Chapter 17

At noon of the next day I gave Fox his look in at his own flat. He was stretched upon a sofa--it was evident that I was to take such of his duties as were takeable. He greeted me with words to that effect.

“Don’t go filling the paper with your unbreeched geniuses,” he said, genially, “and don’t overwork yourself. There’s really nothing to do, but you’re being there will keep that little beast Evans from getting too cock-a-hoop. He’d like to jerk me out altogether; thinks they’d get on just as well without me.”

I expressed in my manner general contempt for Evans, and was taking my leave.

“Oh, and--” Fox called after me. I turned back. “The Greenland mail ought to be in to-day. If Callan’s contrived to get his flood-gates open, run his stuff in, there’s a good chap. It’s a feature and all that, you know.”

“I suppose Soane’s to have a look at it,” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he answered; “but tell him to keep strictly to old Cal’s lines--rub that into him. If he were to get drunk and run in some of his own tips it’d be awkward. People are expecting Cal’s stuff. Tell you what: you take him out to lunch, eh? Keep an eye on the supplies, and ram it into him that he’s got to stick to Cal’s line of argument.”

“Soane’s as bad as ever, then?” I asked.

“Oh,” Fox answered, “he’ll be all right for the stuff if you get that one idea into him.” A prolonged and acute fit of pain seized him. I fetched his man and left him to his rest.

At the office of the Hour I was greeted by the handing to me of a proof of Callan’s manuscript. Evans, the man across the screen, was the immediate agent.

“I suppose it’s got to go in, so I had it set up,” he said.

“Oh, of course it’s got to go in,” I answered. “It’s to go to Soane first, though.”

“Soane’s not here yet,” he answered. I noted the tone of sub-acid pleasure in his voice. Evans would have enjoyed a fiasco.

“Oh, well,” I answered, nonchalantly, “there’s plenty of time. You allow space on those lines. I’ll send round to hunt Soane up.”

I felt called to be upon my mettle. I didn’t much care about the paper, but I had a definite antipathy to being done by Evans--by a mad Welshman in a stubborn fit. I knew what was going to happen; knew that Evans would feign inconceivable stupidity, the sort of black stupidity that is at command of individuals of his primitive race. I was in for a day of petty worries. In the circumstances it was a thing to be thankful for; it dragged my mind away from larger issues. One has no time for brooding when one is driving a horse in a jibbing fit.

Evans was grimly conscious that I was moderately ignorant of technical details; he kept them well before my eyes all day long.

At odd moments I tried to read Callan’s article. It was impossible. It opened with a description of the squalor of the Greenlander’s life, and contained tawdry passages of local colour.

I knew what was coming. This was the view of the Greenlanders of pre-Merschian Greenland, elaborated, after the manner of Callan--the Special Commissioner--so as to bring out the glory and virtue of the work of regeneration. Then in a gush of superlatives the work itself would be described. I knew quite well what was coming, and was temperamentally unable to read more than the first ten lines.

Everything was going wrong. The printers developed one of their sudden crazes for asking idiotic questions. Their messengers came to Evans, Evans sent them round the pitch-pine screen to me. “Mr. Jackson wants to know----”

The fourth of the messengers that I had despatched to Soane returned with the news that Soane would arrive at half-past nine. I sent out in search of the strongest coffee that the city afforded. Soane arrived. He had been ill, he said, very ill. He desired to be fortified with champagne. I produced the coffee.

Soane was the son of an Irish peer. He had magnificent features--a little blurred nowadays--and a remainder of the grand manner. His nose was a marvel of classic workmanship, but the floods of time had reddened and speckled it--not offensively, but ironically; his hair was turning grey, his eyes were bloodshot, his heavy moustache rather ragged. He inspired one with the respect that one feels for a man who has lived and does not care a curse. He had a weird intermittent genius that made it worth Fox’s while to put up with his lapses and his brutal snubs.

I produced the coffee and pointed to the sofa of the night before.

“Damn it,” he said, “I’m ill, I tell you; I want...”

“Exactly!” I cut in. “You want a rest, old fellow. Here’s Cal’s article. We want something special about it. If you don’t feel up to it I’ll send round to Jenkins.”

“Damn Jenkins,” he said; “I’m up to it.”

“You understand,” I said, “you’re to write strictly on Callan’s lines. Don’t insert any information from extraneous sources. And make it as slashing as you like--on those lines.”

He grunted in acquiescence. I left him lying on the sofa, drinking the coffee. I had tenderly arranged the lights for him as Fox had arranged them the night before. As I went out to get my dinner I was comfortably aware of him, holding the slips close to his muddled eyes and philosophically damning the nature of things.

When I returned, Soane, from his sofa, said something that I did not catch--something about Callan and his article.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I answered, “don’t worry me. Have some more coffee and stick to Cal’s line of argument. That’s what Fox said. I’m not responsible.”

“Deuced queer,” Soane muttered. He began to scribble with a pencil. From the tone of his voice I knew that he had reached the precise stage at which something brilliant--the real thing of its kind--might be expected.

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 bump 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-button 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 Groënlandais--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 damned.” 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 institutions 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 pronouncement. 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 noble 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 passage 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?