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

Syme stood up before any of the others. The instant of choice had come
at last, the pistol was at his head. On the pavement before he could hear
the policeman idly stir and stamp, for the morning, though bright, was cold.
A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial
tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle. He
found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from nowhere.
That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the vulgarity, and the
irrational valour of the poor, who in all those unclean streets were all
clinging to the decencies and the charities of Christendom. His youthful
prank of being a policeman had faded from his mind; he did not think of
himself as the representative of the corps of gentlemen turned into fancy
constables, or of the old eccentric who lived in the dark room. But he did
feel himself as the ambassador of all these common and kindly people in the
street, who every day marched into battle to the music of the barrel-organ.
And this high pride in being human had lifted him unaccountably to an
infinite height above the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at
least, he looked down upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the
starry pinnacle of the commonplace. He felt towards them all that
unconscious and elementary superiority that a brave man feels over powerful
beasts or a wise man over powerful errors. He knew that he had neither the
intellectual nor the physical strength of President Sunday; but in that
moment he minded it no more than the fact that he had not the muscles of a
tiger or a horn on his nose like a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an
ultimate certainty that the President was wrong and that the barrel-organ
was right. There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism
in the song of Roland--

"Pagens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit."

which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.
This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a
quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the barrel-organ
could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This very pride in
keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last
triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for
something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ seemed to
give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises of a whole
orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the
pride of life, the drums of the pride of death.
The conspirators were already filing through the open window and into
the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his brain and
body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them down an
irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and into a dim,
cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an abandoned boardroom.
When they were all in, he closed and locked the door.
The first to speak was Gogol, the irreconcilable, who seemed bursting
with inarticulate grievance.
"Zso! Zso!" he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish
accent becoming almost impenetrable. "You zay you nod 'ide. You zay you show
himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you run