CHAPTER II
THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME
THE cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated
themselves in a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained
wooden table with one wooden leg. The room was so small and dark,
that very little could be seen of the attendant who was summoned,
beyond a vague and dark impression of something bulky and bearded.
"Will you take a little supper?" asked Gregory politely. "The pate
de foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."
Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred
indifference--
"Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."
To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly,
sir!" and went away apparently to get it.
"What will you drink?" resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. "I shall only have a crepe de menthe myself; I have
dined. But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you
with a half-bottle of Pommery at least?"
"Thank you!" said the motionless Syme. "You are very good."
His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in
themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the
actual appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it
particularly good. Then he suddenly began to eat with great
rapidity and appetite.
"Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!" he said to Gregory,
smiling. "I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It
is new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly
the other way."
"You are not asleep, I assure you," said Gregory. "You are, on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your
existence. Ah, here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be
a slight disproportion, let us say, between the inner arrangements
of this excellent hotel and its simple and unpretentious exterior.
But that is all our modesty. We are the most modest men that ever
lived on earth."
"And who are we?" asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.
"It is quite simple," replied Gregory. "We are the serious
anarchists, in whom you do not believe."
"Oh!" said Syme shortly. "You do yourselves well in drinks."
"Yes, we are serious about everything," answered Gregory.
Then after a pause he added--
"If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little,
don't put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don't wish
you to do yourself an injustice."
"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect
calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either
condition. May I smoke?"
"Certainly!" said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. "Try one of
mine."
Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out
of his waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and
let out a long cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit
that he performed these rites with so much composure, for almost
before he had begun them the table at which he sat had begun to
revolve, first slowly, and then rapidly, as if at an insane
seance.
"You must not mind it," said Gregory; "it's a kind of screw."
"Quite so," said Syme placidly, "a kind of screw. How simple that
is!"
The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering
across the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a
factory chimney, and the two, with their chairs and table, shot
down through the floor as if the earth had swallowed them. They
went rattling down a kind of roaring chimney as rapidly as a lift
cut loose, and they came with an abrupt bump to the bottom. But
when Gregory threw open a pair of doors and let in a red
subterranean light, Syme was still smoking with one leg thrown
over the other, and had not turned a yellow hair.
Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which
was the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as
big as a fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the
door there was a sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory
struck five times. A heavy voice with a foreign accent asked him
who he was. To this he gave the more or less unexpected reply,
"Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." The heavy hinges began to move; it was
obviously some kind of password.
Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a
network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering
pattern was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and
revolvers, closely packed or interlocked.
"I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities," said Gregory;
"we have to be very strict here."
"Oh, don't apologise," said Syme. "I know your passion for law and
order," and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel
weapons. With his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he
looked a singularly frail and fanciful figure as he walked down
that shining avenue of death.
They passed through several such passages, and came out at last
into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in
shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the
appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or
pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more
dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of
iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the
very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his
cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.
"And now, my dear Mr. Syme," said Gregory, throwing himself in an
expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, "now we are
quite cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give
you any notion of why I brought you here. It was one of those quite
arbitrary emotions, like jumping off a cliff or falling in love.
Suffice it to say that you were an inexpressibly irritating fellow,
and, to do you justice, you are still. I would break twenty oaths
of secrecy for the pleasure of taking you down a peg. That way you
have of lighting a cigar would make a priest break the seal of
confession. Well, you said that you were quite certain I was not a
serious anarchist. Does this place strike you as being serious?"
"It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety," assented
Syme; "but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give
me information, because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted
from me a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall
certainly keep. So it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries.
First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object
to? You want to abolish Government?"
"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We
do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations;
that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the
Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to
deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour
and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly
sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of
Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and
Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope
you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
"You spoke of a second question," snapped Gregory.
"With pleasure," resumed Syme. "In all your present acts and
surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an
aunt who lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have
found people living from preference under a public-house. You have
a heavy iron door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the
humiliation of calling yourself Mr. Chamberlain. You surround
yourself with steel instruments which make the place, if I may say
so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after taking all
this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the earth,
you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to
every silly woman in Saffron Park?"
Gregory smiled.
"The answer is simple," he said. "I told you I was a serious
anarchist, and you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me.
Unless I took them into this infernal room they would not believe
me."
Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory
went on.
"The history of the thing might amuse you," he said. "When first I
became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable
disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops
in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and
Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from them that bishops are
strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind.
I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters
in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, 'Down! down!
presumptuous human reason!' they found out in some way that I was
not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a
millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that
a fool could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a
major. Now I am a humanitarian myself, but I have, I hope, enough
intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who, like
Nietzsche, admire violence--the proud, mad war of Nature and all
that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and
waved it constantly. I called out 'Blood!' abstractedly, like a
man calling for wine. I often said, 'Let the weak perish; it is
the Law.' Well, well, it seems majors don't do this. I was nabbed
again. At last I went in despair to the President of the Central
Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe."
"What is his name?" asked Syme.
"You would not know it," answered Gregory. "That is his greatness.
Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and
they were heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of,
and he is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the
room with him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have
been children in his hands."
He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed--
"But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling
as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said
to him, 'What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find
more respectable than bishops and majors?' He looked at me with his
large but indecipherable face. 'You want a safe disguise, do you?
You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in
which no one would ever look for a bomb?' I nodded. He suddenly
lifted his lion's voice. 'Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you
fool!' he roared so that the room shook. 'Nobody will ever expect
you to do anything dangerous then.' And he turned his broad back
on me without another word. I took his advice, and have never
regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and
night, and--by God!--they would let me wheel their perambulators."
Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.
"You took me in," he said. "It is really a smart dodge."
Then after a pause he added--
"What do you call this tremendous President of yours?"
"We generally call him Sunday," replied Gregory with simplicity.
"You see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist
Council, and they are named after days of the week. He is called
Sunday, by some of his admirers Bloody Sunday. It is curious you
should mention the matter, because the very night you have dropped
in (if I may so express it) is the night on which our London
branch, which assembles in this room, has to elect its own deputy
to fill a vacancy in the Council. The gentleman who has for some
time past played, with propriety and general applause, the
difficult part of Thursday, has died quite suddenly. Consequently,
we have called a meeting this very evening to elect a successor."
He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of
smiling embarrassment.
"I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme," he continued
casually. "I feel that I can confide anything to you, as you have
promised to tell nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something
that I would not say in so many words to the anarchists who will be
coming to the room in about ten minutes. We shall, of course, go
through a form of election; but I don't mind telling you that it is
practically certain what the result will be." He looked down for a
moment modestly. "It is almost a settled thing that I am to be
Thursday."
"My dear fellow." said Syme heartily, "I congratulate you. A great
career!"
Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking
rapidly.
"As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table," he
said, "and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible."
Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a
walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick,
a large Colt's revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask of
brandy. Over the chair, beside the table, was thrown a
heavy-looking cape or cloak.
"I have only to get the form of election finished," continued
Gregory with animation, "then I snatch up this cloak and stick,
stuff these other things into my pocket, step out of a door in
this cavern, which opens on the river, where there is a steam-tug
already waiting for me, and then--then--oh, the wild joy of being
Thursday!" And he clasped his hands.
Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent languor,
got to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation.
"Why is it," he asked vaguely, "that I think you are quite a decent
fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory?" He paused a moment,
and then added with a sort of fresh curiosity, "Is it because you
are such an ass?"
There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out--
"Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been
in in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave
you a promise before I came into this place. That promise I would
keep under red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a
little promise of the same kind?"
"A promise?" asked Gregory, wondering.
"Yes," said Syme very seriously, "a promise. I swore before God
that I would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by
Humanity, or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will
not tell my secret to the anarchists?"
"Your secret?" asked the staring Gregory. "Have you got a secret?"
"Yes," said Syme, "I have a secret." Then after a pause, "Will you
swear?"
Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said
abruptly--
"You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about
you. Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell
me. But look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes."
Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into
his long, grey trousers' pockets. Almost as he did so there came
five knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the
first of the conspirators.
"Well," said Syme slowly, "I don't know how to tell you the truth
more shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as
an aimless poet is not confined to you or your President. We have
known the dodge for some time at Scotland Yard."
Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.
"What do you say?" he asked in an inhuman voice.
"Yes," said Syme simply, "I am a police detective. But I think I
hear your friends coming."
From the doorway there came a murmur of "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain."
It was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the
crowd of Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard
trampling down the corridor.
