“Will you take a little supper?” asked Gregory politely. “The pate3 de foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game.”
Syme received the remark with stolidity4, imagining it to be a joke. Accepting the vein5 of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference—
To his indescribable astonishment7, the man only said “Certainly, sir!” and went away apparently8 to get it.
“What will you drink?” resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet apologetic air. “I shall only have a creme de menthe myself; I have dined. But the champagne9 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 exterior11. But that is all our modesty12. 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 anarchists13, 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 injustice15.”
“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 rites16 with so much composure, for almost before he had begun them the table at which he sat had begun to revolve17, first slowly, and then rapidly, as if at an insane seance.
“You must not mind it,” said Gregory; “it’s a kind of screw.”
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 rattling19 down a kind of roaring chimney as rapidly as a lift cut loose, and they came with an abrupt20 bump to the bottom. But when Gregory threw open a pair of doors and let in a red subterranean21 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, vaulted22 passage, at the end of which was the red light. It was an enormous crimson23 lantern, nearly as big as a fireplace, fixed24 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 doorway26 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 foppish27 frock-coat, he looked a singularly frail28 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 chamber25 with curved walls, almost spherical29 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 dubious30 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 cosy31, 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 secrecy32 for the pleasure of taking you down a peg33. That way you have of lighting34 a cigar would make a priest break the seal of confession35. Well, you said that you were quite certain I was not a serious anarchist14. Does this place strike you as being serious?”
“It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety,” assented36 Syme; “but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me information, because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted37 from me a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep. So it is in mere38 curiosity that I make my queries39. First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?”
“To abolish God!” said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic40. “We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice41 and virtue42, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.”
“And Right and Left,” said Syme with a simple eagerness, “I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”
“With pleasure,” resumed Syme. “In all your present acts and surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt who lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people living from preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the humiliation44 of calling yourself Mr. Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel instruments which make the place, if I may say so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after taking all this trouble to barricade45 yourselves in the bowels46 of the earth, you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to every silly woman in Saffron Park?”
Gregory smiled.
“The answer is simple,” he said. “I told you I was a serious anarchist, and you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me. Unless I took them into this infernal room they would not believe me.”
Syme smoked thoughtfully, and looked at him with interest. Gregory went on.
“The history of the thing might amuse you,” he said. “When first I became one of the New Anarchists I tried all kinds of respectable disguises. I dressed up as a bishop47. I read up all about bishops48 in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition49 the Vampire50 and Priests of Prey51. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, ‘Down! down! presumptuous52 human reason!’ they found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire; but I defended Capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see that I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major. Now I am a humanitarian53 myself, but I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence—the proud, mad war of Nature and all that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it constantly. I called out ‘Blood!’ abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, ‘Let the weak perish; it is the Law.’ Well, well, it seems majors don’t do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the President of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe.”
“What is his name?” asked Syme.
“You would not know it,” answered Gregory. “That is his greatness. Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they were heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children in his hands.”
He was silent and even pale for a moment, and then resumed—
“But whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. I said to him, ‘What disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors?’ He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face. ‘You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?’ I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice. ‘Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!’ he roared so that the room shook. ‘Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then.’ And he turned his broad back on me without another word. I took his advice, and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”
Syme sat watching him with some respect in his large, blue eyes.
Then after a pause he added—
“What do you call this tremendous President of yours?”
“We generally call him Sunday,” replied Gregory with simplicity55. “You see, there are seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, and they are named after days of the week. He is called Sunday, by some of his admirers Bloody56 Sunday. It is curious you should mention the matter, because the very night you have dropped in (if I may so express it) is the night on which our London branch, which assembles in this room, has to elect its own deputy to fill a vacancy57 in the Council. The gentleman who has for some time past played, with propriety58 and general applause, the difficult part of Thursday, has died quite suddenly. Consequently, we have called a meeting this very evening to elect a successor.”
He got to his feet and strolled across the room with a sort of smiling embarrassment59.
“I feel somehow as if you were my mother, Syme,” he continued casually60. “I feel that I can confide61 anything to you, as you have promised to tell nobody. In fact, I will confide to you something that I would not say in so many words to the anarchists who will be coming to the room in about ten minutes. We shall, of course, go through a form of election; but I don’t mind telling you that it is practically certain what the result will be.” He looked down for a moment modestly. “It is almost a settled thing that I am to be Thursday.”
Gregory smiled in deprecation, and walked across the room, talking rapidly.
“As a matter of fact, everything is ready for me on this table,” he said, “and the ceremony will probably be the shortest possible.”
Syme also strolled across to the table, and found lying across it a walking-stick, which turned out on examination to be a sword-stick, a large Colt’s revolver, a sandwich case, and a formidable flask63 of brandy. Over the chair, beside the table, was thrown a heavy-looking cape64 or cloak.
“I have only to get the form of election finished,” continued Gregory with animation65, “then I snatch up this cloak and stick, stuff these other things into my pocket, step out of a door in this cavern66, which opens on the river, where there is a steam-tug already waiting for me, and then—then—oh, the wild joy of being Thursday!” And he clasped his hands.
Syme, who had sat down once more with his usual insolent67 languor68, got to his feet with an unusual air of hesitation69.
“Why is it,” he asked vaguely70, “that I think you are quite a decent fellow? Why do I positively71 like you, Gregory?” He paused a moment, and then added with a sort of fresh curiosity, “Is it because you are such an ass10?”
There was a thoughtful silence again, and then he cried out—
“Well, damn it all! this is the funniest situation I have ever been in in my life, and I am going to act accordingly. Gregory, I gave you a promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise of the same kind?”
“A promise?” asked Gregory, wondering.
“Yes,” said Syme very seriously, “a promise. I swore before God that I would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret to the anarchists?”
“Your secret?” asked the staring Gregory. “Have you got a secret?”
“Yes,” said Syme, “I have a secret.” Then after a pause, “Will you swear?”
Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said abruptly—
“You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you. Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes.”
Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his long, grey trousers’ pockets. Almost as he did so there came five knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators72.
“Well,” said Syme slowly, “I don’t know how to tell you the truth more shortly than by saying that your expedient73 of dressing74 up as an aimless poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge for some time at Scotland Yard.”
Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.
“Yes,” said Syme simply, “I am a police detective. But I think I hear your friends coming.”
From the doorway there came a murmur76 of “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.” It was repeated twice and thrice, and then thirty times, and the crowd of Joseph Chamberlains (a solemn thought) could be heard trampling77 down the corridor.
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1
dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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greasy
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| adj. 多脂的，油脂的 | |
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pate
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| n.头顶；光顶 | |
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stolidity
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| n.迟钝，感觉麻木 | |
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vein
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| n.血管，静脉；叶脉，纹理；情绪；vt.使成脉络 | |
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6
lobster
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| n.龙虾，龙虾肉 | |
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7
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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8
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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9
champagne
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| n.香槟酒；微黄色 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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exterior
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| adj.外部的，外在的；表面的 | |
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modesty
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| n.谦逊，虚心，端庄，稳重，羞怯，朴素 | |
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anarchists
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| 无政府主义者( anarchist的名词复数 ) | |
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anarchist
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| n.无政府主义者 | |
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injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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rites
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| 仪式，典礼( rite的名词复数 ) | |
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revolve
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| vi.(使)旋转；循环出现 | |
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18
placidly
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| adv.平稳地，平静地 | |
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rattling
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| adj. 格格作响的, 活泼的, 很好的 adv. 极其, 很, 非常 动词rattle的现在分词 | |
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abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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subterranean
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| adj.地下的，地表下的 | |
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vaulted
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| adj.拱状的 | |
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crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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foppish
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| adj.矫饰的，浮华的 | |
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frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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spherical
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| adj.球形的；球面的 | |
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dubious
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| adj.怀疑的，无把握的；有问题的，靠不住的 | |
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cosy
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| adj.温暖而舒适的，安逸的 | |
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secrecy
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| n.秘密，保密，隐蔽 | |
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peg
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| n.木栓，木钉；vt.用木钉钉，用短桩固定 | |
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lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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confession
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| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
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assented
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| 同意，赞成( assent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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extorted
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| v.敲诈( extort的过去式和过去分词 )；曲解 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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queries
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| n.问题( query的名词复数 )；疑问；询问；问号v.质疑，对…表示疑问( query的第三人称单数 )；询问 | |
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fanatic
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| n.狂热者，入迷者；adj.狂热入迷的 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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43
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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44
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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45
barricade
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| n.路障，栅栏，障碍；vt.设路障挡住 | |
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46
bowels
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| n.肠，内脏，内部；肠( bowel的名词复数 )；内部，最深处 | |
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47
bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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48
bishops
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| （基督教某些教派管辖大教区的）主教( bishop的名词复数 )； （国际象棋的）象 | |
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49
superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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50
vampire
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| n.吸血鬼 | |
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51
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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52
presumptuous
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| adj.胆大妄为的，放肆的，冒昧的，冒失的 | |
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53
humanitarian
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| n.人道主义者，博爱者，基督凡人论者 | |
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54
dodge
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| v.闪开，躲开，避开；n.妙计，诡计 | |
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55
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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56
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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57
vacancy
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| n.（旅馆的）空位，空房，（职务的）空缺 | |
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58
propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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59
embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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60
casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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61
confide
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| v.向某人吐露秘密 | |
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62
heartily
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| adv.衷心地，诚恳地，十分，很 | |
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63
flask
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| n.瓶，火药筒，砂箱 | |
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64
cape
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| n.海角，岬；披肩，短披风 | |
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65
animation
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| n.活泼，兴奋，卡通片／动画片的制作 | |
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66
cavern
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| n.洞穴，大山洞 | |
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67
insolent
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| adj.傲慢的，无理的 | |
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68
languor
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| n.无精力，倦怠 | |
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69
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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70
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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71
positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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72
conspirators
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| n.共谋者，阴谋家( conspirator的名词复数 ) | |
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73
expedient
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| adj.有用的，有利的；n.紧急的办法，权宜之计 | |
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74
dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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75
inhuman
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| adj.残忍的，不人道的，无人性的 | |
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76
murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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77
trampling
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| 踩( trample的现在分词 )； 践踏； 无视； 侵犯 | |
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