Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ The priest had sprung erect, and had the voice of steel of a soldier in command.
"No fighting," he cried coolly; "we are enough to hold anyone we want to. What is the matter, doctor?"
"Things are not right with Quinton," said the doctor, quite white. "I could just see him through the glass, and I don't like the way he's lying. It's not as I left him, anyhow."
"Let us go in to him," said Father Brown shortly. "You can leave Mr. Atkinson alone. I have had him in sight since we heard Quinton's voice."
"I will stop here and watch him," said Flambeau hurriedly. "You go in and see." ”

“ Your mother would certainly have worried if you had been engaged to the Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is bearing his disappointment very well) : how much more when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place. I could have prophesied her unrest: wait and she will calm down all right, dear. God comfort her: I dare not. . . ."
". . . Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born of comfortable but honest parents on the top of Campden Hill, Kensington. ”

“ This man, who was smoking a pipe on the bench beside him, with his knapsack before him on the table, was an artist come to sketch on that romantic coast; a tall man in a velvet jacket, with a shock of tow-colored hair, a long fair beard, but eyes of dark brown, the effect of which contrast reminded Paynter vaguely, he hardly knew why, of a Russian. The stranger carried his knapsack into many picturesque corners; he obtained permission to set up his easel in that high garden where the late Squire had held his al fresco banquets. ”

“ In a delightful villa, called Top Meadow, in Beaconsfield, a small town of Buckinghamshire, about forty minutes on the train from London, lives, and has lived for some ten years, Gilbert Keith Chesterton with his charming wife. Chesterton, a huge man, possesses the frankness and enthusiasm of a boy, with unkept curly blond hair, blue eyes, shaggy reddish brown moustache, an exceedingly pleasant and attractive smile, wearing clothes in a somewhat careless and negligent manner. Although clear and resonant, his voice is not as powerful as one would be led to expect for a man of his size. ”

“ And at this moment there came over his features a kind of frightful transfiguration of living astonishment, as if he had been lit up like a lamp from the inside. "Why, I beg your pardon, sir," he said. "I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. You took me from Leicester-square. I remember now. I beg your pardon." And with that this astonishing man let out his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away. The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George I swear, is strictly true.
. . . . .
I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the distance and the mists. ”

“ There was a sort of stir at the back of the hall and half way down one side of it. Choked whispers could be heard of "Now then, Garge!"--"Go it Garge! Is there any questions! Gor!"
Mr. Leveson looked up with an alertness somewhat akin to alarm. He realised for the first time that a few quite common men in coarse, unclean clothes, had somehow strolled in through the open door. They were not true rustics, but the semi-rustic labourers that linger about the limits of the large watering-places. There was no "Mr." among them. There was a general tendency to call everybody George. ”

“ The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us for an instant.
"But what about Greenwood and Burrows?" she said. "What did I understand you to say had become of them?"
"They are lying on the floor up-stairs," said Rupert, chuckling, "tied hand and foot."
"Well, that settles it," said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang into her seat again, "I must stop where I am."
Rupert looked bewildered.
"Stop where you are?" he said. "Why should you stop any longer where you are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?" ”

“ The Squire in his turn seemed more hopelessly puzzled than the whole crowd of his friends had been over his own escapade. "Why not?" he demanded. "I thought it was the whole point to make it look like magic. Why did you want me to die so much?"
Doctor Brown had lifted his head; and he now very slowly lifted his hand. He pointed with outstretched arm at the headland overhanging the foreshore, just above the entrance to the cave. It was the exact part of the beach where Paynter had first landed, on that spring morning when he had looked up in his first fresh wonder at the peacock trees. ”

“ You did not have to be anything in order to be one of the Twelve Fishers; unless you were already a certain sort of person, you never even heard of them. It had been in existence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-president was the Duke of Chester.
If I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this appalling hotel, the reader may feel a natural wonder as to how I came to know anything about it, and may even speculate as to how so ordinary a person as my friend Father Brown came to find himself in that golden galley. ”

“ The Lord High Provost of North Kensington, who was a prosperous draper, wrote a curt business note, like a man complaining of a railway company, stating that definite inconvenience had been caused him by the presence of the halberdiers, whom he had to take with him everywhere. When attempting to catch an omnibus to the City, he had found that while room could have been found for himself, the halberdiers had a difficulty in getting into the vehicle-believe him, theirs faithfully.
The Lord High Provost of Shepherd's Bush said his wife did not like men hanging round the kitchen. ”

“ Chester, a cynic as he is, believes seriously in the beauty of being a gentleman; a real man of that type probably disbelieved in that as in everything else. Dickens was too bracing, one may say too bouncing himself to understand the psychology of fatigue in a protected and leisured class. He could understand a tyrant like Quilp, a tyrant who is on his throne because he has climbed up into it, like a monkey. He could not understand a tyrant who is on his throne because he is too weary to get out of it. The old aristocrats were in a dead way quite good-natured. ”

“ But the awful invading Light grows stronger in the dreams, till the soul in one last struggle, plunges into a body, as into a house and wakes up within it. Then he rises and finds himself in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly coloured shapes, an inheritor of a million stars. On enquiry he is informed that his name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. ”

“ Patrick Dalroy drank a little rum out of a small medicine glass which the generally unaccountable Mr. Pump unaccountably produced from his waistcoat pocket; but Patrick's colour had risen, his brow was almost as red as his hair; and he was evidently reluctant.
"I don't see why I should sing all the songs," he said. "Why the divil don't you sing a song yourself? And now I come to think of it," he cried, with an accumulating brogue, not, perhaps, wholly unaffected by the rum, which he had not, in fact, drunk for years, "and now I come to think of it, what about that song of yours? ”

“ The black, glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost thought it was really a statue. In another moment the gray area was golden with gaslight as the basement door was opened suddenly and a small and decorous housemaid stood in it.
"Pray excuse me," said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make somehow or other at once affable and underbred, "but we thought perhaps that you might do some thing for the Waifs and Strays. We don't expect—"
"Not here," said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of the menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in our faces. ”

“ Buck merely diabolical.
"I suppose," he began, bitterly, but the King stopped him with a gesture of listening.
"Hush," he said, "I think I hear some one else coming. I seem to hear another herald, a herald whose boots creak."
As he spoke another voice cried from the doorway—
"The Lord High Provost of South Kensington desires an audience."
"The Lord High Provost of South Kensington!" cried the King. "Why, that is my old friend James Barker! What does he want, I wonder? If the tender memories of friendship have not grown misty, I fancy he wants something for himself, probably money. ”

“ He grumbled very much at the thistles and nettles, much as a city man will grumble at the jostling of a crowd. But he continued to press forward, with his nose near the ground, as if he had already smelt something that interested him. And, indeed, he had smelt something in which a dog, except on special occasions, is much more interested than he is in dogs. Breaking through a last barrier of high and hoary purple thistles he came out on a semicircle of somewhat clearer ground, dotted with slender trees, and having, by way of back scene, the brown brick arch of an old tunnel. ”

“ He's a dirty little scamp, though he is Mrs. Quinton's brother, and she's as fine a woman as ever walked."
"Yes," said Father Brown. "She's a good woman."
"So I propose to hang about the garden till the creature has cleared off," went on the doctor, "and then I'll go in to Quinton with the medicine. Atkinson can't get in, because I locked the door."
"In that case, Dr. Harris," said Flambeau, "we might as well walk round at the back by the end of the conservatory. There's no entrance to it that way, but it's worth seeing, even from the outside." ”

“ After her hasty steps had fallen silent there was no other noise than the faint but powerful purring of the now distant sea, the occasional shriek of a sea-bird, and the continuous sound of a soliloquy.
"Mark, all of you," continued the man flourishing his green umbrella so furiously that it almost flew open like a green flag unfurled, and then striking it deep in the sand, in the sand in which his fighting fathers had so often struck their tents, "mark all of you this marvellous fact! ”

“ She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively close to her on the lawn. Her quiet companion had come down very quietly into the garden, but dressed very decisively for travel. She had a neat but very ancient blue tam-o'-shanter on her head, and was pulling some rather threadbare gray gloves on to her hands. Yet the two tints fitted excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair; the more excellently for the touch of shabbiness: for a woman's clothes never suit her so well as when they seem to suit her by accident. ”

“ Do we know what they might do—we, who have only seen them asleep?"
"Great heavens!" cried Paynter. "You don't dare suggest that she——"
"No, I don't," said the lawyer, with composure, "but there are other reasons. . . . I don't suggest anything fully, till we've had our interview with this poet of yours. I think I know where to find him."
They found him, in fact, before they expected him, sitting on the bench outside the Vane Arms, drinking a mug of cider and waiting for the return of his American friend; so it was not difficult to open conversation with him. ”

“ So while the essays and romances of Gilbert Keith Chesterton reach thousands of readers week by week through the journals, and are bought with avidity in volume form, his poems are but little known to readers of his prose, although they have, I fancy, a circle of their own. Yet no one can understand Chesterton fully who ignores his verse, for his thought, expressed through this medium, is seen from another angle and so gains solidity to the view. ”

“ My only objection is a quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an alternative, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all. You cannot argue with the choice of the soul."
"Of the soul," said Barker, knitting his brows, "I cannot pretend to say anything, but speaking in the interests of the public—"
Mr. Auberon Quin rose suddenly to his feet.
"If you'll excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "I will step out for a moment into the air."
"I'm so sorry, Auberon," said Lambert, goodnaturedly; "do you feel bad?" ”

“ I snatched a knife from the mat, and, rushing between them, managed to cut the rope before I fainted."
"I see," said Father Brown, with the same wooden civility. "Thank you."
As the girl collapsed under her memories, the priest passed stiffly into the next room, where he found Gilder and Merton alone with Patrick Royce, who sat in a chair, handcuffed. There he said to the Inspector submissively:
"Might I say a word to the prisoner in your presence; and might he take off those funny cuffs for a minute?"
"He is a very powerful man," said Merton in an undertone. ”

“ If Philip, Lord Ivywood, had ever looked at a human being in his life, he would have seen that J. Leveson, Secretary, was suffering from a very ancient human malady, excusable in all men and rather more excusable in one who has had his top-hat smashed over his eyes and has run for his life. As it was, he saw nothing, but merely said, "Oh, well, get someone else. What about your friend Hibbs?" ”

“ Gilbert's first letter, from the Norfolk Broads, began "I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife: what more can any man want on a honeymoon."
Asked on his return what wallpapers he would prefer in the house they had chosen, he asked for brown paper so that he could draw pictures everywhere. He had by no means abandoned this old habit, and Annie remembers an illness during which he asked for a long enough pencil to draw on the ceiling. Their quaint little house in Edwardes Square, Kensington, lent to them by Mr. Boore, an old friend of Frances, was close to Warwick Gardens. ”