Bluffing Your Way Through Intrigue

Intrigue. Mystery. Parable.

All are somehow connected to G.K. Chesterton's book, The Man Who Was Thursday. Written over a century ago, it's been called everything from a psychological romance to a spy novel with traces of the parable.

To set up this scene for this blog post, we must know the following: The main character is Gabriel Syme, who finds himself witness to a meeting of anarchists involved in a conspiracy to assassinate two key political figures. But, Syme isn't just any man. He's at the meeting in an undercover capacity. In short, he's a police detective.

During the meeting, the leader of the anarchists -- a mysterious man by the name of Sunday -- refuses to reveal all the details of the assassination plan because he knows there's a spy in their midst. The meeting comes to an abrupt end. Syme leaves, but soon realizes that he is being shadowed by one of the anarchists, Professor de Worms. A chase through London ensues.

Finally, Syme decides to confront the Professor...

Before Syme could ask the first diplomatic question, the old anarchist had asked suddenly, without any sort of preparation--

"Are you a policeman?"

Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only manage a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.

"A policeman?" he said, laughing vaguely. "Whatever made you think of a policeman in connection to me?"

"The process was simple enough," answered the Professor patiently. "I thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now."

"Did I take a policeman's hat by mistake out of the restaurant?" asked Syme, smiling wildly. "Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a policeman? Do, do let me be a postman."

The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but Syme ran on with feverish irony.

Chesterton continues the conversation (which I am omitting). And with every word Syme says to refute the accusation, we feel a sense of approaching doom. Will Syme's true identity be found out by this anarchist? What is the Professor's purpose?

We pick up the conversation a few paragraphs later...

"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you paltering spy?" he shrieked in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a police detective?"

"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.

"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! ... Will there really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?"

He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large loose hand like a flap to his ear.

"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.

Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly collapse.

"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."

Taken from:
Chesterton, G.K. The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), p. 84-86.

How did I rate this book? 3 stars (kind of a strange book)