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all talked hopelessly. One asked whether a bushy beard would hide my nice
smile; another said that if they blacked my face I might look like a negro
anarchist; but this old chap chipped in with a most extraordinary remark. 'A
pair of smoked spectacles will do it,' he said positively. 'Look at him now;
he looks like an angelic office boy. Put him on a pair of smoked spectacles,
and children will scream at the sight of him.' And so it was, by George!
When once my eyes were covered, all the rest, smile and big shoulders and
short hair, made me look a perfect little devil. As I say, it was simple
enough when it was done, like miracles; but that wasn't the really
miraculous part of it. There was one really staggering thing about the
business, and my head still turns at it."
"What was that?" asked Syme.
"I'll tell you," answered the man in spectacles. "This big pot in the
police who sized me up so that he knew how the goggles would go with my hair
and socks--by God, he never saw me at all!"
Syme's eyes suddenly flashed on him.
"How was that?" he asked. "I thought you talked to him."
"So I did," said Bull brightly; "but we talked in a pitch-dark room
like a coalcellar. There, you would never have guessed that."
"I could not have conceived it," said Syme gravely.
"It is indeed a new idea," said the Professor.
Their new ally was in practical matters a whirlwind. At the inquiry
office he asked with businesslike brevity about the trains for Dover. Having
got his information, he bundled the company into a cab, and put them and
himself inside a railway carriage before they had properly realised the
breathless process. They were already on the Calais boat before conversation
flowed freely.
"I had already arranged," he explained, "to go to France for my lunch;
but I am delighted to have someone to lunch with me. You see, I had to send
that beast, the Marquis, over with his bomb, because the President had his
eye on me, though God knows how. I'll tell you the story some day. It was
perfectly choking. Whenever I tried to slip out of it I saw the President
somewhere, smiling out of the bow-window of a club, or taking off his hat to
me from the top of an omnibus. I tell you, you can say what you like, that
fellow sold himself to the devil; he can be in six places at once."
"So you sent the Marquis off, I understand," asked the Professor. "Was
it long ago? Shall we be in time to catch him?"
"Yes," answered the new guide, "I've timed it all. He'll still be at
Calais when we arrive."
"But when we do catch him at Calais," said the Professor, "what are we
going to do?"
At this question the countenance of Dr. Bull fell for the first time.
He reflected a little, and then said--
"Theoretically, I suppose, we ought to call the police."
"Not I," said Syme. "Theoretically I ought to drown myself first. I
promised a poor fellow, who was a real modern pessimist, on my word of
honour not to tell the police. I'm no hand at casuistry, but I can't break
my word to a modern pessimist. It's like breaking one's word to a child."
"I'm in the same boat," said the Professor. "I tried to tell the police
and I couldn't, because of some silly oath I took. You see, when I was an
actor I was a sort of all-round beast. Perjury or treason is the only crime
I haven't committed. If I did that I shouldn't know the difference between
right and wrong."
"I've been through all that," said Dr. Bull, "and I've made up my mind.
I gave my promise to the Secretary--you know him, man who smiles upside
down. My friends, that man is the most utterly unhappy man that was ever
human. It may be his digestion, or his conscience, or his nerves, or his
philosophy of the universe, but he's damned, he's in hell! Well, I can't
turn on a man like that, and hunt him down. It's like whipping a leper. I
may be mad, but that's how I feel; and there's jolly well the end of it."
"I don't think you're mad," said Syme. "I knew you would decide like
that when first you--"
"Eh?" said Dr. Bull.
"When first you took off your spectacles."
Dr. Bull smiled a little, and strolled across the deck to look at the
sunlit sea. Then he strolled back again, kicking his heels carelessly, and a
companionable silence fell between the three men.
"Well," said Syme, "it seems that we have all the same kind of morality
or immorality, so we had better face the fact that comes of it."
"Yes," assented the Professor, "you're quite right; and we must hurry
up, for I can see the Grey Nose standing out from France."
"The fact that comes of it," said Syme seriously, "is this, that we
three are alone on this planet. Gogol has gone, God knows where; perhaps the
President has smashed him like a fly. On the Council we are three men
against three, like the Romans who held the bridge. But we are worse off
than that, first because they can appeal to their organization and we cannot
appeal to ours, and second because--"
"Because one of those other three men," said the Professor, "is not a
man."
Syme nodded and was silent for a second or two, then he said--
"My idea is this. We must do something to keep the Marquis in Calais
till tomorrow midday. I have turned over twenty schemes in my head. We
cannot denounce him as a dynamiter; that is agreed. We cannot get him
detained on some trivial charge, for we should have to appear; he knows us,
and he would smell a rat. We cannot pretend to keep him on anarchist
business; he might swallow much in that way, but not the notion of stopping
in Calais while the Czar went safely through Paris. We might try to kidnap
him, and lock him up ourselves; but he is a well-known man here. He has a
whole bodyguard of friends; he is very strong and brave, and the event is
doubtful. The only thing I can see to do is actually to take advantage of
the very things that are in the Marquis's favour. I am going to profit by
the fact that he is a highly respected nobleman. I am going to profit by the
fact that he has many friends and moves in the best society."
"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the Professor.
"The Symes are first mentioned in the fourteenth century," said Syme;
"but there is a tradition that one of them rode behind Bruce at Bannockburn.
Since 1350 the tree is quite clear."
"He's gone off his head," said the little Doctor, staring.
"Our bearings," continued Syme calmly, "are 'argent a chevron gules
charged with three cross crosslets of the field.' The motto varies."
The Professor seized Syme roughly by the waistcoat.
"We are just inshore," he said. "Are you seasick or joking in the wrong
place?"
"My remarks are almost painfully practical," answered Syme, in an
unhurried manner. "The house of St. Eustache also is very ancient. The
Marquis cannot deny that he is a gentleman. He cannot deny that I am a
gentleman. And in order to put the matter of my social position quite beyond
a doubt, I propose at the earliest opportunity to knock his hat off. But
here we are in the harbour."
They went on shore under the strong sun in a sort of daze. Syme, who
had now taken the lead as Bull had taken it in London, led them along a kind
of marine parade until he came to some cafes, embowered in a bulk of
greenery and overlooking the sea. As he went before them his step was
slightly swaggering, and he swung his stick like a sword. He was making
apparently for the extreme end of the line of cafes, but he stopped
abruptly. With a sharp gesture he motioned them to silence, but he pointed
with one gloved finger to a cafe table under a bank of flowering foliage at
which sat the Marquis de St. Eustache, his teeth shining in his thick, black
beard, and his bold, brown face shadowed by a light yellow straw hat and
outlined against the violet sea.
SYME sat down at a cafe table with his companions, his blue eyes
sparkling like the bright sea below, and ordered a bottle of Saumur with a
pleased impatience. He was for some reason in a condition of curious
hilarity. His spirits were already unnaturally high; they rose as the Saumur
sank, and in half an hour his talk was a torrent of nonsense. He professed
to be making out a plan of the conversation which was going to ensue between
himself and the deadly Marquis. He jotted it down wildly with a pencil. It
was arranged like a printed catechism, with questions and answers, and was
delivered with an extraordinary rapidity of utterance.
"I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take off my own.
I shall say, 'The Marquis de Saint Eustache, I believe.' He will say, ' The
celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume.' He will say in the most exquisite French,
'How are you?' I shall reply in the most exquisite Cockney, 'Oh, just the
Syme--' "
"Oh, shut it," said the man in spectacles. "Pull yourself together, and
chuck away that bit of paper. What are you really going to do?"
"But it was a lovely catechism," said Syme pathetically. "Do let me
read it you. It has only forty-three questions and answers, and some of the
Marquis's answers are wonderfully witty. I like to be just to my enemy."
"But what's the good of it all?" asked Dr. Bull in exasperation.
"It leads up to my challenge, don't you see," said Syme, beaming. "When
the Marquis has given the thirty-ninth reply, which runs--"
"Has it by any chance occurred to you," asked the Professor, with a
ponderous simplicity, "that the Marquis may not say all the forty-three
things you have put down for him? In that case, I understand, your own
epigrams may appear somewhat more forced."
Syme struck the table with a radiant face.
"Why, how true that is," he said, "and I never thought of it. Sir, you
have an intellect beyond the common. You will make a name."
"Oh, you're as drunk as an owl!" said the Doctor.
"It only remains," continued Syme quite unperturbed, "to adopt some
other method of breaking the ice (if I may so express it) between myself and
the man I wish to kill. And since the course of a dialogue cannot be
predicted by one of its parties alone (as you have pointed out with such
recondite acumen), the only thing to be done, I suppose, is for the one
party, as far as possible, to do all the dialogue by himself. And so I will,
by George!" And he stood up suddenly, his yellow hair blowing in the slight
sea breeze.
A band was playing in a cafe chantant hidden somewhere among the trees,
and a woman had just stopped singing. On Syme's heated head the bray of the
brass band seemed like the jar and jingle of that barrel-organ in Leicester
Square, to the tune of which he had once stood up to die. He looked across
to the little table where the Marquis sat. The man had two companions now,
solemn Frenchmen in frock-coats and silk hats, one of them with the red
rosette of the Legion of Honour, evidently people of a solid social
position. Besides these black, cylindrical costumes, the Marquis, in his
loose straw hat and light spring clothes, looked Bohemian and even barbaric;
but he looked the Marquis. Indeed, one might say that he looked the king,
with his animal elegance, his scornful eyes, and his proud head lifted
against the purple sea. But he was no Christian king, at any rate; he was,
rather, some swarthy despot, half Greek, half Asiatic, who in the days when
slavery seemed natural looked down on the Mediterranean, on his galley and
his groaning slaves. Just so, Syme thought, would the brown-gold face of
such a tyrant have shown against the dark green olives and the burning blue.
"Are you going to address the meeting?" asked the Professor peevishly,
seeing that Syme still stood up without moving.
Syme drained his last glass of sparkling wine.
"I am," he said, pointing across to the Marquis and his companions,
"that meeting. That meeting displeases me. I am going to pull that meeting's
great ugly, mahogany-coloured nose."
He stepped across swiftly, if not quite steadily. The Marquis, seeing
him, arched his black Assyrian eyebrows in surprise, but smiled politely.
"You are Mr. Syme, I think," he said.
Syme bowed.
"And you are the Marquis de Saint Eustache," he said gracefully.
"Permit me to pull your nose."
He leant over to do so, but the Marquis started backwards, upsetting
his chair, and the two men in top hats held Syme back by the shoulders.
"This man has insulted me!" said Syme, with gestures of explanation.
"Insulted you?" cried the gentleman with the red rosette, "when?"
"Oh, just now," said Syme recklessly. "He insulted my mother."
"Insulted your mother!" exclaimed the gentleman incredulously.
"Well, anyhow," said Syme, conceding a point, "my aunt."
"But how can the Marquis have insulted your aunt just now?" said the
second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. "He has been sitting here all
the time."
"Ah, it was what he said!" said Syme darkly.
"I said nothing at all," said the Marquis, "except something about the
band. I only said that I liked Wagner played well."
"It was an allusion to my family," said Syme firmly. "My aunt played
Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being insulted about
it."
"This seems most extraordinary," said the gentleman who was decore,
looking doubtfully at the Marquis.
"Oh, I assure you," said Syme earnestly, "the whole of your
conversation was simply packed with sinister allusions to my aunt's
weaknesses."
"This is nonsense!" said the second gentleman. "I for one have said
nothing for half an hour except that I liked the singing of that girl with
black hair."
"Well, there you are again!" said Syme indignantly. "My aunt's was
red."
"It seems to me," said the other, "that you are simply seeking a
pretext to insult the Marquis."
"By George!" said Syme, facing round and looking at him, "what a clever
chap you are!"
The Marquis started up with eyes flaming like a tiger's.
"Seeking a quarrel with me!" he cried. "Seeking a fight with me! By
God! there was never a man who had to seek long. These gentlemen will
perhaps act for me. There are still four hours of daylight. Let us fight
this evening."
Syme bowed with a quite beautiful graciousness.
"Marquis," he said, "your action is worthy of your fame and blood.
Permit me to consult for a moment with the gentlemen in whose hands I shall
place myself."
In three long strides he rejoined his companions, and they, who had
seen his champagne-inspired attack and listened to his idiotic explanations,
were quite startled at the look of him. For now that he came back to them he
was quite sober, a little pale, and he spoke in a low voice of passionate
practicality.
"I have done it," he said hoarsely. "I have fixed a fight on the beast.
But look here, and listen carefully. There is no time for talk. You are my
seconds, and everything must come from you. Now you must insist, and insist
absolutely, on the duel coming off after seven to-morrow, so as to give me
the chance of preventing him from catching the 7.45 for Paris. If he misses
that he misses his crime. He can't refuse to meet you on such a small point
of time and place. But this is what he will do. He will choose a field
somewhere near a wayside station, where he can pick up the train. He is a
very good swordsman, and he will trust to killing me in time to catch it.
But I can fence well too, and I think I can keep him in play, at any rate,
until the train is lost. Then perhaps he may kill me to console his
feelings. You understand? Very well then, let me introduce you to some
charming friends of mine," and leading them quickly across the parade, he
presented them to the Marquis's seconds by two very aristocratic names of
which they had not previously heard.
Syme was subject to spasms of singular common sense, not otherwise a
part of his character. They were (as he said of his impulse about the
spectacles) poetic intuitions, and they sometimes rose to the exaltation of
prophecy.
He had correctly calculated in this case the policy of his opponent.
When the Marquis was informed by his seconds that Syme could only fight in
the morning, he must fully have realised that an obstacle had suddenly
arisen between him and his bomb-throwing business in the capital. Naturally
he could not explain this objection to his friends, so he chose the course
which Syme had predicted. He induced his seconds to settle on a small meadow
not far from the railway, and he trusted to the fatality of the first
engagement.
When he came down very coolly to the field of honour, no one could have
guessed that he had any anxiety about a journey; his hands were in his
pockets, his straw hat on the back of his head, his handsome face brazen in
the sun. But it might have struck a stranger as odd that there appeared in
his train, not only his seconds carrying the sword-case, but two of his
servants carrying a portmanteau and a luncheon basket.
Early as was the hour, the sun soaked everything in warmth, and Syme
was vaguely surprised to see so many spring flowers burning gold and silver
in the tall grass in which the whole company stood almost knee-deep.
With the exception of the Marquis, all the men were in sombre and
solemn morning-dress, with hats like black chimney-pots; the little Doctor
especially, with the addition of his black spectacles, looked like an
undertaker in a farce. Syme could not help feeling a comic contrast between
this funereal church parade of apparel and the rich and glistening meadow,
growing wild flowers everywhere. But, indeed, this comic contrast between
the yellow blossoms and the black hats was but a symbol of the tragic
contrast between the yellow blossoms and the black business. On his right
was a little wood; far away to his left lay the long curve of the railway
line, which he was, so to speak, guarding from the Marquis, whose goal and
escape it was. In front of him, behind the black group of his opponents, he
could see, like a tinted cloud, a small almond bush in flower against the
faint line of the sea.
The member of the Legion of Honour, whose name it seemed was Colonel
Ducroix, approached the Professor and Dr. Bull with great politeness, and
suggested that the play should terminate with the first considerable hurt.
Dr. Bull, however, having been carefully coached by Syme upon this
point of policy, insisted, with great dignity and in very bad French, that
it should continue until one of the combatants was disabled. Syme had made
up his mind that he could avoid disabling the Marquis and prevent the
Marquis from disabling him for at least twenty minutes. In twenty minutes
the Paris train would have gone by.
"To a man of the well-known skill and valour of Monsieur de St.
Eustache," said the Professor solemnly, "it must be a matter of indifference
which method is adopted, and our principal has strong reasons for demanding
the longer encounter, reasons the delicacy of which prevent me from being
explicit, but for the just and honourable nature of which I can--"
"Peste!" broke from the Marquis behind, whose face had suddenly
darkened, "let us stop talking and begin," and he slashed off the head of a
tall flower with his stick.
Syme understood his rude impatience and instinctively looked over his
shoulder to see whether the train was coming in sight. But there was no
smoke on the horizon.
Colonel Ducroix knelt down and unlocked the case, taking out a pair of
twin swords, which took the sunlight and turned to two streaks of white
fire. He offered one to the Marquis, who snatched it without ceremony, and
another to Syme, who took it, bent it, and poised it with as much delay as
was consistent with dignity.
Then the Colonel took out another pair of blades, and taking one
himself and giving another to Dr. Bull, proceeded to place the men.
Both combatants had thrown off their coats and waistcoats, and stood
sword in hand. The seconds stood on each side of the line of fight with
drawn swords also, but still sombre in their dark frock-coats and hats. The
principals saluted. The Colonel said quietly, "Engage!" and the two blades
touched and tingled.
When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme's arm, all the fantastic
fears that have been the subject of this story fell from him like dreams
from a man waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in order as mere
delusions of the nerves--how the fear of the Professor had been the fear of
the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear of the Doctor had been
the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was the old fear that
any miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless modern fear that no
miracle can ever happen. But he saw that these fears were fancies, for he
found himself in the presence of the great fact of the fear of death, with
its coarse and pitiless common sense. He felt like a man who had dreamed all
night of falling over precipices, and had woke up on the morning when he was
to be hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the channel
of his foe's foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had felt the two tongues
of steel touch, vibrating like two living things, he knew that his enemy was
a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had come.
He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the
grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He
could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy
that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into
blossom in the meadow--flowers blood red and burning gold and blue,
fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed
for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the Marquis, they saw
the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line. He had the feeling that
if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever before that
almond tree, desiring nothing else in the world.
But while earth and sky and everything had the living beauty of a thing
lost, the other half of his head was as clear as glass, and he was parrying
his enemy's point with a kind of clockwork skill of which he had hardly
supposed himself capable. Once his enemy's point ran along his wrist,
leaving a slight streak of blood, but it either was not noticed or was
tacitly ignored. Every now and then he riposted, and once or twice he could
almost fancy that he felt his point go home, but as there was no blood on
blade or shirt he supposed he was mistaken. Then came an interruption and a
change.
At the risk of losing all, the Marquis, interrupting his quiet stare,
flashed one glance over his shoulder at the line of railway on his right.
Then he turned on Syme a face transfigured to that of a fiend, and began to
fight as if with twenty weapons. The attack came so fast and furious, that
the one shining sword seemed a shower of shining arrows. Syme had no chance
to look at the railway; but also he had no need. He could guess the reason
of the Marquis's sudden madness of battle-- the Paris train was in sight.
But the Marquis's morbid energy over-reached itself. Twice Syme,
parrying, knocked his opponent's point far out of the fighting circle; and
the third time his riposte was so rapid, that there was no doubt about the
hit this time. Syme's sword actually bent under the weight of the Marquis's
body, which it had pierced.
Syme was as certain that he had stuck his blade into his enemy as a
gardener that he has stuck his spade into the ground. Yet the Marquis sprang
back from the stroke without a stagger, and Syme stood staring at his own
sword-point like an idiot. There was no blood on it at all.
There was an instant of rigid silence, and then Syme in his turn fell
furiously on the other, filled with a flaming curiosity. The Marquis was
probably, in a general sense, a better fencer than he, as he had surmised at
the beginning, but at the moment the Marquis seemed distraught and at a
disadvantage. He fought wildly and even weakly, and he constantly looked
away at the railway line, almost as if he feared the train more than the
pointed steel. Syme, on the other hand, fought fiercely but still carefully,
in an intellectual fury, eager to solve the riddle of his own bloodless
sword. For this purpose, he aimed less at the Marquis's body, and more at
his throat and head. A minute and a half afterwards he felt his point enter
the man's neck below the jaw. It came out clean. Half mad, he thrust again,
and made what should have been a bloody scar on the Marquis's cheek. But
there was no scar.
For one moment the heaven of Syme again grew black with supernatural
terrors. Surely the man had a charmed life. But this new spiritual dread was
a more awful thing than had been the mere spiritual topsy-turvydom
symbolised by the paralytic who pursued him. The Professor was only a
goblin; this man was a devil--perhaps he was the Devil! Anyhow, this was
certain, that three times had a human sword been driven into him and made no
mark. When Syme had that thought he drew himself up, and all that was good
in him sang high up in the air as a high wind sings in the trees. He thought
of all the human things in his story--of the Chinese lanterns in Saffron
Park, of the girl's red hair in the garden, of the honest, beer-swilling
sailors down by the dock, of his loyal companions standing by. Perhaps he
had been chosen as a champion of all these fresh and kindly things to cross
swords with the enemy of all creation. "After all," he said to himself, "I
am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself
cannot do--I can die," and as the word went through his head, he heard a
faint and far-off hoot, which would soon be the roar of the Paris train.
He fell to fighting again with a supernatural levity, like a Mohammedan
panting for Paradise. As the train came nearer and nearer he fancied he
could see people putting up the floral arches in Paris; he joined in the
growing noise and the glory of the great Republic whose gate he was guarding
against Hell. His thoughts rose higher and higher with the rising roar of
the train, which ended, as if proudly, in a long and piercing whistle. The
train stopped.
Suddenly, to the astonishment of everyone the Marquis sprang back quite
out of sword reach and threw down his sword. The leap was wonderful, and not
the less wonderful because Syme had plunged his sword a moment before into
the man's thigh.
"Stop!" said the Marquis in a voice that compelled a momentary
obedience. "I want to say something."
"What is the matter?" asked Colonel Ducroix, staring. "Has there been
foul play?"
"There has been foul play somewhere," said Dr. Bull, who was a little
pale. "Our principal has wounded the Marquis four times at least, and he is
none the worse ."
The Marquis put up his hand with a curious air of ghastly patience.
"Please let me speak," he said. "It is rather important. Mr. Syme," he
continued, turning to his opponent, "we are fighting to-day, if I remember
right, because you expressed a wish (which I thought irrational) to pull my
nose. Would you oblige me by pulling my nose now as quickly as possible? I
have to catch a train."
"I protest that this is most irregular," said Dr. Bull indignantly.
"It is certainly somewhat opposed to precedent," said Colonel Ducroix,
looking wistfully at his principal. "There is, I think, one case on record
(Captain Bellegarde and the Baron Zumpt) in which the weapons were changed
in the middle of the encounter at the request of one of the combatants. But
one can hardly call one's nose a weapon."
"Will you or will you not pull my nose?" said the Marquis in
exasperation. "Come, come, Mr. Syme! You wanted to do it, do it! You can
have no conception of how important it is to me. Don't be so selfish! Pull
my nose at once, when I ask you!" and he bent slightly forward with a
fascinating smile. The Paris train, panting and groaning, had grated into a
little station behind the neighbouring hill.
Syme had the feeling he had more than once had in these adventures--
the sense that a horrible and sublime wave lifted to heaven was just
toppling over. Walking in a world he half understood, he took two paces
forward and seized the Roman nose of this remarkable nobleman. He pulled it
hard, and it came off in his hand.
He stood for some seconds with a foolish solemnity, with the pasteboard
proboscis still between his fingers, looking at it, while the sun and the
clouds and the wooded hills looked down upon this imbecile scene.
The Marquis broke the silence in a loud and cheerful voice.
"If anyone has any use for my left eyebrow," he said, "he can have it.
Colonel Ducroix, do accept my left eyebrow! It's the kind of thing that
might come in useful any day," and he gravely tore off one of his swarthy
Assyrian brows, bringing about half his brown forehead with it, and politely
offered it to the Colonel, who stood crimson and speechless with rage.
"If I had known," he spluttered, "that I was acting for a poltroon who
pads himself to fight--"
"Oh, I know, I know!" said the Marquis, recklessly throwing various
parts of himself right and left about the field. "You are making a mistake;
but it can't be explained just now. I tell you the train has come into the
station!"
"Yes," said Dr. Bull fiercely, "and the train shall go out of the
station. It shall go out without you. We know well enough for what devil's
work--"
The mysterious Marquis lifted his hands with a desperate gesture. He
was a strange scarecrow standing there in the sun with half his old face
peeled off, and half another face glaring and grinning from underneath.
"Will you drive me mad?" he cried. "The train--"
"You shall not go by the train," said Syme firmly, and grasped his
sword.
The wild figure turned towards Syme, and seemed to be gathering itself
for a sublime effort before speaking.
"You great fat, blasted, blear-eyed, blundering, thundering, brainless,
Godforsaken, doddering, damned fool!" he said without taking breath. "You
great silly, pink-faced, towheaded turnip! You--"
"You shall not go by this train," repeated Syme.
"And why the infernal blazes," roared the other, "should I want to go
by the train?"
"We know all," said the Professor sternly. "You are going to Paris to
throw a bomb!"
"Going to Jericho to throw a Jabberwock!" cried the other, tearing his
hair, which came off easily.
"Have you all got softening of the brain, that you don't realise what I
am? Did you really think I wanted to catch that train? Twenty Paris trains
might go by for me. Damn Paris trains!"
"Then what did you care about?" began the Professor.
"What did I care about? I didn't care about catching the train; I cared
about whether the train caught me, and now, by God! it has caught me."
"I regret to inform you," said Syme with restraint, "that your remarks
convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the remains
of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your chin, your
meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself in many ways.
What do you mean by saying that the train has caught you? It may be my
literary fancy, but somehow I feel that it ought to mean something."
"It means everything," said the other, "and the end of everything.
Sunday has us now in the hollow of his hand."
"Us!" repeated the Professor, as if stupefied. "What do you mean by
'us'?"
"The police, of course!" said the Marquis, and tore off his scalp and
half his face.
The head which emerged was the blonde, well brushed, smooth-haired head
which is common in the English constabulary, but the face was terribly pale.
"I am Inspector Ratcliffe," he said, with a sort of haste that verged
on harshness. "My name is pretty well known to the police, and I can see
well enough that you belong to them. But if there is any doubt about my
position, I have a card " and he began to pull a blue card from his pocket.
The Professor gave a tired gesture.
"Oh, don't show it us," he said wearily; "we've got enough of them to
equip a paper-chase."
The little man named Bull, had, like many men who seem to be of a mere
vivacious vulgarity, sudden movements of good taste. Here he certainly saved
the situation. In the midst of this staggering transformation scene he
stepped forward with all the gravity and responsibility of a second, and
addressed the two seconds of the Marquis.
"Gentlemen," he said, "we all owe you a serious apology; but I assure
you that you have not been made the victims of such a low joke as you
imagine, or indeed of anything undignified in a man of honour. You have not
wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons,
but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy. A secret society of
anarchists is hunting us like hares; not such unfortunate madmen as may here
or there throw a bomb through starvation or German philosophy, but a rich
and powerful and fanatical church, a church of eastern pessimism, which
holds it holy to destroy mankind like vermin. How hard they hunt us you can
gather from the fact that we are driven to such disguises as those for which
I apologise, and to such pranks as this one by which you suffer. "
The younger second of the Marquis, a short man with a black moustache,
bowed politely, and said--
"Of course, I accept the apology; but you will in your turn forgive me
if I decline to follow you further into your difficulties, and permit myself
to say good morning! The sight of an acquaintance and distinguished
fellow-townsman coming to pieces in the open air is unusual, and, upon the
whole, sufficient for one day. Colonel Ducroix, I would in no way influence
your actions, but if you feel with me that our present society is a little
abnormal, I am now going to walk back to the town."
Colonel Ducroix moved mechanically, but then tugged abruptly at his
white moustache and broke out--
"No, by George! I won't. If these gentlemen are really in a mess with a
lot of low wreckers like that, I'll see them through it. I have fought for
France, and it is hard if I can't fight for civilization."
Dr. Bull took off his hat and waved it, cheering as at a public
meeting.
"Don't make too much noise," said Inspector Ratcliffe, "Sunday may hear
you."
"Sunday!" cried Bull, and dropped his hat.
"Yes," retorted Ratcliffe, "he may be with them."
"With whom?" asked Syme.
"With the people out of that train," said the other.
"What you say seems utterly wild," began Syme. "Why, as a matter of
fact--But, my God," he cried out suddenly, like a man who sees an explosion
a long way off, "by God! if this is true the whole bally lot of us on the
Anarchist Council were against anarchy! Every born man was a detective
except the President and his personal secretary. What can it mean?"
"Mean!" said the new policeman with incredible violence. "It means that
we are struck dead! Don't you know Sunday? Don't you know that his jokes are
always so big and simple that one has never thought of them? Can you think
of anything more like Sunday than this, that he should put all his powerful
enemies on the Supreme Council, and then take care that it was not supreme?
I tell you he has bought every trust, he has captured every cable, he has
control of every railway line--especially of that railway line!" and he
pointed a shaking finger towards the small wayside station. "The whole
movement was controlled by him; half the world was ready to rise for him.
But there were just five people, perhaps, who would have resisted him . . .
and the old devil put them on the Supreme Council, to waste their time in
watching each other. Idiots that we are, he planned the whole of our
idiocies! Sunday knew that the Professor would chase Syme through London,
and that Syme would fight me in France. And he was combining great masses of
capital, and seizing great lines of telegraphy, while we five idiots were
running after each other like a lot of confounded babies playing blind man's
buff."
"Well?" asked Syme with a sort of steadiness.
"Well," replied the other with sudden serenity, "he has found us
playing blind man's buff to-day in a field of great rustic beauty and
extreme solitude. He has probably captured the world; it only remains to him
to capture this field and all the fools in it. And since you really want to
know what was my objection to the arrival of that train, I will tell you. My
objection was that Sunday or his Secretary has just this moment got out of
it."
Syme uttered an involuntary cry, and they all turned their eyes towards
the far-off station. It was quite true that a considerable bulk of people
seemed to be moving in their direction. But they were too distant to be
distinguished in any way.
"It was a habit of the late Marquis de St. Eustache," said the new
policeman, producing a leather case, "always to carry a pair of opera
glasses. Either the President or the Secretary is coming after us with that
mob. They have caught us in a nice quiet place where we are under no
temptations to break our oaths by calling the police. Dr. Bull, I have a
suspicion that you will see better through these than through your own
highly decorative spectacles."
He handed the field-glasses to the Doctor, who immediately took off his
spectacles and put the apparatus to his eyes.
"It cannot be as bad as you say," said the Professor, somewhat shaken.
"There are a good number of them certainly, but they may easily be ordinary
tourists."
"Do ordinary tourists," asked Bull, with the fieldglasses to his eyes,
"wear black masks half-way down the face?"
Syme almost tore the glasses out of his hand, and looked through them.
Most men in the advancing mob really looked ordinary enough; but it was
quite true that two or three of the leaders in front wore black half-masks
almost down to their mouths. This disguise is very complete, especially at
such a distance, and Syme found it impossible to conclude anything from the
clean-shaven jaws and chins of the men talking in the front. But presently
as they talked they all smiled and one of them smiled on one side.
SYME put the field-glasses from his eyes with an almost ghastly relief.
"The President is not with them, anyhow," he said, and wiped his
forehead.
"But surely they are right away on the horizon," said the bewildered
Colonel, blinking and but half recovered from Bull's hasty though polite
explanation. "Could you possibly know your President among all those
people?"
"Could I know a white elephant among all those people!" answered Syme
somewhat irritably. "As you very truly say, they are on the horizon; but if
he were walking with them . . . by God! I believe this ground would shake."
After an instant's pause the new man called Ratcliffe said with gloomy
decision--
"Of course the President isn't with them. I wish to Gemini he were.
Much more likely the President is riding in triumph through Paris, or
sitting on the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral."
"This is absurd!" said Syme. "Something may have happened in our
absence; but he cannot have carried the world with a rush like that. It is
quite true," he added, frowning dubiously at the distant fields that lay
towards the little station, "it is certainly true that there seems to be a
crowd coming this way; but they are not all the army that you make out."
"Oh, they," said the new detective contemptuously; "no they are not a
very valuable force. But let me tell you frankly that they are precisely
calculated to our value-- we are not much, my boy, in Sunday's universe. He
has got hold of all the cables and telegraphs himself. But to kill the
Supreme Council he regards as a trivial matter, like a post card; it may be
left to his private secretary," and he spat on the grass.
Then he turned to the others and said somewhat austerely--
"There is a great deal to be said for death; but if anyone has any
preference for the other alternative, I strongly advise him to walk after
me."
With these words, he turned his broad back and strode with silent
energy towards the wood. The others gave one glance over their shoulders,
and saw that the dark cloud of men had detached itself from the station and
was moving with a mysterious discipline across the plain. They saw already,
even with the naked eye, black blots on the foremost faces, which marked the
masks they wore. They turned and followed their leader, who had already
struck the wood, and disappeared among the twinkling trees.
The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood they
had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool. The
inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows. They
made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the dizziness of a
cinematograph. Even the solid figures walking with him Syme could hardly see
for the patterns of sun and shade that danced upon them. Now a man's head
was lit as with a light of Rembrandt, leaving all else obliterated; now
again he had strong and staring white hands with the face of a negro. The
ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, and the black shade
of the brim cut his face so squarely in two that it seemed to be wearing one
of the black half-masks of their pursuers. The fancy tinted Syme's
overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a
mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men's faces
turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into
sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro
(after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the
world in which he had been moving for three days, this world where men took
off their beards and their spectacles and their noses, and turned into other
people. That tragic self-confidence which he had felt when he believed that
the Marquis was a devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the
Marquis was a friend. He felt almost inclined to ask after all these
bewilderments what was a friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that
was apart from what it seemed? The Marquis had taken off his nose and turned
out to be a detective. Might he not just as well take off his head and turn
out to be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering
woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the
glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found
in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found
there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism,
which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to
the universe.
As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Syme
strove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worst of his fancies.
With two impatient strides he overtook the man in the Marquis's straw hat,
the man whom he had come to address as Ratcliffe. In a voice exaggeratively
loud and cheerful, he broke the bottomless silence and made conversation.
"May I ask," he said, "where on earth we are all going to? "
So genuine had been the doubts of his soul, that he was quite glad to
hear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.
"We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he said. "I
think that part of the country is least likely to be with them."
"What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be running the
real world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, and
surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern armies and police."
"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you
talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've
got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the
poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been
anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some
decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich
smile; another said that if they blacked my face I might look like a negro
anarchist; but this old chap chipped in with a most extraordinary remark. 'A
pair of smoked spectacles will do it,' he said positively. 'Look at him now;
he looks like an angelic office boy. Put him on a pair of smoked spectacles,
and children will scream at the sight of him.' And so it was, by George!
When once my eyes were covered, all the rest, smile and big shoulders and
short hair, made me look a perfect little devil. As I say, it was simple
enough when it was done, like miracles; but that wasn't the really
miraculous part of it. There was one really staggering thing about the
business, and my head still turns at it."
"What was that?" asked Syme.
"I'll tell you," answered the man in spectacles. "This big pot in the
police who sized me up so that he knew how the goggles would go with my hair
and socks--by God, he never saw me at all!"
Syme's eyes suddenly flashed on him.
"How was that?" he asked. "I thought you talked to him."
"So I did," said Bull brightly; "but we talked in a pitch-dark room
like a coalcellar. There, you would never have guessed that."
"I could not have conceived it," said Syme gravely.
"It is indeed a new idea," said the Professor.
Their new ally was in practical matters a whirlwind. At the inquiry
office he asked with businesslike brevity about the trains for Dover. Having
got his information, he bundled the company into a cab, and put them and
himself inside a railway carriage before they had properly realised the
breathless process. They were already on the Calais boat before conversation
flowed freely.
"I had already arranged," he explained, "to go to France for my lunch;
but I am delighted to have someone to lunch with me. You see, I had to send
that beast, the Marquis, over with his bomb, because the President had his
eye on me, though God knows how. I'll tell you the story some day. It was
perfectly choking. Whenever I tried to slip out of it I saw the President
somewhere, smiling out of the bow-window of a club, or taking off his hat to
me from the top of an omnibus. I tell you, you can say what you like, that
fellow sold himself to the devil; he can be in six places at once."
"So you sent the Marquis off, I understand," asked the Professor. "Was
it long ago? Shall we be in time to catch him?"
"Yes," answered the new guide, "I've timed it all. He'll still be at
Calais when we arrive."
"But when we do catch him at Calais," said the Professor, "what are we
going to do?"
At this question the countenance of Dr. Bull fell for the first time.
He reflected a little, and then said--
"Theoretically, I suppose, we ought to call the police."
"Not I," said Syme. "Theoretically I ought to drown myself first. I
promised a poor fellow, who was a real modern pessimist, on my word of
honour not to tell the police. I'm no hand at casuistry, but I can't break
my word to a modern pessimist. It's like breaking one's word to a child."
"I'm in the same boat," said the Professor. "I tried to tell the police
and I couldn't, because of some silly oath I took. You see, when I was an
actor I was a sort of all-round beast. Perjury or treason is the only crime
I haven't committed. If I did that I shouldn't know the difference between
right and wrong."
"I've been through all that," said Dr. Bull, "and I've made up my mind.
I gave my promise to the Secretary--you know him, man who smiles upside
down. My friends, that man is the most utterly unhappy man that was ever
human. It may be his digestion, or his conscience, or his nerves, or his
philosophy of the universe, but he's damned, he's in hell! Well, I can't
turn on a man like that, and hunt him down. It's like whipping a leper. I
may be mad, but that's how I feel; and there's jolly well the end of it."
"I don't think you're mad," said Syme. "I knew you would decide like
that when first you--"
"Eh?" said Dr. Bull.
"When first you took off your spectacles."
Dr. Bull smiled a little, and strolled across the deck to look at the
sunlit sea. Then he strolled back again, kicking his heels carelessly, and a
companionable silence fell between the three men.
"Well," said Syme, "it seems that we have all the same kind of morality
or immorality, so we had better face the fact that comes of it."
"Yes," assented the Professor, "you're quite right; and we must hurry
up, for I can see the Grey Nose standing out from France."
"The fact that comes of it," said Syme seriously, "is this, that we
three are alone on this planet. Gogol has gone, God knows where; perhaps the
President has smashed him like a fly. On the Council we are three men
against three, like the Romans who held the bridge. But we are worse off
than that, first because they can appeal to their organization and we cannot
appeal to ours, and second because--"
"Because one of those other three men," said the Professor, "is not a
man."
Syme nodded and was silent for a second or two, then he said--
"My idea is this. We must do something to keep the Marquis in Calais
till tomorrow midday. I have turned over twenty schemes in my head. We
cannot denounce him as a dynamiter; that is agreed. We cannot get him
detained on some trivial charge, for we should have to appear; he knows us,
and he would smell a rat. We cannot pretend to keep him on anarchist
business; he might swallow much in that way, but not the notion of stopping
in Calais while the Czar went safely through Paris. We might try to kidnap
him, and lock him up ourselves; but he is a well-known man here. He has a
whole bodyguard of friends; he is very strong and brave, and the event is
doubtful. The only thing I can see to do is actually to take advantage of
the very things that are in the Marquis's favour. I am going to profit by
the fact that he is a highly respected nobleman. I am going to profit by the
fact that he has many friends and moves in the best society."
"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the Professor.
"The Symes are first mentioned in the fourteenth century," said Syme;
"but there is a tradition that one of them rode behind Bruce at Bannockburn.
Since 1350 the tree is quite clear."
"He's gone off his head," said the little Doctor, staring.
"Our bearings," continued Syme calmly, "are 'argent a chevron gules
charged with three cross crosslets of the field.' The motto varies."
The Professor seized Syme roughly by the waistcoat.
"We are just inshore," he said. "Are you seasick or joking in the wrong
place?"
"My remarks are almost painfully practical," answered Syme, in an
unhurried manner. "The house of St. Eustache also is very ancient. The
Marquis cannot deny that he is a gentleman. He cannot deny that I am a
gentleman. And in order to put the matter of my social position quite beyond
a doubt, I propose at the earliest opportunity to knock his hat off. But
here we are in the harbour."
They went on shore under the strong sun in a sort of daze. Syme, who
had now taken the lead as Bull had taken it in London, led them along a kind
of marine parade until he came to some cafes, embowered in a bulk of
greenery and overlooking the sea. As he went before them his step was
slightly swaggering, and he swung his stick like a sword. He was making
apparently for the extreme end of the line of cafes, but he stopped
abruptly. With a sharp gesture he motioned them to silence, but he pointed
with one gloved finger to a cafe table under a bank of flowering foliage at
which sat the Marquis de St. Eustache, his teeth shining in his thick, black
beard, and his bold, brown face shadowed by a light yellow straw hat and
outlined against the violet sea.
SYME sat down at a cafe table with his companions, his blue eyes
sparkling like the bright sea below, and ordered a bottle of Saumur with a
pleased impatience. He was for some reason in a condition of curious
hilarity. His spirits were already unnaturally high; they rose as the Saumur
sank, and in half an hour his talk was a torrent of nonsense. He professed
to be making out a plan of the conversation which was going to ensue between
himself and the deadly Marquis. He jotted it down wildly with a pencil. It
was arranged like a printed catechism, with questions and answers, and was
delivered with an extraordinary rapidity of utterance.
"I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take off my own.
I shall say, 'The Marquis de Saint Eustache, I believe.' He will say, ' The
celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume.' He will say in the most exquisite French,
'How are you?' I shall reply in the most exquisite Cockney, 'Oh, just the
Syme--' "
"Oh, shut it," said the man in spectacles. "Pull yourself together, and
chuck away that bit of paper. What are you really going to do?"
"But it was a lovely catechism," said Syme pathetically. "Do let me
read it you. It has only forty-three questions and answers, and some of the
Marquis's answers are wonderfully witty. I like to be just to my enemy."
"But what's the good of it all?" asked Dr. Bull in exasperation.
"It leads up to my challenge, don't you see," said Syme, beaming. "When
the Marquis has given the thirty-ninth reply, which runs--"
"Has it by any chance occurred to you," asked the Professor, with a
ponderous simplicity, "that the Marquis may not say all the forty-three
things you have put down for him? In that case, I understand, your own
epigrams may appear somewhat more forced."
Syme struck the table with a radiant face.
"Why, how true that is," he said, "and I never thought of it. Sir, you
have an intellect beyond the common. You will make a name."
"Oh, you're as drunk as an owl!" said the Doctor.
"It only remains," continued Syme quite unperturbed, "to adopt some
other method of breaking the ice (if I may so express it) between myself and
the man I wish to kill. And since the course of a dialogue cannot be
predicted by one of its parties alone (as you have pointed out with such
recondite acumen), the only thing to be done, I suppose, is for the one
party, as far as possible, to do all the dialogue by himself. And so I will,
by George!" And he stood up suddenly, his yellow hair blowing in the slight
sea breeze.
A band was playing in a cafe chantant hidden somewhere among the trees,
and a woman had just stopped singing. On Syme's heated head the bray of the
brass band seemed like the jar and jingle of that barrel-organ in Leicester
Square, to the tune of which he had once stood up to die. He looked across
to the little table where the Marquis sat. The man had two companions now,
solemn Frenchmen in frock-coats and silk hats, one of them with the red
rosette of the Legion of Honour, evidently people of a solid social
position. Besides these black, cylindrical costumes, the Marquis, in his
loose straw hat and light spring clothes, looked Bohemian and even barbaric;
but he looked the Marquis. Indeed, one might say that he looked the king,
with his animal elegance, his scornful eyes, and his proud head lifted
against the purple sea. But he was no Christian king, at any rate; he was,
rather, some swarthy despot, half Greek, half Asiatic, who in the days when
slavery seemed natural looked down on the Mediterranean, on his galley and
his groaning slaves. Just so, Syme thought, would the brown-gold face of
such a tyrant have shown against the dark green olives and the burning blue.
"Are you going to address the meeting?" asked the Professor peevishly,
seeing that Syme still stood up without moving.
Syme drained his last glass of sparkling wine.
"I am," he said, pointing across to the Marquis and his companions,
"that meeting. That meeting displeases me. I am going to pull that meeting's
great ugly, mahogany-coloured nose."
He stepped across swiftly, if not quite steadily. The Marquis, seeing
him, arched his black Assyrian eyebrows in surprise, but smiled politely.
"You are Mr. Syme, I think," he said.
Syme bowed.
"And you are the Marquis de Saint Eustache," he said gracefully.
"Permit me to pull your nose."
He leant over to do so, but the Marquis started backwards, upsetting
his chair, and the two men in top hats held Syme back by the shoulders.
"This man has insulted me!" said Syme, with gestures of explanation.
"Insulted you?" cried the gentleman with the red rosette, "when?"
"Oh, just now," said Syme recklessly. "He insulted my mother."
"Insulted your mother!" exclaimed the gentleman incredulously.
"Well, anyhow," said Syme, conceding a point, "my aunt."
"But how can the Marquis have insulted your aunt just now?" said the
second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. "He has been sitting here all
the time."
"Ah, it was what he said!" said Syme darkly.
"I said nothing at all," said the Marquis, "except something about the
band. I only said that I liked Wagner played well."
"It was an allusion to my family," said Syme firmly. "My aunt played
Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being insulted about
it."
"This seems most extraordinary," said the gentleman who was decore,
looking doubtfully at the Marquis.
"Oh, I assure you," said Syme earnestly, "the whole of your
conversation was simply packed with sinister allusions to my aunt's
weaknesses."
"This is nonsense!" said the second gentleman. "I for one have said
nothing for half an hour except that I liked the singing of that girl with
black hair."
"Well, there you are again!" said Syme indignantly. "My aunt's was
red."
"It seems to me," said the other, "that you are simply seeking a
pretext to insult the Marquis."
"By George!" said Syme, facing round and looking at him, "what a clever
chap you are!"
The Marquis started up with eyes flaming like a tiger's.
"Seeking a quarrel with me!" he cried. "Seeking a fight with me! By
God! there was never a man who had to seek long. These gentlemen will
perhaps act for me. There are still four hours of daylight. Let us fight
this evening."
Syme bowed with a quite beautiful graciousness.
"Marquis," he said, "your action is worthy of your fame and blood.
Permit me to consult for a moment with the gentlemen in whose hands I shall
place myself."
In three long strides he rejoined his companions, and they, who had
seen his champagne-inspired attack and listened to his idiotic explanations,
were quite startled at the look of him. For now that he came back to them he
was quite sober, a little pale, and he spoke in a low voice of passionate
practicality.
"I have done it," he said hoarsely. "I have fixed a fight on the beast.
But look here, and listen carefully. There is no time for talk. You are my
seconds, and everything must come from you. Now you must insist, and insist
absolutely, on the duel coming off after seven to-morrow, so as to give me
the chance of preventing him from catching the 7.45 for Paris. If he misses
that he misses his crime. He can't refuse to meet you on such a small point
of time and place. But this is what he will do. He will choose a field
somewhere near a wayside station, where he can pick up the train. He is a
very good swordsman, and he will trust to killing me in time to catch it.
But I can fence well too, and I think I can keep him in play, at any rate,
until the train is lost. Then perhaps he may kill me to console his
feelings. You understand? Very well then, let me introduce you to some
charming friends of mine," and leading them quickly across the parade, he
presented them to the Marquis's seconds by two very aristocratic names of
which they had not previously heard.
Syme was subject to spasms of singular common sense, not otherwise a
part of his character. They were (as he said of his impulse about the
spectacles) poetic intuitions, and they sometimes rose to the exaltation of
prophecy.
He had correctly calculated in this case the policy of his opponent.
When the Marquis was informed by his seconds that Syme could only fight in
the morning, he must fully have realised that an obstacle had suddenly
arisen between him and his bomb-throwing business in the capital. Naturally
he could not explain this objection to his friends, so he chose the course
which Syme had predicted. He induced his seconds to settle on a small meadow
not far from the railway, and he trusted to the fatality of the first
engagement.
When he came down very coolly to the field of honour, no one could have
guessed that he had any anxiety about a journey; his hands were in his
pockets, his straw hat on the back of his head, his handsome face brazen in
the sun. But it might have struck a stranger as odd that there appeared in
his train, not only his seconds carrying the sword-case, but two of his
servants carrying a portmanteau and a luncheon basket.
Early as was the hour, the sun soaked everything in warmth, and Syme
was vaguely surprised to see so many spring flowers burning gold and silver
in the tall grass in which the whole company stood almost knee-deep.
With the exception of the Marquis, all the men were in sombre and
solemn morning-dress, with hats like black chimney-pots; the little Doctor
especially, with the addition of his black spectacles, looked like an
undertaker in a farce. Syme could not help feeling a comic contrast between
this funereal church parade of apparel and the rich and glistening meadow,
growing wild flowers everywhere. But, indeed, this comic contrast between
the yellow blossoms and the black hats was but a symbol of the tragic
contrast between the yellow blossoms and the black business. On his right
was a little wood; far away to his left lay the long curve of the railway
line, which he was, so to speak, guarding from the Marquis, whose goal and
escape it was. In front of him, behind the black group of his opponents, he
could see, like a tinted cloud, a small almond bush in flower against the
faint line of the sea.
The member of the Legion of Honour, whose name it seemed was Colonel
Ducroix, approached the Professor and Dr. Bull with great politeness, and
suggested that the play should terminate with the first considerable hurt.
Dr. Bull, however, having been carefully coached by Syme upon this
point of policy, insisted, with great dignity and in very bad French, that
it should continue until one of the combatants was disabled. Syme had made
up his mind that he could avoid disabling the Marquis and prevent the
Marquis from disabling him for at least twenty minutes. In twenty minutes
the Paris train would have gone by.
"To a man of the well-known skill and valour of Monsieur de St.
Eustache," said the Professor solemnly, "it must be a matter of indifference
which method is adopted, and our principal has strong reasons for demanding
the longer encounter, reasons the delicacy of which prevent me from being
explicit, but for the just and honourable nature of which I can--"
"Peste!" broke from the Marquis behind, whose face had suddenly
darkened, "let us stop talking and begin," and he slashed off the head of a
tall flower with his stick.
Syme understood his rude impatience and instinctively looked over his
shoulder to see whether the train was coming in sight. But there was no
smoke on the horizon.
Colonel Ducroix knelt down and unlocked the case, taking out a pair of
twin swords, which took the sunlight and turned to two streaks of white
fire. He offered one to the Marquis, who snatched it without ceremony, and
another to Syme, who took it, bent it, and poised it with as much delay as
was consistent with dignity.
Then the Colonel took out another pair of blades, and taking one
himself and giving another to Dr. Bull, proceeded to place the men.
Both combatants had thrown off their coats and waistcoats, and stood
sword in hand. The seconds stood on each side of the line of fight with
drawn swords also, but still sombre in their dark frock-coats and hats. The
principals saluted. The Colonel said quietly, "Engage!" and the two blades
touched and tingled.
When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme's arm, all the fantastic
fears that have been the subject of this story fell from him like dreams
from a man waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in order as mere
delusions of the nerves--how the fear of the Professor had been the fear of
the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear of the Doctor had been
the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was the old fear that
any miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless modern fear that no
miracle can ever happen. But he saw that these fears were fancies, for he
found himself in the presence of the great fact of the fear of death, with
its coarse and pitiless common sense. He felt like a man who had dreamed all
night of falling over precipices, and had woke up on the morning when he was
to be hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the channel
of his foe's foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had felt the two tongues
of steel touch, vibrating like two living things, he knew that his enemy was
a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had come.
He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the
grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He
could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy
that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into
blossom in the meadow--flowers blood red and burning gold and blue,
fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed
for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the Marquis, they saw
the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line. He had the feeling that
if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever before that
almond tree, desiring nothing else in the world.
But while earth and sky and everything had the living beauty of a thing
lost, the other half of his head was as clear as glass, and he was parrying
his enemy's point with a kind of clockwork skill of which he had hardly
supposed himself capable. Once his enemy's point ran along his wrist,
leaving a slight streak of blood, but it either was not noticed or was
tacitly ignored. Every now and then he riposted, and once or twice he could
almost fancy that he felt his point go home, but as there was no blood on
blade or shirt he supposed he was mistaken. Then came an interruption and a
change.
At the risk of losing all, the Marquis, interrupting his quiet stare,
flashed one glance over his shoulder at the line of railway on his right.
Then he turned on Syme a face transfigured to that of a fiend, and began to
fight as if with twenty weapons. The attack came so fast and furious, that
the one shining sword seemed a shower of shining arrows. Syme had no chance
to look at the railway; but also he had no need. He could guess the reason
of the Marquis's sudden madness of battle-- the Paris train was in sight.
But the Marquis's morbid energy over-reached itself. Twice Syme,
parrying, knocked his opponent's point far out of the fighting circle; and
the third time his riposte was so rapid, that there was no doubt about the
hit this time. Syme's sword actually bent under the weight of the Marquis's
body, which it had pierced.
Syme was as certain that he had stuck his blade into his enemy as a
gardener that he has stuck his spade into the ground. Yet the Marquis sprang
back from the stroke without a stagger, and Syme stood staring at his own
sword-point like an idiot. There was no blood on it at all.
There was an instant of rigid silence, and then Syme in his turn fell
furiously on the other, filled with a flaming curiosity. The Marquis was
probably, in a general sense, a better fencer than he, as he had surmised at
the beginning, but at the moment the Marquis seemed distraught and at a
disadvantage. He fought wildly and even weakly, and he constantly looked
away at the railway line, almost as if he feared the train more than the
pointed steel. Syme, on the other hand, fought fiercely but still carefully,
in an intellectual fury, eager to solve the riddle of his own bloodless
sword. For this purpose, he aimed less at the Marquis's body, and more at
his throat and head. A minute and a half afterwards he felt his point enter
the man's neck below the jaw. It came out clean. Half mad, he thrust again,
and made what should have been a bloody scar on the Marquis's cheek. But
there was no scar.
For one moment the heaven of Syme again grew black with supernatural
terrors. Surely the man had a charmed life. But this new spiritual dread was
a more awful thing than had been the mere spiritual topsy-turvydom
symbolised by the paralytic who pursued him. The Professor was only a
goblin; this man was a devil--perhaps he was the Devil! Anyhow, this was
certain, that three times had a human sword been driven into him and made no
mark. When Syme had that thought he drew himself up, and all that was good
in him sang high up in the air as a high wind sings in the trees. He thought
of all the human things in his story--of the Chinese lanterns in Saffron
Park, of the girl's red hair in the garden, of the honest, beer-swilling
sailors down by the dock, of his loyal companions standing by. Perhaps he
had been chosen as a champion of all these fresh and kindly things to cross
swords with the enemy of all creation. "After all," he said to himself, "I
am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself
cannot do--I can die," and as the word went through his head, he heard a
faint and far-off hoot, which would soon be the roar of the Paris train.
He fell to fighting again with a supernatural levity, like a Mohammedan
panting for Paradise. As the train came nearer and nearer he fancied he
could see people putting up the floral arches in Paris; he joined in the
growing noise and the glory of the great Republic whose gate he was guarding
against Hell. His thoughts rose higher and higher with the rising roar of
the train, which ended, as if proudly, in a long and piercing whistle. The
train stopped.
Suddenly, to the astonishment of everyone the Marquis sprang back quite
out of sword reach and threw down his sword. The leap was wonderful, and not
the less wonderful because Syme had plunged his sword a moment before into
the man's thigh.
"Stop!" said the Marquis in a voice that compelled a momentary
obedience. "I want to say something."
"What is the matter?" asked Colonel Ducroix, staring. "Has there been
foul play?"
"There has been foul play somewhere," said Dr. Bull, who was a little
pale. "Our principal has wounded the Marquis four times at least, and he is
none the worse ."
The Marquis put up his hand with a curious air of ghastly patience.
"Please let me speak," he said. "It is rather important. Mr. Syme," he
continued, turning to his opponent, "we are fighting to-day, if I remember
right, because you expressed a wish (which I thought irrational) to pull my
nose. Would you oblige me by pulling my nose now as quickly as possible? I
have to catch a train."
"I protest that this is most irregular," said Dr. Bull indignantly.
"It is certainly somewhat opposed to precedent," said Colonel Ducroix,
looking wistfully at his principal. "There is, I think, one case on record
(Captain Bellegarde and the Baron Zumpt) in which the weapons were changed
in the middle of the encounter at the request of one of the combatants. But
one can hardly call one's nose a weapon."
"Will you or will you not pull my nose?" said the Marquis in
exasperation. "Come, come, Mr. Syme! You wanted to do it, do it! You can
have no conception of how important it is to me. Don't be so selfish! Pull
my nose at once, when I ask you!" and he bent slightly forward with a
fascinating smile. The Paris train, panting and groaning, had grated into a
little station behind the neighbouring hill.
Syme had the feeling he had more than once had in these adventures--
the sense that a horrible and sublime wave lifted to heaven was just
toppling over. Walking in a world he half understood, he took two paces
forward and seized the Roman nose of this remarkable nobleman. He pulled it
hard, and it came off in his hand.
He stood for some seconds with a foolish solemnity, with the pasteboard
proboscis still between his fingers, looking at it, while the sun and the
clouds and the wooded hills looked down upon this imbecile scene.
The Marquis broke the silence in a loud and cheerful voice.
"If anyone has any use for my left eyebrow," he said, "he can have it.
Colonel Ducroix, do accept my left eyebrow! It's the kind of thing that
might come in useful any day," and he gravely tore off one of his swarthy
Assyrian brows, bringing about half his brown forehead with it, and politely
offered it to the Colonel, who stood crimson and speechless with rage.
"If I had known," he spluttered, "that I was acting for a poltroon who
pads himself to fight--"
"Oh, I know, I know!" said the Marquis, recklessly throwing various
parts of himself right and left about the field. "You are making a mistake;
but it can't be explained just now. I tell you the train has come into the
station!"
"Yes," said Dr. Bull fiercely, "and the train shall go out of the
station. It shall go out without you. We know well enough for what devil's
work--"
The mysterious Marquis lifted his hands with a desperate gesture. He
was a strange scarecrow standing there in the sun with half his old face
peeled off, and half another face glaring and grinning from underneath.
"Will you drive me mad?" he cried. "The train--"
"You shall not go by the train," said Syme firmly, and grasped his
sword.
The wild figure turned towards Syme, and seemed to be gathering itself
for a sublime effort before speaking.
"You great fat, blasted, blear-eyed, blundering, thundering, brainless,
Godforsaken, doddering, damned fool!" he said without taking breath. "You
great silly, pink-faced, towheaded turnip! You--"
"You shall not go by this train," repeated Syme.
"And why the infernal blazes," roared the other, "should I want to go
by the train?"
"We know all," said the Professor sternly. "You are going to Paris to
throw a bomb!"
"Going to Jericho to throw a Jabberwock!" cried the other, tearing his
hair, which came off easily.
"Have you all got softening of the brain, that you don't realise what I
am? Did you really think I wanted to catch that train? Twenty Paris trains
might go by for me. Damn Paris trains!"
"Then what did you care about?" began the Professor.
"What did I care about? I didn't care about catching the train; I cared
about whether the train caught me, and now, by God! it has caught me."
"I regret to inform you," said Syme with restraint, "that your remarks
convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the remains
of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your chin, your
meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself in many ways.
What do you mean by saying that the train has caught you? It may be my
literary fancy, but somehow I feel that it ought to mean something."
"It means everything," said the other, "and the end of everything.
Sunday has us now in the hollow of his hand."
"Us!" repeated the Professor, as if stupefied. "What do you mean by
'us'?"
"The police, of course!" said the Marquis, and tore off his scalp and
half his face.
The head which emerged was the blonde, well brushed, smooth-haired head
which is common in the English constabulary, but the face was terribly pale.
"I am Inspector Ratcliffe," he said, with a sort of haste that verged
on harshness. "My name is pretty well known to the police, and I can see
well enough that you belong to them. But if there is any doubt about my
position, I have a card " and he began to pull a blue card from his pocket.
The Professor gave a tired gesture.
"Oh, don't show it us," he said wearily; "we've got enough of them to
equip a paper-chase."
The little man named Bull, had, like many men who seem to be of a mere
vivacious vulgarity, sudden movements of good taste. Here he certainly saved
the situation. In the midst of this staggering transformation scene he
stepped forward with all the gravity and responsibility of a second, and
addressed the two seconds of the Marquis.
"Gentlemen," he said, "we all owe you a serious apology; but I assure
you that you have not been made the victims of such a low joke as you
imagine, or indeed of anything undignified in a man of honour. You have not
wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons,
but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy. A secret society of
anarchists is hunting us like hares; not such unfortunate madmen as may here
or there throw a bomb through starvation or German philosophy, but a rich
and powerful and fanatical church, a church of eastern pessimism, which
holds it holy to destroy mankind like vermin. How hard they hunt us you can
gather from the fact that we are driven to such disguises as those for which
I apologise, and to such pranks as this one by which you suffer. "
The younger second of the Marquis, a short man with a black moustache,
bowed politely, and said--
"Of course, I accept the apology; but you will in your turn forgive me
if I decline to follow you further into your difficulties, and permit myself
to say good morning! The sight of an acquaintance and distinguished
fellow-townsman coming to pieces in the open air is unusual, and, upon the
whole, sufficient for one day. Colonel Ducroix, I would in no way influence
your actions, but if you feel with me that our present society is a little
abnormal, I am now going to walk back to the town."
Colonel Ducroix moved mechanically, but then tugged abruptly at his
white moustache and broke out--
"No, by George! I won't. If these gentlemen are really in a mess with a
lot of low wreckers like that, I'll see them through it. I have fought for
France, and it is hard if I can't fight for civilization."
Dr. Bull took off his hat and waved it, cheering as at a public
meeting.
"Don't make too much noise," said Inspector Ratcliffe, "Sunday may hear
you."
"Sunday!" cried Bull, and dropped his hat.
"Yes," retorted Ratcliffe, "he may be with them."
"With whom?" asked Syme.
"With the people out of that train," said the other.
"What you say seems utterly wild," began Syme. "Why, as a matter of
fact--But, my God," he cried out suddenly, like a man who sees an explosion
a long way off, "by God! if this is true the whole bally lot of us on the
Anarchist Council were against anarchy! Every born man was a detective
except the President and his personal secretary. What can it mean?"
"Mean!" said the new policeman with incredible violence. "It means that
we are struck dead! Don't you know Sunday? Don't you know that his jokes are
always so big and simple that one has never thought of them? Can you think
of anything more like Sunday than this, that he should put all his powerful
enemies on the Supreme Council, and then take care that it was not supreme?
I tell you he has bought every trust, he has captured every cable, he has
control of every railway line--especially of that railway line!" and he
pointed a shaking finger towards the small wayside station. "The whole
movement was controlled by him; half the world was ready to rise for him.
But there were just five people, perhaps, who would have resisted him . . .
and the old devil put them on the Supreme Council, to waste their time in
watching each other. Idiots that we are, he planned the whole of our
idiocies! Sunday knew that the Professor would chase Syme through London,
and that Syme would fight me in France. And he was combining great masses of
capital, and seizing great lines of telegraphy, while we five idiots were
running after each other like a lot of confounded babies playing blind man's
buff."
"Well?" asked Syme with a sort of steadiness.
"Well," replied the other with sudden serenity, "he has found us
playing blind man's buff to-day in a field of great rustic beauty and
extreme solitude. He has probably captured the world; it only remains to him
to capture this field and all the fools in it. And since you really want to
know what was my objection to the arrival of that train, I will tell you. My
objection was that Sunday or his Secretary has just this moment got out of
it."
Syme uttered an involuntary cry, and they all turned their eyes towards
the far-off station. It was quite true that a considerable bulk of people
seemed to be moving in their direction. But they were too distant to be
distinguished in any way.
"It was a habit of the late Marquis de St. Eustache," said the new
policeman, producing a leather case, "always to carry a pair of opera
glasses. Either the President or the Secretary is coming after us with that
mob. They have caught us in a nice quiet place where we are under no
temptations to break our oaths by calling the police. Dr. Bull, I have a
suspicion that you will see better through these than through your own
highly decorative spectacles."
He handed the field-glasses to the Doctor, who immediately took off his
spectacles and put the apparatus to his eyes.
"It cannot be as bad as you say," said the Professor, somewhat shaken.
"There are a good number of them certainly, but they may easily be ordinary
tourists."
"Do ordinary tourists," asked Bull, with the fieldglasses to his eyes,
"wear black masks half-way down the face?"
Syme almost tore the glasses out of his hand, and looked through them.
Most men in the advancing mob really looked ordinary enough; but it was
quite true that two or three of the leaders in front wore black half-masks
almost down to their mouths. This disguise is very complete, especially at
such a distance, and Syme found it impossible to conclude anything from the
clean-shaven jaws and chins of the men talking in the front. But presently
as they talked they all smiled and one of them smiled on one side.
SYME put the field-glasses from his eyes with an almost ghastly relief.
"The President is not with them, anyhow," he said, and wiped his
forehead.
"But surely they are right away on the horizon," said the bewildered
Colonel, blinking and but half recovered from Bull's hasty though polite
explanation. "Could you possibly know your President among all those
people?"
"Could I know a white elephant among all those people!" answered Syme
somewhat irritably. "As you very truly say, they are on the horizon; but if
he were walking with them . . . by God! I believe this ground would shake."
After an instant's pause the new man called Ratcliffe said with gloomy
decision--
"Of course the President isn't with them. I wish to Gemini he were.
Much more likely the President is riding in triumph through Paris, or
sitting on the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral."
"This is absurd!" said Syme. "Something may have happened in our
absence; but he cannot have carried the world with a rush like that. It is
quite true," he added, frowning dubiously at the distant fields that lay
towards the little station, "it is certainly true that there seems to be a
crowd coming this way; but they are not all the army that you make out."
"Oh, they," said the new detective contemptuously; "no they are not a
very valuable force. But let me tell you frankly that they are precisely
calculated to our value-- we are not much, my boy, in Sunday's universe. He
has got hold of all the cables and telegraphs himself. But to kill the
Supreme Council he regards as a trivial matter, like a post card; it may be
left to his private secretary," and he spat on the grass.
Then he turned to the others and said somewhat austerely--
"There is a great deal to be said for death; but if anyone has any
preference for the other alternative, I strongly advise him to walk after
me."
With these words, he turned his broad back and strode with silent
energy towards the wood. The others gave one glance over their shoulders,
and saw that the dark cloud of men had detached itself from the station and
was moving with a mysterious discipline across the plain. They saw already,
even with the naked eye, black blots on the foremost faces, which marked the
masks they wore. They turned and followed their leader, who had already
struck the wood, and disappeared among the twinkling trees.
The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood they
had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool. The
inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows. They
made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the dizziness of a
cinematograph. Even the solid figures walking with him Syme could hardly see
for the patterns of sun and shade that danced upon them. Now a man's head
was lit as with a light of Rembrandt, leaving all else obliterated; now
again he had strong and staring white hands with the face of a negro. The
ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, and the black shade
of the brim cut his face so squarely in two that it seemed to be wearing one
of the black half-masks of their pursuers. The fancy tinted Syme's
overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a
mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men's faces
turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into
sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro
(after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the
world in which he had been moving for three days, this world where men took
off their beards and their spectacles and their noses, and turned into other
people. That tragic self-confidence which he had felt when he believed that
the Marquis was a devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the
Marquis was a friend. He felt almost inclined to ask after all these
bewilderments what was a friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that
was apart from what it seemed? The Marquis had taken off his nose and turned
out to be a detective. Might he not just as well take off his head and turn
out to be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering
woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the
glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found
in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found
there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism,
which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to
the universe.
As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Syme
strove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worst of his fancies.
With two impatient strides he overtook the man in the Marquis's straw hat,
the man whom he had come to address as Ratcliffe. In a voice exaggeratively
loud and cheerful, he broke the bottomless silence and made conversation.
"May I ask," he said, "where on earth we are all going to? "
So genuine had been the doubts of his soul, that he was quite glad to
hear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.
"We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he said. "I
think that part of the country is least likely to be with them."
"What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be running the
real world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, and
surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern armies and police."
"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you
talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've
got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the
poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been
anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some
decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich