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

"May I ask how it occurred?"

"I will begin at the beginning," said Mr Shorter, "and I will tell
my story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes
past eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain
appointments and pay certain visits in the village. My first visit
was to Mr Jervis, the treasurer of our League of Christian
Amusements, with whom I concluded some business touching the claim
made by Parkes the gardener in the matter of the rolling of our
tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very earnest
churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author of
several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled
(unless my memory misleads me) Eglantine."

He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something
that can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager
deliberation. He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the
detectives in the detective stories, who always sternly require
that nothing should be kept back.

"I then proceeded," he went on, with the same maddening
conscientiousness of manner, "to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of
course; Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist,
and having consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who
is accused, I cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting
holes in the organ pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas
meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The Dorcas meetings are
usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell, Miss
Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in church work,
had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society is
entirely under my wife's management as a rule, and except for Miss
Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any members
of it. I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did so.

"When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss
Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of
course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the
necessity in these matters of full and exact exposition of the
facts, to remember and repeat the actual details of a
conversation, particularly a conversation which (though inspired
with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work) was one which
did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the time and was in
fact--er--mostly about socks. I can, however, remember distinctly
that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with a
woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure
she was introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather
was very changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea,
which I accepted, I cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a
short and stout lady with white hair. The only other figure in the
group that caught my attention was a Miss Mowbray, a small and