by Jack London
“John Gray,” Hall whispered to Grunya. “If the theatre were not so hopelessly commercialized, he would revolutionize the whole of it.”
“Logomachy,” they heard Lucoville begin his reply. “Word-mongering, tricks of speech, a shuffling of words and ideas. If you chaps will give me ten minutes, I’ll expound my position.”
“Behold!” Hall whispered. “Our amiable assassins, adorable philosophers. Now, would you rather believe them madmen than cruel and brutal murderers?”
Grunya shrugged her shoulders. “They may bend beauty any way they please, but I cannot forget that they are bent on killing Uncle Sergius—my father.”
“But don’t you see? They are obsessed by ideas. They take no count of mere human life—not even of their own. They are in slavery to thought. They live in a world of ideas.”
“At fifty thousand per,” she retorted.
It was his turn to shrug his shoulders.
“Come,” he said. “Let us enter. No, I’ll go first.”
He turned the door handle and went in, followed by Grunya. The conversation stopped abruptly, and seven men, seated comfortably about the room, stared at the two intruders.
“Look here, Hall,” Harkins said with evident irritation. “You were to be kept out of this. And we kept you out. Yet here you are, and with a—pardon me—a stranger.”
“And if it had depended on you fellows, I should have been kept out,” Hall answered. “Why so secret?”
“It was the Chief’s orders. He invited us here. And since we obeyed his instructions and didn’t let you in on it, our only conclusion is that it is he who let you in.”
“No he didn’t,” Hall laughed. “And you might as well ask us to be seated. This, gentlemen, is Miss Constantine. Miss Constantine, Mr. Gray; Mr. Harkins; Mr. Lucoville; Mr. Breen; Mr. Alsworthy; Mr. Starkington; and Mr. Hanover—with the one exception of Mr. Haas, the surviving members of the Assassination Bureau.”
“This is broken faith!” Lucoville cried angrily. “Hall, I am disappointed!”
“You do not understand, friend Lucoville. This is Miss Constantine’s house. In the absence of her father you are her guests, all of you.”
“We were given to understand it was Dragomiloff’s house,” Starkington said. “He told us so. We came separately, yet, since we all arrived here we can only conclude that there was no mistake of street and number.”
“It is the same thing,” Hall replied, with a quiet smile. “Miss Constantine is Dragomiloff’s daughter.”
On the instant Grunya and Hall were surrounded by the others, and hands were held out to her. Her own hand she put behind her, at the same time taking a backward step.
“You want to kill my father,” she said to Lucoville. “It is impossible that I should take your hand.”
“Here, this chair; be seated, dear lady,” Lucoville was saying, assisted by Starkington and Gray in bringing the chair to her. “We are highly honored—the daughter of our Chief—we did not know he had a daughter—she is welcome—any daughter of our Chief is welcome—”
“But you want to kill him,” she continued her objection. “You are murderers.”
“We are friends, believe me. We represent an amity that is higher and deeper than life and death. Dear lady, human life is nothing—less than a bagatelle. Life! Why, our lives are mere pawns in the game of social evolution. We admire your father, we respect him; he is a great man. He is—or, rather, he was—our Chief.”
“Yet you want to kill him,” she persisted.
“And by his orders. Be seated, please.” Lucoville succeeded in his attentions, insofar as she sank down in the chair. “This friend of yours, Mr. Hall,” he went on. “You do not refuse him as a friend. You do not call him a murderer. Yet it was he who deposited the fifty-thousand-dollar fee for your father’s life. You see, dear lady, already he has half destroyed our organization. Yet we do not hold it against him. He is our friend. We honor him because we know him to be a man, an honest man, a man of his word, an ethicist of no mean dimensions.”
“Isn’t it wonderful, Miss Constantine!” Hanover broke in ecstatically. “Amity that makes death cheap! The rule of right! The worship of right! Does it not make one hope? Think of it! It proves that the future is ours; that the future belongs to the right-thinking, right-acting man and woman; that such fierce, feeble stirrings and animal yearnings of the beastly clay, love of self and love of kindred flesh and blood, vanish away as dawn mist before the sun of the higher righteousness! Reason—and, mark me, right reason—triumphs! All the human world, some day, will comport itself, not according to the flesh and the abysmal mire, but according to high right reason!”
Grunya bowed her head and threw up her arms in admission of befuddled despair.
“You can’t resist them, eh?” Hall exulted, bending over her.
“It is the chaos of super-thinking,” she said helplessly. “It is ethics gone mad.”
“So I told you,” he answered. “They are all mad, as your father is mad, as you and I are mad insofar as we are touched by their thinking. And now what do you think of our lovable assassins?”
“Yes, what do you think of us?” Hanover beamed over the top of his spectacles.
“All I can say,” she replied, “is that you don’t look like it—like assassins, I mean. As for you, Mr. Lucoville, I will take your hand, I will take the hands of all of you, if you will promise to give up this attempt to kill my father.”
“You have a long way, Miss Constantine, to climb upwards to the light,” Hanover chided regretfully.
“Kill? Kill?” Lucoville queried excitedly. “Why this fear of killing? Death is nothing. Only the beasts, the creatures of the mire, fear death. My dear lady, we are beyond death. We are full-statured intelligences, knowing good and evil. It is no more difficult for us to be killed than it is for us to kill. Killing—why, it occurs in every slaughterhouse and meat-canning establishment in the land. It is so common that it is almost vulgar.”
“Who has not swatted a mosquito?” Starkington shouted. “With one fell swoop of a meat-nourished, death-nourished hand smashed to destruction a most wonderful, sentient, and dazzling flying mechanism? If there be tragedy in death—think of the mosquito, the squashed mosquito, the airy fairy miracle of flight disrupted and crushed as no aviator has ever been disrupted and crushed, not even MacDonald who fell fifteen thousand feet. Have you ever studied the mosquito, Miss Constantine? It will repay you. Why, the mosquito is just as wonderful, in the phenomena of living matter, as man is wonderful.”
“But there is a difference,” Gray put in.
“I was coming to that. And what is the difference? Swat the mosquito.” He paused for emphasis. “Well, he is swatted, isn’t he? And that is all. He is finished. The memory of him is not. But swat a man—by entire generations swat man—and something is left. What is it that is left? Not a peripatetic organism, not a hungry stomach, a bald head, and a mouthful of aching teeth, but thoughts—royal, kingly thoughts. That’s the difference. Thoughts! High thoughts! Right thoughts! Reasoned righteousness!”
“Hold!” Hanover shouted, in his excitement springing to his feet and waving his arms. “Swat—and I accept your word, Starkington, crude though it is, but expressive. Swat—and I warn you, Starkington—swat as much as the tiniest pigment cell of the diaphanous gauze of a new-hatched mosquito’s wing, and the totality of the universe is jarred from its central suns to the stars beyond the stars. Do not forget there is a cosmic righteousness in that pigment cell and in the last atom of the billion atoms that go to compose that pigment cell, and in every one of the countless myriads of corpuscles that go to compose one of those billion atoms.”
“Listen, gentlemen,” Grunya said. “What are you here for? I do not mean in the universe, but here in this house. I accept all that Mr. Hanover has so eloquently said of the pigment cell of the mosquito’s wing. It is evidently not right to—to swat a mosquito. Then, how in the name of sanity can you reconcile your presence here, bent as you are on a r
ed-handed murder, with the ethics you have just expounded?”
An uproar of reconciliation arose from every mouth.
“Hey! Shut up!” Hall bellowed at them, then turned to the girl and commanded peremptorily, “Grunya, stop it. You’re getting touched. In five minutes you’ll be as bad as they are. A truce to argument, you fellows. Cut it out. Forget it. Let’s get down to business. Where is the Chief, Miss Constantine’s father? You say he told you to come here. Why have you come here? To kill him?”
Hanover wiped his forehead, collapsed from his passion of thought, and nodded.
“That is our reasoned intention,” he said calmly. “Of course, the presence of Miss Constantine is embarrassing. I fear we shall have to ask her to withdraw.”
“You are a brute, sir,” she gravely assured the mild-mannered scholar. “I shall remain right here. And you won’t kill my father. I tell you, you won’t.”
“Why isn’t the Chief here, then?” Hall inquired.
“Because it is not yet time. He telephoned to us, talked with us himself, and he said he would meet us here in this room at ten o’clock. It is almost ten now.”
“Maybe he won’t come,” Hall suggested.
“He gave his word,” was the simple but quite convincing answer.
Hall looked at his watch. It marked a few seconds before ten. And ere those seconds had ticked off, the door opened and Dragomiloff, blond and colorless, clad in a gray traveling suit, stepped in, passing a glance over the assemblage from silken eyes of the palest blue.
“Greetings, dear friends and brothers,” he said in his monotonously even voice. “I see you are all here, with the exception of Haas. Where is Haas?”
The assassins who could not lie stared at one another in awkward confusion.
“Where is Haas?” Dragomiloff repeated.
“We—ah—we don’t know exactly, that is it, exactly,” Harkins began haltingly.
“Well, I do, and exactly,” Dragomiloff chopped him short. “I watched you arrive from the upstairs window. I recognized all of you. Haas also arrived. He is now lying in the shrubbery inside the gate on the right-hand side of the walk, and exactly four feet and four inches from the lower hinge of the gate. I measured it the other day. Do you think that was what I intended?”
“We did not care to anticipate your intentions, dear Chief,” Hanover spoke up benignly, but with logical emphasis. “We debated your invitation and your instructions carefully, and it was our unanimous conclusion that we committed no breach of word or faith in assigning Haas to his position outside. Do you remember your instructions?”
“Perfectly,” Dragomiloff assented. “Wait till I go over them to myself.” For a half-minute of silence he reviewed his instructions, then his face thawed into almost a beam of satisfaction. “You are correct,” he announced. “You have committed no breach of right conduct. And now, dear comrades, all our plans are destroyed by this intrusion of my daughter and of the man who is your Temporary Secretary and who I hope some day will be my son-in-law.”
“What was the aim of your plan?” Starkington asked quickly.
“To destroy you,” Dragomiloff laughed. “And the aim of your plan was?”
“To destroy you,” Starkington admitted. “And destroy you we will. We regret Miss Constantine’s presence, as we likewise do Mr. Hall’s presence. They came uninvited. They can, of course, withdraw.”
“I won’t!” Grunya cried out. “You cold-blooded, inhuman, mathematical monsters! This is my father, and I may be abysmal mire, or anything else you please, but I will not withdraw, and you shall not harm him.”
“You must meet me halfway in this,” Dragomiloff urged. “Let us consider this once that we have failed on both sides. Let me propose a truce.”
“Very well,” Starkington conceded. “A truce for five minutes, during which time no overt act may be attempted and no one may leave the room. We should like to confer together over there by the piano. Is it agreed?”
“Yes, certainly. But first you will please notice where I am standing. My hand is resting against this particular book in this bookcase. I shall not move until you have decided on what course you intend to pursue.”
The assassins drew to the far end of the room and began talking in whispers.
“Come,” Grunya whispered to her father. “You have but to step through the door and escape.”
Dragomiloff smiled forgivingly. “You do not understand,” he said with gentleness.
She clenched her hands passionately, crying, “You are as insane as they.”
“But Grunya, love,” he pleaded, “is it not a beautiful insanity—if you prefer the misnomer? Here thought rules and right rules. It would seem to me the highest rationality and control. What distinguishes man from the lower animals is control. Witness this scene. There stand seven men intent on killing me. Here I stand intent on killing them. Yet, by the miracle of the spoken word we agree to a truce. We trust. It is a beautiful example of high moral inhibition.”
“Every hermit, on top of a pillar or living with the snakes in a cliff cave, has been a beautiful example of such inhibition,” she came back impatiently. “The inhibitions practiced in the asylums are often very remarkable.”
But Dragomiloff refused to be drawn, and smiled and joked until the assassins returned. As before, Starkington was the spokesman.
“We have decided,” he said, “that it is our duty to kill you, dear Chief. There is still a minute to run. When it is gone we shall proceed to our work. Also, in that interval, we again request our two unbidden guests to withdraw.”
Grunya shook her head positively. “I am armed,” she threatened, drawing a small automatic pistol and displaying her inexperience by not pressing down the safety catch.
“It’s too bad,” Starkington apologized. “But we shall have to go on with our work just the same.”
“If nothing unforeseen prevents?” Dragomiloff suggested.
Starkington glanced at his comrades, who nodded, then said, “Certainly, unless nothing unforeseen—”
“And here is the unforeseen,” Dragomiloff interrupted quietly. “You see my hands, my dear Starkington. They bear no weapons. Forbear a minute. You see the book against which my left hand rests. Behind that book, at the back of the case, is a push-button. One firm thrust in of the book presses the button. The room is a magazine of dynamite. Need I explain more? Draw aside that rug on which you are standing—that’s right. Now carefully lift up that loose board. See the sticks lying side by side. They’re all connected.”
“Most interesting,” Hanover murmured, peering down at the dynamite through his spectacles. “Death so simply achieved! A violent chemical reaction, I believe. Some day, when I can spare the time, I shall make a study of explosives.”
And in that moment, Hall and Grunya realized that the philosopher-assassins were truly not afraid of death. As they claimed for themselves, they were not burdened by the flesh. Love of life did not yearn through their mental processes. All they knew was the love of thought.
“We did not guess this,” Gray assured Dragomiloff. “But we apprehended what we did not guess. That is why we stationed Haas outside. You could escape us, but not him.”
“Which reminds me, comrades,” Dragomiloff said. “I ran another wire to the spot in the grounds where Haas is now lurking. Let us hope he does not blunder upon my button I concealed there, else we’ll all go up along with our theories. Suppose one of you goes and brings him in to join us. And while we’re about it, let us agree to another truce. Under the present circumstances, your hands are tied.”
“Seven lives for one,” said Harkins. “Mathematically it is repulsive.”
“It is poor economics,” Breen agreed.
“And suppose,” Dragomiloff continued, “we make the truce till one o’clock and you all come and have supper with me.”
“If Haas agrees,” Alsworthy said. “I am going to get him now.”
Haas agreed and, like any party of friends, they left
the house together and caught an electric car for uptown.
13
In a private room at the Poodle Dog, the eight assassins and Dragomiloff, Hall, and Grunya sat at table. And a merry, almost convivial supper it was, despite the fact that Harkins and Hanover were vegetarians, that Lucoville eschewed all cooked food and munched bovinely at a great plate of lettuce, raw turnips, and carrots, and that Alsworthy began, kept up, and finished with nuts, raisins, and bananas. On the other hand, Breen, who looked a dyspeptic, orgied with a thick, raw steak and shuddered at the suggestion of wine. Dragomiloff and Haas drank thin native claret, while Hall, Gray, and Grunya shared a pint of light Rhine wine. Starkington, however, began with two Martini cocktails, and ever and again, throughout the meal, buried his face in a huge stein of Würzburger.
The talk was outspoken, though the feeling displayed was comradely and affectionate.
“We’d have got you,” Starkington told Dragomiloff, “if it hadn’t been for the inopportune arrival of your daughter.”
“My dear Starkington,” Dragomiloff retorted. “It was she who saved you. I’d have bagged the seven of you.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Breen joined in. “As I understand, the wire led to the bushes where Haas was hiding.”
“His being there was an accident, a mere accident,” Dragomiloff answered lightly enough, yet unable to conceal that he was somewhat crestfallen.
“Since when has the fortuitous been discarded from the factors of evolution?” Hanover began learnedly.
“You’d never have touched it off, Chief,” Haas was saying at the same time that Lucoville was demanding of Hanover, “Since when was the fortuitous ever classed as a factor?”
“Possibly your disagreement is merely of definition,” Hall said pacifically. “That asparagus is tinned, Hanover. Did you know that?”
Hanover forgot the argument, and sat back aghast. “And I never eat tinned stuff of any sort! Are you sure, Hall? Are you sure?”
“Ask the waiter. He’ll tell you the same.”
“It’s all right, dear Haas,” Dragomiloff was saying. “The next time I’ll surely touch it off, and you won’t be in the way. You’ll be at the other end of the wire.”
