CHAPTER VIII
THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS
WHEN Gabriel Syme found himself finally established in a chair,
and opposite to him, fixed and final also, the lifted eyebrows and
leaden eyelids of the Professor, his fears fully returned. This
incomprehensible man from the fierce council, after all, had
certainly pursued him. If the man had one character as a paralytic
and another character as a pursuer, the antithesis might make him
more interesting, but scarcely more soothing. It would be a very
small comfort that he could not find the Professor out, if by some
serious accident the Professor should find him out. He emptied a
whole pewter pot of ale before the professor had touched his milk.
One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless. It was
just possible that this escapade signified something other than
even a slight suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some regular form or
sign. Perhaps the foolish scamper was some sort of friendly signal
that he ought to have understood. Perhaps it was a ritual. Perhaps
the new Thursday was always chased along Cheapside, as the new Lord
Mayor is always escorted along it. He was just selecting a
tentative inquiry, when the old Professor opposite suddenly and
simply cut him short. Before Syme could ask the first diplomatic
question, the old anarchist had asked suddenly, without any sort of
preparation--
"Are you a policeman?"
Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could
only manage a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.
"A policeman?" he said, laughing vaguely. "Whatever made you think
of a policeman in connection with me?"
"The process was simple enough," answered the Professor patiently.
"I thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now."
"Did I take a policeman's hat by mistake out of the restaurant?"
asked Syme, smiling wildly. "Have I by any chance got a number
stuck on to me somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look?
Why must I be a policeman? Do, do let me be a postman."
The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope,
but Syme ran on with a feverish irony.
"But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German
philosophy. Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an
evolutionary sense, sir, the ape fades so gradually into the
policeman, that I myself can never detect the shade. The monkey is
only the policeman that may be. Perhaps a maiden lady on Clapham
Common is only the policeman that might have been. I don't mind
being the policeman that might have been. I don't mind being
anything in German thought."
"Are you in the police service?" said the old man, ignoring all
Syme's improvised and desperate raillery. "Are you a detective?"
Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.
"Your suggestion is ridiculous," he began. "Why on earth--"
The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety
table, nearly breaking it.
"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he
shrieked in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a
police detective?"
"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.
"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead
face becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! You
swear it! If you swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be
sure that the devil dances at your funeral? Will you see that the
nightmare sits on your grave? Will there really be no mistake? You
are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all, you are not in
any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?"
He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his
large loose hand like a flap to his ear.
"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.
Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of
kindly collapse.
"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."
Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a
crash.
"Because you are what?" he said thickly. "You are what?"
"I am a policeman," said the Professor with his first broad smile.
and beaming through his spectacles. "But as you think policeman
only a relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I
am in the British police force; but as you tell me you are not in
the British police force, I can only say that I met you in a
dynamiters' club. I suppose I ought to arrest you." And with these
words he laid on the table before Syme an exact facsimile of the
blue card which Syme had in his own waistcoat pocket, the symbol
of his power from the police.
Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned
exactly upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and
that all stars were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite
conviction. For the last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really
been upside down, but now the capsized universe had come right side
up again. This devil from whom he had been fleeing all day was only
an elder brother of his own house, who on the other side of the
table lay back and laughed at him. He did not for the moment ask
any questions of detail; he only knew the happy and silly fact that
this shadow, which had pursued him with an intolerable oppression
of peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying to catch him up.
He knew simultaneously that he was a fool and a free man. For with
any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy
humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when
only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic
pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme's egotism held hard
to the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly adopted
the third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist
coat pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head
back until his spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling,
and shouted with a barbaric laughter.
Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes,
there was something Homeric in Syme's mirth which made many
half-drunken men look round.
"What yer laughing at, guv'nor?" asked one wondering labourer from
the docks.
"At myself," answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of
his ecstatic reaction.
"Pull yourself together," said the Professor, "or you'll get
hysterical. Have some more beer. I'll join you."
"You haven't drunk your milk," said Syme.
"My milk!" said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
contempt, "my milk! Do you think I'd look at the beastly stuff when
I'm out of sight of the bloody anarchists? We're all Christians in
this room, though perhaps," he added, glancing around at the
reeling crowd, "not strict ones. Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes,
I'll finish it right enough!" and he knocked the tumbler off the
table, making a crash of glass and a splash of silver fluid.
Syme was staring at him with a happy curiosity.
"I understand now," he cried; "of course, you're not an old man at
all."
"I can't take my face off here," replied Professor de Worms. "It's
rather an elaborate make-up. As to whether I'm an old man, that's
not for me to say. I was thirty-eight last birthday."
"Yes, but I mean," said Syme impatiently, "there's nothing the
matter with you."
"Yes," answered the other dispassionately. "I am subject to colds."
Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief.
He laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a
young actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that
he would have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over.
The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard.
"Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"
"I? No, I didn't know it," answered Syme in some surprise. "But
didn't you?"
"I knew no more than the dead," replied the man who called himself
de Worms. "I thought the President was talking about me, and I
rattled in my boots."
"And I thought he was talking about me," said Syme, with his rather
reckless laughter. "I had my hand on my revolver all the time."
"So had I," said the Professor grimly; "so had Gogol evidently."
Syme struck the table with an exclamation.
"Why, there were three of us there!" he cried. "Three out of seven
is a fighting number. If we had only known that we were three!"
The face of Professor de Worms darkened, and he did not look up.
"We were three," he said. "If we had been three hundred we could
still have done nothing."
"Not if we were three hundred against four?" asked Syme, jeering
rather boisterously.
"No," said the Professor with sobriety, "not if we were three
hundred against Sunday."
And the mere name struck Syme cold and serious; his laughter had
died in his heart before it could die on his lips. The face of
the unforgettable President sprang into his mind as startling as
a coloured photograph, and he remarked this difference between
Sunday and all his satellites, that their faces, however fierce
or sinister, became gradually blurred by memory like other human
faces, whereas Sunday's seemed almost to grow more actual during
absence, as if a man's painted portrait should slowly come alive.
They were both silent for a measure of moments, and then Syme's
speech came with a rush, like the sudden foaming of champagne.
"Professor," he cried, "it is intolerable. Are you afraid of this
man?"
The Professor lifted his heavy lids, and gazed at Syme with large,
wide-open, blue eyes of an almost ethereal honesty.
"Yes, I am," he said mildly. "So are you."
Syme was dumb for an instant. Then he rose to his feet erect, like
an insulted man, and thrust the chair away from him.
"Yes," he said in a voice indescribable, "you are right. I am
afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this
man whom I fear until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If
heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that
I would pull him down."
"How?" asked the staring Professor. "Why?"
"Because I am afraid of him," said Syme; "and no man should leave
in the universe anything of which he is afraid."
De Worms blinked at him with a sort of blind wonder. He made an
effort to speak, but Syme went on in a low voice, but with an
undercurrent of inhuman exaltation--
"Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does
not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any
common prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree?
Fight the thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the
English clergyman who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily,
and how on his death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no
money, but I can give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the
blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you
strike at the stars."
The other looked at the ceiling, one of the tricks of his pose.
"Sunday is a fixed star," he said.
"You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat.
The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet.
"Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent
bewilderment, "exactly where you are going?"
"Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being
thrown in Paris."
"Have you any conception how?" inquired the other.
"No," said Syme with equal decision.
"You remember, of course," resumed the soi-disant de Worms, pulling
his beard and looking out of the window, "that when we broke up
rather hurriedly the whole arrangements for the atrocity were left
in the private hands of the Marquis and Dr. Bull. The Marquis is by
this time probably crossing the Channel. But where he will go and
what he will do it is doubtful whether even the President knows;
certainly we don't know. The only man who does know is Dr. Bull."
"Confound it!" cried Syme. "And we don't know where he is."
"Yes," said the other in his curious, absent-minded way, "I know
where he is myself."
"Will you tell me?" asked Syme with eager eyes.
"I will take you there," said the Professor, and took down his own
hat from a peg.
Syme stood looking at him with a sort of rigid excitement.
"What do you mean?" he asked sharply. "Will you join me? Will you
take the risk?"
"Young man," said the Professor pleasantly, "I am amused to observe
that you think I am a coward. As to that I will say only one word,
and that shall be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical
rhetoric. You think that it is possible to pull down the President.
I know that it is impossible, and I am going to try it," and
opening the tavern door, which let in a blast of bitter air, they
went out together into the dark streets by the docks.
Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there
a clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The
small streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the
flaming lamps irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some
other and fallen world. Syme felt almost dazed as he stepped
through this growing confusion of lights and shadows; but his
companion walked on with a certain briskness, towards where, at
the end of the street, an inch or two of the lamplit river looked
like a bar of flame.
"Where are you going?" Syme inquired.
"Just now," answered the Professor, "I am going just round the
corner to see whether Dr. Bull has gone to bed. He is hygienic,
and retires early."
"Dr. Bull!" exclaimed Syme. "Does he live round the corner?"
"No," answered his friend. "As a matter of fact he lives some way
off, on the other side of the river, but we can tell from here
whether he has gone to bed."
Turning the corner as he spoke, and facing the dim river, flecked
with flame, he pointed with his stick to the other bank. On the
Surrey side at this point there ran out into the Thames, seeming
almost to overhang it, a bulk and cluster of those tall tenements,
dotted with lighted windows, and rising like factory chimneys to
an almost insane height. Their special poise and position made one
block of buildings especially look like a Tower of Babel with a
hundred eyes. Syme had never seen any of the sky-scraping buildings
in America, so he could only think of the buildings in a dream.
Even as he stared, the highest light in this innumerably lighted
turret abruptly went out, as if this black Argus had winked at him
with one of his innumerable eyes.
Professor de Worms swung round on his heel, and struck his stick
against his boot.
"We are too late," he said, "the hygienic Doctor has gone to bed."
"What do you mean?" asked Syme. "Does he live over there, then?"
"Yes," said de Worms, "behind that particular window which you
can't see. Come along and get some dinner. We must call on him
tomorrow morning."
Without further parley, he led the way through several by-ways
until they came out into the flare and clamour of the East India
Dock Road. The Professor, who seemed to know his way about the
neighbourhood, proceeded to a place where the line of lighted
shops fell back into a sort of abrupt twilight and quiet, in which
an old white inn, all out of repair, stood back some twenty feet
from the road.
"You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
fossils," explained the Professor. "I once found a decent place in
the West End."
"I suppose," said Syme, smiling, "that this is the corresponding
decent place in the East End?"
"It is," said the Professor reverently, and went in.
In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The
beans and bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well,
the astonishing emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned
Syme's sense of a new comradeship and comfort. Through all this
ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words
to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may
be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two
is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in
spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to
monogamy.
Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his
outrageous tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to
the little tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a
luxuriant monologue, as a man speaks with very old friends. On
his side, also, the man who had impersonated Professor de Worms
was not less communicative. His own story was almost as silly as
Syme's.
"That's a good get-up of yours," said Syme, draining a glass of
Macon; "a lot better than old Gogol's. Even at the start I thought
he was a bit too hairy."
"A difference of artistic theory," replied the Professor pensively.
"Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic
ideal of an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter.
But, indeed, to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate
expression. I am a portrait."
"I don't understand you," said Syme.
"I am a portrait," repeated the Professor. "I am a portrait of the
celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples."
"You mean you are made up like him," said Syme. "But doesn't he
know that you are taking his nose in vain?"
"He knows it right enough," replied his friend cheerfully.
"Then why doesn't he denounce you?"
"I have denounced him," answered the Professor.
"Do explain yourself," said Syme.
"With pleasure, if you don't mind hearing my story," replied the
eminent foreign philosopher. "I am by profession an actor, and my
name is Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of
Bohemian and blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of
the turf, sometimes the riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the
political refugee. In some den of exiled dreamers I was introduced
to the great German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did
not gather much about him beyond his appearance, which was very
disgusting, and which I studied carefully. I understood that he had
proved that the destructive principle in the universe was God;
hence he insisted on the need for a furious and incessant energy,
rending all things in pieces. Energy, he said, was the All. He was
lame, shortsighted, and partially paralytic. When I met him I was
in a frivolous mood, and I disliked him so much that I resolved to
imitate him. If I had been a draughtsman I would have drawn a
caricature. I was only an actor, I could only act a caricature. I
made myself up into what was meant for a wild exaggeration of the
old Professor's dirty old self. When I went into the room full of
his supporters I expected to be received with a roar of laughter,
or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation at the
insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance was
received with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first
opened my lips) with a murmur of admiration. The curse of the
perfect artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had
been too true. They thought I really was the great Nihilist
Professor. I was a healthy-minded young man at the time, and I
confess that it was a blow. Before I could fully recover, however,
two or three of these admirers ran up to me radiating indignation,
and told me that a public insult had been put upon me in the next
room. I inquired its nature. It seemed that an impertinent fellow
had dressed himself up as a preposterous parody of myself. I had
drunk more champagne than was good for me, and in a flash of folly
I decided to see the situation through. Consequently it was to meet
the glare of the company and my own lifted eyebrows and freezing
eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
"I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round
me looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to
see which was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor
health, like my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively
feeble as a young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really
had paralysis, and working within this definite limitation, he
couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my
claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple dodge.
Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I
replied with something which I could not even understand myself.
'I don't fancy,' he said, 'that you could have worked out the
principle that evolution is only negation, since there inheres in
it the introduction of lacuna, which are an essential of
differentiation.' I replied quite scornfully, 'You read all that up
in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically
was exposed long ago by Glumpe.' It is unnecessary for me to say
that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the
people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them
quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and
mysterious method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly
deficient in scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit.
'I see,' he sneered, 'you prevail like the false pig in Aesop.'
'And you fail,' I answered, smiling, 'like the hedgehog in
Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no hedgehog in Montaigne?
'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your beard.' I had no
intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather witty.
But I laughed heartily, answered, 'Like the Pantheist's boots,' at
random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The
real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one
man tried very patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I
believe, received everywhere in Europe as a delightful impostor.
His apparent earnestness and anger, you see, make him all the more
entertaining."
"Well," said Syme, "I can understand your putting on his dirty old
beard for a night's practical joke, but I don't understand your
never taking it off again."
"That is the rest of the story," said the impersonator. "When I
myself left the company, followed by reverent applause, I went
limping down the dark street, hoping that I should soon be far
enough away to be able to walk like a human being. To my
astonishment, as I was turning the corner, I felt a touch on the
shoulder, and turning, found myself under the shadow of an enormous
policeman. He told me I was wanted. I struck a sort of paralytic
attitude, and cried in a high German accent, 'Yes, I am wanted--by
the oppressed of the world. You are arresting me on the charge of
being the great anarchist, Professor de Worms.' The policeman
impassively consulted a paper in his hand, 'No, sir,' he said
civilly, 'at least, not exactly, sir. I am arresting you on the
charge of not being the celebrated anarchist, Professor de Worms.'
This charge, if it was criminal at all, was certainly the lighter
of the two, and I went along with the man, doubtful, but not
greatly dismayed. I was shown into a number of rooms, and
eventually into the presence of a police officer, who explained
that a serious campaign had been opened against the centres of
anarchy, and that this, my successful masquerade, might be of
considerable value to the public safety. He offered me a good
salary and this little blue card. Though our conversation was
short, he struck me as a man of very massive common sense and
humour; but I cannot tell you much about him personally, because--"
Syme laid down his knife and fork.
"I know," he said, "because you talked to him in a dark room."
Professor de Worms nodded and drained his glass.
