At first an instinct had told Syme that this was the man whom he was meant to meet. Then, seeing that the man made no sign, he had concluded that he was not. And now again he had come back to a certainty that the man had something to do with his mad adventure. For the man remained more still than would have been natural if a stranger had come so close. He was as motionless as a wax-work, and got on the nerves somewhat in the same way. Syme looked again and again at the pale, dignified7 and delicate face, and the face still looked blankly across the river. Then he took out of his pocket the note from Buttons proving his election, and put it before that sad and beautiful face. Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.
There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked8 smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme’s circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it.
There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.
The spasm10 of smile was instantaneous, and the man’s face dropped at once into its harmonious11 melancholy12. He spoke13 without further explanation or inquiry14, like a man speaking to an old colleague.
“If we walk up towards Leicester Square,” he said, “we shall just be in time for breakfast. Sunday always insists on an early breakfast. Have you had any sleep?”
“No,” said Syme.
“Nor have I,” answered the man in an ordinary tone. “I shall try to get to bed after breakfast.”
He spoke with casual civility, but in an utterly15 dead voice that contradicted the fanaticism16 of his face. It seemed almost as if all friendly words were to him lifeless conveniences, and that his only life was hate. After a pause the man spoke again.
“Of course, the Secretary of the branch told you everything that can be told. But the one thing that can never be told is the last notion of the President, for his notions grow like a tropical forest. So in case you don’t know, I’d better tell you that he is carrying out his notion of concealing17 ourselves by not concealing ourselves to the most extraordinary lengths just now. Originally, of course, we met in a cell underground, just as your branch does. Then Sunday made us take a private room at an ordinary restaurant. He said that if you didn’t seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out. Well, he is the only man on earth, I know; but sometimes I really think that his huge brain is going a little mad in its old age. For now we flaunt18 ourselves before the public. We have our breakfast on a balcony—on a balcony, if you please—overlooking Leicester Square.”
“And what do the people say?” asked Syme.
“It’s quite simple what they say,” answered his guide. “They say we are a lot of jolly gentlemen who pretend they are anarchists19.”
“It seems to me a very clever idea,” said Syme.
“Clever! God blast your impudence21! Clever!” cried out the other in a sudden, shrill22 voice which was as startling and discordant23 as his crooked smile. “When you’ve seen Sunday for a split second you’ll leave off calling him clever.”
With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early sunlight filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I suppose, why this square itself should look so alien and in some ways so continental24. It will never be known whether it was the foreign look that attracted the foreigners or the foreigners who gave it the foreign look. But on this particular morning the effect seemed singularly bright and clear. Between the open square and the sunlit leaves and the statue and the Saracenic outlines of the Alhambra, it looked the replica25 of some French or even Spanish public place. And this effect increased in Syme the sensation, which in many shapes he had had through the whole adventure, the eerie26 sensation of having strayed into a new world. As a fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square ever since he was a boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the trees and the Moorish27 cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning into an unknown Place de something or other in some foreign town.
At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street behind. In the wall there was one large French window, probably the window of a large coffee-room; and outside this window, almost literally28 overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed29 balcony, big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did contain a dining-table, or more strictly30 a breakfast-table; and round the breakfast-table, glowing in the sunlight and evident to the street, were a group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed in the insolence31 of fashion, with white waistcoats and expensive button-holes. Some of their jokes could almost be heard across the square. Then the grave Secretary gave his unnatural32 smile, and Syme knew that this boisterous33 breakfast party was the secret conclave34 of the European Dynamiters.
Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately36 as colossal37. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle38 and become dwarfish39. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.
As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter came out smiling with every tooth in his head.
“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”
And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased with the singular frivolity40 of the gentlemen upstairs.
The two men mounted the stairs in silence.
Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous41 man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe42. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid43 of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently44, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.
The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.
By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an empty seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him with good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered himself a little by looking at their conventional coats and solid, shining coffee-pot; then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very large, but it was still possible to humanity.
In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently45 commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by the President’s caprice they had been dressed up with a festive46 respectability, which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast. One man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He at least was the common or garden Dynamiter35. He wore, indeed, the high white collar and satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion; but out of this collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle47, and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it had every diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque48. If out of that stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly49 the head of a cat or a dog, it could not have been a more idiotic50 contrast.
The man’s name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably51 tragic52; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous53 part demanded of him by President Sunday. And, indeed, when Syme came in the President, with that daring disregard of public suspicion which was his policy, was actually chaffing Gogol upon his inability to assume conventional graces.
“Our friend Tuesday,” said the President in a deep voice at once of quietude and volume, “our friend Tuesday doesn’t seem to grasp the idea. He dresses up like a gentleman, but he seems to be too great a soul to behave like one. He insists on the ways of the stage conspirator54. Now if a gentleman goes about London in a top hat and a frock-coat, no one need know that he is an anarchist20. But if a gentleman puts on a top hat and a frock-coat, and then goes about on his hands and knees—well, he may attract attention. That’s what Brother Gogol does. He goes about on his hands and knees with such inexhaustible diplomacy55, that by this time he finds it quite difficult to walk upright.”
“I am not good at concealment,” said Gogol sulkily, with a thick foreign accent; “I am not ashamed of the cause.”
“Yes you are, my boy, and so is the cause of you,” said the President good-naturedly. “You hide as much as anybody; but you can’t do it, you see, you’re such an ass9! You try to combine two inconsistent methods. When a householder finds a man under his bed, he will probably pause to note the circumstance. But if he finds a man under his bed in a top hat, you will agree with me, my dear Tuesday, that he is not likely even to forget it. Now when you were found under Admiral Biffin’s bed—”
“I am not good at deception,” said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.
“Right, my boy, right,” said the President with a ponderous56 heartiness57, “you aren’t good at anything.”
While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking more steadily58 at the men around him. As he did so, he gradually felt all his sense of something spiritually queer return.
He had thought at first that they were all of common stature59 and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor60 he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.
Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed eccentricity61. Syme’s original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with more terror than anything, except the President’s horrible, happy laughter. But now that Syme had more space and light to observe him, there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated62, that Syme thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very distress63 of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure thought was pain.
He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and differently wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a man more obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing unusual about him, except that he was the only man at table who wore the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own. He had a black French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer. But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated64. It reminded one irrationally65 of drowsy66 odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad, not in lighter67 colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer and warmer than the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of profound colour. His black coat looked as if it were only black by being too dense68 a purple. His black beard looked as if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the bright coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants69 hunting, you may see just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson70 lips.
Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed71 finally in a furrow72 of mild despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous73 effect was as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse74. When he rose or sat down, which was with long labour and peril75, something worse was expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude76 merely, but corruption77. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off.
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner78 going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon79 in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque80 spectacles. It may have been merely a crescendo81 of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme’s eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma82. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility83 wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful84 to see.
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1
deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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2
triangular
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| adj.三角（形）的，三者间的 | |
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scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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4
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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5
oversight
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| n.勘漏，失察，疏忽 | |
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6
ascetic
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| adj.禁欲的；严肃的 | |
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7
dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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8
crooked
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| adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的 | |
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9
ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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10
spasm
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| n.痉挛，抽搐；一阵发作 | |
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11
harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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13
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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inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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15
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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16
fanaticism
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| n.狂热，盲信 | |
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17
concealing
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，遮住( conceal的现在分词 ) | |
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18
flaunt
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| vt.夸耀，夸饰 | |
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19
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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21
impudence
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| n.厚颜无耻；冒失；无礼 | |
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shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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discordant
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| adj.不调和的 | |
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continental
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| adj.大陆的，大陆性的，欧洲大陆的 | |
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replica
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| n.复制品 | |
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eerie
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| adj.怪诞的；奇异的；可怕的；胆怯的 | |
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moorish
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| adj.沼地的，荒野的，生[住]在沼地的 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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29
buttressed
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| v.用扶壁支撑，加固( buttress的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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31
insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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boisterous
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| adj.喧闹的，欢闹的 | |
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conclave
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| n.秘密会议，红衣主教团 | |
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35
dynamiter
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| n.炸药使用者（尤指革命者） | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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colossal
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| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
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38
dwindle
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| v.逐渐变小（或减少） | |
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dwarfish
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| a.像侏儒的，矮小的 | |
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40
frivolity
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| n.轻松的乐事，兴高采烈；轻浮的举止 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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42
awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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43
devoid
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| adj.全无的，缺乏的 | |
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44
pruriently
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| adv.好色地，挑逗性地 | |
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45
sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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46
festive
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| adj.欢宴的，节日的 | |
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47
tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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48
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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49
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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50
idiotic
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| adj.白痴的 | |
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51
incurably
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| ad.治不好地 | |
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52
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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53
frivolous
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| adj.轻薄的；轻率的 | |
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54
conspirator
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| n.阴谋者，谋叛者 | |
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55
diplomacy
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| n.外交；外交手腕，交际手腕 | |
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56
ponderous
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| adj.沉重的，笨重的，(文章)冗长的 | |
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57
heartiness
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| 诚实，热心 | |
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58
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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59
stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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60
metaphor
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| n.隐喻，暗喻 | |
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61
eccentricity
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| n.古怪，反常，怪癖 | |
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62
emaciated
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| adj.衰弱的，消瘦的 | |
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63
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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64
suffocated
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| （使某人）窒息而死( suffocate的过去式和过去分词 )； （将某人）闷死； 让人感觉闷热； 憋气 | |
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65
irrationally
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| ad.不理性地 | |
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66
drowsy
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| adj.昏昏欲睡的，令人发困的 | |
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67
lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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68
dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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69
tyrants
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| 专制统治者( tyrant的名词复数 )； 暴君似的人； （古希腊的）僭主； 严酷的事物 | |
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70
crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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71
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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72
furrow
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| n.沟；垄沟；轨迹；车辙；皱纹 | |
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73
hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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74
corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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75
peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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76
decrepitude
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| n.衰老；破旧 | |
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77
corruption
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| n.腐败，堕落，贪污 | |
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practitioner
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| n.实践者，从事者；(医生或律师等)开业者 | |
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uncommon
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| adj.罕见的，非凡的，不平常的 | |
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opaque
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| adj.不透光的；不反光的，不传导的；晦涩的 | |
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81
crescendo
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| n.(音乐)渐强，高潮 | |
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82
enigma
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| n.谜，谜一样的人或事 | |
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83
virility
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| n.雄劲，丈夫气 | |
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84
frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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