The Man Who Knew Too Much

by G.K. Chesterton

Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about politics, and nothing about politicians. He also knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.

with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even headache.

feeling unequal to a technical discussion at least as deep as the deep-sea fishes,

It's like those places Stevenson talks about, where something ought to happen." "I know," answered the other. "I think it's because the place itself, so to speak, seems to happen and not merely to exist.

He stopped, and before the next word came something had happened almost too quickly and completely to be realized.

like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in some wild epic.

March thought he had never seen a face so naturally alive as that dead one. And its ugly energy seemed all the stranger for its halo of hoary hair.

I think this Budget is the greatest thing in English history. If it fails, it will be the most heroic failure in English history.

"No, but really, he's a beautiful shot." As if fired by his own words, he took a sort of leap at the ledges of the rock above him, and scaled them with a sudden agility in startling contrast to his general lassitude.

"I can't make head or tail of it," said March. "Was he blind? Or blind drunk?"

"Nobody knew him exactly," replied Fisher, with some vagueness. "But one knew him, of course.

This repeated eulogy on the great social statesman affected Harold March as if somebody had defined Napoleon as a distinguished player of nap.

humming horribly like a huge insect that had killed a man.

On a nearer approach this first more fantastic impression faded; in a full light the figure took on more conventional colors, as of an ordinary gentleman who happened to have come out without a hat and without very studiously brushing his hair.

It was relatively a small thing, but it was only the first in a string of singular antics on which his new and eccentric friend was leading him.

What? Didn't you know Halkett wrote Burke's book for him? Burke can't use anything except a gun; and you can't write with that.

Fisher's bald brow became abruptly corrugated, and a curious expression came into his eyes. "I know too much," he said. "That's what's the matter with me. That's what's the matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know too much. Too much about one another; too much about ourselves. That's why I'm really interested, just now, about one thing that I don't know."

Yet no fury of revolt could have seemed to him more utterly revolutionary than this cold familiarity.

half the white road was gray in the great shadow of the Torwood pine forests, themselves like gray bars shuttered against the sunshine and within, amid that clear noon, manufacturing their own midnight. Soon, however, rifts began to appear in them like gleams of colored windows; the trees thinned and fell away as the road went forward, showing the wild, irregular copses in which, as Fisher said, the house-party had been blazing away all day.

about as inviting as a gallows. March remarked that it looked like a tavern for vinegar instead of wine.

holding the man all the time with a glittering eye like the Ancient Mariner.

I never knew a chap with such good shooting that was such a bad shot.

And he was something else as well." "What do you mean?" asked his companion, with a creepy premonition of something coming, he knew not why.

like a glass cottage standing in its own fields in fairyland.

one of his vague visions of ladies in cloudy crinolines and gentlemen in outlandish hats and whiskers revisiting that lost garden like ghosts.

But he's just the sort of silent, sensible little devil who might be very good at anything; the sort of man you know for years before you find he's a chess champion."

Such people seldom reject anything nonsensical, for they are always seeking for something new.

Sir Howard only pausing, in a sort of ecstasy, to point out the celebrated gilt summerhouse on which the gilt weathercock still stood crooked.

the poplars against the sunset were like great plumes upon a purple hearse,

a torrent of guttural but good-humored oaths

shone in the shadowy grass, smeared with sea fire

Jenkins dresses like a character in Punch. But that's because he is a character in Punch. I mean he's a fictitious character.

To be a new kind of hypocrite hiding a talent in a new kind of napkin.

dexterous little cosmopolitan guttersnipe

Now a man like that may find the hiding of his talents useful; but he could never help wanting to use them where they were useless.

There's nothing needs such mathematical precision as a wild caricature.

"If you people ever happen to blow the whole tangle of society to hell with dynamite, I don't know that the human race will be much the worse.

But don't be too hard on me merely because I know what society is. That's why I moon away my time over things like stinking fish."

He had a talent for appearing when he was not wanted and a talent for disappearing when he was wanted, especially when he was wanted by the police. It may be added that his disappearances were more dangerous than his appearances.

The sun upon the glittering garden depressed her more than the darkness, but she continued to stare at it. Then the world itself went half-witted and she screamed.

her soul walked over the border line of treason.

These stories can now be told in some detail, not because they are the most marvelous of his many adventures, but because these alone were not covered with silence by the loyalty of the peasantry.

a Liverpool man long pickled in the Irish quarrels, and doing his duty among them in a sour fashion

"We know one thing about him," said Wilson, "and it's the one thing that nobody ever knew before. We know where he is."

On the last occasion he had escaped by a forensic quibble and not, as usual, by a private escapade;

Sir Walter's large leonine head was for use as well as ornament,

He had all the love of the luxurious classes for new ideas.

Suddenly the silence was pierced by a long, wailing cry from the dark moors outside. The silence that followed it seemed more startling than the shriek itself,

I reckon an angry woman is much the same in all countries."

Dawn had lifted, leaving a wide chasm of white between a great gray cloud and the great gray moorland, beyond which the tower was outlined against the daybreak and the sea.