The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (31 page)

THE
great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets, walked swiftly into his
favourite restaurant, which overlooked the Mediterranean, was covered by an awning
and fenced by little lemon and orange trees. Waiters in white aprons were
already laying out on white tables the insignia of an early and elegant lunch;
and this seemed to increase a satisfaction that already touched the top of
swagger. Muscari had an eagle nose like Dante; his hair and neckerchief were dark
and flowing; he carried a black cloak, and might almost have carried a black
mask, so much did he bear with him a sort of Venetian melodrama. He acted as if
a troubadour had still a definite social office, like a bishop. He went as near
as his century permitted to walking the world literally like Don Juan, with
rapier and guitar.

For
he never travelled without a case of swords, with which he had fought many brilliant
duels, or without a corresponding case for his mandolin, with which he had
actually serenaded Miss Ethel Harrogate, the highly conventional daughter of a
Yorkshire banker on a holiday. Yet he was neither a charlatan nor a child; but
a hot, logical Latin who liked a certain thing and was it. His poetry was as
straightforward as anyone else’s prose. He desired fame or wine or the beauty
of women with a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals or
cloudy compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger
or even crime. Like fire or the sea, he was too simple to be trusted.

The
banker and his beautiful English daughter were staying at the hotel attached to
Muscari’s restaurant; that was why it was his favourite restaurant. A glance flashed
around the room told him at once, however, that the English party had not
descended. The restaurant was glittering, but still comparatively empty. Two
priests were talking at a table in a corner, but Muscari (an ardent Catholic)
took no more notice of them than of a couple of crows. But from a yet farther
seat, partly concealed behind a dwarf tree golden with oranges, there rose and
advanced towards the poet a person whose costume was the most aggressively
opposite to his own.

This
figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie, a sharp collar and
protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the true tradition of ‘Arry at Margate,
to look at once startling and commonplace. But as the Cockney apparition drew
nearer, Muscari was astounded to observe that the head was distinctly different
from the body. It was an Italian head: fuzzy, swarthy and very vivacious, that
rose abruptly out of the standing collar like cardboard and the comic pink tie.
In fact it was a head he knew. He recognized it, above all the dire erection of
English holiday array, as the face of an old but forgotten friend name Ezza.
This youth had been a prodigy at college, and European fame was promised him
when he was barely fifteen; but when he appeared in the world he failed, first
publicly as a dramatist and a demagogue, and then privately for years on end as
an actor, a traveller, a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known
him last behind the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the excitements
of that profession, and it was believed that some moral calamity had swallowed
him up.

“
Ezza!”
cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in a pleasant astonishment. “Well, I’ve
seen you in many costumes in the green room; but I never expected to see you
dressed up as an Englishman.”

“
This,”
answered Ezza gravely, “is not the costume of an Englishman, but of the Italian
of the future.”

“
In
that case,” remarked Muscari, “I confess I prefer the Italian of the past.”

“
That
is your old mistake, Muscari,” said the man in tweeds, shaking his head; “and the
mistake of Italy. In the sixteenth century we Tuscans made the morning: we had
the newest steel, the newest carving, the newest chemistry. Why should we not
now have the newest factories, the newest motors, the newest finance — the newest
clothes?”

“
Because
they are not worth having,” answered Muscari. “You cannot make Italians really progressive;
they are too intelligent. Men who see the short cut to good living will never
go by the new elaborate roads.”

“
Well,
to me Marconi, or D’Annunzio, is the star of Italy” said the other. “That is why
I have become a Futurist — and a courier.”

“
A
courier!” cried Muscari, laughing. “Is that the last of your list of trades? And
whom are you conducting?”

“
Oh,
a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I believe.”

“
Not
the banker in this hotel?” inquired the poet, with some eagerness.

“
That’s
the man,” answered the courier.

“
Does
it pay well?” asked the troubadour innocently.

“
It
will pay me,” said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. “But I am a rather curious
sort of courier.” Then, as if changing the subject, he said abruptly: “He has a
daughter — and a son.”

“
The
daughter is divine,” affirmed Muscari, “the father and son are, I suppose, human.
But granted his harmless qualities doesn’t that banker strike you as a splendid
instance of my argument? Harrogate has millions in his safes, and I have — the
hole in my pocket. But you daren’t say — you can’t say — that he’s cleverer
than I, or bolder than I, or even more energetic. He’s not clever, he’s got
eyes like blue buttons; he’s not energetic, he moves from chair to chair like a
paralytic. He’s a conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he’s got money
simply because he collects money, as a boy collects stamps. You’re too
strong-minded for business, Ezza. You won’t get on. To be clever enough to get
all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

“
I’m
stupid enough for that,” said Ezza gloomily. “But I should suggest a suspension
of your critique of the banker, for here he comes.”

Mr
Harrogate, the great financier, did indeed enter the room, but nobody looked at
him. He was a massive elderly man with a boiled blue eye and faded grey-sandy moustaches;
but for his heavy stoop he might have been a colonel. He carried several
unopened letters in his hand. His son Frank was a really fine lad, curly-haired,
sun-burnt and strenuous; but nobody looked at him either. All eyes, as usual,
were riveted, for the moment at least, upon Ethel Harrogate, whose golden Greek
head and colour of the dawn seemed set purposely above that sapphire sea, like
a goddess’s. The poet Muscari drew a deep breath as if he were drinking
something, as indeed he was. He was drinking the Classic; which his fathers
made. Ezza studied her with a gaze equally intense and far more baffling.

Miss
Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for conversation on this occasion; and
her family had fallen into the easier Continental habit, allowing the stranger
Muscari and even the courier Ezza to share their table and their talk. In Ethel
Harrogate conventionality crowned itself with a perfection and splendour of its
own. Proud of her father’s prosperity, fond of fashionable pleasures, a fond
daughter but an arrant flirt, she was all these things with a sort of golden
good-nature that made her very pride pleasing and her worldly respectability a
fresh and hearty thing.

They
were in an eddy of excitement about some alleged peril in the mountain path they
were to attempt that week. The danger was not from rock and avalanche, but from
something yet more romantic. Ethel had been earnestly assured that brigands,
the true cut-throats of the modern legend, still haunted that ridge and held
that pass of the Apennines.

“
They
say,” she cried, with the awful relish of a schoolgirl, “that all that country isn’t
ruled by the King of Italy, but by the King of Thieves. Who is the King of
Thieves?”

“
A
great man,” replied Muscari, “worthy to rank with your own Robin Hood, signorina.
Montano, the King of Thieves, was first heard of in the mountains some ten
years ago, when people said brigands were extinct. But his wild authority
spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution. Men found his fierce
proclamations nailed in every mountain village; his sentinels, gun in hand, in
every mountain ravine. Six times the Italian Government tried to dislodge him,
and was defeated in six pitched battles as if by Napoleon.”

“
Now
that sort of thing,” observed the banker weightily, “would never be allowed in England;
perhaps, after all, we had better choose another route. But the courier thought
it perfectly safe.”

“
It
is perfectly safe,” said the courier contemptuously. “I have been over it twenty
times. There may have been some old jailbird called a King in the time of our
grandmothers; but he belongs to history if not to fable. Brigandage is utterly
stamped out.”

“
It
can never be utterly stamped out,” Muscari answered; “because armed revolt is a
recreation natural to southerners. Our peasants are like their mountains, rich in
grace and green gaiety, but with the fires beneath. There is a point of human
despair where the northern poor take to drink — and our own poor take to daggers.”

“
A
poet is privileged,” replied Ezza, with a sneer. “If Signor Muscari were English
he would still be looking for highwaymen in Wandsworth. Believe me, there is no
more danger of being captured in Italy than of being scalped in Boston.”

“
Then
you propose to attempt it?” asked Mr Harrogate, frowning.

“
Oh,
it sounds rather dreadful,” cried the girl, turning her glorious eyes on Muscari.
“Do you really think the pass is dangerous?”

Muscari
threw back his black mane. “I know it is dangerous:” he said. “I am crossing it
tomorrow.”

The
young Harrogate was left behind for a moment emptying a glass of white wine and
lighting a cigarette, as the beauty retired with the banker, the courier and the
poet, distributing peals of silvery satire. At about the same instant the two
priests in the corner rose; the taller, a white-haired Italian, taking his leave.
The shorter priest turned and walked towards the banker’s son, and the latter
was astonished to realize that though a Roman priest the man was an Englishman.
He vaguely remembered meeting him at the social crushes of some of his Catholic
friends. But the man spoke before his memories could collect themselves.

“
Mr
Frank Harrogate, I think,” he said. “I have had an introduction, but I do not mean
to presume on it. The odd thing I have to say will come far better from a stranger.
Mr Harrogate, I say one word and go: take care of your sister in her great
sorrow.”

Even
for Frank’s truly fraternal indifference the radiance and derision of his sister
still seemed to sparkle and ring; he could hear her laughter still from the
garden of the hotel, and he stared at his sombre adviser in puzzledom.

“
Do
you mean the brigands?” he asked; and then, remembering a vague fear of his own,
“or can you be thinking of Muscari?”

“
One
is never thinking of the real sorrow,” said the strange priest. “One can only be
kind when it comes.”

And
he passed promptly from the room, leaving the other almost with his mouth open.

A
day or two afterwards a coach containing the company was really crawling and staggering
up the spurs of the menacing mountain range. Between Ezza’s cheery denial of
the danger and Muscari’s boisterous defiance of it, the financial family were
firm in their original purpose; and Muscari made his mountain journey coincide
with theirs. A more surprising feature was the appearance at the coast-town
station of the little priest of the restaurant; he alleged merely that business
led him also to cross the mountains of the midland. But young Harrogate could
not but connect his presence with the mystical fears and warnings of yesterday.

The
coach was a kind of commodious wagonette, invented by the modernist talent of the
courier, who dominated the expedition with his scientific activity and breezy
wit. The theory of danger from thieves was banished from thought and speech;
though so far conceded in formal act that some slight protection was employed.
The courier and the young banker carried loaded revolvers, and Muscari (with
much boyish gratification) buckled on a kind of cutlass under his black cloak.

He
had planted his person at a flying leap next to the lovely Englishwoman; on the
other side of her sat the priest, whose name was Brown and who was fortunately a
silent individual; the courier and the father and son were on the banc behind.
Muscari was in towering spirits, seriously believing in the peril, and his talk
to Ethel might well have made her think him a maniac. But there was something
in the crazy and gorgeous ascent, amid crags like peaks loaded with woods like
orchards, that dragged her spirit up along with his into purple preposterous
heavens with wheeling suns. The white road climbed like a white cat; it spanned
sunless chasms like a tight-rope; it was flung round far-off headlands like a
lasso.

And
yet, however high they went, the desert still blossomed like the rose. The fields
were burnished in sun and wind with the colour of kingfisher and parrot and
humming-bird, the hues of a hundred flowering flowers. There are no lovelier
meadows and woodlands than the English, no nobler crests or chasms than those
of Snowdon and Glencoe. But Ethel Harrogate had never before seen the southern
parks tilted on the splintered northern peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with
the fruits of Kent. There was nothing here of that chill and desolation that in
Britain one associates with high and wild scenery. It was rather like a mosaic
palace, rent with earthquakes; or like a Dutch tulip garden blown to the stars
with dynamite.