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The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

by G. K. Chesterton · English · Gutenberg #1695 · 341,424 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Author: G. K. Chesterton


        
Release date: April 1, 1999 [eBook #1695]
                Most recently updated: February 5, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1695

Credits: Harry Plantinga and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE ***




The Man Who Was Thursday

A Nightmare

by G. K. Chesterton


Contents

 A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE
 THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

 CHAPTER I. THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK
 CHAPTER II. THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME
 CHAPTER III. THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
 CHAPTER IV. THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE
 CHAPTER V. THE FEAST OF FEAR
 CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE
 CHAPTER VII. THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS
 CHAPTER VIII. THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS
 CHAPTER IX. THE MAN IN SPECTACLES
 CHAPTER X. THE DUEL
 CHAPTER XI. THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE
 CHAPTER XII. THE EARTH IN ANARCHY
 CHAPTER XIII. THE PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENT
 CHAPTER XIV. THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS
 CHAPTER XV. THE ACCUSER




A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE


It is very difficult to classify THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. It is
possible to say that it is a gripping adventure story of murderous
criminals and brilliant policemen; but it was to be expected that the
author of the Father Brown stories should tell a detective story like
no-one else. On this level, therefore, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
succeeds superbly; if nothing else, it is a magnificent tour-de-force
of suspense-writing.

However, the reader will soon discover that it is much more than that.
Carried along on the boisterous rush of the narrative by Chesterton’s
wonderful high-spirited style, he will soon see that he is being
carried into much deeper waters than he had planned on; and the totally
unforeseeable denouement will prove for the modern reader, as it has
for thousands of others since 1908 when the book was first published,
an inevitable and moving experience, as the investigators finally
discover who Sunday is.




THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
A NIGHTMARE


To Edmund Clerihew Bentley

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came—
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us
Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.

Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain—
Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved—
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells—
Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand—
Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets e’er it broke upon the brain.
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

G. K. C.




CHAPTER I.
THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK


The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and
ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout;
its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had
been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art,
who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen
Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were
identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony,
though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its
pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its
pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The
stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could
only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to
them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect.
The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard
it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were
not “artists,” the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with
the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not
really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the
wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not
really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in
others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the
bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he
assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what
biological creature could he have discovered more singular than
himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be
regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for
artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped
into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written
comedy.

More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall,
when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the
whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again
was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the
little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns
glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit. And
this was strongest of all on one particular evening, still vaguely
remembered in the locality, of which the auburn-haired poet was the
hero. It was not by any means the only evening of which he was the
hero. On many nights those passing by his little back garden might hear
his high, didactic voice laying down the law to men and particularly to
women. The attitude of women in such cases was indeed one of the
paradoxes of the place. Most of the women were of the kind vaguely
called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy.
Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant
compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening
while he is talking. And Mr. Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, was
really (in some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one only
laughed at the end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art
and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave
at least a momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the
arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase
goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was
literally like a woman’s, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in
a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost saintly oval,
however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried
forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once
tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed
like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.

This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be
remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end
of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and
palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers,
and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of
the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve
and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole
grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot
plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The
whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent
secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that
splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky
seemed small.

I say that there are some inhabitants who may remember the evening if
only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it
because it marked the first appearance in the place of the second poet
of Saffron Park. For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had
reigned without a rival; it was upon the night of the sunset that his
solitude suddenly ended. The new poet, who introduced himself by the
name of Gabriel Syme was a very mild-looking mortal, with a fair,
pointed beard and faint, yellow hair. But an impression grew that he
was less meek than he looked. He signalised his entrance by differing
with the established poet, Gregory, upon the whole nature of poetry. He
said that he (Syme) was poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he
was a poet of respectability. So all the Saffron Parkers looked at him
as if he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky.

In fact, Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two
events.

“It may well be,” he said, in his sudden lyrical manner, “it may well
be on such a night of clouds and cruel colours that there is brought
forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you
are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only
wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared
in this garden.”

The man with the meek blue eyes and the pale, pointed beard endured
these thunders with a certain submissive solemnity. The third party of
the group, Gregory’s sister Rosamond, who had her brother’s braids of
red hair, but a kindlier face underneath them, laughed with such
mixture of admiration and disapproval as she gave commonly to the
family oracle.

Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.

“An artist is identical with an anarchist,” he cried. “You might
transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who
throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to
everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing
light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a
few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments,
abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it
were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the
Underground Railway.”

“So it is,” said Mr. Syme.

“Nonsense!” said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else
attempted paradox. “Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway
trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you.
It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because
they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place
they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square
they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but
Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their
souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker
Street!”

“It is you who are unpoetical,” replied the poet Syme. “If what you say
of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The
rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to
miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a
distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine
strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train
might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a
magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria,
and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose;
let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who
commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his
victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!”

“Must you go?” inquired Gregory sarcastically.

“I tell you,” went on Syme with passion, “that every time a train comes
in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man
has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one
has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might
do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I
have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout
out the word ‘Victoria,’ it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the
cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it
is the victory of Adam.”

Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.

“And even then,” he said, “we poets always ask the question, ‘And what
is Victoria now that you have got there?’ You think Victoria is like
the New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like
Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of
heaven. The poet is always in revolt.”

“There again,” said Syme irritably, “what is there poetical about being
in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick.
Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the
wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can
see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It’s
mere vomiting.”

The girl winced for a flash at the unpleasant word, but Syme was too
hot to heed her.

“It is things going right,” he cried, “that is poetical! Our
digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is
the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more
poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars—the most
poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”

“Really,” said Gregory superciliously, “the examples you choose—”

“I beg your pardon,” said Syme grimly, “I forgot we had abolished all
conventions.”

For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory’s forehead.

“You don’t expect me,” he said, “to revolutionise society on this
lawn?”

Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.

“No, I don’t,” he said; “but I suppose that if you were serious about
your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.”

Gregory’s big bull’s eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion,
and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.

“Don’t you think, then,” he said in a dangerous voice, “that I am
serious about my anarchism?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Syme.

“Am I not serious about my anarchism?” cried Gregory, with knotted
fists.

“My dear fellow!” said Syme, and strolled away.

With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond Gregory
still in his company.

“Mr. Syme,” she said, “do the people who talk like you and my brother
often mean what they say? Do you mean what you say now?”

Syme smiled.

“Do you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” asked the girl, with grave eyes.

“My dear Miss Gregory,” said Syme gently, “there are many kinds of
sincerity and insincerity. When you say ‘thank you’ for the salt, do
you mean what you say? No. When you say ‘the world is round,’ do you
mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don’t mean it. Now,
sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It
may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says
more than he means—from sheer force of meaning it.”

She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave and
open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning
responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the
maternal watch which is as old as the world.

“Is he really an anarchist, then?” she asked.

“Only in that sense I speak of,” replied Syme; “or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense.”

She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly—

“He wouldn’t really use—bombs or that sort of thing?”

Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.

“Good Lord, no!” he said, “that has to be done anonymously.”

And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory’s absurdity and of his
safety.

Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in
spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it
is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches
himself too closely. He defended respectability with violence and
exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of tidiness and
propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac all round him. Once
he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to
play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny
tune from under or beyond the world.

He stared and talked at the girl’s red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered
the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself
with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his
head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which
were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again
until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she
kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures
afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread
through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what
followed was so improbable, that it might well have been a dream.

When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a
street lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out
over the fence behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a
figure almost as rigid and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall
hat and long frock coat were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was
almost as dark. Only a fringe of fiery hair against the light, and also
something aggressive in the attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet
Gregory. He had something of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword
in hand for his foe.

He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally
returned.

“I was waiting for you,” said Gregory. “Might I have a moment’s
conversation?”

“Certainly. About what?” asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree.

“About _this_ and _this_,” he cried; “about order and anarchy. There is
your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there
is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid
in green and gold.”

“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see
the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the
lamp by the light of the tree.” Then after a pause he said, “But may I
ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our
little argument?”

“No,” cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, “I did
not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever.”

The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing,
listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth
voice and with a rather bewildering smile.

“Mr. Syme,” he said, “this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of woman
has ever succeeded in doing before.”

“Indeed!”

“Now I remember,” resumed Gregory reflectively, “one other person
succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me.”

“I am very sorry,” replied Syme with gravity.

“I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology,” said Gregory very calmly. “No duel could wipe it
out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one
way by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am
going, at the possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to _prove_ to
you that you were wrong in what you said.”

“In what I said?”

“You said I was not serious about being an anarchist.”

“There are degrees of seriousness,” replied Syme. “I have never doubted
that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what
you said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men
up to a neglected truth.”

Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.

“And in no other sense,” he asked, “you think me serious? You think me
a _flâneur_ who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious.”

Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.

“Serious!” he cried. “Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these
damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious? One
comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well,
but I should think very little of a man who didn’t keep something in
the background of his life that was more serious than all this
talking—something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink.”

“Very well,” said Gregory, his face darkening, “you shall see something
more serious than either drink or religion.”

Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory again
opened his lips.

“You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that you
have one?”

“Oh,” said Syme with a beaming smile, “we are all Catholics now.”

“Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion
involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to
any son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that!
If you will take upon yourself this awful abnegation if you will
consent to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a
knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in return—”

“You will promise me in return?” inquired Syme, as the other paused.

“I will promise you a very entertaining evening.” Syme suddenly took
off his hat.

“Your offer,” he said, “is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that
a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he
is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a
Christian, and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I
will not report anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And
now, in the name of Colney Hatch, what is it?”

“I think,” said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, “that we will call a
cab.”

He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the road.
The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the trap the
address of an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank of the river.
The cab whisked itself away again, and in it these two fantastics
quitted their fantastic town.




CHAPTER II.
THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME


The cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated
themselves in a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained wooden
table with one wooden leg. The room was so small and dark, that very
little could be seen of the attendant who was summoned, beyond a vague
and dark impression of something bulky and bearded.

“Will you take a little supper?” asked Gregory politely. “The _pâté de
foie gras_ is not good here, but I can recommend the game.”

Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference—

“Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise.”

To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said “Certainly, sir!”
and went away apparently to get it.

“What will you drink?” resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. “I shall only have a _crême de menthe_ myself; I have
dined. But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you
with a half-bottle of Pommery at least?”

“Thank you!” said the motionless Syme. “You are very good.”

His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in
themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the actual
appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it particularly
good. Then he suddenly began to eat with great rapidity and appetite.

“Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!” he said to Gregory,
smiling. “I don’t often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is
new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the
other way.”

“You are not asleep, I assure you,” said Gregory. “You are, on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your
existence. Ah, here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be a
slight disproportion, let us say, between the inner arrangements of
this excellent hotel and its simple and unpretentious exterior. But
that is all our modesty. We are the most modest men that ever lived on
earth.”

“And who are _we?_” asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.

“It is quite simple,” replied Gregory. “_We_ are the serious
anarchists, in whom you do not believe.”

“Oh!” said Syme shortly. “You do yourselves well in drinks.”

“Yes, we are serious about everything,” answered Gregory.

Then after a pause he added—

“If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little, don’t
put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don’t wish you to do
yourself an injustice.”

“Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad,” replied Syme with perfect calm;
“but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition. May I
smoke?”

“Certainly!” said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. “Try one of mine.”

Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out of his
waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and let out a
long cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit that he performed
these rites with so much composure, for almost before he had begun them
the table at which he sat had begun to revolve, first slowly, and then
rapidly, as if at an insane seance.

“You must not mind it,” said Gregory; “it’s a kind of screw.”

“Quite so,” said Syme placidly, “a kind of screw. How simple that is!”

The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering across
the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a factory
chimney, and the two, with their chairs and table, shot down through
the floor as if the earth had swallowed them. They went rattling down a
kind of roaring chimney as rapidly as a lift cut loose, and they came
with an abrupt bump to the bottom. But when Gregory threw open a pair
of doors and let in a red subterranean light, Syme was still smoking
with one leg thrown over the other, and had not turned a yellow hair.

Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which was
the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as big as a
fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the door there
was a sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory struck five
times. A heavy voice with a foreign accent asked him who he was. To
this he gave the more or less unexpected reply, “Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain.” The heavy hinges began to move; it was obviously some
kind of password.

Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a
network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering
pattern was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and revolvers,
closely packed or interlocked.

“I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities,” said Gregory; “we
have to be very strict here.”

“Oh, don’t apologise,” said Syme. “I know your passion for law and
order,” and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel weapons.
With his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he looked a
singularly frail and fanciful figure as he walked down that shining
avenue of death.

They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a
queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but
presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a
scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this
apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and
dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or
the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself
seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off
against the wall, and went in.

“And now, my dear Mr. Syme,” said Gregory, throwing himself in an
expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, “now we are quite
cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give you any
notion of why I brought you here. It was one of those quite arbitrary
emotions, like jumping off a cliff or falling in love. Suffice it to
say that you were an inexpressibly irritating fellow, and, to do you
justice, you are still. I would break twenty oaths of secrecy for the
pleasure of taking you down a peg. That way you have of lighting a
cigar would make a priest break the seal of confession. Well, you said
that you were quite certain I was not a serious anarchist. Does this
place strike you as being serious?”

“It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety,” assented Syme;
“but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me
information, because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted from me
a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep. So
it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is
it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish
Government?”

“To abolish God!” said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. “We do
not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that
sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the
Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny
all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and
treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly
sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man!
We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.”

“And Right and Left,” said Syme with a simple eagerness, “I hope you
will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”

“You spoke of a second question,” snapped Gregory.

“With pleasure,” resumed Syme. “In all your present acts and
surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt
who lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people
living from preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron
door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the humiliation of
calling yourself Mr. Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel
instruments which make the place, if I may say so, more impressive than
homelike. May I ask why, after taking all this trouble to barricade
yourselves in the bowels of the earth, you then parade your whole
secret by talking about anarchism to every silly woman in Saffron
Park?”

Gregory smiled.

“The answer is simple,” he said. “I told you I was a serious anarchist,
and you did not believe me. Nor do _they_ believe me. Unless I took
them into this infernal room they would not believe me.”

Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory went
on.

“The history of the thing might amuse you,” he said. “When first I
became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable
disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our
anarchist pamphlets, in _Superstition the Vampire_ and _Priests of
Prey_. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and
terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was
misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a
drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, ‘Down! down!
presumptuous human reason!’ they found out in some way that I was not a
bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire;
but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see
that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a
humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to
understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire
violence—the proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw
myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I
called out ‘Blood!’ abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often
said, ‘Let the weak perish; it is the Law.’ Well, well, it seems majors
don’t do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the
President of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in
Europe.”

“What is his name?” asked Syme.

“You would not know it,” answered Gregory. “That is his greatness.
Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they
_were_ heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he
is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with
him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children
in his hands.”

He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed—

“But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an
epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said to him,
‘What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more
respectable than bishops and majors?’ He looked at me with his large
but indecipherable face. ‘You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a
dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would
ever look for a bomb?’ I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice.
‘Why, then, dress up as an _anarchist_, you fool!’ he roared so that
the room shook. ‘Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous
then.’ And he turned his broad back on me without another word. I took
his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to
those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their
perambulators.”

Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.

“You took me in,” he said. “It is really a smart dodge.”

Then after a pause he added—

“What do you call this tremendous President of yours?”

“We generally call him Sunday,” replied Gregory with simplicity. “You
see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, and they
are named after days of the week. He is called Sunday, by some of his
admirers Bloody Sunday. It is curious you should mention the matter,
because the very night you have dropped in (if I may so express it) is
the night on which our London branch, which assembles in this room, has
to elect its own deputy to fill a vacancy in the Council. The gentleman
who has for some time past played, with propriety and general applause,
the difficult part of Thursday, has died quite suddenly. Consequently,
we have called a meeting this very evening to elect a successor.”

He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of smiling
embarrassment.

“I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme,” he continued casually.
“I feel that I can confide anything to you, as you have promised to
tell nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something that I would not
say in so many words to the anarchists who will be coming to the room
in about ten minutes. We shall, of course, go through a form of
election; but I don’t mind telling you that it is practically certain
what the result will be.” He looked down for a moment modestly. “It is
almost a settled thing that I am to be Thursday.”

“My dear fellow.” said Syme heartily, “I congratulate you. A great
career!”

Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking
rapidly.

“As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table,” he
said, “and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible.”

Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a
walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick, a
large Colt’s revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of
brandy. Over the chair, beside the table, was thrown a heavy-looking
cape or cloak.

“I have only to get the form of election finished,” continued Gregory
with animation, “then I snatch up this cloak and stick, stuff these
other things into my pocket, step out of a door in this cavern, which
opens on the river, where there is a steam-tug already waiting for me,
and then—then—oh, the wild joy of being Thursday!” And he clasped his
hands.

Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent languor, got
to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.

“Why is it,” he asked vaguely, “that I think you are quite a decent
fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?” He paused a moment, and
then added with a sort of fresh curiosity, “Is it because you are such
an ass?”

There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out—

“Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been in
in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave you a
promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under
red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise
of the same kind?”

“A promise?” asked Gregory, wondering.

“Yes,” said Syme very seriously, “a promise. I swore before God that I
would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity,
or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my
secret to the anarchists?”

“Your secret?” asked the staring Gregory. “Have you got a secret?”

“Yes,” said Syme, “I have a secret.” Then after a pause, “Will you
swear?”

Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said
abruptly—

“You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you.
Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But
look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes.”

Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his
long, grey trousers’ pockets. Almost as he did so there came five
knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of
the conspirators.

“Well,” said Syme slowly, “I don’t know how to tell you the truth more
shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless
poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge
for some time at Scotland Yard.”

Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.

“What do you say?” he asked in an inhuman voice.

“Yes,” said Syme simply, “I am a police detective. But I think I hear
your friends coming.”

From the doorway there came a murmur of “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.” It
was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the crowd of
Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard trampling down
the corridor.




CHAPTER III.
THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY


Before one of the fresh faces could appear at the doorway, Gregory’s
stunned surprise had fallen from him. He was beside the table with a
bound, and a noise in his throat like a wild beast. He caught up the
Colt’s revolver and took aim at Syme. Syme did not flinch, but he put
up a pale and polite hand.

“Don’t be such a silly man,” he said, with the effeminate dignity of a
curate. “Don’t you see it’s not necessary? Don’t you see that we’re
both in the same boat? Yes, and jolly sea-sick.”

Gregory could not speak, but he could not fire either, and he looked
his question.

“Don’t you see we’ve checkmated each other?” cried Syme. “I can’t tell
the police you are an anarchist. You can’t tell the anarchists I’m a
policeman. I can only watch you, knowing what you are; you can only
watch me, knowing what I am. In short, it’s a lonely, intellectual
duel, my head against yours. I’m a policeman deprived of the help of
the police. You, my poor fellow, are an anarchist deprived of the help
of that law and organisation which is so essential to anarchy. The one
solitary difference is in your favour. You are not surrounded by
inquisitive policemen; I am surrounded by inquisitive anarchists. I
cannot betray you, but I might betray myself. Come, come! wait and see
me betray myself. I shall do it so nicely.”

Gregory put the pistol slowly down, still staring at Syme as if he were
a sea-monster.

“I don’t believe in immortality,” he said at last, “but if, after all
this, you were to break your word, God would make a hell only for you,
to howl in for ever.”

“I shall not break my word,” said Syme sternly, “nor will you break
yours. Here are your friends.”

The mass of the anarchists entered the room heavily, with a slouching
and somewhat weary gait; but one little man, with a black beard and
glasses—a man somewhat of the type of Mr. Tim Healy—detached himself,
and bustled forward with some papers in his hand.

“Comrade Gregory,” he said, “I suppose this man is a delegate?”

Gregory, taken by surprise, looked down and muttered the name of Syme;
but Syme replied almost pertly—

“I am glad to see that your gate is well enough guarded to make it hard
for anyone to be here who was not a delegate.”

The brow of the little man with the black beard was, however, still
contracted with something like suspicion.

“What branch do you represent?” he asked sharply.

“I should hardly call it a branch,” said Syme, laughing; “I should call
it at the very least a root.”

“What do you mean?”

“The fact is,” said Syme serenely, “the truth is I am a Sabbatarian. I
have been specially sent here to see that you show a due observance of
Sunday.”

The little man dropped one of his papers, and a flicker of fear went
over all the faces of the group. Evidently the awful President, whose
name was Sunday, did sometimes send down such irregular ambassadors to
such branch meetings.

“Well, comrade,” said the man with the papers after a pause, “I suppose
we’d better give you a seat in the meeting?”

“If you ask my advice as a friend,” said Syme with severe benevolence,
“I think you’d better.”

When Gregory heard the dangerous dialogue end, with a sudden safety for
his rival, he rose abruptly and paced the floor in painful thought. He
was, indeed, in an agony of diplomacy. It was clear that Syme’s
inspired impudence was likely to bring him out of all merely accidental
dilemmas. Little was to be hoped from them. He could not himself betray
Syme, partly from honour, but partly also because, if he betrayed him
and for some reason failed to destroy him, the Syme who escaped would
be a Syme freed from all obligation of secrecy, a Syme who would simply
walk to the nearest police station. After all, it was only one night’s
discussion, and only one detective who would know of it. He would let
out as little as possible of their plans that night, and then let Syme
go, and chance it.

He strode across to the group of anarchists, which was already
distributing itself along the benches.

“I think it is time we began,” he said; “the steam-tug is waiting on
the river already. I move that Comrade Buttons takes the chair.”

This being approved by a show of hands, the little man with the papers
slipped into the presidential seat.

“Comrades,” he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, “our meeting tonight
is important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had
the honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We
have elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease
of the heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you
know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the
great dynamite coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances,
ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death
was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a
hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which
beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow.
Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always. But
it is not to acclaim his virtues that we are met, but for a harder
task. It is difficult properly to praise his qualities, but it is more
difficult to replace them. Upon you, comrades, it devolves this evening
to choose out of the company present the man who shall be Thursday. If
any comrade suggests a name I will put it to the vote. If no comrade
suggests a name, I can only tell myself that that dear dynamiter, who
is gone from us, has carried into the unknowable abysses the last
secret of his virtue and his innocence.”

There was a stir of almost inaudible applause, such as is sometimes
heard in church. Then a large old man, with a long and venerable white
beard, perhaps the only real working-man present, rose lumberingly and
said—

“I move that Comrade Gregory be elected Thursday,” and sat lumberingly
down again.

“Does anyone second?” asked the chairman.

A little man with a velvet coat and pointed beard seconded.

“Before I put the matter to the vote,” said the chairman, “I will call
on Comrade Gregory to make a statement.”

Gregory rose amid a great rumble of applause. His face was deadly pale,
so that by contrast his queer red hair looked almost scarlet. But he
was smiling and altogether at ease. He had made up his mind, and he saw
his best policy quite plain in front of him like a white road. His best
chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech, such as would leave
on the detective’s mind the impression that the anarchist brotherhood
was a very mild affair after all. He believed in his own literary
power, his capacity for suggesting fine shades and picking perfect
words. He thought that with care he could succeed, in spite of all the
people around him, in conveying an impression of the institution,
subtly and delicately false. Syme had once thought that anarchists,
under all their bravado, were only playing the fool. Could he not now,
in the hour of peril, make Syme think so again?

“Comrades,” began Gregory, in a low but penetrating voice, “it is not
necessary for me to tell you what is my policy, for it is your policy
also. Our belief has been slandered, it has been disfigured, it has
been utterly confused and concealed, but it has never been altered.
Those who talk about anarchism and its dangers go everywhere and
anywhere to get their information, except to us, except to the fountain
head. They learn about anarchists from sixpenny novels; they learn
about anarchists from tradesmen’s newspapers; they learn about
anarchists from _Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday_ and the _Sporting Times_.
They never learn about anarchists from anarchists. We have no chance of
denying the mountainous slanders which are heaped upon our heads from
one end of Europe to another. The man who has always heard that we are
walking plagues has never heard our reply. I know that he will not hear
it tonight, though my passion were to rend the roof. For it is deep,
deep under the earth that the persecuted are permitted to assemble, as
the Christians assembled in the Catacombs. But if, by some incredible
accident, there were here tonight a man who all his life had thus
immensely misunderstood us, I would put this question to him: ‘When
those Christians met in those Catacombs, what sort of moral reputation
had they in the streets above? What tales were told of their atrocities
by one educated Roman to another? Suppose’ (I would say to him),
‘suppose that we are only repeating that still mysterious paradox of
history. Suppose we seem as shocking as the Christians because we are
really as harmless as the Christians. Suppose we seem as mad as the
Christians because we are really as meek.”’

The applause that had greeted the opening sentences had been gradually
growing fainter, and at the last word it stopped suddenly. In the
abrupt silence, the man with the velvet jacket said, in a high, squeaky
voice—

“I’m not meek!”

“Comrade Witherspoon tells us,” resumed Gregory, “that he is not meek.
Ah, how little he knows himself! His words are, indeed, extravagant;
his appearance is ferocious, and even (to an ordinary taste)
unattractive. But only the eye of a friendship as deep and delicate as
mine can perceive the deep foundation of solid meekness which lies at
the base of him, too deep even for himself to see. I repeat, we are the
true early Christians, only that we come too late. We are simple, as
they revere simple—look at Comrade Witherspoon. We are modest, as they
were modest—look at me. We are merciful—”

“No, no!” called out Mr. Witherspoon with the velvet jacket.

“I say we are merciful,” repeated Gregory furiously, “as the early
Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused
of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh—”

“Shame!” cried Witherspoon. “Why not?”

“Comrade Witherspoon,” said Gregory, with a feverish gaiety, “is
anxious to know why nobody eats him (laughter). In our society, at any
rate, which loves him sincerely, which is founded upon love—”

“No, no!” said Witherspoon, “down with love.”

“Which is founded upon love,” repeated Gregory, grinding his teeth,
“there will be no difficulty about the aims which we shall pursue as a
body, or which I should pursue were I chosen as the representative of
that body. Superbly careless of the slanders that represent us as
assassins and enemies of human society, we shall pursue with moral
courage and quiet intellectual pressure, the permanent ideals of
brotherhood and simplicity.”

Gregory resumed his seat and passed his hand across his forehead. The
silence was sudden and awkward, but the chairman rose like an
automaton, and said in a colourless voice—

“Does anyone oppose the election of Comrade Gregory?”

The assembly seemed vague and sub-consciously disappointed, and Comrade
Witherspoon moved restlessly on his seat and muttered in his thick
beard. By the sheer rush of routine, however, the motion would have
been put and carried. But as the chairman was opening his mouth to put
it, Syme sprang to his feet and said in a small and quiet voice—

“Yes, Mr. Chairman, I oppose.”

The most effective fact in oratory is an unexpected change in the
voice. Mr. Gabriel Syme evidently understood oratory. Having said these
first formal words in a moderated tone and with a brief simplicity, he
made his next word ring and volley in the vault as if one of the guns
had gone off.

“Comrades!” he cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of his
boots, “have we come here for this? Do we live underground like rats in
order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might listen to
while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line these walls with
weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone should come and hear
Comrade Gregory saying to us, ‘Be good, and you will be happy,’
‘Honesty is the best policy,’ and ‘Virtue is its own reward’? There was
not a word in Comrade Gregory’s address to which a curate could not
have listened with pleasure (hear, hear). But I am not a curate (loud
cheers), and I did not listen to it with pleasure (renewed cheers). The
man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a
resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear).

“Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that we
are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the enemies of
society, and so much the worse for society. We are the enemies of
society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its oldest and its most
pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory has told us
(apologetically again) that we are not murderers. There I agree. We are
not murderers, we are executioners (cheers).”

Ever since Syme had risen Gregory had sat staring at him, his face
idiotic with astonishment. Now in the pause his lips of clay parted,
and he said, with an automatic and lifeless distinctness—

“You damnable hypocrite!”

Syme looked straight into those frightful eyes with his own pale blue
ones, and said with dignity—

“Comrade Gregory accuses me of hypocrisy. He knows as well as I do that
I am keeping all my engagements and doing nothing but my duty. I do not
mince words. I do not pretend to. I say that Comrade Gregory is unfit
to be Thursday for all his amiable qualities. He is unfit to be
Thursday because of his amiable qualities. We do not want the Supreme
Council of Anarchy infected with a maudlin mercy (hear, hear). This is
no time for ceremonial politeness, neither is it a time for ceremonial
modesty. I set myself against Comrade Gregory as I would set myself
against all the Governments of Europe, because the anarchist who has
given himself to anarchy has forgotten modesty as much as he has
forgotten pride (cheers). I am not a man at all. I am a cause (renewed
cheers). I set myself against Comrade Gregory as impersonally and as
calmly as I should choose one pistol rather than another out of that
rack upon the wall; and I say that rather than have Gregory and his
milk-and-water methods on the Supreme Council, I would offer myself for
election—”

His sentence was drowned in a deafening cataract of applause. The
faces, that had grown fiercer and fiercer with approval as his tirade
grew more and more uncompromising, were now distorted with grins of
anticipation or cloven with delighted cries. At the moment when he
announced himself as ready to stand for the post of Thursday, a roar of
excitement and assent broke forth, and became uncontrollable, and at
the same moment Gregory sprang to his feet, with foam upon his mouth,
and shouted against the shouting.

“Stop, you blasted madmen!” he cried, at the top of a voice that tore
his throat. “Stop, you—”

But louder than Gregory’s shouting and louder than the roar of the room
came the voice of Syme, still speaking in a peal of pitiless thunder—

“I do not go to the Council to rebut that slander that calls us
murderers; I go to earn it (loud and prolonged cheering). To the priest
who says these men are the enemies of religion, to the judge who says
these men are the enemies of law, to the fat parliamentarian who says
these men are the enemies of order and public decency, to all these I
will reply, ‘You are false kings, but you are true prophets. I am come
to destroy you, and to fulfil your prophecies.’”

The heavy clamour gradually died away, but before it had ceased
Witherspoon had jumped to his feet, his hair and beard all on end, and
had said—

“I move, as an amendment, that Comrade Syme be appointed to the post.”

“Stop all this, I tell you!” cried Gregory, with frantic face and
hands. “Stop it, it is all—”

The voice of the chairman clove his speech with a cold accent.

“Does anyone second this amendment?” he said. A tall, tired man, with
melancholy eyes and an American chin beard, was observed on the back
bench to be slowly rising to his feet. Gregory had been screaming for
some time past; now there was a change in his accent, more shocking
than any scream. “I end all this!” he said, in a voice as heavy as
stone. “This man cannot be elected. He is a—”

“Yes,” said Syme, quite motionless, “what is he?” Gregory’s mouth
worked twice without sound; then slowly the blood began to crawl back
into his dead face.

“He is a man quite inexperienced in our work,” he said, and sat down
abruptly.

Before he had done so, the long, lean man with the American beard was
again upon his feet, and was repeating in a high American monotone—

“I beg to second the election of Comrade Syme.”

“The amendment will, as usual, be put first,” said Mr. Buttons, the
chairman, with mechanical rapidity.

“The question is that Comrade Syme—”

Gregory had again sprung to his feet, panting and passionate.

“Comrades,” he cried out, “I am not a madman.”

“Oh, oh!” said Mr. Witherspoon.

“I am not a madman,” reiterated Gregory, with a frightful sincerity
which for a moment staggered the room, “but I give you a counsel which
you can call mad if you like. No, I will not call it a counsel, for I
can give you no reason for it. I will call it a command. Call it a mad
command, but act upon it. Strike, but hear me! Kill me, but obey me! Do
not elect this man.” Truth is so terrible, even in fetters, that for a
moment Syme’s slender and insane victory swayed like a reed. But you
could not have guessed it from Syme’s bleak blue eyes. He merely began—

“Comrade Gregory commands—”

Then the spell was snapped, and one anarchist called out to Gregory—

“Who are you? You are not Sunday;” and another anarchist added in a
heavier voice, “And you are not Thursday.”

“Comrades,” cried Gregory, in a voice like that of a martyr who in an
ecstacy of pain has passed beyond pain, “it is nothing to me whether
you detest me as a tyrant or detest me as a slave. If you will not take
my command, accept my degradation. I kneel to you. I throw myself at
your feet. I implore you. Do not elect this man.”

“Comrade Gregory,” said the chairman after a painful pause, “this is
really not quite dignified.”

For the first time in the proceedings there was for a few seconds a
real silence. Then Gregory fell back in his seat, a pale wreck of a
man, and the chairman repeated, like a piece of clock-work suddenly
started again—

“The question is that Comrade Syme be elected to the post of Thursday
on the General Council.”

The roar rose like the sea, the hands rose like a forest, and three
minutes afterwards Mr. Gabriel Syme, of the Secret Police Service, was
elected to the post of Thursday on the General Council of the
Anarchists of Europe.

Everyone in the room seemed to feel the tug waiting on the river, the
sword-stick and the revolver, waiting on the table. The instant the
election was ended and irrevocable, and Syme had received the paper
proving his election, they all sprang to their feet, and the fiery
groups moved and mixed in the room. Syme found himself, somehow or
other, face to face with Gregory, who still regarded him with a stare
of stunned hatred. They were silent for many minutes.

“You are a devil!” said Gregory at last.

“And you are a gentleman,” said Syme with gravity.

“It was you that entrapped me,” began Gregory, shaking from head to
foot, “entrapped me into—”

“Talk sense,” said Syme shortly. “Into what sort of devils’ parliament
have you entrapped me, if it comes to that? You made me swear before I
made you. Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we
think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us
in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but
honour and death,” and he pulled the great cloak about his shoulders
and picked up the flask from the table.

“The boat is quite ready,” said Mr. Buttons, bustling up. “Be good
enough to step this way.”

With a gesture that revealed the shop-walker, he led Syme down a short,
iron-bound passage, the still agonised Gregory following feverishly at
their heels. At the end of the passage was a door, which Buttons opened
sharply, showing a sudden blue and silver picture of the moonlit river,
that looked like a scene in a theatre. Close to the opening lay a dark,
dwarfish steam-launch, like a baby dragon with one red eye.

Almost in the act of stepping on board, Gabriel Syme turned to the
gaping Gregory.

“You have kept your word,” he said gently, with his face in shadow.
“You are a man of honour, and I thank you. You have kept it even down
to a small particular. There was one special thing you promised me at
the beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by
the end of it.”

“What do you mean?” cried the chaotic Gregory. “What did I promise
you?”

“A very entertaining evening,” said Syme, and he made a military salute
with the sword-stick as the steamboat slid away.




CHAPTER IV.
THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE


Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he
was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of
anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life
into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most
revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His
respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against
rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest
people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked
about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to
walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and
self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence
the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any
drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he
had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan
abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan
latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing
vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of
defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy,
Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only
thing left—sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of
these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too
fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been
crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side
street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf
for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and
the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous,
rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He
did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid
men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a
huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets a
torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this
deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his
enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames
embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance
of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage
or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood
alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to
have cared for it otherwise.

He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river
reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky,
indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid,
that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it
mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the
vast caverns of a subterranean country.

Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black
chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak,
black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early
villains in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair
were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards,
cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black
cigar, bought in Soho for twopence, stood out from between his
tightened teeth, and altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen
of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was
why a policeman on the Embankment spoke to him, and said “Good
evening.”

Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the
mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the
twilight.

“A good evening is it?” he said sharply. “You fellows would call the
end of the world a good evening. Look at that bloody red sun and that
bloody river! I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt
and shining, you would still be standing here as solid as ever, looking
out for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen
are cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it
were not for your calm.”

“If we are calm,” replied the policeman, “it is the calm of organised
resistance.”

“Eh?” said Syme, staring.

“The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,” pursued the
policeman. “The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.”

“Good God, the Board Schools!” said Syme. “Is this undenominational
education?”

“No,” said the policeman sadly, “I never had any of those advantages.
The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very
rough and old-fashioned, I am afraid.”

“Where did you have it?” asked Syme, wondering.

“Oh, at Harrow,” said the policeman

The class sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in
so many men, broke out of Syme before he could control them.

“But, good Lord, man,” he said, “you oughtn’t to be a policeman!”

The policeman sighed and shook his head.

“I know,” he said solemnly, “I know I am not worthy.”

“But why did you join the police?” asked Syme with rude curiosity.

“For much the same reason that you abused the police,” replied the
other. “I found that there was a special opening in the service for
those whose fears for humanity were concerned rather with the
aberrations of the scientific intellect than with the normal and
excusable, though excessive, outbreaks of the human will. I trust I
make myself clear.”

“If you mean that you make your opinion clear,” said Syme, “I suppose
you do. But as for making yourself clear, it is the last thing you do.
How comes a man like you to be talking philosophy in a blue helmet on
the Thames embankment?”

“You have evidently not heard of the latest development in our police
system,” replied the other. “I am not surprised at it. We are keeping
it rather dark from the educated class, because that class contains
most of our enemies. But you seem to be exactly in the right frame of
mind. I think you might almost join us.”

“Join you in what?” asked Syme.

“I will tell you,” said the policeman slowly. “This is the situation:
The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated
detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely
intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of
civilisation. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are
silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has,
therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also
philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this
conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. I am
a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the value of the ordinary
man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue. But it would obviously be
undesirable to employ the common policeman in an investigation which is
also a heresy hunt.”

Syme’s eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.

“What do you do, then?” he said.

“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is
at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The
ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to
artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective
discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We
discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have
to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at
last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only
just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was
entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow)
thoroughly understood a triolet.”

“Do you mean,” asked Syme, “that there is really as much connection
between crime and the modern intellect as all that?”

“You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, “but you
were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the
poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes
sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon
the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very
different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the
uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors.
We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that
the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most
dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my
heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they
merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the
property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect
it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy
the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or
they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic
formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater
fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to
them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own
as much as other people’s.”

Syme struck his hands together.

“How true that is,” he cried. “I have felt it from my boyhood, but
never could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad
man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says
that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is
then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a
reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but
not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter
things, but to annihilate them. Yes, the modern world has retained all
those parts of police work which are really oppressive and ignominious,
the harrying of the poor, the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given
up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the
State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must
not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish
anybody else.”

“But this is absurd!” cried the policeman, clasping his hands with an
excitement uncommon in persons of his figure and costume, “but it is
intolerable! I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re wasting your
life. You must, you shall, join our special army against anarchy. Their
armies are on our frontiers. Their bolt is ready to fall. A moment
more, and you may lose the glory of working with us, perhaps the glory
of dying with the last heroes of the world.”

“It is a chance not to be missed, certainly,” assented Syme, “but still
I do not quite understand. I know as well as anybody that the modern
world is full of lawless little men and mad little movements. But,
beastly as they are, they generally have the one merit of disagreeing
with each other. How can you talk of their leading one army or hurling
one bolt. What is this anarchy?”

“Do not confuse it,” replied the constable, “with those chance dynamite
outbreaks from Russia or from Ireland, which are really the outbreaks
of oppressed, if mistaken, men. This is a vast philosophic movement,
consisting of an outer and an inner ring. You might even call the outer
ring the laity and the inner ring the priesthood. I prefer to call the
outer ring the innocent section, the inner ring the supremely guilty
section. The outer ring—the main mass of their supporters—are merely
anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have
destroyed human happiness. They believe that all the evil results of
human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime.
They do not believe that the crime creates the punishment. They believe
that the punishment has created the crime. They believe that if a man
seduced seven women he would naturally walk away as blameless as the
flowers of spring. They believe that if a man picked a pocket he would
naturally feel exquisitely good. These I call the innocent section.”

“Oh!” said Syme.

“Naturally, therefore, these people talk about ‘a happy time coming’;
‘the paradise of the future’; ‘mankind freed from the bondage of vice
and the bondage of virtue,’ and so on. And so also the men of the inner
circle speak—the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding
crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last.
But in their mouths”—and the policeman lowered his voice—“in their
mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no
illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth
can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean
death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that
mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without
right or wrong, they mean the grave.

“They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then
themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The
innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed
the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed
somebody.”

“How can I join you?” asked Syme, with a sort of passion.

“I know for a fact that there is a vacancy at the moment,” said the
policeman, “as I have the honour to be somewhat in the confidence of
the chief of whom I have spoken. You should really come and see him. Or
rather, I should not say see him, nobody ever sees him; but you can
talk to him if you like.”

“Telephone?” inquired Syme, with interest.

“No,” said the policeman placidly, “he has a fancy for always sitting
in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter. Do come
along.”

Somewhat dazed and considerably excited, Syme allowed himself to be led
to a side-door in the long row of buildings of Scotland Yard. Almost
before he knew what he was doing, he had been passed through the hands
of about four intermediate officials, and was suddenly shown into a
room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light.
It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced;
it was like going suddenly stone-blind.

“Are you the new recruit?” asked a heavy voice.

And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in
the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of
massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.

“Are you the new recruit?” said the invisible chief, who seemed to have
heard all about it. “All right. You are engaged.”

Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this
irrevocable phrase.

“I really have no experience,” he began.

“No one has any experience,” said the other, “of the Battle of
Armageddon.”

“But I am really unfit—”

“You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown.

“Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know any profession of which mere
willingness is the final test.”

“I do,” said the other—“martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good
day.”

Thus it was that when Gabriel Syme came out again into the crimson
light of evening, in his shabby black hat and shabby, lawless cloak, he
came out a member of the New Detective Corps for the frustration of the
great conspiracy. Acting under the advice of his friend the policeman
(who was professionally inclined to neatness), he trimmed his hair and
beard, bought a good hat, clad himself in an exquisite summer suit of
light blue-grey, with a pale yellow flower in the button-hole, and, in
short, became that elegant and rather insupportable person whom Gregory
had first encountered in the little garden of Saffron Park. Before he
finally left the police premises his friend provided him with a small
blue card, on which was written, “The Last Crusade,” and a number, the
sign of his official authority. He put this carefully in his upper
waistcoat pocket, lit a cigarette, and went forth to track and fight
the enemy in all the drawing-rooms of London. Where his adventure
ultimately led him we have already seen. At about half-past one on a
February night he found himself steaming in a small tug up the silent
Thames, armed with swordstick and revolver, the duly elected Thursday
of the Central Council of Anarchists.

When Syme stepped out on to the steam-tug he had a singular sensation
of stepping out into something entirely new; not merely into the
landscape of a new land, but even into the landscape of a new planet.
This was mainly due to the insane yet solid decision of that evening,
though partly also to an entire change in the weather and the sky since
he entered the little tavern some two hours before. Every trace of the
passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a
naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full that
(by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It
gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.

Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as
of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in
eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was
actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some
sadder star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the
moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like
a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him—the food and
the brandy and the loaded pistol—took on exactly that concrete and
material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey
or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though
in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the
expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick became
almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the
stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on
some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the
adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even
be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the
presence of a man really human. To Syme’s exaggerative mind the bright,
bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the
mountains of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there
is a man in the moon.

The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively
slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the
time that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous
bulk of Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the
splitting of great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had
brightened like white fire when the tug, changing its onward course,
turned inward to a large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.

The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as
Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white
dawn. They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of
some Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he
was, in his own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible
and heathen kings. He leapt out of the boat on to one slimy step, and
stood, a dark and slender figure, amid the enormous masonry. The two
men in the tug put her off again and turned up stream. They had never
spoken a word.




CHAPTER V.
THE FEAST OF FEAR


At first the large stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid;
but before he reached the top he had realised that there was a man
leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the
river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and
frock-coat of the more formal type of fashion; he had a red flower in
his buttonhole. As Syme drew nearer to him step by step, he did not
even move a hair; and Syme could come close enough to notice even in
the dim, pale morning light that his face was long, pale and
intellectual, and ended in a small triangular tuft of dark beard at the
very point of the chin, all else being clean-shaven. This scrap of hair
almost seemed a mere oversight; the rest of the face was of the type
that is best shaven—clear-cut, ascetic, and in its way noble. Syme drew
closer and closer, noting all this, and still the figure did not stir.

At first an instinct had told Syme that this was the man whom he was
meant to meet. Then, seeing that the man made no sign, he had concluded
that he was not. And now again he had come back to a certainty that the
man had something to do with his mad adventure. For the man remained
more still than would have been natural if a stranger had come so
close. He was as motionless as a wax-work, and got on the nerves
somewhat in the same way. Syme looked again and again at the pale,
dignified and delicate face, and the face still looked blankly across
the river. Then he took out of his pocket the note from Buttons proving
his election, and put it before that sad and beautiful face. Then the
man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side,
going up in the right cheek and down in the left.

There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this.
Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it
is even attractive. But in all Syme’s circumstances, with the dark dawn
and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones,
there was something unnerving in it.

There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic
face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly
went wrong.

The spasm of smile was instantaneous, and the man’s face dropped at
once into its harmonious melancholy. He spoke without further
explanation or inquiry, like a man speaking to an old colleague.

“If we walk up towards Leicester Square,” he said, “we shall just be in
time for breakfast. Sunday always insists on an early breakfast. Have
you had any sleep?”

“No,” said Syme.

“Nor have I,” answered the man in an ordinary tone. “I shall try to get
to bed after breakfast.”

He spoke with casual civility, but in an utterly dead voice that
contradicted the fanaticism of his face. It seemed almost as if all
friendly words were to him lifeless conveniences, and that his only
life was hate. After a pause the man spoke again.

“Of course, the Secretary of the branch told you everything that can be
told. But the one thing that can never be told is the last notion of
the President, for his notions grow like a tropical forest. So in case
you don’t know, I’d better tell you that he is carrying out his notion
of concealing ourselves by not concealing ourselves to the most
extraordinary lengths just now. Originally, of course, we met in a cell
underground, just as your branch does. Then Sunday made us take a
private room at an ordinary restaurant. He said that if you didn’t seem
to be hiding nobody hunted you out. Well, he is the only man on earth,
I know; but sometimes I really think that his huge brain is going a
little mad in its old age. For now we flaunt ourselves before the
public. We have our breakfast on a balcony—on a balcony, if you
please—overlooking Leicester Square.”

“And what do the people say?” asked Syme.

“It’s quite simple what they say,” answered his guide. “They say we are
a lot of jolly gentlemen who pretend they are anarchists.”

“It seems to me a very clever idea,” said Syme.

“Clever! God blast your impudence! Clever!” cried out the other in a
sudden, shrill voice which was as startling and discordant as his
crooked smile. “When you’ve seen Sunday for a split second you’ll leave
off calling him clever.”

With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early
sunlight filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I suppose,
why this square itself should look so alien and in some ways so
continental. It will never be known whether it was the foreign look
that attracted the foreigners or the foreigners who gave it the foreign
look. But on this particular morning the effect seemed singularly
bright and clear. Between the open square and the sunlit leaves and the
statue and the Saracenic outlines of the Alhambra, it looked the
replica of some French or even Spanish public place. And this effect
increased in Syme the sensation, which in many shapes he had had
through the whole adventure, the eerie sensation of having strayed into
a new world. As a fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square
ever since he was a boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the
trees and the Moorish cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning
into an unknown Place de something or other in some foreign town.

At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a
prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street
behind. In the wall there was one large French window, probably the
window of a large coffee-room; and outside this window, almost
literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed balcony,
big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did contain a
dining-table, or more strictly a breakfast-table; and round the
breakfast-table, glowing in the sunlight and evident to the street,
were a group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed in the insolence
of fashion, with white waistcoats and expensive button-holes. Some of
their jokes could almost be heard across the square. Then the grave
Secretary gave his unnatural smile, and Syme knew that this boisterous
breakfast party was the secret conclave of the European Dynamiters.

Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had
not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large
to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of
the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme
had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break
down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact
that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was
planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved
deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen
from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood
out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to
scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him
all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become
dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers
and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining
five children to tea.

As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter
came out smiling with every tooth in his head.

“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do
laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”

And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased
with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.

The two men mounted the stairs in silence.

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost
filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others
stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but
instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are
open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a
little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical
dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual
evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out
at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and
nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering
as he drew nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked
across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday
grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he
was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he
would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at
the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so
large.

By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an
empty seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him
with good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered
himself a little by looking at their conventional coats and solid,
shining coffee-pot; then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very
large, but it was still possible to humanity.

In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently
commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by
the President’s caprice they had been dressed up with a festive
respectability, which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast.
One man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He at least was
the common or garden Dynamiter. He wore, indeed, the high white collar
and satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion; but out of this
collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a
bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes
like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle,
and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this
figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it had every
diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque. If out of that
stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of a cat or a
dog, it could not have been a more idiotic contrast.

The man’s name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle
of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably
tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous
part demanded of him by President Sunday. And, indeed, when Syme came
in the President, with that daring disregard of public suspicion which
was his policy, was actually chaffing Gogol upon his inability to
assume conventional graces.

“Our friend Tuesday,” said the President in a deep voice at once of
quietude and volume, “our friend Tuesday doesn’t seem to grasp the
idea. He dresses up like a gentleman, but he seems to be too great a
soul to behave like one. He insists on the ways of the stage
conspirator. Now if a gentleman goes about London in a top hat and a
frock-coat, no one need know that he is an anarchist. But if a
gentleman puts on a top hat and a frock-coat, and then goes about on
his hands and knees—well, he may attract attention. That’s what Brother
Gogol does. He goes about on his hands and knees with such
inexhaustible diplomacy, that by this time he finds it quite difficult
to walk upright.”

“I am not good at concealment,” said Gogol sulkily, with a thick
foreign accent; “I am not ashamed of the cause.”

“Yes you are, my boy, and so is the cause of you,” said the President
good-naturedly. “You hide as much as anybody; but you can’t do it, you
see, you’re such an ass! You try to combine two inconsistent methods.
When a householder finds a man under his bed, he will probably pause to
note the circumstance. But if he finds a man under his bed in a top
hat, you will agree with me, my dear Tuesday, that he is not likely
even to forget it. Now when you were found under Admiral Biffin’s bed—”

“I am not good at deception,” said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.

“Right, my boy, right,” said the President with a ponderous heartiness,
“you aren’t good at anything.”

While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking more
steadily at the men around him. As he did so, he gradually felt all his
sense of something spiritually queer return.

He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and
costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he
looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he
had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That
lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his
original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something
about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which
was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he
could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and
presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and
curved mirror.

Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed
eccentricity. Syme’s original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was
the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with
more terror than anything, except the President’s horrible, happy
laughter. But now that Syme had more space and light to observe him,
there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme
thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very
distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that
troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure
thought was pain.

He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and
differently wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a
man more obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St.
Eustache, a sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances
found nothing unusual about him, except that he was the only man at
table who wore the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own.
He had a black French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat
cut even squarer. But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that
the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that
suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying
lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of
his being clad, not in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his
black seemed richer and warmer than the black shades about him, as if
it were compounded of profound colour. His black coat looked as if it
were only black by being too dense a purple. His black beard looked as
if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and
thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful.
Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be
something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the bright
coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may
see just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel,
crimson lips.

Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still
kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his
death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last
dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey
beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild
despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom
brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For
the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was
literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if
some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose
or sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was
expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the
horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but
corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He
could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might
fall off.

Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most
baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face
clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had
that combination of _savoir-faire_ with a sort of well-groomed
coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine
clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set
smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a
pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a
crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs
were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales,
of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme’s
eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying
Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been
appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an
enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his
smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had
a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that
he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the
thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too
frightful to see.




CHAPTER VI.
THE EXPOSURE


Such were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and
again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence.
Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective,
that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another
nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism
always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on
the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of
thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end,
so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in
some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the
world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a
tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end
of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a
tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures
seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate
horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.

Talk had been going on steadily as he took in the scene; and not the
least of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was the
contrast between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terrible
purport. They were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediate
plot. The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said
that they were talking about bombs and kings. Only three days
afterwards the Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in
Paris, and over their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these
beaming gentlemen had decided how both should die. Even the instrument
was chosen; the black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the
bomb.

Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objective crime
would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical
tremors. He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at
least two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and
roaring gas. But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel a
third kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moral
revulsion or his social responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear to
spare for the French President or the Czar; he had begun to fear for
himself. Most of the talkers took little heed of him, debating now with
their faces closer together, and almost uniformly grave, save when for
an instant the smile of the Secretary ran aslant across his face as the
jagged lightning runs aslant across the sky. But there was one
persistent thing which first troubled Syme and at last terrified him.
The President was always looking at him, steadily, and with a great and
baffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but his blue eyes
stood out of his head. And they were always fixed on Syme.

Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When the
President’s eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He
had hardly the shred of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary
way Sunday had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge of
the balcony, and saw a policeman, standing abstractedly just beneath,
staring at the bright railings and the sunlit trees.

Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him
for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men, who
were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and
fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism. He
even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played
together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to
Gregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thing
that he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised
not to jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his
cold hand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo
of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made
to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as
the square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep his
antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this
great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber.
Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable
policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he
looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly
studying him with big, unbearable eyes.

In all the torrent of his thought there were two thoughts that never
crossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that the
President and his Council could crush him if he continued to stand
alone. The place might be public, the project might seem impossible.
But Sunday was not the man who would carry himself thus easily without
having, somehow or somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either by
anonymous poison or sudden street accident, by hypnotism or by fire
from hell, Sunday could certainly strike him. If he defied the man he
was probably dead, either struck stiff there in his chair or long
afterwards as by an innocent ailment. If he called in the police
promptly, arrested everyone, told all, and set against them the whole
energy of England, he would probably escape; certainly not otherwise.
They were a balconyful of gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy
square; but he felt no more safe with them than if they had been a
boatful of armed pirates overlooking an empty sea.

There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to
him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a
weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their
allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might
have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable,
he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking
abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called
something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be
detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood.
But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink
even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to
fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.

The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical.
Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually and conventionally of the best
things on the table—cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary
was a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over
half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old
Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And
even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of
mere mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a
frightful freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage
factory. Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets or
drunk a quart of coffee, he would be found with his great head on one
side staring at Syme.

“I have often wondered,” said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a
slice of bread and jam, “whether it wouldn’t be better for me to do it
with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off with a
knife. And it would be a new emotion to get a knife into a French
President and wriggle it round.”

“You are wrong,” said the Secretary, drawing his black brows together.
“The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with a
personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best
symbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers of
the Christians. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even
so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man’s brain is a
bomb,” he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and
striking his own skull with violence. “My brain feels like a bomb,
night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must
expand, if it breaks up the universe.”

“I don’t want the universe broken up just yet,” drawled the Marquis. “I
want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one
yesterday in bed.”

“No, if the only end of the thing is nothing,” said Dr. Bull with his
sphinx-like smile, “it hardly seems worth doing.”

The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.

“Every man knows in his heart,” he said, “that nothing is worth doing.”

There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said—

“We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is how
Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all agree with the
original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I should
suggest that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to—”

The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday
had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.

“Before we discuss that,” he said in a small, quiet voice, “let us go
into a private room. I have something very particular to say.”

Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had come
at last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he could
hear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright,
was cold.

A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial
tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle.
He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from
nowhere. That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the
vulgarity, and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those
unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of
Christendom. His youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his
mind; he did not think of himself as the representative of the corps of
gentlemen turned into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who
lived in the dark room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of
all these common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched
into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in
being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above
the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at least, he looked down
upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the
commonplace. He felt towards them all that unconscious and elementary
superiority that a brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man
over powerful errors. He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor
the physical strength of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded
it no more than the fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a
horn on his nose like a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate
certainty that the President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was
right. There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism
in the song of Roland—

    “Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit,”

which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.
This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a
quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the
barrel-organ could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This
very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to
miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into
their dark room and die for something that they could not even
understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the
energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear
deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the
drums of the pride of death.

The conspirators were already filing through the open window and into
the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his
brain and body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them
down an irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and
into a dim, cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an
abandoned boardroom. When they were all in, he closed and locked the
door.

The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed bursting
with inarticulate grievance.

“Zso! Zso!” he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish
accent becoming almost impenetrable. “You zay you nod ’ide. You zay you
show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you
run yourselves in a dark box!”

The President seemed to take the foreigner’s incoherent satire with
entire good humour.

“You can’t get hold of it yet, Gogol,” he said in a fatherly way. “When
once they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will not
care where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should have
had the whole staff at the keyhole. You don’t seem to know anything
about mankind.”

“I die for zem,” cried the Pole in thick excitement, “and I slay zare
oppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite ze
tyrant in ze open square.”

“I see, I see,” said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himself
at the top of a long table. “You die for mankind first, and then you
get up and smite their oppressors. So that’s all right. And now may I
ask you to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the
other gentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning
something intelligent is going to be said.”

Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the original
summons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling in his brown
beard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion of
the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feeling
of a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, of
making a good speech.

“Comrades,” said the President, suddenly rising, “we have spun out this
farce long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something so
simple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to our
levities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we
were discussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying
anything else, that those plans and places should not be voted by this
meeting, but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable
member. I suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull.”

They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for the
next words, though not loud, had a living and sensational emphasis.
Sunday struck the table.

“Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at this
meeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to do must be
mentioned in this company.”

Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers; but it seemed
as if he had never really astonished them until now. They all moved
feverishly in their seats, except Syme. He sat stiff in his, with his
hand in his pocket, and on the handle of his loaded revolver. When the
attack on him came he would sell his life dear. He would find out at
least if the President was mortal.

Sunday went on smoothly—

“You will probably understand that there is only one possible motive
for forbidding free speech at this festival of freedom. Strangers
overhearing us matters nothing. They assume that we are joking. But
what would matter, even unto death, is this, that there should be one
actually among us who is not of us, who knows our grave purpose, but
does not share it, who—”

The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.

“It can’t be!” he cried, leaping. “There can’t—”

The President flapped his large flat hand on the table like the fin of
some huge fish.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “there is a spy in this room. There is a traitor
at this table. I will waste no more words. His name—”

Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.

“His name is Gogol,” said the President. “He is that hairy humbug over
there who pretends to be a Pole.”

Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the same flash
three men sprang at his throat. Even the Professor made an effort to
rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was blinded with a
beneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat shuddering, in a
palsy of passionate relief.




CHAPTER VII.
THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS


“Sit down!” said Sunday in a voice that he used once or twice in his
life, a voice that made men drop drawn swords.

The three who had risen fell away from Gogol, and that equivocal person
himself resumed his seat.

“Well, my man,” said the President briskly, addressing him as one
addresses a total stranger, “will you oblige me by putting your hand in
your upper waistcoat pocket and showing me what you have there?”

The alleged Pole was a little pale under his tangle of dark hair, but
he put two fingers into the pocket with apparent coolness and pulled
out a blue strip of card. When Syme saw it lying on the table, he woke
up again to the world outside him. For although the card lay at the
other extreme of the table, and he could read nothing of the
inscription on it, it bore a startling resemblance to the blue card in
his own pocket, the card which had been given to him when he joined the
anti-anarchist constabulary.

“Pathetic Slav,” said the President, “tragic child of Poland, are you
prepared in the presence of that card to deny that you are in this
company—shall we say _de trop?_”

“Right oh!” said the late Gogol. It made everyone jump to hear a clear,
commercial and somewhat cockney voice coming out of that forest of
foreign hair. It was irrational, as if a Chinaman had suddenly spoken
with a Scotch accent.

“I gather that you fully understand your position,” said Sunday.

“You bet,” answered the Pole. “I see it’s a fair cop. All I say is, I
don’t believe any Pole could have imitated my accent like I did his.”

“I concede the point,” said Sunday. “I believe your own accent to be
inimitable, though I shall practise it in my bath. Do you mind leaving
your beard with your card?”

“Not a bit,” answered Gogol; and with one finger he ripped off the
whole of his shaggy head-covering, emerging with thin red hair and a
pale, pert face. “It was hot,” he added.

“I will do you the justice to say,” said Sunday, not without a sort of
brutal admiration, “that you seem to have kept pretty cool under it.
Now listen to me. I like you. The consequence is that it would annoy me
for just about two and a half minutes if I heard that you had died in
torments. Well, if you ever tell the police or any human soul about us,
I shall have that two and a half minutes of discomfort. On your
discomfort I will not dwell. Good day. Mind the step.”

The red-haired detective who had masqueraded as Gogol rose to his feet
without a word, and walked out of the room with an air of perfect
nonchalance. Yet the astonished Syme was able to realise that this ease
was suddenly assumed; for there was a slight stumble outside the door,
which showed that the departing detective had not minded the step.

“Time is flying,” said the President in his gayest manner, after
glancing at his watch, which like everything about him seemed bigger
than it ought to be. “I must go off at once; I have to take the chair
at a Humanitarian meeting.”

The Secretary turned to him with working eyebrows.

“Would it not be better,” he said a little sharply, “to discuss further
the details of our project, now that the spy has left us?”

“No, I think not,” said the President with a yawn like an unobtrusive
earthquake. “Leave it as it is. Let Saturday settle it. I must be off.
Breakfast here next Sunday.”

But the late loud scenes had whipped up the almost naked nerves of the
Secretary. He was one of those men who are conscientious even in crime.

“I must protest, President, that the thing is irregular,” he said. “It
is a fundamental rule of our society that all plans shall be debated in
full council. Of course, I fully appreciate your forethought when in
the actual presence of a traitor—”

“Secretary,” said the President seriously, “if you’d take your head
home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it
might.”

The Secretary reared back in a kind of equine anger.

“I really fail to understand—” he began in high offense.

“That’s it, that’s it,” said the President, nodding a great many times.
“That’s where you fail right enough. You fail to understand. Why, you
dancing donkey,” he roared, rising, “you didn’t want to be overheard by
a spy, didn’t you? How do you know you aren’t overheard now?”

And with these words he shouldered his way out of the room, shaking
with incomprehensible scorn.

Four of the men left behind gaped after him without any apparent
glimmering of his meaning. Syme alone had even a glimmering, and such
as it was it froze him to the bone. If the last words of the President
meant anything, they meant that he had not after all passed
unsuspected. They meant that while Sunday could not denounce him like
Gogol, he still could not trust him like the others.

The other four got to their feet grumbling more or less, and betook
themselves elsewhere to find lunch, for it was already well past
midday. The Professor went last, very slowly and painfully. Syme sat
long after the rest had gone, revolving his strange position. He had
escaped a thunderbolt, but he was still under a cloud. At last he rose
and made his way out of the hotel into Leicester Square. The bright,
cold day had grown increasingly colder, and when he came out into the
street he was surprised by a few flakes of snow. While he still carried
the sword-stick and the rest of Gregory’s portable luggage, he had
thrown the cloak down and left it somewhere, perhaps on the steam-tug,
perhaps on the balcony. Hoping, therefore, that the snow-shower might
be slight, he stepped back out of the street for a moment and stood up
under the doorway of a small and greasy hair-dresser’s shop, the front
window of which was empty, except for a sickly wax lady in evening
dress.

Snow, however, began to thicken and fall fast; and Syme, having found
one glance at the wax lady quite sufficient to depress his spirits,
stared out instead into the white and empty street. He was considerably
astonished to see, standing quite still outside the shop and staring
into the window, a man. His top hat was loaded with snow like the hat
of Father Christmas, the white drift was rising round his boots and
ankles; but it seemed as if nothing could tear him away from the
contemplation of the colourless wax doll in dirty evening dress. That
any human being should stand in such weather looking into such a shop
was a matter of sufficient wonder to Syme; but his idle wonder turned
suddenly into a personal shock; for he realised that the man standing
there was the paralytic old Professor de Worms. It scarcely seemed the
place for a person of his years and infirmities.

Syme was ready to believe anything about the perversions of this
dehumanized brotherhood; but even he could not believe that the
Professor had fallen in love with that particular wax lady. He could
only suppose that the man’s malady (whatever it was) involved some
momentary fits of rigidity or trance. He was not inclined, however, to
feel in this case any very compassionate concern. On the contrary, he
rather congratulated himself that the Professor’s stroke and his
elaborate and limping walk would make it easy to escape from him and
leave him miles behind. For Syme thirsted first and last to get clear
of the whole poisonous atmosphere, if only for an hour. Then he could
collect his thoughts, formulate his policy, and decide finally whether
he should or should not keep faith with Gregory.

He strolled away through the dancing snow, turned up two or three
streets, down through two or three others, and entered a small Soho
restaurant for lunch. He partook reflectively of four small and quaint
courses, drank half a bottle of red wine, and ended up over black
coffee and a black cigar, still thinking. He had taken his seat in the
upper room of the restaurant, which was full of the chink of knives and
the chatter of foreigners. He remembered that in old days he had
imagined that all these harmless and kindly aliens were anarchists. He
shuddered, remembering the real thing. But even the shudder had the
delightful shame of escape. The wine, the common food, the familiar
place, the faces of natural and talkative men, made him almost feel as
if the Council of the Seven Days had been a bad dream; and although he
knew it was nevertheless an objective reality, it was at least a
distant one. Tall houses and populous streets lay between him and his
last sight of the shameful seven; he was free in free London, and
drinking wine among the free. With a somewhat easier action, he took
his hat and stick and strolled down the stair into the shop below.

When he entered that lower room he stood stricken and rooted to the
spot. At a small table, close up to the blank window and the white
street of snow, sat the old anarchist Professor over a glass of milk,
with his lifted livid face and pendent eyelids. For an instant Syme
stood as rigid as the stick he leant upon. Then with a gesture as of
blind hurry, he brushed past the Professor, dashing open the door and
slamming it behind him, and stood outside in the snow.

“Can that old corpse be following me?” he asked himself, biting his
yellow moustache. “I stopped too long up in that room, so that even
such leaden feet could catch me up. One comfort is, with a little brisk
walking I can put a man like that as far away as Timbuctoo. Or am I too
fanciful? Was he really following me? Surely Sunday would not be such a
fool as to send a lame man?”

He set off at a smart pace, twisting and whirling his stick, in the
direction of Covent Garden. As he crossed the great market the snow
increased, growing blinding and bewildering as the afternoon began to
darken. The snow-flakes tormented him like a swarm of silver bees.
Getting into his eyes and beard, they added their unremitting futility
to his already irritated nerves; and by the time that he had come at a
swinging pace to the beginning of Fleet Street, he lost patience, and
finding a Sunday teashop, turned into it to take shelter. He ordered
another cup of black coffee as an excuse. Scarcely had he done so, when
Professor de Worms hobbled heavily into the shop, sat down with
difficulty and ordered a glass of milk.

Syme’s walking-stick had fallen from his hand with a great clang, which
confessed the concealed steel. But the Professor did not look round.
Syme, who was commonly a cool character, was literally gaping as a
rustic gapes at a conjuring trick. He had seen no cab following; he had
heard no wheels outside the shop; to all mortal appearances the man had
come on foot. But the old man could only walk like a snail, and Syme
had walked like the wind. He started up and snatched his stick, half
crazy with the contradiction in mere arithmetic, and swung out of the
swinging doors, leaving his coffee untasted. An omnibus going to the
Bank went rattling by with an unusual rapidity. He had a violent run of
a hundred yards to reach it; but he managed to spring, swaying upon the
splash-board and, pausing for an instant to pant, he climbed on to the
top. When he had been seated for about half a minute, he heard behind
him a sort of heavy and asthmatic breathing.

Turning sharply, he saw rising gradually higher and higher up the
omnibus steps a top hat soiled and dripping with snow, and under the
shadow of its brim the short-sighted face and shaky shoulders of
Professor de Worms. He let himself into a seat with characteristic
care, and wrapped himself up to the chin in the mackintosh rug.

Every movement of the old man’s tottering figure and vague hands, every
uncertain gesture and panic-stricken pause, seemed to put it beyond
question that he was helpless, that he was in the last imbecility of
the body. He moved by inches, he let himself down with little gasps of
caution. And yet, unless the philosophical entities called time and
space have no vestige even of a practical existence, it appeared quite
unquestionable that he had run after the omnibus.

Syme sprang erect upon the rocking car, and after staring wildly at the
wintry sky, that grew gloomier every moment, he ran down the steps. He
had repressed an elemental impulse to leap over the side.

Too bewildered to look back or to reason, he rushed into one of the
little courts at the side of Fleet Street as a rabbit rushes into a
hole. He had a vague idea, if this incomprehensible old Jack-in-the-box
was really pursuing him, that in that labyrinth of little streets he
could soon throw him off the scent. He dived in and out of those
crooked lanes, which were more like cracks than thoroughfares; and by
the time that he had completed about twenty alternate angles and
described an unthinkable polygon, he paused to listen for any sound of
pursuit. There was none; there could not in any case have been much,
for the little streets were thick with the soundless snow. Somewhere
behind Red Lion Court, however, he noticed a place where some energetic
citizen had cleared away the snow for a space of about twenty yards,
leaving the wet, glistening cobble-stones. He thought little of this as
he passed it, only plunging into yet another arm of the maze. But when
a few hundred yards farther on he stood still again to listen, his
heart stood still also, for he heard from that space of rugged stones
the clinking crutch and labouring feet of the infernal cripple.

The sky above was loaded with the clouds of snow, leaving London in a
darkness and oppression premature for that hour of the evening. On each
side of Syme the walls of the alley were blind and featureless; there
was no little window or any kind of eve. He felt a new impulse to break
out of this hive of houses, and to get once more into the open and
lamp-lit street. Yet he rambled and dodged for a long time before he
struck the main thoroughfare. When he did so, he struck it much farther
up than he had fancied. He came out into what seemed the vast and void
of Ludgate Circus, and saw St. Paul’s Cathedral sitting in the sky.

At first he was startled to find these great roads so empty, as if a
pestilence had swept through the city. Then he told himself that some
degree of emptiness was natural; first because the snow-storm was even
dangerously deep, and secondly because it was Sunday. And at the very
word Sunday he bit his lip; the word was henceforth for hire like some
indecent pun. Under the white fog of snow high up in the heaven the
whole atmosphere of the city was turned to a very queer kind of green
twilight, as of men under the sea. The sealed and sullen sunset behind
the dark dome of St. Paul’s had in it smoky and sinister
colours—colours of sickly green, dead red or decaying bronze, that were
just bright enough to emphasise the solid whiteness of the snow. But
right up against these dreary colours rose the black bulk of the
cathedral; and upon the top of the cathedral was a random splash and
great stain of snow, still clinging as to an Alpine peak. It had fallen
accidentally, but just so fallen as to half drape the dome from its
very topmost point, and to pick out in perfect silver the great orb and
the cross. When Syme saw it he suddenly straightened himself, and made
with his sword-stick an involuntary salute.

He knew that that evil figure, his shadow, was creeping quickly or
slowly behind him, and he did not care.

It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the skies were
darkening that high place of the earth was bright. The devils might
have captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross. He had a
new impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and
pursuing paralytic; and at the entrance of the court as it opened upon
the Circus he turned, stick in hand, to face his pursuer.

Professor de Worms came slowly round the corner of the irregular alley
behind him, his unnatural form outlined against a lonely gas-lamp,
irresistibly recalling that very imaginative figure in the nursery
rhymes, “the crooked man who went a crooked mile.” He really looked as
if he had been twisted out of shape by the tortuous streets he had been
threading. He came nearer and nearer, the lamplight shining on his
lifted spectacles, his lifted, patient face. Syme waited for him as St.
George waited for the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation or
for death. And the old Professor came right up to him and passed him
like a total stranger, without even a blink of his mournful eyelids.

There was something in this silent and unexpected innocence that left
Syme in a final fury. The man’s colourless face and manner seemed to
assert that the whole following had been an accident. Syme was
galvanised with an energy that was something between bitterness and a
burst of boyish derision. He made a wild gesture as if to knock the old
man’s hat off, called out something like “Catch me if you can,” and
went racing away across the white, open Circus. Concealment was
impossible now; and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the
black figure of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging
strides like a man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding
body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a
lecturer upon the body of a harlequin.

This outrageous chase sped across Ludgate Circus, up Ludgate Hill,
round St. Paul’s Cathedral, along Cheapside, Syme remembering all the
nightmares he had ever known. Then Syme broke away towards the river,
and ended almost down by the docks. He saw the yellow panes of a low,
lighted public-house, flung himself into it and ordered beer. It was a
foul tavern, sprinkled with foreign sailors, a place where opium might
be smoked or knives drawn.

A moment later Professor de Worms entered the place, sat down
carefully, and asked for a glass of milk.




CHAPTER VIII.
THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS


When Gabriel Syme found himself finally established in a chair, and
opposite to him, fixed and final also, the lifted eyebrows and leaden
eyelids of the Professor, his fears fully returned. This
incomprehensible man from the fierce council, after all, had certainly
pursued him. If the man had one character as a paralytic and another
character as a pursuer, the antithesis might make him more interesting,
but scarcely more soothing. It would be a very small comfort that he
could not find the Professor out, if by some serious accident the
Professor should find him out. He emptied a whole pewter pot of ale
before the professor had touched his milk.

One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless. It was
just possible that this escapade signified something other than even a
slight suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some regular form or sign.
Perhaps the foolish scamper was some sort of friendly signal that he
ought to have understood. Perhaps it was a ritual. Perhaps the new
Thursday was always chased along Cheapside, as the new Lord Mayor is
always escorted along it. He was just selecting a tentative inquiry,
when the old Professor opposite suddenly and simply cut him short.
Before Syme could ask the first diplomatic question, the old anarchist
had asked suddenly, without any sort of preparation—

“Are you a policeman?”

Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only
manage a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.

“A policeman?” he said, laughing vaguely. “Whatever made you think of a
policeman in connection with me?”

“The process was simple enough,” answered the Professor patiently. “I
thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now.”

“Did I take a policeman’s hat by mistake out of the restaurant?” asked
Syme, smiling wildly. “Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me
somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a
policeman? Do, do let me be a postman.”

The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but
Syme ran on with a feverish irony.

“But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy.
Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir,
the ape fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never
detect the shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps
a maiden lady on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have
been. I don’t mind being the policeman that might have been. I don’t
mind being anything in German thought.”

“Are you in the police service?” said the old man, ignoring all Syme’s
improvised and desperate raillery. “Are you a detective?”

Syme’s heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.

“Your suggestion is ridiculous,” he began. “Why on earth—”

The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
nearly breaking it.

“Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?” he shrieked
in a high, crazy voice. “Are you, or are you not, a police detective?”

“No!” answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman’s drop.

“You swear it,” said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
becoming as it were loathsomely alive. “You swear it! You swear it! If
you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil
dances at your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your
grave? Will there really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a
dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not
in the British police?”

He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
loose hand like a flap to his ear.

“I am not in the British police,” said Syme with insane calm.

Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
collapse.

“That’s a pity,” he said, “because I am.”

Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a
crash.

“Because you are what?” he said thickly. “You are what?”

“I am a policeman,” said the Professor with his first broad smile, and
beaming through his spectacles. “But as you think policeman only a
relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the
British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British
police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters’ club. I
suppose I ought to arrest you.” And with these words he laid on the
table before Syme an exact facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in
his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol of his power from the police.

Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars
were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the
last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now
the capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from
whom he had been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own
house, who on the other side of the table lay back and laughed at him.
He did not for the moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the
happy and silly fact that this shadow, which had pursued him with an
intolerable oppression of peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying
to catch him up. He knew simultaneously that he was a fool and a free
man. For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain
healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions
when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic
pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme’s egotism held hard to
the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly adopted the
third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat
pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until
his spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted
with a barbaric laughter.

Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there
was something Homeric in Syme’s mirth which made many half-drunken men
look round.

“What yer laughing at, guv’nor?” asked one wondering labourer from the
docks.

“At myself,” answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his
ecstatic reaction.

“Pull yourself together,” said the Professor, “or you’ll get
hysterical. Have some more beer. I’ll join you.”

“You haven’t drunk your milk,” said Syme.

“My milk!” said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
contempt, “my milk! Do you think I’d look at the beastly stuff when I’m
out of sight of the bloody anarchists? We’re all Christians in this
room, though perhaps,” he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd,
“not strict ones. Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I’ll finish it
right enough!” and he knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash
of glass and a splash of silver fluid.

Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.

“I understand now,” he cried; “of course, you’re not an old man at
all.”

“I can’t take my face off here,” replied Professor de Worms. “It’s
rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I’m an old man, that’s not
for me to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday.”

“Yes, but I mean,” said Syme impatiently, “there’s nothing the matter
with you.”

“Yes,” answered the other dispassionately. “I am subject to colds.”

Syme’s laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He
laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young
actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would
have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.

The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.

“Did you know,” he asked, “that that man Gogol was one of us?”

“I? No, I didn’t know it,” answered Syme in some surprise. “But didn’t
you?”

“I knew no more than the dead,” replied the man who called himself de
Worms. “I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in
my boots.”

“And I thought he was talking about me,” said Syme, with his rather
reckless laughter. “I had my hand on my revolver all the time.”

“So had I,” said the Professor grimly; “so had Gogol evidently.”

Syme struck the table with an exclamation.

“Why, there were three of us there!” he cried. “Three out of seven is a
fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!”

The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.

“We were three,” he said. “If we had been three hundred we could still
have done nothing.”

“Not if we were three hundred against four?” asked Syme, jeering rather
boisterously.

“No,” said the Professor with sobriety, “not if we were three hundred
against Sunday.”

And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died
in his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the
unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured
photograph, and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his
satellites, that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became
gradually blurred by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday’s
seemed almost to grow more actual during absence, as if a man’s painted
portrait should slowly come alive.

They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme’s speech
came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.

“Professor,” he cried, “it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this man?”

The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.

“Yes, I am,” he said mildly. “So are you.”

Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like an
insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.

“Yes,” he said in a voice indescribable, “you are right. I am afraid of
him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear
until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his
throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him
down.”

“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?”

“Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in
the universe anything of which he is afraid.”

De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made an effort
to speak, but Syme went on in a low voice, but with an undercurrent of
inhuman exaltation—

“Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless—like a tree? Fight the
thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
death-bed the great robber said, ‘I can give you no money, but I can
give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
upwards.’ So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.”

The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his pose.

“Sunday is a fixed star,” he said.

“You shall see him a falling star,” said Syme, and put on his hat.

The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet.

“Have you any idea,” he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment,
“exactly where you are going?”

“Yes,” replied Syme shortly, “I am going to prevent this bomb being
thrown in Paris.”

“Have you any conception how?” inquired the other.

“No,” said Syme with equal decision.

“You remember, of course,” resumed the soi-disant de Worms, pulling his
beard and looking out of the window, “that when we broke up rather
hurriedly the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left in the
private hands of the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by this time
probably crossing the Channel. But where he will go and what he will do
it is doubtful whether even the President knows; certainly we don’t
know. The only man who does know is Dr. Bull.”

“Confound it!” cried Syme. “And we don’t know where he is.”

“Yes,” said the other in his curious, absent-minded way, “I know where
he is myself.”

“Will you tell me?” asked Syme with eager eyes.

“I will take you there,” said the Professor, and took down his own hat
from a peg.

Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.

“What do you mean?” he asked sharply. “Will you join me? Will you take
the risk?”

“Young man,” said the Professor pleasantly, “I am amused to observe
that you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word, and
that shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical
rhetoric. You think that it is possible to pull down the President. I
know that it is impossible, and I am going to try it,” and opening the
tavern door, which let in a blast of bitter air, they went out together
into the dark streets by the docks.

Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a
clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small
streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming
lamps irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and
fallen world. Syme felt almost dazed as he stepped through this growing
confusion of lights and shadows; but his companion walked on with a
certain briskness, towards where, at the end of the street, an inch or
two of the lamplit river looked like a bar of flame.

“Where are you going?” Syme inquired.

“Just now,” answered the Professor, “I am going just round the corner
to see whether Dr. Bull has gone to bed. He is hygienic, and retires
early.”

“Dr. Bull!” exclaimed Syme. “Does he live round the corner?”

“No,” answered his friend. “As a matter of fact he lives some way off,
on the other side of the river, but we can tell from here whether he
has gone to bed.”

Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river, flecked with
flame, he pointed with his stick to the other bank. On the Surrey side
at this point there ran out into the Thames, seeming almost to overhang
it, a bulk and cluster of those tall tenements, dotted with lighted
windows, and rising like factory chimneys to an almost insane height.
Their special poise and position made one block of buildings especially
look like a Tower of Babel with a hundred eyes. Syme had never seen any
of the sky-scraping buildings in America, so he could only think of the
buildings in a dream.

Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably lighted turret
abruptly went out, as if this black Argus had winked at him with one of
his innumerable eyes.

Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his stick
against his boot.

“We are too late,” he said, “the hygienic Doctor has gone to bed.”

“What do you mean?” asked Syme. “Does he live over there, then?”

“Yes,” said de Worms, “behind that particular window which you can’t
see. Come along and get some dinner. We must call on him tomorrow
morning.”

Without further parley, he led the way through several by-ways until
they came out into the flare and clamour of the East India Dock Road.
The Professor, who seemed to know his way about the neighbourhood,
proceeded to a place where the line of lighted shops fell back into a
sort of abrupt twilight and quiet, in which an old white inn, all out
of repair, stood back some twenty feet from the road.

“You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
fossils,” explained the Professor. “I once found a decent place in the
West End.”

“I suppose,” said Syme, smiling, “that this is the corresponding decent
place in the East End?”

“It is,” said the Professor reverently, and went in.

In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The beans and
bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing
emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme’s sense of a new
comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had
been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between
isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians
that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand
times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world
will always return to monogamy.

Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his
outrageous tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little
tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant
monologue, as a man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also,
the man who had impersonated Professor de Worms was not less
communicative. His own story was almost as silly as Syme’s.

“That’s a good get-up of yours,” said Syme, draining a glass of Macon;
“a lot better than old Gogol’s. Even at the start I thought he was a
bit too hairy.”

“A difference of artistic theory,” replied the Professor pensively.
“Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of
an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed,
to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a
portrait.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Syme.

“I am a portrait,” repeated the Professor. “I am a portrait of the
celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples.”

“You mean you are made up like him,” said Syme. “But doesn’t he know
that you are taking his nose in vain?”

“He knows it right enough,” replied his friend cheerfully.

“Then why doesn’t he denounce you?”

“I have denounced him,” answered the Professor.

“Do explain yourself,” said Syme.

“With pleasure, if you don’t mind hearing my story,” replied the
eminent foreign philosopher. “I am by profession an actor, and my name
is Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian
and blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of the turf,
sometimes the riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the political
refugee. In some den of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great
German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much
about him beyond his appearance, which was very disgusting, and which I
studied carefully. I understood that he had proved that the destructive
principle in the universe was God; hence he insisted on the need for a
furious and incessant energy, rending all things in pieces. Energy, he
said, was the All. He was lame, shortsighted, and partially paralytic.
When I met him I was in a frivolous mood, and I disliked him so much
that I resolved to imitate him. If I had been a draughtsman I would
have drawn a caricature. I was only an actor, I could only act a
caricature. I made myself up into what was meant for a wild
exaggeration of the old Professor’s dirty old self. When I went into
the room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar
of laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation
at the insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance
was received with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first
opened my lips) with a murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect
artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true.
They thought I really was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a
healthy-minded young man at the time, and I confess that it was a blow.
Before I could fully recover, however, two or three of these admirers
ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that a public insult
had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its nature. It seemed
that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous
parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for me, and
in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through.
Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted
eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.

“I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me
looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which
was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like
my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young
actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and
working within this definite limitation, he couldn’t be so jolly
paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I
countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that
nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could
not even understand myself. ‘I don’t fancy,’ he said, ‘that you could
have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since
there inheres in it the introduction of lacuna, which are an essential
of differentiation.’ I replied quite scornfully, ‘You read all that up
in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was
exposed long ago by Glumpe.’ It is unnecessary for me to say that there
never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all
round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and
the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him
rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell
back upon a more popular form of wit. ‘I see,’ he sneered, ‘you prevail
like the false pig in Æsop.’ ‘And you fail,’ I answered, smiling, ‘like
the hedgehog in Montaigne.’ Need I say that there is no hedgehog in
Montaigne? ‘Your claptrap comes off,’ he said; ‘so would your beard.’ I
had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather
witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, ‘Like the Pantheist’s boots,’
at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The
real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man
tried very patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I believe,
received everywhere in Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent
earnestness and anger, you see, make him all the more entertaining.”

“Well,” said Syme, “I can understand your putting on his dirty old
beard for a night’s practical joke, but I don’t understand your never
taking it off again.”

“That is the rest of the story,” said the impersonator. “When I myself
left the company, followed by reverent applause, I went limping down
the dark street, hoping that I should soon be far enough away to be
able to walk like a human being. To my astonishment, as I was turning
the corner, I felt a touch on the shoulder, and turning, found myself
under the shadow of an enormous policeman. He told me I was wanted. I
struck a sort of paralytic attitude, and cried in a high German accent,
‘Yes, I am wanted—by the oppressed of the world. You are arresting me
on the charge of being the great anarchist, Professor de Worms.’ The
policeman impassively consulted a paper in his hand, ‘No, sir,’ he said
civilly, ‘at least, not exactly, sir. I am arresting you on the charge
of not being the celebrated anarchist, Professor de Worms.’ This
charge, if it was criminal at all, was certainly the lighter of the
two, and I went along with the man, doubtful, but not greatly dismayed.
I was shown into a number of rooms, and eventually into the presence of
a police officer, who explained that a serious campaign had been opened
against the centres of anarchy, and that this, my successful
masquerade, might be of considerable value to the public safety. He
offered me a good salary and this little blue card. Though our
conversation was short, he struck me as a man of very massive common
sense and humour; but I cannot tell you much about him personally,
because—”

Syme laid down his knife and fork.

“I know,” he said, “because you talked to him in a dark room.”

Professor de Worms nodded and drained his glass.




CHAPTER IX.
THE MAN IN SPECTACLES


“Burgundy is a jolly thing,” said the Professor sadly, as he set his
glass down.

“You don’t look as if it were,” said Syme; “you drink it as if it were
medicine.”

“You must excuse my manner,” said the Professor dismally, “my position
is rather a curious one. Inside I am really bursting with boyish
merriment; but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I
can’t leave off. So that when I am among friends, and have no need at
all to disguise myself, I still can’t help speaking slow and wrinkling
my forehead—just as if it were my forehead. I can be quite happy, you
understand, but only in a paralytic sort of way. The most buoyant
exclamations leap up in my heart, but they come out of my mouth quite
different. You should hear me say, ‘Buck up, old cock!’ It would bring
tears to your eyes.”

“It does,” said Syme; “but I cannot help thinking that apart from all
that you are really a bit worried.”

The Professor started a little and looked at him steadily.

“You are a very clever fellow,” he said, “it is a pleasure to work with
you. Yes, I have rather a heavy cloud in my head. There is a great
problem to face,” and he sank his bald brow in his two hands.

Then he said in a low voice—

“Can you play the piano?”

“Yes,” said Syme in simple wonder, “I’m supposed to have a good touch.”

Then, as the other did not speak, he added—

“I trust the great cloud is lifted.”

After a long silence, the Professor said out of the cavernous shadow of
his hands—

“It would have done just as well if you could work a typewriter.”

“Thank you,” said Syme, “you flatter me.”

“Listen to me,” said the other, “and remember whom we have to see
tomorrow. You and I are going tomorrow to attempt something which is
very much more dangerous than trying to steal the Crown Jewels out of
the Tower. We are trying to steal a secret from a very sharp, very
strong, and very wicked man. I believe there is no man, except the
President, of course, who is so seriously startling and formidable as
that little grinning fellow in goggles. He has not perhaps the
white-hot enthusiasm unto death, the mad martyrdom for anarchy, which
marks the Secretary. But then that very fanaticism in the Secretary has
a human pathos, and is almost a redeeming trait. But the little Doctor
has a brutal sanity that is more shocking than the Secretary’s disease.
Don’t you notice his detestable virility and vitality. He bounces like
an india-rubber ball. Depend on it, Sunday was not asleep (I wonder if
he ever sleeps?) when he locked up all the plans of this outrage in the
round, black head of Dr. Bull.”

“And you think,” said Syme, “that this unique monster will be soothed
if I play the piano to him?”

“Don’t be an ass,” said his mentor. “I mentioned the piano because it
gives one quick and independent fingers. Syme, if we are to go through
this interview and come out sane or alive, we must have some code of
signals between us that this brute will not see. I have made a rough
alphabetical cypher corresponding to the five fingers—like this, see,”
and he rippled with his fingers on the wooden table—“B A D, bad, a word
we may frequently require.”

Syme poured himself out another glass of wine, and began to study the
scheme. He was abnormally quick with his brains at puzzles, and with
his hands at conjuring, and it did not take him long to learn how he
might convey simple messages by what would seem to be idle taps upon a
table or knee. But wine and companionship had always the effect of
inspiring him to a farcical ingenuity, and the Professor soon found
himself struggling with the too vast energy of the new language, as it
passed through the heated brain of Syme.

“We must have several word-signs,” said Syme seriously—“words that we
are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is
‘coeval’. What’s yours?”

“Do stop playing the goat,” said the Professor plaintively. “You don’t
know how serious this is.”

“‘Lush’ too,” said Syme, shaking his head sagaciously, “we must have
‘lush’—word applied to grass, don’t you know?”

“Do you imagine,” asked the Professor furiously, “that we are going to
talk to Dr. Bull about grass?”

“There are several ways in which the subject could be approached,” said
Syme reflectively, “and the word introduced without appearing forced.
We might say, ‘Dr. Bull, as a revolutionist, you remember that a tyrant
once advised us to eat grass; and indeed many of us, looking on the
fresh lush grass of summer...’”

“Do you understand,” said the other, “that this is a tragedy?”

“Perfectly,” replied Syme; “always be comic in a tragedy. What the
deuce else can you do? I wish this language of yours had a wider scope.
I suppose we could not extend it from the fingers to the toes? That
would involve pulling off our boots and socks during the conversation,
which however unobtrusively performed—”

“Syme,” said his friend with a stern simplicity, “go to bed!”

Syme, however, sat up in bed for a considerable time mastering the new
code. He was awakened next morning while the east was still sealed with
darkness, and found his grey-bearded ally standing like a ghost beside
his bed.

Syme sat up in bed blinking; then slowly collected his thoughts, threw
off the bed-clothes, and stood up. It seemed to him in some curious way
that all the safety and sociability of the night before fell with the
bedclothes off him, and he stood up in an air of cold danger. He still
felt an entire trust and loyalty towards his companion; but it was the
trust between two men going to the scaffold.

“Well,” said Syme with a forced cheerfulness as he pulled on his
trousers, “I dreamt of that alphabet of yours. Did it take you long to
make it up?”

The Professor made no answer, but gazed in front of him with eyes the
colour of a wintry sea; so Syme repeated his question.

“I say, did it take you long to invent all this? I’m considered good at
these things, and it was a good hour’s grind. Did you learn it all on
the spot?”

The Professor was silent; his eyes were wide open, and he wore a fixed
but very small smile.

“How long did it take you?”

The Professor did not move.

“Confound you, can’t you answer?” called out Syme, in a sudden anger
that had something like fear underneath. Whether or no the Professor
could answer, he did not.

Syme stood staring back at the stiff face like parchment and the blank,
blue eyes. His first thought was that the Professor had gone mad, but
his second thought was more frightful. After all, what did he know
about this queer creature whom he had heedlessly accepted as a friend?
What did he know, except that the man had been at the anarchist
breakfast and had told him a ridiculous tale? How improbable it was
that there should be another friend there beside Gogol! Was this man’s
silence a sensational way of declaring war? Was this adamantine stare
after all only the awful sneer of some threefold traitor, who had
turned for the last time? He stood and strained his ears in this
heartless silence. He almost fancied he could hear dynamiters come to
capture him shifting softly in the corridor outside.

Then his eye strayed downwards, and he burst out laughing. Though the
Professor himself stood there as voiceless as a statue, his five dumb
fingers were dancing alive upon the dead table. Syme watched the
twinkling movements of the talking hand, and read clearly the message—

“I will only talk like this. We must get used to it.”

He rapped out the answer with the impatience of relief—

“All right. Let’s get out to breakfast.”

They took their hats and sticks in silence; but as Syme took his
sword-stick, he held it hard.

They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and coarse
thick sandwiches at a coffee stall, and then made their way across the
river, which under the grey and growing light looked as desolate as
Acheron. They reached the bottom of the huge block of buildings which
they had seen from across the river, and began in silence to mount the
naked and numberless stone steps, only pausing now and then to make
short remarks on the rail of the banisters. At about every other flight
they passed a window; each window showed them a pale and tragic dawn
lifting itself laboriously over London. From each the innumerable roofs
of slate looked like the leaden surges of a grey, troubled sea after
rain. Syme was increasingly conscious that his new adventure had
somehow a quality of cold sanity worse than the wild adventures of the
past. Last night, for instance, the tall tenements had seemed to him
like a tower in a dream. As he now went up the weary and perpetual
steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series.
But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be
exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty
infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to
thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the
distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a
thing more hideous than unreason itself.

By the time they reached Dr. Bull’s landing, a last window showed them
a harsh, white dawn edged with banks of a kind of coarse red, more like
red clay than red cloud. And when they entered Dr. Bull’s bare garret
it was full of light.

Syme had been haunted by a half historic memory in connection with
these empty rooms and that austere daybreak. The moment he saw the
garret and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he remembered what the
memory was—the French Revolution. There should have been the black
outline of a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the
morning. Dr. Bull was in his white shirt and black breeches only; his
cropped, dark head might well have just come out of its wig; he might
have been Marat or a more slipshod Robespierre.

Yet when he was seen properly, the French fancy fell away. The Jacobins
were idealists; there was about this man a murderous materialism. His
position gave him a somewhat new appearance. The strong, white light of
morning coming from one side creating sharp shadows, made him seem both
more pale and more angular than he had looked at the breakfast on the
balcony. Thus the two black glasses that encased his eyes might really
have been black cavities in his skull, making him look like a
death’s-head. And, indeed, if ever Death himself sat writing at a
wooden table, it might have been he.

He looked up and smiled brightly enough as the men came in, and rose
with the resilient rapidity of which the Professor had spoken. He set
chairs for both of them, and going to a peg behind the door, proceeded
to put on a coat and waistcoat of rough, dark tweed; he buttoned it up
neatly, and came back to sit down at his table.

The quiet good humour of his manner left his two opponents helpless. It
was with some momentary difficulty that the Professor broke silence and
began, “I’m sorry to disturb you so early, comrade,” said he, with a
careful resumption of the slow de Worms manner. “You have no doubt made
all the arrangements for the Paris affair?” Then he added with infinite
slowness, “We have information which renders intolerable anything in
the nature of a moment’s delay.”

Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without speaking.
The Professor resumed, a pause before each weary word—

“Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I advise you to alter
those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow your agent with
all the support you can get for him. Comrade Syme and I have had an
experience which it would take more time to recount than we can afford,
if we are to act on it. I will, however, relate the occurrence in
detail, even at the risk of losing time, if you really feel that it is
essential to the understanding of the problem we have to discuss.”

He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably long and
lingering, in the hope of maddening the practical little Doctor into an
explosion of impatience which might show his hand. But the little
Doctor continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill
work. Syme began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor’s smile
and silence were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible
silence which he had confronted in the Professor half an hour before.
About the Professor’s makeup and all his antics there was always
something merely grotesque, like a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild
woes of yesterday as one remembers being afraid of Bogy in childhood.
But here was daylight; here was a healthy, square-shouldered man in
tweeds, not odd save for the accident of his ugly spectacles, not
glaring or grinning at all, but smiling steadily and not saying a word.
The whole had a sense of unbearable reality. Under the increasing
sunlight the colours of the Doctor’s complexion, the pattern of his
tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too
important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the
pose of his head polite; the only uncanny thing was his silence.

“As I say,” resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through heavy
sand, “the incident that has occurred to us and has led us to ask for
information about the Marquis, is one which you may think it better to
have narrated; but as it came in the way of Comrade Syme rather than
me—”

His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an anthem; but
Syme, who was watching, saw his long fingers rattle quickly on the edge
of the crazy table. He read the message, “You must go on. This devil
has sucked me dry!”

Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of improvisation which
always came to him when he was alarmed.

“Yes, the thing really happened to me,” he said hastily. “I had the
good fortune to fall into conversation with a detective who took me,
thanks to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing to clinch my
reputation for respectability, I took him and made him very drunk at
the Savoy. Under this influence he became friendly, and told me in so
many words that within a day or two they hope to arrest the Marquis in
France.

“So unless you or I can get on his track—”

The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and his
protected eyes were still impenetrable. The Professor signalled to Syme
that he would resume his explanation, and he began again with the same
elaborate calm.

“Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came here
together to see what use you would be inclined to make of it. It seems
to me unquestionably urgent that—”

All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as steadily as
the Doctor stared at the Professor, but quite without the smile. The
nerves of both comrades-in-arms were near snapping under that strain of
motionless amiability, when Syme suddenly leant forward and idly tapped
the edge of the table. His message to his ally ran, “I have an
intuition.”

The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue, signalled back,
“Then sit on it.”

Syme telegraphed, “It is quite extraordinary.”

The other answered, “Extraordinary rot!”

Syme said, “I am a poet.”

The other retorted, “You are a dead man.”

Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were
burning feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to
a sort of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he
signalled to his friend, “You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition
is. It has that sudden quality we sometimes feel in the coming of
spring.”

He then studied the answer on his friend’s fingers. The answer was, “Go
to hell!”

The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue addressed to the
Doctor.

“Perhaps I should rather say,” said Syme on his fingers, “that it
resembles that sudden smell of the sea which may be found in the heart
of lush woods.”

His companion disdained to reply.

“Or yet again,” tapped Syme, “it is positive, as is the passionate red
hair of a beautiful woman.”

The Professor was continuing his speech, but in the middle of it Syme
decided to act. He leant across the table, and said in a voice that
could not be neglected—

“Dr. Bull!”

The Doctor’s sleek and smiling head did not move, but they could have
sworn that under his dark glasses his eyes darted towards Syme.

“Dr. Bull,” said Syme, in a voice peculiarly precise and courteous,
“would you do me a small favour? Would you be so kind as to take off
your spectacles?”

The Professor swung round on his seat, and stared at Syme with a sort
of frozen fury of astonishment. Syme, like a man who has thrown his
life and fortune on the table, leaned forward with a fiery face. The
Doctor did not move.

For a few seconds there was a silence in which one could hear a pin
drop, split once by the single hoot of a distant steamer on the Thames.
Then Dr. Bull rose slowly, still smiling, and took off his spectacles.

Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a chemical
lecturer from a successful explosion. His eyes were like stars, and for
an instant he could only point without speaking.

The Professor had also started to his feet, forgetful of his supposed
paralysis. He leant on the back of the chair and stared doubtfully at
Dr. Bull, as if the Doctor had been turned into a toad before his eyes.
And indeed it was almost as great a transformation scene.

The two detectives saw sitting in the chair before them a very
boyish-looking young man, with very frank and happy hazel eyes, an open
expression, cockney clothes like those of a city clerk, and an
unquestionable breath about him of being very good and rather
commonplace. The smile was still there, but it might have been the
first smile of a baby.

“I knew I was a poet,” cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. “I knew my
intuition was as infallible as the Pope. It was the spectacles that did
it! It was all the spectacles. Given those beastly black eyes, and all
the rest of him his health and his jolly looks, made him a live devil
among dead ones.”

“It certainly does make a queer difference,” said the Professor
shakily. “But as regards the project of Dr. Bull—”

“Project be damned!” roared Syme, beside himself. “Look at him! Look at
his face, look at his collar, look at his blessed boots! You don’t
suppose, do you, that that thing’s an anarchist?”

“Syme!” cried the other in an apprehensive agony.

“Why, by God,” said Syme, “I’ll take the risk of that myself! Dr. Bull,
I am a police officer. There’s my card,” and he flung down the blue
card upon the table.

The Professor still feared that all was lost; but he was loyal. He
pulled out his own official card and put it beside his friend’s. Then
the third man burst out laughing, and for the first time that morning
they heard his voice.

“I’m awfully glad you chaps have come so early,” he said, with a sort
of schoolboy flippancy, “for we can all start for France together. Yes,
I’m in the force right enough,” and he flicked a blue card towards them
lightly as a matter of form.

Clapping a brisk bowler on his head and resuming his goblin glasses,
the Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the others
instinctively followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait, and as he
passed under the doorway he suddenly struck his stick on the stone
passage so that it rang.

“But Lord God Almighty,” he cried out, “if this is all right, there
were more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the
damned Council!”

“We might have fought easily,” said Bull; “we were four against three.”

The Professor was descending the stairs, but his voice came up from
below.

“No,” said the voice, “we were not four against three—we were not so
lucky. We were four against One.”

The others went down the stairs in silence.

The young man called Bull, with an innocent courtesy characteristic of
him, insisted on going last until they reached the street; but there
his own robust rapidity asserted itself unconsciously, and he walked
quickly on ahead towards a railway inquiry office, talking to the
others over his shoulder.

“It is jolly to get some pals,” he said. “I’ve been half dead with the
jumps, being quite alone. I nearly flung my arms round Gogol and
embraced him, which would have been imprudent. I hope you won’t despise
me for having been in a blue funk.”

“All the blue devils in blue hell,” said Syme, “contributed to my blue
funk! But the worst devil was you and your infernal goggles.”

The young man laughed delightedly.

“Wasn’t it a rag?” he said. “Such a simple idea—not my own. I haven’t
got the brains. You see, I wanted to go into the detective service,
especially the anti-dynamite business. But for that purpose they wanted
someone to dress up as a dynamiter; and they all swore by blazes that I
could never look like a dynamiter. They said my very walk was
respectable, and that seen from behind I looked like the British
Constitution. They said I looked too healthy and too optimistic, and
too reliable and benevolent; they called me all sorts of names at
Scotland Yard. They said that if I had been a criminal, I might have
made my fortune by looking so like an honest man; but as I had the
misfortune to be an honest man, there was not even the remotest chance
of my assisting them by ever looking like a criminal. But at last I was
brought before some old josser who was high up in the force, and who
seemed to have no end of a head on his shoulders. And there the others
all talked hopelessly. One asked whether a bushy beard would hide my
nice smile; another said that if they blacked my face I might look like
a negro anarchist; but this old chap chipped in with a most
extraordinary remark. ‘A pair of smoked spectacles will do it,’ he said
positively. ‘Look at him now; he looks like an angelic office boy. Put
him on a pair of smoked spectacles, and children will scream at the
sight of him.’ And so it was, by George! When once my eyes were
covered, all the rest, smile and big shoulders and short hair, made me
look a perfect little devil. As I say, it was simple enough when it was
done, like miracles; but that wasn’t the really miraculous part of it.
There was one really staggering thing about the business, and my head
still turns at it.”

“What was that?” asked Syme.

“I’ll tell you,” answered the man in spectacles. “This big pot in the
police who sized me up so that he knew how the goggles would go with my
hair and socks—by God, he never saw me at all!”

Syme’s eyes suddenly flashed on him.

“How was that?” he asked. “I thought you talked to him.”

“So I did,” said Bull brightly; “but we talked in a pitch-dark room
like a coalcellar. There, you would never have guessed that.”

“I could not have conceived it,” said Syme gravely.

“It is indeed a new idea,” said the Professor.

Their new ally was in practical matters a whirlwind. At the inquiry
office he asked with businesslike brevity about the trains for Dover.
Having got his information, he bundled the company into a cab, and put
them and himself inside a railway carriage before they had properly
realised the breathless process. They were already on the Calais boat
before conversation flowed freely.

“I had already arranged,” he explained, “to go to France for my lunch;
but I am delighted to have someone to lunch with me. You see, I had to
send that beast, the Marquis, over with his bomb, because the President
had his eye on me, though God knows how. I’ll tell you the story some
day. It was perfectly choking. Whenever I tried to slip out of it I saw
the President somewhere, smiling out of the bow-window of a club, or
taking off his hat to me from the top of an omnibus. I tell you, you
can say what you like, that fellow sold himself to the devil; he can be
in six places at once.”

“So you sent the Marquis off, I understand,” asked the Professor. “Was
it long ago? Shall we be in time to catch him?”

“Yes,” answered the new guide, “I’ve timed it all. He’ll still be at
Calais when we arrive.”

“But when we do catch him at Calais,” said the Professor, “what are we
going to do?”

At this question the countenance of Dr. Bull fell for the first time.
He reflected a little, and then said—

“Theoretically, I suppose, we ought to call the police.”

“Not I,” said Syme. “Theoretically I ought to drown myself first. I
promised a poor fellow, who was a real modern pessimist, on my word of
honour not to tell the police. I’m no hand at casuistry, but I can’t
break my word to a modern pessimist. It’s like breaking one’s word to a
child.”

“I’m in the same boat,” said the Professor. “I tried to tell the police
and I couldn’t, because of some silly oath I took. You see, when I was
an actor I was a sort of all-round beast. Perjury or treason is the
only crime I haven’t committed. If I did that I shouldn’t know the
difference between right and wrong.”

“I’ve been through all that,” said Dr. Bull, “and I’ve made up my mind.
I gave my promise to the Secretary—you know him, man who smiles upside
down. My friends, that man is the most utterly unhappy man that was
ever human. It may be his digestion, or his conscience, or his nerves,
or his philosophy of the universe, but he’s damned, he’s in hell! Well,
I can’t turn on a man like that, and hunt him down. It’s like whipping
a leper. I may be mad, but that’s how I feel; and there’s jolly well
the end of it.”

“I don’t think you’re mad,” said Syme. “I knew you would decide like
that when first you—”

“Eh?” said Dr. Bull.

“When first you took off your spectacles.”

Dr. Bull smiled a little, and strolled across the deck to look at the
sunlit sea. Then he strolled back again, kicking his heels carelessly,
and a companionable silence fell between the three men.

“Well,” said Syme, “it seems that we have all the same kind of morality
or immorality, so we had better face the fact that comes of it.”

“Yes,” assented the Professor, “you’re quite right; and we must hurry
up, for I can see the Grey Nose standing out from France.”

“The fact that comes of it,” said Syme seriously, “is this, that we
three are alone on this planet. Gogol has gone, God knows where;
perhaps the President has smashed him like a fly. On the Council we are
three men against three, like the Romans who held the bridge. But we
are worse off than that, first because they can appeal to their
organization and we cannot appeal to ours, and second because—”

“Because one of those other three men,” said the Professor, “is not a
man.”

Syme nodded and was silent for a second or two, then he said—

“My idea is this. We must do something to keep the Marquis in Calais
till tomorrow midday. I have turned over twenty schemes in my head. We
cannot denounce him as a dynamiter; that is agreed. We cannot get him
detained on some trivial charge, for we should have to appear; he knows
us, and he would smell a rat. We cannot pretend to keep him on
anarchist business; he might swallow much in that way, but not the
notion of stopping in Calais while the Czar went safely through Paris.
We might try to kidnap him, and lock him up ourselves; but he is a
well-known man here. He has a whole bodyguard of friends; he is very
strong and brave, and the event is doubtful. The only thing I can see
to do is actually to take advantage of the very things that are in the
Marquis’s favour. I am going to profit by the fact that he is a highly
respected nobleman. I am going to profit by the fact that he has many
friends and moves in the best society.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” asked the Professor.

“The Symes are first mentioned in the fourteenth century,” said Syme;
“but there is a tradition that one of them rode behind Bruce at
Bannockburn. Since 1350 the tree is quite clear.”

“He’s gone off his head,” said the little Doctor, staring.

“Our bearings,” continued Syme calmly, “are ‘argent a chevron gules
charged with three cross crosslets of the field.’ The motto varies.”

The Professor seized Syme roughly by the waistcoat.

“We are just inshore,” he said. “Are you seasick or joking in the wrong
place?”

“My remarks are almost painfully practical,” answered Syme, in an
unhurried manner. “The house of St. Eustache also is very ancient. The
Marquis cannot deny that he is a gentleman. He cannot deny that I am a
gentleman. And in order to put the matter of my social position quite
beyond a doubt, I propose at the earliest opportunity to knock his hat
off. But here we are in the harbour.”

They went on shore under the strong sun in a sort of daze. Syme, who
had now taken the lead as Bull had taken it in London, led them along a
kind of marine parade until he came to some cafés, embowered in a bulk
of greenery and overlooking the sea. As he went before them his step
was slightly swaggering, and he swung his stick like a sword. He was
making apparently for the extreme end of the line of cafés, but he
stopped abruptly. With a sharp gesture he motioned them to silence, but
he pointed with one gloved finger to a café table under a bank of
flowering foliage at which sat the Marquis de St. Eustache, his teeth
shining in his thick, black beard, and his bold, brown face shadowed by
a light yellow straw hat and outlined against the violet sea.




CHAPTER X.
THE DUEL


Syme sat down at a café table with his companions, his blue eyes
sparkling like the bright sea below, and ordered a bottle of Saumur
with a pleased impatience. He was for some reason in a condition of
curious hilarity. His spirits were already unnaturally high; they rose
as the Saumur sank, and in half an hour his talk was a torrent of
nonsense. He professed to be making out a plan of the conversation
which was going to ensue between himself and the deadly Marquis. He
jotted it down wildly with a pencil. It was arranged like a printed
catechism, with questions and answers, and was delivered with an
extraordinary rapidity of utterance.

“I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take off my own.
I shall say, ‘The Marquis de Saint Eustache, I believe.’ He will say,
‘The celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume.’ He will say in the most exquisite
French, ‘How are you?’ I shall reply in the most exquisite Cockney,
‘Oh, just the Syme—’”

“Oh, shut it,” said the man in spectacles. “Pull yourself together, and
chuck away that bit of paper. What are you really going to do?”

“But it was a lovely catechism,” said Syme pathetically. “Do let me
read it you. It has only forty-three questions and answers, and some of
the Marquis’s answers are wonderfully witty. I like to be just to my
enemy.”

“But what’s the good of it all?” asked Dr. Bull in exasperation.

“It leads up to my challenge, don’t you see,” said Syme, beaming. “When
the Marquis has given the thirty-ninth reply, which runs—”

“Has it by any chance occurred to you,” asked the Professor, with a
ponderous simplicity, “that the Marquis may not say all the forty-three
things you have put down for him? In that case, I understand, your own
epigrams may appear somewhat more forced.”

Syme struck the table with a radiant face.

“Why, how true that is,” he said, “and I never thought of it. Sir, you
have an intellect beyond the common. You will make a name.”

“Oh, you’re as drunk as an owl!” said the Doctor.

“It only remains,” continued Syme quite unperturbed, “to adopt some
other method of breaking the ice (if I may so express it) between
myself and the man I wish to kill. And since the course of a dialogue
cannot be predicted by one of its parties alone (as you have pointed
out with such recondite acumen), the only thing to be done, I suppose,
is for the one party, as far as possible, to do all the dialogue by
himself. And so I will, by George!” And he stood up suddenly, his
yellow hair blowing in the slight sea breeze.

A band was playing in a _café chantant_ hidden somewhere among the
trees, and a woman had just stopped singing. On Syme’s heated head the
bray of the brass band seemed like the jar and jingle of that
barrel-organ in Leicester Square, to the tune of which he had once
stood up to die. He looked across to the little table where the Marquis
sat. The man had two companions now, solemn Frenchmen in frock-coats
and silk hats, one of them with the red rosette of the Legion of
Honour, evidently people of a solid social position. Besides these
black, cylindrical costumes, the Marquis, in his loose straw hat and
light spring clothes, looked Bohemian and even barbaric; but he looked
the Marquis. Indeed, one might say that he looked the king, with his
animal elegance, his scornful eyes, and his proud head lifted against
the purple sea. But he was no Christian king, at any rate; he was,
rather, some swarthy despot, half Greek, half Asiatic, who in the days
when slavery seemed natural looked down on the Mediterranean, on his
galley and his groaning slaves. Just so, Syme thought, would the
brown-gold face of such a tyrant have shown against the dark green
olives and the burning blue.

“Are you going to address the meeting?” asked the Professor peevishly,
seeing that Syme still stood up without moving.

Syme drained his last glass of sparkling wine.

“I am,” he said, pointing across to the Marquis and his companions,
“that meeting. That meeting displeases me. I am going to pull that
meeting’s great ugly, mahogany-coloured nose.”

He stepped across swiftly, if not quite steadily. The Marquis, seeing
him, arched his black Assyrian eyebrows in surprise, but smiled
politely.

“You are Mr. Syme, I think,” he said.

Syme bowed.

“And you are the Marquis de Saint Eustache,” he said gracefully.
“Permit me to pull your nose.”

He leant over to do so, but the Marquis started backwards, upsetting
his chair, and the two men in top hats held Syme back by the shoulders.

“This man has insulted me!” said Syme, with gestures of explanation.

“Insulted you?” cried the gentleman with the red rosette, “when?”

“Oh, just now,” said Syme recklessly. “He insulted my mother.”

“Insulted your mother!” exclaimed the gentleman incredulously.

“Well, anyhow,” said Syme, conceding a point, “my aunt.”

“But how can the Marquis have insulted your aunt just now?” said the
second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. “He has been sitting here
all the time.”

“Ah, it was what he said!” said Syme darkly.

“I said nothing at all,” said the Marquis, “except something about the
band. I only said that I liked Wagner played well.”

“It was an allusion to my family,” said Syme firmly. “My aunt played
Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being insulted
about it.”

“This seems most extraordinary,” said the gentleman who was _décoré_,
looking doubtfully at the Marquis.

“Oh, I assure you,” said Syme earnestly, “the whole of your
conversation was simply packed with sinister allusions to my aunt’s
weaknesses.”

“This is nonsense!” said the second gentleman. “I for one have said
nothing for half an hour except that I liked the singing of that girl
with black hair.”

“Well, there you are again!” said Syme indignantly. “My aunt’s was
red.”

“It seems to me,” said the other, “that you are simply seeking a
pretext to insult the Marquis.”

“By George!” said Syme, facing round and looking at him, “what a clever
chap you are!”

The Marquis started up with eyes flaming like a tiger’s.

“Seeking a quarrel with me!” he cried. “Seeking a fight with me! By
God! there was never a man who had to seek long. These gentlemen will
perhaps act for me. There are still four hours of daylight. Let us
fight this evening.”

Syme bowed with a quite beautiful graciousness.

“Marquis,” he said, “your action is worthy of your fame and blood.
Permit me to consult for a moment with the gentlemen in whose hands I
shall place myself.”

In three long strides he rejoined his companions, and they, who had
seen his champagne-inspired attack and listened to his idiotic
explanations, were quite startled at the look of him. For now that he
came back to them he was quite sober, a little pale, and he spoke in a
low voice of passionate practicality.

“I have done it,” he said hoarsely. “I have fixed a fight on the beast.
But look here, and listen carefully. There is no time for talk. You are
my seconds, and everything must come from you. Now you must insist, and
insist absolutely, on the duel coming off after seven tomorrow, so as
to give me the chance of preventing him from catching the 7.45 for
Paris. If he misses that he misses his crime. He can’t refuse to meet
you on such a small point of time and place. But this is what he will
do. He will choose a field somewhere near a wayside station, where he
can pick up the train. He is a very good swordsman, and he will trust
to killing me in time to catch it. But I can fence well too, and I
think I can keep him in play, at any rate, until the train is lost.
Then perhaps he may kill me to console his feelings. You understand?
Very well then, let me introduce you to some charming friends of mine,”
and leading them quickly across the parade, he presented them to the
Marquis’s seconds by two very aristocratic names of which they had not
previously heard.

Syme was subject to spasms of singular common sense, not otherwise a
part of his character. They were (as he said of his impulse about the
spectacles) poetic intuitions, and they sometimes rose to the
exaltation of prophecy.

He had correctly calculated in this case the policy of his opponent.
When the Marquis was informed by his seconds that Syme could only fight
in the morning, he must fully have realised that an obstacle had
suddenly arisen between him and his bomb-throwing business in the
capital. Naturally he could not explain this objection to his friends,
so he chose the course which Syme had predicted. He induced his seconds
to settle on a small meadow not far from the railway, and he trusted to
the fatality of the first engagement.

When he came down very coolly to the field of honour, no one could have
guessed that he had any anxiety about a journey; his hands were in his
pockets, his straw hat on the back of his head, his handsome face
brazen in the sun. But it might have struck a stranger as odd that
there appeared in his train, not only his seconds carrying the
sword-case, but two of his servants carrying a portmanteau and a
luncheon basket.

Early as was the hour, the sun soaked everything in warmth, and Syme
was vaguely surprised to see so many spring flowers burning gold and
silver in the tall grass in which the whole company stood almost
knee-deep.

With the exception of the Marquis, all the men were in sombre and
solemn morning-dress, with hats like black chimney-pots; the little
Doctor especially, with the addition of his black spectacles, looked
like an undertaker in a farce. Syme could not help feeling a comic
contrast between this funereal church parade of apparel and the rich
and glistening meadow, growing wild flowers everywhere. But, indeed,
this comic contrast between the yellow blossoms and the black hats was
but a symbol of the tragic contrast between the yellow blossoms and the
black business. On his right was a little wood; far away to his left
lay the long curve of the railway line, which he was, so to speak,
guarding from the Marquis, whose goal and escape it was. In front of
him, behind the black group of his opponents, he could see, like a
tinted cloud, a small almond bush in flower against the faint line of
the sea.

The member of the Legion of Honour, whose name it seemed was Colonel
Ducroix, approached the Professor and Dr. Bull with great politeness,
and suggested that the play should terminate with the first
considerable hurt.

Dr. Bull, however, having been carefully coached by Syme upon this
point of policy, insisted, with great dignity and in very bad French,
that it should continue until one of the combatants was disabled. Syme
had made up his mind that he could avoid disabling the Marquis and
prevent the Marquis from disabling him for at least twenty minutes. In
twenty minutes the Paris train would have gone by.

“To a man of the well-known skill and valour of Monsieur de St.
Eustache,” said the Professor solemnly, “it must be a matter of
indifference which method is adopted, and our principal has strong
reasons for demanding the longer encounter, reasons the delicacy of
which prevent me from being explicit, but for the just and honourable
nature of which I can—”

“_Peste!_” broke from the Marquis behind, whose face had suddenly
darkened, “let us stop talking and begin,” and he slashed off the head
of a tall flower with his stick.

Syme understood his rude impatience and instinctively looked over his
shoulder to see whether the train was coming in sight. But there was no
smoke on the horizon.

Colonel Ducroix knelt down and unlocked the case, taking out a pair of
twin swords, which took the sunlight and turned to two streaks of white
fire. He offered one to the Marquis, who snatched it without ceremony,
and another to Syme, who took it, bent it, and poised it with as much
delay as was consistent with dignity.

Then the Colonel took out another pair of blades, and taking one
himself and giving another to Dr. Bull, proceeded to place the men.

Both combatants had thrown off their coats and waistcoats, and stood
sword in hand. The seconds stood on each side of the line of fight with
drawn swords also, but still sombre in their dark frock-coats and hats.
The principals saluted. The Colonel said quietly, “Engage!” and the two
blades touched and tingled.

When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme’s arm, all the fantastic
fears that have been the subject of this story fell from him like
dreams from a man waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in
order as mere delusions of the nerves—how the fear of the Professor had
been the fear of the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear
of the Doctor had been the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The
first was the old fear that any miracle might happen, the second the
more hopeless modern fear that no miracle can ever happen. But he saw
that these fears were fancies, for he found himself in the presence of
the great fact of the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless
common sense. He felt like a man who had dreamed all night of falling
over precipices, and had woke up on the morning when he was to be
hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the channel of
his foe’s foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had felt the two
tongues of steel touch, vibrating like two living things, he knew that
his enemy was a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had
come.

He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the
grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He
could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost
fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and
breaking into blossom in the meadow—flowers blood red and burning gold
and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his
eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the
Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line.
He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready
to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the
world.

But while earth and sky and everything had the living beauty of a thing
lost, the other half of his head was as clear as glass, and he was
parrying his enemy’s point with a kind of clockwork skill of which he
had hardly supposed himself capable. Once his enemy’s point ran along
his wrist, leaving a slight streak of blood, but it either 

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