The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (93 page)

“
Oh,
never mind about those just now, Jameson,” said Smart rather hurriedly. “Only something
about my account; I’ll see Mr. Smith about it later. You were saying that the
‘cello, Mr. Smith — —”

But
the cold breath of business had sufficed to disperse the fumes of transcendental
talk, and the guests began one after another to say farewell. Only Mr. Imlack
Smith, bank manager and musician, remained to the last; and when the rest were
gone he and his host went into the inner room, where the goldfish were kept,
and closed the door.

The
house was long and narrow, with a covered balcony running along the first floor,
which consisted mostly of a sort of suite of rooms used by the householder
himself, his bedroom and dressing-room, and an inner room in which his very
valuable treasures were sometimes stored for the night instead of being left in
the rooms below. This balcony, like the insufficiently barred door below it,
was a matter of concern to the housekeeper and the head clerk and the others
who lamented the carelessness of the collector; but, in truth, that cunning old
gentleman was more careful than he seemed. He professed no great belief in the
antiquated fastenings of the old house, which the housekeeper lamented to see
rusting in idleness, but he had an eye to the more important point of strategy.
He always put his favourite goldfish in the room at the back of his bedroom for
the night, and slept in front of it, as it were, with a pistol under his
pillow. And when Boyle and Jameson, awaiting his return from the tete-a-tete,
at length saw the door open and their employer reappear, he was carrying the
great glass bowl as reverently as if it had been the relic of a saint.

Outside,
the last edges of the sunset still clung to the corners of the green square; but
inside, a lamp had already been kindled; and in the mingling of the two lights
the coloured globe glowed like some monstrous jewel, and the fantastic outlines
of the fiery fishes seemed to give it, indeed, something of the mystery of a
talisman, like strange shapes seen by a seer in the crystal of doom. Over the
old man’s shoulder the olive face of Imlack Smith stared like a sphinx.

“
I
am going up to London to-night, Mr. Boyle,” said old Smart, with more gravity than
he commonly showed. “Mr. Smith and I are catching the six-forty-five. I should prefer
you, Jameson, to sleep upstairs in my room to-night; if you put the bowl in the
back room as usual, it will be quite safe then. Not that I suppose anything
could possibly happen.”

“
Anything
may happen anywhere,” said the smiling Mr. Smith. “I think you generally take a
gun to bed with you. Perhaps you had better leave it behind in this case.”

Peregrine
Smart did not reply, and they passed out of the house on to the road round the village
green.

The
secretary and the head clerk slept that night as directed in their employer’s bedroom.
To speak more strictly, Jameson, the head clerk, slept in a bed in the dressing-room,
but the door stood open between, and the two rooms running along the front were
practically one. Only the bedroom had a long French window giving on the
balcony, and an entrance at the back into the inner apartment where the
goldfish bowl had been placed for safety. Boyle dragged his bed right across so
as to bar this entrance, put the revolver under his pillow, and then undressed
and went to bed, feeling that he had taken all possible precautions against an
impossible or improbable event. He did not see why there should be any
particular danger of normal burglary; and as for the spiritual burglary that
figured in the traveller’s tales of the Count de Lara, if his thoughts ran on
them so near to sleep it was because they were such stuff as dreams are made of.
They soon turned into dreams with intervals of dreamless slumber. The old clerk
was a little more restless as usual; but after fussing about a little longer
and repeating some of his favourite regrets and warnings, he also retired to
his bed in the same manner and slept. The moon brightened and grew dim again
above the green square and the grey blocks of houses in a solitude and silence
that seemed to have no human witness; and it was when the white cracks of
daybreak had already appeared in the corners of the grey sky that the thing
happened.

Boyle,
being young, was naturally both the healthier and the heavier sleeper of the two.
Though active enough when he was once awake, he always had a load to lift in
waking. Moreover, he had dreams of the sort that cling to the emerging minds like
the dim tentacles of an octopus. They were a medley of many things, including
his last look from the balcony across the four grey roads and the green square.
But the pattern of them changed and shifted and turned dizzily, to the
accompaniment of a low grinding noise, which sounded somehow like a subterranean
river, and may have been no more than old Mr. Jameson snoring in the
dressing-room. But in the dreamer’s mind all that murmur and motion was vaguely
connected with the words of the Count de Lara, about a wisdom that could hold
the levers of time and space and turn the world. In the dream it seemed as if a
vast murmuring machinery under the world were really moving whole landscapes
hither and thither, so that the ends of the earth might appear in a man’s
front-garden, or his own front-garden be exiled beyond the sea.

The
first complete impressions he had were the words of a song, with a rather thin metallic
accompaniment; they were sung in a foreign accent and a voice that was still
strange and yet faintly familiar. And yet he could hardly feel sure that he was
not making up poetry in his sleep.

Over
the land and over the sea

My
flying fishes will come to me,

For
the note is not of the world that wakes them,

But
in — —

He
struggled to his feet and saw that his fellow-guardian was already out of bed; Jameson
was peering out of the long window on to the balcony and calling out sharply to
someone in the street below.

“
Who’s
that?” he called out sharply. “What do you want?”

He
turned to Boyle in agitation, saying: “There’s somebody prowling about just outside.
I knew it wasn’t safe. I’m going down to bar that front door, whatever they
say.”

He
ran downstairs in a flutter and Boyle could hear the clattering of the bars upon
the front door; but Boyle himself stepped out upon the balcony and looked out
on the long grey road that led up to the house, and he thought he was still dreaming.

Upon
that grey road leading across that empty moor and through that little English hamlet,
there had appeared a figure that might have stepped straight out of the jungle
or the bazaar — a figure out of one of the Count’s fantastic stories; a figure
out of the “Arabian Nights.” The rather ghostly grey twilight which begins to
define and yet to discolour everything when the light in the east has ceased to
be localized, lifted slowly like a veil of grey gauze and showed him a figure
wrapped in outlandish raiment. A scarf of a strange sea-blue, vast and voluminous,
went round the head like a turban, and then again round the chin, giving rather
the general character of a hood; so far as the face was concerned it had all
the effects of a mask. For the raiment round the head was drawn close as a
veil; and the head itself was bowed over a queer-looking musical instrument
made of silver or steel, and shaped like a deformed or crooked violin. It was
played with something like a silver comb, and the notes were curiously thin and
keen. Before Boyle could open his mouth, the same haunting alien accent came
from under the shadow of the burnous, singing-words of the same sort:

As
the golden birds go back to the tree
My golden fishes return to me.
Return — —

“
You’ve
no right here,” called out Boyle in exasperation, hardly knowing what he said.

“
I
have a right to the goldfish,” said the stranger, speaking more like King Solomon
than an unsandalled Bedouin in a ragged blue cloak. “And they will come to me.
Come!”

He
struck his strange fiddle as his voice rose sharply on the word. There was a pang
of sound that seemed to pierce the mind, and then there came a fainter sound,
like an answer: a vibrant whisper. It came from the dark room behind where the
bowl of goldfish was standing.

Boyle
turned towards it; and even as he turned the echo in the inner room changed to a
long tingling sound like an electric bell, and then to a faint crash. It was still
a matter of seconds since he had challenged the man from the balcony; but the
old clerk had already regained the top of the stairs, panting a little, for he
was an elderly gentleman.

“
I’ve
locked up the door, anyhow,” he said.

“
The
stable door,” said Boyle out of the darkness of the inner room.

Jameson
followed him into that apartment and found him staring down at the floor, which
was covered with a litter of coloured glass like the curved bits of a broken rainbow.

“
What
do you mean by the stable door?” began Jameson.

“
I
mean that the steed is stolen,” answered Boyle. “The flying steeds. The flying fishes
our Arab friend outside has just whistled to like so many performing puppies.”

“
But
how could he?” exploded the old clerk, as if such events were hardly respectable.

“
Well,
they’re gone,” said Boyle shortly. “The broken bowl is here, which would have taken
a long time to open properly, but only a second to smash. But the fish are
gone, God knows how, though I think our friend ought to be asked.”

“
We
are wasting time,” said the distracted Jameson. “We ought to be after him at once.”

“
Much
better be telephoning the police at once,” answered Boyle. “They ought to outstrip
him in a flash with motors and telephones that go a good deal farther than we
should ever get, running through the village in our nightgowns. But it may be
there are things even the police cars and wires won’t outstrip.”

While
Jameson was talking to the police-station through the telephone in an agitated voice,
Boyle went out again on to the balcony and hastily scanned that grey landscape
of daybreak. There was no trace of the man in the turban, and no other sign of
life, except some faint stirrings an expert might have recognized in the hotel
of the Blue Dragon. Only Boyle, for the first time, noted consciously something
that he had all along been noting unconsciously. It was like a fact struggling
in the submerged mind and demanding its own meaning. It was simply the fact
that the grey landscape had never been entirely grey; there was one gold spot
amid its stripes of colourless colour, a lamp lighted in one of the houses on
the other side of the green — Something, perhaps irrational, told him that it
had been burning through all the hours of the darkness and was only fading with
the dawn. He counted the houses, and his calculation brought out a result which
seemed to fit in with something, he knew not what. Anyhow, it was apparently
the house of the Count Yvon de Lara.

Inspector
Pinner had arrived with several policemen, and done several things of a rapid and
resolute sort, being conscious that the very absurdity of the costly trinkets
might give the case considerable prominence in the newspapers. He had examined
everything, measured everything, taken down everybody’s deposition, taken
everybody’s finger-prints, put everybody’s back up, and found himself at the
end left facing a fact which he could not believe. An Arab from the desert had
walked up the public road and stopped in front of the house of Mr. Peregrine
Smart, where a bowl of artificial goldfish was kept in an inner room; he had
then sung or recited a little poem, and the bowl had exploded like a bomb and
the fishes vanished into thin air. Nor did it soothe the inspector to be told
by a foreign Count — in a soft, purring voice — that the bounds of experience
were being enlarged.

Indeed,
the attitude of each member of the little group was characteristic enough. Peregrine
Smart himself had come back from London the next morning to hear the news of
his loss. Naturally he admitted a shock; but it was typical of something sporting
and spirited in the little old gentleman, something that always made his small
strutting figure look like a cock-sparrow’s, that he showed more vivacity in
the search than depression at the loss. The man named Harmer, who had come to
the village on purpose to buy the goldfish, might be excused for being a little
testy on learning they were not there to be bought. But, in truth, his rather
aggressive moustache and eyebrows seemed to bristle with something more
definite than disappointment, and the eyes that darted over the company were
bright with a vigilance that might well be suspicion. The sallow face of the
bank manager, who had also returned from London though by a later train, seemed
again and again to attract those shining and shifting eyes like a magnet. Of
the two remaining figures of the original circle, Father Brown was generally
silent when he was not spoken to, and the dazed Hartopp was often silent even
when he was.

But
the Count was not a man to let anything pass that gave an apparent advantage to
his views. He smiled at his rationalistic rival, the doctor, in the manner of one
who knows how it is possible to be irritating by being ingratiating.

“
You
will admit, doctor,” he said, “that at least some of the stories you thought so
improbable look a little more realistic to-day than they did yesterday. When a man
as ragged as those I described is able, by speaking a word, to dissolve a solid
vessel inside the four walls of the house he stands outside, it might perhaps
be called an example of what I said about spiritual powers and material barriers.”