《代号星期四》07第五章 恐惧的盛宴（在线收听）

CHAPTER V. THE FEAST OF FEAR

 AT first the large stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid; but before he reached the top he had realised that there was a man leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and frock-coat of the more formal type of fashion; he had a red flower in his buttonhole. As Syme drew nearer to him step by step, he did not even move a hair; and Syme could come close enough to notice even in the dim, pale morning light that his face was long, pale and intellectual, and ended in a small triangular tuft of dark beard at the very point of the chin, all else being clean-shaven. This scrap of hair almost seemed a mere oversight; the rest of the face was of the type that is best shaven—clear-cut, ascetic, and in its way noble. Syme drew closer and closer, noting all this, and still the figure did not stir.

At first an instinct had told Syme that this was the man whom he was meant to meet. Then, seeing that the man made no sign, he had concluded that he was not. And now again he had come back to a certainty that the man had something to do with his mad adventure. For the man remained more still than would have been natural if a stranger had come so close. He was as motionless as a wax-work, and got on the nerves somewhat in the same way. Syme looked again and again at the pale, dignified and delicate face, and the face still looked blankly across the river. Then he took out of his pocket the note from Buttons proving his election, and put it before that sad and beautiful face. Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.

There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme’s circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it.

There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.

The spasm of smile was instantaneous, and the man’s face dropped at once into its harmonious melancholy. He spoke without further explanation or inquiry, like a man speaking to an old colleague.

“If we walk up towards Leicester Square,” he said, “we shall just be in time for breakfast. Sunday always insists on an early breakfast. Have you had any sleep?”

“No,” said Syme.

“Nor have I,” answered the man in an ordinary tone. “I shall try to get to bed after breakfast.”

He spoke with casual civility, but in an utterly dead voice that contradicted the fanaticism of his face. It seemed almost as if all friendly words were to him lifeless conveniences, and that his only life was hate. After a pause the man spoke again.

“Of course, the Secretary of the branch told you everything that can be told. But the one thing that can never be told is the last notion of the President, for his notions grow like a tropical forest. So in case you don’t know, I’d better tell you that he is carrying out his notion of concealing ourselves by not concealing ourselves to the most extraordinary lengths just now. Originally, of course, we met in a cell underground, just as your branch does. Then Sunday made us take a private room at an ordinary restaurant. He said that if you didn’t seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out. Well, he is the only man on earth, I know; but sometimes I really think that his huge brain is going a little mad in its old age. For now we flaunt ourselves before the public. We have our breakfast on a balcony—on a balcony, if you please—overlooking Leicester Square.”

“And what do the people say?” asked Syme.

“It’s quite simple what they say,” answered his guide. “They say we are a lot of jolly gentlemen who pretend they are anarchists.”

“It seems to me a very clever idea,” said Syme.

“Clever! God blast your impudence! Clever!” cried out the other in a sudden, shrill voice which was as startling and discordant as his crooked smile. “When you’ve seen Sunday for a split second you’ll leave off calling him clever.”

With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early sunlight filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I suppose, why this square itself should look so alien and in some ways so continental. It will never be known whether it was the foreign look that attracted the foreigners or the foreigners who gave it the foreign look. But on this particular morning the effect seemed singularly bright and clear. Between the open square and the sunlit leaves and the statue and the Saracenic outlines of the Alhambra, it looked the replica of some French or even Spanish public place. And this effect increased in Syme the sensation, which in many shapes he had had through the whole adventure, the eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world. As a fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square ever since he was a boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the trees and the Moorish cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning into an unknown Place de something or other in some foreign town.

At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street behind. In the wall there was one large French window, probably the window of a large coffee-room; and outside this window, almost literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed balcony, big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did contain a dining-table, or more strictly a breakfast-table; and round the breakfast-table, glowing in the sunlight and evident to the street, were a group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed in the insolence of fashion, with white waistcoats and expensive button-holes. Some of their jokes could almost be heard across the square. Then the grave Secretary gave his unnatural smile, and Syme knew that this boisterous breakfast party was the secret conclave of the European Dynamiters.

Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.

As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter came out smiling with every tooth in his head.

“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”

And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.

The two men mounted the stairs in silence.

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.

By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an empty seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him with good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered himself a little by looking at their conventional coats and solid, shining coffee-pot; then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very large, but it was still possible to humanity.

In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by the President’s caprice they had been dressed up with a festive respectability, which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast. One man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He at least was the common or garden Dynamiter. He wore, indeed, the high white collar and satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion; but out of this collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it had every diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque. If out of that stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of a cat or a dog, it could not have been a more idiotic contrast.

The man’s name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous part demanded of him by President Sunday. And, indeed, when Syme came in the President, with that daring disregard of public suspicion which was his policy, was actually chaffing Gogol upon his inability to assume conventional graces.

“Our friend Tuesday,” said the President in a deep voice at once of quietude and volume, “our friend Tuesday doesn’t seem to grasp the idea. He dresses up like a gentleman, but he seems to be too great a soul to behave like one. He insists on the ways of the stage conspirator. Now if a gentleman goes about London in a top hat and a frock-coat, no one need know that he is an anarchist. But if a gentleman puts on a top hat and a frock-coat, and then goes about on his hands and knees—well, he may attract attention. That’s what Brother Gogol does. He goes about on his hands and knees with such inexhaustible diplomacy, that by this time he finds it quite difficult to walk upright.”

“I am not good at concealment,” said Gogol sulkily, with a thick foreign accent; “I am not ashamed of the cause.”

“Yes you are, my boy, and so is the cause of you,” said the President good-naturedly. “You hide as much as anybody; but you can’t do it, you see, you’re such an ass! You try to combine two inconsistent methods. When a householder finds a man under his bed, he will probably pause to note the circumstance. But if he finds a man under his bed in a top hat, you will agree with me, my dear Tuesday, that he is not likely even to forget it. Now when you were found under Admiral Biffin’s bed—”

“I am not good at deception,” said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.

“Right, my boy, right,” said the President with a ponderous heartiness, “you aren’t good at anything.”

While this stream of conversation continued, Syme was looking more steadily at the men around him. As he did so, he gradually felt all his sense of something spiritually queer return.

He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.

Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed eccentricity. 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. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure thought was pain.

He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and differently wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a man more obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing unusual about him, except that he was the only man at table who wore the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own. He had a black French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer. But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad, not in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer and warmer than the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of profound colour. His black coat looked as if it were only black by being too dense a purple. His black beard looked as if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the bright coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may see just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.

Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose or sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off.

Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. 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. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see.

第五章 恐惧的盛宴

    起初，在赛姆看来，这巨大的石阶就像金字塔一样荒无一人；不过，在他到达顶端之前，他就意识到有个男子靠在河堤的挡墙上注视着河的两岸。他的体格很平常，戴着一顶丝帽，穿着更正规、时尚的长礼服，扣眼里则插着一朵红花。尽管赛姆在一步步靠近，他依然纹丝不动。直到赛姆走近他，在暗淡微弱的晨光中，赛姆才看清楚他长着一张瘦削的知识分子的脸，下巴尖上留着一小撮三角形的黑胡子，看起来就像一个仅有的疏忽；脸的其余部分剃得干干净净——如同苦修者，高贵且别致。赛姆走得越来越近，并且看清所有的一切，这个人仍然一动不动。

    赛姆的本能首先告诉他，这就是他有义务碰头的那个人。可是，看到那个人没有什么反应，赛姆又推断他不是。现在，在一个陌生人如此靠近他的情况下，他仍然保持一动不动，这有点反常，赛姆又再次断定这个人和他疯狂的冒险有关。他像蜡像一样静止，这种静止多少令人神经紧张。赛姆一再看那张苍白、尊贵而精致的脸，可这张脸仍然空洞地注视着河的两岸。赛姆从口袋里取出巴顿斯交给他的证明他当选的短信，伸到那张忧郁而漂亮的脸前面。那个人笑了，不过这是个令人惊异的笑容，因为他的笑从右边脸颊上出现，然后在左边脸颊上消失。

    理智地讲，这样的笑容吓不到任何人。很多人会摆出这种扭曲笑容，玩神经质的把戏，很多人甚至因此显得更有魅力。但赛姆处在一个阴暗的黎明，危险的使命以及身处湿淋淋的大石阶上的孤独，他不能不感到紧张不安。

    河是宁静的，人是安静的，这个人长着一张古典的脸。最后一个噩梦般的感受是他的微笑突然不对劲了。

    他微笑后的痉挛猝然发作，脸猛地陷入得体的忧郁。他并未多加解释或询问就开口了，仿佛是对一位老同事说话。

    “如果我们步行去莱瑟斯特广场，”他说，“我们还赶得上吃早饭。星期天总是坚持早饭要早。你睡过没有？”

    “没有。”赛姆答道。

    “我也没睡，”他以平常的声调答道，“吃过早饭我要好好睡一觉。”

    他的语气轻松而客气，但又完全地麻木，与他脸上的狂热形成鲜明的对照。对他来说，仿佛所有友善的言辞都是了无生气的权宜之计，仿佛他唯一的生命就是仇恨。

    停顿片刻他又继续说道：“当然，支部书记把一切可以说的都告诉你了。唯一绝对不可能告诉你的是主席最后的想法，因为他的想法像热带森林一样膨胀、扩展。也许你不知道，我最好告诉你，他目前操作的想法是以达到最为离奇的程度把我们公开的方式来隐藏我们。确实，最初我们在一个地下单间碰头，就像你们的支部所那样。随后星期天让我们在一家普通餐馆开一个单间。他说，如果你不东躲西藏就没有人能找到你。嗯，他是我所知的地球上的唯一一个人；不过有时候我真的认为他巨大的脑袋因为上了年纪而有点发疯。现在，我们在公众面前炫耀自己。我们在一个阳台上吃早餐——也许你不会拒绝——在一个俯瞰莱瑟斯特广场的阳台上。”

    “旁人怎么说？”赛姆问道。

    “他们说得很简单。”他的向导回答，“他们说我们是一群假冒无政府主义者的快乐绅士。”

    “我看这是一个很聪明的主意。”赛姆说。

    “聪明！上帝会谴责你的厚颜无耻！聪明！”对方突然以一种刺耳的嗓音喊道，就像他扭曲的微笑一样怪异而令人吃惊，“只要见到星期天的一瞬间，你就不再会说他聪明。”

    就这样说着说着，他们走出了一条狭窄的街道，早晨的阳光洒满莱瑟斯特广场。我认为，人们绝对不可能知道这个广场为什么看起来那么具有外国风情，而且在某些方面具有欧洲大陆的风格。人们也绝不可能知道是它的外国风情吸引了外国人，还是外国人赋予了它外国风情。可是就在这个特殊的早晨，这种风景显得格外地鲜明和清晰。那空旷的广场和阳光照耀的树叶以及雕像和爱尔汗布拉宫的萨拉森式的轮廓都使它看起来像某个法国甚至西班牙公共场所的复制品。这风景使赛姆的兴奋有增无减，在整个冒险过程中，他经历了各种形式的兴奋，那种怪异的误入一个新世界的兴奋。事实上，自少年时代起，他就在莱瑟斯特广场周围购买劣质雪茄。不过在他转过那个角落，看见那些树以及摩尔式的圆屋顶后，他或许可以发誓他正在进入一个外国城镇的某个未知的地域。

    在广场的一角，一家生意兴隆然却安静的饭店伸出了某种尖角，饭店庞大的身躯位于后面一条街。墙上有一扇巨大的法式窗子，可能是一家大咖啡厅的窗子；窗外几乎悬突于广场之上的，是一个可怕的用扶壁支撑的阳台，大得足以容纳一张餐桌。事实上，它确实摆放一张餐桌，或者严格地说一张早餐桌；围绕在早餐桌周围，在阳光下闪闪发光、路人一目了然的是一群高谈阔论的男士，他们都穿着夸张的时装，马甲都是白色的，别在扣眼上的花都很昂贵。他们讲的几个笑话，广场对面的人都能听到。然后严肃的秘书展露了他反常的微笑，赛姆明白了，这个喧闹的早餐会就是这批欧洲炸弹刺客的秘密会场。

    就在赛姆继续盯着他们看时，他看到了以前没见过的东西。他以前确实没见过，因为它大得让人看走眼。最靠近阳台的一个角落，阻挡住大部分视线的是一位男士大山一样的后背。赛姆看见他，第一个想法是他的体重一定能压倒石制的阳台。他的庞大不仅仅在于他高得不正常，而且胖得离奇。这位男士最初的比例就设计得大，就像一座被刻意雕刻成的庞大的雕像，长着白发的头颅从后面看大得离谱，脑袋两旁的耳朵也大得异常。他被惊人地按比例放大，这种庞大的感觉令人震惊，所以当赛姆看见他时，所有人显得又小又矮。他们仍然戴着花、穿着长礼服坐在那儿，不过此刻那位大块头男士好像正在招待五个孩子喝茶。

    当赛姆和向导靠近饭店的边门时，一个侍者满面笑容地迎了出来。

    “先生们都在上面，那儿，”他说道，“他们又说又笑。他们说他们要给国王扔炸弹。”

    说完，侍者胳膊搭着餐巾迅速离开了，对楼上绅士们异常轻薄的举动并不反感。

    这两个人安静地登上了楼梯。

    赛姆从未想过询问那个几乎要占满和压倒阳台的巨人是否就是那位人人敬畏的了不起的主席。他带着一种莫名的，但突然的确定事实就是如此。实际上，赛姆是个对不知名的心理危险极其敏感的男士。

    他并不恐惧肉体的危险，不过他对邪恶灵魂的踪影实在太敏感。那天晚上已经有两件无意义的小事物热切地窥视他，给他的感觉是越来越靠近地狱的总部。就在他走近那位了不起的主席时，这种感觉变得无法抗拒。

    实现的形式是一种孩子气的讨厌的想象。当他穿过里间走向阳台时，星期天的脸变得越来越大；赛姆心里萦绕的担心是他越靠近这张脸就会大得离谱，而他会高声尖叫。他记得孩童时，他不敢看大英博物馆里门农的面具，因为那是一张脸，而且太大了。

    赛姆费力地带着一种比跳入悬崖更大的勇气走向早餐桌旁的一个空座位坐下。这些男士们用轻松的玩笑和他打招呼，就像他们是老友。他看着他们传统的外套和结实闪亮的咖啡壶，冷静了下来，然后他又把目光转向星期天。他脸异常的大，但还不算离谱。

    在主席面前，所有的人都显得非常普通；乍看之下他们没有什么惹眼的东西，除了一件事，那就是因为主席的怪念头，他们的穿着都带着一种节庆式的体面，使得这顿饭看起来就像早餐婚宴。有一位男士，即使是一眼带过，也能吸引人的眼球。他至少是一名普通的或者花园里的炸弹刺客。事实上，他穿着白色的高领衣服，戴着绸缎领结，这些都是正式场合的标准穿着；但是在这个衣领之上有一个突兀的脑袋，他令人困惑的棕色头发和胡子就像斯凯岛犬，几乎把双眼都遮住了。但他的双眼从那乱糟糟的一团头发里朝外扫视时，可以看出是属于某个俄国农奴的忧郁的眼睛。这个人给人的感觉不像主席那么令人惊惧，但他全身充斥的怪异感觉只能来自一个十足的怪物。假如从那僵硬的领结和衣领中蓦然冒出了一只猫或者一条狗的脑袋，这种愚蠢的对比就足以使人瞠目结舌。

    这个人名叫果戈理，是波兰人，在这个首领的圈子里被称为星期二。他的灵魂和发言都是无可救药的悲惨；他无法强迫自己去扮演星期天主席要求他的那个成功而轻浮的角色。事实上，当赛姆走进来时，这位以大胆漠视公众猜疑为政策的主席正在嘲笑果戈理无法展现常人的魅力。

    “我们的朋友星期二，”主席以兼具沉静和洪亮的嗓音说道，“我们的朋友星期二看来没有领会这个计划。他打扮得像一位绅士，但他太高贵的灵魂装不出来。他坚持采取舞台上阴谋者的方式。现在如果一位绅士戴着大礼帽、穿着长礼服在伦敦四处走动，没有人会知道他是一个无政府主义者。但是如果一位绅士戴着大礼帽、穿着长礼服，却趴在地上用双手和膝盖走路——那么，他就相当引人注目，这就是果戈理兄弟的做派。他带着无穷无尽的交际手段趴在地上用双手和膝盖走路，到如今他发现很难直立行走了。”

    “我不善于隐藏，”果戈理带着浓重的外国口音闷闷不乐地说，“我不以这项事业为耻。”

    “你善于隐藏，我的孩子，所以你的事业才会如此，”主席温厚地说，“你像别人一样尽力躲藏。但是你做不到，你瞧，你是一个笨蛋！你企图把两种前后矛盾的方法结合起来。当一位户主在他的床下发现一个男子，他可能会先停手了解一下详情。可如果他在床下发现一个戴着大礼帽的男子，情况一定是，我亲爱的星期二，他就不太可能忘记这件事。现在谈谈你曾经在毕芬海军上将的床下被发现——”

    “我不善于欺骗。”星期二忧郁地说，脸红了。

    “对了，我的孩子，对了，”主席沉闷而热心地说道，“你不擅长任何东西。”

    在他们的对话进行时，赛姆更加专注地观察他周围的人。他一边看，一边渐渐地感觉到他对怪异的精神外物的感知力复苏了。

    赛姆第一个念头是他们都有普通的身材、穿着普通的衣服，除了多毛的果戈理。不过当他观察其他人时，他意识到他们和河边那个男子有着一模一样的特性，那是一种魔鬼般凶恶的细节。那种会使原来的那个向导精致的脸变得奇形怪状的笑容，是所有细节中的典型。看那些人十次或者二十次之后，总会发现他们身上不正常的地方，而且几乎都丧失了人性。赛姆唯一能够想到的比喻就是这样，即他们看起来都像是迎合时尚的、有风度的人，但是凹陷的镜子映现他们虚假的扭曲。

    只有一个个单独的例子才可以表现这种半遮半掩的古怪行为。赛姆的向导有星期一的头衔；他是理事会的秘书，扭曲的笑容比任何东西都更令人恐惧，当然除了主席的可怕的欢笑之外。不过，赛姆既然能仔细地观察他，那就能有更多的印象。他精致的脸庞很憔悴，赛姆认定是某种疾病使他消瘦；可是不知为何，他的黑眼睛流露出的忧伤否认了这一点。困扰他的不是肉体的疾病。他的眼睛因为理智的折磨而充满生气，仿佛纯粹的思想就是痛苦。

    他是这帮人中的一个典型；每个人都坏得很巧妙，而且坏得不一样。他旁边坐着头发蓬乱的星期二果戈理，他的疯狂更为明显。接下来是星期三，那位德·圣尤斯塔奇侯爵，一位非常独特的人物。初看几眼，根本看不出他有什么不同寻常之处，除了他是席上唯一一个煞有介事地穿着上流社会服装的人。他黑色的法式胡子被修剪成方形，黑色的英式长礼服被裁剪得更加方正。对这些东西极为敏感的赛姆不知什么原因，觉得这个人带着一种丰富的情调，这情调浓得令人窒息，让人无端地想起了拜伦阴郁的诗歌中出现的令人昏昏欲睡的气息和将熄未熄的灯盏。随之而来的是一种感觉，即他穿的不是更淡而是更软和的衣服；他的黑色比他身上的黑影更丰富、温暖，仿佛是由深色所合成。他的黑大衣看起来就像紫得发黑，黑胡子看起来就像蓝得发黑，而在阴暗浓密的胡子下，他暗红色的嘴显得放荡而轻蔑。无论如何他不是一个法国人，可能是一个犹太人；他可能是东方黑暗的中心地带某种较深刻的存在。在那些表现暴君打猎的色彩鲜艳的波斯瓷砖和图画中，你可以看到那些杏仁眼，那些黑蓝色的胡子，那些残酷的深红色嘴唇。

    赛姆接着观察的是一位年迈的男士，德·沃姆斯教授，他仍然保有星期五的位子，尽管每一天都有人期待着他去世后会把位子空出来。除了他的才智，他处在高龄所致的衰退的最后崩溃阶段。他的脸和他的长胡子一样灰白，他的额头安放在一堆展现轻微绝望的皱纹里。在其他人，甚至在果戈理身上，长礼服的新郎般的光彩也不会表达出更令人痛苦的对比。他的扣眼里的红花映衬着一张铅褪色一样的脸，这个可怕的形象就像喝醉酒的花花公子把他们的衣服盖在了一具尸体上。当他相当费力而危险地站起或坐下时，比虚弱更糟糕的东西就会表露出来，这东西无端地和全场的恐怖感相关联。它并不仅仅表露老朽，而且表露腐化。另一个讨厌的想法穿过了赛姆颤抖的内心，他忍不住想到这位老人只要动一下胳膊或腿就会摔倒。

    桌子的末端坐着星期六，所有人中最简单却最难对付的一个。他个子不高却结实，有一张剃得干干净净的阴沉而方正的脸，他是一位执业医师，本名叫布尔。他既有良好的教养，又有穿戴入时者的粗野，这在年轻医生中很寻常。他自信而不放松地穿着他精致的衣服，脸上通常挂着固定的笑容。他身上没有任何怪异之处，除了他戴着一副黑色的眼镜。这可能仅仅是先前出现过的神经质的想象的一种高潮，但这两片黑色的镜片令赛姆恐惧，因为这使他想起了那些基本遗忘的险恶的以及一个关于把小硬币放在死者眼睛上的故事。赛姆总是盯着那副黑色眼镜和那不带任何眼神的露齿笑容。那个垂死的教授，或者那个脸色苍白的秘书戴着它，可能会更合适。但是由这个年轻又粗俗的男士戴着它，成了一个谜。他隐去了脸上的关键部位。你说不出他的笑容或他的严肃意在何处。一部分是这个原因，另外是因为他有一种大多数人缺乏的粗俗的男子气，赛姆认为他可能是所有这些坏人中最坏的一个。赛姆甚至想，他的眼睛被遮住是因为它们太吓人了。