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

Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly
collapse.
"That's a pity," he said, "because I am."
Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a
crash.
"Because you are what?" he said thickly. "You are what?"
"I am a policeman," said the Professor with his first broad smile. and
beaming through his spectacles. "But as you think policeman only a relative
term, of course I have nothing to do with you. I am in the British police
force; but as you tell me you are not in the British police force, I can
only say that I met you in a dynamiters' club. I suppose I ought to arrest
you." And with these words he laid on the table before Syme an exact
facsimile of the blue card which Syme had in his own waistcoat pocket, the
symbol of his power from the police.
Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly
upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were
under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the last
twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now the
capsized universe had come right side up again. This devil from whom he had
been fleeing all day was only an elder brother of his own house, who on the
other side of the table lay back and laughed at him. He did not for the
moment ask any questions of detail; he only knew the happy and silly fact
that this shadow, which had pursued him with an intolerable oppression of
peril, was only the shadow of a friend trying to catch him up. He knew
simultaneously that he was a fool and a free man. For with any recovery from
morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain
point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a
perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. Syme's
egotism held hard to the first course for a few seconds, and then suddenly
adopted the third. Taking his own blue police ticket from his own waist coat
pocket, he tossed it on to the table; then he flung his head back until his
spike of yellow beard almost pointed at the ceiling, and shouted with a
barbaric laughter.
Even in that close den, perpetually filled with the din of knives,
plates, cans, clamorous voices, sudden struggles and stampedes, there was
something Homeric in Syme's mirth which made many half-drunken men look
round.
"What yer laughing at, guv'nor?" asked one wondering labourer from the
docks.
"At myself," answered Syme, and went off again into the agony of his
ecstatic reaction.
"Pull yourself together," said the Professor, "or you'll get
hysterical. Have some more beer. I'll join you."
"You haven't drunk your milk," said Syme.
"My milk! " said the other, in tones of withering and unfathomable
contempt, "my milk! Do you think I'd look at the beastly stuff when I'm out
of sight of the bloody anarchists? We're all Christians in this room, though
perhaps," he added, glancing around at the reeling crowd, "not strict ones.
Finish my milk? Great blazes! yes, I'll finish it right enough!" and he
knocked the tumbler off the table, making a crash of glass and a splash of