Good heavens, man! Why should I come to your exploded windbag? He has played his game ... murdered and muddled. Why should I?"
The young man stood with an air of vigilant respect.
"It is a fact, Sir," he interrupted, "that the Giants insist that they shall see you. They will have no amba.s.sador but you. Unless you come to them, I am afraid, Sir, there will be more bloodshed."
"On _your_ side, perhaps."
"No, Sir--on both sides. The world is resolved the thing must end."
Redwood looked about the study. His eyes rested for a moment on the photograph of his boy. He turned and met the expectation of the young man. "Yes," he said at last, "I will come."
IV.
His encounter with Caterham was entirely different from his antic.i.p.ation. He had seen the man only twice in his life, once at dinner and once in the lobby of the House, and his imagination had been active not with the man but with the creation of the newspapers and caricaturists, the legendary Caterham, Jack the Giant-killer, Perseus, and all the rest of it. The element of a human personality came in to disorder all that.
Here was not the face of the caricatures and portraits, but the face of a worn and sleepless man, lined and drawn, yellow in the whites of the eyes, a little weakened about the mouth. Here, indeed, were the red-brown eyes, the black hair, the distinctive aquiline profile of the great demagogue, but here was also something else that smote any premeditated scorn and rhetoric aside. This man was suffering; he was suffering acutely; he was under enormous stress. From the beginning he had an air of impersonating himself. Presently, with a single gesture, the slightest movement, he revealed to Redwood that he was keeping himself up with drugs. He moved a thumb to his waistcoat pocket, and then, after a few sentences more, threw concealment aside, and slipped the little tabloid to his lips.
Moreover, in spite of the stresses upon him, in spite of the fact that he was in the wrong, and Redwood"s junior by a dozen years, that strange quality in him, the something--personal magnetism one may call it for want of a better name--that had won his way for him to this eminence of disaster was with him still. On that also Redwood had failed to reckon.
From the first, so far as the course and conduct of their speech went, Caterham prevailed over Redwood. All the quality of the first phase of their meeting was determined by him, all the tone and procedure were his. That happened as if it was a matter of course. All Redwood"s expectations vanished at his presence. He shook hands before Redwood remembered that he meant to parry that familiarity; he pitched the note of their conference from the outset, sure and clear, as a search for expedients under a common catastrophe.
If he made any mistake it was when ever and again his fatigue got the better of his immediate attention, and the habit of the public meeting carried him away. Then he drew himself up--through all their interview both men stood--and looked away from Redwood, and began to fence and justify. Once even he said "Gentlemen!"
Quietly, expandingly, he began to talk....
There were moments when Redwood ceased even to feel himself an interlocutor, when he became the mere auditor of a monologue. He became the privileged spectator of an extraordinary phenomenon. He perceived something almost like a specific difference between himself and this being whose beautiful voice enveloped him, who was talking, talking.
This mind before him was so powerful and so limited. From its driving energy, its personal weight, its invincible oblivion to certain things, there sprang up in Redwood"s mind the most grotesque and strange of images. Instead of an antagonist who was a fellow-creature, a man one could hold morally responsible, and to whom one could address reasonable appeals, he saw Caterham as something, something like a monstrous rhinoceros, as it were, a civilised rhinoceros begotten of the jungle of democratic affairs, a monster of irresistible onset and invincible resistance. In all the crashing conflicts of that tangle he was supreme. And beyond? This man was a being supremely adapted to make his way through mult.i.tudes of men. For him there was no fault so important as self-contradiction, no science so significant as the reconciliation of "interests." Economic realities, topographical necessities, the barely touched mines of scientific expedients, existed for him no more than railways or rifled guns or geographical literature exist for his animal prototype. What did exist were gatherings, and caucuses, and votes--above all, votes. He was votes incarnate--millions of votes.
And now in the great crisis, with the Giants broken but not beaten, this vote-monster talked.
It was so evident that even now he had everything to learn. He did not know there were physical laws and economic laws, quant.i.ties and reactions that all humanity voting _nemine contradicente_ cannot vote away, and that are disobeyed only at the price of destruction. He did not know there are moral laws that cannot be bent by any force of glamour, or are bent only to fly back with vindictive violence. In the face of shrapnel or the Judgment Day, it was evident to Redwood that this man would have sheltered behind some curiously dodged vote of the House of Commons.
What most concerned his mind now was not the powers that held the fastness away there to the south, not defeat and death, but the effect of these things upon his Majority, the cardinal reality in his life. He had to defeat the Giants or go under. He was by no means absolutely despairful. In this hour of his utmost failure, with blood and disaster upon his hands, and the rich promise of still more horrible disaster, with the gigantic destinies of the world towering and toppling over him, he was capable of a belief that by sheer exertion of his voice, by explaining and qualifying and restating, he might yet reconst.i.tute his power. He was puzzled and distressed no doubt, fatigued and suffering, but if only he could keep up, if only he could keep talking--
As he talked he seemed to Redwood to advance and recede, to dilate and contract. Redwood"s share of the talk was of the most subsidiary sort, wedges as it were suddenly thrust in. "That"s all nonsense." "No." "It"s no use suggesting that." "Then why did you begin?"
It is doubtful if Caterham really heard him at all. Round such interpolations Caterham"s speech flowed indeed like some swift stream about a rock. There this incredible man stood, on his official hearthrug, talking, talking with enormous power and skill, talking as though a pause in his talk, his explanations, his presentation of standpoints and lights, of considerations and expedients, would permit some antagonistic influence to leap into being--into vocal being, the only being he could comprehend. There he stood amidst the slightly faded splendours of that official room in which one man after another had succ.u.mbed to the belief that a certain power of intervention was the creative control of an empire....
The more he talked the more certain Redwood"s sense of stupendous futility grew. Did this man realise that while he stood and talked there, the whole great world was moving, that the invincible tide of growth flowed and flowed, that there were any hours but parliamentary hours, or any weapons in the hands of the Avengers of Blood? Outside, darkling the whole room, a single leaf of giant Virginian creeper tapped unheeded on the pane.
Redwood became anxious to end this amazing monologue, to escape to sanity and judgment, to that beleaguered camp, the fastness of the future, where, at the very nucleus of greatness, the Sons were gathered together. For that this talking was endured. He had a curious impression that unless this monologue ended he would presently find himself carried away by it, that he must fight against Caterham"s voice as one fights against a drug. Facts had altered and were altering beneath that spell.
What was the man saying?
Since Redwood had to report it to the Children of the Food, in a sort of way he perceived it did matter. He would have to listen and guard his sense of realities as well as he could.
Much about bloodguiltiness. That was eloquence. That didn"t matter.
Next?
He was suggesting a convention!
He was suggesting that the surviving Children of the Food should capitulate and go apart and form a community of their own. There were precedents, he said, for this. "We would a.s.sign them territory--"
"Where?" interjected Redwood, stooping to argue.
Caterham s.n.a.t.c.hed at that concession. He turned his face to Redwood"s, and his voice fell to a persuasive reasonableness. That could be determined. That, he contended, was a quite subsidiary question. Then he went on to stipulate: "And except for them and where they are we must have absolute control, the Food and all the Fruits of the Food must be stamped out--"
Redwood found himself bargaining: "The Princess?"
"She stands apart."
"No," said Redwood, struggling to get back to the old footing. "That"s absurd."
"That afterwards. At any rate we are agreed that the making of the Food must stop--"
"I have agreed to nothing. I have said nothing--"
"But on one planet, to have two races of men, one great, one small!
Consider what has happened! Consider that is but a little foretaste of what might presently happen if this Food has its way! Consider all you have already brought upon this world! If there is to be a race of Giants, increasing and multiplying--"
"It is not for me to argue," said Redwood. "I must go to our sons. I want to go to my son. That is why I have come to you. Tell me exactly what you offer."
Caterham made a speech upon his terms.
The Children of the Food were to be given a great reservation--in North America perhaps or Africa--in which they might live out their lives in their own fashion.
"But it"s nonsense," said Redwood. "There are other Giants now abroad.
All over Europe--here and there!"
"There could be an international convention. It"s _not_ impossible.
Something of the sort indeed has already been spoken of ... But in this reservation they can live out their own lives in their own way. They may do what they like; they may make what they like. We shall be glad if they will make us things. They may be happy. Think!"
"Provided there are no more Children."
"Precisely. The Children are for us. And so, Sir, we shall save the world, we shall save it absolutely from the fruits of your terrible discovery. It is not too late for us. Only we are eager to temper expediency with mercy. Even now we are burning and searing the places their sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.t yesterday. We can get it under. Trust me we shall get it under. But in that way, without cruelty, without injustice--"
"And suppose the Children do not agree?"
For the first time Caterham looked Redwood fully in the face.
"They must!"
"I don"t think they will."
"Why should they not agree?" he asked, in richly toned amazement.
"Suppose they don"t?"
"What can it be but war? We cannot have the thing go on. We cannot. Sir.