The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Author:G. K. Chesterton
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Allegories, Detective and mystery stories, Anarchists -- Fiction, Fantasy fiction, London (England) -- Fiction, Police -- Fiction
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2015-12-01T00:01:00+00:00

X The Duel

Syme sat down at a café table with his com­pan­ions, his blue eyes spark­ling like the bright sea be­low, and ordered a bottle of Saumur with a pleased im­pa­tience. He was for some reason in a con­di­tion of curi­ous hil­ar­ity. His spir­its were already un­nat­ur­ally high; they rose as the Saumur sank, and in half an hour his talk was a tor­rent of non­sense. He pro­fessed to be mak­ing out a plan of the con­ver­sa­tion which was go­ing to en­sue between him­self and the deadly Mar­quis. He jot­ted it down wildly with a pen­cil. It was ar­ranged like a prin­ted cat­ech­ism, with ques­tions and an­swers, and was de­livered with an ex­traordin­ary rapid­ity of ut­ter­ance.

“I shall ap­proach. Be­fore tak­ing off his hat, I shall take off my own. I shall say, ‘The Mar­quis de Saint Eus­tache, I be­lieve.’ He will say, ‘The cel­eb­rated Mr. Syme, I pre­sume.’ He will say in the most ex­quis­ite French, ‘How are you?’ I shall reply in the most ex­quis­ite Cock­ney, ‘Oh, just the Syme—’ ”

“Oh, shut it,” said the man in spec­tacles. “Pull your­self to­gether, and chuck away that bit of pa­per. What are you really go­ing to do?”

“But it was a lovely cat­ech­ism,” said Syme pathet­ic­ally. “Do let me read it you. It has only forty-three ques­tions and an­swers, and some of the Mar­quis’s an­swers are won­der­fully witty. I like to be just to my en­emy.”

“But what’s the good of it all?” asked Dr. Bull in ex­as­per­a­tion.

“It leads up to my chal­lenge, don’t you see,” said Syme, beam­ing. “When the Mar­quis has given the thirty-ninth reply, which runs—”

“Has it by any chance oc­curred to you,” asked the Pro­fessor, with a pon­der­ous sim­pli­city, “that the Mar­quis may not say all the forty-three things you have put down for him? In that case, I un­der­stand, your own epi­grams may ap­pear some­what more forced.”

Syme struck the table with a ra­di­ant face.

“Why, how true that is,” he said, “and I never thought of it. Sir, you have an in­tel­lect bey­ond the com­mon. You will make a name.”

“Oh, you’re as drunk as an owl!” said the Doc­tor.

“It only re­mains,” con­tin­ued Syme quite un­per­turbed, “to ad­opt some other method of break­ing the ice (if I may so ex­press it) between my­self and the man I wish to kill. And since the course of a dia­logue can­not be pre­dicted by one of its parties alone (as you have poin­ted out with such re­con­dite acu­men), the only thing to be done, I sup­pose, is for the one party, as far as pos­sible, to do all the dia­logue by him­self. And so I will, by Ge­orge!” And he stood up sud­denly, his yel­low hair blow­ing in the slight sea breeze.

A band was play­ing in a café chant­ant hid­den some­where among the trees, and a wo­man had just stopped singing. On Syme’s heated head the bray of the brass band seemed like the jar and jingle of that bar­rel-or­gan in Leicester Square, to the tune of which he had once stood up to die.

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