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.