The Man Who Was Thursday | Page 8

doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember
correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."
"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.

"I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology," said Gregory very calmly. "No duel could wipe
it out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one
way by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am
going, at the possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to prove to you
that you were wrong in what you said."
"In what I said?"
"You said I was not serious about being an anarchist."
"There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never
doubted that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought
what you said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might
wake men up to a neglected truth."
Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully.
"And in no other sense," he asked, "you think me serious? You think
me a flaneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a
deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious."
Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road.
"Serious!" he cried. "Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these
damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious? One
comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well,
but I should think very little of a man who didn't keep something in the
background of his life that was more serious than all this
talking--something more serious, whether it was religion or only
drink."
"Very well," said Gregory, his face darkening, "you shall see
something more serious than either drink or religion."
Syme stood waiting with his usual air of mildness until Gregory again
opened his lips.

"You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that you have
one?"
"Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now."
"Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion
involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any
son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If
you will take upon yourself this awful abnegations if you will consent
to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a
knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in
return--"
"You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused.
"I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly took
off his hat.
"Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that a
poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he is
always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a Christian,
and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I will not report
anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And now, in the name of
Colney Hatch, what is it?"
"I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will call a
cab."
He gave two long whistles, and a hansom came rattling down the road.
The two got into it in silence. Gregory gave through the trap the
address of an obscure public-house on the Chiswick bank of the river.
The cab whisked itself away again, and in it these two fantastics quitted
their fantastic town.

CHAPTER II

THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME
THE cab pulled up before a particularly dreary and greasy beershop,
into which Gregory rapidly conducted his companion. They seated
themselves in a close and dim sort of bar-parlour, at a stained wooden
table with one wooden leg. The room was so small and dark, that very
little could be seen of the attendant who was summoned, beyond a
vague and dark impression of something bulky and bearded.
"Will you take a little supper?" asked Gregory politely. "The pate de
foie gras is not good here, but I can recommend the game."
Syme received the remark with stolidity, imagining it to be a joke.
Accepting the vein of humour, he said, with a well-bred indifference--
"Oh, bring me some lobster mayonnaise."
To his indescribable astonishment, the man only said "Certainly, sir!"
and went away apparently to get it.
"What will you drink?" resumed Gregory, with the same careless yet
apologetic air. "I shall only have a crepe de menthe myself; I have
dined. But the champagne 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