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The Man Who Was Thursday

by G. K. Chesterton

April, 1999 [Etext #1695]

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The Man Who Was Thursday

by G. K. Chesterton

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

G. K. CHESTERTON

To Edmund Clerihew Bentley

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,

Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.

Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;

The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;

Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--

Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.

Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,

Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.

Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;

The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.

They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:

Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.

Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;

When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us

Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as eve,

High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.

Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,

When all church bells were silent our cap and beds were heard.

Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;

Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.

I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings

Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;

And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,

Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;

Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain--

Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.

Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,

Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.

But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.

God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:

We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--

Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,

And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells--

Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,

Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.

The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand--

Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?

The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,

And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.

Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;

Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.

We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,

And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

G. K. C.

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 I Our

digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that

is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more

poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars--the most

poetical thing in the world is not being sick."

"Really," said Gregory superciliously, "the examples you choose--"

"I beg your pardon," said Syme grimly, "I forgot we had abolished

all conventions."

For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory's forehead.

"You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionise society on this

lawn ?"

Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.

"No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious

about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do."

Gregory's big bull's eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry

lion, and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.

"Don't you think, then," he said in a dangerous voice, "that I am

serious about my anarchism?"

"I beg your pardon ?" said Syme.

"Am I not serious about my anarchism ?" cried Gregory, with knotted

fists.

"My dear fellow!" said Syme, and strolled away.

With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond

Gregory still in his company.

"Mr. Syme," she said, "do the people who talk like you and my

brother often mean what they say ? Do you mean what you say now ?"

Syme smiled.

"Do you ?" he asked.

"What do you mean ?" asked the girl, with grave eyes.

"My dear Miss Gregory," said Syme gently, "there are many kinds of

sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt,

do you mean what you say ? No. When you say 'the world is round,'

do you mean what you say ? No. It is true, but you don't mean it.

Now, sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing he does

mean. It may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but

then he says more than he means--from sheer force of meaning it."

She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave

and open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that

unreasoning responsibility which is at the bottom of the most

frivolous woman, the maternal watch which is as old as the world.

"Is he really an anarchist, then?" she asked.

"Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer

it, in that nonsense."

She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--

"He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"

Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight

and somewhat dandified figure.

"Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."

And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and

she thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity

and of his safety.

Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and

continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and

in spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one.

And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man

watches himself too closely. He defended respectability with

violence and exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of

tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac

all round him. Once he heard very faintly in some distant street a

barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic

words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for

what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups

in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment,

he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago,

and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a

sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards

explain. In the wild events which were to follow this girl had no

part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over.

And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a

motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the

glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark

and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so

improbable, that it might well have been a dream.

When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the

moment empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence

was rather a living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the

door stood a street lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree

that bent out over the fence behind him. About a foot from the

lamp-post stood a figure almost as rigid and motionless as the

lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long frock coat were black; the

face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe of

fiery hair against the light, and also something aggressive in the

attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He had something

of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.

He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more

formally returned.

"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's

conversation?"

"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the

tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy.

There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and

barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing

itself--there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold."

"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only

see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever

see the lamp by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said,

"But may I ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only

to resume our little argument?"

"No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, "I

did not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."

The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing,

listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a

smooth voice and with a rather bewildering smile.

"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something

rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of

woman has ever succeeded in doing before."

"Indeed!"

"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person

succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I

remember correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."

"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.

"I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped

out even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel

could wipe it out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out.

There is only one way by which that insult can be erased, and that

way I choose. I am going, at the possible sacrifice of my life and

honour, to prove to you that you were wrong in what you said."

"In what I said?"

"You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."

"There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never

doubted that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you

thought what you said well worth saying, that you thought a

paradox might wake men up to a neglected truth."

Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.

"And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You think

me a flaneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that

in a deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."

Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.

"Serious!" he cried. "Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these

damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious?

One comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as

well, but I should think very little of a man who didn't keep

something in the background of his life that was more serious than

all this talking--something more serious, whether it was religion

or only drink."

"Very well," said Gregory, his face darkening, "you shall see

something more serious than either drink or religion."

Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory

again opened his lips.

"You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that

you have one?"

"Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now."

"Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your

religion involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to

tell you to any son of Adam, and especially not to the police?

Will you swear that! If you will take upon yourself this awful

abnegations if you will consent to burden your soul with a vow

that you should never make and a knowledge you should never dream

about, I will promise you in return--"

"You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other

paused.

"I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly

took off his hat.

"Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say

that a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least

that he is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as

a Christian, and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist,

that I will not report anything of this, whatever it is, to the

police. And now, in the name of Colney Hatch, what is it?"

"I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will

call a cab."

He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the

road. The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the

trap the address of an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank

of the river. The cab whisked itself away again, and in it these

two fantastics quitted their fantastic town.

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 pate

de foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."

Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.

Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred

indifference--

"Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."

To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly,

sir!" and went away apparently to get it.

"What will you drink?" resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet

apologetic air. "I shall only have a crepe de menthe myself; I have

dined. But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you

with a half-bottle of Pommery at least?"

"Thank you!" said the motionless Syme. "You are very good."

His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in

themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the

actual appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it

particularly good. Then he suddenly began to eat with great

rapidity and appetite.

"Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!" he said to Gregory,

smiling. "I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It

is new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly

the other way."

"You are not asleep, I assure you," said Gregory. "You are, on the

contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your

existence. Ah, here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be

a slight disproportion, let us say, between the inner arrangements

of this excellent hotel and its simple and unpretentious exterior.

But that is all our modesty. We are the most modest men that ever

lived on earth."

"And who are we?" asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.

"It is quite simple," replied Gregory. "We are the serious

anarchists, in whom you do not believe."

"Oh!" said Syme shortly. "You do yourselves well in drinks."

"Yes, we are serious about everything," answered Gregory.

Then after a pause he added--

"If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little,

don't put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don't wish

you to do yourself an injustice."

"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect

calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either

condition. May I smoke?"

"Certainly!" said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. "Try one of

mine."

Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out

of his waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and

let out a long cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit

that he performed these rites with so much composure, for almost

before he had begun them the table at which he sat had begun to

revolve, first slowly, and then rapidly, as if at an insane

seance.

"You must not mind it," said Gregory; "it's a kind of screw."

"Quite so," said Syme placidly, "a kind of screw. How simple that

is!"

The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering

across the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a

factory chimney, and the two, with their chairs and table, shot

down through the floor as if the earth had swallowed them. They

went rattling down a kind of roaring chimney as rapidly as a lift

cut loose, and they came with an abrupt bump to the bottom. But

when Gregory threw open a pair of doors and let in a red

subterranean light, Syme was still smoking with one leg thrown

over the other, and had not turned a yellow hair.

Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which

was the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as

big as a fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the

door there was a sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory

struck five times. A heavy voice with a foreign accent asked him

who he was. To this he gave the more or less unexpected reply,

"Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." The heavy hinges began to move; it was

obviously some kind of password.

Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a

network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering

pattern was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and

revolvers, closely packed or interlocked.

"I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities," said Gregory;

"we have to be very strict here."

"Oh, don't apologise," said Syme. "I know your passion for law and

order," and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel

weapons. With his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he

looked a singularly frail and fanciful figure as he walked down

that shining avenue of death.

They passed through several such passages, and came out at last

into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in

shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the

appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or

pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more

dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of

iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the

very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his

cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.

"And now, my dear Mr. Syme," said Gregory, throwing himself in an

expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, "now we are

quite cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give

you any notion of why I brought you here. It was one of those quite

arbitrary emotions, like jumping off a cliff or falling in love.

Suffice it to say that you were an inexpressibly irritating fellow,

and, to do you justice, you are still. I would break twenty oaths

of secrecy for the pleasure of taking you down a peg. That way you

have of lighting a cigar would make a priest break the seal of

confession. Well, you said that you were quite certain I was not a

serious anarchist. Does this place strike you as being serious?"

"It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety," assented

Syme; "but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give

me information, because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted

from me a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall

certainly keep. So it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries.

First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object

to? You want to abolish Government?"

"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We

do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations;

that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the

Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to

deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour

and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly

sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of

Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and

Wrong."

"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope

you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."

"You spoke of a second question," snapped Gregory.

"With pleasure," resumed Syme. "In all your present acts and

surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an

aunt who lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have

found people living from preference under a public-house. You have

a heavy iron door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the

humiliation of calling yourself Mr. Chamberlain. You surround

yourself with steel instruments which make the place, if I may say

so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after taking all

this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the earth,

you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to

every silly woman in Saffron Park?"

Gregory smiled.

"The answer is simple," he said. "I told you I was a serious

anarchist, and you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me.

Unless I took them into this infernal room they would not believe

me."

Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory

went on.

"The history of the thing might amuse you," he said. "When first I

became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable

disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops

in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and

Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from them that bishops are

strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind.

I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters

in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, 'Down! down!

presumptuous human reason!' they found out in some way that I was

not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a

millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that

a fool could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a

major. Now I am a humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough

intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who, like

Nietzsche, admire violence--the proud, mad war of Nature and all

that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and

waved it constantly. I called out 'Blood!' abstractedly, like a

man calling for wine. I often said, 'Let the weak perish; it is

the Law.' Well, well, it seems majors don't do this. I was nabbed

again. At last I went in despair to the President of the Central

Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe."

"What is his name?" asked Syme.

"You would not know it," answered Gregory. "That is his greatness.

Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and

they were heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of,

and he is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the

room with him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have

been children in his hands."

He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed--

"But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling

as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said

to him, 'What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find

more respectable than bishops and majors?' He looked at me with his

large but indecipherable face. 'You want a safe disguise, do you?

You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in

which no one would ever look for a bomb?' I nodded. He suddenly

lifted his lion's voice. 'Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you

fool!' he roared so that the room shook. 'Nobody will ever expect

you to do anything dangerous then.' And he turned his broad back

on me without another word. I took his advice, and have never

regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and

night, and--by God!--they would let me wheel their perambulators."

Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.

"You took me in," he said. "It is really a smart dodge."

Then after a pause he added--

"What do you call this tremendous President of yours?"

"We generally call him Sunday," replied Gregory with simplicity.

'You see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist

Council, and they are named after days of the week. He is called

Sunday, by some of his admirers Bloody Sunday. It is curious you

should mention the matter, because the very night you have dropped

in (if I may so express it) is the night on which our London

branch, which assembles in this room, has to elect its own deputy

to fill a vacancy in the Council. The gentleman who has for some

time past played, with propriety and general applause, the

difficult part of Thursday, has died quite suddenly. Consequently,

we have called a meeting this very evening to elect a successor."

He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of

smiling embarrassment.

"I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme," he continued

casually. "I feel that I can confide anything to you, as you have

promised to tell nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something

that I would not say in so many words to the anarchists who will be

coming to the room in about ten minutes. We shall, of course, go

through a form of election; but I don't mind telling you that it is

practically certain what the result will be." He looked down for a

moment modestly. "It is almost a settled thing that I am to be

Thursday."

"My dear fellow." said Syme heartily, "I congratulate you. A great

career!"

Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking

rapidly.

"As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table," he

said, "and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible."

Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a

walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick,

a large Colt's revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of

brandy. Over the chair, beside the table, was thrown a

heavy-looking cape or cloak.

"I have only to get the form of election finished," continued

Gregory with animation, "then I snatch up this cloak and stick,

stuff these other things into my pocket, step out of a door in

this cavern, which opens on the river, where there is a steam-tug

already waiting for me, and then--then--oh, the wild joy of being

Thursday!" And he clasped his hands.

Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent languor,

got to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.

"Why is it," he asked vaguely, "that I think you are quite a decent

fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?" He paused a moment,

and then added with a sort of fresh curiosity, "Is it because you

are such an ass?"

There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out--

"Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been

in in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave

you a promise before I came into this place. That promise I would

keep under red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a

little promise of the same kind? "

"A promise?" asked Gregory, wondering.

"Yes," said Syme very seriously, "a promise. I swore before God

that I would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by

Humanity, or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will

not tell my secret to the anarchists?"

"Your secret?" asked the staring Gregory. "Have you got a secret?"

"Yes," said Syme, "I have a secret." Then after a pause, "Will you

swear?"

Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said

abruptly--

"You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about

you. Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell

me. But look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes."

Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into

his long, grey trousers' pockets. Almost as he did so there came

five knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the

first of the conspirators.

"Well," said Syme slowly, "I don't know how to tell you the truth

more shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as

an aimless poet is not confined to you or your President. We have

known the dodge for some time at Scotland Yard."

Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.

"What do you say?" he asked in an inhuman voice.

"Yes," said Syme simply, "I am a police detective. But I think I

hear your friends coming."

From the doorway there came a murmur of "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain."

It was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the

crowd of Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard

trampling down the corridor.

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 Hartle pool, 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 the 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 goncealment," said Gogol sulkily, with a thick

foreign accent; "I am not ashamed of the cause."

"Yes you are, my boy, and so is the cause of you," said the

President good-naturedly. "You hide as much as anybody; but you

can't do it, you see, you're such an ass! You try to combine two

inconsistent methods. When a householder finds a man under his

bed, he will probably pause to note the circumstance. But if he

finds a man under his bed in a top hat, you will agree with me,

my dear Tuesday, that he is not likely even to forget it. Now

when you were found under Admiral Biffin's bed--"

"I am not good at deception," said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.

"Right, my boy, right," said the President with a ponderous

heartiness, "you aren't good at anything."

While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking

more steadily at the men around him. As he did so, he gradually

felt all his sense of something spiritually queer return.

He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and

costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he

looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what

he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere.

That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine

face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each

man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or

twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly

human. The only metaphor he could think of was this, that they

all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the

additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.

Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed

eccentricity. Syme's original cicerone bore the title of Monday;

he was the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was

regarded with more terror than anything, except the President's

horrible, happy laughter. But now that Syme had more space and

light to observe him, there were other touches. His fine face

was so emaciated, that Syme thought it must be wasted with some

disease; yet somehow the very distress of his dark eyes denied

this. It was no physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were

alive with intellectual torture, as if pure thought was pain.

He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and

differently wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed

Gogol, a man more obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain

Marquis de St. Eustache, a sufficiently characteristic figure. The

first few glances found nothing unusual about him, except that he

was the only man at table who wore the fashionable clothes as if

they were really his own. He had a black French beard cut square

and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer. But Syme,

sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a rich

atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It

reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in

the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his

being clad, not in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his

black seemed richer and warmer than the black shades about him, as

if it were compounded of profound colour. His black coat looked as

if it were only black by being too dense a purple. His black beard

looked as if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in

the gloom and thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed

sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he

might be a Jew; he might be something deeper yet in the dark heart

of the East. In the bright coloured Persian tiles and pictures

showing tyrants hunting, you may see just those almond eyes, those

blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.

Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who

still kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected

that his death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was

in the last dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as

his long grey beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a

furrow of mild despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol,

did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress express a more

painful contrast. For the red flower in his button-hole showed up

against a face that was literally discoloured like lead; the whole

hideous effect was as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes

upon a corpse. When he rose or sat down, which was with long labour

and peril, something worse was expressed than mere weakness,

something indefinably connected with the horror of the whole scene.

It did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption. Another

hateful fancy crossed Syme's quivering mind. He could not help

thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off.

Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the

most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark,

square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name

of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of

well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He

carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he

mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him,

except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It

may have been merely a crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone

before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded

him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies

being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme's eye always caught the

black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn

them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate.

But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They

took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or

his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a

vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme

that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even

had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were

too frightful to see.

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;