t
seemed to be wearing one of the black half-masks of their pursuers. The
fancy tinted Syme's overwhelming sense of wonder. Was he wearing a mask?
Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery,
in which men's faces turned black and white by turns, in which their
figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night,
this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside),
seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving
for three days, this world where men took off their beards and their
spectacles and their noses, and turned into other people. That tragic
self-confidence which he had felt when he believed that the Marquis was
a devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the Marquis was
a friend. He felt almost inclined to ask after all these bewilderments
what was a friend and what an enemy. Was there anything that was apart
from what it seemed? The Marquis had taken off his nose and turned out
to be a detective. Might he not just as well take off his head and
turn out to be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like this
bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only
a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For
Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many
modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the
modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final
scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

As a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake, Syme
strove with a sudden effort to fling off this last and worst of his
fancies. With two impatient strides he overtook the man in the Marquis's
straw hat, the man whom he had come to address as Ratcliffe. In a voice
exaggeratively loud and cheerful, he broke the bottomless silence and
made conversation.

"May I ask," he said, "where on earth we are all going to?"

So genuine had been the doubts of his soul, that he was quite glad to
hear his companion speak in an easy, human voice.

"We must get down through the town of Lancy to the sea," he said. "I
think that part of the country is least likely to be with them."

"What can you mean by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be running the
real world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, and
surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern armies and police."

"Mere mobs!" repeated h