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To Edmund Clerihew Bentley
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us
Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as eve,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent our cap and beds were heard.
Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain--
Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.
This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells--
Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand--
Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.
G. K. C.
THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and
ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its
sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the
outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its
architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently
under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was
described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any
definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an
intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant
place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at
the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must
be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed
in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he
could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people
were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with
the long, auburn hair and the impudent face-- that young man was not really
a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white
beard and the wild, white hat--that venerable humbug was not really a
philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That
scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like
neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not
discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he
have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole
place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a
workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who
stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written
comedy.
More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall,
when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole
insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more
strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens
were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish
trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit. And this was strongest of all on
one particular evening, still vaguely remembered in the locality, of which
the auburn-haired poet was the hero. It was not by any means the only
evening of which he was the hero. On many nights those passing by his little
back garden might hear his high, didactic voice laying down the law to men
and particularly to women. The attitude of women in such cases was indeed
one of the paradoxes of the place. Most of the women were of the kind
vaguely called emancipated, and professed some protest against male
supremacy. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant
compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while
he is talking. And Mr. Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, was really (in
some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one only laughed at the end of
it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness
with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure.
He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance,
which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair
parted in the middle was literally like a woman's, and curved into the slow
curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost
saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the
chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at
once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed
like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be
remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of
the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable
plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of
feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome
they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an
unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past
description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it
covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so
close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very
empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which
is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.
I say that there are some inhabitants who may remember the evening if
only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it because it
marked the first appearance in the place of the second poet of Saffron Park.
For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had reigned without a rival; it
was upon the night of the sunset that his solitude suddenly ended. The new
poet, who introduced himself by the name of Gabriel Syme was a very
mild-looking mortal, with a fair, pointed beard and faint, yellow hair. But
an impression grew that he was less meek than he looked. He signalised his
entrance by differing with the established poet, Gregory, upon the whole
nature of poetry. He said that he (Syme) was poet of law, a poet of order;
nay, he said he was a poet of respectability. So all the Saffron Parkers
looked at him as if he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky.
In fact, Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two
events.
"It may well be," he said, in his sudden lyrical manner, "it may well
be on such a night of clouds and cruel colours that there is brought forth
upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet
of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not
comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden."
The man with the meek blue eyes and the pale, pointed beard endured
these thunders with a certain submissive solemnity. The third party of the
group, Gregory's sister Rosamond, who had her brother's braids of red hair,
but a kindlier face underneath them, laughed with such mixture of admiration
and disapproval as she gave commonly to the family oracle.
Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.
"An artist is identical with an anarchist," he cried. "You might
transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws
a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He
sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of
perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen.
An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet
delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the
world would be the Underground Railway."
"So it is," said Mr. Syme.
"Nonsense! " said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else
attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains
look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because
they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that
whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It
is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next
station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture!
oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station
were unaccountably Baker Street!"
"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say
of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare,
strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We
feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it
not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station?
Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker
Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this,
that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of
mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take
your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who
commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"
"Must you go?" inquired Gregory sarcastically.
"I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes
in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has
won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left
Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand
things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of
hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,'
it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing
conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam."
Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.
"And even then," he said, "we poets always ask the question, 'And what
is Victoria now that you have got there ?' You think Victoria is like the
New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria.
Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet
is always in revolt."
"There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being
in revolt ? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being
sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome
thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they
are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is--revolting. It's mere vomiting."
The girl winced for a flash at the unpleasant word, but Syme was too
hot to heed her.
"It is things going right," he cried, "that is poetical I Our
digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the
foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than
the flowers, more poetical than the stars-- the most poetical thing in the
world is not being sick."
"Really," said Gregory superciliously, "the examples you choose--"
"I beg your pardon," said Syme grimly, "I forgot we had abolished all
conventions."
For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory's forehead.
"You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionise society on this lawn
?"
Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
"No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about
your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do."
Gregory's big bull's eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion,
and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.
"Don't you think, then," he said in a dangerous voice, "that I am
serious about my anarchism?"
"I beg your pardon ?" said Syme.
"Am I not serious about my anarchism ?" cried Gregory, with knotted
fists.
"My dear fellow!" said Syme, and strolled away.
With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond Gregory
still in his company.
"Mr. Syme," she said, "do the people who talk like you and my brother
often mean what they say ? Do you mean what you say now ?"
Syme smiled.
"Do you ?" he asked.
"What do you mean ?" asked the girl, with grave eyes.
"My dear Miss Gregory," said Syme gently, "there are many kinds of
sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt, do you
mean what you say ? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean what
you say ? No. It is true, but you don't mean it. Now, sometimes a man like
your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth,
quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he means--from sheer
force of meaning it."
She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave and
open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning
responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the
maternal watch which is as old as the world.
"Is he really an anarchist, then?" she asked.
"Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense."
She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--
"He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"
Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.
"Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."
And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity and of his
safety.
Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in spite
of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always
the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too
closely. He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration. He grew
passionate in his praise of tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a
smell of lilac all round him. Once he heard very faintly in some distant
street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic
words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.
He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the
whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a
rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which
he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow
this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was
over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive
in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her
strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn
tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable, that it might
well have been a dream.
When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street
lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence
behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure almost as rigid
and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long frock coat
were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe
of fiery hair against the light, and also something aggressive in the
attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He had something of the
look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.
He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally
returned.
"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's
conversation?"
"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is
your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is
anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in
green and gold."
"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see
the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp
by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said, "But may I ask if you
have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our little argument?"
"No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, "I did
not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."
The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing,
listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth
voice and with a rather bewildering smile.
"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of woman has
ever succeeded in doing before."
"Indeed!"
"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person
succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."
"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.
"I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel could wipe it out.
If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one way by which
that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am going, at the
possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to prove to you that you were
wrong in what you said."
"In what I said?"
"You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."
"There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never doubted
that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you
said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men up to a
neglected truth."
Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.
"And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You think me
a flaneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."
Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.
"Serious! " he cried. "Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these
damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious? One comes
here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well, but I should
think very little of a man who didn't keep something in the background of
his life that was more serious than all this talking-- something more
serious, whether it was religion or only drink."
"Very well," said Gregory, his face darkening, "you shall see something
more serious than either drink or religion."
Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory again
opened his lips.
"You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that you
have one?"
"Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now."
"Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion
involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son
of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If you will
take upon yourself this awful abnegations if you will consent to burden your
soul with a vow that you should never make and a knowledge you should never
dream about, I will promise you in return--"
"You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused.
"I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly took
off his hat.
"Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that
a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he is
always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a Christian, and
promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I will not report
anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And now, in the name of
Colney Hatch, what is it?"
"I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will call a
cab."
He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the road.
The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the trap the address of
an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank of the river. The cab whisked
itself away again, and in it these two fantastics quitted their fantastic
town.
THE cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated themselves
in a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained wooden table with one
wooden leg. The room was so small and dark, that very little could be seen
of the attendant who was summoned, beyond a vague and dark impression of
something bulky and bearded.
"Will you take a little supper?" asked Gregory politely. "The pate de
foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."
Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference--
"Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."
To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly, sir!"
and went away apparently to get it.
"What will you drink?" resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. "I shall only have a crepe de menthe myself; I have dined.
But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you with a
half-bottle of Pommery at least?"
"Thank you!" said the motionless Syme. "You are very good."
His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in
themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the actual
appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it particularly good.
Then he suddenly began to eat with great rapidity and appetite.
"Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!" he said to Gregory,
smiling. "I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new
to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the other way."
"You are not asleep, I assure you," said Gregory. "You are, on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your existence. Ah,
here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be a slight disproportion,
let us say, between the inner arrangements of this excellent hotel and its
simple and unpretentious exterior. But that is all our modesty. We are the
most modest men that ever lived on earth."
"And who are we?" asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.
"It is quite simple," replied Gregory. "We are the serious anarchists,
in whom you do not believe."
"Oh!" said Syme shortly. "You do yourselves well in drinks."
"Yes, we are serious about everything," answered Gregory.
Then after a pause he added--
"If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little, don't
put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don't wish you to do
yourself an injustice."
"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm;
"but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition. May I
smoke?"
"Certainly!" said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. "Try one of mine."
Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out of his
waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and let out a long
cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit that he performed these
rites with so much composure, for almost before he had begun them the table
at which he sat had begun to revolve, first slowly, and then rapidly, as if
at an insane seance.
"You must not mind it," said Gregory; "it's a kind of screw."
"Quite so," said Syme placidly, "a kind of screw. How simple that is!"
The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering across
the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a factory chimney, and
the two, with their chairs and table, shot down through the floor as if the
earth had swallowed them. They went rattling down a kind of roaring chimney
as rapidly as a lift cut loose, and they came with an abrupt bump to the
bottom. But when Gregory threw open a pair of doors and let in a red
subterranean light, Syme was still smoking with one leg thrown over the
other, and had not turned a yellow hair.
Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which was
the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as big as a
fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the door there was a
sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory struck five times. A heavy
voice with a foreign accent asked him who he was. To this he gave the more
or less unexpected reply, "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." The heavy hinges began
to move; it was obviously some kind of password.
Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a
network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering pattern
was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and revolvers, closely
packed or interlocked.
"I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities," said Gregory; "we
have to be very strict here."
"Oh, don't apologise," said Syme. "I know your passion for law and
order," and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel weapons. With
his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he looked a singularly
frail and fanciful figure as he walked down that shining avenue of death.
They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a
queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but
presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a
scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this
apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful
shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of
iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself seemed like the inside
of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.
"And now, my dear Mr. Syme," said Gregory, throwing himself in an
expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, "now we are quite
cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give you any notion of
why I brought you here. It was one of those quite arbitrary emotions, like
jumping off a cliff or falling in love. Suffice it to say that you were an
inexpressibly irritating fellow, and, to do you justice, you are still. I
would break twenty oaths of secrecy for the pleasure of taking you down a
peg. That way you have of lighting a cigar would make a priest break the
seal of confession. Well, you said that you were quite certain I was not a
serious anarchist. Does this place strike you as being serious?"
"It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety," assented Syme;
"but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me information,
because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted from me a promise not to
tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep. So it is in mere
curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is it really all about?
What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?"
"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do
not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of
anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig
deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary
distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere
rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution
talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have
abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you
will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
"You spoke of a second question," snapped Gregory.
"With pleasure," resumed Syme. "In all your present acts and
surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt who
lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people living
from preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron door. You cannot
pass it without submitting to the humiliation of calling yourself Mr.
Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel instruments which make the
place, if I may say so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after
taking all this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the earth,
you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to every silly
woman in Saffron Park?"
Gregory smiled.
"The answer is simple," he said. "I told you I was a serious anarchist,
and you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me. Unless I took them into
this infernal room they would not believe me."
Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory went
on.
"The history of the thing might amuse you," he said. "When first I
became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable disguises.
I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our anarchist
pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I certainly
understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a
cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in
episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder,
'Down! down! presumptuous human reason!' they found out in some way that I
was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a
millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool
could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a
humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to
understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence-- the
proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw myself into the
major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I called out 'Blood!'
abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, 'Let the weak
perish; it is the Law.' Well, well, it seems majors don't do this. I was
nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the President of the Central
Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe."
"What is his name?" asked Syme.
"You would not know it," answered Gregory. "That is his greatness.
Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they were
heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he is not
heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with him without
feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children in his hands."
He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed--
"But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an
epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said to him, 'What
disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more respectable than
bishops and majors?' He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face.
'You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you
harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?' I nodded. He
suddenly lifted his lion's voice. 'Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you
fool!' he roared so that the room shook. 'Nobody will ever expect you to do
anything dangerous then.' And he turned his broad back on me without another
word. I took his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and
murder to those women day and night, and--by God!-- they would let me wheel
their perambulators."
Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.
"You took me in," he said. "It is really a smart dodge."
Then after a pause he added--
"What do you call this tremendous President of yours?"
"We generally call him Sunday," replied Gregory with simplicity. 'You
see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, and they are
named after days of the week. He is called Sunday, by some of his admirers
Bloody Sunday. It is curious you should mention the matter, because the very
night you have dropped in (if I may so express it) is the night on which our
London branch, which assembles in this room, has to elect its own deputy to
fill a vacancy in the Council. The gentleman who has for some time past
played, with propriety and general applause, the difficult part of Thursday,
has died quite suddenly. Consequently, we have called a meeting this very
evening to elect a successor."
He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of smiling
embarrassment.
"I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme," he continued casually.
"I feel that I can confide anything to you, as you have promised to tell
nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something that I would not say in so
many words to the anarchists who will be coming to the room in about ten
minutes. We shall, of course, go through a form of election; but I don't
mind telling you that it is practically certain what the result will be." He
looked down for a moment modestly. "It is almost a settled thing that I am
to be Thursday."
"My dear fellow." said Syme heartily, "I congratulate you. A great
career!"
Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking
rapidly.
"As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table," he
said, "and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible."
Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a
walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick, a large
Colt's revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of brandy. Over the
chair, beside the table, was thrown a heavy-looking cape or cloak.
"I have only to get the form of election finished," continued Gregory
with animation, "then I snatch up this cloak and stick, stuff these other
things into my pocket, step out of a door in this cavern, which opens on the
river, where there is a steam-tug already waiting for me, and
then--then--oh, the wild joy of being Thursday!" And he clasped his hands.
Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent languor, got
to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.
"Why is it," he asked vaguely, "that I think you are quite a decent
fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?" He paused a moment, and then
added with a sort of fresh curiosity, "Is it because you are such an ass?"
There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out--
"Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been in
in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave you a promise
before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under red-hot
pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise of the same
kind? "
"A promise?" asked Gregory, wondering.
"Yes," said Syme very seriously, "a promise. I swore before God that I
would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or
whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret to
the anarchists?"
"Your secret?" asked the staring Gregory. "Have you got a secret?"
"Yes," said Syme, "I have a secret." Then after a pause, "Will you
swear?"
Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said
abruptly--
"You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you.
Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But look
sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes."
Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his
long, grey trousers' pockets. Almost as he did so there came five knocks on
the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators.
"Well," said Syme slowly, "I don't know how to tell you the truth more
shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless poet
is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge for some
time at Scotland Yard."
Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.
"What do you say?" he asked in an inhuman voice.
"Yes," said Syme simply, "I am a police detective. But I think I hear
your friends coming."
From the doorway there came a murmur of "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." It
was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the crowd of
Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard trampling down the
corridor.
BEFORE one of the fresh faces could appear at the doorway, Gregory's
stunned surprise had fallen from him. He was beside the table with a bound,
and a noise in his throat like a wild beast. He caught up the Colt's
revolver and took aim at Syme. Syme did not flinch, but he put up a pale and
polite hand.
"Don't be such a silly man," he said, with the effeminate dignity of a
curate. "Don't you see it's not necessary? Don't you see that we're both in
the same boat? Yes, and jolly sea-sick."
Gregory could not speak, but he could not fire either, and he looked
his question.
"Don't you see we've checkmated each other?" cried Syme. "I can't tell
the police you are an anarchist. You can't tell the anarchists I'm a
policeman. I can only watch you, knowing what you are; you can only watch
me, knowing what I am. In short, it's a lonely, intellectual duel, my head
against yours. I'm a policeman deprived of the help of the police. You, my
poor fellow, are an anarchist deprived of the help of that law and
organisation which is so essential to anarchy. The one solitary difference
is in your favour. You are not surrounded by inquisitive policemen; I am
surrounded by inquisitive anarchists. I cannot betray you, but I might
betray myself. Come, come! wait and see me betray myself. I shall do it so
nicely."
Gregory put the pistol slowly down, still staring at Syme as if he were
a sea-monster.
"I don't believe in immortality," he said at last, "but if, after all
this, you were to break your word, God would make a hell only for you, to
howl in for ever."
"I shall not break my word," said Syme sternly, "nor will you break
yours. Here are your friends."
The mass of the anarchists entered the room heavily, with a slouching
and somewhat weary gait; but one little man, with a black beard and
glasses-- a man somewhat of the type of Mr. Tim Healy--detached himself, and
bustled forward with some papers in his hand.
"Comrade Gregory," he said, "I suppose this man is a delegate?"
Gregory, taken by surprise, looked down and muttered the name of Syme;
but Syme replied almost pertly--
"I am glad to see that your gate is well enough guarded to make it hard
for anyone to be here who was not a delegate."
The brow of the little man with the black beard was, however, still
contracted with something like suspicion.
"What branch do you represent?" he asked sharply.
"I should hardly call it a branch," said Syme, laughing; "I should call
it at the very least a root."
"What do you mean?"
"The fact is," said Syme serenely, "the truth is I am a Sabbatarian. I
have been specially sent here to see that you show a due observance of
Sunday."
The little man dropped one of his papers, and a flicker of fear went
over all the faces of the group. Evidently the awful President, whose name
was Sunday, did sometimes send down such irregular ambassadors to such
branch meetings.
"Well, comrade," said the man with the papers after a pause, "I suppose
we'd better give you a seat in the meeting?"
"If you ask my advice as a friend," said Syme with severe benevolence,
"I think you'd better."
When Gregory heard the dangerous dialogue end, with a sudden safety for
his rival, he rose abruptly and paced the floor in painful thought. He was,
indeed, in an agony of diplomacy. It was clear that Syme's inspired
impudence was likely to bring him out of all merely accidental dilemmas.
Little was to be hoped from them. He could not himself betray Syme, partly
from honour, but partly also because, if he betrayed him and for some reason
failed to destroy him, the Syme who escaped would be a Syme freed from all
obligation of secrecy, a Syme who would simply walk to the nearest police
station. After all, it was only one night's discussion, and only one
detective who would know of it. He would let out as little as possible of
their plans that night, and then let Syme go, and chance it.
He strode across to the group of anarchists, which was already
distributing itself along the benches.
"I think it is time we began," he said; "the steam-tug is waiting on
the river already. I move that Comrade Buttons takes the chair."
This being approved by a show of hands, the little man with the papers
slipped into the presidential seat.
"Comrades," he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, "our meeting to-night
is important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had the
honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We have
elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease of the
heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know, his
services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite
coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed
everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as
his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and
water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and
as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to
cruelty, revolted him always. But it is not to acclaim his virtues that we
are met, but for a harder task. It is difficult properly to praise his
qualities, but it is more difficult to replace them. Upon you, comrades, it
devolves this evening to choose out of the company present the man who shall
be Thursday. If any comrade suggests a name I will put it to the vote. If no
comrade suggests a name, I can only tell myself that that dear dynamiter,
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us
Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as eve,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent our cap and beds were heard.
Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain--
Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.
This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells--
Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand--
Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.
G. K. C.
THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and
ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its
sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the
outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its
architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently
under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was
described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any
definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an
intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant
place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at
the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must
be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed
in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he
could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people
were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with
the long, auburn hair and the impudent face-- that young man was not really
a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white
beard and the wild, white hat--that venerable humbug was not really a
philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That
scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like
neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not
discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he
have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole
place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a
workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who
stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written
comedy.
More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall,
when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole
insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more
strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens
were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish
trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit. And this was strongest of all on
one particular evening, still vaguely remembered in the locality, of which
the auburn-haired poet was the hero. It was not by any means the only
evening of which he was the hero. On many nights those passing by his little
back garden might hear his high, didactic voice laying down the law to men
and particularly to women. The attitude of women in such cases was indeed
one of the paradoxes of the place. Most of the women were of the kind
vaguely called emancipated, and professed some protest against male
supremacy. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant
compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while
he is talking. And Mr. Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, was really (in
some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one only laughed at the end of
it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness
with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure.
He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance,
which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair
parted in the middle was literally like a woman's, and curved into the slow
curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost
saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the
chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at
once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed
like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be
remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of
the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable
plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of
feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome
they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an
unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past
description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it
covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so
close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very
empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which
is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.
I say that there are some inhabitants who may remember the evening if
only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it because it
marked the first appearance in the place of the second poet of Saffron Park.
For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had reigned without a rival; it
was upon the night of the sunset that his solitude suddenly ended. The new
poet, who introduced himself by the name of Gabriel Syme was a very
mild-looking mortal, with a fair, pointed beard and faint, yellow hair. But
an impression grew that he was less meek than he looked. He signalised his
entrance by differing with the established poet, Gregory, upon the whole
nature of poetry. He said that he (Syme) was poet of law, a poet of order;
nay, he said he was a poet of respectability. So all the Saffron Parkers
looked at him as if he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky.
In fact, Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two
events.
"It may well be," he said, in his sudden lyrical manner, "it may well
be on such a night of clouds and cruel colours that there is brought forth
upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet
of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not
comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden."
The man with the meek blue eyes and the pale, pointed beard endured
these thunders with a certain submissive solemnity. The third party of the
group, Gregory's sister Rosamond, who had her brother's braids of red hair,
but a kindlier face underneath them, laughed with such mixture of admiration
and disapproval as she gave commonly to the family oracle.
Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.
"An artist is identical with an anarchist," he cried. "You might
transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws
a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He
sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of
perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen.
An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet
delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the
world would be the Underground Railway."
"So it is," said Mr. Syme.
"Nonsense! " said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else
attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains
look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because
they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that
whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It
is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next
station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture!
oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station
were unaccountably Baker Street!"
"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say
of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare,
strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We
feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it
not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station?
Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker
Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this,
that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of
mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take
your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who
commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"
"Must you go?" inquired Gregory sarcastically.
"I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes
in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has
won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left
Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand
things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of
hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,'
it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing
conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam."
Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.
"And even then," he said, "we poets always ask the question, 'And what
is Victoria now that you have got there ?' You think Victoria is like the
New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria.
Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet
is always in revolt."
"There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being
in revolt ? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being
sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome
thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they
are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is--revolting. It's mere vomiting."
The girl winced for a flash at the unpleasant word, but Syme was too
hot to heed her.
"It is things going right," he cried, "that is poetical I Our
digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the
foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than
the flowers, more poetical than the stars-- the most poetical thing in the
world is not being sick."
"Really," said Gregory superciliously, "the examples you choose--"
"I beg your pardon," said Syme grimly, "I forgot we had abolished all
conventions."
For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory's forehead.
"You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionise society on this lawn
?"
Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
"No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about
your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do."
Gregory's big bull's eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion,
and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.
"Don't you think, then," he said in a dangerous voice, "that I am
serious about my anarchism?"
"I beg your pardon ?" said Syme.
"Am I not serious about my anarchism ?" cried Gregory, with knotted
fists.
"My dear fellow!" said Syme, and strolled away.
With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond Gregory
still in his company.
"Mr. Syme," she said, "do the people who talk like you and my brother
often mean what they say ? Do you mean what you say now ?"
Syme smiled.
"Do you ?" he asked.
"What do you mean ?" asked the girl, with grave eyes.
"My dear Miss Gregory," said Syme gently, "there are many kinds of
sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt, do you
mean what you say ? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean what
you say ? No. It is true, but you don't mean it. Now, sometimes a man like
your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth,
quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he means--from sheer
force of meaning it."
She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave and
open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning
responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the
maternal watch which is as old as the world.
"Is he really an anarchist, then?" she asked.
"Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense."
She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--
"He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"
Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.
"Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."
And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity and of his
safety.
Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in spite
of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always
the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too
closely. He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration. He grew
passionate in his praise of tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a
smell of lilac all round him. Once he heard very faintly in some distant
street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic
words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.
He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the
whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a
rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which
he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow
this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was
over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive
in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her
strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn
tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable, that it might
well have been a dream.
When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street
lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence
behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure almost as rigid
and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long frock coat
were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe
of fiery hair against the light, and also something aggressive in the
attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He had something of the
look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.
He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally
returned.
"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's
conversation?"
"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is
your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is
anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in
green and gold."
"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see
the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp
by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said, "But may I ask if you
have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our little argument?"
"No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, "I did
not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."
The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing,
listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth
voice and with a rather bewildering smile.
"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of woman has
ever succeeded in doing before."
"Indeed!"
"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person
succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."
"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.
"I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel could wipe it out.
If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one way by which
that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am going, at the
possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to prove to you that you were
wrong in what you said."
"In what I said?"
"You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."
"There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never doubted
that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you
said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men up to a
neglected truth."
Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.
"And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You think me
a flaneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."
Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.
"Serious! " he cried. "Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these
damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious? One comes
here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well, but I should
think very little of a man who didn't keep something in the background of
his life that was more serious than all this talking-- something more
serious, whether it was religion or only drink."
"Very well," said Gregory, his face darkening, "you shall see something
more serious than either drink or religion."
Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory again
opened his lips.
"You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that you
have one?"
"Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now."
"Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion
involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son
of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If you will
take upon yourself this awful abnegations if you will consent to burden your
soul with a vow that you should never make and a knowledge you should never
dream about, I will promise you in return--"
"You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused.
"I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly took
off his hat.
"Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that
a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he is
always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a Christian, and
promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I will not report
anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And now, in the name of
Colney Hatch, what is it?"
"I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will call a
cab."
He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the road.
The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the trap the address of
an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank of the river. The cab whisked
itself away again, and in it these two fantastics quitted their fantastic
town.
THE cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated themselves
in a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained wooden table with one
wooden leg. The room was so small and dark, that very little could be seen
of the attendant who was summoned, beyond a vague and dark impression of
something bulky and bearded.
"Will you take a little supper?" asked Gregory politely. "The pate de
foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."
Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference--
"Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."
To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly, sir!"
and went away apparently to get it.
"What will you drink?" resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. "I shall only have a crepe de menthe myself; I have dined.
But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you with a
half-bottle of Pommery at least?"
"Thank you!" said the motionless Syme. "You are very good."
His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in
themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the actual
appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it particularly good.
Then he suddenly began to eat with great rapidity and appetite.
"Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!" he said to Gregory,
smiling. "I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new
to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the other way."
"You are not asleep, I assure you," said Gregory. "You are, on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your existence. Ah,
here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be a slight disproportion,
let us say, between the inner arrangements of this excellent hotel and its
simple and unpretentious exterior. But that is all our modesty. We are the
most modest men that ever lived on earth."
"And who are we?" asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.
"It is quite simple," replied Gregory. "We are the serious anarchists,
in whom you do not believe."
"Oh!" said Syme shortly. "You do yourselves well in drinks."
"Yes, we are serious about everything," answered Gregory.
Then after a pause he added--
"If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little, don't
put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don't wish you to do
yourself an injustice."
"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm;
"but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition. May I
smoke?"
"Certainly!" said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. "Try one of mine."
Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out of his
waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and let out a long
cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit that he performed these
rites with so much composure, for almost before he had begun them the table
at which he sat had begun to revolve, first slowly, and then rapidly, as if
at an insane seance.
"You must not mind it," said Gregory; "it's a kind of screw."
"Quite so," said Syme placidly, "a kind of screw. How simple that is!"
The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering across
the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a factory chimney, and
the two, with their chairs and table, shot down through the floor as if the
earth had swallowed them. They went rattling down a kind of roaring chimney
as rapidly as a lift cut loose, and they came with an abrupt bump to the
bottom. But when Gregory threw open a pair of doors and let in a red
subterranean light, Syme was still smoking with one leg thrown over the
other, and had not turned a yellow hair.
Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which was
the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as big as a
fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the door there was a
sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory struck five times. A heavy
voice with a foreign accent asked him who he was. To this he gave the more
or less unexpected reply, "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." The heavy hinges began
to move; it was obviously some kind of password.
Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a
network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering pattern
was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and revolvers, closely
packed or interlocked.
"I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities," said Gregory; "we
have to be very strict here."
"Oh, don't apologise," said Syme. "I know your passion for law and
order," and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel weapons. With
his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he looked a singularly
frail and fanciful figure as he walked down that shining avenue of death.
They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a
queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but
presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a
scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this
apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful
shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of
iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself seemed like the inside
of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.
"And now, my dear Mr. Syme," said Gregory, throwing himself in an
expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, "now we are quite
cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give you any notion of
why I brought you here. It was one of those quite arbitrary emotions, like
jumping off a cliff or falling in love. Suffice it to say that you were an
inexpressibly irritating fellow, and, to do you justice, you are still. I
would break twenty oaths of secrecy for the pleasure of taking you down a
peg. That way you have of lighting a cigar would make a priest break the
seal of confession. Well, you said that you were quite certain I was not a
serious anarchist. Does this place strike you as being serious?"
"It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety," assented Syme;
"but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me information,
because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted from me a promise not to
tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep. So it is in mere
curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is it really all about?
What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?"
"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do
not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of
anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig
deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary
distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere
rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution
talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have
abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you
will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
"You spoke of a second question," snapped Gregory.
"With pleasure," resumed Syme. "In all your present acts and
surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt who
lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people living
from preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron door. You cannot
pass it without submitting to the humiliation of calling yourself Mr.
Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel instruments which make the
place, if I may say so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after
taking all this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the earth,
you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to every silly
woman in Saffron Park?"
Gregory smiled.
"The answer is simple," he said. "I told you I was a serious anarchist,
and you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me. Unless I took them into
this infernal room they would not believe me."
Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory went
on.
"The history of the thing might amuse you," he said. "When first I
became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable disguises.
I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our anarchist
pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I certainly
understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a
cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in
episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder,
'Down! down! presumptuous human reason!' they found out in some way that I
was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a
millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool
could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a
humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to
understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence-- the
proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw myself into the
major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I called out 'Blood!'
abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, 'Let the weak
perish; it is the Law.' Well, well, it seems majors don't do this. I was
nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the President of the Central
Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe."
"What is his name?" asked Syme.
"You would not know it," answered Gregory. "That is his greatness.
Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they were
heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he is not
heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with him without
feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children in his hands."
He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed--
"But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an
epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said to him, 'What
disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more respectable than
bishops and majors?' He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face.
'You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you
harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?' I nodded. He
suddenly lifted his lion's voice. 'Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you
fool!' he roared so that the room shook. 'Nobody will ever expect you to do
anything dangerous then.' And he turned his broad back on me without another
word. I took his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and
murder to those women day and night, and--by God!-- they would let me wheel
their perambulators."
Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.
"You took me in," he said. "It is really a smart dodge."
Then after a pause he added--
"What do you call this tremendous President of yours?"
"We generally call him Sunday," replied Gregory with simplicity. 'You
see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, and they are
named after days of the week. He is called Sunday, by some of his admirers
Bloody Sunday. It is curious you should mention the matter, because the very
night you have dropped in (if I may so express it) is the night on which our
London branch, which assembles in this room, has to elect its own deputy to
fill a vacancy in the Council. The gentleman who has for some time past
played, with propriety and general applause, the difficult part of Thursday,
has died quite suddenly. Consequently, we have called a meeting this very
evening to elect a successor."
He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of smiling
embarrassment.
"I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme," he continued casually.
"I feel that I can confide anything to you, as you have promised to tell
nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something that I would not say in so
many words to the anarchists who will be coming to the room in about ten
minutes. We shall, of course, go through a form of election; but I don't
mind telling you that it is practically certain what the result will be." He
looked down for a moment modestly. "It is almost a settled thing that I am
to be Thursday."
"My dear fellow." said Syme heartily, "I congratulate you. A great
career!"
Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking
rapidly.
"As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table," he
said, "and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible."
Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a
walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick, a large
Colt's revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of brandy. Over the
chair, beside the table, was thrown a heavy-looking cape or cloak.
"I have only to get the form of election finished," continued Gregory
with animation, "then I snatch up this cloak and stick, stuff these other
things into my pocket, step out of a door in this cavern, which opens on the
river, where there is a steam-tug already waiting for me, and
then--then--oh, the wild joy of being Thursday!" And he clasped his hands.
Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent languor, got
to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.
"Why is it," he asked vaguely, "that I think you are quite a decent
fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?" He paused a moment, and then
added with a sort of fresh curiosity, "Is it because you are such an ass?"
There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out--
"Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been in
in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave you a promise
before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under red-hot
pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise of the same
kind? "
"A promise?" asked Gregory, wondering.
"Yes," said Syme very seriously, "a promise. I swore before God that I
would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or
whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret to
the anarchists?"
"Your secret?" asked the staring Gregory. "Have you got a secret?"
"Yes," said Syme, "I have a secret." Then after a pause, "Will you
swear?"
Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said
abruptly--
"You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you.
Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But look
sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes."
Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his
long, grey trousers' pockets. Almost as he did so there came five knocks on
the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators.
"Well," said Syme slowly, "I don't know how to tell you the truth more
shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless poet
is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge for some
time at Scotland Yard."
Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.
"What do you say?" he asked in an inhuman voice.
"Yes," said Syme simply, "I am a police detective. But I think I hear
your friends coming."
From the doorway there came a murmur of "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." It
was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the crowd of
Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard trampling down the
corridor.
BEFORE one of the fresh faces could appear at the doorway, Gregory's
stunned surprise had fallen from him. He was beside the table with a bound,
and a noise in his throat like a wild beast. He caught up the Colt's
revolver and took aim at Syme. Syme did not flinch, but he put up a pale and
polite hand.
"Don't be such a silly man," he said, with the effeminate dignity of a
curate. "Don't you see it's not necessary? Don't you see that we're both in
the same boat? Yes, and jolly sea-sick."
Gregory could not speak, but he could not fire either, and he looked
his question.
"Don't you see we've checkmated each other?" cried Syme. "I can't tell
the police you are an anarchist. You can't tell the anarchists I'm a
policeman. I can only watch you, knowing what you are; you can only watch
me, knowing what I am. In short, it's a lonely, intellectual duel, my head
against yours. I'm a policeman deprived of the help of the police. You, my
poor fellow, are an anarchist deprived of the help of that law and
organisation which is so essential to anarchy. The one solitary difference
is in your favour. You are not surrounded by inquisitive policemen; I am
surrounded by inquisitive anarchists. I cannot betray you, but I might
betray myself. Come, come! wait and see me betray myself. I shall do it so
nicely."
Gregory put the pistol slowly down, still staring at Syme as if he were
a sea-monster.
"I don't believe in immortality," he said at last, "but if, after all
this, you were to break your word, God would make a hell only for you, to
howl in for ever."
"I shall not break my word," said Syme sternly, "nor will you break
yours. Here are your friends."
The mass of the anarchists entered the room heavily, with a slouching
and somewhat weary gait; but one little man, with a black beard and
glasses-- a man somewhat of the type of Mr. Tim Healy--detached himself, and
bustled forward with some papers in his hand.
"Comrade Gregory," he said, "I suppose this man is a delegate?"
Gregory, taken by surprise, looked down and muttered the name of Syme;
but Syme replied almost pertly--
"I am glad to see that your gate is well enough guarded to make it hard
for anyone to be here who was not a delegate."
The brow of the little man with the black beard was, however, still
contracted with something like suspicion.
"What branch do you represent?" he asked sharply.
"I should hardly call it a branch," said Syme, laughing; "I should call
it at the very least a root."
"What do you mean?"
"The fact is," said Syme serenely, "the truth is I am a Sabbatarian. I
have been specially sent here to see that you show a due observance of
Sunday."
The little man dropped one of his papers, and a flicker of fear went
over all the faces of the group. Evidently the awful President, whose name
was Sunday, did sometimes send down such irregular ambassadors to such
branch meetings.
"Well, comrade," said the man with the papers after a pause, "I suppose
we'd better give you a seat in the meeting?"
"If you ask my advice as a friend," said Syme with severe benevolence,
"I think you'd better."
When Gregory heard the dangerous dialogue end, with a sudden safety for
his rival, he rose abruptly and paced the floor in painful thought. He was,
indeed, in an agony of diplomacy. It was clear that Syme's inspired
impudence was likely to bring him out of all merely accidental dilemmas.
Little was to be hoped from them. He could not himself betray Syme, partly
from honour, but partly also because, if he betrayed him and for some reason
failed to destroy him, the Syme who escaped would be a Syme freed from all
obligation of secrecy, a Syme who would simply walk to the nearest police
station. After all, it was only one night's discussion, and only one
detective who would know of it. He would let out as little as possible of
their plans that night, and then let Syme go, and chance it.
He strode across to the group of anarchists, which was already
distributing itself along the benches.
"I think it is time we began," he said; "the steam-tug is waiting on
the river already. I move that Comrade Buttons takes the chair."
This being approved by a show of hands, the little man with the papers
slipped into the presidential seat.
"Comrades," he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, "our meeting to-night
is important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had the
honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We have
elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease of the
heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know, his
services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite
coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed
everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as
his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and
water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and
as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to
cruelty, revolted him always. But it is not to acclaim his virtues that we
are met, but for a harder task. It is difficult properly to praise his
qualities, but it is more difficult to replace them. Upon you, comrades, it
devolves this evening to choose out of the company present the man who shall
be Thursday. If any comrade suggests a name I will put it to the vote. If no
comrade suggests a name, I can only tell myself that that dear dynamiter,