G K Chesterton

The Man Who Knew Too Much G K Chesterton

Harold March, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking vigorously across a greattableland of moors and commons, the horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woodsof the famous estate of Torwood Park. He was a good-looking young man in tweeds, withvery pale curly hair and pale clear eyes. Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape ofliberty, he was still young enough to remember his politics and not merely try to forgetthem. For his errand at Torwood Park was a political one; it was the place of appointmentnamed by no less a person than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Howard Horne, thenintroducing his so-called Socialist budget, and prepared to expound it in an interview withso promising a penman. Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything aboutpolitics, 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 wasliving in. Abruptly, in the middle of those sunny and windy flats, he came upon a sort of cleftalmost narrow enough to be called a crack in the land. It was just large enough to be thewater-course for a small stream which vanished at intervals under green tunnels ofundergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest. Indeed, he had an odd feeling as if he were a giantlooking over the valley of the pygmies. When he dropped into the hollow, however, theimpression was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above the height of a cottage, hungover and had the profile of a precipice. As he began to wander down the course of thestream, in idle but romantic curiosity, and saw the water shining in short strips betweenthe great gray boulders and bushes as soft as great green mosses, he fell into quite anopposite vein of fantasy. It was rather as if the earth had opened and swallowed him into asort of underworld of dreams. And when he became conscious of a human figure darkagainst the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, itwas perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangestfriendship of his life. The man was apparently fishing; or at least was fixed in a fisherman's attitude with morethan a fisherman's immobility. March was able to examine the man almost as if he had beena statue for some minutes before the statue spoke. He was a tall, fair man, cadaverous, anda little lackadaisical, with heavy eyelids and a highbridged nose. When his face was shadedwith his wide white hat, his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. Butthe Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see that his brow wasprematurely bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an airof headwork and even headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after ashort scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was not fishing