The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
The Secretary turned to him with working eyebrows.
“Would it not be better,” he said a little sharply, “to discuss further
the details of our project, now that the spy has left us?”
“No, I think not,” said the President with a yawn like an unobtrusive
earthquake. “Leave it as it is. Let Saturday settle it. I must be off.
Breakfast here next Sunday.”
But the late loud scenes had whipped up the almost naked nerves of the
Secretary. He was one of those men who are conscientious even in crime.
“I must protest, President, that the thing is irregular,” he said. “It
is a fundamental rule of our society that all plans shall be debated in
full council. Of course, I fully appreciate your forethought when in
the actual presence of a traitor—”
“Secretary,” said the President seriously, “if you’d take your head
home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it
might.”
The Secretary reared back in a kind of equine anger.
“I really fail to understand—” he began in high offense.
“That’s it, that’s it,” said the President, nodding a great many times.
“That’s where you fail right enough. You fail to understand. Why, you
dancing donkey,” he roared, rising, “you didn’t want to be overheard by
a spy, didn’t you? How do you know you aren’t overheard now?”
And with these words he shouldered his way out of the room, shaking
with incomprehensible scorn.
Four of the men left behind gaped after him without any apparent
glimmering of his meaning. Syme alone had even a glimmering, and such
as it was it froze him to the bone. If the last words of the President
meant anything, they meant that he had not after all passed
unsuspected. They meant that while Sunday could not denounce him like
Gogol, he still could not trust him like the others.
The other four got to their feet grumbling more or less, and betook
themselves elsewhere to find lunch, for it was already well past
midday. The Professor went last, very slowly and painfully. Syme sat
long after the rest had gone, revolving his strange position. He had
escaped a thunderbolt, but he was still under a cloud. At last he rose
and made his way out of the hotel into Leicester Square. The bright,
cold day had grown increasingly colder, and when he came out into the
street he was surprised by a few flakes of snow. While he still carried
the sword-stick and the rest of Gregory’s portable luggage, he had
thrown the cloak down and left it somewhere, perhaps on the steam-tug,
perhaps on the balcony. Hoping, therefore, that the snow-shower might
be slight, he stepped back out of the street for a moment and stood up
under the doorway of a small and greasy hair-dresser’s shop, the front
window of which was empty, except for a sickly wax lady in evening
dress.
Snow, however, began to thicken and fall fast; and Syme, having found
one glance at the wax lady quite sufficient to depress his spirits,
stared out instead into the white and empty street. He was considerably
astonished to see, standing quite still outside the shop and staring
into the window, a man. His top hat was loaded with snow like the hat
of Father Christmas, the white drift was rising round his boots and
ankles; but it seemed as if nothing could tear him away from the
contemplation of the colourless wax doll in dirty evening dress. That
any human being should stand in such weather looking into such a shop
was a matter of sufficient wonder to Syme; but his idle wonder turned
suddenly into a personal shock; for he realised that the man standing
there was the paralytic old Professor de Worms. It scarcely seemed the
place for a person of his years and infirmities.
Syme was ready to believe anything about the perversions of this
dehumanized brotherhood; but even he could not believe that the
Professor had fallen in love with that particular wax lady. He could
only suppose that the man’s malady (whatever it was) involved some
momentary fits of rigidity or trance. He was not inclined, however, to
feel in this case any very compassionate concern. On the contrary, he
rather congratulated himself that the Professor’s stroke and his
elaborate and limping walk would make it easy to escape from him and
leave him miles behind. For Syme thirsted first and last to get clear
of the whole poisonous atmosphere, if only for an hour. Then he could
collect his thoughts, formulate his policy, and decide finally whether
he should or should not keep faith with Gregory.
He strolled away through the dancing snow, turned up two or three
streets, down through two or three others, and entered a small Soho
restaurant for lunch. He partook reflectively of four small and quaint
courses, drank half a bottle of red wine, and ended up over black
coffee and a black cigar, still thinking. He had taken his seat in the
upper room of the restaurant, which was full of the chink of knives and
the chatter of foreigners. He remembered that in old days he had
imagined that all these harmless and kindly aliens were anarchists. He
shuddered, remembering the real thing. But even the shudder had the
delightful shame of escape. The wine, the common food, the familiar
place, the faces of natural and talkative men, made him almost feel as
if the Council of the Seven Days had been a bad dream; and although he
knew it was nevertheless an objective reality, it was at least a
distant one. Tall houses and populous streets lay between him and his
last sight of the shameful seven; he was free in free London, and
drinking wine among the free. With a somewhat easier action, he took
his hat and stick and strolled down the stair into the shop below.
When he entered that lower room he stood stricken and rooted to the
spot. At a small table, close up to the blank window and the white
street of snow, sat the old anarchist Professor over a glass of milk,
with his lifted livid face and pendent eyelids. For an instant Syme
stood as rigid as the stick he leant upon. Then with a gesture as of
blind hurry, he brushed past the Professor, dashing open the door and
slamming it behind him, and stood outside in the snow.
“Can that old corpse be following me?” he asked himself, biting his
yellow moustache. “I stopped too long up in that room, so that even
such leaden feet could catch me up. One comfort is, with a little brisk
walking I can put a man like that as far away as Timbuctoo. Or am I too
fanciful? Was he really following me? Surely Sunday would not be such a
fool as to send a lame man?”
He set off at a smart pace, twisting and whirling his stick, in the
direction of Covent Garden. As he crossed the great market the snow
increased, growing blinding and bewildering as the afternoon began to
darken. The snow-flakes tormented him like a swarm of silver bees.
Getting into his eyes and beard, they added their unremitting futility
to his already irritated nerves; and by the time that he had come at a
swinging pace to the beginning of Fleet Street, he lost patience, and
finding a Sunday teashop, turned into it to take shelter. He ordered
another cup of black coffee as an excuse. Scarcely had he done so, when
Professor de Worms hobbled heavily into the shop, sat down with
difficulty and ordered a glass of milk.
Syme’s walking-stick had fallen from his hand with a great clang, which
confessed the concealed steel. But the Professor did not look round.
Syme, who was commonly a cool character, was literally gaping as a
rustic gapes at a conjuring trick. He had seen no cab following; he had
heard no wheels outside the shop; to all mortal appearances the man had
come on foot. But the old man could only walk like a snail, and Syme
had walked like the wind. He started up and snatched his stick, half
crazy with the contradiction in mere arithmetic, and swung out of the
swinging doors, leaving his coffee untasted. An omnibus going to the
Bank went rattling by with an unusual rapidity. He had a violent run of
a hundred yards to reach it; but he managed to spring, swaying upon the
splash-board and, pausing for an instant to pant, he climbed on to the
top. When he had been seated for about half a minute, he heard behind
him a sort of heavy and asthmatic breathing.
Turning sharply, he saw rising gradually higher and higher up the
omnibus steps a top hat soiled and dripping with snow, and under the
shadow of its brim the short-sighted face and shaky shoulders of
Professor de Worms. He let himself into a seat with characteristic
care, and wrapped himself up to the chin in the mackintosh rug.
Every movement of the old man’s tottering figure and vague hands, every
uncertain gesture and panic-stricken pause, seemed to put it beyond
question that he was helpless, that he was in the last imbecility of
the body. He moved by inches, he let himself down with little gasps of
caution. And yet, unless the philosophical entities called time and
space have no vestige even of a practical existence, it appeared quite
unquestionable that he had run after the omnibus.
Syme sprang erect upon the rocking car, and after staring wildly at the
wintry sky, that grew gloomier every moment, he ran down the steps. He
had repressed an elemental impulse to leap over the side.
Too bewildered to look back or to reason, he rushed into one of the
little courts at the side of Fleet Street as a rabbit rushes into a
hole. He had a vague idea, if this incomprehensible old Jack-in-the-box
was really pursuing him, that in that labyrinth of little streets he
could soon throw him off the scent. He dived in and out of those
crooked lanes, which were more like cracks than thoroughfares; and by
the time that he had completed about twenty alternate angles and
described an unthinkable polygon, he paused to listen for any sound of
pursuit. There was none; there could not in any case have been much,
for the little streets were thick with the soundless snow. Somewhere
behind Red Lion Court, however, he noticed a place where some energetic
citizen had cleared away the snow for a space of about twenty yards,
leaving the wet, glistening cobble-stones. He thought little of this as
he passed it, only plunging into yet another arm of the maze. But when
a few hundred yards farther on he stood still again to listen, his
heart stood still also, for he heard from that space of rugged stones
the clinking crutch and labouring feet of the infernal cripple.
The sky above was loaded with the clouds of snow, leaving London in a
darkness and oppression premature for that hour of the evening. On each
side of Syme the walls of the alley were blind and featureless; there
was no little window or any kind of eve. He felt a new impulse to break
out of this hive of houses, and to get once more into the open and
lamp-lit street. Yet he rambled and dodged for a long time before he
struck the main thoroughfare. When he did so, he struck it much farther
up than he had fancied. He came out into what seemed the vast and void
of Ludgate Circus, and saw St. Paul’s Cathedral sitting in the sky.
At first he was startled to find these great roads so empty, as if a
pestilence had swept through the city. Then he told himself that some
degree of emptiness was natural; first because the snow-storm was even
dangerously deep, and secondly because it was Sunday. And at the very
word Sunday he bit his lip; the word was henceforth for hire like some
indecent pun. Under the white fog of snow high up in the heaven the
whole atmosphere of the city was turned to a very queer kind of green
twilight, as of men under the sea. The sealed and sullen sunset behind
the dark dome of St. Paul’s had in it smoky and sinister
colours—colours of sickly green, dead red or decaying bronze, that were
just bright enough to emphasise the solid whiteness of the snow. But
right up against these dreary colours rose the black bulk of the