THE letter of the Colossus was characteristic. Such cordial simplicity was so like him. In a keen and swift recoil of feeling which cut like a knife, Helen recalled the man as he had always seemed to her. It was a case, if ever there was one, of multiple personality. To her Saul Hartz had appeared a man whose kindliness, charm, generosity it would have been hard to exaggerate. There might have been motive behind it all, but so far as Helen was concerned personally there was no reason to think so. He liked her because he liked her. The human beings for whom the Colossus had a regard were not many, but certainly she was among the chosen few admitted to the sunny side of a nature complex, enigmatic, subtle beyond analysis.
Helen now did not doubt that in sum the Colossus was a bad man; a creature of abnormal powers of mind who owed the workaday world of men and things a grudge for having been born into it. He was a natural enemy, who at the call of a perverted genius was ready to under-pin civilization, that crazy structure, the moment he got the chance. And that chance was surely coming, unless——
His friendly letter in hand, Helen had now to harden the will with a brief restatement of a dreadful plight. She was luring a man who on the surface was simple and kindly to her house in order to do him to death. As she sat down to breakfast opposite her husband and toyed with dry toast and a cup of tea, a ghoulish sense of nightmare seemed to cause the four walls of their little dining room to contract.
John was very pale. He, too, had not slept. At three o’clock he had got up and dressed and had spent the night’s remaining hours downstairs among his books. Helen saw that his hand was trembling as she gave him his cup. He, too, was living on his nerves.
This long-drawn Thursday was for both an intolerable day. They now stood together fighting with their wills against an implacable destiny. John, some instinct told her, was already trying to subdue the whole force of his nature to the thought of death. Precisely in what form it would overtake him or when it might be expected to do so, he did all that he could not to allow her to guess. But in the course of another night in which neither of them closed their eyes, words escaped his lips that gave her a clue to the mind process which in the end would destroy him.
“Macbeth has murdered sleep,” he whispered to her in the winter darkness. “This side the grave, my darling, I shall never sleep again.”
She hugged him close, as a mother hugs a child. Nature, she knew then, was nearing exhaustion. All too soon the will that grappled him to life must relax. And then in a moment of frenzy, of desperation, he would kill himself.
It behooved her, as long as was possible, to delay that moment. Friday was already here. And at four o’clock that afternoon Saul Hartz had promised to come to her. Pray Heaven that he did not fail!
As Helen lay in bed, however, listening hour by hour to the chime of the clocks of many neighboring steeples, she was haunted by a fear that the man by her side would not be able to carry on through the day. One stroke of a razor while he shaved, one step in front of an electric train, what could be simpler? His controls were yielding. Of that fact there were many indications. The question was, could he now outlast this all-important day?
Many times she had urged him to take a bromide, but he had not done so. Such things were likely to prove worse than futile. Death was the penalty he inevitably would have to pay; and his mind and will were at one in that, so far as his soul’s welfare was concerned, it was best that death came to him through his instincts working in a natural and unfettered way.
“If one bedevils oneself,” he argued, “with drugs and potions one may lose control of one’s reason altogether. And that will mean a state of aphasia compared with which death is more than kind. Hell is a mental condition. And there is none to equal that of the man who longs for death and yet has not the nerve to ensue it.”
Helen had felt bound to respect this attitude of mind. But dressing now in the wintry dawn of Friday, the question that harrowed her was, Could unaided nature hold him to his course for another four-and-twenty hours?
Immediately their pretense at breakfast was over, they went to a church close by. Here they stayed nearly three hours. And when they emerged from its precincts into the December gloom, they felt far down in their hearts that at the back of everything was still a Friend who was surely helping them to keep their sanity.
As evidence of this strength that had been given them both were able to take a little food. And then for Helen came the facing of the grim problem—How did John propose to spend the afternoon?
She had hoped that he would go down to the House of Commons. But as soon as luncheon was at an end he retired to the room in which he worked. An hour passed and yet he made no sign of going out. Presently the clock struck three; and Helen, no longer able to bear the suspense, came in and found him sitting apathetically at his table, not attempting to write or to read.
Her instinct for the practical showed her now the paramount need of making up his mind for him. She determined to take a strong line.
“It’s such an unpleasant afternoon that I am going to get you a taxi.”
The eyes he lifted to hers seemed to have scarcely a spark of life in them. “Why—a taxi?” he asked dully.
“To take you to the House.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going there again.”
“Oh, but you are,” she said quickly. “Just once more—to please me.”
The eyes that looked at her were those of a man who was near the end of his tether. “But I said good-bye to it yesterday,” he muttered.
Plain sense now told her that all must depend on the imperious exercise of her own strong will. She left the room, to return almost at once with his coat and hat. “Ferris has gone for a taxi,” she said.
“No, no,” he said wearily, “I don’t feel up to it to-day.”
“Make the effort, my darling—if only because I ask you.”
Loving her as he did, it was hard to refuse. The spirit was willing, but alas he was no longer in command of himself.
“You needn’t stay long,” said Helen beguilingly. “But in the name of that in which we both believe and for the sake of the work we have still to do——”
As one compelled by sheer magnetism he got up slowly from his chair. With resolute deftness she fixed him up with his overcoat. “Promise me that you will take a taxi home again.”
“Promise,” she gently insisted. “Anyhow, I’ll promise for you. And you’ll come back to me, won’t you? Yes, you will.” She pressed her lips to his cold cheek. “You shall—you must!”
With the same gentle insistence she led him out of the room and through the tiny entrance hall. As if he had been a small child going to a New Year’s party she herded him into the taxi.
As she closed the door upon him, she put her head through the lowered window with a little laugh that was almost gay. “Something tells me that Providence is working for us. Promise me, darling, that you’ll take a taxi and come straight back home?”
As the taxi began to move she ran beside it.
“Promise?”
“I’ll do my best,” he muttered as the taxi began to outpace her.