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

this oppression of a great personality. They might have called Sunday the
super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he looked, indeed, somewhat
like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction, as of a stone statue walking.
He might have been called something above man, with his large plans, which
were too obvious to be detected, with his large face, which was too frank to
be understood. But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could
not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough
to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.
The men were eating as they talked, and even in this they were typical.
Dr. Bull and the Marquis ate casually and conventionally of the best things
on the table--cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary was a
vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over half a raw
tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old Professor had
such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And even in this
President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of mere mass. For he ate
like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a frightful freshness of appetite,
so that it was like watching a sausage factory. Yet continually, when he had
swallowed a dozen crumpets or drunk a quart of coffee, he would be found
with his great head on one side staring at Syme.
"I have often wondered," said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a
slice of bread and jam, "whether it wouldn't be better for me to do it with
a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off with a knife. And it
would be a new emotion to get a knife into a French President and wriggle it
round."
"You are wrong," said the Secretary, drawing his black brows together.
"The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with a
personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best symbol. It
is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers of the Christians.
It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only
destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out,
loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with
violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It
must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe."
"I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the Marquis. "I
want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one yesterday
in bed."
"No, if the only end of the thing is nothing," said Dr. Bull with his
sphinx-like smile, "it hardly seems worth doing."
The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes.
"Every man knows in his heart, " he said, "that nothing is worth
doing."
There was a singular silence, and then the Secretary said--
"We are wandering, however, from the point. The only question is how
Wednesday is to strike the blow. I take it we should all agree with the
original notion of a bomb. As to the actual arrangements, I should suggest
that tomorrow morning he should go first of all to--"
The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday
had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.
"Before we discuss that," he said in a small, quiet voice, "let us go
into a private room. I have something vent particular to say."