"Avram Davidson - What Strange Stars And Skies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

like pigs in the mud-banks of London River, the tall figure of Dame Phillipa would turn (for the time
being) from the waterfront, and make her way towards the quickening traffic of the Commercial Road
and Goodman Fields; proceeding through Salem Yard, Fenugreek Close, Primrose Alley, and Argyll
Court. The fashionable and sweet-smelling ladies of the West End, as well as their wretched and garishly
bedaubed fallen sisters, smelling of cheap "scent" and sweetened gin, just at this hour beginning those
peregrinations of the East End's mean and squalid streets for which those less tender than Dame Phillipa
might think them dead to all shame; were wearing, with fashion's licence, their skirts higher than they had
ever been before: but Dame Phillipa (though she never criticised the choice of others) still wore hers long,
and sometimes with one hand she would lift them an inch or two to avoid the foul pavements-- though
she never drew back from contact, neither an inch nor an instant, with any human being however filthy or
diseased.
Sometimes Miss Mothermer's bird-like little figure was with her friend and employer, perhaps
assuming for the moment the burden of the famous Army kit-bag; sometimes-- and such times Dame
Phillipa walked more slowly-- Lord FitzMorris Banstock accompanied her; but usually only quite late at
night, and along the less-frequented thoroughfares, where such people whom they were likely to meet
were too preoccupied with their own unhappy concerns, or too brutalised and too calloused, to stare at
the muscular but misshapen peer for more than a second or two.
The kit-bag had been the gift of Piggott, batman to Dame Phillipa's brother, the late Lt. Colonel Sir
Chiddiock Garreck, when she had sent him out to the Transvaal in hopes that that Province's warmer and
dryer air would be kindlier to his gas-ruined lungs than the filthy fogs and sweats of England. The kit-bag
usually contained, to my own knowledge, on an average evening, the following:
Five to ten pounds in coins, as well as several ten-shilling notes folded quite small. Two sets of singlets
and drawers, two shirts, and two pair of stockings: none of them new, but all clean and mended. A dozen
slices of bread and butter, wrapped in packets of three. Ten or twenty copies of a pamphlet-sized edition
of the Gospel of St. John in various languages. A brittania-metal pint flask of a good French brandy. A
quantity of hard-cooked eggs and an equal supply of salt and pepper in small screws of paper. Four
handkerchiefs. First aid equipment. Two reels of cotton, with needles. A packet of mixed toffees. The
Book of Common Prayer. Fifteen packets of five Woodbine cigarettes, into each of which she had thrust
six wooden matches. One pocket-mirror. A complete change of infant's clothing. Several small cakes of
soap. Several pocket-combs. A pair of scissors.
And three picture-postcards of the Royal Family.
All this arranged with maximum efficiency in minimum space, but not packed so tightly that Dame
Phillipa's fingers could not instantly produce the requisite article. It will be observed that she was
prepared to deal with a wide variety of occasions.
Tragic, infinitely tragic though it is, not even a person of Dame Phillipa's great experience among what
a late American author termed, not infelicitously, The People of the Abyss, could have been prepared
either to expect or to deal on this occasion with such persons as the man wearing the false nose or the
hideously-- the unspeakably evil Eurasian, Motilal Smith.
The countenance of Motilal Smith, once observed, is not one likely ever to be forgotten, and proves a
singular and disturbing exception to the rule that Eurasians are generally of a comely appearance; it being
broad and frog-like in its flatness, protuberance of the eyes (which are green and wet-looking), reverse
U-shaped mouth, and its multiplicity of warts or wart-like swellings. Most striking of all, however, is the
air of slyness, malevolence, of hostility both overt and covert, towards everything which is kindly and
decent and, in a word, human.
Motilal Smith has since his first appearance in the United Kingdom been the subject of unremitting
police attention, and for some time now has gained the sinister distinction of being mentioned more often
in the Annual Report of the League of Nations Commission on the Traffic in Women and Children than
any other resident of London. He has often been arrested and detained on suspicion, but the impossibility
of bringing witnesses to testify against him has invariably resulted in his release. Evidences of his nefarious
commerce have come from places so far distant as the Province of Santa Cruz in the Republic of Bolivia