The Man Who Knew Too Much

by G.K. Chesterton

"Somehow," he said, "there seems to be something rather horrid about the things you know." "There is," replied Horne Fisher. "I am not at all pleased with my small stock of knowledge and reflection.

A thing can sometimes be too extraordinary to be remembered.

he accepted Prime Ministers as he accepted railway trains—as part of a system which he, at least, was not the revolutionist sent on earth to destroy.

with many apologetic curses and faint damns,

he paused at the bookstall to add to his light luggage a number of cheap murder stories, which he read with great pleasure, and without any premonition that he was about to walk into as strange a story in real life.

He was only one of those young men who cannot support the burden of consciousness unless they are doing something, and whose conceptions of doing something are limited to a game of some kind.

still felt all around him, under the dome of golden evening, an Old World savor and reverberation in that riverhaunted garden.

for the figure might well have been an early-Victorian ghost revisiting the ghosts of the croquet hoops and mallets.

Having been a fashionable dandy forty years ago, he had managed to preserve the dandyism while ignoring the fashions.

Nobody knew better than Fisher how rare such noblemen are in fact, and how numerous in fiction.

If there's one animal alive I loathe it's a valet.

has to play the part of a universal genius, which God knows he was never meant for.

"Not the sort of line I use," answered Hook, with satisfaction.

He fell on the riverside garden like a quiet and well-behaved thunderbolt, but he was a thunderbolt without knowing it.

"You'll make Mr. March think he has come to call on a lunatic.

there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

suddenly broke down, or perhaps blew up, for his voice was like an explosion in the silent garden.

did not turn a red hair on his hard head, but he looked at the other out of the corners of his eyes.

You're all born with silver spoons in your mouths, and then you swagger about with everlasting virtue because you haven't got other people's spoons in your pockets. But I was born in a Pimlico lodging house and I had to make my spoon,

"I believe you must know everything, like God Almighty." "I know too much," said Horne Fisher, "and all the wrong things."

That's why they went to pieces when they found him murdered, of course. They felt as if they'd done it in a dream.

their host, Lord Bulmer, in his breezy way, thought it natural to introduce them. It must be confessed that he was hazy as well as breezy, and had no very clear connection in his mind, beyond the sense that an architect and an archaeologist begin with the same series of letters.

But a serious observer, at a second glance, might have seen in his eyes something of that shining sleep that is called vision;

"I hardly even know what an archaeologist is, except that a rather rusty remnant of Greek suggests that he is a man who studies old things." "Yes," replied Haddow, grimly. "An archaeologist is a man who studies old things and finds they are new."

This suburb of ours used to be a village, and because some of the people slurred the name and pronounced it Holliwell, many a minor poet indulged in fancies about a Holy Well, with spells and fairies and all the rest of it, filling the suburban drawing-rooms with the Celtic twilight. Whereas anyone acquainted with the facts knows that 'Hollinwall' simply means 'the hole in the wall,' and probably referred to some quite trivial accident.

The obvious thing to say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome if he had not been entirely bald. But, indeed, that would itself be a rather bald way of putting it.

a brown skeleton of a man with dark, deep, sunken eyes and a black mustache that hid the meaning of his mouth. Though he had the look of one wasted by some tropical disease, his movements were much more alert than those of his lounging companion.

"Italy is primarily associated with ices," remarked Mr. Horne Fisher. "I mean with ice cream men. Most people in this country imagine that Italy is entirely populated with ice cream men and organ grinders. There certainly are a lot of them; perhaps they're an invading army in disguise."

They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes everywhere with the extension of education.

The gray and black and silver of the wintry wood were all the more severe or somber as a contrast to the colored carnival groups that already stood on and around the frozen pool. For the house party had already flung themselves impatiently into fancy dress, and the lawyer, with his neat black suit and red hair, was the only modern figure among them.

As to the prince, he's perfectly glorious, in great crimson robes as a cardinal. He looks as if he could poison everybody.

I must look a little like a steward when I give an account of my stewardship."

The noble lord was indeed marching toward them in a magnificent sixteenth-century costume of purple and gold, with a gold-hilted sword and a plumed cap, and manners to match.

In the light of after events there seemed to be something monstrous and ominous about that exuberance, something of the spirit that is called fey. At the time it merely crossed a few people's minds that he might possibly be drunk.

"If I have to begin the day with ice, in the American fashion, I prefer it in smaller quantities. But no early hours for me in December. The early bird catches the cold." "Oh, I shan't die of catching a cold," answered Bulmer, and laughed.

being a man with a quiet and quaint capacity for being interested in anything,

There was only one thing in nature from which could come the sound that echoed through the dark house at daybreak.

something unusually finished and formal, in the way of an early bird, about this magnificent red cockatoo. It was as if the early bird had been up all night.

the very memory of yesterday brought back the mystery of to-day.

floating in his own pool like a pallid weed.

"May I break the ice by talking about the weather?—which, by the way, has already broken the ice. I know that breaking the ice might be a rather melancholy metaphor in this case."

In the singular silence that ensued, the train of thought in many minds became involuntarily a series of colored pictures.

They had grown used to their fanciful garments looking more gay and gorgeous against the dark gray and streaky silver of the forest, so that the moving figures glowed like stained-glass saints walking.

Fisher's dreamy, and even dreary, eye

It was almost as if they were the ghosts of their own ancestors haunting that dark wood and dismal lake, and playing some old part that they only half remembered. The movements of those colored figures seemed to mean something that had been settled long before, like a silent heraldry.

"It has shed no blood," answered Fisher, "but for all that it has committed a crime. This is as near as the criminal came to the crime when he committed it."

"He was not there when he did it," explained Fisher. "It's a poor sort of murderer who can't murder people when he isn't there."

He had thoughts on the border of thought; fancies about a fourth dimension which was itself a hole to hide anything, of seeing everything from a new angle out of a new window in the senses;

You tell me to look for the secret in the hole in the wall, but I can't find any hole in the wall." "There isn't any," said Fisher. "That's the secret." After reflecting a moment, he added: "Unless you call it a hole in the wall of the world.

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.