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

perambulators.”

Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.

“You took me in,” he said. “It is really a smart dodge.”

Then after a pause he added—

“What do you call this tremendous President of yours?”

“We generally call him Sunday,” replied Gregory with simplicity. “You

see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, and they

are named after days of the week. He is called Sunday, by some of his

admirers Bloody Sunday. It is curious you should mention the matter,

because the very night you have dropped in (if I may so express it) is

the night on which our London branch, which assembles in this room, has

to elect its own deputy to fill a vacancy in the Council. The gentleman

who has for some time past played, with propriety and general applause,

the difficult part of Thursday, has died quite suddenly. Consequently,

we have called a meeting this very evening to elect a successor.”

He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of smiling

embarrassment.

“I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme,” he continued casually.

“I feel that I can confide anything to you, as you have promised to

tell nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something that I would not

say in so many words to the anarchists who will be coming to the room

in about ten minutes. We shall, of course, go through a form of

election; but I don’t mind telling you that it is practically certain

what the result will be.” He looked down for a moment modestly. “It is

almost a settled thing that I am to be Thursday.”

“My dear fellow.” said Syme heartily, “I congratulate you. A great

career!”

Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking

rapidly.

“As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table,” he

said, “and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible.”

Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a

walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick, a

large Colt’s revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of

brandy. Over the chair, beside the table, was thrown a heavy-looking

cape or cloak.

“I have only to get the form of election finished,” continued Gregory

with animation, “then I snatch up this cloak and stick, stuff these

other things into my pocket, step out of a door in this cavern, which

opens on the river, where there is a steam-tug already waiting for me,

and then—then—oh, the wild joy of being Thursday!” And he clasped his

hands.

Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent languor, got

to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.

“Why is it,” he asked vaguely, “that I think you are quite a decent

fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?” He paused a moment, and

then added with a sort of fresh curiosity, “Is it because you are such

an ass?”

There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out—

“Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been in

in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave you a

promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under

red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise

of the same kind?”

“A promise?” asked Gregory, wondering.

“Yes,” said Syme very seriously, “a promise. I swore before God that I

would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity,

or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my

secret to the anarchists?”

“Your secret?” asked the staring Gregory. “Have you got a secret?”

“Yes,” said Syme, “I have a secret.” Then after a pause, “Will you

swear?”

Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said

abruptly—

“You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you.

Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But

look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes.”

Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his

long, grey trousers’ pockets. Almost as he did so there came five

knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of

the conspirators.

“Well,” said Syme slowly, “I don’t know how to tell you the truth more

shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless

poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge

for some time at Scotland Yard.”

Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.

“What do you say?” he asked in an inhuman voice.

“Yes,” said Syme simply, “I am a police detective. But I think I hear

your friends coming.”

From the doorway there came a murmur of “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.” It

was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the crowd of

Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard trampling down

the corridor.