“I kill him.” Involuntarily his hand strayed to the bandage that had been fixed above his right eye. “It is not revenge. It is far more than that ... the job one was sent here to do ... to remove a deadly menace from this unlucky world.”
Helen fixed her eyes on the drawn face of the man she loved and believed in as she said slowly, “You’ll surely do that if you don’t lose heart. One of your powers can do anything.”
“Less than a week ago that was my own opinion. Since then something terrible has happened.” He forced a laugh which sounded harsh and unreal. “A knock on the head has changed all that. One realizes now what one is up against. What chance has a penny trumpet? Can it persuade the walls of Jericho to fall down? Can it drown the thunders of the U. P.?”
“Surely yes, if you have faith.”
“Don’t let us deceive ourselves. There are facts to face. This monster has been well called the Colossus. And his power is great. In this country, at least, he is the absolute dictator of public opinion. Controlling the wires in the way he does—nearly every newspaper in the United Kingdom has now been forced by the mere cost of its production to enter his Trust—he sways these islands from end to end. At Hellington it was incredible what a plain, uncolored lie could do in so short a time. They simply wouldn’t hear me. All morning journals had sung together. And a Fleet Street Lucifer, a twopence-daily antichrist, had composed the tune.”
Grief, concern, pity were in the face of Helen.
“One had always hoped and felt,” he went on with anger stifling his voice, “that this noise and vanity, this catchpenny patriotism, this lipservice to the majority, this bag of cheap tricks, don’t really count—in the sum of things. But they do. Hellington teaches one that. The malign force that lured the Hun to his doom is now about to deal with what remains of civilization.”
“But why? ... but why? ... but why?”
“The ambition of Saul Hartz is insensate. Like all of his kind before him, he doesn’t know when to stop. By that sin fell the angels. Cheap, debased, vulgarized he may be, but he is still Lucifer, Son of the Morning, in up-to-date clothes.”
Helen, while she listened, was torn with pain. She loved this man. This creature of intuitions, now broken and tormented, had grown more than ever dear in the course of four terrible days. The desire to help him had never been so strong. He could read that in her compressed lips, her burning eyes. But very gentleman as he was, now the case was altered, now he could no longer count on the integrity of the central forces, he was ready, almost eager in his own despite to release her.