The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (35 page)

“
He
is escaping from everywhere,” answered Father Brown.

Valognes’s
eyes brightened, but his voice sank. “Do you mean suicide?” he asked.

“
You
will not find his body,” replied the other.

A
kind of cry came from Flambeau on the wall above. “My God,” he exclaimed in French,
“I know what this place is now! Why, it’s the back of the street where old
Hirsch lives. I thought I could recognize the back of a house as well as the
back of a man.”

“
And
Dubosc’s gone in there!” cried the Duke, smiting his hip. “Why, they’ll meet after
all!” And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on the wall beside Flambeau
and sat there positively kicking his legs with excitement. The priest alone
remained below, leaning against the wall, with his back to the whole theatre of
events, and looking wistfully across to the park palings and the twinkling,
twilit trees.

The
Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and desired rather
to stare at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau, who had the instincts of
a burglar (and a detective), had already swung himself from the wall into the
fork of a straggling tree from which he could crawl quite close to the only
illuminated window in the back of the high dark house. A red blind had been
pulled down over the light, but pulled crookedly, so that it gaped on one side,
and by risking his neck along a branch that looked as treacherous as a twig,
Flambeau could just see Colonel Dubosc walking about in a brilliantly-lighted
and luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the house, he heard the
words of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.

“
Yes,
they will meet now after all!”

“
They
will never meet,” said Father Brown. “Hirsch was right when he said that in such
an affair the principals must not meet. Have you read a queer psychological
story by Henry James, of two persons who so perpetually missed meeting each
other by accident that they began to feel quite frightened of each other, and
to think it was fate? This is something of the kind, but more curious.”

“
There
are people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,” said Valognes vindictively.
“They will jolly well have to meet if we capture them and force them to fight.”

“
They
will not meet on the Day of Judgement,” said the priest. “If God Almighty held the
truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet for the swords to cross
— even then, if one of them stood ready, the other would not come.”

“
Oh,
what does all this mysticism mean?” cried the Duc de Valognes, impatiently; “why
on earth shouldn’t they meet like other people?”

“
They
are the opposite of each other,” said Father Brown, with a queer kind of smile.
“They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to speak.”

He
continued to gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes turned his head
sharply at a suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That investigator, peering into
the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel, after a pace or two, proceed to
take his coat off. Flambeau’s first thought was that this really looked like a
fight; but he soon dropped the thought for another. The solidity and squareness
of Dubosc’s chest and shoulders was all a powerful piece of padding and came
off with his coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively slim gentleman,
who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious purpose
than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his dripping hands
and face on a towel, and turned again so that the strong light fell on his
face. His brown complexion had gone, his big black moustache had gone; he — was
clean-shaven and very pale. Nothing remained of the Colonel but his bright,
hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall Father Brown was going on in heavy
meditation, as if to himself.

“
It
is all just like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites won’t do. They don’t
work. They don’t fight. If it’s white instead of black, and solid instead of
liquid, and so on all along the line — then there’s something wrong, Monsieur,
there’s something wrong. One of these men is fair and the other dark, one stout
and the other slim, one strong and the other weak. One has a moustache and no
beard, so you can’t see his mouth; the other has a beard and no moustache, so
you can’t see his chin. One has hair cropped to his skull, but a scarf to hide
his neck; the other has low shirt-collars, but long hair to hide his skull.
It’s all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and there’s something wrong. Things
made so opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one sticks out
the other sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a key . . .”

Flambeau
was peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet. The occupant of the
room was standing with his back to him, but in front of a looking-glass, and
had already fitted round his face a sort of framework of rank red hair, hanging
disordered from the head and clinging round the jaws and chin while leaving the
mocking mouth uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked like the
face of Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For
a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were covered
with a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat, the figure
vanished towards the front of the house. A few moments later a roar of popular
applause from the street beyond announced that Dr Hirsch had once more appeared
upon the balcony.

TWO
men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage running along the
side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening daylight in the streets
was large and luminous, opalescent and empty. The passage was comparatively
long and dark, so each man could see the other as a mere black silhouette at
the other end. Nevertheless, each man knew the other, even in that inky
outline; for they were both men of striking appearance and they hated each
other.

The
covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the Adelphi, and
at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured river. One side of
the passage was a blank wall, for the building it supported was an old unsuccessful
theatre restaurant, now shut up. The other side of the passage contained two
doors, one at each end. Neither was what was commonly called the stage door;
they were a sort of special and private stage doors used by very special performers,
and in this case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance
of the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits and
entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.

The
two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who evidently knew the
doors and counted on their opening, for each approached the door at the upper end
with equal coolness and confidence. Not, however, with equal speed; but the man
who walked fast was the man from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived
before the secret stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each
other with civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker
who seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.

In
this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could be called inferior.
As private persons both were handsome, capable and popular. As public persons,
both were in the first public rank. But everything about them, from their glory
to their good looks, was of a diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour
was the kind of man whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more
you mixed with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often
you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty unintelligent
committees — on every sort of subject, from the reform of the Royal Academy to
the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain. In the Arts especially he was
omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody could quite decide whether he was a
great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats
had taken up. But you could not meet him for five minutes without realizing
that you had really been ruled by him all your life.

His
appearance was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at once conventional
and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his high silk hat — yet it
was unlike anyone else’s hat — a little higher, perhaps, and adding something
to his natural height. His tall, slender figure had a slight stoop yet it
looked the reverse of feeble. His hair was silver-grey, but he did not look
old; it was worn longer than the common yet he did not look effeminate; it was
curly but it did not look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look
more manly and militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of
Velazquez with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a
shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of such gloves
and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the restaurants.

The
other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short, but merely as
strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and cropped close to a strong,
massive head — the sort of head you break a door with, as Chaucer said of the
Miller’s. His military moustache and the carriage of his shoulders showed him a
soldier, but he had a pair of those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which
are more common in sailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square,
his shoulders were square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild
school of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a
proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.

For
he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success. You did not
have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain Cutler, of the siege of
Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You could not get away from
hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait was on every other postcard; his
maps and battles in every other illustrated paper; songs in his honour in every
other music-hall turn or on every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably
more temporary, was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other
man’s. In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, like
Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson Seymour.

The
door was opened to them by an aged servant or “dresser”, whose broken-down face
and figure and black shabby coat and trousers contrasted queerly with the glittering
interior of the great actress’s dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with
looking-glasses at every angle of refraction, so that they looked like the
hundred facets of one huge diamond — if one could get inside a diamond. The
other features of luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps
of stage costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of the
Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the shuffling
attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against the wall.

They
both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and asking for the
lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the other room, but he would
go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of both visitors; for the other room
was the private room of the great actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing,
and she was of the kind that does not inflame admiration without inflaming
jealousy. In about half a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she
entered as she always did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed
to be a roar of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat
strange garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue
and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy, hot
brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to all men, but
especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company with her male colleague,
the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was producing a particularly
poetical and fantastic interpretation of Midsummer Night’s Dream: in which the
artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno
and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical
dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the
elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what
was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman’s face.

She
greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so many males at
the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted some flowers from Cutler,
which were as tropical and expensive as his victories; and another sort of present
from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered later on and more nonchalantly by that
gentleman. For it was against his breeding to show eagerness, and against his
conventional unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had
picked up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient
Greek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in the time
of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the Heroic weapons,
but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still. He had really been
attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was as perfect as a Greek vase. If
it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could come in anywhere in the play, he
hoped she would —

The
inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of a contrast to the
explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly six-foot-six, and of more
than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore Bruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin
and golden-brown garments of Oberon, looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a
sort of hunting-spear, which across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand,
but which in the small and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a
pike-staff — and as menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed
face, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of high cheekbones
with set white teeth, which recalled certain American conjectures about his
origin in the Southern plantations.

“
Aurora,”
he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had moved so many audiences,
“will you —”

He
stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented itself just inside
the doorway — a figure so incongruous in the scene as to be almost comic. It
was a very short man in the black uniform of the Roman secular clergy, and
looking (especially in such a presence as Bruno’s and Aurora’s) rather like the
wooden Noah out of an ark. He did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast,
but said with dull civility: “I believe Miss Rome sent for me.”

A
shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature rather rose at
so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a professional celibate seemed
to reveal to the others that they stood round the woman as a ring of amorous
rivals; just as a stranger coming in with frost on his coat will reveal that a
room is like a furnace. The presence of the one man who did not care about her
increased Miss Rome’s sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each
in a somewhat dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a
spoilt child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will
rather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentration with which
old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abject Parkinson, who had known
her before her triumphs, and who followed her about the room with eyes or feet,
with the dumb fascination of a dog.

A
shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a black wooden
Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with a considerable but
contained amusement. It was evident that the great Aurora, though by no means
indifferent to the admiration of the other sex, wanted at this moment to get
rid of all the men who admired her and be left alone with the man who did not —
did not admire her in that sense at least; for the little priest did admire and
even enjoy the firm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There
was, perhaps, only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was
one half of humanity — the other half. The little priest watched, like a
Napoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling all while
banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it was easy to send
him off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the British officer, was pachydermatous
to ideas, but punctilious about behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he
would die rather than ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old
Seymour, he had to be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The
only way to move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to
let him into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss
Rome as she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.

She
went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner: “I shall value all
these flowers, because they must be your favourite flowers. But they won’t be
complete, you know, without my favourite flower. Do go over to that shop round
the corner and get me some lilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite
lovely.”

The
first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at once achieved.
He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, like a sceptre, to the
piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of the cushioned seats like a
throne. But at this open appeal to his rival there glowed in his opal eyeballs
all the sensitive insolence of the slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists
for an instant, and then, dashing open the door, disappeared into his own
apartments beyond. But meanwhile Miss Rome’s experiment in mobilizing the
British Army had not succeeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed
risen stiffly and suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a
word of command. But perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about
the languid figure of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses that
brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head this way and that like a
bewildered bulldog.

“
I
must show this stupid man where to go,” said Aurora in a whisper to Seymour, and
ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.

Seymour
seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his posture, and he seemed
relieved when he heard the lady call out some last instructions to the Captain,
and then turn sharply and run laughing down the passage towards the other end,
the end on the terrace above the Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour’s
brow darkened again. A man in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered
that at the other end of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno’s
private room. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father
Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster Cathedral,
and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into the upper end of the
passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were left alone, and they were neither of
them men with a taste for superfluous conversation. The dresser went round the
room, pulling out looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark
coat and trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the
festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame of a new
glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd glass chamber
was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like angels, turning
somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to everybody like very rude
persons.