THE reception of the Colossus by the châtelain of Doe Hill was instinct with charm. Rose Carburton, as accomplished a hostess as the Old World could show, had the art of shining like a rare jewel in an exquisite setting. And hers the imperious magnetism to which all men yield. Highly sexed, a siren, an enchantress, she never forgot in mid-career the painfully difficult lessons learned in early youth.
Ridden by no sect, truckling to no class, Rose Carburton cast her net wide. The widow of a man of fabulous wealth, one of her ambitions had been to make Doe Hill the most interesting house in Britain. This she was in a fair way to achieve. At any rate, the representative few of many diverse worlds were glad to visit this famous trysting place to meet their kind.
The party for the week-end was not large but it had been chosen with care. Comprising eight men and four women, at dinner they mustered thirteen. Although the hostess jested gayly, Saul Hartz in his present frame of mind was not proof altogether against the omen. Casting a dubious eye along the table he scrutinized his fellow guests. His gaze was caught at once by the ascetic visage of Lien Weng. The Celestial in the magnificent robes of a high order of mandarins was an awe-inspiring figure. Such a man seemed to bear the centuries on his brow and in the deep lines of an impassive face. He spoke little, but his English was choice, with hardly a trace of accent; his every word was ripe, his every gesture pregnant with meaning.
Seated next but one to Lien Weng was an old gray-bearded Hindu, the famous sage and philosopher Bandar Ali. The controller of the Universal Press, who plumed himself justly on the encyclopedic nature of his mind, knew this old man as one whose name was familiar throughout the East. Opposite was Roland Holles, a combination almost unique, of poet, sportsman, publicist, seer, Kentish squire, and member of an old family who scandalized his relations and alienated his friends by a rooted antagonism to the British Empire. On the right of the hostess was De Tournel, litterateur and homme du monde, unsparing critic of all religions and most advanced of thinkers; on her left was Hierons the American. The other men at the table were John Endor and El Santo, the Spanish mystic.
The women, even with the hostess left out, were hardly less interesting; the venerable Marchesa della Gardia who had spent a long life fighting for Italy; the awe-inspiring Madame Kornileff who had braved Siberia for her opinions; Pauline Verdet, widow of the great chemist who so recently had discovered a new element and had forfeited his life in the process; and Ethel Bergman, a woman of vast possessions, only child of a great inventor who had inherited much of her father’s genius. These people, seated dourly round that solemn mahogany, were a company whose significance even a house with the traditions of Doe Hill could seldom, if ever, have equaled.
To a man like Saul Hartz, the range of whose information allowed him to know exactly who these persons were and what they stood for, such a gathering was in itself a portent. So formidable was its collective effect that for once his habitual self-confidence threatened to desert him. As revealed by the tempered rays of the softly shaded candles, there was something sinister in those twelve faces.
The talk at the dinner table ministered to this impression. There was little of the light give and take, of the cheerful wit, of the loosing of the voice for the love of hearing it, peculiar to these occasions. Low tones embodied words weighty and considered; all seemed preoccupied with large issues, grave things.
Saul Hartz was soon alive to the fact that he was rather being given the cold shoulder. In such a picked company of intellectuals, even he might expect to feel a little out of it. Such indeed was his sense of isolation that several times that evening the Colossus was fain to ask himself why he had been invited to meet these people. And for his severely logical mind there could be only one answer.
He could have wished that he had not come. All the same, the love of adventure was rooted in him. And deep in his heart was the arrogance of one who knows that he has the master-key to human nature. No matter how imposing its airs, human nature can never be more than itself, an affair of pygmies. In relation to others, even if they comprised the world’s flower, he saw himself a giant. So far, he had carried everything to victory. All that he handled turned to gold. His was the Midas touch. Let those cranks and visionaries do their worst. He did not fear them; he did not fear mortal men. And they would do well to look to themselves. As controller of that amazing engine, the Universal Press, Saul Hartz firmly believed that he wielded the mightiest power of the modern world.
If the atmosphere of the dining room had been heavy to the verge of the baleful, that of the ancient library, whither the men retired with their coffee and cigars, was no less suffocating. Hartz’s educated palate had been regaled with a cordon bleu and vintage wines, the brandy was old and the cigars not unworthy of it, but, in spite of these things, he was unable to throw off the feeling that a sword was hanging over his head. Somehow, the other seven men held intercourse in a language to which he had not a key. Their words were few and fragmentary, but they held esoteric meanings. As the time passed, Hartz’s conviction grew that these men were assembled for a dark purpose. When at last he decided to look for consolation elsewhere, his withdrawal from the library seemed to provoke a keen sense of relief.
It was ten o’clock. He sought the ladies in various stately rooms, but already they appeared to have gone to bed. Thoroughly depressed by now, the Colossus felt that he could not do better than follow this example.
His bedroom was at the end of a long cavernous-looking corridor. The room was large, magnificently upholstered and full of Louis Seize furniture, an apartment, in fact, which le grand monarque himself might have condescended to sleep in. Yet, to the senses of its present occupant, now so acutely strung, it gave a feeling of the uncanny. Shadows lurked round the canopied bed; in spite of the thick carpet, the floor seemed a thing of echoes as he walked across it; the great shutters of the windows with their look of medieval solidity might have hid some magic casement; above all, the dark lights springing from the black oak paneling were weird and strange. None knew better than Saul Hartz how to ride imagination on the curb, yet as he slowly and rather unwillingly undressed, he felt that in such a room anything might happen.
Impatient with himself he switched off the light and got into bed. But never had he felt so little like sleep. Something was afoot in this old house. Just what it was he could not say, and yet he was sure it concerned him intimately. His mind was a nest of fancies. The second glass of port might have been a mistake, or the oysters might have upset him, for by some means, the room in which he lay was now alive with the evil spirit of the Middle Ages. Who knew what black arts, what latent devilries lurked behind its tapestry? Would this ancient bed in which he felt so uncomfortable be let down into a secret vault wherein a Vehmgericht was assembled? Would these mysterious walls recede to disclose a Secret Council in session? Lying impotently there, his mind grew morbid. He was almost tempted to ring for his servant that he might have company.
What was in the wind? Downstairs in the library something was afoot. The frigid politeness of his fellow guests returned to him with new meaning. All these people, men and women alike, nobly and variously gifted as they were, had a taint of fanaticism. It was idle to deny that he was lying in the midst of danger.
A man of less force might have been tempted to blame his own folly in lying there at all. But Saul Hartz neither repined nor looked back. All experience was good. This was a real adventure. Besides having at last fallen foul of this precious Society, soon or late he would have to face it. So far as he was concerned, it might as well be now. He knew the grim record of the Council of Seven, but he would not swerve an inch from the course already prescribed for himself. It should not be easy to terrorize Saul Hartz. And even if life itself was the stake, was life, after all, such a very great matter?
Lying there, with sleep far from his pillow, he sought to arrange his mind and put his affairs in order. He felt it likely that he would never leave that room alive, but the premonition did not lessen his scorn of others. For that remorseless mind there could be no hereafter. The position he took up was that of a philosopher known to the recent past: “He knew there had been one ice age, and he believed there was going to be another.” A bundle of primal instincts, he merely followed his appetites.
Saul Hartz had an appetite for power. Up till the very moment of entering that room he had considered himself beyond good and evil. But as he lay, waves of thought leaped upon him from those walls. Conspiracy was in the air. Certain forces meant to break him. And how easy to achieve. A drop of poison in a cup of coffee, a knife, or a pistol shot, a knock on the head in the dark, a push, neatly timed, onto a live rail of the Underground, and all would be over. So far as the Colossus was concerned, that would be the end. Let it be so. After all, he had read the Riddle of the Sphinx. Knowing all, there was nothing to know.
He pressed a button of his devil’s machine, and wheat rose five shillings a bushel in Europe; he pressed another button, and half a continent was removed from the comity of nations. But what did it matter? In the sight of Saul Hartz the planet Earth was but a grain of sand on the tideway of eternity. Organic life was a negation of a negation, yet from the first, he had been ready to pay a full price for supreme power. But now it had come to him, it wrought no appeasement of the cosmic sense. Man he was and man he must remain.
It was probable that he was entering upon his last hours, but he made no oblation to a God in which he did not believe. Pursuing the laws of reason with remorseless logic, he had made of himself a god. At the dawn of consciousness he had seen the self in pictures, till now, at the threshold of the night of time, he saw himself as antichrist. His brain, as he had always known, was adapted just a little better to the modern one-hell-of-a-muss than that of any other adventurous insect. It enabled him to get, with a minimum of effort, all the things he sought in the material world. They did not bring happiness, but he did not look for it. Such an abortion as man had no claims to beatitude. For man in his very nature was a hybrid, a contradiction, a grotesque in whom the elements must be ever at war. Let him never seek peace on earth, and as far as heaven was concerned, granting that it existed, what a place of exquisite boredom it must be!
Long hours the Colossus lay searching his heart and then, finally, he drew the bedclothes over his head and decided to go down fighting. To go down fighting—that would be the ultimate bliss for one who made no terms with life. After all, the lust for power was greater than the will to live.
Lying there, hour after hour, in the uncanny silence of that room, the conviction had grown until now it enfolded him like the arms of a woman, that the sleep upon which he was about to enter would be his last. This brief but intense review of experience had pierced him so deeply that it began to seem certain that the end was now near.
At last, he fell into a doze. But hardly had consciousness left him, when, with a violent start, he awoke. Somebody had entered the room. The electric light next the door had been switched on. He sat up in bed to confront a face drawn and haggard, and a pair of eyes somber, ruthless, terrible.
They were the eyes of John Endor.