AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

believe my statement, but it is none the less true that the incident came before
and not after the more appropriate use of the corkscrew. I was perfectly sober;
probably I should have been more vigilant if I had been drunk. Another
anecdote, expanded into “The Adventure of the Astonished Clerk”, accused
me of having asked for a cup of coffee instead of a ticket at the booking-office
of a railway station, and doubtless I went on to ask the waitress politely for a
third single to Battersea. I am not particularly proud of this characteristic, for I
think that presence of mind is far more really poetical than absence of mind.
But I only mention it, at this stage, because it introduces a character who
played a considerable part in the fortunes of my friends and myself; and who,
in the absorbing narrative of “The Adventure of the Curate’s Trousers”, was
cast for the important part of the curate.
I cannot remember exactly where my brother or I first met the Rev. Conrad
Noel. I rather fancy it was at some strange club where somebody was lecturing
on Nietzsche; and where the debaters (by typical transition) passed from the
gratifying thought that Nietzsche attacked Christianity to the natural inference
that he was a True Christian. And I admired the common sense of a curate,
with dark curly hair and a striking face, who got up and pointed out that
Nietzsche would be even more opposed to True Christianity than to False
Christianity, supposing there were any True Christianity to oppose. I learned
that the curate’s name was Noel, but in many ways his intervention was
symbolic of my experience of that strange world. That Intelligentsia of the
artistic and vaguely anarchic clubs was indeed a very strange world. And the
strangest thing about it, I fancy, was that, while it thought a great deal about
thinking, it did not think. Everything seemed to come at second or third hand;
from Nietzsche or Tolstoy or Ibsen or Shaw; and there was a pleasant
atmosphere of discussing all these things, without any particular sense of
responsibility for coming to any conclusion on them. The company often
included really clever people, like Mr. Edgar Jepson, who always seemed as if
he had strayed out of Society to smile mysteriously in Bohemia. Here and
there it would include a man who had not only cleverness but strong
traditional beliefs, which he kept largely to himself; like my old friend Louis
McQuilland, who was long content to appear as a modern of the club called
the Moderns, dealing in detached epigrams of the Wilde and Whistler fashion;
and guarding within him all the time a flame of pure Catholic faith and
burning Irish Nationalism, which never appeared save when those sacred
things were challenged. But I think it profoundly significant, as a matter of
intellectual instincts, that he preferred the almost avowed nonsense of the
Decadents to the more high-minded and heretical earnestness of the Fabians.
He once said in his wrath, on the occasion of the hundredth eulogy on Candida
or Arms and the Man, something which ran (if I remember right) in a
Scriptural form, “Stay me with Hitchens, comfort me with Beerbohm; for I am