DINNER that evening was again a cheerless meal. It was hard to say why. All that wealth, discriminating taste, the social arts could devise was there in profusion. There was an absence of ceremony. Taken as individuals nothing could have exceeded the personal attraction of those who graced the famous Doe Hill mahogany, but in a subtle way and for some hidden reason they refused to coalesce.
Some of the foremost minds of the world had come together. On a normal occasion the talk of such people must have been copious, salt, full of marrow; this evening it was tentative, halting, spineless; the hearts and minds of the speakers were too plainly not in it.
A skeleton was at the feast. Of that fact Saul Hartz was fully aware. From the moment of arrival the previous day a deadly sense of being in the enemy’s camp had oppressed him. All that had happened since, outwardly unimportant though it was, had ministered to it. Each one of these people, even the hostess herself seemed, so far as possible, to avoid him. They were forever looking the other way; even in moments of unavoidable intercourse he felt an odd constraint. And this evening, in spite of the mise en scene, an almost positive sense of disharmony reached a climax. Course by course the conversation waned. By the time the meal was at an end, silence hung like a pall over the whole table.
When the ladies left the room, the eight men who remained were conscious of a momentary lifting of the cloud. But they stayed only a short time circulating the decanters. A move was made once more to that wonderful room, the library, whose walls had been furnished so liberally with the world’s wisdom, for the most part in bindings choice and rare. The somber magnificence of the drawn curtains, the soft radiance of the candelabra, the glow from the open hearth, lent to the scene an austere dignity that was felt by all. Coffee and cigars, and even the fine liqueurs which were promptly dispensed, came almost as a desecration to such a sacramental atmosphere.
Less than five minutes after the servants had gone, Lien Weng gave a quiet signal. The American, George Hierons, and the Frenchman de Tournel rose abruptly from their chairs and proceeded at once to lock the two doors of the room. With a ceremonious bow they handed the keys to Lien Weng.
The Chinaman turned to face Saul Hartz. “Sir, the Court is now constituted,” he said without a trace of emotion. His English was perfect, but there was a curiously soft inflection in the low voice.
Saul Hartz, defiance in his air, merely shrugged contemptuous shoulders. Every sense keenly strung, he had been apprised by this overt act even before it came.
“My good friends have done me the honor,” Lien Weng continued in a voice whose timbre was persuasion itself, “to invite me to conduct these wholly informal proceedings.”
“And you might add ‘wholly illegal’ while you are about it,” said the Colossus with a sudden gust of anger.
Lien Weng raised a finger with a gravity verging upon the pontifical. “Legal—illegal—are words—words. This Court—this Council of Seven deals only with realities.”
“Golf balls a shilling!” In order to express an utter contempt the Colossus spat in the fire.
“Words—phrases!” The courtesy of a very old civilization rooted in an immemorial past was in the deep smile of Lien Weng. “I ask you, sir, to believe that as far as this world is concerned we are about to deal with a matter of life and death.”
Another gust of rage swept Saul Hartz. “About to murder me, eh?” he said savagely, “as you murdered Garland the other day, not to mention Kornileff the Russian, and Yamotoga the Jap, and heaven knows who besides!”
When the Colossus had spoken he got up from his chair.
“Be seated, pray,” said Lien Weng with his priest’s smile. “It will be more agreeable for all if you stay as you were.”
“If you intend to stick a knife in me and put me underneath that”—Saul Hartz pointed to the yawning Tudor fireplace which might easily have concealed a chasm—“get through with it at once. I’m not in a mood for cat and mouse.”
Lien Weng certainly looked feline enough as he narrowed his eyes and yet distended their pupils. His subtle face was luminous with meaning. “You will be unwise,” he said simply, “not to hear all that is said to you. It is not our wish to go to the extreme. Sir, your case has received much consideration. It is our prayer that we may deal with it in the way of wisdom. I will not add in the way of mercy and justice, for ‘mercy,’ ‘justice,’ those too are words, and the Council of Seven deals only with things. And yet its every act is governed by the ideals we serve. This Council is pledged to do the will of the Time-Spirit with as little suffering or unhappiness to the object of its attentions as may consist with the high and noble aim it has in view.”
Saul Hartz, still standing, folded his arms defiantly. But the cold force of the speaker was not without effect. In spite of a bitter and deep hostility the Colossus was obliged to abate his anger to the point of listening to every word spoken by this remarkable man.
“Sir,” continued the President of the Council with the same icy politeness, “you will do well to know just what it is that has constituted you the enemy of the human race. In the fewest possible words I shall hope to make that clear to you. A man of truly remarkable gifts, a man of creative imagination in the world of common affairs, you have so adapted your brain to the new order evolved by modern civilization that you have gained control of the sinister machine which evokes, creates, molds and directs public opinion. That is a feat of which our Society makes no complaint. But having acquired by the exercise of your genius this stupendous power in the physical world, you are proved to be totally lacking, as was Napoleon, your prototype before you, in any true or vital sense of the awful responsibility such a gift confers upon you.”
Each word of this speech Saul Hartz followed with care. But as the gravamen of the charge was unfolded, he took up Lien Weng sharply.
“By what authority,” he interposed violently, “are you and your fellow fanatics”—he cast a glance of savage contempt at the pale, tense faces around him—“constituted your brother’s keeper?”
“By that same authority,” said Lien Weng, “which confers upon you the power you wield.”
“Whatever power I may wield,” said Saul Hartz, “has the sanction of the law.”
“Of what law?”
“The law implicit in the usages of all civilized communities.”
“Sir, there we join issue.”
Lien Weng looked solemnly at the others. With an oriental gravity that raised the act to the plane of ritual, he took a signet ring from the first finger of his right hand, for no apparent reason pressed it to his lips and then put it back again. “No law,” he went on in the same unchanging voice, “of man’s contrivance can be effective unless there lies behind the moral power to enforce it.”
“I agree.”
“Perhaps you do not realize that you and your friends, the members of this infamous International Newspaper Ring, are no longer to be permitted to carry out the policy for which you stand.”
“What is the policy for which we stand?”
“Giantism—world-power—in other words, enslavement and spoliation of the weak.”
“Arrant nonsense!”
“We shall gain nothing,” said Lien Weng “by bandying words. It has taken the Society of the Friends of Peace many months to reach a conclusion in this case of yours; and it has done so only after complete investigation of all the salient facts. Understand, sir, that all its verdicts are based upon reason, and that once moved to action it pursues an undeviating, a relentless course.”
Saul Hartz made a gesture of contempt. “You are an illegal body. At best you are a murder club. You stand outside the law.”
“Not outside the moral law. Take the case of the teeming, helpless millions of my Chinese compatriots for whom I speak, of those millions of unlucky creatures who know themselves impotent to deal with the marvelous physical forces now controlled by the western mind. For months, through the agency of your terrible engine the Universal Press, you have been inciting your Government to shatter Peking. For months, to this end you have been organizing public opinion by means of false news and distorted facts. Once the die is cast the yellow and black races are powerless to cope with the airships, the poison gases, the high explosives, the dread magics the civilization of the West is able to hurl upon them. Not a month ago you caused to be wiped out of existence, by means of bombs rained from the clouds, a native village in the heart of Africa. Not a year ago a similar thing occurred in Afghanistan in Upper India.”
“You would hold me responsible for that?”
“Indirectly—yes. Or to look nearer home, consider the case of Ireland.”
“The example is not altogether well chosen,” Saul Hartz spoke with a scorn he did not try to conceal. “If your precious Society will condescend to read our newspapers, it will see that we are committed to a policy of conciliation.”
“Ireland and her affairs have long been a political cat’s-paw for the Newspaper Ring, the secret power which sways the destinies of mankind.”
“Cheap generalizations,” said Saul Hartz, contemptuously.
“The Society does not share your view. By the light of what has happened since, it now sees that Ireland and her affairs were a card played with Luciferian skill to precipitate the world catastrophe. A masterstroke of policy on the part of antichrist, no doubt. The scheme was crowned with every success. By the irony of fate, however, that catastrophe has made it possible to restore the moral law to the world.”
“Of which your Society is the embodiment, I presume?”
“That is so,” Lien Weng bowed gravely. “It is based entirely on the moral idea.”
“In other words,” said Saul Hartz, “it murders people of whom it doesn’t approve from the highest motives. A scheme delightfully convenient, yet not altogether new.”
“The Society makes no claim to novelty. It has existed in a rudimentary form in the Celestial Empire and throughout many Eastern lands for thousands of years. In the oldest of all existing civilizations it is the last resort of the weak against the strong. Those whose minds are developed on disparate lines from that implacable ‘efficiency’ which enables the brain of the modern western business man to dominate the physical world and make life a hell for those who arouse its predatory instincts, are now banded together in self-defense against the common enemy of the human race.”
“Who and what is the common enemy of the human race?”
“Those who contrive war. Those who preach war. Those who spread rumors of war. The Society has one aim, and one aim only. By every means in its power it ensues Peace.”
“Even at the price of murder.”
“Murder is a word, a phrase, determined by the man-made statutes of a ballot-box democracy, presided over by the occupant of the Woolsack whom a supine government failed to hang in the year 19——. Human nature does not vary in the matter of its law courts. The man who is hanged is never so finished a criminal as the man who hangs him. Murder, I repeat, is a word, a phrase. Peace is tangible, a possible ideal, a definite object. For many months now, to give one more instance of its activities, the Universal Press, of which you, sir, are the controlling spirit, owing allegiance to none, has been working in a hundred subterranean ways to embroil the United States with Great Britain. What it has to gain by these periodical rifts the stock exchanges of London and New York are best able to say. But the Universal Press, whose power is now manifest in every land of the habitable globe, may yet choose, if unable to surmount the Trust Law, that bulwark and defense of the plain American citizen, to involve the two nations in a fratricidal conflict, with unchallenged world-power a fitting crown for the victor. Antichrist would then be indeed enthroned.”
The Colossus again expressed a contempt of such reasoning. “Evidently,” he said in his husky whisper, “your precious Society has not condescended to read the article in yesterday’s Planet which I myself dictated.”
“Let me assure you, sir,” said Lien Weng, “that it has done so and marked it carefully. But such admirable sentiments, of which your newspapers have an inexhaustible supply, is no more than dust for the eyes of fools. The Universal Press has taken for its motto the famous saying of our own Lao-tsze, the prophet of Taoism, ‘Learn to throw dust in order to cast it.’ Or in words which the western brain may find easier to understand, ‘Learn to defile the wells of truth behind a curtain of poison gas.’”
“One has heard all this so often,” said the Colossus, plaintively. “Can’t you tell us something new?” And he yawned cavernously in the face of the others.
Lien Weng paid no regard to the interruption. He went quietly on, “Much of the political news the Universal Press transmits so diligently from America to England is willfully distorted; much of the political news it transmits from England to America is equally false.”
“So you say,” laughed the Colossus.
“Let us take one example. The report of the speech in Congress of Senator Larcom which you print on page 8 of yesterday’s Planet is quite inaccurate.”
“How do you know that?”
“Senator Larcom has already sent by cable his own version of his speech to a member of the Society. You may read it if you choose, and compare it with the garbled fragments which appear in the Planet newspaper and which the Universal Press has already flashed round the world. At this moment it is being read, assimilated, acted upon in Hong Kong, Calcutta, Sydney, Montreal and a hundred-and-one other centers of public opinion.”
At a sign from Lien Weng, the cabled account from Washington was produced by George Hierons, the person to whom it was sent. It was laid on the table.
“Read,” said Lien Weng.
“It doesn’t interest me,” said the Colossus. “Besides, it proves nothing. Mistakes of this kind are bound to arise.”
“That may or may not be so,” said Lien Weng. “But they occur far too often. And as far as Britain and the United States are concerned they always err upon one side. That is not the side of amity. Less than a month ago you put in the mouth of an eminent English politician a phrase he never used, and sowed it broadcast. Tardy denial followed, but a calculated lie had a clear start of seventy-two hours. Infinite damage has thereby been done to a growing reputation and to the cause we have at heart.”
“What sort of a reputation is it, I ask you,” said Saul Hartz, insolently, “that can suffer infinite damage because a single letter is omitted accidentally from a single word its owner uses?”
“There lies your skill,” a hoarse voice broke in. It was that of John Endor. With lustrous eyes and a face inhuman in its pallor he was following each word of the argument with intensity. “All of us here can only regard it as devilish.”
“Yes—devilish,” said Lien Weng, in his soft and gentle voice. “But even sheer wickedness sometimes overreaches itself. That simple act of omission, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, was vile. Yet already it has had a recoil. The Society of the Friends of Peace owes to that foul blow the presence here this evening of John Endor.” The President bowed gravely to the politician. “He will prove a source of infinite strength to our counsels. We welcome such a man with open arms.”
A look of disgust flashed from the eyes of Saul Hartz. “A man is not to be envied,” he said, “who mixes himself up with a thing of this kind. If Mr. Endor is the man I take him to be,” Hartz looked Endor steadily in the face, “he is going to regret very bitterly his association with you and your fellow anarchists and murderers.”
“Time alone can prove,” said Lien Weng impassively, “whether John Endor will have anything to regret in his whole-hearted devotion to the cause of peace. Meanwhile his presence here cannot fail to give weight to the deliberations of the Council of Seven.”
“And if I may say so,” interposed George Hierons, “authority to its acts. Without the help of John Endor and all that he stands for, the Society might not have been able to deal with the most inimical power of the modern world.”
“You pay poor me far too high a compliment,” said the Colossus with a down-looking smile. But all present knew, when they saw it, the pride which apes humility. “However, what does it matter?” With an air of resignation Saul Hartz folded his arms. “And you are getting tedious, aren’t you? Why not cut the cackle and get to the hosses? Before you proceed to nick my throat, or knock me on the head, or dope my mineral water is there any little thing in which I can oblige you?”
“We are coming, sir, to that.” The civilized politeness of Lien Weng was an odd contrast to Saul Hartz’s ill-breeding. “On behalf of the Society I am about to place before you a formal proposition. It is this: The Society is prepared to buy your entire holding, including the Founder’s shares, in the Universal Press.”
“I shall be glad to learn your price.”
“Within three months the Society is prepared to pay you the sum of two hundred millions sterling. But to this offer it attaches one condition. You will be required to give an undertaking never again to engage in any form whatever of journalistic enterprise. In other words, sir, you must give up the formidable, nay, terrible, machine you control, and you are expressly debarred from ever constructing another one like it.”
“And in the event of this offer being refused?” Saul Hartz asked.
For a moment there was silence. Lien Weng looked at the circle of tense faces. But it was the American who answered the question. As a preliminary he slowly removed a large cigar from the corner of his mouth.
“Pretty bad for the coo, sir,” he said in a voice like a child’s. “Take it from me.”
“I expect so,” was Saul Hartz’s only comment.
Silence came again. The eight men smoked steadily.
Lien Weng it was who spoke at last. “We don’t ask you to make up your mind here and now. You shall have eight weeks from to-morrow, Monday, in which to reach a decision.”
“Eight weeks. Thank you,” said the Colossus dryly. And he began to chew the end of his cigar.
“Think it over, my friend,” said Hierons, in a cheerful and business-like tone. “One thousand million dollars—paid down within three months. Think it over.”
“I will.” The Colossus knocked the ash from the end of his cigar. “I promise you that. And now perhaps you’ll let me out of this mousetrap.”
“For the time being, sir, the business is concluded.” And Lien Weng returned the keys of the room to the Frenchman and the American who promptly unlocked the doors of the library.