星期四人-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 man smiled,
and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right
cheek and down in the left.
There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people
have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive.
But in all Syme’s circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand
and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving
in it.
There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And
there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.
The spasm of smile was instantaneous, and the man’s face dropped at once
into its harmonious melancholy. He spoke without further explanation or
inquiry, like a man speaking to an old colleague.
“If we walk up towards Leicester Square,” he said, “we shall
just be in time for breakfast. Sunday always insists on an early breakfast.
Have you had any sleep?”
“No,” said Syme.
“Nor have I,” answered the man in an ordinary tone. “I shall
try to get to bed after breakfast.”
He spoke with casual civility, but in an utterly dead voice that contradicted
the fanaticism of his face. It seemed almost as if all friendly words were to
him lifeless conveniences, and that his only life was hate. After a pause the
man spoke again.
“Of course, the Secretary of the branch told you everything that can be
told. But the one thing that can never be told is the last notion of the
President, for his notions grow like a tropical forest. So in case you
don’t know, I’d better tell you that he is carrying out his notion
of concealing ourselves by not concealing ourselves to the most extraordinary
lengths just now. Originally, of course, we met in a cell underground, just as
your branch does. Then Sunday made us take a private room at an ordinary
restaurant. He said that if you didn’t seem to be hiding nobody hunted
you out. Well, he is the only man on earth, I know; but sometimes I really
think that his huge brain is going a little mad in its old age. For now we
flaunt ourselves before the public. We have our breakfast on a balcony—on
a balcony, if you please—overlooking Leicester Square.”
“And what do the people say?” asked Syme.
“It’s quite simple what they say,” answered his guide.
“They say we are a lot of jolly gentlemen who pretend they are
anarchists.”
“It seems to me a very clever idea,” said Syme.
“Clever! God blast your impudence! Clever!” cried out the other in
a sudden, shrill voice which was as startling and discordant as his crooked
smile. “When you’ve seen Sunday for a split second you’ll
leave off calling him clever.”
With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early sunlight
filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I suppose, why this square
itself should look so alien and in some ways so continental. It will never be
known whether it was the foreign look that attracted the foreigners or the
foreigners who gave it the foreign look. But on this particular morning the
effect seemed singularly bright and clear. Between the open square and the
sunlit leaves and the statue and the Saracenic outlines of the Alhambra, it
looked the replica of some French or even Spanish public place. And this effect
increased in Syme the sensation, which in many shapes he had had through the
whole adventure, the eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world. As a
fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square ever since he was a boy.
But as he turned that corner, and saw the trees and the Moorish cupolas, he
could have sworn that he was turning into an unknown Place de something or
other in some foreign town.
At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a prosperous but
quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street behind. In the wall there
was one large French window, probably the window of a large coffee-room; and
outside this window, almost literally overhanging the square, was a formidably
buttressed balcony, big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did
contain a dining-table, or more strictly a breakfast-table; and round the
breakfast-table, glowing in the sunlight and evident to the street, were a
group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed in the insolence of fashion, with
white waistcoats and expensive button-holes. Some of their jokes could almost
be heard across the square. Then the grave Secretary gave his unnatural smile,
and Syme knew that this boisterous breakfast party was the secret conclave of
the European Dynamiters.
Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen
before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the
nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was
the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first
thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His
vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite
incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions,
like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white
hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that
stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to
scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the
other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish. They were
still sitting there as before with their flowers and frock-coats, but now it
looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.
As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter came out
smiling with every tooth in his head.
“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk
and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze
king.”
And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased with the
singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.
The two men mounted the stairs in silence.
Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled
and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe.
He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme,
indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless
psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health.
Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive
to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning
things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of
drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became
overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.
The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the
inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and
larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face
would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered
that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum,
because it was a face, and so large.
By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an empty
seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him with
good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered himself a
little by looking at their conventional coats and solid, shining coffee-pot;
then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very large, but it was still
possible to humanity.
In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently
commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by the
President’s caprice they had been dressed up with a festive
respectability, which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast. One man
indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He at least was the common or
garden Dynamiter. He wore, indeed, the high white collar and satin tie that
were the uniform of the occasion; but out of this collar there sprang a head
quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and
beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes
did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf.
The effect of this figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it
had every diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque. If out of that
stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of a cat or a dog, it
could not have been a more idiotic contrast.
The man’s name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle
of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably tragic; he
could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous part demanded of
him by President Sunday. And, indeed, when Syme came in the President, with
that daring disregard of public suspicion which was his policy, was actually
chaffing Gogol upon his inability to assume conventional graces.
“Our friend Tuesday,” said the President in a deep voice at once of
quietude and volume, “our friend Tuesday doesn’t seem to grasp the
idea. He dresses up like a gentleman, but he seems to be too great a soul to
behave like one. He insists on the ways of the stage conspirator. Now if a
gentleman goes about London in a top hat and a frock-coat, no one need know
that he is an anarchist. But if a gentleman puts on a top hat and a frock-coat,
and then goes about on his hands and knees—well, he may attract
attention. That’s what Brother Gogol does. He goes about on his hands and
knees with such inexhaustible diplomacy, that by this time he finds it quite
difficult to walk upright.”
“I am not good at concealment,” said Gogol sulkily, with a thick
foreign accent; “I am not ashamed of the cause.”
“Yes you are, my boy, and so is the cause of you,” said the
President good-naturedly. “You hide as much as anybody; but you
can’t do it, you see, you’re such an ass! You try to combine two
inconsistent methods. When a householder finds a man under his bed, he will
probably pause to note the circumstance. But if he finds a man under his bed in
a top hat, you will agree with me, my dear Tuesday, that he is not likely even
to forget it. Now when you were found under Admiral Biffin’s
bed—”
“I am not good at deception,” said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.
“Right, my boy, right,” said the President with a ponderous
heartiness, “you aren’t good at anything.”
While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking more steadily at
the men around him. As he did so, he gradually felt all his sense of something
spiritually queer return.
He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with
the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he
began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river,
a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly
disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types.
Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth
glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor
he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence
would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.
Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed eccentricity.
Syme’s original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was the Secretary
of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with more terror than
anything, except the President’s horrible, happy laughter. But now that
Syme had more space and light to observe him, there were other touches. His
fine face was so emaciated, that Syme thought it must be wasted with some
disease; yet somehow the very distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no
physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture,
as if pure thought was pain.
He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and differently wrong.
Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a man more obviously mad.
Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a sufficiently
characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing unusual about him,
except that he was the only man at table who wore the fashionable clothes as if
they were really his own. He had a black French beard cut square and a black
English frock-coat cut even squarer. But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt
somehow that the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that
suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in
the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad,
not in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer and
warmer than the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of profound
colour. His black coat looked as if it were only black by being too dense a
purple. His black beard looked as if it were only black by being too deep a
blue. And in the gloom and thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed
sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a
Jew; he might be something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the
bright coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may see
just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.
Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still kept the
chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his death would leave it
empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last dissolution of senile decay.
His face was as grey as his long grey beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed
finally in a furrow of mild despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol,
did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful
contrast. For the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that
was literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if some
drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose or sat down,
which was with long labour and peril, something worse was expressed than mere
weakness, something indefinably connected with the horror of the whole scene.
It did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption. Another hateful fancy
crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever
the man moved a leg or arm might fall off.
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most
baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face
clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that
combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which
is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence
rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever
odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It
may have been merely a crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before, but
those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered
ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead.
Syme’s eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the
dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been
appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma.
They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his
gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility
wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest
of all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be
covered up because they were too frightful to see.