【英文原著类】THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH(知道得太多的人).pdf

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
THE MAN WHO KNEW
TOO MUCH
By Gilbert K. Chesterton
1
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
CHAPTER I. THE FACE IN THE
TARGET
Harold March, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking
vigorously across a great tableland of moors mons, the horizon of
which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous estate of Torwood
Park. He was a good-looking young man in tweeds, with very pale curly
hair and pale clear eyes. Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape of
liberty, he was still young enough to remember his politics and not merely
try to forget them. For his errand at Torwood Park was a political one; it
was the place of appointment named by no less a person than the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Howard Horne, then introducing his so-
called Socialist budget, and prepared to expound it in an interview with so
promising a penman. Harold March was the sort of man who knows
everything about politics, and nothing about politicians. He also knew a
great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost
everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.
Abruptly, in the middle of those sunny and windy flats, he came upon
a sort of cleft almost narrow enough to be called a crack in the land. It was
just large enough to be the water-course for a small stream which vanished
at intervals under green tunnels of undergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest.
Indeed, he had an odd feeling as if he were a giant looking over the valley
of the pygmies. When he dropped into the hollow, however, the
impression was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above the height of a
cottage, hung over and had the profile of a precipice. As he began to
wander down the course of the stream, in idle but romantic curiosity, and
saw the water shining in short strips between the great gray boulders and
bushes as soft as great green mosses, he fell into quite an opposite vein of
fantasy. It was rather as if the ear