The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, Page 7

  CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE

  SUCH were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again andagain 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, anothernervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolismalways settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, onthe borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland ofthought. 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, asin some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of theworld he would find something--say a tree--that was more or less than atree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the endof the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself--atower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figuresseemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimatehorizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.

  Talk had been going on steadily as he took in the scene; and not theleast of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was thecontrast between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terriblepurport. They were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediateplot. The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said thatthey were talking about bombs and kings. Only three days afterwards theCzar was to meet the President of the French Republic in Paris, and overtheir bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these beaming gentlemenhad decided how both should die. Even the instrument was chosen; theblack-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the bomb.

  Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objectivecrime would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mysticaltremors. He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving atleast two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and roaringgas. But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel athird kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moralrevulsion or his social responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear tospare for the French President or the Czar; he had begun to fear forhimself. Most of the talkers took little heed of him, debating now withtheir faces closer together, and almost uniformly grave, save when foran instant the smile of the Secretary ran aslant across his face asthe jagged lightning runs aslant across the sky. But there was onepersistent thing which first troubled Syme and at last terrified him.The President was always looking at him, steadily, and with a great andbaffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but his blue eyesstood out of his head. And they were always fixed on Syme.

  Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When thePresident's eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He hadhardly the shred of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary waySunday had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge ofthe balcony, and saw a policeman, standing abstractedly just beneath,staring at the bright railings and the sunlit trees.

  Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment himfor many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men,who were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail andfanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism.He even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had playedtogether when children. But he remembered that he was still tied toGregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thingthat he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised notto jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his coldhand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo ofmoral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made toa villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny asthe square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep hisantiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of thisgreat enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber.Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortablepoliceman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he lookedback at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studyinghim with big, unbearable eyes.

  In all the torrent of his thought there were two thoughts that nevercrossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that thePresident and his Council could crush him if he continued to standalone. The place might be public, the project might seem impossible.But Sunday was not the man who would carry himself thus easily withouthaving, somehow or somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either byanonymous poison or sudden street accident, by hypnotism or by fire fromhell, Sunday could certainly strike him. If he defied the man he wasprobably dead, either struck stiff there in his chair or long afterwardsas by an innocent ailment. If he called in the police promptly, arrestedeveryone, told all, and set against them the whole energy of England, hewould probably escape; certainly not otherwise. They were a balconyfulof gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy square; but he felt nomore safe with them than if they had been a boatful of armed piratesoverlooking an empty sea.

  There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred tohim to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured toa weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in theirallegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might havecalled Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, helooked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction,as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something aboveman, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, withhis large face, which was too frank to be understood. But this was akind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extrememorbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; buthe was not quite coward enough to admire it.

  The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical.Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually and conventionally of the bestthings on the table--cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretarywas a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder overhalf a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The oldProfessor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. Andeven in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of meremass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a frightfulfreshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage factory.Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets or drunk a quartof coffee, he would be found with his great head on one side staring atSyme.

  "I have often wondered," said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of aslice of bread and jam, "whether it wouldn't be better for me to doit with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off witha knife. And it would be a new emotion to get a knife into a FrenchPresident and wriggle it round."

  "You are wrong," said the Secretary, drawing his black brows together."The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel witha personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our bestsymbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers ofthe Christians. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; evenso, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb,"he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking hisown skull with violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. Itmust expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks upthe universe."

  "I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the Marquis."I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of oneyesterday in bed."

  "No, if the only end of the thing is nothing," said Dr. Bull with hissphinx-like smile, "it hardly seems worth doing."

  The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.

  "Every man knows in his heart," he said, "that nothing is worth doing."

  There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said--

  "We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is howWednesday is to strike the blow. I take it w
e should all agree withthe original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I shouldsuggest that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to--"

  The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sundayhad risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.

  "Before we discuss that," he said in a small, quiet voice, "let us gointo a private room. I have something very particular to say."

  Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had comeat last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he couldhear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright,was cold.

  A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovialtune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle.He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came fromnowhere. That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the vulgarity,and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those unclean streetswere all clinging to the decencies and the charities of Christendom. Hisyouthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his mind; he did notthink of himself as the representative of the corps of gentlemen turnedinto fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who lived in the darkroom. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common andkindly people in the street, who every day marched into battle to themusic of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in being human had liftedhim unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous men aroundhim. For an instant, at least, he looked down upon all their sprawlingeccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the commonplace. He felttowards them all that unconscious and elementary superiority that abrave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man over powerful errors.He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor the physical strengthof President Sunday; but in that moment he minded it no more than thefact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a horn on his nose likea rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate certainty that thePresident was wrong and that the barrel-organ was right. There clangedin his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism in the song ofRoland--

  "Pagens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit."

  which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with aquite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the barrel-organcould keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This very pride inkeeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was hislast triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room anddie for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organseemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noisesof a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all thetrumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death.

  The conspirators were already filing through the open window and intothe rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his brainand body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them down anirregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and into a dim,cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an abandoned boardroom.When they were all in, he closed and locked the door.

  The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed burstingwith inarticulate grievance.

  "Zso! Zso!" he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polishaccent becoming almost impenetrable. "You zay you nod 'ide. You zay youshow himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you runyourselves in a dark box!"

  The President seemed to take the foreigner's incoherent satire withentire good humour.

  "You can't get hold of it yet, Gogol," he said in a fatherly way. "Whenonce they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will notcare where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should havehad the whole staff at the keyhole. You don't seem to know anythingabout mankind."

  "I die for zem," cried the Pole in thick excitement, "and I slay zareoppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite zetyrant in ze open square."

  "I see, I see," said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himselfat the top of a long table. "You die for mankind first, and then you getup and smite their oppressors. So that's all right. And now may I askyou to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the othergentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning somethingintelligent is going to be said."

  Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the originalsummons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling in his brownbeard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion ofthe blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feelingof a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, ofmaking a good speech.

  "Comrades," said the President, suddenly rising, "we have spun out thisfarce long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something sosimple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to ourlevities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we werediscussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying anythingelse, that those plans and places should not be voted by this meeting,but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable member. Isuggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull."

  They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for thenext words, though not loud, had a living and sensational emphasis.Sunday struck the table.

  "Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at thismeeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to do must bementioned in this company."

  Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers; but it seemedas if he had never really astonished them until now. They all movedfeverishly in their seats, except Syme. He sat stiff in his, with hishand in his pocket, and on the handle of his loaded revolver. When theattack on him came he would sell his life dear. He would find out atleast if the President was mortal.

  Sunday went on smoothly--

  "You will probably understand that there is only one possible motivefor forbidding free speech at this festival of freedom. Strangersoverhearing us matters nothing. They assume that we are joking. Butwhat would matter, even unto death, is this, that there should be oneactually among us who is not of us, who knows our grave purpose, butdoes not share it, who--"

  The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.

  "It can't be!" he cried, leaping. "There can't--"

  The President flapped his large flat hand on the table like the fin ofsome huge fish.

  "Yes," he said slowly, "there is a spy in this room. There is a traitorat this table. I will waste no more words. His name--"

  Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.

  "His name is Gogol," said the President. "He is that hairy humbug overthere who pretends to be a Pole."

  Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the same flashthree men sprang at his throat. Even the Professor made an effortto rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was blinded with abeneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat shuddering, in apalsy of passionate relief.