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

For Mr Rock was very firmly and rightly convinced that a very large
number of things hadn't ought to be. He was a slashing and savage critic of
national degeneration, on the Minneapolis Meteor, and a bold and honest man.
He had perhaps come to specialize too much in the spirit of indignation, but
it had had a healthy enough origin in his reaction against sloppy attempts
to confuse right and wrong in modern journalism and gossip. He expressed it
first in the form of a protest against an unholy halo of romance being
thrown round the gunman and the gangster. Perhaps he was rather too much
inclined to assume, in robust impatience, that all gangsters were Dagos and
that all Dagos were gangsters. But his prejudices, even when they were a
little provincial, were rather refreshing after a certain sort of maudlin
and unmanly hero - worship, which was ready to regard a professional
murderer as a leader of fashion, so long as the pressmen reported that his
smile was irresistible or his tuxedo was all right. Anyhow, the prejudices
did not boil the less in the bosom of Mr Rock, because he was actually in
the land of the Dagos when this story opens; striding furiously up a hill
beyond the Mexican border, to the white hotel, fringed with ornamental
palms, in which it was supposed that the Potters were staying and that the
mysterious Hypatia now held her court. Agar Rock was a good specimen of a
Puritan, even to look at; he might even have been a virile Puritan of the
seventeenth century, rather than the softer and more sophisticated Puritan
of the twentieth. If you had told him that his antiquated black hat and
habitual black frown, and fine flinty features, cast a gloom over the sunny
land of palms and vines, he would have been very much gratified. He looked
to right and left with eyes bright with universal suspicions. And, as he did
so, he saw two figures on the ridge above him, outlined against the clear
sub - tropical sunset; figures in a momentary posture which might have made
even a less suspicious man suspect something.
One of the figures was rather remarkable in itself. It was poised at
the exact angle of the turning road above the valley, as if by an instinct
for the site as well as the attitude of statuary. It was wrapt in a great
black cloak, in the Byronic manner, and the head that rose above it in
swarthy beauty was remarkably like Byron's. This man had the same curling
hair and curling nostrils; and he seemed to be snorting something of the
same scorn and indignation against the world. He grasped in his hand a
rather long cane or walking - stick, which having a spike of the sort used
for mountaineering, carried at the moment a fanciful suggestion of a spear.
It was rendered all the more fanciful by something comically contradictory
in the figure of the other man, who carried an umbrella. It was indeed a new
and neatly - rolled umbrella, very different, for instance, from Father
Brown's umbrella: and he was neatly clad like a clerk in light holiday
clothes; a stumpy stoutish bearded man; but the prosaic umbrella was raised
and even brandished at an acute angle of attack. The taller man thrust back
at him, but in a hasty defensive manner; and then the scene rather collapsed
into comedy; for the umbrella opened of itself and its owner almost seemed
to sink behind it, while the other man had the air of pushing his spear
through a great grotesque shield. But the other man did not push it, or the
quarrel, very far; he plucked out the point, turned away impatiently and
strode down the road; while the other, rising and carefully refolding his
umbrella, turned in the opposite direction towards the hotel. Rock had not