The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (50 page)

The
priest could hear him dragging down his palm-leaf hat from the peg and tumbling
out of the front door; he heard the garden gate slam. But he only stood looking
at Cray; and after a silence said quietly:

“
I
shall not talk to you much; but I will tell you what you want to know. There is
no curse on you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a coincidence or a part of
the trick; the trick was the trick of a white man. There is only one weapon that
will bring blood with that mere feathery touch: a razor held by a white man.
There is one way of making a common room full of invisible, overpowering poison:
turning on the gas — the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of
club that can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the
window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You’ll see some of them in the
Major’s study.”

With
that he went outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The moment after, Audrey
Watson came rushing into the house and fell on her knees beside Cray’s chair.
He could not hear what they said to each other; but their faces moved with
amazement, not unhappiness. The doctor and the priest walked slowly towards the
garden gate.

“
I
suppose the Major was in love with her, too,” he said with a sigh; and when the
other nodded, observed: “You were very generous, doctor. You did a fine thing. But
what made you suspect?”

“
A
very small thing,” said Oman; “but it kept me restless in church till I came back
to see that all was well. That book on his table was a work on poisons; and was
put down open at the place where it stated that a certain Indian poison, though
deadly and difficult to trace, was particularly easily reversible by the use of
the commonest emetics. I suppose he read that at the last moment —”

“
And
remembered that there were emetics in the cruet-stand,” said Father Brown. “Exactly.
He threw the cruet in the dustbin — where I found it, along with other silver —
for the sake of a burglary blind. But if you look at that pepper-pot I put on
the table, you’ll see a small hole. That’s where Cray’s bullet struck, shaking
up the pepper and making the criminal sneeze.”

There
was a silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: “The Major is a long time looking for the
police.”

“
Or
the police in looking for the Major?” said the priest. “Well, good-bye.”

MR
CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with
its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie. He was
the emissary in England of the colossal American daily called the Western Sun —
also humorously described as the “Rising Sunset”. This was in allusion to a
great journalistic declaration (attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed
the sun would rise in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling.”
Those, however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat
mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it. For while
the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything
English, it also shows a real excitement about the most earnest mental problems,
of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable. The Sun was full of
the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William James figured
there as well as “Weary Willie,” and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in
the long procession of its portraits.

Thus,
when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable
review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged
weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English
papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary
universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy
fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism”. But
many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun
threw the shadow of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the
paradox already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were
presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines
such as “Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks” — or
“Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western
Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the
little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of
such a title.

That
fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to receive the interviewer,
and had named the hour of nine that evening. The last of a summer sunset clung about
Cumnor and the low wooded hills; the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his
road and inquisitive about his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine
feudal old-country inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make
inquiries.

In
the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time for a reply to
it. The only other person present was a lean man with close red hair and loose,
horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very bad whisky, but smoking a very
good cigar. The whisky, of course, was the choice brand of The Champion Arms;
the cigar he had probably brought with him from London. Nothing could be more
different than his cynical negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American;
but something in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of
his alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother
journalist.

“
Could
you do me the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his nation, “of directing
me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives, as I understand?”

“
It’s
a few yards down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his cigar; “I shall
be passing it myself in a minute, but I’m going on to Pendragon Park to try and
see the fun.”

“
What
is Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.

“
Sir
Claude Champion’s place — haven’t you come down for that, too?” asked the other
pressman, looking up. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”

“
I
have come to see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.

“
I’ve
come to see Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan’t catch her at home.”
And he laughed rather unpleasantly.

“
Are
you interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.

“
I’m
interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,” replied his companion
gloomily. “Mine’s a filthy trade, and I never pretend it isn’t.”

With
that he spat on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant one could realize
that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.

The
American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was pale and dissipated,
with the promise of formidable passions yet to be loosed; but it was a clever
and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse and careless, but he had a good
seal ring on one of his long, thin fingers. His name, which came out in the
course of talk, was James Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord,
and attached to a pink paper which he heartily despised, called Smart Society,
in the capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.

Smart
Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois on Darwin which
was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western Sun. Dalroy had come
down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal which might very well end
in the Divorce Court, but which was at present hovering between Grey Cottage
and Pendragon Park.

Sir
Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well as Mr Boulnois.
So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea of their intimate acquaintanceship
would have struck Kidd as equally incongruous. He had heard of (and written
about, nay, falsely pretended to know) Sir Claude Champion, as “one of the
brightest and wealthiest of England’s Upper Ten”; as the great sportsman who
raced yachts round the world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the
Himalayas, as the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of
Tory Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and, above
all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American
eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous culture
and restless publicity — he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one.
There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by the word
“dilettante”.

That
faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had been snap-shotted
so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun, gave everyone the
impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire, or even a disease. But though
Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude — a great deal more, in fact, than
there was to know — it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect
so showy an aristocrat with the newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to
guess that Sir Claude Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends.
Such, according to Dalroy’s account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had
hunted in couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had
been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a
millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately, an
unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other. Indeed, Boulnois’s
cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon Park.

But
whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a dark and ugly question.
A year or two before, Boulnois had married a beautiful and not unsuccessful
actress, to whom he was devoted in his own shy and ponderous style; and the
proximity of the household to Champion’s had given that flighty celebrity
opportunities for behaving in a way that could not but cause painful and rather
base excitement. Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection;
and he seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an
intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were
perpetually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were
perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades
perpetually filled the grounds in which the baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like
the Queen of Love and Beauty at a tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr
Kidd for the exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude
Champion for an open-air rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play
Romeo to a Juliet it was needless to name.

“
I
don’t think it can go on without a smash,” said the young man with red hair, getting
up and shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be squared — or he may be square. But
if he’s square he’s thick — what you might call cubic. But I don’t believe it’s
possible.”

“
He
is a man of grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep voice.

“
Yes,”
answered Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers can’t be such a blighted
fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall be following myself in a minute
or two.”

But
Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself smartly up the road
towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical informant to his whisky and tobacco.
The last of the daylight had faded; the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like
slate, studded here and there with a star, but lighter on the left side of the
sky, with the promise of a rising moon.

The
Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of stiff, high thorn-hedges,
was so close under the pines and palisades of the Park that Kidd at first
mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the name on the narrow wooden gate,
however, and seeing by his watch that the hour of the “Thinker’s” appointment
had just struck, he went in and knocked at the front door. Inside the garden
hedge, he could see that the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and
more luxurious than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place
from a porter’s lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols
of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation of
prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was reverend-looking
and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly man-servant who opened the door
was brief but dignified.

“
Mr
Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has been obliged
to go out suddenly.”

“
But
see here, I had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a rising voice. “Do
you know where he went to?”

“
To
Pendragon Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began to close the
door.

Kidd
started a little.

“
Did
he go with Mrs — with the rest of the party?” he asked rather vaguely.

“
No,
sir,” said the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out alone.” And he
shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty not done.

The
American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness, was annoyed. He
felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit and teach them business habits;
the hoary old dog and the grizzled, heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric
shirt-front, and the drowsy old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old
philosopher who couldn’t keep an appointment.

“
If
that’s the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife’s purest devotion,” said
Mr Calhoun Kidd. “But perhaps he’s gone over to make a row. In that case I reckon
a man from the Western Sun will be on the spot.”

And
turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up the long avenue
of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective towards the inner gardens
of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and orderly as plumes upon a hearse;
there were still a few stars. He was a man with more literary than direct
natural associations; the word “Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It
was partly the raven colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable
atmosphere almost described in Scott’s great tragedy; the smell of something
that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns,
of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less
incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.

More
than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic artifice, he stopped,
startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see nothing in
front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky above
them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo
of his own tramp. But as he went on he was more and more inclined to conclude,
with the remains of his reason, that there really were other feet upon the
road. He thought hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see
the image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as
Pierrot’s, but patched with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue sky was
growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that this was because
he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house and garden. He only felt
that the atmosphere was growing more intense, there was in the sadness more
violence and secrecy — more — he hesitated for the word, and then said it with
a jerk of laughter — Catastrophism.

More
pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic.
It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he
felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human beings are used to
inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it
is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it
wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would
have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale.