The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he
is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a
Christian, and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I
will not report anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And
now, in the name of Colney Hatch, what is it?”
“I think,” said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, “that we will call a
cab.”
He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the road.
The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the trap the
address of an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank of the river.
The cab whisked itself away again, and in it these two fantastics
quitted their fantastic town.
CHAPTER II.
THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME
The cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated
themselves in a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained wooden
table with one wooden leg. The room was so small and dark, that very
little could be seen of the attendant who was summoned, beyond a vague
and dark impression of something bulky and bearded.
“Will you take a little supper?” asked Gregory politely. “The _pâté de
foie gras_ is not good here, but I can recommend the game.”
Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference—
“Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise.”
To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said “Certainly, sir!”
and went away apparently to get it.
“What will you drink?” resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. “I shall only have a _crême de menthe_ myself; I have
dined. But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you
with a half-bottle of Pommery at least?”
“Thank you!” said the motionless Syme. “You are very good.”
His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in
themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the actual
appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it particularly
good. Then he suddenly began to eat with great rapidity and appetite.
“Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!” he said to Gregory,
smiling. “I don’t often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is
new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the
other way.”
“You are not asleep, I assure you,” said Gregory. “You are, on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your
existence. Ah, here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be a
slight disproportion, let us say, between the inner arrangements of
this excellent hotel and its simple and unpretentious exterior. But
that is all our modesty. We are the most modest men that ever lived on
earth.”
“And who are _we?_” asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.
“It is quite simple,” replied Gregory. “_We_ are the serious
anarchists, in whom you do not believe.”
“Oh!” said Syme shortly. “You do yourselves well in drinks.”
“Yes, we are serious about everything,” answered Gregory.
Then after a pause he added—
“If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little, don’t
put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don’t wish you to do
yourself an injustice.”
“Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad,” replied Syme with perfect calm;
“but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition. May I
smoke?”
“Certainly!” said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. “Try one of mine.”
Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out of his
waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and let out a
long cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit that he performed
these rites with so much composure, for almost before he had begun them
the table at which he sat had begun to revolve, first slowly, and then
rapidly, as if at an insane seance.
“You must not mind it,” said Gregory; “it’s a kind of screw.”
“Quite so,” said Syme placidly, “a kind of screw. How simple that is!”
The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering across
the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a factory
chimney, and the two, with their chairs and table, shot down through
the floor as if the earth had swallowed them. They went rattling down a
kind of roaring chimney as rapidly as a lift cut loose, and they came
with an abrupt bump to the bottom. But when Gregory threw open a pair
of doors and let in a red subterranean light, Syme was still smoking
with one leg thrown over the other, and had not turned a yellow hair.
Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which was
the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as big as a
fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the door there
was a sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory struck five
times. A heavy voice with a foreign accent asked him who he was. To
this he gave the more or less unexpected reply, “Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain.” The heavy hinges began to move; it was obviously some
kind of password.
Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a
network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering
pattern was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and revolvers,
closely packed or interlocked.
“I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities,” said Gregory; “we
have to be very strict here.”
“Oh, don’t apologise,” said Syme. “I know your passion for law and
order,” and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel weapons.
With his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he looked a
singularly frail and fanciful figure as he walked down that shining
avenue of death.
They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a
queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but
presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a
scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this
apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and
dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or
the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the very room itself
seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off
against the wall, and went in.
“And now, my dear Mr. Syme,” said Gregory, throwing himself in an
expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, “now we are quite
cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give you any
notion of why I brought you here. It was one of those quite arbitrary
emotions, like jumping off a cliff or falling in love. Suffice it to
say that you were an inexpressibly irritating fellow, and, to do you
justice, you are still. I would break twenty oaths of secrecy for the
pleasure of taking you down a peg. That way you have of lighting a
cigar would make a priest break the seal of confession. Well, you said
that you were quite certain I was not a serious anarchist. Does this
place strike you as being serious?”
“It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety,” assented Syme;
“but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me
information, because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted from me
a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep. So
it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is
it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish
Government?”
“To abolish God!” said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. “We do
not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that
sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the
Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny
all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and
treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly
sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man!
We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.”
“And Right and Left,” said Syme with a simple eagerness, “I hope you
will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”
“You spoke of a second question,” snapped Gregory.
“With pleasure,” resumed Syme. “In all your present acts and
surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt
who lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people
living from preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron
door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the humiliation of
calling yourself Mr. Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel
instruments which make the place, if I may say so, more impressive than
homelike. May I ask why, after taking all this trouble to barricade
yourselves in the bowels of the earth, you then parade your whole
secret by talking about anarchism to every silly woman in Saffron
Park?”
Gregory smiled.
“The answer is simple,” he said. “I told you I was a serious anarchist,
and you did not believe me. Nor do _they_ believe me. Unless I took
them into this infernal room they would not believe me.”
Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory went
on.
“The history of the thing might amuse you,” he said. “When first I
became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable
disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our
anarchist pamphlets, in _Superstition the Vampire_ and _Priests of
Prey_. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and
terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was
misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a
drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, ‘Down! down!
presumptuous human reason!’ they found out in some way that I was not a
bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire;
but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see
that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a
humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to
understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire
violence—the proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw
myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I
called out ‘Blood!’ abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often
said, ‘Let the weak perish; it is the Law.’ Well, well, it seems majors
don’t do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the
President of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in
Europe.”
“What is his name?” asked Syme.
“You would not know it,” answered Gregory. “That is his greatness.
Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they
_were_ heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he
is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with
him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children
in his hands.”
He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed—
“But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an
epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said to him,
‘What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more
respectable than bishops and majors?’ He looked at me with his large
but indecipherable face. ‘You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a
dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would
ever look for a bomb?’ I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice.
‘Why, then, dress up as an _anarchist_, you fool!’ he roared so that
the room shook. ‘Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous
then.’ And he turned his broad back on me without another word. I took
his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to
those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their