GK Chesterton Father Brown 2 Wisdom of Father Brown, The

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often like to have such private exits and entrances, for meeting friends or
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avoiding them.
The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who evidently
knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each approached the door at
the upper end with equal coolness and confidence. Not, however, with equal
speed; but the man who walked fast was the man from the other end of the
tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret stage door almost at the same
instant. They saluted each other with civility, and waited a moment before one
of them, the sharper walker who seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked
at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could be called
inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and popular. As
public persons, both were in the first public rank. But everything about them,
from their glory to their good looks, was of a diverse and incomparable kind.
Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man whose importance is known to everybody
who knows. The more you mixed with the innermost ring in every polity or
profession, the more often you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one
intelligent man on twenty unintelligent committees on every sort of subject,
from the reform of the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater
Britain. In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that
nobody could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up
Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could not
meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been ruled by
him all your life.
His appearance was distinguished in exactly the same sense; it was at once
conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his high silk
hat , yet it was unlike anyone else s hat a little higher, perhaps, and adding
something to his natural height. His tall, slender figure had a slight stoop
yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair was silver-grey, but he did not
look old; it was worn longer than the common yet he did not look effeminate;
it was curly but it did not look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him
look more manly and militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals
of Velazquez with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves
were a shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of such
gloves and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the
restaurants.
The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short, but
merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and cropped
close to a strong, massive head the sort of head you break a door with, as
Chaucer said of the Miller s. His military moustache and the carriage of his
shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair of those peculiar frank and
piercing blue eyes which are more common in sailors. His face was somewhat
square, his jaw was square, his shoulders were square, even his jacket was
square. Indeed, in the wild school of caricature then current, Mr. Max
Beerbohm had represented him as a proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.
For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success. You
did not have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain Cutler, of the
siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You could not get away
from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait was on every other
postcard; his maps and battles in every other illustrated paper; songs in his
honor in every other music-hall turn or on every other barrel-organ. His fame,
though probably more temporary, was ten times more wide, popular and
spontaneous than the other man s. In thousands of English homes he appeared
enormous above England, like Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in
England than Sir Wilson Seymour.
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The door was opened to them by an aged servant or dresser , whose
broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers contrasted
queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress s dressing room. It
was fitted and filled with looking glasses at every angle of refraction, so [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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