by Jack London
“Do you draw any line at accepting commissions?” Winter Hall asked.
“No; from emperor and king down to the humblest peasant—we accept them all, if—and it is a big if—if their execution is decided to be socially justifiable. And, once we have accepted payment, which is in advance, you know, and have decided it to be right to make a certain killing, that killing takes place. It is one of our rules.”
As Winter Hall listened, a wild idea flashed into his mind. So whimsical was it, so almost lunatic, that he felt immeasurably fascinated by it.
“You are very ethical, I must say,” he began, “a—what I might call—ethical enthusiast.”
“Or monstrosity,” Dragomiloff added pleasantly. “Yes, I have quite a penchant that way.”
“Anything you conceive to be right, that thing you will do.”
Dragomiloff nodded affirmation, and a silence fell, which he was the first to break.
“You have some one in mind whom you wish removed. Who is it?”
“I am so curious,” was the reply, “and so interested, that I should like to approach it tentatively . . . you know, in arranging the terms of the bargain. You surely must have a scale of prices, determined, of course, by the position and influence of . . . of the victim.”
Dragomiloff nodded.
“Suppose it were a king I wished removed?” Hall queried.
“There are kings and kings. The price varies. Is your man a king?”
“No; he is not a king. He is a strong man, but not of noble title.”
“He is not a president?” Dragomiloff asked quickly.
“No; he holds no official position whatever. In fact, he is a man in private life. For what sum will you guarantee the removal of a man in private life?”
“For such a man it would be less difficult and hazardous. He would come cheaper.”
“Not so,” Hall urged. “I can afford to be generous in this. It is a very difficult and hazardous commission I am giving you. He is a man of powerful mind, of infinite wit and recourse.”
“A millionaire?”
“I do not know.”
“I would suggest forty thousand dollars as the price,” the head of the Bureau concluded. “Of course, on learning his identity, I may have to increase that sum. On the other hand, I may decrease it.”
Hall drew bills of large denomination from his pocketbook, counted them, and handed them to the other.
“I imagined you did business on a currency basis,” he said, “and so I came prepared. And, now, as I understand it, you will guarantee to kill—”
“I do no killing,” Dragomiloff interrupted.
“You will guarantee to have killed any man I name.”
“That is correct, with the proviso, of course, that an investigation shows his execution to be justifiable.”
“Good. I understand perfectly. Any man I name, even if he should be my father, or yours?”
“Yes; though as it happens I have neither father nor son.”
“Suppose I named myself?”
“It would be done. The order would go forth. We have no concern with the whims of our clients.”
“But suppose, say tomorrow or next week, I should change my mind?”
“It would be too late.” Dragomiloff spoke with decision.
“Once an order goes forth it can never be recalled. That is one of the most necessary of our rules.”
“Very good. However, I am not the man.”
“Then who is he?”
“The name men know him by is Ivan Dragomiloff.”
Hall said it quietly enough, and just as quietly was it received.
“I want better identification,” Dragomiloff suggested.
“He is a native of Russia, I believe. I know he is a resident of New York City. He is blond, remarkably blond, and of just about your size, height, weight, and age.”
Dragomiloff’s pale-blue eyes looked long and steadily at his visitor. At last he spoke.
“I was born in the province of Valenko. Where was your man born?”
“In the province of Valenko.”
Again Dragomiloff scrutinized the other with unwavering eyes.
“I am compelled to believe that you mean me.”
Hall nodded unequivocally.
“It is, believe me, unprecedented,” Dragomiloff went on. “I am puzzled. Frankly, I cannot understand why you want my life. I have never seen you before. We do not know each other. I cannot guess at the remotest motive. At any rate, you forget that I must have a sanction of right before I order this execution.”
“I am prepared to furnish it,” was Hall’s answer.
“But you must convince me.”
“I am prepared to do that. It was because I divined you to be what you called yourself, an ethical monstrosity, that I conceived this proposition and made it to you. I believe, if I can prove to you the justification of your death, that you will carry it out. Am I right?”
“You are right.” Dragomiloff paused, and then his face lighted up with a smile. “Of course, that would be suicide, and you know that this is an Assassination Bureau.”
“You would give the order to one of your members. As I understand, under pledge of his own life he would be compelled to carry out the order.”
Dragomiloff looked even pleased.
“Very true. It goes to show how perfect is the machine I have created. It is fitted to every contingency, even to this most unexpected one developed by you. Come. You interest me. You are original. You have imagination, fantasy. Pray show me the ethical sanction for my own removal from this world.”
“Thou shalt not kill,” Hall began.
“Pardon me,” came the interruption. “We must get a basis for this discussion, which I fear will quickly become academic. The point is, you must prove to me that I have done such wrong that my death is right. And I am to be judge. What wrong have I done? What person, not a wrong-doer, have I ordered executed? In what way have I violated my own sanctions of right conduct, or even have done wrong blunderingly or unwittingly?”
“I understand, and I change my discourse accordingly. First, let me ask if you were responsible for the death of John Mossman?”
Dragomiloff nodded.
“He was a friend of mine. I had known him all my life. There was no evil in him. He harmed no one.”
Hall was speaking warmly, but the other’s raised hand and amused smile made him pause.
“It was something like seven years ago that John Mossman built the Fidelity Building. Where did he get the money? It was at that time that he, who had all his life been a banker in a small, conservative way, suddenly branched out in a number of large enterprises. You remember the fortune he left. Where did he get it?”
Hall was about to speak, but Dragomiloff signified that he had not finished.
“Not long before the building of the Fidelity, you will remember, the Combine attacked Carolina Steel, bankrupted it, and then absorbed the wreckage for a song. The president of Carolina Steel committed suicide—”
“To escape the penitentiary,” Hall interpolated.
“He was tricked into doing what he did.”
Hall nodded and said, “I recollect. It was one of the agents of the Combine.”
“That agent was John Mossman.”
Hall remained incredulously silent, while the other continued.
“I assure you I can prove it, and I will. But do me the courtesy of accepting for a moment whatever statements I make. They will be proved, and to your satisfaction.”
“Very well then. You killed Stolypin.”
“No; not guilty. The Russian Terrorists did that.”
“I have your word?”
“You have my word.”
Hall ranged over in his mind all the assassinations he had tabulated, and made another departure.
“James and Hardman, president and secretary of the Southwestern Federation of Miners—”
“We killed them,” Dragomiloff broke in. “And what was
wrong about it—mind you, wrong to me?”
“You are a humanist. The cause of labor, as that of the people, must be dear to you. It was a great loss to organized labor, the deaths of these two leaders.”
“On the contrary,” Dragomiloff replied. “They were killed in 1904. For six years prior to that, the Federation had won not one victory, while it had been decisively beaten in three disastrous strikes. In the first six months after the two leaders were removed, the Federation won the big strike of 1905, and from then to now has never ceased making substantial gains.”
“You mean?” Hall demanded.
“I mean that the Mine Owners League did not bring about the assassination. I mean that James and Hardman were secretly in the pay, and in big pay, of the Mine Owners League. I mean that it was a group of the miners themselves that laid the facts of their leaders’ treason before us and paid the price we demanded for the service. We did it for twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Winter Hall’s bafflement plainly showed, and he debated a long minute before speaking.
“I believe you, Mr. Dragomiloff. Tomorrow or next day I should like to go over the proofs with you. But that will be merely for formal correctness. In the meantime I must find some other way to convince you. This list of assassinations is a long one.”
“Longer than you think.”
“And I do not doubt but what you have found similar justification for all of them. Mind you, not that I believe any one of these killings to be right, but that I believe they have been right to you. Your fear that the discussion would become academic was well founded. It is only in that way that I can hope to get you. Suppose we defer it until tomorrow. Will you lunch with me? Or where would you prefer us to meet?”
“Right here, I think, after lunch.” Dragomiloff waved his hand around at his book-covered walls. “There are plenty of authorities, you see, and we can always send out to the branch Carnegie Library around the corner for more.”
He pressed the call button, and both arose as the servant entered.
“Believe me, I am going to get you,” was Hall’s parting assurance.
Dragomiloff smiled whimsically.
“I trust not,” he said. “But if you do it will be unique.”
5
For long days and nights the discussion between Hall and Dragomiloff was waged. At first confined to ethics, it quickly grew wider and deeper. Ethics being the capstone of all the sciences, they found themselves compelled to seek down through those sciences to the original foundations. Dragomiloff demanded of Hall’s Thou shalt not kill a more rigid philosophic sanction than religion had given it. While, in order to be intelligible, and to reason intelligently, they found it necessary to thresh out and ascertain each other’s most ultimate beliefs and telic ideals.
It was the struggle of two scholars, and practical scholars at that; yet more often than not the final result sought was lost in the excitement and clash of ideas. And Hall did his antagonist the justice of realizing that on his part it was purely a pursuit of truth. That his life was the forfeit if he lost had no influence on Dragomiloff’s reasoning. The question at issue was whether or not his Assassination Bureau was a right institution.
Hall’s one thesis, which he never abandoned, to which he forced all roads of argument to lead, was that the time had come in the evolution of society when society, as a whole, must work out its own salvation. The time was past, he contended, for the man on horseback, or for small groups of men on horseback, to manage the destinies of society. Dragomiloff, he insisted, was such a man, and his Assassination Bureau was the steed he bestrode, by virtue of which he judged and punished, and, within narrow limits it was true, herded and trampled society in the direction he wanted it to go.
Dragomiloff, on the other hand, did not deny that he played the part of the man on horseback, who thought for society, decided for society, and drove society; but he did deny, and emphatically, that society as a whole was able to manage itself, and that, despite blunders and mistakes, social progress lay in such management of the whole by itself. And this was the crux of the question, to settle which they ransacked history and traced the social evolution of man up from the minutest known details of primitive groupings to highest civilization.
In fact, so practical-minded were the two scholars, so unmetaphysical, that they accepted social expediency as the determining factor and agreed that it was in the highest way ethical. And in the end, measured by this particular yardstick, Winter Hall won. Dragomiloff acknowledged his own defeat, and, in his gratification and excitement, Hall’s hand went impulsively out to him. Firmly, and despite his surprise, Dragomiloff returned the grip.
“I see, now,” he said, “that I failed to lay sufficient stress on the social factors. The assassinations have not been so much intrinsically wrong as socially wrong. I even take part of that back. As between individuals, they have not been wrong at all. But individuals are not individuals alone. They are parts of complexes of individuals. There was where I erred. It is dimly clear to me. I was not justified. And now—” He broke off and looked at his watch. “It is two o’clock. We have sat late. And now I am prepared to pay the penalty. Of course you will give me time to settle my affairs before I give the order to my agents?”
Hall, who in the height of debate had forgotten the terms of the debate, was startled.
“I am not prepared for that,” he said. “And to tell the truth, it had quite slipped my mind. Perhaps it is not necessary. You are yourself convinced of the wrong of assassination. Suppose you disband the organization. That will be sufficient.”
But Dragomiloff shook his head.
“An agreement is an agreement. I have accepted a commission from you. Right is right, and this is where, I maintain, the doctrine of social expediency does not apply. The individual, per se, has some prerogatives left, and one of these is the keeping of one’s word. This I must do. The commission shall be carried out. I am afraid it will be the last handled by the Bureau. This is Saturday morning. Suppose you give me until tomorrow night before issuing the order?”
“Tommyrot!” Hall exclaimed.
“That is not argument,” was the grave reproof. “Besides, all argument is finished. I decline to hear any more. One thing, though, in fairness: considering how difficult a person I shall be to assassinate, I would suggest a further charge of at least ten thousand dollars.” He held up his hand in token that he had more to say. “Oh, believe me, I am modest. I shall make it so difficult for my agents that it will be worth all of fifty thousand and more—”
“If you will only break up the organization—”
But Dragomiloff silenced him.
“The discussion is ended. This is now my affair. The organization will be broken up in any event, but I warn you, according to our rules of long standing, I may escape. As you will recollect, I promised you, at the time the bargain was made, that if, at the end of a year, the commission had not been fulfilled, the fee would be returned to you plus five percent. If I escape I shall hand it to you myself.”
But Winter Hall waved his hand impatiently.
“Listen,” he said. “I insist on one statement. You and I are agreed on the foundation of ethics. Social expedience being the basis of all ethics—”
“Pardon me—” came the interruption “—of social ethics only. The individual, in certain aspects, is still an individual.”
“Neither you nor I,” Hall continued, “accepts the old Judaic code of an eye for an eye. We do not believe in punishment for crime. The killings of your Bureau, while justified by crimes committed by the victims, were not regarded by you as punishments. You looked upon your victims as social ills, the extirpation of which would benefit society. You removed them from the social organism on the same principle that surgeons remove cancers. I caught that point of view of yours from the beginning of the discussion.
“But to return. Not accepting the punishment theory, you and I regard crime as a mere anti-social tendency, and as such, expedientl
y and arbitrarily, we classify it. Thus, crime is a social abnormality, partaking of the nature of sickness. It is sickness. The criminal, the wrong-doer, is a sick man, and he should be treated accordingly, so that he may be cured of his sickness.
“Now I come to you and to my point. Your Assassination Bureau was anti-social. You believed in it. Therefore you were sick. Your belief in assassination constituted your sickness. But now you no longer believe. You are cured. Your tendency is no longer anti-social. There is now no need for your death, which would be nothing else than punishment for an illness of which you had already been cured. Disband the organization and go out of business. That is all you have to do.”
“Are you done—quite done?” Dragomiloff queried suavely.
“Yes.”
“Then let me answer and end the argument. I conceived my Bureau in righteousness, and I operated it in righteousness. Also, I created it, made it the perfect thing that it is. Its foundation was certain right principles. In all its history, not one of these principles was violated. A particular one of these principles was that portion of the contracts with our clients wherein we guaranteed to carry out any commission we accepted. I accepted a commission from you. I received forty thousand dollars. The agreement was that I should order my own execution if you proved to my satisfaction that the assassinations achieved by the Bureau were wrong. You have proved it. Nothing remains but to live up to the agreement.
“I am proud of this institution. Nor shall I, with a last act, stultify its basic principles, break the rules under which it operated. This I hold is my right as an individual, and in no way does it conflict with social expediency. I do not want to die. If I escape death for a year, the commission I accepted from you, as you know, automatically terminates. I shall do my best to escape. And now, not another word. I am resolved. Concerning breaking up the Bureau, what would you suggest?”
“Give me the names and all details of all members. I shall then serve notice on them to disband—”
“Not until after my death or until the year has expired,” Dragomiloff objected.