The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
“Sunday!” cried Bull, and dropped his hat.
“Yes,” retorted Ratcliffe, “he may be with them.”
“With whom?” asked Syme.
“With the people out of that train,” said the other.
“What you say seems utterly wild,” began Syme. “Why, as a matter of
fact—But, my God,” he cried out suddenly, like a man who sees an
explosion a long way off, “by God! if this is true the whole bally lot
of us on the Anarchist Council were against anarchy! Every born man was
a detective except the President and his personal secretary. What can
it mean?”
“Mean!” said the new policeman with incredible violence. “It means that
we are struck dead! Don’t you know Sunday? Don’t you know that his
jokes are always so big and simple that one has never thought of them?
Can you think of anything more like Sunday than this, that he should
put all his powerful enemies on the Supreme Council, and then take care
that it was not supreme? I tell you he has bought every trust, he has
captured every cable, he has control of every railway line—especially
of _that_ railway line!” and he pointed a shaking finger towards the
small wayside station. “The whole movement was controlled by him; half
the world was ready to rise for him. But there were just five people,
perhaps, who would have resisted him... and the old devil put them on
the Supreme Council, to waste their time in watching each other. Idiots
that we are, he planned the whole of our idiocies! Sunday knew that the
Professor would chase Syme through London, and that Syme would fight me
in France. And he was combining great masses of capital, and seizing
great lines of telegraphy, while we five idiots were running after each
other like a lot of confounded babies playing blind man’s buff.”
“Well?” asked Syme with a sort of steadiness.
“Well,” replied the other with sudden serenity, “he has found us
playing blind man’s buff today in a field of great rustic beauty and
extreme solitude. He has probably captured the world; it only remains
to him to capture this field and all the fools in it. And since you
really want to know what was my objection to the arrival of that train,
I will tell you. My objection was that Sunday or his Secretary has just
this moment got out of it.”
Syme uttered an involuntary cry, and they all turned their eyes towards
the far-off station. It was quite true that a considerable bulk of
people seemed to be moving in their direction. But they were too
distant to be distinguished in any way.
“It was a habit of the late Marquis de St. Eustache,” said the new
policeman, producing a leather case, “always to carry a pair of opera
glasses. Either the President or the Secretary is coming after us with
that mob. They have caught us in a nice quiet place where we are under
no temptations to break our oaths by calling the police. Dr. Bull, I
have a suspicion that you will see better through these than through
your own highly decorative spectacles.”
He handed the field-glasses to the Doctor, who immediately took off his
spectacles and put the apparatus to his eyes.
“It cannot be as bad as you say,” said the Professor, somewhat shaken.
“There are a good number of them certainly, but they may easily be
ordinary tourists.”
“Do ordinary tourists,” asked Bull, with the fieldglasses to his eyes,
“wear black masks half-way down the face?”
Syme almost tore the glasses out of his hand, and looked through them.
Most men in the advancing mob really looked ordinary enough; but it was
quite true that two or three of the leaders in front wore black
half-masks almost down to their mouths. This disguise is very complete,
especially at such a distance, and Syme found it impossible to conclude
anything from the clean-shaven jaws and chins of the men talking in the
front. But presently as they talked they all smiled and one of them
smiled on one side.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE
Syme put the field-glasses from his eyes with an almost ghastly relief.
“The President is not with them, anyhow,” he said, and wiped his
forehead.
“But surely they are right away on the horizon,” said the bewildered
Colonel, blinking and but half recovered from Bull’s hasty though
polite explanation. “Could you possibly know your President among all
those people?”
“Could I know a white elephant among all those people!” answered Syme
somewhat irritably. “As you very truly say, they are on the horizon;
but if he were walking with them... by God! I believe this ground would
shake.”
After an instant’s pause the new man called Ratcliffe said with gloomy
decision—
“Of course the President isn’t with them. I wish to Gemini he were.
Much more likely the President is riding in triumph through Paris, or
sitting on the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
“This is absurd!” said Syme. “Something may have happened in our
absence; but he cannot have carried the world with a rush like that. It
is quite true,” he added, frowning dubiously at the distant fields that
lay towards the little station, “it is certainly true that there seems
to be a crowd coming this way; but they are not all the army that you
make out.”
“Oh, they,” said the new detective contemptuously; “no, they are not a
very valuable force. But let me tell you frankly that they are
precisely calculated to our value—we are not much, my boy, in Sunday’s
universe. He has got hold of all the cables and telegraphs himself. But
to kill the Supreme Council he regards as a trivial matter, like a post
card; it may be left to his private secretary,” and he spat on the
grass.
Then he turned to the others and said somewhat austerely—
“There is a great deal to be said for death; but if anyone has any
preference for the other alternative, I strongly advise him to walk
after me.”
With these words, he turned his broad back and strode with silent
energy towards the wood. The others gave one glance over their
shoulders, and saw that the dark cloud of men had detached itself from
the station and was moving with a mysterious discipline across the
plain. They saw already, even with the naked eye, black blots on the
foremost faces, which marked the masks they wore. They turned and
followed their leader, who had already struck the wood, and disappeared
among the twinkling trees.
The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood they
had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool.
The inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken
shadows. They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the
dizziness of a cinematograph. Even the solid figures walking with him
Syme could hardly see for the patterns of sun and shade that danced
upon them. Now a man’s head was lit as with a light of Rembrandt,
leaving all else obliterated; now again he had strong and staring white
hands with the face of a negro. The ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw
hat over his eyes, and the black shade of the brim cut his face so
squarely in two that it seemed to be wearing one of the black
half-masks of their pursuers. The fancy tinted Syme’s overwhelming
sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was
anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men’s faces turned
black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into
sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of
chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a
perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days,
this world where men took off their beards and their spectacles and
their noses, and turned into other people. That tragic self-confidence
which he had felt when he believed that the Marquis was a devil had
strangely disappeared now that he knew that the Marquis was a friend.
He felt almost inclined to ask after all these bewilderments what was a
friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that was apart from what
it seemed? The Marquis had taken off his nose and turned out to be a
detective. Might he not just as well take off his head and turn out to
be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering
woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the
glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had
found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters
had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call
Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which
can find no floor to the universe.
As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Syme
strove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worst of his
fancies. With two impatient strides he overtook the man in the
Marquis’s straw hat, the man whom he had come to address as Ratcliffe.
In a voice exaggeratively loud and cheerful, he broke the bottomless
silence and made conversation.
“May I ask,” he said, “where on earth we are all going to?”
So genuine had been the doubts of his soul, that he was quite glad to
hear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.
“We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea,” he said. “I
think that part of the country is least likely to be with them.”
“What can you mean by all this?” cried Syme. “They can’t be running the
real world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, and
surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern armies and
police.”
“Mere mobs!” repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. “So you
talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question.
You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come
from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have
never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in
there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in
the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a
yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the
rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were
always anarchists, as you can see from the barons’ wars.”
“As a lecture on English history for the little ones,” said Syme, “this
is all very nice; but I have not yet grasped its application.”
“Its application is,” said his informant, “that most of old Sunday’s
right-hand men are South African and American millionaires. That is why
he has got hold of all the communications; and that is why the last
four champions of the anti-anarchist police force are running through a
wood like rabbits.”
“Millionaires I can understand,” said Syme thoughtfully, “they are
nearly all mad. But getting hold of a few wicked old gentlemen with
hobbies is one thing; getting hold of great Christian nations is
another. I would bet the nose off my face (forgive the allusion) that
Sunday would stand perfectly helpless before the task of converting any
ordinary healthy person anywhere.”
“Well,” said the other, “it rather depends what sort of person you
mean.”
“Well, for instance,” said Syme, “he could never convert that person,”
and he pointed straight in front of him.
They had come to an open space of sunlight, which seemed to express to
Syme the final return of his own good sense; and in the middle of this
forest clearing was a figure that might well stand for that common
sense in an almost awful actuality. Burnt by the sun and stained with
perspiration, and grave with the bottomless gravity of small necessary
toils, a heavy French peasant was cutting wood with a hatchet. His cart
stood a few yards off, already half full of timber; and the horse that
cropped the grass was, like his master, valorous but not desperate;
like his master, he was even prosperous, but yet was almost sad. The
man was a Norman, taller than the average of the French and very