CHAPTER VII.

THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS

“Sit down!” said Sunday in a voice that he used once or twice in his

life, a voice that made men drop drawn swords.

The three who had risen fell away from Gogol, and that equivocal person

himself resumed his seat.

“Well, my man,” said the President briskly, addressing him as one

addresses a total stranger, “will you oblige me by putting your hand in

your upper waistcoat pocket and showing me what you have there?”

The alleged Pole was a little pale under his tangle of dark hair, but

he put two fingers into the pocket with apparent coolness and pulled

out a blue strip of card. When Syme saw it lying on the table, he woke

up again to the world outside him. For although the card lay at the

other extreme of the table, and he could read nothing of the

inscription on it, it bore a startling resemblance to the blue card in

his own pocket, the card which had been given to him when he joined the

anti-anarchist constabulary.

“Pathetic Slav,” said the President, “tragic child of Poland, are you

prepared in the presence of that card to deny that you are in this

company—shall we say _de trop?_”

“Right oh!” said the late Gogol. It made everyone jump to hear a clear,

commercial and somewhat cockney voice coming out of that forest of

foreign hair. It was irrational, as if a Chinaman had suddenly spoken

with a Scotch accent.

“I gather that you fully understand your position,” said Sunday.

“You bet,” answered the Pole. “I see it’s a fair cop. All I say is, I

don’t believe any Pole could have imitated my accent like I did his.”

“I concede the point,” said Sunday. “I believe your own accent to be

inimitable, though I shall practise it in my bath. Do you mind leaving

your beard with your card?”

“Not a bit,” answered Gogol; and with one finger he ripped off the

whole of his shaggy head-covering, emerging with thin red hair and a

pale, pert face. “It was hot,” he added.

“I will do you the justice to say,” said Sunday, not without a sort of

brutal admiration, “that you seem to have kept pretty cool under it.

Now listen to me. I like you. The consequence is that it would annoy me

for just about two and a half minutes if I heard that you had died in

torments. Well, if you ever tell the police or any human soul about us,

I shall have that two and a half minutes of discomfort. On your

discomfort I will not dwell. Good day. Mind the step.”

The red-haired detective who had masqueraded as Gogol rose to his feet

without a word, and walked out of the room with an air of perfect

nonchalance. Yet the astonished Syme was able to realise that this ease

was suddenly assumed; for there was a slight stumble outside the door,

which showed that the departing detective had not minded the step.

“Time is flying,” said the President in his gayest manner, after

glancing at his watch, which like everything about him seemed bigger

than it ought to be. “I must go off at once; I have to take the chair

at a Humanitarian meeting.”

The Secretary turned to him with working eyebrows.

“Would it not be better,” he said a little sharply, “to discuss further

the details of our project, now that the spy has left us?”

“No, I think not,” said the President with a yawn like an unobtrusive

earthquake. “Leave it as it is. Let Saturday settle it. I must be off.

Breakfast here next Sunday.”

But the late loud scenes had whipped up the almost naked nerves of the

Secretary. He was one of those men who are conscientious even in crime.

“I must protest, President, that the thing is irregular,” he said. “It

is a fundamental rule of our society that all plans shall be debated in

full council. Of course, I fully appreciate your forethought when in

the actual presence of a traitor—”

“Secretary,” said the President seriously, “if you’d take your head

home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it

might.”

The Secretary reared back in a kind of equine anger.

“I really fail to understand—” he began in high offense.

“That’s it, that’s it,” said the President, nodding a great many times.

“That’s where you fail right enough. You fail to understand. Why, you

dancing donkey,” he roared, rising, “you didn’t want to be overheard by

a spy, didn’t you? How do you know you aren’t overheard now?”

And with these words he shouldered his way out of the room, shaking

with incomprehensible scorn.

Four of the men left behind gaped after him without any apparent

glimmering of his meaning. Syme alone had even a glimmering, and such

as it was it froze him to the bone. If the last words of the President

meant anything, they meant that he had not after all passed

unsuspected. They meant that while Sunday could not denounce him like

Gogol, he still could not trust him like the others.

The other four got to their feet grumbling more or less, and betook

themselves elsewhere to find lunch, for it was already well past

midday. The Professor went last, very slowly and painfully. Syme sat

long after the rest had gone, revolving his strange position. He had

escaped a thunderbolt, but he was still under a cloud. At last he rose

and made his way out of the hotel into Leicester Square. The bright,

cold day had grown increasingly colder, and when he came out into the

street he was surprised by a few flakes of snow. While he still carried

the sword-stick and the rest of Gregory’s portable luggage, he had

thrown the cloak down and left it somewhere, perhaps on the steam-tug,

perhaps on the balcony. Hoping, therefore, that the snow-shower might

be slight, he stepped back out of the street for a moment and stood up

under the doorway of a small and greasy hair-dresser’s shop, the front

window of which was empty, except for a sickly wax lady in evening

dress.

Snow, however, began to thicken and fall fast; and Syme, having found

one glance at the wax lady quite sufficient to depress his spirits,

stared out instead into the white and empty street. He was considerably

astonished to see, standing quite still outside the shop and staring

into the window, a man. His top hat was loaded with snow like the hat

of Father Christmas, the white drift was rising round his boots and

ankles; but it seemed as if nothing could tear him away from the

contemplation of the colourless wax doll in dirty evening dress. That

any human being should stand in such weather looking into such a shop

was a matter of sufficient wonder to Syme; but his idle wonder turned

suddenly into a personal shock; for he realised that the man standing

there was the paralytic old Professor de Worms. It scarcely seemed the

place for a person of his years and infirmities.

Syme was ready to believe anything about the perversions of this

dehumanized brotherhood; but even he could not believe that the

Professor had fallen in love with that particular wax lady. He could

only suppose that the man’s malady (whatever it was) involved some

momentary fits of rigidity or trance. He was not inclined, however, to

feel in this case any very compassionate concern. On the contrary, he

rather congratulated himself that the Professor’s stroke and his

elaborate and limping walk would make it easy to escape from him and

leave him miles behind. For Syme thirsted first and last to get clear

of the whole poisonous atmosphere, if only for an hour. Then he could

collect his thoughts, formulate his policy, and decide finally whether

he should or should not keep faith with Gregory.

He strolled away through the dancing snow, turned up two or three

streets, down through two or three others, and entered a small Soho

restaurant for lunch. He partook reflectively of four small and quaint

courses, drank half a bottle of red wine, and ended up over black

coffee and a black cigar, still thinking. He had taken his seat in the

upper room of the restaurant, which was full of the chink of knives and

the chatter of foreigners. He remembered that in old days he had

imagined that all these harmless and kindly aliens were anarchists. He

shuddered, remembering the real thing. But even the shudder had the

delightful shame of escape. The wine, the common food, the familiar

place, the faces of natural and talkative men, made him almost feel as

if the Council of the Seven Days had been a bad dream; and although he

knew it was nevertheless an objective reality, it was at least a

distant one. Tall houses and populous streets lay between him and his

last sight of the shameful seven; he was free in free London, and

drinking wine among the free. With a somewhat easier action, he took

his hat and stick and strolled down the stair into the shop below.

When he entered that lower room he stood stricken and rooted to the

spot. At a small table, close up to the blank window and the white

street of snow, sat the old anarchist Professor over a glass of milk,

with his lifted livid face and pendent eyelids. For an instant Syme

stood as rigid as the stick he leant upon. Then with a gesture as of

blind hurry, he brushed past the Professor, dashing open the door and

slamming it behind him, and stood outside in the snow.

“Can that old corpse be following me?” he asked himself, biting his

yellow moustache. “I stopped too long up in that room, so that even

such leaden feet could catch me up. One comfort is, with a little brisk

walking I can put a man like that as far away as Timbuctoo. Or am I too

fanciful? Was he really following me? Surely Sunday would not be such a

fool as to send a lame man?”

He set off at a smart pace, twisting and whirling his stick, in the

direction of Covent Garden. As he crossed the great market the snow

increased, growing blinding and bewildering as the afternoon began to

darken. The snow-flakes tormented him like a swarm of silver bees.

Getting into his eyes and beard, they added their unremitting futility

to his already irritated nerves; and by the time that he had come at a

swinging pace to the beginning of Fleet Street, he lost patience, and

finding a Sunday teashop, turned into it to take shelter. He ordered

another cup of black coffee as an excuse. Scarcely had he done so, when

Professor de Worms hobbled heavily into the shop, sat down with

difficulty and ordered a glass of milk.

Syme’s walking-stick had fallen from his hand with a great clang, which

confessed the concealed steel. But the Professor did not look round.

Syme, who was commonly a cool character, was literally gaping as a

rustic gapes at a conjuring trick. He had seen no cab following; he had

heard no wheels outside the shop; to all mortal appearances the man had

come on foot. But the old man could only walk like a snail, and Syme

had walked like the wind. He started up and snatched his stick, half

crazy with the contradiction in mere arithmetic, and swung out of the

swinging doors, leaving his coffee untasted. An omnibus going to the

Bank went rattling by with an unusual rapidity. He had a violent run of

a hundred yards to reach it; but he managed to spring, swaying upon the

splash-board and, pausing for an instant to pant, he climbed on to the

top. When he had been seated for about half a minute, he heard behind

him a sort of heavy and asthmatic breathing.

Turning sharply, he saw rising gradually higher and higher up the

omnibus steps a top hat soiled and dripping with snow, and under the

shadow of its brim the short-sighted face and shaky shoulders of

Professor de Worms. He let himself into a seat with characteristic

care, and wrapped himself up to the chin in the mackintosh rug.

Every movement of the old man’s tottering figure and vague hands, every

uncertain gesture and panic-stricken pause, seemed to put it beyond

question that he was helpless, that he was in the last imbecility of

the body. He moved by inches, he let himself down with little gasps of

caution. And yet, unless the philosophical entities called time and

space have no vestige even of a practical existence, it appeared quite

unquestionable that he had run after the omnibus.

Syme sprang erect upon the rocking car, and after staring wildly at the

wintry sky, that grew gloomier every moment, he ran down the steps. He

had repressed an elemental impulse to leap over the side.

Too bewildered to look back or to reason, he rushed into one of the

little courts at the side of Fleet Street as a rabbit rushes into a

hole. He had a vague idea, if this incomprehensible old Jack-in-the-box

was really pursuing him, that in that labyrinth of little streets he

could soon throw him off the scent. He dived in and out of those

crooked lanes, which were more like cracks than thoroughfares; and by

the time that he had completed about twenty alternate angles and

described an unthinkable polygon, he paused to listen for any sound of

pursuit. There was none; there could not in any case have been much,

for the little streets were thick with the soundless snow. Somewhere

behind Red Lion Court, however, he noticed a place where some energetic

citizen had cleared away the snow for a space of about twenty yards,

leaving the wet, glistening cobble-stones. He thought little of this as

he passed it, only plunging into yet another arm of the maze. But when

a few hundred yards farther on he stood still again to listen, his

heart stood still also, for he heard from that space of rugged stones

the clinking crutch and labouring feet of the infernal cripple.

The sky above was loaded with the clouds of snow, leaving London in a

darkness and oppression premature for that hour of the evening. On each

side of Syme the walls of the alley were blind and featureless; there

was no little window or any kind of eve. He felt a new impulse to break

out of this hive of houses, and to get once more into the open and

lamp-lit street. Yet he rambled and dodged for a long time before he

struck the main thoroughfare. When he did so, he struck it much farther

up than he had fancied. He came out into what seemed the vast and void

of Ludgate Circus, and saw St. Paul’s Cathedral sitting in the sky.

At first he was startled to find these great roads so empty, as if a

pestilence had swept through the city. Then he told himself that some

degree of emptiness was natural; first because the snow-storm was even

dangerously deep, and secondly because it was Sunday. And at the very

word Sunday he bit his lip; the word was henceforth for hire like some

indecent pun. Under the white fog of snow high up in the heaven the

whole atmosphere of the city was turned to a very queer kind of green

twilight, as of men under the sea. The sealed and sullen sunset behind

the dark dome of St. Paul’s had in it smoky and sinister

colours—colours of sickly green, dead red or decaying bronze, that were

just bright enough to emphasise the solid whiteness of the snow. But

right up against these dreary colours rose the black bulk of the

cathedral; and upon the top of the cathedral was a random splash and

great stain of snow, still clinging as to an Alpine peak. It had fallen

accidentally, but just so fallen as to half drape the dome from its

very topmost point, and to pick out in perfect silver the great orb and

the cross. When Syme saw it he suddenly straightened himself, and made

with his sword-stick an involuntary salute.

He knew that that evil figure, his shadow, was creeping quickly or

slowly behind him, and he did not care.

It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the skies were

darkening that high place of the earth was bright. The devils might

have captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross. He had a

new impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and

pursuing paralytic; and at the entrance of the court as it opened upon

the Circus he turned, stick in hand, to face his pursuer.

Professor de Worms came slowly round the corner of the irregular alley

behind him, his unnatural form outlined against a lonely gas-lamp,

irresistibly recalling that very imaginative figure in the nursery

rhymes, “the crooked man who went a crooked mile.” He really looked as

if he had been twisted out of shape by the tortuous streets he had been

threading. He came nearer and nearer, the lamplight shining on his

lifted spectacles, his lifted, patient face. Syme waited for him as St.

George waited for the dragon, as a man waits for a final explanation or

for death. And the old Professor came right up to him and passed him

like a total stranger, without even a blink of his mournful eyelids.

There was something in this silent and unexpected innocence that left

Syme in a final fury. The man’s colourless face and manner seemed to

assert that the whole following had been an accident. Syme was

galvanised with an energy that was something between bitterness and a

burst of boyish derision. He made a wild gesture as if to knock the old

man’s hat off, called out something like “Catch me if you can,” and

went racing away across the white, open Circus. Concealment was

impossible now; and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the

black figure of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging

strides like a man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding

body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a

lecturer upon the body of a harlequin.

This outrageous chase sped across Ludgate Circus, up Ludgate Hill,

round St. Paul’s Cathedral, along Cheapside, Syme remembering all the

nightmares he had ever known. Then Syme broke away towards the river,

and ended almost down by the docks. He saw the yellow panes of a low,

lighted public-house, flung himself into it and ordered beer. It was a

foul tavern, sprinkled with foreign sailors, a place where opium might

be smoked or knives drawn.

A moment later Professor de Worms entered the place, sat down

carefully, and asked for a glass of milk.