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Perhaps a maiden lady on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have been. I don't mind being the policeman that might have been. I don't mind being anything in German thought." "Are you in the police service?" said the old man, ignoring all Syme's improvised and desperate raillery. "Are you a detective?" Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.
When Gregory heard the dangerous dialogue end, with a sudden safety for his rival, he rose abruptly and paced the floor in painful thought. He was, indeed, in an agony of diplomacy. It was clear that Syme's inspired impudence was likely to bring him out of all merely accidental dilemmas. Little was to be hoped from them.
The beans and bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme's sense of a new comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two.
But the Marquis's morbid energy over-reached itself. Twice Syme, parrying, knocked his opponent's point far out of the fighting circle; and the third time his riposte was so rapid, that there was no doubt about the hit this time. Syme's sword actually bent under the weight of the Marquis's body, which it had pierced.
Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over. The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard. "Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"
Say, you can't hold up a gang of ten an' more toughs with a single gun in the dead, o' night, 'specially with a hole in your guts same as young Syme's had bored into his. I ain't ast once, nor twice, to hev them beasties run into the corrals o' nights, and fed hay, same as in winter. I've ast it fifty times. It's bin up to you, boss. So I say it's no use in squealin'."
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.
Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives, plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there was something Homeric in Syme's mirth which made many half-drunken men look round. "What yer laughing at, guv'nor?" asked one wondering labourer from the docks. "At myself," answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his ecstatic reaction.
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.
My poor dear Bull, I do not believe that you really have a face. I have not faith enough to believe in matter." Syme's eyes were still fixed upon the errant orb, which, reddened in the evening light, looked like some rosier and more innocent world. "Have you noticed an odd thing," he said, "about all your descriptions?
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