The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
and silk hats, one of them with the red rosette of the Legion of
Honour, evidently people of a solid social position. Besides these
black, cylindrical costumes, the Marquis, in his loose straw hat and
light spring clothes, looked Bohemian and even barbaric; but he looked
the Marquis. Indeed, one might say that he looked the king, with his
animal elegance, his scornful eyes, and his proud head lifted against
the purple sea. But he was no Christian king, at any rate; he was,
rather, some swarthy despot, half Greek, half Asiatic, who in the days
when slavery seemed natural looked down on the Mediterranean, on his
galley and his groaning slaves. Just so, Syme thought, would the
brown-gold face of such a tyrant have shown against the dark green
olives and the burning blue.
“Are you going to address the meeting?” asked the Professor peevishly,
seeing that Syme still stood up without moving.
Syme drained his last glass of sparkling wine.
“I am,” he said, pointing across to the Marquis and his companions,
“that meeting. That meeting displeases me. I am going to pull that
meeting’s great ugly, mahogany-coloured nose.”
He stepped across swiftly, if not quite steadily. The Marquis, seeing
him, arched his black Assyrian eyebrows in surprise, but smiled
politely.
“You are Mr. Syme, I think,” he said.
Syme bowed.
“And you are the Marquis de Saint Eustache,” he said gracefully.
“Permit me to pull your nose.”
He leant over to do so, but the Marquis started backwards, upsetting
his chair, and the two men in top hats held Syme back by the shoulders.
“This man has insulted me!” said Syme, with gestures of explanation.
“Insulted you?” cried the gentleman with the red rosette, “when?”
“Oh, just now,” said Syme recklessly. “He insulted my mother.”
“Insulted your mother!” exclaimed the gentleman incredulously.
“Well, anyhow,” said Syme, conceding a point, “my aunt.”
“But how can the Marquis have insulted your aunt just now?” said the
second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. “He has been sitting here
all the time.”
“Ah, it was what he said!” said Syme darkly.
“I said nothing at all,” said the Marquis, “except something about the
band. I only said that I liked Wagner played well.”
“It was an allusion to my family,” said Syme firmly. “My aunt played
Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being insulted
about it.”
“This seems most extraordinary,” said the gentleman who was _décoré_,
looking doubtfully at the Marquis.
“Oh, I assure you,” said Syme earnestly, “the whole of your
conversation was simply packed with sinister allusions to my aunt’s
weaknesses.”
“This is nonsense!” said the second gentleman. “I for one have said
nothing for half an hour except that I liked the singing of that girl
with black hair.”
“Well, there you are again!” said Syme indignantly. “My aunt’s was
red.”
“It seems to me,” said the other, “that you are simply seeking a
pretext to insult the Marquis.”
“By George!” said Syme, facing round and looking at him, “what a clever
chap you are!”
The Marquis started up with eyes flaming like a tiger’s.
“Seeking a quarrel with me!” he cried. “Seeking a fight with me! By
God! there was never a man who had to seek long. These gentlemen will
perhaps act for me. There are still four hours of daylight. Let us
fight this evening.”
Syme bowed with a quite beautiful graciousness.
“Marquis,” he said, “your action is worthy of your fame and blood.
Permit me to consult for a moment with the gentlemen in whose hands I
shall place myself.”
In three long strides he rejoined his companions, and they, who had
seen his champagne-inspired attack and listened to his idiotic
explanations, were quite startled at the look of him. For now that he
came back to them he was quite sober, a little pale, and he spoke in a
low voice of passionate practicality.
“I have done it,” he said hoarsely. “I have fixed a fight on the beast.
But look here, and listen carefully. There is no time for talk. You are
my seconds, and everything must come from you. Now you must insist, and
insist absolutely, on the duel coming off after seven tomorrow, so as
to give me the chance of preventing him from catching the 7.45 for
Paris. If he misses that he misses his crime. He can’t refuse to meet
you on such a small point of time and place. But this is what he will
do. He will choose a field somewhere near a wayside station, where he
can pick up the train. He is a very good swordsman, and he will trust
to killing me in time to catch it. But I can fence well too, and I
think I can keep him in play, at any rate, until the train is lost.
Then perhaps he may kill me to console his feelings. You understand?
Very well then, let me introduce you to some charming friends of mine,”
and leading them quickly across the parade, he presented them to the
Marquis’s seconds by two very aristocratic names of which they had not
previously heard.
Syme was subject to spasms of singular common sense, not otherwise a
part of his character. They were (as he said of his impulse about the
spectacles) poetic intuitions, and they sometimes rose to the
exaltation of prophecy.
He had correctly calculated in this case the policy of his opponent.
When the Marquis was informed by his seconds that Syme could only fight
in the morning, he must fully have realised that an obstacle had
suddenly arisen between him and his bomb-throwing business in the
capital. Naturally he could not explain this objection to his friends,
so he chose the course which Syme had predicted. He induced his seconds
to settle on a small meadow not far from the railway, and he trusted to
the fatality of the first engagement.
When he came down very coolly to the field of honour, no one could have
guessed that he had any anxiety about a journey; his hands were in his
pockets, his straw hat on the back of his head, his handsome face
brazen in the sun. But it might have struck a stranger as odd that
there appeared in his train, not only his seconds carrying the
sword-case, but two of his servants carrying a portmanteau and a
luncheon basket.
Early as was the hour, the sun soaked everything in warmth, and Syme
was vaguely surprised to see so many spring flowers burning gold and
silver in the tall grass in which the whole company stood almost
knee-deep.
With the exception of the Marquis, all the men were in sombre and
solemn morning-dress, with hats like black chimney-pots; the little
Doctor especially, with the addition of his black spectacles, looked
like an undertaker in a farce. Syme could not help feeling a comic
contrast between this funereal church parade of apparel and the rich
and glistening meadow, growing wild flowers everywhere. But, indeed,
this comic contrast between the yellow blossoms and the black hats was
but a symbol of the tragic contrast between the yellow blossoms and the
black business. On his right was a little wood; far away to his left
lay the long curve of the railway line, which he was, so to speak,
guarding from the Marquis, whose goal and escape it was. In front of
him, behind the black group of his opponents, he could see, like a
tinted cloud, a small almond bush in flower against the faint line of
the sea.
The member of the Legion of Honour, whose name it seemed was Colonel
Ducroix, approached the Professor and Dr. Bull with great politeness,
and suggested that the play should terminate with the first
considerable hurt.
Dr. Bull, however, having been carefully coached by Syme upon this
point of policy, insisted, with great dignity and in very bad French,
that it should continue until one of the combatants was disabled. Syme
had made up his mind that he could avoid disabling the Marquis and
prevent the Marquis from disabling him for at least twenty minutes. In
twenty minutes the Paris train would have gone by.
“To a man of the well-known skill and valour of Monsieur de St.
Eustache,” said the Professor solemnly, “it must be a matter of
indifference which method is adopted, and our principal has strong
reasons for demanding the longer encounter, reasons the delicacy of
which prevent me from being explicit, but for the just and honourable
nature of which I can—”
“_Peste!_” broke from the Marquis behind, whose face had suddenly
darkened, “let us stop talking and begin,” and he slashed off the head
of a tall flower with his stick.
Syme understood his rude impatience and instinctively looked over his
shoulder to see whether the train was coming in sight. But there was no
smoke on the horizon.
Colonel Ducroix knelt down and unlocked the case, taking out a pair of
twin swords, which took the sunlight and turned to two streaks of white
fire. He offered one to the Marquis, who snatched it without ceremony,
and another to Syme, who took it, bent it, and poised it with as much
delay as was consistent with dignity.
Then the Colonel took out another pair of blades, and taking one
himself and giving another to Dr. Bull, proceeded to place the men.
Both combatants had thrown off their coats and waistcoats, and stood
sword in hand. The seconds stood on each side of the line of fight with
drawn swords also, but still sombre in their dark frock-coats and hats.
The principals saluted. The Colonel said quietly, “Engage!” and the two
blades touched and tingled.
When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme’s arm, all the fantastic
fears that have been the subject of this story fell from him like
dreams from a man waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in
order as mere delusions of the nerves—how the fear of the Professor had
been the fear of the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear
of the Doctor had been the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The
first was the old fear that any miracle might happen, the second the
more hopeless modern fear that no miracle can ever happen. But he saw
that these fears were fancies, for he found himself in the presence of
the great fact of the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless
common sense. He felt like a man who had dreamed all night of falling
over precipices, and had woke up on the morning when he was to be
hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the channel of
his foe’s foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had felt the two
tongues of steel touch, vibrating like two living things, he knew that
his enemy was a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had
come.
He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the
grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He
could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost
fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and
breaking into blossom in the meadow—flowers blood red and burning gold
and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his
eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the
Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line.
He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready
to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the
world.
But while earth and sky and everything had the living beauty of a thing
lost, the other half of his head was as clear as glass, and he was
parrying his enemy’s point with a kind of clockwork skill of which he
had hardly supposed himself capable. Once his enemy’s point ran along
his wrist, leaving a slight streak of blood, but it either was not
noticed or was tacitly ignored. Every now and then he _riposted_, and
once or twice he could almost fancy that he felt his point go home, but
as there was no blood on blade or shirt he supposed he was mistaken.
Then came an interruption and a change.