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

"I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the
nightmares that men have ever dreamed, there has never been
anything so blighting and horrible as the faces of those five men,
looking out of their poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors
with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is anything so
heart-breaking in hell.

"For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions
and the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome
the policeman and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as
one can describe anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I
lurched suddenly forward and ran my head into his chest, calling
out (if I remember correctly), `Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was
at that moment that I remembered most dearly that I was the Vicar
of Chuntsey, in Essex.

"My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back
of the neck.

"`You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his
perfect imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.

"`Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor
friend. We will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but
she is quite a lady--only eccentric.'

"`She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman briefly.

"`Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.

"`Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed
character of Miss James, `she wants looking after.' `She does,'
said the policeman, `but I'll look after her.'

"`That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. `She wants her friends.
She wants a particular medicine we've got.'

"`Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, `no other medicine
any good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'

"`I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal
shame, the Vicar of Chuntsey.

"`Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, `I don't like the
eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or 'er
'ead in my stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the
looks of you I've seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong
'uns. Who are you?'