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.
