In Chapter 4, Chesterton uses a flashback to contextualize Syme’s dedication to reason and especially his desire to eradicate anarchism and rebellion:
His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous, rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane.
This revelation of Syme’s deeply-held memory of horrific trauma and bloodshed crystallizes why he feels so strongly about his anti-anarchist views. The violent bombing attack that occurs in this flashback is poignantly rendered—Syme’s terror, the quick flashes of gruesome images, his loss of sight and sound—and Syme’s struggle to return to normalcy following this attack is likewise depicted as a logical response to an utterly incomprehensible life event.
This flashback sequence continues, moving slightly forward in time to depict how the aftershocks of this bombing continued to effect him:
Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak, black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early villains in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards, cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. [...] altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a holy war.
Haunted by his past experiences, Syme descends into shabbiness and listlessness. That is, until he is stopped on the street for looking unkempt by the philosophical police officer. This fateful encounter leads to Syme’s recruitment to the secret anti-anarchist police force, and his discovery of a new purpose: to improve society by protecting the common, ordinary man.
