The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (49 page)

When
he strolled across to him, the black, unbrushed head was lifted abruptly, as if
in some surprise at his continued presence. And indeed, Father Brown, for reasons
best known to himself, had lingered much longer than politeness required; or
even, in the ordinary sense, permitted.

“
Well!”
cried Cray, with wild eyes. “I suppose you think I’m mad, like the rest?”

“
I
have considered the thesis,” answered the little man, composedly. “And I incline
to think you are not.”

“
What
do you mean?” snapped Cray quite savagely.

“
Real
madmen,” explained Father Brown, “always encourage their own morbidity. They never
strive against it. But you are trying to find traces of the burglar; even when
there aren’t any. You are struggling against it. You want what no madman ever
wants.”

“
And
what is that?”

“
You
want to be proved wrong,” said Brown.

During
the last words Cray had sprung or staggered to his feet and was regarding the cleric
with agitated eyes. “By hell, but that is a true word!” he cried. “They are all
at me here that the fellow was only after the silver — as if I shouldn’t be
only too pleased to think so! She’s been at me,” and he tossed his tousled
black head towards Audrey, but the other had no need of the direction, “she’s
been at me today about how cruel I was to shoot a poor harmless house-breaker,
and how I have the devil in me against poor harmless natives. But I was a
good-natured man once — as good-natured as Putnam.”

After
a pause he said: “Look here, I’ve never seen you before; but you shall judge of
the whole story. Old Putnam and I were friends in the same mess; but, owing to some
accidents on the Afghan border, I got my command much sooner than most men;
only we were both invalided home for a bit. I was engaged to Audrey out there;
and we all travelled back together. But on the journey back things happened.
Curious things. The result of them was that Putnam wants it broken off, and
even Audrey keeps it hanging on — and I know what they mean. I know what they
think I am. So do you.

“
Well,
these are the facts. The last day we were in an Indian city I asked Putnam if I
could get some Trichinopoli cigars, he directed me to a little place opposite his
lodgings. I have since found he was quite right; but ‘opposite’ is a dangerous
word when one decent house stands opposite five or six squalid ones; and I must
have mistaken the door. It opened with difficulty, and then only on darkness;
but as I turned back, the door behind me sank back and settled into its place
with a noise as of innumerable bolts. There was nothing to do but to walk
forward; which I did through passage after passage, pitch-dark. Then I came to
a flight of steps, and then to a blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate
Eastern ironwork, which I could only trace by touch, but which I loosened at
last. I came out again upon gloom, which was half turned into a greenish twilight
by a multitude of small but steady lamps below. They showed merely the feet or
fringes of some huge and empty architecture. Just in front of me was something
that looked like a mountain. I confess I nearly fell on the great stone
platform on which I had emerged, to realize that it was an idol. And worst of
all, an idol with its back to me.

“
It
was hardly half human, I guessed; to judge by the small squat head, and still more
by a thing like a tail or extra limb turned up behind and pointing, like a loathsome
large finger, at some symbol graven in the centre of the vast stone back. I had
begun, in the dim light, to guess at the hieroglyphic, not without horror, when
a more horrible thing happened. A door opened silently in the temple wall
behind me and a man came out, with a brown face and a black coat. He had a
carved smile on his face, of copper flesh and ivory teeth; but I think the most
hateful thing about him was that he was in European dress. I was prepared, I
think, for shrouded priests or naked fakirs. But this seemed to say that the
devilry was over all the earth. As indeed I found it to be.

“‘
If
you had only seen the Monkey’s Feet,’ he said, smiling steadily, and without other
preface, ‘we should have been very gentle — you would only be tortured and die.
If you had seen the Monkey’s Face, still we should be very moderate, very
tolerant — you would only be tortured and live. But as you have seen the Monkey’s
Tail, we must pronounce the worst sentence, which is — Go Free.’

“
When
he said the words I heard the elaborate iron latch with which I had struggled, automatically
unlock itself: and then, far down the dark passages I had passed, I heard the
heavy street-door shifting its own bolts backwards.

“‘
It
is vain to ask for mercy; you must go free,’ said the smiling man. ‘Henceforth a
hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you like an adder; weapons
shall come against you out of nowhere; and you shall die many times.’ And with
that he was swallowed once more in the wall behind; and I went out into the
street.”

Cray
paused; and Father Brown unaffectedly sat down on the lawn and began to pick daisies.

Then
the soldier continued: “Putnam, of course, with his jolly common sense, pooh-poohed
all my fears; and from that time dates his doubt of my mental balance. Well,
I’ll simply tell you, in the fewest words, the three things that have happened
since; and you shall judge which of us is right.

“
The
first happened in an Indian village on the edge of the jungle, but hundreds of miles
from the temple, or town, or type of tribes and customs where the curse had
been put on me. I woke in black midnight, and lay thinking of nothing in particular,
when I felt a faint tickling thing, like a thread or a hair, trailed across my
throat. I shrank back out of its way, and could not help thinking of the words
in the temple. But when I got up and sought lights and a mirror, the line
across my neck was a line of blood.

“
The
second happened in a lodging in Port Said, later, on our journey home together.
It was a jumble of tavern and curiosity-shop; and though there was nothing there
remotely suggesting the cult of the Monkey, it is, of course, possible that
some of its images or talismans were in such a place. Its curse was there, anyhow.
I woke again in the dark with a sensation that could not be put in colder or
more literal words than that a breath bit like an adder. Existence was an agony
of extinction; I dashed my head against walls until I dashed it against a
window; and fell rather than jumped into the garden below. Putnam, poor fellow,
who had called the other thing a chance scratch, was bound to take seriously
the fact of finding me half insensible on the grass at dawn. But I fear it was
my mental state he took seriously; and not my story.

“
The
third happened in Malta. We were in a fortress there; and as it happened our bedrooms
overlooked the open sea, which almost came up to our window-sills, save for a
flat white outer wall as bare as the sea. I woke up again; but it was not dark.
There was a full moon, as I walked to the window; I could have seen a bird on
the bare battlement, or a sail on the horizon. What I did see was a sort of
stick or branch circling, self-supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in
at my window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was
one of those queer-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had come
from no human hand.”

Father
Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a wistful look. “Has
Major Putnam,” he asked, “got any Eastern curios, idols, weapons and so on,
from which one might get a hint?”

“
Plenty
of those, though not much use, I fear,” replied Cray; “but by all means come into
his study.”

As
they entered they passed Miss Watson buttoning her gloves for church, and heard
the voice of Putnam downstairs still giving a lecture on cookery to the cook. In
the Major’s study and den of curios they came suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted
and dressed for the street, who was poring over an open book on the smoking-table
— a book which he dropped rather guiltily, and turned.

Cray
introduced him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such disfavour in his very
face that Brown guessed the two men, whether Audrey knew it or not, were rivals.
Nor was the priest wholly unsympathetic with the prejudice. Dr Oman was a very
well-dressed gentleman indeed; well-featured, though almost dark enough for an
Asiatic. But Father Brown had to tell himself sharply that one should be in
charity even with those who wax their pointed beards, who have small gloved hands,
and who speak with perfectly modulated voices.

Cray
seemed to find something specially irritating in the small prayer-book in Oman’s
dark-gloved hand. “I didn’t know that was in your line,” he said rather rudely.

Oman
laughed mildly, but without offence. “This is more so, I know,” he said, laying
his hand on the big book he had dropped, “a dictionary of drugs and such things.
But it’s rather too large to take to church.” Then he closed the larger book,
and there seemed again the faintest touch of hurry and embarrassment.

“
I
suppose,” said the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject, “all these
spears and things are from India?”

“
From
everywhere,” answered the doctor. “Putnam is an old soldier, and has been in
Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for all I know.”

“
I
hope it was not in the Cannibal Islands,” said Brown, “that he learnt the art of
cookery.” And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other strange utensils on
the wall.

At
this moment the jolly subject of their conversation thrust his laughing, lobsterish
face into the room. “Come along, Cray,” he cried. “Your lunch is just coming
in. And the bells are ringing for those who want to go to church.”

Cray
slipped upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook themselves solemnly down
the street, with a string of other churchgoers; but Father Brown noticed that
the doctor twice looked back and scrutinized the house; and even came back to
the corner of the street to look at it again.

The
priest looked puzzled. “He can’t have been at the dustbin,” he muttered. “Not in
those clothes. Or was he there earlier today?”

Father
Brown, touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer; but today he seemed
about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social law, rigid or implied, could
he be supposed to linger round the lunch of the Anglo-Indian friends; but he
lingered, covering his position with torrents of amusing but quite needless conversation.
He was the more puzzling because he did not seem to want any lunch. As one
after another of the most exquisitely balanced kedgerees of curries,
accompanied with their appropriate vintages, were laid before the other two, he
only repeated that it was one of his fast-days, and munched a piece of bread
and sipped and then left untasted a tumbler of cold water. His talk, however,
was exuberant.

“
I’ll
tell you what I’ll do for you,” he cried — “I’ll mix you a salad! I can’t eat it,
but I’ll mix it like an angel! You’ve got a lettuce there.”

“
Unfortunately
it’s the only thing we have got,” answered the good-humoured Major. “You must remember
that mustard, vinegar, oil and so on vanished with the cruet and the burglar.”

“
I
know,” replied Brown, rather vaguely. “That’s what I’ve always been afraid would
happen. That’s why I always carry a cruet-stand about with me. I’m so fond of
salads.”

And
to the amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his waistcoat pocket
and put it on the table.

“
I
wonder why the burglar wanted mustard, too,” he went on, taking a mustard-pot from
another pocket. “A mustard plaster, I suppose. And vinegar” — and producing
that condiment — “haven’t I heard something about vinegar and brown paper? As
for oil, which I think I put in my left —”

His
garrulity was an instant arrested; for lifting his eyes, he saw what no one else
saw — the black figure of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit lawn and looking steadily
into the room. Before he could quite recover himself Cray had cloven in.

“
You’re
an astounding card,” he said, staring. “I shall come and hear your sermons, if they’re
as amusing as your manners.” His voice changed a little, and he leaned back in
his chair.

“
Oh,
there are sermons in a cruet-stand, too,” said Father Brown, quite gravely. “Have
you heard of faith like a grain of mustard-seed; or charity that anoints with
oil? And as for vinegar, can any soldiers forget that solitary soldier, who,
when the sun was darkened —”

Colonel
Cray leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth.

Father
Brown, who was making the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the mustard into the tumbler
of water beside him; stood up and said in a new, loud and sudden voice — “Drink
that!”

At
the same moment the motionless doctor in the garden came running, and bursting open
a window cried: “Am I wanted? Has he been poisoned?”

“
Pretty
near,” said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic had very suddenly
taken effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as for life, but alive.

Major
Putnam had sprung up, his purple face mottled. “A crime!” he cried hoarsely. “I
will go for the police!”