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

"I said genially, `I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I
must really be going. I have--er--' I stopped here, for the words
she had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone
extremely business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my
remarks, I think, natural and excusable. I have these words also
noted down. I have not the least idea of their meaning; so I have
only been able to render them phonetically. But she said," and Mr
Shorter peered short-sightedly at his papers, "she said: `Chuck it,
fat 'ead,' and she added something that sounded like `It's a kop',
or (possibly) `a kopt'. And then the last cord, either of my sanity
or the sanity of the universe, snapped suddenly. My esteemed friend
and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said: `Put 'is
old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up before you start jawin'.
You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days with this way of coin'
things, har lar theater.'

"My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had
suddenly fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some
dreadful riotous society of their own from which all others were
excluded? I remembered dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar
in a small way once, but now, alas! rusty), I remembered the
mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange female freemasonry. I
remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was just, in my absurd
lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse about Diana's
nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind. The
moment it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.

"Miss Brett--or what I had called Miss Brett--was standing in front
of me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face.
Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into
an attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave
one a shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her
pockets and her cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a
wo--no, that is I saw that instead of being a woman she--he, I
mean--that is, it was a man."

Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in
endeavouring to arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the
same time. He resumed with a higher fever of nervousness:

"As for Miss Mowbray, she--he, held me in a ring of iron. He had
her arm--that is she had his arm--round her neck--my neck I mean--
and I could not cry out. Miss Brett--that is, Mr Brett, at least Mr
something who was not Miss Brett--had the revolver pointed at me.
The other two ladies--or er--gentlemen, were rummaging in some bag
in the background. It was all clear at last: they were criminals
dressed up as women, to kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey,
in Essex. But why? Was it to be Nonconformists?