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

boisterous breakfast party was the secret conclave of the European
Dynamiters.
Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had
not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to
see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the
perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen
him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the
balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was
abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in
his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His
head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head
ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears.
He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering,
that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to
dwindle and become dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with
their flowers and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was
entertaining five children to tea.
As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter
came out smiling with every tooth in his head.
"The gentlemen are up there, sare," he said. "They do talk and they do
laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king."
And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased
with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.
The two men mounted the stairs in silence.
Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost
filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others
stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous
certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more
nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental
health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too
sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little
unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a
sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this
sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.
The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked
across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew
larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite
close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream
aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon
in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.
By an effort, braver than that of leaping over a cliff, he went to an
empty seat at the breakfast-table and sat down. The men greeted him with
good-humoured raillery as if they had always known him. He sobered himself a
little by looking at their conventional coats and solid, shining coffee-pot;
then he looked again at Sunday. His face was very large, but it was still
possible to humanity.
In the presence of the President the whole company looked sufficiently
commonplace; nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by the
President's caprice they had been dressed up with a festive respectability,
which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast. One man indeed stood