The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
never could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad
man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says
that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is
then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a
reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but
not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter
things, but to annihilate them. Yes, the modern world has retained all
those parts of police work which are really oppressive and ignominious,
the harrying of the poor, the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given
up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the
State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must
not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish
anybody else.”
“But this is absurd!” cried the policeman, clasping his hands with an
excitement uncommon in persons of his figure and costume, “but it is
intolerable! I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re wasting your
life. You must, you shall, join our special army against anarchy. Their
armies are on our frontiers. Their bolt is ready to fall. A moment
more, and you may lose the glory of working with us, perhaps the glory
of dying with the last heroes of the world.”
“It is a chance not to be missed, certainly,” assented Syme, “but still
I do not quite understand. I know as well as anybody that the modern
world is full of lawless little men and mad little movements. But,
beastly as they are, they generally have the one merit of disagreeing
with each other. How can you talk of their leading one army or hurling
one bolt. What is this anarchy?”
“Do not confuse it,” replied the constable, “with those chance dynamite
outbreaks from Russia or from Ireland, which are really the outbreaks
of oppressed, if mistaken, men. This is a vast philosophic movement,
consisting of an outer and an inner ring. You might even call the outer
ring the laity and the inner ring the priesthood. I prefer to call the
outer ring the innocent section, the inner ring the supremely guilty
section. The outer ring—the main mass of their supporters—are merely
anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have
destroyed human happiness. They believe that all the evil results of
human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime.
They do not believe that the crime creates the punishment. They believe
that the punishment has created the crime. They believe that if a man
seduced seven women he would naturally walk away as blameless as the
flowers of spring. They believe that if a man picked a pocket he would
naturally feel exquisitely good. These I call the innocent section.”
“Oh!” said Syme.
“Naturally, therefore, these people talk about ‘a happy time coming’;
‘the paradise of the future’; ‘mankind freed from the bondage of vice
and the bondage of virtue,’ and so on. And so also the men of the inner
circle speak—the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding
crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last.
But in their mouths”—and the policeman lowered his voice—“in their
mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no
illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth
can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean
death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that
mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without
right or wrong, they mean the grave.
“They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then
themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The
innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed
the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed
somebody.”
“How can I join you?” asked Syme, with a sort of passion.
“I know for a fact that there is a vacancy at the moment,” said the
policeman, “as I have the honour to be somewhat in the confidence of
the chief of whom I have spoken. You should really come and see him. Or
rather, I should not say see him, nobody ever sees him; but you can
talk to him if you like.”
“Telephone?” inquired Syme, with interest.
“No,” said the policeman placidly, “he has a fancy for always sitting
in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter. Do come
along.”
Somewhat dazed and considerably excited, Syme allowed himself to be led
to a side-door in the long row of buildings of Scotland Yard. Almost
before he knew what he was doing, he had been passed through the hands
of about four intermediate officials, and was suddenly shown into a
room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light.
It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced;
it was like going suddenly stone-blind.
“Are you the new recruit?” asked a heavy voice.
And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in
the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of
massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.
“Are you the new recruit?” said the invisible chief, who seemed to have
heard all about it. “All right. You are engaged.”
Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this
irrevocable phrase.
“I really have no experience,” he began.
“No one has any experience,” said the other, “of the Battle of
Armageddon.”
“But I am really unfit—”
“You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown.
“Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know any profession of which mere
willingness is the final test.”
“I do,” said the other—“martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good
day.”
Thus it was that when Gabriel Syme came out again into the crimson
light of evening, in his shabby black hat and shabby, lawless cloak, he
came out a member of the New Detective Corps for the frustration of the
great conspiracy. Acting under the advice of his friend the policeman
(who was professionally inclined to neatness), he trimmed his hair and
beard, bought a good hat, clad himself in an exquisite summer suit of
light blue-grey, with a pale yellow flower in the button-hole, and, in
short, became that elegant and rather insupportable person whom Gregory
had first encountered in the little garden of Saffron Park. Before he
finally left the police premises his friend provided him with a small
blue card, on which was written, “The Last Crusade,” and a number, the
sign of his official authority. He put this carefully in his upper
waistcoat pocket, lit a cigarette, and went forth to track and fight
the enemy in all the drawing-rooms of London. Where his adventure
ultimately led him we have already seen. At about half-past one on a
February night he found himself steaming in a small tug up the silent
Thames, armed with swordstick and revolver, the duly elected Thursday
of the Central Council of Anarchists.
When Syme stepped out on to the steam-tug he had a singular sensation
of stepping out into something entirely new; not merely into the
landscape of a new land, but even into the landscape of a new planet.
This was mainly due to the insane yet solid decision of that evening,
though partly also to an entire change in the weather and the sky since
he entered the little tavern some two hours before. Every trace of the
passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a
naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full that
(by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It
gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as
of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in
eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was
actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some
sadder star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the
moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like
a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him—the food and
the brandy and the loaded pistol—took on exactly that concrete and
material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey
or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though
in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the
expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick became
almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the
stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on
some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the
adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even
be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the
presence of a man really human. To Syme’s exaggerative mind the bright,
bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the
mountains of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there
is a man in the moon.
The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively
slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the
time that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous
bulk of Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the
splitting of great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had
brightened like white fire when the tug, changing its onward course,
turned inward to a large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.
The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as
Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white
dawn. They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of
some Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he
was, in his own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible
and heathen kings. He leapt out of the boat on to one slimy step, and
stood, a dark and slender figure, amid the enormous masonry. The two
men in the tug put her off again and turned up stream. They had never
spoken a word.
CHAPTER V.
THE FEAST OF FEAR
At first the large stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid;
but before he reached the top he had realised that there was a man
leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the
river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and
frock-coat of the more formal type of fashion; he had a red flower in
his buttonhole. As Syme drew nearer to him step by step, he did not
even move a hair; and Syme could come close enough to notice even in
the dim, pale morning light that his face was long, pale and
intellectual, and ended in a small triangular tuft of dark beard at the
very point of the chin, all else being clean-shaven. This scrap of hair
almost seemed a mere oversight; the rest of the face was of the type
that is best shaven—clear-cut, ascetic, and in its way noble. Syme drew
closer and closer, noting all this, and still the figure did not stir.
At first an instinct had told Syme that this was the man whom he was
meant to meet. Then, seeing that the man made no sign, he had concluded
that he was not. And now again he had come back to a certainty that the
man had something to do with his mad adventure. For the man remained
more still than would have been natural if a stranger had come so
close. He was as motionless as a wax-work, and got on the nerves
somewhat in the same way. Syme looked again and again at the pale,
dignified and delicate face, and the face still looked blankly across
the river. Then he took out of his pocket the note from Buttons proving
his election, and put it before that sad and beautiful face. Then the