Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was a little, insignificant-looking man, and seemed annoyed, anxious to have done with it all. Then, among a group of frock-coated gentlemen, some of the spectators pointed out Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Police, who wore a cold, official air, and Amadieu, the investigating magistrate, who smiled and looked very spruce, early though the hour was.
He thought most of life compressible into a set of by-laws and the rest unmentionable; and with his stiff frock-coated and tall-hatted mind, instinctively distrustful of intelligences in another dress, with his arbitrary classification of whatever he didn't understand into 'the kind of thing I don't approve of, 'the kind of thing that isn't done, and deepest depth of all 'the kind of thing I'd rather not discuss, he lived in bondage to a shadowy moral etiquette of which the complex rites and awful penalties had cast an abiding gloom upon his manner.
The traffic of Cheapside it was mostly in horse omnibuses in those days seemed stupendous, its roar was stupendous; I wondered where the money came from to employ so many cabs, what industry could support the endless jostling stream of silk-hatted, frock-coated, hurrying men. Down a turning I found the Temperance Hotel Mr. Mantell had recommended to me.
Some one led him back to his post of honor as the head of the engineer corps. A silence fell then over that larger, denser multitude. It grew impressive, charged, waiting. Then a man of God offered up a prayer. His voice floated dreamily to Neale. When he had ceased there were slow, dignified movements of frock-coated men as they placed in position the last spike.
They were crouching here and away there in France and England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are hooded.... And I had never thought very much about them before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit to call them out to action.
To live in the frock-coated ranks of life, to hear canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man might suppose that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it goes forward on a scale so great as to fill me with surprise.
At first the physicians who gathered in his darkened room would not commit themselves to any promise of recovery. The skull was fractured. Ahead lay a long illness at best after that but here they left off words and resorted to a non-committal shrugging of frock-coated shoulders.
A little later, moreover, came the employes, the clerks, the counter-jumpers, the whole world of frock-coated penury "gentlemen" who devoured a roll as they hastened onward, worried the while by the dread of being unable to pay their rent, or by the problem of providing food for wife and children until the end of the month should come.* And now the sun was fast ascending on the horizon, the whole army of ants was out and about, and the toilsome day had begun with its ceaseless display of courage, energy and suffering.
Such an extraordinary scuffle was bound to attract a crowd; few had seen the commencement of the fray, because nothing could be more usual and commonplace in a fashionable place like Eastbourne than the sight of a frock-coated and top-hatted gentleman handing a well-dressed lady into a motor car. The first general intimation of something bizarre and sensational was provided by Theydon's fall.
He was a little, insignificant-looking man, and seemed annoyed, anxious to have done with it all. Then, among a group of frock-coated gentlemen, some of the spectators pointed out Gascogne, the Chief of the Detective Police, who wore a cold, official air, and Amadieu, the investigating magistrate, who smiled and looked very spruce, early though the hour was.
Word Of The Day