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

rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever
odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles.
It may have been merely a crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before,
but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of
half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the
eyes of the dead. Syme's eye always caught the black glasses and the blind
grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they
would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed
only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what
his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had
a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he
might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought
that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see.


CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE


SUCH were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and
again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence.
Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective, that he
was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous,
another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled
back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of
things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that
each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild
road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if
a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something-- say a
tree--that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and
that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else
that was not wholly itself-- a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was
wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable,
against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth
were closing in.
Talk had been going on steadily as he took in the scene; and not the
least of the contrasts of that bewildering breakfast-table was the contrast
between the easy and unobtrusive tone of talk and its terrible purport. They
were deep in the discussion of an actual and immediate plot. The waiter
downstairs had spoken quite correctly when he said that they were talking
about bombs and kings. Only three days afterwards the Czar was to meet the
President of the French Republic in Paris, and over their bacon and eggs
upon their sunny balcony these beaming gentlemen had decided how both should
die. Even the instrument was chosen; the black-bearded Marquis, it appeared,
was to carry the bomb.
Ordinarily speaking, the proximity of this positive and objective crime
would have sobered Syme, and cured him of all his merely mystical tremors.
He would have thought of nothing but the need of saving at least two human
bodies from being ripped in pieces with iron and roaring gas. But the truth
was that by this time he had begun to feel a third kind of fear, more
piercing and practical than either his moral revulsion or his social