The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (69 page)

‘
I
knew he meant he’d been doing some wild thing or other, and I don’t think my face
frightened him much, for he was soon telling me about it. And a very strange
thing it was. He asked me if I knew Warren Wynd, and I said no, though I knew
he lived near the top of these flats. He said, ‘That’s a man who thinks he’s a
saint of God; but if he knew what I was saying of him he should be ready to
hang himself.’ And he repeated hysterically more than once, ‘Yes, ready to hang
himself.’ I asked him if he’d done any harm to Wynd, and his answer was rather
a queer one. He said: ‘I took a pistol and I loaded it with neither shot nor
slug, but only with a curse.’ As far as I could make out, all he had done was
to go down that little alley between this building and the big warehouse, with
an old pistol loaded with a blank charge, and merely fire it against the wall,
as if that would bring down the building. ‘But as I did it,’ he said, ‘I cursed
him with the great curse, that the justice of God should take him by the hair
and the vengeance of hell by the heels, and he should be torn asunder like Judas
and the world know him no more.’

‘
Well,
it doesn’t matter now what else I said to the poor, crazy fellow; he went away quieted
down a little, and I went round to the back of the building to inspect. And
sure enough, in the little alley at the foot of this wall there lay a rusty antiquated
pistol; I know enough about pistols to know it had been loaded only with a
little powder, there were the black marks of powder and smoke on the wall, and
even the mark of the muzzle, but not even a dent of any bullet. He had left no
trace of destruction; he had left no trace of anything, except those black
marks and that black curse he had hurled into heaven. So I came back here to
ask for this Warren Wynd and find out if he’s all right.’

Fenner
the secretary laughed. ‘I can soon settle that difficulty for you. I assure you
he’s quite all right; we left him writing at his desk only a few minutes ago. He
was alone in his flat; it’s a hundred feet up from the street, and so placed that
no shot could have reached him, even if your friend hadn’t fired blank. There’s
no other entrance to this place but this door, and we’ve been standing outside
it ever since.’

‘
All
the same,’ said Father Brown, gravely, ‘I should like to look in and see.’

‘
Well,
you can’t,’ retorted the other. ‘Good Lord, you don’t tell me you think anything
of the curse.’

‘
You
forget,’ said the millionaire, with a slight sneer, ‘the reverend gentleman’s whole
business is blessings and cursings. Come, sir, if he’s been cursed to hell, why
don’t you bless him back again? What’s the good of your blessings if they can’t
beat an Irish larrykin’s curse?’

‘
Does
anybody believe such things now?’ protested the Westerner.

‘
Father
Brown believes a good number of things, I take it,’ said Vandam, whose temper was
suffering from the past snub and the present bickering. ’Father Brown believes
a hermit crossed a river on a crocodile conjured out of nowhere, and then he
told the crocodile to die, and it sure did. Father Brown believes that some
blessed saint or other died, and had his dead body turned into three dead bodies,
to be served out to three parishes that were all intent on figuring as his
home-town. Father Brown believes that a saint hung his cloak on a sunbeam, and
another used his for a boat to cross the Atlantic. Father Brown believes the
holy donkey had six legs and the house of Loretto flew through the air. He believes
in hundreds of stone virgins winking and weeping all day long. It’s nothing to
him to believe that a man might escape through the keyhole or vanish out of a
locked room. I reckon he doesn’t take much stock of the laws of nature.’

‘
Anyhow,
I have to take stock in the laws of Warren Wynd,’ said the secretary, wearily, ‘and
it’s his rule that he’s to be left alone when he says so. Wilson will tell you
just the same,’ for the large servant who had been sent for the pamphlet, passed
placidly down the corridor even as he spoke, carrying the pamphlet, but serenely
passing the door. ‘He’ll go and sit on the bench by the floor-clerk and twiddle
his thumbs till he’s wanted; but he won’t go in before then; and nor will I. I
reckon we both know which side our bread is buttered, and it’d take a good many
of Father Brown’s saints and angels to make us forget it.’

‘
As
for saints and angels — ’ began the priest.

‘
It’s
all nonsense,’ repeated Fenner. ‘I don’t want to say anything offensive, but that
sort of thing may be very well for crypts and cloisters and all sorts of moonshiny
places. But ghosts can’t get through a closed door in an American hotel.’

‘
But
men can open a door, even in an American hotel,’ replied Father Brown, patiently.
‘And it seems to me the simplest thing would be to open it.’

‘
It
would be simple enough to lose me my job,’ answered the secretary, ‘and Warren Wynd
doesn’t like his secretaries so simple as that. Not simple enough to believe in
the sort of fairy tales you seem to believe in.’

‘
Well,’
said the priest gravely, ‘it is true enough that I believe in a good many things
that you probably don’t. But it would take a considerable time to explain all
the things I believe in, and all the reasons I have for thinking I’m right. It
would take about two seconds to open that door and prove I am wrong.’

Something
in the phrase seemed to please the more wild and restless spirit of the man from
the West.

‘
I’ll
allow I’d love to prove you wrong,’ said Alboin, striding suddenly past them, ‘and
I will.’

He
threw open the door of the flat and looked in. The first glimpse showed that Warren
Wynd’s chair was empty. The second glance showed that his room was empty also.

Fenner,
electrified with energy in his turn, dashed past the other into the apartment.

‘
He’s
in his bedroom,’ he said curtly, ‘he must be.’

As
he disappeared into the inner chamber the other men stood in the empty outer room
staring about them. The severity and simplicity of its fittings, which had already
been noted, returned on them with a rigid challenge. Certainly in this room
there was no question of hiding a mouse, let alone a man. There were no curtains
and, what is rare in American arrangements, no cupboards. Even the desk was no
more than a plain table with a shallow drawer and a tilted lid. The chairs were
hard and high-backed skeletons. A moment after the secretary reappeared at the
inner door, having searched the two inner rooms. A staring negation stood in
his eyes, and his mouth seemed to move in a mechanical detachment from it as he
said sharply: ‘He didn’t come out through here?’

Somehow
the others did not even think it necessary to answer that negation in the
negative. Their minds had come up against something like the blank wall of the
warehouse that stared in at the opposite window, gradually turning from white
to grey as dusk slowly descended with the advancing afternoon. Vandam walked
over to the window-sill against which he had leant half an hour before and
looked out of the open window. There was no pipe or fire-escape, no shelf or
foothold of any kind on the sheer fall to the little by-street below, there was
nothing on the similar expanse of wall that rose many stories above. There was
even less variation on the other side of the street; there was nothing whatever
but the wearisome expanse of whitewashed wall. He peered downwards, as if
expecting to see the vanished philanthropist lying in a suicidal wreck on the
path. He could see nothing but one small dark object which, though diminished
by distance, might well be the pistol that the priest had found lying there.
Meanwhile, Fenner had walked to the other window, which looked out from a wall equally
blank and inaccessible, but looking out over a small ornamental park instead of
a side street. Here a clump of trees interrupted the actual view of the ground;
but they reached but a little way up the huge human cliff. Both turned back into
the room and faced each other in the gathering twilight where the last silver
gleams of daylight on the shiny tops of desks and tables were rapidly turning
grey. As if the twilight itself irritated him, Fenner touched the switch and
the scene sprang into the startling distinctness of electric light.

‘
As
you said just now,’ said Vandam grimly, ‘there’s no shot from down there could hit
him, even if there was a shot in the gun. But even if he was hit with a bullet
he wouldn’t have just burst like a bubble.’

The
secretary, who was paler than ever, glanced irritably at the bilious visage of the
millionaire. ‘What’s got you started on those morbid notions? Who’s talking about
bullets and bubbles? Why shouldn’t he be alive?’

‘
Why
not indeed?’ replied Vandam smoothly. ‘If you’ll tell me where he is, I’ll tell
you how he got there.’

After
a pause the secretary muttered, rather sulkily: ‘I suppose you’re right. We’re right
up against the very thing we were talking about. It’d be a queer thing if you
or I ever came to think there was anything in cursing. But who could have harmed
Wynd shut up in here?’

Mr
Alboin, of Oklahoma, had been standing rather astraddle in the middle of the room,
his white, hairy halo as well as his round eyes seeming to radiate astonishment.
At this point he said, abstractedly, with something of the irrelevant impudence
of an enfant terrible: ‘You didn’t cotton to him much, did you, Mr Vandam?’

Mr
Vandam’s long yellow face seemed to grow longer as it grew more sinister, while
he smiled and answered quietly: ‘If it comes to these coincidences, it was you,
I think, who said that a wind from the West would blow away our big men like thistledown.’

‘
I
know I said it would,’ said the Westerner, with candour; ’but all the same, how
the devil could it?’

The
silence was broken by Fenner saying with an abruptness amounting to violence: ‘There’s
only one thing to say about this affair. It simply hasn’t happened. It can’t
have happened.’

‘
Oh,
yes,’ said Father Brown out of the corner; ‘it has happened all right.’

They
all jumped; for the truth was they had all forgotten the insignificant little man
who had originally induced them to open the door. And the recovery of memory
went with a sharp reversal of mood; it came back to them with a rush that they
had all dismissed him as a superstitious dreamer for even hinting at the very
thing that had since happened before their eyes.

‘
Snakes!’
cried the impetuous Westerner, like one speaking before he could stop himself; ’suppose
there were something in it, after all!’

‘
I
must confess,’ said Fenner, frowning at the table, ‘that his reverence’s anticipations
were apparently well founded. I don’t know whether he has anything else to tell
us.’

‘
He
might possibly tell us,’ said Vandam, sardonically, ‘what the devil we are to do
now.’

The
little priest seemed to accept the position in a modest, but matter-of-fact manner.
‘The only thing I can think of,’ he said, ‘is first to tell the authorities of
this place, and then to see if there were any more traces of my man who let off
the pistol. He vanished round the other end of the Crescent where the little
garden is. There are seats there, and it’s a favourite place for tramps.’

Direct
consultations with the headquarters of the hotel, leading to indirect consultations
with the authorities of the police, occupied them for a considerable time; and
it was already nightfall when they went out under the long, classical curve of
the colonnade. The crescent looked as cold and hollow as the moon after which
it was named, and the moon itself was rising luminous but spectral behind the
black tree-tops when they turned the corner by the little public garden. Night
veiled much of what was merely urban and artificial about the place, and as
they melted into the shadows of the trees they had a strange feeling of having
suddenly travelled many hundred miles from their homes. When they had walked in
silence for a little, Alboin, who had something elemental about him, suddenly
exploded.

‘
I
give up,’ he cried; ‘I hand in my checks. I never thought I should come to such
things; but what happens when the things come to you? I beg your pardon, Father
Brown; I reckon I’ll just come across, so far as you and your fairy-tales are concerned.
After this, it’s me for the fairy-tales. Why, you said yourself, Mr Vandam,
that you’re an atheist and only believe what you see. Well, what was it you did
see? Or rather, what was it you didn’t see?’

‘
I
know,’ said Vandam and nodded in a gloomy fashion.

‘
Oh,
it’s partly all this moon and trees that get on one’s nerves,’ said Fenner obstinately.
‘Trees always look queer by moonlight, with their branches crawling about. Look
at that — ’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, standing still and peering at the moon through a tangle of trees.
‘That’s a very queer branch up there.’

When
he spoke again he only said: ‘I thought it was a broken branch.’

But
this time there was a catch in his voice that unaccountably turned his hearers cold.
Something that looked rather like a dead branch was certainly dependent in a
limp fashion from the tree that showed dark against the moon; but it was not a
dead branch. When they came close to it to see what it was Fenner sprang away
again with a ringing oath. Then he ran in again and loosened a rope from the
neck of the dingy little body dangling with drooping plumes of grey hair.
Somehow he knew that the body was a dead body before he managed to take it down
from the tree. A very long coil of rope was wrapped round and round the
branches, and a comparatively short length of it hung from the fork of the
branch to the body. A long garden tub was rolled a yard or so from under the
feet, like the stool kicked away from the feet of a suicide.