The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
“The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with a
personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best
symbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers of
the Christians. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even
so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man’s brain is a
bomb,” he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and
striking his own skull with violence. “My brain feels like a bomb,
night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must
expand, if it breaks up the universe.”
“I don’t want the universe broken up just yet,” drawled the Marquis. “I
want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one
yesterday in bed.”
“No, if the only end of the thing is nothing,” said Dr. Bull with his
sphinx-like smile, “it hardly seems worth doing.”
The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.
“Every man knows in his heart,” he said, “that nothing is worth doing.”
There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said—
“We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is how
Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all agree with the
original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I should
suggest that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to—”
The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday
had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.
“Before we discuss that,” he said in a small, quiet voice, “let us go
into a private room. I have something very particular to say.”
Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had come
at last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he could
hear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright,
was cold.
A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial
tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle.
He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from
nowhere. That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the
vulgarity, and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those
unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of
Christendom. His youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his
mind; he did not think of himself as the representative of the corps of
gentlemen turned into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who
lived in the dark room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of
all these common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched
into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in
being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above
the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at least, he looked down
upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the
commonplace. He felt towards them all that unconscious and elementary
superiority that a brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man
over powerful errors. He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor
the physical strength of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded
it no more than the fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a
horn on his nose like a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate
certainty that the President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was
right. There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism
in the song of Roland—
“Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit,”
which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.
This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a
quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the
barrel-organ could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This
very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to
miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into
their dark room and die for something that they could not even
understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the
energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear
deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the
drums of the pride of death.
The conspirators were already filing through the open window and into
the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his
brain and body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them
down an irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and
into a dim, cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an
abandoned boardroom. When they were all in, he closed and locked the
door.
The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed bursting
with inarticulate grievance.
“Zso! Zso!” he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish
accent becoming almost impenetrable. “You zay you nod ’ide. You zay you
show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you
run yourselves in a dark box!”
The President seemed to take the foreigner’s incoherent satire with
entire good humour.
“You can’t get hold of it yet, Gogol,” he said in a fatherly way. “When
once they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will not
care where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should have
had the whole staff at the keyhole. You don’t seem to know anything
about mankind.”
“I die for zem,” cried the Pole in thick excitement, “and I slay zare
oppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite ze
tyrant in ze open square.”
“I see, I see,” said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himself
at the top of a long table. “You die for mankind first, and then you
get up and smite their oppressors. So that’s all right. And now may I
ask you to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the
other gentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning
something intelligent is going to be said.”
Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the original
summons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling in his brown
beard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion of
the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feeling
of a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, of
making a good speech.
“Comrades,” said the President, suddenly rising, “we have spun out this
farce long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something so
simple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to our
levities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we
were discussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying
anything else, that those plans and places should not be voted by this
meeting, but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable
member. I suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull.”
They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for the
next words, though not loud, had a living and sensational emphasis.
Sunday struck the table.
“Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at this
meeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to do must be
mentioned in this company.”
Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers; but it seemed
as if he had never really astonished them until now. They all moved
feverishly in their seats, except Syme. He sat stiff in his, with his
hand in his pocket, and on the handle of his loaded revolver. When the
attack on him came he would sell his life dear. He would find out at
least if the President was mortal.
Sunday went on smoothly—
“You will probably understand that there is only one possible motive
for forbidding free speech at this festival of freedom. Strangers
overhearing us matters nothing. They assume that we are joking. But
what would matter, even unto death, is this, that there should be one
actually among us who is not of us, who knows our grave purpose, but
does not share it, who—”
The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.
“It can’t be!” he cried, leaping. “There can’t—”
The President flapped his large flat hand on the table like the fin of
some huge fish.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “there is a spy in this room. There is a traitor
at this table. I will waste no more words. His name—”
Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.
“His name is Gogol,” said the President. “He is that hairy humbug over
there who pretends to be a Pole.”
Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the same flash
three men sprang at his throat. Even the Professor made an effort to
rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was blinded with a
beneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat shuddering, in a
palsy of passionate relief.
CHAPTER VII.
THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS
“Sit down!” said Sunday in a voice that he used once or twice in his
life, a voice that made men drop drawn swords.
The three who had risen fell away from Gogol, and that equivocal person
himself resumed his seat.
“Well, my man,” said the President briskly, addressing him as one
addresses a total stranger, “will you oblige me by putting your hand in
your upper waistcoat pocket and showing me what you have there?”
The alleged Pole was a little pale under his tangle of dark hair, but
he put two fingers into the pocket with apparent coolness and pulled
out a blue strip of card. When Syme saw it lying on the table, he woke
up again to the world outside him. For although the card lay at the
other extreme of the table, and he could read nothing of the
inscription on it, it bore a startling resemblance to the blue card in
his own pocket, the card which had been given to him when he joined the
anti-anarchist constabulary.
“Pathetic Slav,” said the President, “tragic child of Poland, are you
prepared in the presence of that card to deny that you are in this
company—shall we say _de trop?_”
“Right oh!” said the late Gogol. It made everyone jump to hear a clear,
commercial and somewhat cockney voice coming out of that forest of
foreign hair. It was irrational, as if a Chinaman had suddenly spoken
with a Scotch accent.
“I gather that you fully understand your position,” said Sunday.
“You bet,” answered the Pole. “I see it’s a fair cop. All I say is, I
don’t believe any Pole could have imitated my accent like I did his.”
“I concede the point,” said Sunday. “I believe your own accent to be
inimitable, though I shall practise it in my bath. Do you mind leaving
your beard with your card?”
“Not a bit,” answered Gogol; and with one finger he ripped off the
whole of his shaggy head-covering, emerging with thin red hair and a
pale, pert face. “It was hot,” he added.
“I will do you the justice to say,” said Sunday, not without a sort of
brutal admiration, “that you seem to have kept pretty cool under it.
Now listen to me. I like you. The consequence is that it would annoy me
for just about two and a half minutes if I heard that you had died in
torments. Well, if you ever tell the police or any human soul about us,
I shall have that two and a half minutes of discomfort. On your
discomfort I will not dwell. Good day. Mind the step.”
The red-haired detective who had masqueraded as Gogol rose to his feet
without a word, and walked out of the room with an air of perfect
nonchalance. Yet the astonished Syme was able to realise that this ease
was suddenly assumed; for there was a slight stumble outside the door,
which showed that the departing detective had not minded the step.
“Time is flying,” said the President in his gayest manner, after
glancing at his watch, which like everything about him seemed bigger
than it ought to be. “I must go off at once; I have to take the chair
at a Humanitarian meeting.”