The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (46 page)

“
But
how do you know?” asked Fanshaw.

“
I
saw the rock you thought was like a dragon, and the one like Merlin, and —”

“
You
seem to have noticed a lot as we came in,” cried Fanshaw. “We thought you were rather
abstracted.”

“
I
was sea-sick,” said Father Brown simply. “I felt simply horrible. But feeling horrible
has nothing to do with not seeing things.” And he closed his eyes.

“
Do
you think most men would have seen that?” asked Flambeau. He received no answer:
Father Brown was asleep.

IT
was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight
is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a
hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the
edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being
broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a
tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamp-post. A light fall of snow
had half-melted into a few strips, also looking leaden rather than silver, when
it had been fixed again by the seal of frost; no fresh snow had fallen, but a
ribbon of the old snow ran along the very margin of the coast, so as to parallel
the pale ribbon of the foam.

The
line of the sea looked frozen in the very vividness of its violet-blue, like the
vein of a frozen finger. For miles and miles, forward and back, there was no
breathing soul, save two pedestrians, walking at a brisk pace, though one had
much longer legs and took much longer strides than the other.

It
did not seem a very appropriate place or time for a holiday, but Father Brown had
few holidays, and had to take them when he could, and he always preferred, if
possible, to take them in company with his old friend Flambeau, ex-criminal and
ex-detective. The priest had had a fancy for visiting his old parish at Cobhole,
and was going north-eastward along the coast.

After
walking a mile or two farther, they found that the shore was beginning to be formally
embanked, so as to form something like a parade; the ugly lamp-posts became
less few and far between and more ornamental, though quite equally ugly. Half a
mile farther on Father Brown was puzzled first by little labyrinths of flowerless
flower-pots, covered with the low, flat, quiet-coloured plants that look less
like a garden than a tessellated pavement, between weak curly paths studded
with seats with curly backs. He faintly sniffed the atmosphere of a certain
sort of seaside town that he did not specially care about, and, looking ahead
along the parade by the sea, he saw something that put the matter beyond a
doubt. In the grey distance the big bandstand of a watering-place stood up like
a giant mushroom with six legs.

“
I
suppose,” said Father Brown, turning up his coat-collar and drawing a woollen scarf
rather closer round his neck, “that we are approaching a pleasure resort.”

“
I
fear,” answered Flambeau, “a pleasure resort to which few people just now have the
pleasure of resorting. They try to revive these places in the winter, but it
never succeeds except with Brighton and the old ones. This must be Seawood, I
think — Lord Pooley’s experiment; he had the Sicilian Singers down at Christmas,
and there’s talk about holding one of the great glove-fights here. But they’ll
have to chuck the rotten place into the sea; it’s as dreary as a lost
railway-carriage.”

They
had come under the big bandstand, and the priest was looking up at it with a curiosity
that had something rather odd about it, his head a little on one side, like a
bird’s. It was the conventional, rather tawdry kind of erection for its
purpose: a flattened dome or canopy, gilt here and there, and lifted on six
slender pillars of painted wood, the whole being raised about five feet above
the parade on a round wooden platform like a drum. But there was something
fantastic about the snow combined with something artificial about the gold that
haunted Flambeau as well as his friend with some association he could not
capture, but which he knew was at once artistic and alien.

“
I’ve
got it,” he said at last. “It’s Japanese. It’s like those fanciful Japanese prints,
where the snow on the mountain looks like sugar, and the gilt on the pagodas is
like gilt on gingerbread. It looks just like a little pagan temple.”

“
Yes,”
said Father Brown. “Let’s have a look at the god.” And with an agility hardly to
be expected of him, he hopped up on to the raised platform.

“
Oh,
very well,” said Flambeau, laughing; and the next instant his own towering figure
was visible on that quaint elevation.

Slight
as was the difference of height, it gave in those level wastes a sense of seeing
yet farther and farther across land and sea. Inland the little wintry gardens
faded into a confused grey copse; beyond that, in the distance, were long low
barns of a lonely farmhouse, and beyond that nothing but the long East Anglian
plains. Seawards there was no sail or sign of life save a few seagulls: and
even they looked like the last snowflakes, and seemed to float rather than fly.

Flambeau
turned abruptly at an exclamation behind him. It seemed to come from lower down
than might have been expected, and to be addressed to his heels rather than his
head. He instantly held out his hand, but he could hardly help laughing at what
he saw. For some reason or other the platform had given way under Father Brown,
and the unfortunate little man had dropped through to the level of the parade. He
was just tall enough, or short enough, for his head alone to stick out of the
hole in the broken wood, looking like St John the Baptist’s head on a charger.
The face wore a disconcerted expression, as did, perhaps, that of St John the
Baptist.

In
a moment he began to laugh a little. “This wood must be rotten,” said Flambeau.
“Though it seems odd it should bear me, and you go through the weak place. Let me
help you out.”

But
the little priest was looking rather curiously at the corners and edges of the wood
alleged to be rotten, and there was a sort of trouble on his brow.

“
Come
along,” cried Flambeau impatiently, still with his big brown hand extended. “Don’t
you want to get out?”

The
priest was holding a splinter of the broken wood between his finger and thumb, and
did not immediately reply. At last he said thoughtfully: “Want to get out? Why,
no. I rather think I want to get in.” And he dived into the darkness under the
wooden floor so abruptly as to knock off his big curved clerical hat and leave
it lying on the boards above, without any clerical head in it.

Flambeau
looked once more inland and out to sea, and once more could see nothing but seas
as wintry as the snow, and snows as level as the sea.

There
came a scurrying noise behind him, and the little priest came scrambling out of
the hole faster than he had fallen in. His face was no longer disconcerted, but
rather resolute, and, perhaps only through the reflections of the snow, a trifle
paler than usual.

“
Well?”
asked his tall friend. “Have you found the god of the temple?”

“
No,”
answered Father Brown. “I have found what was sometimes more important. The Sacrifice.”

“
What
the devil do you mean?” cried Flambeau, quite alarmed.

Father
Brown did not answer. He was staring, with a knot in his forehead, at the landscape;
and he suddenly pointed at it. “What’s that house over there?” he asked.

Following
his finger, Flambeau saw for the first time the corners of a building nearer than
the farmhouse, but screened for the most part with a fringe of trees. It was
not a large building, and stood well back from the shore — but a glint of ornament
on it suggested that it was part of the same watering-place scheme of decoration
as the bandstand, the little gardens and the curly-backed iron seats.

Father
Brown jumped off the bandstand, his friend following; and as they walked in the
direction indicated the trees fell away to right and left, and they saw a small,
rather flashy hotel, such as is common in resorts — the hotel of the Saloon Bar
rather than the Bar Parlour. Almost the whole frontage was of gilt plaster and
figured glass, and between that grey seascape and the grey, witch-like trees,
its gimcrack quality had something spectral in its melancholy. They both felt
vaguely that if any food or drink were offered at such a hostelry, it would be
the paste-board ham and empty mug of the pantomime.

In
this, however, they were not altogether confirmed. As they drew nearer and nearer
to the place they saw in front of the buffet, which was apparently closed, one
of the iron garden-seats with curly backs that had adorned the gardens, but
much longer, running almost the whole length of the frontage. Presumably, it
was placed so that visitors might sit there and look at the sea, but one hardly
expected to find anyone doing it in such weather.

Nevertheless,
just in front of the extreme end of the iron seat stood a small round restaurant
table, and on this stood a small bottle of Chablis and a plate of almonds and
raisins. Behind the table and on the seat sat a dark-haired young man, bareheaded,
and gazing at the sea in a state of almost astonishing immobility.

But
though he might have been a waxwork when they were within four yards of him, he
jumped up like a jack-in-the-box when they came within three, and said in a deferential,
though not undignified, manner: “Will you step inside, gentlemen? I have no
staff at present, but I can get you anything simple myself.”

“
Much
obliged,” said Flambeau. “So you are the proprietor?”

“
Yes,”
said the dark man, dropping back a little into his motionless manner. “My waiters
are all Italians, you see, and I thought it only fair they should see their
countryman beat the black, if he really can do it. You know the great fight
between Malvoli and Nigger Ned is coming off after all?”

“
I’m
afraid we can’t wait to trouble your hospitality seriously,” said Father Brown.
“But my friend would be glad of a glass of sherry, I’m sure, to keep out the cold
and drink success to the Latin champion.”

Flambeau
did not understand the sherry, but he did not object to it in the least. He could
only say amiably: “Oh, thank you very much.”

“
Sherry,
sir — certainly,” said their host, turning to his hostel. “Excuse me if I detain
you a few minutes. As I told you, I have no staff —” And he went towards the
black windows of his shuttered and unlighted inn.

“
Oh,
it doesn’t really matter,” began Flambeau, but the man turned to reassure him.

“
I
have the keys,” he said. “I could find my way in the dark.”

“
I
didn’t mean —” began Father Brown.

He
was interrupted by a bellowing human voice that came out of the bowels of the uninhabited
hotel. It thundered some foreign name loudly but inaudibly, and the hotel
proprietor moved more sharply towards it than he had done for Flambeau’s sherry.
As instant evidence proved, the proprietor had told, then and after, nothing
but the literal truth. But both Flambeau and Father Brown have often confessed
that, in all their (often outrageous) adventures, nothing had so chilled their
blood as that voice of an ogre, sounding suddenly out of a silent and empty
inn.

“
My
cook!” cried the proprietor hastily. “I had forgotten my cook. He will be starting
presently. Sherry, sir?”

And,
sure enough, there appeared in the doorway a big white bulk with white cap and white
apron, as befits a cook, but with the needless emphasis of a black face. Flambeau
had often heard that negroes made good cooks. But somehow something in the
contrast of colour and caste increased his surprise that the hotel proprietor
should answer the call of the cook, and not the cook the call of the proprietor.
But he reflected that head cooks are proverbially arrogant; and, besides, the
host had come back with the sherry, and that was the great thing.

“
I
rather wonder,” said Father Brown, “that there are so few people about the beach,
when this big fight is coming on after all. We only met one man for miles.”

The
hotel proprietor shrugged his shoulders. “They come from the other end of the town,
you see — from the station, three miles from here. They are only interested in
the sport, and will stop in hotels for the night only. After all, it is hardly
weather for basking on the shore.”

“
Or
on the seat,” said Flambeau, and pointed to the little table.

“
I
have to keep a look-out,” said the man with the motionless face. He was a quiet,
well-featured fellow, rather sallow; his dark clothes had nothing distinctive about
them, except that his black necktie was worn rather high, like a stock, and
secured by a gold pin with some grotesque head to it. Nor was there anything
notable in the face, except something that was probably a mere nervous trick —
a habit of opening one eye more narrowly than the other, giving the impression
that the other was larger, or was, perhaps, artificial.

The
silence that ensued was broken by their host saying quietly: “Whereabouts did you
meet the one man on your march?”

“
Curiously
enough,” answered the priest, “close by here — just by that bandstand.”

Flambeau,
who had sat on the long iron seat to finish his sherry, put it down and rose to
his feet, staring at his friend in amazement. He opened his mouth to speak, and
then shut it again.

“
Curious,”
said the dark-haired man thoughtfully. “What was he like?”

“
It
was rather dark when I saw him,” began Father Brown, “but he was —”

As
has been said, the hotel-keeper can be proved to have told the precise truth. His
phrase that the cook was starting presently was fulfilled to the letter, for
the cook came out, pulling his gloves on, even as they spoke.