Chesterton The Return of Don Quixote

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.In this case, for instance, anybody looking at the surface of the situation would naturally say that the whole of humanity had gone mad.Anybody who says the paints they advertise in that leaflet are better than my paints obviously must be mad.And so, in a sense, most of these people really are mad.What the scientific men of the age have failed altogether to investigate adequately is why they are mad.Now by my theory the unmistakable symptom of colour-blindness is connected with–”“I’m afraid you must excuse my father talking any more,” said the young woman in a voice that was at once harsh and refined.“I think he is a little tired.”“Oh, certainly,” said Murrel, and got up in a rather dazed fashion.He was moving towards the door, when he was suddenly stopped by an almost startling transformation in the young lady.She still stood in a rather rigid fashion behind her father’s chair.But her eyes, which were both dark and bright, shifted and shot, as it were, in a shining obliquity towards the window; and every line in her not ungraceful figure turned into a straight line like a steel rod.In the dead silence a sound could be heard through the half-open window.It was the sound of the large and lumbering wheels of the antiquated hansom cab drawing up at the door.Murrel, still full of embarrassment, opened the door of the room and went out on to the dark landing.When he turned he found, with a certain surprise, that the girl had followed him.“Do you know what that means?” she asked.“That brute there has come for father.”A dim premonition of the probable state of affairs began to pass across his mind.He knew that a number of new and rather sweeping laws, which in practice only swept over the poor streets, had given medical and other officials very abrupt and arbitrary powers over people supposed to fall short of the full efficiency of the manager of the stores.He thought it only too likely that the discoverer of the remarkable scientific theory of colour-blindness as a cause of social decay might appear to fall short of that efficiency.Indeed, it would even seem that his own daughter thought so, from her desperate efforts to steer the poor old gentleman away from the topic.In plain words, somebody was going to treat the eccentric as a lunatic.And as he was not an eccentric millionaire or an eccentric squire, or even in these days regarded as an eccentric gentleman, it was probable enough that the new classification could be effected rapidly and without a hitch.Murrel felt what he had never felt fully since he was a boy, a sudden and boiling rage.He opened his mouth to speak, but the girl had already struck in with her voice of steel.“It’s been like that all along,” she said.“First they kick him into the gutter and then they blame him for being there.It’s as if you hammered a child on the head till he was stunned and stupid and then abused him for being a dunce.”“Your father,” observed the visitor doubtfully, “does not strike me as at all stupid.”“Oh, no,” she answered, “he’s too clever, and that proves he’s cracked.If he wasn’t cracked, it would prove that he was half-witted.If it isn’t one way it’s the other.They always know how to have you.”“Who are they?” asked Murrel, in a low and (for anyone who knew him) rather menacing voice.The question was in some sense answered, not by the person to whom it was addressed, but by a deep and rather guttural voice coming up the black well of the staircase, from somebody who was mounting the stairs.The crazy stairs creaked and even shook under him as he mounted, for he was a heavy man, and as he emerged into the half-light from the little window on the landing he seemed to fill up the whole entrance with a bulk of big overcoat and broad shoulders.The face that was thus turned up to the light reminded Murrel for the first moment of something between a walrus and a whale; it was as if some deep-sea monster was rising out of the deeps and turning up its round and pale and fishy face like a moon.When he looked at the man more carefully and less fancifully he saw that the effect came from very fair hair being very closely cropped in contrast with a moustache like a pair of pale tusks, and from the light of the window on the round spectacles.This was Dr.Gambrel, who spoke perfectly good English, but stumbled on the steep stairs and swore softly in some other speech.Monkey listened intently a moment, and then silently slipped back into the room.“Why don’t you have a light?” asked the doctor sharply [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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