The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you.
It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because
they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place
they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square
they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but
Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their
souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker
Street!”
“It is you who are unpoetical,” replied the poet Syme. “If what you say
of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The
rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to
miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a
distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine
strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train
might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a
magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria,
and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose;
let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who
commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his
victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!”
“Must you go?” inquired Gregory sarcastically.
“I tell you,” went on Syme with passion, “that every time a train comes
in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man
has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one
has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might
do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I
have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout
out the word ‘Victoria,’ it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the
cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it
is the victory of Adam.”
Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.
“And even then,” he said, “we poets always ask the question, ‘And what
is Victoria now that you have got there?’ You think Victoria is like
the New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like
Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of
heaven. The poet is always in revolt.”
“There again,” said Syme irritably, “what is there poetical about being
in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick.
Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the
wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can
see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It’s
mere vomiting.”
The girl winced for a flash at the unpleasant word, but Syme was too
hot to heed her.
“It is things going right,” he cried, “that is poetical! Our
digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is
the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more
poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars—the most
poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”
“Really,” said Gregory superciliously, “the examples you choose—”
“I beg your pardon,” said Syme grimly, “I forgot we had abolished all
conventions.”
For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory’s forehead.
“You don’t expect me,” he said, “to revolutionise society on this
lawn?”
Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
“No, I don’t,” he said; “but I suppose that if you were serious about
your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.”
Gregory’s big bull’s eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion,
and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.
“Don’t you think, then,” he said in a dangerous voice, “that I am
serious about my anarchism?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Syme.
“Am I not serious about my anarchism?” cried Gregory, with knotted
fists.
“My dear fellow!” said Syme, and strolled away.
With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond Gregory
still in his company.
“Mr. Syme,” she said, “do the people who talk like you and my brother
often mean what they say? Do you mean what you say now?”
Syme smiled.
“Do you?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” asked the girl, with grave eyes.
“My dear Miss Gregory,” said Syme gently, “there are many kinds of
sincerity and insincerity. When you say ‘thank you’ for the salt, do
you mean what you say? No. When you say ‘the world is round,’ do you
mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don’t mean it. Now,
sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It
may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says
more than he means—from sheer force of meaning it.”
She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave and
open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning
responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the
maternal watch which is as old as the world.
“Is he really an anarchist, then?” she asked.
“Only in that sense I speak of,” replied Syme; “or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense.”
She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly—
“He wouldn’t really use—bombs or that sort of thing?”
Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.
“Good Lord, no!” he said, “that has to be done anonymously.”
And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory’s absurdity and of his
safety.
Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in
spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it
is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches
himself too closely. He defended respectability with violence and
exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of tidiness and
propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac all round him. Once
he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to
play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny
tune from under or beyond the world.
He stared and talked at the girl’s red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered
the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself
with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his
head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which
were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again
until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she
kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures
afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread
through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what
followed was so improbable, that it might well have been a dream.
When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a
street lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out
over the fence behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a
figure almost as rigid and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall
hat and long frock coat were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was
almost as dark. Only a fringe of fiery hair against the light, and also
something aggressive in the attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet
Gregory. He had something of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword
in hand for his foe.
He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally
returned.
“I was waiting for you,” said Gregory. “Might I have a moment’s
conversation?”
“Certainly. About what?” asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree.
“About _this_ and _this_,” he cried; “about order and anarchy. There is
your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there
is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid
in green and gold.”
“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see
the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the
lamp by the light of the tree.” Then after a pause he said, “But may I
ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our
little argument?”
“No,” cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, “I did
not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever.”
The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing,
listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth
voice and with a rather bewildering smile.
“Mr. Syme,” he said, “this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of woman
has ever succeeded in doing before.”
“Indeed!”
“Now I remember,” resumed Gregory reflectively, “one other person
succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me.”
“I am very sorry,” replied Syme with gravity.
“I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology,” said Gregory very calmly. “No duel could wipe it
out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one
way by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am
going, at the possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to _prove_ to
you that you were wrong in what you said.”
“In what I said?”
“You said I was not serious about being an anarchist.”
“There are degrees of seriousness,” replied Syme. “I have never doubted
that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what
you said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men
up to a neglected truth.”
Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.
“And in no other sense,” he asked, “you think me serious? You think me
a _flâneur_ who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious.”
Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.
“Serious!” he cried. “Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these
damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious? One
comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well,
but I should think very little of a man who didn’t keep something in
the background of his life that was more serious than all this
talking—something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink.”
“Very well,” said Gregory, his face darkening, “you shall see something
more serious than either drink or religion.”
Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory again
opened his lips.
“You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that you
have one?”
“Oh,” said Syme with a beaming smile, “we are all Catholics now.”
“Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion
involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to
any son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that!
If you will take upon yourself this awful abnegation if you will
consent to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a
knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in return—”
“You will promise me in return?” inquired Syme, as the other paused.
“I will promise you a very entertaining evening.” Syme suddenly took
off his hat.
“Your offer,” he said, “is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that