The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (23 page)

“
Sir,”
said the physician harshly, “you appear to know some secrets in this black business.
May I ask if you are going to keep them to yourself?”

“
Why,
doctor,” answered the priest, smiling quite pleasantly, “there is one very good
reason why a man of my trade should keep things to himself when he is not sure of
them, and that is that it is so constantly his duty to keep them to himself when
he is sure of them. But if you think I have been discourteously reticent with
you or anyone, I will go to the extreme limit of my custom. I will give you two
very large hints.”

“
Well,
sir?” said the doctor gloomily.

“
First,”
said Father Brown quietly, “the thing is quite in your own province. It is a matter
of physical science. The blacksmith is mistaken, not perhaps in saying that the
blow was divine, but certainly in saying that it came by a miracle. It was no
miracle, doctor, except in so far as man is himself a miracle, with his strange
and wicked and yet half-heroic heart. The force that smashed that skull was a
force well known to scientists — one of the most frequently debated of the laws
of nature.”

The
doctor, who was looking at him with frowning intentness, only said: “And the other
hint?”

“
The
other hint is this,” said the priest. “Do you remember the blacksmith, though he
believes in miracles, talking scornfully of the impossible fairy tale that his
hammer had wings and flew half a mile across country?”

“
Yes,”
said the doctor, “I remember that.”

“
Well,”
added Father Brown, with a broad smile, “that fairy tale was the nearest thing to
the real truth that has been said today.” And with that he turned his back and
stumped up the steps after the curate.

The
Reverend Wilfred, who had been waiting for him, pale and impatient, as if this little
delay were the last straw for his nerves, led him immediately to his favourite
corner of the church, that part of the gallery closest to the carved roof and
lit by the wonderful window with the angel. The little Latin priest explored
and admired everything exhaustively, talking cheerfully but in a low voice all
the time. When in the course of his investigation he found the side exit and
the winding stair down which Wilfred had rushed to find his brother dead,
Father Brown ran not down but up, with the agility of a monkey, and his clear
voice came from an outer platform above.

“
Come
up here, Mr. Bohun,” he called. “The air will do you good.”

Bohun
followed him, and came out on a kind of stone gallery or balcony outside the building,
from which one could see the illimitable plain in which their small hill stood,
wooded away to the purple horizon and dotted with villages and farms. Clear and
square, but quite small beneath them, was the blacksmith’s yard, where the
inspector still stood taking notes and the corpse still lay like a smashed fly.

“
Might
be the map of the world, mightn’t it?” said Father Brown.

“
Yes,”
said Bohun very gravely, and nodded his head.

Immediately
beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building plunged outwards into the
void with a sickening swiftness akin to suicide. There is that element of Titan
energy in the architecture of the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be
seen, it always seems to be rushing away, like the strong back of some maddened
horse. This church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old
fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it from
below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw it, as now,
from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit. For these two men
on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of Gothic; the monstrous
foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great
things small and small things great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air.
Details of stone, enormous by their proximity, were relieved against a pattern
of fields and farms, pygmy in their distance. A carved bird or beast at a
corner seemed like some vast walking or flying dragon wasting the pastures and
villages below. The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men were
upheld in air amid the gyrating wings of colossal genii; and the whole of that
old church, as tall and rich as a cathedral, seemed to sit upon the sunlit
country like a cloudburst.

“
I
think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even
to pray,” said Father Brown. “Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked
from.”

“
Do
you mean that one may fall over,” asked Wilfred.

“
I
mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,” said the other priest.

“
I
scarcely understand you,” remarked Bohun indistinctly.

“
Look
at that blacksmith, for instance,” went on Father Brown calmly; “a good man, but
not a Christian — hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his Scotch religion was
made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on
the world more than to look up at heaven. Humility is the mother of giants. One
sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”

“
But
he — he didn’t do it,” said Bohun tremulously.

“
No,”
said the other in an odd voice; “we know he didn’t do it.”

After
a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with his pale grey eyes.
“I knew a man,” he said, “who began by worshipping with others before the altar,
but who grew fond of high and lonely places to pray from, corners or niches in
the belfry or the spire. And once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole
world seemed to turn under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he
fancied he was God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great
crime.”

Wilfred’s
face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white as they tightened
on the parapet of stone.

“
He
thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the sinner. He would
never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling with other men upon a
floor. But he saw all men walking about like insects. He saw one especially strutting
just below him, insolent and evident by a bright green hat — a poisonous
insect.”

Rooks
cawed round the corners of the belfry; but there was no other sound till Father
Brown went on.

“
This
also tempted him, that he had in his hand one of the most awful engines of nature;
I mean gravitation, that mad and quickening rush by which all earth’s creatures
fly back to her heart when released. See, the inspector is strutting just below
us in the smithy. If I were to toss a pebble over this parapet it would be
something like a bullet by the time it struck him. If I were to drop a hammer —
even a small hammer —”

Wilfred
Bohun threw one leg over the parapet, and Father Brown had him in a minute by the
collar.

“
Not
by that door,” he said quite gently; “that door leads to hell.”

Bohun
staggered back against the wall, and stared at him with frightful eyes.

“
How
do you know all this?” he cried. “Are you a devil?”

“
I
am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.
Listen to me,” he said after a short pause. “I know what you did — at least, I
can guess the great part of it. When you left your brother you were racked with
no unrighteous rage, to the extent even that you snatched up a small hammer,
half inclined to kill him with his foulness on his mouth. Recoiling, you thrust
it under your buttoned coat instead, and rushed into the church. You pray
wildly in many places, under the angel window, upon the platform above, and a
higher platform still, from which you could see the colonel’s Eastern hat like
the back of a green beetle crawling about. Then something snapped in your soul,
and you let God’s thunderbolt fall.”

Wilfred
put a weak hand to his head, and asked in a low voice: “How did you know that his
hat looked like a green beetle?”

“
Oh,
that,” said the other with the shadow of a smile, “that was common sense. But hear
me further. I say I know all this; but no one else shall know it. The next step
is for you; I shall take no more steps; I will seal this with the seal of confession.
If you ask me why, there are many reasons, and only one that concerns you. I
leave things to you because you have not yet gone very far wrong, as assassins
go. You did not help to fix the crime on the smith when it was easy; or on his
wife, when that was easy. You tried to fix it on the imbecile because you knew
that he could not suffer. That was one of the gleams that it is my business to
find in assassins. And now come down into the village, and go your own way as
free as the wind; for I have said my last word.”

They
went down the winding stairs in utter silence, and came out into the sunlight by
the smithy. Wilfred Bohun carefully unlatched the wooden gate of the yard, and
going up to the inspector, said: “I wish to give myself up; I have killed my
brother.”

That
singular smoky sparkle, at once a confusion and a transparency, which is the strange
secret of the Thames, was changing more and more from its grey to its glittering
extreme as the sun climbed to the zenith over Westminster, and two men crossed
Westminster Bridge. One man was very tall and the other very short; they might
even have been fantastically compared to the arrogant clock-tower of Parliament
and the humbler humped shoulders of the Abbey, for the short man was in
clerical dress. The official description of the tall man was M. Hercule Flambeau,
private detective, and he was going to his new offices in a new pile of flats
facing the Abbey entrance. The official description of the short man was the
Reverend J. Brown, attached to St. Francis Xavier’s Church, Camberwell, and he
was coming from a Camberwell deathbed to see the new offices of his friend.

The
building was American in its sky-scraping altitude, and American also in the oiled
elaboration of its machinery of telephones and lifts. But it was barely finished
and still understaffed; only three tenants had moved in; the office just above
Flambeau was occupied, as also was the office just below him; the two floors
above that and the three floors below were entirely bare. But the first glance
at the new tower of flats caught something much more arresting. Save for a few
relics of scaffolding, the one glaring object was erected outside the office
just above Flambeau’s. It was an enormous gilt effigy of the human eye,
surrounded with rays of gold, and taking up as much room as two or three of the
office windows.

“
What
on earth is that?” asked Father Brown, and stood still. “Oh, a new religion,” said
Flambeau, laughing; “one of those new religions that forgive your sins by saying
you never had any. Rather like Christian Science, I should think. The fact is
that a fellow calling himself Kalon (I don’t know what his name is, except that
it can’t be that) has taken the flat just above me. I have two lady typewriters
underneath me, and this enthusiastic old humbug on top. He calls himself the
New Priest of Apollo, and he worships the sun.”

“
Let
him look out,” said Father Brown. “The sun was the cruellest of all the gods. But
what does that monstrous eye mean?”

“
As
I understand it, it is a theory of theirs,” answered Flambeau, “that a man can endure
anything if his mind is quite steady. Their two great symbols are the sun and
the open eye; for they say that if a man were really healthy he could stare at
the sun.”

“
If
a man were really healthy,” said Father Brown, “he would not bother to stare at
it.”

“
Well,
that’s all I can tell you about the new religion,” went on Flambeau carelessly.
“It claims, of course, that it can cure all physical diseases.”

“
Can
it cure the one spiritual disease?” asked Father Brown, with a serious curiosity.

“
And
what is the one spiritual disease?” asked Flambeau, smiling.

“
Oh,
thinking one is quite well,” said his friend.

Flambeau
was more interested in the quiet little office below him than in the flamboyant
temple above. He was a lucid Southerner, incapable of conceiving himself as anything
but a Catholic or an atheist; and new religions of a bright and pallid sort
were not much in his line. But humanity was always in his line, especially when
it was good-looking; moreover, the ladies downstairs were characters in their
way. The office was kept by two sisters, both slight and dark, one of them tall
and striking. She had a dark, eager and aquiline profile, and was one of those
women whom one always thinks of in profile, as of the clean-cut edge of some
weapon. She seemed to cleave her way through life. She had eyes of startling
brilliancy, but it was the brilliancy of steel rather than of diamonds; and her
straight, slim figure was a shade too stiff for its grace. Her younger sister
was like her shortened shadow, a little greyer, paler, and more insignificant.
They both wore a business-like black, with little masculine cuffs and collars.
There are thousands of such curt, strenuous ladies in the offices of London,
but the interest of these lay rather in their real than their apparent
position.

For
Pauline Stacey, the elder, was actually the heiress of a crest and half a county,
as well as great wealth; she had been brought up in castles and gardens, before
a frigid fierceness (peculiar to the modern woman) had driven her to what she
considered a harsher and a higher existence. She had not, indeed, surrendered
her money; in that there would have been a romantic or monkish abandon quite
alien to her masterful utilitarianism. She held her wealth, she would say, for
use upon practical social objects. Part of it she had put into her business,
the nucleus of a model typewriting emporium; part of it was distributed in
various leagues and causes for the advancement of such work among women. How
far Joan, her sister and partner, shared this slightly prosaic idealism no one
could be very sure. But she followed her leader with a dog-like affection which
was somehow more attractive, with its touch of tragedy, than the hard, high
spirits of the elder. For Pauline Stacey had nothing to say to tragedy; she was
understood to deny its existence.

Her
rigid rapidity and cold impatience had amused Flambeau very much on the first occasion
of his entering the flats. He had lingered outside the lift in the entrance
hall waiting for the lift-boy, who generally conducts strangers to the various
floors. But this bright-eyed falcon of a girl had openly refused to endure such
official delay. She said sharply that she knew all about the lift, and was not
dependent on boys — or men either. Though her flat was only three floors above,
she managed in the few seconds of ascent to give Flambeau a great many of her
fundamental views in an off-hand manner; they were to the general effect that
she was a modern working woman and loved modern working machinery. Her bright
black eyes blazed with abstract anger against those who rebuke mechanic science
and ask for the return of romance. Everyone, she said, ought to be able to
manage machines, just as she could manage the lift. She seemed almost to resent
the fact of Flambeau opening the lift-door for her; and that gentleman went up
to his own apartments smiling with somewhat mingled feelings at the memory of
such spit-fire self-dependence.

She
certainly had a temper, of a snappy, practical sort; the gestures of her thin, elegant
hands were abrupt or even destructive. Once Flambeau entered her office on some
typewriting business, and found she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging
to her sister into the middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already
in the rapids of an ethical tirade about the “sickly medical notions” and the
morbid admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister
to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She asked if
she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass eyes; and as she
spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.

Flambeau,
quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from asking Miss Pauline
(with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles was a more morbid sign of
weakness than a lift, and why, if science might help us in the one effort, it
might not help us in the other.

“
That
is so different,” said Pauline Stacey, loftily. “Batteries and motors and all those
things are marks of the force of man — yes, Mr. Flambeau, and the force of
woman, too! We shall take our turn at these great engines that devour distance
and defy time. That is high and splendid — that is really science. But these
nasty props and plasters the doctors sell — why, they are just badges of poltroonery.
Doctors stick on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But
I was free-born, Mr. Flambeau! People only think they need these things because
they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power and courage,
just as the silly nurses tell children not to stare at the sun, and so they
can’t do it without blinking. But why among the stars should there be one star
I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I will open my eyes and stare at
him whenever I choose.”

“
Your
eyes,” said Flambeau, with a foreign bow, “will dazzle the sun.” He took pleasure
in complimenting this strange stiff beauty, partly because it threw her a
little off her balance. But as he went upstairs to his floor he drew a deep
breath and whistled, saying to himself: “So she has got into the hands of that
conjurer upstairs with his golden eye.” For, little as he knew or cared about
the new religion of Kalon, he had heard of his special notion about sun-gazing.

He
soon discovered that the spiritual bond between the floors above and below him was
close and increasing. The man who called himself Kalon was a magnificent creature,
worthy, in a physical sense, to be the pontiff of Apollo. He was nearly as tall
even as Flambeau, and very much better looking, with a golden beard, strong
blue eyes, and a mane flung back like a lion’s. In structure he was the blonde
beast of Nietzsche, but all this animal beauty was heightened, brightened and
softened by genuine intellect and spirituality. If he looked like one of the
great Saxon kings, he looked like one of the kings that were also saints. And
this despite the cockney incongruity of his surroundings; the fact that he had
an office half-way up a building in Victoria Street; that the clerk (a
commonplace youth in cuffs and collars) sat in the outer room, between him and
the corridor; that his name was on a brass plate, and the gilt emblem of his
creed hung above his street, like the advertisement of an oculist. All this
vulgarity could not take away from the man called Kalon the vivid oppression
and inspiration that came from his soul and body. When all was said, a man in
the presence of this quack did feel in the presence of a great man. Even in the
loose jacket-suit of linen that he wore as a workshop dress in his office he
was a fascinating and formidable figure; and when robed in the white vestments
and crowned with the golden circlet, in which he daily saluted the sun, he
really looked so splendid that the laughter of the street people sometimes died
suddenly on their lips. For three times in the day the new sun-worshipper went
out on his little balcony, in the face of all Westminster, to say some litany
to his shining lord: once at daybreak, once at sunset, and once at the shock of
noon. And it was while the shock of noon still shook faintly from the towers of
Parliament and parish church that Father Brown, the friend of Flambeau, first
looked up and saw the white priest of Apollo.

Flambeau
had seen quite enough of these daily salutations of Phoebus, and plunged into the
porch of the tall building without even looking for his clerical friend to follow.
But Father Brown, whether from a professional interest in ritual or a strong
individual interest in tomfoolery, stopped and stared up at the balcony of the
sun-worshipper, just as he might have stopped and stared up at a Punch and Judy.
Kalon the Prophet was already erect, with argent garments and uplifted hands,
and the sound of his strangely penetrating voice could be heard all the way
down the busy street uttering his solar litany. He was already in the middle of
it; his eyes were fixed upon the flaming disc. It is doubtful if he saw anything
or anyone on this earth; it is substantially certain that he did not see a
stunted, round-faced priest who, in the crowd below, looked up at him with
blinking eyes. That was perhaps the most startling difference between even these
two far divided men. Father Brown could not look at anything without blinking;
but the priest of Apollo could look on the blaze at noon without a quiver of
the eyelid.

“
O
sun,” cried the prophet, “O star that art too great to be allowed among the stars!
O fountain that flowest quietly in that secret spot that is called space. White
Father of all white unwearied things, white flames and white flowers and white
peaks. Father, who art more innocent than all thy most innocent and quiet
children; primal purity, into the peace of which —”

A
rush and crash like the reversed rush of a rocket was cloven with a strident and
incessant yelling. Five people rushed into the gate of the mansions as three
people rushed out, and for an instant they all deafened each other. The sense
of some utterly abrupt horror seemed for a moment to fill half the street with
bad news — bad news that was all the worse because no one knew what it was. Two
figures remained still after the crash of commotion: the fair priest of Apollo on
the balcony above, and the ugly priest of Christ below him.

At
last the tall figure and titanic energy of Flambeau appeared in the doorway of the
mansions and dominated the little mob. Talking at the top of his voice like a
fog-horn, he told somebody or anybody to go for a surgeon; and as he turned back
into the dark and thronged entrance his friend Father Brown dipped in insignificantly
after him. Even as he ducked and dived through the crowd he could still hear
the magnificent melody and monotony of the solar priest still calling on the
happy god who is the friend of fountains and flowers.

Father
Brown found Flambeau and some six other people standing round the enclosed space
into which the lift commonly descended. But the lift had not descended. Something
else had descended; something that ought to have come by a lift.

For
the last four minutes Flambeau had looked down on it; had seen the brained and bleeding
figure of that beautiful woman who denied the existence of tragedy. He had
never had the slightest doubt that it was Pauline Stacey; and, though he had
sent for a doctor, he had not the slightest doubt that she was dead.