The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (68 page)

‘
Now,
you left the geography a little vague; but it was possible to put two and two together.
You said the Rock of Fortune was not really high; but you also said it could be
seen dominating the garden like a mountain-peak. In other words, it was very
near the end of the garden, though your walk had taken you a long way round to
it. Also, it isn’t likely the young lady really howled so as to be heard half a
mile. She gave an ordinary involuntary cry, and yet you heard it on the shore.
And among other interesting things that you told me, may I remind you that you
said Harry Druce had fallen behind to light his pipe under a hedge.’

Fiennes
shuddered slightly. ‘You mean he drew his blade there and sent it through the hedge
at the white spot. But surely it was a very odd chance and a very sudden choice.
Besides, he couldn’t be certain the old man’s money had passed to him, and as a
fact it hadn’t.’

Father
Brown’s face became animated. ‘You misunderstand the man’s character,’ he said,
as if he himself had known the man all his life. ‘A curious but not unknown type
of character. If he had really known the money would come to him, I seriously
believe he wouldn’t have done it. He would have seen it as the dirty thing it
was.’

‘
Isn’t
that rather paradoxical?’ asked the other.

‘
This
man was a gambler,’ said the priest, ‘and a man in disgrace for having taken
risks and anticipated orders. It was probably for something pretty unscrupulous,
for every imperial police is more like a Russian secret police than we like to think.
But he had gone beyond the line and failed. Now, the temptation of that type of
man is to do a mad thing precisely because the risk will be wonderful in
retrospect. He wants to say, ‘Nobody but I could have seized that chance or seen
that it was then or never. What a wild and wonderful guess it was, when I put
all those things together; Donald in disgrace; and the lawyer being sent for;
and Herbert and I sent for at the same time — and then nothing more but the way
the old man grinned at me and shook hands. Anybody would say I was mad to risk
it; but that is how fortunes are made, by the man mad enough to have a little
foresight.’ In short, it is the vanity of guessing. It is the megalomania of
the gambler. The more incongruous the coincidence, the more instantaneous the
decision, the more likely he is to snatch the chance. The accident, the very
triviality of the white speck and the hole in the hedge intoxicated him like a
vision of the world’s desire. Nobody clever enough to see such a combination of
accidents could be cowardly enough not to use them! That is how the devil talks
to the gambler. But the devil himself would hardly have induced that unhappy
man to go down in a dull, deliberate way and kill an old uncle from whom he’d
always had expectations. It would be too respectable.’

He
paused a moment, and then went on with a certain quiet emphasis.

‘
And
now try to call up the scene, even as you saw it yourself. As he stood there, dizzy
with his diabolical opportunity, he looked up and saw that strange outline that
might have been the image of his own tottering soul; the one great crag poised
perilously on the other like a pyramid on its point, and remembered that it was
called the Rock of Fortune. Can you guess how such a man at such a moment would
read such a signal? I think it strung him up to action and even to vigilance.
He who would be a tower must not fear to be a toppling tower. Anyhow, he acted;
his next difficulty was to cover his tracks. To be found with a sword-stick,
let alone a blood-stained sword-stick, would be fatal in the search that was
certain to follow. If he left it anywhere, it would be found and probably
traced. Even if he threw it into the sea the action might be noticed, and
thought noticeable — unless indeed he could think of some more natural way of
covering the action. As you know, he did think of one, and a very good one.
Being the only one of you with a watch, he told you it was not yet time to
return, strolled a little farther, and started the game of throwing in sticks
for the retriever. But how his eyes must have rolled darkly over all that
desolate sea-shore before they alighted on the dog!’

Fiennes
nodded, gazing thoughtfully into space. His mind seemed to have drifted back to
a less practical part of the narrative.

‘
It’s
queer,’ he said, ‘that the dog really was in the story after all.’

‘
The
dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,’ said the priest. ‘All
I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk you made up his story for him,
and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something
I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of
newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords; something that’s arbitrary
without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of
this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and
scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.’ He
stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking
almost as if he were alone. ‘It’s the first effect of not believing in God that
you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that
anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself
indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a
mystery, and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the
menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great
green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the
bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and
crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words:

‘
He
was made Man’.’

The
young man got up with a little embarrassment, almost as if he had overheard a soliloquy.
He called to the dog and left the room with vague but breezy farewells. But he
had to call the dog twice, for the dog had remained behind quite motionless for
a moment, looking up steadily at Father Brown as the wolf looked at St Francis.

MOON
CRESCENT was meant in a sense to be as romantic as its name; and the things
that happened there were romantic enough in their way. At least it had been an expression
of that genuine element of sentiment — historic and almost heroic — which
manages to remain side by side with commercialism in the elder cities on the
eastern coast of America. It was originally a curve of classical architecture
really recalling that eighteenth-century atmosphere in which men like
Washington and Jefferson had seemed to be all the more republicans for being
aristocrats. Travellers faced with the recurrent query of what they thought of
our city were understood to be specially answerable for what they thought of
our Moon Crescent. The very contrasts that confuse its original harmony were
characteristic of its survival. At one extremity or horn of the crescent its
last windows looked over an enclosure like a strip of a gentleman’s park, with
trees and hedges as formal as a Queen Anne garden. But immediately round the
corner, the other windows, even of the same rooms, or rather ‘apartments’,
looked out on the blank, unsightly wall of a huge warehouse attached to some
ugly industry. The apartments of Moon Crescent itself were at that end
remodelled on the monotonous pattern of an American hotel, and rose to a
height, which, though lower than the colossal warehouse, would have been called
a skyscraper in London. But the colonnade that ran round the whole frontage
upon the street had a grey and weather-stained stateliness suggesting that the
ghosts of the Fathers of the Republic might still be walking to and fro in it.
The insides of the rooms, however, were as neat and new as the last New York
fittings could make them, especially at the northern end between the neat
garden and the blank warehouse wall. They were a system of very small flats, as
we should say in England, each consisting of a sitting-room, bedroom, and
bathroom, as identical as the hundred cells of a hive. In one of these the
celebrated Warren Wynd sat at his desk sorting letters and scattering orders
with wonderful rapidity and exactitude. He could only be compared to a tidy
whirlwind.

Warren
Wynd was a very little man with loose grey hair and a pointed beard, seemingly frail
but fierily active. He had very wonderful eyes, brighter than stars and stronger
than magnets, which nobody who had ever seen them could easily forget. And
indeed in his work as a reformer and regulator of many good works he had shown
at least that he had a pair of eyes in his head. All sorts of stories and even
legends were told of the miraculous rapidity with which he could form a sound
judgement, especially of human character. It was said that he selected the wife
who worked with him so long in so charitable a fashion, by picking her out of a
whole regiment of women in uniform marching past at some official celebration,
some said of the Girl Guides and some of the Women Police. Another story was
told of how three tramps, indistinguishable from each other in their community
of filth and rags, had presented themselves before him asking for charity.
Without a moment’s hesitation he had sent one of them to a particular hospital
devoted to a certain nervous disorder, had recommended the second to an
inebriates’ home, and had engaged the third at a handsome salary as his own private
servant, a position which he filled successfully for years afterwards. There
were, of course, the inevitable anecdotes of his prompt criticisms and curt
repartees when brought in contact with Roosevelt, with Henry Ford, and with Mrs
Asquith and all other persons with whom an American public man ought to have a
historic interview, if only in the newspapers. Certainly he was not likely to
be overawed by such personages; and at the moment here in question he continued
very calmly his centrifugal whirl of papers, though the man confronting him was
a personage of almost equal importance.

Silas
T. Vandam, the millionaire and oil magnate, was a lean man with a long, yellow face
and blue-black hair, colours which were the less conspicuous yet somehow the
more sinister because his face and figure showed dark against the window and
the white warehouse wall outside it; he was buttoned up tight in an elegant overcoat
with strips of astrakhan. The eager face and brilliant eyes of Wynd, on the
other hand, were in the full light from the other window over-looking the
little garden, for his chair and desk stood facing it; and though the face was
preoccupied, it did not seem unduly preoccupied about the millionaire. Wynd’s
valet or personal servant, a big, powerful man with flat fair hair, was standing
behind his master’s desk holding a sheaf of letters; and Wynd’s private
secretary, a neat, red-haired youth with a sharp face, had his hand already on
the door handle, as if guessing some purpose or obeying some gesture of his
employer. The room was not only neat, but austere to the point of emptiness;
for Wynd, with characteristic thoroughness, had rented the whole floor above,
and turned it into a loft or storeroom, where all his other papers and
possessions were stacked in boxes and corded bales.

‘
Give
these to the floor-clerk, Wilson,’ said Wynd to the servant holding the letters,
‘and then get me the pamphlet on the Minneapolis Night Clubs; you’ll find it in
the bundle marked ‘G’. I shall want it in half an hour, but don’t disturb me
till then. Well, Mr Vandam, I think your proposition sounds very promising; but
I can’t give a final answer till I’ve seen the report. It ought to reach me
to-morrow afternoon, and I’ll phone you at once. I’m sorry I can’t say anything
more definite just now.’

Mr
Vandam seemed to feel that this was something like a polite dismissal; and his sallow,
saturnine face suggested that he found a certain irony in the fact.

‘
Well,
I suppose I must be going,’ he said.

‘
Very
good of you to call, Mr Vandam,’ said Wynd, politely; ‘you will excuse my not coming
out, as I’ve something here I must fix at once. Fenner,’ he added to the secretary,’
show Mr Vandam to his car, and don’t come back again for half an hour. I’ve
something here I want to work out by myself; after that I shall want you.’

The
three men went out into the hallway together, closing the door behind them. The
big servant, Wilson, was turning down the hallway in the direction of the floor-clerk,
and the other two moving in the opposite direction towards the lift; for Wynd’s
apartment was high up on the fourteenth floor. They had hardly gone a yard from
the closed door when they became conscious that the corridor was filled with a
marching and even magnificent figure. The man was very tall and
broad-shouldered, his bulk being the more conspicuous for being clad in white,
or a light grey that looked like it, with a very wide white panama hat and an
almost equally wide fringe or halo of almost equally white hair. Set in this
aureole his face was strong and handsome, like that of a Roman emperor, save
that there was something more than boyish, something a little childish, about
the brightness of his eyes and the beatitude of his smile. ‘Mr Warren Wynd in?’
he asked, in hearty tones.

‘
Mr
Warren Wynd is engaged,’ said Fenner; ‘he must not be disturbed on any account.
I may say I am his secretary and can take any message.’

‘
Mr
Warren Wynd is not at home to the Pope or the Crowned Heads,’ said Vandam, the oil
magnate, with sour satire. ‘Mr Warren Wynd is mighty particular. I went in there
to hand him over a trifle of twenty thousand dollars on certain conditions,
and, he told me to call again like as if I was a call-boy.’

‘
It’s
a fine thing to be a boy,’ said the stranger, ‘and a finer to have a call; and I’ve
got a call he’s just got to listen to. It’s a call of the great good country
out West, where the real American is being made while you’re all snoring. Just
tell him that Art Alboin of Oklahoma City has come to convert him.’

‘
I
tell you nobody can see him,’ said the red-haired secretary sharply. ‘He has given
orders that he is not to be disturbed for half an hour.’

‘
You
folks down East are all against being disturbed,’ said the breezy Mr Alboin, ‘but
I calculate there’s a big breeze getting up in the West that will have to disturb
you. He’s been figuring out how much money must go to this and that stuffy old
religion; but I tell you any scheme that leaves out the new Great Spirit
movement in Texas and Oklahoma, is leaving out the religion of the future.’

‘
Oh;
I’ve sized up those religions of the future,’ said the millionaire, contemptuously.
‘I’ve been through them with a tooth-comb and they’re as mangy as yellow dogs.
There was that woman called herself Sophia: ought to have called herself
Sapphira, I reckon. Just a plum fraud. Strings tied to all the tables and
tambourines. Then there were the Invisible Life bunch; said they could vanish
when they liked, and they did vanish, too, and a hundred thousand of my dollars
vanished with them. I knew Jupiter Jesus out in Denver; saw him for weeks on
end; and he was just a common crook. So was the Patagonian Prophet; you bet
he’s made a bolt for Patagonia. No, I’m through with all that; from now on I
only believe what I see. I believe they call it being an atheist.’

‘
I
guess you got me wrong,’ said the man from Oklahoma, almost eagerly. ‘I guess I’m
as much of an atheist as you are. No supernatural or superstitious stuff in our
movement; just plain science. The only real right science is just health, and
the only real right health is just breathing. Fill your lungs with the wide air
of the prairie and you could blow all your old eastern cities into the sea. You
could just puff away their biggest men like thistledown. That’s what we do in
the new movement out home: we breathe. We don’t pray; we breathe.’

‘
Well,
I suppose you do,’ said the secretary, wearily. He had a keen, intelligent face
which could hardly conceal the weariness; but he had listened to the two monologues
with the admirable patience and politeness (so much in contrast with the
legends of impatience and insolence) with which such monologues are listened to
in America.

‘
Nothing
supernatural,’ continued Alboin, ‘just the great natural fact behind all the supernatural
fancies. What did the Jews want with a God except to breathe into man’s
nostrils the breath of life? We do the breathing into our own nostrils out in
Oklahoma. What’s the meaning of the very word Spirit? It’s just the Greek for
breathing exercises. Life, progress, prophecy; it’s all breath.’

‘
Some
would allow it’s all wind,’ said Vandam; ‘but I’m glad you’ve got rid of the divinity
stunt, anyhow.’

The
keen face of the secretary, rather pale against his red hair, showed a flicker of
some odd feeling suggestive of a secret bitterness.

‘
I’m
not glad,’ he said, ‘I’m just sure. You seem to like being atheists; so you may
be just believing what you like to believe. But. I wish to God there were a God;
and there ain’t. It’s just my luck.’

Without
a sound or stir they all became almost creepily conscious at this moment that the
group, halted outside Wynd’s door, had silently grown from three figures to four.
How long the fourth figure had stood there none of the earnest disputants could
tell, but he had every appearance of waiting respectfully and even timidly for
the opportunity to say something urgent. But to their nervous sensibility he
seemed to have sprung up suddenly and silently like a mushroom. And indeed, he
looked rather like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite short and his small,
stumpy figure was eclipsed by his big, black clerical hat; the resemblance
might have been more complete if mushrooms were in the habit of carrying
umbrellas, even of a shabby and shapeless sort.

Fenner,
the secretary, was conscious of a curious additional surprise at recognizing the
figure of a priest; but when the priest turned up a round face under the round
hat and innocently asked for Mr Warren Wynd, he gave the regular negative answer
rather more curtly than before. But the priest stood his ground.

‘
I
do really want to see Mr Wynd,’ he said. ‘It seems odd, but that’s exactly what
I do want to do. I don’t want to speak to him. I just want to see him. I just want
to see if he’s there to be seen.’

‘
Well,
I tell you he’s there and can’t be seen,’ said Fenner, with increasing annoyance.
‘What do you mean by saying you want to see if he’s there to be seen? Of course
he’s there. We all left him there five minutes ago, and we’ve stood outside
this door ever since.’

‘
Well,
I want to see if he’s all right,’ said the priest.

‘
Why?’
demanded the secretary, in exasperation. ‘Because I have a serious, I might say
solemn, reason,’ said the cleric, gravely, ’for doubting whether he is all right.’

‘
Oh,
Lord!’ cried Vandam, in a sort of fury; ‘not more superstitions.’

‘
I
see I shall have to give my reasons,’ observed the little cleric, gravely. ‘I suppose
I can’t expect you even to let me look through the crack of a door till I tell
you the whole story.’ He was silent a moment as in reflection, and then went on
without noticing the wondering faces around him. ‘I was walking outside along
the front of the colonnade when I saw a very ragged man running hard round the
corner at the end of the crescent. He came pounding along the pavement towards
me, revealing a great raw-boned figure and a face I knew. It was the face of a
wild Irish fellow I once helped a little; I will not tell you his name. When he
saw me he staggered, calling me by mine and saying, ‘Saints alive, it’s Father
Brown; you’re the only man whose face could frighten me to-day.’