ON Saturday afternoon Saul Hartz left London by the 3:20 from Paddington. It was a long and full train and the Colossus whose habit was to travel en prince whenever possible, had, in spite of all that his equerry could do, to share a carriage with other passengers. Slight attention was paid to these. Acutely observant on occasion of the world around him he could also be the reverse. And now as he entered the compartment and took the seat that had been retained for him in the corner next the door, he gave to his fellow travelers, of whom there were three, a glance so perfunctory that it told nothing. He proceeded to immerse himself in a memoir of a publicist lately dead whom he had intimately known. It amused him to compare his own estimate of the man with that presented to the world in this official biography.
When the train stopped at Slough, two of the other occupants of the carriage got out, leaving the one who remained in the corner farthest from Saul Hartz. At first, the Colossus paid him no more attention than before, but as the train began to move out of the station, he chanced to look up from the book whose naïveté had palled already, and suddenly caught the eye of his fellow traveler.
It was the eye of John Endor.
The two men had a nodding acquaintance with each other. All the personalities of the time were known to Saul Hartz. He went everywhere, he rubbed shoulders continually with the celebrated, the notorious, in fact with all the members of that heterogeneous body who from whatever cause are large in the public eye. John Endor was not yet forty but he was a figure already in the life of the time.
The Colossus never forgot a face. And he never forgot any material fact that was involved in the process of recognition. His glance was held at once, less by John Endor than by an ugly bruise above the right eye. Seeing it, he gave a slight start. Involuntarily his gaze fell to the eyes beneath, and again he started, this time, at their look of open, implacable enmity.
Saul Hartz smiled. On all occasions his power of recovery was automatic. As became one who saw himself as a modern dictator, he allowed nothing to come between the wind and his nobility.
The eyes of John Endor would have quelled a lesser man. They merely goaded the Colossus into action.
“I wonder if we are going to the same place.” Hartz’s voice, which seldom rose above a husky wheeze and yet had the power of carrying a great distance, had a note of half insolent bonhomie. It had, too, the complacence of one who does not disguise that he has sized up all things in the visible universe. Not for him the irritating reserves, the conventional glosses of “the English gentleman.” Sublime faith in himself and a stupendous power of will enabled him to ride straight at every obstacle in his path. He knew that he could and would surmount it.
No answer having greeted his remark, the Colossus slowly repeated it.
“Mr. Hartz?” The tentativeness of John Endor was emphasized by a quick fall of the eyelids.
The owner of the Planet smiled affirmatively. “My first visit to Doe Hill,” he said. “A beautiful Tudor house, I’m told. I suppose you know it well.”
“I’ve been there several times.” Endor’s cold politeness let it be seen that he was not in a mood to talk. “Shakespeare and the musical glasses.”
The Colossus, however, declined to be put off. He had things to say to this man, and he was going to say them. Between the two was an antagonism that was absolutely deadly, but so well was each versed in the rules of the game that a third person not sharing their grim secret could never have guessed it.
“Who’ll be there?” said Hartz in a light tone.
Endor was unable to say.
“Our dear Helen Sholto for one, perhaps.” The genial voice was full of charm.
John Endor believed not. And to hear that name on the lips of the man opposite was a little more than he could bear. He let down the window with a jerk.
“By the way, congratulations—hearty congratulations.” The husky wheeze floating across the compartment seemed to grow more virile. “A lucky—a very lucky fellow. I hope you know—but of course, you do know—what a prize—an altogether exceptional prize—you have drawn in the lottery.”
Endor returned icy thanks. With all the aristocrat’s power of defending himself at close quarters, he began to feel that the man opposite was too much for him.
“Of course,”—the Colossus was almost like a kitten with a skein of wool—“I shall always owe you a grudge for stealing her from me.”
Gentle, half amused as were the words, behind them was a glint of steel. Endor, in spite of a disciplined will, could not resist its challenge.
“Not quite a pretty way of putting it,” he said. And there was a nip in his voice.
“Rien qui blesse comme la verité.” The laugh of the Colossus had now a singular lack of music. “Helen Sholto was my right hand, my other self almost. She understood my ways. I don’t know what I shall do without her.”
Endor had only a conventional regret to offer for having robbed his enemy of so rare a treasure. He may have felt that the note of lamentation was pitched dangerously high, or again, knowing this man for what he was, he may have been seeking a motive behind it.
The Colossus, however, with an odd concentration of voice and eye, went on developing the theme in his own peculiar manner.
“She was everything to me,” he said. “Just—everything.”
Somehow that husky wheeze put John in mind of a Californian rattler he had heard more than once in his travels. It now struck right home to his heart.
“Everything is a big word.” He tried to keep his voice level, but restrain himself as he might he was beginning to see red.
“A big word—yes—I agree.” The wheeze became a snarl of subtle contempt. “But in this case it’s the only one you see.”
Helen’s lover had an illusion of fangs striking his flesh.
“What do you mean?” he demanded with savage eyes.
Saul Hartz shrugged contemptuously and spread his hands like a stage Frenchman.
In the vain hope of freeing his veins of a poison, Endor repeated a futile question. With a skill, in itself a mockery, his enemy tossed it lightly into the air.
“Isn’t it better in some cases,” he said, picking each word with the fetid delicacy of a Baudelaire, “to leave, my dear friend, just a little to the imagination?”
The words in the ear of John Endor were those of a devil. He could but gasp. There was no mistaking their implication. Looking squarely across at the man seated in the far corner of the carriage, he saw the image of one capable of doing evil for the love of it. A monster of wickedness confronted him. But in this moment of suffering, his thought was less of the woman he loved than of the country he adored. By what cruel turn of Fate’s shuttle had she, the conqueror of half the world, been conquered by antichrist himself?
This secret power behind the great movements of the time, this framer of policies, foreign and domestic, this boss of all bosses, this big serpent who swallowed the little serpents, what a commentary he was on the world that he governed! Was it possible, that in the act of recoil from the highest moment in her history, Civilization should now be in bondage to a mere beast!
Still looking at the hooded eyes of the man opposite, a strange light came into those of John Endor. As in a glass darkly he saw the final degradation, the ultimate doom of the thing he loved beyond all other things. “One with Nineveh and Tyre.” How often had antichrist, and with what a gusto, blazoned these words in the pages of his own newspapers. He even printed them in Greek on appropriate occasions. Cynicism raised to this power was the perquisite of no common man.
Man he hardly seemed to be as there he sat, looking at the light in the face of John Endor and yet characteristically heedless of its cause. Truly, the mind becomes subdued to that in which it works! Having, with his insight into modern mechanical conditions, bemused the five continents of the world by diabolonian arts, he saw himself now with the world at his feet, and in his grasp all the strings of the U. P.—that latter-day symbol of the supreme power.
Endor might well despair of his country. A sort of blind fury swept him as the thought of its impotence flooded his mind. Sheer force of will was needed to choke back that tide of rage. The man opposite, reading his heart like a page of news tensed his muscles, held himself ready. Even if the true cause of Endor’s violence was not yet revealed to Saul Hartz, he knew that he had goaded to the breaking point one whose nerves were overstrung.
The Colossus, however, was not afraid. He was ready for Endor’s expected onset. Of powerful physique, in the prime of manhood, he neither smoked nor drank too much; he rode two hours daily and in youth he had studied the arts of self-defense under the best masters.
Let this mad fool come on! He would find waiting for him a pretty old-fashioned customer.