“Great Lord!” cried Bull, “I never knew an elephant could go so fast. Well, it must be hansom-cabs again if we are to keep him in sight.”
As they raced along to the gate out of which the elephant had vanished, Syme felt a glaring panorama of the strange animals in the cages which they passed. Afterwards he thought it queer that he should have seen them so clearly. He remembered especially seeing pelicans, with their preposterous, pendant throats. He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican. He remembered a hornbill, which was simply a huge yellow beak with a small bird tied on behind it. The whole gave him a sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was always making quite mysterious jokes. Sunday had told them that they would understand him when they had understood the stars. He wondered whether even the archangels understood the hornbill.
The six unhappy detectives flung themselves into cabs and followed the elephant sharing the terror which he spread through the long stretch of the streets. This time Sunday did not turn round, but offered them the solid stretch of his unconscious back, which maddened them, if possible, more than his previous mockeries. Just before they came to Baker Street, however, he was seen to throw something far up into the air, as a boy does a ball meaning to catch it again. But at their rate of racing it fell far behind, just by the cab containing Gogol; and in faint hope of a clue or for some impulse unexplainable, he stopped his cab so as to pick it up. It was addressed to himself, and was quite a bulky parcel. On examination, however, its bulk was found to consist of thirty-three pieces of paper of no value wrapped one round the other. When the last covering was torn away it reduced itself to a small slip of paper, on which was written:
“The word, I fancy, should be ‘pink’.”
The man once known as Gogol said nothing, but the movements of his hands and feet were like those of a man urging a horse to renewed efforts.
Through street after street, through district after district, went the prodigy of the flying elephant, calling crowds to every window, and driving the traffic left and right. And still through all this insane publicity the three cabs toiled after it, until they came to be regarded as part of a procession, and perhaps the advertisement of a circus. They went at such a rate that distances were shortened beyond belief, and Syme saw the Albert Hall in Kensington when he thought that he was still in Paddington. The animal’s pace was even more fast and free through the empty, aristocratic streets of South Kensington, and he finally headed towards that part of the sky-line where the enormous Wheel of Earl’s Court stood up in the sky. The wheel grew larger and larger, till it filled heaven like the wheel of stars.
The beast outstripped the cabs. They lost him round several corners, and when they came to one of the gates of the Earl’s Court Exhibition they found themselves finally blocked. In front of them was an enormous crowd; in the midst of it was an enormous elephant, heaving and shuddering as such shapeless creatures do. But the President had disappeared.
“Where has he gone to?” asked Syme, slipping to the ground.
“Gentleman rushed into the Exhibition, sir!” said an official in a dazed manner. Then he added in an injured voice: “Funny gentleman, sir. Asked me to hold his horse, and gave me this.”
He held out with distaste a piece of folded paper, addressed: “To the Secretary of the Central Anarchist Council.”
The Secretary, raging, rent it open, and found written inside it:
“Why the eternal crikey,” began the Secretary, “did you let the man in? Do people commonly come to you Exhibition riding on mad elephants? Do ”
“Look! ” shouted Syme suddenly. “Look over there!”
“Look at what?” asked the Secretary savagely.
“Look at the captive balloon!” said Syme, and pointed in a frenzy.
“Why the blazes should I look at a captive balloon?” demanded the Secretary. “What is there queer about a captive balloon?”
“Nothing,” said Syme, “except that it isn’t captive!”
They all turned their eyes to where the balloon swung and swelled above the Exhibition on a string, like a child’s balloon. A second afterwards the string came in two just under the car, and the balloon, broken loose, floated away with the freedom of a soap bubble.
“Ten thousand devils!” shrieked the Secretary. “He’s got into it!” and he shook his fists at the sky.
The balloon, borne by some chance wind, came right above them, and they could see the great white head of the President peering over the side and looking benevolently down on them.
“God bless my soul!” said the Professor with the elderly manner that he could never disconnect from his bleached beard and parchment face. “God bless my soul! I seemed to fancy that something fell on the top of my hat!”
He put up a trembling hand and took from that shelf a piece of twisted paper, which he opened absently only to find it inscribed with a true lover’s knot and, the words:
“Your beauty has not left me indifferent. From LITTLE SNOWDROP. ”
There was a short silence, and then Syme said, biting his beard
“I’m not beaten yet. The blasted thing must come down somewhere. Let’s follow it!”
CHAPTER XIV
THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS
ACROSS green fields, and breaking through blooming hedges, toiled six draggled detectives, about five miles out of London. The optimist of the party had at first proposed that they should follow the balloon across South England in hansom-cabs. But he was ultimately convinced of the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon. Consequently the tireless though exasperated travellers broke through black thickets and ploughed through ploughed fields till each was turned into a figure too outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp. Those green hills of Surrey saw the final collapse and tragedy of the admirable light grey suit in which Syme had set out from Saffron Park. His silk hat was broken over his nose by a swinging bough, his coat-tails were torn to the shoulder by arresting thorns, the clay of England was splashed up to his collar; but he still carried his yellow beard forward with a silent and furious determination, and his eyes were still fixed on that floating ball of gas, which in the full flush of sunset seemed coloured like a sunset cloud.
“After all,” he said, “it is very beautiful!”
“It is singularly and strangely beautiful!” said the Professor. “I wish the beastly gas-bag would burst!”
“No,” said Dr. Bull, “I hope it won’t. It might hurt the old boy.”
“Hurt him!” said the vindictive Professor, “hurt him! Not as much as I’d hurt him if I could get up with him. Little Snowdrop!”
“I don’t want him hurt, somehow,” said Dr. Bull.
“What!” cried the Secretary bitterly. “Do you believe all that tale about his being our man in the dark room? Sunday would say he was anybody.”
“I don’t know whether I believe it or not,” said Dr. Bull. “But it isn’t that that I mean. I can’t wish old Sunday’s balloon to burst because ”