The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton
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                  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 cr�pe 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  to-night is important, though it
need not be long. This branch has  always had the honour of electing Thursdays for the Central
European Council. We have elected many and splendid Thursdays. We  all lament the sad decease
of the heroic worker who occupied the  post until last week. As you know, his services to the
cause were  considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton  which, under
happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody  on the pier. As you also know, his death
was as self-denying as  his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of  chalk and
water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he  regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to
the cow.  Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always.  But it is not to
acclaim his virtues that we are met, but for a  harder task. It is difficult properly to praise his
qualities, but  it is more difficult to replace them. Upon you, comrades, it  devolves this evening to
choose out of the company present the man  who shall be Thursday. If any comrade suggests a
name I will put  it to the vote. If no comrade suggests a name, I can only tell  myself that that dear
dynamiter, 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 to-night 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; it only  destroys because it broadens; even so,
thought only destroys  because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out,  loosening
suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull  with violence. "My brain feels like a
bomb, night and day. It must  expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up
the universe."
    "I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the  Marquis. "I want to do a lot of
beastly things before I die. I  thought of one yesterday in bed."
    "No, if the only end of the thing is nothing," said Dr. Bull  with his sphinx-like smile, "it hardly
seems worth doing."      The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.      "Every
man knows in his heart, " he said, "that nothing is  worth doing."
    There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said�      "We are wandering, however,
from the point. The only question  is how Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all
agree with the original notion of a bomb. As to the actual  arrangements, I should suggest that
tomorrow morning he should go  first of all to�"
    The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow.  President Sunday had risen to his feet,
seeming to fill the sky  above them.
    "Before we discuss that," he said in a small, quiet voice,  "let us go into a private room. I have
something vent particular  to say."
    Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice  had come at last, the pistol was
at his head. On the pavement  before he could hear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the
morning, though bright, was cold.
    A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into  a jovial tune. Syme stood up taut,
as if it had been a bugle  before the battle. He found himself filled with a supernatural  courage
that came from nowhere. That jingling music seemed full of  the vivacity, the vulgarity, and the
irrational valour of the  poor, who in all those unclean streets were all clinging to the  decencies
and the charities of Christendom. His youthful prank of  being a policeman had faded from his
mind; he did not think of  himself as the representative of the corps of gentlemen turned  into
fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who lived in the  dark room. But he did feel himself as
the ambassador of all these  common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched into
battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in  being human had lifted him
unaccountably to an infinite height  above the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at least,
he  looked down upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the  starry pinnacle of the
commonplace. He felt towards them all that  unconscious and elementary superiority that a brave
man feels over  powerful beasts or a wise man over powerful errors. He knew that  he had neither
the intellectual nor the physical strength of  President Sunday; but in that moment he minded it no
more than the  fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a horn on his nose  like a rhinoceros.
All was swallowed up in an ultimate certainty  that the President was wrong and that the
barrel-organ was right.  There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism in
the song of Roland�

    "Pa�ens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit."

    which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of  great iron. This liberation of his spirit
from the load of his  weakness went with a quite clear decision to embrace death. If the  people of
the barrel-organ could keep their old-world obligations,  so could he. This very pride in keeping
his word was that he was  keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these  lunatics to
go down into their dark room and die for something  that they could not even understand. The
barrel-organ seemed to  give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises of a
whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the  trumpets of the pride of life,
the drums of the pride of death.      The conspirators were already filing through the open window
and into the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but  with all his brain and body
throbbing with romantic rhythm. The  President led them down an irregular side stair, such as
might be  used by servants, and into a dim, cold, empty room, with a table  and benches, like an
abandoned boardroom. When they were all in,  he closed and locked the door.
    The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed  bursting with inarticulate
grievance.
    "Zso! Zso!" he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy  Polish accent becoming almost
impenetrable. "You zay you nod 'ide.  You zay you show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you
vant talk  importance you run yourselves in a dark box!"
    The President seemed to take the foreigner's incoherent  satire with entire good humour.
    "You can't get hold of it yet, Gogol," he said in a fatherly  way. "When once they have heard
us talking nonsense on that  balcony they will not care where we go afterwards. If we had come
here first, we should have had the whole staff at the keyhole. You  don't seem to know anything
about mankind."
    "I die for zem," cried the Pole in thick excitement, "and I  slay zare oppressors. I care not for
these games of gonzealment. I  would zmite ze tyrant in ze open square."
    "I see, I see," said the President, nodding kindly as he  seated himself at the top of a long table.
"You die for mankind  first, and then you get up and smite their oppressors. So that's  all right.
And now may I ask you to control your beautiful  sentiments, and sit down with the other
gentlemen at this table.  For the first time this morning something intelligent is going to  be said."
    Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the  original summons, sat down
first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling  in his brown beard about gombromise. No one except Syme
seemed to  have any notion of the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he  had merely the
feeling of a man mounting the scaffold with the  intention, at any rate, of making a good speech.
    "Comrades," said the President, suddenly rising, "we have  spun out this farce long enough. I
have called you down here to  tell you something so simple and shocking that even the waiters
upstairs (long inured to our levities) might hear some new  seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we
were discussing plans and  naming places. I propose, before saying anything else, that those
plans and places should not be voted by this meeting, but should  be left wholly in the control of
some one reliable member. I  suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull."
    They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats,  for the next words, though not loud,
had a living and sensational  emphasis. Sunday struck the table.
    "Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at  this meeting. Not one tiny
detail more about what we mean to do  must be mentioned in this company."
    Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers; but  it seemed as if he had never really
astonished them until now.  They all moved feverishly in their seats, except Syme. He sat
stiff in his, with his hand in his pocket, and on the handle of  his loaded revolver. When the attack
on him came he would sell his  life dear. He would find out at least if the President was mortal.
Sunday went on smoothly�
    "You will probably understand that there is only one possible  motive for forbidding free
speech at this festival of freedom.  Strangers overhearing us matters nothing. They assume that
we are  joking. But what would matter, even unto death, is this, that  there should be one actually
among us who is not of us, who knows  our grave purpose, but does not share it, who�"
    The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.
    "It can't be!" he cried, leaping. "There can't�"
    The President flapped his large flat hand on the table like  the fin of some huge fish.
    "Yes," he said slowly, "there is a spy in this room. There is  a traitor at this table. I will waste
no more words. His name�"      Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.
"His name is Gogol," said the President. "He is that hairy  humbug over there who pretends to be
a Pole."
    Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the  same flash three men sprang at his
throat. Even the Professor made  an effort to rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was
blinded with a beneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat  shuddering, in a palsy of
passionate relief.



                        CHAPTER VII

      THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS

    "SIT down!" said Sunday in a voice that he used once or twice  in his life, a voice that made
men drop drawn swords.
    The three who had risen fell away from Gogol, and that  equivocal person himself resumed his
seat.
    "Well, my man," said the President briskly, addressing him as  one addresses a total stranger,
"will you oblige me by putting  your hand in your upper waistcoat pocket and showing me what
you  have there?"
    The alleged Pole was a little pale under his tangle of dark  hair, but he put two fingers into the
pocket with apparent  coolness and pulled out a blue strip of card. When Syme saw it  lying on
the table, he woke up again to the world outside him. For  although the card lay at the other
extreme of the table, and he  could read nothing of the inscription on it, it bore a startling
resemblance to the blue card in his own pocket, the card which had  been given to him when he
joined the anti-anarchist constabulary.      "Pathetic Slav," said the President, "tragic child of
Poland,  are you prepared in the presence of that card to deny that you are  in this company�shall
we say de trop?"
    "Right oh!" said the late Gogol. It made everyone jump to  hear a clear, commercial and
somewhat cockney voice coming out of  that forest of foreign hair. It was irrational, as if a
Chinaman  had suddenly spoken with a Scotch accent.
    "I gather that you fully understand your position," said  Sunday.
    "You bet," answered the Pole. "I see it's a fair cop. All I  say is, I don't believe any Pole could
have imitated my accent  like I did his."
    "I concede the point," said Sunday. "I believe your own  accent to be inimitable, though I shall
practise it in my bath. Do  you mind leaving your beard with your card?"
    "Not a bit," answered Gogol; and with one finger he ripped  off the whole of his shaggy
head-covering, emerging with thin red  hair and a pale, pert face. "It was hot," he added.
    "I will do you the justice to say," said Sunday, not without  a sort of brutal admiration, "that
you seem to have kept pretty  cool under it. Now listen to me. I like you. The consequence is
that it would annoy me for just about two and a half minutes if I  heard that you had died in
torments. Well, if you ever tell the  police or any human soul about us, I shall have that two and a
half minutes of discomfort. On your discomfort I will not dwell.  Good day. Mind the step."
    The red-haired detective who had masqueraded as Gogol rose to  his feet without a word, and
walked out of the room with an air of  perfect nonchalance. Yet the astonished Syme was able to
realise  that this ease was suddenly assumed; for there was a slight  stumble outside the door,
which showed that the departing  detective had not minded the step.
    "Time is flying," said the President in his gayest manner,  after glancing at his watch, which
like everything about him  seemed bigger than it ought to be. "I must go off at once; I have
to take the chair at a Humanitarian meeting."
    The Secretary turned to him with working eyebrows.
    "Would it not be better," he said a little sharply, "to  discuss further the details of our project,
now that the spy has  left us?"
    "No, I think not," said the President with a yawn like an  unobtrusive earthquake. "Leave it as
it is. Let Saturday settle  it. I must be off. Breakfast here next Sunday."
    But the late loud scenes had whipped up the almost naked  nerves of the Secretary. He was
one of those men who are
conscientious even in crime.
    "I must protest, President, that the thing is irregular," he  said. "It is a fundamental rule of our
society that all plans  shall be debated in full council. Of course, I fully appreciate  your
forethought when in the actual presence of a traitor�"      "Secretary," said the President
seriously, "if you'd take  your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I  can't say. But
it might.
    The Secretary reared back in a kind of equine anger.
    "I really fail to understand�" he began in high offense.      "That's it, that's it," said the
President, nodding a great  many times. "That's where you fail right enough. You fail to
understand. Why, you dancing donkey," he roared, rising, "you  didn't want to be overheard by a
spy, didn't you? How do you know  you aren't overheard now?"
    And with these words he shouldered his way out of the room,  shaking with incomprehensible
scorn.
    Four of the men left behind gaped after him without any  apparent glimmering of his meaning.
Syme alone had even a  glimmering, and such as it was it froze him to the bone. If the  last words
of the President meant anything, they meant that he had  not after all passed unsuspected. They
meant that while Sunday  could not denounce him like Gogol, he still could not trust him
like the others.
    The other four got to their feet grumbling more or less, and  betook themselves elsewhere to
find lunch, for it was already well  past midday. The Professor went last, very slowly and
painfully.  Syme sat long after the rest had gone, revolving his strange  position. He had escaped a
thunderbolt, but he was still under a  cloud. At last he rose and made his way out of the hotel into
Leicester Square. The bright, cold day had grown increasingly  colder, and when he came out into
the street he was surprised by a  few flakes of snow. While he still carried the sword-stick and the
rest of Gregory's portable luggage, he had thrown the cloak down  and left it somewhere, perhaps
on the steam-tug, perhaps on the  balcony. Hoping, therefore, that the snow-shower might be
slight,  he stepped back out of the street for a moment and stood up under  the doorway of a small
and greasy hair-dresser's shop, the front  window of which was empty, except for a sickly wax
lady in evening  dress.
    Snow, however, began to thicken and fall fast; and Syme,  having found one glance at the wax
lady quite sufficient to  depress his spirits, stared out instead into the white and empty  street. He
was considerably astonished to see, standing quite  still outside the shop and staring into the
window, a man. His top  hat was loaded with snow like the hat of Father Christmas, the  white
drift was rising round his boots and ankles; but it seemed  as if nothing could tear him away from
the contemplation of the  colourless wax doll in dirty evening dress. That any human being  should
stand in such weather looking into such a shop was a matter  of sufficient wonder to Syme; but
his idle wonder turned suddenly  into a personal shock; for he realised that the man standing there
was the paralytic old Professor de Worms. It scarcely seemed the  place for a person of his years
and infirmities.
    Syme was ready to believe anything about the perversions of  this dehumanized brotherhood;
but even he could not believe that  the Professor had fallen in love with that particular wax lady.
He  could only suppose that the man's malady (whatever it was)  involved some momentary fits of
rigidity or trance. He was not  inclined, however, to feel in this case any very compassionate
concern. On the contrary, he rather congratulated himself that the  Professor's stroke and his
elaborate and limping walk would make  it easy to escape from him and leave him miles behind.
For Syme  thirsted first and last to get clear of the whole poisonous  atmosphere, if only for an
hour. Then he could collect his  thoughts, formulate his policy, and decide finally whether he
should or should not keep faith with Gregory.
    He strolled away through the dancing snow, turned up two or  three streets, down through
two or three others, and entered a  small Soho restaurant for lunch. He partook reflectively of
four  small and quaint courses, drank half a bottle of red wine, and  ended up over black coffee
and a black cigar, still thinking. He  had taken his seat in the upper room of the restaurant, which
was  full of the chink of knives and the chatter of foreigners. He  remembered that in old days he
had imagined that all these  harmless and kindly aliens were anarchists. He shuddered,
remembering the real thing. But even the shudder had the
delightful shame of escape. The wine, the common food, the  familiar place, the faces of natural
and talkative men, made him  almost feel as if the Council of the Seven Days had been a bad
dream; and although he knew it was nevertheless an objective  reality, it was at least a distant one.
Tall houses and populous  streets lay between him and his last sight of the shameful seven;  he
was free in free London, and drinking wine among the free. With  a somewhat easier action, he
took his hat and stick and strolled  down the stair into the shop below.
    When he entered that lower room he stood stricken and rooted  to the spot. At a small table,
close up to the blank window and  the white street of snow, sat the old anarchist Professor over a
glass of milk, with his lifted livid face and pendent eyelids. For  an instant Syme stood as rigid as
the stick he leant upon. Then  with a gesture as of blind hurry, he brushed past the Professor,
dashing open the door and slamming it behind him, and stood  outside in the snow.
    "Can that old corpse be following me?" he asked himself,  biting his yellow moustache. "I
stopped too long up in that room,  so that even such leaden feet could catch me up. One comfort
is,  with a little brisk walking I can put a man like that as far away  as Timbuctoo. Or am I too
fanciful? Was he really following me?  Surely Sunday would not be such a fool as to send a lame
man? "      He set off at a smart pace, twisting and whirling his stick,  in the direction of Covent
Garden. As he crossed the great market  the snow increased, growing blinding and bewildering as
the  afternoon began to darken. The snow-flakes tormented him like a  swarm of silver bees.
Getting into his eyes and beard, they added  their unremitting futility to his already irritated
nerves; and by  the time that he had come at a swinging pace to the beginning of  Fleet Street, he
lost patience, and finding a Sunday teashop,  turned into it to take shelter. He ordered another cup
of black  coffee as an excuse. Scarcely had he done so, when Professor de  Worms hobbled
heavily into the shop, sat down with difficulty and  ordered a glass of milk.
    Syme's walking-stick had fallen from his hand with a great  clang, which confessed the
concealed steel. But the Professor did  not look round. Syme, who was commonly a cool
character, was  literally gaping as a rustic gapes at a conjuring trick. He had  seen no cab
following; he had heard no wheels outside the shop; to  all mortal appearances the man had come
on foot. But the old man  could only walk like a snail, and Syme had walked like the wind.
He started up and snatched his stick, half crazy with the  contradiction in mere arithmetic, and
swung out of the swinging  doors, leaving his coffee untasted. An omnibus going to the Bank
went rattling by with an unusual rapidity. He had a violent run of  a hundred yards to reach it; but
he managed to spring, swaying  upon the splash-board and, pausing for an instant to pant, he
climbed on to the top. When he had been seated for about half a  minute, he heard behind him a
sort of heavy and asthmatic  breathing.
    Turning sharply, he saw rising gradually higher and higher up  the omnibus steps a top hat
soiled and dripping with snow, and  under the shadow of its brim the short-sighted face and shaky
shoulders of Professor de Worms. He let himself into a seat with  characteristic care, and wrapped
himself up to the chin in the  mackintosh rug.
    Every movement of the old man's tottering figure and vague  hands, every uncertain gesture
and panic-stricken pause, seemed to  put it beyond question that he was helpless, that he was in
the  last imbecility of the body. He moved by inches, he let himself  down with little gasps of
caution. And yet, unless the
philosophical entities called time and space have no vestige even  of a practical existence, it
appeared quite unquestionable that he  had run after the omnibus.
    Syme sprang erect upon the rocking car, and after staring  wildly at the wintry sky, that grew
gloomier every moment, he ran  down the steps. He had repressed an elemental impulse to leap
over  the side.
    Too bewildered to look back or to reason, he rushed into one  of the little courts at the side of
Fleet Street as a rabbit  rushes into a hole. He had a vague idea, if this incomprehensible  old
Jack-in-the-box was really pursuing him, that in that  labyrinth of little streets he could soon throw
him off the scent.  He dived in and out of those crooked lanes, which were more like  cracks than
thoroughfares; and by the time that he had completed  about twenty alternate angles and described
an unthinkable  polygon, he paused to listen for any sound of pursuit. There was  none; there
could not in any case have been much, for the little  streets were thick with the soundless snow.
Somewhere behind Red  Lion Court, however, he noticed a place where some energetic  citizen
had cleared away the snow for a space of about twenty  yards, leaving the wet, glistening
cobble-stones. He thought  little of this as he passed it, only plunging into yet another arm  of the
maze. But when a few hundred yards farther on he stood  still again to listen, his heart stood still
also, for he heard  from that space of rugged stones the clinking crutch and labouring  feet of the
infernal cripple.
    The sky above was loaded with the clouds of snow, leaving  London in a darkness and
oppression premature for that hour of the  evening. On each side of Syme the walls of the alley
were blind  and featureless; there was no little window or any kind of eve. He  felt a new impulse
to break out of this hive of houses, and to get  once more into the open and lamp-lit street. Yet he
rambled and  dodged for a long time before he struck the main thoroughfare.  When he did so, he
struck it much farther up than he had fancied.  He came out into what seemed the vast and void of
Ludgate Circus,  and saw St. Paul's Cathedral sitting in the sky.
    At first he was startled to find these great roads so empty,  as if a pestilence had swept through
the city. Then he told  himself that some degree of emptiness was natural; first because  the
snow-storm was even dangerously deep, and secondly because it  was Sunday. And at the very
word Sunday he bit his lip; the word  was henceforth for hire like some indecent pun. Under the
white  fog of snow high up in the heaven the whole atmosphere of the city  was turned to a very
queer kind of green twilight, as of men under  the sea. The sealed and sullen sunset behind the
dark dome of St.  Paul's had in it smoky and sinister colours�colours of sickly  green, dead red or
decaying bronze, that were just bright enough  to emphasise the solid whiteness of the snow. But
right up against  these dreary colours rose the black bulk of the cathedral; and  upon the top of the
cathedral was a random splash and great stain  of snow, still clinging as to an Alpine peak. It had
fallen  accidentally, but just so fallen as to half drape the dome from  its very topmost point, and
to pick out in perfect silver the  great orb and the cross. When Syme saw it he suddenly
straightened  himself, and made with his sword-stick an involuntary salute.      He knew that that
evil figure, his shadow, was creeping  quickly or slowly behind him, and he did not care.
    It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the  skies were darkening that high
place of the earth was bright. The  devils might have captured heaven, but they had not yet
captured  the cross. He had a new impulse to tear out the secret of this  dancing, jumping and
pursuing paralytic; and at the entrance of  the court as it opened upon the Circus he turned, stick
in hand,  to face his pursuer.
    Professor de Worms came slowly round the corner of the  irregular alley behind him, his
unnatural form outlined against a  lonely gas-lamp, irresistibly recalling that very imaginative
figure in the nursery rhymes, "the crooked man who went a crooked  mile." He really looked as if
he had been twisted out of shape by  the tortuous streets he had been threading. He came nearer
and  nearer, the lamplight shining on his lifted spectacles, his  lifted, patient face. Syme waited for
him as St. George waited for  the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation or for death.
And the old Professor came right up to him and passed him like a  total stranger, without even a
blink of his mournful eyelids.      There was something in this silent and unexpected innocence
that left Syme in a final fury. The man's colourless face and  manner seemed to assert that the
whole following had been an  accident. Syme was galvanised with an energy that was something
between bitterness and a burst of boyish derision. He made a wild  gesture as if to knock the old
man's hat off, called out something  like "Catch me if you can," and went racing away across the
white,  open Circus. Concealment was impossible now; and looking back over  his shoulder, he
could see the black figure of the old gentleman  coming after him with long, swinging strides like
a man winning a  mile race. But the head upon that bounding body was still pale,  grave and
professional, like the head of a lecturer upon the body  of a harlequin.
    This outrageous chase sped across Ludgate Circus, up Ludgate  Hill, round St. Paul's
Cathedral, along Cheapside, Syme
remembering all the nightmares he had ever known. Then Syme broke  away towards the river,
and ended almost down by the docks. He saw  the yellow panes of a low, lighted public-house,
flung himself  into it and ordered beer. It was a foul tavern, sprinkled with  foreign sailors, a place
where opium might be smoked or knives  drawn.
    A moment later Professor de Worms entered the place, sat down  carefully, and asked for a
glass of milk.



                        CHAPTER VIII

                   THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS

    WHEN Gabriel Syme found himself finally established in a  chair, and opposite to him, fixed
and final also, the lifted  eyebrows and leaden eyelids of the Professor, his fears fully  returned.
This incomprehensible man from the fierce council, after  all, had certainly pursued him. If the
man had one character as a  paralytic and another character as a pursuer, the antithesis might
make him more interesting, but scarcely more soothing. It would be  a very small comfort that he
could not find the Professor out, if  by some serious accident the Professor should find him out.
He  emptied a whole pewter pot of ale before the professor had touched  his milk.
    One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless.  It was just possible that this
escapade signified something other  than even a slight suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some
regular  form or sign. Perhaps the foolish scamper was some sort of  friendly signal that he ought
to have understood. Perhaps it was a  ritual. Perhaps the new Thursday was always chased along
Cheapside, as the new Lord Mayor is always escorted along it. He  was just selecting a tentative
inquiry, when the old Professor  opposite suddenly and simply cut him short. Before Syme could
ask  the first diplomatic question, the old anarchist had asked  suddenly, without any sort of
preparation�
    "Are you a policeman?"
    Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected  anything so brutal and actual as
this. Even his great presence of  mind could only manage a reply with an air of rather blundering
jocularity.
    "A policeman?" he said, laughing vaguely. "Whatever made you  think of a policeman in
connection with me?"
    "The process was simple enough," answered the Professor  patiently. "I thought you looked
like a policeman. I think so  now."
    "Did I take a policeman's hat by mistake out of the
restaurant?" asked Syme, smiling wildly. "Have I by any chance got  a number stuck on to me
somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful  look? Why must I be a policeman? Do, do let me
be a postman."      The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no  hope, but Syme
ran on with a feverish irony.
    "But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German  philosophy. Perhaps policeman is
a relative term. In an
evolutionary sense, sir, the ape fades so gradually into the  policeman, that I myself can never
detect the shade. The monkey is  only the policeman that may be. Perhaps a maiden lady on
Clapham  Common is only the policeman that might have been. I don't mind  being the policeman
that might have been. I don't mind being  anything in German thought."
    "Are you in the police service?" said the old man, ignoring  all Syme's improvised and
desperate raillery. "Are you a
detective?"
    Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.      "Your suggestion is ridiculous,"
he began. "Why on earth�"      The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the  rickety
table, nearly breaking it.
    "Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he  shrieked in a high, crazy voice.
"Are you, or are you not, a  police detective?"
    "No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's  drop.
    "You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his  dead face becoming as it were
loathsomely alive. "You swear it!  You swear it! If you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will
you  be sure that the devil dances at your funeral? Will you see that  the nightmare sits on your
grave? Will there really be no mistake?  You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all, you
are not  in any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?"      He leant his angular elbow
far across the table, and put up  his large loose hand like a flap to his ear.
    "I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.      Professor de Worms fell back
in his chair with a curious air  of kindly collapse.
    "That's a pity," he said, "because I am."
    Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him  with a crash.
    "Because you are what?" he said thickly. "You are what?"      "I am a policeman," said the
Professor with his first broad  smile. and beaming through his spectacles. "But as you think
policeman only a relative term, of course I have nothing to do  with you. I am in the British police
force; but as you tell me you  are not in the British police force, I can only say that I met you
in a dynamiters' club. I suppose I ought to arrest you." And with  these words he laid on the table
before Syme an exact facsimile of  the blue card which Syme had in his own waistcoat pocket, the
symbol of his power from the police.
    Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned  exactly upside down, that all
trees were growing downwards and  that all stars were under his feet. Then came slowly the
opposite  conviction. For the last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really  been upside down, but
now the capsized universe had come right  side up again. This devil from whom he had been
fleeing all day  was only an elder brother of his own house, who on the other side  of the table lay
back and laughed at him. He did not for the  moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the
happy and  silly fact that this shadow, which had pursued him with an  intolerable oppression of
peril, was only the shadow of a friend  trying to catch him up. He knew simultaneously that he
was a fool  and a free man. For with any recovery from morbidity there must go  a certain healthy
humiliation. There comes a certain point in such  conditions when only three things are possible:
first a
perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter.  Syme's egotism held hard to the
first course for a few seconds,  and then suddenly adopted the third. Taking his own blue police
ticket from his own waist coat pocket, he tossed it on to the  table; then he flung his head back
until his spike of yellow beard  almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted with a barbaric
laughter.
    Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of  knives, plates, cans, clamorous voices,
sudden struggles and  stampedes, there was something Homeric in Syme's mirth which made
many half-drunken men look round.
    "What yer laughing at, guv'nor?" asked one wondering labourer  from the docks.
    "At myself," answered Syme, and went off again into the agony  of his ecstatic reaction.
    "Pull yourself together," said the Professor, "or you'll get  hysterical. Have some more beer. I'll
join you."
    "You haven't drunk your milk," said Syme.
    "My milk! " said the other, in tones of withering and  unfathomable contempt, "my milk! Do
you think I'd look at the  beastly stuff when I'm out of sight of the bloody anarchists?  We're all
Christians in this room, though perhaps," he added,  glancing around at the reeling crowd, "not
strict ones. Finish my  milk? Great blazes! yes, I'll finish it right enough!" and he  knocked the
tumbler off the table, making a crash of glass and a  splash of silver fluid.
    Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.
    "I understand now," he cried; "of course, you're not an old  man at all."
    "I can't take my face off here," replied Professor de Worms.  "It's rather an elaborate make-up.
As to whether I'm an old man,  that's not for me to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday."      "Yes,
but I mean," said Syme impatiently, "there's nothing  the matter with you."
    "Yes," answered the other dispassionately. "I am subject to  colds."
    Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of  relief. He laughed at the idea of the
paralytic Professor being  really a young actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he
felt that he would have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had  fallen over.
    The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.
    "Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of  us?"
    "I? No, I didn't know it," answered Syme in some surprise.  "But didn't you?"
    "I knew no more than the dead," replied the man who called  himself de Worms. "I thought the
President was talking about me,  and I rattled in my boots."
    "And I thought he was talking about me," said Syme, with his  rather reckless laughter. "I had
my hand on my revolver all the  time."
    "So had I," said the Professor grimly; "so had Gogol  evidently."
    Syme struck the table with an exclamation.
    "Why, there were three of us there!" he cried. "Three out of  seven is a fighting number. If we
had only known that we were  three!"
    The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look  up.
    "We were three," he said. "If we had been three hundred we  could still have done nothing."
    "Not if we were three hundred against four?" asked Syme,  jeering rather boisterously.
    "No," said the Professor with sobriety, "not if we were three  hundred against Sunday."
    And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter  had died in his heart before it
could die on his lips. The face of  the unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as a
coloured photograph, and he remarked this difference between  Sunday and all his satellites, that
their faces, however fierce or  sinister, became gradually blurred by memory like other human
faces, whereas Sunday's seemed almost to grow more actual during  absence, as if a man's painted
portrait should slowly come alive.      They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then
Syme's speech came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of  champagne.
    "Professor," he cried, "it is intolerable. Are you afraid of  this man?"
    The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with  large, wide-open, blue eyes of an
almost ethereal honesty.      "Yes, I am," he said mildly. "So are you."
    Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect,  like an insulted man, and thrust
the chair away from him.
    "Yes," he said in a voice indescribable, "you are right. I am  afraid of him. Therefore I swear
by God that I will seek out this  man whom I fear until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If
heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that I  would pull him down."
    "How?" asked the staring Professor. "Why?"
    "Because I am afraid of him," said Syme; "and no man should  leave in the universe anything of
which he is afraid."
    De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made  an effort to speak, but Syme
went on in a low voice, but with an  undercurrent of inhuman exaltation�
    "Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he  does not fear? Who would
debase himself to be merely brave, like  any common prizefighter? Who would stoop to be
fearless�like a  tree? Fight the thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of  the English
clergyman who gave the last rites to the brigand of  Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great
robber said, 'I can  give you no money, but I can give you advice for a lifetime: your  thumb on
the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you, strike  upwards, if you strike at the stars."
    The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his  pose.
    "Sunday is a fixed star," he said.
    "You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his  hat.
    The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his  feet.
    "Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent  bewilderment, "exactly where you
are going?"
    "Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb  being thrown in Paris."
    "Have you any conception how?" inquired the other.
    "No," said Syme with equal decision.
    "You remember, of course," resumed the soi-disant de Worms,  pulling his beard and looking
out of the window, "that when we  broke up rather hurriedly the whole arrangements for the
atrocity  were left in the private hands of the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The  Marquis is by this time
probably crossing the Channel. But where  he will go and what he will do it is doubtful whether
even the  President knows; certainly we don't know. The only man who does  know is Dr. Bull.
    "Confound it!" cried Syme. "And we don't know where he is."      "Yes," said the other in his
curious, absent-minded way, "I  know where he is myself."
    "Will you tell me?" asked Syme with eager eyes.
    "I will take you there," said the Professor, and took down  his own hat from a peg.
    Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.      "What do you mean?" he asked
sharply. "Will you join me? Will  you take the risk?"
    "Young man," said the Professor pleasantly, "I am amused to  observe that you think I am a
coward. As to that I will say only  one word, and that shall be entirely in the manner of your own
philosophical rhetoric. You think that it is possible to pull down  the President. I know that it is
impossible, and I am going to try  it," and opening the tavern door, which let in a blast of bitter
air, they went out together into the dark streets by the docks.      Most of the snow was melted or
trampled to mud, but here and  there a clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the  gloom.
The small streets were sloppy and full of pools, which  reflected the flaming lamps irregularly, and
by accident, like  fragments of some other and fallen world. Syme felt almost dazed  as he stepped
through this growing confusion of lights and  shadows; but his companion walked on with a
certain briskness,  towards where, at the end of the street, an inch or two of the  lamplit river
looked like a bar of flame.
    "Where are you going?" Syme inquired.
    "Just now," answered the Professor, "I am going just round  the corner to see whether Dr. Bull
has gone to bed. He is  hygienic, and retires early."
    "Dr. Bull!" exclaimed Syme. "Does he live round the corner?"      "No," answered his friend.
"As a matter of fact he lives some  way off, on the other side of the river, but we can tell from
here  whether he has gone to bed."
    Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river,  flecked with flame, he pointed with
his stick to the other bank.  On the Surrey side at this point there ran out into the Thames,
seeming almost to overhang it, a bulk and cluster of those tall  tenements, dotted with lighted
windows, and rising like factory  chimneys to an almost insane height. Their special poise and
position made one block of buildings especially look like a Tower  of Babel with a hundred eyes.
Syme had never seen any of the  sky-scraping buildings in America, so he could only think of the
buildings in a dream.
    Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably  lighted turret abruptly went out, as if
this black Argus had  winked at him with one of his innumerable eyes.
    Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his  stick against his boot.
    "We are too late," he said, "the hygienic Doctor has gone to  bed."
    "What do you mean?" asked Syme. "Does he live over there,  then?"
    "Yes," said de Worms, "behind that particular window which  you can't see. Come along and
get some dinner. We must call on him  to-morrow morning."
    Without further parley, he led the way through several  by-ways until they came out into the
flare and clamour of the East  India Dock Road. The Professor, who seemed to know his way
about  the neighbourhood, proceeded to a place where the line of lighted  shops fell back into a
sort of abrupt twilight and quiet, in which  an old white inn, all out of repair, stood back some
twenty feet  from the road.
    "You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere,  like fossils," explained the
Professor. "I once found a decent  place in the West End."
    "I suppose," said Syme, smiling, "that this is the
corresponding decent place in the East End?"
    "It is," said the Professor reverently, and went in.
    In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The  beans and bacon, which these
unaccountable people cooked well, the  astonishing emergence of Burgundy from their cellars,
crowned  Syme's sense of a new comradeship and comfort. Through all this  ordeal his root
horror had been isolation, and there are no words  to express the abyss between isolation and
having one ally. It may  be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two
is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in  spite of a hundred
disadvantages, the world will always return to  monogamy.
    Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his  outrageous tale, from the time
when Gregory had taken him to the  little tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a
luxuriant monologue, as a man speaks with very old friends. On his  side, also, the man who had
impersonated Professor de Worms was  not less communicative. His own story was almost as silly
as  Syme's.
    "That's a good get-up of yours," said Syme, draining a glass  of Macon; "a lot better than old
Gogol's. Even at the start I  thought he was a bit too hairy."
    "A difference of artistic theory," replied the Professor  pensively. "Gogol was an idealist. He
made up as the abstract or  platonic ideal of an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a  portrait
painter. But, indeed, to say that I am a portrait painter  is an inadequate expression. I am a
portrait."
    "I don't understand you," said Syme.
    "I am a portrait," repeated the Professor. "I am a portrait  of the celebrated Professor de
Worms, who is, I believe, in  Naples."
    "You mean you are made up like him," said Syme. "But doesn't  he know that you are taking
his nose in vain?"
    "He knows it right enough," replied his friend cheerfully.      "Then why doesn't he denounce
you?"
    "I have denounced him," answered the Professor.
    "Do explain yourself," said Syme.
    "With pleasure, if you don't mind hearing my story," replied  the eminent foreign philosopher.
"I am by profession an actor, and  my name is Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all
sorts  of Bohemian and blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge  of the turf,
sometimes the riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally  the political refugee. In some den of exiled
dreamers I was  introduced to the great German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de  Worms. I did
not gather much about him beyond his appearance,  which was very disgusting, and which I
studied carefully. I  understood that he had proved that the destructive principle in  the universe
was God; hence he insisted on the need for a furious  and incessant energy, rending all things in
pieces. Energy, he  said, was the All. He was lame, shortsighted, and partially  paralytic. When I
met him I was in a frivolous mood, and I  disliked him so much that I resolved to imitate him. If I
had been  a draughtsman I would have drawn a caricature. I was only an  actor, I could only act a
caricature. I made myself up into what  was meant for a wild exaggeration of the old Professor's
dirty old  self. When I went into the room full of his supporters I expected  to be received with a
roar of laughter, or (if they were too far  gone) with a roar of indignation at the insult. I cannot
describe  the surprise I felt when my entrance was received with a
respectful silence, followed (when I had first opened my lips)  with a murmur of admiration. The
curse of the perfect artist had  fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true. They
thought I really was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a  healthy-minded young man at the time,
and I confess that it was a  blow. Before I could fully recover, however, two or three of these
admirers ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that a  public insult had been put upon
me in the next room. I inquired  its nature. It seemed that an impertinent fellow had dressed
himself up as a preposterous parody of myself. I had drunk more  champagne than was good for
me, and in a flash of folly I decided  to see the situation through. Consequently it was to meet the
glare of the company and my own lifted eyebrows and freezing eyes  that the real Professor came
into the room.
    "I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all  round me looked anxiously from
one Professor to the other  Professor to see which was really the more feeble. But I won. An  old
man in poor health, like my rival, could not be expected to be  so impressively feeble as a young
actor in the prime of life. You  see, he really had paralysis, and working within this definite
limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he  tried to blast my claims intellectually.
I countered that by a  very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he  could
understand, I replied with something which I could not even  understand myself. 'I don't fancy,' he
said, 'that you could have  worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since  there
inheres in it the introduction of lacuna, which are an  essential of differentiation.' I replied quite
scornfully, 'You  read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution  functioned eugenically
was exposed long ago by Glumpe.' It is  unnecessary for me to say that there never were such
people as  Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all round (rather to my  surprise) seemed to
remember them quite well, and the Professor,  finding that the learned and mysterious method left
him rather at  the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell back  upon a more popular
form of wit. 'I see,' he sneered, 'you prevail  like the false pig in �sop.' 'And you fail,' I answered,
smiling,  'like the hedgehog in Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no  hedgehog in Montaigne?
'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so  would your beard.' I had no intelligent answer to this,
which was  quite true and rather witty. But I laughed heartily, answered,  'Like the Pantheist's
boots,' at random, and turned on my heel  with all the honours of victory. The real Professor was
thrown  out, but not with violence, though one man tried very patiently to  pull off his nose. He is
now, I believe, received everywhere in  Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent earnestness
and  anger, you see, make him all the more entertaining."
    "Well," said Syme, "I can understand your putting on his  dirty old beard for a night's practical
joke, but I don't  understand your never taking it off again."
    "That is the rest of the story," said the impersonator. "When  I myself left the company,
followed by reverent applause, I went  limping down the dark street, hoping that I should soon be
far  enough away to be able to walk like a human being. To my
astonishment, as I was turning the corner, I felt a touch on the  shoulder, and turning, found
myself under the shadow of an  enormous policeman. He told me I was wanted. I struck a sort of
paralytic attitude, and cried in a high German accent, 'Yes, I am  wanted�by the oppressed of the
world. You are arresting me on the  charge of being the great anarchist, Professor de Worms.'
The  policeman impassively consulted a paper in his hand, 'No, sir,' he  said civilly, 'at least, not
exactly, sir. I am arresting you on  the charge of not being the celebrated anarchist, Professor de
Worms.' This charge, if it was criminal at all, was certainly the  lighter of the two, and I went
along with the man, doubtful, but  not greatly dismayed. I was shown into a number of rooms,
and  eventually into the presence of a police officer, who explained  that a serious campaign had
been opened against the centres of  anarchy, and that this, my successful masquerade, might be of
considerable value to the public safety. He offered me a good  salary and this little blue card.
Though our conversation was  short, he struck me as a man of very massive common sense and
humour; but I cannot tell you much about him personally, because�"      Syme laid down his knife
and fork.
    "I know," he said, "because you talked to him in a dark  room."
    Professor de Worms nodded and drained his glass.



                        CHAPTER IX

                   THE MAN IN SPECTACLES

    "BURGUNDY is a jolly thing," said the Professor sadly, as he  set his glass down.
    "You don't look as if it were," said Syme; "you drink it as  if it were medicine."
    "You must excuse my manner," said the Professor dismally, "my  position is rather a curious
one. Inside I am really bursting with  boyish merriment; but I acted the paralytic Professor so well,
that now I can't leave off. So that when I am among friends, and  have no need at all to disguise
myself, I still can't help  speaking slow and wrinkling my forehead�just as if it were my  forehead.
I can be quite happy, you understand, but only in a  paralytic sort of way. The most buoyant
exclamations leap up in my  heart, but they come out of my mouth quite different. You should
hear me say, 'Buck up, old cock!' It would bring tears to your  eyes."
    "It does," said Syme; "but I cannot help thinking that apart  from all that you are really a bit
worried."
    The Professor started a little and looked at him steadily.      "You are a very clever fellow," he
said, "it is a pleasure to  work with you. Yes, I have rather a heavy cloud in my head. There  is a
great problem to face," and he sank his bald brow in his two  hands.
    Then he said in a low voice�
    "Can you play the piano?"
    "Yes," said Syme in simple wonder, "I'm supposed to have a  good touch."
    Then, as the other did not speak, he added�
    "I trust the great cloud is lifted."
    After a long silence, the Professor said out of the cavernous  shadow of his hands�
    "It would have done just as well if you could work a  typewriter."
    "Thank you," said Syme, "you flatter me."
    "Listen to me," said the other, "and remember whom we have to  see tomorrow. You and I are
going to-morrow to attempt something  which is very much more dangerous than trying to steal
the Crown  Jewels out of the Tower. We are trying to steal a secret from a  very sharp, very
strong, and very wicked man. I believe there is  no man, except the President, of course, who is so
seriously  startling and formidable as that little grinning fellow in  goggles. He has not perhaps the
white-hot enthusiasm unto death,  the mad martyrdom for anarchy, which marks the Secretary.
But then  that very fanaticism in the Secretary has a human pathos, and is  almost a redeeming
trait. But the little Doctor has a brutal  sanity that is more shocking than the Secretary's disease.
Don't  you notice his detestable virility and vitality. He bounces like  an india-rubber ball. Depend
on it, Sunday was not asleep (I  wonder if he ever sleeps?) when he locked up all the plans of this
outrage in the round, black head of Dr. Bull."
    "And you think," said Syme, "that this unique monster will be  soothed if I play the piano to
him?"
    "Don't be an ass," said his mentor. "I mentioned the piano  because it gives one quick and
independent fingers. Syme, if we  are to go through this interview and come out sane or alive, we
must have some code of signals between us that this brute will not  see. I have made a rough
alphabetical cypher corresponding to the  five fingers�like this, see," and he rippled with his
fingers on  the wooden table�"B A D, bad, a word we may frequently require."      Syme poured
himself out another glass of wine, and began to  study the scheme. He was abnormally quick with
his brains at  puzzles, and with his hands at conjuring, and it did not take him  long to learn how
he might convey simple messages by what would  seem to be idle taps upon a table or knee. But
wine and
companionship had always the effect of inspiring him to a farcical  ingenuity, and the Professor
soon found himself struggling with  the too vast energy of the new language, as it passed through
the  heated brain of Syme.
    "We must have several word-signs," said Syme seriously�"words  that we are likely to want,
fine shades of meaning. My favourite  word is ' coeval.' What's yours?"
    "Do stop playing the goat," said the Professor plaintively.  "You don't know how serious this
is."
    " ' Lush,' too, " said Syme, shaking his head sagaciously,  "we must have ' lush'�word applied
to grass, don't you know?"      "Do you imagine," asked the Professor furiously, "that we are
going to talk to Dr. Bull about grass?"
    "There are several ways in which the subject could be  approached," said Syme reflectively,
"and the word introduced  without appearing forced. We might say, ' Dr. Bull, as a
revolutionist, you remember that a tyrant once advised us to eat  grass; and indeed many of us,
looking on the fresh lush grass of  summer "'
    "Do you understand," said the other, "that this is a  tragedy?"
    "Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy.  What the deuce else can you do? I
wish this language of yours had  a wider scope. I suppose we could not extend it from the fingers
to the toes? That would involve pulling off our boots and socks  during the conversation, which
however unobtrusively performed�"      "Syme," said his friend with a stern simplicity, "go to
bed!"      Syme, however, sat up in bed for a considerable time  mastering the new code. He was
awakened next morning while the  east was still sealed with darkness, and found his grey-bearded
ally standing like a ghost beside his bed.
    Syme sat up in bed blinking; then slowly collected his  thoughts, threw off the bed-clothes, and
stood up. It seemed to  him in some curious way that all the safety and sociability of the  night
before fell with the bedclothes off him, and he stood up in  an air of cold danger. He still felt an
entire trust and loyalty  towards his companion; but it was the trust between two men going
to the scaffold.
    "Well," said Syme with a forced cheerfulness as he pulled on  his trousers, "I dreamt of that
alphabet of yours. Did it take you  long to make it up?"
    The Professor made no answer, but gazed in front of him with  eyes the colour of a wintry sea;
so Syme repeated his question.      "I say, did it take you long to invent all this? I'm  considered
good at these things, and it was a good hour's grind.  Did you learn it all on the spot?"
    The Professor was silent; his eyes were wide open, and he  wore a fixed but very small smile.
    "How long did it take you?"
    The Professor did not move.
    "Confound you, can't you answer?" called out Syme, in a  sudden anger that had something
like fear underneath. Whether or  no the Professor could answer, he did not.
    Syme stood staring back at the stiff face like parchment and  the blank, blue eyes. His first
thought was that the Professor had  gone mad, but his second thought was more frightful. After
all,  what did he know about this queer creature whom he had heedlessly  accepted as a friend?
What did he know, except that the man had  been at the anarchist breakfast and had told him a
ridiculous  tale? How improbable it was that there should be another friend  there beside Gogol!
Was this man's silence a sensational way of  declaring war? Was this adamantine stare after all
only the awful  sneer of some threefold traitor, who had turned for the last time?  He stood and
strained his ears in this heartless silence. He  almost fancied he could hear dynamiters come to
capture him  shifting softly in the corridor outside.
    Then his eye strayed downwards, and he burst out laughing.  Though the Professor himself
stood there as voiceless as a statue,  his five dumb fingers were dancing alive upon the dead table.
Syme  watched the twinkling movements of the talking hand, and read  clearly the message�
    "I will only talk like this. We must get used to it."      He rapped out the answer with the
impatience of relief�      "All right. Let's get out to breakfast."
    They took their hats and sticks in silence; but as Syme took  his sword-stick, he held it hard.
    They paused for a few minutes only to stuff down coffee and  coarse thick sandwiches at a
coffee stall, and then made their way  across the river, which under the grey and growing light
looked as  desolate as Acheron. They reached the bottom of the huge block of  buildings which
they had seen from across the river, and began in  silence to mount the naked and numberless
stone steps, only  pausing now and then to make short remarks on the rail of the  banisters. At
about every other flight they passed a window; each  window showed them a pale and tragic
dawn lifting itself
laboriously over London. From each the innumerable roofs of slate  looked like the leaden surges
of a grey, troubled sea after rain.  Syme was increasingly conscious that his new adventure had
somehow  a quality of cold sanity worse than the wild adventures of the  past. Last night, for
instance, the tall tenements had seemed to  him like a tower in a dream. As he now went up the
weary and  perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost  infinite series. But it
was not the hot horror of a dream or of  anything that might be exaggeration or delusion. Their
infinity  was more like the empty infinity of arithmetic, something  unthinkable, yet necessary to
thought. Or it was like the stunning  statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars.
He  was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than  unreason itself.
    By the time they reached Dr. Bull's landing, a last window  showed them a harsh, white dawn
edged with banks of a kind of  coarse red, more like red clay than red cloud. And when they
entered Dr. Bull's bare garret it was full of light.
    Syme had been haunted by a half historic memory in connection  with these empty rooms and
that austere daybreak. The moment he  saw the garret and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he
remembered what the memory was�the French Revolution. There should  have been the black
outline of a guillotine against that heavy red  and white of the morning. Dr. Bull was in his white
shirt and  black breeches only; his cropped, dark head might well have just  come out of its wig;
he might have been Marat or a more slipshod  Robespierre.
    Yet when he was seen properly, the French fancy fell away.  The Jacobins were idealists; there
was about this man a murderous  materialism. His Dosition gave him a somewhat new
appearance. The  strong, white light of morning coming from one side creating sharp  shadows,
made him seem both more pale and more angular than he had  looked at the breakfast on the
balcony. Thus the two black glasses  that encased his eyes might really have been black cavities in
his  skull, making him look like a death's-head. And, indeed, if ever  Death himself sat writing at a
wooden table, it might have been  he.
    He looked up and smiled brightly enough as the men came in,  and rose with the resilient
rapidity of which the Professor had  spoken. He set chairs for both of them, and going to a peg
behind  the door, proceeded to put on a coat and waistcoat of rough, dark  tweed; he buttoned it
up neatly, and came back to sit down at his  table.
    The quiet good humour of his manner left his two opponents  helpless. It was with some
momentary difficulty that the Professor  broke silence and began, "I'm sorry to disturb you so
early,  comrade," said he, with a careful resumption of the slow de Worms  manner. "You have no
doubt made all the arrangements for the Paris  affair?" Then he added with infinite slowness, "We
have
information which renders intolerable anything in the nature of a  moment's delay."
    Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without  speaking. The Professor
resumed, a pause before each weary word�      "Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I
advise you  to alter those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow  your agent with all the
support you can get for him. Comrade Syme  and I have had an experience which it would take
more time to  recount than we can afford, if we are to act on it. I will,  however, relate the
occurrence in detail, even at the risk of  losing time, if you really feel that it is essential to the
understanding of the problem we have to discuss."
    He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably  long and lingering, in the hope of
maddening the practical little  Doctor into an explosion of impatience which might show his hand.
But the little Doctor continued only to stare and smile, and the  monologue was uphill work.
Syme began to feel a new sickness and  despair. The Doctor's smile and silence were not at all like
the  cataleptic stare and horrible silence which he had confronted in  the Professor half an hour
before. About the Professor's makeup  and all his antics there was always something merely
grotesque,  like a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild woes of yesterday as  one remembers
being afraid of Bogy in childhood. But here was  daylight; here was a healthy, square-shouldered
man in tweeds, not  odd save for the accident of his ugly spectacles, not glaring or  grinning at all,
but smiling steadily and not saying a word. The  whole had a sense of unbearable reality. Under
the increasing  sunlight the colours of the Doctor's complexion, the pattern of  his tweeds, grew
and expanded outrageously, as such things grow  too important in a realistic novel. But his smile
was quite  slight, the pose of his head polite; the only uncanny thing was  his silence.
    "As I say," resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through  heavy sand, "the incident that
has occurred to us and has led us  to ask for information about the Marquis, is one which you may
think it better to have narrated; but as it came in the way of  Comrade Syme rather than me�"
    His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an  anthem; but Syme, who was
watching, saw his long fingers rattle  quickly on the edge of the crazy table. He read the message,
"You  must go on. This devil has sucked me dry!"
    Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of
improvisation which always came to him when he was alarmed.      "Yes, the thing really
happened to me," he said hastily. "I  had the good fortune to fall into conversation with a
detective  who took me, thanks to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing  to clinch my
reputation for respectability, I took him and made  him very drunk at the Savoy. Under this
influence he became  friendly, and told me in so many words that within a day or two  they hope
to arrest the Marquis in France.
    So unless you or I can get on his track�"
    The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and  his protected eyes were still
impenetrable. The Professor  signalled to Syme that he would resume his explanation, and he
began again with the same elaborate calm.
    "Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came  here together to see what
use you would be inclined to make of it.  It seems to me unquestionably urgent that�"
    All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as  steadily as the Doctor stared at
the Professor, but quite without  the smile. The nerves of both comrades-in-arms were near
snapping  under that strain of motionless amiability, when Syme suddenly  leant forward and idly
tapped the edge of the table. His message  to his ally ran, "I have an intuition."
    The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue,  signalled back, "Then sit on it."
    Syme telegraphed, "It is quite extraordinary."
    The other answered, "Extraordinary rot!"
    Syme said, "I am a poet."
    The other retorted, "You are a dead man."
    Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes  were burning feverishly. As he
said he had an intuition, and it  had risen to a sort of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his
symbolic taps, he signalled to his friend, "You scarcely realise  how poetic my intuition is. It has
that sudden quality we  sometimes feel in the coming of spring."
    He then studied the answer on his friend's fingers. The  answer was, "Go to hell! "
    The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue  addressed to the Doctor.
    "Perhaps I should rather say," said Syme on his fingers,  "that it resembles that sudden smell of
the sea which may be found  in the heart of lush woods."
    His companion disdained to reply.
    "Or yet again," tapped Syme, "it is positive, as is the  passionate red hair of a beautiful
woman."
    The Professor was continuing his speech, but in the middle of  it Syme decided to act. He leant
across the table, and said in a  voice that could not be neglected�
    "Dr. Bull!"
    The Doctor's sleek and smiling head did not move, but they  could have sworn that under his
dark glasses his eyes darted  towards Syme.
    "Dr. Bull," said Syme, in a voice peculiarly precise and  courteous, "would you do me a small
favour? Would you be so kind  as to take off your spectacles?"
    The Professor swung round on his seat, and stared at Syme  with a sort of frozen fury of
astonishment. Syme, like a man who  has thrown his life and fortune on the table, leaned forward
with  a fiery face. The Doctor did not move.
    For a few seconds there was a silence in which one could hear  a pin drop, split once by the
single hoot of a distant steamer on  the Thames. Then Dr. Bull rose slowly, still smiling, and took
off  his spectacles.
    Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a  chemical lecturer from a successful
explosion. His eyes were like  stars, and for an instant he could only point without speaking.
The Professor had also started to his feet, forgetful of his  supposed paralysis. He leant on the
back of the chair and stared  doubtfully at Dr. Bull, as if the Doctor had been turned into a
toad before his eyes. And indeed it was almost as great a  transformation scene.
    The two detectives saw sitting in the chair before them a  very boyish-looking young man,
with very frank and happy hazel  eyes, an open expression, cockney clothes like those of a city
clerk, and an unquestionable breath about him of being very good  and rather commonplace. The
smile was still there, but it might  have been the first smile of a baby.
    "I knew I was a poet," cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. "I  knew my intuition was as infallible
as the Pope. It was the  spectacles that did it! It was all the spectacles.  Given those  beastly black
eyes, and all the rest of him his health and his  jolly looks, made him a live devil among dead
ones."
    "It certainly does make a queer difference," said the  Professor shakily. "But as regards the
project of Dr. Bull�"      "Project be damned!" roared Syme, beside himself. "Look at  him! Look
at his face, look at his collar, look at his blessed  boots! You don't suppose, do you, that that
thing's an anarchist?"      "Syme!" cried the other in an apprehensive agony.
    "Why, by God," said Syme, "I'll take the risk of that myself!  Dr. Bull, I am a police officer.
There's my card," and he flung  down the blue card upon the table.
    The Professor still feared that all was lost; but he was  loyal. He pulled out his own official
card and put it beside his  friend's. Then the third man burst out laughing, and for the first
time that morning they heard his voice.
    "I'm awfully glad you chaps have come so early," he said,  with a sort of schoolboy flippancy,
"for we can all start for  France together. Yes, I'm in the force right enough," and he  flicked a
blue card towards them lightly as a matter of form.      Clapping a brisk bowler on his head and
resuming his goblin  glasses, the Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the  others
instinctively followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait,  and as he passed under the doorway he
suddenly struck his stick on  the stone passage so that it rang.
    "But Lord God Almighty," he cried out, "if this is all right,  there were more damned
detectives than there were damned
dynamiters at the damned Council!"
    "We might have fought easily," said Bull; "we were four  against three."
    The Professor was descending the stairs, but his voice came  up from below.
    "No," said the voice, "we were not four against three �we  were not so lucky. We were four
against One."
    The others went down the stairs in silence.
    The young man called Bull, with an innocent courtesy  characteristic of him, insisted on going
last until they reached  the street; but there his own robust rapidity asserted itself  unconsciously,
and he walked quickly on ahead towards a railway  inquiry office, talking to the others over his
shoulder.
    "It is jolly to get some pals," he said. "I've been half dead  with the jumps, being quite alone. I
nearly flung my arms round  Gogol and embraced him, which would have been imprudent. I hope
you won't despise me for having been in a blue funk."
    "All the blue devils in blue hell," said Syme, "contributed  to my blue funk! But the worst devil
was you and your infernal  goggles."
    The young man laughed delightedly.
    "Wasn't it a rag?" he said. "Such a simple idea� not my own.  I haven't got the brains. You
see, I wanted to go into the  detective service, especially the anti-dynamite business. But for  that
purpose they wanted someone to dress up as a dynamiter; and  they all swore by blazes that I
could never look like a dynamiter.  They said my very walk was respectable, and that seen from
behind  I looked like the British Constitution. They said I looked too  healthy and too optimistic,
and too reliable and benevolent; they  called me all sorts of names at Scotland Yard. They said
that if I  had been a criminal, I might have made my fortune by looking so  like an honest man; but
as I had the misfortune to be an honest  man, there was not even the remotest chance of my
assisting them  by ever looking like a criminal. But as last I was brought before  some old josser
who was high up in the force, and who seemed to  have no end of a head on his shoulders. And
there the others all  talked hopelessly. One asked whether a bushy beard would hide my  nice
smile; another said that if they blacked my face I might look  like a negro anarchist; but this old
chap chipped in with a most  extraordinary remark. 'A pair of smoked spectacles will do it,' he
said positively. 'Look at him now; he looks like an angelic office  boy. Put him on a pair of
smoked spectacles, and children will  scream at the sight of him.' And so it was, by George! When
once  my eyes were covered, all the rest, smile and big shoulders and  short hair, made me look a
perfect little devil. As I say, it was  simple enough when it was done, like miracles; but that wasn't
the  really miraculous part of it. There was one really staggering  thing about the business, and my
head still turns at it."
    "What was that?" asked Syme.
    "I'll tell you," answered the man in spectacles. "This big  pot in the police who sized me up so
that he knew how the goggles  would go with my hair and socks�by God, he never saw me at
all!"      Syme's eyes suddenly flashed on him.
    "How was that?" he asked. "I thought you talked to him."      "So I did," said Bull brightly;
"but we talked in a
pitch-dark room like a coalcellar. There, you would never have  guessed that."
    "I could not have conceived it," said Syme gravely.
    "It is indeed a new idea," said the Professor.
    Their new ally was in practical matters a whirlwind. At the  inquiry office he asked with
businesslike brevity about the trains  for Dover. Having got his information, he bundled the
company into  a cab, and put them and himself inside a railway carriage before  they had properly
realised the breathless process. They were  already on the Calais boat before conversation flowed
freely.      "I had already arranged," he explained, "to go to France for  my lunch; but I am
delighted to have someone to lunch with me. You  see, I had to send that beast, the Marquis, over
with his bomb,  because the President had his eye on me, though God knows how.  I'll tell you the
story some day. It was perfectly choking.  Whenever I tried to slip out of it I saw the President
somewhere,  smiling out of the bow-window of a club, or taking off his hat to  me from the top of
an omnibus. I tell you, you can say what you  like, that fellow sold himself to the devil; he can be
in six  places at once."
    "So you sent the Marquis off, I understand," asked the  Professor. "Was it long ago? Shall we
be in time to catch him?"      "Yes," answered the new guide, "I've timed it all. He'll  still be at
Calais when we arrive."
    "But when we do catch him at Calais," said the Professor,  "what are we going to do?"
    At this question the countenance of Dr. Bull fell for the  first time. He reflected a little, and
then said�
    "Theoretically, I suppose, we ought to call the police."      "Not I," said Syme. "Theoretically I
ought to drown myself  first. I promised a poor fellow, who was a real modern pessimist,
on my word of honour not to tell the police. I'm no hand at  casuistry, but I can't break my word
to a modern pessimist. It's  like breaking one's word to a child."
    "I'm in the same boat," said the Professor. "I tried to tell  the police and I couldn't, because of
some silly oath I took. You  see, when I was an actor I was a sort of all-round beast. Perjury
or treason is the only crime I haven't committed. If I did that I  shouldn't know the difference
between right and wrong."
    "I've been through all that," said Dr. Bull, "and I've made  up my mind. I gave my promise to
the Secretary �you know him, man  who smiles upside down. My friends, that man is the most
utterly  unhappy man that was ever human. It may be his digestion, or his  conscience, or his
nerves, or his philosophy of the universe, but  he's damned, he's in hell! Well, I can't turn on a man
like that,  and hunt him down. It's like whipping a leper. I may be mad, but  that's how I feel; and
there's jolly well the end of it."
    "I don't think you're mad," said Syme. "I knew you would  decide like that when first you�"
    "Eh?" said Dr. Bull.
    "When first you took off your spectacles."
    Dr. Bull smiled a little, and strolled across the deck to  look at the sunlit sea. Then he strolled
back again, kicking his  heels carelessly, and a companionable silence fell between the  three men.
    "Well," said Syme, "it seems that we have all the same kind  of morality or immorality, so we
had better face the fact that  comes of it."
    "Yes," assented the Professor, "you're quite right; and we  must hurry up, for I can see the
Grey Nose standing out from  France."
    "The fact that comes of it," said Syme seriously, "is this,  that we three are alone on this planet.
Gogol has gone, God knows  where; perhaps the President has smashed him like a fly. On the
Council we are three men against three, like the Romans who held  the bridge. But we are worse
off than that, first because they can  appeal to their organization and we cannot appeal to ours,
and  second because�"
    "Because one of those other three men," said the Professor,  "is not a man."
    Syme nodded and was silent for a second or two, then he said�      "My idea is this. We must
do something to keep the Marquis in  Calais till tomorrow midday. I have turned over twenty
schemes in  my head. We cannot denounce him as a dynamiter; that is agreed. We  cannot get him
detained on some trivial charge, for we should have  to appear; he knows us, and he would smell
a rat. We cannot  pretend to keep him on anarchist business; he might swallow much  in that way,
but not the notion of stopping in Calais while the  Czar went safely through Paris. We might try to
kidnap him, and  lock him up ourselves; but he is a well-known man here. He has a  whole
bodyguard of friends; he is very strong and brave, and the  event is doubtful. The only thing I can
see to do is actually to  take advantage of the very things that are in the Marquis's  favour. I am
going to profit by the fact that he is a highly  respected nobleman. I am going to profit by the fact
that he has  many friends and moves in the best society."
    "What the devil are you talking about?" asked the Professor.      "The Symes are first
mentioned in the fourteenth century,"  said Syme; "but there is a tradition that one of them rode
behind  Bruce at Bannockburn. Since 1350 the tree is quite clear."      "He's gone off his head,"
said the little Doctor, staring.      "Our bearings," continued Syme calmly, "are 'argent a chevron
gules charged with three cross crosslets of the field.' The motto  varies."
    The Professor seized Syme roughly by the waistcoat.
    "We are just inshore," he said. "Are you seasick or joking in  the wrong place?"
    "My remarks are almost painfully practical," answered Syme,  in an unhurried manner. "The
house of St. Eustache also is very  ancient. The Marquis cannot deny that he is a gentleman. He
cannot  deny that I am a gentleman. And in order to put the matter of my  social position quite
beyond a doubt, I propose at the earliest  opportunity to knock his hat off. But here we are in the
harbour."      They went on shore under the strong sun in a sort of daze.  Syme, who had now
taken the lead as Bull had taken it in London,  led them along a kind of marine parade until he
came to some  cafes, embowered in a bulk of greenery and overlooking the sea. As  he went
before them his step was slightly swaggering, and he swung  his stick like a sword. He was
making apparently for the extreme  end of the line of cafes, but he stopped abruptly. With a sharp
gesture he motioned them to silence, but he pointed with one  gloved finger to a cafe table under
a bank of flowering foliage at  which sat the Marquis de St. Eustache, his teeth shining in his
thick, black beard, and his bold, brown face shadowed by a light  yellow straw hat and outlined
against the violet sea.



                         CHAPTER X

                          THE DUEL

    SYME sat down at a cafe table with his companions, his blue  eyes sparkling like the bright sea
below, and ordered a bottle of  Saumur with a pleased impatience. He was for some reason in a
condition of curious hilarity. His spirits were already
unnaturally high; they rose as the Saumur sank, and in half an  hour his talk was a torrent of
nonsense. He professed to be making  out a plan of the conversation which was going to ensue
between  himself and the deadly Marquis. He jotted it down wildly with a  pencil. It was arranged
like a printed catechism, with questions  and answers, and was delivered with an extraordinary
rapidity of  utterance.
    "I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take  off my own. I shall say, 'The Marquis
de Saint Eustache, I  believe.' He will say, ' The celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume.' He  will say in
the most exquisite French, 'How are you?' I shall  reply in the most exquisite Cockney, 'Oh, just
the Syme�' "      "Oh, shut it," said the man in spectacles. "Pull yourself  together, and chuck
away that bit of paper. What are you really  going to do?"
    "But it was a lovely catechism," said Syme pathetically. "Do  let me read it you. It has only
forty-three questions and answers,  and some of the Marquis's answers are wonderfully witty. I
like to  be just to my enemy."
    "But what's the good of it all?" asked Dr. Bull in
exasperation.
    "It leads up to my challenge, don't you see," said Syme,  beaming. "When the Marquis has
given the thirty-ninth reply, which  runs�"
    "Has it by any chance occurred to you," asked the Professor,  with a ponderous simplicity,
"that the Marquis may not say all the  forty-three things you have put down for him? In that case,
I  understand, your own epigrams may appear somewhat more forced."      Syme struck the table
with a radiant face.
    "Why, how true that is," he said, "and I never thought of it.  Sir, you have an intellect beyond
the common. You will make a  name."
    "Oh, you're as drunk as an owl!" said the Doctor.
    "It only remains," continued Syme quite unperturbed, "to  adopt some other method of
breaking the ice (if I may so express  it) between myself and the man I wish to kill. And since the
course of a dialogue cannot be predicted by one of its parties  alone (as you have pointed out with
such recondite acumen), the  only thing to be done, I suppose, is for the one party, as far as
possible, to do all the dialogue by himself. And so I will, by  George!" And he stood up suddenly,
his yellow hair blowing in the  slight sea breeze.
    A band was playing in a cafe chantant hidden somewhere among  the trees, and a woman had
just stopped singing. On Syme's heated  head the bray of the brass band seemed like the jar and
jingle of  that barrel-organ in Leicester Square, to the tune of which he had  once stood up to die.
He looked across to the little table where  the Marquis sat. The man had two companions now,
solemn Frenchmen  in frock-coats and silk hats, one of them with the red rosette of  the Legion of
Honour, evidently people of a solid social position.  Besides these black, cylindrical costumes, the
Marquis, in his  loose straw hat and light spring clothes, looked Bohemian and even  barbaric; but
he looked the Marquis. Indeed, one might say that he  looked the king, with his animal elegance,
his scornful eyes, and  his proud head lifted against the purple sea. But he was no  Christian king,
at any rate; he was, rather, some swarthy despot,  half Greek, half Asiatic, who in the days when
slavery seemed  natural looked down on the Mediterranean, on his galley and his  groaning slaves.
Just so, Syme thought, would the brown-gold face  of such a tyrant have shown against the dark
green olives and the  burning blue.
    "Are you going to address the meeting?" asked the Professor  peevishly, seeing that Syme still
stood up without moving.      Syme drained his last glass of sparkling wine.
    "I am," he said, pointing across to the Marquis and his  companions, "that meeting. That
meeting displeases me. I am going  to pull that meeting's great ugly, mahogany-coloured nose."
He stepped across swiftly, if not quite steadily. The  Marquis, seeing him, arched his black
Assyrian eyebrows in  surprise, but smiled politely.
    "You are Mr. Syme, I think," he said.
    Syme bowed.
    "And you are the Marquis de Saint Eustache," he said  gracefully. "Permit me to pull your
nose."
    He leant over to do so, but the Marquis started backwards,  upsetting his chair, and the two
men in top hats held Syme back by  the shoulders.
    "This man has insulted me!" said Syme, with gestures of  explanation.
    "Insulted you?" cried the gentleman with the red rosette,  "when?"
    "Oh, just now," said Syme recklessly. "He insulted my  mother."
    "Insulted your mother!" exclaimed the gentleman
incredulously.
    "Well, anyhow," said Syme, conceding a point, "my aunt."      "But how can the Marquis have
insulted your aunt just now?"  said the second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. "He has
been sitting here all the time."
    "Ah, it was what he said!" said Syme darkly.
    "I said nothing at all," said the Marquis, "except something  about the band. I only said that I
liked Wagner played well."      "It was an allusion to my family," said Syme firmly. "My aunt
played Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being  insulted about it."
    "This seems most extraordinary," said the gentleman who was  decore, looking doubtfully at
the Marquis.
    "Oh, I assure you," said Syme earnestly, "the whole of your  conversation was simply packed
with sinister allusions to my  aunt's weaknesses."
    "This is nonsense!" said the second gentleman. "I for one  have said nothing for half an hour
except that I liked the singing  of that girl with black hair."
    "Well, there you are again!" said Syme indignantly. "My  aunt's was red."
    "It seems to me," said the other, "that you are simply  seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis."
    "By George!" said Syme, facing round and looking at him,  "what a clever chap you are!"
    The Marquis started up with eyes flaming like a tiger's.      "Seeking a quarrel with me!" he
cried. "Seeking a fight with  me! By God! there was never a man who had to seek long. These
gentlemen will perhaps act for me. There are still four hours of  daylight. Let us fight this
evening."
    Syme bowed with a quite beautiful graciousness.
    "Marquis," he said, "your action is worthy of your fame and  blood. Permit me to consult for a
moment with the gentlemen in  whose hands I shall place myself."
    In three long strides he rejoined his companions, and they,  who had seen his
champagne-inspired attack and listened to his  idiotic explanations, were quite startled at the look
of him. For  now that he came back to them he was quite sober, a little pale,  and he spoke in a
low voice of passionate practicality.
    "I have done it," he said hoarsely. "I have fixed a fight on  the beast. But look here, and listen
carefully. There is no time  for talk. You are my seconds, and everything must come from you.
Now you must insist, and insist absolutely, on the duel coming off  after seven to-morrow, so as
to give me the chance of preventing  him from catching the 7.45 for Paris. If he misses that he
misses  his crime. He can't refuse to meet you on such a small point of  time and place. But this is
what he will do. He will choose a  field somewhere near a wayside station, where he can pick up
the  train. He is a very good swordsman, and he will trust to killing  me in time to catch it. But I
can fence well too, and I think I  can keep him in play, at any rate, until the train is lost. Then
perhaps he may kill me to console his feelings. You understand?  Very well then, let me introduce
you to some charming friends of  mine," and leading them quickly across the parade, he presented
them to the Marquis's seconds by two very aristocratic names of  which they had not previously
heard.
    Syme was subject to spasms of singular common sense, not  otherwise a part of his character.
They were (as he said of his  impulse about the spectacles) poetic intuitions, and they  sometimes
rose to the exaltation of prophecy.
    He had correctly calculated in this case the policy of his  opponent. When the Marquis was
informed by his seconds that Syme  could only fight in the morning, he must fully have realised
that  an obstacle had suddenly arisen between him and his bomb-throwing  business in the capital.
Naturally he could not explain this  objection to his friends, so he chose the course which Syme
had  predicted. He induced his seconds to settle on a small meadow not  far from the railway, and
he trusted to the fatality of the first  engagement.
    When he came down very coolly to the field of honour, no one  could have guessed that he
had any anxiety about a journey; his  hands were in his pockets, his straw hat on the back of his
head,  his handsome face brazen in the sun. But it might have struck a  stranger as odd that there
appeared in his train, not only his  seconds carrying the sword-case, but two of his servants
carrying  a portmanteau and a luncheon basket.
    Early as was the hour, the sun soaked everything in warmth,  and Syme was vaguely surprised
to see so many spring flowers  burning gold and silver in the tall grass in which the whole
company stood almost knee-deep.
    With the exception of the Marquis, all the men were in sombre  and solemn morning-dress,
with hats like black chimney-pots; the  little Doctor especially, with the addition of his black
spectacles, looked like an undertaker in a farce. Syme could not  help feeling a comic contrast
between this funereal church parade  of apparel and the rich and glistening meadow, growing wild
flowers everywhere. But, indeed, this comic contrast between the  yellow blossoms and the black
hats was but a symbol of the tragic  contrast between the yellow blossoms and the black business.
On  his right was a little wood; far away to his left lay the long  curve of the railway line, which he
was, so to speak, guarding  from the Marquis, whose goal and escape it was. In front of him,
behind the black group of his opponents, he could see, like a  tinted cloud, a small almond bush in
flower against the faint line  of the sea.
    The member of the Legion of Honour, whose name it seemed was  Colonel Ducroix,
approached the Professor and Dr. Bull with great  politeness, and suggested that the play should
terminate with the  first considerable hurt.
    Dr. Bull, however, having been carefully coached by Syme upon  this point of policy, insisted,
with great dignity and in very bad  French, that it should continue until one of the combatants was
disabled. Syme had made up his mind that he could avoid disabling  the Marquis and prevent the
Marquis from disabling him for at  least twenty minutes. In twenty minutes the Paris train would
have  gone by.
    "To a man of the well-known skill and valour of Monsieur de  St. Eustache," said the
Professor solemnly, "it must be a matter  of indifference which method is adopted, and our
principal has  strong reasons for demanding the longer encounter, reasons the  delicacy of which
prevent me from being explicit, but for the just  and honourable nature of which I can�"
    "Peste!" broke from the Marquis behind, whose face had  suddenly darkened, "let us stop
talking and begin," and he slashed  off the head of a tall flower with his stick.
    Syme understood his rude impatience and instinctively looked  over his shoulder to see
whether the train was coming in sight.  But there was no smoke on the horizon.
    Colonel Ducroix knelt down and unlocked the case, taking out  a pair of twin swords, which
took the sunlight and turned to two  streaks of white fire. He offered one to the Marquis, who
snatched  it without ceremony, and another to Syme, who took it, bent it,  and poised it with as
much delay as was consistent with dignity.      Then the Colonel took out another pair of blades,
and taking  one himself and giving another to Dr. Bull, proceeded to place the  men.
    Both combatants had thrown off their coats and waistcoats,  and stood sword in hand. The
seconds stood on each side of the  line of fight with drawn swords also, but still sombre in their
dark frock-coats and hats. The principals saluted. The Colonel  said quietly, "Engage!" and the
two blades touched and tingled.      When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme's arm, all the
fantastic fears that have been the subject of this story fell from  him like dreams from a man
waking up in bed. He remembered them  clearly and in order as mere delusions of the
nerves�how the fear  of the Professor had been the fear of the tyrannic accidents of  nightmare,
and how the fear of the Doctor had been the fear of the  airless vacuum of science. The first was
the old fear that any  miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless modern fear  that no
miracle can ever happen. But he saw that these fears were  fancies, for he found himself in the
presence of the great fact of  the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless common sense. He
felt like a man who had dreamed all night of falling over  precipices, and had woke up on the
morning when he was to be  hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the
channel of his foe's foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had  felt the two tongues of steel
touch, vibrating like two living  things, he knew that his enemy was a terrible fighter, and that
probably his last hour had come.
    He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around  him, in the grass under his feet; he felt
the love of life in all  living things. He could almost fancy that he heard the grass  growing; he
could almost fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers  were springing up and breaking into
blossom in the meadow�flowers  blood red and burning gold and blue, fulfilling the whole
pageant  of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed for a flash from the  calm, staring, hypnotic
eyes of the Marquis, they saw the little  tuft of almond tree against the sky-line. He had the feeling
that  if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever  before that almond tree,
desiring nothing else in the world.      But while earth and sky and everything had the living beauty
of a thing lost, the other half of his head was as clear as glass,  and he was parrying his enemy's
point with a kind of clockwork  skill of which he had hardly supposed himself capable. Once his
enemy's point ran along his wrist, leaving a slight streak of  blood, but it either was not noticed or
was tacitly ignored. Every  now and then he riposted, and once or twice he could almost fancy
that he felt his point go home, but as there was no blood on blade  or shirt he supposed he was
mistaken. Then came an interruption  and a change.
    At the risk of losing all, the Marquis, interrupting his  quiet stare, flashed one glance over his
shoulder at the line of  railway on his right. Then he turned on Syme a face transfigured  to that of
a fiend, and began to fight as if with twenty weapons.  The attack came so fast and furious, that
the one shining sword  seemed a shower of shining arrows. Syme had no chance to look at
the railway; but also he had no need. He could guess the reason of  the Marquis's sudden madness
of battle �the Paris train was in  sight.
    But the Marquis's morbid energy over-reached itself. Twice  Syme, parrying, knocked his
opponent's point far out of the  fighting circle; and the third time his riposte was so rapid, that
there was no doubt about the hit this time. Syme's sword actually  bent under the weight of the
Marquis's body, which it had pierced.      Syme was as certain that he had stuck his blade into his
enemy as a gardener that he has stuck his spade into the ground.  Yet the Marquis sprang back
from the stroke without a stagger, and  Syme stood staring at his own sword-point like an idiot.
There was  no blood on it at all.
    There was an instant of rigid silence, and then Syme in his  turn fell furiously on the other,
filled with a flaming curiosity.  The Marquis was probably, in a general sense, a better fencer than
he, as he had surmised at the beginning, but at the moment the  Marquis seemed distraught and at
a disadvantage. He fought wildly  and even weakly, and he constantly looked away at the railway
line, almost as if he feared the train more than the pointed  steel. Syme, on the other hand, fought
fiercely but still  carefully, in an intellectual fury, eager to solve the riddle of  his own bloodless
sword. For this purpose, he aimed less at the  Marquis's body, and more at his throat and head. A
minute and a  half afterwards he felt his point enter the man's neck below the  jaw. It came out
clean. Half mad, he thrust again, and made what  should have been a bloody scar on the Marquis's
cheek. But there  was no scar.
    For one moment the heaven of Syme again grew black with  supernatural terrors. Surely the
man had a charmed life. But this  new spiritual dread was a more awful thing than had been the
mere  spiritual topsy-turvydom symbolised by the paralytic who pursued  him. The Professor was
only a goblin; this man was a devil�perhaps  he was the Devil! Anyhow, this was certain, that
three times had a  human sword been driven into him and made no mark. When Syme had
that thought he drew himself up, and all that was good in him sang  high up in the air as a high
wind sings in the trees. He thought  of all the human things in his story�of the Chinese lanterns in
Saffron Park, of the girl's red hair in the garden, of the honest,  beer-swilling sailors down by the
dock, of his loyal companions  standing by. Perhaps he had been chosen as a champion of all these
fresh and kindly things to cross swords with the enemy of all  creation. "After all," he said to
himself, "I am more than a  devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself
cannot do�I can die," and as the word went through his head, he  heard a faint and far-off hoot,
which would soon be the roar of  the Paris train.
    He fell to fighting again with a supernatural levity, like a  Mohammedan panting for Paradise.
As the train came nearer and  nearer he fancied he could see people putting up the floral arches  in
Paris; he joined in the growing noise and the glory of the  great Republic whose gate he was
guarding against Hell. His  thoughts rose higher and higher with the rising roar of the train,
which ended, as if proudly, in a long and piercing whistle. The  train stopped.
    Suddenly, to the astonishment of everyone the Marquis sprang  back quite out of sword reach
and threw down his sword. The leap  was wonderful, and not the less wonderful because Syme
had plunged  his sword a moment before into the man's thigh.
    "Stop!" said the Marquis in a voice that compelled a  momentary obedience. "I want to say
something."
    "What is the matter?" asked Colonel Ducroix, staring. "Has  there been foul play?"
    "There has been foul play somewhere," said Dr. Bull, who was  a little pale. "Our principal has
wounded the Marquis four times  at least, and he is none the worse ."
    The Marquis put up his hand with a curious air of ghastly  patience.
    "Please let me speak," he said. "It is rather important. Mr.  Syme," he continued, turning to his
opponent, "we are fighting  to-day, if I remember right, because you expressed a wish (which I
thought irrational) to pull my nose. Would you oblige me by  pulling my nose now as quickly as
possible? I have to catch a  train."
    "I protest that this is most irregular," said Dr. Bull  indignantly.
    "It is certainly somewhat opposed to precedent," said Colonel  Ducroix, looking wistfully at
his principal. "There is, I think,  one case on record (Captain Bellegarde and the Baron Zumpt) in
which the weapons were changed in the middle of the encounter at  the request of one of the
combatants. But one can hardly call  one's nose a weapon."
    "Will you or will you not pull my nose?" said the Marquis in  exasperation. "Come, come, Mr.
Syme! You wanted to do it, do it!  You can have no conception of how important it is to me.
Don't be  so selfish! Pull my nose at once, when I ask you!" and he bent  slightly forward with a
fascinating smile. The Paris train,  panting and groaning, had grated into a little station behind the
neighbouring hill.
    Syme had the feeling he had more than once had in these  adventures�the sense that a horrible
and sublime wave lifted to  heaven was just toppling over. Walking in a world he half  understood,
he took two paces forward and seized the Roman nose of  this remarkable nobleman. He pulled it
hard, and it came off in  his hand.
    He stood for some seconds with a foolish solemnity, with the  pasteboard proboscis still
between his fingers, looking at it,  while the sun and the clouds and the wooded hills looked down
upon  this imbecile scene.
    The Marquis broke the silence in a loud and cheerful voice.      "If anyone has any use for my
left eyebrow," he said, "he can  have it. Colonel Ducroix, do accept my left eyebrow! It's the kind
of thing that might come in useful any day," and he gravely tore  off one of his swarthy Assyrian
brows, bringing about half his  brown forehead with it, and politely offered it to the Colonel,  who
stood crimson and speechless with rage.
    "If I had known," he spluttered, "that I was acting for a  poltroon who pads himself to fight�"
    "Oh, I know, I know!" said the Marquis, recklessly throwing  various parts of himself right and
left about the field. "You are  making a mistake; but it can't be explained just now. I tell you
the train has come into the station!"
    "Yes," said Dr. Bull fiercely, "and the train shall go out of  the station. It shall go out without
you. We know well enough for  what devil's work�"
    The mysterious Marquis lifted his hands with a desperate  gesture. He was a strange scarecrow
standing there in the sun with  half his old face peeled off, and half another face glaring and
grinning from underneath.
    "Will you drive me mad?" he cried. "The train�"
    "You shall not go by the train," said Syme firmly, and  grasped his sword.
    The wild figure turned towards Syme, and seemed to be  gathering itself for a sublime effort
before speaking.
    "You great fat, blasted, blear-eyed, blundering, thundering,  brainless, Godforsaken,
doddering, damned fool!" he said without  taking breath. "You great silly, pink-faced, towheaded
turnip!  You�"
    "You shall not go by this train," repeated Syme.
    "And why the infernal blazes," roared the other, "should I  want to go by the train?"
    "We know all," said the Professor sternly. "You are going to  Paris to throw a bomb!"
    "Going to Jericho to throw a Jabberwock!" cried the other,  tearing his hair, which came off
easily.
    "Have you all got softening of the brain, that you don't  realise what I am? Did you really think
I wanted to catch that  train? Twenty Paris trains might go by for me. Damn Paris trains!"
"Then what did you care about?" began the Professor.
    "What did I care about? I didn't care about catching the  train; I cared about whether the train
caught me, and now, by God!  it has caught me."
    "I regret to inform you," said Syme with restraint, "that  your remarks convey no impression to
my mind. Perhaps if you were  to remove the remains of your original forehead and some portion
of what was once your chin, your meaning would become clearer.  Mental lucidity fulfils itself in
many ways. What do you mean by  saying that the train has caught you? It may be my literary
fancy,  but somehow I feel that it ought to mean something."
    "It means everything," said the other, "and the end of  everything. Sunday has us now in the
hollow of his hand."
    "Us!" repeated the Professor, as if stupefied. "What do you  mean by 'us'?"
    "The police, of course!" said the Marquis, and tore off his  scalp and half his face.
    The head which emerged was the blonde, well brushed,  smooth-haired head which is common
in the English constabulary,  but the face was terribly pale.
    "I am Inspector Ratcliffe," he said, with a sort of haste  that verged on harshness. "My name is
pretty well known to the  police, and I can see well enough that you belong to them. But if  there
is any doubt about my position, I have a card " and he began  to pull a blue card from his pocket.
    The Professor gave a tired gesture.
    "Oh, don't show it us," he said wearily; "we've got enough of  them to equip a paper-chase."
    The little man named Bull, had, like many men who seem to be  of a mere vivacious vulgarity,
sudden movements of good taste.  Here he certainly saved the situation. In the midst of this
staggering transformation scene he stepped forward with all the  gravity and responsibility of a
second, and addressed the two  seconds of the Marquis.
    "Gentlemen," he said, "we all owe you a serious apology; but  I assure you that you have not
been made the victims of such a low  joke as you imagine, or indeed of anything undignified in a
man of  honour. You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the  world. We are not
buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a  vast conspiracy. A secret society of anarchists is
hunting us like  hares; not such unfortunate  madmen as may here or there throw a  bomb through
starvation or German philosophy, but a rich and  powerful and fanatical church, a church of
eastern pessimism,  which holds it holy to destroy mankind like vermin. How hard they  hunt us
you can gather from the fact that we are driven to such  disguises as those for which I apologise,
and to such pranks as  this one by which you suffer. "
    The younger second of the Marquis, a short man with a black  moustache, bowed politely, and
said�
    "Of course, I accept the apology; but you will in your turn  forgive me if I decline to follow
you further into your
difficulties, and permit myself to say good morning! The sight of  an acquaintance and
distinguished fellow-townsman coming to pieces  in the open air is unusual, and, upon the whole,
sufficient for  one day. Colonel Ducroix, I would in no way influence your  actions, but if you feel
with me that our present society is a  little abnormal, I am now going to walk back to the town."
Colonel Ducroix moved mechanically, but then tugged abruptly  at his white moustache and
broke out�
    "No, by George! I won't. If these gentlemen are really in a  mess with a lot of low wreckers
like that, I'll see them through  it. I have fought for France, and it is hard if I can't fight for
civilization."
    Dr. Bull took off his hat and waved it, cheering as at a  public meeting.
    "Don't make too much noise," said Inspector Ratcliffe,  "Sunday may hear you."
    "Sunday!" cried Bull, and dropped his hat.
    "Yes," retorted Ratcliffe, "he may be with them."
    "With whom?" asked Syme.
    "With the people out of that train," said the other.
    "What you say seems utterly wild," began Syme. "Why, as a  matter of fact�But, my God," he
cried out suddenly, like a man who  sees an explosion a long way off, "by God! if this is true the
whole bally lot of us on the Anarchist Council were against  anarchy! Every born man was a
detective except the President and  his personal secretary. What can it mean?"
    "Mean!" said the new policeman with incredible violence. "It  means that we are struck dead!
Don't you know Sunday? Don't you  know that his jokes are always so big and simple that one has
never thought of them? Can you think of anything more like Sunday  than this, that he should put
all his powerful enemies on the  Supreme Council, and then take care that it was not supreme? I
tell you he has bought every trust, he has captured every cable,  he has control of every railway
line�especially of that railway  line!" and he pointed a shaking finger towards the small wayside
station. "The whole movement was controlled by him; half the world  was ready to rise for him.
But there were just five people,  perhaps, who would have resisted him . . . and the old devil put
them on the Supreme Council, to waste their time in watching each  other. Idiots that we are, he
planned the whole of our idiocies!  Sunday knew that the Professor would chase Syme through
London,  and that Syme would fight me in France. And he was combining great  masses of
capital, and seizing great lines of telegraphy, while we  five idiots were running after each other
like a lot of confounded  babies playing blind man's buff."
    "Well?" asked Syme with a sort of steadiness.
    "Well," replied the other with sudden serenity, "he has found  us playing blind man's buff
to-day in a field of great rustic  beauty and extreme solitude. He has probably captured the world;
it only remains to him to capture this field and all the fools in  it. And since you really want to
know what was my objection to the  arrival of that train, I will tell you. My objection was that
Sunday or his Secretary has just this moment got out of it."      Syme uttered an involuntary cry,
and they all turned their  eyes towards the far-off station. It was quite true that a  considerable
bulk of people seemed to be moving in their
direction. But they were too distant to be distinguished in any  way.
    "It was a habit of the late Marquis de St. Eustache," said  the new policeman, producing a
leather case,  "always to carry a  pair of opera glasses. Either the President or the Secretary is
coming after us with that mob. They have caught us in a nice quiet  place where we are under no
temptations to break our oaths by  calling the police. Dr. Bull, I have a suspicion that you will see
better through these than through your own highly decorative  spectacles."
    He handed the field-glasses to the Doctor, who immediately  took off his spectacles and put
the apparatus to his eyes.      "It cannot be as bad as you say," said the Professor,  somewhat
shaken. "There are a good number of them certainly, but  they may easily be ordinary tourists."
    "Do ordinary tourists," asked Bull, with the fieldglasses to  his eyes, "wear black masks
half-way down the face?"
    Syme almost tore the glasses out of his hand, and looked  through them. Most men in the
advancing mob really looked ordinary  enough; but it was quite true that two or three of the
leaders in  front wore black half-masks almost down to their mouths. This  disguise is very
complete, especially at such a distance, and Syme  found it impossible to conclude anything from
the clean-shaven  jaws and chins of the men talking in the front. But presently as  they talked they
all smiled and one of them smiled on one side.


                        CHAPTER XI

               THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE

    SYME put the field-glasses from his eyes with an almost  ghastly relief.
    "The President is not with them, anyhow," he said, and wiped  his forehead.
    "But surely they are right away on the horizon," said the  bewildered Colonel, blinking and but
half recovered from Bull's  hasty though polite explanation. "Could you possibly know your
President among all those people?"
    "Could I know a white elephant among all those people!"  answered Syme somewhat irritably.
"As you very truly say, they are  on the horizon; but if he were walking with them . . . by God! I
believe this ground would shake."
    After an instant's pause the new man called Ratcliffe said  with gloomy decision�
    "Of course the President isn't with them. I wish to Gemini he  were. Much more likely the
President is riding in triumph through  Paris, or sitting on the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral."
    "This is absurd!" said Syme. "Something may have happened in  our absence; but he cannot
have carried the world with a rush like  that. It is quite true," he added, frowning dubiously at the
distant fields that lay towards the little station, "it is  certainly true that there seems to be a crowd
coming this way; but  they are not all the army that you make out."
    "Oh, they," said the new detective contemptuously; "no they  are not a very valuable force.
But let me tell you frankly that  they are precisely calculated to our value�we are not much, my
boy, in Sunday's universe. He has got hold of all the cables and  telegraphs himself. But to kill the
Supreme Council he regards as  a trivial matter, like a post card; it may be left to his private
secretary," and he spat on the grass.
    Then he turned to the others and said somewhat austerely�      "There is a great deal to be said
for death; but if anyone  has any preference for the other alternative, I strongly advise  him to
walk after me."
    With these words, he turned his broad back and strode with  silent energy towards the wood.
The others gave one glance over  their shoulders, and saw that the dark cloud of men had
detached  itself from the station and was moving with a mysterious
discipline across the plain. They saw already, even with the naked  eye, black blots on the
foremost faces, which marked the masks  they wore. They turned and followed their leader, who
had already  struck the wood, and disappeared among the twinkling trees.      The sun on the grass
was dry and hot. So in plunging into the  wood they had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who
plunge into  a dim pool. The inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight  and shaken
shadows. They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost  recalling the dizziness of a cinematograph.
Even the solid figures  walking with him Syme could hardly see for the patterns of sun and
shade that danced upon them. Now a man's head was lit as with a  light of Rembrandt, leaving all
else obliterated; now again he had  strong and staring white hands with the face of a negro. The
ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, and the  black shade of the brim cut his
face so squarely in two that it  seemed to be wearing one of the black half-masks of their
pursuers. The fancy tinted Syme's overwhelming sense of wonder.  Was he wearing a mask? Was
anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone  anything? This wood of witchery, in which men's faces
turned black  and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into  sunlight and then faded
into formless night, this mere chaos of  chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside), seemed to
Syme a  perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three  days, this world
where men took off their beards and their  spectacles and their noses, and turned into other
people. That  tragic self-confidence which he had felt when he believed that the  Marquis was a
devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew  that the Marquis was a friend. He felt almost
inclined to ask  after all these bewilderments what was a friend and what an enemy.  Was there
anything that was apart from what it seemed? The Marquis  had taken off his nose and turned out
to be a detective. Might he  not just as well take off his head and turn out to be a hobgoblin?
Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland,  this dance of dark and light?
Everything only a glimpse, the  glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel
Syme  had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern  painters had found
there. He had found the thing which the modern  people call Impressionism, which is another
name for that final  scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
    As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake,  Syme strove with a sudden
effort to fling off this last and worst  of his fancies. With two impatient strides he overtook the
man in  the Marquis's straw hat, the man whom he had come to address as  Ratcliffe. In a voice
exaggeratively loud and cheerful, he broke  the bottomless silence and made conversation.
    "May I ask," he said, "where on earth we are all going to? "      So genuine had been the
doubts of his soul, that he was quite  glad to hear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.
    "We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he  said. "I think that part of the
country is least likely to be with  them."
    "What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be  running the real world in that
way. Surely not many working men  are anarchists, and surely if they were, mere mobs could not
beat  modern armies and police."
    "Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn.  "So you talk about mobs and the
working classes as if they were  the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy
came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have  been rebels, but they have
never been anarchists; they have more  interest than anyone else in there being some decent
government.  The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man  hasn't; he can go
away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have  sometimes objected to being governed badly; the
rich have always  objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always  anarchists, as you
can see from the barons' wars."
    "As a lecture on English history for the little ones," said  Syme, "this is all very nice; but I have
not yet grasped its  application."
    "Its application is," said his informant, "that most of old  Sunday's right-hand men are South
African and American
millionaires. That is why he has got hold of all the
communications; and that is why the last four champions of the  anti-anarchist police force are
running through a wood like  rabbits."
    "Millionaires I can understand," said Syme thoughtfully,  "they are nearly all mad. But getting
hold of a few wicked old  gentlemen with hobbies is one thing; getting hold of great  Christian
nations is another. I would bet the nose off my face  (forgive the allusion) that Sunday would
stand perfectly helpless  before the task of converting any ordinary healthy person  anywhere."
    "Well," said the other, "it rather depends what sort of  person you mean."
    "Well, for instance," said Syme, "he could never convert that  person," and he pointed straight
in front of him.
    They had come to an open space of sunlight, which seemed to  express to Syme the final
return of his own good sense; and in the  middle of this forest clearing was a figure that might
well stand  for that common sense in an almost awful actuality. Burnt by the  sun and stained with
perspiration, and grave with the bottomless  gravity of small necessary toils, a heavy French
peasant was  cutting wood with a hatchet. His cart stood a few yards off,  already half full of
timber; and the horse that cropped the grass  was, like his master, valorous but not desperate; like
his master,  he was even prosperous, but yet was almost sad. The man was a  Norman, taller than
the average of the French and very angular;  and his swarthy figure stood dark against a square of
sunlight,  almost like some allegoric figure of labour frescoed on a ground  of gold.
    "Mr. Syme is saying," called out Ratcliffe to the French  Colonel, "that this man, at least, will
never be an anarchist."      "Mr. Syme is right enough there," answered Colonel Ducroix,
laughing, "if only for the reason that he has plenty of property  to defend. But I forgot that in your
country you are not used to  peasants being wealthy."
    "He looks poor," said Dr. Bull doubtfully.
    "Quite so," said the Colonel; "that is why he is rich."      "I have an idea," called out Dr. Bull
suddenly; "how much  would he take to give us a lift in his cart? Those dogs are all on  foot, and
we could soon leave them behind."
    "Oh, give him anything! " said Syme eagerly. "I have piles of  money on me."
    "That will never do," said the Colonel; "he will never have  any respect for you unless you
drive a bargain."
    "Oh, if he haggles!" began Bull impatiently.
    "Erie haggles because he is a free man," said the other. "You  do not understand; he would not
see the meaning of generosity. He  is not being tipped."
    And even while they seemed to hear the heavy feet of their  strange pursuers behind them, they
had to stand and stamp while  the French Colonel talked to the French wood-cutter with all the
leisurely badinage and bickering of market-day. At the end of the  four minutes, however, they
saw that the Colonel was right, for  the wood-cutter entered into their plans, not with the vague
servility of a tout too-well paid, but with the seriousness of a  solicitor who had been paid the
proper fee. He told them that the  best thing they could do was to make their way down to the
little  inn on the hills above Lancy, where the innkeeper, an old soldier  who had become devot in
his latter years, would be certain to  sympathise with them, and even to take risks in their support.
The  whole company, therefore, piled themselves on top of the stacks of  wood, and went rocking
in the rude cart down the other and steeper  side of the woodland. Heavy and ramshackle as was
the vehicle, it  was driven quickly enough, and they soon had the exhilarating  impression of
distancing altogether those, whoever they were, who  were hunting them. For, after all, the riddle
as to where the  anarchists had got all these followers was still unsolved. One  man's presence had
sufficed for them; they had fled at the first  sight of the deformed smile of the Secretary. Syme
every now and  then looked back over his shoulder at the army on their track.      As the wood
grew first thinner and then smaller with  distance, he could see the sunlit slopes beyond it and
above it;  and across these was still moving the square black mob like one  monstrous beetle. In
the very strong sunlight and with his own  very strong eyes, which were almost telescopic, Syme
could see  this mass of men quite plainly. He could see them as separate  human figures; but he
was increasingly surprised by the way in  which they moved as one man. They seemed to be
dressed in dark  clothes and plain hats, like any common crowd out of the streets;  but they did
not spread and sprawl and trail by various lines to  the attack, as would be natural in an ordinary
mob. They moved  with a sort of dreadful and wicked woodenness, like a staring army  of
automatons.
    Syme pointed this out to Ratcliffe.
    "Yes," replied the policeman, "that's discipline. That's  Sunday. He is perhaps five hundred
miles off, but the fear of him  is on all of them, like the finger of God. Yes, they are walking
regularly; and you bet your boots that they are talking regularly,  yes, and thinking regularly. But
the one important thing for us is  that they are disappearing regularly."
    Syme nodded. It was true that the black patch of the pursuing  men was growing smaller and
smaller as the peasant belaboured his  horse.
    The level of the sunlit landscape, though flat as a whole,  fell away on the farther side of the
wood in billows of heavy  slope towards the sea, in a way not unlike the lower slopes of the
Sussex downs. The only difference was that in Sussex the road  would have been broken and
angular like a little brook, but here  the white French road fell sheer in front of them like a
waterfall. Down this direct descent the cart clattered at a  considerable angle, and in a few
minutes, the road growing yet  steeper, they saw below them the little harbour of Lancy and a
great blue arc of the sea. The travelling cloud of their enemies  had wholly disappeared from the
horizon.
    The horse and cart took a sharp turn round a clump of elms,  and the horse's nose nearly
struck the face of an old gentleman  who was sitting on the benches outside the little cafe of "Le
Soleil d'Or." The peasant grunted an apology, and got down from  his seat. The others also
descended one by one, and spoke to the  old gentleman with fragmentary phrases of courtesy, for
it was  quite evident from his expansive manner that he was the owner of  the little tavern.
    He was a white-haired, apple-faced old boy, with sleepy eyes  and a grey moustache; stout,
sedentary, and very innocent, of a  type that may often be found in France, but is still commoner
in  Catholic Germany. Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer,  his flowers, and his
beehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only  when his visitors looked up as they entered the
inn-parlour, they  saw the sword upon the wall.
    The Colonel, who greeted the innkeeper as an old friend,  passed rapidly into the inn-parlour,
and sat down ordering some  ritual refreshment. The military decision of his action interested
Syme, who sat next to him, and he took the opportunity when the  old innkeeper had gone out of
satisfying his curiosity.
    "May I ask you, Colonel," he said in a low voice, "why we  have come here?"
    Colonel Ducroix smiled behind his bristly white moustache.      "For two reasons, sir," he said;
"and I will give first, not  the most important, but the most utilitarian. We came here because
this is the only place within twenty miles in which we can get  horses."
    "Horses!" repeated Syme, looking up quickly.
    "Yes," replied the other; "if you people are really to  distance your enemies it is horses or
nothing for you, unless of  course you have bicycles and motor-cars in your pocket."
    "And where do you advise us to make for?" asked Syme  doubtfully.
    "Beyond question," replied the Colonel, "you had better make  all haste to the police station
beyond the town. My friend, whom I  seconded under somewhat deceptive circumstances, seems
to me to  exaggerate very much the possibilities of a general rising; but  even he would hardly
maintain, I suppose, that you were not safe  with the gendarmes."
    Syme nodded gravely; then he said abruptly�
    "And your other reason for coming here?"
    "My other reason for coming here," said Ducroix soberly, "is  that it is just as well to see a
good man or two when one is  possibly near to death."
    Syme looked up at the wall, and saw a crudely-painted and  pathetic religious picture. Then he
said�
    "You are right," and then almost immediately afterwards, "Has  anyone seen about the
horses?"
    "Yes," answered Ducroix, "you may be quite certain that I  gave orders the moment I came in.
Those enemies of yours gave no  impression of hurry, but they were really moving wonderfully
fast,  like a well-trained army. I had no idea that the anarchists had so  much discipline. You have
not a moment to waste."
    Almost as he spoke, the old innkeeper with the blue eyes and  white hair came ambling into the
room, and announced that six  horses were saddled outside.
    By Ducroix's advice the five others equipped themselves with  some portable form of food and
wine, and keeping their duelling  swords as the only weapons available, they clattered away down
the  steep, white road. The two servants, who had carried the Marquis's  luggage when he was a
marquis, were left behind to drink at the  cafe by common consent, and not at all against their own
inclination.
    By this time the afternoon sun was slanting westward, and by  its rays Syme could see the
sturdy figure of the old innkeeper  growing smaller and smaller, but still standing and looking after
them quite silently, the sunshine in his silver hair. Syme had a  fixed, superstitious fancy, left in his
mind by the chance phrase  of the Colonel, that this was indeed, perhaps, the last honest  stranger
whom he should ever see upon the earth.
    He was still looking at this dwindling figure, which stood as  a mere grey blot touched with a
white flame against the great  green wall of the steep down behind him. And as he stared over the
top of the down behind the innkeeper, there appeared an army of  black-clad and marching men.
They seemed to hang above the good  man and his house like a black cloud of locusts. The horses
had  been saddled none too soon.



                        CHAPTER XII

                   THE EARTH IN ANARCHY

    URGING the horses to a gallop, without respect to the rather  rugged descent of the road, the
horsemen soon regained their  advantage over the men on the march, and at last the bulk of the
first buildings of Lancy cut off the sight of their pursuers.  Nevertheless, the ride had been a long
one, and by the time they  reached the real town the west was warming with the colour and
quality of sunset. The Colonel suggested that, before making  finally for the police station, they
should make the effort, in  passing, to attach to themselves one more individual who might be
useful.
    "Four out of the five rich men in this town," he said, "are  common swindlers. I suppose the
proportion is pretty equal all  over the world. The fifth is a friend of mine, and a very fine  fellow;
and what is even more important from our point of view, he  owns a motor-car."
    "I am afraid," said the Professor in his mirthful way,  looking back along the white road on
which the black, crawling  patch might appear at any moment, "I am afraid we have hardly time
for afternoon calls."
    "Doctor Renard's house is only three minutes off," said the  Colonel.
    "Our danger," said Dr. Bull, "is not two minutes off."      "Yes," said Syme, "if we ride on fast
we must leave them  behind, for they are on foot."
    "He has a motor-car," said the Colonel.
    "But we may not get it," said Bull.
    "Yes, he is quite on your side."
    "But he might be out."
    "Hold your tongue," said Syme suddenly. "What is that noise?"      For a second they all sat as
still as equestrian statues, and  for a second�for two or three or four seconds� heaven and earth
seemed equally still. Then all their ears, in an agony of  attention, heard along the road that
indescribable thrill and  throb that means only one thing�horses!
    The Colonel's face had an instantaneous change, as if  lightning had struck it, and yet left it
scatheless.
    "They have done us," he said, with brief military irony.  "Prepare to receive cavalry!"
    "Where can they have got the horses?" asked Syme, as he  mechanically urged his steed to a
canter.
    The Colonel was silent for a little, then he said in a  strained voice�
    "I was speaking with strict accuracy when I said that the  'Soleil d'Or' was the only place where
one can get horses within  twenty miles."
    "No!" said Syme violently, "I don't believe he'd do it. Not  with all that white hair."
    "He may have been forced," said the Colonel gently. "They  must be at least a hundred strong,
for which reason we are all  going to see my friend Renard, who has a motor-car."
    With these words he swung his horse suddenly round a street  corner, and went down the
street with such thundering speed, that  the others, though already well at the gallop, had
difficulty in  following the flying tail of his horse.
    Dr. Renard inhabited a high and comfortable house at the top  of a steep street, so that when
the riders alighted at his door  they could once more see the solid green ridge of the hill, with  the
white road across it, standing up above all the roofs of the  town. They breathed again to see that
the road as yet was clear,  and they rang the bell.
    Dr. Renard was a beaming, brown-bearded man, a good example  of that silent but very busy
professional class which France has  preserved even more perfectly than England. When the
matter was  explained to him he pooh-poohed the panic of the ex-Marquis  altogether; he said,
with the solid French scepticism, that there  was no conceivable probability of a general anarchist
rising.  "Anarchy," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "it is childishness!  "
    "Et ca," cried out the Colonel suddenly, pointing over the  other's shoulder, "and that is
childishness, isn't it?"
    They all looked round, and saw a curve of black cavalry come  sweeping over the top of the
hill with all the energy of Attila.  Swiftly as they rode, however, the whole rank still kept well
together, and they could see the black vizards of the first line  as level as a line of uniforms. But
although the main black square  was the same, though travelling faster, there was now one
sensational difference which they could see clearly upon the slope  of the hill, as if upon a slanted
map. The bulk of the riders were  in one block; but one rider flew far ahead of the column, and
with  frantic movements of hand and heel urged his horse faster and  faster, so that one might
have fancied that he was not the pursuer  but the pursued. But even at that great distance they
could see  something so fanatical, so unquestionable in his figure, that they  knew it was the
Secretary himself. "I am sorry to cut short a  cultured discussion," said the Colonel, "but can you
lend me your  motor-car now, in two minutes?"
    "I have a suspicion that you are all mad," said Dr. Renard,  smiling sociably; "but God forbid
that madness should in any way  interrupt friendship. Let us go round to the garage."
    Dr. Renard was a mild man with monstrous wealth; his rooms  were like the Musee de Cluny,
and he had three motor-cars. These,  however, he seemed to use very sparingly, having the simple
tastes  of the French middle class, and when his impatient friends came to  examine them, it took
them some time to assure themselves that one  of them even could be made to work. This with
some difficulty they  brought round into the street before the Doctor's house. When they  came
out of the dim garage they were startled to find that  twilight had already fallen with the
abruptness of night in the  tropics. Either they had been longer in the place than they  imagined, or
some unusual canopy of cloud had gathered over the  town. They looked down the steep streets,
and seemed to see a  slight mist coming up from the sea.
    "It is now or never," said Dr. Bull. "I hear horses."      "No," corrected the Professor, "a
horse."
    And as they listened, it was evident that the noise, rapidly  coming nearer on the rattling
stones, was not the noise of the  whole cavalcade but that of the one horseman, who had left it far
behind�the insane Secretary.
    Syme's family, like most of those who end in the simple life,  had once owned a motor, and he
knew all about them. He had leapt  at once into the chauffeur's seat, and with flushed face was
wrenching and tugging at the disused machinery. He bent his  strength upon one handle, and then
said quite quietly�
    "I am afraid it's no go."
    As he spoke, there swept round the corner a man rigid on his  rushing horse, with the rush and
rigidity of an arrow. He had a  smile that thrust out his chin as if it were dislocated. He swept
alongside of the stationary car, into which its company had  crowded, and laid his hand on the
front. It was the Secretary, and  his mouth went quite straight in the solemnity of triumph.
Syme was leaning hard upon the steering wheel, and there was  no sound but the rumble of the
other pursuers riding into the  town. Then there came quite suddenly a scream of scraping iron,
and the car leapt forward. It plucked the Secretary clean out of  his saddle, as a knife is whipped
out of its sheath, trailed him  kicking terribly for twenty yards, and left him flung flat upon
the road far in front of his frightened horse. As the car took the  corner of the street with a
splendid curve, they could just see  the other anarchists filling the street and raising their fallen
leader.
    "I can't understand why it has grown so dark," said the  Professor at last in a low voice.
    "Going to be a storm, I think," said Dr. Bull. "I say, it's a  pity we haven't got a light on this
car, if only to see by."      "We have," said the Colonel, and from the floor of the car he  fished up
a heavy, old-fashioned, carved iron lantern with a light  inside it. It was obviously an antique, and
it would seem as if  its original use had been in some way semi-religious, for there  was a rude
moulding of a cross upon one of its sides.
    "Where on earth did you get that?" asked the Professor.      "I got it where I got the car,"
answered the Colonel,  chuckling, "from my best friend. While our friend here was  fighting with
the steering wheel, I ran up the front steps of the  house and spoke to Renard, who was standing
in his own porch, you  will remember. 'I suppose,' I said, 'there's no time to get a  lamp.' He
looked up, blinking amiably at the beautiful arched  ceiling of his own front hall. From this was
suspended, by chains  of exquisite ironwork, this lantern, one of the hundred  treasures  of his
treasure house. By sheer force he tore the lamp out of his  own ceiling, shattering the painted
panels, and bringing down two  blue vases with his violence. Then he handed me the iron lantern,
and I put it in the car. Was I not right when I said that Dr.  Renard was worth knowing?"
    "You were," said Syme seriously, and hung the heavy lantern  over the front. There was a
certain allegory of their whole  position in the contrast between the modern automobile and its
strange ecclesiastical lamp. Hitherto they had passed through the  quietest part of the town,
meeting at most one or two pedestrians,  who could give them no hint of the peace or the hostility
of the  place. Now, however, the windows in the houses began one by one to  be lit up, giving a
greater sense of habitation and humanity. Dr.  Bull turned to the new detective who had led their
flight, and  permitted himself one of his natural and friendly smiles.
    "These lights make one feel more cheerful."
    Inspector Ratcliffe drew his brows together.
    "There is only one set of lights that make me more cheerful,"  he said, "and they are those
lights of the police station which I  can see beyond the town. Please God we may be there in ten
minutes."
    Then all Bull's boiling good sense and optimism broke  suddenly out of him.
    "Oh, this is all raving nonsense!" he cried. "If you really  think that ordinary people in ordinary
houses are anarchists, you  must be madder than an anarchist yourself. If we turned and fought
these fellows, the whole town would fight for us."
    "No," said the other with an immovable simplicity, "the whole  town would fight for them. We
shall see.'
    While they were speaking the Professor had leant forward with  sudden excitement.
    "What is that noise?" he said.
    "Oh, the horses behind us, I suppose," said the Colonel. "I  thought we had got clear of them."
    "The horses behind us! No," said the Professor, "it is not  horses, and it is not behind us."
    Almost as he spoke, across the end of the street before them  two shining and rattling shapes
shot past. They were gone almost  in a flash, but everyone could see that they were motor-cars,
and  the Professor stood up with a pale face and swore that they were  the other two motor-cars
from Dr. Renard's garage.
    "I tell you they were his," he repeated, with wild eyes, "and  they were full of men in masks!"
    "Absurd!" said the Colonel angrily. "Dr. Renard would never  give them his cars."
    "He may have been forced," said Ratcliffe quietly. "The whole  town is on their side."
    "You still believe that," asked the Colonel incredulously.      "You will all believe it soon," said
the other with a  hopeless calm.
    There was a puzzled pause for some little time, and then the  Colonel began again abruptly�
    "No, I can't believe it. The thing is nonsense. The plain  people of a peaceable French town�"
    He was cut short by a bang and a blaze of light, which seemed  close to his eyes. As the car
sped on it left a floating patch of  white smoke behind it, and Syme had heard a shot shriek past
his  ear.
    "My God!" said the Colonel, "someone has shot at us."      "It need not interrupt
conversation," said the gloomy  Ratcliffe. "Pray resume your remarks, Colonel. You were talking,
I  think, about the plain people of a peaceable French town."      The staring Colonel was long
past minding satire. He rolled  his eyes all round the street.
    "It is extraordinary," he said, "most extraordinary."      "A fastidious person," said Syme,
"might even call it  unpleasant. However, I suppose those lights out in the field  beyond this street
are the Gendarmerie. We shall soon get there."      "No," said Inspector Ratcliffe, "we shall never
get there."      He had been standing up and looking keenly ahead of him. Now  he sat down and
smoothed his sleek hair with a weary gesture.      "What do you mean?" asked Bull sharply.
    "I mean that we shall never get there," said the pessimist  placidly. "They have two rows of
armed men across the road  already; I can see them from here. The town is in arms, as I said  it
was.
    I can only wallow in the exquisite comfort of my own  exactitude."
    And Ratcliffe sat down comfortably in the car and lit a  cigarette, but the others rose excitedly
and stared down the road.  Syme had slowed down the car as their plans became doubtful, and
he brought it finally to a standstill just at the corner of a side  street that ran down very steeply to
the sea.
    The town was mostly in shadow, but the sun had not sunk;  wherever its level light could
break through, it painted
everything a burning gold. Up this side street the last sunset  light shone as sharp and narrow as
the shaft of artificial light  at the theatre. It struck the car of the five friends, and lit it  like a
burning chariot. But the rest of the street, especially the  two ends of it, was in the deepest
twilight, and for some seconds  they could see nothing. Then Syme, whose eyes were the keenest,
broke into a little bitter whistle, and said
    "It is quite true. There is a crowd or an army or some such  thing across the end of that street."
    "Well, if there is," said Bull impatiently, "it must be  something else�a sham fight or the
mayor's birthday or something.  I cannot and will not believe that plain, jolly people in a place  like
this walk about with dynamite in their pockets. Get on a bit,  Syme, and let us look at them."
    The car crawled about a hundred yards farther, and then they  were all startled by Dr. Bull
breaking into a high crow of  laughter.
    "Why, you silly mugs!" he cried, "what did I tell you. That  crowd's as law-abiding as a cow,
and if it weren't, it's on our  side."
    "How do you know?" asked the professor, staring.
    "You blind bat," cried Bull, "don't you see who is leading  them?"
    They peered again, and then the Colonel, with a catch in his  voice, cried out�
    "Why, it's Renard!"
    There was, indeed, a rank of dim figures running across the  road, and they could not be
clearly seen; but far enough in front  to catch the accident of the evening light was stalking up and
down the unmistakable Dr. Renard, in a white hat, stroking his  long brown beard, and holding a
revolver in his left hand.      "What a fool I've been! " exclaimed the Colonel. "Of course,
the dear old boy has turned out to help us."
    Dr. Bull was bubbling over with laughter, swinging the sword  in his hand as carelessly as a
cane. He jumped out of the car and  ran across the intervening space, calling out�
    "Dr. Renard! Dr. Renard!"
    An instant after Syme thought his own eyes had gone mad in  his head. For the philanthropic
Dr. Renard had deliberately raised  his revolver and fired twice at Bull, so that the shots rang
down  the road.
    Almost at the same second as the puff of white cloud went up  from this atrocious explosion a
long puff of white cloud went up  also from the cigarette of the cynical Ratcliffe. Like all the  rest
he turned a little pale, but he smiled. Dr. Bull, at whom the  bullets had been fired, just missing his
scalp, stood quite still  in the middle of the road without a sign of fear, and then turned  very
slowly and crawled back to the car, and climbed in with two  holes through his hat.
    "Well," said the cigarette smoker slowly, "what do you think  now?"
    "I think," said Dr. Bull with precision, "that I am lying in  bed at No. 217 Peabody Buildings,
and that I shall soon wake up  with a jump; or, if that's not it, I think that I am sitting in a  small
cushioned cell in Hanwell, and that the doctor can't make  much of my case. But if you want to
know what I don't think, I'll  tell you. I don't think what you think. I don't think, and I never
shall think, that the mass of ordinary men are a pack of dirty  modern thinkers. No, sir, I'm a
democrat, and I still don't  believe that Sunday could convert one average navvy or counter-
jumper. No, I may be mad, but humanity isn't."
    Syme turned his bright blue eyes on Bull with an earnestness  which he did not commonly
make clear.
    "You are a very fine fellow," he said. "You can believe in a  sanity which is not merely your
sanity. And you're right enough  about humanity, about peasants and people like that jolly old
innkeeper. But you're not right about Renard. I suspected him from  the first. He's rationalistic,
and, what's worse, he's rich. When  duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich."
"They are really destroyed now," said the man with a  cigarette, and rose with his hands in his
pockets. "The devils are  coming on!"
    The men in the motor-car looked anxiously in the direction of  his dreamy gaze, and they saw
that the whole regiment at the end  of the road was advancing upon them, Dr. Renard marching
furiously  in front, his beard flying in the breeze.
    The Colonel sprang out of the car with an intolerant  exclamation.
    "Gentlemen," he cried, "the thing is incredible. It must be a  practical joke. If you knew Renard
as I do� it's like calling  Queen Victoria a dynamiter. If you had got the man's character  into your
head�"
    "Dr. Bull," said Syme sardonically, "has at least got it into  his hat."
    "I tell you it can't be!" cried the Colonel, stamping.      "Renard shall explain it. He shall explain
it to me," and he  strode forward.
    "Don't be in such a hurry," drawled the smoker. "He will very  soon explain it to all of us."
    But the impatient Colonel was already out of earshot,  advancing towards the advancing
enemy. The excited Dr. Renard  lifted his pistol again, but perceiving his opponent, hesitated,  and
the Colonel came face to face with him with frantic gestures  of remonstrance.
    "It is no good," said Syme. "He will never get anything out  of that old heathen. I vote we
drive bang through the thick of  them, bang as the bullets went through Bull's hat. We may all be
killed, but we must kill a tidy number of them."
    "I won't 'ave it," said Dr. Bull, growing more vulgar in the  sincerity of his virtue. "The poor
chaps may be making a mistake.  Give the Colonel a chance."
    "Shall we go back, then?" asked the Professor.
    "No," said Ratcliffe in a cold voice, "the street behind us  is held too. In fact, I seem to see
there another friend of yours,  Syme."
    Syme spun round smartly, and stared backwards at the track  which they had travelled. He saw
an irregular body of horsemen  gathering and galloping towards them in the gloom. He saw above
the foremost saddle the silver gleam of a sword, and then as it  grew nearer the silver gleam of an
old man's hair. The next  moment, with shattering violence, he had swung the motor round and
sent it dashing down the steep side street to the sea, like a man  that desired only to die.
    "What the devil is up?" cried the Professor, seizing his arm.      "The morning star has fallen!"
said Syme, as his own car went  down the darkness like a falling star.
    The others did not understand his words, but when they looked  back at the street above they
saw the hostile cavalry coming round  the corner and down the slopes after them; and foremost of
all  rode the good innkeeper, flushed with the fiery innocence of the  evening light.
    "The world is insane!" said the Professor, and buried his  face in his hands.
    "No," said Dr. Bull in adamantine humility, "it is I."      "What are we going to do?" asked the
Professor.
    "At this moment," said Syme, with a scientific detachment, "I  think we are going to smash
into a lamppost."
    The next instant the automobile had come with a catastrophic  jar against an iron object. The
instant after that four men had  crawled out from under a chaos of metal, and a tall lean lamp-post
that had stood up straight on the edge of the marine parade stood  out, bent and twisted, like the
branch of a broken tree.
    "Well, we smashed something," said the Professor, with a  faint smile. "That's some comfort."
    "You're becoming an anarchist," said Syme, dusting his  clothes with his instinct of daintiness.
    "Everyone is," said Ratcliffe.
    As they spoke, the white-haired horseman and his followers  came thundering from above, and
almost at the same moment a dark  string of men ran shouting along the sea-front. Syme snatched
a  sword, and took it in his teeth; he stuck two others under his  arm-pits, took a fourth in his left
hand and the lantern in his  right, and leapt off the high parade on to the beach below.      The
others leapt after him, with a common acceptance of such  decisive action, leaving the debris and
the gathering mob above  them.
    "We have one more chance," said Syme, taking the steel out of  his mouth. "Whatever all this
pandemonium means, I suppose the  police station will help us. We can't get there, for they hold
the  way. But there's a pier or breakwater runs out into the sea just  here, which we could defend
longer than anything else, like  Horatius and his bridge. We must defend it till the Gendarmerie
turn out. Keep after me."
    They followed him as he went crunching down the beach, and in  a second or two their boots
broke not on the sea gravel, but on  broad, flat stones. They marched down a long, low jetty,
running  out in one arm into the dim, boiling sea, and when they came to  the end of it they felt
that they had come to the end of their  story. They turned and faced the town.
    That town was transfigured with uproar. All along the high  parade from which they had just
descended was a dark and roaring  stream of humanity, with tossing arms and fiery faces, groping
and  glaring towards them. The long dark line was dotted with torches  and lanterns; but even
where no flame lit up a furious face, they  could see in the farthest figure, in the most shadowy
gesture, an  organised hate. It was clear that they were the accursed of all  men, and they knew
not why.
    Two or three men, looking little and black like monkeys,  leapt over the edge as they had done
and dropped on to the beach.  These came ploughing down the deep sand, shouting horribly, and
strove to wade into the sea at random. The example was followed,  and the whole black mass of
men began to run and drip over the  edge like black treacle.
    Foremost among the men on the beach Syme saw the peasant who  had driven their cart. He
splashed into the surf on a huge  cart-horse, and shook his axe at them.
    "The peasant!" cried Syme. "They have not risen since the  Middle Ages."
    "Even if the police do come now," said the Professor  mournfully, "they can do nothing with
this mob."
    "Nonsence!" said Bull desperately; "there must be some people  left in the town who are
human."
    "No," said the hopeless Inspector, "the human being will soon  be extinct. We are the last of
mankind."
    "It may be," said the Professor absently. Then he added in  his dreamy voice, "What is all that
at the end of the 'Dunciad'?
    Nor public flame; nor private, dares to shine;
    Nor human light is left, nor glimpse divine!
    Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos, is restored;
    Light dies before thine uncreating word:
    Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall;
    And universal darkness buries all."'

    "Stop!" cried Bull suddenly, "the gendarmes are out."      The low lights of the police station
were indeed blotted and  broken with hurrying figures, and they heard through the darkness
the clash and jingle of a disciplined cavalry.
    ' They are charging the mob!" cried Bull in ecstacy or alarm.      "No," said Syme, "they are
formed along the parade."
    "They have unslung their carbines," cried Bull dancing with  excitement.
    "Yes," said Ratcliffe, "and they are going to fire on us."      As he spoke there came a long
crackle of musketry, and  bullets seemed to hop like hailstones on the stones in front of  them.
    'The gendarmes have joined them!" cried the Professor, and  struck his forehead.
    "I am in the padded cell," said Bull solidly.
    There was a long silence, and then Ratcliffe said, looking  out over the swollen sea, all a sort
of grey purple�
    "What does it matter who is mad or who is sane? We shall all  be dead soon."
    Syme turned to him and said�
    "You are quite hopeless, then?"
    Mr. Ratcliffe kept a stony silence; then at last he said  quietly�
    "No; oddly enough I am not quite hopeless. There is one  insane little hope that I cannot get
out of my mind. The power of  this whole planet is against us, yet I cannot help wondering
whether this one silly little hope is hopeless yet."
    "In what or whom is your hope?" asked Syme with curiosity.      "In a man I never saw," said
the other, looking at the leaden  sea.
    "I know what you mean," said Syme in a low voice, "the man in  the dark room. But Sunday
must have killed him by now."
    "Perhaps," said the other steadily; "but if so, he was the  only man whom Sunday found it hard
to kill."
    "I heard what you said," said the Professor, with his back  turned. "I also am holding hard on
to the thing I never saw."      All of a sudden Syme, who was standing as if blind with
introspective thought, swung round and cried out, like a man  waking from sleep�
    "Where is the Colonel? I thought he was with us!"
    "The Colonel! Yes," cried Bull, "where on earth is the  Colonel?"
    "He went to speak to Renard," said the Professor.
    "We cannot leave him among all those beasts," cried Syme.  "Let us die like gentlemen if�"
    "Do not pity the Colonel," said Ratcliffe, with a pale sneer.  "He is extremely comfortable. He
is�"
    "No! no! no!" cried Syme in a kind of frenzy, "not the  Colonel too! I will never believe it!"
    "Will you believe your eyes?" asked the other, and pointed to  the beach.
    Many of their pursuers had waded into the water shaking their  fists, but the sea was rough,
and they could not reach the pier.  Two or three figures, however, stood on the beginning of the
stone  footway, and seemed to be cautiously advancing down it. The glare  of a chance lantern lit
up the faces of the two foremost. One face  wore a black half-mask, and under it the mouth was
twisting about  in such a madness of nerves that the black tuft of beard wriggled  round and round
like a restless, living thing. The other was the  red face and white moustache of Colonel Ducroix.
They were in  earnest consultation.
    "Yes, he is gone too," said the Professor, and sat down on a  stone. "Everything's gone. I'm
gone! I can't trust my own bodily  machinery. I feel as if my own hand might fly up and strike
me."      "When my hand flies up," said Syme, "it will strike somebody  else," and he strode along
the pier towards the Colonel, the sword  in one hand and the lantern in the other.
    As if to destroy the last hope or doubt, the Colonel, who saw  him coming, pointed his
revolver at him and fired. The shot missed  Syme, but struck his sword, breaking it short at the
hilt. Syme  rushed on, and swung the iron lantern above his head.
    "Judas before Herod!" he said, and struck the Colonel down  upon the stones. Then he turned
to the Secretary, whose frightful  mouth was almost foaming now, and held the lamp high with so
rigid  and arresting a gesture, that the man was, as it were, frozen for  a moment, and forced to
hear.
    "Do you see this lantern?" cried Syme in a terrible voice.  "Do you see the cross carved on it,
and the flame inside? You did  not make it. You did not light it, Better men than you, men who
could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved  the legend of fire. There is not
a street you walk on, there is  not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by
denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing.  You can only destroy. You will
destroy mankind; you will destroy  the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian
lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of  apes will  never have the wit to
find it."
    He struck the Secretary once with the lantern so that  he  staggered; and then, whirling it twice
round his head, sent it  flying far out to sea, where it flared like a roaring rocket and  fell.
    "Swords!" shouted Syme, turning his flaming face ; to the  three behind him. "Let us charge
these dogs, for our time has come  to die."
    His three companions came after him sword in hand.  Syme's  sword was broken, but he rent a
bludgeon from the fist of a  fisherman, flinging him down. In a moment they would have flung
themselves upon the face of the mob and perished, when an  interruption came. The Secretary,
ever since Syme's speech, had  stood with his hand to his stricken head as if dazed; now he
suddenly pulled off his black mask.
    The pale face thus peeled in the lamplight revealed not so  much rage as astonishment. He put
up his hand with an anxious  authority.
    "There is some mistake," he said. "Mr. Syme, I hardly think  you understand your position. I
arrest you in the name of the  law."
    "Of the law?" said Syme, and dropped his stick.
    "Certainly!" said the Secretary. "I am a detective from  Scotland Yard," and he took a small
blue card from his pocket.      "And what do you suppose we are?" asked the Professor, and
threw up his arms.
    "You," said the Secretary stiffly, "are, as I know for a  fact, members of the Supreme
Anarchist Council. Disguised as one  of you, I�"
    Dr. Bull tossed his sword into the sea.
    "There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council," he said. "We  were all a lot of silly
policemen looking at each other. And all  these nice people who have been peppering us with shot
thought we  were the dynamiters. I knew I couldn't be wrong about the mob," he  said, beaming
over the enormous multitude, which stretched away to  the distance on both sides. "Vulgar people
are never mad. I'm  vulgar myself, and I know. I am now going on shore to stand a  drink to
everybody here."



                        CHAPTER XIII

               THE PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENT

    NEXT morning five bewildered but hilarious people took the  boat for Dover. The poor old
Colonel might have had some cause to  complain, having been first forced to fight for two factions
that  didn't exist, and then knocked down with an iron lantern. But he  was a magnanimous old
gentleman, and being much relieved that  neither party had anything to do with dynamite, he saw
them off on  the pier with great geniality.
    The five reconciled detectives had a hundred details to  explain to each other. The Secretary
had to tell Syme how they had  come to wear masks originally in order to approach the supposed
enemy as fellow-conspirators;
    Syme had to explain how they had fled with such swiftness  through a civilised country. But
above all these matters of detail  which could be explained, rose the central mountain of the
matter  that they could not explain. What did it all mean? If they were  all harmless officers, what
was Sunday? If he had not seized the  world, what on earth had he been up to? Inspector Ratcliffe
was  still gloomy about this.
    "I can't make head or tail of old Sunday's little game any  more than you can," he said. "But
whatever else Sunday is, he  isn't a blameless citizen. Damn it! do you remember his face?"      "I
grant you," answered Syme, "that I have never been able to  forget it."
    "Well," said the Secretary, "I suppose we can find out soon,  for to-morrow we have our next
general meeting. You will excuse  me," he said, with a rather ghastly smile, "for being well
acquainted with my secretarial duties."
    "I suppose you are right," said the Professor reflectively.  "I suppose we might find it out from
him; but I confess that I  should feel a bit afraid of asking Sunday who he really is."      "Why,"
asked the Secretary, "for fear of bombs?"
    "No," said the Professor, "for fear he might tell me."      "Let us have some drinks," said Dr.
Bull, after a silence.      Throughout their whole journey by boat and train they were  highly
convivial, but they instinctively kept together. Dr. Bull,  who had always been the optimist of the
party, endeavoured to  persuade the other four that the whole company could take the same
hansom cab from Victoria; but this was over-ruled, and they went  in a four-wheeler, with Dr.
Bull on the box, singing. They  finished their journey at an hotel in Piccadilly Circus, so as to
be close to the early breakfast next morning in Leicester Square.  Yet even then the adventures of
the day were not entirely over.  Dr. Bull, discontented with the general proposal to go to bed, had
strolled out of the hotel at about eleven to see and taste some of  the beauties of London. Twenty
minutes afterwards, however, he  came back and made quite a clamour in the hall. Syme, who
tried at  first to soothe him, was forced at last to listen to his
communication with quite new attention.
    "I tell you I've seen him!" said Dr. Bull, with thick  emphasis.
    "Whom?" asked Syme quickly. "Not the President?"
    "Not so bad as that," said Dr. Bull, with unnecessary  laughter, "not so bad as that. I've got
him here."
    "Got whom here?" asked Syme impatiently.
    "Hairy man," said the other lucidly, "man that used to be  hairy man�Gogol. Here he is," and
he pulled forward by a reluctant  elbow the identical young man who five days before had
marched out  of the Council with thin red hair and a pale face, the first of  all the sham anarchists
who had been exposed.
    "Why do you worry with me?" he cried. "You have expelled me  as a spy."
    "We are all spies!" whispered Syme.
    "We're all spies!" shouted Dr. Bull. "Come and have a drink."      Next morning the battalion
of the reunited six marched  stolidly towards the hotel in Leicester Square.
    "This is more cheerful," said Dr. Bull; "we are six men going  to ask one man what he means."
    "I think it is a bit queerer than that," said Syme. "I think  it is six men going to ask one man
what they mean."
    They turned in silence into the Square, and though the hotel  was in the opposite corner, they
saw at once the little balcony  and a figure that looked too big for it. He was sitting alone with
bent head, poring over a newspaper. But all his councillors, who  had come to vote him down,
crossed that Square as if they were  watched out of heaven by a hundred eyes.
    They had disputed much upon their policy, about whether they  should leave the unmasked
Gogol without and begin diplomatically,  or whether they should bring him in and blow up the
gunpowder at  once. The influence of Syme and Bull prevailed for the latter  course, though the
Secretary to the last asked them why they  attacked Sunday so rashly.
    "My reason is quite simple," said Syme. "I attack him rashly  because I am afraid of him."
    They followed Syme up the dark stair in silence, and they all  came out simultaneously into the
broad sunlight of the morning and  the broad sunlight of Sunday's smile.
    "Delightful!" he said. "So pleased to see you all. What an  exquisite day it is. Is the Czar
dead?"
    The Secretary, who happened to be foremost, drew himself  together for a dignified outburst.
    "No, sir," he said sternly "there has been no massacre. I  bring you news of no such disgusting
spectacles."
    "Disgusting spectacles?" repeated the President, with a  bright, inquiring smile. "You mean Dr.
Bull's spectacles?"      The Secretary choked for a moment, and the President went on  with a sort
of smooth appeal�
    "Of course, we all have our opinions and even our eyes, but  really to call them disgusting
before the man himself�"
    Dr. Bull tore off his spectacles and broke them on the table.      "My spectacles are
blackguardly," he said, "but I'm not. Look  at my face."
    "I dare say it's the sort of face that grows on one," said  the President, "in fact, it grows on
you; and who am I to quarrel  with the wild fruits upon the Tree of Life? I dare say it will  grow
on me some day."
    "We have no time for tomfoolery," said the Secretary,  breaking in savagely. "We have come
to know what all this means.  Who are you? What are you? Why did you get us all here? Do you
know who and what we are? Are you a half-witted man playing the  conspirator, or are you a
clever man playing the fool? Answer me,  I tell you."
    "Candidates," murmured Sunday, "are only required to answer  eight out of the seventeen
questions on the paper. As far as I can  make out, you want me to tell you what I am, and what
you are, and  what this table is, and what this Council is, and what this world  is for all I know.
Well, I will go so far as to rend the veil of  one mystery. If you want to know what you are, you
are a set of  highly well-intentioned young jackasses."
    "And you," said Syme, leaning forward, "what are you?"      "I? What am I?" roared the
President, and he rose slowly to  an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch
above  them and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are  a man of science.
Grub in the roots of those trees and find out  the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at
those morning  clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the  truth of the last tree
and the top-most cloud before the truth  about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still
a  riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am.  Since the beginning of the
world all men have hunted me like a  wolf�kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the
churches,  and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and  the skies will fall in the
time I turn to bay. I have given them a  good run for their money, and I will now."
    Before one of them could move, the monstrous man had swung  himself like some huge
ourang-outang over the balustrade of the  balcony. Yet before he dropped he pulled himself up
again as on a  horizontal bar, and thrusting his great chin over the edge of the  balcony, said
solemnly�
    "There's one thing I'll tell you though about who I am. I am  the man in the dark room, who
made you all policemen."
    With that he fell from the balcony, bouncing on the stones  below like a great ball of
india-rubber, and went bounding off  towards the corner of the Alhambra, where he hailed a
hansom-cab  and sprang inside it. The six detectives had been standing  thunderstruck and livid in
the light of his last assertion; but  when he disappeared into the cab, Syme's practical senses
returned  to him, and leaping over the balcony so recklessly as almost to  break his legs, he called
another cab.
    He and Bull sprang into the cab together, the Professor and  the Inspector into another, while
the Secretary and the late Gogol  scrambled into a third just in time to pursue the flying Syme,
who  was pursuing the flying President. Sunday led them a wild chase  towards the north-west, his
cabman, evidently under the influence  of more than common inducements, urging the horse at
breakneck  speed. But Syme was in no mood for delicacies, and he stood up in  his own cab
shouting, "Stop thief!" until crowds ran along beside  his cab, and policemen began to stop and
ask questions. All this  had its influence upon the President's cabman, who began to look  dubious,
and to slow down to a trot. He opened the trap to talk  reasonably to his fare, and in so doing let
the long whip droop  over the front of the cab. Sunday leant forward, seized it, and  jerked it
violently out of the man's hand. Then standing up in  front of the cab himself, he lashed the horse
and roared aloud, so  that they went down the streets like a flying storm. Through  street after
street and square after square went whirling this  preposterous vehicle, in which the fare was
urging the horse and  the driver trying desperately to stop it. The other three cabs  came after it (if
the phrase be permissible of a cab) like panting  hounds. Shops and streets shot by like rattling
arrows.
    At the highest ecstacy of speed, Sunday turned round on the  splashboard where he stood, and
sticking his great grinning head  out of the cab, with white hair whistling in the wind, he made a
horrible face at his pursuers, like some colossal urchin. Then  raising his right hand swiftly, he
flung a ball of paper in Syme's  face and vanished. Syme caught the thing while instinctively
warding it off, and discovered that it consisted of two crumpled  papers. One was addressed to
himself, and the other to Dr. Bull,  with a very long, and it is to be feared partly ironical, string
of letters after his name. Dr. Bull's address was, at any rate,  considerably longer than his
communication, for the communication  consisted entirely of the words:�

    "What about Martin Tupper now?"

    "What does the old maniac mean?" asked Bull, staring at the  words. "What does yours say,
Syme?"
    Syme's message was, at any rate, longer, and ran as follows:�      "No one would regret
anything in the nature of an
interference by the Archdeacon more than I. I trust it will not  come to that. But, for the last time,
where are your goloshes? The  thing is too bad, especially after what uncle said."
    The President's cabman seemed to be regaining some control  over his horse, and the pursuers
gained a little as they swept  round into the Edgware Road. And here there occurred what seemed
to the allies a providential stoppage. Traffic of every kind was  swerving to right or left or
stopping, for down the long road was  coming the unmistakable roar announcing the fire-engine,
which in  a few seconds went by like a brazen thunderbolt. But quick as it  went by, Sunday had
bounded out of his cab, sprung at the  fire-engine, caught it, slung himself on to it, and was seen
as he  disappeared in the noisy distance talking to the astonished  fireman with explanatory
gestures.
    "After him!" howled Syme. "He can't go astray now. There's no  mistaking a fire-engine."
    The three cabmen, who had been stunned for a moment, whipped  up their horses and slightly
decreased the distance between  themselves and their disappearing prey. The President
acknowledged  this proximity by coming to the back of the car, bowing
repeatedly, kissing his hand, and finally flinging a neatly-folded  note into the bosom of Inspector
Ratcliffe. When that gentleman  opened it, not without impatience, he found it contained the
words:�

    "Fly at once. The truth about your trouser-stretchers is  known.�A FRIEND."

    The fire-engine had struck still farther to the north,  into  a region that they did not recognise;
and as it ran by a line of  high railings shadowed with trees, the six friends were startled,  but
somewhat relieved, to see  the President leap from the  fire-engine, though whether through
another whim or the increasing  protest of his entertainers they could not see. Before the three
cabs, however, could reach up to the spot, he had gone up the high  railings like a huge grey cat,
tossed himself over, and vanished  in a darkness of leaves.
    Syme with a furious gesture stopped his cab, jumped out, and  sprang also to the escalade.
When he had one leg over the fence  and his friends were following, he turned a face on them
which  shone quite pale in the shadow.
    "What place can this be?" he asked. "Can it be the old  devil's house? I've heard he has a house
in North London."      "All the better," said the Secretary grimly, planting a foot  in a foothold,
"we shall find him at home."
    "No, but it isn't that," said Syme, knitting his brows. "I  hear the most horrible noises, like
devils laughing and sneezing  and blowing their devilish noses!"
    "His dogs barking, of course," said the Secretary.
    "Why not say his black-beetles barking!" said Syme furiously,  "snails barking! geraniums
barking! Did you ever hear a dog bark  like that?"
    He held up his hand, and there came out of the thicket a long  growling roar that seemed to get
under the skin and freeze the  flesh�a low thrilling roar that made a throbbing in the air all  about
them.
    "The dogs of Sunday would be no ordinary dogs," said Gogol,  and shuddered.
    Syme had jumped down on the other side, but he still stood  listening impatiently.
    "Well, listen to that," he said, "is that a dog�anybody's  dog?"
    There broke upon their ear a hoarse screaming as of things  protesting and clamouring in
sudden pain; and then, far off like  an echo, what sounded like a long nasal trumpet.
    "Well, his house ought to be hell! " said the Secretary; "and  if it is hell, I'm going in!" and he
sprang over the tall railings  almost with one swing.
    The others followed. They broke through a tangle of plants  and shrubs, and came out on an
open path. Nothing was in sight,  but Dr. Bull suddenly struck his hands together.
    "Why, you asses," he cried, "it's the Zoo!"
    As they were looking round wildly for any trace of their wild  quarry, a keeper in uniform
came running along the path with a man  in plain clothes.
    "Has it come this way?" gasped the keeper.
    "Has what?" asked Syme.
    "The elephant!" cried the keeper. "An elephant has gone mad  and run away!"
    "He has run away with an old gentleman," said the other  stranger breathlessly, "a poor old
gentleman with white hair! "      "What sort of old gentleman?" asked Syme, with great  curiosity.
    "A very large and fat old gentleman in light grey clothes,"  said the keeper eagerly.
    "Well," said Syme, "if he's that particular kind of old  gentleman, if you're quite sure that he's a
large and fat old  gentleman in grey clothes, you may take my word for it that the  elephant has
not run away with him. He has run away with the  elephant. The elephant is not made by God that
could run away with  him if he did not consent to the elopement. And, by thunder, there  he is! "
    There was no doubt about it this time. Clean across the space  of grass, about two hundred
yards away, with a crowd screaming and  scampering vainly at his heels, went a huge grey
elephant at an  awful stride, with his trunk thrown out as rigid as a ship's  bowsprit, and
trumpeting like the trumpet of doom. On the back of  the bellowing and plunging animal sat
President Sunday with all  the placidity of a sultan, but goading the animal to a furious  speed with
some sharp object in his hand.
    "Stop him!" screamed the populace. "He'll be out of the  gate!"
    "Stop a landslide!" said the keeper. "He is out of the gate!"      And even as he spoke, a final
crash and roar of terror  announced that the great grey elephant had broken out of the gates
of the Zoological Gardens, and was careening down Albany Street  like a new and swift sort of
omnibus.
    "Great Lord!" cried Bull, "I never knew an elephant could go  so fast. Well, it must be
hansom-cabs again if we are to keep him  in sight."
    As they raced along to the gate out of which the elephant had  vanished, Syme felt a glaring
panorama of the strange animals in  the cages which they passed. Afterwards he thought it queer
that  he should have seen them so clearly. He remembered especially  seeing pelicans, with their
preposterous, pendant throats. He  wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it
was  that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican. He  remembered a hornbill, which
was simply a huge yellow beak with a  small bird tied on behind it. The whole gave him a
sensation, the  vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was always  making quite
mysterious jokes. Sunday had told them that they  would understand him when they had
understood the stars. He  wondered whether even the archangels understood the hornbill.      The
six unhappy detectives flung themselves into cabs and  followed the elephant sharing the terror
which he spread through  the long stretch of the streets. This time Sunday did not turn  round, but
offered them the solid stretch of his unconscious back,  which maddened them, if possible, more
than his previous
mockeries. Just before they came to Baker Street, however, he was  seen to throw something far
up into the air, as a boy does a ball  meaning to catch it again. But at their rate of racing it fell far
behind, just by the cab containing Gogol; and in faint hope of a  clue or for some impulse
unexplainable, he stopped his cab so as  to pick it up. It was addressed to himself, and was quite a
bulky  parcel. On examination, however, its bulk was found to consist of  thirty-three pieces of
paper of no value wrapped one round the  other. When the last covering was torn away it reduced
itself to a  small slip of paper, on which was written:�

    "The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'."

    The man once known as Gogol said nothing, but the movements  of his hands and feet were
like those of a man urging a horse to  renewed efforts.
    Through street after street, through district after district,  went the prodigy of the flying
elephant, calling crowds to every  window, and driving the traffic left and right. And still through
all this insane publicity the three cabs toiled after it, until  they came to be regarded as part of a
procession, and perhaps the  advertisement of a circus. They went at such a rate that distances
were shortened beyond belief, and Syme saw the Albert Hall in  Kensington when he thought that
he was still in Paddington. The  animal's pace was even more fast and free through the empty,
aristocratic streets of South Kensington, and he finally headed  towards that part of the sky-line
where the enormous Wheel of  Earl's Court stood up in the sky. The wheel grew larger and
larger, till it filled heaven like the wheel of stars.
    The beast outstripped the cabs. They lost him round several  corners, and when they came to
one of the gates of the Earl's  Court Exhibition they found themselves finally blocked. In front
of them was an enormous crowd; in the midst of it was an enormous  elephant, heaving and
shuddering as such shapeless creatures do.  But the President had disappeared.
    "Where has he gone to?" asked Syme, slipping to the ground.      "Gentleman rushed into the
Exhibition, sir!" said an official  in a dazed manner. Then he added in an injured voice: "Funny
gentleman, sir. Asked me to hold his horse, and gave me this."      He held out with distaste a
piece of folded paper, addressed:  "To the Secretary of the Central Anarchist Council."
    The Secretary, raging, rent it open, and found written inside  it:�

    "When the herring runs a mile,
    Let the Secretary smile;
    When the herring tries to fly,
    Let the Secretary die.
         Rustic Proverb."

    "Why the eternal crikey," began the Secretary, "did you let  the man in? Do people commonly
come to you Exhibition riding on  mad elephants? Do�"
    "Look! " shouted Syme suddenly. "Look over there! '
    "Look at what?" asked the Secretary savagely.
    "Look at the captive balloon!" said Syme, and pointed in a  frenzy.
    "Why the blazes should I look at a captive balloon?' demanded  the Secretary. "What is there
queer about a captive balloon?"      "Nothing," said Syme, "except that it isn't captive!'      They all
turned their eyes to where the balloon swung and  swelled above the Exhibition on a string, like a
child's balloon.  A second afterwards the string came in two just under the car, and  the balloon,
broken loose, floated away with the freedom of a soap  bubble.
    "Ten thousand devils!" shrieked the Secretary. "He's got into  it!" and he shook his fists at the
sky.
    The balloon, borne by some chance wind, came right above  them, and they could see the great
white head of the President  peering over the side and looking benevolently down on them.
"God bless my soul!" said the Professor with the elderly  manner that he could never disconnect
from his bleached beard and  parchment face. "God bless my soul! I seemed to fancy that
something fell on the top of my hat!"
    He put up a trembling hand and took from that shelf a piece  of twisted paper, which he
opened absently only to find it  inscribed with a true lover's knot and, the words:�
    "Your beauty has not left me indifferent.�From LITTLE  SNOWDROP. "
    There was a short silence, and then Syme said, biting his  beard�
    "I'm not beaten yet. The blasted thing must come down  somewhere. Let's follow it!"



                        CHAPTER XIV

                   THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS

    ACROSS green fields, and breaking through blooming hedges,  toiled six draggled detectives,
about five miles out of London.  The optimist of the party had at first proposed that they should
follow the balloon across South England in hansom-cabs. But he was  ultimately convinced of the
persistent refusal of the balloon to  follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the
cabmen to follow the balloon. Consequently the tireless though  exasperated travellers broke
through black thickets and ploughed  through ploughed fields till each was turned into a figure
too  outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp. Those green hills of Surrey  saw the final collapse and
tragedy of the admirable light grey  suit in which Syme had set out from Saffron Park. His silk hat
was  broken over his nose by a swinging bough, his coat-tails were torn  to the shoulder by
arresting thorns, the clay of England was  splashed up to his collar; but he still carried his yellow
beard  forward with a silent and furious determination, and his eyes were  still fixed on that
floating ball of gas, which in the full flush  of sunset seemed coloured like a sunset cloud.
    "After all," he said, "it is very beautiful!"
    "It is singularly and strangely beautiful!" said the  Professor. "I wish the beastly gas-bag would
burst!"
    "No," said Dr. Bull, "I hope it won't. It might hurt the old  boy."
    "Hurt him!" said the vindictive Professor, "hurt him! Not as  much as I'd hurt him if I could get
up with him. Little Snowdrop!"      "I don't want him hurt, somehow," said Dr. Bull.
    "What!" cried the Secretary bitterly. "Do you believe all  that tale about his being our man in
the dark room? Sunday would  say he was anybody."
    "I don't know whether I believe it or not," said Dr. Bull.  "But it isn't that that I mean. I can't
wish old Sunday's balloon  to burst because�"
    "Well," said Syme impatiently, "because?"
    "Well, because he's so jolly like a balloon himself," said  Dr. Bull desperately. "I don't
understand a word of all that idea  of his being the same man who gave us all our blue cards. It
seems  to make everything nonsense. But I don't care who knows it, I  always had a sympathy for
old Sunday himself, wicked as he was.  Just as if he was a great bouncing baby. How can I explain
what my  queer sympathy was? It didn't prevent my fighting him like hell!  Shall I make it clear if I
say that I liked him because he was so  fat?"
    "You will not," said the Secretary.
    "I've got it now," cried Bull, "it was because he was so fat  and so light. Just like a balloon. We
always think of fat people  as heavy, but he could have danced against a sylph. I see now what  I
mean. Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength  is shown in levity. It was like
the old speculations�what would  happen if an elephant could leap up in the sky like a
grasshopper?"
    "Our elephant," said Syme, looking upwards, "has leapt into  the sky like a grasshopper."
    "And somehow," concluded Bull, "that's why I can't help  liking old Sunday. No, it's not an
admiration of force, or any  silly thing like that. There is a kind of gaiety in the thing, as  if he
were bursting with some good news. Haven't you sometimes  felt it on a spring day? You know
Nature plays tricks, but somehow  that day proves they are good-natured tricks. I never read the
Bible myself, but that part they laugh at is literal truth, 'Why  leap ye, ye high hills?' The hills do
leap �-at least, they try  to.... Why do I like Sunday? . . . how can I tell you? . . .  because he's
such a Bounder."
    There was a long silence, and then the Secretary said in a  curious, strained voice�
    "You do not know Sunday at all. Perhaps it is because you are  better than I, and do not know
hell. I was a fierce fellow, and a  trifle morbid from the first. The man who sits in darkness, and
who chose us all, chose me because I had all the crazy look of a  conspirator�because my smile
went crooked, and my eyes were  gloomy, even when I smiled. But there must have been
something in  me that answered to the nerves in all these anarchic men. For when  I first saw
Sunday he expressed to me, not your airy vitality, but  something both gross and sad in the Nature
of Things. I found him  smoking in a twilight room, a room with brown blind down,  infinitely
more depressing than the genial darkness in which our  master lives. He sat there on a bench, a
huge heap of a man, dark  and out of shape. He listened to all my words without speaking or
even stirring. I poured out my most passionate appeals, and asked  my most eloquent questions.
Then, after a long silence, the Thing  began to shake, and I thought it was shaken by some secret
malady.  It shook like a loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of  everything I had ever read
about the base bodies that are the  origin of life�the deep sea lumps and protoplasm. It seemed
like  the final form of matter, the most shapeless and the most  shameful. I could only tell myself,
from its shudderings, that it  was something at least that such a monster could be miserable. And
then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was shaking with a  lonely laughter, and the
laughter was at me. Do you ask me to  forgive him that? It is no small thing to be laughed at by
something at once lower and stronger than oneself."
    "Surely you fellows are exaggerating wildly," cut in the  clear voice of Inspector Ratcliffe.
"President Sunday is a  terrible fellow for one's intellect, but he is not such a Barnum's  freak
physically as you make out. He received me in an ordinary  office, in a grey check coat, in broad
daylight. He talked to me  in an ordinary way. But I'll tell you what is a trifle creepy  about
Sunday. His room is neat, his clothes are neat, everything  seems in order; but he's absent-minded.
Sometimes his great bright  eyes go quite blind. For hours he forgets that you are there. Now
absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We think  of a wicked man as vigilant. We
can't think of a wicked man who is  honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren't think of a
wicked man alone with himself. An absentminded man means a  good-natured man. It means a
man who, if he happens to see you,  will apologise. But how will you bear an absentminded man
who, if  he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the  nerves, abstraction combined
with cruelty. Men have felt it  sometimes when they went through wild forests, and felt that the
animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might  ignore or slay. How would you like
to pass ten mortal hours in a  parlour with an absent-minded tiger?"
    "And what do you think of Sunday, Gogol?" asked Syme.      "I don't think of Sunday on
principle," said Gogol simply,  "any more than I stare at the sun at noonday."
    "Well, that is a point of view," said Syme thoughtfully.  "What do you say, Professor?"
    The Professor was walking with bent head and trailing stick,  and he did not answer at all.
    "Wake up, Professor!" said Syme genially. "Tell us what you  think of Sunday."
    The Professor spoke at last very slowly.
    "I think something," he said, "that I cannot say clearly. Or,  rather, I think something that I
cannot even think clearly. But it  is something like this. My early life, as you know, was a bit too
large and loose.
    Well, when I saw Sunday's face I thought it was too large� everybody does, but I also thought
it was too loose. The face was  so big, that one couldn't focus it or make it a face at all. The
eye was so far away from the nose, that it wasn't an eye. The  mouth was so much by itself, that
one had to think of it by  itself. The whole thing is too hard to explain."
    He paused for a little, still trailing his stick, and then  went on�
    "But put it this way. Walking up a road at night, I have seen  a lamp and a lighted window and
a cloud make together a most  complete and unmistakable face. If anyone in heaven has that face
I shall know him again. Yet when I walked a little farther I found  that there was no face, that the
window was ten yards away, the  lamp ten hundred yards, the cloud beyond the world. Well,
Sunday's  face escaped me; it ran away to right and left, as such chance  pictures run away. And
so his face has made me, somehow, doubt  whether there are any faces. I don't know whether
your face, Bull,  is a face or a combination in perspective. Perhaps one black disc  of your beastly
glasses is quite close and another fifty miles  away. Oh, the doubts of a materialist are not worth a
dump. Sunday  has taught me the last and the worst doubts, the doubts of a  spiritualist. I am a
Buddhist, I suppose; and Buddhism is not a  creed, it is a doubt. My poor dear Bull, I do not
believe that you  really have a face. I have not faith enough to believe in matter."      Syme's eyes
were still fixed upon the errant orb, which,  reddened in the evening light, looked like some rosier
and more  innocent world.
    "Have you noticed an odd thing," he said, "about all your  descriptions? Each man of you finds
Sunday quite different, yet  each man of you can only find one thing to compare him to�the
universe itself. Bull finds him like the earth in spring, Gogol  like the sun at noonday. The
Secretary is reminded of the  shapeless protoplasm, and the Inspector of the carelessness of  virgin
forests. The Professor says he is like a changing
landscape. This is queer, but it is queerer still that I also have  had my odd notion about the
President, and I also find that I  think of Sunday as I think of the whole world."
    "Get on a little faster, Syme," said Bull; "never mind the  balloon."
    "When I first saw Sunday," said Syme slowly, "I only saw his  back; and when I saw his back,
I knew he was the worst man in the  world. His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of
some  apish god. His head had a stoop that was hardly human, like the  stoop of an ox. In fact, I
had at once the revolting fancy that  this was not a man at all, but a beast dressed up in men's
clothes."
    "Get on," said Dr. Bull.
    "And then the queer thing happened. I had seen his back from  the street, as he sat in the
balcony. Then I entered the hotel,  and coming round the other side of him, saw his face in the
sunlight. His face frightened me, as it did everyone; but not  because it was brutal, not because it
was evil. On the contrary,  it frightened me because it was so beautiful, because it was so
good."
    "Syme," exclaimed the Secretary, "are you ill?"
    "It was like the face of some ancient archangel, judging  justly after heroic wars. There was
laughter in the eyes, and in  the mouth honour and sorrow. There was the same white hair, the
same great, grey-clad shoulders that I had seen from behind. But  when I saw him from behind I
was certain he was an animal, and  when I saw him in front I knew he was a god."
    "Pan," said the Professor dreamily, "was a god and an  animal."
    "Then, and again and always," went on Syme like a man talking  to himself, "that has been for
me the mystery of Sunday, and it is  also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I
am  sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an  instant, I know the back is
only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we  cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we
feel  certain that evil could be explained. But the whole came to a kind  of crest yesterday when I
raced Sunday for the cab, and was just  behind him all the way."
    "Had you time for thinking then?" asked Ratcliffe.
    "Time," replied Syme, "for one outrageous thought. I was  suddenly possessed with the idea
that the blind, blank back of his  head really was his face�an awful, eyeless face staring at me!
And  I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a  figure running backwards, and
dancing as he ran."
    "Horrible!" said Dr. Bull, and shuddered.
    "Horrible is not the word," said Syme. "It was exactly the  worst instant of my life. And yet ten
minutes afterwards, when he  put his head out of the cab and made a grimace like a gargoyle, I
knew that he was only like a father playing hide-and-seek with his  children."
    "It is a long game," said the Secretary, and frowned at his  broken boots.
    "Listen to me," cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis.  "Shall I tell you the secret of the
whole world? It is that we  have only known the back of the world. We see everything from
behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a  tree. That is not a cloud, but the
back of a cloud. Cannot you see  that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only
get round in front�"
    "Look!" cried out Bull clamorously, "the balloon is coming  down!"
    There was no need to cry out to Syme, who had never taken his  eyes off it. He saw the great
luminous globe suddenly stagger in  the sky, right itself, and then sink slowly behind the trees like
a setting sun.
    The man called Gogol, who had hardly spoken through all their  weary travels, suddenly threw
up his hands like a lost spirit.      "He is dead!" he cried. "And now I know he was my friend�my
friend in the dark!"
    "Dead!" snorted the Secretary. "You will not find him dead  easily. If he has been tipped out of
the car, we shall find him  rolling as a colt rolls in a field, kicking his legs for fun."      "Clashing
his hoofs," said the Professor. "The colts do, and  so did Pan."
    "Pan again!" said Dr. Bull irritably. "You seem to think Pan  is everything."
    "So he is," said the Professor, "in Greek. He means
everything."
    "Don't forget," said the Secretary, looking down, "that he  also means Panic."
    Syme had stood without hearing any of the exclamations.      "It fell over there," he said
shortly. "Let us follow it!"      Then he added with an indescribable gesture�
    "Oh, if he has cheated us all by getting killed! It would be  like one of his larks."
    He strode off towards the distant trees with a new energy,  his rags and ribbons fluttering in
the wind. The others followed  him in a more footsore and dubious manner. And almost at the
same  moment all six men realised that they were not alone in the little  field.
    Across the square of turf a tall man was advancing towards  them, leaning on a strange long
staff like a sceptre. He was clad  in a fine but old-fashioned suit with knee-breeches; its colour
was that shade between blue, violet and grey which can be seen in  certain shadows of the
woodland. His hair was whitish grey, and at  the first glance, taken along with his knee-breeches,
looked as if  it was powdered. His advance was very quiet; but for the silver  frost upon his head,
he might have been one to the shadows of the  wood.
    "Gentlemen," he said, "my master has a carriage waiting for  you in the road just by."
    "Who is your master?" asked Syme, standing quite still.      "I was told you knew his name,"
said the man respectfully.      There was a silence, and then the Secretary said�
    "Where is this carriage?"
    "It has been waiting only a few moments," said the stranger.  "My master has only just come
home."
    Syme looked left and right upon the patch of green field in  which he found himself. The
hedges were ordinary hedges, the trees  seemed ordinary trees; yet he felt like a man entrapped in
fairyland.
    He looked the mysterious ambassador up and down, but he could  discover nothing except
that the man's coat was the exact colour  of the purple shadows, and that the man's face was the
exact  colour of the red and brown and golden sky.
    "Show us the place," Syme said briefly, and without a word  the man in the violet coat turned
his back and walked towards a  gap in the hedge, which let in suddenly the light of a white road.
As the six wanderers broke out upon this thoroughfare, they  saw the white road blocked by what
looked like a long row of  carriages, such a row of carriages as might close the approach to  some
house in Park Lane. Along the side of these carriages stood a  rank of splendid servants, all
dressed in the grey-blue uniform,  and all having a certain quality of stateliness and freedom which
would not commonly belong to the servants of a gentleman, but  rather to the officials and
ambassadors of a great king. There  were no less than six carriages waiting, one for each of the
tattered and miserable band. All the attendants (as if in  court-dress) wore swords, and as each
man crawled into his  carriage they drew them, and saluted with a sudden blaze of steel.      "What
can it all mean?" asked Bull of Syme as they separated.  "Is this another joke of Sunday's?"
    "I don't know," said Syme as he sank wearily back in the  cushions of his carriage; "but if it is,
it's one of the jokes you  talk about. It's a good-natured one."
    The six adventurers had passed through many adventures, but  not one had carried them so
utterly off their feet as this last  adventure of comfort. They had all become inured to things going
roughly; but things suddenly going smoothly swamped them. They  could not even feebly imagine
what the carriages were; it was  enough for them to know that they were carriages, and carriages
with cushions. They could not conceive who the old man was who had  led them; but it was quite
enough that he had certainly led them  to the carriages.
    Syme drove through a drifting darkness of trees in utter  abandonment. It was typical of him
that while he had carried his  bearded chin forward fiercely so long as anything could be done,
when the whole business was taken out of his hands he fell back on  the cushions in a frank
collapse.
    Very gradually and very vaguely he realised into what rich  roads the carriage was carrying
him. He saw that they passed the  stone gates of what might have been a park, that they began
gradually to climb a hill which, while wooded on both sides, was  somewhat more orderly than a
forest. Then there began to grow upon  him, as upon a man slowly waking from a healthy sleep, a
pleasure  in everything. He felt that the hedges were what hedges should be,  living walls; that a
hedge is like a human army, disciplined, but  all the more alive. He saw high elms behind the
hedges, and  vaguely thought how happy boys would be climbing there. Then his  carriage took a
turn of the path, and he saw suddenly and quietly,  like a long, low, sunset cloud, a long, low
house, mellow in the  mild light of sunset. All the six friends compared notes
afterwards and quarrelled; but they all agreed that in some  unaccountable way the place reminded
them of their boyhood. It was  either this elm-top or that crooked path, it was either this scrap  of
orchard or that shape of a window; but each man of them  declared that he could remember this
place before he could  remember his mother.
    When the carriages eventually rolled up to a large, low,  cavernous gateway, another man in
the same uniform, but wearing a  silver star on the grey breast of his coat, came out to meet them.
This impressive person said to the bewildered Syme�
    "Refreshments are provided for you in your room."
    Syme, under the influence of the same mesmeric sleep of  amazement, went up the large oaken
stairs after the respectful  attendant. He entered a splendid suite of apartments that seemed  to be
designed specially for him. He walked up to a long mirror  with the ordinary instinct of his class,
to pull his tie straight  or to smooth his hair; and there he saw the frightful figure that  he
was�blood running down his face from where the bough had struck  him, his hair standing out
like yellow rags of rank grass, his  clothes torn into long, wavering tatters. At once the whole
enigma  sprang up, simply as the question of how he had got there, and how  he was to get out
again. Exactly at the same moment a man in blue,  who had been appointed as his valet, said very
solemnly�
    "I have put out your clothes, sir."
    "Clothes!" said Syme sardonically. "I have no clothes except  these," and he lifted two long
strips of his frock-coat in  fascinating festoons, and made a movement as if to twirl like a  ballet
girl.
    "My master asks me to say," said the attendant, that there is  a fancy dress ball to-night, and
that he desires you to put on the  costume that I have laid out. Meanwhile, sir, there is a bottle of
Burgundy and some cold pheasant, which he hopes you will not  refuse, as it is some hours before
supper."
    "Cold pheasant is a good thing," said Syme reflectively, "and  Burgundy is a spanking good
thing. But really I do not want either  of them so much as I want to know what the devil all this
means,  and what sort of costume you have got laid out for me. Where is  it?"
    The servant lifted off a kind of ottoman a long peacock-blue  drapery, rather of the nature of a
domino, on the front of which  was emblazoned a large golden sun, and which was splashed here
and  there with flaming stars and crescents.
    "You're to be dressed as Thursday, sir," said the valet  somewhat affably.
    "Dressed as Thursday!" said Syme in meditation. "It doesn't  sound a warm costume."
    "Oh, yes, sir," said the other eagerly, "the Thursday costume  is quite warm, sir. It fastens up
to the chin."
    "Well, I don't understand anything," said Syme, sighing. "I  have been used so long to
uncomfortable adventures that
comfortable adventures knock me out. Still, I may be allowed to  ask why I should be particularly
like Thursday in a green frock  spotted all over with the sun and moon. Those orbs, I think, shine
on other days. I once saw the moon on Tuesday, I remember."      "Beg pardon, sir," said the
valet, "Bible also provided for  you," and with a respectful and rigid finger he pointed out a
passage in the first chapter of Genesis. Syme read it wondering.  It was that in which the fourth
day of the week is associated with  the creation of the sun and moon. Here, however, they
reckoned  from a Christian Sunday.
    "This is getting wilder and wilder," said Syme, as he sat  down in a chair. "Who are these
people who provide cold pheasant  and Burgundy, and green clothes and Bibles? Do they provide
everything?"
    "Yes, sir, everything," said the attendant gravely. "Shall I  help you on with your costume?"
    "Oh, hitch the bally thing on! " said Syme impatiently.      But though he affected to despise the
mummery, he felt a  curious freedom and naturalness in his movements as the blue and  gold
garment fell about him; and when he found that he had to wear  a sword, it stirred a boyish dream.
As he passed out of the room  he flung the folds across his shoulder with a gesture, his sword
stood out at an angle, and he had all the swagger of a troubadour.  For these disguises did not
disguise, but reveal.



                         CHAPTER XV

                         THE ACCUSER

    AS Syme strode along the corridor he saw the Secretary  standing at the top of a great flight
of stairs. The man had never  looked so noble. He was draped in a long robe of starless black,
down the centre of which fell a band or broad stripe of pure  white, like a single shaft of light. The
whole looked like some  very severe ecclesiastical vestment. There was no need for Syme to
search his memory or the Bible in order to remember that the first  day of creation marked the
mere creation of light out of darkness.  The vestment itself would alone have suggested the
symbol; and  Syme felt also how perfectly this pattern of pure white and black  expressed the soul
of the pale and austere Secretary, with his  inhuman veracity and his cold frenzy, which made him
so easily  make war on the anarchists, and yet so easily pass for one of  them. Syme was scarcely
surprised to notice that, amid all the  ease and hospitality of their new surroundings, this man's
eyes  were still stern. No smell of ale or orchards could make the  Secretary cease to ask a
reasonable question.
    If Syme had been able to see himself, he would have realised  that he, too, seemed to be for the
first time himself and no one  else. For if the Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves  the
original and formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who  seeks always to make the light in
special shapes, to split it up  into sun and star. The philosopher may sometimes love the  infinite;
the poet always loves the finite. For him the great  moment is not the creation of light, but the
creation of the sun  and moon.
    As they descended the broad stairs together they overtook  Ratcliffe, who was clad in spring
green like a huntsman, and the  pattern upon whose garment was a green tangle of trees. For he
stood for that third day on which the earth and green things were  made, and his square, sensible
face, with its not unfriendly  cynicism, seemed appropriate enough to it.
    They were led out of another broad and low gateway into a  very large old English garden, full
of torches and bonfires, by  the broken light of which a vast carnival of people were dancing  in
motley dress. Syme seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated  in some crazy costume. There
was a man dressed as a windmill with  enormous sails, a man dressed as an elephant, a man
dressed as a  balloon; the two last, together, seemed to keep the thread of  their farcical
adventures. Syme even saw, with a queer thrill, one  dancer dressed like an enormous hornbill,
with a beak twice as big  as himself�the queer bird which had fixed itself on his fancy like  a living
question while he was rushing down the long road at the  Zoological Gardens. There were a
thousand other such objects,  however. There was a dancing lamp-post, a dancing apple tree, a
dancing ship. One would have thought that the untamable tune of  some mad musician had set all
the common objects of field and  street dancing an eternal jig. And long afterwards, when Syme
was  middle-aged and at rest, he could never see one of those
particular objects�a lamppost, or an apple tree, or a windmill� without thinking that it was a
strayed reveller from that revel of  masquerade.
    On one side of this lawn, alive with dancers, was a sort of  green bank, like the terrace in such
old-fashioned gardens.      Along this, in a kind of crescent, stood seven great chairs,  the thrones
of the seven days. Gogol and Dr. Bull were already in  their seats; the Professor was just
mounting to his. Gogol, or  Tuesday, had his simplicity well symbolised by a dress designed  upon
the division of the waters, a dress that separated upon his  forehead and fell to his feet, grey and
silver, like a sheet of  rain. The Professor, whose day was that on which the birds and  fishes�the
ruder forms of life�were created, had a dress of dim  purple, over which sprawled goggle-eyed
fishes and outrageous  tropical birds, the union in him of unfathomable fancy and of  doubt. Dr.
Bull, the last day of Creation, wore a coat covered  with heraldic animals in red and gold, and on
his crest a man  rampant. He lay back in his chair with a broad smile, the picture  of an optimist in
his element.
    One by one the wanderers ascended the bank and sat in their  strange seats. As each of them
sat down a roar of enthusiasm rose  from the carnival, such as that with which crowds receive
kings.  Cups were clashed and torches shaken, and feathered hats flung in  the air. The men for
whom these thrones were reserved were men  crowned with some extraordinary laurels. But the
central chair was  empty.
    Syme was on the left hand of it and the Secretary on the  right. The Secretary looked across
the empty throne at Syme, and  said, compressing his lips�
    "We do not know yet that he is not dead in a field."
    Almost as Syme heard the words, he saw on the sea of human  faces in front of him a frightful
and beautiful alteration, as if  heaven had opened behind his head. But Sunday had only passed
silently along the front like a shadow, and had sat in the central  seat. He was draped plainly, in a
pure and terrible white, and his  hair was like a silver flame on his forehead.
    For a long time�it seemed for hours�that huge masquerade of  mankind swayed and stamped
in front of them to marching and  exultant music. Every couple dancing seemed a separate
romance; it  might be a fairy dancing with a pillar-box, or a peasant girl  dancing with the moon;
but in each case it was, somehow, as absurd  as Alice in Wonderland, yet as grave and kind as a
love story. At  last, however, the thick crowd began to thin itself. Couples  strolled away into the
garden-walks, or began to drift towards  that end of the building where stood smoking, in huge
pots like  fish-kettles, some hot and scented mixtures of old ale or wine.  Above all these, upon a
sort of black framework on the roof of the  house, roared in its iron basket a gigantic bonfire,
which lit up  the land for miles. It flung the homely effect of firelight over  the face of vast forests
of grey or brown, and it seemed to fill  with warmth even the emptiness of upper night. Yet this
also,  after a time, was allowed to grow fainter; the dim groups gathered  more and more round
the great cauldrons, or passed, laughing and  clattering, into the inner passages of that ancient
house. Soon  there were only some ten loiterers in the garden; soon only four.  Finally the last
stray merry-maker ran into the house whooping to  his companions. The fire faded, and the slow,
strong stars came  out. And the seven strange men were left alone, like seven stone  statues on
their chairs of stone. Not one of them had spoken a  word.
    They seemed in no haste to do so, but heard in silence the  hum of insects and the distant song
of one bird. Then Sunday  spoke, but so dreamily that he might have been continuing a
conversation rather than beginning one.
    "We will eat and drink later," he said. "Let us remain  together a little, we who have loved
each other so sadly, and have  fought so long. I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war,
in which you were always heroes�epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and  you always brothers in arms.
Whether it was but recently (for time  is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out
to  war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing,  and to you I was only a voice
commanding valour and an unnatural  virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never
heard it  again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it,  all human wisdom denied
it. And when I met you in the daylight I  denied it myself."
    Syme stirred sharply in his seat, but otherwise there was  silence, and the incomprehensible
went on.
    "But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour,  though the whole cosmos turned
an engine of torture to tear it out  of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you,
Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday,  named me in the hour
without hope."
    There was complete silence in the starlit garden, and then  the black-browed Secretary,
implacable, turned in his chair  towards Sunday, and said in a harsh voice�
    "Who and what are you?"
    "I am the Sabbath," said the other without moving. "I am the  peace of God."
    The Secretary started up, and stood crushing his costly robe  in his hand.
    "I know what you mean," he cried, "and it is exactly that  that I cannot forgive you. I know
you are contentment, optimism,  what do they call the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I
am not reconciled. If you were the man in the dark room, why were  you also Sunday, an offense
to the sunlight? If you were from the  first our father and our friend, why were you also our
greatest  enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our  souls�and you are the
peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His  anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive
Him His  peace."
    Sunday answered not a word, but very slowly he turned his  face of stone upon Syme as if
asking a question.
    "No," said Syme, "I do not feel fierce like that. I am  grateful to you, not only for wine and
hospitality here, but for  many a fine scamper and free fight. But I should like to know. My
soul and heart are as happy and quiet here as this old garden, but  my reason is still crying out. I
should like to know."
    Sunday looked at Ratcliffe, whose clear voice said�
    "It seems so silly that you should have been on both sides  and fought yourself."
    Bull said�
    "l understand nothing, but I am happy. In fact, I am going to  sleep."
    "I am not happy," said the Professor with his head in his  hands, "because I do not understand.
You let me stray a little too  near to hell."
    And then Gogol said, with the absolute simplicity of a child�      "I wish I knew why I was
hurt so much."
    Still Sunday said nothing, but only sat with his mighty chin  upon his hand, and gazed at the
distance. Then at last he said�      "I have heard your complaints in order. And here, I think,
comes another to complain, and we will hear him also."
    The falling fire in the great cresset threw a last long  gleam, like a bar of burning gold, across
the dim grass. Against  this fiery band was outlined in utter black the advancing legs of  a
black-clad figure. He seemed to have a fine close suit with  knee-breeches such as that which was
worn by the servants of the  house, only that it was not blue, but of this absolute sable. He
had, like the servants, a kind of word by his side. It was only  when he had come quite close to the
crescent of the seven and  flung up his face to look at them, that Syme saw, with
thunder-struck clearness, that the face was the broad, almost  ape-like face of his old friend
Gregory, with its rank red hair  and its insulting smile.
    "Gregory!" gasped Syme, half-rising from his seat. "Why, this  is the real anarchist!"
    "Yes," said Gregory, with a great and dangerous restraint, "I  am the real anarchist."
    " 'Now there was a day,' " murmured Bull, who seemed really  to have fallen asleep, " 'when
the sons of God came to present  themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.' "
   "You are right," said Gregory, and gazed all round. "I am a  destroyer. I would destroy the
world if I could."
    A sense of a pathos far under the earth stirred up in Syme,  and he spoke brokenly and without
sequence.
    "Oh, most unhappy man," he cried, "try to be happy! You have  red hair like your sister."
    "My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world," said  Gregory. "I thought I hated
everything more than common men can  hate anything; but I find that I do not hate everything so
much as  I hate you! "
    "I never hated you," said Syme very sadly.
    Then out of this unintelligible creature the last thunders  broke.
    "You! " he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I  know what you are all of you,
from first to last�you are the  people in power! You are the police�the great fat, smiling men in
blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken.  But is there a free soul
alive that does not long to break you,  only because you have never been broken? We in revolt
talk all  kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the  Government. It is all
folly! The only crime of the Government is  that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme
power is that  it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse  you (though I
might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!  You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never
come down from  them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no  troubles. Oh, I
could forgive you everything, you that rule all  mankind, if I could feel for once that you had
suffered for one  hour a real agony such as I�"
    Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.
    "I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why  does each thing on the earth war
against each other thing? Why  does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world
itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does  a dandelion have to fight the
whole universe? For the same reason  that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days.
So  that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of  the anarchist. So that each
man fighting for order may be as brave  and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of
Satan may  be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and  torture we may earn
the right to say to this man, 'You lie!' No  agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this
accuser,  'We also have suffered.'
    "It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been  broken upon the wheel. It is not
true that we have never descended  from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were
complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when  this man entered insolently
to accuse us of happiness. I repel the  slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every
one of the  great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least�"
    He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face  of Sunday, which wore a strange
smile.
    "Have you," he cried in a dreadful voice, "have you ever  suffered?"
    As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew  larger than the colossal mask of
Memnon, which had made him scream  as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky;
then  everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely  destroyed his brain he
seemed to hear a distant voice saying a  commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, "Can ye
drink of the  cup that I drink of?"

                        *    *    *

    When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find  themselves in some place in
which they might have fallen asleep;  they yawn in a chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs
from a  field. Syme's experience was something much more psychologically  strange if there was
indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense,  about the things he had gone through. For while he
could always  remember afterwards that he had swooned before the face of Sunday,  he could not
remember having ever come to at all. He could only  remember that gradually and naturally he
knew that he was and had  been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational
companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it  was the red-haired poet
Gregory. They were walking like old  friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about
some  triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his  body and a crystal
simplicity in his mind that seemed to be  superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was
in  possession of some impossible good news, which made every other  thing a triviality, but an
adorable triviality.
    Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear  and timid; as if Nature made a
first attempt at yellow and a first  attempt at rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one
could  not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some  hole in the sky. Syme felt a
simple surprise when he saw rising  all round him on both sides of the road the red, irregular
buildings of Saffron Park. He had no idea that he had walked so  near London. He walked by
instinct along one white road, on which  early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a
fenced  garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the  gold-red hair, cutting lilac
before breakfast, with the great  unconscious gravity of a girl.

                          THE END







     A WILD, MAD, HILARIOUS AND PROFOUNDLY MOVING TALE

                  THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

                     by G. K. Chesterton

             author of the Father Brown stories

    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.

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