THERE was something almost feline in the movements of Saul Hartz. So cat-footed was his progress about the Office that he was continually taking his staff by surprise. It made for efficiency, no doubt, this liability to be overlooked and incidentally “to be fired” at short notice; but in the opinion of the more Olympian spirits who lived under his ægis such tactics were hardly worthy of one so august. They were content to suffer them all the same. Saul Hartz in everything insisted on being a law unto himself.
He was very much a law unto himself to-night.
“What do you make of it?” So like the man to get through at once, without preface or apology, to a leading question. The book, at that moment, was the one thing that mattered to the Colossus. “Bright fellow that?” He did not disdain to answer his own question; it was his method, as a rule, of asking another. “But!” He tapped a finger of rue, half humorous, half melodramatic upon the center of an immense forehead, “just a weeny!” As he drummed again an odd puckering of the eyelids somehow became truly comic. “I’m sorry to have to say so.”
Helen rose rather nervously from her chair. She was never quite at her ease in this man’s presence. Few were. Before she could muster wits enough to say anything, Saul Hartz had gone on developing his theme in the hushed, far-away voice which only one person at a time was ever able to hear and yet in the ear of that person every syllable was like a bell. “Madness in the mother’s family. Got his dossier—dear fellow! Brilliant at Oxford. At Eton, too. Geared a little too high, just a little too high—that’s all. Great pity! A second Gladstone might have been so useful just now. But”—the shrug of the Colossus almost seemed in the tranced eyes of Helen to set the cosmos whirling—“over the verge already. Dear fellow!”
The finality of that gentle, rather eerie voice turned her soul faint. She could not repress a shudder. The sense of fate as adumbrated in the personality of this man was overpowering.
“Dear fellow!” He developed his theme with a cadence ever-recurring, yet of a slightly fantastic irrelevance, like a leit-motif of the later Wagner. “You’ve seen his speech, I daresay, to his constituents. Proud people—they must be—dear fellow! Mother, you know, was one of the mad Dinneford lot.”
So intense was his absorption in his subject that it might be said to evoke an atmosphere. The room itself became submerged in a miasma that was almost deadly. Helen had a sensation of being stifled by a lurking, unknown force. It was very difficult to interpose a word. By the time she was able to do so, mischief had been wrought.
“Don’t you wonder why I’m here,” she said, “at this hour?”
“To own the Planet,” he laughed, “is to wonder at nothing.”
“I want your help in a matter of great importance.”
“Aha!” There came at once an entire change of tone and manner that was charming. “Sit down again in that chair, and tell me just precisely what I can do.” Of a sudden he had put on the cloak of an indulgent father. When he spoke like that to any one, there was no resisting him.
Helen automatically obeyed. “It’s about Mr. Endor’s speech.” She plunged in medias res. With those eyes, their light ever changing, fixed upon her, she lost the power to order her words artistically. “I have his assurance that he has been misreported.”
“Ah!” The slight exclamation was curiously, almost affectionately, gentle.
“He’s so upset!” A feminine urgency of tone was the oddest contrast. “Almost every word he used has in some strange way been given another meaning. For instance, the final phrase as given in the Evening Press is ‘I believe in the Sword.’”
“Yes, I noticed that.” The tone had all the kindliness of an old-fashioned pedagogue patting on the head a favorite pupil. “A little bold perhaps just now, but striking ... really quite striking!”
“But it was never used. What he did say was, ‘I believe in the Word.’”
“Ah—the ‘Word’—‘I believe in the Word.’ Quite so. Hardly so effective. Everybody has believed in the ‘Word’ since the time of Moses. But the ‘sword,’ it takes a big man just now—just at the moment—to believe in the sword.”
“He doesn’t believe in it, that’s the whole point.” Helen’s voice grew a little strained. “It’s a mistake, just a ghastly mistake. On no account, he says, must the speech be circulated. It will do so much harm, not only in this country, but in America, where he has so many friends.”
“So many friends in America. How interesting!” Again the head of the good boy received a gentle, fatherly pat.
“Don’t you see—that a speech like that—may undo a reputation—a reputation that it has taken years—years—to build up?”
“You think so?” The soul of a courtier was in the throbbing warmth of that faint whisper. “Well, you are always right.” What in the mouth of any one else would have been a gross compliment became in that of the Colossus a sober presentment of fact.
“It is of vital importance that the speech, at any rate the U. P. version, shall not appear in to-morrow’s Planet or Mercury.”
“Quite.” Mr. Hartz nodded indulgently. “One appreciates that ... at least ... one appreciates his feeling about it ... dear fellow!”
“He has an important meeting at Hellington to-morrow.”
“Quite.” Again the indulgent nod.
“And the U. P. must circulate an unconditional withdrawal to overtake as quickly as possible the harm it has already done.”
There was not an instant’s hesitation. “If he wants that, he’s entitled to have it certainly.”
“But there’s so little time,” said Helen urgently. “It is only with the utmost difficulty that Mr. Fuller has been persuaded to keep the provincial Mercury off the machines until a quarter to twelve, in the hope of being able to get your permission to omit the speech altogether. There’s only five minutes now, I’m afraid.”
“Much may happen in five minutes at the headquarters of the planetary bodies.” The playfulness of the Colossus was delightful. It was also reassuring. For it had been said of him that inside five minutes he was fully competent to knock Saturn out of the firmament and put it back again.
“Have I your authority to stop the Mercury?” Her eagerness was a little pathetic.
“Why, of course,—of course.” The tone was thistledown.
“If I may use your telephone——” She was on her feet, the woman of action.
“Sit down, please, and go on reading his clever book while I myself speak a little word to the Office. These rubs will arise, don’t you know, in the best regulated families, as Lucifer, Son of the Morning, is said to have remarked on a much-celebrated occasion to President Wilson.” With the air of a very kindly, rather boyish, old gentleman having a game of romps with a favorite grandchild, he forced her back to her chair and her book. And then with a kind of elephantine humor he made for the door.
At its threshold, with a hearty laugh, he turned again. “The revised version of this priceless old-world story is that it was Mr. President who really made the remark to the Eldest of the Sons of Time in old John Milton’s—or was it old John Morley’s?—hearing. However, the point is not material at the moment. A little word with the Office.”
With the pleasant chuckle of one basking agreeably in the light of his own humor, he went out of the room.