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

in the little garden of Saffron Park. Before he finally left the police
premises his friend provided him with a small blue card, on which was
written, "The Last Crusade," and a number, the sign of his official
authority. He put this carefully in his upper waistcoat pocket, lit a
cigarette, and went forth to track and fight the enemy in all the
drawing-rooms of London. Where his adventure ultimately led him we have
already seen. At about half-past one on a February night he found himself
steaming in a small tug up the silent Thames, armed with swordstick and
revolver, the duly elected Thursday of the Central Council of Anarchists.
When Syme stepped out on to the steam-tug he had a singular sensation
of stepping out into something entirely new; not merely into the landscape
of a new land, but even into the landscape of a new planet. This was mainly
due to the insane yet solid decision of that evening, though partly also to
an entire change in the weather and the sky since he entered the little
tavern some two hours before. Every trace of the passionate plumage of the
cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky.
The moon was so strong and full that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it
seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but
rather of a dead daylight.
Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as
of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in
eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was
actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some sadder
star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land,
the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire. Even
the common things he carried with him--the food and the brandy and the
loaded pistol--took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a
child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed. The
sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of
morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his own more healthy romance.
The sword-stick became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine
of the stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on
some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer
must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even be grotesque. So
this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the presence of a man really
human. To Syme's exaggerative mind the bright, bleak houses and terraces by
the Thames looked as empty as the mountains of the moon. But even the moon
is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively
slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the time
that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous bulk of
Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the splitting of
great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had brightened like
white fire when the tug, changing its onward course, turned inward to a
large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.
The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as
Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white dawn.
They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of some
Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he was, in his
own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible and heathen