THE next day, which was Sunday, began with a surprise for Helen. When she came downstairs, exactly two minutes after the clock chimed half past eight, she found the servants to the number of sixteen kneeling in the hall and Lady Elizabeth reading prayers in a rigid evangelical manner. Suddenly, the heart of Helen took a leap across the Atlantic. The wanderer was back in her own home; she saw and heard her own mother, who alone of created beings she suspected of practicing this ritual. The flat voice, with its curious, low monotone, the stiffness of the central figure and those around it, even the soft play of light from the diamond panes upon the wonderful Tudor paneling, brought back her childhood with a rush. As Helen knelt in the midst of these people she was once again among her own.
John had had a fairly good night. His temperature was back to normal, and his Spartan parent had given a tardy consent that, provided Dr. Evans, who was expected in the course of the morning, confirmed it, the patient should come down to luncheon and eat roast beef. “Of course, my dear, he ought to stay in bed until to-morrow, but Dr. Evans is a weak man so he’s sure to get round him. However, we mustn’t let that keep us from church.”
For church they set out accordingly twenty minutes before the doctor was due; and Lady Elizabeth, helped by stout boots, a short skirt, and an ebony cane, walked an honest three quarters of a mile across the beautiful park with a practical strength of spirit that Helen could but admire. Again it might have been her own mother in her own home, except that Lady Elizabeth was older than her mother by twenty years.
Sustained by the hope of John at luncheon, Helen did not find the service, although in itself decidedly uninspired, so hard to bear as otherwise it might have been. She hoped she was not guilty of the sin known to the Greeks as hubris, but she could not kill a feeling that John and she lived in another time, another mental atmosphere, another world. This handful of bovine rustics, stiff and uncomfortable in their Sunday clothes, listening vacantly to a string of clichés which they didn’t comprehend and for which they would have been none the better had they been able to do so, how pathetic they were! And the “pi-jaw” delivered falsetto in the high voice known to Victorian days as an appanage of “the Oxford manner,” how incongruous, how outworn it was!
The church itself, however, was another affair. It was an exquisite piece of early Gothic, nearly perfect of its kind, an authentic bit of the Middle Ages. While the old lady sat rigidly upright in her high-backed pew facing the chancel, her eyes fixed upon the clergyman, her ears struggling to catch and hold every one of the rapid, slovenly, half meaningless words that fell from his lips, the living alert mind by her side could not help reflecting that human nature did not change through the centuries. The Lady Elizabeth and her feudal retainers of six hundred years ago must have been like these! The same shibboleths, the same arcana, the same crude paraphernalia to enable one to make the best of this life and the next!
On Helen’s return to the house, full of a sense of duty stoutly performed, she was rewarded by the sight of John. He was sitting in the bow of the drawing-room window to catch the fugitive warmth of an October sun. A bandage was round his head and she was a little shocked to see how pale, how shattered, he looked. But as soon as he saw her he got up at once and took a quick step towards her, both hands held out like an eager, impulsive child.
If she had ever doubted her feeling for him, or had not weighed it adequately, their coming together now, in these tragic circumstances, seemed to define it anew. He was looking weak and ill, but apart from that he was much changed in three short days. Since the evening of Thursday, just before he received the enemy’s first blow, he looked older by twenty years. Something had passed out of his nature, something had crept in.
He was possessed now by a sense of frustration, anger, defeat. Fully, even whimsically, he was conscious of the unhappy bedfellows who had entered his brain. “It is wonderful,” he said, “how a knock on the head may change a man. The short way to madness, I daresay.” He spoke with a bitterness that did not belong to his nature.
Such words did not soften Helen’s distress. They did not arise from physical suffering; there was neither fever nor pain; he was still a little weak, but otherwise not ill. The cause was within, somewhere deep down, at the root of being. Looking at his drawn face and tragic eyes, listening to his slow, enfeebled voice, the words of Saul Hartz came back to her. “He’s down and out already.”
Could it be so? Had his will been broken by this blow? Were those high, ennobling hopes which made him the man he was now permanently destroyed? She would not believe it. And yet, as she talked with him, a haunting fear flooded her mind. He was like one who bleeds internally. There was nothing that showed and yet there was dire reason to suspect a lesion of the soul.
In the afternoon, after a playful passage at arms with his mother who was determined to exalt him into “a case,” he took Helen as far as the gazebo at the end of the terrace. Here for a full hour they sat with a generous sun upon them. Spread before their eyes was a lovely panoramic sweep of country. Out beyond the distant ring of fir-clad hills were the immensities.
As they sat side by side looking in silence and awe upon this wonder of wonders, a measure of healing came to them. The tragedy of their own frail humanity filled their hearts and drew them closer together. They saw themselves and one another as they were, two hapless specks of life. And yet with what tenacity they clung to it. Poised crazily in the middle of a narrow plank, rotten with age, over a bottomless abyss, one false step, and they were as though they had never been. That image of mortality filled their minds. To both alike, in those unforgettable moments, came knowledge of the stoicism that was needed in men and women who sought to overcome destiny.
Neither John or Helen had the depth of mind of the real thinker. In action lay their strength. To improve one tiny niche of the world they knew but very little was all they sought. But they were open to impressions, intensely alive. And each had a secret ear to catch, no matter how fitfully, how faintly, the pulse of the time.
“When we humans,” said the sick man, “we hapless two-legs sit in our gazebo trying to peer behind the sunset, as you and I are doing now, we always seem to be up against one question. Is there anything really to be hoped from science? It is contriving all sorts of wonders, they say. The elixir of youth has been found. There shall be length of days for those who desire it. A remarkable vista is opened up by these recent discoveries. Here is a most fascinating book, a translation from the Chinese, which is causing a great stir.”
Helen was shown the small volume in his hand.
“Lien Weng, I see,” was her comment. “They were talking about him the other evening at the Bryants. He has revolutionized psychology, they say, whatever that may mean. One hasn’t the mental machinery really to get at this sort of thing.”
“It’s beyond me, too,” said John. “One can’t quite reach to what he’s driving at, although the translation seems pretty exact.”
Helen read aloud the title of the book: New Uses for the Will.
“Or how to interpose your own upon the lives of others—that’s what it seems to boil down to, as far as one can make out.”
Helen could not withhold a slight shudder. “The idea sounds distinctly unpleasant to me. Instinctively one shuns it.”
“It may have its ugly side,” John agreed. “But it’s reassuring to know that for the practice of this new and ticklish science, certain conditions have to be present in the mind of the subject to start with.”
“Sounds like the old-fashioned hypnotism.”
“Lien Weng claims more for it than that, much more. One’s actions can be controlled from a distance, without physical contact of any kind, simply by the massed power of thought.”
“How horrid! And how uncomfortable!”
“It is, I grant you. But we live in an uncomfortable world.”
“Isn’t the world largely what we make it?” said Helen softly.
“A week ago one would have said yes. But I’ve had a knock on the head since then. Everything is altered.” He forced a sudden laugh which jarred a little on Helen’s nerves. “But, to return to this diabolically clever old Chinaman. I’m swotting up his book, because this day fortnight—touching wood!—I shall be at Doe Hill at Rose Carburton’s, and the great Lien Weng himself is expected to be there. So you see one is likely to hear a great deal about his theory.”
“Rather too much about it, perhaps,” said Helen chaffingly. “He might consider you a fit subject for one of his experiments.”
Clearly she was not inclined to take Lien Weng too seriously. John for his part, however, was impressed by something he had read in a book which had caused a flutter in the dovecotes of science; or it may have been something he had heard as to the reputation of its writer. “Great discoveries are in the air,” he said.
“No doubt,” said Helen. “At any rate, George Hierons thinks so.”
“Hierons the inventor. You know him?”
“I used to know him at home. And I met him again, the first time for some years, at dinner the other night. He had just arrived from Ottawa, although like myself I’m proud to say he’s an American citizen.”
“Yes, a wonderful man. Another Edison, people seem to think. I met him in New York last year. He impressed me enormously. For a man still young he’s gone a long way already on his own lines, and he’s expected to go farther. His grasp of general world conditions and their relation to modern thought in its present state of continual flux was amazing.”
Helen agreed. She too, was quite fascinated by him. Apart from his work, the importance of which could hardly be exaggerated, George Hierons had the mind of a seer.
There was a note, however, in this enthusiasm which suddenly cast Endor into an odd change of mood.
“Let us hope,” he said, with a melancholy so intense that to Helen it was like a blow over the heart, “that he won’t try too much. To me that seemed his danger. Wasn’t it Goethe who said that man must learn first to know where his problem begins? Minds of the Hierons’ type don’t always recognize how small are the resources of humanity. The best, the wisest, the strongest, all are in chains. Man is a slave.”
Helen was unready to accept so hard a saying.
“One can but read the riddle by the inner light,” Endor went on. “Since this time last week I have shed many illusions. Now am I fully awake, having lived forty years, to the fact that man is chained in a galley or, if you prefer the figure, harnessed to a chariot with the Furies in charge.”
Helen shivered at the strange light in his dark eyes.
“How many ages, through what æons of time this has been his lot there is no God to tell him. What mysteries he has profaned in the dim past, who shall say? But wherever the primal urge may lead, man has to follow.”
She let her hand rest lightly in his. “How cold you are!” she said. “We had better go back to the house. I’m afraid you got up too soon on my account.”
“Dearest—no!” Like a lover he pressed his lips upon her fingers. “I am quite well again in body. But I am what you might call a little ‘thrawn’ and it is my duty to tell you. Now that I have had this knock on the head, you’ll be taking a risk if you marry me.”
The simple words in their deliberation plucked at Helen’s heart. “Don’t—don’t say that!” she gasped.
“I love you too well, my darling, to keep you in the dark.”
“You have a will.” Her fingers tightened upon his. “Use it, I beg you—use it!”
“I must. I do. But I am in the grip of forces stronger than myself. I am called to battle with a monster. He is in my stars. And he will kill me ... unless....”
She hung upon an answer which seemed an age in coming—an answer which in reality she had to force him to make.
“I kill him.” Involuntarily his hand strayed to the bandage that had been fixed above his right eye. “It is not revenge. It is far more than that ... the job one was sent here to do ... to remove a deadly menace from this unlucky world.”
Helen fixed her eyes on the drawn face of the man she loved and believed in as she said slowly, “You’ll surely do that if you don’t lose heart. One of your powers can do anything.”
“Less than a week ago that was my own opinion. Since then something terrible has happened.” He forced a laugh which sounded harsh and unreal. “A knock on the head has changed all that. One realizes now what one is up against. What chance has a penny trumpet? Can it persuade the walls of Jericho to fall down? Can it drown the thunders of the U. P.?”
“Surely yes, if you have faith.”
“Don’t let us deceive ourselves. There are facts to face. This monster has been well called the Colossus. And his power is great. In this country, at least, he is the absolute dictator of public opinion. Controlling the wires in the way he does—nearly every newspaper in the United Kingdom has now been forced by the mere cost of its production to enter his Trust—he sways these islands from end to end. At Hellington it was incredible what a plain, uncolored lie could do in so short a time. They simply wouldn’t hear me. All morning journals had sung together. And a Fleet Street Lucifer, a twopence-daily antichrist, had composed the tune.”
Grief, concern, pity were in the face of Helen.
“One had always hoped and felt,” he went on with anger stifling his voice, “that this noise and vanity, this catchpenny patriotism, this lipservice to the majority, this bag of cheap tricks, don’t really count—in the sum of things. But they do. Hellington teaches one that. The malign force that lured the Hun to his doom is now about to deal with what remains of civilization.”
“But why? ... but why? ... but why?”
“The ambition of Saul Hartz is insensate. Like all of his kind before him, he doesn’t know when to stop. By that sin fell the angels. Cheap, debased, vulgarized he may be, but he is still Lucifer, Son of the Morning, in up-to-date clothes.”
Helen, while she listened, was torn with pain. She loved this man. This creature of intuitions, now broken and tormented, had grown more than ever dear in the course of four terrible days. The desire to help him had never been so strong. He could read that in her compressed lips, her burning eyes. But very gentleman as he was, now the case was altered, now he could no longer count on the integrity of the central forces, he was ready, almost eager in his own despite to release her.
One thing was now clear. They must come to a decision. Again in the inward ear of Helen sounded that voice grim with menace: Under which king, Bezonian? To serve both was now impossible.
She didn’t hesitate to tell this stricken, perhaps mortally stricken, gladiator, that she was wholly his. Yet no longer self-secure, a tide of doubt swept his mind.
“Take a little time,” he said. “There is your own life to think of. It may be—I don’t know—that I am no more than a half-crazy egoist; in any case, I have no right to involve you in what may prove the ruin of all our hopes. You have made a position for yourself. Something is due to your career. I have no right to drag you down, I have no right to sink your fine abilities in a cause which in my heart I feel to be already lost.”
Not only the simplicity of the man, but his honesty in this hour of desolating weakness wrung her with pain. “I ask no more than to serve you in any way I can,” she said, her face raised to his.
“I cannot take pity,” he said. “Even though it is a gift which ennobles the giver. Too much is at stake for us—and for the world in which we live.”
With more than a lover’s tenderness which made her whole being quiver like the rays of light upon the path before them, he took her in his arms and pressed kisses upon her forehead and lips. In the next moment, even as she gave herself up body and soul to his embrace, he was able to fight his weakness again. With a shudder he let her go. “Don’t let me drag you over the precipice,” he said. “Nothing now may be able to save me. Therefore, if you still have the power, stand clear.”