"Г.К.Честертон. The Club of Queer Trades " - читать интересную книгу автора

The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.

"I am terribly sorry, Major," said he, "but what you ask is
impossible. I don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you;
but the rules of the agency are strict. The Adventures are
confidential; you are an outsider; I am not allowed to let you
know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you understand--"

"There is no one," said Brown, "who understands discipline better
than I do. Thank you very much. Good night."

And the little man withdrew for the last time.

He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the
Romance Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused
some stir in her languid and intellectualized set. She always
replied very quietly that she had met scores of men who acted
splendidly in the charades provided for them by Northover, but that
she had only met one man who went down into a coal-cellar when he
really thought it contained a murderer.

The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd
villa, and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is
unchanged--except, perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full
of feminine unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into
a trance of abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed
smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering
what were the title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention
jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and
believes that he will realize the rest of those purple adventures
in a better world.



Chapter 2

The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted
tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the
top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace
gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it
were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real
horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally
missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict
it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals