The Man Who Was Thursday | Page 7

was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave and
open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning
responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the
maternal watch which is as old as the world.
"Is he really an anarchist, then?" she asked.
"Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense."
She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--
"He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"
Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.
"Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."
And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity and of his
safety.

Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in
spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is
always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches
himself too closely. He defended respectability with violence and
exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of tidiness and propriety.
All the time there was a smell of lilac all round him. Once he heard
very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it
seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny tune from
under or beyond the world.
He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered
the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went
himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of
champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the
wild events which were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never
saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable
way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad
adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red
thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For
what followed was so improbable, that it might well have been a
dream.
When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street
lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the
fence behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure
almost as rigid and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and
long frock coat were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost
as dark. Only a fringe of fiery hair against the light, and also something
aggressive in the attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He
had something of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for
his foe.

He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more
formally returned.
"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's
conversation?"
"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree.
"About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your
precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is
anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in
green and gold."
"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the
tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the
lamp by the light of the tree." Then after a pause he said, "But may I
ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our
little argument?"
"No," cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, "I did not
stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever."
The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing,
listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth
voice and with a rather bewildering smile.
"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something
rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of
woman has ever succeeded in doing before."
"Indeed!"
"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person
succeeded in