“I’ve got it written,” he said. “But ... I say, what the deuce is up? It’s like being a tall clock with the mainspring breaking, this.”
I rang the bell for someone to take the copy down.
“Your metaphor’s too much for me, Soane,” I said.
“It’s appropriate all the way along,” he maintained, “if you call me a mainspring. I’ve been wound up and wound up to write old de Mersch and his Greenland up—and it’s been a tight wind, these days, I tell you. Then all of a sudden ...”
A boy appeared and carried off the copy.
“All of a sudden,” Soane resumed, “something gives—I suppose something’s given—and there’s a whirr-rr-rr and the hands fly backwards and old de Mersch and Greenland bump to the bottom, like the weights.”
The boom of the great presses was rattling the window frames. Soane got up and walked toward one of the cupboards.
“Dry work,” he said; “but the simile’s just, isn’t it?”
I gave one swift step toward the bell-button beside the desk. The proof of Callan’s article, from which Soane had been writing, lay a crumpled white streamer on the brown wood of Fox’s desk. I made toward it. As I stretched out my hand the solution slipped into my mind, coming with no more noise than that of a bullet; impinging with all the shock and remaining with all the pain. I had remembered the morning, over there in Paris, when she had told me that she had invited one of de Mersch’s lieutenants to betray him by not concealing from Callan the real horrors of the Systeme Groënlandais—flogged, butchered, miserable natives, the famines, the vices, diseases, and the crimes. There came suddenly before my eyes the tall narrow room in my aunt’s house, the opening of the door and her entry, followed by that of the woebegone governor of a province—the man who was to show Callan things—with his grating “Cest entendu ...”
I remembered the scene distinctly; her words; her looks; my utter unbelief. I remembered, too, that it had not saved me from a momentary sense of revolt against that inflexible intention of a treachery which was to be another step toward the inheritance of the earth. I had rejected the very idea, and here it had come; it was confronting me with all its meaning and consequences. Callan had been shown things he had not been meant to see, and had written the truth as he had seen it. His article was a small thing in itself, but he had been sent out there with tremendous flourishes of de Mersch’s trumpets. He was the man who could be believed. De Mersch’s supporters had practically said: “If he condemns us we are indeed damned.” And now that the condemnation had come, it meant ruin, as it seemed to me, for everybody I had known, worked for, seen, or heard of, during the last year of my life. It was ruin for Fox, for Churchill, for the ministers, and for the men who talk in railway carriages, for shopkeepers and for the government; it was a menace to the institutions which hold us to the past, that are our guarantees for the future. The safety of everything one respected and believed in was involved in the disclosure of an atrocious fraud, and the disclosure was in my hands. For that night I had the power of the press in my keeping. People were waiting for this pronouncement. De Mersch’s last card was his philanthropy; his model state and his happy natives.