THE FEAST OF FEAR
At first the large stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid;
but before he reached the top he had realised that there was a man
leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the
river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and
frock-coat of the more formal type of fashion; he had a red flower in
his buttonhole. As Syme drew nearer to him step by step, he did not
even move a hair; and Syme could come close enough to notice even in
the dim, pale morning light that his face was long, pale and
intellectual, and ended in a small triangular tuft of dark beard at the
very point of the chin, all else being clean-shaven. This scrap of hair
almost seemed a mere oversight; the rest of the face was of the type
that is best shaven—clear-cut, ascetic, and in its way noble. Syme drew
closer and closer, noting all this, and still the figure did not stir.
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,
dignified 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 crooked 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 spasm of smile was instantaneous, and the man’s face dropped at
once into its harmonious melancholy. He spoke without further
explanation or inquiry, 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 utterly dead voice that
contradicted the fanaticism 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 concealing 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 flaunt 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 anarchists.”
“It seems to me a very clever idea,” said Syme.
“Clever! God blast your impudence! Clever!” cried out the other in a
sudden, shrill voice which was as startling and discordant 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
continental. 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
replica 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 eerie 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 Moorish 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
literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed balcony,
big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did contain a
dining-table, or more strictly 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 insolence
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 unnatural smile, and Syme knew that this boisterous
breakfast party was the secret conclave 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
deliberately as colossal. 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 dwindle and become
dwarfish. 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 frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.
The two men mounted the stairs in silence.
Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost
filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others
stood in awe. 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 devoid 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 pruriently, 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 sufficiently
commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by
the President’s caprice they had been dressed up with a festive
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 Dynamiter. 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 tangle,
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 grotesque. If out of that
stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of a cat or a
dog, it could not have been a more idiotic 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 incurably
tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous
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
conspirator. Now if a gentleman goes about London in a top hat and a
frock-coat, no one need know that he is an anarchist. 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 diplomacy, 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 ass! 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 ponderous heartiness,
“you aren’t good at anything.”
While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking more
steadily 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 stature 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 metaphor 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
eccentricity. 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 emaciated, that Syme
thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very
distress 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
suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying
lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of
his being clad, not in lighter 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 dense 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 tyrants hunting, you may
see just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel,
crimson 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 fixed finally in a furrow 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 hideous effect was as if
some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose
or sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was
expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the
horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but
corruption. 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 practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had
that combination of _savoir-faire_ with a sort of well-groomed
coarseness which is not uncommon 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 opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a
crescendo 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
enigma. 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 virility 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
frightful to see.