The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
election was ended and irrevocable, and Syme had received the paper
proving his election, they all sprang to their feet, and the fiery
groups moved and mixed in the room. Syme found himself, somehow or
other, face to face with Gregory, who still regarded him with a stare
of stunned hatred. They were silent for many minutes.
“You are a devil!” said Gregory at last.
“And you are a gentleman,” said Syme with gravity.
“It was you that entrapped me,” began Gregory, shaking from head to
foot, “entrapped me into—”
“Talk sense,” said Syme shortly. “Into what sort of devils’ parliament
have you entrapped me, if it comes to that? You made me swear before I
made you. Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we
think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us
in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but
honour and death,” and he pulled the great cloak about his shoulders
and picked up the flask from the table.
“The boat is quite ready,” said Mr. Buttons, bustling up. “Be good
enough to step this way.”
With a gesture that revealed the shop-walker, he led Syme down a short,
iron-bound passage, the still agonised Gregory following feverishly at
their heels. At the end of the passage was a door, which Buttons opened
sharply, showing a sudden blue and silver picture of the moonlit river,
that looked like a scene in a theatre. Close to the opening lay a dark,
dwarfish steam-launch, like a baby dragon with one red eye.
Almost in the act of stepping on board, Gabriel Syme turned to the
gaping Gregory.
“You have kept your word,” he said gently, with his face in shadow.
“You are a man of honour, and I thank you. You have kept it even down
to a small particular. There was one special thing you promised me at
the beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by
the end of it.”
“What do you mean?” cried the chaotic Gregory. “What did I promise
you?”
“A very entertaining evening,” said Syme, and he made a military salute
with the sword-stick as the steamboat slid away.
CHAPTER IV.
THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE
Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he
was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of
anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life
into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most
revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His
respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against
rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest
people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked
about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to
walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and
self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence
the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any
drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he
had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan
abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan
latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing
vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of
defending cannibalism.
Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy,
Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only
thing left—sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of
these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too
fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been
crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side
street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf
for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and
the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous,
rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He
did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid
men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a
huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.
He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets a
torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this
deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his
enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames
embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance
of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage
or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood
alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to
have cared for it otherwise.
He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river
reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky,
indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid,
that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it
mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the
vast caverns of a subterranean country.
Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black
chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak,
black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early
villains in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair
were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards,
cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black
cigar, bought in Soho for twopence, stood out from between his
tightened teeth, and altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen
of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was
why a policeman on the Embankment spoke to him, and said “Good
evening.”
Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the
mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the
twilight.
“A good evening is it?” he said sharply. “You fellows would call the
end of the world a good evening. Look at that bloody red sun and that
bloody river! I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt
and shining, you would still be standing here as solid as ever, looking
out for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen
are cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it
were not for your calm.”
“If we are calm,” replied the policeman, “it is the calm of organised
resistance.”
“Eh?” said Syme, staring.
“The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,” pursued the
policeman. “The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.”
“Good God, the Board Schools!” said Syme. “Is this undenominational
education?”
“No,” said the policeman sadly, “I never had any of those advantages.
The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very
rough and old-fashioned, I am afraid.”
“Where did you have it?” asked Syme, wondering.
“Oh, at Harrow,” said the policeman
The class sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in
so many men, broke out of Syme before he could control them.
“But, good Lord, man,” he said, “you oughtn’t to be a policeman!”
The policeman sighed and shook his head.
“I know,” he said solemnly, “I know I am not worthy.”
“But why did you join the police?” asked Syme with rude curiosity.
“For much the same reason that you abused the police,” replied the
other. “I found that there was a special opening in the service for
those whose fears for humanity were concerned rather with the
aberrations of the scientific intellect than with the normal and
excusable, though excessive, outbreaks of the human will. I trust I
make myself clear.”
“If you mean that you make your opinion clear,” said Syme, “I suppose
you do. But as for making yourself clear, it is the last thing you do.
How comes a man like you to be talking philosophy in a blue helmet on
the Thames embankment?”
“You have evidently not heard of the latest development in our police
system,” replied the other. “I am not surprised at it. We are keeping
it rather dark from the educated class, because that class contains
most of our enemies. But you seem to be exactly in the right frame of
mind. I think you might almost join us.”
“Join you in what?” asked Syme.
“I will tell you,” said the policeman slowly. “This is the situation:
The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated
detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely
intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of
civilisation. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are
silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has,
therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also
philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this
conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. I am
a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the value of the ordinary
man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue. But it would obviously be
undesirable to employ the common policeman in an investigation which is
also a heresy hunt.”
Syme’s eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.
“What do you do, then?” he said.
“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is
at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The
ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to
artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective
discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We
discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have
to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at
last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only
just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was
entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow)
thoroughly understood a triolet.”
“Do you mean,” asked Syme, “that there is really as much connection
between crime and the modern intellect as all that?”
“You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, “but you
were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the
poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes
sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon
the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very
different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the
uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors.
We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that
the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most
dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my
heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they
merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the
property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect
it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy
the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or
they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic
formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater
fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to
them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own
as much as other people’s.”
Syme struck his hands together.
“How true that is,” he cried. “I have felt it from my boyhood, but