CHAPTER VI.

THE EXPOSURE

Such were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and

again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence.

Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective,

that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another

nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism

always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on

the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of

thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end,

so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in

some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the

world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a

tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end

of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a

tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures

seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate

horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.

Talk had been going on steadily as he took in the scene; and not the

least of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was the

contrast between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terrible

purport. They were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediate

plot. The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said

that they were talking about bombs and kings. Only three days

afterwards the Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in

Paris, and over their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these

beaming gentlemen had decided how both should die. Even the instrument

was chosen; the black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the

bomb.

Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objective crime

would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical

tremors. He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at

least two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and

roaring gas. But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel a

third kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moral

revulsion or his social responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear to

spare for the French President or the Czar; he had begun to fear for

himself. Most of the talkers took little heed of him, debating now with

their faces closer together, and almost uniformly grave, save when for

an instant the smile of the Secretary ran aslant across his face as the

jagged lightning runs aslant across the sky. But there was one

persistent thing which first troubled Syme and at last terrified him.

The President was always looking at him, steadily, and with a great and

baffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but his blue eyes

stood out of his head. And they were always fixed on Syme.

Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When the

President’s eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He

had hardly the shred of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary

way Sunday had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge of

the balcony, and saw a policeman, standing abstractedly just beneath,

staring at the bright railings and the sunlit trees.

Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him

for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men, who

were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and

fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism. He

even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played

together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to

Gregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thing

that he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised

not to jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his

cold hand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo

of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made

to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as

the square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep his

antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this

great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber.

Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable

policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he

looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly

studying him with big, unbearable eyes.

In all the torrent of his thought there were two thoughts that never

crossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that the

President and his Council could crush him if he continued to stand

alone. The place might be public, the project might seem impossible.

But Sunday was not the man who would carry himself thus easily without

having, somehow or somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either by

anonymous poison or sudden street accident, by hypnotism or by fire

from hell, Sunday could certainly strike him. If he defied the man he

was probably dead, either struck stiff there in his chair or long

afterwards as by an innocent ailment. If he called in the police

promptly, arrested everyone, told all, and set against them the whole

energy of England, he would probably escape; certainly not otherwise.

They were a balconyful of gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy

square; but he felt no more safe with them than if they had been a

boatful of armed pirates overlooking an empty sea.

There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to

him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a

weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their

allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might

have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable,

he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking

abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called

something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be

detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood.

But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink

even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to

fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.

The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical.

Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually and conventionally of the best

things on the table—cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary

was a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over

half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old

Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And

even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of

mere mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a

frightful freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage

factory. Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets or

drunk a quart of coffee, he would be found with his great head on one

side staring at Syme.

“I have often wondered,” said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a

slice of bread and jam, “whether it wouldn’t be better for me to do it

with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off with a

knife. And it would be a new emotion to get a knife into a French

President and wriggle it round.”

“You are wrong,” said the Secretary, drawing his black brows together.

“The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with a

personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best

symbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers of

the Christians. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even

so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man’s brain is a

bomb,” he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and

striking his own skull with violence. “My brain feels like a bomb,

night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must

expand, if it breaks up the universe.”

“I don’t want the universe broken up just yet,” drawled the Marquis. “I

want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one

yesterday in bed.”

“No, if the only end of the thing is nothing,” said Dr. Bull with his

sphinx-like smile, “it hardly seems worth doing.”

The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.

“Every man knows in his heart,” he said, “that nothing is worth doing.”

There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said—

“We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is how

Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all agree with the

original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I should

suggest that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to—”

The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday

had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.

“Before we discuss that,” he said in a small, quiet voice, “let us go

into a private room. I have something very particular to say.”

Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had come

at last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he could

hear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright,

was cold.

A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial

tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle.

He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from

nowhere. That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the

vulgarity, and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those

unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of

Christendom. His youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his

mind; he did not think of himself as the representative of the corps of

gentlemen turned into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who

lived in the dark room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of

all these common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched

into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in

being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above

the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at least, he looked down

upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the

commonplace. He felt towards them all that unconscious and elementary

superiority that a brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man

over powerful errors. He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor

the physical strength of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded

it no more than the fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a

horn on his nose like a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate

certainty that the President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was

right. There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism

in the song of Roland—

“Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit,”

which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.

This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a

quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the

barrel-organ could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This

very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to

miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into

their dark room and die for something that they could not even

understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the

energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear

deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the

drums of the pride of death.

The conspirators were already filing through the open window and into

the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his

brain and body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them

down an irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and

into a dim, cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an

abandoned boardroom. When they were all in, he closed and locked the

door.

The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed bursting

with inarticulate grievance.

“Zso! Zso!” he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish

accent becoming almost impenetrable. “You zay you nod ’ide. You zay you

show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you

run yourselves in a dark box!”

The President seemed to take the foreigner’s incoherent satire with

entire good humour.

“You can’t get hold of it yet, Gogol,” he said in a fatherly way. “When

once they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will not

care where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should have

had the whole staff at the keyhole. You don’t seem to know anything

about mankind.”

“I die for zem,” cried the Pole in thick excitement, “and I slay zare

oppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite ze

tyrant in ze open square.”

“I see, I see,” said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himself

at the top of a long table. “You die for mankind first, and then you

get up and smite their oppressors. So that’s all right. And now may I

ask you to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the

other gentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning

something intelligent is going to be said.”

Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the original

summons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling in his brown

beard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion of

the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feeling

of a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, of

making a good speech.

“Comrades,” said the President, suddenly rising, “we have spun out this

farce long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something so

simple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to our

levities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we

were discussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying

anything else, that those plans and places should not be voted by this

meeting, but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable

member. I suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull.”

They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for the

next words, though not loud, had a living and sensational emphasis.

Sunday struck the table.

“Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at this

meeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to do must be

mentioned in this company.”

Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers; but it seemed

as if he had never really astonished them until now. They all moved

feverishly in their seats, except Syme. He sat stiff in his, with his

hand in his pocket, and on the handle of his loaded revolver. When the

attack on him came he would sell his life dear. He would find out at

least if the President was mortal.

Sunday went on smoothly—

“You will probably understand that there is only one possible motive

for forbidding free speech at this festival of freedom. Strangers

overhearing us matters nothing. They assume that we are joking. But

what would matter, even unto death, is this, that there should be one

actually among us who is not of us, who knows our grave purpose, but

does not share it, who—”

The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.

“It can’t be!” he cried, leaping. “There can’t—”

The President flapped his large flat hand on the table like the fin of

some huge fish.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “there is a spy in this room. There is a traitor

at this table. I will waste no more words. His name—”

Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.

“His name is Gogol,” said the President. “He is that hairy humbug over

there who pretends to be a Pole.”

Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the same flash

three men sprang at his throat. Even the Professor made an effort to

rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was blinded with a

beneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat shuddering, in a

palsy of passionate relief.