‘We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.’
(A policeman, talking to the novel’s protagonist, Gabriel Syme)
Chesterton’s paper-thin characters
Having just read four novels on the trot by H.G. Wells, I am well aware that one of Wells’s notorious shortcomings is the way his characters are often mere pawns in scenarios or plotlines designed to convey Wells’s social, technological and political ideas.
At least that’s what I thought until I read these two novels of Chesterton’s. Wells’s characters have Shakespearian depth compared to Chesterton’s.
Chesterton’s characters are names attached to attitudes, or positions, and a great deal of the interchanges between these entities are really the cut and thrust of opposing ideas in a debating society.
I find Wells’s characters endearing because, by comparison, they do have real back stories and histories – for example, Wells goes to maybe silly lengths to give realistic depth to his character Bert Smallways. He builds up our sense of Bert’s ability with mechanics and engines, at repairing bicycle and motor bikes, a skill which will come in handy as he proceed through the adventures in the novel, The War In the Air.
Chesterton’s characters, by contrast, are almost all the same. They all give clever speeches. They are all fond of paradoxes. And very fond of generalising about human nature, about God. Reminiscent of the kind of ‘soft’ theologising you get in Graham Greene. But whereas Greene does it (at length) in his novels mainly to make the reader share Greene’s basically suicidal worldview by blackening human nature at every opportunity…
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
… Chesterton does it to make the reader chortle with the recognition of a clever paradox, to satirise the progressive philosophies of his day, and to point to something deeper and more mysterious about human existence.
The introductions to The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Man Who Was Thursday confidently extract from them certain ‘messages’ and ‘meanings’; but the experience of actually reading the books is nowhere near as clear-cut and simple. I found them both to be murky and difficult reads. I sensed that a ‘message’ was being propounded, I just couldn’t work out what it was.
Chesterton’s characters are, in fact, so featureless and interchangeable that they do, often, interchange. The Man Who Was Thursday is not so much a novel, more a fantasy entirely concerned with false identities and secret sides, and characters who flip, in a moment, from being on the side of darkness to being on the side of light – or vice-versa.
The plot
The novel is set in the present-day, Edwardian era, where we find two poets in the garden of an artist’s colony, located in a fictional new garden city, named Saffron Park.
Mr Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, is holding court. All the young ladies of the town flock to admire him and his daringly ‘anarchistic’ sentiments. But on this evening Gregory is confronted by another poet, flaxen-haired Mr Gabriel Syme, who politely doubts the anarchist’s ‘commitment’.
Gregory argues that poetry is anarchy and breaking the rules. This makes the young ladies swoon with excitement. Syme counters that poetry is law and gives as an example the wonderful poetry of the London Underground, where you have a map and know exactly which station is coming next on any journey. Law and logic and certainty are the only poetry (says Syme).
Angered, Gregory waits for the party to end then confronts Syme outside the ground of his house. In a feverish conversation Gregory reveals that he really is an anarchist and makes Syme swear not to tell anyone. At which point Syme reveals that he is really a policeman, but that Gregory must swear to tell no-one. They both solemnly swear to keep each other’s secrets.
You see how Chesterton’s taste for symmetry and paradox overcomes any attempt at ‘realism’.
Gregory promptly takes Syme along to a pub which contains a secret table which – in true James Bond style – at the touch of secret button descends down through the floor to a basement below the pub.
This turns out to be the meeting place of the most dangerous Anarchists Club in London. Syme accepts all this with upper-class sang-froid. He is told he is attending a meeting to decide who will become the next leader of this anarchists’ ‘chapter’. He learns there are seven anarchist groups, each ruled by someone given the codename of a day of the week. Head of the entire Anarchist Movement is a mysterious man named Sunday.
As it happens the man named ‘Thursday’, who was leader of this section, recently passed away and tonight they are voting for his successor. Everyone expects Gregory to be elected ‘Thursday’, but he is suddenly overcome by worry that, making them all sound too dangerous will prompt Syme to denounce them all to his police colleagues.
So Gregory makes a surprisingly tame speech recommending they obey the Law, which is met with general disappointment from the assembled anarchists. At which (in a characteristically Chestertonian paradox) Syme the policeman leaps to his feet and makes a startlingly violent speech, denouncing Gregory’s pacifism – and he is elected by an overwhelming majority. Humorous paradox, and ironic reversal.
Thus Syme is made the new ‘Thursday’ and is led off down a secret passage which opens onto the Thames where a steam boat is waiting – leaving Gregory seething with anger and impotence. It is, to say the least, odd to the modern reader that Gregory keeps his promise not to expose his rival – but then the entire novel is odd, and is really more of a psychological fantasia than a ‘novel’. If you try applying realistic criteria you will get nowhere.
The man who was Sunday
The steam boat chugs along to the Embankment in central London where ‘Thursday’ is met by ‘the secretary’, a posh man with a disfigured face who takes him through the streets up to Leicester Square where the Anarchists are holding a meeting on a balcony overlooking the tourists.
Their leader, Sunday, has a theory that if you loudly announce to everyone that you are an anarchist no-one will believe you. Thus they make their plans to blow up kings and emperors, at an open-air restaurant while waiters come and go bringing drinks and dishes, tut-tutting and laughing at those funny old anarchists who do like their little jokes. Irony. Paradox.
Syme is greeted by the assembled anarchist leaders as the new Thursday and promptly introduced to Monday, Tuesday etc. Chesterton takes the time to introduce them all to us, along with their real identities and histories, including a grey-haired professor.
After all the introductions, Sunday does in fact call them away from the terrace and into a locked room, where he announces that one among them is a traitor!!
This is a scene I’ve seen in so many James Bond and other spy adventure movies, I wonder if it originated with Chesterton. Probably not, in which case I wonder if an origin can be found – or whether the trope of the spy among the band of conspirators, the traitor in our midst, is not in fact as old as story-telling.
Anyway, Sunday ratchets up the tension with furious denunciations of the as-yet-unidentified spy in their midst, and Syme is just about to stand up and confess that it is he when, to his amazement, a scraggy-haired Polish anarchist does just that – stands up and confesses to being a policeman, throwing his blue police card onto the table.
Sunday is incomprehensibly magnanimous, and asks him to go now and promise not to tell their plans to anyone (!).
Then Sunday gets down to organising an assassination outrage against a politician visiting Paris. After this the group break up and go their separate ways.
Syme is pursued
There is then a spookily atmospheric sequence where Syme wanders along to a Soho restaurant… only to find the so-called Professor has followed him.
Syme gets up, walks through Covent Garden and stops in a pub… only to find the Professor sitting at a table.
Syme storms out and runs along to St Pauls, its dome shimmering as night falls and with it a shower of snow and hears, in the snowdrift quietness… the sound of the Professor pottering along behind him.
Gripped by a kind of panic fear Syme runs on through the black London streets, down to the docks and ducks into a rough pub. Where the Professor walks through the door straight after him.
Sequences like this fully justify the novel’s sub-title, ‘A Nightmare’. There is something fully nightmareish, something creepily uncanny, about this unstoppable pursuit.
The Professor finally confronts Syme, asking whether he is a policeman, which Syme furiously denies. ‘Shame,’ replies the Professor’, because I am,’ and he tosses onto the table the same type of blue police identity card that the Pole had done earlier, at the same time ripping off the mask which makes him look like a senile old man, to reveal a fresh-faced young chap beneath!!!!
So now Syme knows that three of the seven dangerous anarchists sitting round the meeting table off Leicester Square… were in fact policemen (the one who got throw out, himself and now, the Professor)!
Double identities and ironies!
Revealing the other police spies
This has taken us up to chapter 8 of 15. To cut a long story what happens next is that Symes and the Professor then track down the other three members of the group and discover, one by one, that they are all policemen masquerading as anarchists.
Unmasking the last one requires the by-now assembled squad of undercover policemen to catch the ferry to France and track down the last member of the seven, who was nominated to be the assassin sent to blow up a leading politician in Paris. The last of the seven is a French aristocrat named the Marquis de Saint Eustache.
This turns into a really compelling and weird fantasia of a sequence as our man Syme ends up fighting an elaborately staged duel with the Marquis, under the misapprehension that the latter is actually an anarchist.
During the duel (with fencing swords) Syme repeatedly sticks his point into the Marquis with no apparent result. Exactly as in a nightmare where, whatever you do to stop it, the monster keeps getting back up.
The solution of the mystery, revealed at the climax of the contest, is that the Marquis is wearing an early type of bullet-proof vest.
Anyway, the Marquis has no sooner revealed that he, like all the others, is in fact an undercover policeman than the train, which everyone thought he was intending to catch to Paris to carry out his terrorist outrage – pulls into the nearby station.
Chased by anarchists
To the horror of the assembled anarchists-now-revealed-as-policemen, a great crowd of genuine anarchists swarm out of it, all wearing Keystone Cops-style black masks over the tops of their faces, and led by none other than the ‘secretary’ who had escorted Syme from the Embankment to the anarchist meeting in Leicester Square, in the earlier chapter.
The chase is on! Our chaps run through woods with the gang of black-masked figures gaining on them. They arrive at a farm the marquis knows, where the kindly old owner lends them horses. But the anarchists are still gaining on them and then they are horrified to hear the sounds of horse galloping after them and to recognise the kindly old man among them. He is one of the Enemy!!
Our chaps gallop onto another house where a friend of the Marquis’s lends them cars and off they zoom. But one breaks down and they hear… other motor cars chasing them, look up and see the ‘friend’ among their pursuers. The whole world is against them!
This nightmare sense becomes overwhelming when they arrive at a fishing village on the coast and… the entire population rises up against them, forming a mob, joined now by the horse riders and the car drivers, creating an enormous crowd of black-masked anarchists and villagers and fishermen who surround them and chase them down onto a pier, pushing them further and further out till they reach the end of the pier and have nowhere left to turn.
The earth in anarchy
No wonder this chapter is titled ‘The Earth In Anarchy’. Apparently, Chesterton wrote the book during a bout of severe depression. It was partly caused by the great wave of anarchist, socialist, positivist and nihilist thinking which swept over Europe in the 1890s and 1900s. All these trends were materialist, denying the existence of a ‘soul’ or God, insisting on the purely material view of life as a constant struggle unmediated by any kind of transcendent values.
As a devout Anglican, Chesterton found all of these philosophies represented profound attacks on his most deeply cherished beliefs and all the things he loved in life.
The Man Who Was Thursday is thus a kind of ecstasy of horror, a vision of a world borne down in a great black tide of nihilism. As he explained: ‘It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date.’
At this, its hysterical climax, Syme, pushed to the end of the quay, suddenly rebels and runs straight at the anarchist crowd and, in particular, at the ‘secretary’ who is leading them. He accuses them of being filthy anarchists who deny the beauty of order and law and life.
At which point the ‘secretary’ steps back, tears off his mask and announces ‘I arrest you in the name of the law.’
‘The law?’ screams Syme. ‘But you’re anarchists.’
‘No you’re the anarchists,’ says the secretary. ‘I am a policeman and these are my deputies, and we have dressed up as anarchists as a disguise, to try and mix in with you.’
!!!!!!
The crowd which has been chasing them all this time was doing so because they had been told they were pursuing dangerous anarchists. They aren’t anarchists at all. The entire thing has been a mistake and a misunderstanding.
‘There is some mistake,’ [the Secretary] said. ‘Mr. Syme, I hardly think you understand your position. I arrest you in the name of the law.’
‘Of the law?’ said Syme, and dropped his stick.
‘Certainly!’ said the Secretary. ‘I am a detective from Scotland Yard,’ and he took a small blue card from his pocket.
‘And what do you suppose we are?’ asked the Professor, and threw up his arms.
‘You,’ said the Secretary stiffly, ‘are, as I know for a fact, members of the Supreme Anarchist Council. Disguised as one of you, I – ‘
Dr. Bull tossed his sword into the sea.
‘There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council,’ he said. ‘We were all a lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice people who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the dynamiters. I knew I couldn’t be wrong about the mob,’ he said, beaming over the enormous multitude, which stretched away to the distance on both sides. ‘Vulgar people are never mad. I’m vulgar myself, and I know. I am now going on shore to stand a drink to everybody here.’
Note this last little speech. Bull is one of the anarchists-who-is-really-a-policeman and here he expresses one of Chesterton’s shibboleths.
It is the intellectuals who we should be worried about, the intellectuals who are promoting anarchy and socialism and nihilism, the intellectuals who are attacking everything good and sweet and clean.
By contrast, the so-called common people have never lost touch with the real values of life, with country lanes and Anglican churches and pints of good old English ale.
Who is Sunday?
So all the six anarchists named after the six days of the week, who are now all revealed to be policemen in disguise, catch the ferry and train back to London and all troop off to Leicester Square to confront big black-suited Sunday. He is still (as in a dream) sitting eating on the balcony overlooking the square where they left him. To be honest I didn’t understand the ending at all. Here is the Wikipedia summary:
Sunday reveals that setting them against each other was all part of his Master Plan. In a surreal conclusion, Sunday is unmasked as only seeming to be terrible; in fact, he is a force of good like the detectives. Sunday is unable to give an answer to the question of why he caused so much trouble and pain for the detectives.
Gregory, the only real anarchist, seems to challenge the good council. His accusation is that they, as rulers, have never suffered like Gregory and their other subjects and so their power is illegitimate. Syme refutes the accusation immediately, because of the terrors inflicted by Sunday on the rest of the council.
So the crux of the thing seems to be that Gregory (the poet, the man we met in the opening scene) is the only spokesman for real anarchists – and he says that the opinions of Syme and all the rest are not valid because they have never suffered.
Only Gregory and his kind have suffered, and their terrorism is justified by their suffering.
But Symes denies this. He and others like him have suffered. The anarchists don’t have a monopoly of suffering. Syme shouts:
‘No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, “We also have suffered.”‘
A dream
And then… it all turns out to be a dream! Syme awakens. He has napped while on a country walk. He resumes his walk along a country lane, in a little epiphany of the kind of values, images and ideas which Chesterton values: the countryside, tradition, good fellowship.
And this hymn leads up to a vision of one of the pretty young women who Syme had met and chatted to in that garden at the start of the novel.
As [Syme] gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?’
* * *
When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme’s experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through.
For while he could always remember afterwards that he had swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.
Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky.
Syme felt a simple surprise when he saw rising all round him on both sides of the road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park. He had no idea that he had walked so near London. He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.
Sunday’s parting question as the nightmare collapses – ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?’ is the question Jesus asks St. James and St. John in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 10, vs 38–39. It is a challenge to Syme and maybe to the reader, asking whether they have the ‘commitment’ to follow in Jesus’ footsteps… Maybe this makes sense to a Christian but within the context of the novel it is difficult to… pin down, to really understand.
Metaphysical landscapes
At its most intense – in the sequence where Syme is followed by the spooky Professor across London, and in the delirious chase scene across the French countryside where everyone on earth seems to be pursuing our heroes – The Man Who Was Thursday becomes a really effective spine-chiller.
And throughout there is an otherworldly sensibility at work. Chesterton’s is a mind which doesn’t flow toward the concrete but naturally leads him off into apocalyptic theological and symbolical landscapes. Here he is summing up Syme’s first impression of the other anarchists sitting round the conference table.
Such were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence. Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective, that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again.
Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something – say a tree – that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself – a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.
‘An ultimate horizon, visions from the verge.’ That is where a lot of Chesterton’s imagination is always tending. He is always moving from the actual towards the metaphysical, but the metaphysical with an Edwardian twist.
The strangeness of some of these visions reminds me of the weird otherworldly landscapes conjured up in C.S. Lewis’s great science fiction trilogy, or even in Wyndham Lewis’s very peculiar theological science fiction novel, The Childermass.
London landscapes
However, the parts of the book I liked most were when Chesterton’s natural taste for the fantastical is tied, anchored and embedded in naturalistic descriptions of Edwardian London.
For example, on the tugboat journey from the secret basement where Syme is elected ‘Thursday’ to a mooring at the Embankment near Charing Cross, where he first meets the ‘Secretary’ and is escorted to Leicester Square.
Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some sadder star.
But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him – the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol [which he has brought from the anarchists meeting] – took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed.
The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even be grotesque.
So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the presence of a man really human. To Syme’s exaggerative mind the bright, bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the mountains of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the time that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous bulk of Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the splitting of great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had brightened like white fire when the tug, changing its onward course, turned inward to a large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.
The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white dawn. They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of some Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he was, in his own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible and heathen kings. He leapt out of the boat on to one slimy step, and stood, a dark and slender figure, amid the enormous masonry. The two men in the tug put her off again and turned up stream. They had never spoken a word.
Chesterton’s point in the middle of the passage is a conservative, Christian one, that even the little things in our life are illuminated and somehow redeemed by repeating older, more noble ‘figures’ and archetypes.
Maybe. Maybe not. But there is no denying the majesty of his description of day breaking like the splitting of great bars of lead, nor the power of his description of Syme leaping onto the slimy steps of a quay, a slender figure dwarfed by the enormous stones of the Embankment.
For Chesterton that physical description is the basis for his theological points; but for me the physical description is the metaphysical. The depiction of the actual world around us – whether in well-chosen phrases or in lines of pen or charcoal – is, for me, the really true worship.
The seven days of the week
Monday
He was the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with more terror than anything, except the President’s horrible, happy laughter. But now that Syme had more space and light to observe him, there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure thought was pain.
Tuesday
The man’s name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous part demanded of him by President Sunday… Gogol, or Tuesday, had his simplicity well symbolised by a dress designed upon the division of the waters, a dress that separated upon his forehead and fell to his feet, grey and silver, like a sheet of rain
Wednesday
A certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing unusual about him, except that he was the only man at table who wore the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own. He had a black French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer. But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad, not in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer and warmer than the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of profound colour. His black coat looked as if it were only black by being too dense a purple. His black beard looked as if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the bright coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may see just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.
Friday
Next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose or sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off.
Saturday
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme’s eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see.
Sunday
At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish.
Books & Boots 