Chapter 7 Chapter 6 Exposure

That's the six people who swore to destroy the world.In front of them, Syme tried his best to use his knowledge again and again.Sometimes, for a while, he thought these thoughts were subjective, that he saw just ordinary people, one of them was very old, another was neurotic, and another was short-sighted.But a sense of unnatural symbolism always came back to him.Somehow, everyone seems to be at the tipping point of things, just like the theory that they are at the tipping point of thought.Each of them, Syme knew, was a veritable extreme in the wild and rational way.He could only fantasize, as in some fable, that if one went westward all the way to the end of the world, one would find something - say a tree - that was more or less a tree , a tree possessed by elves; and if he went eastward to the end of the world, he would find something else that was not quite his own—a tower, perhaps, of hideous form.So these people seem to stand up violently and recklessly against the ultimate time and space and the vision from the critical point.The end of the earth is coming.

Syme accepted the scene, and the conversation continued; the bewildering contrast of the breakfast table was nothing compared to the deliberate tone and dire thrust of the speaker.They were talking in depth about a plot that was about to be carried out.The waiter downstairs said they were discussing bombs and kings, and he was quite right.Only three days later, the Russian Tsar was meeting in Paris with the President of the French Republic.And on this sunny balcony, these smiling gentlemen enjoying bacon and fried eggs are deciding how to kill them, and even the tools for committing crimes have been selected; Bombs destroy everything.

Logically speaking, such proximity to this real and objective crime would have calmed Syme and taken away his mysterious tremors.He would only think about how to save two people, so that their flesh would not be torn to pieces by the steel and roaring air waves.But in fact, now Syme began to feel a third kind of fear, which was sharper and more existential than his psychological hatred or social responsibility.Quite simply, he had no time to worry about the safety of the French president or the Russian tsar; he began to worry for himself, since he was all but ignored by most of his interlocutors.Their faces were close to each other, arguing almost in unison, save for a moment when the secretary grinned with his mouth twisted as jagged lightning slashed across the sky.But there was always one thing that haunted Syme from the first and terrified him till the end.The Chairman watched him all the time with inexplicable interest.The giant was quite quiet, but his blue eyes stood out from his head, and they were always fixed on Syme.

Syme felt an urge to jump up and across the balcony.When the chairman stared at him, he felt as fragile as if he were made of glass.He had no doubt that Sunday had sensed in some silent and uncanny way that he was a spy.He glanced over the edge of the balcony and saw a policeman standing absent-mindedly below, his eyes fixed on the shiny railing and the trees in the sun. Then a temptation arose in Syme that would haunt him for days.In the face of these powerful and hateful anarchist champions, he almost forgot the fragile and eccentric poet Gregory, the small, anarchist esthete.He even thought of Gregory with a kind of familiar kindness, as if they had been childhood friends.He still remembered, though, that he was still bound by Gregory for a promise.He had promised never to do what he felt almost doing now, had promised not to jump out of the balcony and call the cop.He pulled his cold hand away from the cold stone railing, his soul swaying with psychological hesitation.He had only to tear the thread of his flippant oath to a murderous body, and his whole life would be as wide and sunny as the square below.On the other hand, so long as he maintains his obsolete reputation, little by little he falls into the grip of this great enemy of mankind, whose wit is like a torture chamber.Every time he looked towards the square, he saw the comfortable policeman who was the backbone of routine and order.Every time he looked back at the breakfast table, he saw the chairman still quietly pondering him with his obnoxiously large eyes.

Among thousands of thoughts, Syme never had two preconceptions.First, Syme had no doubt that if he continued to fight alone, the Chairman and his council would destroy him, possibly in an open location with a scheme that seemed impossible.This man won't rest easily on Sunday until he's somewhere and somehow planting his iron traps, either with unknown poisons or with a sudden street accident; with hypnosis or hellfire, Sunday It must be able to hit him.If he openly challenged Sunday, he was doomed, beheaded into a zombie in his chair, or succumbed to an unknown disease much later.If he called the police at once, arrested everyone, made it public, and mobilized the whole of England against these anarchists, he might get away; otherwise he couldn't.These gentlemen, who filled their balconies, overlooked a splendid and busy square; Syme would not have felt any safer if they had been a ship of armed pirates overlooking the open sea.

Second, it never occurred to Syme to lose mentally to the enemy.Many moderns, accustomed to a fragile worship of intellect and strength, might shake their allegiance under the weight of such a great man.They might call Sunday Superman, and if there were such men, Sunday would have looked like one of them, a living stone statue with an earth-shattering fantasy.Sunday may be called a god, his grand plan is open, but no one can see it; his big face is sincere and frank, but no one can understand it.But it was a modern cruelty, and Syme, even in his extreme morbidity, would not have descended to it, for he had as much cowardice as anyone to fear the mighty; but he would not be so cowardly as to praise it.

These people eat as they talk, and even in this they are unique.Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate, as usual, the best thing on the table—cold pheasant, or Strasbourg pie.But the secretary was a vegetarian, and he was talking earnestly about planned murder with half a raw tomato and three-quarters of a glass of warm water.The old professor was eating liquid food, which reminded me of an old man with dementia.In this respect even Sunday retains his eccentric dominance of numbers.He had the appetite of twenty men; he ate a prodigiously large, formidable appetite, so that watching him eat was like seeing a sausage factory.Yet every time, after he'd swallowed a dozen pancakes or drank a quart of coffee, he'd turn his big head sideways to stare at Syme.

"I've often wondered," said the Marquis, after taking a big bite out of a slice of jam bread, "whether it would be better if I used a knife? Most good things are done with a knife. Stabbing a knife into a French president." , and wiggle it a bit, it’s a new passion.” "You're not right," said the secretary, furrowing his dark brows. "A knife is just an old-fashioned complaint against a tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, it's our best badge. It is as perfect a sign of us as incense is a Christian's prayer. It expands and destroys by expanding, just as thoughts destroy by expanding. A man's brain is a bomb," he said. jerked off his monstrous passion and banged his head violently exclaiming, "I feel like my brain is a bomb day and night. It must expand! It must expand! To blow up the universe, a man's brain Must swell."

"I don't want to blow up the universe yet," said the Marquis slowly. "I want to do a lot of cruel things before I die. I remembered one thing yesterday in bed." "No, if nothing is the only end of the matter," said Dr. Bull with his sphinx smile, "it's hardly worth doing." The old professor's dull eyes were fixed on the ceiling. "Everyone knew in their hearts," he said, "that nothing was worth doing." There was a strange silence, and then the secretary spoke— "But we're off topic. The only question now is how the attack will be launched on Wednesday. I think we should all agree with the original bomb idea, and as for the actual arrangements, I suggest that tomorrow morning he should go first—"

The speech was interrupted suddenly under a huge shadow.Sunday stood up and seemed to fill the entire sky above them. "Before we discuss that," he said quietly and calmly, "let's go to a private room. I have something special to say." Syme stood up before the others.At last the moment of choice came, and he remembered the pistol.On the sidewalk below he could hear the police lolling and stomping, and the morning was cold despite the bright sun. Joyful accordion music was heard in the street.Syme stood nervously, as if it were the bugle call before a battle.He found himself filled with a miraculous courage that came out of nowhere.There was vigor, brutality, and the irrational prowess of the poor, who insisted on decency and Christian charity in the dirty streets, in the sound of the music.Gone is the banter of his teenage years as a cop, and he doesn't see himself as the poster child for a good cop, or the old monster who stayed in the dark room.He felt like a representative of all these good, ordinary people on the street who went into battle every day to the tune of the accordion.This intense pride in being human somehow elevates him above the villains around him, and for at least a moment he looks down on their humble eccentricities from the starry sky.To these anarchists he felt an unconscious sense of superiority which one feels only when a warrior faces a mighty beast, or a wise man faces a colossal mistake.Syme knew that he had no match for Sunday, either physically or mentally; but at that moment he didn't care any more than he cared that he didn't have the muscles of a tiger or the horns of a rhino.Everything is contained in the ultimate certainty that Sunday is wrong and the accordion is right.What rings in his mind is the frightening and irrefutable old saying of the "Song of Roland"-"The heathen are wrong, and the Christians are right."

This sentence is pronounced in Old French nasally, and there is a clang and whine of steel.Syme's spirit was freed from the burden of weakness, and he resolved to embrace death.If people who love the accordion can take on their old responsibilities, so can he.He prides himself on keeping his promises, because he keeps his promises to the villains.It was his last victory over these lunatics, and he would go into their dark rooms to die for reasons they could not comprehend.The accordion played the marching tune with the vibrancy and mingled voices of the whole orchestra, and among the horns of proud life he could hear the deep rumble of the drums of glorious death. The conspirators had already fished through the French windows into the back room.Syme came last, outwardly composed, but his whole brain and body beat to a romantic rhythm.Sunday led them down an irregularly edged staircase, which might have been used by the servants, and into a dark, cold, empty room with a table and some benches like a Abandoned conference room.After they were all inside, Sunday closed and locked the door. The first to speak was an aggrieved Gogol, who seemed to be full of unspeakable complaints. "No! No!" he exclaimed with unaccountable excitement, his thick Polish accent becoming unintelligible, "You said you weren't hiding. You said you were going to expose yourself. It's all nonsense. You want to talk about important things Then I hid in a small dark room!" Sunday listened mildly to the foreigner's incoherent sarcasm. "You don't understand, Gogol," he said in a fatherly tone, "that when they listen to our nonsense on the balcony, they don't care where we go after that. If we came here in the first place, All the restaurant staff would be spying on us through the keyhole. You don't seem to know anything about humans." "I die for them," cried the Pole with great excitement. "I kill their oppressors. I don't like these games of hiding. I will beat the tyrants in the empty squares." "I get it, I get it," said Sunday, nodding kindly as he sat down at the head of the long table. "First you die for humanity, then you get up and punch their oppressors. That's nice. Now I ask you to control your wonderful emotions, and sit down with other gentlemen. Today, for the first time, we have a wise conversation." Syme, with the quickness and uneasiness that had manifested since his call, was the first to sit down.Gogol was the last to sit down, his brown-bearded mouth still grumbling about his compromise.Nobody but Syme seemed to think anyone was going to be hit.As for himself, the only thing he felt was that of a man on the gallows, but nevertheless wanted to make a good speech. "Comrades," said Sunday, standing up abruptly, "we've been involved in this farce long enough. I've called you here to tell you something the simplicity and shock of which would make the upstairs waiter ( They are so used to our frivolity) can also hear a certain new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we were discussing plans earlier and named some places. I suggest, before talking about anything else , these plans and places should not be put to a vote at this meeting, but should be left entirely in the hands of some reliable member. I propose Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull." They all stared at him; and then they all jumped in their seats, for Sunday's following words, though low-toned, were to the point.Sunday knocked on the table. "Not one more word about these plans and locations at this meeting. Not one minute detail of our planned actions in front of everyone." Sunday had spent his life trying to surprise his followers, but it seemed they had never really surprised them until now, when they all swung excitedly in their seats except Syme.He sat motionless in his seat, clutching a loaded revolver in his pocket.If someone attacked him, he would fight to the death.At least he could figure out if Sunday was mortal or not. Sunday continued steadily: "As you may understand, there is only one possibility of banning free speech in this festival of freedom. It doesn't matter that strangers overhear us, they think we are joking. But most importantly, even lives are at stake. The point is that there is indeed one of us who is an oddity who understands our serious goals but ignores them, who—” The secretary suddenly screamed like a woman. "Impossible!" he cried, jumping up, "Impossible—" Sunday slapped his giant hand on the table, spreading him flat like the fin of a giant fish. "Yes," he said slowly, "there's a spy in this room. There's a traitor at this table. I don't want to waste any more words. His name—" Syme curled up in his seat, his finger firmly on the trigger. "His name is Gogol," said the chairman, "and he's the hairy impostor there pretending to be a Pole." Gogol jumped up, a pistol in each hand.Three men stood up almost as fast as he did and jammed his neck.The professor also wanted to stand up.Syme didn't see the scene clearly, though, for he was blocked by a nice shadow; and he leaned back trembling in his chair, as if paralyzed after the relaxation of passion.

---

Notes: