Part 2 (2/2)
He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country.
Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fas.h.i.+oned black chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fas.h.i.+oned cloak, black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early villains in d.i.c.kens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards, cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black cigar, bought in Soho for twopence, stood out from between his tightened teeth, and altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was why a policeman on the Embankment spoke to him, and said ”Good evening.”
Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the twilight.
”A good evening is it?” he said sharply. ”You fellows would call the end of the world a good evening. Look at that b.l.o.o.d.y red sun and that b.l.o.o.d.y river! I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt and s.h.i.+ning, you would still be standing here as solid as ever, looking out for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen are cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.”
”If we are calm,” replied the policeman, ”it is the calm of organised resistance.”
”Eh?” said Syme, staring.
”The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,” pursued the policeman. ”The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.”
”Good G.o.d, the Board Schools!” said Syme. ”Is this undenominational education?”
”No,” said the policeman sadly, ”I never had any of those advantages. The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very rough and old-fas.h.i.+oned, I am afraid.”
”Where did you have it?” asked Syme, wondering.
”Oh, at Harrow,” said the policeman The cla.s.s sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in so many men, broke out of Syme before he could control them.
”But, good Lord, man,” he said, ”you oughtn't to be a policeman!”
The policeman sighed and shook his head.
”I know,” he said solemnly, ”I know I am not worthy.”
”But why did you join the police?” asked Syme with rude curiosity.
”For much the same reason that you abused the police,” replied the other. ”I found that there was a special opening in the service for those whose fears for humanity were concerned rather with the aberrations of the scientific intellect than with the normal and excusable, though excessive, outbreaks of the human will. I trust I make myself clear.”
”If you mean that you make your opinion clear,” said Syme, ”I suppose you do. But as for making yourself clear, it is the last thing you do. How comes a man like you to be talking philosophy in a blue helmet on the Thames embankment?”
”You have evidently not heard of the latest development in our police system,” replied the other. ”I am not surprised at it. We are keeping it rather dark from the educated cla.s.s, because that cla.s.s contains most of our enemies. But you seem to be exactly in the right frame of mind. I think you might almost join us.”
”Join you in what?” asked Syme.
”I will tell you,” said the policeman slowly. ”This is the situation: The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilisation. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. I am a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the value of the ordinary man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue. But it would obviously be undesirable to employ the common policeman in an investigation which is also a heresy hunt.”
Syme's eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.
”What do you do, then?” he said.
”The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, ”is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the a.s.sa.s.sination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.”
”Do you mean,” asked Syme, ”that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?”
”You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, ”but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the sn.o.bbish English a.s.sumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.”
Syme struck his hands together.
”How true that is,” he cried. ”I have felt it from my boyhood, but never could state the verbal ant.i.thesis. The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed--say a wealthy uncle--he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise G.o.d. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them. Yes, the modern world has retained all those parts of police work which are really oppressive and ignominious, the harrying of the poor, the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anybody else.”
”But this is absurd!” cried the policeman, clasping his hands with an excitement uncommon in persons of his figure and costume, ”but it is intolerable! I don't know what you're doing, but you're wasting your life. You must, you shall, join our special army against anarchy. Their armies are on our frontiers. Their bolt is ready to fall. A moment more, and you may lose the glory of working with us, perhaps the glory of dying with the last heroes of the world.”
”It is a chance not to be missed, certainly,” a.s.sented Syme, ”but still I do not quite understand. I know as well as anybody that the modern world is full of lawless little men and mad little movements. But, beastly as they are, they generally have the one merit of disagreeing with each other. How can you talk of their leading one army or hurling one bolt. What is this anarchy?”
”Do not confuse it,” replied the constable, ”with those chance dynamite outbreaks from Russia or from Ireland, which are really the outbreaks of oppressed, if mistaken, men. This is a vast philosophic movement, consisting of an outer and an inner ring. You might even call the outer ring the laity and the inner ring the priesthood. I prefer to call the outer ring the innocent section, the inner ring the supremely guilty section. The outer ring--the main ma.s.s of their supporters--are merely anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have destroyed human happiness. They believe that all the evil results of human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime. They do not believe that the crime creates the punishment. They believe that the punishment has created the crime. They believe that if a man seduced seven women he would naturally walk away as blameless as the flowers of spring. They believe that if a man picked a pocket he would naturally feel exquisitely good. These I call the innocent section.”
”Oh!” said Syme.
”Naturally, therefore, these people talk about 'a happy time coming'; 'the paradise of the future'; 'mankind freed from the bondage of vice and the bondage of virtue,' and so on. And so also the men of the inner circle speak--the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last. But in their mouths”--and the policeman lowered his voice--”in their mouths these happy phrases have a horrible meaning. They are under no illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right or wrong, they mean the grave.
”They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed somebody.”
”How can I join you?” asked Syme, with a sort of pa.s.sion.
”I know for a fact that there is a vacancy at the moment,” said the policeman, ”as I have the honour to be somewhat in the confidence of the chief of whom I have spoken. You should really come and see him. Or rather, I should not say see him, n.o.body ever sees him; but you can talk to him if you like.”
”Telephone?” inquired Syme, with interest.
”No,” said the policeman placidly, ”he has a fancy for always sitting in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter. Do come along.”
Somewhat dazed and considerably excited, Syme allowed himself to be led to a side-door in the long row of buildings of Scotland Yard. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he had been pa.s.sed through the hands of about four intermediate officials, and was suddenly shown into a room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light. It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced; it was like going suddenly stone-blind.
”Are you the new recruit?” asked a heavy voice.
And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of ma.s.sive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.
”Are you the new recruit?” said the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. ”All right. You are engaged.”
Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase.
”I really have no experience,” he began.
”No one has any experience,” said the other, ”of the Battle of Armageddon.”
”But I am really unfit--”
”You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown.
”Well, really,” said Syme, ”I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.”
”I do,” said the other--”martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.”
<script>