The Colossus was never more the Colossus than this evening. All about him were mainly strangers—he was a man of many acquaintances and no friends—and no doubt there were secret enemies in their midst, but he paid them scant regard. He was willing, more than willing, that “his dear Helen” should claim it all.
She fought against him, but it was no use. He spread before her the jewels of his mind and her soul was dazzled. Ever and again, the thought recurred to her that there was none like him. None could there ever be. If demigods there were, to-night Saul Hartz was of their kin.
From the very hour of their first meeting some two years ago at his office in New York she had felt the sense of his power. And now hating him implacably as she did and as she must, he seemed to be raised to a power yet higher. His will, his courage, his imagination made her think of him now as a latter-day Haroun-al-Raschid. But he was something more. He saw beyond the Beyond. To Helen, as he revealed himself in the course of this unforgettable evening, he was like one who had rifled a sealed envelope and read its forbidden contents.
His talk in its abandon was that of one who cares for none of the world’s standards. It was the talk of one who defied God and man; of one who looks beyond experience; of one who saw so much that he accepted nothing. Deep in the heart of Helen was a desire to pity him. He was indeed a figure for pity. A noble mind was straining its moorings. Chartless, rudderless it might soon be out in an open sea.
In the two months that had passed since she had last talked with Saul Hartz, a subtle change had taken place in him. Something had happened to the man himself. Those hooded eyes still veiled their fires, but in the face to which they lent a luster and a value was the look of death. With a flash of vision it came upon Helen that the Colossus was now living in its shadow.
That fact, if fact it was, explained the man to-night. He seemed to know that the end was near. And it was as if he was trying not to care. After all he had had a pretty good inning. He was only fifty-four, still in the prime of his years as other men reckoned them, but a single year as the Colossus lived it was more than a lustrum for those of normal chemistry. Measured in terms of achievement, brain tissue, dynamic power, the fifty-four years of Saul Hartz could be multiplied by ten.
Slowly, with a stealth that at first she did not perceive, the spell of an old fascination came again upon Helen. She did not forget his depth of wickedness. With a shudder that had a tinge of joy she recognized that the mind and will so delicately enfolding hers did evil for the love of evil; but yet she felt, too, as she had always done, that there was nothing ignoble in his choice of the baser part. At the worst, it belonged to a false philosophy of life. It was part of his giantism, his lust of power for power’s sake.
“All the silly gnats”—a big wine was in his glass—“all the silly gnats who swarm in bus and tube, who line up in queues for theaters and movies, who devour bookstalls and live on our headlines, well, well! One-hell-of-a-muss, isn’t it, my dear? No place for people as sane as you and me.”
She was left a little stunned by the logical ferocity of a mind so modern, and yet so subversive of all things that seemed to make life livable.