The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (82 page)

FATHER
BROWN always regarded the case as the queerest example of the theory of an alibi:
the theory by which it is maintained, in defiance of the mythological Irish
bird, that it is impossible for anybody to be in two places at once. To begin
with, James Byrne, being an Irish journalist, was perhaps the nearest approximation
to the Irish bird. He came as near as anybody could to being in two places at
once: for he was in two places at the opposite extremes of the social and
political world within the space of twenty minutes. The first was in the
Babylonian halls of the big hotel, which was the meeting place of the three commercial
magnates concerned with arranging for a coal lock-out and denouncing it as a
coal-strike, the second was in a curious tavern, having the facade of a grocery
store, where met the more subterranean triumvirate of those who would have been
very glad to turn the lock-out into a strike — and the strike into a revolution.
The reporter passed to and fro between the three millionaires and the three
Bolshevist leaders with the immunity of the modern herald or the new ambassador.

He
found the three mining magnates hidden in a jungle of flowering plants and a forest
of fluted and florid columns of gilded plaster; gilded birdcages hung high
under the painted domes amid the highest leaves of the palms; and in them were
birds of motley colours and varied cries. No bird in the wilderness ever sang
more unheeded, and no flower ever wasted its sweetness on the desert air more
completely than the blossoms of those tall plants wasted theirs upon the brisk
and breathless business men, mostly American, who talked and ran to and fro in
that place. And there, amid a riot of rococo ornament that nobody ever looked
at, and a chatter of expensive foreign birds that nobody ever heard, and a mass
of gorgeous upholstery and a labyrinth of luxurious architecture, the three men
sat and talked of how success was founded on thought and thrift and a vigilance
of economy and self-control.

One
of them indeed did not talk so much as the others; but he watched with very bright
and motionless eyes, which seemed to be pinched together by his pince-nez, and
the permanent smile under his small black moustache was rather like a permanent
sneer. This was the famous Jacob P. Stein, and he did not speak till he had
something to say. But his companion, old Gallup the Pennsylvanian, a huge fat
fellow with reverend grey hair but a face like a pugilist, talked a great deal.
He was in a jovial mood and was half rallying, half bullying the third
millionaire, Gideon Wise — a hard, dried, angular old bird of the type that his
countrymen compare to hickory, with a stiff grey chin-beard and the manners and
clothes of any old farmer from the central plains. There was an old argument
between Wise and Gallup about combination and competition. For old Wise still
retained, with the manners of the old backwoodsman, something of his opinions
of the old individualist; he belonged, as we should say in England, to the
Manchester School; and Gallup was always trying to persuade him to cut out
competition and pool the resources of the world.

‘
You’ll
have to come in, old fellow, sooner or later,’ Gallup was saying genially as Byrne
entered. ‘It’s the way the world is going, and we can’t go back to the one-man-business
now. We’ve all got to stand together.’

‘
If
I might say a word,’ said Stein, in his tranquil way, ‘I would say there is something
a little more urgent even than standing together commercially. Anyhow, we must
stand together politically; and that’s why I’ve asked Mr Byrne to meet us here
today. On the political issue we must combine; for the simple reason that all
our most dangerous enemies are already combined.’

‘
Oh,
I quite agree about political combination,’ grumbled Gideon Wise.

‘
See
here,’ said Stein to the journalist; ‘I know you have the run of these queer places,
Mr Byrne, and I want you to do something for us unofficially. You know where
these men meet; there are only two or three of them that count, John Elias and
Jake Halket, who does all the spouting, and perhaps that poet fellow Home.’

‘
Why
Home used to be a friend of Gideon,’ said the jeering Mr Gallup; ‘used to be in
his Sunday School class or something.’

‘
He
was a Christian, then,’ said old Gideon solemnly; ‘but when a man takes up with
atheists you never know. I still meet him now and then. I was quite ready to back
him against war and conscription and all that, of course, but when it comes to
all the goddam bolshies in creation — ’

‘
Excuse
me,’ interposed Stein, ‘the matter is rather urgent, so I hope you will excuse me
putting it before Mr Byrne at once. Mr Byrne, I may tell you in confidence that
I hold information, or rather evidence that would land at least two of those
men in prison for long terms, in connexion with conspiracies during the late
war. I don’t want to use that evidence. But I want you to go to them quietly
and tell them that I shall use it, and use it tomorrow, unless they alter their
attitude.’

‘
Well,’
replied Byrne, ‘what you propose would certainly be called compounding a felony
and might be called blackmail, Don’t you think it is rather dangerous?’

‘
I
think it is rather dangerous for them,’ said Stein with a snap; ‘and I want you
to go and tell them so.’

‘
Oh,
very well,’ said Byrne standing up, with a half humorous sigh. ‘It’s all in the
day’s work; but if I get into trouble, I warn you I shall try to drag you into it.’

‘
You
will try, boy,’ said old Gallup with a hearty laugh.

For
so much still lingers of that great dream of Jefferson and, the thing that men have
called Democracy that in his country, while the rich rule like tyrants, the
poor do not talk like slaves; but there is candour between the oppressor and
the oppressed.

The
meeting-place of the revolutionists was a queer, bare, whitewashed place, on the
walls of which were one or two distorted uncouth sketches in black and white,
in the style of something that was supposed to be Proletarian Art, of which not
one proletarian in a million could have made head or tail. Perhaps the one
point in common to the two council chambers was that both violated the American
Constitution by the display of strong drink. Cocktails of various colours had
stood before the three millionaires. Halket, the most violent of the
Bolshevists, thought it only appropriate to drink vodka. He was a long, hulking
fellow with a menacing stoop, and his very profile was aggressive like a dog’s,
the nose and lips thrust out together, the latter carrying a ragged red
moustache and the whole curling outwards with perpetual scorn. John Elias was a
dark watchful man in spectacles, with a black pointed beard; and he had learnt
in many European cafes a taste for absinthe. The journalist’s first and last
feeling was how very like each other, after all, were John Elias and Jacob P.
Stein. They were so like in face and mind and manner, that the millionaire might
have disappeared down a trap-door in the Babylon Hotel and come up again in the
stronghold of the Bolshevists.

The
third man also had a curious taste in drinks, and his drink was symbolic of him.
For what stood in front of the poet Home was a glass of milk, and its very mildness
seemed in that setting to have something sinister about it, as if its opaque
and colourless colour were of some leprous paste more poisonous than the dead
sick green of absinthe. Yet in truth the mildness was so far genuine enough;
for Henry Home came to the camp of revolution along a very different road and
from very different origins from those of Jake, the common tub-thumper, and
Elias, the cosmopolitan wire-puller. He had had what is called a careful
upbringing, had gone to chapel in his childhood, and carried through life a
teetotalism which he could not shake off when he cast away such trifles as
Christianity and marriage. He had fair hair and a fine face that might have looked
like Shelley, if he had not weakened the chin with a little foreign fringe of
beard. Somehow the beard made him look more like a woman; it was as if those
few golden hairs were all he could do.

When
the journalist entered, the notorious Jake was talking, as he generally was. Home
had uttered some casual and conventional phrase about ‘Heaven forbid’ something
or other, and this was quite enough to set Jake off with a torrent of profanity.

‘
Heaven
forbid! and that’s about all it bally well does do,’ he said. ‘Heaven never does
anything but forbid this, that and the other; forbids us to strike, and forbids
us to fight, and forbids us to shoot the damned usurers and blood-suckers where
they sit. Why doesn’t Heaven forbid them something for a bit? Why don’t the
damned priests and parsons stand up and tell the truth about those brutes for a
change? Why doesn’t their precious God — ’

Elias
allowed a gentle sigh, as of faint fatigue, to escape him.

‘
Priests,’
he said, ‘belonged, as Marx has shown, to the feudal stage of economic development
and are therefore no longer really any part of the problem. The part once
played by the priest is now played by the capitalist expert and — ’

‘
Yes,’
interrupted the journalist, with his grim and ironic implacability, ‘and it’s about
time you knew that some of them are jolly expert in playing it.’ And without
moving his own eyes from the bright but dead eyes of Elias, he told him of the
threat of Stein.

‘
I
was prepared for something of that sort,’ said the smiling Elias without moving;
‘I may say quite prepared.’

‘
Dirty
dogs!’ exploded Jake. ‘If a poor man said a thing like that he’d go to penal servitude.
But I reckon they’ll go somewhere worse before they guess. If they don’t go to
hell, I don’t know where the hell they’ll go to — ’

Home
made a movement of protest, perhaps not so much at what the man was saying as at
what he was going to say, and Elias cut the speech short with cold exactitude.

‘
It
is quite unnecessary for us,’ he said, looking at Byrne steadily through his spectacles,
‘to bandy threats with the other side. It is quite sufficient that their
threats are quite ineffective so far as we are concerned. We also have made all
our own arrangements, and some of them will not appear until they appear in
motion. So far as we are concerned, an immediate rupture and an extreme trial
of strength will be quite according to plan.’

As
he spoke in a quite quiet and dignified fashion, something in his motionless yellow
face and his great goggles started a faint fear creeping up the journalist’s
spine. Halket’s savage face might seem to have a snarl in its very silhouette
when seen sideways; but when seen face to face, the smouldering rage in his
eyes had also something of anxiety, as if the ethical and economic riddle were
after all a little too much for him; and Home seemed even more hanging on wires
of worry and self-criticism. But about this third man with the goggles, who
spoke so sensibly and simply, there was something uncanny; it was like a dead
man talking at the table.

As
Byrne went out with his message of defiance, and passed along the very narrow passage
beside the grocery store, he found the end of it blocked by a strange though
strangely familiar figure: short and sturdy, and looking rather quaint when
seen in dark outline with its round head and wide hat.

‘
Father
Brown!’ cried the astonished journalist. ‘I think you must have come into the wrong
door. You’re not likely to be in this little conspiracy.’

‘
Mine
is a rather older conspiracy,’ replied Father Brown smiling,’ but it is quite a
widespread conspiracy.’

‘
Well,’
replied Byrne,’ you can’t imagine any of the people here being within a thousand
miles of your concern.’

‘
It
is not always easy to tell,’ replied the priest equably; ‘but as a matter of fact,
there is one person here who’s within an inch of it.’

He
disappeared into the dark entrance and the journalist went on his way very much
puzzled. He was still more puzzled by a small incident that happened to him as he
turned into the hotel to make his report to his capitalist clients. The bower
of blossoms and bird-cages in which those crabbed old gentlemen were embosomed
was approached by a flight of marble steps, flanked by gilded nymphs and
tritons. Down these steps ran an active young man with black hair, a snub nose,
and a flower in his buttonhole, who seized him and drew him aside before he
could ascend the stair.

‘
I
say,’ whispered the young man, ‘I’m Potter — old Gid’s secretary, you know: now,
between ourselves, there is a sort of a thunderbolt being forged, isn’t there,
now?’

‘
I
came to the conclusion,’ replied Byrne cautiously, ‘that the Cyclops had something
on the anvil. But always remember that the Cyclops is a giant, but he has only
one eye. I think Bolshevism is — ’

While
he was speaking the secretary listened with a face that had a certain almost Mongolian
immobility, despite the liveliness of his legs and his attire. But when Byrne
said the word ‘Bolshevism’, the young man’s sharp eyes shifted and he said
quickly:

‘
What
has that — oh yes, that sort of thunderbolt; so sorry, my mistake. So easy to say
anvil when you mean ice-box.’

With
which the extraordinary young man disappeared down the steps and Byrne continued
to mount them, more and more mystification clouding his mind.