The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (8 page)

This
time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man had walked, with levity
indeed and lightning quickness, but he had walked. This time he ran. One could
hear the swift, soft, bounding steps coming along the corridor, like the pads
of a fleeing and leaping panther. Whoever was coming was a very strong, active
man, in still yet tearing excitement. Yet, when the sound had swept up to the
office like a sort of whispering whirlwind, it suddenly changed again to the
old slow, swaggering stamp.

Father
Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door to be locked, went at once
into the cloak room on the other side. The attendant of this place was temporarily
absent, probably because the only guests were at dinner and his office was a
sinecure. After groping through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the
dim cloak room opened on the lighted corridor in the form of a sort of counter
or half-door, like most of the counters across which we have all handed
umbrellas and received tickets. There was a light immediately above the
semicircular arch of this opening. It threw little illumination on Father Brown
himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dim sunset window behind
him. But it threw an almost theatrical light on the man who stood outside the
cloak room in the corridor.

He
was an elegant man in very plain evening dress; tall, but with an air of not taking
up much room; one felt that he could have slid along like a shadow where many
smaller men would have been obvious and obstructive. His face, now flung back
in the lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious, the face of a foreigner. His figure
was good, his manners good humoured and confident; a critic could only say that
his black coat was a shade below his figure and manners, and even bulged and
bagged in an odd way. The moment he caught sight of Brown’s black silhouette
against the sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called
out with amiable authority: “I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have to
go away at once.”

Father
Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to look for the coat; it
was not the first menial work he had done in his life. He brought it and laid
it on the counter; meanwhile, the strange gentleman who had been feeling in his
waistcoat pocket, said laughing: “I haven’t got any silver; you can keep this.”
And he threw down half a sovereign, and caught up his coat.

Father
Brown’s figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his
head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he
put two and two together and made four million. Often the Catholic Church
(which is wedded to common sense) did not approve of it. Often he did not
approve of it himself. But it was real inspiration — important at rare crises —
when whosoever shall lose his head the same shall save it.

“
I
think, sir,” he said civilly, “that you have some silver in your pocket.”

The
tall gentleman stared. “Hang it,” he cried, “if I choose to give you gold, why should
you complain?”

“
Because
silver is sometimes more valuable than gold,” said the priest mildly; “that is,
in large quantities.”

The
stranger looked at him curiously. Then he looked still more curiously up the passage
towards the main entrance. Then he looked back at Brown again, and then he
looked very carefully at the window beyond Brown’s head, still coloured with the
after-glow of the storm. Then he seemed to make up his mind. He put one hand on
the counter, vaulted over as easily as an acrobat and towered above the priest,
putting one tremendous hand upon his collar.

“
Stand
still,” he said, in a hacking whisper. “I don’t want to threaten you, but —”

“
I
do want to threaten you,” said Father Brown, in a voice like a rolling drum, “I
want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.”

“
You’re
a rum sort of cloak-room clerk,” said the other.

“
I
am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau,” said Brown, “and I am ready to hear your confession.”

The
other stood gasping for a few moments, and then staggered back into a chair.

The
first two courses of the dinner of The Twelve True Fishermen had proceeded with
placid success. I do not possess a copy of the menu; and if I did it would not convey
anything to anybody. It was written in a sort of super-French employed by
cooks, but quite unintelligible to Frenchmen. There was a tradition in the club
that the hors d’oeuvres should be various and manifold to the point of madness.
They were taken seriously because they were avowedly useless extras, like the
whole dinner and the whole club. There was also a tradition that the soup
course should be light and unpretending — a sort of simple and austere vigil
for the feast of fish that was to come. The talk was that strange, slight talk
which governs the British Empire, which governs it in secret, and yet would scarcely
enlighten an ordinary Englishman even if he could overhear it. Cabinet
ministers on both sides were alluded to by their Christian names with a sort of
bored benignity. The Radical Chancellor of the Exchequer, whom the whole Tory
party was supposed to be cursing for his extortions, was praised for his minor
poetry, or his saddle in the hunting field. The Tory leader, whom all Liberals
were supposed to hate as a tyrant, was discussed and, on the whole, praised —
as a Liberal. It seemed somehow that politicians were very important. And yet,
anything seemed important about them except their politics. Mr. Audley, the
chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who still wore Gladstone collars; he was
a kind of symbol of all that phantasmal and yet fixed society. He had never
done anything — not even anything wrong. He was not fast; he was not even particularly
rich. He was simply in the thing; and there was an end of it. No party could
ignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly would have
been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising
politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth, with flat, fair hair and a
freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. In public his
appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough. When he
thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think
of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able. In
private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and
silly, like a schoolboy. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated
them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by
phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a
Conservative. He himself was a Conservative, even in private life. He had a
roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certain old-fashioned statesmen,
and seen from behind he looked like the man the empire wants. Seen from the
front he looked like a mild, self-indulgent bachelor, with rooms in the Albany
— which he was.

As
has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table, and only twelve
members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace in the most luxurious style
of all, being ranged along the inner side of the table, with no one opposite,
commanding an uninterrupted view of the garden, the colours of which were still
vivid, though evening was closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. The
chairman sat in the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the
right-hand end of it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it
was the custom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to stand
lining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat
proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he had
never heard of them before. But before the first chink of knife and fork this
army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required to collect and
distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence. Mr. Lever, the
proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions of courtesy long before.
It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent, to say that he ever positively
appeared again. But when the important course, the fish course, was being
brought on, there was — how shall I put it? — a vivid shadow, a projection of
his personality, which told that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course
consisted (to the eyes of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the
size and shape of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of
interesting fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The
Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish forks, and approached
it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost as much as the silver fork
it was eaten with. So it did, for all I know. This course was dealt with in
eager and devouring silence; and it was only when his plate was nearly empty
that the young duke made the ritual remark: “They can’t do this anywhere but
here.”

“
Nowhere,”
said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker and nodding his venerable
head a number of times. “Nowhere, assuredly, except here. It was represented to
me that at the Cafe Anglais —”

Here
he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal of his plate, but
he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. “It was represented to me
that the same could be done at the Cafe Anglais. Nothing like it, sir,” he said,
shaking his head ruthlessly, like a hanging judge. “Nothing like it.”

“
Overrated
place,” said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look of him) for the first
time for some months.

“
Oh,
I don’t know,” said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, “it’s jolly good for
some things. You can’t beat it at —”

A
waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stoppage was as silent
as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the
utter smoothness of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their
lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt
as you and I would feel if the inanimate world disobeyed — if a chair ran away
from us.

The
waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every face at table
a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time. It is the combination of
modern humanitarianism with the horrible modern abyss between the souls of the
rich and poor. A genuine historic aristocrat would have thrown things at the
waiter, beginning with empty bottles, and very probably ending with money. A
genuine democrat would have asked him, with comrade-like clearness of speech, what
the devil he was doing. But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man
near to them, either as a slave or as a friend. That something had gone wrong
with the servants was merely a dull, hot embarrassment. They did not want to be
brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent. They wanted the thing,
whatever it was, to be over. It was over. The waiter, after standing for some
seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned round and ran madly out of the room.

When
he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was in company with another
waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulated with southern fierceness. Then
the first waiter went away, leaving the second waiter, and reappeared with a
third waiter. By the time a fourth waiter had joined this hurried synod, Mr.
Audley felt it necessary to break the silence in the interests of Tact. He used
a very loud cough, instead of a presidential hammer, and said: “Splendid work
young Moocher’s doing in Burmah. Now, no other nation in the world could have
—”

A
fifth waiter had sped towards him like an arrow, and was whispering in his ear:
“So sorry. Important! Might the proprietor speak to you?”

The
chairman turned in disorder, and with a dazed stare saw Mr. Lever coming towards
them with his lumbering quickness. The gait of the good proprietor was indeed
his usual gait, but his face was by no means usual. Generally it was a genial
copper-brown; now it was a sickly yellow.

“
You
will pardon me, Mr. Audley,” he said, with asthmatic breathlessness. “I have great
apprehensions. Your fish-plates, they are cleared away with the knife and fork
on them!”

“
Well,
I hope so,” said the chairman, with some warmth.

“
You
see him?” panted the excited hotel keeper; “you see the waiter who took them away?
You know him?”

“
Know
the waiter?” answered Mr. Audley indignantly. “Certainly not!”

Mr.
Lever opened his hands with a gesture of agony. “I never send him,” he said. “I
know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take away the plates, and he find
them already away.”

Mr.
Audley still looked rather too bewildered to be really the man the empire wants;
none of the company could say anything except the man of wood — Colonel Pound —
who seemed galvanised into an unnatural life. He rose rigidly from his chair,
leaving all the rest sitting, screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and spoke in a
raucous undertone as if he had half-forgotten how to speak. “Do you mean,” he
said, “that somebody has stolen our silver fish service?”

The
proprietor repeated the open-handed gesture with even greater helplessness and in
a flash all the men at the table were on their feet.

“
Are
all your waiters here?” demanded the colonel, in his low, harsh accent.