This message, strange as it was, came as a blow he had half foreseen. He was not unprepared, yet in spite of himself he felt a little stunned by it. The instinct of the dominant human male was to affect a high contempt, but the instinct of a mind acquainted with a thousand-and-one cross currents immediately below the troubled surface of human society was very different. As he stood at his writing table, holding the letter in his hand, a chill seemed to strike at his heart.
He was still in this attitude when Robert Norton, one of the principal leader writers of the Planet, came into the room. Norton, a brilliant Irishman of thirty, was the master of a diabolically incisive but absolutely unscrupulous pen. Without convictions of his own, without faith, religion or a sense of justice, at every fresh cast of the political horoscope he was ready at a moment’s notice to make the worse appear the better part in entire subordination to the abnormal mind by whom he was rewarded with the salary of a prime minister.
“Ha, Norton, good-morning!” It was a wrench for the Colossus to break his reverie, but with an effort he managed to do so.
Norton, typical product of the large public school and the old university, bowed slightly. He was able to hide the urbane irony of his race, and that was all. With the air of a man at some pains to conceal the fact that his tongue is in his cheek he waited for the august Chief of the U. P. to speak again.
“Are you up in this Garland business?”
It was second nature with Saul Hartz to weigh his words. He took pains to adjust them to every fresh mind with whom he was brought in contact. In his daily intercourse with all sorts and conditions of people he prided himself upon the faculty of saying neither too little nor too much.
“One only knows,” Norton answered, “that about twelve o’clock last night he fell down dead as he entered the Cosmopolitan.”
“No more than that?” The careless tone, the veiled eyes took all significance out of the question.
Such was the limit of Norton’s knowledge of the matter, except that Mr. Gage had given him to understand that he was required to write a leader on the subject whose scope the Chief himself would indicate.
Saul Hartz made no immediate comment on this rather dry answer. He seemed oddly silent and constrained. For the first time in Norton’s knowledge of him there was a look of indecision in his face. Suddenly he said with a change of key so curious as to be a little startling to one who knew him so well: “I’ve changed my mind. We’ll postpone this Garland leader.” He hesitated an instant, and then his voice changed again. “Tell Mr. Gage I would like a further word with him.” It was that tone of the high potentate which was apt secretly to amuse men like Norton who were constitutionally incapable of reverence.