Talk had been going on steadily8 as he took in the scene; and not the least of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was the contrast between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terrible purport9. They were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediate10 plot. The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said that they were talking about bombs and kings. Only three days afterwards the Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in Paris, and over their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these beaming gentlemen had decided12 how both should die. Even the instrument was chosen; the black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the bomb.
Ordinarily speaking, the proximity13 of this positive and objective crime would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical tremors15. He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at least two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and roaring gas. But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel a third kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moral revulsion or his social responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear to spare for the French President or the Czar; he had begun to fear for himself. Most of the talkers took little heed16 of him, debating now with their faces closer together, and almost uniformly grave, save when for an instant the smile of the Secretary ran aslant17 across his face as the jagged lightning runs aslant across the sky. But there was one persistent18 thing which first troubled Syme and at last terrified him. The President was always looking at him, steadily, and with a great and baffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but his blue eyes stood out of his head. And they were always fixed19 on Syme.
Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When the President’s eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He had hardly the shred20 of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary way Sunday had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge of the balcony, and saw a policeman, standing21 abstractedly just beneath, staring at the bright railings and the sunlit trees.
Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment22 him for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive23 men, who were the princes of anarchy24, he had almost forgotten the frail25 and fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere14 aesthete26 of anarchism. He even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to Gregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thing that he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised not to jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his cold hand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo27 of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow28 made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep his antiquated29 honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable30 eyes.
In all the torrent31 of his thought there were two thoughts that never crossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that the President and his Council could crush him if he continued to stand alone. The place might be public, the project might seem impossible. But Sunday was not the man who would carry himself thus easily without having, somehow or somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either by anonymous32 poison or sudden street accident, by hypnotism or by fire from hell, Sunday could certainly strike him. If he defied the man he was probably dead, either struck stiff there in his chair or long afterwards as by an innocent ailment33. If he called in the police promptly34, arrested everyone, told all, and set against them the whole energy of England, he would probably escape; certainly not otherwise. They were a balconyful of gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy square; but he felt no more safe with them than if they had been a boatful of armed pirates overlooking an empty sea.
There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured35 to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood. But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity36. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.
The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical. Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually37 and conventionally of the best things on the table—cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary was a vegetarian38, and he spoke11 earnestly of the projected murder over half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid39 water. The old Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of mere mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a frightful40 freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage factory. Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets or drunk a quart of coffee, he would be found with his great head on one side staring at Syme.
“I have often wondered,” said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a slice of bread and jam, “whether it wouldn’t be better for me to do it with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off with a knife. And it would be a new emotion to get a knife into a French President and wriggle41 it round.”
“You are wrong,” said the Secretary, drawing his black brows together. “The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with a personal tyrant42. Dynamite43 is not only our best tool, but our best symbol. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense44 of the prayers of the Christians45. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man’s brain is a bomb,” he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull46 with violence. “My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe.”
“I don’t want the universe broken up just yet,” drawled the Marquis. “I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one yesterday in bed.”
“No, if the only end of the thing is nothing,” said Dr. Bull with his sphinx-like smile, “it hardly seems worth doing.”
The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.
“Every man knows in his heart,” he said, “that nothing is worth doing.”
There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said—
“We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is how Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all agree with the original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I should suggest that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to—”
The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.
“Before we discuss that,” he said in a small, quiet voice, “let us go into a private room. I have something very particular to say.”
Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had come at last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he could hear the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright, was cold.
A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial47 tune48. Syme stood up taut49, as if it had been a bugle50 before the battle. He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from nowhere. That jingling51 music seemed full of the vivacity52, the vulgarity, and the irrational53 valour of the poor, who in all those unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of Christendom. His youthful prank54 of being a policeman had faded from his mind; he did not think of himself as the representative of the corps55 of gentlemen turned into fancy constables56, or of the old eccentric who lived in the dark room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common and kindly57 people in the street, who every day marched into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous58 men around him. For an instant, at least, he looked down upon all their sprawling59 eccentricities60 from the starry61 pinnacle62 of the commonplace. He felt towards them all that unconscious and elementary superiority that a brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man over powerful errors. He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor the physical strength of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded it no more than the fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a horn on his nose like a rhinoceros63. All was swallowed up in an ultimate certainty that the President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was right. There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism in the song of Roland—
“Pagens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit.”
which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan64 of great iron. This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the barrel-organ could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants65. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled66 noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the trumpets67 of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death.
The conspirators68 were already filing through the open window and into the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his brain and body throbbing69 with romantic rhythm. The President led them down an irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and into a dim, cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an abandoned boardroom. When they were all in, he closed and locked the door.
The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable70, who seemed bursting with inarticulate grievance71.
“Zso! Zso!” he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish accent becoming almost impenetrable. “You zay you nod ‘ide. You zay you show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you run yourselves in a dark box!”
“You can’t get hold of it yet, Gogol,” he said in a fatherly way. “When once they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will not care where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should have had the whole staff at the keyhole. You don’t seem to know anything about mankind.”
“I die for zem,” cried the Pole in thick excitement, “and I slay73 zare oppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite ze tyrant in ze open square.”
“I see, I see,” said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himself at the top of a long table. “You die for mankind first, and then you get up and smite74 their oppressors. So that’s all right. And now may I ask you to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the other gentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning something intelligent is going to be said.”
Syme, with the perturbed75 promptitude he had shown since the original summons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling76 in his brown beard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion of the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feeling of a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, of making a good speech.
“Comrades,” said the President, suddenly rising, “we have spun77 out this farce78 long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something so simple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to our levities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we were discussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying anything else, that those plans and places should not be voted by this meeting, but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable member. I suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull.”
They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for the next words, though not loud, had a living and sensational79 emphasis. Sunday struck the table.
“Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at this meeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to do must be mentioned in this company.”
Sunday had spent his life in astonishing his followers80; but it seemed as if he had never really astonished them until now. They all moved feverishly81 in their seats, except Syme. He sat stiff in his, with his hand in his pocket, and on the handle of his loaded revolver. When the attack on him came he would sell his life dear. He would find out at least if the President was mortal.
Sunday went on smoothly—
“You will probably understand that there is only one possible motive82 for forbidding free speech at this festival of freedom. Strangers overhearing us matters nothing. They assume that we are joking. But what would matter, even unto death, is this, that there should be one actually among us who is not of us, who knows our grave purpose, but does not share it, who—”
The Secretary screamed out suddenly like a woman.
“It can’t be!” he cried, leaping. “There can’t—”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “there is a spy in this room. There is a traitor83 at this table. I will waste no more words. His name—”
Syme half rose from his seat, his finger firm on the trigger.
“His name is Gogol,” said the President. “He is that hairy humbug84 over there who pretends to be a Pole.”
Gogol sprang to his feet, a pistol in each hand. With the same flash three men sprang at his throat. Even the Professor made an effort to rise. But Syme saw little of the scene, for he was blinded with a beneficent darkness; he had sunk down into his seat shuddering85, in a palsy of passionate86 relief.
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1
subjective
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| a.主观(上)的，个人的 | |
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unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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fable
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| n.寓言；童话；神话 | |
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westward
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| n.西方，西部；adj.西方的，向西的；adv.向西 | |
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fin
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| n.鳍；(飞机的)安定翼 | |
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6
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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8
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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purport
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| n.意义，要旨，大要；v.意味著，做为...要旨，要领是... | |
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10
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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11
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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12
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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13
proximity
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| n.接近，邻近 | |
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14
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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15
tremors
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| 震颤( tremor的名词复数 )； 战栗； 震颤声； 大地的轻微震动 | |
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16
heed
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| v.注意，留意；n.注意，留心 | |
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aslant
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| adv.倾斜地；adj.斜的 | |
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18
persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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19
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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20
shred
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| v.撕成碎片，变成碎片；n.碎布条，细片，些少 | |
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21
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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22
torment
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| n.折磨；令人痛苦的东西(人)；vt.折磨；纠缠 | |
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23
repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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24
anarchy
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| n.无政府状态；社会秩序混乱，无秩序 | |
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25
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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aesthete
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| n.审美家 | |
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vertigo
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| n.眩晕 | |
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28
vow
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| n.誓(言)，誓约；v.起誓，立誓 | |
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29
antiquated
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| adj.陈旧的，过时的 | |
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unbearable
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| adj.不能容忍的；忍受不住的 | |
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31
torrent
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| n.激流，洪流；爆发，(话语等的)连发 | |
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32
anonymous
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| adj.无名的；匿名的；无特色的 | |
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ailment
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| n.疾病，小病 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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inured
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| adj.坚强的，习惯的 | |
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morbidity
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| n.病态；不健全；发病；发病率 | |
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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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vegetarian
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| n.素食者；adj.素食的 | |
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tepid
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| adj.微温的，温热的，不太热心的 | |
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40
frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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wriggle
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| v./n.蠕动，扭动；蜿蜒 | |
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42
tyrant
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| n.暴君，专制的君主，残暴的人 | |
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43
dynamite
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| n./vt.(用)炸药(爆破) | |
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44
incense
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| v.激怒；n.香，焚香时的烟，香气 | |
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45
Christians
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| n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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46
skull
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| n.头骨；颅骨 | |
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47
jovial
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| adj.快乐的，好交际的 | |
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48
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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taut
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| adj.拉紧的，绷紧的，紧张的 | |
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50
bugle
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| n.军号，号角，喇叭；v.吹号，吹号召集 | |
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51
jingling
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| 叮当声 | |
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52
vivacity
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| n.快活，活泼，精神充沛 | |
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irrational
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| adj.无理性的，失去理性的 | |
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prank
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| n.开玩笑，恶作剧；v.装饰；打扮；炫耀自己 | |
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55
corps
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| n.(通信等兵种的)部队；(同类作的)一组 | |
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56
constables
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| n.警察( constable的名词复数 ) | |
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57
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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58
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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sprawling
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| adj.蔓生的，不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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60
eccentricities
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| n.古怪行为( eccentricity的名词复数 )；反常；怪癖 | |
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61
starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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62
pinnacle
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| n.尖塔，尖顶，山峰；(喻)顶峰 | |
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rhinoceros
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| n.犀牛 | |
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64
groan
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| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
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65
miscreants
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| n.恶棍，歹徒( miscreant的名词复数 ) | |
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66
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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67
trumpets
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| 喇叭( trumpet的名词复数 )； 小号； 喇叭形物； （尤指）绽开的水仙花 | |
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68
conspirators
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| n.共谋者，阴谋家( conspirator的名词复数 ) | |
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69
throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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70
irreconcilable
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| adj.（指人）难和解的，势不两立的 | |
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71
grievance
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| n.怨愤，气恼，委屈 | |
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72
satire
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| n.讽刺，讽刺文学，讽刺作品 | |
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73
slay
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| v.杀死，宰杀，杀戮 | |
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74
smite
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| v.重击；彻底击败；n.打；尝试；一点儿 | |
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75
perturbed
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| adj.烦燥不安的v.使（某人）烦恼，不安( perturb的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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76
grumbling
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| adj. 喃喃鸣不平的, 出怨言的 | |
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77
spun
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| v.纺，杜撰，急转身 | |
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78
farce
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| n.闹剧，笑剧，滑稽戏；胡闹 | |
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79
sensational
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| adj.使人感动的，非常好的，轰动的，耸人听闻的 | |
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80
followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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81
feverishly
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| adv. 兴奋地 | |
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82
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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83
traitor
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| n.叛徒，卖国贼 | |
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84
humbug
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| n.花招，谎话，欺骗 | |
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85
shuddering
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| v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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86
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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