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.