The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

  CHAPTER XI. THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE

  SYME put the field-glasses from his eyes with an almost ghastly relief.

  "The President is not with them, anyhow," he said, and wiped hisforehead.

  "But surely they are right away on the horizon," said the bewilderedColonel, blinking and but half recovered from Bull's hasty though politeexplanation. "Could you possibly know your President among all thosepeople?"

  "Could I know a white elephant among all those people!" answered Symesomewhat irritably. "As you very truly say, they are on the horizon;but if he were walking with them... by God! I believe this ground wouldshake."

  After an instant's pause the new man called Ratcliffe said with gloomydecision--

  "Of course the President isn't with them. I wish to Gemini he were. Muchmore likely the President is riding in triumph through Paris, or sittingon the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral."

  "This is absurd!" said Syme. "Something may have happened in ourabsence; but he cannot have carried the world with a rush like that. Itis quite true," he added, frowning dubiously at the distant fields thatlay towards the little station, "it is certainly true that there seemsto be a crowd coming this way; but they are not all the army that youmake out."

  "Oh, they," said the new detective contemptuously; "no they are not avery valuable force. But let me tell you frankly that they are preciselycalculated to our value--we are not much, my boy, in Sunday's universe.He has got hold of all the cables and telegraphs himself. But to killthe Supreme Council he regards as a trivial matter, like a post card; itmay be left to his private secretary," and he spat on the grass.

  Then he turned to the others and said somewhat austerely--

  "There is a great deal to be said for death; but if anyone has anypreference for the other alternative, I strongly advise him to walkafter me."

  With these words, he turned his broad back and strode with silent energytowards the wood. The others gave one glance over their shoulders, andsaw that the dark cloud of men had detached itself from the stationand was moving with a mysterious discipline across the plain. They sawalready, even with the naked eye, black blots on the foremost faces,which marked the masks they wore. They turned and followed their leader,who had already struck the wood, and disappeared among the twinklingtrees.

  The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood theyhad a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool. Theinside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows.They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the dizziness of acinematograph. Even the solid figures walking with him Syme could hardlysee for the patterns of sun and shade that danced upon them. Now a man'shead was lit as with a light of Rembrandt, leaving all else obliterated;now again he had strong and staring white hands with the face of anegro. The ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, andthe black shade of the brim cut his face so squarely in two that itseemed to be wearing one of the black half-masks of their pursuers. Thefancy tinted Syme's overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask?Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery,in which men's faces turned black and white by turns, in which theirfigures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night,this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside),seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been movingfor three days, this world where men took off their beards and theirspectacles and their noses, and turned into other people. That tragicself-confidence which he had felt when he believed that the Marquis wasa devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the Marquis wasa friend. He felt almost inclined to ask after all these bewildermentswhat was a friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that was apartfrom what it seemed? The Marquis had taken off his nose and turned outto be a detective. Might he not just as well take off his head andturn out to be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like thisbewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything onlya glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. ForGabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what manymodern painters had found there. He had found the thing which themodern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that finalscepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

  As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Symestrove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worst of hisfancies. With two impatient strides he overtook the man in the Marquis'sstraw hat, the man whom he had come to address as Ratcliffe. In a voiceexaggeratively loud and cheerful, he broke the bottomless silence andmade conversation.

  "May I ask," he said, "where on earth we are all going to?"

  So genuine had been the doubts of his soul, that he was quite glad tohear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.

  "We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he said. "Ithink that part of the country is least likely to be with them."

  "What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be running thereal world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, andsurely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern armies and police."

  "Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talkabout mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You'vegot that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come fromthe poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have neverbeen anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there beingsome decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country.The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poorhave sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have alwaysobjected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists,as you can see from the barons' wars."

  "As a lecture on English history for the little ones," said Syme, "thisis all very nice; but I have not yet grasped its application."

  "Its application is," said his informant, "that most of old Sunday'sright-hand men are South African and American millionaires. That is whyhe has got hold of all the communications; and that is why the last fourchampions of the anti-anarchist police force are running through a woodlike rabbits."

  "Millionaires I can understand," said Syme thoughtfully, "they arenearly all mad. But getting hold of a few wicked old gentlemen withhobbies is one thing; getting hold of great Christian nations isanother. I would bet the nose off my face (forgive the allusion) thatSunday would stand perfectly helpless before the task of converting anyordinary healthy person anywhere."

  "Well," said the other, "it rather depends what sort of person youmean."

  "Well, for instance," said Syme, "he could never convert that person,"and he pointed straight in front of him.

  They had come to an open space of sunlight, which seemed to express toSyme the final return of his own good sense; and in the middle of thisforest clearing was a figure that might well stand for that commonsense in an almost awful actuality. Burnt by the sun and stained withperspiration, and grave with the bottomless gravity of small necessarytoils, a heavy French peasant was cutting wood with a hatchet. His cartstood a few yards off, already half full of timber; and the horse thatcropped the grass was, like his master, valorous but not desperate; likehis master, he was even prosperous, but yet was almost sad. The man wasa Norman, taller than the average of the French and very angular; andhis swarthy figure stood dark against a square of sunlight, almost likesome allegoric figure of labour frescoed on a ground of gold.

  "Mr. Syme is saying," called out Ratcliffe to the French Colonel, "thatthis man, at least, will never be an anarchist."

  "Mr. Syme is right enough there," answered Colonel Ducroix, laughing,"if only for the reason that he has plenty of property to defend. But Iforgot that in your country you are not used to peasants being wealthy."

  "He looks poor," said Dr. Bull doubtfully.

  "Quite so," said the Colonel; "that is why he is rich."

  "I have an idea," called out Dr. Bull suddenly; "h
ow much would he taketo give us a lift in his cart? Those dogs are all on foot, and we couldsoon leave them behind."

  "Oh, give him anything!" said Syme eagerly. "I have piles of money onme."

  "That will never do," said the Colonel; "he will never have any respectfor you unless you drive a bargain."

  "Oh, if he haggles!" began Bull impatiently.

  "He haggles because he is a free man," said the other. "You do notunderstand; he would not see the meaning of generosity. He is not beingtipped."

  And even while they seemed to hear the heavy feet of their strangepursuers behind them, they had to stand and stamp while the FrenchColonel talked to the French wood-cutter with all the leisurely badinageand bickering of market-day. At the end of the four minutes, however,they saw that the Colonel was right, for the wood-cutter entered intotheir plans, not with the vague servility of a tout too-well paid, butwith the seriousness of a solicitor who had been paid the proper fee. Hetold them that the best thing they could do was to make their way downto the little inn on the hills above Lancy, where the innkeeper, an oldsoldier who had become devout in his latter years, would be certain tosympathise with them, and even to take risks in their support. The wholecompany, therefore, piled themselves on top of the stacks of wood, andwent rocking in the rude cart down the other and steeper side of thewoodland. Heavy and ramshackle as was the vehicle, it was driven quicklyenough, and they soon had the exhilarating impression of distancingaltogether those, whoever they were, who were hunting them. For, afterall, the riddle as to where the anarchists had got all these followerswas still unsolved. One man's presence had sufficed for them; they hadfled at the first sight of the deformed smile of the Secretary. Symeevery now and then looked back over his shoulder at the army on theirtrack.

  As the wood grew first thinner and then smaller with distance, he couldsee the sunlit slopes beyond it and above it; and across these wasstill moving the square black mob like one monstrous beetle. In the verystrong sunlight and with his own very strong eyes, which were almosttelescopic, Syme could see this mass of men quite plainly. He could seethem as separate human figures; but he was increasingly surprised by theway in which they moved as one man. They seemed to be dressed in darkclothes and plain hats, like any common crowd out of the streets; butthey did not spread and sprawl and trail by various lines to the attack,as would be natural in an ordinary mob. They moved with a sort ofdreadful and wicked woodenness, like a staring army of automatons.

  Syme pointed this out to Ratcliffe.

  "Yes," replied the policeman, "that's discipline. That's Sunday. He isperhaps five hundred miles off, but the fear of him is on all of them,like the finger of God. Yes, they are walking regularly; and you betyour boots that they are talking regularly, yes, and thinking regularly.But the one important thing for us is that they are disappearingregularly."

  Syme nodded. It was true that the black patch of the pursuing men wasgrowing smaller and smaller as the peasant belaboured his horse.

  The level of the sunlit landscape, though flat as a whole, fell away onthe farther side of the wood in billows of heavy slope towards thesea, in a way not unlike the lower slopes of the Sussex downs. Theonly difference was that in Sussex the road would have been broken andangular like a little brook, but here the white French road fell sheerin front of them like a waterfall. Down this direct descent the cartclattered at a considerable angle, and in a few minutes, the roadgrowing yet steeper, they saw below them the little harbour of Lancy anda great blue arc of the sea. The travelling cloud of their enemies hadwholly disappeared from the horizon.

  The horse and cart took a sharp turn round a clump of elms, and thehorse's nose nearly struck the face of an old gentleman who was sittingon the benches outside the little cafe of "Le Soleil d'Or." Thepeasant grunted an apology, and got down from his seat. The others alsodescended one by one, and spoke to the old gentleman with fragmentaryphrases of courtesy, for it was quite evident from his expansive mannerthat he was the owner of the little tavern.

  He was a white-haired, apple-faced old boy, with sleepy eyes and a greymoustache; stout, sedentary, and very innocent, of a type that mayoften be found in France, but is still commoner in Catholic Germany.Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer, his flowers, and hisbeehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only when his visitors looked upas they entered the inn-parlour, they saw the sword upon the wall.

  The Colonel, who greeted the innkeeper as an old friend, passed rapidlyinto the inn-parlour, and sat down ordering some ritual refreshment. Themilitary decision of his action interested Syme, who sat next to him,and he took the opportunity when the old innkeeper had gone out ofsatisfying his curiosity.

  "May I ask you, Colonel," he said in a low voice, "why we have comehere?"

  Colonel Ducroix smiled behind his bristly white moustache.

  "For two reasons, sir," he said; "and I will give first, not the mostimportant, but the most utilitarian. We came here because this is theonly place within twenty miles in which we can get horses."

  "Horses!" repeated Syme, looking up quickly.

  "Yes," replied the other; "if you people are really to distance yourenemies it is horses or nothing for you, unless of course you havebicycles and motor-cars in your pocket."

  "And where do you advise us to make for?" asked Syme doubtfully.

  "Beyond question," replied the Colonel, "you had better make all hasteto the police station beyond the town. My friend, whom I seconded undersomewhat deceptive circumstances, seems to me to exaggerate verymuch the possibilities of a general rising; but even he would hardlymaintain, I suppose, that you were not safe with the gendarmes."

  Syme nodded gravely; then he said abruptly--

  "And your other reason for coming here?"

  "My other reason for coming here," said Ducroix soberly, "is that itis just as well to see a good man or two when one is possibly near todeath."

  Syme looked up at the wall, and saw a crudely-painted and patheticreligious picture. Then he said--

  "You are right," and then almost immediately afterwards, "Has anyoneseen about the horses?"

  "Yes," answered Ducroix, "you may be quite certain that I gave ordersthe moment I came in. Those enemies of yours gave no impression ofhurry, but they were really moving wonderfully fast, like a well-trainedarmy. I had no idea that the anarchists had so much discipline. You havenot a moment to waste."

  Almost as he spoke, the old innkeeper with the blue eyes and white haircame ambling into the room, and announced that six horses were saddledoutside.

  By Ducroix's advice the five others equipped themselves with someportable form of food and wine, and keeping their duelling swords as theonly weapons available, they clattered away down the steep, white road.The two servants, who had carried the Marquis's luggage when he was amarquis, were left behind to drink at the cafe by common consent, andnot at all against their own inclination.

  By this time the afternoon sun was slanting westward, and by its raysSyme could see the sturdy figure of the old innkeeper growing smallerand smaller, but still standing and looking after them quite silently,the sunshine in his silver hair. Syme had a fixed, superstitious fancy,left in his mind by the chance phrase of the Colonel, that this wasindeed, perhaps, the last honest stranger whom he should ever see uponthe earth.

  He was still looking at this dwindling figure, which stood as a meregrey blot touched with a white flame against the great green wall of thesteep down behind him. And as he stared over the top of the down behindthe innkeeper, there appeared an army of black-clad and marching men.They seemed to hang above the good man and his house like a black cloudof locusts. The horses had been saddled none too soon.