The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (10 page)

“
Come
along, Pound,” he cried breathlessly. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. The
dinner’s going again in spanking style, and old Audley has got to make a speech
in honour of the forks being saved. We want to start some new ceremony, don’t
you know, to commemorate the occasion. I say, you really got the goods back,
what do you suggest?”

“
Why,”
said the colonel, eyeing him with a certain sardonic approval, “I should suggest
that henceforward we wear green coats, instead of black. One never knows what
mistakes may arise when one looks so like a waiter.”

“
Oh,
hang it all!” said the young man, “a gentleman never looks like a waiter.”

“
Nor
a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose,” said Colonel Pound, with the same lowering
laughter on his face. “Reverend sir, your friend must have been very smart to
act the gentleman.”

Father
Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the night was stormy,
and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.

“
Yes,”
he said; “it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do you know, I have
sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter.”

And
saying “Good evening,” he pushed open the heavy doors of that palace of pleasures.
The golden gates closed behind him, and he went at a brisk walk through the
damp, dark streets in search of a penny omnibus.

“
The
most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old
age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last. It was committed at Christmas.
As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special
season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or
garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be
swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should
rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of
the Cafe Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his riches
(which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame him, if I make
myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some cathedral town.
Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich and wicked peasant
(which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get his indignant head relieved
against a grey line of clipped poplars, and those solemn plains of Gaul over
which broods the mighty spirit of Millet.

“
Well,
my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English middle-class crime;
a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old middle-class house near
Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage drive, a house with a stable by the
side of it, a house with the name on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey
tree. Enough, you know the species. I really think my imitation of Dickens’s
style was dexterous and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same
evening.”

Flambeau
would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and even from the inside it
was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly incomprehensible, and it is from
the outside that the stranger must study it. From this standpoint the drama may
be said to have begun when the front doors of the house with the stable opened
on the garden with the monkey tree, and a young girl came out with bread to
feed the birds on the afternoon of Boxing Day. She had a pretty face, with
brave brown eyes; but her figure was beyond conjecture, for she was so wrapped
up in brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur. But
for the attractive face she might have been a small toddling bear.

The
winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby light was rolled
over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead
roses. On one side of the house stood the stable, on the other an alley or
cloister of laurels led to the larger garden behind. The young lady, having
scattered bread for the birds (for the fourth or fifth time that day, because
the dog ate it), passed unobutrusively down the lane of laurels and into a
glimmering plantation of evergreens behind. Here she gave an exclamation of
wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld
it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure.

“
Oh,
don’t jump, Mr. Crook,” she called out in some alarm; “it’s much too high.”

The
individual riding the party wall like an aerial horse was a tall, angular young
man, with dark hair sticking up like a hair brush, intelligent and even distinguished
lineaments, but a sallow and almost alien complexion. This showed the more
plainly because he wore an aggressive red tie, the only part of his costume of
which he seemed to take any care. Perhaps it was a symbol. He took no notice of
the girl’s alarmed adjuration, but leapt like a grasshopper to the ground
beside her, where he might very well have broken his legs.

“
I
think I was meant to be a burglar,” he said placidly, “and I have no doubt I should
have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t
see any harm in it, anyhow.”

“
How
can you say such things!” she remonstrated.

“
Well,”
said the young man, “if you’re born on the wrong side of the wall, I can’t see that
it’s wrong to climb over it.”

“
I
never know what you will say or do next,” she said.

“
I
don’t often know myself,” replied Mr. Crook; “but then I am on the right side of
the wall now.”

“
And
which is the right side of the wall?” asked the young lady, smiling.

“
Whichever
side you are on,” said the young man named Crook.

As
they went together through the laurels towards the front garden a motor horn sounded
thrice, coming nearer and nearer, and a car of splendid speed, great elegance,
and a pale green colour swept up to the front doors like a bird and stood
throbbing.

“
Hullo,
hullo!” said the young man with the red tie, “here’s somebody born on the right
side, anyhow. I didn’t know, Miss Adams, that your Santa Claus was so modern as
this.”

“
Oh,
that’s my godfather, Sir Leopold Fischer. He always comes on Boxing Day.”

Then,
after an innocent pause, which unconsciously betrayed some lack of enthusiasm, Ruby
Adams added:

“
He
is very kind.”

John
Crook, journalist, had heard of that eminent City magnate; and it was not his fault
if the City magnate had not heard of him; for in certain articles in The Clarion
or The New Age Sir Leopold had been dealt with austerely. But he said nothing
and grimly watched the unloading of the motor-car, which was rather a long
process. A large, neat chauffeur in green got out from the front, and a small,
neat manservant in grey got out from the back, and between them they deposited
Sir Leopold on the doorstep and began to unpack him, like some very carefully
protected parcel. Rugs enough to stock a bazaar, furs of all the beasts of the
forest, and scarves of all the colours of the rainbow were unwrapped one by
one, till they revealed something resembling the human form; the form of a
friendly, but foreign-looking old gentleman, with a grey goat-like beard and a
beaming smile, who rubbed his big fur gloves together.

Long
before this revelation was complete the two big doors of the porch had opened in
the middle, and Colonel Adams (father of the furry young lady) had come out himself
to invite his eminent guest inside. He was a tall, sunburnt, and very silent
man, who wore a red smoking-cap like a fez, making him look like one of the
English Sirdars or Pashas in Egypt. With him was his brother-in-law, lately come
from Canada, a big and rather boisterous young gentleman-farmer, with a yellow
beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of
the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel’s late wife had
been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained
to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to
his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something
companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family gatherings.

In
the large entrance hall of the house there was ample room even for Sir Leopold and
the removal of his wraps. Porch and vestibule, indeed, were unduly large in proportion
to the house, and formed, as it were, a big room with the front door at one
end, and the bottom of the staircase at the other. In front of the large hall
fire, over which hung the colonel’s sword, the process was completed and the
company, including the saturnine Crook, presented to Sir Leopold Fischer. That
venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his well-lined
attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket, a black
oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his
god-daughter. With an unaffected vain-glory that had something disarming about
it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and
half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their
eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid
diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood
beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the
girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the
whole group.

“
I’ll
put ’em back now, my dear,” said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his
coat. “I had to be careful of ’em coming down. They’re the three great African
diamonds called ‘The Flying Stars,’ because they’ve been stolen so often. All
the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets
and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them
on the road here. It was quite possible.”

“
Quite
natural, I should say,” growled the man in the red tie. “I shouldn’t blame ’em if
they had taken ’em. When they ask for bread, and you don’t even give them a stone,
I think they might take the stone for themselves.”

“
I
won’t have you talking like that,” cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. “You’ve
only talked like that since you became a horrid what’s-his-name. You know what
I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?”

“
A
saint,” said Father Brown.

“
I
think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.”

“
A
radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes,” remarked Crook, with some impatience;
and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure
you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep.
A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the
chimney-sweeps paid for it.”

“
But
who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”

Crook
looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. “Does one want to own soot?”
he asked.

“
One
might,” answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. “I’ve heard that gardeners
use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn’t
come, entirely with soot — applied externally.”

“
Oh,
splendid,” cried Ruby. “Oh, I wish you’d do it to this company.”

The
boisterous Canadian, Mr. Blount, was lifting his loud voice in applause, and the
astonished financier his (in some considerable deprecation), when a knock sounded
at the double front doors. The priest opened them, and they showed again the
front garden of evergreens, monkey-tree and all, now gathering gloom against a
gorgeous violet sunset. The scene thus framed was so coloured and quaint, like
a back scene in a play, that they forgot a moment the insignificant figure
standing in the door. He was dusty-looking and in a frayed coat, evidently a
common messenger. “Any of you gentlemen Mr. Blount?” he asked, and held forward
a letter doubtfully. Mr. Blount started, and stopped in his shout of assent.
Ripping up the envelope with evident astonishment he read it; his face clouded
a little, and then cleared, and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.

“
I’m
sick at being such a nuisance, colonel,” he said, with the cheery colonial conventions;
“but would it upset you if an old acquaintance called on me here tonight on
business? In point of fact it’s Florian, that famous French acrobat and comic
actor; I knew him years ago out West (he was a French-Canadian by birth), and
he seems to have business for me, though I hardly guess what.”

“
Of
course, of course,” replied the colonel carelessly — “My dear chap, any friend of
yours. No doubt he will prove an acquisition.”

“
He’ll
black his face, if that’s what you mean,” cried Blount, laughing. “I don’t doubt
he’d black everyone else’s eyes. I don’t care; I’m not refined. I like the
jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top hat.”

“
Not
on mine, please,” said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.

“
Well,
well,” observed Crook, airily, “don’t let’s quarrel. There are lower jokes than
sitting on a top hat.”

Dislike
of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and evident intimacy with
the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his most sarcastic, magisterial manner:
“No doubt you have found something much lower than sitting on a top hat. What
is it, pray?”

“
Letting
a top hat sit on you, for instance,” said the Socialist.

“
Now,
now, now,” cried the Canadian farmer with his barbarian benevolence, “don’t let’s
spoil a jolly evening. What I say is, let’s do something for the company tonight.
Not blacking faces or sitting on hats, if you don’t like those — but something
of the sort. Why couldn’t we have a proper old English pantomime — clown,
columbine, and so on? I saw one when I left England at twelve years old, and
it’s blazed in my brain like a bonfire ever since. I came back to the old country
only last year, and I find the thing’s extinct. Nothing but a lot of snivelling
fairy plays. I want a hot poker and a policeman made into sausages, and they
give me princesses moralising by moonlight, Blue Birds, or something. Blue Beard’s
more in my line, and him I like best when he turned into the pantaloon.”

“
I’m
all for making a policeman into sausages,” said John Crook. “It’s a better definition
of Socialism than some recently given. But surely the get-up would be too big a
business.”

“
Not
a scrap,” cried Blount, quite carried away. “A harlequinade’s the quickest thing
we can do, for two reasons. First, one can gag to any degree; and, second, all
the objects are household things — tables and towel-horses and washing baskets,
and things like that.”