ON the way to Freeman’s Hotel in a taxi, Helen did her best to remember that she still lived and moved and had her being in twentieth century London. She tried hard to keep all the simple and familiar realities before her mind. Everything looked so oddly different now from what it had done less than three hours ago when she had driven west from St. Pancras station, that such a ritual seemed necessary. She was plunged in a state of affairs whose fantastic horror it was hardly possible for a mind so sane as hers to exaggerate. It was like living in a nightmare, except that it was much more vivid. But when everything around, the rattle of the taxi, the London mud, the raw air, had convinced her that she was truly awake, she might have bartered her immortal soul to believe otherwise.
George Hierons, who was living en suite, received Helen in his own private sitting room. He greeted her with a cordial tenderness which could only have sprung from the regard of an honest and a good man. Yet hardly a glance was needed to tell her that not a little of her own acute distress was shared by a true friend.
The face of George Hierons was that of a highly sensitive man who was suffering acutely. His visitor was struck by a tragic change in his appearance. Eyes and cheeks had deep hollows, their lines a look of age that mere years did not warrant; and underlying a strong and beautiful face was a torment of pain, stifled and repressed, that Helen could not bear to see.
She had the courage to begin with a conventional remark. But Hierons at once made clear that there was no need to withhold anything. He took her hands gently in his own.
“You have done a wise thing in coming to see me,” he said without a word of preface. “Tell me just how much you know.”
Helen hesitated. John had revealed much as to the workings of the Society, but he had been careful not to disclose the names of its members. She had strong reason to suspect that Hierons belonged to it, but until she was quite sure it would be the height of folly to lay her cards on the table.
“You may tell me all,” he said, reading her thoughts without difficulty. “I was with the Council so recently as half past eleven this morning—if it is any satisfaction to you to know that.”
“That is to say you belong?”
“Yes,” he said, again taking her hands.
She could not hide the look of frank horror that came into her eyes. Her impulse was to draw away from him as if he had been a thing unclean. Man of fine perceptions as he was, he yielded instantly to her emotion, not trying to combat it, but stepping back a pace with a slight bow.
“You see,” he said in a low voice, “the stake we play for is the highest there is. All that we do, all that we have done, all that we hope to do, is dictated by the faith that the peace of the world depends upon us.”
“Do you still believe that?” asked Helen, looking at him steadily.
He did not answer at once.
With an insurgency of feeling, an odd tightening of her throat and breast, she repeated her question.
“Yes,” he said. “That is still our position.”
“You honestly think,” said Helen, “that evil can be met with evil? You think that murder can prevent murder?”
“In certain extreme cases,” said Hierons, “we hold that view. The Church has failed, Christianity is a back number, one after another the higher moral sanctions are going by the board. Human society is very sick indeed. Only a desperate remedy can save it.”
Helen looked bleakly at Hierons. But she didn’t speak.
“The root of the trouble,” Hierons went on, “is that it is still in the power of certain people, of one man if you like, to unchain forces more terrible than the earth has yet known. This unlucky planet of ours is entering upon a new phase. Unless steps, drastic and immediate, are taken to bring under control those who now govern it, the human race may soon be faced with a catastrophe beside which all its other catastrophes—and Heaven knows what they have been in the immemorial past!—may appear of small account.”
The grim intensity of her countryman’s earnestness kept Helen silent. He paused a few seconds that she might say something, but she chose not to speak.
“I intend to take you fully into my confidence,” said Hierons with the childlike simplicity of a great mind. “Our Society which we believe to include the flower of the world’s creative wisdom takes no narrow or partial view. It sees the human race now at the mercy of a particular type of brain and that type is peculiarly ignoble. It sees other and finer types, developed on lines less grossly material, with but little chance against this archetype whose gospel is the cynical application of brute force. The weaker or more delicate types—so far as our Society can read world tendencies—are fighting a losing battle with their backs against the wall. In other words, so far as this unhappy time is concerned, Evil is stronger than Good.”
“Hasn’t it always been so?” said Helen.
“More or less, I agree. But human ingenuity has now entered a phase which is a direct menace to evolution itself. Never has it been so imperative that those who do evil for the love of evil should be brought under control.”
“Surely,” said Helen, “that control can only be acquired by invoking the spirit of Right.”
“True. And our Society, odd as the fact may seem to the uninitiate, exists for that very purpose.”
Helen’s face showed a frank incredulity. “You would have one believe,” she said, with a thrill of horror in her voice, “that people are murdered secretly in the name of the Most High?”
“Murder is a harsh word. But as you say,” Hierons went on in a stern, solemn tone, “the Society’s every act is dictated by the aim it has in view. ‘God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.’”
“To me,” said Helen with a little gasp of horror, “that sounds very like blasphemy.”
“No, no!” said Hierons. “Consider the problem the world has now to face. It is all very well to say that faith will move mountains, but when Good is being done inevitably to death by the massed forces of Evil, it is for those of us who dare to believe that the world may yet be saved for mankind to use to the best of our skill what weapons the stronger power may have left us.”
“Or to put it in another way,” said Helen, who was following a singular argument closely, “believing as your Society does that this earth of ours is now ruled by the spirit of Evil, in order to restore the balance of power it is necessary in the most literal fashion to break the Sixth Commandment.”
“Yes,” said Hierons. “But only in the last resort. And such are the basic conditions which now govern the world that no other alternative is left to the Friends of Peace. Let us take a concrete instance. Saul Hartz has the power with the terrible machine he controls to bring about war between Britain and America. And the best informed people firmly believe that he will do so.”
“But why should he? The power of the Universal Press is almost as great in one country as in the other.”
“True. And there’s the rub. The American Senate has recently decided to take strong action against the International Newspaper Ring. Certain trust laws, more or less obsolete, are going to be revived and rigidly enforced. The Colossus is now in a position to fight them and is preparing to do so. And say the wise, so that his will may prevail, he must presently force a fratricidal conflict which may plunge the entire world in darkness.”
“You really feel,” gasped Helen, “that he has that power?”
“Undoubtedly. All the strings are in his hand. He has brought to perfection the art of fouling public opinion at its source. And rather than this ‘unthinkable’ war—his favorite newspaper phrase!—shall come to pass, with hell loose in the very air we breathe, with famine and pestilence on every continent, and damage irreparable to all forms of organic life, it were better, say the wise, for the human race to close down altogether.”
“But surely all this is surmise?”
“Would that one might think so. For those who have eyes to see, the designs of the Colossus in 19— are just as clear as were those of Wilhelm II in the years prior to 1914. That is why the Society of the Friends of Peace is determined at all costs to remove Saul Hartz before a second and greater disaster overtakes this unlucky world.”
Helen was silent. Extremists, tinged with fanaticism, these people might be, but as Hierons presented the facts of the case, and once granting its premises, there was no gainsaying the hard logic of the whole matter.