The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
chair. “Who are these people who provide cold pheasant and Burgundy,
and green clothes and Bibles? Do they provide everything?”
“Yes, sir, everything,” said the attendant gravely. “Shall I help you
on with your costume?”
“Oh, hitch the bally thing on!” said Syme impatiently.
But though he affected to despise the mummery, he felt a curious
freedom and naturalness in his movements as the blue and gold garment
fell about him; and when he found that he had to wear a sword, it
stirred a boyish dream. As he passed out of the room he flung the folds
across his shoulder with a gesture, his sword stood out at an angle,
and he had all the swagger of a troubadour. For these disguises did not
disguise, but reveal.
CHAPTER XV.
THE ACCUSER
As Syme strode along the corridor he saw the Secretary standing at the
top of a great flight of stairs. The man had never looked so noble. He
was draped in a long robe of starless black, down the centre of which
fell a band or broad stripe of pure white, like a single shaft of
light. The whole looked like some very severe ecclesiastical vestment.
There was no need for Syme to search his memory or the Bible in order
to remember that the first day of creation marked the mere creation of
light out of darkness. The vestment itself would alone have suggested
the symbol; and Syme felt also how perfectly this pattern of pure white
and black expressed the soul of the pale and austere Secretary, with
his inhuman veracity and his cold frenzy, which made him so easily make
war on the anarchists, and yet so easily pass for one of them. Syme was
scarcely surprised to notice that, amid all the ease and hospitality of
their new surroundings, this man’s eyes were still stern. No smell of
ale or orchards could make the Secretary cease to ask a reasonable
question.
If Syme had been able to see himself, he would have realised that he,
too, seemed to be for the first time himself and no one else. For if
the Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves the original and
formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make
the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The
philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the
finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the
creation of the sun and moon.
As they descended the broad stairs together they overtook Ratcliffe,
who was clad in spring green like a huntsman, and the pattern upon
whose garment was a green tangle of trees. For he stood for that third
day on which the earth and green things were made, and his square,
sensible face, with its not unfriendly cynicism, seemed appropriate
enough to it.
They were led out of another broad and low gateway into a very large
old English garden, full of torches and bonfires, by the broken light
of which a vast carnival of people were dancing in motley dress. Syme
seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume.
There was a man dressed as a windmill with enormous sails, a man
dressed as an elephant, a man dressed as a balloon; the two last,
together, seemed to keep the thread of their farcical adventures. Syme
even saw, with a queer thrill, one dancer dressed like an enormous
hornbill, with a beak twice as big as himself—the queer bird which had
fixed itself on his fancy like a living question while he was rushing
down the long road at the Zoological Gardens. There were a thousand
other such objects, however. There was a dancing lamp-post, a dancing
apple tree, a dancing ship. One would have thought that the untamable
tune of some mad musician had set all the common objects of field and
street dancing an eternal jig. And long afterwards, when Syme was
middle-aged and at rest, he could never see one of those particular
objects—a lamppost, or an apple tree, or a windmill—without thinking
that it was a strayed reveller from that revel of masquerade.
On one side of this lawn, alive with dancers, was a sort of green bank,
like the terrace in such old-fashioned gardens.
Along this, in a kind of crescent, stood seven great chairs, the
thrones of the seven days. Gogol and Dr. Bull were already in their
seats; the Professor was just mounting to his. Gogol, or Tuesday, had
his simplicity well symbolised by a dress designed upon the division of
the waters, a dress that separated upon his forehead and fell to his
feet, grey and silver, like a sheet of rain. The Professor, whose day
was that on which the birds and fishes—the ruder forms of life—were
created, had a dress of dim purple, over which sprawled goggle-eyed
fishes and outrageous tropical birds, the union in him of unfathomable
fancy and of doubt. Dr. Bull, the last day of Creation, wore a coat
covered with heraldic animals in red and gold, and on his crest a man
rampant. He lay back in his chair with a broad smile, the picture of an
optimist in his element.
One by one the wanderers ascended the bank and sat in their strange
seats. As each of them sat down a roar of enthusiasm rose from the
carnival, such as that with which crowds receive kings. Cups were
clashed and torches shaken, and feathered hats flung in the air. The
men for whom these thrones were reserved were men crowned with some
extraordinary laurels. But the central chair was empty.
Syme was on the left hand of it and the Secretary on the right. The
Secretary looked across the empty throne at Syme, and said, compressing
his lips—
“We do not know yet that he is not dead in a field.”
Almost as Syme heard the words, he saw on the sea of human faces in
front of him a frightful and beautiful alteration, as if heaven had
opened behind his head. But Sunday had only passed silently along the
front like a shadow, and had sat in the central seat. He was draped
plainly, in a pure and terrible white, and his hair was like a silver
flame on his forehead.
For a long time—it seemed for hours—that huge masquerade of mankind
swayed and stamped in front of them to marching and exultant music.
Every couple dancing seemed a separate romance; it might be a fairy
dancing with a pillar-box, or a peasant girl dancing with the moon; but
in each case it was, somehow, as absurd as Alice in Wonderland, yet as
grave and kind as a love story. At last, however, the thick crowd began
to thin itself. Couples strolled away into the garden-walks, or began
to drift towards that end of the building where stood smoking, in huge
pots like fish-kettles, some hot and scented mixtures of old ale or
wine. Above all these, upon a sort of black framework on the roof of
the house, roared in its iron basket a gigantic bonfire, which lit up
the land for miles. It flung the homely effect of firelight over the
face of vast forests of grey or brown, and it seemed to fill with
warmth even the emptiness of upper night. Yet this also, after a time,
was allowed to grow fainter; the dim groups gathered more and more
round the great cauldrons, or passed, laughing and clattering, into the
inner passages of that ancient house. Soon there were only some ten
loiterers in the garden; soon only four. Finally the last stray
merry-maker ran into the house whooping to his companions. The fire
faded, and the slow, strong stars came out. And the seven strange men
were left alone, like seven stone statues on their chairs of stone. Not
one of them had spoken a word.
They seemed in no haste to do so, but heard in silence the hum of
insects and the distant song of one bird. Then Sunday spoke, but so
dreamily that he might have been continuing a conversation rather than
beginning one.
“We will eat and drink later,” he said. “Let us remain together a
little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long.
I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were
always heroes—epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in
arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the
beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness,
where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice
commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the
dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the
earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you
in the daylight I denied it myself.”
Syme stirred sharply in his seat, but otherwise there was silence, and
the incomprehensible went on.
“But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the
whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew
how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords
with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without
hope.”
There was complete silence in the starlit garden, and then the
black-browed Secretary, implacable, turned in his chair towards Sunday,
and said in a harsh voice—
“Who and what are you?”
“I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of
God.”
The Secretary started up, and stood crushing his costly robe in his
hand.
“I know what you mean,” he cried, “and it is exactly that that I cannot
forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call
the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If
you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offense
to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend,
why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the
iron entered into our souls—and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can
forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot
forgive Him His peace.”
Sunday answered not a word, but very slowly he turned his face of stone
upon Syme as if asking a question.
“No,” said Syme, “I do not feel fierce like that. I am grateful to you,
not only for wine and hospitality here, but for many a fine scamper and
free fight. But I should like to know. My soul and heart are as happy
and quiet here as this old garden, but my reason is still crying out. I
should like to know.”
Sunday looked at Ratcliffe, whose clear voice said—
“It seems so _silly_ that you should have been on both sides and fought
yourself.”
Bull said—
“I understand nothing, but I am happy. In fact, I am going to sleep.”
“I am not happy,” said the Professor with his head in his hands,
“because I do not understand. You let me stray a little too near to
hell.”
And then Gogol said, with the absolute simplicity of a child—
“I wish I knew why I was hurt so much.”
Still Sunday said nothing, but only sat with his mighty chin upon his
hand, and gazed at the distance. Then at last he said—
“I have heard your complaints in order. And here, I think, comes
another to complain, and we will hear him also.”
The falling fire in the great cresset threw a last long gleam, like a
bar of burning gold, across the dim grass. Against this fiery band was
outlined in utter black the advancing legs of a black-clad figure. He
seemed to have a fine close suit with knee-breeches such as that which
was worn by the servants of the house, only that it was not blue, but
of this absolute sable. He had, like the servants, a kind of sword by
his side. It was only when he had come quite close to the crescent of
the seven and flung up his face to look at them, that Syme saw, with
thunder-struck clearness, that the face was the broad, almost ape-like
face of his old friend Gregory, with its rank red hair and its
insulting smile.
“Gregory!” gasped Syme, half-rising from his seat. “Why, this is the
real anarchist!”
“Yes,” said Gregory, with a great and dangerous restraint, “I am the
real anarchist.”
“‘Now there was a day,’” murmured Bull, who seemed really to have
fallen asleep, “‘when the sons of God came to present themselves before