"G.K.Chesterton. The man who was Thursday. A nightmare (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

you?"
"A very entertaining evening," said Syme, and he made a military salute
with the sword-stick as the steamboat slid away.


CHAPTER IV. THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE


GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he
was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy
hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too
conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He
had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was
spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family
of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of
his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an
unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father
cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and
hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted
with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which
he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan
abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude;
and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter
had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.
Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy,
Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing
left--sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these
fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be
sensible. 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. He did not regard anarchists, as most of us
do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He
regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.
He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets a
torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of
barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what
was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly
biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no
anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed,
he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its back to
the wall. He was too quixotic to have cared for it otherwise.
He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river
reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed,
was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the
water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked
like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a
subterranean country.