1 files changed, 6977 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/1695-0.txt~ b/1695-0.txt~
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a802bb3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1695-0.txt~
@@ -0,0 +1,6977 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K.
+Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Man Who Was Thursday
+       A Nightmare
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: April, 1999 [eBook #1695]
+[Most recently updated: February 5, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Harry Plantinga and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY ***
+
+
+
+
+The Man Who Was Thursday
+
+A Nightmare
+
+by G. K. Chesterton
+
+
+Contents
+
+ A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE
+ THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
+
+ CHAPTER I. THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK
+ CHAPTER II. THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME
+ CHAPTER III. THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
+ CHAPTER IV. THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE
+ CHAPTER V. THE FEAST OF FEAR
+ CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE
+ CHAPTER VII. THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS
+ CHAPTER VIII. THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS
+ CHAPTER IX. THE MAN IN SPECTACLES
+ CHAPTER X. THE DUEL
+ CHAPTER XI. THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE
+ CHAPTER XII. THE EARTH IN ANARCHY
+ CHAPTER XIII. THE PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENT
+ CHAPTER XIV. THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS
+ CHAPTER XV. THE ACCUSER
+
+
+
+
+A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE
+
+
+It is very difficult to classify THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. It is
+possible to say that it is a gripping adventure story of murderous
+criminals and brilliant policemen; but it was to be expected that the
+author of the Father Brown stories should tell a detective story like
+no-one else. On this level, therefore, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
+succeeds superbly; if nothing else, it is a magnificent tour-de-force
+of suspense-writing.
+
+However, the reader will soon discover that it is much more than that.
+Carried along on the boisterous rush of the narrative by Chesterton’s
+wonderful high-spirited style, he will soon see that he is being
+carried into much deeper waters than he had planned on; and the totally
+unforeseeable denouement will prove for the modern reader, as it has
+for thousands of others since 1908 when the book was first published,
+an inevitable and moving experience, as the investigators finally
+discover who Sunday is.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
+A NIGHTMARE
+
+
+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 we,
+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 bells 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK
+
+
+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! 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 _flâneur_ 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 abnegation 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME
+
+
+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 _pâté 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 _crême 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
+
+
+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 tonight
+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, who
+is gone from us, has carried into the unknowable abysses the last
+secret of his virtue and his innocence.”
+
+There was a stir of almost inaudible applause, such as is sometimes
+heard in church. Then a large old man, with a long and venerable white
+beard, perhaps the only real working-man present, rose lumberingly and
+said—
+
+“I move that Comrade Gregory be elected Thursday,” and sat lumberingly
+down again.
+
+“Does anyone second?” asked the chairman.
+
+A little man with a velvet coat and pointed beard seconded.
+
+“Before I put the matter to the vote,” said the chairman, “I will call
+on Comrade Gregory to make a statement.”
+
+Gregory rose amid a great rumble of applause. His face was deadly pale,
+so that by contrast his queer red hair looked almost scarlet. But he
+was smiling and altogether at ease. He had made up his mind, and he saw
+his best policy quite plain in front of him like a white road. His best
+chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech, such as would leave
+on the detective’s mind the impression that the anarchist brotherhood
+was a very mild affair after all. He believed in his own literary
+power, his capacity for suggesting fine shades and picking perfect
+words. He thought that with care he could succeed, in spite of all the
+people around him, in conveying an impression of the institution,
+subtly and delicately false. Syme had once thought that anarchists,
+under all their bravado, were only playing the fool. Could he not now,
+in the hour of peril, make Syme think so again?
+
+“Comrades,” began Gregory, in a low but penetrating voice, “it is not
+necessary for me to tell you what is my policy, for it is your policy
+also. Our belief has been slandered, it has been disfigured, it has
+been utterly confused and concealed, but it has never been altered.
+Those who talk about anarchism and its dangers go everywhere and
+anywhere to get their information, except to us, except to the fountain
+head. They learn about anarchists from sixpenny novels; they learn
+about anarchists from tradesmen’s newspapers; they learn about
+anarchists from _Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday_ and the _Sporting Times_.
+They never learn about anarchists from anarchists. We have no chance of
+denying the mountainous slanders which are heaped upon our heads from
+one end of Europe to another. The man who has always heard that we are
+walking plagues has never heard our reply. I know that he will not hear
+it tonight, though my passion were to rend the roof. For it is deep,
+deep under the earth that the persecuted are permitted to assemble, as
+the Christians assembled in the Catacombs. But if, by some incredible
+accident, there were here tonight a man who all his life had thus
+immensely misunderstood us, I would put this question to him: ‘When
+those Christians met in those Catacombs, what sort of moral reputation
+had they in the streets above? What tales were told of their atrocities
+by one educated Roman to another? Suppose’ (I would say to him),
+‘suppose that we are only repeating that still mysterious paradox of
+history. Suppose we seem as shocking as the Christians because we are
+really as harmless as the Christians. Suppose we seem as mad as the
+Christians because we are really as meek.”’
+
+The applause that had greeted the opening sentences had been gradually
+growing fainter, and at the last word it stopped suddenly. In the
+abrupt silence, the man with the velvet jacket said, in a high, squeaky
+voice—
+
+“I’m not meek!”
+
+“Comrade Witherspoon tells us,” resumed Gregory, “that he is not meek.
+Ah, how little he knows himself! His words are, indeed, extravagant;
+his appearance is ferocious, and even (to an ordinary taste)
+unattractive. But only the eye of a friendship as deep and delicate as
+mine can perceive the deep foundation of solid meekness which lies at
+the base of him, too deep even for himself to see. I repeat, we are the
+true early Christians, only that we come too late. We are simple, as
+they revere simple—look at Comrade Witherspoon. We are modest, as they
+were modest—look at me. We are merciful—”
+
+“No, no!” called out Mr. Witherspoon with the velvet jacket.
+
+“I say we are merciful,” repeated Gregory furiously, “as the early
+Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused
+of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh—”
+
+“Shame!” cried Witherspoon. “Why not?”
+
+“Comrade Witherspoon,” said Gregory, with a feverish gaiety, “is
+anxious to know why nobody eats him (laughter). In our society, at any
+rate, which loves him sincerely, which is founded upon love—”
+
+“No, no!” said Witherspoon, “down with love.”
+
+“Which is founded upon love,” repeated Gregory, grinding his teeth,
+“there will be no difficulty about the aims which we shall pursue as a
+body, or which I should pursue were I chosen as the representative of
+that body. Superbly careless of the slanders that represent us as
+assassins and enemies of human society, we shall pursue with moral
+courage and quiet intellectual pressure, the permanent ideals of
+brotherhood and simplicity.”
+
+Gregory resumed his seat and passed his hand across his forehead. The
+silence was sudden and awkward, but the chairman rose like an
+automaton, and said in a colourless voice—
+
+“Does anyone oppose the election of Comrade Gregory?”
+
+The assembly seemed vague and sub-consciously disappointed, and Comrade
+Witherspoon moved restlessly on his seat and muttered in his thick
+beard. By the sheer rush of routine, however, the motion would have
+been put and carried. But as the chairman was opening his mouth to put
+it, Syme sprang to his feet and said in a small and quiet voice—
+
+“Yes, Mr. Chairman, I oppose.”
+
+The most effective fact in oratory is an unexpected change in the
+voice. Mr. Gabriel Syme evidently understood oratory. Having said these
+first formal words in a moderated tone and with a brief simplicity, he
+made his next word ring and volley in the vault as if one of the guns
+had gone off.
+
+“Comrades!” he cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of his
+boots, “have we come here for this? Do we live underground like rats in
+order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might listen to
+while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line these walls with
+weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone should come and hear
+Comrade Gregory saying to us, ‘Be good, and you will be happy,’
+‘Honesty is the best policy,’ and ‘Virtue is its own reward’? There was
+not a word in Comrade Gregory’s address to which a curate could not
+have listened with pleasure (hear, hear). But I am not a curate (loud
+cheers), and I did not listen to it with pleasure (renewed cheers). The
+man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a
+resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear).
+
+“Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that we
+are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the enemies of
+society, and so much the worse for society. We are the enemies of
+society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its oldest and its most
+pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory has told us
+(apologetically again) that we are not murderers. There I agree. We are
+not murderers, we are executioners (cheers).”
+
+Ever since Syme had risen Gregory had sat staring at him, his face
+idiotic with astonishment. Now in the pause his lips of clay parted,
+and he said, with an automatic and lifeless distinctness—
+
+“You damnable hypocrite!”
+
+Syme looked straight into those frightful eyes with his own pale blue
+ones, and said with dignity—
+
+“Comrade Gregory accuses me of hypocrisy. He knows as well as I do that
+I am keeping all my engagements and doing nothing but my duty. I do not
+mince words. I do not pretend to. I say that Comrade Gregory is unfit
+to be Thursday for all his amiable qualities. He is unfit to be
+Thursday because of his amiable qualities. We do not want the Supreme
+Council of Anarchy infected with a maudlin mercy (hear, hear). This is
+no time for ceremonial politeness, neither is it a time for ceremonial
+modesty. I set myself against Comrade Gregory as I would set myself
+against all the Governments of Europe, because the anarchist who has
+given himself to anarchy has forgotten modesty as much as he has
+forgotten pride (cheers). I am not a man at all. I am a cause (renewed
+cheers). I set myself against Comrade Gregory as impersonally and as
+calmly as I should choose one pistol rather than another out of that
+rack upon the wall; and I say that rather than have Gregory and his
+milk-and-water methods on the Supreme Council, I would offer myself for
+election—”
+
+His sentence was drowned in a deafening cataract of applause. The
+faces, that had grown fiercer and fiercer with approval as his tirade
+grew more and more uncompromising, were now distorted with grins of
+anticipation or cloven with delighted cries. At the moment when he
+announced himself as ready to stand for the post of Thursday, a roar of
+excitement and assent broke forth, and became uncontrollable, and at
+the same moment Gregory sprang to his feet, with foam upon his mouth,
+and shouted against the shouting.
+
+“Stop, you blasted madmen!” he cried, at the top of a voice that tore
+his throat. “Stop, you—”
+
+But louder than Gregory’s shouting and louder than the roar of the room
+came the voice of Syme, still speaking in a peal of pitiless thunder—
+
+“I do not go to the Council to rebut that slander that calls us
+murderers; I go to earn it (loud and prolonged cheering). To the priest
+who says these men are the enemies of religion, to the judge who says
+these men are the enemies of law, to the fat parliamentarian who says
+these men are the enemies of order and public decency, to all these I
+will reply, ‘You are false kings, but you are true prophets. I am come
+to destroy you, and to fulfil your prophecies.’”
+
+The heavy clamour gradually died away, but before it had ceased
+Witherspoon had jumped to his feet, his hair and beard all on end, and
+had said—
+
+“I move, as an amendment, that Comrade Syme be appointed to the post.”
+
+“Stop all this, I tell you!” cried Gregory, with frantic face and
+hands. “Stop it, it is all—”
+
+The voice of the chairman clove his speech with a cold accent.
+
+“Does anyone second this amendment?” he said. A tall, tired man, with
+melancholy eyes and an American chin beard, was observed on the back
+bench to be slowly rising to his feet. Gregory had been screaming for
+some time past; now there was a change in his accent, more shocking
+than any scream. “I end all this!” he said, in a voice as heavy as
+stone. “This man cannot be elected. He is a—”
+
+“Yes,” said Syme, quite motionless, “what is he?” Gregory’s mouth
+worked twice without sound; then slowly the blood began to crawl back
+into his dead face.
+
+“He is a man quite inexperienced in our work,” he said, and sat down
+abruptly.
+
+Before he had done so, the long, lean man with the American beard was
+again upon his feet, and was repeating in a high American monotone—
+
+“I beg to second the election of Comrade Syme.”
+
+“The amendment will, as usual, be put first,” said Mr. Buttons, the
+chairman, with mechanical rapidity.
+
+“The question is that Comrade Syme—”
+
+Gregory had again sprung to his feet, panting and passionate.
+
+“Comrades,” he cried out, “I am not a madman.”
+
+“Oh, oh!” said Mr. Witherspoon.
+
+“I am not a madman,” reiterated Gregory, with a frightful sincerity
+which for a moment staggered the room, “but I give you a counsel which
+you can call mad if you like. No, I will not call it a counsel, for I
+can give you no reason for it. I will call it a command. Call it a mad
+command, but act upon it. Strike, but hear me! Kill me, but obey me! Do
+not elect this man.” Truth is so terrible, even in fetters, that for a
+moment Syme’s slender and insane victory swayed like a reed. But you
+could not have guessed it from Syme’s bleak blue eyes. He merely began—
+
+“Comrade Gregory commands—”
+
+Then the spell was snapped, and one anarchist called out to Gregory—
+
+“Who are you? You are not Sunday;” and another anarchist added in a
+heavier voice, “And you are not Thursday.”
+
+“Comrades,” cried Gregory, in a voice like that of a martyr who in an
+ecstacy of pain has passed beyond pain, “it is nothing to me whether
+you detest me as a tyrant or detest me as a slave. If you will not take
+my command, accept my degradation. I kneel to you. I throw myself at
+your feet. I implore you. Do not elect this man.”
+
+“Comrade Gregory,” said the chairman after a painful pause, “this is
+really not quite dignified.”
+
+For the first time in the proceedings there was for a few seconds a
+real silence. Then Gregory fell back in his seat, a pale wreck of a
+man, and the chairman repeated, like a piece of clock-work suddenly
+started again—
+
+“The question is that Comrade Syme be elected to the post of Thursday
+on the General Council.”
+
+The roar rose like the sea, the hands rose like a forest, and three
+minutes afterwards Mr. Gabriel Syme, of the Secret Police Service, was
+elected to the post of Thursday on the General Council of the
+Anarchists of Europe.
+
+Everyone in the room seemed to feel the tug waiting on the river, the
+sword-stick and the revolver, waiting on the table. The instant the
+election was ended and irrevocable, and Syme had received the paper
+proving his election, they all sprang to their feet, and the fiery
+groups moved and mixed in the room. Syme found himself, somehow or
+other, face to face with Gregory, who still regarded him with a stare
+of stunned hatred. They were silent for many minutes.
+
+“You are a devil!” said Gregory at last.
+
+“And you are a gentleman,” said Syme with gravity.
+
+“It was you that entrapped me,” began Gregory, shaking from head to
+foot, “entrapped me into—”
+
+“Talk sense,” said Syme shortly. “Into what sort of devils’ parliament
+have you entrapped me, if it comes to that? You made me swear before I
+made you. Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we
+think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us
+in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but
+honour and death,” and he pulled the great cloak about his shoulders
+and picked up the flask from the table.
+
+“The boat is quite ready,” said Mr. Buttons, bustling up. “Be good
+enough to step this way.”
+
+With a gesture that revealed the shop-walker, he led Syme down a short,
+iron-bound passage, the still agonised Gregory following feverishly at
+their heels. At the end of the passage was a door, which Buttons opened
+sharply, showing a sudden blue and silver picture of the moonlit river,
+that looked like a scene in a theatre. Close to the opening lay a dark,
+dwarfish steam-launch, like a baby dragon with one red eye.
+
+Almost in the act of stepping on board, Gabriel Syme turned to the
+gaping Gregory.
+
+“You have kept your word,” he said gently, with his face in shadow.
+“You are a man of honour, and I thank you. You have kept it even down
+to a small particular. There was one special thing you promised me at
+the beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by
+the end of it.”
+
+“What do you mean?” cried the chaotic Gregory. “What did I promise
+you?”
+
+“A very entertaining evening,” said Syme, and he made a military salute
+with the sword-stick as the steamboat slid away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE
+
+
+Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he
+was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of
+anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life
+into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most
+revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His
+respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against
+rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest
+people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked
+about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to
+walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and
+self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence
+the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any
+drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he
+had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan
+abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan
+latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing
+vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of
+defending cannibalism.
+
+Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy,
+Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only
+thing left—sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of
+these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too
+fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been
+crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side
+street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf
+for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and
+the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous,
+rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He
+did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid
+men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a
+huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.
+
+He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets a
+torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this
+deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his
+enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames
+embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance
+of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage
+or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood
+alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to
+have cared for it otherwise.
+
+He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river
+reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky,
+indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid,
+that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it
+mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the
+vast caverns of a subterranean country.
+
+Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black
+chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak,
+black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early
+villains in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair
+were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards,
+cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black
+cigar, bought in Soho for twopence, stood out from between his
+tightened teeth, and altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen
+of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was
+why a policeman on the Embankment spoke to him, and said “Good
+evening.”
+
+Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the
+mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the
+twilight.
+
+“A good evening is it?” he said sharply. “You fellows would call the
+end of the world a good evening. Look at that bloody red sun and that
+bloody river! I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt
+and shining, you would still be standing here as solid as ever, looking
+out for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen
+are cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it
+were not for your calm.”
+
+“If we are calm,” replied the policeman, “it is the calm of organised
+resistance.”
+
+“Eh?” said Syme, staring.
+
+“The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,” pursued the
+policeman. “The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.”
+
+“Good God, the Board Schools!” said Syme. “Is this undenominational
+education?”
+
+“No,” said the policeman sadly, “I never had any of those advantages.
+The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very
+rough and old-fashioned, I am afraid.”
+
+“Where did you have it?” asked Syme, wondering.
+
+“Oh, at Harrow,” said the policeman
+
+The class sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in
+so many men, broke out of Syme before he could control them.
+
+“But, good Lord, man,” he said, “you oughtn’t to be a policeman!”
+
+The policeman sighed and shook his head.
+
+“I know,” he said solemnly, “I know I am not worthy.”
+
+“But why did you join the police?” asked Syme with rude curiosity.
+
+“For much the same reason that you abused the police,” replied the
+other. “I found that there was a special opening in the service for
+those whose fears for humanity were concerned rather with the
+aberrations of the scientific intellect than with the normal and
+excusable, though excessive, outbreaks of the human will. I trust I
+make myself clear.”
+
+“If you mean that you make your opinion clear,” said Syme, “I suppose
+you do. But as for making yourself clear, it is the last thing you do.
+How comes a man like you to be talking philosophy in a blue helmet on
+the Thames embankment?”
+
+“You have evidently not heard of the latest development in our police
+system,” replied the other. “I am not surprised at it. We are keeping
+it rather dark from the educated class, because that class contains
+most of our enemies. But you seem to be exactly in the right frame of
+mind. I think you might almost join us.”
+
+“Join you in what?” asked Syme.
+
+“I will tell you,” said the policeman slowly. “This is the situation:
+The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated
+detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely
+intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of
+civilisation. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are
+silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has,
+therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also
+philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this
+conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. I am
+a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the value of the ordinary
+man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue. But it would obviously be
+undesirable to employ the common policeman in an investigation which is
+also a heresy hunt.”
+
+Syme’s eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.
+
+“What do you do, then?” he said.
+
+“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is
+at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The
+ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to
+artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective
+discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We
+discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have
+to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at
+last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only
+just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was
+entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow)
+thoroughly understood a triolet.”
+
+“Do you mean,” asked Syme, “that there is really as much connection
+between crime and the modern intellect as all that?”
+
+“You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, “but you
+were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the
+poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes
+sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon
+the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very
+different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the
+uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors.
+We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that
+the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most
+dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
+Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my
+heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they
+merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the
+property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect
+it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy
+the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or
+they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic
+formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
+Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater
+fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to
+them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own
+as much as other people’s.”
+
+Syme struck his hands together.
+
+“How true that is,” he cried. “I have felt it from my boyhood, but
+never could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad
+man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says
+that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is
+then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a
+reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but
+not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter
+things, but to annihilate them. Yes, the modern world has retained all
+those parts of police work which are really oppressive and ignominious,
+the harrying of the poor, the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given
+up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the
+State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must
+not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish
+anybody else.”
+
+“But this is absurd!” cried the policeman, clasping his hands with an
+excitement uncommon in persons of his figure and costume, “but it is
+intolerable! I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re wasting your
+life. You must, you shall, join our special army against anarchy. Their
+armies are on our frontiers. Their bolt is ready to fall. A moment
+more, and you may lose the glory of working with us, perhaps the glory
+of dying with the last heroes of the world.”
+
+“It is a chance not to be missed, certainly,” assented Syme, “but still
+I do not quite understand. I know as well as anybody that the modern
+world is full of lawless little men and mad little movements. But,
+beastly as they are, they generally have the one merit of disagreeing
+with each other. How can you talk of their leading one army or hurling
+one bolt. What is this anarchy?”
+
+“Do not confuse it,” replied the constable, “with those chance dynamite
+outbreaks from Russia or from Ireland, which are really the outbreaks
+of oppressed, if mistaken, men. This is a vast philosophic movement,
+consisting of an outer and an inner ring. You might even call the outer
+ring the laity and the inner ring the priesthood. I prefer to call the
+outer ring the innocent section, the inner ring the supremely guilty
+section. The outer ring—the main mass of their supporters—are merely
+anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have
+destroyed human happiness. They believe that all the evil results of
+human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime.
+They do not believe that the crime creates the punishment. They believe
+that the punishment has created the crime. They believe that if a man
+seduced seven women he would naturally walk away as blameless as the
+flowers of spring. They believe that if a man picked a pocket he would
+naturally feel exquisitely good. These I call the innocent section.”
+
+“Oh!” said Syme.
+
+“Naturally, therefore, these people talk about ‘a happy time coming’;
+‘the paradise of the future’; ‘mankind freed from the bondage of vice
+and the bondage of virtue,’ and so on. And so also the men of the inner
+circle speak—the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding
+crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last.
+But in their mouths”—and the policeman lowered his voice—“in their
+mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no
+illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth
+can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean
+death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that
+mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without
+right or wrong, they mean the grave.
+
+“They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then
+themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The
+innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed
+the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed
+somebody.”
+
+“How can I join you?” asked Syme, with a sort of passion.
+
+“I know for a fact that there is a vacancy at the moment,” said the
+policeman, “as I have the honour to be somewhat in the confidence of
+the chief of whom I have spoken. You should really come and see him. Or
+rather, I should not say see him, nobody ever sees him; but you can
+talk to him if you like.”
+
+“Telephone?” inquired Syme, with interest.
+
+“No,” said the policeman placidly, “he has a fancy for always sitting
+in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter. Do come
+along.”
+
+Somewhat dazed and considerably excited, Syme allowed himself to be led
+to a side-door in the long row of buildings of Scotland Yard. Almost
+before he knew what he was doing, he had been passed through the hands
+of about four intermediate officials, and was suddenly shown into a
+room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light.
+It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced;
+it was like going suddenly stone-blind.
+
+“Are you the new recruit?” asked a heavy voice.
+
+And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in
+the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of
+massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.
+
+“Are you the new recruit?” said the invisible chief, who seemed to have
+heard all about it. “All right. You are engaged.”
+
+Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this
+irrevocable phrase.
+
+“I really have no experience,” he began.
+
+“No one has any experience,” said the other, “of the Battle of
+Armageddon.”
+
+“But I am really unfit—”
+
+“You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown.
+
+“Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know any profession of which mere
+willingness is the final test.”
+
+“I do,” said the other—“martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good
+day.”
+
+Thus it was that when Gabriel Syme came out again into the crimson
+light of evening, in his shabby black hat and shabby, lawless cloak, he
+came out a member of the New Detective Corps for the frustration of the
+great conspiracy. Acting under the advice of his friend the policeman
+(who was professionally inclined to neatness), he trimmed his hair and
+beard, bought a good hat, clad himself in an exquisite summer suit of
+light blue-grey, with a pale yellow flower in the button-hole, and, in
+short, became that elegant and rather insupportable person whom Gregory
+had first encountered in the little garden of Saffron Park. Before he
+finally left the police premises his friend provided him with a small
+blue card, on which was written, “The Last Crusade,” and a number, the
+sign of his official authority. He put this carefully in his upper
+waistcoat pocket, lit a cigarette, and went forth to track and fight
+the enemy in all the drawing-rooms of London. Where his adventure
+ultimately led him we have already seen. At about half-past one on a
+February night he found himself steaming in a small tug up the silent
+Thames, armed with swordstick and revolver, the duly elected Thursday
+of the Central Council of Anarchists.
+
+When Syme stepped out on to the steam-tug he had a singular sensation
+of stepping out into something entirely new; not merely into the
+landscape of a new land, but even into the landscape of a new planet.
+This was mainly due to the insane yet solid decision of that evening,
+though partly also to an entire change in the weather and the sky since
+he entered the little tavern some two hours before. Every trace of the
+passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a
+naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full that
+(by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It
+gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
+
+Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as
+of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in
+eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was
+actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some
+sadder star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the
+moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like
+a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him—the food and
+the brandy and the loaded pistol—took on exactly that concrete and
+material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey
+or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though
+in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the
+expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick became
+almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the
+stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on
+some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the
+adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even
+be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the
+presence of a man really human. To Syme’s exaggerative mind the bright,
+bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the
+mountains of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there
+is a man in the moon.
+
+The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively
+slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the
+time that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous
+bulk of Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the
+splitting of great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had
+brightened like white fire when the tug, changing its onward course,
+turned inward to a large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.
+
+The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as
+Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white
+dawn. They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of
+some Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he
+was, in his own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible
+and heathen kings. He leapt out of the boat on to one slimy step, and
+stood, a dark and slender figure, amid the enormous masonry. The two
+men in the tug put her off again and turned up stream. They had never
+spoken a word.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+THE FEAST OF FEAR
+
+
+At first the large stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid;
+but before he reached the top he had realised that there was a man
+leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the
+river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and
+frock-coat of the more formal type of fashion; he had a red flower in
+his buttonhole. As Syme drew nearer to him step by step, he did not
+even move a hair; and Syme could come close enough to notice even in
+the dim, pale morning light that his face was long, pale and
+intellectual, and ended in a small triangular tuft of dark beard at the
+very point of the chin, all else being clean-shaven. This scrap of hair
+almost seemed a mere oversight; the rest of the face was of the type
+that is best shaven—clear-cut, ascetic, and in its way noble. Syme drew
+closer and closer, noting all this, and still the figure did not stir.
+
+At first an instinct had told Syme that this was the man whom he was
+meant to meet. Then, seeing that the man made no sign, he had concluded
+that he was not. And now again he had come back to a certainty that the
+man had something to do with his mad adventure. For the man remained
+more still than would have been natural if a stranger had come so
+close. He was as motionless as a wax-work, and got on the nerves
+somewhat in the same way. Syme looked again and again at the pale,
+dignified and delicate face, and the face still looked blankly across
+the river. Then he took out of his pocket the note from Buttons proving
+his election, and put it before that sad and beautiful face. Then the
+man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side,
+going up in the right cheek and down in the left.
+
+There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this.
+Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it
+is even attractive. But in all Syme’s circumstances, with the dark dawn
+and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones,
+there was something unnerving in it.
+
+There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic
+face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly
+went wrong.
+
+The spasm of smile was instantaneous, and the man’s face dropped at
+once into its harmonious melancholy. He spoke without further
+explanation or inquiry, like a man speaking to an old colleague.
+
+“If we walk up towards Leicester Square,” he said, “we shall just be in
+time for breakfast. Sunday always insists on an early breakfast. Have
+you had any sleep?”
+
+“No,” said Syme.
+
+“Nor have I,” answered the man in an ordinary tone. “I shall try to get
+to bed after breakfast.”
+
+He spoke with casual civility, but in an utterly dead voice that
+contradicted the fanaticism of his face. It seemed almost as if all
+friendly words were to him lifeless conveniences, and that his only
+life was hate. After a pause the man spoke again.
+
+“Of course, the Secretary of the branch told you everything that can be
+told. But the one thing that can never be told is the last notion of
+the President, for his notions grow like a tropical forest. So in case
+you don’t know, I’d better tell you that he is carrying out his notion
+of concealing ourselves by not concealing ourselves to the most
+extraordinary lengths just now. Originally, of course, we met in a cell
+underground, just as your branch does. Then Sunday made us take a
+private room at an ordinary restaurant. He said that if you didn’t seem
+to be hiding nobody hunted you out. Well, he is the only man on earth,
+I know; but sometimes I really think that his huge brain is going a
+little mad in its old age. For now we flaunt ourselves before the
+public. We have our breakfast on a balcony—on a balcony, if you
+please—overlooking Leicester Square.”
+
+“And what do the people say?” asked Syme.
+
+“It’s quite simple what they say,” answered his guide. “They say we are
+a lot of jolly gentlemen who pretend they are anarchists.”
+
+“It seems to me a very clever idea,” said Syme.
+
+“Clever! God blast your impudence! Clever!” cried out the other in a
+sudden, shrill voice which was as startling and discordant as his
+crooked smile. “When you’ve seen Sunday for a split second you’ll leave
+off calling him clever.”
+
+With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early
+sunlight filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I suppose,
+why this square itself should look so alien and in some ways so
+continental. It will never be known whether it was the foreign look
+that attracted the foreigners or the foreigners who gave it the foreign
+look. But on this particular morning the effect seemed singularly
+bright and clear. Between the open square and the sunlit leaves and the
+statue and the Saracenic outlines of the Alhambra, it looked the
+replica of some French or even Spanish public place. And this effect
+increased in Syme the sensation, which in many shapes he had had
+through the whole adventure, the eerie sensation of having strayed into
+a new world. As a fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square
+ever since he was a boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the
+trees and the Moorish cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning
+into an unknown Place de something or other in some foreign town.
+
+At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a
+prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street
+behind. In the wall there was one large French window, probably the
+window of a large coffee-room; and outside this window, almost
+literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed balcony,
+big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did contain a
+dining-table, or more strictly a breakfast-table; and round the
+breakfast-table, glowing in the sunlight and evident to the street,
+were a group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed in the insolence
+of fashion, with white waistcoats and expensive button-holes. Some of
+their jokes could almost be heard across the square. Then the grave
+Secretary gave his unnatural smile, and Syme knew that this boisterous
+breakfast party was the secret conclave of the European Dynamiters.
+
+Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had
+not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large
+to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of
+the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme
+had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break
+down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact
+that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was
+planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved
+deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen
+from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood
+out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to
+scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him
+all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become
+dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers
+and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining
+five children to tea.
+
+As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter
+came out smiling with every tooth in his head.
+
+“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do
+laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”
+
+And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased
+with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.
+
+The two men mounted the stairs in silence.
+
+Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost
+filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others
+stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but
+instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are
+open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a
+little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical
+dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual
+evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out
+at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and
+nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering
+as he drew nearer to the great President.
+
+The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked
+across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday
+grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he
+was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he
+would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at
+the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so
+large.
+
+By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an
+empty seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him
+with good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered
+himself a little by looking at their conventional coats and solid,
+shining coffee-pot; then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very
+large, but it was still possible to humanity.
+
+In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently
+commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by
+the President’s caprice they had been dressed up with a festive
+respectability, which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast.
+One man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He at least was
+the common or garden Dynamiter. He wore, indeed, the high white collar
+and satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion; but out of this
+collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a
+bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes
+like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle,
+and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this
+figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it had every
+diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque. If out of that
+stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of a cat or a
+dog, it could not have been a more idiotic contrast.
+
+The man’s name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle
+of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably
+tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous
+part demanded of him by President Sunday. And, indeed, when Syme came
+in the President, with that daring disregard of public suspicion which
+was his policy, was actually chaffing Gogol upon his inability to
+assume conventional graces.
+
+“Our friend Tuesday,” said the President in a deep voice at once of
+quietude and volume, “our friend Tuesday doesn’t seem to grasp the
+idea. He dresses up like a gentleman, but he seems to be too great a
+soul to behave like one. He insists on the ways of the stage
+conspirator. Now if a gentleman goes about London in a top hat and a
+frock-coat, no one need know that he is an anarchist. But if a
+gentleman puts on a top hat and a frock-coat, and then goes about on
+his hands and knees—well, he may attract attention. That’s what Brother
+Gogol does. He goes about on his hands and knees with such
+inexhaustible diplomacy, that by this time he finds it quite difficult
+to walk upright.”
+
+“I am not good at concealment,” said Gogol sulkily, with a thick
+foreign accent; “I am not ashamed of the cause.”
+
+“Yes you are, my boy, and so is the cause of you,” said the President
+good-naturedly. “You hide as much as anybody; but you can’t do it, you
+see, you’re such an ass! You try to combine two inconsistent methods.
+When a householder finds a man under his bed, he will probably pause to
+note the circumstance. But if he finds a man under his bed in a top
+hat, you will agree with me, my dear Tuesday, that he is not likely
+even to forget it. Now when you were found under Admiral Biffin’s bed—”
+
+“I am not good at deception,” said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.
+
+“Right, my boy, right,” said the President with a ponderous heartiness,
+“you aren’t good at anything.”
+
+While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking more
+steadily at the men around him. As he did so, he gradually felt all his
+sense of something spiritually queer return.
+
+He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and
+costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he
+looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he
+had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That
+lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his
+original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something
+about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which
+was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he
+could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and
+presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and
+curved mirror.
+
+Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed
+eccentricity. Syme’s original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was
+the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with
+more terror than anything, except the President’s horrible, happy
+laughter. But now that Syme had more space and light to observe him,
+there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme
+thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very
+distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that
+troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure
+thought was pain.
+
+He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and
+differently wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a
+man more obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St.
+Eustache, a sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances
+found nothing unusual about him, except that he was the only man at
+table who wore the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own.
+He had a black French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat
+cut even squarer. But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that
+the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that
+suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying
+lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of
+his being clad, not in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his
+black seemed richer and warmer than the black shades about him, as if
+it were compounded of profound colour. His black coat looked as if it
+were only black by being too dense a purple. His black beard looked as
+if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and
+thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful.
+Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be
+something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the bright
+coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may
+see just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel,
+crimson lips.
+
+Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still
+kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his
+death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last
+dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey
+beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild
+despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom
+brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For
+the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was
+literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if
+some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose
+or sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was
+expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the
+horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but
+corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He
+could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might
+fall off.
+
+Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most
+baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face
+clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had
+that combination of _savoir-faire_ with a sort of well-groomed
+coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine
+clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set
+smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a
+pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a
+crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs
+were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales,
+of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme’s
+eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying
+Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been
+appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an
+enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his
+smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had
+a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that
+he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the
+thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too
+frightful to see.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+THE EXPOSURE
+
+
+Such were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and
+again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence.
+Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective,
+that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another
+nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism
+always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on
+the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of
+thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end,
+so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in
+some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the
+world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a
+tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end
+of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a
+tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures
+seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate
+horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.
+
+Talk had been going on steadily as he took in the scene; and not the
+least of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was the
+contrast between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terrible
+purport. They were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediate
+plot. The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said
+that they were talking about bombs and kings. Only three days
+afterwards the Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in
+Paris, and over their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these
+beaming gentlemen had decided how both should die. Even the instrument
+was chosen; the black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the
+bomb.
+
+Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objective crime
+would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical
+tremors. He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at
+least two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and
+roaring gas. But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel a
+third kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moral
+revulsion or his social responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear to
+spare for the French President or the Czar; he had begun to fear for
+himself. Most of the talkers took little heed of him, debating now with
+their faces closer together, and almost uniformly grave, save when for
+an instant the smile of the Secretary ran aslant across his face as the
+jagged lightning runs aslant across the sky. But there was one
+persistent thing which first troubled Syme and at last terrified him.
+The President was always looking at him, steadily, and with a great and
+baffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but his blue eyes
+stood out of his head. And they were always fixed on Syme.
+
+Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When the
+President’s eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He
+had hardly the shred of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary
+way Sunday had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge of
+the balcony, and saw a policeman, standing abstractedly just beneath,
+staring at the bright railings and the sunlit trees.
+
+Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him
+for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men, who
+were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and
+fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism. He
+even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played
+together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to
+Gregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thing
+that he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised
+not to jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his
+cold hand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo
+of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made
+to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as
+the square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep his
+antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this
+great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber.
+Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable
+policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he
+looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly
+studying him with big, unbearable eyes.
+
+In all the torrent of his thought there were two thoughts that never
+crossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that the
+President and his Council could crush him if he continued to stand
+alone. The place might be public, the project might seem impossible.
+But Sunday was not the man who would carry himself thus easily without
+having, somehow or somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either by
+anonymous poison or sudden street accident, by hypnotism or by fire
+from hell, Sunday could certainly strike him. If he defied the man he
+was probably dead, either struck stiff there in his chair or long
+afterwards as by an innocent ailment. If he called in the police
+promptly, arrested everyone, told all, and set against them the whole
+energy of England, he would probably escape; certainly not otherwise.
+They were a balconyful of gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy
+square; but he felt no more safe with them than if they had been a
+boatful of armed pirates overlooking an empty sea.
+
+There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to
+him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a
+weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their
+allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might
+have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable,
+he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking
+abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called
+something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be
+detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood.
+But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink
+even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to
+fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.
+
+The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical.
+Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually and conventionally of the best
+things on the table—cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary
+was a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over
+half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old
+Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And
+even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of
+mere mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a
+frightful freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage
+factory. Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets or
+drunk a quart of coffee, he would be found with his great head on one
+side staring at Syme.
+
+“I have often wondered,” said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a
+slice of bread and jam, “whether it wouldn’t be better for me to do it
+with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off with a
+knife. And it would be a new emotion to get a knife into a French
+President and wriggle it round.”
+
+“You are wrong,” said the Secretary, drawing his black brows together.
+“The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with a
+personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best
+symbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers of
+the Christians. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even
+so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man’s brain is a
+bomb,” he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and
+striking his own skull with violence. “My brain feels like a bomb,
+night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must
+expand, if it breaks up the universe.”
+
+“I don’t want the universe broken up just yet,” drawled the Marquis. “I
+want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one
+yesterday in bed.”
+
+“No, if the only end of the thing is nothing,” said Dr. Bull with his
+sphinx-like smile, “it hardly seems worth doing.”
+
+The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.
+
+“Every man knows in his heart,” he said, “that nothing is worth doing.”
+
+There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said—
+
+“We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is how
+Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all agree with the
+original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I should
+suggest that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to—”
+
+The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday
+had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.
+
+“Before we discuss that,” he said in a small, quiet voice, “let us go
+into a private room. I have something very particular to say.”
+
+Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had come
+at last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he could
+hear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright,
+was cold.
+
+A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial
+tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle.
+He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from
+nowhere. That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the
+vulgarity, and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those
+unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of
+Christendom. His youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his
+mind; he did not think of himself as the representative of the corps of
+gentlemen turned into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who
+lived in the dark room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of
+all these common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched
+into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in
+being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above
+the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at least, he looked down
+upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the
+commonplace. He felt towards them all that unconscious and elementary
+superiority that a brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man
+over powerful errors. He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor
+the physical strength of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded
+it no more than the fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a
+horn on his nose like a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate
+certainty that the President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was
+right. There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism
+in the song of Roland—
+
+    “Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit,”
+
+which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.
+This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a
+quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the
+barrel-organ could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This
+very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to
+miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into
+their dark room and die for something that they could not even
+understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the
+energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear
+deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the
+drums of the pride of death.
+
+The conspirators were already filing through the open window and into
+the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his
+brain and body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them
+down an irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and
+into a dim, cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an
+abandoned boardroom. When they were all in, he closed and locked the
+door.
+
+The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed bursting
+with inarticulate grievance.
+
+“Zso! Zso!” he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish
+accent becoming almost impenetrable. “You zay you nod ’ide. You zay you
+show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you
+run yourselves in a dark box!”
+
+The President seemed to take the foreigner’s incoherent satire with
+entire good humour.
+
+“You can’t get hold of it yet, Gogol,” he said in a fatherly way. “When
+once they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will not
+care where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should have
+had the whole staff at the keyhole. You don’t seem to know anything
+about mankind.”
+
+“I die for zem,” cried the Pole in thick excitement, “and I slay zare
+oppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite ze
+tyrant in ze open square.”
+
+“I see, I see,” said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himself
+at the top of a long table. “You die for mankind first, and then you
+get up and smite their oppressors. So that’s all right. And now may I
+ask you to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the
+other gentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning
+something intelligent is going to be said.”
+
+Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the original
+summons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling in his brown
+beard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion of
+the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feeling
+of a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, of
+making a good speech.
+
+“Comrades,” said the President, suddenly rising, “we have spun out this
+farce long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something so
+simple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to our
+levities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we
+were discussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying
+anything else, that those plans and places should not be voted by this
+meeting, but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable
+member. I suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull.”
+
+They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for the
+next words, though not loud, had a living and sensational emphasis.
+Sunday struck the table.
+
+“Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at this
+meeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to do must be
+mentioned in this company.”
+
+Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers; but it seemed
+as if he had never really astonished them until now. They all moved
+feverishly in their seats, except Syme. He sat stiff in his, with his
+hand in his pocket, and on the handle of his loaded revolver. When the
+attack on him came he would sell his life dear. He would find out at
+least if the President was mortal.
+
+Sunday went on smoothly—
+
+“You will probably understand that there is only one possible motive
+for forbidding free speech at this festival of freedom. Strangers
+overhearing us matters nothing. They assume that we are joking. But
+what would matter, even unto death, is this, that there should be one
+actually among us who is not of us, who knows our grave purpose, but
+does not share it, who—”
+
+The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.
+
+“It can’t be!” he cried, leaping. “There can’t—”
+
+The President flapped his large flat hand on the table like the fin of
+some huge fish.
+
+“Yes,” he said slowly, “there is a spy in this room. There is a traitor
+at this table. I will waste no more words. His name—”
+
+Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.
+
+“His name is Gogol,” said the President. “He is that hairy humbug over
+there who pretends to be a Pole.”
+
+Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the same flash
+three men sprang at his throat. Even the Professor made an effort to
+rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was blinded with a
+beneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat shuddering, in a
+palsy of passionate relief.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS
+
+
+“Sit down!” said Sunday in a voice that he used once or twice in his
+life, a voice that made men drop drawn swords.
+
+The three who had risen fell away from Gogol, and that equivocal person
+himself resumed his seat.
+
+“Well, my man,” said the President briskly, addressing him as one
+addresses a total stranger, “will you oblige me by putting your hand in
+your upper waistcoat pocket and showing me what you have there?”
+
+The alleged Pole was a little pale under his tangle of dark hair, but
+he put two fingers into the pocket with apparent coolness and pulled
+out a blue strip of card. When Syme saw it lying on the table, he woke
+up again to the world outside him. For although the card lay at the
+other extreme of the table, and he could read nothing of the
+inscription on it, it bore a startling resemblance to the blue card in
+his own pocket, the card which had been given to him when he joined the
+anti-anarchist constabulary.
+
+“Pathetic Slav,” said the President, “tragic child of Poland, are you
+prepared in the presence of that card to deny that you are in this
+company—shall we say _de trop?_”
+
+“Right oh!” said the late Gogol. It made everyone jump to hear a clear,
+commercial and somewhat cockney voice coming out of that forest of
+foreign hair. It was irrational, as if a Chinaman had suddenly spoken
+with a Scotch accent.
+
+“I gather that you fully understand your position,” said Sunday.
+
+“You bet,” answered the Pole. “I see it’s a fair cop. All I say is, I
+don’t believe any Pole could have imitated my accent like I did his.”
+
+“I concede the point,” said Sunday. “I believe your own accent to be
+inimitable, though I shall practise it in my bath. Do you mind leaving
+your beard with your card?”
+
+“Not a bit,” answered Gogol; and with one finger he ripped off the
+whole of his shaggy head-covering, emerging with thin red hair and a
+pale, pert face. “It was hot,” he added.
+
+“I will do you the justice to say,” said Sunday, not without a sort of
+brutal admiration, “that you seem to have kept pretty cool under it.
+Now listen to me. I like you. The consequence is that it would annoy me
+for just about two and a half minutes if I heard that you had died in
+torments. Well, if you ever tell the police or any human soul about us,
+I shall have that two and a half minutes of discomfort. On your
+discomfort I will not dwell. Good day. Mind the step.”
+
+The red-haired detective who had masqueraded as Gogol rose to his feet
+without a word, and walked out of the room with an air of perfect
+nonchalance. Yet the astonished Syme was able to realise that this ease
+was suddenly assumed; for there was a slight stumble outside the door,
+which showed that the departing detective had not minded the step.
+
+“Time is flying,” said the President in his gayest manner, after
+glancing at his watch, which like everything about him seemed bigger
+than it ought to be. “I must go off at once; I have to take the chair
+at a Humanitarian meeting.”
+
+The Secretary turned to him with working eyebrows.
+
+“Would it not be better,” he said a little sharply, “to discuss further
+the details of our project, now that the spy has left us?”
+
+“No, I think not,” said the President with a yawn like an unobtrusive
+earthquake. “Leave it as it is. Let Saturday settle it. I must be off.
+Breakfast here next Sunday.”
+
+But the late loud scenes had whipped up the almost naked nerves of the
+Secretary. He was one of those men who are conscientious even in crime.
+
+“I must protest, President, that the thing is irregular,” he said. “It
+is a fundamental rule of our society that all plans shall be debated in
+full council. Of course, I fully appreciate your forethought when in
+the actual presence of a traitor—”
+
+“Secretary,” said the President seriously, “if you’d take your head
+home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it
+might.”
+
+The Secretary reared back in a kind of equine anger.
+
+“I really fail to understand—” he began in high offense.
+
+“That’s it, that’s it,” said the President, nodding a great many times.
+“That’s where you fail right enough. You fail to understand. Why, you
+dancing donkey,” he roared, rising, “you didn’t want to be overheard by
+a spy, didn’t you? How do you know you aren’t overheard now?”
+
+And with these words he shouldered his way out of the room, shaking
+with incomprehensible scorn.
+
+Four of the men left behind gaped after him without any apparent
+glimmering of his meaning. Syme alone had even a glimmering, and such
+as it was it froze him to the bone. If the last words of the President
+meant anything, they meant that he had not after all passed
+unsuspected. They meant that while Sunday could not denounce him like
+Gogol, he still could not trust him like the others.
+
+The other four got to their feet grumbling more or less, and betook
+themselves elsewhere to find lunch, for it was already well past
+midday. The Professor went last, very slowly and painfully. Syme sat
+long after the rest had gone, revolving his strange position. He had
+escaped a thunderbolt, but he was still under a cloud. At last he rose
+and made his way out of the hotel into Leicester Square. The bright,
+cold day had grown increasingly colder, and when he came out into the
+street he was surprised by a few flakes of snow. While he still carried
+the sword-stick and the rest of Gregory’s portable luggage, he had
+thrown the cloak down and left it somewhere, perhaps on the steam-tug,
+perhaps on the balcony. Hoping, therefore, that the snow-shower might
+be slight, he stepped back out of the street for a moment and stood up
+under the doorway of a small and greasy hair-dresser’s shop, the front
+window of which was empty, except for a sickly wax lady in evening
+dress.
+
+Snow, however, began to thicken and fall fast; and Syme, having found
+one glance at the wax lady quite sufficient to depress his spirits,
+stared out instead into the white and empty street. He was considerably
+astonished to see, standing quite still outside the shop and staring
+into the window, a man. His top hat was loaded with snow like the hat
+of Father Christmas, the white drift was rising round his boots and
+ankles; but it seemed as if nothing could tear him away from the
+contemplation of the colourless wax doll in dirty evening dress. That
+any human being should stand in such weather looking into such a shop
+was a matter of sufficient wonder to Syme; but his idle wonder turned
+suddenly into a personal shock; for he realised that the man standing
+there was the paralytic old Professor de Worms. It scarcely seemed the
+place for a person of his years and infirmities.
+
+Syme was ready to believe anything about the perversions of this
+dehumanized brotherhood; but even he could not believe that the
+Professor had fallen in love with that particular wax lady. He could
+only suppose that the man’s malady (whatever it was) involved some
+momentary fits of rigidity or trance. He was not inclined, however, to
+feel in this case any very compassionate concern. On the contrary, he
+rather congratulated himself that the Professor’s stroke and his
+elaborate and limping walk would make it easy to escape from him and
+leave him miles behind. For Syme thirsted first and last to get clear
+of the whole poisonous atmosphere, if only for an hour. Then he could
+collect his thoughts, formulate his policy, and decide finally whether
+he should or should not keep faith with Gregory.
+
+He strolled away through the dancing snow, turned up two or three
+streets, down through two or three others, and entered a small Soho
+restaurant for lunch. He partook reflectively of four small and quaint
+courses, drank half a bottle of red wine, and ended up over black
+coffee and a black cigar, still thinking. He had taken his seat in the
+upper room of the restaurant, which was full of the chink of knives and
+the chatter of foreigners. He remembered that in old days he had
+imagined that all these harmless and kindly aliens were anarchists. He
+shuddered, remembering the real thing. But even the shudder had the
+delightful shame of escape. The wine, the common food, the familiar
+place, the faces of natural and talkative men, made him almost feel as
+if the Council of the Seven Days had been a bad dream; and although he
+knew it was nevertheless an objective reality, it was at least a
+distant one. Tall houses and populous streets lay between him and his
+last sight of the shameful seven; he was free in free London, and
+drinking wine among the free. With a somewhat easier action, he took
+his hat and stick and strolled down the stair into the shop below.
+
+When he entered that lower room he stood stricken and rooted to the
+spot. At a small table, close up to the blank window and the white
+street of snow, sat the old anarchist Professor over a glass of milk,
+with his lifted livid face and pendent eyelids. For an instant Syme
+stood as rigid as the stick he leant upon. Then with a gesture as of
+blind hurry, he brushed past the Professor, dashing open the door and
+slamming it behind him, and stood outside in the snow.
+
+“Can that old corpse be following me?” he asked himself, biting his
+yellow moustache. “I stopped too long up in that room, so that even
+such leaden feet could catch me up. One comfort is, with a little brisk
+walking I can put a man like that as far away as Timbuctoo. Or am I too
+fanciful? Was he really following me? Surely Sunday would not be such a
+fool as to send a lame man?”
+
+He set off at a smart pace, twisting and whirling his stick, in the
+direction of Covent Garden. As he crossed the great market the snow
+increased, growing blinding and bewildering as the afternoon began to
+darken. The snow-flakes tormented him like a swarm of silver bees.
+Getting into his eyes and beard, they added their unremitting futility
+to his already irritated nerves; and by the time that he had come at a
+swinging pace to the beginning of Fleet Street, he lost patience, and
+finding a Sunday teashop, turned into it to take shelter. He ordered
+another cup of black coffee as an excuse. Scarcely had he done so, when
+Professor de Worms hobbled heavily into the shop, sat down with
+difficulty and ordered a glass of milk.
+
+Syme’s walking-stick had fallen from his hand with a great clang, which
+confessed the concealed steel. But the Professor did not look round.
+Syme, who was commonly a cool character, was literally gaping as a
+rustic gapes at a conjuring trick. He had seen no cab following; he had
+heard no wheels outside the shop; to all mortal appearances the man had
+come on foot. But the old man could only walk like a snail, and Syme
+had walked like the wind. He started up and snatched his stick, half
+crazy with the contradiction in mere arithmetic, and swung out of the
+swinging doors, leaving his coffee untasted. An omnibus going to the
+Bank went rattling by with an unusual rapidity. He had a violent run of
+a hundred yards to reach it; but he managed to spring, swaying upon the
+splash-board and, pausing for an instant to pant, he climbed on to the
+top. When he had been seated for about half a minute, he heard behind
+him a sort of heavy and asthmatic breathing.
+
+Turning sharply, he saw rising gradually higher and higher up the
+omnibus steps a top hat soiled and dripping with snow, and under the
+shadow of its brim the short-sighted face and shaky shoulders of
+Professor de Worms. He let himself into a seat with characteristic
+care, and wrapped himself up to the chin in the mackintosh rug.
+
+Every movement of the old man’s tottering figure and vague hands, every
+uncertain gesture and panic-stricken pause, seemed to put it beyond
+question that he was helpless, that he was in the last imbecility of
+the body. He moved by inches, he let himself down with little gasps of
+caution. And yet, unless the philosophical entities called time and
+space have no vestige even of a practical existence, it appeared quite
+unquestionable that he had run after the omnibus.
+
+Syme sprang erect upon the rocking car, and after staring wildly at the
+wintry sky, that grew gloomier every moment, he ran down the steps. He
+had repressed an elemental impulse to leap over the side.
+
+Too bewildered to look back or to reason, he rushed into one of the
+little courts at the side of Fleet Street as a rabbit rushes into a
+hole. He had a vague idea, if this incomprehensible old Jack-in-the-box
+was really pursuing him, that in that labyrinth of little streets he
+could soon throw him off the scent. He dived in and out of those
+crooked lanes, which were more like cracks than thoroughfares; and by
+the time that he had completed about twenty alternate angles and
+described an unthinkable polygon, he paused to listen for any sound of
+pursuit. There was none; there could not in any case have been much,
+for the little streets were thick with the soundless snow. Somewhere
+behind Red Lion Court, however, he noticed a place where some energetic
+citizen had cleared away the snow for a space of about twenty yards,
+leaving the wet, glistening cobble-stones. He thought little of this as
+he passed it, only plunging into yet another arm of the maze. But when
+a few hundred yards farther on he stood still again to listen, his
+heart stood still also, for he heard from that space of rugged stones
+the clinking crutch and labouring feet of the infernal cripple.
+
+The sky above was loaded with the clouds of snow, leaving London in a
+darkness and oppression premature for that hour of the evening. On each
+side of Syme the walls of the alley were blind and featureless; there
+was no little window or any kind of eve. He felt a new impulse to break
+out of this hive of houses, and to get once more into the open and
+lamp-lit street. Yet he rambled and dodged for a long time before he
+struck the main thoroughfare. When he did so, he struck it much farther
+up than he had fancied. He came out into what seemed the vast and void
+of Ludgate Circus, and saw St. Paul’s Cathedral sitting in the sky.
+
+At first he was startled to find these great roads so empty, as if a
+pestilence had swept through the city. Then he told himself that some
+degree of emptiness was natural; first because the snow-storm was even
+dangerously deep, and secondly because it was Sunday. And at the very
+word Sunday he bit his lip; the word was henceforth for hire like some
+indecent pun. Under the white fog of snow high up in the heaven the
+whole atmosphere of the city was turned to a very queer kind of green
+twilight, as of men under the sea. The sealed and sullen sunset behind
+the dark dome of St. Paul’s had in it smoky and sinister
+colours—colours of sickly green, dead red or decaying bronze, that were
+just bright enough to emphasise the solid whiteness of the snow. But
+right up against these dreary colours rose the black bulk of the
+cathedral; and upon the top of the cathedral was a random splash and
+great stain of snow, still clinging as to an Alpine peak. It had fallen
+accidentally, but just so fallen as to half drape the dome from its
+very topmost point, and to pick out in perfect silver the great orb and
+the cross. When Syme saw it he suddenly straightened himself, and made
+with his sword-stick an involuntary salute.
+
+He knew that that evil figure, his shadow, was creeping quickly or
+slowly behind him, and he did not care.
+
+It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the skies were
+darkening that high place of the earth was bright. The devils might
+have captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross. He had a
+new impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and
+pursuing paralytic; and at the entrance of the court as it opened upon
+the Circus he turned, stick in hand, to face his pursuer.
+
+Professor de Worms came slowly round the corner of the irregular alley
+behind him, his unnatural form outlined against a lonely gas-lamp,
+irresistibly recalling that very imaginative figure in the nursery
+rhymes, “the crooked man who went a crooked mile.” He really looked as
+if he had been twisted out of shape by the tortuous streets he had been
+threading. He came nearer and nearer, the lamplight shining on his
+lifted spectacles, his lifted, patient face. Syme waited for him as St.
+George waited for the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation or
+for death. And the old Professor came right up to him and passed him
+like a total stranger, without even a blink of his mournful eyelids.
+
+There was something in this silent and unexpected innocence that left
+Syme in a final fury. The man’s colourless face and manner seemed to
+assert that the whole following had been an accident. Syme was
+galvanised with an energy that was something between bitterness and a
+burst of boyish derision. He made a wild gesture as if to knock the old
+man’s hat off, called out something like “Catch me if you can,” and
+went racing away across the white, open Circus. Concealment was
+impossible now; and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the
+black figure of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging
+strides like a man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding
+body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a
+lecturer upon the body of a harlequin.
+
+This outrageous chase sped across Ludgate Circus, up Ludgate Hill,
+round St. Paul’s Cathedral, along Cheapside, Syme remembering all the
+nightmares he had ever known. Then Syme broke away towards the river,
+and ended almost down by the docks. He saw the yellow panes of a low,
+lighted public-house, flung himself into it and ordered beer. It was a
+foul tavern, sprinkled with foreign sailors, a place where opium might
+be smoked or knives drawn.
+
+A moment later Professor de Worms entered the place, sat down
+carefully, and asked for a glass of milk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS
+
+
+When Gabriel Syme found himself finally established in a chair, and
+opposite to him, fixed and final also, the lifted eyebrows and leaden
+eyelids of the Professor, his fears fully returned. This
+incomprehensible man from the fierce council, after all, had certainly
+pursued him. If the man had one character as a paralytic and another
+character as a pursuer, the antithesis might make him more interesting,
+but scarcely more soothing. It would be a very small comfort that he
+could not find the Professor out, if by some serious accident the
+Professor should find him out. He emptied a whole pewter pot of ale
+before the professor had touched his milk.
+
+One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless. It was
+just possible that this escapade signified something other than even a
+slight suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some regular form or sign.
+Perhaps the foolish scamper was some sort of friendly signal that he
+ought to have understood. Perhaps it was a ritual. Perhaps the new
+Thursday was always chased along Cheapside, as the new Lord Mayor is
+always escorted along it. He was just selecting a tentative inquiry,
+when the old Professor opposite suddenly and simply cut him short.
+Before Syme could ask the first diplomatic question, the old anarchist
+had asked suddenly, without any sort of preparation—
+
+“Are you a policeman?”
+
+Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
+brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only
+manage a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.
+
+“A policeman?” he said, laughing vaguely. “Whatever made you think of a
+policeman in connection with me?”
+
+“The process was simple enough,” answered the Professor patiently. “I
+thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now.”
+
+“Did I take a policeman’s hat by mistake out of the restaurant?” asked
+Syme, smiling wildly. “Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me
+somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a
+policeman? Do, do let me be a postman.”
+
+The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but
+Syme ran on with a feverish irony.
+
+“But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy.
+Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir,
+the ape fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never
+detect the shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps
+a maiden lady on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have
+been. I don’t mind being the policeman that might have been. I don’t
+mind being anything in German thought.”
+
+“Are you in the police service?” said the old man, ignoring all Syme’s
+improvised and desperate raillery. “Are you a detective?”
+
+Syme’s heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.
+
+“Your suggestion is ridiculous,” he began. “Why on earth—”
+
+The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
+nearly breaking it.
+
+“Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?” he shrieked
+in a high, crazy voice. “Are you, or are you not, a police detective?”
+
+“No!” answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman’s drop.
+
+“You swear it,” said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
+becoming as it were loathsomely alive. “You swear it! You swear it! If
+you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil
+dances at your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your
+grave? Will there really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a
+dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not
+in the British police?”
+
+He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
+loose hand like a flap to his ear.
+
+“I am not in the British police,” said Syme with insane calm.
+
+Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
+collapse.
+
+“That’s a pity,” he said, “because I am.”
+
+Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a
+crash.
+
+“Because you are what?” he said thickly. “You are what?”
+
+“I am a policeman,” said the Professor with his first broad smile, and
+beaming through his spectacles. “But as you think policeman only a
+relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the
+British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British
+police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters’ club. I
+suppose I ought to arrest you.” And with these words he laid on the
+table before Syme an exact facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in
+his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol of his power from the police.
+
+Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
+upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars
+were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the
+last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now
+the capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from
+whom he had been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own
+house, who on the other side of the table lay back and laughed at him.
+He did not for the moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the
+happy and silly fact that this shadow, which had pursued him with an
+intolerable oppression of peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying
+to catch him up. He knew simultaneously that he was a fool and a free
+man. For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain
+healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions
+when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic
+pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme’s egotism held hard to
+the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly adopted the
+third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat
+pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until
+his spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted
+with a barbaric laughter.
+
+Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
+plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there
+was something Homeric in Syme’s mirth which made many half-drunken men
+look round.
+
+“What yer laughing at, guv’nor?” asked one wondering labourer from the
+docks.
+
+“At myself,” answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his
+ecstatic reaction.
+
+“Pull yourself together,” said the Professor, “or you’ll get
+hysterical. Have some more beer. I’ll join you.”
+
+“You haven’t drunk your milk,” said Syme.
+
+“My milk!” said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
+contempt, “my milk! Do you think I’d look at the beastly stuff when I’m
+out of sight of the bloody anarchists? We’re all Christians in this
+room, though perhaps,” he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd,
+“not strict ones. Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I’ll finish it
+right enough!” and he knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash
+of glass and a splash of silver fluid.
+
+Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.
+
+“I understand now,” he cried; “of course, you’re not an old man at
+all.”
+
+“I can’t take my face off here,” replied Professor de Worms. “It’s
+rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I’m an old man, that’s not
+for me to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday.”
+
+“Yes, but I mean,” said Syme impatiently, “there’s nothing the matter
+with you.”
+
+“Yes,” answered the other dispassionately. “I am subject to colds.”
+
+Syme’s laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He
+laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young
+actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would
+have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.
+
+The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.
+
+“Did you know,” he asked, “that that man Gogol was one of us?”
+
+“I? No, I didn’t know it,” answered Syme in some surprise. “But didn’t
+you?”
+
+“I knew no more than the dead,” replied the man who called himself de
+Worms. “I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in
+my boots.”
+
+“And I thought he was talking about me,” said Syme, with his rather
+reckless laughter. “I had my hand on my revolver all the time.”
+
+“So had I,” said the Professor grimly; “so had Gogol evidently.”
+
+Syme struck the table with an exclamation.
+
+“Why, there were three of us there!” he cried. “Three out of seven is a
+fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!”
+
+The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.
+
+“We were three,” he said. “If we had been three hundred we could still
+have done nothing.”
+
+“Not if we were three hundred against four?” asked Syme, jeering rather
+boisterously.
+
+“No,” said the Professor with sobriety, “not if we were three hundred
+against Sunday.”
+
+And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died
+in his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the
+unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured
+photograph, and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his
+satellites, that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became
+gradually blurred by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday’s
+seemed almost to grow more actual during absence, as if a man’s painted
+portrait should slowly come alive.
+
+They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme’s speech
+came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.
+
+“Professor,” he cried, “it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this man?”
+
+The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
+wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.
+
+“Yes, I am,” he said mildly. “So are you.”
+
+Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like an
+insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.
+
+“Yes,” he said in a voice indescribable, “you are right. I am afraid of
+him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear
+until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his
+throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him
+down.”
+
+“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?”
+
+“Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in
+the universe anything of which he is afraid.”
+
+De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made an effort
+to speak, but Syme went on in a low voice, but with an undercurrent of
+inhuman exaltation—
+
+“Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
+fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
+prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless—like a tree? Fight the
+thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
+who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
+death-bed the great robber said, ‘I can give you no money, but I can
+give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
+upwards.’ So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.”
+
+The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his pose.
+
+“Sunday is a fixed star,” he said.
+
+“You shall see him a falling star,” said Syme, and put on his hat.
+
+The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet.
+
+“Have you any idea,” he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment,
+“exactly where you are going?”
+
+“Yes,” replied Syme shortly, “I am going to prevent this bomb being
+thrown in Paris.”
+
+“Have you any conception how?” inquired the other.
+
+“No,” said Syme with equal decision.
+
+“You remember, of course,” resumed the soi-disant de Worms, pulling his
+beard and looking out of the window, “that when we broke up rather
+hurriedly the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left in the
+private hands of the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by this time
+probably crossing the Channel. But where he will go and what he will do
+it is doubtful whether even the President knows; certainly we don’t
+know. The only man who does know is Dr. Bull.”
+
+“Confound it!” cried Syme. “And we don’t know where he is.”
+
+“Yes,” said the other in his curious, absent-minded way, “I know where
+he is myself.”
+
+“Will you tell me?” asked Syme with eager eyes.
+
+“I will take you there,” said the Professor, and took down his own hat
+from a peg.
+
+Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.
+
+“What do you mean?” he asked sharply. “Will you join me? Will you take
+the risk?”
+
+“Young man,” said the Professor pleasantly, “I am amused to observe
+that you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word, and
+that shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical
+rhetoric. You think that it is possible to pull down the President. I
+know that it is impossible, and I am going to try it,” and opening the
+tavern door, which let in a blast of bitter air, they went out together
+into the dark streets by the docks.
+
+Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a
+clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small
+streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming
+lamps irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and
+fallen world. Syme felt almost dazed as he stepped through this growing
+confusion of lights and shadows; but his companion walked on with a
+certain briskness, towards where, at the end of the street, an inch or
+two of the lamplit river looked like a bar of flame.
+
+“Where are you going?” Syme inquired.
+
+“Just now,” answered the Professor, “I am going just round the corner
+to see whether Dr. Bull has gone to bed. He is hygienic, and retires
+early.”
+
+“Dr. Bull!” exclaimed Syme. “Does he live round the corner?”
+
+“No,” answered his friend. “As a matter of fact he lives some way off,
+on the other side of the river, but we can tell from here whether he
+has gone to bed.”
+
+Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river, flecked with
+flame, he pointed with his stick to the other bank. On the Surrey side
+at this point there ran out into the Thames, seeming almost to overhang
+it, a bulk and cluster of those tall tenements, dotted with lighted
+windows, and rising like factory chimneys to an almost insane height.
+Their special poise and position made one block of buildings especially
+look like a Tower of Babel with a hundred eyes. Syme had never seen any
+of the sky-scraping buildings in America, so he could only think of the
+buildings in a dream.
+
+Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably lighted turret
+abruptly went out, as if this black Argus had winked at him with one of
+his innumerable eyes.
+
+Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his stick
+against his boot.
+
+“We are too late,” he said, “the hygienic Doctor has gone to bed.”
+
+“What do you mean?” asked Syme. “Does he live over there, then?”
+
+“Yes,” said de Worms, “behind that particular window which you can’t
+see. Come along and get some dinner. We must call on him tomorrow
+morning.”
+
+Without further parley, he led the way through several by-ways until
+they came out into the flare and clamour of the East India Dock Road.
+The Professor, who seemed to know his way about the neighbourhood,
+proceeded to a place where the line of lighted shops fell back into a
+sort of abrupt twilight and quiet, in which an old white inn, all out
+of repair, stood back some twenty feet from the road.
+
+“You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
+fossils,” explained the Professor. “I once found a decent place in the
+West End.”
+
+“I suppose,” said Syme, smiling, “that this is the corresponding decent
+place in the East End?”
+
+“It is,” said the Professor reverently, and went in.
+
+In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The beans and
+bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing
+emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme’s sense of a new
+comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had
+been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between
+isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians
+that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand
+times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world
+will always return to monogamy.
+
+Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his
+outrageous tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little
+tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant
+monologue, as a man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also,
+the man who had impersonated Professor de Worms was not less
+communicative. His own story was almost as silly as Syme’s.
+
+“That’s a good get-up of yours,” said Syme, draining a glass of Macon;
+“a lot better than old Gogol’s. Even at the start I thought he was a
+bit too hairy.”
+
+“A difference of artistic theory,” replied the Professor pensively.
+“Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of
+an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed,
+to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a
+portrait.”
+
+“I don’t understand you,” said Syme.
+
+“I am a portrait,” repeated the Professor. “I am a portrait of the
+celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples.”
+
+“You mean you are made up like him,” said Syme. “But doesn’t he know
+that you are taking his nose in vain?”
+
+“He knows it right enough,” replied his friend cheerfully.
+
+“Then why doesn’t he denounce you?”
+
+“I have denounced him,” answered the Professor.
+
+“Do explain yourself,” said Syme.
+
+“With pleasure, if you don’t mind hearing my story,” replied the
+eminent foreign philosopher. “I am by profession an actor, and my name
+is Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian
+and blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of the turf,
+sometimes the riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the political
+refugee. In some den of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great
+German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much
+about him beyond his appearance, which was very disgusting, and which I
+studied carefully. I understood that he had proved that the destructive
+principle in the universe was God; hence he insisted on the need for a
+furious and incessant energy, rending all things in pieces. Energy, he
+said, was the All. He was lame, shortsighted, and partially paralytic.
+When I met him I was in a frivolous mood, and I disliked him so much
+that I resolved to imitate him. If I had been a draughtsman I would
+have drawn a caricature. I was only an actor, I could only act a
+caricature. I made myself up into what was meant for a wild
+exaggeration of the old Professor’s dirty old self. When I went into
+the room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar
+of laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation
+at the insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance
+was received with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first
+opened my lips) with a murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect
+artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true.
+They thought I really was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a
+healthy-minded young man at the time, and I confess that it was a blow.
+Before I could fully recover, however, two or three of these admirers
+ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that a public insult
+had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its nature. It seemed
+that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous
+parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for me, and
+in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through.
+Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted
+eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
+
+“I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me
+looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which
+was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like
+my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young
+actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and
+working within this definite limitation, he couldn’t be so jolly
+paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I
+countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that
+nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could
+not even understand myself. ‘I don’t fancy,’ he said, ‘that you could
+have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since
+there inheres in it the introduction of lacuna, which are an essential
+of differentiation.’ I replied quite scornfully, ‘You read all that up
+in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was
+exposed long ago by Glumpe.’ It is unnecessary for me to say that there
+never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all
+round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and
+the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him
+rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell
+back upon a more popular form of wit. ‘I see,’ he sneered, ‘you prevail
+like the false pig in Æsop.’ ‘And you fail,’ I answered, smiling, ‘like
+the hedgehog in Montaigne.’ Need I say that there is no hedgehog in
+Montaigne? ‘Your claptrap comes off,’ he said; ‘so would your beard.’ I
+had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather
+witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, ‘Like the Pantheist’s boots,’
+at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The
+real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man
+tried very patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I believe,
+received everywhere in Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent
+earnestness and anger, you see, make him all the more entertaining.”
+
+“Well,” said Syme, “I can understand your putting on his dirty old
+beard for a night’s practical joke, but I don’t understand your never
+taking it off again.”
+
+“That is the rest of the story,” said the impersonator. “When I myself
+left the company, followed by reverent applause, I went limping down
+the dark street, hoping that I should soon be far enough away to be
+able to walk like a human being. To my astonishment, as I was turning
+the corner, I felt a touch on the shoulder, and turning, found myself
+under the shadow of an enormous policeman. He told me I was wanted. I
+struck a sort of paralytic attitude, and cried in a high German accent,
+‘Yes, I am wanted—by the oppressed of the world. You are arresting me
+on the charge of being the great anarchist, Professor de Worms.’ The
+policeman impassively consulted a paper in his hand, ‘No, sir,’ he said
+civilly, ‘at least, not exactly, sir. I am arresting you on the charge
+of not being the celebrated anarchist, Professor de Worms.’ This
+charge, if it was criminal at all, was certainly the lighter of the
+two, and I went along with the man, doubtful, but not greatly dismayed.
+I was shown into a number of rooms, and eventually into the presence of
+a police officer, who explained that a serious campaign had been opened
+against the centres of anarchy, and that this, my successful
+masquerade, might be of considerable value to the public safety. He
+offered me a good salary and this little blue card. Though our
+conversation was short, he struck me as a man of very massive common
+sense and humour; but I cannot tell you much about him personally,
+because—”
+
+Syme laid down his knife and fork.
+
+“I know,” he said, “because you talked to him in a dark room.”
+
+Professor de Worms nodded and drained his glass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+THE MAN IN SPECTACLES
+
+
+“Burgundy is a jolly thing,” said the Professor sadly, as he set his
+glass down.
+
+“You don’t look as if it were,” said Syme; “you drink it as if it were
+medicine.”
+
+“You must excuse my manner,” said the Professor dismally, “my position
+is rather a curious one. Inside I am really bursting with boyish
+merriment; but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I
+can’t leave off. So that when I am among friends, and have no need at
+all to disguise myself, I still can’t help speaking slow and wrinkling
+my forehead—just as if it were my forehead. I can be quite happy, you
+understand, but only in a paralytic sort of way. The most buoyant
+exclamations leap up in my heart, but they come out of my mouth quite
+different. You should hear me say, ‘Buck up, old cock!’ It would bring
+tears to your eyes.”
+
+“It does,” said Syme; “but I cannot help thinking that apart from all
+that you are really a bit worried.”
+
+The Professor started a little and looked at him steadily.
+
+“You are a very clever fellow,” he said, “it is a pleasure to work with
+you. Yes, I have rather a heavy cloud in my head. There is a great
+problem to face,” and he sank his bald brow in his two hands.
+
+Then he said in a low voice—
+
+“Can you play the piano?”
+
+“Yes,” said Syme in simple wonder, “I’m supposed to have a good touch.”
+
+Then, as the other did not speak, he added—
+
+“I trust the great cloud is lifted.”
+
+After a long silence, the Professor said out of the cavernous shadow of
+his hands—
+
+“It would have done just as well if you could work a typewriter.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Syme, “you flatter me.”
+
+“Listen to me,” said the other, “and remember whom we have to see
+tomorrow. You and I are going tomorrow to attempt something which is
+very much more dangerous than trying to steal the Crown Jewels out of
+the Tower. We are trying to steal a secret from a very sharp, very
+strong, and very wicked man. I believe there is no man, except the
+President, of course, who is so seriously startling and formidable as
+that little grinning fellow in goggles. He has not perhaps the
+white-hot enthusiasm unto death, the mad martyrdom for anarchy, which
+marks the Secretary. But then that very fanaticism in the Secretary has
+a human pathos, and is almost a redeeming trait. But the little Doctor
+has a brutal sanity that is more shocking than the Secretary’s disease.
+Don’t you notice his detestable virility and vitality. He bounces like
+an india-rubber ball. Depend on it, Sunday was not asleep (I wonder if
+he ever sleeps?) when he locked up all the plans of this outrage in the
+round, black head of Dr. Bull.”
+
+“And you think,” said Syme, “that this unique monster will be soothed
+if I play the piano to him?”
+
+“Don’t be an ass,” said his mentor. “I mentioned the piano because it
+gives one quick and independent fingers. Syme, if we are to go through
+this interview and come out sane or alive, we must have some code of
+signals between us that this brute will not see. I have made a rough
+alphabetical cypher corresponding to the five fingers—like this, see,”
+and he rippled with his fingers on the wooden table—“B A D, bad, a word
+we may frequently require.”
+
+Syme poured himself out another glass of wine, and began to study the
+scheme. He was abnormally quick with his brains at puzzles, and with
+his hands at conjuring, and it did not take him long to learn how he
+might convey simple messages by what would seem to be idle taps upon a
+table or knee. But wine and companionship had always the effect of
+inspiring him to a farcical ingenuity, and the Professor soon found
+himself struggling with the too vast energy of the new language, as it
+passed through the heated brain of Syme.
+
+“We must have several word-signs,” said Syme seriously—“words that we
+are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is
+‘coeval’. What’s yours?”
+
+“Do stop playing the goat,” said the Professor plaintively. “You don’t
+know how serious this is.”
+
+“‘Lush’ too,” said Syme, shaking his head sagaciously, “we must have
+‘lush’—word applied to grass, don’t you know?”
+
+“Do you imagine,” asked the Professor furiously, “that we are going to
+talk to Dr. Bull about grass?”
+
+“There are several ways in which the subject could be approached,” said
+Syme reflectively, “and the word introduced without appearing forced.
+We might say, ‘Dr. Bull, as a revolutionist, you remember that a tyrant
+once advised us to eat grass; and indeed many of us, looking on the
+fresh lush grass of summer...’”
+
+“Do you understand,” said the other, “that this is a tragedy?”
+
+“Perfectly,” replied Syme; “always be comic in a tragedy. What the
+deuce else can you do? I wish this language of yours had a wider scope.
+I suppose we could not extend it from the fingers to the toes? That
+would involve pulling off our boots and socks during the conversation,
+which however unobtrusively performed—”
+
+“Syme,” said his friend with a stern simplicity, “go to bed!”
+
+Syme, however, sat up in bed for a considerable time mastering the new
+code. He was awakened next morning while the east was still sealed with
+darkness, and found his grey-bearded ally standing like a ghost beside
+his bed.
+
+Syme sat up in bed blinking; then slowly collected his thoughts, threw
+off the bed-clothes, and stood up. It seemed to him in some curious way
+that all the safety and sociability of the night before fell with the
+bedclothes off him, and he stood up in an air of cold danger. He still
+felt an entire trust and loyalty towards his companion; but it was the
+trust between two men going to the scaffold.
+
+“Well,” said Syme with a forced cheerfulness as he pulled on his
+trousers, “I dreamt of that alphabet of yours. Did it take you long to
+make it up?”
+
+The Professor made no answer, but gazed in front of him with eyes the
+colour of a wintry sea; so Syme repeated his question.
+
+“I say, did it take you long to invent all this? I’m considered good at
+these things, and it was a good hour’s grind. Did you learn it all on
+the spot?”
+
+The Professor was silent; his eyes were wide open, and he wore a fixed
+but very small smile.
+
+“How long did it take you?”
+
+The Professor did not move.
+
+“Confound you, can’t you answer?” called out Syme, in a sudden anger
+that had something like fear underneath. Whether or no the Professor
+could answer, he did not.
+
+Syme stood staring back at the stiff face like parchment and the blank,
+blue eyes. His first thought was that the Professor had gone mad, but
+his second thought was more frightful. After all, what did he know
+about this queer creature whom he had heedlessly accepted as a friend?
+What did he know, except that the man had been at the anarchist
+breakfast and had told him a ridiculous tale? How improbable it was
+that there should be another friend there beside Gogol! Was this man’s
+silence a sensational way of declaring war? Was this adamantine stare
+after all only the awful sneer of some threefold traitor, who had
+turned for the last time? He stood and strained his ears in this
+heartless silence. He almost fancied he could hear dynamiters come to
+capture him shifting softly in the corridor outside.
+
+Then his eye strayed downwards, and he burst out laughing. Though the
+Professor himself stood there as voiceless as a statue, his five dumb
+fingers were dancing alive upon the dead table. Syme watched the
+twinkling movements of the talking hand, and read clearly the message—
+
+“I will only talk like this. We must get used to it.”
+
+He rapped out the answer with the impatience of relief—
+
+“All right. Let’s get out to breakfast.”
+
+They took their hats and sticks in silence; but as Syme took his
+sword-stick, he held it hard.
+
+They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and coarse
+thick sandwiches at a coffee stall, and then made their way across the
+river, which under the grey and growing light looked as desolate as
+Acheron. They reached the bottom of the huge block of buildings which
+they had seen from across the river, and began in silence to mount the
+naked and numberless stone steps, only pausing now and then to make
+short remarks on the rail of the banisters. At about every other flight
+they passed a window; each window showed them a pale and tragic dawn
+lifting itself laboriously over London. From each the innumerable roofs
+of slate looked like the leaden surges of a grey, troubled sea after
+rain. Syme was increasingly conscious that his new adventure had
+somehow a quality of cold sanity worse than the wild adventures of the
+past. Last night, for instance, the tall tenements had seemed to him
+like a tower in a dream. As he now went up the weary and perpetual
+steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series.
+But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be
+exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty
+infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to
+thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the
+distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a
+thing more hideous than unreason itself.
+
+By the time they reached Dr. Bull’s landing, a last window showed them
+a harsh, white dawn edged with banks of a kind of coarse red, more like
+red clay than red cloud. And when they entered Dr. Bull’s bare garret
+it was full of light.
+
+Syme had been haunted by a half historic memory in connection with
+these empty rooms and that austere daybreak. The moment he saw the
+garret and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he remembered what the
+memory was—the French Revolution. There should have been the black
+outline of a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the
+morning. Dr. Bull was in his white shirt and black breeches only; his
+cropped, dark head might well have just come out of its wig; he might
+have been Marat or a more slipshod Robespierre.
+
+Yet when he was seen properly, the French fancy fell away. The Jacobins
+were idealists; there was about this man a murderous materialism. His
+position gave him a somewhat new appearance. The strong, white light of
+morning coming from one side creating sharp shadows, made him seem both
+more pale and more angular than he had looked at the breakfast on the
+balcony. Thus the two black glasses that encased his eyes might really
+have been black cavities in his skull, making him look like a
+death’s-head. And, indeed, if ever Death himself sat writing at a
+wooden table, it might have been he.
+
+He looked up and smiled brightly enough as the men came in, and rose
+with the resilient rapidity of which the Professor had spoken. He set
+chairs for both of them, and going to a peg behind the door, proceeded
+to put on a coat and waistcoat of rough, dark tweed; he buttoned it up
+neatly, and came back to sit down at his table.
+
+The quiet good humour of his manner left his two opponents helpless. It
+was with some momentary difficulty that the Professor broke silence and
+began, “I’m sorry to disturb you so early, comrade,” said he, with a
+careful resumption of the slow de Worms manner. “You have no doubt made
+all the arrangements for the Paris affair?” Then he added with infinite
+slowness, “We have information which renders intolerable anything in
+the nature of a moment’s delay.”
+
+Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without speaking.
+The Professor resumed, a pause before each weary word—
+
+“Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I advise you to alter
+those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow your agent with
+all the support you can get for him. Comrade Syme and I have had an
+experience which it would take more time to recount than we can afford,
+if we are to act on it. I will, however, relate the occurrence in
+detail, even at the risk of losing time, if you really feel that it is
+essential to the understanding of the problem we have to discuss.”
+
+He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably long and
+lingering, in the hope of maddening the practical little Doctor into an
+explosion of impatience which might show his hand. But the little
+Doctor continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill
+work. Syme began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor’s smile
+and silence were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible
+silence which he had confronted in the Professor half an hour before.
+About the Professor’s makeup and all his antics there was always
+something merely grotesque, like a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild
+woes of yesterday as one remembers being afraid of Bogy in childhood.
+But here was daylight; here was a healthy, square-shouldered man in
+tweeds, not odd save for the accident of his ugly spectacles, not
+glaring or grinning at all, but smiling steadily and not saying a word.
+The whole had a sense of unbearable reality. Under the increasing
+sunlight the colours of the Doctor’s complexion, the pattern of his
+tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too
+important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the
+pose of his head polite; the only uncanny thing was his silence.
+
+“As I say,” resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through heavy
+sand, “the incident that has occurred to us and has led us to ask for
+information about the Marquis, is one which you may think it better to
+have narrated; but as it came in the way of Comrade Syme rather than
+me—”
+
+His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an anthem; but
+Syme, who was watching, saw his long fingers rattle quickly on the edge
+of the crazy table. He read the message, “You must go on. This devil
+has sucked me dry!”
+
+Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of improvisation which
+always came to him when he was alarmed.
+
+“Yes, the thing really happened to me,” he said hastily. “I had the
+good fortune to fall into conversation with a detective who took me,
+thanks to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing to clinch my
+reputation for respectability, I took him and made him very drunk at
+the Savoy. Under this influence he became friendly, and told me in so
+many words that within a day or two they hope to arrest the Marquis in
+France.
+
+“So unless you or I can get on his track—”
+
+The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and his
+protected eyes were still impenetrable. The Professor signalled to Syme
+that he would resume his explanation, and he began again with the same
+elaborate calm.
+
+“Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came here
+together to see what use you would be inclined to make of it. It seems
+to me unquestionably urgent that—”
+
+All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as steadily as
+the Doctor stared at the Professor, but quite without the smile. The
+nerves of both comrades-in-arms were near snapping under that strain of
+motionless amiability, when Syme suddenly leant forward and idly tapped
+the edge of the table. His message to his ally ran, “I have an
+intuition.”
+
+The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue, signalled back,
+“Then sit on it.”
+
+Syme telegraphed, “It is quite extraordinary.”
+
+The other answered, “Extraordinary rot!”
+
+Syme said, “I am a poet.”
+
+The other retorted, “You are a dead man.”
+
+Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were
+burning feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to
+a sort of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he
+signalled to his friend, “You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition
+is. It has that sudden quality we sometimes feel in the coming of
+spring.”
+
+He then studied the answer on his friend’s fingers. The answer was, “Go
+to hell!”
+
+The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue addressed to the
+Doctor.
+
+“Perhaps I should rather say,” said Syme on his fingers, “that it
+resembles that sudden smell of the sea which may be found in the heart
+of lush woods.”
+
+His companion disdained to reply.
+
+“Or yet again,” tapped Syme, “it is positive, as is the passionate red
+hair of a beautiful woman.”
+
+The Professor was continuing his speech, but in the middle of it Syme
+decided to act. He leant across the table, and said in a voice that
+could not be neglected—
+
+“Dr. Bull!”
+
+The Doctor’s sleek and smiling head did not move, but they could have
+sworn that under his dark glasses his eyes darted towards Syme.
+
+“Dr. Bull,” said Syme, in a voice peculiarly precise and courteous,
+“would you do me a small favour? Would you be so kind as to take off
+your spectacles?”
+
+The Professor swung round on his seat, and stared at Syme with a sort
+of frozen fury of astonishment. Syme, like a man who has thrown his
+life and fortune on the table, leaned forward with a fiery face. The
+Doctor did not move.
+
+For a few seconds there was a silence in which one could hear a pin
+drop, split once by the single hoot of a distant steamer on the Thames.
+Then Dr. Bull rose slowly, still smiling, and took off his spectacles.
+
+Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a chemical
+lecturer from a successful explosion. His eyes were like stars, and for
+an instant he could only point without speaking.
+
+The Professor had also started to his feet, forgetful of his supposed
+paralysis. He leant on the back of the chair and stared doubtfully at
+Dr. Bull, as if the Doctor had been turned into a toad before his eyes.
+And indeed it was almost as great a transformation scene.
+
+The two detectives saw sitting in the chair before them a very
+boyish-looking young man, with very frank and happy hazel eyes, an open
+expression, cockney clothes like those of a city clerk, and an
+unquestionable breath about him of being very good and rather
+commonplace. The smile was still there, but it might have been the
+first smile of a baby.
+
+“I knew I was a poet,” cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. “I knew my
+intuition was as infallible as the Pope. It was the spectacles that did
+it! It was all the spectacles. Given those beastly black eyes, and all
+the rest of him his health and his jolly looks, made him a live devil
+among dead ones.”
+
+“It certainly does make a queer difference,” said the Professor
+shakily. “But as regards the project of Dr. Bull—”
+
+“Project be damned!” roared Syme, beside himself. “Look at him! Look at
+his face, look at his collar, look at his blessed boots! You don’t
+suppose, do you, that that thing’s an anarchist?”
+
+“Syme!” cried the other in an apprehensive agony.
+
+“Why, by God,” said Syme, “I’ll take the risk of that myself! Dr. Bull,
+I am a police officer. There’s my card,” and he flung down the blue
+card upon the table.
+
+The Professor still feared that all was lost; but he was loyal. He
+pulled out his own official card and put it beside his friend’s. Then
+the third man burst out laughing, and for the first time that morning
+they heard his voice.
+
+“I’m awfully glad you chaps have come so early,” he said, with a sort
+of schoolboy flippancy, “for we can all start for France together. Yes,
+I’m in the force right enough,” and he flicked a blue card towards them
+lightly as a matter of form.
+
+Clapping a brisk bowler on his head and resuming his goblin glasses,
+the Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the others
+instinctively followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait, and as he
+passed under the doorway he suddenly struck his stick on the stone
+passage so that it rang.
+
+“But Lord God Almighty,” he cried out, “if this is all right, there
+were more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the
+damned Council!”
+
+“We might have fought easily,” said Bull; “we were four against three.”
+
+The Professor was descending the stairs, but his voice came up from
+below.
+
+“No,” said the voice, “we were not four against three—we were not so
+lucky. We were four against One.”
+
+The others went down the stairs in silence.
+
+The young man called Bull, with an innocent courtesy characteristic of
+him, insisted on going last until they reached the street; but there
+his own robust rapidity asserted itself unconsciously, and he walked
+quickly on ahead towards a railway inquiry office, talking to the
+others over his shoulder.
+
+“It is jolly to get some pals,” he said. “I’ve been half dead with the
+jumps, being quite alone. I nearly flung my arms round Gogol and
+embraced him, which would have been imprudent. I hope you won’t despise
+me for having been in a blue funk.”
+
+“All the blue devils in blue hell,” said Syme, “contributed to my blue
+funk! But the worst devil was you and your infernal goggles.”
+
+The young man laughed delightedly.
+
+“Wasn’t it a rag?” he said. “Such a simple idea—not my own. I haven’t
+got the brains. You see, I wanted to go into the detective service,
+especially the anti-dynamite business. But for that purpose they wanted
+someone to dress up as a dynamiter; and they all swore by blazes that I
+could never look like a dynamiter. They said my very walk was
+respectable, and that seen from behind I looked like the British
+Constitution. They said I looked too healthy and too optimistic, and
+too reliable and benevolent; they called me all sorts of names at
+Scotland Yard. They said that if I had been a criminal, I might have
+made my fortune by looking so like an honest man; but as I had the
+misfortune to be an honest man, there was not even the remotest chance
+of my assisting them by ever looking like a criminal. But at last I was
+brought before some old josser who was high up in the force, and who
+seemed to have no end of a head on his shoulders. And there the others
+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 cafés, 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 cafés, but he
+stopped abruptly. With a sharp gesture he motioned them to silence, but
+he pointed with one gloved finger to a café 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+THE DUEL
+
+
+Syme sat down at a café 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 _café 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 _décoré_,
+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 tomorrow, 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 today, 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 today 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE
+
+
+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 man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a
+yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the
+rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were
+always anarchists, as you can see from the barons’ wars.”
+
+“As a lecture on English history for the little ones,” said Syme, “this
+is all very nice; but I have not yet grasped its application.”
+
+“Its application is,” said his informant, “that most of old Sunday’s
+right-hand men are South African and American millionaires. That is why
+he has got hold of all the communications; and that is why the last
+four champions of the anti-anarchist police force are running through a
+wood like rabbits.”
+
+“Millionaires I can understand,” said Syme thoughtfully, “they are
+nearly all mad. But getting hold of a few wicked old gentlemen with
+hobbies is one thing; getting hold of great Christian nations is
+another. I would bet the nose off my face (forgive the allusion) that
+Sunday would stand perfectly helpless before the task of converting any
+ordinary healthy person anywhere.”
+
+“Well,” said the other, “it rather depends what sort of person you
+mean.”
+
+“Well, for instance,” said Syme, “he could never convert that person,”
+and he pointed straight in front of him.
+
+They had come to an open space of sunlight, which seemed to express to
+Syme the final return of his own good sense; and in the middle of this
+forest clearing was a figure that might well stand for that common
+sense in an almost awful actuality. Burnt by the sun and stained with
+perspiration, and grave with the bottomless gravity of small necessary
+toils, a heavy French peasant was cutting wood with a hatchet. His cart
+stood a few yards off, already half full of timber; and the horse that
+cropped the grass was, like his master, valorous but not desperate;
+like his master, he was even prosperous, but yet was almost sad. The
+man was a Norman, taller than the average of the French and very
+angular; and his swarthy figure stood dark against a square of
+sunlight, almost like some allegoric figure of labour frescoed on a
+ground of gold.
+
+“Mr. Syme is saying,” called out Ratcliffe to the French Colonel, “that
+this man, at least, will never be an anarchist.”
+
+“Mr. Syme is right enough there,” answered Colonel Ducroix, laughing,
+“if only for the reason that he has plenty of property to defend. But I
+forgot that in your country you are not used to peasants being
+wealthy.”
+
+“He looks poor,” said Dr. Bull doubtfully.
+
+“Quite so,” said the Colonel; “that is why he is rich.”
+
+“I have an idea,” called out Dr. Bull suddenly; “how much would he take
+to give us a lift in his cart? Those dogs are all on foot, and we could
+soon leave them behind.”
+
+“Oh, give him anything!” said Syme eagerly. “I have piles of money on
+me.”
+
+“That will never do,” said the Colonel; “he will never have any respect
+for you unless you drive a bargain.”
+
+“Oh, if he haggles!” began Bull impatiently.
+
+“He haggles because he is a free man,” said the other. “You do not
+understand; he would not see the meaning of generosity. He is not being
+tipped.”
+
+And even while they seemed to hear the heavy feet of their strange
+pursuers behind them, they had to stand and stamp while the French
+Colonel talked to the French wood-cutter with all the leisurely
+badinage and bickering of market-day. At the end of the four minutes,
+however, they saw that the Colonel was right, for the wood-cutter
+entered into their plans, not with the vague servility of a tout
+too-well paid, but with the seriousness of a solicitor who had been
+paid the proper fee. He told them that the best thing they could do was
+to make their way down to the little inn on the hills above Lancy,
+where the innkeeper, an old soldier who had become _dévot_ in his
+latter years, would be certain to sympathise with them, and even to
+take risks in their support. The whole company, therefore, piled
+themselves on top of the stacks of wood, and went rocking in the rude
+cart down the other and steeper side of the woodland. Heavy and
+ramshackle as was the vehicle, it was driven quickly enough, and they
+soon had the exhilarating impression of distancing altogether those,
+whoever they were, who were hunting them. For, after all, the riddle as
+to where the anarchists had got all these followers was still unsolved.
+One man’s presence had sufficed for them; they had fled at the first
+sight of the deformed smile of the Secretary. Syme every now and then
+looked back over his shoulder at the army on their track.
+
+As the wood grew first thinner and then smaller with distance, he could
+see the sunlit slopes beyond it and above it; and across these was
+still moving the square black mob like one monstrous beetle. In the
+very strong sunlight and with his own very strong eyes, which were
+almost telescopic, Syme could see this mass of men quite plainly. He
+could see them as separate human figures; but he was increasingly
+surprised by the way in which they moved as one man. They seemed to be
+dressed in dark clothes and plain hats, like any common crowd out of
+the streets; but they did not spread and sprawl and trail by various
+lines to the attack, as would be natural in an ordinary mob. They moved
+with a sort of dreadful and wicked woodenness, like a staring army of
+automatons.
+
+Syme pointed this out to Ratcliffe.
+
+“Yes,” replied the policeman, “that’s discipline. That’s Sunday. He is
+perhaps five hundred miles off, but the fear of him is on all of them,
+like the finger of God. Yes, they are walking regularly; and you bet
+your boots that they are talking regularly, yes, and thinking
+regularly. But the one important thing for us is that they are
+disappearing regularly.”
+
+Syme nodded. It was true that the black patch of the pursuing men was
+growing smaller and smaller as the peasant belaboured his horse.
+
+The level of the sunlit landscape, though flat as a whole, fell away on
+the farther side of the wood in billows of heavy slope towards the sea,
+in a way not unlike the lower slopes of the Sussex downs. The only
+difference was that in Sussex the road would have been broken and
+angular like a little brook, but here the white French road fell sheer
+in front of them like a waterfall. Down this direct descent the cart
+clattered at a considerable angle, and in a few minutes, the road
+growing yet steeper, they saw below them the little harbour of Lancy
+and a great blue arc of the sea. The travelling cloud of their enemies
+had wholly disappeared from the horizon.
+
+The horse and cart took a sharp turn round a clump of elms, and the
+horse’s nose nearly struck the face of an old gentleman who was sitting
+on the benches outside the little café of “Le Soleil d’Or.” The peasant
+grunted an apology, and got down from his seat. The others also
+descended one by one, and spoke to the old gentleman with fragmentary
+phrases of courtesy, for it was quite evident from his expansive manner
+that he was the owner of the little tavern.
+
+He was a white-haired, apple-faced old boy, with sleepy eyes and a grey
+moustache; stout, sedentary, and very innocent, of a type that may
+often be found in France, but is still commoner in Catholic Germany.
+Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer, his flowers, and his
+beehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only when his visitors looked up
+as they entered the inn-parlour, they saw the sword upon the wall.
+
+The Colonel, who greeted the innkeeper as an old friend, passed rapidly
+into the inn-parlour, and sat down ordering some ritual refreshment.
+The military decision of his action interested Syme, who sat next to
+him, and he took the opportunity when the old innkeeper had gone out of
+satisfying his curiosity.
+
+“May I ask you, Colonel,” he said in a low voice, “why we have come
+here?”
+
+Colonel Ducroix smiled behind his bristly white moustache.
+
+“For two reasons, sir,” he said; “and I will give first, not the most
+important, but the most utilitarian. We came here because this is the
+only place within twenty miles in which we can get horses.”
+
+“Horses!” repeated Syme, looking up quickly.
+
+“Yes,” replied the other; “if you people are really to distance your
+enemies it is horses or nothing for you, unless of course you have
+bicycles and motor-cars in your pocket.”
+
+“And where do you advise us to make for?” asked Syme doubtfully.
+
+“Beyond question,” replied the Colonel, “you had better make all haste
+to the police station beyond the town. My friend, whom I seconded under
+somewhat deceptive circumstances, seems to me to exaggerate very much
+the possibilities of a general rising; but even he would hardly
+maintain, I suppose, that you were not safe with the gendarmes.”
+
+Syme nodded gravely; then he said abruptly—
+
+“And your other reason for coming here?”
+
+“My other reason for coming here,” said Ducroix soberly, “is that it is
+just as well to see a good man or two when one is possibly near to
+death.”
+
+Syme looked up at the wall, and saw a crudely-painted and pathetic
+religious picture. Then he said—
+
+“You are right,” and then almost immediately afterwards, “Has anyone
+seen about the horses?”
+
+“Yes,” answered Ducroix, “you may be quite certain that I gave orders
+the moment I came in. Those enemies of yours gave no impression of
+hurry, but they were really moving wonderfully fast, like a
+well-trained army. I had no idea that the anarchists had so much
+discipline. You have not a moment to waste.”
+
+Almost as he spoke, the old innkeeper with the blue eyes and white hair
+came ambling into the room, and announced that six horses were saddled
+outside.
+
+By Ducroix’s advice the five others equipped themselves with some
+portable form of food and wine, and keeping their duelling swords as
+the only weapons available, they clattered away down the steep, white
+road. The two servants, who had carried the Marquis’s luggage when he
+was a marquis, were left behind to drink at the café by common consent,
+and not at all against their own inclination.
+
+By this time the afternoon sun was slanting westward, and by its rays
+Syme could see the sturdy figure of the old innkeeper growing smaller
+and smaller, but still standing and looking after them quite silently,
+the sunshine in his silver hair. Syme had a fixed, superstitious fancy,
+left in his mind by the chance phrase of the Colonel, that this was
+indeed, perhaps, the last honest stranger whom he should ever see upon
+the earth.
+
+He was still looking at this dwindling figure, which stood as a mere
+grey blot touched with a white flame against the great green wall of
+the steep down behind him. And as he stared over the top of the down
+behind the innkeeper, there appeared an army of black-clad and marching
+men. They seemed to hang above the good man and his house like a black
+cloud of locusts. The horses had been saddled none too soon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+THE EARTH IN ANARCHY
+
+
+Urging the horses to a gallop, without respect to the rather rugged
+descent of the road, the horsemen soon regained their advantage over
+the men on the march, and at last the bulk of the first buildings of
+Lancy cut off the sight of their pursuers. Nevertheless, the ride had
+been a long one, and by the time they reached the real town the west
+was warming with the colour and quality of sunset. The Colonel
+suggested that, before making finally for the police station, they
+should make the effort, in passing, to attach to themselves one more
+individual who might be useful.
+
+“Four out of the five rich men in this town,” he said, “are common
+swindlers. I suppose the proportion is pretty equal all over the world.
+The fifth is a friend of mine, and a very fine fellow; and what is even
+more important from our point of view, he owns a motor-car.”
+
+“I am afraid,” said the Professor in his mirthful way, looking back
+along the white road on which the black, crawling patch might appear at
+any moment, “I am afraid we have hardly time for afternoon calls.”
+
+“Doctor Renard’s house is only three minutes off,” said the Colonel.
+
+“Our danger,” said Dr. Bull, “is not two minutes off.”
+
+“Yes,” said Syme, “if we ride on fast we must leave them behind, for
+they are on foot.”
+
+“He has a motor-car,” said the Colonel.
+
+“But we may not get it,” said Bull.
+
+“Yes, he is quite on your side.”
+
+“But he might be out.”
+
+“Hold your tongue,” said Syme suddenly. “What is that noise?”
+
+For a second they all sat as still as equestrian statues, and for a
+second—for two or three or four seconds—heaven and earth seemed equally
+still. Then all their ears, in an agony of attention, heard along the
+road that indescribable thrill and throb that means only one
+thing—horses!
+
+The Colonel’s face had an instantaneous change, as if lightning had
+struck it, and yet left it scatheless.
+
+“They have done us,” he said, with brief military irony. “Prepare to
+receive cavalry!”
+
+“Where can they have got the horses?” asked Syme, as he mechanically
+urged his steed to a canter.
+
+The Colonel was silent for a little, then he said in a strained voice—
+
+“I was speaking with strict accuracy when I said that the ‘Soleil d’Or’
+was the only place where one can get horses within twenty miles.”
+
+“No!” said Syme violently, “I don’t believe he’d do it. Not with all
+that white hair.”
+
+“He may have been forced,” said the Colonel gently. “They must be at
+least a hundred strong, for which reason we are all going to see my
+friend Renard, who has a motor-car.”
+
+With these words he swung his horse suddenly round a street corner, and
+went down the street with such thundering speed, that the others,
+though already well at the gallop, had difficulty in following the
+flying tail of his horse.
+
+Dr. Renard inhabited a high and comfortable house at the top of a steep
+street, so that when the riders alighted at his door they could once
+more see the solid green ridge of the hill, with the white road across
+it, standing up above all the roofs of the town. They breathed again to
+see that the road as yet was clear, and they rang the bell.
+
+Dr. Renard was a beaming, brown-bearded man, a good example of that
+silent but very busy professional class which France has preserved even
+more perfectly than England. When the matter was explained to him he
+pooh-poohed the panic of the ex-Marquis altogether; he said, with the
+solid French scepticism, that there was no conceivable probability of a
+general anarchist rising. “Anarchy,” he said, shrugging his shoulders,
+“it is childishness!”
+
+“_Et ça_,” cried out the Colonel suddenly, pointing over the other’s
+shoulder, “and that is childishness, isn’t it?”
+
+They all looked round, and saw a curve of black cavalry come sweeping
+over the top of the hill with all the energy of Attila. Swiftly as they
+rode, however, the whole rank still kept well together, and they could
+see the black vizards of the first line as level as a line of uniforms.
+But although the main black square was the same, though travelling
+faster, there was now one sensational difference which they could see
+clearly upon the slope of the hill, as if upon a slanted map. The bulk
+of the riders were in one block; but one rider flew far ahead of the
+column, and with frantic movements of hand and heel urged his horse
+faster and faster, so that one might have fancied that he was not the
+pursuer but the pursued. But even at that great distance they could see
+something so fanatical, so unquestionable in his figure, that they knew
+it was the Secretary himself. “I am sorry to cut short a cultured
+discussion,” said the Colonel, “but can you lend me your motor-car now,
+in two minutes?”
+
+“I have a suspicion that you are all mad,” said Dr. Renard, smiling
+sociably; “but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt
+friendship. Let us go round to the garage.”
+
+Dr. Renard was a mild man with monstrous wealth; his rooms were like
+the Musée de Cluny, and he had three motor-cars. These, however, he
+seemed to use very sparingly, having the simple tastes of the French
+middle class, and when his impatient friends came to examine them, it
+took them some time to assure themselves that one of them even could be
+made to work. This with some difficulty they brought round into the
+street before the Doctor’s house. When they came out of the dim garage
+they were startled to find that twilight had already fallen with the
+abruptness of night in the tropics. Either they had been longer in the
+place than they imagined, or some unusual canopy of cloud had gathered
+over the town. They looked down the steep streets, and seemed to see a
+slight mist coming up from the sea.
+
+“It is now or never,” said Dr. Bull. “I hear horses.”
+
+“No,” corrected the Professor, “a horse.”
+
+And as they listened, it was evident that the noise, rapidly coming
+nearer on the rattling stones, was not the noise of the whole cavalcade
+but that of the one horseman, who had left it far behind—the insane
+Secretary.
+
+Syme’s family, like most of those who end in the simple life, had once
+owned a motor, and he knew all about them. He had leapt at once into
+the chauffeur’s seat, and with flushed face was wrenching and tugging
+at the disused machinery. He bent his strength upon one handle, and
+then said quite quietly—
+
+“I am afraid it’s no go.”
+
+As he spoke, there swept round the corner a man rigid on his rushing
+horse, with the rush and rigidity of an arrow. He had a smile that
+thrust out his chin as if it were dislocated. He swept alongside of the
+stationary car, into which its company had crowded, and laid his hand
+on the front. It was the Secretary, and his mouth went quite straight
+in the solemnity of triumph.
+
+Syme was leaning hard upon the steering wheel, and there was no sound
+but the rumble of the other pursuers riding into the town. Then there
+came quite suddenly a scream of scraping iron, and the car leapt
+forward. It plucked the Secretary clean out of his saddle, as a knife
+is whipped out of its sheath, trailed him kicking terribly for twenty
+yards, and left him flung flat upon the road far in front of his
+frightened horse. As the car took the corner of the street with a
+splendid curve, they could just see the other anarchists filling the
+street and raising their fallen leader.
+
+“I can’t understand why it has grown so dark,” said the Professor at
+last in a low voice.
+
+“Going to be a storm, I think,” said Dr. Bull. “I say, it’s a pity we
+haven’t got a light on this car, if only to see by.”
+
+“We have,” said the Colonel, and from the floor of the car he fished up
+a heavy, old-fashioned, carved iron lantern with a light inside it. It
+was obviously an antique, and it would seem as if its original use had
+been in some way semi-religious, for there was a rude moulding of a
+cross upon one of its sides.
+
+“Where on earth did you get that?” asked the Professor.
+
+“I got it where I got the car,” answered the Colonel, chuckling, “from
+my best friend. While our friend here was fighting with the steering
+wheel, I ran up the front steps of the house and spoke to Renard, who
+was standing in his own porch, you will remember. ‘I suppose,’ I said,
+‘there’s no time to get a lamp.’ He looked up, blinking amiably at the
+beautiful arched ceiling of his own front hall. From this was
+suspended, by chains of exquisite ironwork, this lantern, one of the
+hundred treasures of his treasure house. By sheer force he tore the
+lamp out of his own ceiling, shattering the painted panels, and
+bringing down two blue vases with his violence. Then he handed me the
+iron lantern, and I put it in the car. Was I not right when I said that
+Dr. Renard was worth knowing?”
+
+“You were,” said Syme seriously, and hung the heavy lantern over the
+front. There was a certain allegory of their whole position in the
+contrast between the modern automobile and its strange ecclesiastical
+lamp. Hitherto they had passed through the quietest part of the town,
+meeting at most one or two pedestrians, who could give them no hint of
+the peace or the hostility of the place. Now, however, the windows in
+the houses began one by one to be lit up, giving a greater sense of
+habitation and humanity. Dr. Bull turned to the new detective who had
+led their flight, and permitted himself one of his natural and friendly
+smiles.
+
+“These lights make one feel more cheerful.”
+
+Inspector Ratcliffe drew his brows together.
+
+“There is only one set of lights that make me more cheerful,” he said,
+“and they are those lights of the police station which I can see beyond
+the town. Please God we may be there in ten minutes.”
+
+Then all Bull’s boiling good sense and optimism broke suddenly out of
+him.
+
+“Oh, this is all raving nonsense!” he cried. “If you really think that
+ordinary people in ordinary houses are anarchists, you must be madder
+than an anarchist yourself. If we turned and fought these fellows, the
+whole town would fight for us.”
+
+“No,” said the other with an immovable simplicity, “the whole town
+would fight for them. We shall see.”
+
+While they were speaking the Professor had leant forward with sudden
+excitement.
+
+“What is that noise?” he said.
+
+“Oh, the horses behind us, I suppose,” said the Colonel. “I thought we
+had got clear of them.”
+
+“The horses behind us! No,” said the Professor, “it is not horses, and
+it is not behind us.”
+
+Almost as he spoke, across the end of the street before them two
+shining and rattling shapes shot past. They were gone almost in a
+flash, but everyone could see that they were motor-cars, and the
+Professor stood up with a pale face and swore that they were the other
+two motor-cars from Dr. Renard’s garage.
+
+“I tell you they were his,” he repeated, with wild eyes, “and they were
+full of men in masks!”
+
+“Absurd!” said the Colonel angrily. “Dr. Renard would never give them
+his cars.”
+
+“He may have been forced,” said Ratcliffe quietly. “The whole town is
+on their side.”
+
+“You still believe that,” asked the Colonel incredulously.
+
+“You will all believe it soon,” said the other with a hopeless calm.
+
+There was a puzzled pause for some little time, and then the Colonel
+began again abruptly—
+
+“No, I can’t believe it. The thing is nonsense. The plain people of a
+peaceable French town—”
+
+He was cut short by a bang and a blaze of light, which seemed close to
+his eyes. As the car sped on it left a floating patch of white smoke
+behind it, and Syme had heard a shot shriek past his ear.
+
+“My God!” said the Colonel, “someone has shot at us.”
+
+“It need not interrupt conversation,” said the gloomy Ratcliffe. “Pray
+resume your remarks, Colonel. You were talking, I think, about the
+plain people of a peaceable French town.”
+
+The staring Colonel was long past minding satire. He rolled his eyes
+all round the street.
+
+“It is extraordinary,” he said, “most extraordinary.”
+
+“A fastidious person,” said Syme, “might even call it unpleasant.
+However, I suppose those lights out in the field beyond this street are
+the Gendarmerie. We shall soon get there.”
+
+“No,” said Inspector Ratcliffe, “we shall never get there.”
+
+He had been standing up and looking keenly ahead of him. Now he sat
+down and smoothed his sleek hair with a weary gesture.
+
+“What do you mean?” asked Bull sharply.
+
+“I mean that we shall never get there,” said the pessimist placidly.
+“They have two rows of armed men across the road already; I can see
+them from here. The town is in arms, as I said it was. I can only
+wallow in the exquisite comfort of my own exactitude.”
+
+And Ratcliffe sat down comfortably in the car and lit a cigarette, but
+the others rose excitedly and stared down the road. Syme had slowed
+down the car as their plans became doubtful, and he brought it finally
+to a standstill just at the corner of a side street that ran down very
+steeply to the sea.
+
+The town was mostly in shadow, but the sun had not sunk; wherever its
+level light could break through, it painted everything a burning gold.
+Up this side street the last sunset light shone as sharp and narrow as
+the shaft of artificial light at the theatre. It struck the car of the
+five friends, and lit it like a burning chariot. But the rest of the
+street, especially the two ends of it, was in the deepest twilight, and
+for some seconds they could see nothing. Then Syme, whose eyes were the
+keenest, broke into a little bitter whistle, and said,
+
+“It is quite true. There is a crowd or an army or some such thing
+across the end of that street.”
+
+“Well, if there is,” said Bull impatiently, “it must be something
+else—a sham fight or the mayor’s birthday or something. I cannot and
+will not believe that plain, jolly people in a place like this walk
+about with dynamite in their pockets. Get on a bit, Syme, and let us
+look at them.”
+
+The car crawled about a hundred yards farther, and then they were all
+startled by Dr. Bull breaking into a high crow of laughter.
+
+“Why, you silly mugs!” he cried, “what did I tell you. That crowd’s as
+law-abiding as a cow, and if it weren’t, it’s on our side.”
+
+“How do you know?” asked the professor, staring.
+
+“You blind bat,” cried Bull, “don’t you see who is leading them?”
+
+They peered again, and then the Colonel, with a catch in his voice,
+cried out—
+
+“Why, it’s Renard!”
+
+There was, indeed, a rank of dim figures running across the road, and
+they could not be clearly seen; but far enough in front to catch the
+accident of the evening light was stalking up and down the unmistakable
+Dr. Renard, in a white hat, stroking his long brown beard, and holding
+a revolver in his left hand.
+
+“What a fool I’ve been!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Of course, the dear
+old boy has turned out to help us.”
+
+Dr. Bull was bubbling over with laughter, swinging the sword in his
+hand as carelessly as a cane. He jumped out of the car and ran across
+the intervening space, calling out—
+
+“Dr. Renard! Dr. Renard!”
+
+An instant after Syme thought his own eyes had gone mad in his head.
+For the philanthropic Dr. Renard had deliberately raised his revolver
+and fired twice at Bull, so that the shots rang down the road.
+
+Almost at the same second as the puff of white cloud went up from this
+atrocious explosion a long puff of white cloud went up also from the
+cigarette of the cynical Ratcliffe. Like all the rest he turned a
+little pale, but he smiled. Dr. Bull, at whom the bullets had been
+fired, just missing his scalp, stood quite still in the middle of the
+road without a sign of fear, and then turned very slowly and crawled
+back to the car, and climbed in with two holes through his hat.
+
+“Well,” said the cigarette smoker slowly, “what do you think now?”
+
+“I think,” said Dr. Bull with precision, “that I am lying in bed at No.
+217 Peabody Buildings, and that I shall soon wake up with a jump; or,
+if that’s not it, I think that I am sitting in a small cushioned cell
+in Hanwell, and that the doctor can’t make much of my case. But if you
+want to know what I don’t think, I’ll tell you. I don’t think what you
+think. I don’t think, and I never shall think, that the mass of
+ordinary men are a pack of dirty modern thinkers. No, sir, I’m a
+democrat, and I still don’t believe that Sunday could convert one
+average navvy or counter-jumper. No, I may be mad, but humanity isn’t.”
+
+Syme turned his bright blue eyes on Bull with an earnestness which he
+did not commonly make clear.
+
+“You are a very fine fellow,” he said. “You can believe in a sanity
+which is not merely your sanity. And you’re right enough about
+humanity, about peasants and people like that jolly old innkeeper. But
+you’re not right about Renard. I suspected him from the first. He’s
+rationalistic, and, what’s worse, he’s rich. When duty and religion are
+really destroyed, it will be by the rich.”
+
+“They are really destroyed now,” said the man with a cigarette, and
+rose with his hands in his pockets. “The devils are coming on!”
+
+The men in the motor-car looked anxiously in the direction of his
+dreamy gaze, and they saw that the whole regiment at the end of the
+road was advancing upon them, Dr. Renard marching furiously in front,
+his beard flying in the breeze.
+
+The Colonel sprang out of the car with an intolerant exclamation.
+
+“Gentlemen,” he cried, “the thing is incredible. It must be a practical
+joke. If you knew Renard as I do—it’s like calling Queen Victoria a
+dynamiter. If you had got the man’s character into your head—”
+
+“Dr. Bull,” said Syme sardonically, “has at least got it into his hat.”
+
+“I tell you it can’t be!” cried the Colonel, stamping.
+
+“Renard shall explain it. He shall explain it to me,” and he strode
+forward.
+
+“Don’t be in such a hurry,” drawled the smoker. “He will very soon
+explain it to all of us.”
+
+But the impatient Colonel was already out of earshot, advancing towards
+the advancing enemy. The excited Dr. Renard lifted his pistol again,
+but perceiving his opponent, hesitated, and the Colonel came face to
+face with him with frantic gestures of remonstrance.
+
+“It is no good,” said Syme. “He will never get anything out of that old
+heathen. I vote we drive bang through the thick of them, bang as the
+bullets went through Bull’s hat. We may all be killed, but we must kill
+a tidy number of them.”
+
+“I won’t ’ave it,” said Dr. Bull, growing more vulgar in the sincerity
+of his virtue. “The poor chaps may be making a mistake. Give the
+Colonel a chance.”
+
+“Shall we go back, then?” asked the Professor.
+
+“No,” said Ratcliffe in a cold voice, “the street behind us is held
+too. In fact, I seem to see there another friend of yours, Syme.”
+
+Syme spun round smartly, and stared backwards at the track which they
+had travelled. He saw an irregular body of horsemen gathering and
+galloping towards them in the gloom. He saw above the foremost saddle
+the silver gleam of a sword, and then as it grew nearer the silver
+gleam of an old man’s hair. The next moment, with shattering violence,
+he had swung the motor round and sent it dashing down the steep side
+street to the sea, like a man that desired only to die.
+
+“What the devil is up?” cried the Professor, seizing his arm.
+
+“The morning star has fallen!” said Syme, as his own car went down the
+darkness like a falling star.
+
+The others did not understand his words, but when they looked back at
+the street above they saw the hostile cavalry coming round the corner
+and down the slopes after them; and foremost of all rode the good
+innkeeper, flushed with the fiery innocence of the evening light.
+
+“The world is insane!” said the Professor, and buried his face in his
+hands.
+
+“No,” said Dr. Bull in adamantine humility, “it is I.”
+
+“What are we going to do?” asked the Professor.
+
+“At this moment,” said Syme, with a scientific detachment, “I think we
+are going to smash into a lamppost.”
+
+The next instant the automobile had come with a catastrophic jar
+against an iron object. The instant after that four men had crawled out
+from under a chaos of metal, and a tall lean lamp-post that had stood
+up straight on the edge of the marine parade stood out, bent and
+twisted, like the branch of a broken tree.
+
+“Well, we smashed something,” said the Professor, with a faint smile.
+“That’s some comfort.”
+
+“You’re becoming an anarchist,” said Syme, dusting his clothes with his
+instinct of daintiness.
+
+“Everyone is,” said Ratcliffe.
+
+As they spoke, the white-haired horseman and his followers came
+thundering from above, and almost at the same moment a dark string of
+men ran shouting along the sea-front. Syme snatched a sword, and took
+it in his teeth; he stuck two others under his arm-pits, took a fourth
+in his left hand and the lantern in his right, and leapt off the high
+parade on to the beach below.
+
+The others leapt after him, with a common acceptance of such decisive
+action, leaving the debris and the gathering mob above them.
+
+“We have one more chance,” said Syme, taking the steel out of his
+mouth. “Whatever all this pandemonium means, I suppose the police
+station will help us. We can’t get there, for they hold the way. But
+there’s a pier or breakwater runs out into the sea just here, which we
+could defend longer than anything else, like Horatius and his bridge.
+We must defend it till the Gendarmerie turn out. Keep after me.”
+
+They followed him as he went crunching down the beach, and in a second
+or two their boots broke not on the sea gravel, but on broad, flat
+stones. They marched down a long, low jetty, running out in one arm
+into the dim, boiling sea, and when they came to the end of it they
+felt that they had come to the end of their story. They turned and
+faced the town.
+
+That town was transfigured with uproar. All along the high parade from
+which they had just descended was a dark and roaring stream of
+humanity, with tossing arms and fiery faces, groping and glaring
+towards them. The long dark line was dotted with torches and lanterns;
+but even where no flame lit up a furious face, they could see in the
+farthest figure, in the most shadowy gesture, an organised hate. It was
+clear that they were the accursed of all men, and they knew not why.
+
+Two or three men, looking little and black like monkeys, leapt over the
+edge as they had done and dropped on to the beach. These came ploughing
+down the deep sand, shouting horribly, and strove to wade into the sea
+at random. The example was followed, and the whole black mass of men
+began to run and drip over the edge like black treacle.
+
+Foremost among the men on the beach Syme saw the peasant who had driven
+their cart. He splashed into the surf on a huge cart-horse, and shook
+his axe at them.
+
+“The peasant!” cried Syme. “They have not risen since the Middle Ages.”
+
+“Even if the police do come now,” said the Professor mournfully, “they
+can do nothing with this mob.”
+
+“Nonsense!” said Bull desperately; “there must be some people left in
+the town who are human.”
+
+“No,” said the hopeless Inspector, “the human being will soon be
+extinct. We are the last of mankind.”
+
+“It may be,” said the Professor absently. Then he added in his dreamy
+voice, “What is all that at the end of the ‘Dunciad’?
+
+‘Nor public flame; nor private, dares to shine;
+Nor human light is left, nor glimpse divine!
+Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos, is restored;
+Light dies before thine uncreating word:
+Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall;
+And universal darkness buries all.’”
+
+
+“Stop!” cried Bull suddenly, “the gendarmes are out.”
+
+The low lights of the police station were indeed blotted and broken
+with hurrying figures, and they heard through the darkness the clash
+and jingle of a disciplined cavalry.
+
+“They are charging the mob!” cried Bull in ecstacy or alarm.
+
+“No,” said Syme, “they are formed along the parade.”
+
+“They have unslung their carbines,” cried Bull dancing with excitement.
+
+“Yes,” said Ratcliffe, “and they are going to fire on us.”
+
+As he spoke there came a long crackle of musketry, and bullets seemed
+to hop like hailstones on the stones in front of them.
+
+“The gendarmes have joined them!” cried the Professor, and struck his
+forehead.
+
+“I am in the padded cell,” said Bull solidly.
+
+There was a long silence, and then Ratcliffe said, looking out over the
+swollen sea, all a sort of grey purple—
+
+“What does it matter who is mad or who is sane? We shall all be dead
+soon.”
+
+Syme turned to him and said—
+
+“You are quite hopeless, then?”
+
+Mr. Ratcliffe kept a stony silence; then at last he said quietly—
+
+“No; oddly enough I am not quite hopeless. There is one insane little
+hope that I cannot get out of my mind. The power of this whole planet
+is against us, yet I cannot help wondering whether this one silly
+little hope is hopeless yet.”
+
+“In what or whom is your hope?” asked Syme with curiosity.
+
+“In a man I never saw,” said the other, looking at the leaden sea.
+
+“I know what you mean,” said Syme in a low voice, “the man in the dark
+room. But Sunday must have killed him by now.”
+
+“Perhaps,” said the other steadily; “but if so, he was the only man
+whom Sunday found it hard to kill.”
+
+“I heard what you said,” said the Professor, with his back turned. “I
+also am holding hard on to the thing I never saw.”
+
+All of a sudden Syme, who was standing as if blind with introspective
+thought, swung round and cried out, like a man waking from sleep—
+
+“Where is the Colonel? I thought he was with us!”
+
+“The Colonel! Yes,” cried Bull, “where on earth is the Colonel?”
+
+“He went to speak to Renard,” said the Professor.
+
+“We cannot leave him among all those beasts,” cried Syme. “Let us die
+like gentlemen if—”
+
+“Do not pity the Colonel,” said Ratcliffe, with a pale sneer. “He is
+extremely comfortable. He is—”
+
+“No! no! no!” cried Syme in a kind of frenzy, “not the Colonel too! I
+will never believe it!”
+
+“Will you believe your eyes?” asked the other, and pointed to the
+beach.
+
+Many of their pursuers had waded into the water shaking their fists,
+but the sea was rough, and they could not reach the pier. Two or three
+figures, however, stood on the beginning of the stone footway, and
+seemed to be cautiously advancing down it. The glare of a chance
+lantern lit up the faces of the two foremost. One face wore a black
+half-mask, and under it the mouth was twisting about in such a madness
+of nerves that the black tuft of beard wriggled round and round like a
+restless, living thing. The other was the red face and white moustache
+of Colonel Ducroix. They were in earnest consultation.
+
+“Yes, he is gone too,” said the Professor, and sat down on a stone.
+“Everything’s gone. I’m gone! I can’t trust my own bodily machinery. I
+feel as if my own hand might fly up and strike me.”
+
+“When my hand flies up,” said Syme, “it will strike somebody else,” and
+he strode along the pier towards the Colonel, the sword in one hand and
+the lantern in the other.
+
+As if to destroy the last hope or doubt, the Colonel, who saw him
+coming, pointed his revolver at him and fired. The shot missed Syme,
+but struck his sword, breaking it short at the hilt. Syme rushed on,
+and swung the iron lantern above his head.
+
+“Judas before Herod!” he said, and struck the Colonel down upon the
+stones. Then he turned to the Secretary, whose frightful mouth was
+almost foaming now, and held the lamp high with so rigid and arresting
+a gesture, that the man was, as it were, frozen for a moment, and
+forced to hear.
+
+“Do you see this lantern?” cried Syme in a terrible voice. “Do you see
+the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You
+did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey,
+twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is
+not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not
+made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats.
+You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind;
+you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old
+Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire
+of apes will never have the wit to find it.”
+
+He struck the Secretary once with the lantern so that he staggered; and
+then, whirling it twice round his head, sent it flying far out to sea,
+where it flared like a roaring rocket and fell.
+
+“Swords!” shouted Syme, turning his flaming face to the three behind
+him. “Let us charge these dogs, for our time has come to die.”
+
+His three companions came after him sword in hand. Syme’s sword was
+broken, but he rent a bludgeon from the fist of a fisherman, flinging
+him down. In a moment they would have flung themselves upon the face of
+the mob and perished, when an interruption came. The Secretary, ever
+since Syme’s speech, had stood with his hand to his stricken head as if
+dazed; now he suddenly pulled off his black mask.
+
+The pale face thus peeled in the lamplight revealed not so much rage as
+astonishment. He put up his hand with an anxious authority.
+
+“There is some mistake,” he said. “Mr. Syme, I hardly think you
+understand your position. I arrest you in the name of the law.”
+
+“Of the law?” said Syme, and dropped his stick.
+
+“Certainly!” said the Secretary. “I am a detective from Scotland Yard,”
+and he took a small blue card from his pocket.
+
+“And what do you suppose we are?” asked the Professor, and threw up his
+arms.
+
+“You,” said the Secretary stiffly, “are, as I know for a fact, members
+of the Supreme Anarchist Council. Disguised as one of you, I—”
+
+Dr. Bull tossed his sword into the sea.
+
+“There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council,” he said. “We were all
+a lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice
+people who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the
+dynamiters. I knew I couldn’t be wrong about the mob,” he said, beaming
+over the enormous multitude, which stretched away to the distance on
+both sides. “Vulgar people are never mad. I’m vulgar myself, and I
+know. I am now going on shore to stand a drink to everybody here.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+THE PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENT
+
+
+Next morning five bewildered but hilarious people took the boat for
+Dover. The poor old Colonel might have had some cause to complain,
+having been first forced to fight for two factions that didn’t exist,
+and then knocked down with an iron lantern. But he was a magnanimous
+old gentleman, and being much relieved that neither party had anything
+to do with dynamite, he saw them off on the pier with great geniality.
+
+The five reconciled detectives had a hundred details to explain to each
+other. The Secretary had to tell Syme how they had come to wear masks
+originally in order to approach the supposed enemy as
+fellow-conspirators.
+
+Syme had to explain how they had fled with such swiftness through a
+civilised country. But above all these matters of detail which could be
+explained, rose the central mountain of the matter that they could not
+explain. What did it all mean? If they were all harmless officers, what
+was Sunday? If he had not seized the world, what on earth had he been
+up to? Inspector Ratcliffe was still gloomy about this.
+
+“I can’t make head or tail of old Sunday’s little game any more than
+you can,” he said. “But whatever else Sunday is, he isn’t a blameless
+citizen. Damn it! do you remember his face?”
+
+“I grant you,” answered Syme, “that I have never been able to forget
+it.”
+
+“Well,” said the Secretary, “I suppose we can find out soon, for
+tomorrow we have our next general meeting. You will excuse me,” he
+said, with a rather ghastly smile, “for being well acquainted with my
+secretarial duties.”
+
+“I suppose you are right,” said the Professor reflectively. “I suppose
+we might find it out from him; but I confess that I should feel a bit
+afraid of asking Sunday who he really is.”
+
+“Why,” asked the Secretary, “for fear of bombs?”
+
+“No,” said the Professor, “for fear he might tell me.”
+
+“Let us have some drinks,” said Dr. Bull, after a silence.
+
+Throughout their whole journey by boat and train they were highly
+convivial, but they instinctively kept together. Dr. Bull, who had
+always been the optimist of the party, endeavoured to persuade the
+other four that the whole company could take the same hansom cab from
+Victoria; but this was overruled, and they went in a four-wheeler,
+with Dr. Bull on the box, singing. They finished their journey at an
+hotel in Piccadilly Circus, so as to be close to the early breakfast
+next morning in Leicester Square. Yet even then the adventures of the
+day were not entirely over. Dr. Bull, discontented with the general
+proposal to go to bed, had strolled out of the hotel at about eleven to
+see and taste some of the beauties of London. Twenty minutes
+afterwards, however, he came back and made quite a clamour in the hall.
+Syme, who tried at first to soothe him, was forced at last to listen to
+his communication with quite new attention.
+
+“I tell you I’ve seen him!” said Dr. Bull, with thick emphasis.
+
+“Whom?” asked Syme quickly. “Not the President?”
+
+“Not so bad as that,” said Dr. Bull, with unnecessary laughter, “not so
+bad as that. I’ve got him here.”
+
+“Got whom here?” asked Syme impatiently.
+
+“Hairy man,” said the other lucidly, “man that used to be hairy
+man—Gogol. Here he is,” and he pulled forward by a reluctant elbow the
+identical young man who five days before had marched out of the Council
+with thin red hair and a pale face, the first of all the sham
+anarchists who had been exposed.
+
+“Why do you worry with me?” he cried. “You have expelled me as a spy.”
+
+“We are all spies!” whispered Syme.
+
+“We’re all spies!” shouted Dr. Bull. “Come and have a drink.”
+
+Next morning the battalion of the reunited six marched stolidly towards
+the hotel in Leicester Square.
+
+“This is more cheerful,” said Dr. Bull; “we are six men going to ask
+one man what he means.”
+
+“I think it is a bit queerer than that,” said Syme. “I think it is six
+men going to ask one man what they mean.”
+
+They turned in silence into the Square, and though the hotel was in the
+opposite corner, they saw at once the little balcony and a figure that
+looked too big for it. He was sitting alone with bent head, poring over
+a newspaper. But all his councillors, who had come to vote him down,
+crossed that Square as if they were watched out of heaven by a hundred
+eyes.
+
+They had disputed much upon their policy, about whether they should
+leave the unmasked Gogol without and begin diplomatically, or whether
+they should bring him in and blow up the gunpowder at once. The
+influence of Syme and Bull prevailed for the latter course, though the
+Secretary to the last asked them why they attacked Sunday so rashly.
+
+“My reason is quite simple,” said Syme. “I attack him rashly because I
+am afraid of him.”
+
+They followed Syme up the dark stair in silence, and they all came out
+simultaneously into the broad sunlight of the morning and the broad
+sunlight of Sunday’s smile.
+
+“Delightful!” he said. “So pleased to see you all. What an exquisite
+day it is. Is the Czar dead?”
+
+The Secretary, who happened to be foremost, drew himself together for a
+dignified outburst.
+
+“No, sir,” he said sternly “there has been no massacre. I bring you
+news of no such disgusting spectacles.”
+
+“Disgusting spectacles?” repeated the President, with a bright,
+inquiring smile. “You mean Dr. Bull’s spectacles?”
+
+The Secretary choked for a moment, and the President went on with a
+sort of smooth appeal—
+
+“Of course, we all have our opinions and even our eyes, but really to
+call them disgusting before the man himself—”
+
+Dr. Bull tore off his spectacles and broke them on the table.
+
+“My spectacles are blackguardly,” he said, “but I’m not. Look at my
+face.”
+
+“I dare say it’s the sort of face that grows on one,” said the
+President, “in fact, it grows on you; and who am I to quarrel with the
+wild fruits upon the Tree of Life? I dare say it will grow on me some
+day.”
+
+“We have no time for tomfoolery,” said the Secretary, breaking in
+savagely. “We have come to know what all this means. Who are you? What
+are you? Why did you get us all here? Do you know who and what we are?
+Are you a half-witted man playing the conspirator, or are you a clever
+man playing the fool? Answer me, I tell you.”
+
+“Candidates,” murmured Sunday, “are only required to answer eight out
+of the seventeen questions on the paper. As far as I can make out, you
+want me to tell you what I am, and what you are, and what this table
+is, and what this Council is, and what this world is for all I know.
+Well, I will go so far as to rend the veil of one mystery. If you want
+to know what you are, you are a set of highly well-intentioned young
+jackasses.”
+
+“And you,” said Syme, leaning forward, “what are you?”
+
+“I? What am I?” roared the President, and he rose slowly to an
+incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and
+break. “You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of
+science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about
+them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell
+you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and
+the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the
+sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are,
+and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have
+hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the
+churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet,
+and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a
+good run for their money, and I will now.”
+
+Before one of them could move, the monstrous man had swung himself like
+some huge ourang-outang over the balustrade of the balcony. Yet before
+he dropped he pulled himself up again as on a horizontal bar, and
+thrusting his great chin over the edge of the balcony, said solemnly—
+
+“There’s one thing I’ll tell you though about who I am. I am the man in
+the dark room, who made you all policemen.”
+
+With that he fell from the balcony, bouncing on the stones below like a
+great ball of india-rubber, and went bounding off towards the corner of
+the Alhambra, where he hailed a hansom-cab and sprang inside it. The
+six detectives had been standing thunderstruck and livid in the light
+of his last assertion; but when he disappeared into the cab, Syme’s
+practical senses returned to him, and leaping over the balcony so
+recklessly as almost to break his legs, he called another cab.
+
+He and Bull sprang into the cab together, the Professor and the
+Inspector into another, while the Secretary and the late Gogol
+scrambled into a third just in time to pursue the flying Syme, who was
+pursuing the flying President. Sunday led them a wild chase towards the
+north-west, his cabman, evidently under the influence of more than
+common inducements, urging the horse at breakneck speed. But Syme was
+in no mood for delicacies, and he stood up in his own cab shouting,
+“Stop thief!” until crowds ran along beside his cab, and policemen
+began to stop and ask questions. All this had its influence upon the
+President’s cabman, who began to look dubious, and to slow down to a
+trot. He opened the trap to talk reasonably to his fare, and in so
+doing let the long whip droop over the front of the cab. Sunday leant
+forward, seized it, and jerked it violently out of the man’s hand. Then
+standing up in front of the cab himself, he lashed the horse and roared
+aloud, so that they went down the streets like a flying storm. Through
+street after street and square after square went whirling this
+preposterous vehicle, in which the fare was urging the horse and the
+driver trying desperately to stop it. The other three cabs came after
+it (if the phrase be permissible of a cab) like panting hounds. Shops
+and streets shot by like rattling arrows.
+
+At the highest ecstacy of speed, Sunday turned round on the splashboard
+where he stood, and sticking his great grinning head out of the cab,
+with white hair whistling in the wind, he made a horrible face at his
+pursuers, like some colossal urchin. Then raising his right hand
+swiftly, he flung a ball of paper in Syme’s face and vanished. Syme
+caught the thing while instinctively warding it off, and discovered
+that it consisted of two crumpled papers. One was addressed to himself,
+and the other to Dr. Bull, with a very long, and it is to be feared
+partly ironical, string of letters after his name. Dr. Bull’s address
+was, at any rate, considerably longer than his communication, for the
+communication consisted entirely of the words:—
+
+“What about Martin Tupper _now?_”
+
+
+“What does the old maniac mean?” asked Bull, staring at the words.
+“What does yours say, Syme?”
+
+Syme’s message was, at any rate, longer, and ran as follows:—
+
+“No one would regret anything in the nature of an interference by the
+Archdeacon more than I. I trust it will not come to that. But, for the
+last time, where are your goloshes? The thing is too bad, especially
+after what uncle said.”
+
+
+The President’s cabman seemed to be regaining some control over his
+horse, and the pursuers gained a little as they swept round into the
+Edgware Road. And here there occurred what seemed to the allies a
+providential stoppage. Traffic of every kind was swerving to right or
+left or stopping, for down the long road was coming the unmistakable
+roar announcing the fire-engine, which in a few seconds went by like a
+brazen thunderbolt. But quick as it went by, Sunday had bounded out of
+his cab, sprung at the fire-engine, caught it, slung himself on to it,
+and was seen as he disappeared in the noisy distance talking to the
+astonished fireman with explanatory gestures.
+
+“After him!” howled Syme. “He can’t go astray now. There’s no mistaking
+a fire-engine.”
+
+The three cabmen, who had been stunned for a moment, whipped up their
+horses and slightly decreased the distance between themselves and their
+disappearing prey. The President acknowledged this proximity by coming
+to the back of the car, bowing repeatedly, kissing his hand, and
+finally flinging a neatly-folded note into the bosom of Inspector
+Ratcliffe. When that gentleman opened it, not without impatience, he
+found it contained the words:—
+
+“Fly at once. The truth about your trouser-stretchers is known.—A
+FRIEND.”
+
+
+The fire-engine had struck still farther to the north, into a region
+that they did not recognise; and as it ran by a line of high railings
+shadowed with trees, the six friends were startled, but somewhat
+relieved, to see the President leap from the fire-engine, though
+whether through another whim or the increasing protest of his
+entertainers they could not see. Before the three cabs, however, could
+reach up to the spot, he had gone up the high railings like a huge grey
+cat, tossed himself over, and vanished in a darkness of leaves.
+
+Syme with a furious gesture stopped his cab, jumped out, and sprang
+also to the escalade. When he had one leg over the fence and his
+friends were following, he turned a face on them which shone quite pale
+in the shadow.
+
+“What place can this be?” he asked. “Can it be the old devil’s house?
+I’ve heard he has a house in North London.”
+
+“All the better,” said the Secretary grimly, planting a foot in a
+foothold, “we shall find him at home.”
+
+“No, but it isn’t that,” said Syme, knitting his brows. “I hear the
+most horrible noises, like devils laughing and sneezing and blowing
+their devilish noses!”
+
+“His dogs barking, of course,” said the Secretary.
+
+“Why not say his black-beetles barking!” said Syme furiously, “snails
+barking! geraniums barking! Did you ever hear a dog bark like that?”
+
+He held up his hand, and there came out of the thicket a long growling
+roar that seemed to get under the skin and freeze the flesh—a low
+thrilling roar that made a throbbing in the air all about them.
+
+“The dogs of Sunday would be no ordinary dogs,” said Gogol, and
+shuddered.
+
+Syme had jumped down on the other side, but he still stood listening
+impatiently.
+
+“Well, listen to that,” he said, “is that a dog—anybody’s dog?”
+
+There broke upon their ear a hoarse screaming as of things protesting
+and clamouring in sudden pain; and then, far off like an echo, what
+sounded like a long nasal trumpet.
+
+“Well, his house ought to be hell!” said the Secretary; “and if it is
+hell, I’m going in!” and he sprang over the tall railings almost with
+one swing.
+
+The others followed. They broke through a tangle of plants and shrubs,
+and came out on an open path. Nothing was in sight, but Dr. Bull
+suddenly struck his hands together.
+
+“Why, you asses,” he cried, “it’s the Zoo!”
+
+As they were looking round wildly for any trace of their wild quarry, a
+keeper in uniform came running along the path with a man in plain
+clothes.
+
+“Has it come this way?” gasped the keeper.
+
+“Has what?” asked Syme.
+
+“The elephant!” cried the keeper. “An elephant has gone mad and run
+away!”
+
+“He has run away with an old gentleman,” said the other stranger
+breathlessly, “a poor old gentleman with white hair!”
+
+“What sort of old gentleman?” asked Syme, with great curiosity.
+
+“A very large and fat old gentleman in light grey clothes,” said the
+keeper eagerly.
+
+“Well,” said Syme, “if he’s that particular kind of old gentleman, if
+you’re quite sure that he’s a large and fat old gentleman in grey
+clothes, you may take my word for it that the elephant has not run away
+with him. He has run away with the elephant. The elephant is not made
+by God that could run away with him if he did not consent to the
+elopement. And, by thunder, there he is!”
+
+There was no doubt about it this time. Clean across the space of grass,
+about two hundred yards away, with a crowd screaming and scampering
+vainly at his heels, went a huge grey elephant at an awful stride, with
+his trunk thrown out as rigid as a ship’s bowsprit, and trumpeting like
+the trumpet of doom. On the back of the bellowing and plunging animal
+sat President Sunday with all the placidity of a sultan, but goading
+the animal to a furious speed with some sharp object in his hand.
+
+“Stop him!” screamed the populace. “He’ll be out of the gate!”
+
+“Stop a landslide!” said the keeper. “He is out of the gate!”
+
+And even as he spoke, a final crash and roar of terror announced that
+the great grey elephant had broken out of the gates of the Zoological
+Gardens, and was careening down Albany Street like a new and swift sort
+of omnibus.
+
+“Great Lord!” cried Bull, “I never knew an elephant could go so fast.
+Well, it must be hansom-cabs again if we are to keep him in sight.”
+
+As they raced along to the gate out of which the elephant had vanished,
+Syme felt a glaring panorama of the strange animals in the cages which
+they passed. Afterwards he thought it queer that he should have seen
+them so clearly. He remembered especially seeing pelicans, with their
+preposterous, pendant throats. He wondered why the pelican was the
+symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity
+to admire a pelican. He remembered a hornbill, which was simply a huge
+yellow beak with a small bird tied on behind it. The whole gave him a
+sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was
+always making quite mysterious jokes. Sunday had told them that they
+would understand him when they had understood the stars. He wondered
+whether even the archangels understood the hornbill.
+
+The six unhappy detectives flung themselves into cabs and followed the
+elephant sharing the terror which he spread through the long stretch of
+the streets. This time Sunday did not turn round, but offered them the
+solid stretch of his unconscious back, which maddened them, if
+possible, more than his previous mockeries. Just before they came to
+Baker Street, however, he was seen to throw something far up into the
+air, as a boy does a ball meaning to catch it again. But at their rate
+of racing it fell far behind, just by the cab containing Gogol; and in
+faint hope of a clue or for some impulse unexplainable, he stopped his
+cab so as to pick it up. It was addressed to himself, and was quite a
+bulky parcel. On examination, however, its bulk was found to consist of
+thirty-three pieces of paper of no value wrapped one round the other.
+When the last covering was torn away it reduced itself to a small slip
+of paper, on which was written:—
+
+“The word, I fancy, should be ‘pink’.”
+
+
+The man once known as Gogol said nothing, but the movements of his
+hands and feet were like those of a man urging a horse to renewed
+efforts.
+
+Through street after street, through district after district, went the
+prodigy of the flying elephant, calling crowds to every window, and
+driving the traffic left and right. And still through all this insane
+publicity the three cabs toiled after it, until they came to be
+regarded as part of a procession, and perhaps the advertisement of a
+circus. They went at such a rate that distances were shortened beyond
+belief, and Syme saw the Albert Hall in Kensington when he thought that
+he was still in Paddington. The animal’s pace was even more fast and
+free through the empty, aristocratic streets of South Kensington, and
+he finally headed towards that part of the sky-line where the enormous
+Wheel of Earl’s Court stood up in the sky. The wheel grew larger and
+larger, till it filled heaven like the wheel of stars.
+
+The beast outstripped the cabs. They lost him round several corners,
+and when they came to one of the gates of the Earl’s Court Exhibition
+they found themselves finally blocked. In front of them was an enormous
+crowd; in the midst of it was an enormous elephant, heaving and
+shuddering as such shapeless creatures do. But the President had
+disappeared.
+
+“Where has he gone to?” asked Syme, slipping to the ground.
+
+“Gentleman rushed into the Exhibition, sir!” said an official in a
+dazed manner. Then he added in an injured voice: “Funny gentleman, sir.
+Asked me to hold his horse, and gave me this.”
+
+He held out with distaste a piece of folded paper, addressed: “To the
+Secretary of the Central Anarchist Council.”
+
+The Secretary, raging, rent it open, and found written inside it:—
+
+“When the herring runs a mile,
+Let the Secretary smile;
+When the herring tries to _fly_,
+Let the Secretary die.
+                    Rustic Proverb.”
+
+
+“Why the eternal crikey,” began the Secretary, “did you let the man in?
+Do people commonly come to your Exhibition riding on mad elephants?
+Do—”
+
+“Look!” shouted Syme suddenly. “Look over there!”
+
+“Look at what?” asked the Secretary savagely.
+
+“Look at the captive balloon!” said Syme, and pointed in a frenzy.
+
+“Why the blazes should I look at a captive balloon?” demanded the
+Secretary. “What is there queer about a captive balloon?”
+
+“Nothing,” said Syme, “except that it isn’t captive!”
+
+They all turned their eyes to where the balloon swung and swelled above
+the Exhibition on a string, like a child’s balloon. A second afterwards
+the string came in two just under the car, and the balloon, broken
+loose, floated away with the freedom of a soap bubble.
+
+“Ten thousand devils!” shrieked the Secretary. “He’s got into it!” and
+he shook his fists at the sky.
+
+The balloon, borne by some chance wind, came right above them, and they
+could see the great white head of the President peering over the side
+and looking benevolently down on them.
+
+“God bless my soul!” said the Professor with the elderly manner that he
+could never disconnect from his bleached beard and parchment face. “God
+bless my soul! I seemed to fancy that something fell on the top of my
+hat!”
+
+He put up a trembling hand and took from that shelf a piece of twisted
+paper, which he opened absently only to find it inscribed with a true
+lover’s knot and, the words:—
+
+“Your beauty has not left me indifferent.—From LITTLE SNOWDROP.”
+
+
+There was a short silence, and then Syme said, biting his beard—
+
+“I’m not beaten yet. The blasted thing must come down somewhere. Let’s
+follow it!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS
+
+
+Across green fields, and breaking through blooming hedges, toiled six
+draggled detectives, about five miles out of London. The optimist of
+the party had at first proposed that they should follow the balloon
+across South England in hansom-cabs. But he was ultimately convinced of
+the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the
+still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon.
+Consequently the tireless though exasperated travellers broke through
+black thickets and ploughed through ploughed fields till each was
+turned into a figure too outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp. Those
+green hills of Surrey saw the final collapse and tragedy of the
+admirable light grey suit in which Syme had set out from Saffron Park.
+His silk hat was broken over his nose by a swinging bough, his
+coat-tails were torn to the shoulder by arresting thorns, the clay of
+England was splashed up to his collar; but he still carried his yellow
+beard forward with a silent and furious determination, and his eyes
+were still fixed on that floating ball of gas, which in the full flush
+of sunset seemed coloured like a sunset cloud.
+
+“After all,” he said, “it is very beautiful!”
+
+“It is singularly and strangely beautiful!” said the Professor. “I wish
+the beastly gas-bag would burst!”
+
+“No,” said Dr. Bull, “I hope it won’t. It might hurt the old boy.”
+
+“Hurt him!” said the vindictive Professor, “hurt him! Not as much as
+I’d hurt him if I could get up with him. Little Snowdrop!”
+
+“I don’t want him hurt, somehow,” said Dr. Bull.
+
+“What!” cried the Secretary bitterly. “Do you believe all that tale
+about his being our man in the dark room? Sunday would say he was
+anybody.”
+
+“I don’t know whether I believe it or not,” said Dr. Bull. “But it
+isn’t that that I mean. I can’t wish old Sunday’s balloon to burst
+because—”
+
+“Well,” said Syme impatiently, “because?”
+
+“Well, because he’s so jolly like a balloon himself,” said Dr. Bull
+desperately. “I don’t understand a word of all that idea of his being
+the same man who gave us all our blue cards. It seems to make
+everything nonsense. But I don’t care who knows it, I always had a
+sympathy for old Sunday himself, wicked as he was. Just as if he was a
+great bouncing baby. How can I explain what my queer sympathy was? It
+didn’t prevent my fighting him like hell! Shall I make it clear if I
+say that I liked him because he was so fat?”
+
+“You will not,” said the Secretary.
+
+“I’ve got it now,” cried Bull, “it was because he was so fat and so
+light. Just like a balloon. We always think of fat people as heavy, but
+he could have danced against a sylph. I see now what I mean. Moderate
+strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. It
+was like the old speculations—what would happen if an elephant could
+leap up in the sky like a grasshopper?”
+
+“Our elephant,” said Syme, looking upwards, “has leapt into the sky
+like a grasshopper.”
+
+“And somehow,” concluded Bull, “that’s why I can’t help liking old
+Sunday. No, it’s not an admiration of force, or any silly thing like
+that. There is a kind of gaiety in the thing, as if he were bursting
+with some good news. Haven’t you sometimes felt it on a spring day? You
+know Nature plays tricks, but somehow that day proves they are
+good-natured tricks. I never read the Bible myself, but that part they
+laugh at is literal truth, ‘Why leap ye, ye high hills?’ The hills do
+leap—at least, they try to.... Why do I like Sunday?... how can I tell
+you?... because he’s such a Bounder.”
+
+There was a long silence, and then the Secretary said in a curious,
+strained voice—
+
+“You do not know Sunday at all. Perhaps it is because you are better
+than I, and do not know hell. I was a fierce fellow, and a trifle
+morbid from the first. The man who sits in darkness, and who chose us
+all, chose me because I had all the crazy look of a conspirator—because
+my smile went crooked, and my eyes were gloomy, even when I smiled. But
+there must have been something in me that answered to the nerves in all
+these anarchic men. For when I first saw Sunday he expressed to me, not
+your airy vitality, but something both gross and sad in the Nature of
+Things. I found him smoking in a twilight room, a room with brown blind
+down, infinitely more depressing than the genial darkness in which our
+master lives. He sat there on a bench, a huge heap of a man, dark and
+out of shape. He listened to all my words without speaking or even
+stirring. I poured out my most passionate appeals, and asked my most
+eloquent questions. Then, after a long silence, the Thing began to
+shake, and I thought it was shaken by some secret malady. It shook like
+a loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of everything I had ever
+read about the base bodies that are the origin of life—the deep sea
+lumps and protoplasm. It seemed like the final form of matter, the most
+shapeless and the most shameful. I could only tell myself, from its
+shudderings, that it was something at least that such a monster could
+be miserable. And then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was
+shaking with a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me. Do you ask
+me to forgive him that? It is no small thing to be laughed at by
+something at once lower and stronger than oneself.”
+
+“Surely you fellows are exaggerating wildly,” cut in the clear voice of
+Inspector Ratcliffe. “President Sunday is a terrible fellow for one’s
+intellect, but he is not such a Barnum’s freak physically as you make
+out. He received me in an ordinary office, in a grey check coat, in
+broad daylight. He talked to me in an ordinary way. But I’ll tell you
+what is a trifle creepy about Sunday. His room is neat, his clothes are
+neat, everything seems in order; but he’s absent-minded. Sometimes his
+great bright eyes go quite blind. For hours he forgets that you are
+there. Now absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We
+think of a wicked man as vigilant. We can’t think of a wicked man who
+is honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren’t think of a wicked
+man alone with himself. An absentminded man means a good-natured man.
+It means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologise. But how
+will you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will
+kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with
+cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild
+forests, and felt that the animals there were at once innocent and
+pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten
+mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded tiger?”
+
+“And what do you think of Sunday, Gogol?” asked Syme.
+
+“I don’t think of Sunday on principle,” said Gogol simply, “any more
+than I stare at the sun at noonday.”
+
+“Well, that is a point of view,” said Syme thoughtfully. “What do you
+say, Professor?”
+
+The Professor was walking with bent head and trailing stick, and he did
+not answer at all.
+
+“Wake up, Professor!” said Syme genially. “Tell us what you think of
+Sunday.”
+
+The Professor spoke at last very slowly.
+
+“I think something,” he said, “that I cannot say clearly. Or, rather, I
+think something that I cannot even think clearly. But it is something
+like this. My early life, as you know, was a bit too large and loose.
+
+“Well, when I saw Sunday’s face I thought it was too large—everybody
+does, but I also thought it was too loose. The face was so big, that
+one couldn’t focus it or make it a face at all. The eye was so far away
+from the nose, that it wasn’t an eye. The mouth was so much by itself,
+that one had to think of it by itself. The whole thing is too hard to
+explain.”
+
+He paused for a little, still trailing his stick, and then went on—
+
+“But put it this way. Walking up a road at night, I have seen a lamp
+and a lighted window and a cloud make together a most complete and
+unmistakable face. If anyone in heaven has that face I shall know him
+again. Yet when I walked a little farther I found that there was no
+face, that the window was ten yards away, the lamp ten hundred yards,
+the cloud beyond the world. Well, Sunday’s face escaped me; it ran away
+to right and left, as such chance pictures run away. And so his face
+has made me, somehow, doubt whether there are any faces. I don’t know
+whether your face, Bull, is a face or a combination in perspective.
+Perhaps one black disc of your beastly glasses is quite close and
+another fifty miles away. Oh, the doubts of a materialist are not worth
+a dump. Sunday has taught me the last and the worst doubts, the doubts
+of a spiritualist. I am a Buddhist, I suppose; and Buddhism is not a
+creed, it is a doubt. My poor dear Bull, I do not believe that you
+really have a face. I have not faith enough to believe in matter.”
+
+Syme’s eyes were still fixed upon the errant orb, which, reddened in
+the evening light, looked like some rosier and more innocent world.
+
+“Have you noticed an odd thing,” he said, “about all your descriptions?
+Each man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each man of you can
+only find one thing to compare him to—the universe itself. Bull finds
+him like the earth in spring, Gogol like the sun at noonday. The
+Secretary is reminded of the shapeless protoplasm, and the Inspector of
+the carelessness of virgin forests. The Professor says he is like a
+changing landscape. This is queer, but it is queerer still that I also
+have had my odd notion about the President, and I also find that I
+think of Sunday as I think of the whole world.”
+
+“Get on a little faster, Syme,” said Bull; “never mind the balloon.”
+
+“When I first saw Sunday,” said Syme slowly, “I only saw his back; and
+when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck
+and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. His head had a
+stoop that was hardly human, like the stoop of an ox. In fact, I had at
+once the revolting fancy that this was not a man at all, but a beast
+dressed up in men’s clothes.”
+
+“Get on,” said Dr. Bull.
+
+“And then the queer thing happened. I had seen his back from the
+street, as he sat in the balcony. Then I entered the hotel, and coming
+round the other side of him, saw his face in the sunlight. His face
+frightened me, as it did everyone; but not because it was brutal, not
+because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was
+so beautiful, because it was so good.”
+
+“Syme,” exclaimed the Secretary, “are you ill?”
+
+“It was like the face of some ancient archangel, judging justly after
+heroic wars. There was laughter in the eyes, and in the mouth honour
+and sorrow. There was the same white hair, the same great, grey-clad
+shoulders that I had seen from behind. But when I saw him from behind I
+was certain he was an animal, and when I saw him in front I knew he was
+a god.”
+
+“Pan,” said the Professor dreamily, “was a god and an animal.”
+
+“Then, and again and always,” went on Syme like a man talking to
+himself, “that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also
+the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the
+noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I
+know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think
+good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could
+be explained. But the whole came to a kind of crest yesterday when I
+raced Sunday for the cab, and was just behind him all the way.”
+
+“Had you time for thinking then?” asked Ratcliffe.
+
+“Time,” replied Syme, “for one outrageous thought. I was suddenly
+possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really
+was his face—an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that
+the figure running in front of me was really a figure running
+backwards, and dancing as he ran.”
+
+“Horrible!” said Dr. Bull, and shuddered.
+
+“Horrible is not the word,” said Syme. “It was exactly the worst
+instant of my life. And yet ten minutes afterwards, when he put his
+head out of the cab and made a grimace like a gargoyle, I knew that he
+was only like a father playing hide-and-seek with his children.”
+
+“It is a long game,” said the Secretary, and frowned at his broken
+boots.
+
+“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell
+you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the
+back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.
+That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but
+the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and
+hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”
+
+“Look!” cried out Bull clamorously, “the balloon is coming down!”
+
+There was no need to cry out to Syme, who had never taken his eyes off
+it. He saw the great luminous globe suddenly stagger in the sky, right
+itself, and then sink slowly behind the trees like a setting sun.
+
+The man called Gogol, who had hardly spoken through all their weary
+travels, suddenly threw up his hands like a lost spirit.
+
+“He is dead!” he cried. “And now I know he was my friend—my friend in
+the dark!”
+
+“Dead!” snorted the Secretary. “You will not find him dead easily. If
+he has been tipped out of the car, we shall find him rolling as a colt
+rolls in a field, kicking his legs for fun.”
+
+“Clashing his hoofs,” said the Professor. “The colts do, and so did
+Pan.”
+
+“Pan again!” said Dr. Bull irritably. “You seem to think Pan is
+everything.”
+
+“So he is,” said the Professor, “in Greek. He means everything.”
+
+“Don’t forget,” said the Secretary, looking down, “that he also means
+Panic.”
+
+Syme had stood without hearing any of the exclamations.
+
+“It fell over there,” he said shortly. “Let us follow it!”
+
+Then he added with an indescribable gesture—
+
+“Oh, if he has cheated us all by getting killed! It would be like one
+of his larks.”
+
+He strode off towards the distant trees with a new energy, his rags and
+ribbons fluttering in the wind. The others followed him in a more
+footsore and dubious manner. And almost at the same moment all six men
+realised that they were not alone in the little field.
+
+Across the square of turf a tall man was advancing towards them,
+leaning on a strange long staff like a sceptre. He was clad in a fine
+but old-fashioned suit with knee-breeches; its colour was that shade
+between blue, violet and grey which can be seen in certain shadows of
+the woodland. His hair was whitish grey, and at the first glance, taken
+along with his knee-breeches, looked as if it was powdered. His advance
+was very quiet; but for the silver frost upon his head, he might have
+been one to the shadows of the wood.
+
+“Gentlemen,” he said, “my master has a carriage waiting for you in the
+road just by.”
+
+“Who is your master?” asked Syme, standing quite still.
+
+“I was told you knew his name,” said the man respectfully.
+
+There was a silence, and then the Secretary said—
+
+“Where is this carriage?”
+
+“It has been waiting only a few moments,” said the stranger. “My master
+has only just come home.”
+
+Syme looked left and right upon the patch of green field in which he
+found himself. The hedges were ordinary hedges, the trees seemed
+ordinary trees; yet he felt like a man entrapped in fairyland.
+
+He looked the mysterious ambassador up and down, but he could discover
+nothing except that the man’s coat was the exact colour of the purple
+shadows, and that the man’s face was the exact colour of the red and
+brown and golden sky.
+
+“Show us the place,” Syme said briefly, and without a word the man in
+the violet coat turned his back and walked towards a gap in the hedge,
+which let in suddenly the light of a white road.
+
+As the six wanderers broke out upon this thoroughfare, they saw the
+white road blocked by what looked like a long row of carriages, such a
+row of carriages as might close the approach to some house in Park
+Lane. Along the side of these carriages stood a rank of splendid
+servants, all dressed in the grey-blue uniform, and all having a
+certain quality of stateliness and freedom which would not commonly
+belong to the servants of a gentleman, but rather to the officials and
+ambassadors of a great king. There were no less than six carriages
+waiting, one for each of the tattered and miserable band. All the
+attendants (as if in court-dress) wore swords, and as each man crawled
+into his carriage they drew them, and saluted with a sudden blaze of
+steel.
+
+“What can it all mean?” asked Bull of Syme as they separated. “Is this
+another joke of Sunday’s?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Syme as he sank wearily back in the cushions of
+his carriage; “but if it is, it’s one of the jokes you talk about. It’s
+a good-natured one.”
+
+The six adventurers had passed through many adventures, but not one had
+carried them so utterly off their feet as this last adventure of
+comfort. They had all become inured to things going roughly; but things
+suddenly going smoothly swamped them. They could not even feebly
+imagine what the carriages were; it was enough for them to know that
+they were carriages, and carriages with cushions. They could not
+conceive who the old man was who had led them; but it was quite enough
+that he had certainly led them to the carriages.
+
+Syme drove through a drifting darkness of trees in utter abandonment.
+It was typical of him that while he had carried his bearded chin
+forward fiercely so long as anything could be done, when the whole
+business was taken out of his hands he fell back on the cushions in a
+frank collapse.
+
+Very gradually and very vaguely he realised into what rich roads the
+carriage was carrying him. He saw that they passed the stone gates of
+what might have been a park, that they began gradually to climb a hill
+which, while wooded on both sides, was somewhat more orderly than a
+forest. Then there began to grow upon him, as upon a man slowly waking
+from a healthy sleep, a pleasure in everything. He felt that the hedges
+were what hedges should be, living walls; that a hedge is like a human
+army, disciplined, but all the more alive. He saw high elms behind the
+hedges, and vaguely thought how happy boys would be climbing there.
+Then his carriage took a turn of the path, and he saw suddenly and
+quietly, like a long, low, sunset cloud, a long, low house, mellow in
+the mild light of sunset. All the six friends compared notes afterwards
+and quarrelled; but they all agreed that in some unaccountable way the
+place reminded them of their boyhood. It was either this elm-top or
+that crooked path, it was either this scrap of orchard or that shape of
+a window; but each man of them declared that he could remember this
+place before he could remember his mother.
+
+When the carriages eventually rolled up to a large, low, cavernous
+gateway, another man in the same uniform, but wearing a silver star on
+the grey breast of his coat, came out to meet them. This impressive
+person said to the bewildered Syme—
+
+“Refreshments are provided for you in your room.”
+
+Syme, under the influence of the same mesmeric sleep of amazement, went
+up the large oaken stairs after the respectful attendant. He entered a
+splendid suite of apartments that seemed to be designed specially for
+him. He walked up to a long mirror with the ordinary instinct of his
+class, to pull his tie straight or to smooth his hair; and there he saw
+the frightful figure that he was—blood running down his face from where
+the bough had struck him, his hair standing out like yellow rags of
+rank grass, his clothes torn into long, wavering tatters. At once the
+whole enigma sprang up, simply as the question of how he had got there,
+and how he was to get out again. Exactly at the same moment a man in
+blue, who had been appointed as his valet, said very solemnly—
+
+“I have put out your clothes, sir.”
+
+“Clothes!” said Syme sardonically. “I have no clothes except these,”
+and he lifted two long strips of his frock-coat in fascinating
+festoons, and made a movement as if to twirl like a ballet girl.
+
+“My master asks me to say,” said the attendant, “that there is a fancy
+dress ball tonight, and that he desires you to put on the costume that
+I have laid out. Meanwhile, sir, there is a bottle of Burgundy and some
+cold pheasant, which he hopes you will not refuse, as it is some hours
+before supper.”
+
+“Cold pheasant is a good thing,” said Syme reflectively, “and Burgundy
+is a spanking good thing. But really I do not want either of them so
+much as I want to know what the devil all this means, and what sort of
+costume you have got laid out for me. Where is it?”
+
+The servant lifted off a kind of ottoman a long peacock-blue drapery,
+rather of the nature of a domino, on the front of which was emblazoned
+a large golden sun, and which was splashed here and there with flaming
+stars and crescents.
+
+“You’re to be dressed as Thursday, sir,” said the valet somewhat
+affably.
+
+“Dressed as Thursday!” said Syme in meditation. “It doesn’t sound a
+warm costume.”
+
+“Oh, yes, sir,” said the other eagerly, “the Thursday costume is quite
+warm, sir. It fastens up to the chin.”
+
+“Well, I don’t understand anything,” said Syme, sighing. “I have been
+used so long to uncomfortable adventures that comfortable adventures
+knock me out. Still, I may be allowed to ask why I should be
+particularly like Thursday in a green frock spotted all over with the
+sun and moon. Those orbs, I think, shine on other days. I once saw the
+moon on Tuesday, I remember.”
+
+“Beg pardon, sir,” said the valet, “Bible also provided for you,” and
+with a respectful and rigid finger he pointed out a passage in the
+first chapter of Genesis. Syme read it wondering. It was that in which
+the fourth day of the week is associated with the creation of the sun
+and moon. Here, however, they reckoned from a Christian Sunday.
+
+“This is getting wilder and wilder,” said Syme, as he sat down in a
+chair. “Who are these people who provide cold pheasant and Burgundy,
+and green clothes and Bibles? Do they provide everything?”
+
+“Yes, sir, everything,” said the attendant gravely. “Shall I help you
+on with your costume?”
+
+“Oh, hitch the bally thing on!” said Syme impatiently.
+
+But though he affected to despise the mummery, he felt a curious
+freedom and naturalness in his movements as the blue and gold garment
+fell about him; and when he found that he had to wear a sword, it
+stirred a boyish dream. As he passed out of the room he flung the folds
+across his shoulder with a gesture, his sword stood out at an angle,
+and he had all the swagger of a troubadour. For these disguises did not
+disguise, but reveal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+THE ACCUSER
+
+
+As Syme strode along the corridor he saw the Secretary standing at the
+top of a great flight of stairs. The man had never looked so noble. He
+was draped in a long robe of starless black, down the centre of which
+fell a band or broad stripe of pure white, like a single shaft of
+light. The whole looked like some very severe ecclesiastical vestment.
+There was no need for Syme to search his memory or the Bible in order
+to remember that the first day of creation marked the mere creation of
+light out of darkness. The vestment itself would alone have suggested
+the symbol; and Syme felt also how perfectly this pattern of pure white
+and black expressed the soul of the pale and austere Secretary, with
+his inhuman veracity and his cold frenzy, which made him so easily make
+war on the anarchists, and yet so easily pass for one of them. Syme was
+scarcely surprised to notice that, amid all the ease and hospitality of
+their new surroundings, this man’s eyes were still stern. No smell of
+ale or orchards could make the Secretary cease to ask a reasonable
+question.
+
+If Syme had been able to see himself, he would have realised that he,
+too, seemed to be for the first time himself and no one else. For if
+the Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves the original and
+formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make
+the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The
+philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the
+finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the
+creation of the sun and moon.
+
+As they descended the broad stairs together they overtook Ratcliffe,
+who was clad in spring green like a huntsman, and the pattern upon
+whose garment was a green tangle of trees. For he stood for that third
+day on which the earth and green things were made, and his square,
+sensible face, with its not unfriendly cynicism, seemed appropriate
+enough to it.
+
+They were led out of another broad and low gateway into a very large
+old English garden, full of torches and bonfires, by the broken light
+of which a vast carnival of people were dancing in motley dress. Syme
+seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume.
+There was a man dressed as a windmill with enormous sails, a man
+dressed as an elephant, a man dressed as a balloon; the two last,
+together, seemed to keep the thread of their farcical adventures. Syme
+even saw, with a queer thrill, one dancer dressed like an enormous
+hornbill, with a beak twice as big as himself—the queer bird which had
+fixed itself on his fancy like a living question while he was rushing
+down the long road at the Zoological Gardens. There were a thousand
+other such objects, however. There was a dancing lamp-post, a dancing
+apple tree, a dancing ship. One would have thought that the untamable
+tune of some mad musician had set all the common objects of field and
+street dancing an eternal jig. And long afterwards, when Syme was
+middle-aged and at rest, he could never see one of those particular
+objects—a lamppost, or an apple tree, or a windmill—without thinking
+that it was a strayed reveller from that revel of masquerade.
+
+On one side of this lawn, alive with dancers, was a sort of green bank,
+like the terrace in such old-fashioned gardens.
+
+Along this, in a kind of crescent, stood seven great chairs, the
+thrones of the seven days. Gogol and Dr. Bull were already in their
+seats; the Professor was just mounting to his. Gogol, or Tuesday, had
+his simplicity well symbolised by a dress designed upon the division of
+the waters, a dress that separated upon his forehead and fell to his
+feet, grey and silver, like a sheet of rain. The Professor, whose day
+was that on which the birds and fishes—the ruder forms of life—were
+created, had a dress of dim purple, over which sprawled goggle-eyed
+fishes and outrageous tropical birds, the union in him of unfathomable
+fancy and of doubt. Dr. Bull, the last day of Creation, wore a coat
+covered with heraldic animals in red and gold, and on his crest a man
+rampant. He lay back in his chair with a broad smile, the picture of an
+optimist in his element.
+
+One by one the wanderers ascended the bank and sat in their strange
+seats. As each of them sat down a roar of enthusiasm rose from the
+carnival, such as that with which crowds receive kings. Cups were
+clashed and torches shaken, and feathered hats flung in the air. The
+men for whom these thrones were reserved were men crowned with some
+extraordinary laurels. But the central chair was empty.
+
+Syme was on the left hand of it and the Secretary on the right. The
+Secretary looked across the empty throne at Syme, and said, compressing
+his lips—
+
+“We do not know yet that he is not dead in a field.”
+
+Almost as Syme heard the words, he saw on the sea of human faces in
+front of him a frightful and beautiful alteration, as if heaven had
+opened behind his head. But Sunday had only passed silently along the
+front like a shadow, and had sat in the central seat. He was draped
+plainly, in a pure and terrible white, and his hair was like a silver
+flame on his forehead.
+
+For a long time—it seemed for hours—that huge masquerade of mankind
+swayed and stamped in front of them to marching and exultant music.
+Every couple dancing seemed a separate romance; it might be a fairy
+dancing with a pillar-box, or a peasant girl dancing with the moon; but
+in each case it was, somehow, as absurd as Alice in Wonderland, yet as
+grave and kind as a love story. At last, however, the thick crowd began
+to thin itself. Couples strolled away into the garden-walks, or began
+to drift towards that end of the building where stood smoking, in huge
+pots like fish-kettles, some hot and scented mixtures of old ale or
+wine. Above all these, upon a sort of black framework on the roof of
+the house, roared in its iron basket a gigantic bonfire, which lit up
+the land for miles. It flung the homely effect of firelight over the
+face of vast forests of grey or brown, and it seemed to fill with
+warmth even the emptiness of upper night. Yet this also, after a time,
+was allowed to grow fainter; the dim groups gathered more and more
+round the great cauldrons, or passed, laughing and clattering, into the
+inner passages of that ancient house. Soon there were only some ten
+loiterers in the garden; soon only four. Finally the last stray
+merry-maker ran into the house whooping to his companions. The fire
+faded, and the slow, strong stars came out. And the seven strange men
+were left alone, like seven stone statues on their chairs of stone. Not
+one of them had spoken a word.
+
+They seemed in no haste to do so, but heard in silence the hum of
+insects and the distant song of one bird. Then Sunday spoke, but so
+dreamily that he might have been continuing a conversation rather than
+beginning one.
+
+“We will eat and drink later,” he said. “Let us remain together a
+little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long.
+I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were
+always heroes—epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in
+arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the
+beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness,
+where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice
+commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the
+dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the
+earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you
+in the daylight I denied it myself.”
+
+Syme stirred sharply in his seat, but otherwise there was silence, and
+the incomprehensible went on.
+
+“But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the
+whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew
+how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords
+with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without
+hope.”
+
+There was complete silence in the starlit garden, and then the
+black-browed Secretary, implacable, turned in his chair towards Sunday,
+and said in a harsh voice—
+
+“Who and what are you?”
+
+“I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of
+God.”
+
+The Secretary started up, and stood crushing his costly robe in his
+hand.
+
+“I know what you mean,” he cried, “and it is exactly that that I cannot
+forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call
+the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If
+you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offense
+to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend,
+why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the
+iron entered into our souls—and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can
+forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot
+forgive Him His peace.”
+
+Sunday answered not a word, but very slowly he turned his face of stone
+upon Syme as if asking a question.
+
+“No,” said Syme, “I do not feel fierce like that. I am grateful to you,
+not only for wine and hospitality here, but for many a fine scamper and
+free fight. But I should like to know. My soul and heart are as happy
+and quiet here as this old garden, but my reason is still crying out. I
+should like to know.”
+
+Sunday looked at Ratcliffe, whose clear voice said—
+
+“It seems so _silly_ that you should have been on both sides and fought
+yourself.”
+
+Bull said—
+
+“I understand nothing, but I am happy. In fact, I am going to sleep.”
+
+“I am not happy,” said the Professor with his head in his hands,
+“because I do not understand. You let me stray a little too near to
+hell.”
+
+And then Gogol said, with the absolute simplicity of a child—
+
+“I wish I knew why I was hurt so much.”
+
+Still Sunday said nothing, but only sat with his mighty chin upon his
+hand, and gazed at the distance. Then at last he said—
+
+“I have heard your complaints in order. And here, I think, comes
+another to complain, and we will hear him also.”
+
+The falling fire in the great cresset threw a last long gleam, like a
+bar of burning gold, across the dim grass. Against this fiery band was
+outlined in utter black the advancing legs of a black-clad figure. He
+seemed to have a fine close suit with knee-breeches such as that which
+was worn by the servants of the house, only that it was not blue, but
+of this absolute sable. He had, like the servants, a kind of sword by
+his side. It was only when he had come quite close to the crescent of
+the seven and flung up his face to look at them, that Syme saw, with
+thunder-struck clearness, that the face was the broad, almost ape-like
+face of his old friend Gregory, with its rank red hair and its
+insulting smile.
+
+“Gregory!” gasped Syme, half-rising from his seat. “Why, this is the
+real anarchist!”
+
+“Yes,” said Gregory, with a great and dangerous restraint, “I am the
+real anarchist.”
+
+“‘Now there was a day,’” murmured Bull, who seemed really to have
+fallen asleep, “‘when the sons of God came to present themselves before
+the Lord, and Satan came also among them.’”
+
+“You are right,” said Gregory, and gazed all round. “I am a destroyer.
+I would destroy the world if I could.”
+
+A sense of a pathos far under the earth stirred up in Syme, and he
+spoke brokenly and without sequence.
+
+“Oh, most unhappy man,” he cried, “try to be happy! You have red hair
+like your sister.”
+
+“My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,” said Gregory.
+“I thought I hated everything more than common men can hate anything;
+but I find that I do not hate everything so much as I hate you!”
+
+“I never hated you,” said Syme very sadly.
+
+Then out of this unintelligible creature the last thunders broke.
+
+“You!” he cried. “You never hated because you never lived. I know what
+you are all of you, from first to last—you are the people in power! You
+are the police—the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are
+the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive
+that does not long to break you, only because you have never been
+broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this
+crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime
+of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the
+supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being
+cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you
+for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come
+down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no
+troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all
+mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a
+real agony such as I—”
+
+Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.
+
+“I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each
+thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small
+thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a
+fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to
+fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in
+the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may
+have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man
+fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So
+that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this
+blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say
+to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to
+say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’
+
+“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken
+upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these
+thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of
+unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered
+insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not
+been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom
+he has accused. At least—”
+
+He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday,
+which wore a strange smile.
+
+“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”
+
+As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the
+colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew
+larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black.
+Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed
+to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard
+somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”
+
+
+When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in
+some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a
+chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme’s
+experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was
+indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had
+gone through. For while he could always remember afterwards that he had
+swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever
+come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he
+knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy
+and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his
+recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking
+like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some
+triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body
+and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to
+everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some
+impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an
+adorable triviality.
+
+Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid;
+as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at
+rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that
+it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky. Syme
+felt a simple surprise when he saw rising all round him on both sides
+of the road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park. He had no
+idea that he had walked so near London. He walked by instinct along one
+white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself
+outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl
+with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great
+unconscious gravity of a girl.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY ***
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
+Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
+on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg™ License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
+other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
+Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
+provided that:
+
+• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
+  works.
+
+• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
+
+Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org.
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
+
+The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact.
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic
+works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org.
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+