The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (121 page)

‘
Well,
I think I know that one,’ answered Father Brown mildly. ‘He is talking nonsense,
because he is telling lies. He is concealing something; and he wanted specially
to conceal it from these two men and their representatives.’

The
doctor lifted his eyes from the two men and looked across at the almost unnaturally
immobile figure of the great chemist. He might almost have been asleep; a
garden butterfly had settled upon him and seemed to turn his stillness into
that of a stone idol. The large folds of his froglike face reminded the doctor
of the hanging skins of a rhinoceros.

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, in a very low voice. ‘He is a wicked man.’

‘
God
damn it all!’ cried the doctor, suddenly moved to his very depths. ‘Do you mean
that a great scientific man like that deals in murder?’

‘
Fastidious
critics would have complained of his dealing in murder,’ said the priest dispassionately.
‘I don’t say I’m very fond of people dealing in murder in that way myself. But
what’s much more to the point — I’m sure that these poor fellows were among his
fastidious critics.’

‘
You
mean they found his secret and he silenced them?’ said Blake frowning. ‘But what
in hell was his secret? How could a man murder on a large scale in a place like
this?’

‘
I
have told you his secret,’ said the priest. ‘It is a secret of the soul. He is a
bad man. For heaven’s sake don’t fancy I say that because he and I are of opposite
schools or traditions. I have a crowd of scientific friends; and most of them
are heroically disinterested. Even of the most sceptical, I would only say they
are rather irrationally disinterested. But now and then you do get a man who is
a materialist, in the sense of a beast. I repeat he’s a bad man. Much worse
than — ’ And Father Brown seemed to hesitate for a word.

‘
You
mean much worse than the Communist?’ suggested the other.

‘
No;
I mean much worse than the murderer,’ said Father Brown.

He
got to his feet in an abstracted manner; and hardly realized that his companion
was staring at him.

‘
But
didn’t you mean,’ asked Blake at last, ‘that this Wadham is the murderer?’

‘
Oh,
no,’ said Father Brown more cheerfully. ‘The murderer is a much more sympathetic
and understandable person. He at least was desperate; and had the excuses of
sudden rage and despair.’

‘
Why,’
cried the doctor, ‘do you mean it was the Communist after all?’

It
was at this very moment, appropriately enough, that the police officials appeared
with an announcement that seemed to conclude the case in a most decisive and
satisfactory manner. They had been somewhat delayed in reaching the scene of
the crime, by the simple fact that they had already captured the criminal.
Indeed, they had captured him almost at the gates of their own official
residence. They had already had reason to suspect the activities of Craken the
Communist during various disorders in the town; when they heard of the outrage
they felt it safe to arrest him; and found the arrest thoroughly justified.
For, as Inspector Cook radiantly explained to dons and doctors on the lawn of
Mandeville garden, no sooner was the notorious Communist searched, than it was
found that he was actually carrying a box of poisoned matches.

The
moment Father Brown heard the word ‘matches’, he jumped from his seat as if a match
had been lighted under him.

‘
Ah,’
he cried, with a sort of universal radiance, ‘and now it’s all clear.’

‘
What
do you mean by all clear?’ demanded the Master of Mandeville, who had returned in
all the pomp of his own officialism to match the pomp of the police officials
now occupying the College like a victorious army. ‘Do you mean you are
convinced now that the case against Craken is clear?’

‘
I
mean that Craken is cleared,’ said Father Brown firmly, ‘and the case against Craken
is cleared away. Do you really believe Craken is the kind of man who would go
about poisoning people with matches?’

‘
That’s
all very well,’ replied the Master, with the troubled expression he had never lost
since the first sensation occurred. ‘But it was you yourself who said that fanatics
with false principles may do wicked things. For that matter, it was you
yourself who said that Communism is creeping up everywhere and Communistic habits
spreading.’

Father
Brown laughed in a rather shamefaced manner.

‘
As
to the last point,’ he said, ‘I suppose I owe you all an apology. I seem to be always
making a mess of things with my silly little jokes.’

‘
Jokes!’
repeated the Master, staring rather indignantly.

‘
Well,’
explained the priest, rubbing his head. ‘When I talked about a Communist habit spreading,
I only meant a habit I happen to have noticed about two or three times even
today. It is a Communist habit by no means confined to Communists. It is the
extraordinary habit of so many men, especially Englishmen, of putting other
people’s matchboxes in their pockets without remembering to return them. Of
course, it seems an awfully silly little trifle to talk about. But it does happen
to be the way the crime was committed.’

‘
It
sounds to me quite crazy,’ said the doctor.

‘
Well,
if almost any man may forget to return matches, you can bet your boots that Craken
would forget to return them. So the poisoner who had prepared the matches got
rid of them on to Craken, by the simple process of lending them and not getting
them back. A really admirable way of shedding responsibility; because Craken
himself would be perfectly unable to imagine where he had got them from. But
when he used them quite innocently to light the cigars he offered to our two
visitors, he was caught in an obvious trap; one of those too obvious traps. He
was the bold bad Revolutionist murdering two millionaires.’

‘
Well,
who else would want to murder them?’ growled the doctor.

‘
Ah,
who indeed?’ replied the priest; and his voice changed to much greater gravity.
‘There we come to the other thing I told you; and that, let me tell you, was not
a joke. I told you that heresies and false doctrines had become common and conversational;
that everybody was used to them; that nobody really noticed them. Did you think
I meant Communism when I said that? Why, it was just the other way. You were
all as nervous as cats about Communism; and you watched Craken like a wolf. Of
course. Communism is a heresy; but it isn’t a heresy that you people take for
granted. It is Capitalism you take for granted; or rather the vices of
Capitalism disguised as a dead Darwinism. Do you recall what you were all
saying in the Common Room, about life being only a scramble, and nature
demanding the survival of the fittest, and how it doesn’t matter whether the
poor are paid justly or not? Why, that is the heresy that you have grown
accustomed to, my friends; and it’s every bit as much a heresy as Communism.
That’s the anti-Christian morality or immorality that you take quite naturally.
And that’s the immorality that has made a man a murderer today.’

‘
What
man?’ cried the Master, and his voice cracked with a sudden weakness.

‘
Let
me approach it another way,’ said the priest placidly. ‘You all talk as if Craken
ran away; but he didn’t. When the two men toppled over, he ran down the street,
summoned the doctor merely by shouting through the window, and shortly afterwards
was trying to summon the police. That was how he was arrested. But doesn’t it
strike you, now one comes to think of it, that Mr Baker the Bursar is rather a
long time looking for the police?’

‘
What
is he doing then?’ asked the Master sharply.

‘
I
fancy he’s destroying papers; or perhaps ransacking these men’s rooms to see they
haven’t left us a letter. Or it may have something to do with our friend Wadham.
Where does he come in? That is really very simple and a sort of joke too. Mr
Wadham is experimenting in poisons for the next war; and has something of which
a whiff of flame will stiffen a man dead. Of course, he had nothing to do with
killing these men; but he did conceal his chemical secret for a very simple
reason. One of them was a Puritan Yankee and the other a cosmopolitan Jew; and
those two types are often fanatical Pacifists. They would have called it
planning murder and probably refused to help the College. But Baker was a friend
of Wadham and it was easy for him to dip matches in the new material.’

Another
peculiarity of the little priest was that his mind was all of a piece, and he was
unconscious of many incongruities; he would change the note of his talk from
something quite public to something quite private, without any particular embarrassment.
On this occasion, he made most of the company stare with mystification, by
beginning to talk to one person when he had just been talking to ten; quite
indifferent to the fact that only the one could have any notion of what he was
talking about.

‘
I’m
sorry if I misled you, doctor, by that maundering metaphysical digression on the
man of sin,’ he said apologetically. ‘Of course it had nothing to do with the
murder; but the truth is I’d forgotten all about the murder for the moment. I’d
forgotten everything, you see, but a sort of vision of that fellow, with his
vast unhuman face, squatting among the flowers like some blind monster of the
Stone Age. And I was thinking that some men are pretty monstrous, like men of
stone; but it was all irrelevant. Being bad inside has very little to do with committing
crimes outside. The worst criminals have committed no crimes. The practical
point is why did the practical criminal commit this crime. Why did Baker the
Bursar want to kill these men? That’s all that concerns us now. The answer is
the answer to the question I’ve asked twice. Where were these men most of the
time, apart from nosing in chapels or laboratories? By the Bursar’s own
account, they were talking business with the Bursar.

‘
Now,
with all respect to the dead, I do not exactly grovel before the intellect of these
two financiers. Their views on economics and ethics were heathen and heartless.
Their views on Peace were tosh. Their views on Port were even more deplorable.
But one thing they did understand; and that was business. And it took them a
remarkably short time to discover that the business man in charge of the funds
of this College was a swindler. Or shall I say, a true follower of the doctrine
of the unlimited struggle for life and the survival of the fittest.’

‘
You
mean they were going to expose him and he killed them before they could speak,’
said the doctor frowning. ‘There are a lot of details I don’t understand.’

‘
There
are some details I’m not sure of myself,’ said the priest frankly. ‘I suspect all
that business of candles underground had something to do with abstracting the
millionaires’ own matches, or perhaps making sure they had no matches. But I’m
sure of the main gesture, the gay and careless gesture of Baker tossing his matches
to the careless Craken. That gesture was the murderous blow.’

‘
There’s
one thing I don’t understand,’ said the Inspector. ‘How did Baker know that Craken
wouldn’t light up himself then and there at the table and become an unwanted
corpse?’

The
face of Father Brown became almost heavy with reproach; and his voice had a sort
of mournful yet generous warmth in it.

‘
Well,
hang it all,’ he said, ‘he was only an atheist.’

‘
I’m
afraid I don’t know what you mean,’ said the Inspector, politely.

‘
He
only wanted to abolish God,’ explained Father Brown in a temperate and reasonable
tone. ‘He only wanted to destroy the Ten Commandments and root up all the
religion and civilization that had made him, and wash out all the common sense
of ownership and honesty; and let his culture and his country be flattened out
by savages from the ends of the earth. That’s all he wanted. You have no right
to accuse him of anything beyond that. Hang it all, everybody draws the line
somewhere! And you come here and calmly suggest that a Mandeville Man of the
old generation (for Craken was of the old generation, whatever his views) would
have begun to smoke, or even strike a match, while he was still drinking the
College Port, of the vintage of ’08 — no, no; men are not so utterly without
laws and limits as all that! I was there; I saw him; he had not finished his
wine, and you ask me why he did not smoke! No such anarchic question has ever
shaken the arches of Mandeville College Funny place, Mandeville College. Funny
place, Oxford. Funny place, England.’

‘
But
you haven’t anything particular to do with Oxford?’ asked the doctor curiously.

‘
I
have to do with England,’ said Father Brown. ‘I come from there. And the funniest
thing of all is that even if you love it and belong to it, you still can’t make
head or tail of it.’

Father
Brown always declared that he solved this problem in his sleep. And this was true,
though in rather an odd fashion; because it occurred at a time when his sleep
was rather disturbed. It was disturbed very early in the morning by the hammering
that began in the huge building, or half-building, that was in process of
erection opposite to his rooms; a colossal pile of flats still mostly covered
with scaffolding and with boards announcing Messrs Swindon & Sand as the
builders and owners. The hammering was renewed at regular intervals and was
easily recognizable: because Messrs Swindon & Sand specialized in some new
American system of cement flooring which, in spite of its subsequent smoothness,
solidity, impenetrability and permanent comfort (as described in the
advertisements), had to be clamped down at certain points with heavy tools. Father
Brown endeavoured, however, to extract exiguous comfort from it; saying that it
always woke him up in time for the very earliest Mass, and was therefore
something almost in the nature of a carillon. After all, he said, it was almost
as poetic that Christians should be awakened by hammers as by bells. As a fact,
however, the building operations were a little on his nerves, for another
reason. For there was hanging like a cloud over the half-built skyscraper the
possibility of a Labour crisis, which the newspapers doggedly insisted on describing
as a Strike. As a matter of fact, if it ever happened, it would be a Lock-out.
But he worried a good deal about whether it would happen. And it might be
questioned whether hammering is more of a strain on the attention because it
may go on for ever, or because it may stop at any minute.

‘
As
a mere matter of taste and fancy,’ said Father Brown, staring up at the edifice
with his owlish spectacles, ‘I rather wish it would stop. I wish all houses would
stop while they still have the scaffolding up. It seems almost a pity that
houses are ever finished. They look so fresh and hopeful with all that fairy
filigree of white wood, all light and bright in the sun; and a man so often
only finishes a house by turning it into a tomb.’

As
he turned away from the object of his scrutiny, he nearly ran into a man who had
just darted across the road towards him. It was a man whom he knew slightly, but
sufficiently to regard him (in the circumstances) as something of a bird of ill-omen.
Mr Mastyk was a squat man with a square head that looked hardly European,
dressed with a heavy dandyism that seemed rather too consciously Europeanized.
But Brown had seen him lately talking to young Sand of the building firm; and
he did not like it. This man Mastyk was the head of an organization rather new
in English industrial politics; produced by extremes at both ends; a definite
army of non-Union and largely alien labour hired out in gangs to various firms;
and he was obviously hovering about in the hope of hiring it out to this one. In
short, he might negotiate some way of out-manoeuvring the Trade Union and
flooding the works with blacklegs. Father Brown had been drawn into some of the
debates, being in some sense called in on both sides. And as the Capitalists
all reported that, to their positive knowledge, he was a Bolshevist; and as the
Bolshevists all testified that he was a reactionary rigidly attached to
bourgeois ideologies, it may be inferred that he talked a certain amount of
sense without any appreciable effect on anybody. The news brought by Mr Mastyk,
however, was calculated to jerk everybody out of the ordinary rut of the
dispute.

‘
They
want you to go over there at once,’ said Mr Mastyk, in awkwardly accented English.
‘There is a threat to murder.’

Father
Brown followed his guide in silence up several stairways and ladders to a platform
of the unfinished building, on which were grouped the more or less familiar
figures of the heads of the building business. They included even what had once
been the head of it; though the head had been for some time rather a head in
the clouds. It was at least a head in a coronet, that hid it from human sight
like a cloud. Lord Stanes, in other words, had not only retired from the business
but been caught up into the House of Lords and disappeared. His rare reappearances
were languid and somewhat dreary; but this one, in conjunction with that of
Mastyk, seemed none the less menacing. Lord Stanes was a lean, long-headed,
hollow-eyed man with very faint fair hair fading into baldness; and he was the
most evasive person the priest had ever met. He was unrivalled in the true
Oxford talent of saying, ‘No doubt you’re right,’ so as to sound like, ‘No
doubt you think you’re right,’ or of merely remarking, ‘You think so?’ so as to
imply the acid addition, ‘You would.’ But Father Brown fancied that the man was
not merely bored but faintly embittered, though whether at being called down
from Olympus to control such trade squabbles, or merely at not being really any
longer in control of them, it was difficult to guess.

On
the whole, Father Brown rather preferred the more bourgeois group of partners. Sir
Hubert Sand and his nephew Henry; though he doubted privately whether they really
had very many ideologies. True, Sir Hubert Sand had obtained considerable celebrity
in the newspapers; both as a patron of sport and as a patriot in many crises
during and after the Great War. He had won notable distinction in France, for a
man of his years, and had afterwards been featured as a triumphant captain of
industry overcoming difficulties among the munition-workers. He had been called
a Strong Man; but that was not his fault. He was in fact a heavy, hearty
Englishman; a great swimmer; a good squire; an admirable amateur colonel.
Indeed, something that can only be called a military makeup pervaded his
appearance. He was growing stout, but he kept his shoulders set back; his curly
hair and moustache were still brown while the colours of his face were already
somewhat withered and faded. His nephew was a burly youth of the pushing, or
rather shouldering, sort with a relatively small head thrust out on a thick
neck, as if he went at things with his head down; a gesture somehow rendered
rather quaint and boyish by the pince-nez that were balanced on his pugnacious
pug-nose.

Father
Brown had looked at all these things before; and at that moment everybody was looking
at something entirely new. In the centre of the wood-work there was nailed up a
large loose flapping piece of paper on which something was scrawled in crude
and almost crazy capital letters, as if the writer were either almost illiterate
or were affecting or parodying illiteracy. The words actually ran: ‘The Council
of the Workers warns Hubert Sand that he will lower wages and lock out workmen
at his peril. If the notices go out tomorrow, he will be dead by the justice of
the people.’

Lord
Stanes was just stepping back from his examination of the paper, and, looking across
at his partner, he said with rather a curious intonation: ‘Well, it’s you they
want to murder. Evidently I’m not considered worth murdering.’

One
of those still electric shocks of fancy that sometimes thrilled Father Brown’s mind
in an almost meaningless way shot through him at that particular instant. He
had a queer notion that the man who was speaking could not now be murdered, because
he was already dead. It was, he cheerfully admitted, a perfectly senseless
idea. But there was something that always gave him the creeps about the cold
disenchanted detachment of the noble senior partner; about his cadaverous
colour and inhospitable eyes. ‘The fellow,’ he thought in the same perverse
mood, ‘has green eyes and looks as if he had green blood.’

Anyhow,
it was certain that Sir Hubert Sand had not got green blood. His blood, which was
red enough in every sense, was creeping up into his withered or weather-beaten
cheeks with all the warm fullness of life that belongs to the natural and
innocent indignation of the good-natured.

‘
In
all my life,’ he said, in a strong voice and yet shakily, ‘I have never had such
a thing said or done about me. I may have differed — ’

‘
We
can none of us differ about this,’ struck in his nephew impetuously. ‘I’ve tried
to get on with them, but this is a bit too thick.’

‘
You
don’t really think,’ began Father Brown, ‘that your workmen — ’

‘
I
say we may have differed,’ said old Sand, still a little tremulously, ‘God knows
I never like the idea of threatening English workmen with cheaper labour — ’

‘
We
none of us liked it,’ said the young man, ‘but if I know you, uncle, this has about
settled it.’

Then
after a pause he added, ‘I suppose, as you say, we did disagree about details; but
as to real policy — ’

‘
My
dear fellow,’ said his uncle, comfortably. ‘I hoped there would never be any real
disagreement.’ From which anybody who understands the English nation may rightly
infer that there had been very considerable disagreement. Indeed the uncle and
nephew differed almost as much as an Englishman and an American. The uncle had
the English ideal of getting outside the business, and setting up a sort of an
alibi as a country gentleman. The nephew had the American ideal of getting
inside the business; of getting inside the very mechanism like a mechanic. And,
indeed, he had worked with most of the mechanics and was familiar with most of
the processes and tricks of the trade. And he was American again, in the fact
that he did this partly as an employer to keep his men up to the mark, but in
some vague way also as an equal, or at least with a pride in showing himself
also as a worker. For this reason he had often appeared almost as a
representative of the workers, on technical points which were a hundred miles
away from his uncle’s popular eminence in politics or sport. The memory of
those many occasions, when young Henry had practically come out of the workshop
in his shirt-sleeves, to demand some concession about the conditions of the
work, lent a peculiar force and even violence to his present reaction the other
way.

‘
Well,
they’ve damned-well locked themselves out this time,’ he cried. ‘After a threat
like that there’s simply nothing left but to defy them. There’s nothing left but
to sack them all now; instanter; on the spot. Otherwise we’ll be the laughing-stock
of the world.’

Old
Sand frowned with equal indignation, but began slowly: ‘I shall be very much criticized
— ’

‘
Criticized!’
cried the young man shrilly. ‘Criticized if you defy a threat of murder! Have you
any notion how you’ll be criticized if you don’t defy it? Won’t you enjoy the
headlines? “Great Capitalist Terrorized” — “Employer Yields to Murder Threat.”

‘
Particularly,’
said Lord Stanes, with something faintly unpleasant in his tone. ‘Particularly when
he has been in so many headlines already as “The Strong Man of Steel-Building.”
’

Sand
had gone very red again and his voice came thickly from under his thick moustache.
‘Of course you’re right there. If these brutes think I’m afraid — ’

At
this point there was an interruption in the conversation of the group; and a slim
young man came towards them swiftly. The first notable thing about him was that
he was one of those whom men, and women too, think are just a little too nice-looking
to look nice. He had beautiful dark curly hair and a silken moustache and he
spoke like a gentleman, but with almost too refined and exactly modulated an
accent. Father Brown knew him at once as Rupert Rae, the secretary of Sir
Hubert, whom he had often seen pottering about in Sir Hubert’s house; but never
with such impatience in his movements or such a wrinkle on his brow.

‘
I’m
sorry, sir,’ he said to his employer, ‘but there’s a man been hanging about over
there. I’ve done my best to get rid of him. He’s only got a letter, but he swears
he must give it to you personally.’

‘
You
mean he went first to my house?’ said Sand, glancing swiftly at his secretary. ‘I
suppose you’ve been there all the morning.’

‘
Yes,
sir,’ said Mr Rupert Rae.

There
was a short silence; and then Sir Hubert Sand curtly intimated that the man had
better be brought along; and the man duly appeared.

Nobody,
not even the least fastidious lady, would have said that the newcomer was too nice-looking.
He had very large ears and a face like a frog, and he stared before him with an
almost ghastly fixity, which Father Brown attributed to his having a glass eye.
In fact, his fancy was tempted to equip the man with two glass eyes; with so
glassy a stare did he contemplate the company. But the priest’s experience, as
distinct from his fancy, was able to suggest several natural causes for that
unnatural waxwork glare; one of them being an abuse of the divine gift of
fermented liquor. The man was short and shabby and carried a large bowler hat
in one hand and a large sealed letter in the other.

Sir
Hubert Sand looked at him; and then said quietly enough, but in a voice that somehow
seemed curiously small, coming out of the fullness of his bodily presence: ‘Oh
— it’s you.’

He
held out his hand for the letter; and then looked around apologetically, with poised
finger, before ripping it open and reading it. When he had read it, he stuffed
it into his inside pocket and said hastily and a little harshly: ‘Well, I
suppose all this business is over, as you say. No more negotiations possible
now; we couldn’t pay the wages they want anyhow. But I shall want to see you
again, Henry, about — about winding things up generally.’