The Inheritors Part 24

Very late Soane finished his leader. He looked up as he wrote the last word.

"I've got it written," he said. "But ... I say, what the deuce is up?

It's like being a tall clock with the mainspring breaking, this."

I rang the bell for someone to take the copy down.

"Your metaphor's too much for me, Soane," I said.

"It's appropriate all the way along," he maintained, "if you call me a mainspring. I've been wound up and wound up to write old de Mersch and his Greenland up--and it's been a tight wind, these days, I tell you.

Then all of a sudden ..."

A boy appeared and carried off the copy.

"All of a sudden," Soane resumed, "something gives--I suppose something's given--and there's a whirr-rr-rr and the hands fly backwards and old de Mersch and Greenland b.u.mp to the bottom, like the weights."

The boom of the great presses was rattling the window frames. Soane got up and walked toward one of the cupboards.

"Dry work," he said; "but the simile's just, isn't it?"

I gave one swift step toward the bell-b.u.t.ton beside the desk. The proof of Callan's article, from which Soane had been writing, lay a crumpled white streamer on the brown wood of Fox's desk. I made toward it. As I stretched out my hand the solution slipped into my mind, coming with no more noise than that of a bullet; impinging with all the shock and remaining with all the pain. I had remembered the morning, over there in Paris, when she had told me that she had invited one of de Mersch's lieutenants to betray him by not concealing from Callan the real horrors of the Systeme Groenlandais--flogged, butchered, miserable natives, the famines, the vices, diseases, and the crimes. There came suddenly before my eyes the tall narrow room in my aunt's house, the opening of the door and her entry, followed by that of the woebegone governor of a province--the man who was to show Callan things--with his grating "_Cest entendu ..._"

I remembered the scene distinctly; her words; her looks; my utter unbelief. I remembered, too, that it had not saved me from a momentary sense of revolt against that inflexible intention of a treachery which was to be another step toward the inheritance of the earth. I had rejected the very idea, and here it had come; it was confronting me with all its meaning and consequences. Callan _had_ been shown things he had not been meant to see, and had written the truth as he had seen it. His article was a small thing in itself, but he had been sent out there with tremendous flourishes of de Mersch's trumpets. He was _the_ man who could be believed. De Mersch's supporters had practically said: "If he condemns us we are indeed d.a.m.ned." And now that the condemnation had come, it meant ruin, as it seemed to me, for everybody I had known, worked for, seen, or heard of, during the last year of my life. It was ruin for Fox, for Churchill, for the ministers, and for the men who talk in railway carriages, for shopkeepers and for the government; it was a menace to the inst.i.tutions which hold us to the past, that are our guarantees for the future. The safety of everything one respected and believed in was involved in the disclosure of an atrocious fraud, and the disclosure was in my hands. For that night I had the power of the press in my keeping. People were waiting for this p.r.o.nouncement. De Mersch's last card was his philanthropy; his model state and his happy natives.

The drone of the presses made the floor under my feet quiver, and the whole building vibrated as if the earth itself had trembled. I was alone with my knowledge. Did she know; had she put the power in my hand? But I was alone, and I was free.

I took up the proof and began to read, slanting the page to the fall of the light. It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric of the man there was genuine indignation and pain. There were revolting details of cruelty to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked; but more revolting to see without a mask was that falsehood which had been hiding under the words that for ages had spurred men to n.o.ble deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism. What was appalling was the sudden perception that all the traditional ideals of honour, glory, conscience, had been committed to the upholding of a gigantic and atrocious fraud. The falsehood had spread stealthily, had eaten into the very heart of creeds and convictions that we lean upon on our pa.s.sage between the past and the future. The old order of things had to live or perish with a lie. I saw all this with the intensity and clearness of a revelation; I saw it as though I had been asleep through a year of work and dreams, and had awakened to the truth. I saw it all; I saw her intention. What was I to do?

Without my marking its approach emotion was upon me. The fingers that held up the extended slips tattooed one on another through its negligible thickness.

"Pretty thick that," Soane said. He was looking back at me from the cupboard he had opened. "I've rubbed it in, too ... there'll be hats on the green to-morrow." He had his head inside the cupboard, and his voice came to me hollowly. He extracted a large bottle with a gilt-foiled neck.

"Won't it upset the apple cart to-morrow," he said, very loudly; "won't it?"

His voice acted on me as the slight shake upon a phial full of waiting chemicals; crystallised them suddenly with a little click. Everything suddenly grew very clear to me. I suddenly understood that all the tortuous intrigue hinged upon what I did in the next few minutes. It rested with me now to stretch out my hand to that b.u.t.ton in the wall or to let the whole world--"the ... the probity ... that sort of thing,"

she had said--fall to pieces. The drone of the presses continued to make itself felt like the quiver of a suppressed emotion. I might stop them or I might not. It rested with me.

Everybody was in my hands; they were quite small. If I let the thing go on, they would be done for utterly, and the new era would begin.

Soane had got hold of a couple of long-stalked gla.s.ses. They clinked together whilst he searched the cupboard for something.

"Eh, what?" he said. "It _is_ pretty _strong_, isn't it? Ought to shake out some of the supporters, eh? Bill comes on to-morrow ... do for that, I should think." He wanted a corkscrew very badly.

But that was precisely it--it would "shake out some of the supporters,"

and give Gurnard his patent excuse. Churchill, I knew, would stick to his line, the saner policy. But so many of the men who had stuck to Churchill would fall away now, and Gurnard, of course, would lead them to his own triumph.

It was a criminal verdict. Callan had gone out as a commissioner--with a good deal of drum-beating. And this was his report, this shriek. If it sounded across the house-tops--if I let it--good-by to the saner policy and to Churchill. It did not make any difference that Churchill's _was_ the saner policy, because there was no one in the nation sane enough to see it. They wanted purity in high places, and here was a definite, criminal indictment against de Mersch. And de Mersch would--in a manner of speaking, have to be lynched, policy or no policy.

She wanted this, and in all the earth she was the only desirable thing.

If I thwarted her--she would ... what would she do now? I looked at Soane.

"What would happen if I stopped the presses?" I asked. Soane was twisting his corkscrew in the wire of the champagne bottle.

It was fatal; I could see nothing on earth but her. What else was there in the world. Wine? The light of the sun? The wind on the heath? Honour!

My G.o.d, what was honour to me if I could see nothing but her on earth?

Would honour or wine or sun or wind ever give me what she could give?

Let them go.

"What would happen if what?" Soane grumbled, "_D--n_ this wire."

"Oh, I was thinking about something," I answered. The wire gave with a little snap and he began to ease the cork. Was I to let the light pa.s.s me by for the sake of ... of Fox, for instance, who trusted me? Well, let Fox go. And Churchill and what Churchill stood for; the probity; the greatness and the spirit of the past from which had sprung my conscience and the consciences of the sleeping millions around me--the woman at the poultry show with her farmers and shopkeepers. Let them go too.

Soane put into my hand one of his charged gla.s.ses. He seemed to rise out of the infinite, a forgotten shape. I sat down at the desk opposite him.

"Deuced good idea," he said, suddenly, "to stop the confounded presses and spoof old Fox. He's up to some devilry. And, by Jove, I'd like to get my knife in him; Jove, I would. And then chuck up everything and leave for the Sandwich Islands. I'm sick of this life, this dog's life.... One might have made a pile though, if one'd known this smash was coming. But one can't get at the innards of things.--No such luck--no such luck, eh?" I looked at him stupidly; took in his blood-shot eyes and his ruffled grizzling hair. I wondered who he was.

_"Il s'agissait de_...?" I seemed to be back in Paris, I couldn't think of what I had been thinking of. I drank his gla.s.s of wine and he filled me another. I drank that too.

Ah yes--even then the thing wasn't settled, even now that I had recognized that Fox and the others were of no account ... What remained was to prove to her that I wasn't a mere chattel, a piece in the game. I was at the very heart of the thing. After all, it was chance that had put me there, the blind chance of all the little things that lead in the inevitable, the future. If, now, I thwarted her, she would ... what would she do? She would have to begin all over again. She wouldn't want to be revenged; she wasn't revengeful. But how if she would never look upon me again?

The thing had reduced itself to a mere matter of policy. Or was it pa.s.sion?

A clatter of the wheels of heavy carts and of the hoofs of heavy horses on granite struck like hammer blows on my ears, coming from the well of the court-yard below. Soane had finished his bottle and was walking to the cupboard. He paused at the window and stood looking down.

"Strong beggars, those porters," he said; "I couldn't carry that weight of paper--not with my rot on it, let alone Callan's. You'd think it would break down the carts."

I understood that they were loading the carts for the newspaper mails.

There was still time to stop them. I got up and went toward the window, very swiftly. I was going to call to them to stop loading. I threw the cas.e.m.e.nt open.

Of course, I did not stop them. The solution flashed on me with the breath of the raw air. It was ridiculously simple. If I thwarted her, well, she would respect me. But her business in life was the inheritance of the earth, and, however much she might respect me--or by so much the more--she would recognise that I was a force to deflect her from the right line--"a disease for me," she had said.

"What I have to do," I said, "is to show her that ... that I had her in my hands and that I co-operated loyally."

The thing was so simple that I triumphed; triumphed with the full glow of wine, triumphed looking down into that murky court-yard where the lanthorns danced about in the rays of a great arc lamp. The gilt letters scattered all over the windows blazed forth the names of Fox's innumerable ventures. Well, he ... he had been a power, but I triumphed.

I had co-operated loyally with the powers of the future, though I wanted no share in the inheritance of the earth. Only, I was going to push into the future. One of the great carts got into motion amidst a shower of sounds that whirled upward round and round the well. The black hood swayed like the shoulders of an elephant as it pa.s.sed beneath my feet under the arch. It disappeared--it was co-operating too; in a few hours people at the other end of the country--of the world--would be raising their hands. Oh, yes, it was co-operating loyally.

I closed the window. Soane was holding a champagne bottle in one hand.

In the other he had a paper knife of Fox's--a metal thing, a j.a.panese dagger or a Deccan knife. He sliced the neck off the bottle.

"Thought you were going to throw yourself out," he said; "I wouldn't stop you. _I'm_ sick of it ... sick."

"Look at this ... to-night ... this infernal trick of Fox's.... And I helped too.... Why?... I must eat." He paused "... and drink," he added. "But there is starvation for no end of fools in this little move. A few will be losing their good names too.... I don't care, I'm off.... By-the-bye: What is he doing it for? Money? Funk?--You ought to know. You must be in it too. It's not hunger with you. Wonderful what people will do to keep their pet vice going.... Eh?" He swayed a little.

"You don't drink--what's your pet vice?"

He looked at me very defiantly, clutching the neck of the empty bottle.

His drunken and overbearing glare seemed to force upon me a complicity in his squalid bargain with life, rewarded by a squalid freedom. He was pitiful and odious to my eyes; and somehow in a moment he appeared menacing.

"You can't frighten me," I said, in response to the strange fear he had inspired. "No one can frighten me now." A sense of my inaccessibility was the first taste of an achieved triumph. I had done with fear. The poor devil before me appeared infinitely remote. He was lost; but he was only one of the lost; one of those that I could see already overwhelmed by the rush from the flood-gates opened at my touch. He would be destroyed in good company; swept out of my sight together with the past they had known and with the future they had waited for. But he was odious. "I am done with you," I said.