The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (11 page)

“
That’s
true,” admitted Crook, nodding eagerly and walking about. “But I’m afraid I can’t
have my policeman’s uniform? Haven’t killed a policeman lately.”

Blount
frowned thoughtfully a space, and then smote his thigh. “Yes, we can!” he cried.
“I’ve got Florian’s address here, and he knows every costumier in London. I’ll
phone him to bring a police dress when he comes.” And he went bounding away to
the telephone.

“
Oh,
it’s glorious, godfather,” cried Ruby, almost dancing. “I’ll be columbine and you
shall be pantaloon.”

The
millionaire held himself stiff with a sort of heathen solemnity. “I think, my dear,”
he said, “you must get someone else for pantaloon.”

“
I
will be pantaloon, if you like,” said Colonel Adams, taking his cigar out of
his mouth, and speaking for the first and last time.

“
You
ought to have a statue,” cried the Canadian, as he came back, radiant, from the
telephone. “There, we are all fitted. Mr. Crook shall be clown; he’s a journalist
and knows all the oldest jokes. I can be harlequin, that only wants long legs
and jumping about. My friend Florian ‘phones he’s bringing the police costume;
he’s changing on the way. We can act it in this very hall, the audience sitting
on those broad stairs opposite, one row above another. These front doors can be
the back scene, either open or shut. Shut, you see an English interior. Open, a
moonlit garden. It all goes by magic.” And snatching a chance piece of billiard
chalk from his pocket, he ran it across the hall floor, half-way between the
front door and the staircase, to mark the line of the footlights.

How
even such a banquet of bosh was got ready in the time remained a riddle. But they
went at it with that mixture of recklessness and industry that lives when youth
is in a house; and youth was in that house that night, though not all may have
isolated the two faces and hearts from which it flamed. As always happens, the
invention grew wilder and wilder through the very tameness of the bourgeois conventions
from which it had to create. The columbine looked charming in an outstanding
skirt that strangely resembled the large lamp-shade in the drawing-room. The
clown and pantaloon made themselves white with flour from the cook, and red
with rouge from some other domestic, who remained (like all true Christian
benefactors) anonymous. The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of
cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian
lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In
fact he would certainly have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime
paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds.
Indeed, her uncle, James Blount, was getting almost out of hand in his
excitement; he was like a schoolboy. He put a paper donkey’s head unexpectedly
on Father Brown, who bore it patiently, and even found some private manner of
moving his ears. He even essayed to put the paper donkey’s tail to the
coat-tails of Sir Leopold Fischer. This, however, was frowned down. “Uncle is
too absurd,” cried Ruby to Crook, round whose shoulders she had seriously placed
a string of sausages. “Why is he so wild?”

“
He
is harlequin to your columbine,” said Crook. “I am only the clown who makes the
old jokes.”

“
I
wish you were the harlequin,” she said, and left the string of sausages swinging.

Father
Brown, though he knew every detail done behind the scenes, and had even evoked applause
by his transformation of a pillow into a pantomime baby, went round to the
front and sat among the audience with all the solemn expectation of a child at
his first matinee. The spectators were few, relations, one or two local friends,
and the servants; Sir Leopold sat in the front seat, his full and still
fur-collared figure largely obscuring the view of the little cleric behind him;
but it has never been settled by artistic authorities whether the cleric lost
much. The pantomime was utterly chaotic, yet not contemptible; there ran
through it a rage of improvisation which came chiefly from Crook the clown.
Commonly he was a clever man, and he was inspired tonight with a wild omniscience,
a folly wiser than the world, that which comes to a young man who has seen for
an instant a particular expression on a particular face. He was supposed to be
the clown, but he was really almost everything else, the author (so far as
there was an author), the prompter, the scene-painter, the scene-shifter, and,
above all, the orchestra. At abrupt intervals in the outrageous performance he
would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and bang out some popular music
equally absurd and appropriate.

The
climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front doors at the back
of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit garden, but showing more
prominently the famous professional guest; the great Florian, dressed up as a
policeman. The clown at the piano played the constabulary chorus in the “Pirates
of Penzance,” but it was drowned in the deafening applause, for every gesture
of the great comic actor was an admirable though restrained version of the
carriage and manner of the police. The harlequin leapt upon him and hit him over
the helmet; the pianist playing “Where did you get that hat?” he faced about in
admirably simulated astonishment, and then the leaping harlequin hit him again
(the pianist suggesting a few bars of “Then we had another one”). Then the
harlequin rushed right into the arms of the policeman and fell on top of him,
amid a roar of applause. Then it was that the strange actor gave that celebrated
imitation of a dead man, of which the fame still lingers round Putney. It was
almost impossible to believe that a living person could appear so limp.

The
athletic harlequin swung him about like a sack or twisted or tossed him like an
Indian club; all the time to the most maddeningly ludicrous tunes from the piano.
When the harlequin heaved the comic constable heavily off the floor the clown
played “I arise from dreams of thee.” When he shuffled him across his back,
“With my bundle on my shoulder,” and when the harlequin finally let fall the
policeman with a most convincing thud, the lunatic at the instrument struck into
a jingling measure with some words which are still believed to have been, “I
sent a letter to my love and on the way I dropped it.”

At
about this limit of mental anarchy Father Brown’s view was obscured altogether;
for the City magnate in front of him rose to his full height and thrust his hands
savagely into all his pockets. Then he sat down nervously, still fumbling, and
then stood up again. For an instant it seemed seriously likely that he would
stride across the footlights; then he turned a glare at the clown playing the
piano; and then he burst in silence out of the room.

The
priest had only watched for a few more minutes the absurd but not inelegant dance
of the amateur harlequin over his splendidly unconscious foe. With real though
rude art, the harlequin danced slowly backwards out of the door into the garden,
which was full of moonlight and stillness. The vamped dress of silver paper and
paste, which had been too glaring in the footlights, looked more and more
magical and silvery as it danced away under a brilliant moon. The audience was
closing in with a cataract of applause, when Brown felt his arm abruptly touched,
and he was asked in a whisper to come into the colonel’s study.

He
followed his summoner with increasing doubt, which was not dispelled by a solemn
comicality in the scene of the study. There sat Colonel Adams, still unaffectedly
dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed whalebone nodding above his brow, but
with his poor old eyes sad enough to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leopold
Fischer was leaning against the mantelpiece and heaving with all the importance
of panic.

“
This
is a very painful matter, Father Brown,” said Adams. “The truth is, those diamonds
we all saw this afternoon seem to have vanished from my friend’s tail-coat
pocket. And as you —”

“
As
I,” supplemented Father Brown, with a broad grin, “was sitting just behind him —”

“
Nothing
of the sort shall be suggested,” said Colonel Adams, with a firm look at Fischer,
which rather implied that some such thing had been suggested. “I only ask you
to give me the assistance that any gentleman might give.”

“
Which
is turning out his pockets,” said Father Brown, and proceeded to do so, displaying
seven and sixpence, a return ticket, a small silver crucifix, a small breviary,
and a stick of chocolate.

The
colonel looked at him long, and then said, “Do you know, I should like to see the
inside of your head more than the inside of your pockets. My daughter is one of
your people, I know; well, she has lately —” and he stopped.

“
She
has lately,” cried out old Fischer, “opened her father’s house to a cut-throat Socialist,
who says openly he would steal anything from a richer man. This is the end of
it. Here is the richer man — and none the richer.”

“
If
you want the inside of my head you can have it,” said Brown rather wearily. “What
it’s worth you can say afterwards. But the first thing I find in that disused
pocket is this: that men who mean to steal diamonds don’t talk Socialism. They
are more likely,” he added demurely, “to denounce it.”

Both
the others shifted sharply and the priest went on:

“
You
see, we know these people, more or less. That Socialist would no more steal a diamond
than a Pyramid. We ought to look at once to the one man we don’t know. The
fellow acting the policeman — Florian. Where is he exactly at this minute, I
wonder.”

The
pantaloon sprang erect and strode out of the room. An interlude ensued, during which
the millionaire stared at the priest, and the priest at his breviary; then the
pantaloon returned and said, with staccato gravity, “The policeman is still
lying on the stage. The curtain has gone up and down six times; he is still
lying there.”

Father
Brown dropped his book and stood staring with a look of blank mental ruin. Very
slowly a light began to creep in his grey eyes, and then he made the scarcely obvious
answer.

“
Please
forgive me, colonel, but when did your wife die?”

“
Wife!”
replied the staring soldier, “she died this year two months. Her brother James arrived
just a week too late to see her.”

The
little priest bounded like a rabbit shot. “Come on!” he cried in quite unusual excitement.
“Come on! We’ve got to go and look at that policeman!”

They
rushed on to the now curtained stage, breaking rudely past the columbine and clown
(who seemed whispering quite contentedly), and Father Brown bent over the prostrate
comic policeman.

“
Chloroform,”
he said as he rose; “I only guessed it just now.”

There
was a startled stillness, and then the colonel said slowly, “Please say seriously
what all this means.”

Father
Brown suddenly shouted with laughter, then stopped, and only struggled with it for
instants during the rest of his speech. “Gentlemen,” he gasped, “there’s not
much time to talk. I must run after the criminal. But this great French actor
who played the policeman — this clever corpse the harlequin waltzed with and
dandled and threw about — he was —” His voice again failed him, and he turned
his back to run.

“
He
was?” called Fischer inquiringly.

“
A
real policeman,” said Father Brown, and ran away into the dark.

There
were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels
and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire sky and silver moon, even in
that midwinter, warm colours as of the south. The green gaiety of the waving
laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal,
make an almost irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of
the garden trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic
as impossible. He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten million moons;
the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch of him on fire.
But he swings, flashing and successful, from the short tree in this garden to
the tall, rambling tree in the other, and only stops there because a shade has
slid under the smaller tree and has unmistakably called up to him.

“
Well,
Flambeau,” says the voice, “you really look like a Flying Star; but that always
means a Falling Star at last.”

The
silver, sparkling figure above seems to lean forward in the laurels and, confident
of escape, listens to the little figure below.

“
You
never did anything better, Flambeau. It was clever to come from Canada (with a Paris
ticket, I suppose) just a week after Mrs. Adams died, when no one was in a mood
to ask questions. It was cleverer to have marked down the Flying Stars and the
very day of Fischer’s coming. But there’s no cleverness, but mere genius, in
what followed. Stealing the stones, I suppose, was nothing to you. You could
have done it by sleight of hand in a hundred other ways besides that pretence
of putting a paper donkey’s tail to Fischer’s coat. But in the rest you
eclipsed yourself.”

The
silvery figure among the green leaves seems to linger as if hypnotised, though his
escape is easy behind him; he is staring at the man below.

“
Oh,
yes,” says the man below, “I know all about it. I know you not only forced the pantomime,
but put it to a double use. You were going to steal the stones quietly; news
came by an accomplice that you were already suspected, and a capable police
officer was coming to rout you up that very night. A common thief would have
been thankful for the warning and fled; but you are a poet. You already had the
clever notion of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellery. Now,
you saw that if the dress were a harlequin’s the appearance of a policeman
would be quite in keeping. The worthy officer started from Putney police
station to find you, and walked into the queerest trap ever set in this world.
When the front door opened he walked straight on to the stage of a Christmas
pantomime, where he could be kicked, clubbed, stunned and drugged by the
dancing harlequin, amid roars of laughter from all the most respectable people
in Putney. Oh, you will never do anything better. And now, by the way, you
might give me back those diamonds.”