronted this pseudo-oriental with a smile and a conventional phrase.

“It is good of you, Mr. Wygram, to see me.”

The man on the floor removed the pipe from his lips and bowed slightly. Between his slender fingers, which were those of an æsthete and an artist, he held the card of his august visitor.

“Pray, sit down,” he said, in a gentle voice of extraordinary sweetness as the Egyptian closed the door and left them together.

As Saul Hartz brought his solid bulk very slowly and deliberately to anchor on the edge of a most seductive divan, he felt pretty sure in his own mind that already he had this merry-andrew sized up.

The man on the floor placidly resumed his tchibouk. With a grave absorption, a more than oriental indifference, he continued to smoke. Evidently it was his way of asking his visitor to explain himself. But the Colossus could not help secretly resenting this detachment. He was a very great man. It was idle to disguise that fact. The world at large was even more keenly aware of it than he was himself; therefore, the pose of this creature Wygram was a little galling.

Saul Hartz was too much a man of the world to betray his private feelings. But with an air more rapt than that of any fakir, soothsayer or mystic, Wygram calmly awaited the declaration of his errand. But why declare it? A sudden doubt now stiffened the will of the Colossus. Such a window-dressing fellow was a European or most likely an American, the astutest kind of westerner who knew how to wear his tongue in his cheek. Why, therefore, disclose such an exceedingly intimate matter to one whom instinctively he did not trust; one who, moreover, might know how, should occasion call, to turn such very perilous knowledge against him.

It was not to be wondered at that the ensuing silence was not immediately broken. To Saul Hartz it was peculiarly trying. He was a man who had a right to plume himself upon the faculty of knowing his own mind. His fortunes had been built upon it. But now, at this difficult moment, for almost the first time in his life it deserted him. Should he confide in this charlatan or should he not?

In the end it was the man on the ground who opened the ball. He removed the tube from his lips and said with a curious absence of gesture, almost in the manner of one who communes with the unseen, “I appreciate your difficulty, Mr. Hartz. But in these little matters, things are not always as they appear.”

This speech, delicately suave though it was, yet stung the visitor to words of his own. “What little matters?” he asked, with a sense of irritation that he knew to be illogical.

“When busy men seek me out,” was the answer, “they desire guidance, as a rule, in things beyond their ken ... things which have suddenly, unexpectedly, even terribly obtruded themselves upon their daily lives.”

Curtly, Saul Hartz agreed. This cunning quack was fishing for a clue to the business which had brought him there.

“You are under no obligation to take me into your confidence.” The voice was charming. “There was no compulsion for you to come here at all. And now you are here, you deplore your boldness. The dilemma is quite intelligible. One even sympathizes with it. But there is a short way out, if you will but consent to take it.”

“Very glad, if you’ll find one for me,” said Hartz, in a voice that was half a growl.

“Nothing simpler. Smoke one of my cigarettes and I guarantee that your path shall grow magically clearer.”

Saul Hartz scowled a little. Even when the man on the floor made a long arm and took a box of wonderful Indian inlay work from a tiny table near his elbow and offered it with a smile of rare courtesy, the dubiousness of the visitor was without disguise.

“No pressure,” Wygram held out the box with an air of delicious irony. “Quite a free agent, my dear sir.”

Like a swimmer taking a plunge into the Serpentine on Christmas morning, Saul Hartz suddenly dipped his fingers among the cigarettes. Moreover, with the faint-smiling aid of his host he lit one defiantly, and what was of even more consequence proceeded to smoke it with an air of slight bravado.

It was a powerful, rare, full-flavored Arabian tobacco. Mumbo jumbo, of course! However, he would humor this trickster, who found it so easy to deceive the world into believing that he was a wielder of occult powers. Nevertheless, a dozen whiffs or so cleared the brain wonderfully. Doubts melted. The mind began to germinate. And the man on the ground in spite of his queer trappings and his feline ways acquired a power, an atmosphere, an authority that Saul Hartz had never before conceded to any human being.

“You suffer from limitations, Mr. Hartz.” The fall of the soft syllables had a music beyond anything the Colossus had ever heard.

“We all do, don’t we?” he answered, with a first gruff approach to geniality.

“Yes, but some in a greater, some in a less, degree.”

“True.”

“Even to the verge of platitude! But the trouble with you clean-run westerners, if you’ll excuse my saying so, is that your minds can only react to one small fragment of the Truth; and again, if you’ll excuse my saying so, it is not the fragment that really matters.”

At any other moment, the creator of the _Planet_ newspaper, whose circulation over five continents was reckoned in millions of copies a day, would have challenged this statement. A brain such as his susceptible only to things that didn’t matter! Yes, the usual “gup” of the inflated high-brow ass. But he was good to listen to, this pseudo-oriental, for the simple reason that he was clever enough to keep a special blend of tobacco to soothe, tickle, stimulate the brains of his patrons.

“You ‘practical’ men, who harness Niagara and dream of making the material universe your servant, who aspire to shoot yourselves out of a gun to the planet Jupiter and back again, have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, if you’ll excuse my saying so. However, that’s neither here nor there. You are a busy man with only a limited portion of what you are pleased to call ‘time’ at your disposal.”

“True enough,” Mr. Hartz was now able to muster his own private blend of raillery. “And you would have one believe that what lesser mortals call time and space are completely transcended by such a mind as your own.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. If one is able to glimpse the Whole its counterfeits don’t matter much. But as I am sure you are not particularly concerned with the Realities, perhaps you’ll tell me what I can do for you.”

Mr. Hartz had now smoked the enchanted cigarette; his ideas were clearer, his thoughts less turgid, but he was not yet convinced that any good end would be served by admitting the mysterious Wygram to his confidence. Still, he hoped for enlightenment, perhaps for a little advice. Many whom the world accounted wise had bestowed upon this man undeniable credentials.

The visitor’s perplexity seemed rather to amuse Wygram. “As a proof of my _bona fides_,” he said, after a pause that held a threat of embarrassment, “allow me to indicate your business. It has to do, unless I am greatly mistaken, with the murder of Garland.”

Skeptical as he was, Hartz could not repress a start of surprise. “How did you find out that?”

“A simple matter. I claim no supranatural power: at least as far as you are concerned, and as up till now your affairs have been presented to me. But there is a science of deduction, even if of late years it has been sadly blown upon by writers of fiction. In other words, two and two still make four--at all events in a three-dimensional universe.”

Saul Hartz was a little impressed. “You claim access to the fourth dimension?” he asked, rather naïvely.

“It will be more immediately profitable, I think, if, for the moment, we keep strictly within the scope of this inquiry. You are troubled by the murder of Garland. I use the word ‘murder’ advisedly. You would like to ask why? But let us pass on to its bearing upon your own affairs. Why, Mr. Hartz, are you troubled by this man Garland’s end? I hope you’ll agree that it was richly deserved.”

“An arch-blackguard, certainly.”

“And therefore his fate was merited?”

“Ye-es. Perhaps. But I don’t hold with murder.”

As Saul Hartz spoke, a pair of vivid eyes completely absorbed him. “_You_ don’t hold with murder?” The sensitive lips had a slight curl of scorn.

“No, sir, I do not.” The emphasis of the Colossus amounted almost to indignation. “But why take it for granted that Garland was murdered?”

“Beyond a doubt he was murdered.”

Proofs were asked for.

“He was warned by the Council of Seven,” said Wygram.

Hartz gazed intently at the man on the ground. “So you know about the Council of Seven?” In spite of himself he could not keep an odd tremor out of his voice.

“Oh, yes,” said Wygram. “Perhaps I know as much about the Society of the Friends of Peace as any man alive.”

An imperious curiosity suddenly devoured Saul Hartz. “A member of it, eh?” A feeling of intense repugnance governed the framing of the question.

Wygram said calmly that he was not a member of the Society.

“But if you were”--Mr. Hartz disdained finesse where his feelings were deeply engaged--“you would have to deny it, I presume?”

“Expedient, no doubt,” said Wygram dryly. “But I assure you the need doesn’t arise.”

The heavy face of the visitor lost a little of its gloom. There was even a light of eagerness in the somber eyes as he said: “May I ask one question? When Garland arrived here from New York a week ago, did he consult you professionally in the matter of his warning?”

“He did.” The answer seemed a little reluctant.

“Sought your help and advice?”

“Ye-es.”

“Sought the help you couldn’t give?” The words were almost a sneer. “But no doubt you were able to offer advice that he was not in a position to follow.”

Wygram laughed softly. “That is so, Mr. Hartz. But if you hold these _a priori_ ideas in regard to my abilities why do you come to me yourself?”

“It doesn’t follow that I’ve come to consult you. Howbeit, there is no harm in saying that I have. But one hardly goes so far as to look for material assistance from you.”

“In your dealings with the Society?”

The uncompromising question rather took Saul Hartz aback. “I didn’t say so,” he fenced. “We were discussing Garland. You say that Garland came to you for advice. May I ask what advice you gave him?”

The answer did not come at once. Wygram drew solemnly at his tchibouk. After a silence of several moments he said with a cool picking of words, “Since Garland didn’t choose to follow the advice I gave, it may not be very profitable to disclose it--particularly as I was out of sympathy with the man himself.”

“You offered advice all the same.”

“I did. Out of no regard for Garland, with no desire to save his life, but merely in the interests of the community as a whole.”

“Allow me to put this question.” Hartz’s senses were now strung to the point of intensity. “Had Garland followed the course you suggested to him, do you suppose he would have been alive to-day?”

“I think it highly probable.”

“Yet in your view he was a bad man?”

“Had he taken the advice I gave him, he would have been impotent to do further mischief. But who does take advice?”

“Then why give it?”

“He came to me and sought it. I was enormously interested in his case. He was one of the most remarkable men I ever met. A creature of rare courage, energy, force of will, he aspired to the kind of dictatorship over his fellow men which seems to have such a fascination for half educated minds.”

“You would rate such a man as Garland among the half educated?”

“Among the rather less than half educated. At best his power lay among the turbulent, seething proletariats of the western world which enjoy political power without having to pay for it, among the shiftless herds which are out to grab the goods and chattels of their more fortunate or more deserving neighbors.”

“In other words, his aim was to set class against class, so that he might ride to power on the storm he had raised.”

“_Vide_ the _Planet_ newspaper.” A soft laugh floated up from the ground.

“Just so!” The owner of the _Planet_ newspaper folded his arms with a fine gesture. “We take credit to ourselves for revealing Garlandism in its true colors.”

“And for drawing a dividend from your soap-and-water-using public, while your string of tag, rag and bobtail prints coax dividends from the millions who have no use for soap and water but can always afford a penny, a couple of cents, a few lira or half a mark as the case may be to have their cupidity pleasantly tickled.”

The Colossus had heard the taunt so often that he had learned to smile at it. “You do the Universal Press less than justice,” he said, with a touch of proprietorial complacency.

“No doubt!” The answering smile was a little dour. “But that is between you--and, shall we say?--the Council of Seven.”

In spite of an iron will, Saul Hartz started at the rather sinister deliberation of the words. “For the present, if you don’t mind, let us keep to Garland.” The attempt at rebuke was not altogether successful.