CHAPTER XI
THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE
SYME put the field-glasses from his eyes with an almost ghastly
relief.
"The President is not with them, anyhow," he said, and wiped his
forehead.
"But surely they are right away on the horizon," said the
bewildered Colonel, blinking and but half recovered from Bull's
hasty though polite explanation. "Could you possibly know your
President among all those people?"
"Could I know a white elephant among all those people!" answered
Syme somewhat irritably. "As you very truly say, they are on the
horizon; but if he were walking with them . . . by God! I believe
this ground would shake."
After an instant's pause the new man called Ratcliffe said with
gloomy decision--
"Of course the President isn't with them. I wish to Gemini he were.
Much more likely the President is riding in triumph through Paris,
or sitting on the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral."
"This is absurd!" said Syme. "Something may have happened in our
absence; but he cannot have carried the world with a rush like
that. It is quite true," he added, frowning dubiously at the
distant fields that lay towards the little station, "it is
certainly true that there seems to be a crowd coming this way;
but they are not all the army that you make out."
"Oh, they," said the new detective contemptuously; "no they are
not a very valuable force. But let me tell you frankly that they
are precisely calculated to our value--we are not much, my boy,
in Sunday's universe. He has got hold of all the cables and
telegraphs himself. But to kill the Supreme Council he regards as
a trivial matter, like a post card; it may be left to his private
secretary," and he spat on the grass.
Then he turned to the others and said somewhat austerely--
"There is a great deal to be said for death; but if anyone has
any preference for the other alternative, I strongly advise him
to walk after me."
With these words, he turned his broad back and strode with silent
energy towards the wood. The others gave one glance over their
shoulders, and saw that the dark cloud of men had detached itself
from the station and was moving with a mysterious discipline
across the plain. They saw already, even with the naked eye, black
blots on the foremost faces, which marked the masks they wore.
They turned and followed their leader, who had already struck the
wood, and disappeared among the twinkling trees.
The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood
they had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a
dim pool. The inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight
and shaken shadows. They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost
recalling the dizziness of a cinematograph. Even the solid figures
walking with him Syme could hardly see for the patterns of sun and
shade that danced upon them. Now a man's head was lit as with a
light of Rembrandt, leaving all else obliterated; now again he had
strong and staring white hands with the face of a negro. The
ex-Marquis had pulled the old straw hat over his eyes, and the
black shade of the brim cut his face so squarely in two that it
seemed to be wearing one of the black half-masks of their pursuers.
The fancy tinted Syme's overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he
wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything?
This wood of witchery, in which men's faces turned black and white
by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and
then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro
(after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol
of the world in which he had been moving for three days, this world
where men took off their beards and their spectacles and their
noses, and turned into other people. That tragic self-confidence
which he had felt when he believed that the Marquis was a devil
had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the Marquis was
a friend. He felt almost inclined to ask after all these
bewilderments what was a friend and what an enemy. Was there
anything that was apart from what it seemed? The Marquis had taken
off his nose and turned out to be a detective. Might he not just
as well take off his head and turn out to be a hobgoblin? Was not
everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance
of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always
unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in
the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had
found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call
Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism
which can find no floor to the universe.
As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Syme
strove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worst of
his fancies. With two impatient strides he overtook the man in the
Marquis's straw hat, the man whom he had come to address as
Ratcliffe. In a voice exaggeratively loud and cheerful, he broke
the bottomless silence and made conversation.
"May I ask," he said, "where on earth we are all going to?"
So genuine had been the doubts of his soul, that he was quite glad
to hear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.
"We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he said.
"I think that part of the country is least likely to be with
them."
"What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be
running the real world in that way. Surely not many working men
are anarchists, and surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat
modern armies and police."
"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So
you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the
question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy
came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have
been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more
interest than anyone else in there being some decent government.
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man
hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have
sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always
objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always
anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars."
"As a lecture on English history for the little ones," said Syme,
"this is all very nice; but I have not yet grasped its application."
"Its application is," said his informant, "that most of old Sunday's
right-hand men are South African and American millionaires. That is
why he has got hold of all the communications; and that is why the
last four champions of the anti-anarchist police force are running
through a wood like rabbits."
"Millionaires I can understand," said Syme thoughtfully, "they are
nearly all mad. But getting hold of a few wicked old gentlemen with
hobbies is one thing; getting hold of great Christian nations is
another. I would bet the nose off my face (forgive the allusion)
that Sunday would stand perfectly helpless before the task of
converting any ordinary healthy person anywhere."
"Well," said the other, "it rather depends what sort of person you
mean."
"Well, for instance," said Syme, "he could never convert that
person," and he pointed straight in front of him.
They had come to an open space of sunlight, which seemed to express
to Syme the final return of his own good sense; and in the middle
of this forest clearing was a figure that might well stand for that
common sense in an almost awful actuality. Burnt by the sun and
stained with perspiration, and grave with the bottomless gravity of
small necessary toils, a heavy French peasant was cutting wood with
a hatchet. His cart stood a few yards off, already half full of
timber; and the horse that cropped the grass was, like his master,
valorous but not desperate; like his master, he was even
prosperous, but yet was almost sad. The man was a Norman, taller
than the average of the French and very angular; and his swarthy
figure stood dark against a square of sunlight, almost like some
allegoric figure of labour frescoed on a ground of gold.
"Mr. Syme is saying," called out Ratcliffe to the French Colonel,
"that this man, at least, will never be an anarchist."
"Mr. Syme is right enough there," answered Colonel Ducroix,
laughing, "if only for the reason that he has plenty of property
to defend. But I forgot that in your country you are not used to
peasants being wealthy."
"He looks poor," said Dr. Bull doubtfully.
"Quite so," said the Colonel; "that is why he is rich."
"I have an idea," called out Dr. Bull suddenly; "how much would he
take to give us a lift in his cart? Those dogs are all on foot, and
we could soon leave them behind."
"Oh, give him anything!" said Syme eagerly. "I have piles of money
on me."
"That will never do," said the Colonel; "he will never have any
respect for you unless you drive a bargain."
"Oh, if he haggles!" began Bull impatiently.
"He haggles because he is a free man," said the other. "You do
not understand; he would not see the meaning of generosity. He is
not being tipped."
And even while they seemed to hear the heavy feet of their strange
pursuers behind them, they had to stand and stamp while the French
Colonel talked to the French wood-cutter with all the leisurely
badinage and bickering of market-day. At the end of the four
minutes, however, they saw that the Colonel was right, for the
wood-cutter entered into their plans, not with the vague servility
of a tout too-well paid, but with the seriousness of a solicitor
who had been paid the proper fee. He told them that the best thing
they could do was to make their way down to the little inn on the
hills above Lancy, where the innkeeper, an old soldier who had
become devot in his latter years, would be certain to sympathise
with them, and even to take risks in their support. The whole
company, therefore, piled themselves on top of the stacks of wood,
and went rocking in the rude cart down the other and steeper side
of the woodland. Heavy and ramshackle as was the vehicle, it was
driven quickly enough, and they soon had the exhilarating
impression of distancing altogether those, whoever they were, who
were hunting them. For, after all, the riddle as to where the
anarchists had got all these followers was still unsolved. One
man's presence had sufficed for them; they had fled at the first
sight of the deformed smile of the Secretary. Syme every now and
then looked back over his shoulder at the army on their track.
As the wood grew first thinner and then smaller with distance, he
could see the sunlit slopes beyond it and above it; and across
these was still moving the square black mob like one monstrous
beetle. In the very strong sunlight and with his own very strong
eyes, which were almost telescopic, Syme could see this mass of
men quite plainly. He could see them as separate human figures;
but he was increasingly surprised by the way in which they moved
as one man. They seemed to be dressed in dark clothes and plain
hats, like any common crowd out of the streets; but they did not
spread and sprawl and trail by various lines to the attack, as
would be natural in an ordinary mob. They moved with a sort of
dreadful and wicked woodenness, like a staring army of automatons.
Syme pointed this out to Ratcliffe.
"Yes," replied the policeman, "that's discipline. That's Sunday. He
is perhaps five hundred miles off, but the fear of him is on all of
them, like the finger of God. Yes, they are walking regularly; and
you bet your boots that they are talking regularly, yes, and
thinking regularly. But the one important thing for us is that they
are disappearing regularly."
Syme nodded. It was true that the black patch of the pursuing men
was growing smaller and smaller as the peasant belaboured his
horse.
The level of the sunlit landscape, though flat as a whole, fell
away on the farther side of the wood in billows of heavy slope
towards the sea, in a way not unlike the lower slopes of the
Sussex downs. The only difference was that in Sussex the road
would have been broken and angular like a little brook, but
here the white French road fell sheer in front of them like a
waterfall. Down this direct descent the cart clattered at a
considerable angle, and in a few minutes, the road growing yet
steeper, they saw below them the little harbour of Lancy and a
great blue arc of the sea. The travelling cloud of their enemies
had wholly disappeared from the horizon.
The horse and cart took a sharp turn round a clump of elms, and
the horse's nose nearly struck the face of an old gentleman who
was sitting on the benches outside the little cafe of "Le Soleil
d'Or." The peasant grunted an apology, and got down from his
seat. The others also descended one by one, and spoke to the old
gentleman with fragmentary phrases of courtesy, for it was quite
evident from his expansive manner that he was the owner of the
little tavern.
He was a white-haired, apple-faced old boy, with sleepy eyes and
a grey moustache; stout, sedentary, and very innocent, of a type
that may often be found in France, but is still commoner in
Catholic Germany. Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer,
his flowers, and his beehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only
when his visitors looked up as they entered the inn-parlour, they
saw the sword upon the wall.
The Colonel, who greeted the innkeeper as an old friend, passed
rapidly into the inn-parlour, and sat down ordering some ritual
refreshment. The military decision of his action interested Syme,
who sat next to him, and he took the opportunity when the old
innkeeper had gone out of satisfying his curiosity.
"May I ask you, Colonel," he said in a low voice, "why we have
come here?"
Colonel Ducroix smiled behind his bristly white moustache.
"For two reasons, sir," he said; "and I will give first, not the
most important, but the most utilitarian. We came here because
this is the only place within twenty miles in which we can get
horses."
"Horses!" repeated Syme, looking up quickly.
"Yes," replied the other; "if you people are really to distance
your enemies it is horses or nothing for you, unless of course
you have bicycles and motor-cars in your pocket."
"And where do you advise us to make for?" asked Syme doubtfully.
"Beyond question," replied the Colonel, "you had better make all
haste to the police station beyond the town. My friend, whom I
seconded under somewhat deceptive circumstances, seems to me to
exaggerate very much the possibilities of a general rising; but
even he would hardly maintain, I suppose, that you were not safe
with the gendarmes."
Syme nodded gravely; then he said abruptly--
"And your other reason for coming here?"
"My other reason for coming here," said Ducroix soberly, "is that
it is just as well to see a good man or two when one is possibly
near to death."
Syme looked up at the wall, and saw a crudely-painted and pathetic
religious picture. Then he said--
"You are right," and then almost immediately afterwards, "Has
anyone seen about the horses?"
"Yes," answered Ducroix, "you may be quite certain that I gave
orders the moment I came in. Those enemies of yours gave no
impression of hurry, but they were really moving wonderfully fast,
like a well-trained army. I had no idea that the anarchists had so
much discipline. You have not a moment to waste."
Almost as he spoke, the old innkeeper with the blue eyes and white
hair came ambling into the room, and announced that six horses
were saddled outside.
By Ducroix's advice the five others equipped themselves with some
portable form of food and wine, and keeping their duelling swords
as the only weapons available, they clattered away down the steep,
white road. The two servants, who had carried the Marquis's
luggage when he was a marquis, were left behind to drink at the
cafe by common consent, and not at all against their own
inclination.
By this time the afternoon sun was slanting westward, and by its
rays Syme could see the sturdy figure of the old innkeeper growing
smaller and smaller, but still standing and looking after them
quite silently, the sunshine in his silver hair. Syme had a fixed,
superstitious fancy, left in his mind by the chance phrase of the
Colonel, that this was indeed, perhaps, the last honest stranger
whom he should ever see upon the earth.
He was still looking at this dwindling figure, which stood as a
mere grey blot touched with a white flame against the great green
wall of the steep down behind him. And as he stared over the top
of the down behind the innkeeper, there appeared an army of
black-clad and marching men. They seemed to hang above the good
man and his house like a black cloud of locusts. The horses had
been saddled none too soon.
