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He was just selecting a tentative inquiry, when the old Professor opposite
suddenly and simply cut him short. Before Syme could ask the first
diplomatic question, the old anarchist had asked suddenly, without any sort
of preparation--
"Are you a policeman?"
Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only manage
a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.
"A policeman?" he said, laughing vaguely. "Whatever made you think of a
policeman in connection with me?"
"The process was simple enough," answered the Professor patiently. "I
thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now."
"Did I take a policeman's hat by mistake out of the restaurant?" asked
Syme, smiling wildly. "Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me
somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a policeman?
Do, do let me be a postman."
The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but
Syme ran on with a feverish irony.
"But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy.
Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir, the ape
fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never detect the
shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps a maiden lady
on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have been. I don't mind
being the policeman that might have been. I don't mind being anything in
German thought."
"Are you in the police service?" said the old man, ignoring all Syme's
improvised and desperate raillery. "Are you a detective?"
Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.
"Your suggestion is ridiculous," he began. "Why on earth--"
The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
nearly breaking it.
"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he shrieked
in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a police detective?"
"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.
"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! You swear it! If you
swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil dances at
your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your grave? Will there
really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all,
you are not in any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?"
He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
loose hand like a flap to his ear.
"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.
Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
collapse.
"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."
Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a
crash.
"Because you are what?" he said thickly. "You are what?"
"I am a policeman," said the Professor with his first broad smile. and
beaming through his spectacles. "But as you think policeman only a relative
term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the British police
force; but as you tell me you are not in the British police force, I can
only say that I met you in a dynamiters' club. I suppose I ought to arrest
you." And with these words he laid on the table before Syme an exact
facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in his own waistcoat pocket, the
symbol of his power from the police.
Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were
under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the last
twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now the
capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from whom he had
been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own house, who on the
other side of the table lay back and laughed at him. He did not for the
moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the happy and silly fact
that this shadow, which had pursued him with an intolerable oppression of
peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying to catch him up. He knew
simultaneously that he was a fool and a free man. For with any recovery from
morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain
point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a
perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme's
egotism held hard to the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly
adopted the third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat
pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until his
spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted with a
barbaric laughter.
Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there was
something Homeric in Syme's mirth which made many half-drunken men look
round.
"What yer laughing at, guv'nor?" asked one wondering labourer from the
docks.
"At myself," answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his
ecstatic reaction.
"Pull yourself together," said the Professor, "or you'll get
hysterical. Have some more beer. I'll join you."
"You haven't drunk your milk," said Syme.
"My milk! " said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
contempt, "my milk! Do you think I'd look at the beastly stuff when I'm out
of sight of the bloody anarchists? We're all Christians in this room, though
perhaps," he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd, "not strict ones.
Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I'll finish it right enough!" and he
knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash of glass and a splash of
silver fluid.
Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.
"I understand now," he cried; "of course, you're not an old man at
all."
"I can't take my face off here," replied Professor de Worms. "It's
rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I'm an old man, that's not for me
to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday."
"Yes, but I mean," said Syme impatiently, "there's nothing the matter
with you."
"Yes," answered the other dispassionately. "I am subject to colds."
Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He
laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young actor
dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would have laughed
as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.
The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.
"Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"
"I? No, I didn't know it," answered Syme in some surprise. "But didn't
you?"
"I knew no more than the dead," replied the man who called himself de
Worms. "I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in my
boots."
"And I thought he was talking about me," said Syme, with his rather
reckless laughter. "I had my hand on my revolver all the time."
"So had I," said the Professor grimly; "so had Gogol evidently."
Syme struck the table with an exclamation.
"Why, there were three of us there!" he cried. "Three out of seven is a
fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!"
The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.
"We were three," he said. "If we had been three hundred we could still
have done nothing."
"Not if we were three hundred against four?" asked Syme, jeering rather
boisterously.
"No," said the Professor with sobriety, "not if we were three hundred
against Sunday."
And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died
in his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the unforgettable
President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured photograph, and he
remarked this difference between Sunday and all his satellites, that their
faces, however fierce or sinister, became gradually blurred by memory like
other human faces, whereas Sunday's seemed almost to grow more actual during
absence, as if a man's painted portrait should slowly come alive.
They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme's speech
came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.
"Professor," he cried, "it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this man?"
The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.
"Yes, I am," he said mildly. "So are you."
Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like an
insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.
"Yes," he said in a voice indescribable, "you are right. I am afraid of
him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear
until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and
the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him down."
"How?" asked the staring Professor. "Why?"
"Because I am afraid of him," said Syme; "and no man should leave in
the universe anything of which he is afraid."
De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made an effort
to speak, but Syme went on in a low voice, but with an undercurrent of
inhuman exaltation--
"Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the thing
that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman who gave
the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great
robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can give you advice for a
lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you,
strike upwards, if you strike at the stars."
The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his pose.
"Sunday is a fixed star," he said.
"You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat.
The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet.
"Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment,
"exactly where you are going?"
"Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being
thrown in Paris."
"Have you any conception how?" inquired the other.
"No," said Syme with equal decision.
"You remember, of course," resumed the soi-disant de Worms, pulling his
beard and looking out of the window, "that when we broke up rather hurriedly
the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left in the private hands of
the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by this time probably crossing the
Channel. But where he will go and what he will do it is doubtful whether
even the President knows; certainly we don't know. The only man who does
know is Dr. Bull.
"Confound it!" cried Syme. "And we don't know where he is."
"Yes," said the other in his curious, absent-minded way, "I know where
he is myself."
"Will you tell me?" asked Syme with eager eyes.
"I will take you there," said the Professor, and took down his own hat
from a peg.
Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.
"What do you mean?" he asked sharply. "Will you join me? Will you take
the risk?"
"Young man," said the Professor pleasantly, "I am amused to observe
that you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word, and that
shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical rhetoric. You
think that it is possible to pull down the President. I know that it is
impossible, and I am going to try it," and opening the tavern door, which
let in a blast of bitter air, they went out together into the dark streets
by the docks.
Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a
clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small
streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming lamps
irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and fallen world.
Syme felt almost dazed as he stepped through this growing confusion of
lights and shadows; but his companion walked on with a certain briskness,
towards where, at the end of the street, an inch or two of the lamplit river
looked like a bar of flame.
"Where are you going?" Syme inquired.
"Just now," answered the Professor, "I am going just round the corner
to see whether Dr. Bull has gone to bed. He is hygienic, and retires early."
"Dr. Bull!" exclaimed Syme. "Does he live round the corner?"
"No," answered his friend. "As a matter of fact he lives some way off,
on the other side of the river, but we can tell from here whether he has
gone to bed."
Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river, flecked with
flame, he pointed with his stick to the other bank. On the Surrey side at
this point there ran out into the Thames, seeming almost to overhang it, a
bulk and cluster of those tall tenements, dotted with lighted windows, and
rising like factory chimneys to an almost insane height. Their special poise
and position made one block of buildings especially look like a Tower of
Babel with a hundred eyes. Syme had never seen any of the sky-scraping
buildings in America, so he could only think of the buildings in a dream.
Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably lighted turret
abruptly went out, as if this black Argus had winked at him with one of his
innumerable eyes.
Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his stick
against his boot.
"We are too late," he said, "the hygienic Doctor has gone to bed."
"What do you mean?" asked Syme. "Does he live over there, then?"
"Yes," said de Worms, "behind that particular window which you can't
see. Come along and get some dinner. We must call on him to-morrow morning."
Without further parley, he led the way through several by-ways until
they came out into the flare and clamour of the East India Dock Road. The
Professor, who seemed to know his way about the neighbourhood, proceeded to
a place where the line of lighted shops fell back into a sort of abrupt
twilight and quiet, in which an old white inn, all out of repair, stood back
some twenty feet from the road.
"You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
fossils," explained the Professor. "I once found a decent place in the West
End."
"I suppose," said Syme, smiling, "that this is the corresponding decent
place in the East End?"
"It is," said the Professor reverently, and went in.
In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The beans and
bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing
emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme's sense of a new
comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had been
isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and
having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice
two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why,
in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to
monogamy.
Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his
outrageous tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little
tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant monologue, as
a man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also, the man who had
impersonated Professor de Worms was not less communicative. His own story
was almost as silly as Syme's.
"That's a good get-up of yours," said Syme, draining a glass of Macon;
"a lot better than old Gogol's. Even at the start I thought he was a bit too
hairy."
"A difference of artistic theory," replied the Professor pensively.
"Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of an
anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed, to say
that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a portrait."
"I don't understand you," said Syme.
"I am a portrait," repeated the Professor. "I am a portrait of the
celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples."
"You mean you are made up like him," said Syme. "But doesn't he know
that you are taking his nose in vain?"
"He knows it right enough," replied his friend cheerfully.
"Then why doesn't he denounce you?"
"I have denounced him," answered the Professor.
"Do explain yourself," said Syme.
"With pleasure, if you don't mind hearing my story," replied the
eminent foreign philosopher. "I am by profession an actor, and my name is
Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian and
blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of the turf, sometimes the
riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the political refugee. In some den
of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great German Nihilist
philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much about him beyond his
appearance, which was very disgusting, and which I studied carefully. I
understood that he had proved that the destructive principle in the universe
was God; hence he insisted on the need for a furious and incessant energy,
rending all things in pieces. Energy, he said, was the All. He was lame,
shortsighted, and partially paralytic. When I met him I was in a frivolous
mood, and I disliked him so much that I resolved to imitate him. If I had
been a draughtsman I would have drawn a caricature. I was only an actor, I
could only act a caricature. I made myself up into what was meant for a wild
exaggeration of the old Professor's dirty old self. When I went into the
room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar of
laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation at the
insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance was received
with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first opened my lips) with a
murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect artist had fallen upon me. I
had been too subtle, I had been too true. They thought I really was the
great Nihilist Professor. I was a healthy-minded young man at the time, and
I confess that it was a blow. Before I could fully recover, however, two or
three of these admirers ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that
a public insult had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its
nature. It seemed that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a
preposterous parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for
me, and in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through.
Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted
eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
"I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me
looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which was
really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like my rival,
could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the
prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and working within this
definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he
tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple
dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I
replied with something which I could not even understand myself. 'I don't
fancy,' he said, 'that you could have worked out the principle that
evolution is only negation, since there inheres in it the introduction of
lacuna, which are an essential of differentiation.' I replied quite
scornfully, 'You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution
functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe.' It is unnecessary
for me to say that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe.
But the people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them
quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious
method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in
scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit. 'I see,' he sneered,
'you prevail like the false pig in Aesop.' 'And you fail,' I answered,
smiling, 'like the hedgehog in Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no
hedgehog in Montaigne? 'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your
beard.' I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather
witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, 'Like the Pantheist's boots,' at
random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The real
Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man tried very
patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I believe, received everywhere in
Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent earnestness and anger, you
see, make him all the more entertaining."
"Well," said Syme, "I can understand your putting on his dirty old
beard for a night's practical joke, but I don't understand your never taking
it off again."
"That is the rest of the story," said the impersonator. "When I myself
left the company, followed by reverent applause, I went limping down the
dark street, hoping that I should soon be far enough away to be able to walk
like a human being. To my astonishment, as I was turning the corner, I felt
a touch on the shoulder, and turning, found myself under the shadow of an
enormous policeman. He told me I was wanted. I struck a sort of paralytic
attitude, and cried in a high German accent, 'Yes, I am wanted--by the
oppressed of the world. You are arresting me on the charge of being the
great anarchist, Professor de Worms.' The policeman impassively consulted a
paper in his hand, 'No, sir,' he said civilly, 'at least, not exactly, sir.
I am arresting you on the charge of not being the celebrated anarchist,
Professor de Worms.' This charge, if it was criminal at all, was certainly
the lighter of the two, and I went along with the man, doubtful, but not
greatly dismayed. I was shown into a number of rooms, and eventually into
the presence of a police officer, who explained that a serious campaign had
been opened against the centres of anarchy, and that this, my successful
masquerade, might be of considerable value to the public safety. He offered
me a good salary and this little blue card. Though our conversation was
short, he struck me as a man of very massive common sense and humour; but I
cannot tell you much about him personally, because--"
Syme laid down his knife and fork.
"I know," he said, "because you talked to him in a dark room."
Professor de Worms nodded and drained his glass.
"BURGUNDY is a jolly thing," said the Professor sadly, as he set his
glass down.
"You don't look as if it were," said Syme; "you drink it as if it were
medicine."
"You must excuse my manner," said the Professor dismally, "my position
is rather a curious one. Inside I am really bursting with boyish merriment;
but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I can't leave off. So
that when I am among friends, and have no need at all to disguise myself, I
still can't help speaking slow and wrinkling my forehead-- just as if it
were my forehead. I can be quite happy, you understand, but only in a
paralytic sort of way. The most buoyant exclamations leap up in my heart,
but they come out of my mouth quite different. You should hear me say, 'Buck
up, old cock!' It would bring tears to your eyes."
"It does," said Syme; "but I cannot help thinking that apart from all
that you are really a bit worried."
The Professor started a little and looked at him steadily.
"You are a very clever fellow," he said, "it is a pleasure to work with
you. Yes, I have rather a heavy cloud in my head. There is a great problem
to face," and he sank his bald brow in his two hands.
Then he said in a low voice--
"Can you play the piano?"
"Yes," said Syme in simple wonder, "I'm supposed to have a good touch."
Then, as the other did not speak, he added--
"I trust the great cloud is lifted."
After a long silence, the Professor said out of the cavernous shadow of
his hands--
"It would have done just as well if you could work a typewriter."
"Thank you," said Syme, "you flatter me."
"Listen to me," said the other, "and remember whom we have to see
tomorrow. You and I are going to-morrow to attempt something which is very
much more dangerous than trying to steal the Crown Jewels out of the Tower.
We are trying to steal a secret from a very sharp, very strong, and very
wicked man. I believe there is no man, except the President, of course, who
is so seriously startling and formidable as that little grinning fellow in
goggles. He has not perhaps the white-hot enthusiasm unto death, the mad
martyrdom for anarchy, which marks the Secretary. But then that very
fanaticism in the Secretary has a human pathos, and is almost a redeeming
trait. But the little Doctor has a brutal sanity that is more shocking than
the Secretary's disease. Don't you notice his detestable virility and
vitality. He bounces like an india-rubber ball. Depend on it, Sunday was not
asleep (I wonder if he ever sleeps?) when he locked up all the plans of this
outrage in the round, black head of Dr. Bull."
"And you think," said Syme, "that this unique monster will be soothed
if I play the piano to him?"
"Don't be an ass," said his mentor. "I mentioned the piano because it
gives one quick and independent fingers. Syme, if we are to go through this
interview and come out sane or alive, we must have some code of signals
between us that this brute will not see. I have made a rough alphabetical
cypher corresponding to the five fingers-- like this, see," and he rippled
with his fingers on the wooden table--"B A D, bad, a word we may frequently
require."
Syme poured himself out another glass of wine, and began to study the
scheme. He was abnormally quick with his brains at puzzles, and with his
hands at conjuring, and it did not take him long to learn how he might
convey simple messages by what would seem to be idle taps upon a table or
knee. But wine and companionship had always the effect of inspiring him to a
farcical ingenuity, and the Professor soon found himself struggling with the
too vast energy of the new language, as it passed through the heated brain
of Syme.
"We must have several word-signs," said Syme seriously--"words that we
are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is ' coeval.'
What's yours?"
"Do stop playing the goat," said the Professor plaintively. "You don't
know how serious this is."
" ' Lush,' too, " said Syme, shaking his head sagaciously, "we must
have ' lush'--word applied to grass, don't you know?"
"Do you imagine," asked the Professor furiously, "that we are going to
talk to Dr. Bull about grass?"
"There are several ways in which the subject could be approached," said
Syme reflectively, "and the word introduced without appearing forced. We
might say, ' Dr. Bull, as a revolutionist, you remember that a tyrant once
advised us to eat grass; and indeed many of us, looking on the fresh lush
grass of summer "'
"Do you understand," said the other, "that this is a tragedy?"
"Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy. What the
deuce else can you do? I wish this language of yours had a wider scope. I
suppose we could not extend it from the fingers to the toes? That would
involve pulling off our boots and socks during the conversation, which
however unobtrusively performed--"
"Syme," said his friend with a stern simplicity, "go to bed!"
Syme, however, sat up in bed for a considerable time mastering the new
code. He was awakened next morning while the east was still sealed with
darkness, and found his grey-bearded ally standing like a ghost beside his
bed.
Syme sat up in bed blinking; then slowly collected his thoughts, threw
off the bed-clothes, and stood up. It seemed to him in some curious way that
all the safety and sociability of the night before fell with the bedclothes
off him, and he stood up in an air of cold danger. He still felt an entire
trust and loyalty towards his companion; but it was the trust between two
men going to the scaffold.
"Well," said Syme with a forced cheerfulness as he pulled on his
trousers, "I dreamt of that alphabet of yours. Did it take you long to make
it up?"
The Professor made no answer, but gazed in front of him with eyes the
colour of a wintry sea; so Syme repeated his question.
"I say, did it take you long to invent all this? I'm considered good at
these things, and it was a good hour's grind. Did you learn it all on the
spot?"
The Professor was silent; his eyes were wide open, and he wore a fixed
but very small smile.
"How long did it take you?"
The Professor did not move.
"Confound you, can't you answer?" called out Syme, in a sudden anger
that had something like fear underneath. Whether or no the Professor could
answer, he did not.
Syme stood staring back at the stiff face like parchment and the blank,
blue eyes. His first thought was that the Professor had gone mad, but his
second thought was more frightful. After all, what did he know about this
queer creature whom he had heedlessly accepted as a friend? What did he
know, except that the man had been at the anarchist breakfast and had told
him a ridiculous tale? How improbable it was that there should be another
friend there beside Gogol! Was this man's silence a sensational way of
declaring war? Was this adamantine stare after all only the awful sneer of
some threefold traitor, who had turned for the last time? He stood and
strained his ears in this heartless silence. He almost fancied he could hear
dynamiters come to capture him shifting softly in the corridor outside.
Then his eye strayed downwards, and he burst out laughing. Though the
Professor himself stood there as voiceless as a statue, his five dumb
fingers were dancing alive upon the dead table. Syme watched the twinkling
movements of the talking hand, and read clearly the message--
"I will only talk like this. We must get used to it."
He rapped out the answer with the impatience of relief--
"All right. Let's get out to breakfast."
They took their hats and sticks in silence; but as Syme took his
sword-stick, he held it hard.
They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and coarse
thick sandwiches at a coffee stall, and then made their way across the
river, which under the grey and growing light looked as desolate as Acheron.
They reached the bottom of the huge block of buildings which they had seen
from across the river, and began in silence to mount the naked and
numberless stone steps, only pausing now and then to make short remarks on
the rail of the banisters. At about every other flight they passed a window;
each window showed them a pale and tragic dawn lifting itself laboriously
over London. From each the innumerable roofs of slate looked like the leaden
surges of a grey, troubled sea after rain. Syme was increasingly conscious
that his new adventure had somehow a quality of cold sanity worse than the
wild adventures of the past. Last night, for instance, the tall tenements
had seemed to him like a tower in a dream. As he now went up the weary and
perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite
series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might
be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty infinity
of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was
like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed
stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than
unreason itself.
By the time they reached Dr. Bull's landing, a last window showed them
a harsh, white dawn edged with banks of a kind of coarse red, more like red
clay than red cloud. And when they entered Dr. Bull's bare garret it was
full of light.
Syme had been haunted by a half historic memory in connection with
these empty rooms and that austere daybreak. The moment he saw the garret
and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he remembered what the memory was--
the French Revolution. There should have been the black outline of a
guillotine against that heavy red and white of the morning. Dr. Bull was in
his white shirt and black breeches only; his cropped, dark head might well
have just come out of its wig; he might have been Marat or a more slipshod
Robespierre.
Yet when he was seen properly, the French fancy fell away. The Jacobins
were idealists; there was about this man a murderous materialism. His
Dosition gave him a somewhat new appearance. The strong, white light of
morning coming from one side creating sharp shadows, made him seem both more
pale and more angular than he had looked at the breakfast on the balcony.
Thus the two black glasses that encased his eyes might really have been
black cavities in his skull, making him look like a death's-head. And,
indeed, if ever Death himself sat writing at a wooden table, it might have
been he.
He looked up and smiled brightly enough as the men came in, and rose
with the resilient rapidity of which the Professor had spoken. He set chairs
for both of them, and going to a peg behind the door, proceeded to put on a
coat and waistcoat of rough, dark tweed; he buttoned it up neatly, and came
back to sit down at his table.
The quiet good humour of his manner left his two opponents helpless. It
was with some momentary difficulty that the Professor broke silence and
began, "I'm sorry to disturb you so early, comrade," said he, with a careful
resumption of the slow de Worms manner. "You have no doubt made all the
arrangements for the Paris affair?" Then he added with infinite slowness,
"We have information which renders intolerable anything in the nature of a
moment's delay."
Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without speaking.
The Professor resumed, a pause before each weary word--
"Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I advise you to alter
those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow your agent with all
the support you can get for him. Comrade Syme and I have had an experience
which it would take more time to recount than we can afford, if we are to
act on it. I will, however, relate the occurrence in detail, even at the
risk of losing time, if you really feel that it is essential to the
understanding of the problem we have to discuss."
He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably long and
lingering, in the hope of maddening the practical little Doctor into an
explosion of impatience which might show his hand. But the little Doctor
continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill work. Syme
began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor's smile and silence
were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible silence which he had
confronted in the Professor half an hour before. About the Professor's
makeup and all his antics there was always something merely grotesque, like
a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild woes of yesterday as one remembers
being afraid of Bogy in childhood. But here was daylight; here was a
healthy, square-shouldered man in tweeds, not odd save for the accident of
his ugly spectacles, not glaring or grinning at all, but smiling steadily
and not saying a word. The whole had a sense of unbearable reality. Under
the increasing sunlight the colours of the Doctor's complexion, the pattern
of his tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too
important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the pose of
his head polite; the only uncanny thing was his silence.
"As I say," resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through heavy
sand, "the incident that has occurred to us and has led us to ask for
information about the Marquis, is one which you may think it better to have
narrated; but as it came in the way of Comrade Syme rather than me--"
His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an anthem; but
Syme, who was watching, saw his long fingers rattle quickly on the edge of
the crazy table. He read the message, "You must go on. This devil has sucked
me dry!"
Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of improvisation which
always came to him when he was alarmed.
"Yes, the thing really happened to me," he said hastily. "I had the
good fortune to fall into conversation with a detective who took me, thanks
to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing to clinch my reputation for
respectability, I took him and made him very drunk at the Savoy. Under this
influence he became friendly, and told me in so many words that within a day
or two they hope to arrest the Marquis in France.
So unless you or I can get on his track--"
The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and his
protected eyes were still impenetrable. The Professor signalled to Syme that
he would resume his explanation, and he began again with the same elaborate
calm.
"Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came here
together to see what use you would be inclined to make of it. It seems to me
unquestionably urgent that--"
All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as steadily as
the Doctor stared at the Professor, but quite without the smile. The nerves
of both comrades-in-arms were near snapping under that strain of motionless
amiability, when Syme suddenly leant forward and idly tapped the edge of the
table. His message to his ally ran, "I have an intuition."
The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue, signalled back,
"Then sit on it."
Syme telegraphed, "It is quite extraordinary."
The other answered, "Extraordinary rot!"
Syme said, "I am a poet."
The other retorted, "You are a dead man."
Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were
burning feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to a
sort of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he signalled to
his friend, "You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition is. It has that
sudden quality we sometimes feel in the coming of spring."
He then studied the answer on his friend's fingers. The answer was, "Go
to hell! "
The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue addressed to the
Doctor.
"Perhaps I should rather say," said Syme on his fingers, "that it
resembles that sudden smell of the sea which may be found in the heart of
lush woods."
His companion disdained to reply.
"Or yet again," tapped Syme, "it is positive, as is the passionate red
hair of a beautiful woman."
The Professor was continuing his speech, but in the middle of it Syme
decided to act. He leant across the table, and said in a voice that could
not be neglected--
"Dr. Bull!"
The Doctor's sleek and smiling head did not move, but they could have
sworn that under his dark glasses his eyes darted towards Syme.
"Dr. Bull," said Syme, in a voice peculiarly precise and courteous,
"would you do me a small favour? Would you be so kind as to take off your
spectacles?"
The Professor swung round on his seat, and stared at Syme with a sort
of frozen fury of astonishment. Syme, like a man who has thrown his life and
fortune on the table, leaned forward with a fiery face. The Doctor did not
move.
For a few seconds there was a silence in which one could hear a pin
drop, split once by the single hoot of a distant steamer on the Thames. Then
Dr. Bull rose slowly, still smiling, and took off his spectacles.
Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a chemical
lecturer from a successful explosion. His eyes were like stars, and for an
instant he could only point without speaking.
The Professor had also started to his feet, forgetful of his supposed
paralysis. He leant on the back of the chair and stared doubtfully at Dr.
Bull, as if the Doctor had been turned into a toad before his eyes. And
indeed it was almost as great a transformation scene.
The two detectives saw sitting in the chair before them a very
boyish-looking young man, with very frank and happy hazel eyes, an open
expression, cockney clothes like those of a city clerk, and an
unquestionable breath about him of being very good and rather commonplace.
The smile was still there, but it might have been the first smile of a baby.
"I knew I was a poet," cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. "I knew my
intuition was as infallible as the Pope. It was the spectacles that did it!
It was all the spectacles. Given those beastly black eyes, and all the rest
of him his health and his jolly looks, made him a live devil among dead
ones."
"It certainly does make a queer difference," said the Professor
shakily. "But as regards the project of Dr. Bull--"
"Project be damned!" roared Syme, beside himself. "Look at him! Look at
his face, look at his collar, look at his blessed boots! You don't suppose,
do you, that that thing's an anarchist?"
"Syme!" cried the other in an apprehensive agony.
"Why, by God," said Syme, "I'll take the risk of that myself! Dr. Bull,
I am a police officer. There's my card," and he flung down the blue card
upon the table.
The Professor still feared that all was lost; but he was loyal. He
pulled out his own official card and put it beside his friend's. Then the
third man burst out laughing, and for the first time that morning they heard
his voice.
"I'm awfully glad you chaps have come so early," he said, with a sort
of schoolboy flippancy, "for we can all start for France together. Yes, I'm
in the force right enough," and he flicked a blue card towards them lightly
as a matter of form.
Clapping a brisk bowler on his head and resuming his goblin glasses,
the Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the others instinctively
followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait, and as he passed under the
doorway he suddenly struck his stick on the stone passage so that it rang.
"But Lord God Almighty," he cried out, "if this is all right, there
were more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the damned
Council!"
"We might have fought easily," said Bull; "we were four against three."
The Professor was descending the stairs, but his voice came up from
below.
"No," said the voice, "we were not four against three--we were not so
lucky. We were four against One."
The others went down the stairs in silence.
The young man called Bull, with an innocent courtesy characteristic of
him, insisted on going last until they reached the street; but there his own
robust rapidity asserted itself unconsciously, and he walked quickly on
ahead towards a railway inquiry office, talking to the others over his
shoulder.
"It is jolly to get some pals," he said. "I've been half dead with the
jumps, being quite alone. I nearly flung my arms round Gogol and embraced
him, which would have been imprudent. I hope you won't despise me for having
been in a blue funk."
"All the blue devils in blue hell," said Syme, "contributed to my blue
funk! But the worst devil was you and your infernal goggles."
The young man laughed delightedly.
"Wasn't it a rag?" he said. "Such a simple idea--not my own. I haven't
got the brains. You see, I wanted to go into the detective service,
especially the anti-dynamite business. But for that purpose they wanted
someone to dress up as a dynamiter; and they all swore by blazes that I
could never look like a dynamiter. They said my very walk was respectable,
and that seen from behind I looked like the British Constitution. They said
I looked too healthy and too optimistic, and too reliable and benevolent;
they called me all sorts of names at Scotland Yard. They said that if I had
been a criminal, I might have made my fortune by looking so like an honest
man; but as I had the misfortune to be an honest man, there was not even the
remotest chance of my assisting them by ever looking like a criminal. But as
last I was brought before some old josser who was high up in the force, and
who seemed to have no end of a head on his shoulders. And there the others
suddenly and simply cut him short. Before Syme could ask the first
diplomatic question, the old anarchist had asked suddenly, without any sort
of preparation--
"Are you a policeman?"
Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only manage
a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.
"A policeman?" he said, laughing vaguely. "Whatever made you think of a
policeman in connection with me?"
"The process was simple enough," answered the Professor patiently. "I
thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now."
"Did I take a policeman's hat by mistake out of the restaurant?" asked
Syme, smiling wildly. "Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me
somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a policeman?
Do, do let me be a postman."
The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but
Syme ran on with a feverish irony.
"But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy.
Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir, the ape
fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never detect the
shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps a maiden lady
on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have been. I don't mind
being the policeman that might have been. I don't mind being anything in
German thought."
"Are you in the police service?" said the old man, ignoring all Syme's
improvised and desperate raillery. "Are you a detective?"
Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.
"Your suggestion is ridiculous," he began. "Why on earth--"
The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
nearly breaking it.
"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he shrieked
in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a police detective?"
"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.
"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! You swear it! If you
swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil dances at
your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your grave? Will there
really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all,
you are not in any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?"
He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
loose hand like a flap to his ear.
"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.
Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
collapse.
"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."
Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a
crash.
"Because you are what?" he said thickly. "You are what?"
"I am a policeman," said the Professor with his first broad smile. and
beaming through his spectacles. "But as you think policeman only a relative
term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the British police
force; but as you tell me you are not in the British police force, I can
only say that I met you in a dynamiters' club. I suppose I ought to arrest
you." And with these words he laid on the table before Syme an exact
facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in his own waistcoat pocket, the
symbol of his power from the police.
Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were
under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the last
twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now the
capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from whom he had
been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own house, who on the
other side of the table lay back and laughed at him. He did not for the
moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the happy and silly fact
that this shadow, which had pursued him with an intolerable oppression of
peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying to catch him up. He knew
simultaneously that he was a fool and a free man. For with any recovery from
morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain
point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a
perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme's
egotism held hard to the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly
adopted the third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat
pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until his
spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted with a
barbaric laughter.
Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there was
something Homeric in Syme's mirth which made many half-drunken men look
round.
"What yer laughing at, guv'nor?" asked one wondering labourer from the
docks.
"At myself," answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his
ecstatic reaction.
"Pull yourself together," said the Professor, "or you'll get
hysterical. Have some more beer. I'll join you."
"You haven't drunk your milk," said Syme.
"My milk! " said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
contempt, "my milk! Do you think I'd look at the beastly stuff when I'm out
of sight of the bloody anarchists? We're all Christians in this room, though
perhaps," he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd, "not strict ones.
Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I'll finish it right enough!" and he
knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash of glass and a splash of
silver fluid.
Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.
"I understand now," he cried; "of course, you're not an old man at
all."
"I can't take my face off here," replied Professor de Worms. "It's
rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I'm an old man, that's not for me
to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday."
"Yes, but I mean," said Syme impatiently, "there's nothing the matter
with you."
"Yes," answered the other dispassionately. "I am subject to colds."
Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He
laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young actor
dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would have laughed
as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.
The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.
"Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"
"I? No, I didn't know it," answered Syme in some surprise. "But didn't
you?"
"I knew no more than the dead," replied the man who called himself de
Worms. "I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in my
boots."
"And I thought he was talking about me," said Syme, with his rather
reckless laughter. "I had my hand on my revolver all the time."
"So had I," said the Professor grimly; "so had Gogol evidently."
Syme struck the table with an exclamation.
"Why, there were three of us there!" he cried. "Three out of seven is a
fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!"
The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.
"We were three," he said. "If we had been three hundred we could still
have done nothing."
"Not if we were three hundred against four?" asked Syme, jeering rather
boisterously.
"No," said the Professor with sobriety, "not if we were three hundred
against Sunday."
And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died
in his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the unforgettable
President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured photograph, and he
remarked this difference between Sunday and all his satellites, that their
faces, however fierce or sinister, became gradually blurred by memory like
other human faces, whereas Sunday's seemed almost to grow more actual during
absence, as if a man's painted portrait should slowly come alive.
They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme's speech
came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.
"Professor," he cried, "it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this man?"
The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.
"Yes, I am," he said mildly. "So are you."
Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like an
insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.
"Yes," he said in a voice indescribable, "you are right. I am afraid of
him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear
until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and
the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him down."
"How?" asked the staring Professor. "Why?"
"Because I am afraid of him," said Syme; "and no man should leave in
the universe anything of which he is afraid."
De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made an effort
to speak, but Syme went on in a low voice, but with an undercurrent of
inhuman exaltation--
"Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the thing
that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman who gave
the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great
robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can give you advice for a
lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you,
strike upwards, if you strike at the stars."
The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his pose.
"Sunday is a fixed star," he said.
"You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat.
The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet.
"Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment,
"exactly where you are going?"
"Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being
thrown in Paris."
"Have you any conception how?" inquired the other.
"No," said Syme with equal decision.
"You remember, of course," resumed the soi-disant de Worms, pulling his
beard and looking out of the window, "that when we broke up rather hurriedly
the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left in the private hands of
the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by this time probably crossing the
Channel. But where he will go and what he will do it is doubtful whether
even the President knows; certainly we don't know. The only man who does
know is Dr. Bull.
"Confound it!" cried Syme. "And we don't know where he is."
"Yes," said the other in his curious, absent-minded way, "I know where
he is myself."
"Will you tell me?" asked Syme with eager eyes.
"I will take you there," said the Professor, and took down his own hat
from a peg.
Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.
"What do you mean?" he asked sharply. "Will you join me? Will you take
the risk?"
"Young man," said the Professor pleasantly, "I am amused to observe
that you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word, and that
shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical rhetoric. You
think that it is possible to pull down the President. I know that it is
impossible, and I am going to try it," and opening the tavern door, which
let in a blast of bitter air, they went out together into the dark streets
by the docks.
Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a
clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small
streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming lamps
irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and fallen world.
Syme felt almost dazed as he stepped through this growing confusion of
lights and shadows; but his companion walked on with a certain briskness,
towards where, at the end of the street, an inch or two of the lamplit river
looked like a bar of flame.
"Where are you going?" Syme inquired.
"Just now," answered the Professor, "I am going just round the corner
to see whether Dr. Bull has gone to bed. He is hygienic, and retires early."
"Dr. Bull!" exclaimed Syme. "Does he live round the corner?"
"No," answered his friend. "As a matter of fact he lives some way off,
on the other side of the river, but we can tell from here whether he has
gone to bed."
Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river, flecked with
flame, he pointed with his stick to the other bank. On the Surrey side at
this point there ran out into the Thames, seeming almost to overhang it, a
bulk and cluster of those tall tenements, dotted with lighted windows, and
rising like factory chimneys to an almost insane height. Their special poise
and position made one block of buildings especially look like a Tower of
Babel with a hundred eyes. Syme had never seen any of the sky-scraping
buildings in America, so he could only think of the buildings in a dream.
Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably lighted turret
abruptly went out, as if this black Argus had winked at him with one of his
innumerable eyes.
Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his stick
against his boot.
"We are too late," he said, "the hygienic Doctor has gone to bed."
"What do you mean?" asked Syme. "Does he live over there, then?"
"Yes," said de Worms, "behind that particular window which you can't
see. Come along and get some dinner. We must call on him to-morrow morning."
Without further parley, he led the way through several by-ways until
they came out into the flare and clamour of the East India Dock Road. The
Professor, who seemed to know his way about the neighbourhood, proceeded to
a place where the line of lighted shops fell back into a sort of abrupt
twilight and quiet, in which an old white inn, all out of repair, stood back
some twenty feet from the road.
"You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
fossils," explained the Professor. "I once found a decent place in the West
End."
"I suppose," said Syme, smiling, "that this is the corresponding decent
place in the East End?"
"It is," said the Professor reverently, and went in.
In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The beans and
bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing
emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme's sense of a new
comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had been
isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and
having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice
two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why,
in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to
monogamy.
Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his
outrageous tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little
tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant monologue, as
a man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also, the man who had
impersonated Professor de Worms was not less communicative. His own story
was almost as silly as Syme's.
"That's a good get-up of yours," said Syme, draining a glass of Macon;
"a lot better than old Gogol's. Even at the start I thought he was a bit too
hairy."
"A difference of artistic theory," replied the Professor pensively.
"Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of an
anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed, to say
that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a portrait."
"I don't understand you," said Syme.
"I am a portrait," repeated the Professor. "I am a portrait of the
celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples."
"You mean you are made up like him," said Syme. "But doesn't he know
that you are taking his nose in vain?"
"He knows it right enough," replied his friend cheerfully.
"Then why doesn't he denounce you?"
"I have denounced him," answered the Professor.
"Do explain yourself," said Syme.
"With pleasure, if you don't mind hearing my story," replied the
eminent foreign philosopher. "I am by profession an actor, and my name is
Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian and
blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of the turf, sometimes the
riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the political refugee. In some den
of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great German Nihilist
philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much about him beyond his
appearance, which was very disgusting, and which I studied carefully. I
understood that he had proved that the destructive principle in the universe
was God; hence he insisted on the need for a furious and incessant energy,
rending all things in pieces. Energy, he said, was the All. He was lame,
shortsighted, and partially paralytic. When I met him I was in a frivolous
mood, and I disliked him so much that I resolved to imitate him. If I had
been a draughtsman I would have drawn a caricature. I was only an actor, I
could only act a caricature. I made myself up into what was meant for a wild
exaggeration of the old Professor's dirty old self. When I went into the
room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar of
laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation at the
insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance was received
with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first opened my lips) with a
murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect artist had fallen upon me. I
had been too subtle, I had been too true. They thought I really was the
great Nihilist Professor. I was a healthy-minded young man at the time, and
I confess that it was a blow. Before I could fully recover, however, two or
three of these admirers ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that
a public insult had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its
nature. It seemed that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a
preposterous parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for
me, and in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through.
Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted
eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
"I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me
looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which was
really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like my rival,
could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the
prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and working within this
definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he
tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple
dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I
replied with something which I could not even understand myself. 'I don't
fancy,' he said, 'that you could have worked out the principle that
evolution is only negation, since there inheres in it the introduction of
lacuna, which are an essential of differentiation.' I replied quite
scornfully, 'You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution
functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe.' It is unnecessary
for me to say that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe.
But the people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them
quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious
method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in
scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit. 'I see,' he sneered,
'you prevail like the false pig in Aesop.' 'And you fail,' I answered,
smiling, 'like the hedgehog in Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no
hedgehog in Montaigne? 'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your
beard.' I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather
witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, 'Like the Pantheist's boots,' at
random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The real
Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man tried very
patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I believe, received everywhere in
Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent earnestness and anger, you
see, make him all the more entertaining."
"Well," said Syme, "I can understand your putting on his dirty old
beard for a night's practical joke, but I don't understand your never taking
it off again."
"That is the rest of the story," said the impersonator. "When I myself
left the company, followed by reverent applause, I went limping down the
dark street, hoping that I should soon be far enough away to be able to walk
like a human being. To my astonishment, as I was turning the corner, I felt
a touch on the shoulder, and turning, found myself under the shadow of an
enormous policeman. He told me I was wanted. I struck a sort of paralytic
attitude, and cried in a high German accent, 'Yes, I am wanted--by the
oppressed of the world. You are arresting me on the charge of being the
great anarchist, Professor de Worms.' The policeman impassively consulted a
paper in his hand, 'No, sir,' he said civilly, 'at least, not exactly, sir.
I am arresting you on the charge of not being the celebrated anarchist,
Professor de Worms.' This charge, if it was criminal at all, was certainly
the lighter of the two, and I went along with the man, doubtful, but not
greatly dismayed. I was shown into a number of rooms, and eventually into
the presence of a police officer, who explained that a serious campaign had
been opened against the centres of anarchy, and that this, my successful
masquerade, might be of considerable value to the public safety. He offered
me a good salary and this little blue card. Though our conversation was
short, he struck me as a man of very massive common sense and humour; but I
cannot tell you much about him personally, because--"
Syme laid down his knife and fork.
"I know," he said, "because you talked to him in a dark room."
Professor de Worms nodded and drained his glass.
"BURGUNDY is a jolly thing," said the Professor sadly, as he set his
glass down.
"You don't look as if it were," said Syme; "you drink it as if it were
medicine."
"You must excuse my manner," said the Professor dismally, "my position
is rather a curious one. Inside I am really bursting with boyish merriment;
but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I can't leave off. So
that when I am among friends, and have no need at all to disguise myself, I
still can't help speaking slow and wrinkling my forehead-- just as if it
were my forehead. I can be quite happy, you understand, but only in a
paralytic sort of way. The most buoyant exclamations leap up in my heart,
but they come out of my mouth quite different. You should hear me say, 'Buck
up, old cock!' It would bring tears to your eyes."
"It does," said Syme; "but I cannot help thinking that apart from all
that you are really a bit worried."
The Professor started a little and looked at him steadily.
"You are a very clever fellow," he said, "it is a pleasure to work with
you. Yes, I have rather a heavy cloud in my head. There is a great problem
to face," and he sank his bald brow in his two hands.
Then he said in a low voice--
"Can you play the piano?"
"Yes," said Syme in simple wonder, "I'm supposed to have a good touch."
Then, as the other did not speak, he added--
"I trust the great cloud is lifted."
After a long silence, the Professor said out of the cavernous shadow of
his hands--
"It would have done just as well if you could work a typewriter."
"Thank you," said Syme, "you flatter me."
"Listen to me," said the other, "and remember whom we have to see
tomorrow. You and I are going to-morrow to attempt something which is very
much more dangerous than trying to steal the Crown Jewels out of the Tower.
We are trying to steal a secret from a very sharp, very strong, and very
wicked man. I believe there is no man, except the President, of course, who
is so seriously startling and formidable as that little grinning fellow in
goggles. He has not perhaps the white-hot enthusiasm unto death, the mad
martyrdom for anarchy, which marks the Secretary. But then that very
fanaticism in the Secretary has a human pathos, and is almost a redeeming
trait. But the little Doctor has a brutal sanity that is more shocking than
the Secretary's disease. Don't you notice his detestable virility and
vitality. He bounces like an india-rubber ball. Depend on it, Sunday was not
asleep (I wonder if he ever sleeps?) when he locked up all the plans of this
outrage in the round, black head of Dr. Bull."
"And you think," said Syme, "that this unique monster will be soothed
if I play the piano to him?"
"Don't be an ass," said his mentor. "I mentioned the piano because it
gives one quick and independent fingers. Syme, if we are to go through this
interview and come out sane or alive, we must have some code of signals
between us that this brute will not see. I have made a rough alphabetical
cypher corresponding to the five fingers-- like this, see," and he rippled
with his fingers on the wooden table--"B A D, bad, a word we may frequently
require."
Syme poured himself out another glass of wine, and began to study the
scheme. He was abnormally quick with his brains at puzzles, and with his
hands at conjuring, and it did not take him long to learn how he might
convey simple messages by what would seem to be idle taps upon a table or
knee. But wine and companionship had always the effect of inspiring him to a
farcical ingenuity, and the Professor soon found himself struggling with the
too vast energy of the new language, as it passed through the heated brain
of Syme.
"We must have several word-signs," said Syme seriously--"words that we
are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is ' coeval.'
What's yours?"
"Do stop playing the goat," said the Professor plaintively. "You don't
know how serious this is."
" ' Lush,' too, " said Syme, shaking his head sagaciously, "we must
have ' lush'--word applied to grass, don't you know?"
"Do you imagine," asked the Professor furiously, "that we are going to
talk to Dr. Bull about grass?"
"There are several ways in which the subject could be approached," said
Syme reflectively, "and the word introduced without appearing forced. We
might say, ' Dr. Bull, as a revolutionist, you remember that a tyrant once
advised us to eat grass; and indeed many of us, looking on the fresh lush
grass of summer "'
"Do you understand," said the other, "that this is a tragedy?"
"Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy. What the
deuce else can you do? I wish this language of yours had a wider scope. I
suppose we could not extend it from the fingers to the toes? That would
involve pulling off our boots and socks during the conversation, which
however unobtrusively performed--"
"Syme," said his friend with a stern simplicity, "go to bed!"
Syme, however, sat up in bed for a considerable time mastering the new
code. He was awakened next morning while the east was still sealed with
darkness, and found his grey-bearded ally standing like a ghost beside his
bed.
Syme sat up in bed blinking; then slowly collected his thoughts, threw
off the bed-clothes, and stood up. It seemed to him in some curious way that
all the safety and sociability of the night before fell with the bedclothes
off him, and he stood up in an air of cold danger. He still felt an entire
trust and loyalty towards his companion; but it was the trust between two
men going to the scaffold.
"Well," said Syme with a forced cheerfulness as he pulled on his
trousers, "I dreamt of that alphabet of yours. Did it take you long to make
it up?"
The Professor made no answer, but gazed in front of him with eyes the
colour of a wintry sea; so Syme repeated his question.
"I say, did it take you long to invent all this? I'm considered good at
these things, and it was a good hour's grind. Did you learn it all on the
spot?"
The Professor was silent; his eyes were wide open, and he wore a fixed
but very small smile.
"How long did it take you?"
The Professor did not move.
"Confound you, can't you answer?" called out Syme, in a sudden anger
that had something like fear underneath. Whether or no the Professor could
answer, he did not.
Syme stood staring back at the stiff face like parchment and the blank,
blue eyes. His first thought was that the Professor had gone mad, but his
second thought was more frightful. After all, what did he know about this
queer creature whom he had heedlessly accepted as a friend? What did he
know, except that the man had been at the anarchist breakfast and had told
him a ridiculous tale? How improbable it was that there should be another
friend there beside Gogol! Was this man's silence a sensational way of
declaring war? Was this adamantine stare after all only the awful sneer of
some threefold traitor, who had turned for the last time? He stood and
strained his ears in this heartless silence. He almost fancied he could hear
dynamiters come to capture him shifting softly in the corridor outside.
Then his eye strayed downwards, and he burst out laughing. Though the
Professor himself stood there as voiceless as a statue, his five dumb
fingers were dancing alive upon the dead table. Syme watched the twinkling
movements of the talking hand, and read clearly the message--
"I will only talk like this. We must get used to it."
He rapped out the answer with the impatience of relief--
"All right. Let's get out to breakfast."
They took their hats and sticks in silence; but as Syme took his
sword-stick, he held it hard.
They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and coarse
thick sandwiches at a coffee stall, and then made their way across the
river, which under the grey and growing light looked as desolate as Acheron.
They reached the bottom of the huge block of buildings which they had seen
from across the river, and began in silence to mount the naked and
numberless stone steps, only pausing now and then to make short remarks on
the rail of the banisters. At about every other flight they passed a window;
each window showed them a pale and tragic dawn lifting itself laboriously
over London. From each the innumerable roofs of slate looked like the leaden
surges of a grey, troubled sea after rain. Syme was increasingly conscious
that his new adventure had somehow a quality of cold sanity worse than the
wild adventures of the past. Last night, for instance, the tall tenements
had seemed to him like a tower in a dream. As he now went up the weary and
perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite
series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might
be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty infinity
of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was
like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed
stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than
unreason itself.
By the time they reached Dr. Bull's landing, a last window showed them
a harsh, white dawn edged with banks of a kind of coarse red, more like red
clay than red cloud. And when they entered Dr. Bull's bare garret it was
full of light.
Syme had been haunted by a half historic memory in connection with
these empty rooms and that austere daybreak. The moment he saw the garret
and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he remembered what the memory was--
the French Revolution. There should have been the black outline of a
guillotine against that heavy red and white of the morning. Dr. Bull was in
his white shirt and black breeches only; his cropped, dark head might well
have just come out of its wig; he might have been Marat or a more slipshod
Robespierre.
Yet when he was seen properly, the French fancy fell away. The Jacobins
were idealists; there was about this man a murderous materialism. His
Dosition gave him a somewhat new appearance. The strong, white light of
morning coming from one side creating sharp shadows, made him seem both more
pale and more angular than he had looked at the breakfast on the balcony.
Thus the two black glasses that encased his eyes might really have been
black cavities in his skull, making him look like a death's-head. And,
indeed, if ever Death himself sat writing at a wooden table, it might have
been he.
He looked up and smiled brightly enough as the men came in, and rose
with the resilient rapidity of which the Professor had spoken. He set chairs
for both of them, and going to a peg behind the door, proceeded to put on a
coat and waistcoat of rough, dark tweed; he buttoned it up neatly, and came
back to sit down at his table.
The quiet good humour of his manner left his two opponents helpless. It
was with some momentary difficulty that the Professor broke silence and
began, "I'm sorry to disturb you so early, comrade," said he, with a careful
resumption of the slow de Worms manner. "You have no doubt made all the
arrangements for the Paris affair?" Then he added with infinite slowness,
"We have information which renders intolerable anything in the nature of a
moment's delay."
Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without speaking.
The Professor resumed, a pause before each weary word--
"Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I advise you to alter
those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow your agent with all
the support you can get for him. Comrade Syme and I have had an experience
which it would take more time to recount than we can afford, if we are to
act on it. I will, however, relate the occurrence in detail, even at the
risk of losing time, if you really feel that it is essential to the
understanding of the problem we have to discuss."
He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably long and
lingering, in the hope of maddening the practical little Doctor into an
explosion of impatience which might show his hand. But the little Doctor
continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill work. Syme
began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor's smile and silence
were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible silence which he had
confronted in the Professor half an hour before. About the Professor's
makeup and all his antics there was always something merely grotesque, like
a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild woes of yesterday as one remembers
being afraid of Bogy in childhood. But here was daylight; here was a
healthy, square-shouldered man in tweeds, not odd save for the accident of
his ugly spectacles, not glaring or grinning at all, but smiling steadily
and not saying a word. The whole had a sense of unbearable reality. Under
the increasing sunlight the colours of the Doctor's complexion, the pattern
of his tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too
important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the pose of
his head polite; the only uncanny thing was his silence.
"As I say," resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through heavy
sand, "the incident that has occurred to us and has led us to ask for
information about the Marquis, is one which you may think it better to have
narrated; but as it came in the way of Comrade Syme rather than me--"
His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an anthem; but
Syme, who was watching, saw his long fingers rattle quickly on the edge of
the crazy table. He read the message, "You must go on. This devil has sucked
me dry!"
Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of improvisation which
always came to him when he was alarmed.
"Yes, the thing really happened to me," he said hastily. "I had the
good fortune to fall into conversation with a detective who took me, thanks
to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing to clinch my reputation for
respectability, I took him and made him very drunk at the Savoy. Under this
influence he became friendly, and told me in so many words that within a day
or two they hope to arrest the Marquis in France.
So unless you or I can get on his track--"
The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and his
protected eyes were still impenetrable. The Professor signalled to Syme that
he would resume his explanation, and he began again with the same elaborate
calm.
"Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came here
together to see what use you would be inclined to make of it. It seems to me
unquestionably urgent that--"
All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as steadily as
the Doctor stared at the Professor, but quite without the smile. The nerves
of both comrades-in-arms were near snapping under that strain of motionless
amiability, when Syme suddenly leant forward and idly tapped the edge of the
table. His message to his ally ran, "I have an intuition."
The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue, signalled back,
"Then sit on it."
Syme telegraphed, "It is quite extraordinary."
The other answered, "Extraordinary rot!"
Syme said, "I am a poet."
The other retorted, "You are a dead man."
Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were
burning feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to a
sort of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he signalled to
his friend, "You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition is. It has that
sudden quality we sometimes feel in the coming of spring."
He then studied the answer on his friend's fingers. The answer was, "Go
to hell! "
The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue addressed to the
Doctor.
"Perhaps I should rather say," said Syme on his fingers, "that it
resembles that sudden smell of the sea which may be found in the heart of
lush woods."
His companion disdained to reply.
"Or yet again," tapped Syme, "it is positive, as is the passionate red
hair of a beautiful woman."
The Professor was continuing his speech, but in the middle of it Syme
decided to act. He leant across the table, and said in a voice that could
not be neglected--
"Dr. Bull!"
The Doctor's sleek and smiling head did not move, but they could have
sworn that under his dark glasses his eyes darted towards Syme.
"Dr. Bull," said Syme, in a voice peculiarly precise and courteous,
"would you do me a small favour? Would you be so kind as to take off your
spectacles?"
The Professor swung round on his seat, and stared at Syme with a sort
of frozen fury of astonishment. Syme, like a man who has thrown his life and
fortune on the table, leaned forward with a fiery face. The Doctor did not
move.
For a few seconds there was a silence in which one could hear a pin
drop, split once by the single hoot of a distant steamer on the Thames. Then
Dr. Bull rose slowly, still smiling, and took off his spectacles.
Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a chemical
lecturer from a successful explosion. His eyes were like stars, and for an
instant he could only point without speaking.
The Professor had also started to his feet, forgetful of his supposed
paralysis. He leant on the back of the chair and stared doubtfully at Dr.
Bull, as if the Doctor had been turned into a toad before his eyes. And
indeed it was almost as great a transformation scene.
The two detectives saw sitting in the chair before them a very
boyish-looking young man, with very frank and happy hazel eyes, an open
expression, cockney clothes like those of a city clerk, and an
unquestionable breath about him of being very good and rather commonplace.
The smile was still there, but it might have been the first smile of a baby.
"I knew I was a poet," cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. "I knew my
intuition was as infallible as the Pope. It was the spectacles that did it!
It was all the spectacles. Given those beastly black eyes, and all the rest
of him his health and his jolly looks, made him a live devil among dead
ones."
"It certainly does make a queer difference," said the Professor
shakily. "But as regards the project of Dr. Bull--"
"Project be damned!" roared Syme, beside himself. "Look at him! Look at
his face, look at his collar, look at his blessed boots! You don't suppose,
do you, that that thing's an anarchist?"
"Syme!" cried the other in an apprehensive agony.
"Why, by God," said Syme, "I'll take the risk of that myself! Dr. Bull,
I am a police officer. There's my card," and he flung down the blue card
upon the table.
The Professor still feared that all was lost; but he was loyal. He
pulled out his own official card and put it beside his friend's. Then the
third man burst out laughing, and for the first time that morning they heard
his voice.
"I'm awfully glad you chaps have come so early," he said, with a sort
of schoolboy flippancy, "for we can all start for France together. Yes, I'm
in the force right enough," and he flicked a blue card towards them lightly
as a matter of form.
Clapping a brisk bowler on his head and resuming his goblin glasses,
the Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the others instinctively
followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait, and as he passed under the
doorway he suddenly struck his stick on the stone passage so that it rang.
"But Lord God Almighty," he cried out, "if this is all right, there
were more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the damned
Council!"
"We might have fought easily," said Bull; "we were four against three."
The Professor was descending the stairs, but his voice came up from
below.
"No," said the voice, "we were not four against three--we were not so
lucky. We were four against One."
The others went down the stairs in silence.
The young man called Bull, with an innocent courtesy characteristic of
him, insisted on going last until they reached the street; but there his own
robust rapidity asserted itself unconsciously, and he walked quickly on
ahead towards a railway inquiry office, talking to the others over his
shoulder.
"It is jolly to get some pals," he said. "I've been half dead with the
jumps, being quite alone. I nearly flung my arms round Gogol and embraced
him, which would have been imprudent. I hope you won't despise me for having
been in a blue funk."
"All the blue devils in blue hell," said Syme, "contributed to my blue
funk! But the worst devil was you and your infernal goggles."
The young man laughed delightedly.
"Wasn't it a rag?" he said. "Such a simple idea--not my own. I haven't
got the brains. You see, I wanted to go into the detective service,
especially the anti-dynamite business. But for that purpose they wanted
someone to dress up as a dynamiter; and they all swore by blazes that I
could never look like a dynamiter. They said my very walk was respectable,
and that seen from behind I looked like the British Constitution. They said
I looked too healthy and too optimistic, and too reliable and benevolent;
they called me all sorts of names at Scotland Yard. They said that if I had
been a criminal, I might have made my fortune by looking so like an honest
man; but as I had the misfortune to be an honest man, there was not even the
remotest chance of my assisting them by ever looking like a criminal. But as
last I was brought before some old josser who was high up in the force, and
who seemed to have no end of a head on his shoulders. And there the others