The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (113 page)

Professor
Openshaw laid down his pen and looked steadily at the man on the other side of the
table; concentrating in that single stare all his long experience of many entirely
different types of humbug, and even some eccentric and extraordinary types of
honest men. In the ordinary way, he would have begun with the healthy hypothesis
that the story was a pack of lies. On the whole he did incline to assume that
it was a pack of lies. And yet he could not fit the man into his story; if it
were only that he could not see that sort of liar telling that sort of lie. The
man was not trying to look honest on the surface, as most quacks and impostors
do; somehow, it seemed all the other way; as if the man was honest, in spite of
something else that was merely on the surface. He thought of a good man with
one innocent delusion; but again the symptoms were not the same; there was even
a sort of virile indifference; as if the man did not care much about his
delusion, if it was a delusion.

‘
Mr
Pringle,’ he said sharply, like a barrister making a witness jump, ‘where is this
book of yours now?’

The
grin reappeared on the bearded face which had grown grave during the recital. ‘I
left it outside,’ said Mr Pringle. ‘I mean in the outer office. It was a risk,
perhaps; but the less risk of the two.’

‘
What
do you mean?’ demanded the Professor. ‘Why didn’t you bring it straight in here?’

‘
Because,’
answered the missionary, ‘I knew that as soon as you saw it, you’d open it — before
you had heard the story. I thought it possible you might think twice about
opening it — after you’d heard the story.’

Then
after a silence he added: ‘There was nobody out there but your clerk; and he looked
a stolid steady-going specimen, immersed in business calculations.’

Openshaw
laughed unaffectedly. ‘Oh, Babbage,’ he cried, ‘your magic tomes are safe enough
with him, I assure you. His name’s Berridge — but I often call him Babbage;
because he’s so exactly like a Calculating Machine. No human being, if you can
call him a human being, would be less likely to open other people’s brown paper
parcels. Well, we may as well go and bring it in now; though I assure you I
will consider seriously the course to be taken with it. Indeed, I tell you
frankly,’ and he stared at the man again, ‘that I’m not quite sure whether we
ought to open it here and now, or send it to this Dr Hankey.’

The
two had passed together out of the inner into the outer office; and even as they
did so, Mr Pringle gave a cry and ran forward towards the clerk’s desk. For the
clerk’s desk was there; but not the clerk. On the clerk’s desk lay a faded old
leather book, torn out of its brown-paper wrappings, and lying closed, but as
if it had just been opened. The clerk’s desk stood against the wide window that
looked out into the street; and the window was shattered with a huge ragged
hole in the glass; as if a human body had been shot through it into the world
without. There was no other trace of Mr Berridge.

Both
the two men left in the office stood as still as statues; and then it was the Professor
who slowly came to life. He looked even more judicial than he had ever looked
in his life, as he slowly turned and held out his hand to the missionary.

‘
Mr
Pringle,’ he said, ‘I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon only for thoughts that
I have had; and half-thoughts at that. But nobody could call himself a scientific
man and not face a fact like this.’

‘
I
suppose,’ said Pringle doubtfully, ‘that we ought to make some inquiries. Can you
ring up his house and find out if he has gone home?’

‘
I
don’t know that he’s on the telephone,’ answered Openshaw, rather absently; ‘he
lives somewhere up Hampstead way, I think. But I suppose somebody will inquire here,
if his friends or family miss him.’

‘
Could
we furnish a description,’ asked the other, ‘if the police want it?’

‘
The
police!’ said the Professor, starting from his reverie. ‘A description . . .
Well, he looked awfully like everybody else, I’m afraid, except for goggles.
One of those clean-shaven chaps. But the police . . . look here, what are we to
do about this mad business?’

‘
I
know what I ought to do,’ said the Rev. Mr Pringle firmly, ‘I am going to take this
book straight to the only original Dr Hankey, and ask him what the devil it’s
all about. He lives not very far from here, and I’ll come straight back and
tell you what he says.’

‘
Oh,
very well,’ said the Professor at last, as he sat down rather wearily; perhaps relieved
for the moment to be rid of the responsibility. But long after the brisk and
ringing footsteps of the little missionary had died away down the street, the
Professor sat in the same posture, staring into vacancy like a man in a trance.

He
was still in the same seat and almost in the same attitude, when the same brisk
footsteps were heard on the pavement without and the missionary entered, this time,
as a glance assured him, with empty hands.

‘
Dr
Hankey,’ said Pringle gravely, ‘wants to keep the book for an hour and consider
the point. Then he asks us both to call, and he will give us his decision. He specially
desired, Professor, that you should accompany me on the second visit.’

Openshaw
continued to stare in silence; then he said, suddenly: ‘Who the devil is Dr Hankey?’

‘
You
sound rather as if you meant he was the devil,’ said Pringle smiling, ‘and I fancy
some people have thought so. He had quite a reputation in your own line; but he
gained it mostly in India, studying local magic and so on, so perhaps he’s not
so well known here. He is a yellow skinny little devil with a lame leg, and a
doubtful temper; but he seems to have set up in an ordinary respectable
practice in these parts, and I don’t know anything definitely wrong about him —
unless it’s wrong to be the only person who can possibly know anything about
all this crazy affair.’

Professor
Openshaw rose heavily and went to the telephone; he rang up Father Brown, changing
the luncheon engagement to a dinner, that he might hold himself free for the
expedition to the house of the Anglo-Indian doctor; after that he sat down
again, lit a cigar and sank once more into his own unfathomable thoughts.

Father
Brown went round to the restaurant appointed for dinner, and kicked his heels for
some time in a vestibule full of mirrors and palms in pots; he had been informed
of Openshaw’s afternoon engagement, and, as the evening closed-in dark and
stormy round the glass and the green plants, guessed that it had produced something
unexpected and unduly prolonged. He even wondered for a moment whether the
Professor would turn up at all; but when the Professor eventually did, it was
clear that his own more general guesses had been justified. For it was a very
wild-eyed and even wild-haired Professor who eventually drove back with Mr
Pringle from the expedition to the North of London, where suburbs are still
fringed with heathy wastes and scraps of common, looking more sombre under the
rather thunderstorm sunset. Nevertheless, they had apparently found the house,
standing a little apart though within hail of other houses; they had verified
the brass-plate duly engraved: ‘J. I. Hankey, MD, MRCS.’ Only they did not find
J. I. Hankey, MD, MRCS. They found only what a nightmare whisper had already
subconsciously prepared them to find: a commonplace parlour with the accursed
volume lying on the table, as if it had just been read; and beyond, a back door
burst open and a faint trail of footsteps that ran a little way up so steep a
garden-path that it seemed that no lame man could have run up so lightly. But
it was a lame man who had run; for in those few steps there was the misshapen
unequal mark of some sort of surgical boot; then two marks of that boot alone
(as if the creature had hopped) and then nothing. There was nothing further to
be learnt from Dr J. I. Hankey, except that he had made his decision. He had
read the oracle and received the doom.

When
the two came into the entrance under the palms, Pringle put the book down suddenly
on a small table, as if it burned his fingers. The priest glanced at it
curiously; there was only some rude lettering on the front with a couplet:

They
that looked into this book
Them the Flying Terror took;

and
underneath, as he afterwards discovered, similar warnings in Greek, Latin and French.
The other two had turned away with a natural impulsion towards drinks, after
their exhaustion and bewilderment; and Openshaw had called to the waiter, who
brought cocktails on a tray.

‘
You
will dine with us, I hope,’ said the Professor to the missionary; but Mr Pringle
amiably shook his head.

‘
If
you’ll forgive me,’ he said, ‘I’m going off to wrestle with this book and this business
by myself somewhere. I suppose I couldn’t use your office for an hour or so?’

‘
I
suppose — I’m afraid it’s locked,’ said Openshaw in some surprise.

‘
You
forget there’s a hole in the window.’ The Rev. Luke Pringle gave the very broadest
of all broad grins and vanished into the darkness without.

‘
A
rather odd fellow, that, after all,’ said the Professor, frowning.

He
was rather surprised to find Father Brown talking to the waiter who had brought
the cocktails, apparently about the waiter’s most private affairs; for there was
some mention of a baby who was now out of danger. He commented on the fact with
some surprise, wondering how the priest came to know the man; but the former
only said, ‘Oh, I dine here every two or three months, and I’ve talked to him
now and then.’

The
Professor, who himself dined there about five times a week, was conscious that he
had never thought of talking to the man; but his thoughts were interrupted by a
strident ringing and a summons to the telephone. The voice on the telephone
said it was Pringle, it was rather a muffled voice, but it might well be
muffled in all those bushes of beard and whisker. Its message was enough to establish
identity.

‘
Professor,’
said the voice, ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going to look for myself. I’m
speaking from your office and the book is in front of me. If anything happens to
me, this is to say good-bye. No — it’s no good trying to stop me. You wouldn’t
be in time anyhow. I’m opening the book now. I . . . ’

Openshaw
thought he heard something like a sort of thrilling or shivering yet almost soundless
crash; then he shouted the name of Pringle again and again; but he heard no
more. He hung up the receiver, and, restored to a superb academic calm, rather
like the calm of despair, went back and quietly took his seat at the
dinner-table. Then, as coolly as if he were describing the failure of some small
silly trick at a seance, he told the priest every detail of this monstrous mystery.

‘
Five
men have now vanished in this impossible way,’ he said. ‘Every one is extraordinary;
and yet the one case I simply can’t get over is my clerk, Berridge. It’s just because
he was the quietest creature that he’s the queerest case.’

‘
Yes,’
replied Father Brown, ‘it was a queer thing for Berridge to do, anyway. He was awfully
conscientious. He was also so jolly careful to keep all the office business
separate from any fun of his own. Why, hardly anybody knew he was quite a
humorist at home and — ’

‘
Berridge!’
cried the Professor. ‘What on earth are you talking about? Did you know him?’

‘
Oh
no,’ said Father Brown carelessly, ‘only as you say I know the waiter. I’ve often
had to wait in your office, till you turned up; and of course I passed the time
of day with poor Berridge. He was rather a card. I remember he once said he
would like to collect valueless things, as collectors did the silly things they
thought valuable. You know the old story about the woman who collected
valueless things.’

‘
I’m
not sure I know what you’re talking about,’ said Openshaw. ‘But even if my clerk
was eccentric (and I never knew a man I should have thought less so), it wouldn’t
explain what happened to him; and it certainly wouldn’t explain the others.’

‘
What
others?’ asked the priest.

The
Professor stared at him and spoke distinctly, as if to a child: ‘My dear Father
Brown, Five Men have disappeared.’

‘
My
dear Professor Openshaw, no men have disappeared.’

Father
Brown gazed back at his host with equal steadiness and spoke with equal distinctness.
Nevertheless, the Professor required the words repeated, and they were repeated
as distinctly. ‘I say that no men have disappeared.’

After
a moment’s silence, he added, ‘I suppose the hardest thing is to convince anybody
that 0+0+0=0. Men believe the oddest things if they are in a series; that is
why Macbeth believed the three words of the three witches; though the first was
something he knew himself; and the last something he could only bring about
himself. But in your case the middle term is the weakest of all.’

‘
What
do you mean?’

‘
You
saw nobody vanish. You did not see the man vanish from the boat. You did not see
the man vanish from the tent. All that rests on the word of Mr Pringle, which I
will not discuss just now. But you’ll admit this; you would never have taken
his word yourself, unless you had seen it confirmed by your clerk’s disappearance;
just as Macbeth would never have believed he would be king, if he had not been
confirmed in believing he would be Cawdor.’