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

"Only in that sense I speak of," replied Syme; "or if you prefer it, in
that nonsense."
She drew her broad brows together and said abruptly--
"He wouldn't really use--bombs or that sort of thing?"
Syme broke into a great laugh, that seemed too large for his slight and
somewhat dandified figure.
"Good Lord, no!" he said, "that has to be done anonymously."
And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity and of his
safety.
Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in spite
of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always
the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too
closely. He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration. He grew
passionate in his praise of tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a
smell of lilac all round him. Once he heard very faintly in some distant
street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic
words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world.
He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the
whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a
rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which
he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow
this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was
over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive
in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her
strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn
tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable, that it might
well have been a dream.
When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street
lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence
behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure almost as rigid
and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long frock coat
were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as dark. Only a fringe
of fiery hair against the light, and also something aggressive in the
attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He had something of the
look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for his foe.
He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally
returned.
"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's
conversation?"
"Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the
tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is
your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is
anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in