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--
"Pagens ont tort et Chretiens 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.
