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

heard any of the words of the quarrel, which must have immediately preceded
this brief and rather absurd bodily conflict; but as he went up the road in
the track of the short man with the beard, he revolved many things. And the
romantic cloak and rather operatic good looks of the one man, combined with
the sturdy self - assertion of the other, fitted in with the whole story
which he had come to seek; and he knew that he could have fixed those two
strange figures with their names: Romanes and Potter.
His view was in every way confirmed when he entered the pillared porch;
and heard the voice of the bearded man raised high in altercation or
command. He was evidently speaking to the manager or staff of the hotel, and
Rock heard enough to know that he was warning them of a wild and dangerous
character in the neighbourhood.
'If he's really been to the hotel already,' the little man was saying,
in answer to some murmur, 'all I can say is that you'd better not let him in
again. Your police ought to be looking after a fellow of that sort, but
anyhow, I won't have the lady pestered with him.'
Rock listened in grim silence and growing conviction; then he slid
across the vestibule to an alcove where he saw the hotel register and
turning to the last page, saw 'the fellow' had indeed been to the hotel
already. There appeared the name of 'Rudel Romanes,' that romantic public
character, in very large and florid foreign lettering; and after a space
under it, rather close together, the names of Hypatia Potter and Ellis T.
Potter, in a correct and quite American handwriting.
Agar Rock looked moodily about him, and saw in the surroundings and
even the small decorations of the hotel everything that he hated most. It is
perhaps unreasonable to complain of oranges growing on orange - trees, even
in small tubs; still more of their only growing on threadbare curtains or
faded wallpapers as a formal scheme of ornament. But to him those red and
golden moons, decoratively alternated with silver moons, were in a queer way
the quintessence of all moonshine. He saw in them all that sentimental
deterioration which his principles deplored in modern manners, and which his
prejudices vaguely connected with the warmth and softness of the South. It
annoyed him even to catch sight of a patch of dark canvas, half - showing a
Watteau shepherd with a guitar, or a blue tile with a common - place design
of a Cupid on a dolphin. His common sense would have told him that he might
have seen these things in a shop - window on Fifth Avenue; but where they
were, they seemed like a taunting siren voice of the Paganism of the
Mediterranean. And then suddenly, the look of all these things seemed to
alter, as a still mirror will flicker when a figure has flashed past it for
a moment; and he knew the whole room was full of a challenging presence. He
turned almost stiffly, and with a sort of resistance, and knew that he was
facing the famous Hypatia, of whom he had read and heard for so many years.
Hypatia Potter, nee Hard, was one of those people to whom the word
'radiant' really does apply definitely and derivatively. That is, she
allowed what the papers called her Personality to go out from her in rays.
She would have been equally beautiful, and to some tastes more attractive,
if she had been self - contained; but she had always been taught to believe
that self - containment was only selfishness. She would have said that she
had lost Self in Service; it would perhaps be truer to say that she had
asserted Self in Service; but she was quite in good faith about the service.