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

whole pewter pot of ale before the professor had touched his milk.
One possibility, however, kept him hopeful and yet helpless. It was
just possible that this escapade signified something other than even a
slight suspicion of him. Perhaps it was some regular form or sign. Perhaps
the foolish scamper was some sort of friendly signal that he ought to have
understood. Perhaps it was a ritual. Perhaps the new Thursday was always
chased along Cheapside, as the new Lord Mayor is always escorted along it.
He was just selecting a tentative inquiry, when the old Professor opposite
suddenly and simply cut him short. Before Syme could ask the first
diplomatic question, the old anarchist had asked suddenly, without any sort
of preparation--
"Are you a policeman?"
Whatever else Syme had expected, he had never expected anything so
brutal and actual as this. Even his great presence of mind could only manage
a reply with an air of rather blundering jocularity.
"A policeman?" he said, laughing vaguely. "Whatever made you think of a
policeman in connection with me?"
"The process was simple enough," answered the Professor patiently. "I
thought you looked like a policeman. I think so now."
"Did I take a policeman's hat by mistake out of the restaurant?" asked
Syme, smiling wildly. "Have I by any chance got a number stuck on to me
somewhere? Have my boots got that watchful look? Why must I be a policeman?
Do, do let me be a postman."
The old Professor shook his head with a gravity that gave no hope, but
Syme ran on with a feverish irony.
"But perhaps I misunderstood the delicacies of your German philosophy.
Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense, sir, the ape
fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never detect the
shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps a maiden lady
on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have been. I don't mind
being the policeman that might have been. I don't mind being anything in
German thought."
"Are you in the police service?" said the old man, ignoring all Syme's
improvised and desperate raillery. "Are you a detective?"
Syme's heart turned to stone, but his face never changed.
"Your suggestion is ridiculous," he began. "Why on earth--"
The old man struck his palsied hand passionately on the rickety table,
nearly breaking it.
"Did you hear me ask a plain question, you pattering spy?" he shrieked
in a high, crazy voice. "Are you, or are you not, a police detective?"
"No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.
"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face
becoming as it were loathsomely alive. "You swear it! You swear it! If you
swear falsely, will you be damned? Will you be sure that the devil dances at
your funeral? Will you see that the nightmare sits on your grave? Will there
really be no mistake? You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all,
you are not in any sense a detective? You are not in the British police?"
He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large
loose hand like a flap to his ear.
"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.