G.K.Chesterton The.Man.Who.Knew.Too.Much

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bronze, like that of a brazen eagle, were often to be
found bent over the charts and folios of the library.
The great Lord Hastings believed in science and study,
as in other severe ideals of life, and had given much
paternal advice on the point to young Boyle, whose
appearances in that place of research were rather
more intermittent. It was from one of these snatches
of study that the young man had just come out
through the glass doors of the library on to the golf
links. But, above all, the club was so appointed as to
serve the social conveniences of ladies at least as
much as gentlemen, and Lady Hastings was able to
play the queen in such a society almost as much as in
her own ballroom. She was eminently calculated and,
as some said, eminently inclined to play such a part.
She was much younger than her husband, an attractive
and sometimes dangerously attractive lady; and Mr.
Horne Fisher looked after her a little sardonically as
she swept away with the young soldier. Then his rather dreary eye
strayed to the green and
prickly growths round the well, growths of that
curious cactus formation in which one thick leaf
grows directly out of the other without stalk or twig.
It gave his fanciful mind a sinister feeling of a blind growth
without shape or purpose. A
flower or shrub in the West grows to the blossom
which is its crown, and is content. But this was as if
hands could grow out of hands or legs grow out of
legs in a nightmare. "Always adding a province to the
Empire," he said, with a smile, and then added, more
sadly, "but I doubt if I was right, after all!"
A strong but genial voice broke in on his
meditations and he looked up and smiled, seeing the
face of an old friend. The voice was, indeed, rather
more genial than the face, which was at the first
glance decidedly grim. It was a typically legal face, with
angular jaws and heavy, grizzled eyebrows; and it belonged to an
eminently legal character, though he was now attached in a
semimilitary capacity to the police of that wild district.
Cuthbert Grayne was perhaps more of a criminologist
than either a lawyer or a policeman, but in his more
barbarous surroundings he had proved successful in
turning himself into a practical combination of all
three. The discovery of a whole series of strange
Oriental crimes stood to his credit. But as few people
were acquainted with, or attracted to, such a hobby
or branch of knowledge, his intellectual life was
somewhat solitary. Among the few exceptions was
Horne Fisher, who had a curious capacity for talking
to almost anybody about almost anything.
"Studying botany, or is it archaeology?" inquired
Grayne. "I shall never come to the end of your
interests, Fisher. I should say that what you don't
know isn't worth knowing."
"You are wrong," replied Fisher, with a very
unusual abruptness 'and even bitterness. "It's what I
do know that isn't worth knowing. All the seamy side
of things, all the secret reasons and rotten motives
and bribery arid blackmail they call politics. I needn't
be so proud of having been down all these sewers
that I should brag about it to the little boys in the
street."
"What do you mean? What's the matter with
you?" asked his friend. "I never knew you taken like
this before."
"I'm ashamed of myself," replied Fisher. "I've just
been throwing cold water on the enthusiasms of a boy."
"Even that explanation is hardly exhaustive," observed the
criminal expert.
"Damned newspaper nonsense the enthusiasms
were, of course," continued Fisher, "but I ought to
know that at that age illusions can be ideals. And
they're better than the reality, anyhow. But there is
one very ugly responsibility
about jolting a young man out of the rut of the
most rotten ideal."
"And what may that be?" inquired his friend.
"It's very apt to set him off with the same energy
in a much worse direction," answered Fisher; "a
pretty endless sort of direction, a bottomless pit as
deep as the bottomless well."
Fisher did not see his friend until a fortnight later,
when he found himself in the garden at the back of
the clubhouse on the opposite side from the links, a
garden heavily colored and scented with sweet
semitropical plants in the glow of a desert sunset.
Two other men were with him, the third being the
now celebrated second in command, familiar to
everybody as Tom Travers, a lean, dark man, who [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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