The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series.
But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be
exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty
infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to
thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the
distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a
thing more hideous than unreason itself.
By the time they reached Dr. Bull’s landing, a last window showed them
a harsh, white dawn edged with banks of a kind of coarse red, more like
red clay than red cloud. And when they entered Dr. Bull’s bare garret
it was full of light.
Syme had been haunted by a half historic memory in connection with
these empty rooms and that austere daybreak. The moment he saw the
garret and Dr. Bull sitting writing at a table, he remembered what the
memory was—the French Revolution. There should have been the black
outline of a guillotine against that heavy red and white of the
morning. Dr. Bull was in his white shirt and black breeches only; his
cropped, dark head might well have just come out of its wig; he might
have been Marat or a more slipshod Robespierre.
Yet when he was seen properly, the French fancy fell away. The Jacobins
were idealists; there was about this man a murderous materialism. His
position gave him a somewhat new appearance. The strong, white light of
morning coming from one side creating sharp shadows, made him seem both
more pale and more angular than he had looked at the breakfast on the
balcony. Thus the two black glasses that encased his eyes might really
have been black cavities in his skull, making him look like a
death’s-head. And, indeed, if ever Death himself sat writing at a
wooden table, it might have been he.
He looked up and smiled brightly enough as the men came in, and rose
with the resilient rapidity of which the Professor had spoken. He set
chairs for both of them, and going to a peg behind the door, proceeded
to put on a coat and waistcoat of rough, dark tweed; he buttoned it up
neatly, and came back to sit down at his table.
The quiet good humour of his manner left his two opponents helpless. It
was with some momentary difficulty that the Professor broke silence and
began, “I’m sorry to disturb you so early, comrade,” said he, with a
careful resumption of the slow de Worms manner. “You have no doubt made
all the arrangements for the Paris affair?” Then he added with infinite
slowness, “We have information which renders intolerable anything in
the nature of a moment’s delay.”
Dr. Bull smiled again, but continued to gaze on them without speaking.
The Professor resumed, a pause before each weary word—
“Please do not think me excessively abrupt; but I advise you to alter
those plans, or if it is too late for that, to follow your agent with
all the support you can get for him. Comrade Syme and I have had an
experience which it would take more time to recount than we can afford,
if we are to act on it. I will, however, relate the occurrence in
detail, even at the risk of losing time, if you really feel that it is
essential to the understanding of the problem we have to discuss.”
He was spinning out his sentences, making them intolerably long and
lingering, in the hope of maddening the practical little Doctor into an
explosion of impatience which might show his hand. But the little
Doctor continued only to stare and smile, and the monologue was uphill
work. Syme began to feel a new sickness and despair. The Doctor’s smile
and silence were not at all like the cataleptic stare and horrible
silence which he had confronted in the Professor half an hour before.
About the Professor’s makeup and all his antics there was always
something merely grotesque, like a gollywog. Syme remembered those wild
woes of yesterday as one remembers being afraid of Bogy in childhood.
But here was daylight; here was a healthy, square-shouldered man in
tweeds, not odd save for the accident of his ugly spectacles, not
glaring or grinning at all, but smiling steadily and not saying a word.
The whole had a sense of unbearable reality. Under the increasing
sunlight the colours of the Doctor’s complexion, the pattern of his
tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too
important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the
pose of his head polite; the only uncanny thing was his silence.
“As I say,” resumed the Professor, like a man toiling through heavy
sand, “the incident that has occurred to us and has led us to ask for
information about the Marquis, is one which you may think it better to
have narrated; but as it came in the way of Comrade Syme rather than
me—”
His words he seemed to be dragging out like words in an anthem; but
Syme, who was watching, saw his long fingers rattle quickly on the edge
of the crazy table. He read the message, “You must go on. This devil
has sucked me dry!”
Syme plunged into the breach with that bravado of improvisation which
always came to him when he was alarmed.
“Yes, the thing really happened to me,” he said hastily. “I had the
good fortune to fall into conversation with a detective who took me,
thanks to my hat, for a respectable person. Wishing to clinch my
reputation for respectability, I took him and made him very drunk at
the Savoy. Under this influence he became friendly, and told me in so
many words that within a day or two they hope to arrest the Marquis in
France.
“So unless you or I can get on his track—”
The Doctor was still smiling in the most friendly way, and his
protected eyes were still impenetrable. The Professor signalled to Syme
that he would resume his explanation, and he began again with the same
elaborate calm.
“Syme immediately brought this information to me, and we came here
together to see what use you would be inclined to make of it. It seems
to me unquestionably urgent that—”
All this time Syme had been staring at the Doctor almost as steadily as
the Doctor stared at the Professor, but quite without the smile. The
nerves of both comrades-in-arms were near snapping under that strain of
motionless amiability, when Syme suddenly leant forward and idly tapped
the edge of the table. His message to his ally ran, “I have an
intuition.”
The Professor, with scarcely a pause in his monologue, signalled back,
“Then sit on it.”
Syme telegraphed, “It is quite extraordinary.”
The other answered, “Extraordinary rot!”
Syme said, “I am a poet.”
The other retorted, “You are a dead man.”
Syme had gone quite red up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were
burning feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to
a sort of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he
signalled to his friend, “You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition
is. It has that sudden quality we sometimes feel in the coming of
spring.”
He then studied the answer on his friend’s fingers. The answer was, “Go
to hell!”
The Professor then resumed his merely verbal monologue addressed to the
Doctor.
“Perhaps I should rather say,” said Syme on his fingers, “that it
resembles that sudden smell of the sea which may be found in the heart
of lush woods.”
His companion disdained to reply.
“Or yet again,” tapped Syme, “it is positive, as is the passionate red
hair of a beautiful woman.”
The Professor was continuing his speech, but in the middle of it Syme
decided to act. He leant across the table, and said in a voice that
could not be neglected—
“Dr. Bull!”
The Doctor’s sleek and smiling head did not move, but they could have
sworn that under his dark glasses his eyes darted towards Syme.
“Dr. Bull,” said Syme, in a voice peculiarly precise and courteous,
“would you do me a small favour? Would you be so kind as to take off
your spectacles?”
The Professor swung round on his seat, and stared at Syme with a sort
of frozen fury of astonishment. Syme, like a man who has thrown his
life and fortune on the table, leaned forward with a fiery face. The
Doctor did not move.
For a few seconds there was a silence in which one could hear a pin
drop, split once by the single hoot of a distant steamer on the Thames.
Then Dr. Bull rose slowly, still smiling, and took off his spectacles.
Syme sprang to his feet, stepping backwards a little, like a chemical
lecturer from a successful explosion. His eyes were like stars, and for
an instant he could only point without speaking.
The Professor had also started to his feet, forgetful of his supposed
paralysis. He leant on the back of the chair and stared doubtfully at
Dr. Bull, as if the Doctor had been turned into a toad before his eyes.
And indeed it was almost as great a transformation scene.
The two detectives saw sitting in the chair before them a very
boyish-looking young man, with very frank and happy hazel eyes, an open
expression, cockney clothes like those of a city clerk, and an
unquestionable breath about him of being very good and rather
commonplace. The smile was still there, but it might have been the
first smile of a baby.
“I knew I was a poet,” cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. “I knew my
intuition was as infallible as the Pope. It was the spectacles that did
it! It was all the spectacles. Given those beastly black eyes, and all
the rest of him his health and his jolly looks, made him a live devil
among dead ones.”
“It certainly does make a queer difference,” said the Professor
shakily. “But as regards the project of Dr. Bull—”
“Project be damned!” roared Syme, beside himself. “Look at him! Look at
his face, look at his collar, look at his blessed boots! You don’t
suppose, do you, that that thing’s an anarchist?”
“Syme!” cried the other in an apprehensive agony.
“Why, by God,” said Syme, “I’ll take the risk of that myself! Dr. Bull,
I am a police officer. There’s my card,” and he flung down the blue
card upon the table.
The Professor still feared that all was lost; but he was loyal. He
pulled out his own official card and put it beside his friend’s. Then
the third man burst out laughing, and for the first time that morning
they heard his voice.
“I’m awfully glad you chaps have come so early,” he said, with a sort
of schoolboy flippancy, “for we can all start for France together. Yes,
I’m in the force right enough,” and he flicked a blue card towards them
lightly as a matter of form.
Clapping a brisk bowler on his head and resuming his goblin glasses,
the Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the others
instinctively followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait, and as he
passed under the doorway he suddenly struck his stick on the stone
passage so that it rang.
“But Lord God Almighty,” he cried out, “if this is all right, there
were more damned detectives than there were damned dynamiters at the
damned Council!”
“We might have fought easily,” said Bull; “we were four against three.”
The Professor was descending the stairs, but his voice came up from
below.
“No,” said the voice, “we were not four against three—we were not so
lucky. We were four against One.”
The others went down the stairs in silence.
The young man called Bull, with an innocent courtesy characteristic of
him, insisted on going last until they reached the street; but there
his own robust rapidity asserted itself unconsciously, and he walked
quickly on ahead towards a railway inquiry office, talking to the
others over his shoulder.
“It is jolly to get some pals,” he said. “I’ve been half dead with the
jumps, being quite alone. I nearly flung my arms round Gogol and
embraced him, which would have been imprudent. I hope you won’t despise
me for having been in a blue funk.”
“All the blue devils in blue hell,” said Syme, “contributed to my blue