The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (59 page)

THERE
was a brief period during which Father Brown enjoyed, or rather did not enjoy, something
like fame. He was a nine days’ wonder in the newspapers; he was even a common
topic of controversy in the weekly reviews; his exploits were narrated eagerly
and inaccurately in any number of clubs and drawing-rooms, especially in
America. Incongruous and indeed incredible as it may seem to any one who knew
him, his adventures as a detective were even made the subject of short stories
appearing in magazines.

Strangely
enough, this wandering limelight struck him in the most obscure, or at least the
most remote, of his many places of residence. He had been sent out to officiate,
as something between a missionary and a parish priest, in one of those sections
of the northern coast of South America, where strips of country still cling
insecurely to European powers, or are continually threatening to become
independent republics, under the gigantic shadow of President Monroe. The
population was red and brown with pink spots; that is, it was Spanish-American,
and largely Spanish-American-Indian, but there was a considerable and
increasing infiltration of Americans of the northern sort — Englishmen,
Germans, and the rest. And the trouble seems to have begun when one of these
visitors, very recently landed and very much annoyed at having lost one of his
bags, approached the first building of which he came in sight — which happened
to be the mission-house and chapel attached to it, in front of which ran a long
veranda and a long row of stakes, up which were trained the black twisted
vines, their square leaves red with autumn. Behind them, also in a row, a
number of human beings sat almost as rigid as the stakes, and coloured in some
fashion like the vines. For while their broad-brimmed hats were as black as
their unblinking eyes, the complexions of many of them might have been made out
of the dark red timber of those transatlantic forests. Many of them were smoking
very long, thin black cigars; and in all that group the smoke was almost the
only moving thing. The visitor would probably have described them as natives,
though some of them were very proud of Spanish blood. But he was not one to
draw any fine distinction between Spaniards and Red Indians, being rather
disposed to dismiss people from the scene when once he had convicted them of
being native to it.

He
was a newspaper man from Kansas City, a lean, light-haired man with what Meredith
called an adventurous nose; one could almost fancy it found its way by feeling
its way and moved like the proboscis of an ant-eater. His name was Snaith, and
his parents, after some obscure meditation, had called him Saul, a fact which
he had the good feeling to conceal as far as possible. Indeed, he had
ultimately compromised by calling himself Paul, though by no means for the same
reason that had affected the Apostle of the Gentiles. On the contrary, so far
as he had any views on such things, the name of the persecutor would have been
more appropriate; for he regarded organized religion with the conventional contempt
which can be learnt more easily from Ingersoll than from Voltaire. And this
was, as it happened, the not very important side of his character which he turned
towards the mission-station and the groups in front of the veranda. Something
in their shameless repose and indifference inflamed his own fury of efficiency;
and, as he could get no particular answer to his first questions, he began to
do all the talking himself.

Standing
out there in the strong sunshine, a spick-and-span figure in his Panama hat and
neat clothes, his grip-sack held in a steely grip, he began to shout at the people
in the shadow. He began to explain to them very loudly why they were lazy and
filthy, and bestially ignorant and lower than the beasts that perish, in case
this problem should have previously exercised their minds. In his opinion it
was the deleterious influence of priests that had made them so miserably poor
and so hopelessly oppressed that they were able to sit in the shade and smoke
and do nothing.

‘
And
a mighty soft crowd you must be at that,’ he said, ‘to be bullied by these stuck-up
josses because they walk about in their mitres and their tiaras and their gold
copes and other glad rags, looking down on everybody else like dirt — being
bamboozled by crowns and canopies and sacred umbrellas like a kid at a pantomime;
just because a pompous old High Priest of Mumbo-Jumbo looks as if he was the
lord of the earth. What about you? What do you look like, you poor simps? I
tell you, that’s why you’re way-back in barbarism and can’t read or write and —
’

At
this point the High Priest of Mumbo-Jumbo came in an undignified hurry out of the
door of the mission-house, not looking very like a lord of the earth, but rather
like a bundle of black second-hand clothes buttoned round a short bolster in
the semblance of a guy. He was not wearing his tiara, supposing him to possess
one, but a shabby broad hat not very dissimilar from those of the Spanish
Indians, and it was thrust to the back of his head with a gesture of botheration.
He seemed just about to speak to the motionless natives when he caught sight of
the stranger and said quickly:

‘
Oh,
can I be of any assistance? Would you like to come inside?’

Mr
Paul Snaith came inside; and it was the beginning of a considerable increase of
that journalist’s information on many things. Presumably his journalistic instinct
was stronger than his prejudices, as, indeed, it often is in clever journalists;
and he asked a good many questions, the answers to which interested and
surprised him. He discovered that the Indians could read and write, for the
simple reason that the priest had taught them; but that they did not read or
write any more than they could help, from a natural preference for more direct
communications. He learned that these strange people, who sat about in heaps on
the veranda without stirring a hair, could work quite hard on their own patches
of land; especially those of them who were more than half Spanish; and he
learned with still more astonishment that they all had patches of land that
were really their own. That much was part of a stubborn tradition that seemed
quite native to natives. But in that also the priest had played a certain part,
and by doing so had taken perhaps what was his first and last part in politics,
if it was only local politics.

There
had recently swept through that region one of those fevers of atheist and almost
anarchist Radicalism which break out periodically in countries of the Latin
culture, generally beginning in a secret society and generally ending in a
civil war and in very little else. The local leader of the iconoclastic party was
a certain Alvarez, a rather picturesque adventurer of Portuguese nationality
but, as his enemies said, of partly Negro origin, the head of any number of
lodges and temples of initiation of the sort that in such places clothe even
atheism with something mystical. The leader on the more conservative side was a
much more commonplace person, a very wealthy man named Mendoza, the owner of
many factories and quite respectable, but not very exciting. It was the general
opinion that the cause of law and order would have been entirely lost if it had
not adopted a more popular policy of its own, in the form of securing land for
the peasants; and this movement had mainly originated from the little
mission-station of Father Brown.

While
he was talking to the journalist, Mendoza, the Conservative leader, came in. He
was a stout, dark man, with a bald head like a pear and a round body also like a
pear; he was smoking a very fragrant cigar, but he threw it away, perhaps a little
theatrically, when he came into the presence of the priest, as if he had been
entering church; and bowed with a curve that in so corpulent a gentleman seemed
quite improbable. He was always exceedingly serious in his social gestures,
especially towards religious institutions. He was one of those laymen who are
much more ecclesiastical than ecclesiastics. It embarrassed Father Brown a good
deal, especially when carried thus into private life.

‘
I
think I am an anti-clerical,’ Father Brown would say with a faint smile; ‘but there
wouldn’t be half so much clericalism if they would only leave things to the
clerics.’

‘
Why
Mr Mendoza,’ exclaimed the journalist with a new animation, ‘I think we have met
before. Weren’t you at the Trade Congress in Mexico last year?’

The
heavy eyelids of Mr Mendoza showed a flutter of recognition, and he smiled in his
slow way. ‘I remember.’

‘
Pretty
big business done there in an hour or two,’ said Snaith with relish. ‘Made a good
deal of difference to you, too, I guess.’

‘
I
have been very fortunate,’ said Mendoza modestly.

‘
Don’t
you believe it!’ cried the enthusiastic Snaith. ‘Good fortune comes to the people
who know when to catch hold; and you caught hold good and sure. But I hope I’m
not interrupting your business?’

‘
Not
at all,’ said the other. ‘I often have the honour of calling on the padre for a
little talk. Merely for a little talk.’

It
seemed as if this familiarity between Father Brown and a successful and even famous
man of business completed the reconciliation between the priest and the practical
Mr Snaith. He felt, it might be supposed, a new respectability clothe the
station and the mission, and was ready to overlook such occasional reminders of
the existence of religion as a chapel and a presbytery can seldom wholly avoid.
He became quite enthusiastic about the priest’s programme — at least on its
secular and social side — and announced himself ready at any moment to act in
the capacity of a live wire for its communication to the world at large. And it
was at this point that Father Brown began to find the journalist rather more
troublesome in his sympathy than in his hostility.

Mr
Paul Snaith set out vigorously to feature Father Brown. He sent long and loud eulogies
on him across the continent to his newspaper in the Middle West. He took
snapshots of the unfortunate cleric in the most commonplace occupations, and
exhibited them in gigantic photographs in the gigantic Sunday papers of the United
States. He turned his sayings into slogans, and was continually presenting the
world with ‘A message’ from the reverend gentleman in South America. Any stock
less strong and strenuously receptive than the American race would have become
very much bored with Father Brown. As it was, he received handsome and eager
offers to go on a lecturing tour in the States; and when he declined, the terms
were raised with expressions of respectful wonder. A series of stories about
him, like the stories of Sherlock Holmes, were, by the instrumentality of Mr
Snaith, planned out and put before the hero with requests for his assistance and
encouragement. As the priest found they had started, he could offer no suggestion
except that they should stop. And this in turn was taken by Mr Snaith as the
text for a discussion on whether Father Brown should disappear temporarily over
a cliff, in the manner of Dr Watson’s hero. To all these demands the priest had
patiently to reply in writing, saying that he would consent on such terms to
the temporary cessation of the stories and begging that a considerable interval
might occur before they began again. The notes he wrote grew shorter and
shorter; and as he wrote the last of them, he sighed.

Needless
to say, this strange boom in the North reacted on the little outpost in the South
where he had expected to live in so lonely an exile. The considerable English
and American population already on the spot began to be proud of possessing so
widely advertised a person. American tourists, of the sort who land with a loud
demand for Westminster Abbey, landed on that distant coast with a loud demand
for Father Brown. They were within measurable distance of running excursion
trains named after him, and bringing crowds to see him as if he were a public
monument. He was especially troubled by the active and ambitious new traders
and shopkeepers of the place, who were perpetually pestering him to try their
wares and to give them testimonials. Even if the testimonials were not
forthcoming, they would prolong the correspondence for the purpose of
collecting autographs. As he was a good-natured person they got a good deal of
what they wanted out of him; and it was in answer to a particular request from
a Frankfort wine-merchant named Eckstein that he wrote hastily a few words on a
card, which were to prove a terrible turning-point in his life.

Eckstein
was a fussy little man with fuzzy hair and pince-nez, who was wildly anxious that
the priest should not only try some of his celebrated medicinal port, but should
let him know where and when he would drink it, in acknowledging its receipt.
The priest was not particularly surprised at the request, for he was long past
surprise at the lunacies of advertisement. So he scribbled something down and
turned to other business which seemed a little more sensible. He was again
interrupted, by a note from no less a person than his political enemy Alvarez,
asking him to come to a conference at which it was hoped that a compromise on
an outstanding question might be reached; and suggesting an appointment that
evening at a cafe just outside the walls of the little town. To this also he
sent a message of acceptance by the rather florid and military messenger who
was waiting for it; and then, having an hour or two before him, sat down to
attempt to get through a little of his own legitimate business. At the end of
the time he poured himself out a glass of Mr Eckstein’s remarkable wine and,
glancing at the clock with a humorous expression, drank it and went out into
the night.