Perhaps the first emotion to arise in the outraged being of the Colossus was regret that he had not recovered quickly enough from his shock to take the number of this friend of progress. It would have been pleasant to deal with the creature in due season; but if such a feeling was ever there, it was superseded immediately by a sense of pride. As usual, the U. P. was living up to itself. The efficiency of the grim monster that had been created by his severely practical genius was ruthless, astonishing, without a flaw. Only a very little reflection was needed for the mind of Saul Hartz to set the incident in true perspective. The achievement of this obscure servant of the U. P. was not a matter for censure. To dash round the Haymarket corner at midday without warning, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, was praiseworthy in the highest degree. Feats such as that, on an ever-ascending plane, without a thought for the rights of others, had enabled the U. P. to declare, as usual, a dividend for the last financial year of one hundred per cent, free of tax.
Difficult as it was to know why at that moment the mangled form of the Colossus was not on its way in a wheeled ambulance to Charing Cross Hospital, he was not a man to yield to an isolated fact of experience. By the time he had passed through Jermyn Street and had made the perilous crossing to Swan & Edgar’s corner, this minor incident was as if it had not been. The mind of Saul Hartz was now engulfed in a far more potent thing.
Near the entrance of the Piccadilly Hotel he stopped and took from an inner pocket a small address book bound in red leather. Memory reinforced, he went on as far as the Albany and halted finally at a door towards the Vigo Street end of that quaint caravansary.
The knock of the Colossus was answered at once by a creature slightly more odd than his surroundings. A pure bred Egyptian in a neat gray flannel suit, surmounted by a taboosh, opened the door and greeted the visitor with a gravely impassive smile. The man, slight of form, lustrous of feature, had an aloof dignity; he had, moreover the noetic subtlety of a very old civilization.
“Mr. Wygram in? Give him my card, will you?”
In the presence of such forceful, deliberate authority the smile of the janitor became a bow. Mr. Hartz produced a card. “Tell him, please, a very urgent matter.”
The man bowed again. Saul Hartz took this further obeisance as an invitation to enter. With cat-footed elegance the Egyptian silently bore the card to his master.
XVII
SAUL HARTZ had not long to wait. Almost immediately the Egyptian reappeared. Without speaking a word he contrived to make clear that Mr. Wygram would receive his visitor.
The Colossus was ushered at once into the presence of a remarkable personage. A man about forty years old was seated cross-legged on the ground, after the fashion of the East, in a room hardly less exotic. Its cushions, rugs and curtains evoked the Orient as surely as the tchibouk its occupant was contemplatively sucking and the fumes of the pungent-scented Arabian tobacco which filled the whole place. The man who sat on a cushion on the richly carpeted floor wore a burnoose, slippers and a turban. In every detail of surroundings and pose he recalled a very different scene, but the dark-eyed, close-shaven face, in spite of a withdrawn look which lent it a subtle asceticism, was too fair of skin to suggest an exclusively eastern type.