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

false and curved mirror.
Only the individual examples will express this half-concealed
eccentricity. Syme's original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was the
Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with more
terror than anything, except the President's horrible, happy laughter. But
now that Syme had more space and light to observe him, there were other
touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme thought it must be wasted
with some disease; yet somehow the very distress of his dark eyes denied
this. It was no physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were alive with
intellectual torture, as if pure thought was pain.
He was typical of each of the tribe; each man was subtly and
differently wrong. Next to him sat Tuesday, the tousle-headed Gogol, a man
more obviously mad. Next was Wednesday, a certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a
sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing
unusual about him, except that he was the only man at table who wore the
fashionable clothes as if they were really his own. He had a black French
beard cut square and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer. But Syme,
sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a rich
atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one
irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of
Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad, not in lighter
colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer and warmer than
the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of profound colour. His
black coat looked as if it were only black by being too dense a purple. His
black beard looked as if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in
the gloom and thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed sensual and
scornful. Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he
might be something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the bright
coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may see
just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.
Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still
kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his death
would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last dissolution
of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey beard, his forehead
was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild despair. In no other case,
not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress
express a more painful contrast. For the red flower in his button-hole
showed up against a face that was literally discoloured like lead; the whole
hideous effect was as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a
corpse. When he rose or sat down, which was with long labour and peril,
something worse was expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably
connected with the horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude
merely, but corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme's quivering mind.
He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might
fall off.
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most
baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face
clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that
combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is
not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence