The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had died
in his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of the
unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as a coloured
photograph, and he remarked this difference between Sunday and all his
satellites, that their faces, however fierce or sinister, became
gradually blurred by memory like other human faces, whereas Sunday’s
seemed almost to grow more actual during absence, as if a man’s painted
portrait should slowly come alive.
They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme’s speech
came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.
“Professor,” he cried, “it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this man?”
The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.
“Yes, I am,” he said mildly. “So are you.”
Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like an
insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.
“Yes,” he said in a voice indescribable, “you are right. I am afraid of
him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear
until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his
throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him
down.”
“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?”
“Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in
the universe anything of which he is afraid.”
De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made an effort
to speak, but Syme went on in a low voice, but with an undercurrent of
inhuman exaltation—
“Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless—like a tree? Fight the
thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
death-bed the great robber said, ‘I can give you no money, but I can
give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
upwards.’ So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.”
The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his pose.
“Sunday is a fixed star,” he said.
“You shall see him a falling star,” said Syme, and put on his hat.
The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet.
“Have you any idea,” he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment,
“exactly where you are going?”
“Yes,” replied Syme shortly, “I am going to prevent this bomb being
thrown in Paris.”
“Have you any conception how?” inquired the other.
“No,” said Syme with equal decision.
“You remember, of course,” resumed the soi-disant de Worms, pulling his
beard and looking out of the window, “that when we broke up rather
hurriedly the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left in the
private hands of the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by this time
probably crossing the Channel. But where he will go and what he will do
it is doubtful whether even the President knows; certainly we don’t
know. The only man who does know is Dr. Bull.”
“Confound it!” cried Syme. “And we don’t know where he is.”
“Yes,” said the other in his curious, absent-minded way, “I know where
he is myself.”
“Will you tell me?” asked Syme with eager eyes.
“I will take you there,” said the Professor, and took down his own hat
from a peg.
Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.
“What do you mean?” he asked sharply. “Will you join me? Will you take
the risk?”
“Young man,” said the Professor pleasantly, “I am amused to observe
that you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word, and
that shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical
rhetoric. You think that it is possible to pull down the President. I
know that it is impossible, and I am going to try it,” and opening the
tavern door, which let in a blast of bitter air, they went out together
into the dark streets by the docks.
Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a
clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small
streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming
lamps irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and
fallen world. Syme felt almost dazed as he stepped through this growing
confusion of lights and shadows; but his companion walked on with a
certain briskness, towards where, at the end of the street, an inch or
two of the lamplit river looked like a bar of flame.
“Where are you going?” Syme inquired.
“Just now,” answered the Professor, “I am going just round the corner
to see whether Dr. Bull has gone to bed. He is hygienic, and retires
early.”
“Dr. Bull!” exclaimed Syme. “Does he live round the corner?”
“No,” answered his friend. “As a matter of fact he lives some way off,
on the other side of the river, but we can tell from here whether he
has gone to bed.”
Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river, flecked with
flame, he pointed with his stick to the other bank. On the Surrey side
at this point there ran out into the Thames, seeming almost to overhang
it, a bulk and cluster of those tall tenements, dotted with lighted
windows, and rising like factory chimneys to an almost insane height.
Their special poise and position made one block of buildings especially
look like a Tower of Babel with a hundred eyes. Syme had never seen any
of the sky-scraping buildings in America, so he could only think of the
buildings in a dream.
Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably lighted turret
abruptly went out, as if this black Argus had winked at him with one of
his innumerable eyes.
Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his stick
against his boot.
“We are too late,” he said, “the hygienic Doctor has gone to bed.”
“What do you mean?” asked Syme. “Does he live over there, then?”
“Yes,” said de Worms, “behind that particular window which you can’t
see. Come along and get some dinner. We must call on him tomorrow
morning.”
Without further parley, he led the way through several by-ways until
they came out into the flare and clamour of the East India Dock Road.
The Professor, who seemed to know his way about the neighbourhood,
proceeded to a place where the line of lighted shops fell back into a
sort of abrupt twilight and quiet, in which an old white inn, all out
of repair, stood back some twenty feet from the road.
“You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
fossils,” explained the Professor. “I once found a decent place in the
West End.”
“I suppose,” said Syme, smiling, “that this is the corresponding decent
place in the East End?”
“It is,” said the Professor reverently, and went in.
In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The beans and
bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing
emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme’s sense of a new
comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had
been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between
isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians
that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand
times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world
will always return to monogamy.
Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his
outrageous tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little
tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant
monologue, as a man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also,
the man who had impersonated Professor de Worms was not less
communicative. His own story was almost as silly as Syme’s.
“That’s a good get-up of yours,” said Syme, draining a glass of Macon;
“a lot better than old Gogol’s. Even at the start I thought he was a
bit too hairy.”
“A difference of artistic theory,” replied the Professor pensively.
“Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of
an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed,
to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a
portrait.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Syme.
“I am a portrait,” repeated the Professor. “I am a portrait of the
celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples.”
“You mean you are made up like him,” said Syme. “But doesn’t he know
that you are taking his nose in vain?”
“He knows it right enough,” replied his friend cheerfully.
“Then why doesn’t he denounce you?”
“I have denounced him,” answered the Professor.
“Do explain yourself,” said Syme.
“With pleasure, if you don’t mind hearing my story,” replied the
eminent foreign philosopher. “I am by profession an actor, and my name
is Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian
and blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of the turf,
sometimes the riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the political
refugee. In some den of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great
German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much
about him beyond his appearance, which was very disgusting, and which I
studied carefully. I understood that he had proved that the destructive
principle in the universe was God; hence he insisted on the need for a
furious and incessant energy, rending all things in pieces. Energy, he
said, was the All. He was lame, shortsighted, and partially paralytic.
When I met him I was in a frivolous mood, and I disliked him so much
that I resolved to imitate him. If I had been a draughtsman I would
have drawn a caricature. I was only an actor, I could only act a
caricature. I made myself up into what was meant for a wild
exaggeration of the old Professor’s dirty old self. When I went into
the room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar
of laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation
at the insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance
was received with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first
opened my lips) with a murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect
artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true.
They thought I really was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a
healthy-minded young man at the time, and I confess that it was a blow.
Before I could fully recover, however, two or three of these admirers
ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that a public insult
had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its nature. It seemed
that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous
parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for me, and
in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through.
Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted
eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
“I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me
looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which
was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like
my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young
actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and
working within this definite limitation, he couldn’t be so jolly
paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I
countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that
nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could
not even understand myself. ‘I don’t fancy,’ he said, ‘that you could
have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since