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

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.