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