The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (33 page)

“
I
cannot imagine,” said Muscari, rubbing up his black hair for once with an unaffected
gesture. “You may think you enlighten me, but you are leading me deeper in the
dark. What may be the third objection to the King of the Thieves?” “The third
objection,” said Father Brown, still in meditation, “is this bank we are
sitting on. Why does our brigand-courier call this his chief fortress and the
Paradise of Thieves? It is certainly a soft spot to fall on and a sweet spot to
look at. It is also quite true, as he says, that it is invisible from valley
and peak, and is therefore a hiding-place. But it is not a fortress. It never
could be a fortress. I think it would be the worst fortress in the world. For
it is actually commanded from above by the common high-road across the
mountains — the very place where the police would most probably pass. Why, five
shabby short guns held us helpless here about half an hour ago. The quarter of
a company of any kind of soldiers could have blown us over the precipice.
Whatever is the meaning of this odd little nook of grass and flowers, it is not
an entrenched position. It is something else; it has some other strange sort of
importance; some value that I do not understand. It is more like an accidental
theatre or a natural green-room; it is like the scene for some romantic comedy;
it is like . . .”

As
the little priest’s words lengthened and lost themselves in a dull and dreamy sincerity,
Muscari, whose animal senses were alert and impatient, heard a new noise in the
mountains. Even for him the sound was as yet very small and faint; but he could
have sworn the evening breeze bore with it something like the pulsation of
horses’ hoofs and a distant hallooing.

At
the same moment, and long before the vibration had touched the less-experienced
English ears, Montano the brigand ran up the bank above them and stood in the broken
hedge, steadying himself against a tree and peering down the road. He was a
strange figure as he stood there, for he had assumed a flapped fantastic hat and
swinging baldric and cutlass in his capacity of bandit king, but the bright prosaic
tweed of the courier showed through in patches all over him.

The
next moment he turned his olive, sneering face and made a movement with his hand.
The brigands scattered at the signal, not in confusion, but in what was evidently
a kind of guerrilla discipline. Instead of occupying the road along the ridge,
they sprinkled themselves along the side of it behind the trees and the hedge,
as if watching unseen for an enemy. The noise beyond grew stronger, beginning
to shake the mountain road, and a voice could be clearly heard calling out
orders. The brigands swayed and huddled, cursing and whispering, and the
evening air was full of little metallic noises as they cocked their pistols, or
loosened their knives, or trailed their scabbards over the stones. Then the
noises from both quarters seemed to meet on the road above; branches broke,
horses neighed, men cried out.

“
A
rescue!” cried Muscari, springing to his feet and waving his hat; “the gendarmes
are on them! Now for freedom and a blow for it! Now to be rebels against
robbers! Come, don’t let us leave everything to the police; that is so dreadfully
modern. Fall on the rear of these ruffians. The gendarmes are rescuing us;
come, friends, let us rescue the gendarmes!”

And
throwing his hat over the trees, he drew his cutlass once more and began to escalade
the slope up to the road. Frank Harrogate jumped up and ran across to help him,
revolver in hand, but was astounded to hear himself imperatively recalled by
the raucous voice of his father, who seemed to be in great agitation.

“
I
won’t have it,” said the banker in a choking voice; “I command you not to interfere.”

“
But,
father,” said Frank very warmly, “an Italian gentleman has led the way. You wouldn’t
have it said that the English hung back.”

“
It
is useless,” said the older man, who was trembling violently, “it is useless. We
must submit to our lot.”

Father
Brown looked at the banker; then he put his hand instinctively as if on his heart,
but really on the little bottle of poison; and a great light came into his face
like the light of the revelation of death.

Muscari
meanwhile, without waiting for support, had crested the bank up to the road, and
struck the brigand king heavily on the shoulder, causing him to stagger and swing
round. Montano also had his cutlass unsheathed, and Muscari, without further
speech, sent a slash at his head which he was compelled to catch and parry. But
even as the two short blades crossed and clashed the King of Thieves deliberately
dropped his point and laughed.

“
What’s
the good, old man?” he said in spirited Italian slang; “this damned farce will soon
be over.”

“
What
do you mean, you shuffler?” panted the fire-eating poet. “Is your courage a sham
as well as your honesty?”

“
Everything
about me is a sham,” responded the ex-courier in complete good humour. “I am an
actor; and if I ever had a private character, I have forgotten it. I am no more
a genuine brigand than I am a genuine courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and
you can’t fight a duel with that.” And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell
into his old straddling attitude, with his back to the skirmish up the road.

Darkness
was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to discern much of the
progress of the struggle, save that tall men were pushing their horses’ muzzles
through a clinging crowd of brigands, who seemed more inclined to harass and
hustle the invaders than to kill them. It was more like a town crowd preventing
the passage of the police than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last
stand of doomed and outlawed men of blood. Just as he was rolling his eyes in
bewilderment he felt a touch on his elbow, and found the odd little priest
standing there like a small Noah with a large hat, and requesting the favour of
a word or two.

“
Signor
Muscari,” said the cleric, “in this queer crisis personalities may be pardoned.
I may tell you without offence of a way in which you will do more good than by helping
the gendarmes, who are bound to break through in any case. You will permit me
the impertinent intimacy, but do you care about that girl? Care enough to marry
her and make her a good husband, I mean?”

“
Yes,”
said the poet quite simply.

“
Does
she care about you?”

“
I
think so,” was the equally grave reply.

“
Then
go over there and offer yourself,” said the priest: “offer her everything you can;
offer her heaven and earth if you’ve got them. The time is short.”

“
Why?”
asked the astonished man of letters.

“
Because,”
said Father Brown, “her Doom is coming up the road.”

“
Nothing
is coming up the road,” argued Muscari, “except the rescue.”

“
Well,
you go over there,” said his adviser, “and be ready to rescue her from the rescue.”

Almost
as he spoke the hedges were broken all along the ridge by a rush of the escaping
brigands. They dived into bushes and thick grass like defeated men pursued; and
the great cocked hats of the mounted gendarmerie were seen passing along above
the broken hedge. Another order was given; there was a noise of dismounting,
and a tall officer with cocked hat, a grey imperial, and a paper in his hand
appeared in the gap that was the gate of the Paradise of Thieves. There was a
momentary silence, broken in an extraordinary way by the banker, who cried out
in a hoarse and strangled voice: “Robbed! I’ve been robbed!”

“
Why,
that was hours ago,” cried his son in astonishment: “when you were robbed of two
thousand pounds.”

“
Not
of two thousand pounds,” said the financier, with an abrupt and terrible composure,
“only of a small bottle.”

The
policeman with the grey imperial was striding across the green hollow. Encountering
the King of the Thieves in his path, he clapped him on the shoulder with
something between a caress and a buffet and gave him a push that sent him
staggering away. “You’ll get into trouble, too,” he said, “if you play these
tricks.”

Again
to Muscari’s artistic eye it seemed scarcely like the capture of a great outlaw
at bay. Passing on, the policeman halted before the Harrogate group and said: “Samuel
Harrogate, I arrest you in the name of the law for embezzlement of the funds of
the Hull and Huddersfield Bank.”

The
great banker nodded with an odd air of business assent, seemed to reflect a moment,
and before they could interpose took a half turn and a step that brought him to
the edge of the outer mountain wall. Then, flinging up his hands, he leapt
exactly as he leapt out of the coach. But this time he did not fall into a
little meadow just beneath; he fell a thousand feet below, to become a wreck of
bones in the valley.

The
anger of the Italian policeman, which he expressed volubly to Father Brown, was
largely mixed with admiration. “It was like him to escape us at last,” he said.
“He was a great brigand if you like. This last trick of his I believe to be absolutely
unprecedented. He fled with the company’s money to Italy, and actually got
himself captured by sham brigands in his own pay, so as to explain both the
disappearance of the money and the disappearance of himself. That demand for
ransom was really taken seriously by most of the police. But for years he’s
been doing things as good as that, quite as good as that. He will be a serious
loss to his family.”

Muscari
was leading away the unhappy daughter, who held hard to him, as she did for many
a year after. But even in that tragic wreck he could not help having a smile
and a hand of half-mocking friendship for the indefensible Ezza Montano. “And
where are you going next?” he asked him over his shoulder.

“
Birmingham,”
answered the actor, puffing a cigarette. “Didn’t I tell you I was a Futurist? I
really do believe in those things if I believe in anything. Change, bustle and new
things every morning. I am going to Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield,
Glasgow, Chicago — in short, to enlightened, energetic, civilized society!”

“
In
short,” said Muscari, “to the real Paradise of Thieves.”

M.
MAURICE BRUN and M. Armand Armagnac were crossing the sunlit Champs Elysee with
a kind of vivacious respectability. They were both short, brisk and bold. They both
had black beards that did not seem to belong to their faces, after the strange
French fashion which makes real hair look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark
wedge of beard apparently affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a
change, had two beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin.
They were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of
outlook but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of the great Dr
Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist.

M.
Brun had become prominent by his proposal that the common expression “Adieu” should
be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight fine imposed for its
use in private life. “Then,” he said, “the very name of your imagined God will
have echoed for the last time in the ear of man.” M. Armagnac specialized
rather in a resistance to militarism, and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise
altered from “Aux armes, citoyens” to “Aux greves, citoyens”. But his
antimilitarism was of a peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy
English Quaker, who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament of the
whole planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac’s proposal that (by way of
beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers.

And
indeed it was in this regard that the two men differed most from their leader and
father in philosophy. Dr Hirsch, though born in France and covered with the most
triumphant favours of French education, was temperamentally of another type —
mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism.
He was, in short, more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired
him, something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his
pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout Europe,
however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and daring cosmic
theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if somewhat frigid,
morality; he held something of the position of Darwin doubled with the position
of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist nor an antipatriot; his views on
disarmament were moderate and evolutionary — the Republican Government put
considerable confidence in him as to various chemical improvements. He had lately
even discovered a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the Government was
carefully guarding.

His
house stood in a handsome street near the Elysee — a street which in that strong
summer seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself; a row of chestnuts
shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place where a large cafe ran
out into the street. Almost opposite to this were the white and green blinds of
the great scientist’s house, an iron balcony, also painted green, running along
in front of the first-floor windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind
of court, gay with shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in
animated talk.

The
door was opened to them by the doctor’s old servant, Simon, who might very well
have passed for a doctor himself, having a strict suit of black, spectacles, grey
hair, and a confidential manner. In fact, he was a far more presentable man of
science than his master, Dr Hirsch, who was a forked radish of a fellow, with
just enough bulb of a head to make his body insignificant. With all the gravity
of a great physician handling a prescription, Simon handed a letter to M.
Armagnac. That gentleman ripped it up with a racial impatience, and rapidly read
the following:

I
cannot come down to speak to you. There is a man in this house whom I refuse to
meet. He is a Chauvinist officer, Dubosc. He is sitting on the stairs. He has been
kicking the furniture about in all the other rooms; I have locked myself in my
study, opposite that cafe. If you love me, go over to the cafe and wait at one
of the tables outside. I will try to send him over to you. I want you to answer
him and deal with him. I cannot meet him myself. I cannot: I will not.

There
is going to be another Dreyfus case.

P.
HIRSCH

M.
Armagnac looked at M. Brun. M. Brun borrowed the letter, read it, and looked at
M. Armagnac. Then both betook themselves briskly to one of the little tables under
the chestnuts opposite, where they procured two tall glasses of horrible green
absinthe, which they could drink apparently in any weather and at any time.
Otherwise the cafe seemed empty, except for one soldier drinking coffee at one
table, and at another a large man drinking a small syrup and a priest drinking nothing.

Maurice
Brun cleared his throat and said: “Of course we must help the master in every way,
but —”

There
was an abrupt silence, and Armagnac said: “He may have excellent reasons for not
meeting the man himself, but —”

Before
either could complete a sentence, it was evident that the invader had been expelled
from the house opposite. The shrubs under the archway swayed and burst apart,
as that unwelcome guest was shot out of them like a cannon-ball.

He
was a sturdy figure in a small and tilted Tyrolean felt hat, a figure that had indeed
something generally Tyrolean about it. The man’s shoulders were big and broad,
but his legs were neat and active in knee-breeches and knitted stockings. His
face was brown like a nut; he had very bright and restless brown eyes; his dark
hair was brushed back stiffly in front and cropped close behind, outlining a
square and powerful skull; and he had a huge black moustache like the horns of
a bison. Such a substantial head is generally based on a bull neck; but this
was hidden by a big coloured scarf, swathed round up the man’s ears and falling
in front inside his jacket like a sort of fancy waistcoat. It was a scarf of
strong dead colours, dark red and old gold and purple, probably of Oriental
fabrication. Altogether the man had something a shade barbaric about him; more
like a Hungarian squire than an ordinary French officer. His French, however,
was obviously that of a native; and his French patriotism was so impulsive as
to be slightly absurd. His first act when he burst out of the archway was to
call in a clarion voice down the street: “Are there any Frenchmen here?” as if
he were calling for Christians in Mecca.

Armagnac
and Brun instantly stood up; but they were too late. Men were already running from
the street corners; there was a small but ever-clustering crowd. With the prompt
French instinct for the politics of the street, the man with the black moustache
had already run across to a corner of the cafe, sprung on one of the tables,
and seizing a branch of chestnut to steady himself, shouted as Camille Desmoulins
once shouted when he scattered the oak-leaves among the populace.

“
Frenchmen!”
he volleyed; “I cannot speak! God help me, that is why I am speaking! The fellows
in their filthy parliaments who learn to speak also learn to be silent — silent
as that spy cowering in the house opposite! Silent as he is when I beat on his
bedroom door! Silent as he is now, though he hears my voice across this street
and shakes where he sits! Oh, they can be silent eloquently — the politicians!
But the time has come when we that cannot speak must speak. You are betrayed to
the Prussians. Betrayed at this moment. Betrayed by that man. I am Jules
Dubosc, Colonel of Artillery, Belfort. We caught a German spy in the Vosges
yesterday, and a paper was found on him — a paper I hold in my hand. Oh, they
tried to hush it up; but I took it direct to the man who wrote it — the man in
that house! It is in his hand. It is signed with his initials. It is a direction
for finding the secret of this new Noiseless Powder. Hirsch invented it; Hirsch
wrote this note about it. This note is in German, and was found in a German’s
pocket. ‘Tell the man the formula for powder is in grey envelope in first
drawer to the left of Secretary’s desk, War Office, in red ink. He must be
careful. P.H.’”

He
rattled short sentences like a quick-firing gun, but he was plainly the sort of
man who is either mad or right. The mass of the crowd was Nationalist, and already
in threatening uproar; and a minority of equally angry Intellectuals, led by
Armagnac and Brun, only made the majority more militant.

“
If
this is a military secret,” shouted Brun, “why do you yell about it in the street?”

“
I
will tell you why I do!” roared Dubosc above the roaring crowd. “I went to this
man in straight and civil style. If he had any explanation it could have been given
in complete confidence. He refuses to explain. He refers me to two strangers in
a cafe as to two flunkeys. He has thrown me out of the house, but I am going
back into it, with the people of Paris behind me!”

A
shout seemed to shake the very facade of mansions and two stones flew, one breaking
a window above the balcony. The indignant Colonel plunged once more under the
archway and was heard crying and thundering inside. Every instant the human sea
grew wider and wider; it surged up against the rails and steps of the traitor’s
house; it was already certain that the place would be burst into like the
Bastille, when the broken french window opened and Dr Hirsch came out on the
balcony. For an instant the fury half turned to laughter; for he was an absurd
figure in such a scene. His long bare neck and sloping shoulders were the shape
of a champagne bottle, but that was the only festive thing about him. His coat
hung on him as on a peg; he wore his carrot-coloured hair long and weedy; his
cheeks and chin were fully fringed with one of those irritating beards that
begin far from the mouth. He was very pale, and he wore blue spectacles.

Livid
as he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob fell silent in
the middle of his third sentence.

“
.
. . only two things to say to you now. The first is to my foes, the second to my
friends. To my foes I say: It is true I will not meet M. Dubosc, though he is
storming outside this very room. It is true I have asked two other men to confront
him for me. And I will tell you why! Because I will not and must not see him —
because it would be against all rules of dignity and honour to see him. Before
I am triumphantly cleared before a court, there is another arbitration this
gentleman owes me as a gentleman, and in referring him to my seconds I am
strictly —”

Armagnac
and Brun were waving their hats wildly, and even the Doctor’s enemies roared applause
at this unexpected defiance. Once more a few sentences were inaudible, but they
could hear him say: “To my friends — I myself should always prefer weapons
purely intellectual, and to these an evolved humanity will certainly confine
itself. But our own most precious truth is the fundamental force of matter and
heredity. My books are successful; my theories are unrefuted; but I suffer in
politics from a prejudice almost physical in the French. I cannot speak like
Clemenceau and Deroulede, for their words are like echoes of their pistols. The
French ask for a duellist as the English ask for a sportsman. Well, I give my
proofs: I will pay this barbaric bribe, and then go back to reason for the rest
of my life.”

Two
men were instantly found in the crowd itself to offer their services to Colonel
Dubosc, who came out presently, satisfied. One was the common soldier with the coffee,
who said simply: “I will act for you, sir. I am the Duc de Valognes.” The other
was the big man, whom his friend the priest sought at first to dissuade; and
then walked away alone.

In
the early evening a light dinner was spread at the back of the Cafe Charlemagne.
Though unroofed by any glass or gilt plaster, the guests were nearly all under
a delicate and irregular roof of leaves; for the ornamental trees stood so
thick around and among the tables as to give something of the dimness and the
dazzle of a small orchard. At one of the central tables a very stumpy little
priest sat in complete solitude, and applied himself to a pile of whitebait
with the gravest sort of enjoyment. His daily living being very plain, he had a
peculiar taste for sudden and isolated luxuries; he was an abstemious epicure.
He did not lift his eyes from his plate, round which red pepper, lemons, brown
bread and butter, etc., were rigidly ranked, until a tall shadow fell across
the table, and his friend Flambeau sat down opposite. Flambeau was gloomy.

“
I’m
afraid I must chuck this business,” said he heavily. “I’m all on the side of the
French soldiers like Dubosc, and I’m all against the French atheists like Hirsch;
but it seems to me in this case we’ve made a mistake. The Duke and I thought it
as well to investigate the charge, and I must say I’m glad we did.”

“
Is
the paper a forgery, then?” asked the priest

“
That’s
just the odd thing,” replied Flambeau. “It’s exactly like Hirsch’s writing, and
nobody can point out any mistake in it. But it wasn’t written by Hirsch. If he’s
a French patriot he didn’t write it, because it gives information to Germany.
And if he’s a German spy he didn’t write it, well — because it doesn’t give
information to Germany.”

“
You
mean the information is wrong?” asked Father Brown.

“
Wrong,”
replied the other, “and wrong exactly where Dr Hirsch would have been right — about
the hiding-place of his own secret formula in his own official department. By
favour of Hirsch and the authorities, the Duke and I have actually been allowed
to inspect the secret drawer at the War Office where the Hirsch formula is
kept. We are the only people who have ever known it, except the inventor
himself and the Minister for War; but the Minister permitted it to save Hirsch
from fighting. After that we really can’t support Dubosc if his revelation is a
mare’s nest.”