The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton Page A

the time the former had cometo enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.
    Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy Gabriel had to revolt into something so he revolted into the only thing left—sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous, rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.
    He poured perpetually into newspapers and their wastepaper baskets a torrent of tales, verses, and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer this enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames Embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have cared for it otherwise.
    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 the subterranean country.
    Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashionedcloak, black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early villains in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards, cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black cigar, bought in Soho for twopence, stood out from between his tightened teeth, and altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was why a policeman on the Embankment spoke to him, and said “Good evening.”
    Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the twilight.
    “A good evening, is it?” he said sharply. “You fellows would call the end of the world a good evening. Look at that bloody red sun and that bloody river: I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt and shining, you would still be standing here as stolid as ever, looking out for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen are cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.”
    “If we are calm,” replied the policeman, “it is the calm of organized resistance.”
    “Eh?” said Syme, staring.
    “The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,” pursued the policeman. “The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.”
    “Good God, the Board Schools!” said Syme. “Is this undenominational education?”
    “No,” said the policeman sadly, “I never had any of those advantages. The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very rough and old-fashioned, I am afraid.”
    “Where did you have it?” asked Syme, wondering.
    “Oh, at Harrow,” said the policeman.
    The class sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in so many