The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (29 page)

To
Lucian Oldershaw

THE
consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain
moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough, in a series of very
large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless
outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the
monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout
by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not
be supposed that Dr Hood’s apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These
things were there, in their place; but one felt that they were never allowed
out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or
ten boxes of the best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the
strongest were always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A
tantalus containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood
always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky,
brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the
left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English
classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But
if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence
irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth. One could not say the
books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their being
chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated
his private book-shelf as if it were a public library. And if this strict
scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads
and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet
more of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the
specialist’s library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and even
fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.

Dr
Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded — as the boys’ geographies
say — on the east by the North Sea and on the west by the serried ranks of his
sociological and criminologist library. He was clad in an artist’s velvet, but
with none of an artist’s negligence; his hair was heavily shot with grey, but
growing thick and healthy; his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant.
Everything about him and his room indicated something at once rigid and
restless, like that great northern sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene)
he had built his home.

Fate,
being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into those long, strict,
sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most startling opposite of them
and their master. In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards
and there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to
find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The
umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a
broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in England; the man was the
very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.

The
doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not unlike that he
would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless sea-beast had crawled into
his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless
geniality which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed to
stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation
and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped
between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked after the
other, but with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as
follows:

“
My
name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I’ve come about that business of the MacNabs. I have
heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong.”

By
this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd little bobbing bow
over it, as if setting everything quite right.

“
I
hardly understand you,” replied the scientist, with a cold intensity of manner.
“I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely
literary and educational. It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by
the police in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but —”

“
Oh,
this is of the greatest importance,” broke in the little man called Brown. “Why,
her mother won’t let them get engaged.” And he leaned back in his chair in
radiant rationality.

The
brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them were bright with
something that might be anger or might be amusement. “And still,” he said, “I
do not quite understand.”

“
You
see, they want to get married,” said the man with the clerical hat. “Maggie MacNab
and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be more important than
that?”

The
great Orion Hood’s scientific triumphs had deprived him of many things — some said
of his health, others of his God; but they had not wholly despoiled him of his
sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke
out of him from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical
attitude of the consulting physician.

“
Mr
Brown,” he said gravely, “it is quite fourteen and a half years since I was personally
asked to test a personal problem: then it was the case of an attempt to poison
the French President at a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. It is now, I understand, a
question of whether some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee
for some friend of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I
will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I
gave the French Republic and the King of England — no, better: fourteen years
better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story.”

The
little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable warmth, but still
with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as if he were thanking a stranger
in a smoking-room for some trouble in passing the matches, than as if he were
(as he was) practically thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him
into a field to find a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his
hearty thanks, the little man began his recital:

“
I
told you my name was Brown; well, that’s the fact, and I’m the priest of the little
Catholic Church I dare say you’ve seen beyond those straggly streets, where the
town ends towards the north. In the last and straggliest of those streets which
runs along the sea like a sea-wall there is a very honest but rather
sharp-tempered member of my flock, a widow called MacNab. She has one daughter,
and she lets lodgings, and between her and the daughter, and between her and
the lodgers — well, I dare say there is a great deal to be said on both sides.
At present she has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter; but he has
given more trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of
the house.”

“
And
the young woman of the house,” asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent amusement,
“what does she want?”

“
Why,
she wants to marry him,” cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly. “That is just the
awful complication.”

“
It
is indeed a hideous enigma,” said Dr Hood.

“
This
young James Todhunter,” continued the cleric, “is a very decent man so far as I
know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile
like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier.
He seems to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his trade
is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is
something dreadful, and probably connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be
of a shy and noiseless sort, for the poor fellow only shuts himself up for
several hours of the day and studies something behind a locked door. He
declares his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before
the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will
tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the tales
grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that. There are tales of two
voices heard talking in the room; though, when the door is opened, Todhunter is
always found alone. There are tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who
once came out of the sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly
across the sandy fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he
was heard talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end
in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the man in
the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the family
with the fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her own
original tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night
from the big box in the corner, which is kept locked all day. You see,
therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter’s is treated as the gate of all
the fancies and monstrosities of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’. And yet there
is the little fellow in his respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent
as a parlour clock. He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller;
he is tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused for a
day on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself equally
popular with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow.”

A
man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them
to any triviality. The great specialist having condescended to the priest’s
simplicity, condescended expansively. He settled himself with comfort in his
arm-chair and began to talk in the tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:

“
Even
in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature.
A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying;
a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming
in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements,
destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return
of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all history is Race. Race produces
religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There is no stronger case than
that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we commonly call the
Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of
this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation
of any incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying)
that superstitious explanation of all incidents which you and your Church
represent. It is not remarkable that such people, with the sea moaning behind
them and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them, should put
fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with your small
parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab, terrified with
this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But the man
with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans of MacNab
scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate average as uniform as a tribe
of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping
their little drop of morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees —”

Before
the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more impatient summons sounded
from without; someone with swishing skirts was marshalled hurriedly down the
corridor, and the door opened on a young girl, decently dressed but disordered
and red-hot with haste. She had sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been
entirely beautiful if her cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a
little high in relief as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as
a command.

“
I’m
sorry to interrupt you, sir,” she said, “but I had to follow Father Brown at once;
it’s nothing less than life or death.”

Father
Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. “Why, what has happened, Maggie?”
he said.

“
James
has been murdered, for all I can make out,” answered the girl, still breathing hard
from her rush. “That man Glass has been with him again; I heard them talking
through the door quite plain. Two separate voices: for James speaks low, with a
burr, and the other voice was high and quavery.”

“
That
man Glass?” repeated the priest in some perplexity.

“
I
know his name is Glass,” answered the girl, in great impatience. “I heard it through
the door. They were quarrelling — about money, I think — for I heard James say
again and again, ‘That’s right, Mr Glass,’ or ‘No, Mr Glass,’ and then, ‘Two or
three, Mr Glass.’ But we’re talking too much; you must come at once, and there
may be time yet.”

“
But
time for what?” asked Dr Hood, who had been studying the young lady with marked
interest. “What is there about Mr Glass and his money troubles that should impel
such urgency?”

“
I
tried to break down the door and couldn’t,” answered the girl shortly, “Then I ran
to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the window-sill that looks into
the room. It was all dim, and seemed to be empty, but I swear I saw James lying
huddled up in a corner, as if he were drugged or strangled.”