The Man Who Was Thursday
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.