The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
“Everything’s gone. I’m gone! I can’t trust my own bodily machinery. I
feel as if my own hand might fly up and strike me.”
“When my hand flies up,” said Syme, “it will strike somebody else,” and
he strode along the pier towards the Colonel, the sword in one hand and
the lantern in the other.
As if to destroy the last hope or doubt, the Colonel, who saw him
coming, pointed his revolver at him and fired. The shot missed Syme,
but struck his sword, breaking it short at the hilt. Syme rushed on,
and swung the iron lantern above his head.
“Judas before Herod!” he said, and struck the Colonel down upon the
stones. Then he turned to the Secretary, whose frightful mouth was
almost foaming now, and held the lamp high with so rigid and arresting
a gesture, that the man was, as it were, frozen for a moment, and
forced to hear.
“Do you see this lantern?” cried Syme in a terrible voice. “Do you see
the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You
did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey,
twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is
not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not
made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats.
You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind;
you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old
Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire
of apes will never have the wit to find it.”
He struck the Secretary once with the lantern so that he staggered; and
then, whirling it twice round his head, sent it flying far out to sea,
where it flared like a roaring rocket and fell.
“Swords!” shouted Syme, turning his flaming face to the three behind
him. “Let us charge these dogs, for our time has come to die.”
His three companions came after him sword in hand. Syme’s sword was
broken, but he rent a bludgeon from the fist of a fisherman, flinging
him down. In a moment they would have flung themselves upon the face of
the mob and perished, when an interruption came. The Secretary, ever
since Syme’s speech, had stood with his hand to his stricken head as if
dazed; now he suddenly pulled off his black mask.
The pale face thus peeled in the lamplight revealed not so much rage as
astonishment. He put up his hand with an anxious authority.
“There is some mistake,” he said. “Mr. Syme, I hardly think you
understand your position. I arrest you in the name of the law.”
“Of the law?” said Syme, and dropped his stick.
“Certainly!” said the Secretary. “I am a detective from Scotland Yard,”
and he took a small blue card from his pocket.
“And what do you suppose we are?” asked the Professor, and threw up his
arms.
“You,” said the Secretary stiffly, “are, as I know for a fact, members
of the Supreme Anarchist Council. Disguised as one of you, I—”
Dr. Bull tossed his sword into the sea.
“There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council,” he said. “We were all
a lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice
people who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the
dynamiters. I knew I couldn’t be wrong about the mob,” he said, beaming
over the enormous multitude, which stretched away to the distance on
both sides. “Vulgar people are never mad. I’m vulgar myself, and I
know. I am now going on shore to stand a drink to everybody here.”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENT
Next morning five bewildered but hilarious people took the boat for
Dover. The poor old Colonel might have had some cause to complain,
having been first forced to fight for two factions that didn’t exist,
and then knocked down with an iron lantern. But he was a magnanimous
old gentleman, and being much relieved that neither party had anything
to do with dynamite, he saw them off on the pier with great geniality.
The five reconciled detectives had a hundred details to explain to each
other. The Secretary had to tell Syme how they had come to wear masks
originally in order to approach the supposed enemy as
fellow-conspirators.
Syme had to explain how they had fled with such swiftness through a
civilised country. But above all these matters of detail which could be
explained, rose the central mountain of the matter that they could not
explain. What did it all mean? If they were all harmless officers, what
was Sunday? If he had not seized the world, what on earth had he been
up to? Inspector Ratcliffe was still gloomy about this.
“I can’t make head or tail of old Sunday’s little game any more than
you can,” he said. “But whatever else Sunday is, he isn’t a blameless
citizen. Damn it! do you remember his face?”
“I grant you,” answered Syme, “that I have never been able to forget
it.”
“Well,” said the Secretary, “I suppose we can find out soon, for
tomorrow we have our next general meeting. You will excuse me,” he
said, with a rather ghastly smile, “for being well acquainted with my
secretarial duties.”
“I suppose you are right,” said the Professor reflectively. “I suppose
we might find it out from him; but I confess that I should feel a bit
afraid of asking Sunday who he really is.”
“Why,” asked the Secretary, “for fear of bombs?”
“No,” said the Professor, “for fear he might tell me.”
“Let us have some drinks,” said Dr. Bull, after a silence.
Throughout their whole journey by boat and train they were highly
convivial, but they instinctively kept together. Dr. Bull, who had
always been the optimist of the party, endeavoured to persuade the
other four that the whole company could take the same hansom cab from
Victoria; but this was overruled, and they went in a four-wheeler,
with Dr. Bull on the box, singing. They finished their journey at an
hotel in Piccadilly Circus, so as to be close to the early breakfast
next morning in Leicester Square. Yet even then the adventures of the
day were not entirely over. Dr. Bull, discontented with the general
proposal to go to bed, had strolled out of the hotel at about eleven to
see and taste some of the beauties of London. Twenty minutes
afterwards, however, he came back and made quite a clamour in the hall.
Syme, who tried at first to soothe him, was forced at last to listen to
his communication with quite new attention.
“I tell you I’ve seen him!” said Dr. Bull, with thick emphasis.
“Whom?” asked Syme quickly. “Not the President?”
“Not so bad as that,” said Dr. Bull, with unnecessary laughter, “not so
bad as that. I’ve got him here.”
“Got whom here?” asked Syme impatiently.
“Hairy man,” said the other lucidly, “man that used to be hairy
man—Gogol. Here he is,” and he pulled forward by a reluctant elbow the
identical young man who five days before had marched out of the Council
with thin red hair and a pale face, the first of all the sham
anarchists who had been exposed.
“Why do you worry with me?” he cried. “You have expelled me as a spy.”
“We are all spies!” whispered Syme.
“We’re all spies!” shouted Dr. Bull. “Come and have a drink.”
Next morning the battalion of the reunited six marched stolidly towards
the hotel in Leicester Square.
“This is more cheerful,” said Dr. Bull; “we are six men going to ask
one man what he means.”
“I think it is a bit queerer than that,” said Syme. “I think it is six
men going to ask one man what they mean.”
They turned in silence into the Square, and though the hotel was in the
opposite corner, they saw at once the little balcony and a figure that
looked too big for it. He was sitting alone with bent head, poring over
a newspaper. But all his councillors, who had come to vote him down,
crossed that Square as if they were watched out of heaven by a hundred
eyes.
They had disputed much upon their policy, about whether they should
leave the unmasked Gogol without and begin diplomatically, or whether
they should bring him in and blow up the gunpowder at once. The
influence of Syme and Bull prevailed for the latter course, though the
Secretary to the last asked them why they attacked Sunday so rashly.
“My reason is quite simple,” said Syme. “I attack him rashly because I
am afraid of him.”
They followed Syme up the dark stair in silence, and they all came out
simultaneously into the broad sunlight of the morning and the broad
sunlight of Sunday’s smile.
“Delightful!” he said. “So pleased to see you all. What an exquisite
day it is. Is the Czar dead?”
The Secretary, who happened to be foremost, drew himself together for a
dignified outburst.
“No, sir,” he said sternly “there has been no massacre. I bring you
news of no such disgusting spectacles.”
“Disgusting spectacles?” repeated the President, with a bright,
inquiring smile. “You mean Dr. Bull’s spectacles?”
The Secretary choked for a moment, and the President went on with a
sort of smooth appeal—
“Of course, we all have our opinions and even our eyes, but really to
call them disgusting before the man himself—”
Dr. Bull tore off his spectacles and broke them on the table.
“My spectacles are blackguardly,” he said, “but I’m not. Look at my
face.”
“I dare say it’s the sort of face that grows on one,” said the
President, “in fact, it grows on you; and who am I to quarrel with the
wild fruits upon the Tree of Life? I dare say it will grow on me some
day.”
“We have no time for tomfoolery,” said the Secretary, breaking in
savagely. “We have come to know what all this means. Who are you? What
are you? Why did you get us all here? Do you know who and what we are?
Are you a half-witted man playing the conspirator, or are you a clever
man playing the fool? Answer me, I tell you.”
“Candidates,” murmured Sunday, “are only required to answer eight out
of the seventeen questions on the paper. As far as I can make out, you
want me to tell you what I am, and what you are, and what this table
is, and what this Council is, and what this world is for all I know.
Well, I will go so far as to rend the veil of one mystery. If you want
to know what you are, you are a set of highly well-intentioned young
jackasses.”
“And you,” said Syme, leaning forward, “what are you?”
“I? What am I?” roared the President, and he rose slowly to an
incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and
break. “You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of
science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about
them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell
you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and
the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the
sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are,
and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have
hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the
churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet,
and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a
good run for their money, and I will now.”
Before one of them could move, the monstrous man had swung himself like
some huge ourang-outang over the balustrade of the balcony. Yet before
he dropped he pulled himself up again as on a horizontal bar, and
thrusting his great chin over the edge of the balcony, said solemnly—
“There’s one thing I’ll tell you though about who I am. I am the man in
the dark room, who made you all policemen.”
With that he fell from the balcony, bouncing on the stones below like a
great ball of india-rubber, and went bounding off towards the corner of
the Alhambra, where he hailed a hansom-cab and sprang inside it. The
six detectives had been standing thunderstruck and livid in the light
of his last assertion; but when he disappeared into the cab, Syme’s