Lord of the World 4
He was a pleasant-looking man, not much over thirty years old; black
wire-haired, clean-shaven, thin, virile, magnetic, blue-eyed and
white-skinned; and he appeared this day extremely content with himself
and the world. His lips moved slightly as he worked, his eyes enlarged
and diminished with excitement, and more than once he paused and stared
out again, smiling and flushed.
Then a door opened; a middle-aged man came nervously in with a bundle of
papers, laid them down on the table without a word, and turned to go
out. Oliver lifted his hand for attention, snapped a lever, and spoke.
"Well, Mr. Phillips?" he said.
"There is news from the East, sir," said the secretary.
Oliver shot a glance sideways, and laid his hand on the bundle.
"Any complete message?" he asked.
"No, sir; it is interrupted again. Mr. Felsenburgh's name is mentioned."
Oliver did not seem to hear; he lifted the flimsy printed sheets with a
sudden movement, and began turning them.
"The fourth from the top, Mr. Brand," said the secretary.
Oliver jerked his head impatiently, and the other went out as if at a
signal.
The fourth sheet from the top, printed in red on green, seemed to absorb
Oliver's attention altogether, for he read it through two or three
times, leaning back motionless in his chair. Then he sighed, and stared
again through the window.
Then once more the door opened, and a tall girl came in.
"Well, my dear?" she observed.
Oliver shook his head, with compressed lips.
"Nothing definite," he said. "Even less than usual. Listen."
He took up the green sheet and began to read aloud as the girl sat down
in a window-seat on his left.
She was a very charming-looking creature, tall and slender, with
serious, ardent grey eyes, firm red lips, and a beautiful carriage of
head and shoulders. She had walked slowly across the room as Oliver took
up the paper, and now sat back in her brown dress in a very graceful and
stately attitude. She seemed to listen with a deliberate kind of
patience; but her eyes flickered with interest.
"'Irkutsk--April fourteen--Yesterday--as--usual--But--rumoured--
defection--from--Sufi--party--Troops--continue--gathering--
Felsenburgh--addressed--Buddhist--crowd--Attempt--on--Llama--last--
Friday--work--of--Anarchists--Felsenburgh--leaving--for--Moscow--as
--arranged--he....' There--that is absolutely all," ended Oliver
dispiritedly. "It's interrupted as usual."
The girl began to swing a foot.
"I don't understand in the least," she said. "Who is Felsenburgh, after
all?"
"My dear child, that is what all the world is asking. Nothing is known
except that he was included in the American deputation at the last
moment. The _Herald_ published his life last week; but it has been
contradicted. It is certain that he is quite a young man, and that he
has been quite obscure until now."
"Well, he is not obscure now," observed the girl.
"I know; it seems as if he were running the whole thing. One never hears
a word of the others. It's lucky he's on the right side."
"And what do you think?"
Oliver turned vacant eyes again out of the window.
"I think it is touch and go," he said. "The only remarkable thing is
that here hardly anybody seems to realise it. It's too big for the
imagination, I suppose. There is no doubt that the East has been
preparing for a descent on Europe for these last five years. They have
only been checked by America; and this is one last attempt to stop them.
But why Felsenburgh should come to the front---" he broke off. "He must
be a good linguist, at any rate. This is at least the fifth crowd he has
addressed; perhaps he is just the American interpreter. Christ! I wonder
who he is."
"Has he any other name?"
"Julian, I believe. One message said so."
"How did this come through?"
Oliver shook his head.
"Private enterprise," he said. "The European agencies have stopped work.
Every telegraph station is guarded night and day. There are lines of
volors strung out on every frontier. The Empire means to settle this
business without us."
"And if it goes wrong?"
"My dear Mabel--if hell breaks loose---" he threw out his hands
deprecatingly.
"And what is the Government doing?"
"Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It'll be Armageddon
with a vengeance if it comes to war."
"What chance do you see?"
"I see two chances," said Oliver slowly: "one, that they may be afraid
of America, and may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that
they may be induced to hold their hands from charity; if only they can
be made to understand that co-operation is the one hope of the world.
But those damned religions of theirs---"
The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of
house-roofs below the window.
The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire,
consisting of a federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made
possible by the merging of the Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the
fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces and learning its own
power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had
laid its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of
the world had learned the folly of war, ever since the fall of the
Russian republic under the combined attack of the yellow races, the last
had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation of
the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise
by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for
the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver
it was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast
limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out
over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and
fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable
that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept
back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less
than this would be the result if the East laid hands on Europe. Even
Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that had
blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all
forms of faith, to Oliver's mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and
enslaving. And the prospect of all this honestly troubled him, far more
than the thought of the physical catastrophe and bloodshed that would
fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope on
the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was
that the Quietistic Pantheism which for the last century had made such
giant strides in East and West alike, among Mohammedans, Buddhists,
Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to check the
supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
understood, was what he held himself; for him "God" was the developing
sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being;
competition then was the great heresy that set men one against another
and delayed all progress; for, to his mind, progress lay in the merging
of the individual in the family, of the family in the commonwealth, of
the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of
impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the
supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of
individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other. It
was treason to appeal from God Immanent to God Transcendent; there was
no God transcendent; God, so far as He could be known, was man.
Yet these two, husband and wife after a fashion--for they had entered
into that terminable contract now recognised explicitly by the
State--these two were very far from sharing in the usual heavy dulness
of mere materialists. The world, for them, beat with one ardent life
blossoming in flower and beast and man, a torrent of beautiful vigour
flowing from a deep source and irrigating all that moved or felt. Its
romance was the more appreciable because it was comprehensible to the
minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries
that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with
every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil,
the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by
the Spirit of the World--fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His
Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer,
twenty years before, that the inhabitation of certain planets had become
a certified fact--how vastly this had altered men's views of themselves.
But the one condition of progress and the building of Jerusalem, on the
planet that happened to be men's dwelling place, was peace, not the
sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that
arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a
knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by
sympathy with his fellows. To Oliver and his wife, then, the last
century seemed like a revelation; little by little the old superstitions
had died, and the new light broadened; the Spirit of the World had
roused Himself, the sun had dawned in the west; and now with horror and
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