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    The Man Who Was Thursday: Political Thriller
    The Man Who Was Thursday: Political Thriller
    The Man Who Was Thursday: Political Thriller
    Ebook209 pages3 hours

    The Man Who Was Thursday: Political Thriller

    By G. K. Chesterton

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    Gabriel Syme is recruited at Scotland Yard to a secret anti-anarchist police corps. Lucian Gregory, an anarchistic poet, lives in the suburb of Saffron Park. They meet at a party and, after a heating debate, Gregory takes Syme to London underground, revealing that he is an influential member of the European anarchist council. The central council consists of seven men, each using the name of a day of the week as a cover. The position of Thursday is about to be elected by Gregory's local chapter and Gregory expects to win the election. However, just before the election, Syme reveals to Gregory after an oath of secrecy that he is a secret policeman. Fearful that Syme may use his speech in evidence of a prosecution, Gregory's weakened words fail to convince the local chapter that he is sufficiently dangerous for the job. Syme then makes a rousing anarchist speech and wins the vote. He is sent immediately as the chapter's delegate to the central council.
    LanguageEnglish
    Publishere-artnow
    Release dateFeb 5, 2019
    ISBN9788027302109
    The Man Who Was Thursday: Political Thriller
    Author

    G. K. Chesterton

    G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, philosopher and critic known for his creative wordplay. Born in London, Chesterton attended St. Paul’s School before enrolling in the Slade School of Fine Art at University College. His professional writing career began as a freelance critic where he focused on art and literature. He then ventured into fiction with his novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday as well as a series of stories featuring Father Brown.

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    Reviews for The Man Who Was Thursday

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      With amazing suspense and continual anticipation, Chesterton positions the reader to the edge of their seats on a wild ride with twists, turns, and delightful encounters. It was a joy to read this work of genius. It was a shorter book. However, with the style and prose of Chesterton, it takes longer than usual. It was well worth the time and investment.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed reading this startling, at times riotously funny, often gorgeously written book. The ending perplexed me, however, and that's why I ultimately dropped my rating to 4 stars. I wouldn't recommend this as anyone's first foray into Chesterton, but if you've enjoyed Orthodoxy, this is likely a good place to start with his fiction. He's a marvelous writer.
    • 4/5
      Levity with a purpose is how I might describe the overall feel of The Man Who Was Thursday. Chesterton creates a tangle of wonderful characters fighting out order vs. anarchy without really knowing who is on which side, and although the prose is light and the dialogue is clever, the allegory certainly has serious things to say to the reader.
    • 4/5
      At first, I was a little unsure of what I was reading. I'd missed the subtitle 'A Nightmare'. But in a short time the tone of the book, and its brilliant humour become, more clear. In the moment comes the delight. The recruitment of those who become what they think they're supposed to oppose, in order to stop it, only to discover they all share in that task, that none of them are who they thought, and that even the real opponent is not who they assumed; the impossibility of appearances at telling the truth, and our own personal vulnerability at seeing what is true; the experience of being pursued as something you are, or might not be, when the truth of a situation is lost to opinions and perspectives and conjecture: all these are the foundation of the nightmare. There is a role we're to play in the world: what if someone confused and scuttled it, or rendered the task impossible to really discern? What if reality and God Himself were somehow disguised beyond our description, and we had no bearings among our peers left? A clever depiction, perhaps, of the horror the secular world has brought. Some spectacular quotes lie within for whomever is willing to see the truth ;-p
    • 5/5
      I suspect that this dream will linger within me for years to come. The philosophical and political currents pale compared to the intrinsic visions within, the idea that the six all saw their childhood in the penultimate geography is a telling terror.
    • 5/5
      This is a heck of a book. Do not shelve it next to The Iron Dragon's Daughter because I think they would annihilate each other or something.
    • 3/5
      Read this at 20 and now again 35 years later. Chesterton can certainly write. Some of the images are startlingly beautiful, but the philosophy is a bit much to take. I'm sure the Chesterton lovers can make sense of it all, but to me it was a hodge-podge of conservative Christianity and Buddhism.
    • 3/5
      Not having read Chesterton before, but knowing of him generally, I was expecting something along the lines of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, at least as regards the struggle between fiction and religion. In that novel, I have always found Raskolnikov’s conversion to Christianity to be unconvincing. What makes that novel amazing is its ability to conjure up Raskolnikov’s psychological character in full, and his jailhouse conversion seems to run contrary to what the novel has spent the bulk of its effort establishing, namely the interior of Raskolnikov’s mind. Christianity emerges not from within the novel, not from within Raskolnikov’s nature, but from without, imposed by the author.As he was a devout Christian, I expected Chesterton to fall into a similar trap in The Man Who Was Thursday, and to allow his convictions to delimit his imagination. In that regard, I was pleasantly surprised. The ending is wholly consistent with the rest of the novel, but in transitioning the novel fully into the realms of allegory, it leads to a different set of problems. The novel is not a form especially conducive to allegory, and if you don’t believe me, try to read Pilgrim’s Progress. As a set of ideas, it makes perfect sense, but to modern readers, it will seem like the barest skeleton of a narrative. Syme, Bull and the Marquis de St. Eustache are not fully imagined human beings in the way that Raskolnikov is, but Chesterton avoids Dostoevsky’s problem because he does not intend his characters to be anything other than what they are.As such, if Thursday is to be judged, it must be judged as an allegory. Allegories can take an abstract, intellectual argument and make it come to life. Two exemplars that suggest where Thursday falls short are Kafka’s “On Parables” and the story of the Prodigal Son from the New Testament. In a quarter page, Kafka produces a phenomenal riddle that seems to contain one of the mysteries of life. In the tale of the Prodigal Son, the whole essence of Christ’s message is condensed into the story of one man.It is no accident that both of these examples are parables. Part of the genius of allegory is its ability to condense whole lines of argument and give them a tactile reality, a genius that is best displayed in parables. The novel is a far more expansive form that the parable, and it is unclear what Chesterton accomplishes in a 200-page allegory that could not be performed more concisely in a parable. Those two hundred pages are not at all painful to read, but they add little to the allegory revealed in the final chapter. Furthermore, allegory cannot achieve its own end. In the story of Sunday, the text hopes to present a convincing theodicy, a mark it falls far short of.I also find it striking that when Chesterton and so many other turn of the century authors (Conrad, Dostoevsky) cast about for a danger that would imperil society, they fingered anarchism, not knowing that World War I lay just around the corner.
    • 5/5
      Obviously intended as a theodicy, but has things to say on a sociological and political level, too. The overarching themes are so big and grave that the insanity of the plot catches you unawares; I actually doubt it would have worked if not for the writing style. With regular pithy insights and some fantastic imagery, Chesterton forces you to take his story seriously, and you are rewarded, in the end, when the absurdity of the plot is equated to the absurdity of the universe. Worth reading unless one is completely allergic to Christian allegories. (So sayeth a dedicated atheist.)
    • 3/5
      A detective inflitrates a gang of anarchists in London, cunningly gaining entry to the super-secretive 'Council of Days', led by the godly Sunday. His mission: to prevent a plot to blow up the Czar on his visit to Paris.The first half of the book is an exciting tale of wit and invention, but soon the tale becomes grossly absurd; the climax is surely allegorical but for me it was greatly unsatisfying, especially considering all the drama that had led to it.
    • 1/5
      I found a recommendation of this book in an article in the Atlantic, sought it out online and acquired an unusual printed on demand hardcover - it has Harry Lyme from the Thin Man movie on the cover. I was disappointed. The plot is the gradual revelation of a group of anarchists as all being in an intellectual police force, all recruited by the same man who is also the head of the anarchists association. They are named for the days of the week, with “Sunday” as the chief anarchist. There is a great deal of philosophical speculation and discussion, and an improbable chase across London, ending in the revelation that Sunday is somehow God Almighty. Antique language, unbelievable plot and characters, ending in religious blather.
    • 4/5
      There are so many reviews which comment on the religious allegory of this book so I will refrain from doing that, except to say I enjoyed the "dueling with the devil" scene the most. There are also many reviews that mention how weird the story gets. Agreed. Completely. This is one of those situations in a story where purpose overshadows plot because the whole thing is really quite ridiculous. In a nutshell, Gabriel Symes is an undercover detective who infiltrates an anarchist group (Council of the Seven Days) only to find that the entire membership, with the exception of its leader, is made up of undercover New Detective Corps members. Each member goes by a day of the week for an alias, hence the Council of the Seven Days. Symes has just been nominated as "Thursday". As a collective week they are all trying to get at the elusive leader, "Sunday". Except, they are all in the dark as to each others true identities. What I find curious is that when Sunday sniffs out a spy his fears are confirmed when the undercover policeman reveals he is carrying his membership card to the anti-anarchist constabulary. Wouldn't you remove that piece of evidence, especially if you bother to go through the trouble of wearing an elaborate disguise? Gogol posed as a hairy Pole, accent and all. The Professor posed as an invalid old man with a huge nose. Turns out, all six policemen are carrying the tell-tale blue identification card. Not one of them thought to leave it at home. But, I digress. For most of the story it is a cat and mouse game with the good guys chasing the bad guys (until one by one, they find out they are all good guys). The theme of "who can you trust" is ongoing.
    • 5/5
      When The Man Who Was Thursday was first published, in 1907, the big terrorist threat came from anarchists, who threw bombs and assassinated people for a variety of complicated reasons. They turn up quite regularly in the literature of the time, quite often as vague caricatures representing some kind of destructive force or forces of evil. This is the case in The Man Who Was Thursday, where Chesterton uses the anarchists to represent all that is negative in the world, and doesn't tie them in to any particular political movement.The book's an allegory, so no character can be taken at its face value--and to complicate matters, within the novel every character is revealed to be quite different from what he seems. (This is almost exclusively a male tale, born of a society where the men of the English ruling class were expected to move in men-only circles from an early age, through boarding school to clubs to Parliament.)The plot is relatively straightforward: the poet Sykes infiltrates a group of anarchists nicknamed according to the days of the week (Sykes is Thursday). He is co-opted into the anti-anarchist police by a mysterious personage whom he meets in a completely dark room. The anarchists are led by a larger-than-life, terrifying character called Sunday.The book has a repeating pattern of wild chases and moments of revelation that build on one another to become funnier as the plot thickens. For this is a comedy, although a subtle and disturbing one. I'd hate to spoil the book for you by explaining exactly what's going on, but I can say that terror alternates with relief and a sense of the ridiculous. The climax of the book is quite thrilling and profound. The novel's subtitle, A Nightmare, may give you a hint about the plot's strange shifts and reverses.If you ever liked the Narnia books, you'll like Thursday, which in some ways is the adult counterpart to C.S. Lewis's books. One day I will go through my bookshelves and make a special section for books that deserve to be re-read at intervals during my life; this book will make the cut.There are many different editions of Thursday: the one I read was published by Ignatius Press, edited by Martin Gardner. I did not particularly like the edition, which was idiosyncratic and self-serving. There must be a better one out there.
    • 5/5
      first line: "The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset."I love Chesterton's language: from brilliantly witty dialogue to perfect visual descriptions. While social philosophy is not something about which I'd generally read, I love how this book presents it. Chesteron sublimates the silly, and treats the cosmos like a carnival. In his world, things may not always make sense...but I think that for Chesterton, more important than complete understanding is complete experience.
    • 4/5
      A long time ago I read several of the Father Brown mysteries. This is a less-conventional bird, but didn't live up to its billing as an unpredictable ride. This novel's genre is heralded as difficult to pin down, but it's easily categorized as Christian allegory. There's plenty of meant-to-be-fun nonsense about police versus anarchists that becomes a slog if you see the emerging pattern. Much of this tale rings less farcical in today's world. Anarchists are anything but comic when anyone with an extreme viewpoint seems abundantly prepared to inflict massive casualities to make their point. Modern perspective's wounding of this story comes to a head with the conclusion. Read as giving answer to terrorists, it's a terribly poor one. I'm not convinced it was a great answer by the allegory interpretation either, but at least more palatable.
    • 4/5
      'You spoke of a second question,' snapped Gregory. 
'With pleasure,' resumed Syme. 'In all your present acts and surroundings there is a scientific attempt at secrecy. I have an aunt who lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people living for preference under a public-house. You have a heavy iron door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the humiliation of calling yourself Mr Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel instruments which make the place, if I may say so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after taking all this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the earth, you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to every silly woman in Saffron Park?'Gregory smiled.'The answer is simple,' he said. 'I told you I was a serious anarchist, and you did not believe me. Nor do they believe me. Unless I took them into this infernal room they would not believe me.'First published in 1908, "The Man Who Was Thursday" is the story of secret policeman Gabriel Syme's infiltration of an anarchist gang and election to its ruling council whose code names are taken from the days of the week. The subtitle says it all really, as the events become more and more dreamlike as the story progresses, and less and less like a real world spy story.
    • 5/5
      This is one very good book! Well written, short and fun. I need to re-read it though, thoroughly deserves a re-read.
    • 3/5
      It would probably be best to get hit by a bus just before you get to the end of this book. Tense chase sequences and a quickly increasing desire to find out exaclty what is going on are let down by the ridiculous half baked ending. A good yarn but the exciting romp through europe and london only lead to disapointment and a little bit of anger.
    • 2/5
      The author's vivid descriptions of scenery and settings, as well as certain philosophy, make for memorable reading.The plot moves along with intriguing mystery and excitement, then becomes redundant and thoroughly improbable, but worse, boring.
    • 4/5
      At once lapidary, rich with ideas and a farcical romp.
    • 2/5
      Martin Amis calls it 'thrilling' in the introduction to my version of the book. I failed to find it so. I was attracted to the book by a passage from it that I read. The passage was the one describing Gabriel Syme's childhood. It is probably the best bit, and the rest of the book fails to live up to the humour of those paragraphs. The story line was not very surprising (and not even completely coherent, I suspect). Chesterton presents Christianity as the only answer to Chaos. I wonder if he would still think that in today's world.
    • 3/5
      This review contains spoilers.This was originally published in 1908 when Chesterton, one of the greatest Christian apologists of the first third of the twentieth century, was still a Protestant. He wouldn’t convert to Catholicism until the 1920s. Yet even as a Protestant, he had managed to do some wonderful writing, including “Orthodoxy,” his classic defense of the inner workings of Christian faith. However, I found this book to be less successful. The characters were so obviously meant to be symbols of something above and beyond themselves that it comes across more as a fable (or, as the subtitle has it, a “nightmare”) than a realist novel.The main struggle Chesterton presents – relentlessly forced down your throat until you almost can’t bear it anymore – is that of anarchy versus order. Gabriel Syme (paladin of law and order) is a member of the Scotland Yard division that keeps an eye on political anarchists. He meets Gregory, an anarchist, at a party where they discuss what makes poetry poetic. Is it law, rationality, and reason – or disorder and anarchy? Syme suggests that Gregory is only a tongue-in-cheek anarchist, since he rightfully claims that total anarchy would never be able to accomplish its political goals. Gregory counters by offering to take Syme to an underground anarchist meeting to show him that they really do exist.The rest proceeds almost predictably: we find that one member after another of the anarchist council is also working undercover as a member for the Scotland Yard. In fact, of the seven members (each named after a day of the week), five of them are discovered to be police officers. The first time or two this is surprising; by the fifth time, I was almost rolling my eyes. By the end, we find out that not even the leader of the group, Sunday, is an anarchist. Instead, he too has been a force for good. In the end, everything comes off sounding like a paean to reason and rationality, but the message comes off as both heavy-handed and confused, as difficult as that is to imagine. Maybe it was the overt force of the message mixed with the phantasmagoric style on top of the need for Chesterton to turn absolutely into a symbol with some latent meaning. There were just too many things he was trying to do here, and none of them come off with any virtuosity.
    • 5/5
      A fantastical story with more twists and turns than a labyrinth; this was a great read. I was able to anticipate some of the “surprises” but that in no way diminished my pleasure and the ending was magnificent—although many reviewers disliked it because it did not neatly tie up all the loose ends. However, this book was not about answers but questions.
    • 4/5
      The strength of the allegory lies in its ability to entertain while teaching. A good allegory shouldn't let the message overpower the story; too many times an allegory has been derailed by flat characters or a loosely connected plot with more McGuffins than a detective novel. Christian allegories tend to suffer from the writers' need to distill their character's humanity down until they're nothing more than a caricature of their most prominent traits. Chesterton avoids this writing pitfall and delivers a story where the characters are both symbols and individuals, evolving as they fulfill their role in the story. The dialogue is witty, well written, and surprisingly fair. As a Chrisitan apologist, Chesterton seems to understand the appeal of nihilism but instead of simply defaming it, he works to understand the causes which drive a man to feel that any action is meaningless.One of the most impressive aspects of The Man Who Was Thursday is the whimsical quality of it. Throughout the telling his story, Chesterton embraces a sense of surreality that allows him to deliver an insightful message about the motivations of man without going into the melodrama of everyday situations. In order to deliver a fantastice message, you need a fantastic story and this novel provides both. Whatever you're looking for-- an adventure story, beautiful imagery, a sensible allegory, a philisophical text, or simply a good quote you'll find it in The Man Who Was Thursday.
    • 5/5
      On the cover of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, there's a sentence from a review by Kingsley Amis where he calls this book "The most thrilling book I have ever read." Clearly, strong recommendations from well-known authors can be a powerful selling tool, but I'll admit, it was the rest of the cover that sold me on this book. You can't always judge by it, sure, but you can certainly be reeled in by an attractive one. Look at this! Can you feel the energy? It's a small little volume, too, but on paper that's more appealing than the usual mass-market paperback. The crisp white and the stark black and red... Hats off to the art department at Penguin. Something about this small volume called to me and after reading the back cover description, I knew this was going to be good.The best way that I've found to describe this book is that it feels like you're reading a car chase. In a good way. No, the whole book is not a car chase (though there is a car chase at one point), but it's a fantastic thriller that had me riveted as it raced through twists and turns in the plot, which featured poets, anarchy, and the question of what makes reality. G.K. Chesterton published this book in 1908 and it opens on the meeting of two poets in turn of the century London -- Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme. Gregory loses his temper when Syme suggests that Gregory is not a true anarchist. So to prove his commitment to anarchy, Gregory extracts a vow of silence from Syme and then takes him to a secret meeting of anarchists... only to find (after Syme requests a similar promise from Gregory) that Syme is part of a secret anti-anarchy group of Scotland Yard. The two are at an impasse, unable to expose the other, and so Gregory is completely at a loss when Syme gives a rousing speech at the meeting and the secret agent is elected to serve as the local representative (called "Thursday") on the worldwide Central Council of Anarchists. And this is only the beginning as Syme joins the Council and meets its president, Sunday, who comes to represent all that Syme is battling against in this world.Wikipedia will tell you that Adam Gopnik ran a piece in The New Yorker which described this book as "one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges." Even 101 years later, I could feel that this was that missing literary link that finally made me understand how the jump to writing and appreciating Kafka's work was made possible. That tradition of literature was never my focus, and I feel that had I been asked to read this before Kafka in school, I could have found a more coherent place for it in the sequence of literary styles. I had always been dissatisfied with explanations of how Kafka brought forth such a surreal narrative, fully-formed in its own unique style, a man suddenly made insect. I knew there must have been some premonitory clue, and here I feel as though I've stumbled upon something that makes that a little clearer. Though it seems amusing to use the term "clarity" here, as the simultaneous trust in and distrust of reality is what makes it all terrifying/fascinating.Oh, and it might be narcissistic, but I'm always going to have a small affinity for a book that treats redheads with respect. There's a fantastic line that you can bet I'll remember: "My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world." Awesome. And I'll leave you with an early paragraph where Syme is speaking with Gregory's sister that I particularly enjoyed:He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow, this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed this book until I got to the end. I was expecting a straightforward mystery/thriller, and then the ending was really strange. G.K. Chesterton is hard to understand sometimes.
    • 4/5
      How does one review this? Let's see, it is the story of a dream, and as with all dreams I suppose, is open to interpretation. I'm not sure what to make of the meaning of it, the meaning floats in and out of my mind and I can't pin it down. However, the story itself was fun, quick to read and full of lovely word images. Now I must go and read more about it, then possibly read it again. Reading it again would be a pleasure.
    • 5/5
      Few books managed to give us the sensation that the world may be dream. This is one of those books. Chesterton's allegory give us a feeling of unreal world, where we are no more awaken than the protagonist. He created a world that Robert Louis Stevenson and Lewis Caroll before him and Borges and Kafka after managed to create. A nightmare that we follow with hardship.
    • 5/5
      The question "What is your favorite book?" has always been impossible for me to answer, but this is the only book I have ever felt comfortable defaulting to. I've read it at least a half a dozen times since I discovered a copy of it in a used bookstore when I was in middle school; I will probably reread it a dozen more in the next ten years. I get something different out of it every time I reread it.The story itself makes no sense, until you come back to the subtitle: A Nightmare. Like a dream, or a nightmare, there is a thread of sense beneath the nonsense, and the mad escapades of the Supreme Anarchist Council are some how more deeply real even in their absurdity. One could call the story a parable, or a fable, but like the costumes worn by the protagonists toward the end of the book, the disguised elements of the story serve only to reveal more of its inner truth.This book is full of great quotes and is one of the finer examples of Chesterton's witty and unique style of storytelling. Like quite a lot of his fiction, it is a story with Christian meaning woven into it; it's not necessary to be a practicing Christian to understand or get something out of the story, but some of the allegory may escape a reader who is unfamiliar with the basics of the book of Genesis. When I finish this book I always feel a little bit bewildered, sort of mentally out of breath. I usually end up reading it in one or two sittings, propelled irresistibly toward the fantastic (in the original sense of the word) conclusion.This book defies genre, plot summary, and most attempts at interpretation, so all I can say is that you should read it for yourself, and see what you make of it.
    • 4/5
      Weird but absolutely brilliant.

    Book preview

    The Man Who Was Thursday - G. K. Chesterton

    Chapter 1.

    The Two Poets of Saffron Park

    Table of Contents

    The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not artists, the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face — that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat — that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.

    More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit. And this was strongest of all on one particular evening, still vaguely remembered in the locality, of which the auburn-haired poet was the hero. It was not by any means the only evening of which he was the hero. On many nights those passing by his little back garden might hear his high, didactic voice laying down the law to men and particularly to women. The attitude of women in such cases was indeed one of the paradoxes of the place. Most of the women were of the kind vaguely called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking. And Mr. Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, was really (in some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one only laughed at the end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literally like a woman’s, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.

    This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.

    I say that there are some inhabitants who may remember the evening if only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it because it marked the first appearance in the place of the second poet of Saffron Park. For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had reigned without a rival; it was upon the night of the sunset that his solitude suddenly ended. The new poet, who introduced himself by the name of Gabriel Syme was a very mild-looking mortal, with a fair, pointed beard and faint, yellow hair. But an impression grew that he was less meek than he looked. He signalised his entrance by differing with the established poet, Gregory, upon the whole nature of poetry. He said that he (Syme) was poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he was a poet of respectability. So all the Saffron Parkers looked at him as if he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky.

    In fact, Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two events.

    It may well be, he said, in his sudden lyrical manner, it may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colours that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.

    The man with the meek blue eyes and the pale, pointed beard endured these thunders with a certain submissive solemnity. The third party of the group, Gregory’s sister Rosamond, who had her brother’s braids of red hair, but a kindlier face underneath them, laughed with such mixture of admiration and disapproval as she gave commonly to the family oracle.

    Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.

    An artist is identical with an anarchist, he cried. You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.

    So it is, said Mr. Syme.

    Nonsense! said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!

    It is you who are unpoetical, replied the poet Syme. If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!

    Must you go? inquired Gregory sarcastically.

    I tell you, went on Syme with passion, that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word ‘Victoria,’ it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it is the victory of Adam.

    Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.

    And even then, he said, we poets always ask the question, ‘And what is Victoria now that you have got there?’ You think Victoria is like the New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt.

    There again, said Syme irritably, what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is — revolting. It’s mere vomiting.

    The girl winced for a flash at the unpleasant word, but Syme was too hot to heed her.

    It is things going right, he cried, that is poetical I Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars — the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

    Really, said Gregory superciliously, the examples you choose —

    I beg your pardon, said Syme grimly, I forgot we had abolished all conventions.

    For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory’s forehead.

    You don’t expect me, he said, to revolutionise society on this lawn?

    Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.

    No, I don’t, he said; but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.

    Gregory’s big bull’s eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion, and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.

    Don’t you think, then, he said in a dangerous voice, that I am serious about my anarchism?

    I beg your pardon? said Syme.

    Am I not serious about my anarchism? cried Gregory, with knotted fists.

    My dear fellow! said Syme, and strolled away.

    With surprise, but with a curious pleasure, he found Rosamond Gregory still in his company.

    Mr. Syme, she said, do the people who talk like you and my brother often mean what they say? Do you mean what you say now?

    Syme smiled.

    Do you? he asked.

    What do you mean? asked the girl, with grave eyes.

    My dear Miss Gregory, said Syme gently, there are many kinds of sincerity and insincerity. When you say ‘thank you’ for the salt, do you mean what you say? No. When you say ‘the world is round,’ do you mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don’t mean it. Now, sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he means — from sheer force of meaning it.

    She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave and open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the maternal watch which is as old as the world.

    Is he really an anarchist, then? she asked.

    Only in that sense I speak of, replied Syme; or if you prefer it, in that nonsense.

    She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly —

    He wouldn’t really use — bombs or that sort of thing?

    Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and somewhat dandified figure.

    Good Lord, no! he said, that has to be done anonymously.

    And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory’s absurdity and of his safety.

    Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely. He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac all round him. Once he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.

    He stared and talked at the girl’s red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable, that it might well have been a dream.

    When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure almost as rigid and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long frock coat were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe of fiery hair against the light, and also something aggressive in the attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He had something of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.

    He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally returned.

    I was waiting for you, said Gregory. Might I have a moment’s conversation?

    Certainly. About what? asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

    Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. About this and this, he cried; about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself — there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.

    All the same, replied Syme patiently, just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree. Then after a pause he said, But may I ask if you have been standing out here in the dark only to resume our little argument?

    No, cried out Gregory, in a voice that rang down the street, I did not stand here to resume our argument, but to end it for ever.

    The silence fell again, and Syme, though he understood nothing, listened instinctively for something serious. Gregory began in a smooth

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