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"You do not know Sunday at all. Perhaps it is because you are
better than I, and do not know hell. I was a fierce fellow, and a
trifle morbid from the first. The man who sits in darkness, and
who chose us all, chose me because I had all the crazy look of a
conspirator--because my smile went crooked, and my eyes were
gloomy, even when I smiled. But there must have been something in
me that answered to the nerves in all these anarchic men. For when
I first saw Sunday he expressed to me, not your airy vitality, but
something both gross and sad in the Nature of Things. I found him
smoking in a twilight room, a room with brown blind down,
infinitely more depressing than the genial darkness in which our
master lives. He sat there on a bench, a huge heap of a man, dark
and out of shape. He listened to all my words without speaking or
even stirring. I poured out my most passionate appeals, and asked
my most eloquent questions. Then, after a long silence, the Thing
began to shake, and I thought it was shaken by some secret malady.
It shook like a loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of
everything I had ever read about the base bodies that are the
origin of life--the deep sea lumps and protoplasm. It seemed like
the final form of matter, the most shapeless and the most shameful.
I could only tell myself, from its shudderings, that it was
something at least that such a monster could be miserable. And
then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was shaking with
a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me. Do you ask me to
forgive him that? It is no small thing to be laughed at by
something at once lower and stronger than oneself."
"Surely you fellows are exaggerating wildly," cut in the clear
voice of Inspector Ratcliffe. "President Sunday is a terrible
fellow for one's intellect, but he is not such a Barnum's freak
physically as you make out. He received me in an ordinary office,
in a grey check coat, in broad daylight. He talked to me in an
ordinary way. But I'll tell you what is a trifle creepy about
Sunday. His room is neat, his clothes are neat, everything seems
in order; but he's absent-minded. Sometimes his great bright eyes
go quite blind. For hours he forgets that you are there. Now
absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We think
of a wicked man as vigilant. We can't think of a wicked man who is
honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren't think of a wicked
man alone with himself. An absentminded man means a good-natured
man. It means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologise.
But how will you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see
you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction
combined with cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went
through wild forests, and felt that the animals there were at once
innocent and pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you
like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded
tiger?"
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