CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE

SUCH were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and
again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence.
Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective,
that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another
nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism
always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on
the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of
thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end,
so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as
in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the
world he would find something--say a tree--that was more or less than a
tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end
of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself--a
tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures
seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate
horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.

Talk had been going on steadily as he took in the scene; and not the
least of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was the
contrast between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terrible
purport. They were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediate
plot. The waiter downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said that
they were talking about bombs and kings. Only three days afterwards the
Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in Paris, and over
their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these beaming gentlemen
had decided how both should die. Even the instrument was chosen; the
black-bearded Marquis, it appeared, was to carry the bomb.

Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objective
crime would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical
tremors. He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at
least two human bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and roaring
gas. But the truth was that by this time he had begun to feel a
third kind of fear, more piercing and practical than either his moral
revulsion or his social responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear to
spare for the French President or the Czar; he had begun to fear for
himself. Most of the talkers took little heed of him, de