Страница:
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 goncealment," 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.
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 vent 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--
"Pagens ont tort et Chretiens 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.
"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.
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.
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 goncealment," 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.
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 vent 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--
"Pagens ont tort et Chretiens 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.
"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.
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.