The Man Who Was Thursday

“Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion.”

“I have the honour to be somewhat in the confidence of the chief of whom I have spoken. You should really come and see him. Or rather, I should not say see him, nobody ever sees him; but you can talk to him if you like.”

“You are the new recruit? All right, you are engaged." "I do. Martyrs. I am sending you to your death. Good day.”

“He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country.”

“A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe." "I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the Marquis. "I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one yesterday in bed.”

“No, if the only end of the thing is nothing," said Dr. Bull with his sphinx-like smile, "it hardly seems worth doing." "Every man knows in his heart," he said, "that nothing is worth doing.”

“If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.”

“It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the skies were darkening that high place of the earth was bright. The devils might have captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross. He had a new impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and pursuing paralytic; and at the entrance of the court as it opened upon the Circus he turned, stick in hand, to face his pursuer.”

“Sunday is a fixed star," he said. "Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being thrown in Paris.”

“Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”

“Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his outrageous tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little tavern by the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant monologue, as a man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also, the man who had impersonated Professor de Worms was not less communicative. His own story was almost as silly as Syme's.”

“Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed, to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a portrait." "I am a portrait," repeated the Professor. "I am a portrait of the celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples.”

“Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could not even understand myself.”

“Do you understand," said the other, "that this is a tragedy?" "Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”

“Four out of the five rich men in this town … are common swindlers. I suppose the proportion is pretty equal all over the world.”

“I have a suspicion that you are all mad … but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.”

“You are a very fine fellow … You can believe in a sanity which is not merely your sanity.”

“When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich.”

“We were all a lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice people who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the dynamiters.”

“Vulgar people are never mad. I'm vulgar myself, and I know. I am now going on shore to stand a drink to everybody here.”

“We're all spies!" shouted Dr. Bull. "Come and have a drink." "I think it is a bit queerer than that," said Syme. "I think it is six men going to ask one man what they mean.”

“There's one thing I'll tell you though about who I am. I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen.”

“Look!" shouted Syme suddenly. "Look over there!" "Nothing," said Syme, "except that it isn't captive!”

“That has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest.”

“I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face — an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran.”

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front —”

“If the Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves the original and formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.”

“'Now there was a day,'" murmured Bull, who seemed really to have fallen asleep, "'when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.'”

“Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky.”

“A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.”

“Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.”

“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.”

“It is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.”

“Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but honour and death.”