"Really," said Gregory superciliously, "the examples you choose--"

"I beg your pardon," said Syme grimly, "I forgot we had abolished
all conventions."

For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory's forehead.

"You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionise society on this
lawn ?"

Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.

"No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious
about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do."

Gregory's big bull's eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry
lion, and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.

"Don't you think, then," he said in a dangerous voice, "that I am
serious about my anarchism?"

"I beg your pardon ?" said Syme.

"Am I not serious about my anarchism ?" cried Gregory, with knotted
fists.

"My dear fellow!" said Syme, and strolled away.

With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond
Gregory still in his company.

"Mr. Syme," she said, "do the people who talk like you and my
brother often mean what they say ? Do you mean what you say now ?"

Syme smiled.

"Do you ?" he asked.

"What do you mean ?" asked the girl, with grave eyes.

"My dear Miss Gregory," said Syme gently, "there are many kinds of
sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt,
do you mean what you say ? No. When you say 'the world is round,'
do you mean what you say ? No. It is true, but you don't mean it.
Now, sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing he does
mean. It may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but
then he says more than he means--from sheer force of meaning it."

She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave
and open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that
unreasoning responsibility which is at the bottom of the most
frivolous woman, the maternal watch which is as old as the world.

"Is he really an anarchist, then?" she asked.

"Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer
it, in that nonsense."

She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--

"He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"

Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight
and somewhat dandified figure.

"Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."

And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and
she thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity
and of his safety.

Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and
in spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one.
And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man
watches himself too closely. He defended respectability with
violence and exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of
tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac
all round him. Once he heard very faintly in some distant street a
barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic
words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for
what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups
in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment,
he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago,
and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a
sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards
explain. In the wild events which were to follow this girl had no
part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over.
And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a
motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the
glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark
and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so
improbable, that it might well have been a dream.

When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the
moment empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence
was rather a living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the
door stood a street lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree
that bent out over the fence behind him. About a foot from the
lamp-post stood a figure almost as rigid and motionless as the
lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long frock coat were black; the
face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe of
fiery hair against the light, and also something aggressive in the
attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He had something
of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.

He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more
formally returned.

"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's
conversation?"

"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy.
There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and
barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing
itself--there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold."

"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only
see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever
see the lamp by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said,
"But may I ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only
to resume our little argument?"

"No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, "I
did not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."

The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing,
listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a
smooth voice and with a rather bewildering smile.

"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of
woman has ever succeeded in doing before."

"Indeed!"

"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person
succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I
remember correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."

"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.

"I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped
out even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel
could wipe it out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out.
There is only one way by which that insult can be erased, and that
way I choose. I am going, at the possible sacrifice of my life and
honour, to prove to you that you were wrong in what you said."

"In what I said?"

"You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."

"There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never
doubted that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you
thought what you said well worth saying, that you thought a
paradox might wake men up to a neglected truth."

Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.

"And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You think
me a flaneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that
in a deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."

Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.

"Serious!" he cried. "Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these
damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious?
One comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as
well, but I should think very little of a man who didn't keep
something in the background of his life that was more serious than
all this talking--something more serious, whether it was religion
or only drink."

"Very well," said Gregory, his face darkening, "you shall see
something more serious than either drink or religion."

Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory
again opened his lips.

"You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that
you have one?"

"Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now."

"Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your
religion involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to
tell you to any son of Adam, and especially not to the police?
Will you swear that! If you will take upon yourself this awful
abnegations if you will consent to burden your soul with a vow
that you should never make and a knowledge you should never dream
about, I will promise you in return--"

"You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other
paused.

"I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly
took off his hat.

"Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say
that a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least
that he is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as
a Christian, and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist,
that I will not report anything of this, whatever it is, to the
police. And now, in the name of Colney Hatch, what is it?"

"I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will
call a cab."

He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the
road. The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the
trap the address of an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank
of the river. The cab whisked itself away again, and in it these
two fantastics quitted their fantastic town.



CHAPTER II

THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME

THE cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated
themselves in a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained
wooden table with one wooden leg. The room was so small and dark,
that very little could be seen of the attendant who was summoned,
beyond a vague and dark impression of something bulky and bearded.

"Will you take a little supper?" asked Gregory politely. "The pate
de foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."

Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred
indifference--

"Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."

To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly,
sir!" and went away apparently to get it.

"What will you drink?" resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. "I shall only have a crepe de menthe myself; I have
dined. But the champagne can really be trusted. Do let me start you
with a half-bottle of Pommery at least?"

"Thank you!" said the motionless Syme. "You are very good."

His further attempts at conversation, somewhat disorganised in
themselves, were cut short finally as by a thunderbolt by the
actual appearance of the lobster. Syme tasted it, and found it
particularly good. Then he suddenly began to eat with great
rapidity and appetite.

"Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!" he said to Gregory,
smiling. "I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It
is new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly
the other way."

"You are not asleep, I assure you," said Gregory. "You are, on the
contrary, close to the most actual and rousing moment of your
existence. Ah, here comes your champagne! I admit that there may be
a slight disproportion, let us say, between the inner arrangements
of this excellent hotel and its simple and unpretentious exterior.
But that is all our modesty. We are the most modest men that ever
lived on earth."

"And who are we?" asked Syme, emptying his champagne glass.

"It is quite simple," replied Gregory. "We are the serious
anarchists, in whom you do not believe."

"Oh!" said Syme shortly. "You do yourselves well in drinks."

"Yes, we are serious about everything," answered Gregory.

Then after a pause he added--

"If in a few moments this table begins to turn round a little,
don't put it down to your inroads into the champagne. I don't wish
you to do yourself an injustice."

"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect
calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either
condition. May I smoke?"

"Certainly!" said Gregory, producing a cigar-case. "Try one of
mine."

Syme took the cigar, clipped the end off with a cigar-cutter out
of his waistcoat pocket, put it in his mouth, lit it slowly, and
let out a long cloud of smoke. It is not a little to his credit
that he performed these rites with so much composure, for almost
before he had begun them the table at which he sat had begun to
revolve, first slowly, and then rapidly, as if at an insane
seance.

"You must not mind it," said Gregory; "it's a kind of screw."

"Quite so," said Syme placidly, "a kind of screw. How simple that
is!"

The next moment the smoke of his cigar, which had been wavering
across the room in snaky twists, went straight up as if from a
factory chimney, and the two, with their chairs and table, shot
down through the floor as if the earth had swallowed them. They
went rattling down a kind of roaring chimney as rapidly as a lift
cut loose, and they came with an abrupt bump to the bottom. But
when Gregory threw open a pair of doors and let in a red
subterranean light, Syme was still smoking with one leg thrown
over the other, and had not turned a yellow hair.

Gregory led him down a low, vaulted passage, at the end of which
was the red light. It was an enormous crimson lantern, nearly as
big as a fireplace, fixed over a small but heavy iron door. In the
door there was a sort of hatchway or grating, and on this Gregory
struck five times. A heavy voice with a foreign accent asked him
who he was. To this he gave the more or less unexpected reply,
"Mr. Joseph Chamberlain." The heavy hinges began to move; it was
obviously some kind of password.

Inside the doorway the passage gleamed as if it were lined with a
network of steel. On a second glance, Syme saw that the glittering
pattern was really made up of ranks and ranks of rifles and
revolvers, closely packed or interlocked.

"I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities," said Gregory;
"we have to be very strict here."

"Oh, don't apologise," said Syme. "I know your passion for law and
order," and he stepped into the passage lined with the steel
weapons. With his long, fair hair and rather foppish frock-coat, he
looked a singularly frail and fanciful figure as he walked down
that shining avenue of death.

They passed through several such passages, and came out at last
into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in
shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the
appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or
pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more
dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of
iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs, and the
very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his
cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.

"And now, my dear Mr. Syme," said Gregory, throwing himself in an
expansive manner on the bench under the largest bomb, "now we are
quite cosy, so let us talk properly. Now no human words can give
you any notion of why I brought you here. It was one of those quite
arbitrary emotions, like jumping off a cliff or falling in love.
Suffice it to say that you were an inexpressibly irritating fellow,
and, to do you justice, you are still. I would break twenty oaths
of secrecy for the pleasure of taking you down a peg. That way you
have of lighting a cigar would make a priest break the seal of
confession. Well, you said that you were quite certain I was not a
serious anarchist. Does this place strike you as being serious?"

"It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety," assented
Syme; "but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give
me information, because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted
from me a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall
certainly keep. So it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries.
First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object
to? You want to abolish Government?"