Гилберт Кит Честертон (G. K. Chesterton)Project Gutenberg's The Wisdom of Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton
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Title: The Wisdom of Father Brown
Author: G. K. Chesterton
Release Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #223]
[Last Updated: December 5, 2014]
Language: English
Produced by Martin Ward, and David Widger
THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN
By G. K. Chesterton
To LUCIAN OLDERSHAW
ONE — The Absence of Mr Glass TWO — The Paradise of Thieves THREE — The Duel of Dr Hirsch FOUR — The Man in the Passage FIVE — The Mistake of the Machine SIX — The Head of Caesar SEVEN — The Purple Wig EIGHT — The Perishing of the Pendragons NINE — The God of the Gongs TEN — The Salad of Colonel Cray ELEVEN — The Strange Crime of John Boulnois TWELVE — The Fairy Tale of Father Brown |
ONE — The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man's front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the specialist's library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.