The Council of Seven

by J. C. Snaith

“A big word—yes—I agree.” The wheeze became a snarl of subtle contempt. “But in this case it’s the only one you see.”

Helen’s lover had an illusion of fangs striking his flesh.

“What do you mean?” he demanded with savage eyes.

Saul Hartz shrugged contemptuously and spread his hands like a stage Frenchman.

In the vain hope of freeing his veins of a poison, Endor repeated a futile question. With a skill, in itself a mockery, his enemy tossed it lightly into the air.

“Isn’t it better in some cases,” he said, picking each word with the fetid delicacy of a Baudelaire, “to leave, my dear friend, just a little to the imagination?”

The words in the ear of John Endor were those of a devil. He could but gasp. There was no mistaking their implication. Looking squarely across at the man seated in the far corner of the carriage, he saw the image of one capable of doing evil for the love of it. A monster of wickedness confronted him. But in this moment of suffering, his thought was less of the woman he loved than of the country he adored. By what cruel turn of Fate’s shuttle had she, the conqueror of half the world, been conquered by antichrist himself?

This secret power behind the great movements of the time, this framer of policies, foreign and domestic, this boss of all bosses, this big serpent who swallowed the little serpents, what a commentary he was on the world that he governed! Was it possible, that in the act of recoil from the highest moment in her history, Civilization should now be in bondage to a mere beast!

Still looking at the hooded eyes of the man opposite, a strange light came into those of John Endor. As in a glass darkly he saw the final degradation, the ultimate doom of the thing he loved beyond all other things. “One with Nineveh and Tyre.” How often had antichrist, and with what a gusto, blazoned these words in the pages of his own newspapers. He even printed them in Greek on appropriate occasions. Cynicism raised to this power was the perquisite of no common man.

Man he hardly seemed to be as there he sat, looking at the light in the face of John Endor and yet characteristically heedless of its cause. Truly, the mind becomes subdued to that in which it works! Having, with his insight into modern mechanical conditions, bemused the five continents of the world by diabolonian arts, he saw himself now with the world at his feet, and in his grasp all the strings of the U. P.—that latter-day symbol of the supreme power.