“It is neither — by God, it is neither!” said one of the first two.

  “What is it, then?” asked the second.

  “The tree is falling,” he replied.

  “As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” said Wayne’s voice out of the darkness, and it had the same sweet and yet horrible air that it had had throughout, of coming from a great distance, from before or after the event. Even when he was struggling like an eel or battering like a madman, he spoke like a spectator. “As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” he said. “Men have called that a gloomy text. It is the essence of all exultation. I am doing now what I have done all my life, what is the only happiness, what is the only universality. I am clinging to something. Let it fall, and there let it lie. Fools, you go about and see the kingdoms of the earth, and are liberal and wise and cosmopolitan, which is all that the devil can give you — all that he could offer to Christ, only to be spurned away. I am doing what the truly wise do. When a child goes out into the garden and takes hold of a tree, saying, ‘Let this tree be all I have,’ that moment its roots take hold on hell and its branches on the stars. The joy I have is what the lover knows when a woman is everything. It is what a savage knows when his idol is everything. It is what I know when Notting Hill is everything. I have a city. Let it stand or fall.”

  As he spoke, the turf lifted itself like a living thing, and out of it rose slowly, like crested serpents, the roots of the oak. Then the great head of the tree, that seemed a green cloud among grey ones, swept the sky suddenly like a broom, and the whole tree heeled over like a ship, smashing every one in its fall.

  Chapter III — Two Voices

  In a place in which there was total darkness for hours, there was also for hours total silence. Then a voice spoke out of the darkness, no one could have told from where, and said aloud —

  “So ends the Empire of Notting Hill. As it began in blood, so it ended in blood, and all things are always the same.”

  And there was silence again, and then again there was a voice, but it had not the same tone; it seemed that it was not the same voice.

  “If all things are always the same, it is because they are always heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power — the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean — an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great — a great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire — of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes, O dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is always unexpected.”

  A little gust of wind blew through the night, and then the first voice answered —

  “But in this world there are some, be they wise or foolish, whom nothing intoxicates. There are some who see all your disturbances like a cloud of flies. They know that while men will laugh at your Notting Hill, and will study and rehearse and sing of Athens and Jerusalem, Athens and Jerusalem were silly suburbs like your Notting Hill. They know that the earth itself is a suburb, and can feel only drearily and respectably amused as they move upon it.”

  “They are philosophers or they are fools,” said the other voice. “They are not men. Men live, as I say, rejoicing from age to age in something fresher than progress — in the fact that with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made. If our ancient humanity were a single man, it might perhaps be that he would break down under the memory of so many loyalties, under the burden of so many diverse heroisms, under the load and terror of all the goodness of men. But it has pleased God so to isolate the individual soul that it can only learn of all other souls by hearsay, and to each one goodness and happiness come with the youth and violence of lightning, as momentary and as pure. And the doom of failure that lies on all human systems does not in real fact affect them any more than the worms of the inevitable grave affect a children’s game in a meadow. Notting Hill has fallen; Notting Hill has died. But that is not the tremendous issue. Notting Hill has lived.”

  “But if,” answered the other voice, “if what is achieved by all these efforts be only the common contentment of humanity, why do men so extravagantly toil and die in them? Has nothing been done by Notting Hill than any chance clump of farmers or clan of savages would not have done without it? What might have been done to Notting Hill if the world had been different may be a deep question; but there is a deeper. What could have happened to the world if Notting Hill had never been?”

  The other voice replied —

  “The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry systems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; something would have been eternally lost. There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quite like it to the crack of doom. I cannot believe anything but that God loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and unreplaceable. But even for that I do not care. If God, with all His thunders, hated it, I loved it.”

  And with the voice a tall, strange figure lifted itself out of the débris in the half-darkness.

  The other voice came after a long pause, and as it were hoarsely.

  “But suppose the whole matter were really a hocus-pocus. Suppose that whatever meaning you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the real meaning of the whole was mockery. Suppose it was all folly. Suppose—”

  “I have been in it,” answered the voice from the tall and strange figure, “and I know it was not.”

  A smaller figure seemed half to rise in the dark.

  “Suppose I am God,” said the voice, “and suppose I made the world in idleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the idiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and the moon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vast and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as enormous toad-stools. Suppose Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by walking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things, laugh at them.”

  “And suppose I am man,” answered the other. “And suppose that I give the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for the fools’ paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible a joy. If we have taken the child’s games, and given them the seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?”

  The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was beginning to turn from black to grey, with a random suggestion of the morning. The slight figure seemed to crawl towards the larger one, and the voice was more human.

  “But suppose, friend,” it said, “suppose that, in a bitterer and more real sense, it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility, of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a joke.”

  The tall figure answered —

  “He could not know it. For it was not all a joke.”

  And a gust of wind blew away some clouds that sealed the sky-line, and showed a strip of silver behind his great dark legs. Then the other voice came, having crept nearer still.

  “WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE.”

  “Adam Wayne,” it said, “there are men who confess only in articulo mortis; there are people who blame themselves only when they can no longer help others. I am one of them. Here, upon the field of the bloody end of it all, I come to tell you plainly what you would never understand before. Do you know who I am?”

  “I know you, Auberon Quin,” answered the tall figure, “and I shall be glad to unburden your spirit of anything that lies upon it.”

  “Adam Wayne,” said the other voice, “of what I have to say you cannot in common reason be glad to unburden me. Wayne, it was all a joke. When I made these cities, I cared no more for them than I care for a centaur, or a merman, or a fish with legs, or a pig with feathers, or any other absurdity. When I spoke to you solemnly and encouragingly about the flag of your freedom and the peace of your city, I was playing a vulgar practical joke on an honest gentleman, a vulgar practical joke that has lasted for twenty years. Though no one could believe it of me, perhaps, it is the truth that I am a man both timid and tender-hearted. I never dared in the early days of your hope, or the central days of your supremacy, to tell you this; I never dared to break the colossal calm of your face. God knows why I should do it now, when my farce has ended in tragedy and the ruin of all your people! But I say it now. Wayne, it was done as a joke.”

  There was silence, and the freshening breeze blew the sky clearer and clearer, leaving great spaces of the white dawn.

  At last Wayne said, very slowly —

  “You did it all only as a joke?”

  “Yes,” said Quin, briefly.

  “When you conceived the idea,” went on Wayne, dreamily, “of an army for Bayswater and a flag for Notting Hill, there was no gleam, no suggestion in your mind that such things might be real and passionate?”

  “No,” answered Auberon, turning his round white face to the morning with a dull and splendid sincerity; “I had none at all.”

  Wayne sprang down from the height above him and held out his hand.

  “I will not stop to thank you,” he said, with a curious joy in his voice, “for the great good for the world you have actually wrought. All that I think of that I have said to you a moment ago, even when I thought that your voice was the voice of a derisive omnipotence, its laughter older than the winds of heaven. But let me say what is immediate and true. You and I, Auberon Quin, have both of us throughout our lives been again and again called mad. And we are mad. We are mad, because we are not two men, but one man. We are mad, because we are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain has been cloven in two. And if you ask for the proof of it, it is not hard to find. It is not merely that you, the humorist, have been in these dark days stripped of the joy of gravity. It is not merely that I, the fanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that, though we seem to be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man and woman, aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We are the father and the mother of the Charter of the Cities.”

  Quin looked down at the débris of leaves and timber, the relics of the battle and stampede, now glistening in the growing daylight, and finally said —

  “Yet nothing can alter the antagonism — the fact that I laughed at these things and you adored them.”

  Wayne’s wild face flamed with something god-like, as he turned it to be struck by the sunrise.

  “I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is already day.”

  In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made the formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the unknown world.

  THE END

  THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

  First published in 1908, Chesterton’s second novel is a thriller set in Edwardian London. It tells the story of Gabriel Syme, who is recruited at Scotland Yard to a secret anti-anarchist police corps. Lucian Gregory, an anarchistic poet, lives in the suburb of Saffron Park. Syme meets him at a party and they debate the meaning of poetry. Gregory argues that revolt is the basis of poetry. Syme demurs, insisting that the essence of poetry is not revolution, but rather law.

  Like most of Chesterton’s fictional works, the story contains Christian allegory. Chesterton, a Protestant by this time (he became a Catholic 15 years later), suffered a brief bout of depression and claimed afterwards that he wrote this novel as an unusual affirmation that goodness and right were at the heart of every aspect of the world.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK

  CHAPTER II. THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME

  CHAPTER III. THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

  CHAPTER IV. THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE

  CHAPTER V. THE FEAST OF FEAR

  CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE

  CHAPTER VII. THE UNACCOUNTABLE CONDUCT OF PROFESSOR DE WORMS

  CHAPTER VIII. THE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS

  CHAPTER IX. THE MAN IN SPECTACLES

  CHAPTER X. THE DUEL

  CHAPTER XI. THE CRIMINALS CHASE THE POLICE

  CHAPTER XII. THE EARTH IN ANARCHY

  CHAPTER XIII. THE PURSUIT OF THE PRESIDENT

  CHAPTER XIV. THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS

  CHAPTER XV. THE ACCUSER

  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 I. THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK