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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 to-night 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.
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 Hartle pool, 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 the 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.
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
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 to-night 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.
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 Hartle pool, 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 the 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.
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