The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (70 page)

‘
Oh,
my God!’ said Alboin, so that it seemed as much a prayer as an oath. ‘What was it
that man said about him? — “If he knew, he would be ready to hang himself.” Wasn’t
that what he said, Father Brown?’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown.

‘
Well,’
said Vandam in a hollow voice, ‘I never thought to see or say such a thing. But
what can one say except that the curse has worked?’

Fenner
was standing with hands covering his face; and the priest laid a hand on his arm
and said, gently, ’Were you very fond of him?’

The
secretary dropped his hands and his white face was ghastly under the moon.

‘
I
hated him like hell,’ he said; ‘and if he died by a curse it might have been mine.’

The
pressure of the priest’s hand on his arm tightened; and the priest said, with an
earnestness he had hardly yet shown: ‘It wasn’t your curse; pray be comforted.’

The
police of the district had considerable difficulty in dealing with the four
witnesses who were involved in the case. All of them were reputable, and even
reliable people in the ordinary sense; and one of them was a person of
considerable power and importance: Silas Vandam of the Oil Trust. The first
police-officer who tried to express scepticism about his story struck sparks
from the steel of that magnate’s mind very rapidly indeed.

‘
Don’t
you talk to me about sticking to the facts,’ said the millionaire with asperity.
‘I’ve stuck to a good many facts before you were born and a few of the facts
have stuck to me. I’ll give you the facts all right if you’ve got the sense to
take ’em down correctly.’

The
policeman in question was youthful and subordinate, and had a hazy idea that the
millionaire was too political to be treated as an ordinary citizen; so he passed
him and his companions on to a more stolid superior, one Inspector Collins, a
grizzled man with a grimly comfortable way of talking; as one who was genial
but would stand no nonsense.

‘
Well,
well,’ he said, looking at the three figures before him with twinkling eyes, ‘this
seems to be a funny sort of a tale.’

Father
Brown had already gone about his daily business; but Silas Vandam had suspended
even the gigantic business of the markets for an hour or so to testify to his remarkable
experience. Fenner’s business as secretary had ceased in a sense with his
employer’s life; and the great Art Alboin, having no business in New York or
anywhere else, except the spreading of the Breath of Life religion or the Great
Spirit, had nothing to draw him away at the moment from the immediate affair.
So they stood in a row in the inspector’s office, prepared to corroborate each
other.

‘
Now
I’d better tell you to start with,’ said the inspector cheerfully, ‘that it’s no
good for anybody to come to me with any miraculous stuff. I’m a practical man
and a policeman, and that sort of thing is all very well for priests and parsons.
This priest of yours seems to have got you all worked up about some story of a
dreadful death and judgement; but I’m going to leave him and his religion out
of it altogether. If Wynd came out of that room, somebody let him out. And if
Wynd was found hanging on that tree, somebody hung him there.’

‘
Quite
so,’ said Fenner; ‘but as our evidence is that nobody let him out, the question
is how could anybody have hung him there?’

‘
How
could anybody have a nose on his face?’ asked the inspector. ‘He had a nose on his
face, and he had a noose round his neck. Those are facts; and, as I say, I’m a
practical man and go by the facts. It can’t have been done by a miracle, so it
must have been done by a man.’

Alboin
had been standing rather in the background; and indeed his broad figure seemed to
form a natural background to the leaner and more vivacious men in front of him.
His white head was bowed with a certain abstraction; but as the inspector said
the last sentence, he lifted it, shaking his hoary mane in a leonine fashion,
and looking dazed but awakened. He moved forward into the centre of the group,
and they had a vague feeling that he was even vaster than before. They had been
only too prone to take him for a fool or a mountebank; but he was not
altogether wrong when he said that there was in him a certain depth of lungs
and life, like a west wind stored up in its strength, which might some day puff
lighter things away.

‘
So
you’re a practical man, Mr Collins,’ he said, in a voice at once soft and heavy.
‘It must be the second or third time you’ve mentioned in this little conversation
that you are a practical man; so I can’t be mistaken about that. And a very
interesting little fact it is for anybody engaged in writing your life,
letters, and table-talk, with portrait at the age of five, daguerreotype of
your grandmother and views of the old home-town; and I’m sure your biographer
won’t forget to mention it along with the fact that you had a pug nose with a
pimple on it, and were nearly too fat to walk. And as you’re a practical man,
perhaps you would just go on practising till you’ve brought Warren Wynd to life
again, and found out exactly how a practical man gets through a steel door. But
I think you’ve got it wrong. You’re not a practical man. You’re a practical
joke; that’s what you are. The Almighty was having a bit of fun with us when he
thought of you.’

With
a characteristic sense of drama he went sailing towards the door before the astonished
inspector could reply; and no after-recriminations could rob him of a certain
appearance of triumph.

‘
I
think you were perfectly right,’ said Fenner. ‘If those are practical men, give
me priests.’

Another
attempt was made to reach an official version of the event when the authorities
fully realized who were the backers of the story, and what were the implications
of it. Already it had broken out in the Press in its most sensationally and
even shamelessly psychic form. Interviews with Vandam on his marvellous
adventure, articles about Father Brown and his mystical intuitions, soon led
those who feel responsible for guiding the public, to wish to guide it into a
wiser channel. Next time the inconvenient witnesses were approached in a more
indirect and tactful manner. They were told, almost in an airy fashion, that
Professor Vair was very much interested in such abnormal experiences; was especially
interested in their own astonishing case. Professor Vair was a psychologist of
great distinction; he had been known to take a detached interest in
criminology; it was only some little time afterwards that they discovered that
he was in any way connected with the police.

Professor
Vair was a courteous gentleman, quietly dressed in pale grey clothes, with an artistic
tie and a fair, pointed beard; he looked more like a landscape painter to
anyone not acquainted with a certain special type of don. He had an air not only
of courtesy, but of frankness.

‘
Yes,
yes, I know,’ he said smiling; ‘I can guess what you must have gone through. The
police do not shine in inquiries of a psychic sort, do they? Of course, dear
old Collins said he only wanted the facts. What an absurd blunder! In a case of
this kind we emphatically do not only want the facts. It is even more essential
to have the fancies.’

‘
Do
you mean,’ asked Vandam gravely, ‘that all that we thought facts were merely fancies?’

‘
Not
at all,’ said the professor; ‘I only mean that the police are stupid in thinking
they can leave out the psychological element in these things. Well, of course,
the psychological element is everything in everything, though it is only just
beginning to be understood. To begin with, take the element called personality.
Now I have heard of this priest, Father Brown, before; and he is one of the
most remarkable men of our time. Men of that sort carry a sort of atmosphere
with them; and nobody knows how much his nerves and even his very senses are
affected by it for the time being. People are hypnotized — yes, hypnotized; for
hypnotism, like everything else, is a matter of degree; it enters slightly into
all daily conversation: it is not necessarily conducted by a man in
evening-dress on a platform in a public hall. Father Brown’s religion has
always understood the psychology of atmospheres, and knows how to appeal to everything
simultaneously; even, for instance, to the sense of smell. It understands those
curious effects produced by music on animals and human beings; it can — ’

‘
Hang
it,’ protested Fenner, ‘you don’t think he walked down the corridor carrying a church
organ?’

‘
He
knows better than to do that,’ said Professor Vair laughing. ‘He knows how to concentrate
the essence of all these spiritual sounds and sights, and even smells, in a few
restrained gestures; in an art or school of manners. He could contrive so to
concentrate your minds on the supernatural by his mere presence, that natural
things slipped off your minds to left and right unnoticed. Now you know,’ he
proceeded with a return to cheerful good sense, ‘that the more we study it the
more queer the whole question of human evidence becomes. There is not one man
in twenty who really observes things at all. There is not one man in a hundred
who observes them with real precision; certainly not one in a hundred who can
first observe, then remember, and finally describe. Scientific experiments have
been made again and again showing that men under strain have thought a door was
shut when it was open, or open when it was shut. Men have differed about the
number of doors or windows in a wall just in front of them. They have suffered
optical illusions in broad daylight. They have done this even without the
hypnotic effect of personality; but here we have a very powerful and persuasive
personality bent upon fixing only one picture on your minds; the picture of the
wild Irish rebel shaking his pistol at the sky and firing that vain volley,
whose echoes were the thunders of heaven.’

‘
Professor,’
cried Fenner, ‘I’d swear on my deathbed that door never opened.’

‘
Recent
experiments,’ went on the professor, quietly, ‘have suggested that our consciousness
is not continuous, but is a succession of very rapid impressions like a cinema;
it is possible that somebody or something may, so to speak, slip in or out
between the scenes. It acts only in the instant while the curtain is down.
Probably the patter of conjurors and all forms of sleight of hand depend on
what we may call these black flashes of blindness between the flashes of sight.
Now this priest and preacher of transcendental notions had filled you with a
transcendental imagery; the image of the Celt like a Titan shaking the tower
with his curse. Probably he accompanied it with some slight but compelling
gesture, pointing your eyes and minds in the direction of the unknown destroyer
below. Or perhaps something else happened, or somebody else passed by.’

‘
Wilson,
the servant,’ grunted Alboin, ‘went down the hallway to wait on the bench, but I
guess he didn’t distract us much.’

‘
You
never know how much,’ replied Vair; ‘it might have been that or more likely your
eyes following some gesture of the priest as he told his tale of magic. It was
in one of those black flashes that Mr Warren Wynd slipped out of his door and
went to his death. That is the most probable explanation. It is an illustration
of the new discovery. The mind is not a continuous line, but rather a dotted
line.’

‘
Very
dotted,’ said Fenner feebly. ‘Not to say dotty.’

‘
You
don’t really believe,’ asked Vair, ’that your employer was shut up in a room like
a box?’

‘
It’s
better than believing that I ought to be shut up in a room like a padded cell,’
answered Fenner. ‘That’s what I complain of in your suggestions, professor. I’d
as soon believe in a priest who believes in a miracle, as disbelieve in any man
having any right to believe in a fact. The priest tells me that a man can appeal
to a God I know nothing about to avenge him by the laws of some higher justice
that I know nothing about. There’s nothing for me to say except that I know
nothing about it. But, at least, if the poor Paddy’s prayer and pistol could be
heard in a higher world, that higher world might act in some way that seems odd
to us. But you ask me to disbelieve the facts of this world as they appear to
my own five wits. According to you, a whole procession of Irishmen carrying
blunderbusses may have walked through this room while we were talking, so long
as they took care to tread on the blind spots in our minds. Miracles of the
monkish sort, like materializing a crocodile or hanging a cloak on a sunbeam,
seem quite sane compared to you.’

‘
Oh,
well,’ said Professor Vair, rather curtly, ‘if you are resolved to believe in your
priest and his miraculous Irishman I can say no more. I’m afraid you have not
had an opportunity of studying psychology.’

‘
No,’
said Fenner dryly; ‘but I’ve had an opportunity of studying psychologists.’

And,
bowing politely, he led his deputation out of the room and did not speak till he
got into the street; then he addressed them rather explosively.

‘
Raving
lunatics!’ cried Fenner in a fume. ‘What the devil do they think is to happen to
the world if nobody knows whether he’s seen anything or not? I wish I’d blown
his silly head off with a blank charge, and then explained that I did it in a
blind flash. Father Brown’s miracle may be miraculous or no, but he said it
would happen and it did happen. All these blasted cranks can do is to see a thing
happen and then say it didn’t. Look here, I think we owe it to the padre to
testify to his little demonstration. We’re all sane, solid men who never believed
in anything. We weren’t drunk. We weren’t devout. It simply happened just as he
said it would.’