The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (40 page)

“
Nature
is older than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the streets to the sea, the
coin clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the Roman Empire on my back as well
as the Carstairs pedigree. It was not only the old lion argent that was roaring
in my ear, but all the eagles of the Caesars seemed flapping and screaming in
pursuit of me. And yet my heart rose higher and higher like a child’s kite,
until I came over the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat, wet sands, where
Philip stood already up to his ankles in the shallow shining water, some
hundred yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset; and the long stretch of
low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a mile, was like a lake of
ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes and stockings and waded to
where he stood, which was well away from the dry land, that I turned and looked
round. We were quite alone in a circle of sea-water and wet sand, and I gave
him the head of Caesar.

“
At
the very instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on the sand-hills was
looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately after that it was a mere
leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was only a dark dot in the distance,
and I could only just see that he was standing quite still and gazing, with his
head a little on one side. There was no earthly logical evidence that he was
looking at me; he might have been looking at a ship, or the sunset, or the
sea-gulls, or at any of the people who still strayed here and there on the
shore between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang from was prophetic;
for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line towards us across the
wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw that he was dark and
bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark spectacles. He was dressed
poorly but respectably in black, from the old black top hat on his head to the
solid black boots on his feet. In spite of these he walked straight into the
sea without a flash of hesitation, and came on at me with the steadiness of a
travelling bullet.

“
I
can’t tell you the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he thus silently
burst the barrier between land and water. It was as if he had walked straight off
a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air. It was as if a house had flown
up into the sky or a man’s head had fallen off. He was only wetting his boots;
but he seemed to be a demon disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated
an instant at the water’s edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed
to look so much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards
away with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till he
stood within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to his knees. Then
he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing articulation: ‘Would it
discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin with a somewhat different
superscription?’

“
With
one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His tinted glasses
were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough, nor were the eyes
behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark beard was not really
long or wild — but he looked rather hairy, because the beard began very high up
in his face, just under the cheek-bones. His complexion was neither sallow nor
livid, but on the contrary rather clear and youthful; yet this gave a
pink-and-white wax look which somehow (I don’t know why) rather increased the horror.
The only oddity one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good
shape, was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft,
it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly a deformity;
yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to me. As he stood there
in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some hellish sea-monster just
risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don’t know why a touch on the nose
should affect my imagination so much. I think it seemed as if he could move his
nose like a finger. And as if he had just that moment moved it.

“‘
Any
little assistance,’ he continued with the same queer, priggish accent, ‘that may
obviate the necessity of my communicating with the family.’

“
Then
it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of the bronze piece;
and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were swallowed up in one
overpowering, practical question. How could he have found out? I had stolen the
thing suddenly and on impulse; I was certainly alone; for I always made sure of
being unobserved when I slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to
all appearance, been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not
‘X-ray’ the coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no
more have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man in
the fairy-tale.

“‘
Philip,’
I cried helplessly, ‘ask this man what he wants.’

“
When
Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked rather red, as if
sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the exertion of stooping and the red
evening light; I may have only had another of the morbid fancies that seemed to
be dancing about me. He merely said gruffly to the man: ‘You clear out of
this.’ And, motioning me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying
further attention to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from
among the roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our
incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and
slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my persecutor
walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed me, picking his way and
picking his phrases. I heard his delicate, detestable voice appealing to me
over my shoulder, until at last, when we had crested the sand-hills, Philip’s
patience (which was by no means so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to
snap. He turned suddenly, saying, ‘Go back. I can’t talk to you now.’ And as
the man hovered and opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that
sent him flying from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him
crawling out below, covered with sand.

“
This
stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my peril; but Philip
showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess. Though as affectionate as ever,
he still seemed cast down; and before I could ask him anything fully, he parted
with me at his own gate, with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said
that, all things considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection;
but that he himself would keep it ‘for the present’. And then he added quite
suddenly and irrelevantly:, ‘You know Giles is back from Australia?’”

The
door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the investigator Flambeau fell
across the table. Father Brown presented him to the lady in his own slight,
persuasive style of speech, mentioning his knowledge and sympathy in such
cases; and almost without knowing, the girl was soon reiterating her story to
two listeners. But Flambeau, as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small
slip of paper. Brown accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to
Wagga Wagga, 379, Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her story.

“
I
went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it had not begun
to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a milk-can — and the man
with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the servants were all out; for, of
course, Arthur, browsing about in his brown dressing-gown in a brown study,
would not hear or answer a bell. Thus there was no one to help me in the house,
except my brother, whose help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two
shillings into the horrid thing’s hand, and told him to call again in a few days,
when I had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had
expected — perhaps he had been shaken by his fall — and I watched the star of
sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid vindictive pleasure.
He turned a corner some six houses down.

“
Then
I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out. I sat at the drawing-room
window looking on to the garden, which still glowed with the last full evening
light. But I was too distracted and dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots
and flower-beds with any concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply
because I’d seen it so slowly.

“
The
man or monster I’d sent away was standing quite still in the middle of the garden.
Oh, we’ve all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the dark; but this was
more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever be. Because, though he cast
a long evening shadow, he still stood in warm sunlight. And because his face
was not pale, but had that waxen bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber’s
dummy. He stood quite still, with his face towards me; and I can’t tell you how
horrid he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost
hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we’d stuck up a waxwork instead of a
statue in the centre of our garden.

“
Yet
almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran out of the garden
by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had undoubtedly entered.
This renewed timidity on his part was so different from the impudence with
which he had walked into the sea, that I felt vaguely comforted. I fancied,
perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled
down at last, and had a quiet dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb
Arthur when he was rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little
released, fled to Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking
blankly, but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained,
but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed to me
that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane. But when I
stared harder, it was more like a man’s thumb pressed on the pane; it had that
curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage re-awakened together, I
rushed at the window and then recoiled with a strangled scream that any man but
Arthur must have heard.

“
For
it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip of a crooked nose,
crushed against the glass; it looked white with the pressure; and the staring
face and eyes behind it were at first invisible and afterwards grey like a
ghost. I slammed the shutters together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked
myself in. But, even as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window
with something on it that was like a snail.

“
It
might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling close all around
the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even than blackmail. My
brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but he was a gentleman, and would
defend me on the spot. After ten minutes’ curious thinking, I went down, knocked
on the door and then went in: to see the last and worst sight.

“
My
brother’s chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man with the crooked
nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat still insolently on his
head, and actually reading one of my brother’s books under my brother’s lamp.
His face was composed and occupied, but his nose-tip still had the air of being
the most mobile part of his face, as if it had just turned from left to right
like an elephant’s proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was
pursuing and watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was
more frightful still.

“
I
think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn’t matter. What I did next does matter:
I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal in paper which, though it
was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch. He went off at last, with hateful,
tactful regrets all in long words; and I sat down, feeling ruined in every
sense. And yet I was saved that very night by a pure accident. Arthur had gone
off suddenly to London, as he so often did, for bargains; and returned, late
but radiant, having nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour even
to the family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened to
confess the abstraction of the lesser gem — but he bore down all other topics
with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still misfire any
moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up with him to lodgings he
had already taken in Fulham, to be near the curio-shop in question. Thus in
spite of myself, I fled from my foe almost in the dead of night — but from
Philip also. . . . My brother was often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in
order to make some sort of secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons
at the Art Schools. I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the
abomination of desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the
rest is as this gentleman has said.

“
I’ve
got only one thing to say. I don’t deserve to be helped; and I don’t question or
complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to have happened. But I still
question, with bursting brains, how it can have happened. Am I punished by
miracle? or how can anyone but Philip and myself know I gave him a tiny coin in
the middle of the sea?”

“
It
is an extraordinary problem,” admitted Flambeau.

“
Not
so extraordinary as the answer,” remarked Father Brown rather gloomily. “Miss Carstairs,
will you be at home if we call at your Fulham place in an hour and a half
hence?”