The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (7 page)

Ivan
of the Scar sprang up. “You lunatic,” he yelled; “you’ll go to my master now, if
I take you by —”

“
Why,
I was going there,” said Brown heavily; “I must ask him to confess, and all that.”

Driving
the unhappy Brown before them like a hostage or sacrifice, they rushed together
into the sudden stillness of Valentin’s study.

The
great detective sat at his desk apparently too occupied to hear their turbulent
entrance. They paused a moment, and then something in the look of that upright and
elegant back made the doctor run forward suddenly. A touch and a glance showed
him that there was a small box of pills at Valentin’s elbow, and that Valentin
was dead in his chair; and on the blind face of the suicide was more than the
pride of Cato.

If
you meet a member of that select club, “The Twelve True Fishermen,” entering the
Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe, as he takes off his
overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not black. If (supposing that you
have the star-defying audacity to address such a being) you ask him why, he will
probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will
then retire crushed. But you will leave behind you a mystery as yet unsolved
and a tale worth telling.

If
(to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture) you were to meet a mild, hard-working
little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask him what he thought was the
most singular luck of his life, he would probably reply that upon the whole his
best stroke was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had averted a crime and, perhaps,
saved a soul, merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage. He is
perhaps a little proud of this wild and wonderful guess of his, and it is
possible that he might refer to it. But since it is immeasurably unlikely that
you will ever rise high enough in the social world to find “The Twelve True
Fishermen,” or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and criminals to
find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at all unless you hear
it from me.

The
Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an
institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost
gone mad on good manners. It was that topsy-turvy product — an “exclusive”
commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting
people, but actually by turning people away. In the heart of a plutocracy
tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers.
They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may
spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel
in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly
make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive
restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday
afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood,
as if by accident, in the corner of a square in Belgravia. It was a small
hotel; and a very inconvenient one. But its very inconveniences were considered
as walls protecting a particular class. One inconvenience, in particular, was
held to be of vital importance: the fact that practically only twenty-four
people could dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was the
celebrated terrace table, which stood open to the air on a sort of veranda
overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London. Thus it happened
that even the twenty-four seats at this table could only be enjoyed in warm
weather; and this making the enjoyment yet more difficult made it yet more desired.
The existing owner of the hotel was a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a
million out of it, by making it difficult to get into. Of course he combined
with this limitation in the scope of his enterprise the most careful polish in
its performance. The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe,
and the demeanour of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the
English upper class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like the fingers on his
hand; there were only fifteen of them all told. It was much easier to become a
Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in that hotel. Each waiter was
trained in terrible silence and smoothness, as if he were a gentleman’s
servant. And, indeed, there was generally at least one waiter to every
gentleman who dined.

The
club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have consented to dine anywhere but
in such a place, for it insisted on a luxurious privacy; and would have been quite
upset by the mere thought that any other club was even dining in the same building.
On the occasion of their annual dinner the Fishermen were in the habit of
exposing all their treasures, as if they were in a private house, especially
the celebrated set of fish knives and forks which were, as it were, the
insignia of the society, each being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form
of a fish, and each loaded at the hilt with one large pearl. These were always
laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the most magnificent
in that magnificent repast. The society had a vast number of ceremonies and
observances, but it had no history and no object; that was where it was so very
aristocratic. You did not have to be anything in order to be one of the Twelve
Fishers; unless you were already a certain sort of person, you never even heard
of them. It had been in existence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley.
Its vice-president was the Duke of Chester.

If
I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this appalling hotel, the reader
may feel a natural wonder as to how I came to know anything about it, and may
even speculate as to how so ordinary a person as my friend Father Brown came to
find himself in that golden galley. As far as that is concerned, my story is simple,
or even vulgar. There is in the world a very aged rioter and demagogue who
breaks into the most refined retreats with the dreadful information that all
men are brothers, and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse it was
Father Brown’s trade to follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, had been struck
down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish employer,
marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to send for the nearest
Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father Brown we are not
concerned, for the excellent reason that that cleric kept it to himself; but
apparently it involved him in writing out a note or statement for the conveying
of some message or the righting of some wrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a
meek impudence which he would have shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to
be provided with a room and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He
was a kind man, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any
difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual stranger in
his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something just cleaned.
There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon Hotel, no people
waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance. There were fifteen
waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as startling to find a new guest
in the hotel that night as to find a new brother taking breakfast or tea in
one’s own family. Moreover, the priest’s appearance was second-rate and his
clothes muddy; a mere glimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis in the
club. Mr. Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate,
the disgrace. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass
down a short passage decorated with a few dingy but important pictures, and
come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right into passages
leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar passage pointing to
the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately on your left hand is the
corner of a glass office, which abuts upon the lounge — a house within a house,
so to speak, like the old hotel bar which probably once occupied its place.

In
this office sat the representative of the proprietor (nobody in this place ever
appeared in person if he could help it), and just beyond the office, on the way
to the servants’ quarters, was the gentlemen’s cloak room, the last boundary of
the gentlemen’s domain. But between the office and the cloak room was a small private
room without other outlet, sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and
important matters, such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or declining to
lend him sixpence. It is a mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever that
he permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour profaned by a mere
priest, scribbling away on a piece of paper. The story which Father Brown was
writing down was very likely a much better story than this one, only it will
never be known. I can merely state that it was very nearly as long, and that
the last two or three paragraphs of it were the least exciting and absorbing.

For
it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began a little to allow
his thoughts to wander and his animal senses, which were commonly keen, to
awaken. The time of darkness and dinner was drawing on; his own forgotten little
room was without a light, and perhaps the gathering gloom, as occasionally happens,
sharpened the sense of sound. As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential
part of his document, he caught himself writing to the rhythm of a recurrent
noise outside, just as one sometimes thinks to the tune of a railway train.
When he became conscious of the thing he found what it was: only the ordinary
patter of feet passing the door, which in a hotel was no very unlikely matter.
Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened ceiling, and listened to the sound.
After he had listened for a few seconds dreamily, he got to his feet and listened
intently, with his head a little on one side. Then he sat down again and buried
his brow in his hands, now not merely listening, but listening and thinking
also.

The
footsteps outside at any given moment were such as one might hear in any hotel;
and yet, taken as a whole, there was something very strange about them. There were
no other footsteps. It was always a very silent house, for the few familiar
guests went at once to their own apartments, and the well-trained waiters were
told to be almost invisible until they were wanted. One could not conceive any
place where there was less reason to apprehend anything irregular. But these
footsteps were so odd that one could not decide to call them regular or
irregular. Father Brown followed them with his finger on the edge of the table,
like a man trying to learn a tune on the piano.

First,
there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light man might make in
winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped and changed to a sort of
slow, swinging stamp, numbering not a quarter of the steps, but occupying about
the same time. The moment the last echoing stamp had died away would come again
the run or ripple of light, hurrying feet, and then again the thud of the heavier
walking. It was certainly the same pair of boots, partly because (as has been
said) there were no other boots about, and partly because they had a small but
unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help
asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split.
He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen men run in order to slide.
But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he
walk in order to run? Yet no other description would cover the antics of this
invisible pair of legs. The man was either walking very fast down one-half of
the corridor in order to walk very slowly down the other half; or he was
walking very slow at one end to have the rapture of walking fast at the other.
Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker and
darker, like his room.

Yet,
as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cell seemed to make his
thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind of vision the fantastic feet
capering along the corridor in unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen
religious dance? Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown
began to ask himself with more exactness what the steps suggested. Taking the
slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his
type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any servant
or messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer
orders (in an oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but
generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand or sit in
constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, with a kind of careless
emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not caring what noise it made, belonged to
only one of the animals of this earth. It was a gentleman of western Europe,
and probably one who had never worked for his living.

Just
as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to the quicker one, and ran
past the door as feverishly as a rat. The listener remarked that though this
step was much swifter it was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man
were walking on tiptoe. Yet it was not associated in his mind with secrecy, but
with something else — something that he could not remember. He was maddened by
one of those half-memories that make a man feel half-witted. Surely he had heard
that strange, swift walking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a
new idea in his head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct outlet on
the passage, but let on one side into the glass office, and on the other into
the cloak room beyond. He tried the door into the office, and found it locked.
Then he looked at the window, now a square pane full of purple cloud cleft by
livid sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil as a dog smells rats.

The
rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained its supremacy. He remembered
that the proprietor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come
later to release him. He told himself that twenty things he had not thought of
might explain the eccentric sounds outside; he reminded himself that there was
just enough light left to finish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the
window so as to catch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely plunged once
more into the almost completed record. He had written for about twenty minutes,
bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light; then suddenly he
sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.