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 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 goncealment," 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.
