Chapter Eight
The Professor Explains
Chapter Summary, questions, comments and spoiler?


Thursday/Syme is flabbergasted when the Professor asks him point blank if he is a policeman. Thursday/Syme tries to play the question off but the Professor demands and answer so Thursday/Syme lies and says that his is not. The Professor then calmly reveals that he is one and produces a blue card to prove it.

Relieved, Thursday/Syme comes clean by showing his blue card.

The Professor now tells his story to Syme. He is really a 38-year-old actor named Wilks. He had been impersonating Professor de Worms as a joke, but did it so convincingly that he was often mistaken for the famous German nihilist. Eventually the real de Worms tracked down Wilks while he was in disguise, in public. Wilks and the real Professor engaged in a debate in front of a group of atheists. Wilks was so convincing that the crowd believed him to be the real de Worms.

Soon after Wilks was contacted by the mysterious man in the dark room and recruited into the fight against anarchy.

There is a discussion about the upcoming attack and that the plot will be difficult to stop since they are ignorant of the details. The decide that the only way to stop the plot is to stop Bull.

The order for milk was questioned in the previous chapter summary. Was Chesterton playing with us? The Thursday prior to Syme had died from drinking a false concoction because he objected to animal abuse. But why drink an imposter for milk instead of some other beverage? Now Wilks orders milk. Why? And it turns out that Wilk hates milk.

So, what’s going on with the Council of Anarchists? We now know that three of the seven are impostors who are actually policemen. What are the odd that would occur by chance?
What question immediately comes to mind?

Is there a candidate for an historical de Worms?