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

responsibility. Very simply, he had no fear to spare for the French
President or the Czar; he had begun to fear for himself. Most of the talkers
took little heed of him, debating now with their faces closer together, and
almost uniformly grave, save when for an instant the smile of the Secretary
ran aslant across his face as the jagged lightning runs aslant across the
sky. But there was one persistent thing which first troubled Syme and at
last terrified him. The President was always looking at him, steadily, and
with a great and baffling interest. The enormous man was quite quiet, but
his blue eyes stood out of his head. And they were always fixed on Syme.
Syme felt moved to spring up and leap over the balcony. When the
President's eyes were on him he felt as if he were made of glass. He had
hardly the shred of a doubt that in some silent and extraordinary way Sunday
had found out that he was a spy. He looked over the edge of the balcony, and
saw a policeman, standing abstractedly just beneath, staring at the bright
railings and the sunlit trees.
Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him
for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men, who were
the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and fanciful
figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism. He even thought
of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played together when
children. But he remembered that he was still tied to Gregory by a great
promise. He had promised never to do the very thing that he now felt himself
almost in the act of doing. He had promised not to jump over that balcony
and speak to that policeman. He took his cold hand off the cold stone
balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to
snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life
could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other
hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into
the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a
torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the
comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever
he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly
studying him with big, unbearable eyes.
In all the torrent of his thought there were two thoughts that never
crossed his mind. First, it never occurred to him to doubt that the
President and his Council could crush him if he continued to stand alone.
The place might be public, the project might seem impossible. But Sunday was
not the man who would carry himself thus easily without having, somehow or
somewhere, set open his iron trap. Either by anonymous poison or sudden
street accident, by hypnotism or by fire from hell, Sunday could certainly
strike him. If he defied the man he was probably dead, either struck stiff
there in his chair or long afterwards as by an innocent ailment. If he
called in the police promptly, arrested everyone, told all, and set against
them the whole energy of England, he would probably escape; certainly not
otherwise. They were a balconyful of gentlemen overlooking a bright and busy
square; but he felt no more safe with them than if they had been a boatful
of armed pirates overlooking an empty sea.
There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to
him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak
worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under