Ruffled in temper, chafed in spirit, the Colossus sought distraction in
his morning’s mail. For the most part his letters were not exciting.
But the _bonne bouche_ was still held in reserve. The registered
envelope heavily sealed with black wax and ominously edged with a
mourning border, which had first caught his attention, he was careful
to keep back until all the others had been opened. Finally, as its turn
came, he felt a queer little thrill of anticipation as he took it in
his fingers.
The emotion it aroused was not wholly agreeable. Nay; it was so odd as
to be a little unpleasant. What could such a portentous thing contain?
Before breaking the seal he examined it closely. But externals told
nothing beyond what was to be deduced from the outside of the envelope,
which bore the postmark Charing Cross.
From the inside he took a single sheet of plain note paper. On it were
typewritten the following words:
“TO THE WORLD’S MISCHIEF MAKER
“_You are required to attend a special meeting of the Council of
Seven. Time and place will be communicated to you in due course.
Meanwhile you are advised to put your affairs in order._”
There was no signature to this document. It revealed nothing beyond
these trite sentences, so cryptic and so bald, which might mean so
little or so much.
To Saul Hartz, however, this message implied a great deal. It was
his boast, and no idle one, that he was the best informed man in
Europe. The wonderful organization of which he was the mainspring, the
controlling spirit, gave him facilities for knowing what was taking
place behind the scenes, not in England nor in Europe only, but in
every land of the habitable globe. Many portentous and significant
things, the aftermath of the recent world upheaval, which were only
hinted at in senates and chancellories or vaguely guessed at by private
individuals and the public at large were matters of common form to Saul
Hartz. No man alive had a deeper insight into hidden things. And for
that reason the shock he now received would hardly have been felt by a
person of average information or experience.
This message, strange as it was, came as a blow he had half foreseen.
He was not unprepared, yet in spite of himself he felt a little stunned
by it. The instinct of the dominant human male was to affect a high
contempt, but the instinct of a mind acquainted with a thousand-and-one
cross currents immediately below the troubled surface of human society
was very different. As he stood at his writing table, holding the
letter in his hand, a chill seemed to strike at his heart.
He was still in this attitude when Robert Norton, one of the principal
leader writers of the _Planet_, came into the room. Norton, a brilliant
Irishman of thirty, was the master of a diabolically incisive but
absolutely unscrupulous pen. Without convictions of his own, without
faith, religion or a sense of justice, at every fresh cast of the
political horoscope he was ready at a moment’s notice to make the worse
appear the better part in entire subordination to the abnormal mind by
whom he was rewarded with the salary of a prime minister.
“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.