The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (120 page)

The
tall man shot along the wall like his own shadow until he sank into the empty chair
on the Master’s right, and looked across at the Bursar and the rest with hollow
and cavernous eyes. His hanging hair and moustache were quite fair, but his
eyes were so deep-set that they might have been black. Everyone knew, or could
guess, who the newcomer was; but an incident instantly followed that sufficiently
illuminated the situation. The Professor of Roman History rose stiffly to his
feet and stalked out of the room, indicating with little finesse his feelings
about sitting at the same table with the Professor of Theoretical Thieving,
otherwise the Communist, Mr Craken.

The
Master of Mandeville covered the awkward situation with nervous grace. ‘I was defending
you, or some aspects of you, my dear Craken,’ he said smiling, ‘though I am
sure you would find me quite indefensible. After all, I can’t forget that the
old Socialist friends of my youth had a very fine ideal of fraternity and
comradeship. William Morris put it all in a sentence, “Fellowship is heaven;
and lack of fellowship is hell.”

‘
Dons
as Democrats; see headline,’ said Mr Craken rather disagreeably. ‘And is Hard-Case
Hake going to dedicate the new Commercial Chair to the memory of William
Morris?’

‘
Well,’
said the Master, still maintaining a desperate geniality, ‘I hope we may say, in
a sense, that all our Chairs are Chairs of good-fellowship.’

‘
Yes;
that’s the academic version of the Morris maxim,’ growled Craken. ‘“A Fellowship
is heaven; and lack of a Fellowship is hell.”’

‘
Don’t
be so cross, Craken,’ interposed the Bursar briskly. ‘Take some port. Tenby, pass
the port to Mr Craken.’

‘
Oh
well, I’ll have a glass,’ said the Communist Professor a little less ungraciously.
‘I really came down here to have a smoke in the garden. Then I looked out of
the window and saw your two precious millionaires were actually blooming in the
garden; fresh, innocent buds. After all, it might be worth while to give them a
bit of my mind.’

The
Master had risen under cover of his last conventional cordiality, and was only too
glad to leave the Bursar to do his best with the Wild Man. Others had risen,
and the groups at the table had begun to break up; and the Bursar and Mr Craken
were left more or less alone at the end of the long table. Only Father Brown continued
to sit staring into vacancy with a rather cloudy expression.

‘
Oh,
as to that,’ said the Bursar. ‘I’m pretty tired of them myself, to tell the truth;
I’ve been with them the best part of a day going into facts and figures and all
the business of this new Professorship. But look here, Craken,’ and he leaned
across the table and spoke with a sort of soft emphasis, ‘you really needn’t
cut up so rough about this new Professorship. It doesn’t really interfere with
your subject. You’re the only Professor of Political Economy at Mandeville and,
though I don’t pretend to agree with your notions, everybody knows you’ve got a
European reputation. This is a special subject they call Applied Economics.
Well, even today, as I told you, I’ve had a hell of a lot of Applied Economics.
In other words, I’ve had to talk business with two business men. Would you
particularly want to do that? Would you envy it? Would you stand it? Isn’t that
evidence enough that there is a separate subject and may well be a separate
Chair?’

‘
Good
God,’ cried Craken with the intense invocation of the atheist. ‘Do you think I don’t
want to apply Economics? Only, when we apply it, you call it red ruin and anarchy;
and when you apply it, I take the liberty of calling it exploitation. If only you
fellows would apply Economics, it’s just possible that people might get
something to eat. We are the practical people; and that’s why you’re afraid of
us. That’s why you have to get two greasy Capitalists to start another Lectureship;
just because I’ve let the cat out of the bag.’

‘
Rather
a wild cat, wasn’t it?’ said the Bursar smiling, ‘that you let out of the bag?’

‘
And
rather a gold-bag, wasn’t it,’ said Craken, ‘that you are tying the cat up in again?’

‘
Well,
I don’t suppose we shall ever agree about all that,’ said the other. ‘But those
fellows have come out of their chapel into the garden; and if you want to have your
smoke there, you’d better come.’ He watched with some amusement his companion
fumbling in all his pockets till he produced a pipe, and then, gazing at it
with an abstracted air, Craken rose to his feet, but even in doing so, seemed
to be feeling all over himself again. Mr Baker the Bursar ended the controversy
with a happy laugh of reconciliation. ‘You are the practical people, and you
will blow up the town with dynamite. Only you’ll probably forget the dynamite,
as I bet you’ve forgotten the tobacco. Never mind, take a fill of mine.
Matches?’ He threw a tobacco-pouch and its accessories across the table; to be
caught by Mr Craken with that dexterity never forgotten by a cricketer, even
when he adopts opinions generally regarded as not cricket. The two men rose
together; but Baker could not forbear remarking, ‘Are you really the only
practical people? Isn’t there anything to be said for the Applied Economics,
that remembers to carry a tobacco-pouch as well as a pipe?’

Craken
looked at him with smouldering eyes; and said at last, after slowly draining the
last of his wine: ‘Let’s say there’s another sort of practicality. I dare say I
do forget details and so on. What I want you to understand is this’ — he automatically
returned the pouch; but his eyes were far away and jet-burning, almost terrible
— ‘because the inside of our intellect has changed, because we really have a
new idea of right, we shall do things you think really wrong. And they will be
very practical.’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, suddenly coming out of his trance. ‘That’s exactly what I said.’

He
looked across at Craken with a glassy and rather ghastly smile, saying: ‘Mr Craken
and I are in complete agreement.’

‘
Well,’
said Baker, ‘Craken is going out to smoke a pipe with the plutocrats; but I doubt
whether it will be a pipe of peace.’

He
turned rather abruptly and called to an aged attendant in the background. Mandeville
was one of the last of the very old-fashioned Colleges; and even Craken was one
of the first of the Communists; before the Bolshevism of today. ‘That reminds
me,’ the Bursar was saying, ‘as you won’t hand round your peace pipe, we must
send out the cigars to our distinguished guests. If they’re smokers they must
be longing for a smoke; for they’ve been nosing about in the chapel since
feeding-time.’

Craken
exploded with a savage and jarring laugh. ‘Oh, I’ll take them their cigars,’ he
said. ‘I’m only a proletarian.’

Baker
and Brown and the attendant were all witnesses to the fact that the Communist strode
furiously into the garden to confront the millionaires; but nothing more was
seen or heard of them until, as is already recorded, Father Brown found them
dead in their chairs.

It
was agreed that the Master and the priest should remain to guard the scene of tragedy,
while the Bursar, younger and more rapid in his movements, ran off to fetch
doctors and policemen. Father Brown approached the table on which one of the
cigars had burned itself away all but an inch or two; the other had dropped from
the hand and been dashed out into dying sparks on the crazy-pavement. The Master
of Mandeville sat down rather shakily on a sufficiently distant seat and buried
his bald brow in his hands. Then he looked up at first rather wearily; and then
he looked very startled indeed and broke the stillness of the garden with a
word like a small explosion of horror.

There
was a certain quality about Father Brown which might sometimes be called blood-curdling.
He always thought about what he was doing and never about whether it was done;
he would do the most ugly or horrible or undignified or dirty things as calmly
as a surgeon. There was a certain blank, in his simple mind, of all those
things commonly associated with being superstitious or sentimental. He sat down
on the chair from which the corpse had fallen, picked up the cigar the corpse
had partially smoked, carefully detached the ash, examined the butt-end and
then stuck it in his mouth and lit it. It looked like some obscene and
grotesque antic in derision of the dead; and it seemed to him to be the most
ordinary common sense. A cloud floated upwards like the smoke of some savage
sacrifice and idolatry; but to Father Brown it appeared a perfectly self-evident
fact that the only way to find out what a cigar is like is to smoke it. Nor did
it lessen the horror for his old friend, the Master of Mandeville, to have a
dim but shrewd guess that Father Brown was, upon the possibilities of the case,
risking his own life.

‘
No;
I think that’s all right,’ said the priest, putting the stump down again. ‘Jolly
good cigars. Your cigars. Not American or German. I don’t think there’s anything
odd about the cigar itself; but they’d better take care of the ashes. These men
were poisoned somehow with the sort of stuff that stiffens the body quickly ...
By the way, there goes somebody who knows more about it than we do.’

The
Master sat up with a curiously uncomfortable jolt; for indeed the large shadow which
had fallen across the pathway preceded a figure which, however heavy, was almost
as soft-footed as a shadow. Professor Wadham, eminent occupant of the Chair of
Chemistry, always moved very quietly in spite of his size, and there was
nothing odd about his strolling in the garden; yet there seemed something unnaturally
neat in his appearing at the exact moment when chemistry was mentioned.

Professor
Wadham prided himself on his quietude; some would say his insensibility. He did
not turn a hair on his flattened flaxen head, but stood looking down at the dead
men with a shade of something like indifference on his large froglike face.
Only when he looked at the cigar-ash, which the priest had preserved, he touched
it with one finger; then he seemed to stand even stiller than before; but in
the shadow of his face his eyes for an instant seemed to shoot out telescopically
like one of his own microscopes. He had certainly realized or recognized something;
but he said nothing.

‘
I
don’t know where anyone is to begin in this business,’ said the Master.

‘
I
should begin,’ said Father Brown, ‘by asking where these unfortunate men had been
most of the time today.’

‘
They
were messing about in my laboratory for a good time,’ said Wadham, speaking for
the first time. ‘Baker often comes up to have a chat, and this time he brought his
two patrons to inspect my department. But I think they went everywhere; real
tourists. I know they went to the chapel and even into the tunnel under the
crypt, where you have to light candles; instead of digesting their food like
sane men. Baker seems to have taken them everywhere.’

‘
Were
they interested in anything particular in your department?’ asked the priest. ‘What
were you doing there just then?’

The
Professor of Chemistry murmured a chemical formula beginning with ‘sulphate’, and
ending with something that sounded like ‘silenium’; unintelligible to both his
hearers. He then wandered wearily away and sat on a remote bench in the sun,
closing his eyes, but turning up his large face with heavy forbearance.

At
his point, by a sharp contrast, the lawns were crossed by a brisk figure travelling
as rapidly and as straight as a bullet; and Father Brown recognized the neat
black clothes and shrewd doglike face of a police-surgeon whom he had met in
the poorer parts of town. He was the first to arrive of the official contingent.

‘
Look
here,’ said the Master to the priest, before the doctor was within earshot. ‘I must
know something. Did you mean what you said about Communism being a real danger
and leading to crime?’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown smiling rather grimly, ‘I have really noticed the spread of some
Communist ways and influences; and, in one sense, this is a Communist crime.’

‘
Thank
you,’ said the Master. ‘Then I must go off and see to something at once. Tell the
authorities I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

The
Master had vanished into one of the Tudor archways at just about the moment when
the police-doctor had reached the table and cheerfully recognized Father Brown.
On the latter’s suggestion that they should sit down at the tragic table, Dr
Blake threw one sharp and doubtful glance at the big, bland and seemingly
somnolent chemist, who occupied a more remote seat. He was duly informed of the
Professor’s identity, and what had so far been gathered of the Professor’s
evidence; and listened to it silently while conducting a preliminary
examination of the dead bodies. Naturally, he seemed more concentrated on the
actual corpses than on the hearsay evidence, until one detail suddenly
distracted him entirely from the science of anatomy.

‘
What
did the Professor say he was working at?’ he inquired.

Father
Brown patiently repeated the chemical formula he did not understand.

‘
What?’
snapped Dr Blake, like a pistol-shot. ‘Gosh! This is pretty frightful!’

‘
Because
it’s poison?’ inquired Father Brown.

‘
Because
it’s piffle,’ replied Dr Blake. ‘It’s simply nonsense. The Professor is quite a
famous chemist. Why is a famous chemist deliberately talking nonsense?’