The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (60 page)

Strong
moonlight lay on the little Spanish town, so that when he came to the picturesque
gateway, with its rather rococo arch and the fantastic fringe of palms beyond
it, it looked rather like a scene in a Spanish opera. One long leaf of palm
with jagged edges, black against the moon, hung down on the other side of the
arch, visible through the archway, and had something of the look of the jaw of
a black crocodile. The fancy would not have lingered in his imagination but for
something else that caught his naturally alert eye. The air was deathly still,
and there was not a stir of wind; but he distinctly saw the pendent palm-leaf
move.

He
looked around him and realized that he was alone. He had left behind the last houses,
which were mostly closed and shuttered, and was walking between two long blank
walls built of large and shapeless but flattened stones, tufted here and there
with the queer prickly weeds of that region — walls which ran parallel all the
way to the gateway. He could not see the lights of the cafe outside the gate;
probably it was too far away. Nothing could be seen under the arch but a wider
expanse of large-flagged pavement, pale in the moon, with the straggling
prickly pear here and there. He had a strong sense of the smell of evil; he
felt queer physical oppression; but he did not think of stopping. His courage,
which was considerable, was perhaps even less strong a part of him than his
curiosity. All his life he had been led by an intellectual hunger for the
truth, even of trifles. He often controlled it in the name of proportion; but
it was always there. He walked straight through the gateway, and on the other
side a man sprang like a monkey out of the tree-top and struck at him with a
knife. At the same moment another man came crawling swiftly along the wall and,
whirling a cudgel round his head, brought it down. Father Brown turned,
staggered, and sank in a heap, but as he sank there dawned on his round face an
expression of mild and immense surprise.

There
was living in the same little town at this time another young American, particularly
different from Mr Paul Snaith. His name was John Adams Race, and he was an
electrical engineer, employed by Mendoza to fit out the old town with all the
new conveniences. He was a figure far less familiar in satire and international
gossip than that of the American journalist. Yet, as a matter of fact, America
contains a million men of the moral type of Race to one of the moral type of
Snaith. He was exceptional in being exceptionally good at his job, but in every
other way he was very simple. He had begun life as a druggist’s assistant in a
Western village, and risen by sheer work and merit; but he still regarded his
home town as the natural heart of the habitable world. He had been taught a
very Puritan, or purely Evangelical, sort of Christianity from the Family Bible
at his mother’s knee; and in so far as he had time to have any religion, that
was still his religion. Amid all the dazzling lights of the latest and even
wildest discoveries, when he was at the very edge and extreme of experiment,
working miracles of light and sound like a god creating new stars and solar
systems, he never for a moment doubted that the things ‘back home’ were the
best things in the world; his mother and the Family Bible and the quiet and
quaint morality of his village. He had as serious and noble a sense of the
sacredness of his mother as if he had been a frivolous Frenchman. He was quite
sure the Bible religion was really the right thing; only he vaguely missed it
wherever he went in the modern world. He could hardly be expected to sympathize
with the religious externals of Catholic countries; and in a dislike of mitres
and croziers he sympathized with Mr Snaith, though not in so cocksure a
fashion. He had no liking for the public bowings and scrapings of Mendoza and
certainly no temptation to the masonic mysticism of the atheist Alvarez.
Perhaps all that semi-tropical life was too coloured for him, shot with Indian
red and Spanish gold. Anyhow, when he said there was nothing to touch his home
town, he was not boasting. He really meant that there was somewhere something
plain and unpretentious and touching, which he really respected more than
anything else in the world. Such being the mental attitude of John Adams Race
in a South American station, there had been growing on him for some time a
curious feeling, which contradicted all his prejudices and for which he could
not account. For the truth was this: that the only thing he had ever met in his
travels that in the least reminded him of the old wood-pile and the provincial
proprieties and the Bible on his mother’s knee was (for some inscrutable
reason) the round face and black clumsy umbrella of Father Brown.

He
found himself insensibly watching that commonplace and even comic black figure as
it went bustling about; watching it with an almost morbid fascination, as if it
were a walking riddle or contradiction. He had found something he could not help
liking in the heart of everything he hated; it was as if he had been horribly
tormented by lesser demons and then found that the Devil was quite an ordinary
person.

Thus
it happened that, looking out of his window on that moonlit night, he saw the Devil
go by, the demon of unaccountable blamelessness, in his broad black hat and
long black coat, shuffling along the street towards the gateway, and saw it with
an interest which he could not himself understand. He wondered where the priest
was going, and what he was really up to; and remained gazing out into the
moonlit street long after the little black figure had passed. And then he saw
something else that intrigued him further. Two other men whom he recognized passed
across his window as across a lighted stage. A sort of blue limelight of the
moon ran in a spectral halo round the big bush of hair that stood erect on the
head of little Eckstein, the wine-seller, and it outlined a taller and darker
figure with an eagle profile and a queer old-fashioned and very top-heavy black
hat, which seemed to make the whole outline still more bizarre, like a shape in
a shadow pantomime. Race rebuked himself for allowing the moon to play such
tricks with his fancy; for on a second glance he recognized the black Spanish
sidewhiskers and high-featured face of Dr Calderon, a worthy medical man of the
town, whom he had once found attending professionally on Mendoza. Still, there
was something in the way the men were whispering to each other and peering up
the street that struck him as peculiar. On a sudden impulse he leapt over the
low window-sill and himself went bareheaded up the road, following their trail.
He saw them disappear under the dark archway, and a moment after there came a
dreadful cry from beyond; curiously loud and piercing, and all the more
blood-curdling to Race because it said something very distinctly in some tongue
that he did not know.

The
next moment there was a rushing of feet, more cries, and then a confused roar of
rage or grief that shook the turrets and tall palm trees of the place; there was
a movement in the mob that had gathered, as if they were sweeping backwards through
the gateway. And then the dark archway resounded with a new voice, this time
intelligible to him and falling with the note of doom, as someone shouted through
the gateway:

‘
Father
Brown is dead!’

He
never knew what prop gave way in his mind, or why something on which he had been
counting suddenly failed him; but he ran towards the gateway and was just in
time to meet his countryman, the journalist Snaith, coming out of the dark entrance,
deadly pale and snapping his fingers nervously.

‘
It’s
quite true,’ said Snaith, with something which for him approached to reverence.
‘He’s a goner. The doctor’s been looking at him, and there’s no hope. Some of these
damned Dagos clubbed him as he came through the gate — God knows why. It’ll be
a great loss to the place.’

Race
did not or perhaps could not reply, but ran on under the arch to the scene beyond.
The small black figure lay where it had fallen on the wilderness of wide stones
starred here and there with green thorn; and the great crowd was being kept back,
chiefly by the mere gestures of one gigantic figure in the foreground. For
there were many there who swayed hither and thither at the mere movement of his
hand, as if he had been a magician.

Alvarez,
the dictator and demagogue, was a tall, swaggering figure, always rather flamboyantly
clad, and on this occasion he wore a green uniform with embroideries like
silver snakes crawling all over it, with an order round his neck hung on a very
vivid maroon ribbon. His close curling hair was already grey, and in contrast
his complexion, which his friends called olive and his foes octoroon, looked
almost literally golden, as if it were a mask moulded in gold. But his
large-featured face, which was powerful and humorous, was at this moment
properly grave and grim. He had been waiting, he explained, for Father Brown at
the cafe when he had heard a rustle and a fall and, coming out, had found the
corpse lying on the flagstones.

‘
I
know what some of you are thinking,’ he said, looking round proudly, ‘and if you
are afraid of me — as you are — I will say it for you. I am an atheist; I have
no god to call on for those who will not take my word. But I tell you in the
name of every root of honour that may be left to a soldier and a man, that I
had no part in this. If I had the men here that did it, I would rejoice to hang
them on that tree.’

‘
Naturally
we are glad to hear you say so,’ said old Mendoza stiffly and solemnly, standing
by the body of his fallen coadjutor. ‘This blow has been too appalling for us
to say what else we feel at present. I suggest that it will be more decent and
proper if we remove my friend’s body and break up this irregular meeting. I
understand,’ he added gravely to the doctor, ‘that there is unfortunately no
doubt.’

‘
There
is no doubt,’ said Dr Calderon.

John
Race went back to his lodgings sad and with a singular sense of emptiness. It seemed
impossible that he should miss a man whom he never knew. He learned that the
funeral was to take place next day; for all felt that the crisis should be past
as quickly as possible, for fear of riots that were hourly growing more probable.
When Snaith had seen the row of Red Indians sitting on the veranda, they might
have been a row of ancient Aztec images carved in red wood. But he had not seen
them as they were when they heard that the priest was dead.

Indeed
they would certainly have risen in revolution and lynched the republican leader,
if they had not been immediately blocked by the direct necessity of behaving
respectfully to the coffin of their own religious leader. The actual assassins,
whom it would have been most natural to lynch, seemed to have vanished into
thin air. Nobody knew their names; and nobody would ever know whether the dying
man had even seen their faces. That strange look of surprise that was
apparently his last look on earth might have been the recognition of their
faces. Alvarez repeated violently that it was no work of his, and attended the
funeral, walking behind the coffin in his splendid silver and green uniform
with a sort of bravado of reverence.

Behind
the veranda a flight of stone steps scaled a very steep green bank, fenced by a
cactus-hedge, and up this the coffin was laboriously lifted to the ground above,
and placed temporarily at the foot of the great gaunt crucifix that dominated
the road and guarded the consecrated ground. Below in the road were great seas
of people lamenting and telling their beads — an orphan population that had
lost a father. Despite all these symbols that were provocative enough to him,
Alvarez behaved with restraint and respect; and all would have gone well — as
Race told himself — had the others only let him alone.

Race
told himself bitterly that old Mendoza had always looked like an old fool and had
now very conspicuously and completely behaved like an old fool. By a custom common
in simpler societies, the coffin was left open and the face uncovered, bringing
the pathos to the point of agony for all those simple people. This, being
consonant to tradition, need have done no harm; but some officious person had
added to it the custom of the French freethinkers, of having speeches by the
graveside. Mendoza proceeded to make a speech — a rather long speech, and the
longer it was, the longer and lower sank John Race’s spirits and sympathies with
the religious ritual involved. A list of saintly attributes, apparently of the
most antiquated sort, was rolled out with the dilatory dullness of an after-dinner
speaker who does not know how to sit down. That was bad enough; but Mendoza had
also the ineffable stupidity to start reproaching and even taunting his
political opponents. In three minutes he had succeeded in making a scene, and a
very extraordinary scene it was.

‘
We
may well ask,’ he said, looking around him pompously; ‘we may well ask where such
virtues can be found among those who have madly abandoned the creed of their
fathers. It is when we have atheists among us, atheist leaders, nay sometimes
even atheist rulers, that we find their infamous philosophy bearing fruit in
crimes like this. If we ask who murdered this holy man, we shall assuredly find
— ’

Africa
of the forests looked out of the eyes of Alvarez the hybrid adventurer; and Race
fancied he could see suddenly that the man was after all a barbarian, who could
not control himself to the end; one might guess that all his ‘illuminated’
transcendentalism had a touch of Voodoo. Anyhow, Mendoza could not continue,
for Alvarez had sprung up and was shouting back at him and shouting him down,
with infinitely superior lungs.