"Г.К.Честертон. The Scandal of Father Brown " - читать интересную книгу автора

not. But still nobody knew how many people had heard the story without
hearing the contradiction. It was possible to find whole blocks of blameless
and innocent people who thought the Mexican Scandal was an ordinary recorded
historical incident like the Gunpowder Plot. Then somebody would enlighten
these simple people, only to discover that the old story had started afresh
among a few quite educated people, who would seem the last people on earth
to be duped by it. And so the two Father Browns chase each other round the
world for ever; the first a shameless criminal fleeing from justice; the
second a martyr broken by slander, in a halo of rehabilitation. But neither
of them is very like the real Father Brown, who is not broken at all; but
goes stumping with his stout umbrella through life, liking most of the
people in it; accepting the world as his companion, but never as his judge.
TWO: The Quick One
The strange story of the incongruous strangers is still remembered
along that strip of the Sussex coast, where the large and quiet hotel called
the Maypole and Garland looks across its own gardens to the sea. Two
quaintly assorted figures did, indeed, enter that quiet hotel on that sunny
afternoon; one being conspicuous in the sunlight, and visible over the whole
shore, by the fact of wearing a lustrous green turban, surrounding a brown
face and a black beard; the other would have seemed to some even more wild
and weird, by reason of his wearing a soft black clergyman's hat with a
yellow moustache and yellow hair of leonine length. He at least had often
been seen preaching on the sands or conducting Band of Hope services with a
little wooden spade; only he had certainly never been seen going into the
bar of an hotel. The arrival of these quaint companions was the climax of
the story, but not the beginning of it; and, in order to make a rather
mysterious story as clear as possible, it is better to begin at the
beginning.
Half an hour before those two conspicuous figures entered the hotel,
and were noticed by everybody, two other very inconspicuous figures had also
entered it, and been noticed by nobody. One was a large man, and handsome in
a heavy style, but he had a knack of taking up very little room, like a
background; only an almost morbidly suspicious examination of his boots
would have told anybody that he was an Inspector of Police in plain clothes;
in very plain clothes. The other was a drab and insignificant little man,
also in plain clothes, only that they happened to be clerical clothes; but
nobody had ever seen him preaching on the sands.
These travellers also found themselves in a sort of large smoking -
room with a bar, for a reason which determined all the events of that tragic
afternoon. The truth is that the respectable hotel called the Maypole and
Garland was being 'done - up'. Those who had liked it in the past were moved
to say that it was being done down; or possibly done in. This was the
opinion of the local grumbler, Mr Raggley, the eccentric old gentleman who
drank cherry brandy in a corner and cursed. Anyhow, it was being carefully
stripped of all the stray indications that it had once been an English inn;
and being busily turned, yard by yard and room by room, into something
resembling the sham palace of a Levantine usurer in an American film. It
was, in short, being 'decorated'; but the only part where the decoration was
complete, and where customers could yet be made comfortable, was this large
room leading out of the hall. It had once been honourably known as a Bar