G.K.Chesterton. The man who was Thursday. A nightmare





     To Edmund Clerihew Bentley

     A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
     Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
     Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
     The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
     Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--
     Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
     Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
     Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
     Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
     The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
     They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
     Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
     Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
     When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us
     Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as eve,
     High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
     Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
     When all church bells were silent our cap and beds were heard.

     Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
     Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
     I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
     Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
     And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
     Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
     Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain--
     Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
     Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
     Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
     But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
     God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
     We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--
     Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

     This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
     And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells--
     Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
     Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
     The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand--
     Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
     The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
     And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.
     Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
     Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
     We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
     And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

           G. K. C.



        CHAPTER I. THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK

     THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and
ragged as a cloud of  sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its
sky-line was fantastic, and  even its ground plan was  wild. It had been the
outburst of  a speculative builder, faintly  tinged with art, who called its
architecture  sometimes  Elizabethan  and sometimes  Queen  Anne, apparently
under  the  impression  that  the  two  sovereigns  were  identical.  It was
described with  some justice as  an artistic colony, though it  never in any
definable  way produced  any  art.  But  although its pretensions to  be  an
intellectual centre were a little  vague, its  pretensions to be a  pleasant
place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at
the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must
be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was  he disappointed
in this respect. The place was not  only pleasant, but perfect, if  once  he
could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people
were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with
the long, auburn hair and the impudent face--  that young man was not really
a  poet; but surely he was a poem. That old  gentleman with  the wild, white
beard and  the  wild,  white  hat--that  venerable humbug  was not really  a
philosopher;  but at least he was the cause of  philosophy in  others.  That
scientific gentleman with the  bald, egg-like head and  the  bare, bird-like
neck had no real right to  the airs of  science that he assumed. He  had not
discovered  anything new  in  biology; but what biological creature could he
have  discovered more singular than himself?  Thus, and thus only, the whole
place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered  not so much as a
workshop for  artists,  but as a  frail but finished work of art. A  man who
stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into  a written
comedy.
     More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall,
when  the  extravagant roofs  were dark against the afterglow and the  whole
insane  village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This  again was more
strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens
were often illuminated, and the big Chinese  lanterns glowed in the dwarfish
trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit. And this was strongest of all on
one particular  evening, still vaguely remembered in the  locality, of which
the  auburn-haired  poet was the  hero. It was  not  by  any means  the only
evening of which he was the hero. On many nights those passing by his little
back garden  might  hear his high, didactic voice laying down the law to men
and particularly  to women.  The  attitude of women in such cases was indeed
one  of  the  paradoxes of  the place. Most  of the  women  were of the kind
vaguely  called  emancipated,  and  professed  some   protest  against  male
supremacy. Yet  these new  women would  always pay to a  man the extravagant
compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while
he is talking. And  Mr. Lucian Gregory, the  red-haired poet, was really (in
some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one only laughed at the end of
it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness
with a  certain impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure.
He  was helped  in  some degree by  the arresting oddity  of his appearance,
which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair
parted  in the middle was literally like a woman's, and curved into the slow
curls of  a  virgin  in  a pre-Raphaelite picture.  From within this  almost
saintly  oval,  however,  his face projected suddenly broad  and brutal, the
chin  carried forward with a look of  cockney  contempt. This combination at
once tickled and  terrified  the nerves  of a neurotic population. He seemed
like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
     This particular evening, if it is remembered for  nothing else, will be
remembered in that  place for its strange sunset.  It looked like the end of
the world. All  the heaven  seemed  covered with a quite vivid  and palpable
plumage;  you  could only say  that  the sky  was  full of feathers,  and of
feathers that  almost brushed  the face. Across the great part  of the  dome
they  were  grey, with the  strangest tints  of  violet  and  mauve  and  an
unnatural pink  or  pale green;  but towards  the west the whole  grew  past
description, transparent and  passionate, and the  last red-hot plumes of it
covered up  the sun  like  something too good to be  seen. The whole  was so
close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very
empyrean seemed to  be a secret. It expressed that  splendid smallness which
is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.
     I  say that there are some  inhabitants who may remember the evening if
only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it because it
marked the first appearance in the place of the second poet of Saffron Park.
For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had reigned without a rival; it
was upon the  night of the sunset that his solitude suddenly ended. The  new
poet, who  introduced  himself by  the  name  of  Gabriel Syme  was  a  very
mild-looking mortal,  with a fair, pointed beard and faint, yellow hair. But
an impression  grew that he was less  meek than he looked. He signalised his
entrance by  differing with the  established poet,  Gregory,  upon the whole
nature of poetry. He  said that he (Syme) was poet  of law, a poet of order;
nay,  he said he was a poet  of respectability. So all  the  Saffron Parkers
looked at him as if he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky.
     In  fact,  Mr.  Lucian Gregory, the anarchic  poet, connected  the  two
events.
     "It may well be," he said, in  his sudden lyrical manner, "it may  well
be on such a night of clouds and cruel  colours that there is  brought forth
upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say  you are a poet
of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not
comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden."
     The man with the meek  blue  eyes and the pale,  pointed  beard endured
these thunders with a certain submissive solemnity.  The third party of  the
group, Gregory's sister Rosamond,  who had her brother's braids of red hair,
but a kindlier face underneath them, laughed with such mixture of admiration
and disapproval as she gave commonly to the family oracle.
     Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.
     "An  artist  is  identical with  an anarchist," he  cried.  "You  might
transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist  is an artist. The man who throws
a bomb is  an artist, because he prefers a great  moment  to  everything. He
sees  how much  more valuable is  one burst of  blazing light, one  peal  of
perfect thunder, than  the mere common  bodies of a few shapeless policemen.
An artist  disregards  all governments, abolishes all  conventions. The poet
delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the
world would be the Underground Railway."
     "So it is," said Mr. Syme.
     "Nonsense!  " said  Gregory,  who  was  very rational when anyone  else
attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway  trains
look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because
they know  that the train  is  going  right. It is  because they  know  that
whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will  reach.  It
is  because after they  have passed  Sloane Square they  know that the  next
station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria.  Oh, their wild rapture!
oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station
were unaccountably Baker Street!"
     "It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say
of  clerks  is true, they can  only be as prosaic as your  poetry. The rare,
strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We
feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it
not also  epical when  man with one wild engine strikes  a  distant station?
Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker
Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his  whole magic is in this,
that  he does say Victoria,  and lo! it is Victoria.  No, take your books of
mere  poetry and prose; let me read  a time table, with tears of pride. Take
your Byron, who  commemorates  the  defeats of man; give  me  Bradshaw,  who
commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"
     "Must you go?" inquired Gregory sarcastically.
     "I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes
in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers,  and that  man has
won a battle against chaos.  You say contemptuously that  when one has  left
Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one  might do a thousand
things instead,  and that whenever I  really come there I have  the sense of
hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,'
it  is not  an unmeaning word. It  is to me  the cry of a  herald announcing
conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam."
     Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.
     "And even then,"  he said, "we poets always ask the question, 'And what
is  Victoria now that you have got there ?'  You think  Victoria is like the
New Jerusalem. We  know that  the New Jerusalem will only  be like Victoria.
Yes, the  poet will be  discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet
is always in revolt."
     "There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being
in revolt ? You might as well say that it  is poetical to be sea-sick. Being
sick is a revolt. Both being sick and  being rebellious may be the wholesome
thing on  certain desperate occasions; but  I'm hanged if I can see why they
are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is--revolting. It's mere vomiting."
     The girl  winced for a flash at  the unpleasant word, but  Syme was too
hot to heed her.
     "It  is  things  going  right,"  he cried,  "that  is  poetical  I  Our
digestions, for  instance,  going sacredly and  silently right,  that is the
foundation of all  poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical  than
the flowers,  more poetical than the stars-- the  most poetical thing in the
world is not being sick."
     "Really," said Gregory superciliously, "the examples you choose--"
     "I beg your pardon," said  Syme grimly, "I  forgot we had abolished all
conventions."
     For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory's forehead.
     "You don't expect me,"  he said, "to revolutionise society on this lawn
?"
     Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
     "No, I don't,"  he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious  about
your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do."
     Gregory's big bull's eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion,
and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.
     "Don't  you think, then,"  he said  in a  dangerous voice,  "that I  am
serious about my anarchism?"
     "I beg your pardon ?" said Syme.
     "Am I  not serious about my anarchism ?" cried  Gregory,  with  knotted
fists.
     "My dear fellow!" said Syme, and strolled away.
     With surprise,  but with a curious pleasure, he found  Rosamond Gregory
still in his company.
     "Mr. Syme," she  said, "do the people who talk like you and my  brother
often mean what they say ? Do you mean what you say now ?"
     Syme smiled.
     "Do you ?" he asked.
     "What do you mean ?" asked the girl, with grave eyes.
     "My dear Miss  Gregory,"  said Syme gently,  "there  are many  kinds of
sincerity and insincerity. When  you  say 'thank  you' for the salt,  do you
mean what  you say ? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean what
you say ?  No. It is true,  but you don't mean it. Now, sometimes a man like
your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth,
quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but  then he says more than he means--from sheer
force of meaning it."
     She was looking at him  from under level brows; her  face was grave and
open,  and  there  had  fallen  upon  it  the  shadow  of  that  unreasoning
responsibility  which is  at the  bottom of the  most  frivolous woman,  the
maternal watch which is as old as the world.
     "Is he really an anarchist, then?" she asked.
     "Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense."
     She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--
     "He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"
     Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.
     "Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."
     And at that the  corners  of her own mouth broke into a smile, and  she
thought with  a simultaneous  pleasure  of  Gregory's absurdity  and of  his
safety.
     Syme  strolled with  her  to a seat in  the corner of  the garden,  and
continued to pour out his  opinions. For  he was a sincere man, and in spite
of his superficial airs  and graces, at root a humble  one. And it is always
the humble  man who  talks too  much;  the  proud  man watches  himself  too
closely. He defended  respectability with violence and exaggeration. He grew
passionate in his praise of tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a
smell  of lilac all round him.  Once he  heard  very faintly in some distant
street a barrel-organ begin to  play, and it seemed  to him that his  heroic
words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.
     He stared  and  talked at the girl's red hair and  amused face for what
seemed  to  be a  few minutes; and  then, feeling that  the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his  astonishment, he  discovered the
whole garden empty. Everyone  had gone  long ago, and he went himself with a
rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which
he could  not afterwards explain. In the  wild events  which were to  follow
this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale  was
over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she  kept  recurring like a motive
in music through all  his mad  adventures afterwards,  and the glory of  her
strange  hair  ran  like  a  red  thread through those  dark  and  ill-drawn
tapestries of the  night. For what followed was so improbable, that it might
well have been a dream.
     When Syme went out  into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty.  Then  he  realised (in some  odd way) that the silence  was rather a
living  silence than a  dead one. Directly outside the  door  stood a street
lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence
behind him. About a foot from the  lamp-post stood  a figure almost as rigid
and motionless as  the lamp-post itself.  The  tall  hat and long frock coat
were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe
of fiery hair  against  the light, and  also  something  aggressive  in  the
attitude, proclaimed that it was  the poet Gregory. He had  something of the
look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.
     He made  a sort of  doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat  more formally
returned.
     "I was  waiting  for  you," said  Gregory.  "Might I  have  a  moment's
conversation?"
     "Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
     Gregory struck  out with his  stick at the lamp-post,  and then at  the
tree. "About  this and this,"  he cried; "about order  and anarchy. There is
your precious  order, that  lean, iron lamp,  ugly and barren; and  there is
anarchy, rich,  living, reproducing itself--there  is anarchy,  splendid  in
green and gold."
     "All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at  present you  only see
the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp
by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said, "But may I ask if you
have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our little argument?"
     "No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the  street, "I  did
not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."
     The silence  fell  again,  and  Syme,  though  he  understood  nothing,
listened instinctively  for  something  serious. Gregory  began in  a smooth
voice and with a rather bewildering smile.
     "Mr.  Syme,"  he said, "this evening you succeeded  in doing  something
rather remarkable. You did something  to  me  that no  man born of woman has
ever succeeded in doing before."
     "Indeed!"
     "Now  I  remember,"  resumed Gregory  reflectively, "one  other  person
succeeded  in  doing it. The  captain of  a penny  steamer  (if  I  remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."
     "I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.
     "I am afraid  my fury and your insult are  too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel could wipe it out.
If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one way by which
that  insult  can be  erased,  and that way  I choose. I  am going,  at  the
possible sacrifice  of  my life and honour,  to prove to  you  that you were
wrong in what you said."
     "In what I said?"
     "You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."
     "There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never doubted
that you  were  perfectly  sincere in  this sense, that you thought what you
said well worth saying,  that you thought a  paradox might  wake men up to a
neglected truth."
     Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.
     "And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You  think me
a flaneur  who lets  fall occasional  truths.  You do not  think  that in  a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."
     Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.
     "Serious! " he cried.  "Good Lord!  is this  street  serious? Are these
damned  Chinese lanterns  serious? Is the  whole caboodle serious? One comes
here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps  some sense as well, but I should
think very  little of  a  man who didn't keep something in the background of
his  life that  was  more  serious  than all  this talking-- something  more
serious, whether it was religion or only drink."
     "Very well," said Gregory, his face darkening, "you shall see something
more serious than either drink or religion."
     Syme  stood  waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory again
opened his lips.
     "You spoke just  now of having a religion. Is  it really  true that you
have one?"
     "Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now."
     "Then may I ask you to swear by  whatever gods or saints  your religion
involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son
of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you  swear that! If you will
take upon yourself this awful abnegations if you will consent to burden your
soul  with a vow that you should never make and a knowledge you should never
dream about, I will promise you in return--"
     "You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused.
     "I will promise you  a very  entertaining evening." Syme  suddenly took
off his hat.
     "Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that
a poet is  always an  anarchist. I  disagree; but I hope at least that he is
always a sportsman. Permit  me, here and now, to swear  as a Christian,  and
promise  as  a  good  comrade  and a fellow-artist, that I  will not  report
anything of  this, whatever it is,  to the police.  And  now, in the name of
Colney Hatch, what is it?"
     "I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will call  a
cab."
     He gave two long  whistles, and a hansom came rattling down  the  road.
The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the trap the address of
an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank of  the river. The  cab whisked
itself  away  again, and in  it these two fantastics quitted their fantastic
town.


        CHAPTER II. THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME

     THE cab pulled up  before  a  particularly dreary and greasy  beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly  conducted his companion. They  seated themselves
in a close and dim  sort of bar-parlour, at a stained  wooden table with one
wooden leg. The room was so small and dark, that very little  could be  seen
of  the  attendant who was summoned, beyond  a vague and dark  impression of
something bulky and bearded.
     "Will you take a little supper?" asked Gregory politely.  "The  pate de
foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."
     Syme received  the remark with stolidity, imagining  it  to be  a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference--
     "Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."
     To  his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly, sir!"
and went away apparently to get it.
     "What  will you drink?"  resumed  Gregory, with  the same  careless yet
apologetic air. "I shall only have a  crepe de menthe myself; I have  dined.
But  the champagne can  really  be  trusted.  Do  let  me start  you  with a
half-bottle of Pommery at least?"
     "Thank you!" said the motionless Syme. "You are very good."
     His  further  attempts   at   conversation,  somewhat  disorganised  in
themselves,  were  cut  short  finally as  by a thunderbolt  by  the  actual
appearance of the  lobster. Syme tasted it, and found  it particularly good.
Then he suddenly began to eat with great rapidity and appetite.
     "Excuse me if I  enjoy myself  rather  obviously!" he said to  Gregory,
smiling. "I  don't often have  the luck to have a dream like this. It is new
to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the other way."
     "You  are not asleep, I assure you,"  said  Gregory. "You  are,  on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your existence. Ah,
here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be a slight disproportion,
let us say, between the  inner arrangements of this excellent hotel and  its
simple and unpretentious  exterior. But that is all our modesty. We are  the
most modest men that ever lived on earth."
     "And who are we?" asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.
     "It is quite simple," replied Gregory. "We are the serious  anarchists,
in whom you do not believe."
     "Oh!" said Syme shortly. "You do yourselves well in drinks."
     "Yes, we are serious about everything," answered Gregory.
     Then after a pause he added--
     "If in a  few  moments this table begins to turn round  a little, don't
put  it down  to  your inroads into the  champagne.  I don't wish you to  do
yourself an injustice."
     "Well, if I am not drunk,  I am mad,"  replied  Syme with perfect calm;
"but  I  trust  I can behave  like  a  gentleman  in either condition. May I
smoke?"
     "Certainly!" said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. "Try one of mine."
     Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out of his
waistcoat pocket, put it in  his mouth, lit it slowly, and  let  out  a long
cloud  of smoke. It is not a  little to his credit that he  performed  these
rites with so much composure, for almost before he had  begun them the table
at which he sat had begun to revolve, first  slowly, and then rapidly, as if
at an insane seance.
     "You must not mind it," said Gregory; "it's a kind of screw."
     "Quite so," said Syme placidly, "a kind of screw. How simple that is!"
     The next moment the smoke of his cigar,  which had been wavering across
the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a factory chimney, and
the two, with their chairs and table, shot down through  the floor as if the
earth  had swallowed them. They went rattling down a kind of roaring chimney
as rapidly  as a lift cut loose,  and they came with an  abrupt bump  to the
bottom.  But  when Gregory  threw  open  a pair of doors  and let  in a  red
subterranean  light, Syme  was  still  smoking with one leg thrown  over the
other, and had not turned a yellow hair.
     Gregory led  him down a  low, vaulted passage, at the end of  which was
the  red light. It was an  enormous  crimson lantern,  nearly as  big  as  a
fireplace, fixed over  a small but heavy  iron door. In the door there was a
sort of hatchway or grating,  and on this Gregory struck five times. A heavy
voice with a  foreign accent asked  him who he was. To this he gave the more
or less  unexpected  reply, "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." The heavy hinges began
to move; it was obviously some kind of password.
     Inside  the  doorway the passage  gleamed  as if  it were  lined with a
network of steel. On a  second glance, Syme  saw that the glittering pattern
was really  made up  of  ranks  and ranks  of rifles and revolvers,  closely
packed or interlocked.
     "I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities," said Gregory; "we
have to be very strict here."
     "Oh, don't apologise," said  Syme.  "I  know your passion for  law  and
order,"  and he stepped into the passage lined with the  steel weapons. With
his  long, fair hair  and rather foppish frock-coat, he looked  a singularly
frail and fanciful figure as he walked down that shining avenue of death.
     They passed through several such passages, and  came out at last into a
queer  steel chamber with curved  walls,  almost  spherical  in  shape,  but
presenting,  with its tiers of benches,  something  of  the appearance of  a
scientific  lecture-theatre.  There  were  no  rifles  or  pistols  in  this
apartment,  but  round the walls  of it were hung more dubious and  dreadful
shapes,  things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants,  or  the  eggs of
iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself seemed like the inside
of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.
     "And  now,  my dear  Mr. Syme,"  said  Gregory,  throwing himself in an
expansive manner on  the  bench under  the largest bomb, "now  we are  quite
cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give you any notion of
why I brought you here. It was one of those quite  arbitrary emotions,  like
jumping off a cliff  or falling in love. Suffice it  to say that you were an
inexpressibly irritating  fellow,  and, to do you justice, you  are still. I
would break twenty oaths of secrecy  for  the pleasure of taking you  down a
peg.  That way you have of  lighting  a cigar would make a  priest break the
seal of confession. Well,  you said that you were quite certain  I was not a
serious anarchist. Does this place strike you as being serious?"
     "It does  seem  to have a moral under  all its gaiety," assented  Syme;
"but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me  information,
because, as you remember, you  very wisely extorted from me a promise not to
tell  the  police,  a promise I shall  certainly keep.  So  it  is  in  mere
curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is it really all about?
What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?"
     "To  abolish God!" said  Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do
not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of
anarchism does exist, but it is a mere  branch of the Nonconformists. We dig
deeper  and  we  blow  you  higher.  We  wish to  deny all  those  arbitrary
distinctions of  vice  and  virtue, honour and  treachery,  upon which  mere
rebels base themselves. The  silly sentimentalists of  the French Revolution
talked  of the Rights  of Man! We hate Rights as  we  hate Wrongs.  We  have
abolished Right and Wrong."
     "And  Right and Left," said  Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope  you
will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
     "You spoke of a second question," snapped Gregory.
     "With  pleasure,"  resumed  Syme.  "In   all  your   present  acts  and
surroundings  there  is a scientific  attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt who
lived over  a  shop, but this is  the first time  I have found people living
from preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron door. You cannot
pass  it  without submitting  to  the humiliation  of  calling yourself  Mr.
Chamberlain. You  surround yourself  with  steel  instruments which make the
place, if I  may say so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after
taking  all this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the earth,
you then parade your whole secret by talking  about anarchism to every silly
woman in Saffron Park?"
     Gregory smiled.
     "The answer is simple," he said. "I told you I was a serious anarchist,
and  you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me. Unless I took them into
this infernal room they would not believe me."
     Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory went
on.
     "The history of the  thing might amuse  you," he  said. "When  first  I
became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable disguises.
I dressed up  as  a  bishop. I  read  up all about  bishops in our anarchist
pamphlets,  in  Superstition  the  Vampire and Priests of  Prey. I certainly
understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a
cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When  on my first appearing in
episcopal gaiters in  a  drawing-room I cried out  in  a  voice of  thunder,
'Down! down! presumptuous human reason!' they found out  in  some way that I
was not  a  bishop  at all.  I  was  nabbed at once.  Then  I made  up  as a
millionaire; but I defended  Capital  with  so much intelligence that a fool
could  see that I  was quite  poor. Then I tried  being a major. Now I am  a
humanitarian myself, but I have,  I  hope,  enough intellectual  breadth  to
understand the position of  those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence-- the
proud, mad war  of Nature and all  that, you know.  I threw myself  into the
major.  I drew my sword  and  waved  it constantly.  I  called out  'Blood!'
abstractedly,  like a  man calling  for  wine. I often said, 'Let  the  weak
perish;  it  is the Law.' Well, well, it  seems majors don't do  this. I was
nabbed  again.  At  last I went in despair to  the President of the  Central
Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe."
     "What is his name?" asked Syme.
     "You  would not know it,"  answered  Gregory.  "That is his  greatness.
Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of,  and they were
heard of.  He puts  all his genius  into not being  heard of,  and he is not
heard  of. But  you cannot be for five minutes in  the room with him without
feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children in his hands."
     He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed--
     "But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an
epigram, and yet as  practical as the Bank of England. I said  to him, 'What
disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find  more respectable than
bishops and majors?' He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face.
'You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you
harmless;  a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?' I nodded. He
suddenly lifted  his lion's voice. 'Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you
fool!'  he roared so that the room shook. 'Nobody will ever expect you to do
anything dangerous then.' And he turned his broad back on me without another
word. I took his advice, and  have never regretted it.  I preached blood and
murder to those women day and night, and--by God!-- they would let  me wheel
their perambulators."
     Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.
     "You took me in," he said. "It is really a smart dodge."
     Then after a pause he added--
     "What do you call this tremendous President of yours?"
     "We generally call him Sunday,"  replied Gregory  with simplicity. 'You
see, there are seven members of  the Central Anarchist Council, and they are
named after days  of the week. He is called Sunday, by some of  his admirers
Bloody Sunday. It is curious you should mention the matter, because the very
night you have dropped in (if I may so express it) is the night on which our
London branch, which assembles in this room, has to  elect its own deputy to
fill  a  vacancy in the  Council.  The gentleman who has for some  time past
played, with propriety and general applause, the difficult part of Thursday,
has died  quite suddenly.  Consequently, we  have called a meeting this very
evening to elect a successor."
     He  got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of smiling
embarrassment.
     "I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme," he continued casually.
"I feel that I  can confide anything to  you, as you  have  promised to tell
nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something  that I would not say in so
many words to the anarchists  who  will  be coming to the room in about  ten
minutes. We  shall,  of course, go through a form  of  election; but I don't
mind telling you that it is practically certain what the result will be." He
looked  down for  a moment modestly. "It is almost a settled thing that I am
to be Thursday."
     "My dear  fellow."  said Syme  heartily, "I congratulate you.  A  great
career!"
     Gregory smiled in  deprecation,  and  walked across  the  room, talking
rapidly.
     "As  a matter of  fact, everything is ready for me on  this table,"  he
said, "and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible."
     Syme also  strolled  across to the  table, and found  lying across it a
walking-stick, which turned out on  examination to be a sword-stick, a large
Colt's revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of brandy. Over the
chair, beside the table, was thrown a heavy-looking cape or cloak.
     "I have only  to get the form of election  finished," continued Gregory
with  animation, "then  I snatch up this cloak  and stick, stuff these other
things into my pocket, step out of a door in this cavern, which opens on the
river,  where   there   is  a  steam-tug  already  waiting   for   me,   and
then--then--oh, the wild joy of being Thursday!" And he clasped his hands.
     Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual  insolent languor,  got
to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.
     "Why is  it,"  he asked vaguely, "that I think you  are quite  a decent
fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?" He paused a moment, and then
added with a sort of fresh curiosity, "Is it because you are such an ass?"
     There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out--
     "Well, damn it all!  this is the funniest situation I have ever been in
in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave you a promise
before I  came  into this place. That  promise  I  would keep  under red-hot
pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise  of the same
kind? "
     "A promise?" asked Gregory, wondering.
     "Yes," said Syme very seriously, "a promise. I swore before God  that I
would not tell your secret to the police.  Will you swear  by  Humanity,  or
whatever beastly thing  you believe in,  that you will not tell my secret to
the anarchists?"
     "Your secret?" asked the staring Gregory. "Have you got a secret?"
     "Yes,"  said  Syme,  "I have a secret." Then after a pause,  "Will  you
swear?"
     Gregory  glared  at  him  gravely  for  a few  moments,  and then  said
abruptly--
     "You must have bewitched me, but I feel  a furious curiosity about you.
Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything  you tell me. But look
sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes."
     Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his  long, white hands into his
long, grey trousers' pockets. Almost as he did so  there came five knocks on
the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators.
     "Well," said Syme slowly, "I don't know how to tell you  the truth more
shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless poet
is not confined to you or your President.  We have known the dodge  for some
time at Scotland Yard."
     Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.
     "What do you say?" he asked in an inhuman voice.
     "Yes," said Syme simply,  "I am a police detective. But I  think I hear
your friends coming."
     From  the doorway  there came a murmur  of "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." It
was  repeated  twice and  thrice, and then  thirty times,  and the  crowd of
Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought)  could be heard  trampling  down  the
corridor.


        CHAPTER III. THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

     BEFORE one of the fresh faces could  appear  at  the doorway, Gregory's
stunned surprise had fallen  from him. He was beside the table with a bound,
and  a  noise in his  throat  like  a wild  beast.  He caught  up the Colt's
revolver and took aim at Syme. Syme did not flinch, but he put up a pale and
polite hand.
     "Don't be such a silly man," he said, with the  effeminate dignity of a
curate. "Don't you see it's not necessary? Don't you see  that we're both in
the same boat? Yes, and jolly sea-sick."
     Gregory could not speak, but he could not fire  either,  and he  looked
his question.
     "Don't you see we've checkmated each other?" cried Syme. "I can't  tell
the  police  you are  an  anarchist.  You can't  tell  the anarchists  I'm a
policeman. I can  only watch you, knowing  what you  are; you can only watch
me,  knowing what I am. In short,  it's a lonely, intellectual duel, my head
against yours. I'm a policeman deprived of the help of the  police.  You, my
poor  fellow,  are  an  anarchist  deprived  of  the  help  of that  law and
organisation which  is so essential to anarchy. The  one solitary difference
is  in your favour. You are not  surrounded  by inquisitive policemen; I  am
surrounded by inquisitive  anarchists.  I cannot betray  you,  but  I  might
betray myself. Come, come! wait and see me betray myself. I  shall  do it so
nicely."
     Gregory put the pistol slowly down, still staring at Syme as if he were
a sea-monster.
     "I don't believe in immortality," he  said at  last, "but if, after all
this, you were to break your word, God would make a hell  only  for  you, to
howl in for ever."
     "I  shall  not break my word," said  Syme  sternly, "nor will you break
yours. Here are your friends."
     The mass of the anarchists entered the room heavily,  with  a slouching
and  somewhat  weary  gait;  but  one little  man,  with a black  beard  and
glasses-- a man somewhat of the type of Mr. Tim Healy--detached himself, and
bustled forward with some papers in his hand.
     "Comrade Gregory," he said, "I suppose this man is a delegate?"
     Gregory, taken by surprise, looked  down and muttered the name of Syme;
but Syme replied almost pertly--
     "I am glad to see that your gate is well enough guarded to make it hard
for anyone to be here who was not a delegate."
     The brow  of  the little man with the black beard  was,  however, still
contracted with something like suspicion.
     "What branch do you represent?" he asked sharply.
     "I should hardly call it a branch," said Syme, laughing; "I should call
it at the very least a root."
     "What do you mean?"
     "The  fact is," said Syme serenely, "the truth is I am a Sabbatarian. I
have been  specially sent here  to see  that  you  show a due  observance of
Sunday."
     The little man dropped one of his papers, and a flicker  of  fear  went
over all the faces of  the group. Evidently  the awful President, whose name
was  Sunday,  did sometimes send down  such  irregular ambassadors  to  such
branch meetings.
     "Well, comrade," said the man with the papers after a pause, "I suppose
we'd better give you a seat in the meeting?"
     "If you ask my advice  as a friend," said Syme with severe benevolence,
"I think you'd better."
     When Gregory heard the dangerous dialogue end, with a sudden safety for
his rival, he rose abruptly and paced the floor in painful thought.  He was,
indeed, in  an  agony  of  diplomacy. It  was  clear  that  Syme's  inspired
impudence  was  likely to bring him out of all  merely accidental  dilemmas.
Little  was to be hoped from them.  He could not himself betray Syme, partly
from honour, but partly also because, if he betrayed him and for some reason
failed to destroy him, the Syme who escaped would  be a Syme freed  from all
obligation of secrecy, a Syme who  would simply  walk  to the nearest police
station.  After  all,  it  was  only  one  night's  discussion, and only one
detective  who would know of  it. He would  let out as little as possible of
their plans that night, and then let Syme go, and chance it.
     He  strode  across  to  the  group  of anarchists,  which  was  already
distributing itself along the benches.
     "I  think it is time  we began,"  he said; "the steam-tug is waiting on
the river already. I move that Comrade Buttons takes the chair."
     This being approved  by a show of hands, the little man with the papers
slipped into the presidential seat.
     "Comrades,"  he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, "our meeting 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