CHAPTER III

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

BEFORE one of the fresh faces could appear at the doorway,
Gregory's stunned surprise had fallen from him. He was beside the
table with a bound, and a noise in his throat like a wild beast.
He caught up the Colt's revolver and took aim at Syme. Syme did
not flinch, but he put up a pale and polite hand.

"Don't be such a silly man," he said, with the effeminate dignity
of a curate. "Don't you see it's not necessary? Don't you see that
we're both in the same boat? Yes, and jolly sea-sick."

Gregory could not speak, but he could not fire either, and he
looked his question.

"Don't you see we've checkmated each other?" cried Syme. "I can't
tell the police you are an anarchist. You can't tell the anarchists
I'm a policeman. I can only watch you, knowing what you are; you
can only watch me, knowing what I am. In short, it's a lonely,
intellectual duel, my head against yours. I'm a policeman deprived
of the help of the police. You, my poor fellow, are an anarchist
deprived of the help of that law and organisation which is so
essential to anarchy. The one solitary difference is in your
favour. You are not surrounded by inquisitive policemen; I am
surrounded by inquisitive anarchists. I cannot betray you, but I
might betray myself. Come, come! wait and see me betray myself. I
shall do it so nicely."

Gregory put the pistol slowly down, still staring at Syme as if he
were a sea-monster.

"I don't believe in immortality," he said at last, "but if, after
all this, you were to break your word, God would make a hell only
for you, to howl in for ever."

"I shall not break my word," said Syme sternly, "nor will you
break yours. Here are your friends."

The mass of the anarchists entered the room heavily, with a
slouching and somewhat weary gait; but one little man, with a
black beard and glasses--a man somewhat of the type of Mr. Tim
Healy--detached himself, and bustled forward with some papers
in his hand.

"Comrade Gregory," he said, "I suppose this man is a delegate?"

Gregory, taken by surprise, looked down and muttered the name of
Syme; but Syme replied almost pertly--

"I am glad to see that your gate is well enough guarded to make it
hard for anyone to be here who was not a delegate."

The brow of the little man with the black beard was, however, still
contracted with something like suspicion.

"What branch do you represent?" he asked sharply.

"I should hardly call it a branch," said Syme, laughing; "I should
call it at the very least a root."

"What do you mean?"

"The fact is," said Syme serenely, "the truth is I am a
Sabbatarian. I have been specially sent here to see that you show
a due observance of Sunday."

The little man dropped one of his papers, and a flicker of fear
went over all the faces of the group. Evidently the awful
President, whose name was Sunday, did sometimes send down such
irregular ambassadors to such branch meetings.

"Well, comrade," said the man with the papers after a pause, "I
suppose we'd better give you a seat in the meeting?"

"If you ask my advice as a friend," said Syme with severe
benevolence, "I think you'd better."

When Gregory heard the dangerous dialogue end, with a sudden safety
for his rival, he rose abruptly and paced the floor in painful
thought. He was, indeed, in an agony of diplomacy. It was clear
that Syme's inspired impudence was likely to bring him out of all
merely accidental dilemmas. Little was to be hoped from them. He
could not himself betray Syme, partly from honour, but partly also
because, if he betrayed him and for some reason failed to destroy
him, the Syme who escaped would be a Syme freed from all obligation
of secrecy, a Syme who would simply walk to the nearest police
station. After all, it was only one night's discussion, and only
one detective who would know of it. He would let out as little as
possible of their plans that night, and then let Syme go, and
chance it.

He strode across to the group of anarchists, which was already
distributing itself along the benches.

"I think it is time we began," he said; "the steam-tug is waiting
on the river already. I move that Comrade Buttons takes the chair."

This being approved by a show of hands, the little man with the
papers slipped into the presidential seat.

"Comrades," he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, "our meeting
tonight is important, though it need not be long. This branch
has always had the honour of electing Thursdays for the Central
European Council. We have elected many and splendid Thursdays. We
all lament the sad decease of the heroic worker who occupied the
post until last week. As you know, his services to the cause were
considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton
which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody
on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as
his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of
chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he
regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow.
Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always.
But it is not to acclaim his virtues that we are met, but for a
harder task. It is difficult properly to praise his qualities, but
it is more difficult to replace them. Upon you, comrades, it
devolves this evening to choose out of the company present the man
who shall be Thursday. If any comrade suggests a name I will put
it to the vote. If no comrade suggests a name, I can only tell
myself that that dear dynamiter, who is gone from us, has carried
into the unknowable abysses the last secret of his virtue and his
innocence."

There was a stir of almost inaudible applause, such as is sometimes
heard in church. Then a large old man, with a long and venerable
white beard, perhaps the only real working-man present, rose
lumberingly and said--

"I move that Comrade Gregory be elected Thursday," and sat
lumberingly down again.

"Does anyone second?" asked the chairman.

A little man with a velvet coat and pointed beard seconded.

"Before I put the matter to the vote," said the chairman, "I will
call on Comrade Gregory to make a statement."

Gregory rose amid a great rumble of applause. His face was deadly
pale, so that by contrast his queer red hair looked almost scarlet.
But he was smiling and altogether at ease. He had made up his mind,
and he saw his best policy quite plain in front of him like a white
road. His best chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech,
such as would leave on the detective's mind the impression that the
anarchist brotherhood was a very mild affair after all. He believed
in his own literary power, his capacity for suggesting fine shades
and picking perfect words. He thought that with care he could
succeed, in spite of all the people around him, in conveying an
impression of the institution, subtly and delicately false. Syme
had once thought that anarchists, under all their bravado, were
only playing the fool. Could he not now, in the hour of peril, make
Syme think so again?

"Comrades," began Gregory, in a low but penetrating voice, "it is
not necessary for me to tell you what is my policy, for it is your
policy also. Our belief has been slandered, it has been disfigured,
it has been utterly confused and concealed, but it has never been
altered. Those who talk about anarchism and its dangers go
everywhere and anywhere to get their information, except to us,
except to the fountain head. They learn about anarchists from
sixpenny novels; they learn about anarchists from tradesmen's
newspapers; they learn about anarchists from Ally Sloper's
Half-Holiday and the Sporting Times. They never learn about
anarchists from anarchists. We have no chance of denying the
mountainous slanders which are heaped upon our heads from one end
of Europe to another. The man who has always heard that we are
walking plagues has never heard our reply. I know that he will not
hear it tonight, though my passion were to rend the roof. For it is
deep, deep under the earth that the persecuted are permitted to
assemble, as the Christians assembled in the Catacombs. But if, by
some incredible accident, there were here tonight a man who all his
life had thus immensely misunderstood us, I would put this question
to him: 'When those Christians met in those Catacombs, what sort of
moral reputation had they in the streets above? What tales were
told of their atrocities by one educated Roman to another? Suppose'
(I would say to him), 'suppose that we are only repeating that
still mysterious paradox of history. Suppose we seem as shocking as
the Christians because we are really as harmless as the Christians.
Suppose we seem as mad as the Christians because we are really as
meek."'

The applause that had greeted the opening sentences had been
gradually growing fainter, and at the last word it stopped
suddenly. In the abrupt silence, the man with the velvet jacket
said, in a high, squeaky voice--

"I'm not meek!"

"Comrade Witherspoon tells us," resumed Gregory, "that he is not
meek. Ah, how little he knows himself! His words are, indeed,
extravagant; his appearance is ferocious, and even (to an ordinary
taste) unattractive. But only the eye of a friendship as deep and
delicate as mine can perceive the deep foundation of solid meekness
which lies at the base of him, too deep even for himself to see. I
repeat, we are the true early Christians, only that we come too
late. We are simple, as they revere simple--look at Comrade
Witherspoon. We are modest, as they were modest--look at me. We are
merciful--"

"No, no!" called out Mr. Witherspoon with the velvet jacket.

"I say we are merciful," repeated Gregory furiously, "as the early
Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being
accused of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh--"

"Shame!" cried Witherspoon. "Why not?"

"Comrade Witherspoon," said Gregory, with a feverish gaiety, "is
anxious to know why nobody eats him (laughter). In our society, at
any rate, which loves him sincerely, which is founded upon love--"

"No, no!" said Witherspoon, "down with love."

"Which is founded upon love," repeated Gregory, grinding his teeth,
"there will be no difficulty about the aims which we shall pursue
as a body, or which I should pursue were I chosen as the
representative of that body. Superbly careless of the slanders that
represent us as assassins and enemies of human society, we shall
pursue with moral courage and quiet intellectual pressure, the
permanent ideals of brotherhood and simplicity."

Gregory resumed his seat and passed his hand across his forehead.
The silence was sudden and awkward, but the chairman rose like an
automaton, and said in a colourless voice--

"Does anyone oppose the election of Comrade Gregory?"

The assembly seemed vague and sub-consciously disappointed, and
Comrade Witherspoon moved restlessly on his seat and muttered in
his thick beard. By the sheer rush of routine, however, the motion
would have been put and carried. But as the chairman was opening
his mouth to put it, Syme sprang to his feet and said in a small
and quiet voice--

"Yes, Mr. Chairman, I oppose."

The most effective fact in oratory is an unexpected change in the
voice. Mr. Gabriel Syme evidently understood oratory. Having said
these first formal words in a moderated tone and with a brief
simplicity, he made his next word ring and volley in the vault as
if one of the guns had gone off.

"Comrades!" he cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of
his boots, "have we come here for this? Do we live underground like
rats in order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might
listen to while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line
these walls with weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone
should come and hear Comrade Gregory saying to us, 'Be good, and
you will be happy,' 'Honesty is the best policy,' and 'Virtue is
its own reward'? There was not a word in Comrade Gregory's address
to which a curate could not have listened with pleasure (hear,
hear). But I am not a curate (loud cheers), and I did not listen to
it with pleasure (renewed cheers). The man who is fitted to make a
good curate is not fitted to make a resolute, forcible, and
efficient Thursday (hear, hear)."

"Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that
we are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the
enemies of society, and so much the worse for society. We are the
enemies of society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its
oldest and its most pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory
has told us (apologetically again) that we are not murderers. There
I agree. We are not murderers, we are executioners (cheers)."

Ever since Syme had risen Gregory had sat staring at him, his face
idiotic with astonishment. Now in the pause his lips of clay
parted, and he said, with an automatic and lifeless distinctness--

"You damnable hypocrite!"

Syme looked straight into those frightful eyes with his own pale
blue ones, and said with dignity--

"Comrade Gregory accuses me of hypocrisy. He knows as well as I do
that I am keeping all my engagements and doing nothing but my duty.
I do not mince words. I do not pretend to. I say that Comrade
Gregory is unfit to be Thursday for all his amiable qualities. He
is unfit to be Thursday because of his amiable qualities. We do not
want the Supreme Council of Anarchy infected with a maudlin mercy
(hear, hear). This is no time for ceremonial politeness, neither is
it a time for ceremonial modesty. I set myself against Comrade
Gregory as I would set myself against all the Governments of
Europe, because the anarchist who has given himself to anarchy has
forgotten modesty as much as he has forgotten pride (cheers). I am
not a man at all. I am a cause (renewed cheers). I set myself
against Comrade Gregory as impersonally and as calmly as I should
choose one pistol rather than another out of that rack upon the
wall; and I say that rather than have Gregory and his
milk-and-water methods on the Supreme Council, I would offer myself
for election--"

His sentence was drowned in a deafening cataract of applause. The
faces, that had grown fiercer and fiercer with approval as his
tirade grew more and more uncompromising, were now distorted with
grins of anticipation or cloven with delighted cries. At the
moment when he announced himself as ready to stand for the post of
Thursday, a roar of excitement and assent broke forth, and became
uncontrollable, and at the same moment Gregory sprang to his feet,
with foam upon his mouth, and shouted against the shouting.

"Stop, you blasted madmen!" he cried, at the top of a voice that
tore his throat. "Stop, you--"

But louder than Gregory's shouting and louder than the roar of the
room came the voice of Syme, still speaking in a peal of pitiless
thunder--

"I do not go to the Council to rebut that slander that calls us
murderers; I go to earn it (loud and prolonged cheering). To the
priest who says these men are the enemies of religion, to the
judge who says these men are the enemies of law, to the fat
parliamentarian who says these men are the enemies of order and
public decency, to all these I will reply, 'You are false kings,
but you are true prophets. I am come to destroy you, and to fulfil
your prophecies.'"

The heavy clamour gradually died away, but before it had ceased
Witherspoon had jumped to his feet, his hair and beard all on end,
and had said--

"I move, as an amendment, that Comrade Syme be appointed to the post."

"Stop all this, I tell you!" cried Gregory, with frantic face and
hands. "Stop it, it is all--"

The voice of the chairman clove his speech with a cold accent.

"Does anyone second this amendment?" he said. A tall, tired man,
with melancholy eyes and an American chin beard, was observed on
the back bench to be slowly rising to his feet. Gregory had been
screaming for some time past; now there was a change in his accent,
more shocking than any scream. "I end all this!" he said, in a
voice as heavy as stone.

"This man cannot be elected. He is a--"

"Yes," said Syme, quite motionless, "what is he?" Gregory's mouth
worked twice without sound; then slowly the blood began to crawl
back into his dead face. "He is a man quite inexperienced in our
work," he said, and sat down abruptly.

Before he had done so, the long, lean man with the American beard
was again upon his feet, and was repeating in a high American
monotone--

"I beg to second the election of Comrade Syme."

"The amendment will, as usual, be put first," said Mr. Buttons, the
chairman, with mechanical rapidity.

"The question is that Comrade Syme--"

Gregory had again sprung to his feet, panting and passionate.

"Comrades," he cried out, "I am not a madman."

"Oh, oh!" said Mr. Witherspoon.

"I am not a madman," reiterated Gregory, with a frightful sincerity
which for a moment staggered the room, "but I give you a counsel
which you can call mad if you like. No, I will not call it a
counsel, for I can give you no reason for it. I will call it a
command. Call it a mad command, but act upon it. Strike, but hear
me! Kill me, but obey me! Do not elect this man." Truth is so
terrible, even in fetters, that for a moment Syme's slender and
insane victory swayed like a reed. But you could not have guessed
it from Syme's bleak blue eyes. He merely began--

"Comrade Gregory commands--"

Then the spell was snapped, and one anarchist called out to Gregory--

"Who are you? You are not Sunday"; and another anarchist added in a
heavier voice, "And you are not Thursday."

"Comrades," cried Gregory, in a voice like that of a martyr who in
an ecstacy of pain has passed beyond pain, "it is nothing to me
whether you detest me as a tyrant or detest me as a slave. If you
will not take my command, accept my degradation. I kneel to you. I
throw myself at your feet. I implore you. Do not elect this man."

"Comrade Gregory," said the chairman after a painful pause, "this
is really not quite dignified."

For the first time in the proceedings there was for a few seconds a
real silence. Then Gregory fell back in his seat, a pale wreck of a
man, and the chairman repeated, like a piece of clock-work suddenly
started again--

"The question is that Comrade Syme be elected to the post of
Thursday on the General Council."

The roar rose like the sea, the hands rose like a forest, and three
minutes afterwards Mr. Gabriel Syme, of the Secret Police Service,
was elected to the post of Thursday on the General Council of the
Anarchists of Europe.

Everyone in the room seemed to feel the tug waiting on the river,
the sword-stick and the revolver, waiting on the table. The instant
the election was ended and irrevocable, and Syme had received the
paper proving his election, they all sprang to their feet, and the
fiery groups moved and mixed in the room. Syme found himself,
somehow or other, face to face with Gregory, who still regarded him
with a stare of stunned hatred. They were silent for many minutes.

"You are a devil!" said Gregory at last.

"And you are a gentleman," said Syme with gravity.

"It was you that entrapped me," began Gregory, shaking from head
to foot, "entrapped me into--"

"Talk sense," said Syme shortly. "Into what sort of devils'
parliament have you entrapped me, if it comes to that? You made me
swear before I made you. Perhaps we are both doing what we think
right. But what we think right is so damned different that there
can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is
nothing possible between us but honour and death," and he pulled
the great cloak about his shoulders and picked up the flask from
the table.

"The boat is quite ready," said Mr. Buttons, bustling up. "Be good
enough to step this way."

With a gesture that revealed the shop-walker, he led Syme down a
short, iron-bound passage, the still agonised Gregory following
feverishly at their heels. At the end of the passage was a door,
which Buttons opened sharply, showing a sudden blue and silver
picture of the moonlit river, that looked like a scene in a
theatre. Close to the opening lay a dark, dwarfish steam-launch,
like a baby dragon with one red eye.

Almost in the act of stepping on board, Gabriel Syme turned to the
gaping Gregory.

"You have kept your word," he said gently, with his face in shadow.
"You are a man of honour, and I thank you. You have kept it even
down to a small particular. There was one special thing you
promised me at the beginning of the affair, and which you have
certainly given me by the end of it."

"What do you mean?" cried the chaotic Gregory. "What did I promise
you?"

"A very entertaining evening," said Syme, and he made a military
salute with the sword-stick as the steamboat slid away.



CHAPTER IV

THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE

GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet;
he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred
of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early
in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly
of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame
tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a
rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in
which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his
uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an
unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His
father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for
simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years,
was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of
absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The
more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more
did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the
time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had
pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from
infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into
the only thing left--sanity. But there was just enough in him of
the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common
sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern
lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that
he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite
outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen,
the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces.
After that he went about as usual--quiet, courteous, rather gentle;
but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not
regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men,
combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a
huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets
a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of
this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no
nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he
paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and
brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with
a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he
always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its
back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have cared for it
otherwise.

He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red
river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The
sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively
so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the
sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding
under the vast caverns of a subterranean country.

Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black
chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak,
black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the
early villains in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard
and hair were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long
afterwards, cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long,
lean, black cigar, bought in Soho for twopence, stood out from
between his tightened teeth, and altogether he looked a very
satisfactory specimen of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a
holy war. Perhaps this was why a policeman on the Embankment spoke
to him, and said "Good evening."

Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by
the mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue
in the twilight.