The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
Let the Secretary smile;
When the herring tries to _fly_,
Let the Secretary die.
Rustic Proverb.”
“Why the eternal crikey,” began the Secretary, “did you let the man in?
Do people commonly come to your Exhibition riding on mad elephants?
Do—”
“Look!” shouted Syme suddenly. “Look over there!”
“Look at what?” asked the Secretary savagely.
“Look at the captive balloon!” said Syme, and pointed in a frenzy.
“Why the blazes should I look at a captive balloon?” demanded the
Secretary. “What is there queer about a captive balloon?”
“Nothing,” said Syme, “except that it isn’t captive!”
They all turned their eyes to where the balloon swung and swelled above
the Exhibition on a string, like a child’s balloon. A second afterwards
the string came in two just under the car, and the balloon, broken
loose, floated away with the freedom of a soap bubble.
“Ten thousand devils!” shrieked the Secretary. “He’s got into it!” and
he shook his fists at the sky.
The balloon, borne by some chance wind, came right above them, and they
could see the great white head of the President peering over the side
and looking benevolently down on them.
“God bless my soul!” said the Professor with the elderly manner that he
could never disconnect from his bleached beard and parchment face. “God
bless my soul! I seemed to fancy that something fell on the top of my
hat!”
He put up a trembling hand and took from that shelf a piece of twisted
paper, which he opened absently only to find it inscribed with a true
lover’s knot and, the words:—
“Your beauty has not left me indifferent.—From LITTLE SNOWDROP.”
There was a short silence, and then Syme said, biting his beard—
“I’m not beaten yet. The blasted thing must come down somewhere. Let’s
follow it!”
CHAPTER XIV.
THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS
Across green fields, and breaking through blooming hedges, toiled six
draggled detectives, about five miles out of London. The optimist of
the party had at first proposed that they should follow the balloon
across South England in hansom-cabs. But he was ultimately convinced of
the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the
still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon.
Consequently the tireless though exasperated travellers broke through
black thickets and ploughed through ploughed fields till each was
turned into a figure too outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp. Those
green hills of Surrey saw the final collapse and tragedy of the
admirable light grey suit in which Syme had set out from Saffron Park.
His silk hat was broken over his nose by a swinging bough, his
coat-tails were torn to the shoulder by arresting thorns, the clay of
England was splashed up to his collar; but he still carried his yellow
beard forward with a silent and furious determination, and his eyes
were still fixed on that floating ball of gas, which in the full flush
of sunset seemed coloured like a sunset cloud.
“After all,” he said, “it is very beautiful!”
“It is singularly and strangely beautiful!” said the Professor. “I wish
the beastly gas-bag would burst!”
“No,” said Dr. Bull, “I hope it won’t. It might hurt the old boy.”
“Hurt him!” said the vindictive Professor, “hurt him! Not as much as
I’d hurt him if I could get up with him. Little Snowdrop!”
“I don’t want him hurt, somehow,” said Dr. Bull.
“What!” cried the Secretary bitterly. “Do you believe all that tale
about his being our man in the dark room? Sunday would say he was
anybody.”
“I don’t know whether I believe it or not,” said Dr. Bull. “But it
isn’t that that I mean. I can’t wish old Sunday’s balloon to burst
because—”
“Well,” said Syme impatiently, “because?”
“Well, because he’s so jolly like a balloon himself,” said Dr. Bull
desperately. “I don’t understand a word of all that idea of his being
the same man who gave us all our blue cards. It seems to make
everything nonsense. But I don’t care who knows it, I always had a
sympathy for old Sunday himself, wicked as he was. Just as if he was a
great bouncing baby. How can I explain what my queer sympathy was? It
didn’t prevent my fighting him like hell! Shall I make it clear if I
say that I liked him because he was so fat?”
“You will not,” said the Secretary.
“I’ve got it now,” cried Bull, “it was because he was so fat and so
light. Just like a balloon. We always think of fat people as heavy, but
he could have danced against a sylph. I see now what I mean. Moderate
strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. It
was like the old speculations—what would happen if an elephant could
leap up in the sky like a grasshopper?”
“Our elephant,” said Syme, looking upwards, “has leapt into the sky
like a grasshopper.”
“And somehow,” concluded Bull, “that’s why I can’t help liking old
Sunday. No, it’s not an admiration of force, or any silly thing like
that. There is a kind of gaiety in the thing, as if he were bursting
with some good news. Haven’t you sometimes felt it on a spring day? You
know Nature plays tricks, but somehow that day proves they are
good-natured tricks. I never read the Bible myself, but that part they
laugh at is literal truth, ‘Why leap ye, ye high hills?’ The hills do
leap—at least, they try to.... Why do I like Sunday?... how can I tell
you?... because he’s such a Bounder.”
There was a long silence, and then the Secretary said in a curious,
strained voice—
“You do not know Sunday at all. Perhaps it is because you are better
than I, and do not know hell. I was a fierce fellow, and a trifle
morbid from the first. The man who sits in darkness, and who chose us
all, chose me because I had all the crazy look of a conspirator—because
my smile went crooked, and my eyes were gloomy, even when I smiled. But
there must have been something in me that answered to the nerves in all
these anarchic men. For when I first saw Sunday he expressed to me, not
your airy vitality, but something both gross and sad in the Nature of
Things. I found him smoking in a twilight room, a room with brown blind
down, infinitely more depressing than the genial darkness in which our
master lives. He sat there on a bench, a huge heap of a man, dark and
out of shape. He listened to all my words without speaking or even
stirring. I poured out my most passionate appeals, and asked my most
eloquent questions. Then, after a long silence, the Thing began to
shake, and I thought it was shaken by some secret malady. It shook like
a loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of everything I had ever
read about the base bodies that are the origin of life—the deep sea
lumps and protoplasm. It seemed like the final form of matter, the most
shapeless and the most shameful. I could only tell myself, from its
shudderings, that it was something at least that such a monster could
be miserable. And then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was
shaking with a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me. Do you ask
me to forgive him that? It is no small thing to be laughed at by
something at once lower and stronger than oneself.”
“Surely you fellows are exaggerating wildly,” cut in the clear voice of
Inspector Ratcliffe. “President Sunday is a terrible fellow for one’s
intellect, but he is not such a Barnum’s freak physically as you make
out. He received me in an ordinary office, in a grey check coat, in
broad daylight. He talked to me in an ordinary way. But I’ll tell you
what is a trifle creepy about Sunday. His room is neat, his clothes are
neat, everything seems in order; but he’s absent-minded. Sometimes his
great bright eyes go quite blind. For hours he forgets that you are
there. Now absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We
think of a wicked man as vigilant. We can’t think of a wicked man who
is honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren’t think of a wicked
man alone with himself. An absentminded man means a good-natured man.
It means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologise. But how
will you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will
kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with
cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild
forests, and felt that the animals there were at once innocent and
pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten
mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded tiger?”
“And what do you think of Sunday, Gogol?” asked Syme.
“I don’t think of Sunday on principle,” said Gogol simply, “any more
than I stare at the sun at noonday.”
“Well, that is a point of view,” said Syme thoughtfully. “What do you
say, Professor?”
The Professor was walking with bent head and trailing stick, and he did
not answer at all.
“Wake up, Professor!” said Syme genially. “Tell us what you think of
Sunday.”
The Professor spoke at last very slowly.
“I think something,” he said, “that I cannot say clearly. Or, rather, I
think something that I cannot even think clearly. But it is something
like this. My early life, as you know, was a bit too large and loose.
“Well, when I saw Sunday’s face I thought it was too large—everybody
does, but I also thought it was too loose. The face was so big, that
one couldn’t focus it or make it a face at all. The eye was so far away
from the nose, that it wasn’t an eye. The mouth was so much by itself,
that one had to think of it by itself. The whole thing is too hard to
explain.”
He paused for a little, still trailing his stick, and then went on—
“But put it this way. Walking up a road at night, I have seen a lamp
and a lighted window and a cloud make together a most complete and
unmistakable face. If anyone in heaven has that face I shall know him
again. Yet when I walked a little farther I found that there was no
face, that the window was ten yards away, the lamp ten hundred yards,
the cloud beyond the world. Well, Sunday’s face escaped me; it ran away
to right and left, as such chance pictures run away. And so his face
has made me, somehow, doubt whether there are any faces. I don’t know
whether your face, Bull, is a face or a combination in perspective.
Perhaps one black disc of your beastly glasses is quite close and
another fifty miles away. Oh, the doubts of a materialist are not worth
a dump. Sunday has taught me the last and the worst doubts, the doubts
of a spiritualist. I am a Buddhist, I suppose; and Buddhism is not a
creed, it is a doubt. My poor dear Bull, I do not believe that you
really have a face. I have not faith enough to believe in matter.”
Syme’s eyes were still fixed upon the errant orb, which, reddened in
the evening light, looked like some rosier and more innocent world.
“Have you noticed an odd thing,” he said, “about all your descriptions?
Each man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each man of you can
only find one thing to compare him to—the universe itself. Bull finds
him like the earth in spring, Gogol like the sun at noonday. The
Secretary is reminded of the shapeless protoplasm, and the Inspector of
the carelessness of virgin forests. The Professor says he is like a
changing landscape. This is queer, but it is queerer still that I also
have had my odd notion about the President, and I also find that I
think of Sunday as I think of the whole world.”
“Get on a little faster, Syme,” said Bull; “never mind the balloon.”
“When I first saw Sunday,” said Syme slowly, “I only saw his back; and
when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck
and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. His head had a
stoop that was hardly human, like the stoop of an ox. In fact, I had at
once the revolting fancy that this was not a man at all, but a beast
dressed up in men’s clothes.”
“Get on,” said Dr. Bull.