The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (107 page)

It
would not be fair to record the adventures of Father Brown, without admitting that
he was once involved in a grave scandal. There still are persons, perhaps even
of his own community, who would say that there was a sort of blot upon his name.
It happened in a picturesque Mexican road-house of rather loose repute, as
appeared later; and to some it seemed that for once the priest had allowed a romantic
streak in him, and his sympathy for human weakness, to lead him into loose and
unorthodox action. The story in itself was a simple one; and perhaps the whole
surprise of it consisted in its simplicity.

Burning
Troy began with Helen; this disgraceful story began with the beauty of Hypatia Potter.
Americans have a great power, which Europeans do not always appreciate, of
creating institutions from below; that is by popular initiative. Like every other
good thing, it has its lighter aspects; one of which, as has been remarked by
Mr Wells and others, is that a person may become a public institution without
becoming an official institution. A girl of great beauty or brilliancy will be
a sort of uncrowned queen, even if she is not a Film Star or the original of a
Gibson Girl. Among those who had the fortune, or misfortune, to exist
beautifully in public in this manner, was a certain Hypatia Hard, who had
passed through the preliminary stage of receiving florid compliments in society
paragraphs of the local press, to the position of one who is actually interviewed
by real pressmen. On War and Peace and Patriotism and Prohibition and Evolution
and the Bible she had made her pronouncements with a charming smile; and if
none of them seemed very near to the real grounds of her own reputation, it was
almost equally hard to say what the grounds of her reputation really were.
Beauty, and being the daughter of a rich man, are things not rare in her
country; but to these she added whatever it is that attracts the wandering eye
of journalism. Next to none of her admirers had even seen her, or even hoped to
do so; and none of them could possibly derive any sordid benefit from her
father’s wealth. It was simply a sort of popular romance, the modern substitute
for mythology; and it laid the first foundations of the more turgid and
tempestuous sort of romance in which she was to figure later on; and in which
many held that the reputation of Father Brown, as well as of others, had been
blown to rags.

It
was accepted, sometimes romantically, sometimes resignedly, by those whom American
satire has named the Sob Sisters, that she had already married a very worthy
and respectable business man of the name of Potter. It was even possible to
regard her for a moment as Mrs Potter, on the universal understanding that her
husband was only the husband of Mrs Potter.

Then
came the Great Scandal, by which her friends and enemies were horrified beyond their
wildest hopes. Her name was coupled (as the queer phrase goes) with a literary
man living in Mexico; in status an American, but in spirit a very Spanish
American. Unfortunately his vices resembled her virtues, in being good copy. He
was no less a person than the famous or infamous Rudel Romanes; the poet whose
works had been so universally popularized by being vetoed by libraries or
prosecuted by the police. Anyhow, her pure and placid star was seen in
conjunction with this comet. He was of the sort to be compared to a comet,
being hairy and hot; the first in his portraits, the second in his poetry. He
was also destructive; the comet’s tail was a trail of divorces, which some
called his success as a lover and some his prolonged failure as a husband. It
was hard on Hypatia; there are disadvantages in conducting the perfect private
life in public; like a domestic interior in a shop-window. Interviewers
reported doubtful utterances about Love’s Larger Law of Supreme Self-Realization.
The Pagans applauded. The Sob Sisterhood permitted themselves a note of
romantic regret; some having even the hardened audacity to quote from the poem
of Maud Mueller, to the effect that of all the words of tongue or pen, the
saddest are ‘It might have been.’ And Mr Agar P. Rock, who hated the Sob Sisterhood
with a holy and righteous hatred, said that in this case he thoroughly agreed
with Bret Harte’s emendation of the poem:

‘
More
sad are those we daily see; it is, but it hadn’t ought to be.’

For
Mr Rock was very firmly and rightly convinced that a very large number of things
hadn’t ought to be. He was a slashing and savage critic of national degeneration,
on the Minneapolis Meteor, and a bold and honest man. He had perhaps come to
specialize too much in the spirit of indignation, but it had had a healthy
enough origin in his reaction against sloppy attempts to confuse right and
wrong in modern journalism and gossip. He expressed it first in the form of a
protest against an unholy halo of romance being thrown round the gunman and the
gangster. Perhaps he was rather too much inclined to assume, in robust
impatience, that all gangsters were Dagos and that all Dagos were gangsters.
But his prejudices, even when they were a little provincial, were rather
refreshing after a certain sort of maudlin and unmanly hero-worship, which was
ready to regard a professional murderer as a leader of fashion, so long as the
pressmen reported that his smile was irresistible or his tuxedo was all right.
Anyhow, the prejudices did not boil the less in the bosom of Mr Rock, because
he was actually in the land of the Dagos when this story opens; striding
furiously up a hill beyond the Mexican border, to the white hotel, fringed with
ornamental palms, in which it was supposed that the Potters were staying and
that the mysterious Hypatia now held her court. Agar Rock was a good specimen
of a Puritan, even to look at; he might even have been a virile Puritan of the
seventeenth century, rather than the softer and more sophisticated Puritan of
the twentieth. If you had told him that his antiquated black hat and habitual
black frown, and fine flinty features, cast a gloom over the sunny land of
palms and vines, he would have been very much gratified. He looked to right and
left with eyes bright with universal suspicions. And, as he did so, he saw two
figures on the ridge above him, outlined against the clear sub-tropical sunset;
figures in a momentary posture which might have made even a less suspicious man
suspect something.

One
of the figures was rather remarkable in itself. It was poised at the exact angle
of the turning road above the valley, as if by an instinct for the site as well
as the attitude of statuary. It was wrapt in a great black cloak, in the
Byronic manner, and the head that rose above it in swarthy beauty was remarkably
like Byron’s. This man had the same curling hair and curling nostrils; and he
seemed to be snorting something of the same scorn and indignation against the
world. He grasped in his hand a rather long cane or walking-stick, which having
a spike of the sort used for mountaineering, carried at the moment a fanciful
suggestion of a spear. It was rendered all the more fanciful by something
comically contradictory in the figure of the other man, who carried an
umbrella. It was indeed a new and neatly-rolled umbrella, very different, for
instance, from Father Brown’s umbrella: and he was neatly clad like a clerk in
light holiday clothes; a stumpy stoutish bearded man; but the prosaic umbrella
was raised and even brandished at an acute angle of attack. The taller man
thrust back at him, but in a hasty defensive manner; and then the scene rather
collapsed into comedy; for the umbrella opened of itself and its owner almost
seemed to sink behind it, while the other man had the air of pushing his spear
through a great grotesque shield. But the other man did not push it, or the
quarrel, very far; he plucked out the point, turned away impatiently and strode
down the road; while the other, rising and carefully refolding his umbrella,
turned in the opposite direction towards the hotel. Rock had not heard any of
the words of the quarrel, which must have immediately preceded this brief and
rather absurd bodily conflict; but as he went up the road in the track of the
short man with the beard, he revolved many things. And the romantic cloak and
rather operatic good looks of the one man, combined with the sturdy
self-assertion of the other, fitted in with the whole story which he had come
to seek; and he knew that he could have fixed those two strange figures with
their names: Romanes and Potter.

His
view was in every way confirmed when he entered the pillared porch; and heard the
voice of the bearded man raised high in altercation or command. He was evidently
speaking to the manager or staff of the hotel, and Rock heard enough to know
that he was warning them of a wild and dangerous character in the neighbourhood.

‘
If
he’s really been to the hotel already,’ the little man was saying, in answer to
some murmur, ‘all I can say is that you’d better not let him in again. Your police
ought to be looking after a fellow of that sort, but anyhow, I won’t have the
lady pestered with him.’

Rock
listened in grim silence and growing conviction; then he slid across the vestibule
to an alcove where he saw the hotel register and turning to the last page, saw
‘the fellow’ had indeed been to the hotel already. There appeared the name of
‘Rudel Romanes,’ that romantic public character, in very large and florid
foreign lettering; and after a space under it, rather close together, the names
of Hypatia Potter and Ellis T. Potter, in a correct and quite American
handwriting.

Agar
Rock looked moodily about him, and saw in the surroundings and even the small decorations
of the hotel everything that he hated most. It is perhaps unreasonable to
complain of oranges growing on orange-trees, even in small tubs; still more of
their only growing on threadbare curtains or faded wallpapers as a formal
scheme of ornament. But to him those red and golden moons, decoratively
alternated with silver moons, were in a queer way the quintessence of all
moonshine. He saw in them all that sentimental deterioration which his
principles deplored in modern manners, and which his prejudices vaguely
connected with the warmth and softness of the South. It annoyed him even to
catch sight of a patch of dark canvas, half-showing a Watteau shepherd with a
guitar, or a blue tile with a common-place design of a Cupid on a dolphin. His
common sense would have told him that he might have seen these things in a
shop-window on Fifth Avenue; but where they were, they seemed like a taunting
siren voice of the Paganism of the Mediterranean. And then suddenly, the look
of all these things seemed to alter, as a still mirror will flicker when a
figure has flashed past it for a moment; and he knew the whole room was full of
a challenging presence. He turned almost stiffly, and with a sort of resistance,
and knew that he was facing the famous Hypatia, of whom he had read and heard
for so many years.

Hypatia
Potter, nee Hard, was one of those people to whom the word ‘radiant’ really does
apply definitely and derivatively. That is, she allowed what the papers called
her Personality to go out from her in rays. She would have been equally beautiful,
and to some tastes more attractive, if she had been self-contained; but she had
always been taught to believe that self-containment was only selfishness. She
would have said that she had lost Self in Service; it would perhaps be truer to
say that she had asserted Self in Service; but she was quite in good faith
about the service. Therefore her outstanding starry blue eyes really struck
outwards, as in the old metaphor that made eyes like Cupid’s darts, killing at
a distance; but with an abstract conception of conquest beyond any mere
coquetry. Her pale fair hair, though arranged in a saintly halo, had a look of
almost electric radiation. And when she understood that the stranger before her
was Mr Agar Rock, of the Minneapolis Meteor, her eyes took on themselves the
range of long searchlights, sweeping the horizon of the States.

But
in this the lady was mistaken; as she sometimes was. For Agar Rock was not Agar
Rock of the Minneapolis Meteor. He was at that moment merely Agar Rock; there had
surged up in him a great and sincere moral impulsion, beyond the coarse courage
of the interviewer. A feeling profoundly mixed of a chivalrous and national
sensibility to beauty, with an instant itch for moral action of some definite
sort, which was also national, nerved him to face a great scene; and to deliver
a noble insult. He remembered the original Hypatia, the beautiful Neo-Platonist,
and how he had been thrilled as a boy by Kingsley’s romance in which the young
monk denounces her for harlotries and idolatries. He confronted her with an
iron gravity and said:

‘
If
you’ll pardon me. Madam, I should like to have a word with you in private.’

‘
Well,’
she said, sweeping the room with her splendid gaze, ‘I don’t know whether you consider
this place private.’

Rock
also gazed round the room and could see no sign of life less vegetable than the
orange trees, except what looked like a large black mushroom, which he
recognized as the hat of some native priest or other, stolidly smoking a black
local cigar, and otherwise as stagnant as any vegetable. He looked for a moment
at the heavy, expressionless features, noting the rudeness of that peasant type
from which priests so often come, in Latin and especially Latin-American countries;
and lowered his voice a little as he laughed.

‘
I
don’t imagine that Mexican padre knows our language,’ he said. ‘Catch those lumps
of laziness learning any language but their own. Oh, I can’t swear he’s a Mexican;
he might be anything; mongrel Indian or nigger, I suppose. But I’ll answer for
it he’s not an American. Our ministries don’t produce that debased type.’