The Council of Seven

by J. C. Snaith

Impatient with himself he switched off the light and got into bed. But never had he felt so little like sleep. Something was afoot in this old house. Just what it was he could not say, and yet he was sure it concerned him intimately. His mind was a nest of fancies. The second glass of port might have been a mistake, or the oysters might have upset him, for by some means, the room in which he lay was now alive with the evil spirit of the Middle Ages. Who knew what black arts, what latent devilries lurked behind its tapestry? Would this ancient bed in which he felt so uncomfortable be let down into a secret vault wherein a Vehmgericht was assembled? Would these mysterious walls recede to disclose a Secret Council in session? Lying impotently there, his mind grew morbid. He was almost tempted to ring for his servant that he might have company.

What was in the wind? Downstairs in the library something was afoot. The frigid politeness of his fellow guests returned to him with new meaning. All these people, men and women alike, nobly and variously gifted as they were, had a taint of fanaticism. It was idle to deny that he was lying in the midst of danger.

A man of less force might have been tempted to blame his own folly in lying there at all. But Saul Hartz neither repined nor looked back. All experience was good. This was a real adventure. Besides having at last fallen foul of this precious Society, soon or late he would have to face it. So far as he was concerned, it might as well be now. He knew the grim record of the Council of Seven, but he would not swerve an inch from the course already prescribed for himself. It should not be easy to terrorize Saul Hartz. And even if life itself was the stake, was life, after all, such a very great matter?

Lying there, with sleep far from his pillow, he sought to arrange his mind and put his affairs in order. He felt it likely that he would never leave that room alive, but the premonition did not lessen his scorn of others. For that remorseless mind there could be no hereafter. The position he took up was that of a philosopher known to the recent past: “He knew there had been one ice age, and he believed there was going to be another.” A bundle of primal instincts, he merely followed his appetites.

Saul Hartz had an appetite for power. Up till the very moment of entering that room he had considered himself beyond good and evil. But as he lay, waves of thought leaped upon him from those walls. Conspiracy was in the air. Certain forces meant to break him. And how easy to achieve. A drop of poison in a cup of coffee, a knife, or a pistol shot, a knock on the head in the dark, a push, neatly timed, onto a live rail of the Underground, and all would be over. So far as the Colossus was concerned, that would be the end. Let it be so. After all, he had read the Riddle of the Sphinx. Knowing all, there was nothing to know.

He pressed a button of his devil’s machine, and wheat rose five shillings a bushel in Europe; he pressed another button, and half a continent was removed from the comity of nations. But what did it matter? In the sight of Saul Hartz the planet Earth was but a grain of sand on the tideway of eternity. Organic life was a negation of a negation, yet from the first, he had been ready to pay a full price for supreme power. But now it had come to him, it wrought no appeasement of the cosmic sense. Man he was and man he must remain.

It was probable that he was entering upon his last hours, but he made no oblation to a God in which he did not believe. Pursuing the laws of reason with remorseless logic, he had made of himself a god. At the dawn of consciousness he had seen the self in pictures, till now, at the threshold of the night of time, he saw himself as antichrist. His brain, as he had always known, was adapted just a little better to the modern one-hell-of-a-muss than that of any other adventurous insect. It enabled him to get, with a minimum of effort, all the things he sought in the material world. They did not bring happiness, but he did not look for it. Such an abortion as man had no claims to beatitude. For man in his very nature was a hybrid, a contradiction, a grotesque in whom the elements must be ever at war. Let him never seek peace on earth, and as far as heaven was concerned, granting that it existed, what a place of exquisite boredom it must be!

Long hours the Colossus lay searching his heart and then, finally, he drew the bedclothes over his head and decided to go down fighting. To go down fighting—that would be the ultimate bliss for one who made no terms with life. After all, the lust for power was greater than the will to live.

Lying there, hour after hour, in the uncanny silence of that room, the conviction had grown until now it enfolded him like the arms of a woman, that the sleep upon which he was about to enter would be his last. This brief but intense review of experience had pierced him so deeply that it began to seem certain that the end was now near.

At last, he fell into a doze. But hardly had consciousness left him, when, with a violent start, he awoke. Somebody had entered the room. The electric light next the door had been switched on. He sat up in bed to confront a face drawn and haggard, and a pair of eyes somber, ruthless, terrible.