Gilbert Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday

“These lights make one feel more cheerful.”

Inspector Ratcliffe drew his brows together.

“There is only one set of lights that make me more cheerful,” he said, “and they are those lights of the police station which I can see beyond the town. Please God we may be there in ten minutes.”

Then all Bull’s boiling good sense and optimism broke suddenly out of him.

“Oh, this is all raving nonsense!” he cried. “If you really think that ordinary people in ordinary houses are anarchists, you must be madder than an anarchist yourself. If we turned and fought these fellows, the whole town would fight for us.”

“No,” said the other with an immovable simplicity, “the whole town would fight for them. We shall see.”

While they were speaking the Professor had leant forward with sudden excitement.

“What is that noise?” he said.

“Oh, the horses behind us, I suppose,” said the Colonel. “I thought we had got clear of them.”

“The horses behind us! No,” said the Professor, “it is not horses, and it is not behind us.”

Almost as he spoke, across the end of the street before them two shining and rattling shapes shot past. They were gone almost in a flash, but everyone could see that they were motor-cars, and the Professor stood up with a pale face and swore that they were the other two motor-cars from Dr. Renard’s garage.

“I tell you they were his,” he repeated, with wild eyes, “and they were full of men in masks!”

“Absurd!” said the Colonel angrily. “Dr. Renard would never give them his cars.”

“He may have been forced,” said Ratcliffe quietly. “The whole town is on their side.”

“You still believe that,” asked the Colonel incredulously.

“You will all believe it soon,” said the other with a hopeless calm.

There was a puzzled pause for some little time, and then the Colonel began again abruptly

“No, I can’t believe it. The thing is nonsense. The plain people of a peaceable French town ”

He was cut short by a bang and a blaze of light, which seemed close to his eyes. As the car sped on it left a floating patch of white smoke behind it, and Syme had heard a shot shriek past his ear.

“My God!” said the Colonel, “someone has shot at us.”

“It need not interrupt conversation,” said the gloomy Ratcliffe. “Pray resume your remarks, Colonel. You were talking, I think, about the plain people of a peaceable French town.”

The staring Colonel was long past minding satire. He rolled his eyes all round the street.

“It is extraordinary,” he said, “most extraordinary.”

“A fastidious person,” said Syme, “might even call it unpleasant. However, I suppose those lights out in the field beyond this street are the Gendarmerie. We shall soon get there.”

“No,” said Inspector Ratcliffe, “we shall never get there.”

He had been standing up and looking keenly ahead of him. Now he sat down and smoothed his sleek hair with a weary gesture.

“What do you mean?” asked Bull sharply.

“I mean that we shall never get there,” said the pessimist placidly. “They have two rows of armed men across the road already; I can see them from here. The town is in arms, as I said it was. I can only wallow in the exquisite comfort of my own exactitude.”

And Ratcliffe sat down comfortably in the car and lit a cigarette, but the others rose excitedly and stared down the road. Syme had slowed down the car as their plans became doubtful, and he brought it finally to a standstill just at the corner of a side street that ran down very steeply to the sea.

The town was mostly in shadow, but the sun had not sunk; wherever its level light could break through, it painted everything a burning gold. Up this side street the last sunset light shone as sharp and narrow as the shaft of artificial light at the theatre. It struck the car of the five friends, and lit it like a burning chariot. But the rest of the street, especially the two ends of it, was in the deepest twilight, and for some seconds they could see nothing. Then Syme, whose eyes were the keenest, broke into a little bitter whistle, and said

“It is quite true. There is a crowd or an army or some such thing across the end of that street.”

“Well, if there is,” said Bull impatiently, “it must be something else a sham fight or the mayor’s birthday or something. I cannot and will not believe that plain, jolly people in a place like this walk about with dynamite in their pockets. Get on a bit, Syme, and let us look at them.”

The car crawled about a hundred yards farther, and then they were all startled by Dr. Bull breaking into a high crow of laughter.

“Why, you silly mugs!” he cried, “what did I tell you. That crowd’s as law-abiding as a cow, and if it weren’t, it’s on our side.”

“How do you know?” asked the professor, staring.

“You blind bat,” cried Bull, “don’t you see who is leading them?”

They peered again, and then the Colonel, with a catch in his voice, cried out

“Why, it’s Renard!”

There was, indeed, a rank of dim figures running across the road, and they could not be clearly seen; but far enough in front to catch the accident of the evening light was stalking up and down the unmistakable Dr. Renard, in a white hat, stroking his long brown beard, and holding a revolver in his left hand.

“What a fool I’ve been! ” exclaimed the Colonel. “Of course, the dear old boy has turned out to help us.”

Dr. Bull was bubbling over with laughter, swinging the sword in his hand as carelessly as a cane. He jumped out of the car and ran across the intervening space, calling out

“Dr. Renard! Dr. Renard!”

An instant after Syme thought his own eyes had gone mad in his head. For the philanthropic Dr. Renard had deliberately raised his revolver and fired twice at Bull, so that the shots rang down the road.

Almost at the same second as the puff of white cloud went up from this atrocious explosion a long puff of white cloud went up also from the cigarette of the cynical Ratcliffe. Like all the rest he turned a little pale, but he smiled. Dr. Bull, at whom the bullets had been fired, just missing his scalp, stood quite still in the middle of the road without a sign of fear, and then turned very slowly and crawled back to the car, and climbed in with two holes through his hat.

“Well,” said the cigarette smoker slowly, “what do you think now?”

“I think,” said Dr. Bull with precision, “that I am lying in bed at No. 217 Peabody Buildings, and that I shall soon wake up with a jump; or, if that’s not it, I think that I am sitting in a small cushioned cell in Hanwell, and that the doctor can’t make much of my case. But if you want to know what I don’t think, I’ll tell you. I don’t think what you think. I don’t think, and I never shall think, that the mass of ordinary men are a pack of dirty modern thinkers. No, sir, I’m a democrat, and I still don’t believe that Sunday could convert one average navvy or counter– jumper. No, I may be mad, but humanity isn’t.”

Syme turned his bright blue eyes on Bull with an earnestness which he did not commonly make clear.

“You are a very fine fellow,” he said. “You can believe in a sanity which is not merely your sanity. And you’re right enough about humanity, about peasants and people like that jolly old innkeeper. But you’re not right about Renard. I suspected him from the first. He’s rationalistic, and, what’s worse, he’s rich. When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich.”

“They are really destroyed now,” said the man with a cigarette, and rose with his hands in his pockets. “The devils are coming on!”

The men in the motor-car looked anxiously in the direction of his dreamy gaze, and they saw that the whole regiment at the end of the road was advancing upon them, Dr. Renard marching furiously in front, his beard flying in the breeze.