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.

The drone of the presses made the floor under my feet quiver, and the whole building vibrated as if the earth itself had trembled.  I was alone with my knowledge.  Did she know; had she put the power in my hand?  But I was alone, and I was free.

I took up the proof and began to read, slanting the page to the fall of the light.  It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric of the man there was genuine indignation and pain.  There were revolting details of cruelty to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked; but more revolting to see without a mask was that falsehood which had been hiding under the words that for ages had spurred men to noble deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism.  What was appalling was the sudden perception that all the traditional ideals of honour, glory, conscience, had been committed to the upholding of a gigantic and atrocious fraud.  The falsehood had spread stealthily, had eaten into the very heart of creeds and convictions that we lean upon on our passage between the past and the future.  The old order of things had to live or perish with a lie.  I saw all this with the intensity and clearness of a revelation; I saw it as though I had been asleep through a year of work and dreams, and had awakened to the truth.  I saw it all; I saw her intention.  What was I to do?

Without my marking its approach emotion was upon me.  The fingers that held up the extended slips tattooed one on another through its negligible thickness.