The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (Annotated) E-Book

G.K. Chesterton

• Herausgeber: ePembaBooks
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

First published in 1908, “The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare” is a metaphysical thriller by English writer G. K. Chesterton. The novel weaves together elements of mystery, comedic farce, and allegory around the threat of anarchy in turn-of-the-century London. Ostensibly about a secret policeman investigating anarchists, it becomes a surreal and philosophical novel.

“The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare” takes place in Edwardian London, where a poet infiltrates the anarchist underground. Elected to the post of Thursday on the anarchist council, masterminded by the monstrous Sunday, the poet tries to prevent an anarchist assassination in Paris. But when the plot takes a surreal turn, he is left unsure who to trust and even what is real.

For over a century after its publication, “The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare” inspired numerous adaptations, including a 1938 Mercury Theatre radio-play written by Orson Welles.

Leseprobe

G. K. Chesterton

Table of contents

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE

A Wild, Mad, Hilarious And Profoundly Moving Tale

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Chapter 1. The Two Poets Of Saffron Park

Chapter 2. The Secret Of Gabriel Syme

Chapter 3. The Man Who Was Thursday

Chapter 4. The Tale Of A Detective

Chapter 5. The Feast Of Fear

Chapter 6. The Exposure

Chapter 7. The Unaccountable Conduct Of Professor De Worms

Chapter 8. The Professor Explains

Chapter 9. The Man In Spectacles

Chapter 10. The Duel

Chapter 11. The Criminals Chase The Police

Chapter 12. The Earth In Anarchy

Chapter 13. The Pursuit Of The President

Chapter 14. The Six Philosophers

Chapter 15. The Accuser

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

There are writers who disappear into their subjects or, rather, who dissolve into them, like a substance that determines, but we barely perceive; others, on the other hand, it seems that their personality is the key to everything they touch. Among the latter is Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), author of almost a hundred works including essays, articles and short stories. He found it hard not to write a book on any subject that occupied his mind. He was a cultured man, and more intuitive than rigorous, although it must be admitted that his intuition was very well formed, except, perhaps, in his fierce defence of Catholicism, something which united him with his lifelong friend Hilaire Belloc, another who, if not bordering on fanaticism, at least touches on obsession bordering on nonsense at times, as when he postulated, something he shared with Chesterton, the need for there to be only one religion, the true one, that is, Catholicism. Chesterton is one of those writers, like Samuel Johnson, who possesses a strong personality, and he shares with the Scotsman the good fortune of having had talent; otherwise he would have been an imbecile or a buffoon. Not all those without talent are imbeciles or buffoons, for that you have to take some risk, and Chesterton took the risk, for the time being, of arguing with his contemporaries, and of confronting the great dead with an attitude not exempt from closeness and irreverence, without excluding admiration and respect, which manages to make them more alive to us. Moreover, like H. G. Wells, he was a writer concerned with his time, although the author of "The Invisible Man" was a socialist and Chesterton a conservative, but, like almost everything about him, he needs to define himself in order to fit in. I said earlier that he was not rigorous, and what I meant was not that he did not try to get to the end of his reflections, but that on many occasions he did not do enough research, for example, in science, when he talks about evolutionism, because, unlike H.G. Wells, he had no idea of biology. But Chesterton was a man of remarkable intelligence, as well as a wonderful prose writer, a master of paradoxes and parallels of all kinds, able to make sparks fly in any sentence. He was brilliant, and those sparkles illuminated much of what he spoke. He had other qualities: cordiality and humour, also with himself, although humour and cordiality did not exempt him from being combative and a fearsome debater. As is well known, he moved from agnosticism to Anglicanism before finally, in 1922, embracing Christianity with fervour and book. From that date is his text "Why I Am Catholic," which could be read in parallel with Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927). Chesterton looked a bit like filmmaker Orson Wells, very tall and getting fatter with age. They both had some temperamental stubbornness, I think. And they both shared what I said at the beginning: we recognise a Chesterton text as easily as we recognise a Wells film fragment as something that belongs entirely to them.

An overview of Chesterton's work In his early literary days he used to write poetry, making his debut with the volume of poems "Greybeards At Play" (1900). In 1911, he would publish his finest work of poetry, "The Ballad of the White Horse." This was followed by phenomenal critical essays on various British literary figures, including Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, and his first novel, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1904), a book of incisive political observation and social criticism approached with an intelligent sense of humour. He later published important titles such as "The Club of Queer Trades" (1905), the book of police intrigue and Christian allegory " The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare" (1908), "Manalive" (1912), "The Flying Inn" (1914) and "The Return of Don Quixote" (1927). His international transcendence, apart from his excellent books of essays, was based on the writing of novels and short stories that showed his skill in linguistic handling, in the use of insightful comedy, and in the imagination for the creation of detective plots, with many of them retaining a critical character and an allegorical sense. His stories featuring Father Brown brought him worldwide fame. This character was created on the basis of his friendship with Father John O'Connor, whom Chesterton met at the beginning of the 20th century. O'Connor's ideals of life made a strong impression on the intellectual mind of G. K., who by 1909 had left the hustle and bustle of London to live in the quieter Beaconsfield. The titles of the books with the adventures of the popular priest detective are "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911), "The Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914), "The Incredulity of Father Brown" (1926), "The Secret of Father Brown" (1927) and "The Scandal of Father Brown" (1935). In fiction, he also published short stories, such as those collected in the volume "The Poet and the Lunatics" (1929), short stories centred on a single character, the poet Gabriel Gale. Chesterton was a lucid thinker on the political and social reality around him, defending the simplicity of primordial Christian values, and in 1911 he founded a publication with another British writer of French origin, Hilarie Belloc. After the First World War he took up distributism, which called for a better distribution of wealth and property. His ideas clashed with other important intellectuals of the time, such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. As explained above, in 1922 G. K. Chesterton eventually converted to Catholicism, writing biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. Some of his most important essays are "Heretics" (1905), "Orthodoxy" (1908), "What's Wrong With the World" (1910) and "The Everlasting Man" (1925).

He also wrote "A Short History of England" (1917) and biographies of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Bernard Shaw.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY: A NIGHTMARE

G. K. Chesterton

A Wild, Mad, Hilarious And Profoundly Moving Tale

It is very difficult to classify THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. It is possible to say that it is a gripping adventure story of murderous criminals and brilliant policemen; but it was to be expected that the author of the Father Brown stories should tell a detective story like no-one else. On this level, therefore, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY succeeds superbly; if nothing else, it is a magnificent tour-de-force of suspense-writing.

However, the reader will soon discover that it is much more than that. Carried along on the boisterous rush of the narrative by Chesterton's wonderful high-spirited style, he will soon see that he is being carried into much deeper waters than he had planned on; and the totally unforeseeable denouement will prove for the modern reader, as it has for thousands of others since 1908 when the book was first published, an inevitable and moving experience, as the investigators finally discover who Sunday is.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

To Edmund Clerihew Bentley

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,

Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.

Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;

The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;

Round us in antic order their crippled vices came—

Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.

Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,

Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.

Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;

The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.

They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:

Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.

Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;

When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us

Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we,

High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.

Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,

When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.

Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;

Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.

I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings

Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;

And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,

Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;

Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain—

Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.

Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,

Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.

But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.

God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:

We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved—

Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,

And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells—

Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,

Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.

The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand—

Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?

The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,

And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.

Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;

Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.

We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,

And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

G. K. C.

Chapter 1. The Two Poets Of Saffron Park

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! 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 voice and with a rather bewildering smile.

"Mr. Syme," he said, "this evening you succeeded in doing something rather remarkable. You did something to me that no man born of woman has ever succeeded in doing before."

"Indeed!"

"Now I remember," resumed Gregory reflectively, "one other person succeeded in doing it. The captain of a penny steamer (if I remember correctly) at Southend. You have irritated me."

"I am very sorry," replied Syme with gravity.