The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
cathedral; and upon the top of the cathedral was a random splash and
great stain of snow, still clinging as to an Alpine peak. It had fallen
accidentally, but just so fallen as to half drape the dome from its
very topmost point, and to pick out in perfect silver the great orb and
the cross. When Syme saw it he suddenly straightened himself, and made
with his sword-stick an involuntary salute.
He knew that that evil figure, his shadow, was creeping quickly or
slowly behind him, and he did not care.
It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the skies were
darkening that high place of the earth was bright. The devils might
have captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross. He had a
new impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and
pursuing paralytic; and at the entrance of the court as it opened upon
the Circus he turned, stick in hand, to face his pursuer.
Professor de Worms came slowly round the corner of the irregular alley
behind him, his unnatural form outlined against a lonely gas-lamp,
irresistibly recalling that very imaginative figure in the nursery
rhymes, “the crooked man who went a crooked mile.” He really looked as
if he had been twisted out of shape by the tortuous streets he had been
threading. He came nearer and nearer, the lamplight shining on his
lifted spectacles, his lifted, patient face. Syme waited for him as St.
George waited for the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation or
for death. And the old Professor came right up to him and passed him
like a total stranger, without even a blink of his mournful eyelids.
There was something in this silent and unexpected innocence that left
Syme in a final fury. The man’s colourless face and manner seemed to
assert that the whole following had been an accident. Syme was
galvanised with an energy that was something between bitterness and a
burst of boyish derision. He made a wild gesture as if to knock the old
man’s hat off, called out something like “Catch me if you can,” and
went racing away across the white, open Circus. Concealment was
impossible now; and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the
black figure of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging
strides like a man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding
body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a
lecturer upon the body of a harlequin.
This outrageous chase sped across Ludgate Circus, up Ludgate Hill,
round St. Paul’s Cathedral, along Cheapside, Syme remembering all the
nightmares he had ever known. Then Syme broke away towards the river,
and ended almost down by the docks. He saw the yellow panes of a low,
lighted public-house, flung himself into it and ordered beer. It was a
foul tavern, sprinkled with foreign sailors, a place where opium might
be smoked or knives drawn.
A moment later Professor de Worms entered the place, sat down
carefully, and asked for a glass of milk.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS
When Gabriel Syme found himself finally established in a chair, and
opposite to him, fixed and final also, the lifted eyebrows and leaden
eyelids of the Professor, his fears fully returned. This
incomprehensible man from the fierce council, after all, had certainly
pursued him. If the man had one character as a paralytic and another
character as a pursuer, the antithesis might make him more interesting,
but scarcely more soothing. It would be a very small comfort that he
could not find the Professor out, if by some serious accident the
Professor should find him out. He emptied a whole pewter pot of ale
before the professor had touched his milk.
One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless. It was
just possible that this escapade signified something other than even a
slight suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some regular form or sign.
Perhaps the foolish scamper was some sort of friendly signal that he
ought to have understood. Perhaps it was a ritual. Perhaps the new
Thursday was always chased along Cheapside, as the new Lord Mayor is
always escorted along it. He was just selecting a tentative inquiry,
when the old Professor opposite suddenly and simply cut him short.
Before Syme could ask the first diplomatic question, the old anarchist
had asked suddenly, without any sort of preparation—
“Are you a policeman?”
Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only
manage a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.
“A policeman?” he said, laughing vaguely. “Whatever made you think of a
policeman in connection with me?”
“The process was simple enough,” answered the Professor patiently. “I
thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now.”
“Did I take a policeman’s hat by mistake out of the restaurant?” asked
Syme, smiling wildly. “Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me
somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a
policeman? Do, do let me be a postman.”
The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but
Syme ran on with a feverish irony.
“But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy.
Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir,
the ape fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never
detect the shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps
a maiden lady on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have
been. I don’t mind being the policeman that might have been. I don’t
mind being anything in German thought.”
“Are you in the police service?” said the old man, ignoring all Syme’s
improvised and desperate raillery. “Are you a detective?”
Syme’s heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.
“Your suggestion is ridiculous,” he began. “Why on earth—”
The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
nearly breaking it.
“Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?” he shrieked
in a high, crazy voice. “Are you, or are you not, a police detective?”
“No!” answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman’s drop.
“You swear it,” said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
becoming as it were loathsomely alive. “You swear it! You swear it! If
you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil
dances at your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your
grave? Will there really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a
dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not
in the British police?”
He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
loose hand like a flap to his ear.
“I am not in the British police,” said Syme with insane calm.
Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
collapse.
“That’s a pity,” he said, “because I am.”
Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a
crash.
“Because you are what?” he said thickly. “You are what?”
“I am a policeman,” said the Professor with his first broad smile, and
beaming through his spectacles. “But as you think policeman only a
relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the
British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British
police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters’ club. I
suppose I ought to arrest you.” And with these words he laid on the
table before Syme an exact facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in
his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol of his power from the police.
Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars
were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the
last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now
the capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from
whom he had been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own
house, who on the other side of the table lay back and laughed at him.
He did not for the moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the
happy and silly fact that this shadow, which had pursued him with an
intolerable oppression of peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying
to catch him up. He knew simultaneously that he was a fool and a free
man. For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain
healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions
when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic
pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme’s egotism held hard to
the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly adopted the
third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat
pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until
his spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted
with a barbaric laughter.
Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there
was something Homeric in Syme’s mirth which made many half-drunken men
look round.
“What yer laughing at, guv’nor?” asked one wondering labourer from the
docks.
“At myself,” answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his
ecstatic reaction.
“Pull yourself together,” said the Professor, “or you’ll get
hysterical. Have some more beer. I’ll join you.”
“You haven’t drunk your milk,” said Syme.
“My milk!” said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
contempt, “my milk! Do you think I’d look at the beastly stuff when I’m
out of sight of the bloody anarchists? We’re all Christians in this
room, though perhaps,” he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd,
“not strict ones. Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I’ll finish it
right enough!” and he knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash
of glass and a splash of silver fluid.
Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.
“I understand now,” he cried; “of course, you’re not an old man at
all.”
“I can’t take my face off here,” replied Professor de Worms. “It’s
rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I’m an old man, that’s not
for me to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday.”
“Yes, but I mean,” said Syme impatiently, “there’s nothing the matter
with you.”
“Yes,” answered the other dispassionately. “I am subject to colds.”
Syme’s laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He
laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young
actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would
have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.
The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.
“Did you know,” he asked, “that that man Gogol was one of us?”
“I? No, I didn’t know it,” answered Syme in some surprise. “But didn’t
you?”
“I knew no more than the dead,” replied the man who called himself de
Worms. “I thought the President was talking about me, and I rattled in
my boots.”
“And I thought he was talking about me,” said Syme, with his rather
reckless laughter. “I had my hand on my revolver all the time.”
“So had I,” said the Professor grimly; “so had Gogol evidently.”
Syme struck the table with an exclamation.
“Why, there were three of us there!” he cried. “Three out of seven is a
fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!”
The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.
“We were three,” he said. “If we had been three hundred we could still
have done nothing.”
“Not if we were three hundred against four?” asked Syme, jeering rather
boisterously.
“No,” said the Professor with sobriety, “not if we were three hundred
against Sunday.”