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The Wisdom of Father Brown
by G. K. Chesterton
February, 1995 Etext #223
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The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Wisdom of Father Brown by Chesterton
G. K. CHESTERTON
THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN
To
LUCIAN OLDERSHAW
CONTENTS
- The Absence of Mr Glass
- The Paradise of Thieves
- The Duel of Dr Hirsch
- The Man in the Passage
- The Mistake of the Machine
- The Head of Caesar
- The Purple Wig
- The Perishing of the Pendragons
- The God of the Gongs
- The Salad of Colonel Cray
- The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
- The Fairy Tale of Father Brown
ONE
The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood’s apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the specialist’s library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.
Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded— as the boys’ geographies say—on the east by the North Sea and on the west by the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was clad in an artist’s velvet, but with none of an artist’s negligence; his hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room indicated something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
“My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I’ve come about that business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong.”
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.
“I hardly understand you,” replied the scientist, with a cold intensity of manner. “I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but—”
“Oh, this is of the greatest importance,” broke in the little man called Brown. “Why, her mother won’t let them get engaged.” And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement. “And still,” he said, “I do not quite understand.”
“You see, they want to get married,” said the man with the clerical hat. “Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be more important than that?”
The great Orion Hood’s scientific triumphs had deprived him of many things—some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting physician.
“Mr Brown,” he said gravely, “it is quite fourteen and a half years since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was the case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of England—no, better: fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story.”
The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks, the little man began his recital:
“I told you my name was Brown; well, that’s the fact, and I’m the priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you’ve seen beyond those straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a widow called MacNab. She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and between her and the daughter, and between her and the lodgers—well, I dare say there is a great deal to be said on both sides. At present she has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter; but he has given more trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of the house.”
“And the young woman of the house,” asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent amusement, “what does she want?”
“Why, she wants to marry him,” cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly. “That is just the awful complication.”
“It is indeed a hideous enigma,” said Dr Hood.
“This young James Todhunter,” continued the cleric, “is a very decent man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for the poor fellow only shuts himself up for several hours of the day and studies something behind a locked door. He declares his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that. There are tales of two voices heard talking in the room; though, when the door is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the man in the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the family with the fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her own original tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night from the big box in the corner, which is kept locked all day. You see, therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter’s is treated as the gate of all the fancies and monstrosities of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’. And yet there is the little fellow in his respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent as a parlour clock. He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused for a day on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself equally popular with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow.”
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having condescended to the priest’s simplicity, condescended expansively. He settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:
“Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all history is Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There is no stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation of any incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that superstitious explanation of all incidents which you and your Church represent. It is not remarkable that such people, with the sea moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them, should put fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with your small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab, terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees—”
Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts was marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a young girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste. She had sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful if her cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high in relief as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a command.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir,” she said, “but I had to follow Father Brown at once; it’s nothing less than life or death.”
Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. “Why, what has happened, Maggie?” he said.
“James has been murdered, for all I can make out,” answered the girl, still breathing hard from her rush. “That man Glass has been with him again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate voices: for James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high and quavery.”
“That man Glass?” repeated the priest in some perplexity.
“I know his name is Glass,” answered the girl, in great impatience. “I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling—about money, I think—for I heard James say again and again, ‘That’s right, Mr Glass,’ or ‘No, Mr Glass,’ and then, ‘Two or three, Mr Glass.’ But we’re talking too much; you must come at once, and there may be time yet.”
“But time for what?” asked Dr Hood, who had been studying the young lady with marked interest. “What is there about Mr Glass and his money troubles that should impel such urgency?”
“I tried to break down the door and couldn’t,” answered the girl shortly, “Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the window-sill that looks into the room. It was an dim, and seemed to be empty, but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he were drugged or strangled.”
“This is very serious,” said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and umbrella and standing up; “in point of fact I was just putting your case before this gentleman, and his view—”
“Has been largely altered,” said the scientist gravely. “I do not think this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down town with you.”
In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the MacNabs’ street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was not without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an energetic trot entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect of this edge of the town was not entirely without justification for the doctor’s hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered houses stood farther and farther apart in a broken string along the seashore; the afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the sand, two black, barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands held up in astonishment, and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet them with lean hands similarly spread, and her fierce face in shadow, she was a little like a demon herself. The doctor and the priest made scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her daughter’s story, with more disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance against Mr Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered, or against the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter, and for not having lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in the front of the house until they came to the lodger’s door at the back, and there Dr Hood, with the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder sharply to the panel and burst in the door.
It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even for a flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre of some thrilling collision between two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards lay littered across the table or fluttered about the floor as if a game had been interrupted. Two wine glasses stood ready for wine on a side-table, but a third lay smashed in a star of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay what looked like a long knife or short sword, straight, but with an ornamental and pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees against the leaden level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of the room was rolled a gentleman’s silk top hat, as if it had just been knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked to see it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter, with a scarf across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.
Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in the whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him that it almost slipped down on to his shoulders.
“Mr Glass’s hat,” said the doctor, returning with it and peering into the inside with a pocket lens. “How to explain the absence of Mr Glass and the presence of Mr Glass’s hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and systematically brushed and burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should think.”
“But, good heavens!” called out Miss MacNab, “aren’t you going to untie the man first?”
“I say ‘old’ with intention, though not with certainty” continued the expositor; “my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair of human beings falls out in very varying degrees, but almost always falls out slightly, and with the lens I should see the tiny hairs in a hat recently worn. It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass is bald. Now when this is taken with the high-pitched and querulous voice which Miss MacNab described so vividly (patience, my dear lady, patience), when we take the hairless head together with the tone common in senile anger, I should think we may deduce some advance in years. Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly tall. I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous appearance at the window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I have more exact indication. This wineglass has been smashed all over the place, but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside the mantelpiece. No such fragment could have fallen there if the vessel had been smashed in the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr Todhunter.”
“By the way,” said Father Brown, “might it not be as well to untie Mr Todhunter?”
“Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,” proceeded the specialist. “I may say at once that it is possible that the man Glass was bald or nervous through dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter, as has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman, essentially an abstainer. These cards and wine-cups are no part of his normal habit; they have been produced for a particular companion. But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or may not possess this wine-service, but there is no appearance of his possessing any wine. What, then, were these vessels to contain? I would at once suggest some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort, from a flask in the pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something like a picture of the man, or at least of the type: tall, elderly, fashionable, but somewhat frayed, certainly fond of play and strong waters, perhaps rather too fond of them. Mr Glass is a gentleman not unknown on the fringes of society.”
“Look here,” cried the young woman, “if you don’t let me pass to untie him I’ll run outside and scream for the police.”
“I should not advise you, Miss MacNab,” said Dr Hood gravely, “to be in any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown, I seriously ask you to compose your flock, for their sakes, not for mine. Well, we have seen something of the figure and quality of Mr Glass; what are the chief facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially three: that he is economical, that he is more or less wealthy, and that he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that there are the three chief marks of the kind of man who is blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious that the faded finery, the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are the unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him. We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end vulture with a scent for a mystery. These two men have met here today and have quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon.”
“Are you going to take those ropes off?” asked the girl stubbornly.
Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table, and went across to the captive. He studied him intently, even moving him a little and half-turning him round by the shoulders, but he only answered:
“No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends the police bring the handcuffs.”
Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet, lifted his round face and said: “What do you mean?”
The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from the carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:
“Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up,” he said, “you all jump to the conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose, escaped. There are four objections to this: First, why should a gentleman so dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind him, if he left of his own free will? Second,” he continued, moving towards the window, “this is the only exit, and it is locked on the inside. Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty complete story.”
“But the ropes?” inquired the priest, whose eyes had remained open with a rather vacant admiration.
“Ah, the ropes,” said the expert with a singular intonation. “Miss MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter free from his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because Mr Todhunter can set himself free from them at any minute he chooses.”
“What?” cried the audience on quite different notes of astonishment.
“I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,” reiterated Hood quietly. “I happen to know something about knots; they are quite a branch of criminal science. Every one of those knots he has made himself and could loosen himself; not one of them would have been made by an enemy really trying to pinion him. The whole of this affair of the ropes is a clever fake, to make us think him the victim of the struggle instead of the wretched Glass, whose corpse may be hidden in the garden or stuffed up the chimney.”
There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening, the sea-blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker than ever, yet they seemed to have come nearer to the window. One could almost fancy they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish, writhing polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see the end of this tragedy, even as he, the villain and victim of it, the terrible man in the tall hat, had once crawled up from the sea. For the whole air was dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most morbid of human things, because it is a crime concealing a crime; a black plaster on a blacker wound.
The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather that creative curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea. “Say it again, please,” he said in a simple, bothered manner; “do you mean that Todhunter can tie himself up all alone and untie himself all alone?”
“That is what I mean,” said the doctor.
“Jerusalem!” ejaculated Brown suddenly, “I wonder if it could possibly be that!”
He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company. “Yes, that’s it!” he cried in a certain excitement. “Can’t you see it in the man’s face? Why, look at his eyes!”
Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his glance. And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half of Todhunter’s visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling and intense about the upper part of it.
“His eyes do look queer,” cried the young woman, strongly moved. “You brutes; I believe it’s hurting him!”
“Not that, I think,” said Dr Hood; “the eyes have certainly a singular expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as expressing rather such slight psychological abnormality—”
“Oh, bosh!” cried Father Brown: “can’t you see he’s laughing?”
“Laughing!” repeated the doctor, with a start; “but what on earth can he be laughing at?”
“Well,” replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, “not to put too fine a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I’m a little inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it.”
“Now you know about what?” asked Hood, in some exasperation.
“Now I know,” replied the priest, “the profession of Mr Todhunter.”
He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those who had to watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more uproariously over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming specialist.
“Dr Hood,” he cried enthusiastically, “you are a great poet! You have called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and comic by comparison.”
“I have no notion what you are talking about,” said Dr Hood rather haughtily; “my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete. A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass—”
“That’s it, that’s it,” said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly, “that’s the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so extremely absent. I suppose,” he added reflectively, “that there was never anybody so absent as Mr Glass.”
“Do you mean he is absent from the town?” demanded the doctor.
“I mean he is absent from everywhere,” answered Father Brown; “he is absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak.”
“Do you seriously mean,” said the specialist with a smile, “that there is no such person?”
The priest made a sign of assent. “It does seem a pity,” he said.
Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. “Well,” he said, “before we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room. If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?”
“It is Mr Todhunter’s,” replied Father Brown.
“But it doesn’t fit him,” cried Hood impatiently. “He couldn’t possibly wear it!”
Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. “I never said he could wear it,” he answered. “I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his.”
“And what is the shade of difference?” asked the criminologist with a slight sneer.
“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin to impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter’s shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between a man’s hat and the hats that are his.”
“But a hatter,” protested Hood, “can get money out of his stock of new hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?”
“Rabbits,” replied Father Brown promptly.
“What?” cried Dr Hood.
“Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,” said the reverend gentleman with rapidity. “Didn’t you see it all when you found out the faked ropes? It’s just the same with the sword. Mr Todhunter hasn’t got a scratch on him, as you say; but he’s got a scratch in him, if you follow me.”
“Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes?” inquired Mrs MacNab sternly.
“I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes,” said Father Brown. “I mean inside Mr Todhunter.”
“Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?”
“Mr Todhunter,” explained Father Brown placidly, “is learning to be a professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and expert in the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces of hair, not because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but because it has never been worn by anybody. The juggling explains the three glasses, which Todhunter was teaching himself to throw up and catch in rotation. But, being only at the stage of practice, he smashed one glass against the ceiling. And the juggling also explains the sword, which it was Mr Todhunter’s professional pride and duty to swallow. But, again, being at the stage of practice, he very slightly grazed the inside of his throat with the weapon. Hence he has a wound inside him, which I am sure (from the expression on his face) is not a serious one. He was also practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all burst into the room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they are scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept his trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with great indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre of Mr Glass.”
“But What about the two voices?” asked Maggie, staring.
“Have you never heard a ventriloquist?” asked Father Brown. “Don’t you know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?”
There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man who had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. “You are certainly a very ingenious person,” he said; “it could not have been done better in a book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in explaining away, and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him so addressed by Mr Todhunter.”
The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. “Well, that,” he said, “that’s the silliest part of the whole silly story. When our juggling friend here threw up the three glasses in turn, he counted them aloud as he caught them, and also commented aloud when he failed to catch them. What he really said was: ‘One, two and three—missed a glass one, two—missed a glass.’ And so on.”
There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone with one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the corner complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish. Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced from his pocket a big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that ZALADIN, the World’s Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist, Ventriloquist and Human Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new series of Tricks at the Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o’clock precisely.
TWO
The Paradise of Thieves
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 alone 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.
“It’s like Kew Gardens on Beachy Head,” said Ethel.
“It is our secret,” answered he, “the secret of the volcano; that is also the secret of the revolution—that a thing can be violent and yet fruitful.”
“You are rather violent yourself,” and she smiled at him.
“And yet rather fruitless,” he admitted; “if I die tonight I die unmarried and a fool.”
“It is not my fault if you have come,” she said after a difficult silence.
“It is never your fault,” answered Muscari; “it was not your fault that Troy fell.”
As they spoke they came under overwhelming cliffs that spread almost like wings above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow on the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to the earth to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse reared up to his full height— the titanic and terrifying height of a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel, who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he lived.
At the moment when the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet’s head like a purple windmill a thing happened which was superficially even more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker sprang erect in the coach and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could take him there. In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in the second it was as sensible as a safe investment. The Yorkshireman had evidently more promptitude, as well as more sagacity, than Muscari had given him credit for; for he landed in a lap of land which might have been specially padded with turf and clover to receive him. As it happened, indeed, the whole company were equally lucky, if less dignified in their form of ejection. Immediately under this abrupt turn of the road was a grassy and flowery hollow like a sunken meadow; a sort of green velvet pocket in the long, green, trailing garments of the hills. Into this they were all tipped or tumbled with little damage, save that their smallest baggage and even the contents of their pockets were scattered in the grass around them. The wrecked coach still hung above, entangled in the tough hedge, and the horses plunged painfully down the slope. The first to sit up was the little priest, who scratched his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him say to himself: “Now why on earth have we fallen just here?”
He blinked at the litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy umbrella. Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance at the address, he returned to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel’s sunshade, and just beyond it lay a curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest picked it up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his heavy face turned the colour of clay.
“Heaven deliver us!” he muttered; “it can’t be hers! Has her sorrow come on her already?” He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. “I think I’m justified,” he said, “till I know a little more.”
He gazed painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the flowers by Muscari, who was saying: “We have fallen into heaven; it is a sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and goddesses who can fall upwards.”
And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy a vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. “After all,” he thought, “perhaps the poison isn’t hers; perhaps it’s one of Muscari’s melodramatic tricks.”
Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly theatrical bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut reins of the horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood in the grass trembling. When he had done so, a most remarkable thing occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed and extremely sunburnt, came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses’ heads. He had a queer-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there was nothing else remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent appearance. The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer.
Looking around him at the confused and startled group in the hollow, Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered man, with a short gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below, leaning his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the road from which they had fallen and saw, looking down on them, the muzzles of four other carbines and four other brown faces with bright but quite motionless eyes.
“The brigands!” cried Muscari, with a kind of monstrous gaiety. “This was a trap. Ezza, if you will oblige me by shooting the coachman first, we can cut our way out yet. There are only six of them.”
“The coachman,” said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in his pockets, “happens to be a servant of Mr Harrogate’s.”
“Then shoot him all the more,” cried the poet impatiently; “he was bribed to upset his master. Then put the lady in the middle, and we will break the line up there—with a rush.”
And, wading in wild grass and flowers, he advanced fearlessly on the four carbines; but finding that no one followed except young Harrogate, he turned, brandishing his cutlass to wave the others on. He beheld the courier still standing slightly astride in the centre of the grassy ring, his hands in his pockets; and his lean, ironical Italian face seemed to grow longer and longer in the evening light.
“You thought, Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows,” he said, “and you thought you were the success. But I have succeeded more than you and fill a bigger place in history. I have been acting epics while you have been writing them.”
“Come on, I tell you!” thundered Muscari from above. “Will you stand there talking nonsense about yourself with a woman to save and three strong men to help you? What do you call yourself?”
“I call myself Montano,” cried the strange courier in a voice equally loud and full. “I am the King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my summer palace.”
And even as he spoke five more silent men with weapons ready came out of the bushes, and looked towards him for their orders. One of them held a large paper in his hand.
“This pretty little nest where we are all picnicking,” went on the courier-brigand, with the same easy yet sinister smile, “is, together with some caves underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of Thieves. It is my principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both from the road above and from the valley below. It is something better than impregnable; it is unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and here I shall certainly die, if the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal that ‘reserves his defence,’ but the better kind that reserves his last bullet.”
All were staring at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown, who heaved a huge sigh as of relief and fingered the little phial in his pocket. “Thank God!” he muttered; “that’s much more probable. The poison belongs to this robber-chief, of course. He carries it so that he may never be captured, like Cato.”
The King of Thieves was, however, continuing his address with the same kind of dangerous politeness. “It only remains for me,” he said, “to explain to my guests the social conditions upon which I have the pleasure of entertaining them. I need not expound the quaint old ritual of ransom, which it is incumbent upon me to keep up; and even this only applies to a part of the company. The Reverend Father Brown and the celebrated Signor Muscari I shall release tomorrow at dawn and escort to my outposts. Poets and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity of speech, never have any money. And so (since it is impossible to get anything out of them), let us, seize the opportunity to show our admiration for classic literature and our reverence for Holy Church.”
He paused with an unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked repeatedly at him, and seemed suddenly to be listening with great attention. The brigand captain took the large paper from the attendant brigand and, glancing over it, continued: “My other intentions are clearly set forth in this public document, which I will hand round in a moment; and which after that will be posted on a tree by every village in the valley, and every cross-road in the hills. I will not weary you with the verbalism, since you will be able to check it; the substance of my proclamation is this: I announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral to announce such a thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it should occur without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior should now give me the two thousand pounds in his pocket.”
The banker looked at him under lowering brows, red-faced and sulky, but seemingly cowed. That leap from the failing carriage seemed to have used up his last virility. He had held back in a hang-dog style when his son and Muscari had made a bold movement to break out of the brigand trap. And now his red and trembling hand went reluctantly to his breast-pocket, and passed a bundle of papers and envelopes to the brigand.
“Excellent!” cried that outlaw gaily; “so far we are all cosy. I resume the points of my proclamation, so soon to be published to all Italy. The third item is that of ransom. I am asking from the friends of the Harrogate family a ransom of three thousand pounds, which I am sure is almost insulting to that family in its moderate estimate of their importance. Who would not pay triple this sum for another day’s association with such a domestic circle? I will not conceal from you that the document ends with certain legal phrases about the unpleasant things that may happen if the money is not paid; but meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, let me assure you that I am comfortably off here for accommodation, wine and cigars, and bid you for the present a sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of the Paradise of Thieves.”
All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with carbines and dirty slouch hats had been gathering silently in such preponderating numbers that even Muscari was compelled to recognize his sally with the sword as hopeless. He glanced around him; but the girl had already gone over to soothe and comfort her father, for her natural affection for his person was as strong or stronger than her somewhat snobbish pride in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality of a lover, admired this filial devotion, and yet was irritated by it. He slapped his sword back in the scabbard and went and flung himself somewhat sulkily on one of the green banks. The priest sat down within a yard or two, and Muscari turned his aquiline nose on him in an instantaneous irritation.
“Well,” said the poet tartly, “do people still think me too romantic? Are there, I wonder, any brigands left in the mountains?”
“There may be,” said Father Brown agnostically.
“What do you mean?” asked the other sharply.
“I mean I am puzzled,” replied the priest. “I am puzzled about Ezza or Montano, or whatever his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable as a brigand even than he was as a courier.”
“But in what way?” persisted his companion. “Santa Maria! I should have thought the brigand was plain enough.”
“I find three curious difficulties,” said the priest in a quiet voice. “I should like to have your opinion on them. First of all I must tell you I was lunching in that restaurant at the seaside. As four of you left the room, you and Miss Harrogate went ahead, talking and laughing; the banker and the courier came behind, speaking sparely and rather low. But I could not help hearing Ezza say these words—‘Well, let her have a little fun; you know the blow may smash her any minute.’ Mr Harrogate answered nothing; so the words must have had some meaning. On the impulse of the moment I warned her brother that she might be in peril; I said nothing of its nature, for I did not know. But if it meant this capture in the hills, the thing is nonsense. Why should the brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint, when it was his whole purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It could not have meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to courier and banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate’s head?”
“Disaster to Miss Harrogate!” ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some ferocity. “Explain yourself; go on.”
“All my riddles, however, revolve round our bandit chief,” resumed the priest reflectively. “And here is the second of them. Why did he put so prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency to evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate’s friends would be far likelier to fear for his fate if they thought the thieves were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was emphasized and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he levied the blackmail?”
“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.”
THREE
The Duel of Dr Hirsch
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.”
“And it is?” asked Father Brown.
“It is,” said his friend gloomily. “It is a clumsy forgery by somebody who knew nothing of the real hiding-place. It says the paper is in the cupboard on the right of the Secretary’s desk. As a fact the cupboard with the secret drawer is some way to the left of the desk. It says the grey envelope contains a long document written in red ink. It isn’t written in red ink, but in ordinary black ink. It’s manifestly absurd to say that Hirsch can have made a mistake about a paper that nobody knew of but himself; or can have tried to help a foreign thief by telling him to fumble in the wrong drawer. I think we must chuck it up and apologize to old Carrots.”
Father Brown seemed to cogitate; he lifted a little whitebait on his fork. “You are sure the grey envelope was in the left cupboard?” he asked.
“Positive,” replied Flambeau. “The grey envelope— it was a white envelope really—was—”
Father Brown put down the small silver fish and the fork and stared across at his companion. “What?” he asked, in an altered voice.
“Well, what?” repeated Flambeau, eating heartily.
“It was not grey,” said the priest. “Flambeau, you frighten me.”
“What the deuce are you frightened of?”
“I’m frightened of a white envelope,” said the other seriously, “If it had only just been grey! Hang it all, it might as well have been grey. But if it was white, the whole business is black. The Doctor has been dabbling in some of the old brimstone after all.”
“But I tell you he couldn’t have written such a note!” cried Flambeau. “The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr Hirsch knew all about the facts.”
“The man who wrote that note knew all about the facts,” said his clerical companion soberly. “He could never have got ‘em so wrong without knowing about ‘em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on every subject—like the devil.”
“Do you mean—?”
“I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth,” said his friend firmly. “Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden—then you would know you had found the house. The man must have known that particular house to be so accurately inaccurate.”
“But what could it mean?” demanded the diner opposite.
“I can’t conceive,” said Brown; “I don’t understand this Hirsch affair at all. As long as it was only the left drawer instead of the right, and red ink instead of black, I thought it must be the chance blunders of a forger, as you say. But three is a mystical number; it finishes things. It finishes this. That the direction about the drawer, the colour of ink, the colour of envelope, should none of them be right by accident, that can’t be a coincidence. It wasn’t.”
“What was it, then? Treason?” asked Flambeau, resuming his dinner.
“I don’t know that either,” answered Brown, with a face of blank bewilderment. “The only thing I can think of… Well, I never understood that Dreyfus case. I can always grasp moral evidence easier than the other sorts. I go by a man’s eyes and voice, don’t you know, and whether his family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses—and avoids. Well, I was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by the horrible things imputed both ways; I know (though it’s not modern to say so) that human nature in the highest places is still capable of being Cenci or Borgia. No—, what puzzled me was the sincerity of both parties. I don’t mean the political parties; the rank and file are always roughly honest, and often duped. I mean the persons of the play. I mean the conspirators, if they were conspirators. I mean the traitor, if he was a traitor. I mean the men who must have known the truth. Now Dreyfus went on like a man who knew he was a wronged man. And yet the French statesmen and soldiers went on as if they knew he wasn’t a wronged man but simply a wrong ‘un. I don’t mean they behaved well; I mean they behaved as if they were sure. I can’t describe these things; I know what I mean.”
“I wish I did,” said his friend. “And what has it to do with old Hirsch?”
“Suppose a person in a position of trust,” went on the priest, “began to give the enemy information because it was false information. Suppose he even thought he was saving his country by misleading the foreigner. Suppose this brought him into spy circles, and little loans were made to him, and little ties tied on to him. Suppose he kept up his contradictory position in a confused way by never telling the foreign spies the truth, but letting it more and more be guessed. The better part of him (what was left of it) would still say: ‘I have not helped the enemy; I said it was the left drawer.’ The meaner part of him would already be saying: ‘But they may have the sense to see that means the right.’ I think it is psychologically possible—in an enlightened age, you know.”
“It may be psychologically possible,” answered Flambeau, “and it certainly would explain Dreyfus being certain he was wronged and his judges being sure he was guilty. But it won’t wash historically, because Dreyfus’s document (if it was his document) was literally correct.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Dreyfus,” said Father Brown.
Silence had sunk around them with the emptying of the tables; it was already late, though the sunlight still clung to everything, as if accidentally entangled in the trees. In the stillness Flambeau shifted his seat sharply—making an isolated and echoing noise— and threw his elbow over the angle of it. “Well,” he said, rather harshly, “if Hirsch is not better than a timid treason-monger…”
“You mustn’t be too hard on them,” said Father Brown gently. “It’s not entirely their fault; but they have no instincts. I mean those things that make a woman refuse to dance with a man or a man to touch an investment. They’ve been taught that it’s all a matter of degree.”
“Anyhow,” cried Flambeau impatiently, “he’s not a patch on my principal; and I shall go through with it. Old Dubosc may be a bit mad, but he’s a sort of patriot after all.”
Father Brown continued to consume whitebait.
Something in the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau’s fierce black eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. “What’s the matter with you?” Flambeau demanded. “Dubosc’s all right in that way. You don’t doubt him?”
“My friend,” said the small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a kind of cold despair, “I doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has happened today. I doubt the whole story, though it has been acted before my face. I doubt every sight that my eyes have seen since morning. There is something in this business quite different from the ordinary police mystery where one man is more or less lying and the other man more or less telling the truth. Here both men… Well! I’ve told you the only theory I can think of that could satisfy anybody. It doesn’t satisfy me.”
“Nor me either,” replied Flambeau frowning, while the other went on eating fish with an air of entire resignation. “If all you can suggest is that notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly clever, but…well, what would you call it?”
“I should call it thin,” said the priest promptly. “I should call it uncommonly thin. But that’s the queer thing about the whole business. The lie is like a schoolboy’s. There are only three versions, Dubosc’s and Hirsch’s and that fancy of mine. Either that note was written by a French officer to ruin a French official; or it was written by the French official to help German officers; or it was written by the French official to mislead German officers. Very well. You’d expect a secret paper passing between such people, officials or officers, to look quite different from that. You’d expect, probably a cipher, certainly abbreviations; most certainly scientific and strictly professional terms. But this thing’s elaborately simple, like a penny dreadful: ‘In the purple grotto you will find the golden casket.’ It looks as if… as if it were meant to be seen through at once.”
Almost before they could take it in a short figure in French uniform had walked up to their table like the wind, and sat down with a sort of thump.
“I have extraordinary news,” said the Duc de Valognes. “I have just come from this Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country, and he asks us to make his excuses sur le terrain.”
“What?” cried Flambeau, with an incredulity quite frightful— “apologize?”
“Yes,” said the Duke gruffly; “then and there—before everybody— when the swords are drawn. And you and I have to do it while he is leaving the country.”
“But what can this mean?” cried Flambeau. “He can’t be afraid of that little Hirsch! Confound it!” he cried, in a kind of rational rage; “nobody could be afraid of Hirsch!”
“I believe it’s some plot!” snapped Valognes—“some plot of the Jews and Freemasons. It’s meant to work up glory for Hirsch…”
The face of Father Brown was commonplace, but curiously contented; it could shine with ignorance as well as with knowledge. But there was always one flash when the foolish mask fell, and the wise mask fitted itself in its place; and Flambeau, who knew his friend, knew that his friend had suddenly understood. Brown said nothing, but finished his plate of fish.
“Where did you last see our precious Colonel?” asked Flambeau, irritably.
“He’s round at the Hotel Saint Louis by the Elysee, where we drove with him. He’s packing up, I tell you.”
“Will he be there still, do you think?” asked Flambeau, frowning at the table.
“I don’t think he can get away yet,” replied the Duke; “he’s packing to go a long journey…”
“No,” said Father Brown, quite simply, but suddenly standing up, “for a very short journey. For one of the shortest, in fact. But we may still be in time to catch him if we go there in a motor-cab.”
Nothing more could be got out of him until the cab swept round the corner by the Hotel Saint Louis, where they got out, and he led the party up a side lane already in deep shadow with the growing dusk. Once, when the Duke impatiently asked whether Hirsch was guilty of treason or not, he answered rather absently: “No; only of ambition—like Caesar.” Then he somewhat inconsequently added: “He lives a very lonely life; he has had to do everything for himself.”
“Well, if he’s ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now,” said Flambeau rather bitterly. “All Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has turned tail.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” said Father Brown, lowering his voice, “your cursed Colonel is just in front.”
The other two started and shrank farther back into the shadow of the wall, for the sturdy figure of their runaway principal could indeed be seen shuffling along in the twilight in front, a bag in each hand. He looked much the same as when they first saw him, except that he had changed his picturesque mountaineering knickers for a conventional pair of trousers. It was clear he was already escaping from the hotel.
The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage scenery. A colourless, continuous wall ran down one flank of it, interrupted at intervals by dull-hued and dirt-stained doors, all shut fast and featureless save for the chalk scribbles of some passing gamin. The tops of trees, mostly rather depressing evergreens, showed at intervals over the top of the wall, and beyond them in the grey and purple gloaming could be seen the back of some long terrace of tall Parisian houses, really comparatively close, but somehow looking as inaccessible as a range of marble mountains. On the other side of the lane ran the high gilt railings of a gloomy park.
Flambeau was looking round him in rather a weird way. “Do you know,” he said, “there is something about this place that—”
“Hullo!” called out the Duke sharply; “that fellow’s disappeared. Vanished, like a blasted fairy!”
“He has a key,” explained their clerical friend. “He’s only gone into one of these garden doors,” and as he spoke they heard one of the dull wooden doors close again with a click in front of them.
Flambeau strode up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood in front of it for a moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of curiosity. Then he threw up his long arms and swung himself aloft like a monkey and stood on the top of the wall, his enormous figure dark against the purple sky, like the dark tree-tops.
The Duke looked at the priest. “Dubosc’s escape is more elaborate than we thought,” he said; “but I suppose he is escaping from France.”
“He is escaping from everywhere,” answered Father Brown.
Valognes’s eyes brightened, but his voice sank. “Do you mean suicide?” he asked.
“You will not find his body,” replied the other.
A kind of cry came from Flambeau on the wall above. “My God,” he exclaimed in French, “I know what this place is now! Why, it’s the back of the street where old Hirsch lives. I thought I could recognize the back of a house as well as the back of a man.”
“And Dubosc’s gone in there!” cried the Duke, smiting his hip. “Why, they’ll meet after all!” And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on the wall beside Flambeau and sat there positively kicking his legs with excitement. The priest alone remained below, leaning against the wall, with his back to the whole theatre of events, and looking wistfully across to the park palings and the twinkling, twilit trees.
The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau, who had the instincts of a burglar (and a detective), had already swung himself from the wall into the fork of a straggling tree from which he could crawl quite close to the only illuminated window in the back of the high dark house. A red blind had been pulled down over the light, but pulled crookedly, so that it gaped on one side, and by risking his neck along a branch that looked as treacherous as a twig, Flambeau could just see Colonel Dubosc walking about in a brilliantly-lighted and luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the house, he heard the words of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.
“Yes, they will meet now after all!”
“They will never meet,” said Father Brown. “Hirsch was right when he said that in such an affair the principals must not meet. Have you read a queer psychological story by Henry James, of two persons who so perpetually missed meeting each other by accident that they began to feel quite frightened of each other, and to think it was fate? This is something of the kind, but more curious.”
“There are people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,” said Valognes vindictively. “They will jolly well have to meet if we capture them and force them to fight.”
“They will not meet on the Day of Judgement,” said the priest. “If God Almighty held the truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet for the swords to cross—even then, if one of them stood ready, the other would not come.”
“Oh, what does all this mysticism mean?” cried the Duc de Valognes, impatiently; “why on earth shouldn’t they meet like other people?”
“They are the opposite of each other,” said Father Brown, with a queer kind of smile. “They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to speak.”
He continued to gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes turned his head sharply at a suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That investigator, peering into the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel, after a pace or two, proceed to take his coat off. Flambeau’s first thought was that this really looked like a fight; but he soon dropped the thought for another. The solidity and squareness of Dubosc’s chest and shoulders was all a powerful piece of padding and came off with his coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively slim gentleman, who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious purpose than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his dripping hands and face on a towel, and turned again so that the strong light fell on his face. His brown complexion had gone, his big black moustache had gone; he—was clean-shaven and very pate. Nothing remained of the Colonel but his bright, hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall Father Brown was going on in heavy meditation, as if to himself.
“It is all just like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites won’t do. They don’t work. They don’t fight. If it’s white instead of black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line—then there’s something wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong. One of these men is fair and the other dark, one stout and the other slim, one strong and the other weak. One has a moustache and no beard, so you can’t see his mouth; the other has a beard and no moustache, so you can’t see his chin. One has hair cropped to his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck; the other has low shirt-collars, but long hair to bide his skull. It’s all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and there’s something wrong. Things made so opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one sticks out the other sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a key…”
Flambeau was peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet. The occupant of the room was standing with his back to him, but in front of a looking-glass, and had already fitted round his face a sort of framework of rank red hair, hanging disordered from the head and clinging round the jaws and chin while leaving the mocking mouth uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked like the face of Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were covered with a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat, the figure vanished towards the front of the house. A few moments later a roar of popular applause from the street beyond announced that Dr Hirsch had once more appeared upon the balcony.
FOUR
The Man in the Passage
TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty. The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each man knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of striking appearance and they hated each other.
The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured river. One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it supported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The other side of the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither was what was commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of special and private stage doors used by very special performers, and in this case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits and entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.
The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each approached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence. Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the man from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other with civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could be called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and popular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. But everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty unintelligent committees—on every sort of subject, from the reform of the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain. In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been ruled by him all your life.
His appearance was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his high silk hat—, yet it was unlike anyone else’s hat— a little higher, perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slender figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than the common yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did not look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly and militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquez with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of such gloves and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the restaurants.
The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short, but merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and cropped close to a strong, massive head—the sort of head you break a door with, as Chaucer said of the Miller’s. His military moustache and the carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair of those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common in sailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulders were square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild school of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.
For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success. You did not have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain Cutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You could not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait was on every other postcard; his maps and battles in every other illustrated paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn or on every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably more temporary, was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man’s. In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, like Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson Seymour.
The door was opened to them by an aged servant or “dresser”, whose broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers contrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress’s dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at every angle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of one huge diamond—if one could get inside a diamond. The other features of luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of the Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against the wall.
They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the other room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of both visitors; for the other room was the private room of the great actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind that does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy, hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to all men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company with her male colleague, the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of Midsummer Night’s Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman’s face.
She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so many males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his victories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered later on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was against his breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventional unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had picked up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient Greek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in the time of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the Heroic weapons, but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still. He had really been attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was as perfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could come in anywhere in the play, he hoped she would—
The inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of a contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly six-foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore Bruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon, looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a sort of hunting-spear, which across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but which in the small and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff—and as menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed face, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of high cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain American conjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations.
“Aurora,” he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had moved so many audiences, “will you—”
He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented itself just inside the doorway—a figure so incongruous in the scene as to be almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform of the Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence as Bruno’s and Aurora’s) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. He did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dull civility: “I believe Miss Rome sent for me.”
A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a professional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stood round the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger coming in with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. The presence of the one man who did not care about her increased Miss Rome’s sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each in a somewhat dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoilt child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will rather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentration with which old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abject Parkinson, who had known her before her triumphs, and who followed her about the room with eyes or feet, with the dumb fascination of a dog.
A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a black wooden Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with a considerable but contained amusement. It was evident that the great Aurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration of the other sex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her and be left alone with the man who did not— did not admire her in that sense at least; for the little priest did admire and even enjoy the firm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There was, perhaps, only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was one half of humanity— the other half. The little priest watched, like a Napoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling all while banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it was easy to send him off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the British officer, was pachydermatous to ideas, but punctilious about behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would die rather than ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he had to be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way to move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let him into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Rome as she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.
She went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner: “I shall value all these flowers, because they must be your favourite flowers. But they won’t be complete, you know, without my favourite flower. Do go over to that shop round the corner and get me some lilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite lovely.”
The first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at once achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, like a sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of the cushioned seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rival there glowed in his opal eyeballs all the sensitive insolence of the slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an instant, and then, dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond. But meanwhile Miss Rome’s experiment in mobilizing the British Army had not succeeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly and suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of command. But perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about the languid figure of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses that brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head this way and that like a bewildered bulldog.
“I must show this stupid man where to go,” said Aurora in a whisper to Seymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.
Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his posture, and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out some last instructions to the Captain, and then turn sharply and run laughing down the passage towards the other end, the end on the terrace above the Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour’s brow darkened again. A man in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the other end of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno’s private room. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster Cathedral, and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into the upper end of the passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were left alone, and they were neither of them men with a taste for superfluous conversation. The dresser went round the room, pulling out looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark coat and trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame of a new glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd glass chamber was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like angels, turning somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to everybody like very rude persons.
Father Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but followed Parkinson with an idly attentive eye till he took himself and his absurd spear into the farther room of Bruno. Then he abandoned himself to such abstract meditations as always amused him— calculating the angles of the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle at which each must fit into the wall…when he heard a strong but strangled cry.
He sprang to his feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instant Sir Wilson Seymour burst back into the room, white as ivory. “Who’s that man in the passage?” he cried. “Where’s that dagger of mine?”
Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was plunging about the room looking for the weapon. And before he could possibly find that weapon or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon the pavement outside, and the square face of Cutler was thrust into the same doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley. “What’s this?” he cried. “What’s that creature down the passage? Is this some of your tricks?”
“My tricks!” hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.
In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped out into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walked briskly towards what he saw.
At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him, Cutler calling out: “What are you doing? Who are you?”
“My name is Brown,” said the priest sadly, as he bent over something and straightened himself again. “Miss Rome sent for me, and I came as quickly as I could. I have come too late.”
The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in that late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of gold, and in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of green and gold, with her dead face turned upwards. Her dress was torn away as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the wound from which the blood was welling was on the other side. The brass dagger lay flat and gleaming a yard or so away.
There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they could hear far off a flower-girl’s laugh outside Charing Cross, and someone whistling furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand. Then the Captain, with a movement so sudden that it might have been passion or play-acting, took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat.
Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight or fear. “You need not kill me,” he said in a voice quite cold; “I shall do that on my own account.”
The Captain’s hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the same icy candour: “If I find I haven’t the nerve to do it with that dagger I can do it in a month with drink.”
“Drink isn’t good enough for me,” replied Cutler, “but I’ll have blood for this before I die. Not yours—but I think I know whose.”
And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the dagger, sprang at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burst it open, bolt and all, and confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he did so, old Parkinson tottered in his wavering way out of the door and caught sight of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakily towards it; looked at it weakly with a working face; then moved shakily back into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on one of the richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him, taking no notice of Cutler and the colossal actor, though the room already rang with their blows and they began to struggle for the dagger. Seymour, who retained some practical sense, was whistling for the police at the end of the passage.
When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an almost ape-like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore Bruno upon a charge of murder, brought against him by his furious opponent. The idea that the great national hero of the hour had arrested a wrongdoer with his own hand doubtless had its weight with the police, who are not without elements of the journalist. They treated Cutler with a certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got a slight slash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair and table, Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled him just below the wrist. The injury was really slight, but till he was removed from the room the half-savage prisoner stared at the running blood with a steady smile.
“Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don’t he?” said the constable confidentially to Cutler.
Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: “We must attend to the…the death…” and his voice escaped from articulation.
“The two deaths,” came in the voice of the priest from the farther side of the room. “This poor fellow was gone when I got across to him.” And he stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the gorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, to the woman who had died.
The silence was first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by a rough tenderness. “I wish I was him,” he said huskily. “I remember he used to watch her wherever she walked more than—anybody. She was his air, and he’s dried up. He’s just dead.”
“We are all dead,” said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the road.
They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some random apologies for any rudeness they might have shown. Both their faces were tragic, but also cryptic.
The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild thoughts that jumped too quickly for him to catch them. Like the white tail of a rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain of their grief, but not so certain of their innocence.
“We had better all be going,” said Seymour heavily; “we have done all we can to help.”
“Will you understand my motives,” asked Father Brown quietly, “if I say you have done all you can to hurt?”
They both started as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: “To hurt whom?”
“To hurt yourselves,” answered the priest. “I would not add to your troubles if it weren’t common justice to warn you. You’ve done nearly everything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should be acquitted. They’ll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that after the cry was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild state and began quarrelling about a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go, you might either of you have done it. You hurt yourselves with that; and then Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger.”
“Hurt myself!” exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. “A silly little scratch.”
“Which drew blood,” replied the priest, nodding. “We know there’s blood on the brass now. And so we shall never know whether there was blood on it before.”
There was a silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien to his daily accent: “But I saw a man in the passage.”
“I know you did,” answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, “so did Captain Cutler. That’s what seems so improbable.”
Before either could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, Father Brown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road with his stumpy old umbrella.
As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most important news is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth century more space is given to murder than to politics, it is for the excellent reason that murder is a more serious subject. But even this would hardly explain the enormous omnipresence and widely distributed detail of “The Bruno Case,” or “The Passage Mystery,” in the Press of London and the provinces. So vast was the excitement that for some weeks the Press really told the truth; and the reports of examination and cross-examination, if interminable, even if intolerable are at least reliable. The true reason, of course, was the coincidence of persons. The victim was a popular actress; the accused was a popular actor; and the accused had been caught red-handed, as it were, by the most popular soldier of the patriotic season. In those extraordinary circumstances the Press was paralysed into probity and accuracy; and the rest of this somewhat singular business can practically be recorded from reports of Bruno’s trial.
The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those who are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much more serious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living impatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really filled with frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chief actors being of a worldly importance, the barristers were well balanced; the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, but weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English and trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner was defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneur by those who misunderstood the Irish character— and those who had not been examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions, the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with the eminent surgeon who had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had been stabbed with some sharp instrument such as a knife or dagger; some instrument, at least, of which the blade was short. The wound was just over the heart, and she had died instantly. When the doctor first saw her she could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes. Therefore when Father Brown found her she could hardly have been dead for three.
Some official detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with the presence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion of this was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem to fit in particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow. When these details had been supplied, though not explained, the first of the important witnesses was called.
Sir Wilson Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he did at all—not only well, but perfectly. Though himself much more of a public man than the judge, he conveyed exactly the fine shade of self-effacement before the King’s justice; and though everyone looked at him as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they could have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a private gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly lucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome at the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined for a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own dressing-room; they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked for the deceased lady and said his name was Brown. Miss Rome had then gone just outside the theatre to the entrance of the passage, in order to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-shop at which he was to buy her some more flowers; and the witness had remained in the room, exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then distinctly heard the deceased, having sent the Captain on his errand, turn round laughing and run down the passage towards its other end, where was the prisoner’s dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement of his friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself and looked down it towards the prisoner’s door. Did he see anything in the passage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.
Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which the witness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have more than his usual pallor. Then the barrister said in a lower voice, which seemed at once sympathetic and creepy: “Did you see it distinctly?”
Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in full working-order. “Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quite indistinctly, indeed not at all, as regards the details inside the outline. The passage is of such length that anyone in the middle of it appears quite black against the light at the other end.” The witness lowered his steady eyes once more and added: “I had noticed the fact before, when Captain Cutler first entered it.” There was another silence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.
“Well,” said Sir Walter patiently, “what was the outline like? Was it, for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?”
“Not in the least,” answered Seymour quietly.
“What did it look like to you?”
“It looked to me,” replied the witness, “like a tall man.”
Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner by main force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and taller when an eyes had been torn away from him.
Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his black silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the witness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were many other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stopped him.
“I shall only detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial slumber. “Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?”
A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour’s features. “I’m afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all.”
Butler’s sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After all!” he repeated slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”
Seymour looked troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of fact,” he said, “but if his lordship would like me to answer for my impression, of course I shall do so. There was something about the thing that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow the curves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair.”
“Thank you,” said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same. He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the upper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicion of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen. Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic—with a somewhat too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said it looked more like a beast— with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner. But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were already fairly clear.
The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination; although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a long time about it. “You used a rather remarkable expression,” he said, looking at Cutler sleepily. “What do you mean by saying that it looked more like a beast than a man or a woman?”
Cutler seemed seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said that,” he said; “but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a chimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig—”
Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind whether its hair was like a pig’s,” he said, “was it like a woman’s?”
“A woman’s!” cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”
“The last witness said it was,” commented the counsel, with unscrupulous swiftness. “And did the figure have any of those serpentine and semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? No feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and square than otherwise?”
“He may have been bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather faint voice.
“Or again, he may not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the second time.
The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic clergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemed hardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining a child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head (mostly by some ramifications of his family’s religion) that Father Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner was wicked and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father Brown up sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and told him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry. When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the man in the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his theories.
“A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black shape. Well, what shape was it?”
Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal nature of obedience. “The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had two sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head or top, rather like horns, and—”
“Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down in triumphant jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”
“No,” said the priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”
Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage, described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and the other a devil…
The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes. “You are a most extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well, who was the man you saw in the passage?”
“He was myself,” said Father Brown.
Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said quite calmly: “Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then, without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question: “You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime was committed with a short blade?”
“A short blade,” assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a very long hilt.”
Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had really seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt (which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried on to explain.
“I mean daggers aren’t the only things with short blades. Spears have short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like daggers, if they’re that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she’d sent for me to settle their family troubles— and I came just too late, God forgive me! But he died penitent— he just died of being penitent. He couldn’t bear what he’d done.”
The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still looked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.
“If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he must have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?” He had slipped into treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.
“The poor lady’s dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free herself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner’s room and lunged with the spear.”
“A panel?” repeated the barrister in a curious voice.
“It was a looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown. “When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could probably be slid out into the passage.”
There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the judge who spoke. “So you really mean that when you looked down that passage, the man you saw was yourself—in a mirror?”
“Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and so I—”
The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said in specially distinct tones: “Do you really mean to say that when Sir Wilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman’s hair and a man’s trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Father Brown.
“And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with humped shoulders and hog’s bristles, he simply saw himself?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us why,” he asked, “you should know your own figure in a looking-glass, when two such distinguished men don’t?”
Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered: “Really, my lord, I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look at it so often.”
FIVE
The Mistake of the Machine
FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third Degree in America.
“I’ve been reading,” said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean; they put a pulsometer on a man’s wrist and judge by how his heart goes at the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?”
“I think it very interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a corpse if the murderer touched it.”
“Do you really mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two methods equally valuable?”
“I think them equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we can ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to shed it.”
“The method,” remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the greatest American men of science.”
“What sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown, “and how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”
“But surely,” insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at something or other.”
“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing done once and I’ve never believed in it since.” And he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.
It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his co-religionists in a prison in Chicago—where the Irish population displayed a capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him tolerably busy. The official second-in-command under the Governor was an ex-detective named Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee philosopher, occasionally varying a very rigid visage with an odd apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in a slightly patronizing way; and Father Brown liked him, though he heartily disliked his theories. His theories were extremely complicated and were held with extreme simplicity.
One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom, took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered with papers, and waited. The official selected from the papers a scrap of newspaper cutting, which he handed across to the cleric, who read it gravely. It appeared to be an extract from one of the pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows:
“Society’s brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim’s Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick’s show the year previous, the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner. The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd’s pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple manners and customs at the other end of Society’s scale. This would be all the more telling, as hospitable Todd is entertaining in Lord Falconroy, the famous traveller, a true-blooded aristocrat fresh from England’s oak-groves. Lord Falconroy’s travels began before his ancient feudal title was resurrected, he was in the Republic in his youth, and fashion murmurs a sly reason for his return. Miss Etta Todd is one of our deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an income of nearly twelve hundred million dollars.”
“Well,” asked Usher, “does that interest you?”
“Why, words rather fail me,” answered Father Brown. “I cannot think at this moment of anything in this world that would interest me less. And, unless the just anger of the Republic is at last going to electrocute journalists for writing like that, I don’t quite see why it should interest you either.”
“Ah!” said Mr Usher dryly, and handing across another scrap of newspaper. “Well, does that interest you?”
The paragraph was headed “Savage Murder of a Warder. Convict Escapes,” and ran: “Just before dawn this morning a shout for help was heard in the Convict Settlement at Sequah in this State. The authorities, hurrying in the direction of the cry, found the corpse of the warder who patrols the top of the north wall of the prison, the steepest and most difficult exit, for which one man has always been found sufficient. The unfortunate officer had, however, been hurled from the high wall, his brains beaten out as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further inquiries showed that one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied by a rather sullen ruffian giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily detained for some comparatively trivial assault; but he gave everyone the impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous future. Finally, when daylight had fully revealed the scene of murder, it was found that he had written on the wall above the body a fragmentary sentence, apparently with a finger dipped in blood: ‘This was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no harm to him or any man but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim’s Pond—O.R.’ A man must have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing bodily daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man.”
“Well, the literary style is somewhat improved,” admitted the priest cheerfully, “but still I don’t see what I can do for you. I should cut a poor figure, with my short legs, running about this State after an athletic assassin of that sort. I doubt whether anybody could find him. The convict settlement at Sequah is thirty miles from here; the country between is wild and tangled enough, and the country beyond, where he will surely have the sense to go, is a perfect no-man’s land tumbling away to the prairies. He may be in any hole or up any tree.”
“He isn’t in any hole,” said the governor; “he isn’t up any tree.”
“Why, how do you know?” asked Father Brown, blinking.
“Would you like to speak to him?” inquired Usher.
Father Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. “He is here?” he exclaimed. “Why, how did your men get hold of him?”
“I got hold of him myself,” drawled the American, rising and lazily stretching his lanky legs before the fire. “I got hold of him with the crooked end of a walking-stick. Don’t look so surprised. I really did. You know I sometimes take a turn in the country lanes outside this dismal place; well, I was walking early this evening up a steep lane with dark hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields on both sides; and a young moon was up and silvering the road. By the light of it I saw a man running across the field towards the road; running with his body bent and at a good mile-race trot. He appeared to be much exhausted; but when he came to the thick black hedge he went through it as if it were made of spiders’ webs; —or rather (for I heard the strong branches breaking and snapping like bayonets) as if he himself were made of stone. In the instant in which he appeared up against the moon, crossing the road, I slung my hooked cane at his legs, tripping him and bringing him down. Then I blew my whistle long and loud, and our fellows came running up to secure him.”
“It would have been rather awkward,” remarked Brown, “if you had found he was a popular athlete practising a mile race.”
“He was not,” said Usher grimly. “We soon found out who he was; but I had guessed it with the first glint of the moon on him.”
“You thought it was the runaway convict,” observed the priest simply, “because you had read in the newspaper cutting that morning that a convict had run away.”
“I had somewhat better grounds,” replied the governor coolly. “I pass over the first as too simple to be emphasized— I mean that fashionable athletes do not run across ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out in bramble hedges. Nor do they run all doubled up like a crouching dog. There were more decisive details to a fairly well-trained eye. The man was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but they were something more than merely coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting as to be quite grotesque; even as he appeared in black outline against the moonrise, the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him look like a hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It at once occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change his convict clothes for some confederate’s clothes which did not fit him. Second, there was a pretty stiff wind against which he was running; so that I must have seen the streaky look of blowing hair, if the hair had not been very short. Then I remembered that beyond these ploughed fields he was crossing lay Pilgrim’s Pond, for which (you will remember) the convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my walking-stick flying.”
“A brilliant piece of rapid deduction,” said Father Brown; “but had he got a gun?”
As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically: “I’ve been told a bullet is not half so useful without it.”
“He had no gun,” said the other gravely; “but that was doubtless due to some very natural mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy that made him change the clothes made him drop the gun; he began to repent the coat he had left behind him in the blood of his victim.”
“Well, that is possible enough,” answered the priest.
“And it’s hardly worth speculating on,” said Usher, turning to some other papers, “for we know it’s the man by this time.”
His clerical friend asked faintly: “But how?” And Greywood Usher threw down the newspapers and took up the two press-cuttings again.
“Well, since you are so obstinate,” he said, “let’s begin at the beginning. You will notice that these two cuttings have only one thing in common, which is the mention of Pilgrim’s Pond, the estate, as you know, of the millionaire Ireton Todd. You also know that he is a remarkable character; one of those that rose on stepping-stones—”
“Of our dead selves to higher things,” assented his companion. “Yes; I know that. Petroleum, I think.”
“Anyhow,” said Usher, “Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal in this rum affair.”
He stretched himself once more before the fire and continued talking in his expansive, radiantly explanatory style.
“To begin with, on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all. It is not mysterious, it is not even odd, that a jailbird should take his gun to Pilgrim’s Pond. Our people aren’t like the English, who will forgive a man for being rich if he throws away money on hospitals or horses. Last-Trick Todd has made himself big by his own considerable abilities; and there’s no doubt that many of those on whom he has shown his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a shot-gun. Todd might easily get dropped by some man he’d never even heard of; some labourer he’d locked out, or some clerk in a business he’d busted. Last-Trick is a man of mental endowments and a high public character; but in this country the relations of employers and employed are considerably strained.
“That’s how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian made for Pilgrim’s Pond to kill Todd. So it looked to me, till another little discovery woke up what I have of the detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe, I picked up my cane again and strolled down the two or three turns of country road that brought me to one of the side entrances of Todd’s grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after which the place is named. It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time; the moonlight was more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks of it lying on the mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid shores in which they say our fathers used to make witches walk until they sank. I’d forgotten the exact tale; but you know the place I mean; it lies north of Todd’s house towards the wilderness, and has two queer wrinkled trees, so dismal that they look more like huge fungoids than decent foliage. As I stood peering at this misty pool, I fancied I saw the faint figure of a man moving from the house towards it, but it was all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the fact, and still less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply arrested by something much closer. I crouched behind the fence which ran not more than two hundred yards from one wing of the great mansion, and which was fortunately split in places, as if specially for the application of a cautious eye. A door had opened in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a figure appeared black against the illuminated interior—a muffled figure bending forward, evidently peering out into the night. It closed the door behind it, and I saw it was carrying a lantern, which threw a patch of imperfect light on the dress and figure of the wearer. It seemed to be the figure of a woman, wrapped up in a ragged cloak and evidently disguised to avoid notice; there was something very strange both about the rags and the furtiveness in a person coming out of those rooms lined with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path which brought her within half a hundred yards of me—, then she stood up for an instant on the terrace of turf that looks towards the slimy lake, and holding her flaming lantern above her head she deliberately swung it three times to and fro as for a signal. As she swung it the second time a flicker of its light fell for a moment on her own face, a face that I knew. She was unnaturally pale, and her head was bundled in her borrowed plebeian shawl; but I am certain it was Etta Todd, the millionaire’s daughter.
“She retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door closed behind her again. I was about to climb the fence and follow, when I realized that the detective fever that had lured me into the adventure was rather undignified; and that in a more authoritative capacity I already held all the cards in my hand. I was just turning away when a new noise broke on the night. A window was thrown up in one of the upper floors, but just round the corner of the house so that I could not see it; and a voice of terrible distinctness was heard shouting across the dark garden to know where Lord Falconroy was, for he was missing from every room in the house. There was no mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a political platform or meeting of directors; it was Ireton Todd himself. Some of the others seemed to have gone to the lower windows or on to the steps, and were calling up to him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll down to the Pilgrim’s Pond an hour before, and could not be traced since. Then Todd cried ‘Mighty Murder!’ and shut down the window violently; and I could hear him plunging down the stairs inside. Repossessing myself of my former and wiser purpose, I whipped out of the way of the general search that must follow; and returned here not later than eight o’clock.
“I now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph which seemed to you so painfully lacking in interest. If the convict was not keeping the shot for Todd, as he evidently wasn’t, it is most likely that he was keeping it for Lord Falconroy; and it looks as if he had delivered the goods. No more handy place to shoot a man than in the curious geological surroundings of that pool, where a body thrown down would sink through thick slime to a depth practically unknown. Let us suppose, then, that our friend with the cropped hair came to kill Falconroy and not Todd. But, as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why people in America might want to kill Todd. There is no reason why anybody in America should want to kill an English lord newly landed, except for the one reason mentioned in the pink paper—that the lord is paying his attentions to the millionaire’s daughter. Our crop-haired friend, despite his ill-fitting clothes, must be an aspiring lover.
“I know the notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that’s because you are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter will be married in St George’s, Hanover Square, to a crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don’t do justice to the climbing and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens. You see a good-looking grey-haired man in evening-dress with a sort of authority about him, you know he is a pillar of the State, and you fancy he had a father. You are in error. You do not realize that a comparatively few years ago he may have been in a tenement or (quite likely) in a jail. You don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen comparatively late in life. Todd’s daughter was fully eighteen when her father first made his pile; so there isn’t really anything impossible in her having a hanger-on in low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as I think she must be doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so, the hand that held the lantern may not be unconnected with the hand that held the gun. This case, sir, will make a noise.”
“Well,” said the priest patiently, “and what did you do next?”
“I reckon you’ll be shocked,” replied Greywood Usher, “as I know you don’t cotton to the march of science in these matters. I am given a good deal of discretion here, and perhaps take a little more than I’m given; and I thought it was an excellent opportunity to test that Psychometric Machine I told you about. Now, in my opinion, that machine can’t lie.”
“No machine can lie,” said Father Brown; “nor can it tell the truth.”
“It did in this case, as I’ll show you,” went on Usher positively. “I sat the man in the ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair, and simply wrote words on a blackboard; and the machine simply recorded the variations of his pulse; and I simply observed his manner. The trick is to introduce some word connected with the supposed crime in a list of words connected with something quite different, yet a list in which it occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote ‘heron’ and ‘eagle’ and ‘owl’, and when I wrote ‘falcon’ he was tremendously agitated; and when I began to make an ‘r’ at the end of the word, that machine just bounded. Who else in this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived Englishman like Falconroy except the man who’s shot him? Isn’t that better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses—if the evidence of a reliable machine?”
“You always forget,” observed his companion, “that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked the detective.
“I mean Man,” said Father Brown, “the most unreliable machine I know of. I don’t want to be rude; and I don’t think you will consider Man to be an offensive or inaccurate description of yourself. You say you observed his manner; but how do you know you observed it right? You say the words have to come in a natural way; but how do you know that you did it naturally? How do you know, if you come to that, that he did not observe your manner? Who is to prove that you were not tremendously agitated? There was no machine tied on to your pulse.”
“I tell you,” cried the American in the utmost excitement, “I was as cool as a cucumber.”
“Criminals also can be as cool as cucumbers,” said Brown with a smile. “And almost as cool as you.”
“Well, this one wasn’t,” said Usher, throwing the papers about. “Oh, you make me tired!”
“I’m sorry,” said the other. “I only point out what seems a reasonable possibility. If you could tell by his manner when the word that might hang him had come, why shouldn’t he tell from your manner that the word that might hang him was coming? I should ask for more than words myself before I hanged anybody.”
Usher smote the table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.
“And that,” he cried, “is just what I’m going to give you. I tried the machine first just in order to test the thing in other ways afterwards and the machine, sir, is right.”
He paused a moment and resumed with less excitement. “I rather want to insist, if it comes to that, that so far I had very little to go on except the scientific experiment. There was really nothing against the man at all. His clothes were ill-fitting, as I’ve said, but they were rather better, if anything, than those of the submerged class to which he evidently belonged. Moreover, under all the stains of his plunging through ploughed fields or bursting through dusty hedges, the man was comparatively clean. This might mean, of course, that he had only just broken prison; but it reminded me more of the desperate decency of the comparatively respectable poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to confess, quite in accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as they are; he seemed to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do. He professed total ignorance of the crime and the whole question; and showed nothing but a sullen impatience for something sensible that might come to take him out of his meaningless scrape. He asked me more than once if he could telephone for a lawyer who had helped him a long time ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you would expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing against him in the world except that little finger on the dial that pointed to the change of his pulse.
“Then, sir, the machine was on its trial; and the machine was right. By the time I came with him out of the private room into the vestibule where all sorts of other people were awaiting examination, I think he had already more or less made up his mind to clear things up by something like a confession. He turned to me and began to say in a low voice: ‘Oh, I can’t stick this any more. If you must know all about me—’
“At the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench stood up, screaming aloud and pointing at him with her finger. I have never in my life heard anything more demoniacally distinct. Her lean finger seemed to pick him out as if it were a pea-shooter. Though the word was a mere howl, every syllable was as clear as a separate stroke on the clock.
“‘Drugger Davis!’ she shouted. ‘They’ve got Drugger Davis!’
“Among the wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers, twenty faces were turned, gaping with glee and hate. If I had never heard the words, I should have known by the very shock upon his features that the so-called Oscar Rian had heard his real name. But I’m not quite so ignorant, you may be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis was one of the most terrible and depraved criminals that ever baffled our police. It is certain he had done murder more than once long before his last exploit with the warder. But he was never entirely fixed for it, curiously enough because he did it in the same manner as those milder—or meaner—crimes for which he was fixed pretty often. He was a handsome, well-bred-looking brute, as he still is, to some extent; and he used mostly to go about with barmaids or shop-girls and do them out of their money. Very often, though, he went a good deal farther; and they were found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and their whole property missing. Then came one case where the girl was found dead; but deliberation could not quite be proved, and, what was more practical still, the criminal could not be found. I heard a rumour of his having reappeared somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending money instead of borrowing it; but still to such poor widows as he might personally fascinate, but still with the same bad result for them. Well, there is your innocent man, and there is his innocent record. Even, since then, four criminals and three warders have identified him and confirmed the story. Now what have you got to say to my poor little machine after that? Hasn’t the machine done for him? Or do you prefer to say that the woman and I have done for him?”
“As to what you’ve done for him,” replied Father Brown, rising and shaking himself in a floppy way, “you’ve saved him from the electrical chair. I don’t think they can kill Drugger Davis on that old vague story of the poison; and as for the convict who killed the warder, I suppose it’s obvious that you haven’t got him. Mr Davis is innocent of that crime, at any rate.”
“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “Why should he be innocent of that crime?”
“Why, bless us all!” cried the small man in one of his rare
moments of animation, “why, because he’s guilty of the other crimes!
I don’t know what you people are made of. You seem to think that
all sins are kept together in a bag. You talk as if a miser on Monday
were always a spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here
spent weeks and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of money;
that he used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst;
that he turned up afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender,
and cheated most poor people in the same patient and pacific style.
Let it be granted—let us admit, for the sake of argument,
that he did all this. If that is so, I will tell you what he didn’t do.
He didn’t storm a spiked wall against a man with a loaded gun.
He didn’t write on the wall with his own hand, to say he had done it.
He didn’t stop to state that his justification was self-defence.
He didn’t explain that he had no quarrel with the poor warder.
He didn’t name the house of the rich man to which he was going with the gun.
He didn’t write his own, initials in a man’s blood. Saints alive!
Can’t you see the whole character is different, in good and evil?
Why, you don’t seem to be like I am a bit. One would think
you’d never had any vices of your own.”
The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the door of his private and official room was hammered and rattled in an unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.
The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after he began to think he was mad himself. There burst and fell into his private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger’s. The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he thought he had never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above all, he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like that speak to him first.
“See here, old man Usher,” shouted the being in the red handkerchief, “I’m getting tired. Don’t you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I don’t get fooled any. Leave go of my guests, and I’ll let up on the fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split instant and you’ll feel pretty mean. I reckon I’m not a man with no pull.”
The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement which had dried up all other sentiments. The mere shock to his eyes had rendered his ears, almost useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand of violence. While the bell was still strong and pealing, the voice of Father Brown fell soft but distinct.
“I have a suggestion to make,” he said, “but it seems a little confusing. I don’t know this gentleman—but— but I think I know him. Now, you know him—you know him quite well— but you don’t know him—naturally. Sounds paradoxical, I know.”
“I reckon the Cosmos is cracked,” said Usher, and fell asprawl in his round office chair.
“Now, see here,” vociferated the stranger, striking the table, but speaking in a voice that was all the more mysterious because it was comparatively mild and rational though still resounding. “I won’t let you in. I want—”
“Who in hell are you?” yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.
“I think the gentleman’s name is Todd,” said the priest.
Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.
“I fear you don’t read the Society papers properly,” he said, and began to read out in a monotonous voice, “‘Or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the manners and customs of the other end of Society’s scale.’ There’s been a big Slum Dinner up at Pilgrim’s Pond tonight; and a man, one of the guests, disappeared. Mr Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked him here, without even waiting to take off his fancy-dress.”
“What man do you mean?”
“I mean the man with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw running across the ploughed field. Hadn’t you better go and investigate him? He will be rather impatient to get back to his champagne, from which he ran away in such a hurry, when the convict with the gun hove in sight.”
“Do you seriously mean—” began the official.
“Why, look here, Mr Usher,” said Father Brown quietly, “you said the machine couldn’t make a mistake; and in one sense it didn’t. But the other machine did; the machine that worked it. You assumed that the man in rags jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy, because he was Lord Falconroy’s murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because he is Lord Falconroy.”
“Then why the blazes didn’t he say so?” demanded the staring Usher.
“He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician,” replied the priest, “so he tried to keep the name back at first. But he was just going to tell it you, when”—and Father Brown looked down at his boots—“when a woman found another name for him.”
“But you can’t be so mad as to say,” said Greywood Usher, very white, “that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis.”
The priest looked at him very earnestly, but with a baffling and undecipherable face.
“I am not saying anything about it,” he said. “I leave all the rest to you. Your pink paper says that the title was recently revived for him; but those papers are very unreliable. It says he was in the States in youth; but the whole story seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are both pretty considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But I think,” he went on softly and reflectively, “I think you Americans are too modest. I think you idealize the English aristocracy—even in assuming it to be so aristocratic. You see a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you know he’s in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential noblemen have not only risen recently, but—”
“Oh, stop it!” cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand in impatience against a shade of irony in the other’s face.
“Don’t stay talking to this lunatic!” cried Todd brutally. “Take me to my friend.”
Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression, carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.
“I’m afraid you neglect the fashionable press rather,” he said, “but this cutting may interest you.”
Usher read the headlines, “Last-Trick’s Strayed Revellers: Mirthful Incident near Pilgrim’s Pond.” The paragraph went on: “A laughable occurrence took place outside Wilkinson’s Motor Garage last night. A policeman on duty had his attention drawn by larrikins to a man in prison dress who was stepping with considerable coolness into the steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied by a girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the young woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd’s daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond, where all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going for the customary joy-ride.”
Under the pink slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper, headed, “Astounding Escape of Millionaire’s Daughter with Convict. She had Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe in—”
Mr Greenwood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.
SIX
The Head of Caesar
THERE is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs. The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade is its telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking down it begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but there is one exception—a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the tall mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess, and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs.
Anyone passing the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost fairylike, might have seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which (along with some large white lettering) half hid the interior from the street, and a face peer out not unlike a rather innocent goblin’s. It was, in fact, the face of one with the harmless human name of Brown, formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London. His friend, Flambeau, a semi-official investigator, was sitting opposite him, making his last notes of a case he had cleared up in the neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up to the window, when the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He waited till a stranger in the street had passed the window, to let the curtain fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the large white lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend put away the pocket-book), he said softly:
“If you’ve got ten minutes, I wish you’d follow that man with the false nose.”
Flambeau looked up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also looked up, and with something that was stronger than astonishment. She was simply and even loosely dressed in light brown sacking stuff; but she was a lady, and even, on a second glance, a rather needlessly haughty one. “The man with the false nose!” repeated Flambeau. “Who’s he?”
“I haven’t a notion,” answered Father Brown. “I want you to find out; I ask it as a favour. He went down there”—and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures— “and can’t have passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want to know the direction.”
Flambeau gazed at his friend for some time, with an expression between perplexity and amusement; and then, rising from the table; squeezed his huge form out of the little door of the dwarf tavern, and melted into the twilight.
Father Brown took a small book out of his pocket and began to read steadily; he betrayed no consciousness of the fact that the red-haired lady had left her own table and sat down opposite him. At last she leaned over and said in a low, strong voice: “Why do you say that? How do you know it’s false?”
He lifted his rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable embarrassment. Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman’s eyes followed his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.
“No,” said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn’t say ‘Sela’, like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was wool-gathering just now; it says ‘Ales.’”
“Well?” inquired the staring young lady. “What does it matter what it says?”
His ruminating eye roved to the girl’s light canvas sleeve, round the wrist of which ran a very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough to distinguish it from a working-dress of a common woman and make it more like the working-dress of a lady art-student. He seemed to find much food for thought in this; but his reply was very slow and hesitant. “You see, madam,” he said, “from outside the place looks—well, it is a perfectly decent place—but ladies like you don’t—don’t generally think so. They never go into such places from choice, except—”
“Well?” she repeated.
“Except an unfortunate few who don’t go in to drink milk.”
“You are a most singular person,” said the young lady. “What is your object in all this?”
“Not to trouble you about it,” he replied, very gently. “Only to arm myself with knowledge enough to help you, if ever you freely ask my help.”
“But why should I need help?”
He continued his dreamy monologue. “You couldn’t have come in to see protegees, humble friends, that sort of thing, or you’d have gone through into the parlour…and you couldn’t have come in because you were ill, or you’d have spoken to the woman of the place, who’s obviously respectable…besides, you don’t look ill in that way, but only unhappy… This street is the only original long lane that has no turning; and the houses on both sides are shut up… I could only suppose that you’d seen somebody coming whom you didn’t want to meet; and found the public-house was the only shelter in this wilderness of stone… I don’t think I went beyond the licence of a stranger in glancing at the only man who passed immediately after… And as I thought he looked like the wrong sort…and you looked like the right sort… I held myself ready to help if he annoyed you; that is all. As for my friend, he’ll be back soon; and he certainly can’t find out anything by stumping down a road like this… I didn’t think he could.”
“Then why did you send him out?” she cried, leaning forward with yet warmer curiosity. She had the proud, impetuous face that goes with reddish colouring, and a Roman nose, as it did in Marie Antoinette.
He looked at her steadily for the first time, and said: “Because I hoped you would speak to me.”
She looked back at him for some time with a heated face, in which there hung a red shadow of anger; then, despite her anxieties, humour broke out of her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and she answered almost grimly: “Well, if you’re so keen on my conversation, perhaps you’ll answer my question.” After a pause she added: “I had the honour to ask you why you thought the man’s nose was false.”
“The wax always spots like that just a little in this weather,” answered Father Brown with entire simplicity,
“But it’s such a crooked nose,” remonstrated the red-haired girl.
The priest smiled in his turn. “I don’t say it’s the sort of nose one would wear out of mere foppery,” he admitted. “This man, I think, wears it because his real nose is so much nicer.”
“But why?” she insisted.
“What is the nursery-rhyme?” observed Brown absent-mindedly. “There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile… That man, I fancy, has gone a very crooked road—by following his nose.”
“Why, what’s he done?” she demanded, rather shakily.
“I don’t want to force your confidence by a hair,” said Father Brown, very quietly. “But I think you could tell me more about that than I can tell you.”
The girl sprang to her feet and stood quite quietly, but with clenched hands, like one about to stride away; then her hands loosened slowly, and she sat down again. “You are more of a mystery than all the others,” she said desperately, “but I feel there might be a heart in your mystery.”
“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.” “I will tell you everything,” said the red-haired girl doggedly, “except why I am telling you; and that I don’t know.”
She picked at the darned table-cloth and went on: “You look as if you knew what isn’t snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours is a good old family, you’ll understand it is a necessary part of the story; indeed, my chief danger is in my brother’s high-and-dry notions, noblesse oblige and all that. Well, my name is Christabel Carstairs; and my father was that Colonel Carstairs you’ve probably heard of, who made the famous Carstairs Collection of Roman coins. I could never describe my father to you; the nearest I can say is that he was very like a Roman coin himself. He was as handsome and as genuine and as valuable and as metallic and as out-of-date. He was prouder of his Collection than of his coat-of-arms— nobody could say more than that. His extraordinary character came out most in his will. He had two sons and one daughter. He quarrelled with one son, my brother Giles, and sent him to Australia on a small allowance. He then made a will leaving the Carstairs Collection, actually with a yet smaller allowance, to my brother Arthur. He meant it as a reward, as the highest honour he could offer, in acknowledgement of Arthur’s loyalty and rectitude and the distinctions he had already gained in mathematics and economics at Cambridge. He left me practically all his pretty large fortune; and I am sure he meant it in contempt.
“Arthur, you may say, might well complain of this; but Arthur is my father over again. Though he had some differences with my father in early youth, no sooner had he taken over the Collection than he became like a pagan priest dedicated to a temple. He mixed up these Roman halfpence with the honour of the Carstairs family in the same stiff, idolatrous way as his father before him. He acted as if Roman money must be guarded by all the Roman virtues. He took no pleasures; he spent nothing on himself; he lived for the Collection. Often he would not trouble to dress for his simple meals; but pattered about among the corded brown-paper parcels (which no one else was allowed to touch) in an old brown dressing-gown. With its rope and tassel and his pale, thin, refined face, it made him look like an old ascetic monk. Every now and then, though, he would appear dressed like a decidedly fashionable gentleman; but that was only when he went up to the London sales or shops to make an addition to the Carstairs Collection.
“Now, if you’ve known any young people, you won’t be shocked if I say that I got into rather a low frame of mind with all this; the frame of mind in which one begins to say that the Ancient Romans were all very well in their way. I’m not like my brother Arthur; I can’t help enjoying enjoyment. I got a lot of romance and rubbish where I got my red hair, from the other side of the family. Poor Giles was the same; and I think the atmosphere of coins might count in excuse for him; though he really did wrong and nearly went to prison. But he didn’t behave any worse than I did; as you shall hear.
“I come now to the silly part of the story. I think a man as clever as you can guess the sort of thing that would begin to relieve the monotony for an unruly girl of seventeen placed in such a position. But I am so rattled with more dreadful things that I can hardly read my own feeling; and don’t know whether I despise it now as a flirtation or bear it as a broken heart. We lived then at a little seaside watering-place in South Wales, and a retired sea-captain living a few doors off had a son about five years older than myself, who had been a friend of Giles before he went to the Colonies. His name does not affect my tale; but I tell you it was Philip Hawker, because I am telling you everything. We used to go shrimping together, and said and thought we were in love with each other; at least he certainly said he was, and I certainly thought I was. If I tell you he had bronzed curly hair and a falconish sort of face, bronzed by the sea also, it’s not for his sake, I assure you, but for the story; for it was the cause of a very curious coincidence.
“One summer afternoon, when I had promised to go shrimping along the sands with Philip, I was waiting rather impatiently in the front drawing-room, watching Arthur handle some packets of coins he had just purchased and slowly shunt them, one or two at a time, into his own dark study and museum which was at the back of the house. As soon as I heard the heavy door close on him finally, I made a bolt for my shrimping-net and tam-o’-shanter and was just going to slip out, when I saw that my brother had left behind him one coin that lay gleaming on the long bench by the window. It was a bronze coin, and the colour, combined with the exact curve of the Roman nose and something in the very lift of the long, wiry neck, made the head of Caesar on it the almost precise portrait of Philip Hawker. Then I suddenly remembered Giles telling Philip of a coin that was like him, and Philip wishing he had it. Perhaps you can fancy the wild, foolish thoughts with which my head went round; I felt as if I had had a gift from the fairies. It seemed to me that if I could only run away with this, and give it to Philip like a wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for ever; I felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like the pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur would think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs treasure! I believe my brother could see me burned like a witch for such a thing, But then, the very thought of such fanatical cruelty heightened my old hatred of his dingy old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for the youth and liberty that called to me from the sea. Outside was strong sunlight with a wind; and a yellow head of some broom or gorse in the garden rapped against the glass of the window. I thought of that living and growing gold calling to me from all the heaths of the world—and then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and brass of my brother’s growing dustier and dustier as life went by. Nature and the Carstairs Collection had come to grips at last.
“Nature is older than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the streets to the sea, the coin clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the Roman Empire on my back as well as the Carstairs pedigree. It was not only the old lion argent that was roaring in my ear, but all the eagles of the Caesars seemed flapping and screaming in pursuit of me. And yet my heart rose higher and higher like a child’s kite, until I came over the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat, wet sands, where Philip stood already up to his ankles in the shallow shining water, some hundred yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset; and the long stretch of low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a mile, was like a lake of ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes and stockings and waded to where he stood, which was well away from the dry land, that I turned and looked round. We were quite alone in a circle of sea-water and wet sand, and I gave him the head of Caesar.
“At the very instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on the sand-hills was looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately after that it was a mere leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was only a dark dot in the distance, and I could only just see that he was standing quite still and gazing, with his head a little on one side. There was no earthly logical evidence that he was looking at me; he might have been looking at a ship, or the sunset, or the sea-gulls, or at any of the people who still strayed here and there on the shore between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang from was prophetic; for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line towards us across the wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw that he was dark and bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark spectacles. He was dressed poorly but respectably in black, from the old black top hat on his head to the solid black boots on his feet. In spite of these he walked straight into the sea without a flash of hesitation, and came on at me with the steadiness of a travelling bullet.
“I can’t tell you the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he thus silently burst the barrier between land and water. It was as if he had walked straight off a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air. It was as if a house had flown up into the sky or a man’s head had fallen off. He was only wetting his boots; but he seemed to be a demon disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated an instant at the water’s edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed to look so much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards away with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till he stood within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to his knees. Then he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing articulation: ‘Would it discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin with a somewhat different superscription?’
“With one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough, nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark beard was not really long or wild—, but he looked rather hairy, because the beard began very high up in his face, just under the cheek-bones. His complexion was neither sallow nor livid, but on the contrary rather clear and youthful; yet this gave a pink-and-white wax look which somehow (I don’t know why) rather increased the horror. The only oddity one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good shape, was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft, it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly a deformity; yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to me. As he stood there in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some hellish sea-monster just risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don’t know why a touch on the nose should affect my imagination so much. I think it seemed as if he could move his nose like a finger. And as if he had just that moment moved it.
“‘Any little assistance,’ he continued with the same queer, priggish accent, ‘that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the family.’
“Then it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of the bronze piece; and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were swallowed up in one overpowering, practical question. How could he have found out? I had stolen the thing suddenly and on impulse; I was certainly alone; for I always made sure of being unobserved when I slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to all appearance, been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not ‘X-ray’ the coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no more have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man in the fairy-tale.
“‘Philip,’ I cried helplessly, ‘ask this man what he wants.’
“When Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked rather red, as if sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the exertion of stooping and the red evening light; I may have only had another of the morbid fancies that seemed to be dancing about me. He merely said gruffly to the man: ‘You clear out of this.’ And, motioning me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying further attention to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from among the roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my persecutor walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed me, picking his way and picking his phrases. I heard his delicate, detestable voice appealing to me over my shoulder, until at last, when we had crested the sand-hills, Philip’s patience (which was by no means so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to snap. He turned suddenly, saying, ‘Go back. I can’t talk to you now.’ And as the man hovered and opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that sent him flying from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him crawling out below, covered with sand.
“This stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my peril; but Philip showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess. Though as affectionate as ever, he still seemed cast down; and before I could ask him anything fully, he parted with me at his own gate, with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said that, all things considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection; but that he himself would keep it ‘for the present’. And then he added quite suddenly and irrelevantly:, ‘You know Giles is back from Australia?’”
The door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the investigator Flambeau fell across the table. Father Brown presented him to the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing, the girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau, as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper. Brown accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to Wagga Wagga, 379, Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her story.
“I went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it had not begun to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a milk-can—and the man with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the servants were all out; for, of course, Arthur, browsing about in his brown dressing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell. Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the horrid thing’s hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had expected— perhaps he had been shaken by his fall—and I watched the star of sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid vindictive pleasure. He turned a corner some six houses down.
“Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out. I sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I’d seen it so slowly.
“The man or monster I’d sent away was standing quite still in the middle of the garden. Oh, we’ve all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever be. Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in warm sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber’s dummy. He stood quite still, with his face towards me; and I can’t tell you how horrid he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we’d stuck up a waxwork instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.
“Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly, but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained, but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane. But when I stared harder, it was more like a man’s thumb pressed on the pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage re-awakened together, I rushed at the window and then recoiled with a strangled scream that any man but Arthur must have heard.
“For it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip of a crooked nose, crushed against the glass; it looked white with the pressure; and the staring face and eyes behind it were at first invisible and afterwards grey like a ghost. I slammed the shutters together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked myself in. But, even as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window with something on it that was like a snail.
“It might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling close all around the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even than blackmail. My brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but he was a gentleman, and would defend me on the spot. After ten minutes’ curious thinking, I went down, knocked on the door and then went in: to see the last and worst sight.
“My brother’s chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man with the crooked nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat still insolently on his head, and actually reading one of my brother’s books under my brother’s lamp. His face was composed and occupied, but his nose-tip still had the air of being the most mobile part of his face, as if it had just turned from left to right like an elephant’s proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was pursuing and watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was more frightful still.
“I think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn’t matter. What I did next does matter: I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal in paper which, though it was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch. He went off at last, with hateful, tactful regrets all in long words; and I sat down, feeling ruined in every sense. And yet I was saved that very night by a pure accident. Arthur had gone off suddenly to London, as he so often did, for bargains; and returned, late but radiant, having nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour even to the family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened to confess the abstraction of the lesser gem—, but he bore down all other topics with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still misfire any moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up with him to lodgings he had already taken in Fulham, to be near the curio-shop in question. Thus in spite of myself, I fled from my foe almost in the dead of night—but from Philip also… My brother was often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make some sort of secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art Schools. I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the abomination of desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the rest is as this gentleman has said.
“I’ve got only one thing to say. I don’t deserve to be helped; and I don’t question or complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to have happened. But I still question, with bursting brains, how it can have happened. Am I punished by miracle? or how can anyone but Philip and myself know I gave him a tiny coin in the middle of the sea?”
“It is an extraordinary problem,” admitted Flambeau.
“Not so extraordinary as the answer,” remarked Father Brown rather gloomily. “Miss Carstairs, will you be at home if we call at your Fulham place in an hour and a half hence?”
The girl looked at him, and then rose and put her gloves on. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll be there”; and almost instantly left the place.
That night the detective and the priest were still talking of the matter as they drew near the Fulham house, a tenement strangely mean even for a temporary residence of the Carstairs family.
“Of course the superficial, on reflection,” said Flambeau, “would think first of this Australian brother who’s been in trouble before, who’s come back so suddenly and who’s just the man to have shabby confederates. But I can’t see how he can come into the thing by any process of thought, unless…”
“Well?” asked his companion patiently.
Flambeau lowered his voice. “Unless the girl’s lover comes in, too, and he would be the blacker villain. The Australian chap did know that Hawker wanted the coin. But I can’t see how on earth he could know that Hawker had got it, unless Hawker signalled to him or his representative across the shore.”
“That is true,” assented the priest, with respect.
“Have you noted another thing?” went on Flambeau eagerly. “this Hawker hears his love insulted, but doesn’t strike till he’s got to the soft sand-hills, where he can be victor in a mere sham-fight. If he’d struck amid rocks and sea, he might have hurt his ally.”
“That is true again,” said Father Brown, nodding.
“And now, take it from the start. It lies between few people, but at least three. You want one person for suicide; two people for murder; but at least three people for blackmail”
“Why?” asked the priest softly.
“Well, obviously,” cried his friend, “there must be one to be exposed; one to threaten exposure; and one at least whom exposure would horrify.”
After a long ruminant pause, the priest said: “You miss a logical step. Three persons are needed as ideas. Only two are needed as agents.”
“What can you mean?” asked the other.
“Why shouldn’t a blackmailer,” asked Brown, in a low voice, “threaten his victim with himself? Suppose a wife became a rigid teetotaller in order to frighten her husband into concealing his pub-frequenting, and then wrote him blackmailing letters in another hand, threatening to tell his wife! Why shouldn’t it work? Suppose a father forbade a son to gamble and then, following him in a good disguise, threatened the boy with his own sham paternal strictness! Suppose—but, here we are, my friend.”
“My God!” cried Flambeau; “you don’t mean—”
An active figure ran down the steps of the house and showed under the golden lamplight the unmistakable head that resembled the Roman coin. “Miss Carstairs,” said Hawker without ceremony, “wouldn’t go in till you came.”
“Well,” observed Brown confidently, “don’t you think it’s the best thing she can do to stop outside—with you to look after her? You see, I rather guess you have guessed it all yourself.”
“Yes,” said the young man, in an undertone, “I guessed on the sands and now I know; that was why I let him fall soft.”
Taking a latchkey from the girl and the coin from Hawker, Flambeau let himself and his friend into the empty house and passed into the outer parlour. It was empty of all occupants but one. The man whom Father Brown had seen pass the tavern was standing against the wall as if at bay; unchanged, save that he had taken off his black coat and was wearing a brown dressing-gown.
“We have come,” said Father Brown politely, “to give back this coin to its owner.” And he handed it to the man with the nose.
Flambeau’s eyes rolled. “Is this man a coin-collector?” he asked.
“This man is Mr Arthur Carstairs,” said the priest positively, “and he is a coin-collector of a somewhat singular kind.”
The man changed colour so horribly that the crooked nose stood out on his face like a separate and comic thing. He spoke, nevertheless, with a sort of despairing dignity. “You shall see, then,” he said, “that I have not lost all the family qualities.” And he turned suddenly and strode into an inner room, slamming the door.
“Stop him!” shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it was too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for doctor and police.
An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body of the man in the brown dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping brown-paper parcels; out of which poured and rolled, not Roman, but very modern English coins.
The priest held up the bronze head of Caesar. “This,” he said, “was all that was left of the Carstairs Collection.”
After a silence he went on, with more than common gentleness: “It was a cruel will his wicked father made, and you see he did resent it a little. He hated the Roman money he had, and grew fonder of the real money denied him. He not only sold the Collection bit by bit, but sank bit by bit to the basest ways of making money— even to blackmailing his own family in a disguise. He blackmailed his brother from Australia for his little forgotten crime (that is why he took the cab to Wagga Wagga in Putney), he blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone could have noticed. And that, by the way, is why she had that supernatural guess when he was away on the sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up face quite close.”
There was another silence. “Well,” growled the detective, “and so this great numismatist and coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser.”
“Is there so great a difference?” asked Father Brown, in the same strange, indulgent tone. “What is there wrong about a miser that is not often as wrong about a collector? What is wrong, except… thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image; thou shalt not bow down to them nor serve them, for I…but we must go and see how the poor young people are getting on.”
“I think,” said Flambeau, “that in spite of everything, they are probably getting on very well.”
SEVEN
The Purple Wig
MR EDWARD NUTT, the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat at his desk, opening letters and marking proofs to the merry tune of a typewriter, worked by a vigorous young lady.
He was a stoutish, fair man, in his shirt-sleeves; his movements were resolute, his mouth firm and his tones final; but his round, rather babyish blue eyes had a bewildered and even wistful look that rather contradicted all this. Nor indeed was the expression altogether misleading. It might truly be said of him, as for many journalists in authority, that his most familiar emotion was one of continuous fear; fear of libel actions, fear of lost advertisements, fear of misprints, fear of the sack.
His life was a series of distracted compromises between the proprietor of the paper (and of him), who was a senile soap-boiler with three ineradicable mistakes in his mind, and the very able staff he had collected to run the paper; some of whom were brilliant and experienced men and (what was even worse) sincere enthusiasts for the political policy of the paper.
A letter from one of these lay immediately before him, and rapid and resolute as he was, he seemed almost to hesitate before opening it. He took up a strip of proof instead, ran down it with a blue eye, and a blue pencil, altered the word “adultery” to the word “impropriety,” and the word “Jew” to the word “Alien,” rang a bell and sent it flying upstairs.
Then, with a more thoughtful eye, he ripped open the letter from his more distinguished contributor, which bore a postmark of Devonshire, and read as follows:
DEAR NUTT,—As I see you’re working Spooks and Dooks at the same time, what about an article on that rum business of the Eyres of Exmoor; or as the old women call it down here, the Devil’s Ear of Eyre? The head of the family, you know, is the Duke of Exmoor; he is one of the few really stiff old Tory aristocrats left, a sound old crusted tyrant it is quite in our line to make trouble about. And I think I’m on the track of a story that will make trouble.
Of course I don’t believe in the old legend about James I; and as for you, you don’t believe in anything, not even in journalism. The legend, you’ll probably remember, was about the blackest business in English history—the poisoning of Overbury by that witch’s cat Frances Howard, and the quite mysterious terror which forced the King to pardon the murderers. There was a lot of alleged witchcraft mixed up with it; and the story goes that a man-servant listening at the keyhole heard the truth in a talk between the King and Carr; and the bodily ear with which he heard grew large and monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret. And though he had to be loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor of dukes, the elf-shaped ear is still recurrent in the family. Well, you don’t believe in black magic; and if you did, you couldn’t use it for copy. If a miracle happened in your office, you’d have to hush it up, now so many bishops are agnostics. But that is not the point The point is that there really is something queer about Exmoor and his family; something quite natural, I dare say, but quite abnormal. And the Ear is in it somehow, I fancy; either a symbol or a delusion or disease or something. Another tradition says that Cavaliers just after James I began to wear their hair long only to cover the ear of the first Lord Exmoor. This also is no doubt fanciful.
The reason I point it out to you is this: It seems to me that we make a mistake in attacking aristocracy entirely for its champagne and diamonds. Most men rather admire the nobs for having a good time, but I think we surrender too much when we admit that aristocracy has made even the aristocrats happy. I suggest a series of articles pointing out how dreary, how inhuman, how downright diabolist, is the very smell and atmosphere of some of these great houses. There are plenty of instances; but you couldn’t begin with a better one than the Ear of the Eyres. By the end of the week I think I can get you the truth about it.—Yours ever, FRANCIS FINN.
Mr Nutt reflected a moment, staring at his left boot; then he called out in a strong, loud and entirely lifeless voice, in which every syllable sounded alike: “Miss Barlow, take down a letter to Mr Finn, please.”
DEAR FINN,—I think it would do; copy should reach us second post Saturday.—Yours, E. NUTT.
This elaborate epistle he articulated as if it were all one word; and Miss Barlow rattled it down as if it were all one word. Then he took up another strip of proof and a blue pencil, and altered the word “supernatural” to the word “marvellous”, and the expression “shoot down” to the expression “repress”.
In such happy, healthful activities did Mr Nutt disport himself, until the ensuing Saturday found him at the same desk, dictating to the same typist, and using the same blue pencil on the first instalment of Mr Finn’s revelations. The opening was a sound piece of slashing invective about the evil secrets of princes, and despair in the high places of the earth. Though written violently, it was in excellent English; but the editor, as usual, had given to somebody else the task of breaking it up into sub-headings, which were of a spicier sort, as “Peeress and Poisons”, and “The Eerie Ear”, “The Eyres in their Eyrie”, and so on through a hundred happy changes. Then followed the legend of the Ear, amplified from Finn’s first letter, and then the substance of his later discoveries, as follows:
I know it is the practice of journalists to put the end of the story at the beginning and call it a headline. I know that journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. Your present correspondent thinks that this, like many other journalistic customs, is bad journalism; and that the Daily Reformer has to set a better example in such things. He proposes to tell his story as it occurred, step by step. He will use the real names of the parties, who in most cases are ready to confirm his testimony. As for the headlines, the sensational proclamations—they will come at the end.
I was walking along a public path that threads through a private Devonshire orchard and seems to point towards Devonshire cider, when I came suddenly upon just such a place as the path suggested. It was a long, low inn, consisting really of a cottage and two barns; thatched all over with the thatch that looks like brown and grey hair grown before history. But outside the door was a sign which called it the Blue Dragon; and under the sign was one of those long rustic tables that used to stand outside most of the free English inns, before teetotallers and brewers between them destroyed freedom. And at this table sat three gentlemen, who might have lived a hundred years ago.
Now that I know them all better, there is no difficulty about disentangling the impressions; but just then they looked like three very solid ghosts. The dominant figure, both because he was bigger in all three dimensions, and because he sat centrally in the length of the table, facing me, was a tall, fat man dressed completely in black, with a rubicund, even apoplectic visage, but a rather bald and rather bothered brow. Looking at him again, more strictly, I could not exactly say what it was that gave me the sense of antiquity, except the antique cut of his white clerical necktie and the barred wrinkles across his brow.
It was even less easy to fix the impression in the case of the man at the right end of the table, who, to say truth, was as commonplace a person as could be seen anywhere, with a round, brown-haired head and a round snub nose, but also clad in clerical black, of a stricter cut. It was only when I saw his broad curved hat lying on the table beside him that I realized why I connected him with anything ancient. He was a Roman Catholic priest.
Perhaps the third man, at the other end of the table, had really more to do with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical presence and more inconsiderate in his dress. His lank limbs were clad, I might also say clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons; he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair (which ought to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which, in conjunction with his yellow face, looked rather purple than red. The unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all the more notable because his hair was almost unnaturally healthy and curling, and he wore it full. But, after all analysis, I incline to think that what gave me my first old-fashioned impression was simply a set of tall, old-fashioned wine-glasses, one or two lemons and two churchwarden pipes. And also, perhaps, the old-world errand on which I had come.
Being a hardened reporter, and it being apparently a public inn, I did not need to summon much of my impudence to sit down at the long table and order some cider. The big man in black seemed very learned, especially about local antiquities; the small man in black, though he talked much less, surprised me with a yet wider culture. So we got on very well together; but the third man, the old gentleman in the tight pantaloons, seemed rather distant and haughty, until I slid into the subject of the Duke of Exmoor and his ancestry.
I thought the subject seemed to embarrass the other two a little; but it broke the spell of the third man’s silence most successfully. Speaking with restraint and with the accent of a highly educated gentleman, and puffing at intervals at his long churchwarden pipe, he proceeded to tell me some of the most horrible stories I have ever heard in my life: how one of the Eyres in the former ages had hanged his own father; and another had his wife scourged at the cart tail through the village; and another had set fire to a church full of children, and so on.
Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for public print—, such as the story of the Scarlet Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog, or the thing that was done in the quarry. And all this red roll of impieties came from his thin, genteel lips rather primly than otherwise, as he sat sipping the wine out of his tall, thin glass.
I could see that the big man opposite me was trying, if anything, to stop him; but he evidently held the old gentleman in considerable respect, and could not venture to do so at all abruptly. And the little priest at the other end of the-table, though free from any such air of embarrassment, looked steadily at the table, and seemed to listen to the recital with great pain—as well as he might.
“You don’t seem,” I said to the narrator, “to be very fond of the Exmoor pedigree.”
He looked at me a moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and tightening; then he deliberately broke his long pipe and glass on the table and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the framing temper of a fiend.
“These gentlemen,” he said, “will tell you whether I have cause to like it. The curse of the Eyres of old has lain heavy on this country, and many have suffered from it. They know there are none who have suffered from it as I have.” And with that he crushed a piece of the fallen glass under his heel, and strode away among the green twilight of the twinkling apple-trees.
“That is an extraordinary old gentleman,” I said to the other two; “do you happen to know what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?”
The big man in black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled bull; he did not at first seem to take it in. Then he said at last, “Don’t you know who he is?”
I reaffirmed my ignorance, and there was another silence; then the little priest said, still looking at the table, “That is the Duke of Exmoor.”
Then, before I could collect my scattered senses, he added equally quietly, but with an air of regularizing things: “My friend here is Doctor Mull, the Duke’s librarian. My name is Brown.”
“But,” I stammered, “if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old dukes like that?”
“He seems really to believe,” answered the priest called Brown, “that they have left a curse on him.” Then he added, with some irrelevance, “That’s why he wears a wig.”
It was a few moments before his meaning dawned on me. “You don’t mean that fable about the fantastic ear?” I demanded. “I’ve heard of it, of course, but surely it must be a superstitious yarn spun out of something much simpler. I’ve sometimes thought it was a wild version of one of those mutilation stories. They used to crop criminals’ ears in the sixteenth century.”
“I hardly think it was that,” answered the little man thoughtfully, “but it is not outside ordinary science or natural law for a family to have some deformity frequently reappearing—such as one ear bigger than the other.”
The big librarian had buried his big bald brow in his big red hands, like a man trying to think out his duty. “No,” he groaned. “You do the man a wrong after all. Understand, I’ve no reason to defend him, or even keep faith with him. He has been a tyrant to me as to everybody else. Don’t fancy because you see him sitting here that he isn’t a great lord in the worst sense of the word. He would fetch a man a mile to ring a bell a yard off—if it would summon another man three miles to fetch a matchbox three yards off. He must have a footman to carry his walking-stick; a body servant to hold up his opera-glasses—”
“But not a valet to brush his clothes,” cut in the priest, with a curious dryness, “for the valet would want to brush his wig, too.”
The librarian turned to him and seemed to forget my presence; he was strongly moved and, I think, a little heated with wine. “I don’t know how you know it, Father Brown,” he said, “but you are right. He lets the whole world do everything for him—except dress him. And that he insists on doing in a literal solitude like a desert. Anybody is kicked out of the house without a character who is so much as found near his dressing-room door.,
“He seems a pleasant old party,” I remarked.
“No,” replied Dr Mull quite simply; “and yet that is just what I mean by saying you are unjust to him after all. Gentlemen, the Duke does really feel the bitterness about the curse that he uttered just now. He does, with sincere shame and terror, hide under that purple wig something he thinks it would blast the sons of man to see. I know it is so; and I know it is not a mere natural disfigurement, like a criminal mutilation, or a hereditary disproportion in the features. I know it is worse than that; because a man told me who was present at a scene that no man could invent, where a stronger man than any of us tried to defy the secret, and was scared away from it.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Mull went on in oblivion of me, speaking out of the cavern of his hands. “I don’t mind telling you, Father, because it’s really more defending the poor Duke than giving him away. Didn’t you ever hear of the time when he very nearly lost all the estates?”
The priest shook his head; and the librarian proceeded to tell the tale as he had heard it from his predecessor in the same post, who had been his patron and instructor, and whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up to a certain point it was a common enough tale of the decline of a great family’s fortunes—the tale of a family lawyer. His lawyer, however, had the sense to cheat honestly, if the expression explains itself. Instead of using funds he held in trust, he took advantage of the Duke’s carelessness to put the family in a financial hole, in which it might be necessary for the Duke to let him hold them in reality.
The lawyer’s name was Isaac Green, but the Duke always called him Elisha; presumably in reference to the fact that he was quite bald, though certainly not more than thirty. He had risen very rapidly, but from very dirty beginnings; being first a “nark” or informer, and then a money-lender: but as solicitor to the Eyres he had the sense, as I say, to keep technically straight until he was ready to deal the final blow. The blow fell at dinner; and the old librarian said he should never forget the very look of the lampshades and the decanters, as the little lawyer, with a steady smile, proposed to the great landlord that they should halve the estates between them. The sequel certainly could not be overlooked; for the Duke, in dead silence, smashed a decanter on the man’s bald head as suddenly as I had seen him smash the glass that day in the orchard. It left a red triangular scar on the scalp, and the lawyer’s eyes altered, but not his smile.
He rose tottering to his feet, and struck back as such men do strike. “I am glad of that,” he said, “for now I can take the whole estate. The law will give it to me.”
Exmoor, it seems, was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed. “The law will give it you,” he said; “but you will not take it… Why not? Why? because it would mean the crack of doom for me, and if you take it I shall take off my wig… Why, you pitiful plucked fowl, anyone can see your bare head. But no man shall see mine and live.”
Well, you may say what you like and make it mean what you like. But Mull swears it is the solemn fact that the lawyer, after shaking his knotted fists in the air for an instant, simply ran from the room and never reappeared in the countryside; and since then Exmoor has been feared more for a warlock than even for a landlord and a magistrate.
Now Dr Mull told his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and with a passion I think at least partisan. I was quite conscious of the possibility that the whole was the extravagance of an old braggart and gossip. But before I end this half of my discoveries, I think it due to Dr Mull to record that my two first inquiries have confirmed his story. I learned from an old apothecary in the village that there was a bald man in evening dress, giving the name of Green, who came to him one night to have a three-cornered cut on his forehead plastered. And I learnt from the legal records and old newspapers that there was a lawsuit threatened, and at least begun, by one Green against the Duke of Exmoor.
Mr Nutt, of the Daily Reformer, wrote some highly incongruous words across the top of the copy, made some highly mysterious marks down the side of it, and called to Miss Barlow in the same loud, monotonous voice: “Take down a letter to Mr Finn.”
DEAR FINN,—Your copy will do, but I have had to headline it a bit; and our public would never stand a Romanist priest in the story— you must keep your eye on the suburbs. I’ve altered him to Mr Brown, a Spiritualist.
Yours,
E. NUTT.
A day or two afterward found the active and judicious editor examining, with blue eyes that seemed to grow rounder and rounder, the second instalment of Mr Finn’s tale of mysteries in high life. It began with the words:
I have made an astounding discovery. I freely confess it is quite different from anything I expected to discover, and will give a much more practical shock to the public. I venture to say, without any vanity, that the words I now write will be read all over Europe, and certainly all over America and the Colonies. And yet I heard all I have to tell before I left this same little wooden table in this same little wood of apple-trees.
I owe it all to the small priest Brown; he is an extraordinary man. The big librarian had left the table, perhaps ashamed of his long tongue, perhaps anxious about the storm in which his mysterious master had vanished: anyway, he betook himself heavily in the Duke’s tracks through the trees. Father Brown had picked up one of the lemons and was eyeing it with an odd pleasure.
“What a lovely colour a lemon is!” he said. “There’s one thing I don’t like about the Duke’s wig—the colour.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I answered.
“I dare say he’s got good reason to cover his ears, like King Midas,” went on the priest, with a cheerful simplicity which somehow seemed rather flippant under the circumstances. “I can quite understand that it’s nicer to cover them with hair than with brass plates or leather flaps. But if he wants to use hair, why doesn’t he make it look like hair? There never was hair of that colour in this world. It looks more like a sunset-cloud coming through the wood. Why doesn’t he conceal the family curse better, if he’s really so ashamed of it? Shall I tell you? It’s because he isn’t ashamed of it. He’s proud of it”
“It’s an ugly wig to be proud of—and an ugly story,” I said.
“Consider,” replied this curious little man, “how you yourself really feel about such things. I don’t suggest you’re either more snobbish or more morbid than the rest of us: but don’t you feel in a vague way that a genuine old family curse is rather a fine thing to have? Would you be ashamed, wouldn’t you be a little proud, if the heir of the Glamis horror called you his friend? or if Byron’s family had confided, to you only, the evil adventures of their race? Don’t be too hard on the aristocrats themselves if their heads are as weak as ours would be, and they are snobs about their own sorrows.”
“By Jove!” I cried; “and that’s true enough. My own mother’s family had a banshee; and, now I come to think of it, it has comforted me in many a cold hour.”
“And think,” he went on, “of that stream of blood and poison that spurted from his thin lips the instant you so much as mentioned his ancestors. Why should he show every stranger over such a Chamber of Horrors unless he is proud of it? He doesn’t conceal his wig, he doesn’t conceal his blood, he doesn’t conceal his family curse, he doesn’t conceal the family crimes—but—”
The little man’s voice changed so suddenly, he shut his hand so sharply, and his eyes so rapidly grew rounder and brighter like a waking owl’s, that it had all the abruptness of a small explosion on the table.
“But,” he ended, “he does really conceal his toilet.”
It somehow completed the thrill of my fanciful nerves that at that instant the Duke appeared again silently among the glimmering trees, with his soft foot and sunset-hued hair, coming round the corner of the house in company with his librarian. Before he came within earshot, Father Brown had added quite composedly, “Why does he really hide the secret of what he does with the purple wig? Because it isn’t the sort of secret we suppose.”
The Duke came round the corner and resumed his seat at the head of the table with all his native dignity. The embarrassment of the librarian left him hovering on his hind legs, like a huge bear. The Duke addressed the priest with great seriousness. “Father Brown,” he said, “Doctor Mull informs me that you have come here to make a request. I no longer profess an observance of the religion of my fathers; but for their sakes, and for the sake of the days when we met before, I am very willing to hear you. But I presume you would rather be heard in private.”
Whatever I retain of the gentleman made me stand up. Whatever I have attained of the journalist made me stand still. Before this paralysis could pass, the priest had made a momentarily detaining motion. “If,” he said, “your Grace will permit me my real petition, or if I retain any right to advise you, I would urge that as many people as possible should be present. All over this country I have found hundreds, even of my own faith and flock, whose imaginations are poisoned by the spell which I implore you to break. I wish we could have all Devonshire here to see you do it.”
“To see me do what?” asked the Duke, arching his eyebrows.
“To see you take off your wig,” said Father Brown.
The Duke’s face did not move; but he looked at his petitioner with a glassy stare which was the most awful expression I have ever seen on a human face. I could see the librarian’s great legs wavering under him like the shadows of stems in a pool; and I could not banish from my own brain the fancy that the trees all around us were filling softly in the silence with devils instead of birds.
“I spare you,” said the Duke in a voice of inhuman pity. “I refuse. If I gave you the faintest hint of the load of horror I have to bear alone, you would lie shrieking at these feet of mine and begging to know no more. I will spare you the hint. You shall not spell the first letter of what is written on the altar of the Unknown God.”
“I know the Unknown God,” said the little priest, with an unconscious grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. “I know his name; it is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among us. And I say to you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it. I entreat your Grace to end this nightmare now and here at this table.”
“If I did,” said the Duke in a low voice, “you and all you believe, and all by which alone you live, would be the first to shrivel and perish. You would have an instant to know the great Nothing before you died.”
“The Cross of Christ be between me and harm,” said Father Brown. “Take off your wig.”
I was leaning over the table in ungovernable excitement; in listening to this extraordinary duel half a thought had come into my head. “Your Grace,” I cried, “I call your bluff. Take off that wig or I will knock it off.”
I suppose I can be prosecuted for assault, but I am very glad I did it. When he said, in the same voice of stone, “I refuse,” I simply sprang on him. For three long instants he strained against me as if he had all hell to help him; but I forced his head until the hairy cap fell off it. I admit that, whilst wrestling, I shut my eyes as it fell.
I was awakened by a cry from Mull, who was also by this time at the Duke’s side. His head and mine were both bending over the bald head of the wigless Duke. Then the silence was snapped by the librarian exclaiming: “What can it mean? Why, the man had nothing to hide. His ears are just like everybody else’s.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown, “that is what he had to hide.”
The priest walked straight up to him, but strangely enough did not even glance at his ears. He stared with an almost comical seriousness at his bald forehead, and pointed to a three-cornered cicatrice, long healed, but still discernible. “Mr Green, I think.” he said politely, “and he did get the whole estate after all.”
And now let me tell the readers of the Daily Reformer what I think the most remarkable thing in the whole affair. This transformation scene, which will seem to you as wild and purple as a Persian fairy-tale, has been (except for my technical assault) strictly legal and constitutional from its first beginnings. This man with the odd scar and the ordinary ears is not an impostor. Though (in one sense) he wears another man’s wig and claims another man’s ear, he has not stolen another man’s coronet. He really is the one and only Duke of Exmoor. What happened was this. The old Duke really had a slight malformation of the ear, which really was more or less hereditary. He really was morbid about it; and it is likely enough that he did invoke it as a kind of curse in the violent scene (which undoubtedly happened) in which he struck Green with the decanter. But the contest ended very differently. Green pressed his claim and got the estates; the dispossessed nobleman shot himself and died without issue. After a decent interval the beautiful English Government revived the “extinct” peerage of Exmoor, and bestowed it, as is usual, on the most important person, the person who had got the property.
This man used the old feudal fables—properly, in his snobbish soul, really envied and admired them. So that thousands of poor English people trembled before a mysterious chieftain with an ancient destiny and a diadem of evil stars—when they are really trembling before a guttersnipe who was a pettifogger and a pawnbroker not twelve years ago. I think it very typical of the real case against our aristocracy as it is, and as it will be till God sends us braver men.
Mr Nutt put down the manuscript and called out with unusual sharpness: “Miss Barlow, please take down a letter to Mr Finn.”
DEAR FINN,—You must be mad; we can’t touch this. I wanted vampires and the bad old days and aristocracy hand-in-hand with superstition. They like that But you must know the Exmoors would never forgive this. And what would our people say then, I should like to know! Why, Sir Simon is one of Exmoor’s greatest pals; and it would ruin that cousin of the Eyres that’s standing for us at Bradford. Besides, old Soap-Suds was sick enough at not getting his peerage last year; he’d sack me by wire if I lost him it with such lunacy as this. And what about Duffey? He’s doing us some rattling articles on “The Heel of the Norman.” And how can he write about Normans if the man’s only a solicitor? Do be reasonable.—Yours, E. NUTT.
As Miss Barlow rattled away cheerfully, he crumpled up the copy and tossed it into the waste-paper basket; but not before he had, automatically and by force of habit, altered the word “God” to the word “circumstances.”
EIGHT
The Perishing of the Pendragons
FATHER BROWN was in no mood for adventures. He had lately fallen ill with over-work, and when he began to recover, his friend Flambeau had taken him on a cruise in a small yacht with Sir Cecil Fanshaw, a young Cornish squire and an enthusiast for Cornish coast scenery. But Brown was still rather weak; he was no very happy sailor; and though he was never of the sort that either grumbles or breaks down, his spirits did not rise above patience and civility. When the other two men praised the ragged violet sunset or the ragged volcanic crags, he agreed with them. When Flambeau pointed out a rock shaped like a dragon, he looked at it and thought it very like a dragon. When Fanshaw more excitedly indicated a rock that was like Merlin, he looked at it, and signified assent. When Flambeau asked whether this rocky gate of the twisted river was not the gate of Fairyland, he said “Yes.” He heard the most important things and the most trivial with the same tasteless absorption. He heard that the coast was death to all but careful seamen; he also heard that the ship’s cat was asleep. He heard that Fanshaw couldn’t find his cigar-holder anywhere; he also heard the pilot deliver the oracle “Both eyes bright, she’s all right; one eye winks, down she sinks.” He heard Flambeau say to Fanshaw that no doubt this meant the pilot must keep both eyes open and be spry. And he heard Fanshaw say to Flambeau that, oddly enough, it didn’t mean this: it meant that while they saw two of the coast lights, one near and the other distant, exactly side by side, they were in the right river-channel; but that if one light was hidden behind the other, they were going on the rocks. He heard Fanshaw add that his country was full of such quaint fables and idioms; it was the very home of romance; he even pitted this part of Cornwall against Devonshire, as a claimant to the laurels of Elizabethan seamanship. According to him there had been captains among these coves and islets compared with whom Drake was practically a landsman. He heard Flambeau laugh, and ask if, perhaps, the adventurous title of “Westward Ho!” only meant that all Devonshire men wished they were living in Cornwall. He heard Fanshaw say there was no need to be silly; that not only had Cornish captains been heroes, but that they were heroes still: that near that very spot there was an old admiral, now retired, who was scarred by thrilling voyages full of adventures; and who had in his youth found the last group of eight Pacific Islands that was added to the chart of the world. This Cecil Fanshaw was, in person, of the kind that commonly urges such crude but pleasing enthusiasms; a very young man, light-haired, high-coloured, with an eager profile; with a boyish bravado of spirits, but an almost girlish delicacy of tint and type. The big shoulders, black brows and black mousquetaire swagger of Flambeau were a great contrast.
All these trivialities Brown heard and saw; but heard them as a tired man hears a tune in the railway wheels, or saw them as a sick man sees the pattern of his wall-paper. No one can calculate the turns of mood in convalescence: but Father Brown’s depression must have had a great deal to do with his mere unfamiliarity with the sea. For as the river mouth narrowed like the neck of a bottle, and the water grew calmer and the air warmer and more earthly, he seemed to wake up and take notice like a baby. They had reached that phase just after sunset when air and water both look bright, but earth and all its growing things look almost black by comparison. About this particular evening, however, there was something exceptional. It was one of those rare atmospheres in which a smoked-glass slide seems to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on cloudier days. The trampled earth of the river-banks and the peaty stain in the pools did not look drab but glowing umber, and the dark woods astir in the breeze did not look, as usual, dim blue with mere depth of distance, but more like wind-tumbled masses of some vivid violet blossom. This magic clearness and intensity in the colours was further forced on Brown’s slowly reviving senses by something romantic and even secret in the very form of the landscape.
The river was still well wide and deep enough for a pleasure boat so small as theirs; but the curves of the country-side suggested that it was closing in on either hand; the woods seemed to be making broken and flying attempts at bridge-building—as if the boat were passing from the romance of a valley to the romance of a hollow and so to the supreme romance of a tunnel. Beyond this mere look of things there was little for Brown’s freshening fancy to feed on; he saw no human beings, except some gipsies trailing along the river bank, with faggots and osiers cut in the forest; and one sight no longer unconventional, but in such remote parts still uncommon: a dark-haired lady, bare-headed, and paddling her own canoe. If Father Brown ever attached any importance to either of these, he certainly forgot them at the next turn of the river which brought in sight a singular object.
The water seemed to widen and split, being cloven by the dark wedge of a fish-shaped and wooded islet. With the rate at which they went, the islet seemed to swim towards them like a ship; a ship with a very high prow—or, to speak more strictly, a very high funnel. For at the extreme point nearest them stood up an odd-looking building, unlike anything they could remember or connect with any purpose. It was not specially high, but it was too high for its breadth to be called anything but a tower. Yet it appeared to be built entirely of wood, and that in a most unequal and eccentric way. Some of the planks and beams were of good, seasoned oak; some of such wood cut raw and recent; some again of white pinewood, and a great deal more of the same sort of wood painted black with tar. These black beams were set crooked or crisscross at all kinds of angles, giving the whole a most patchy and puzzling appearance. There were one or two windows, which appeared to be coloured and leaded in an old-fashioned but more elaborate style. The travellers looked at it with that paradoxical feeling we have when something reminds us of something, and yet we are certain it is something very different.
Father Brown, even when he was mystified, was clever in analysing his own mystification. And he found himself reflecting that the oddity seemed to consist in a particular shape cut out in an incongruous material; as if one saw a top-hat made of tin, or a frock-coat cut out of tartan. He was sure he had seen timbers of different tints arranged like that somewhere, but never in such architectural proportions. The next moment a glimpse through the dark trees told him all he wanted to know and he laughed. Through a gap in the foliage there appeared for a moment one of those old wooden houses, faced with black beams, which are still to be found here and there in England, but which most of us see imitated in some show called “Old London” or “Shakespeare’s England’. It was in view only long enough for the priest to see that, however old-fashioned, it was a comfortable and well-kept country-house, with flower-beds in front of it. It had none of the piebald and crazy look of the tower that seemed made out of its refuse.
“What on earth’s this?” said Flambeau, who was still staring at the tower.
Fanshaw’s eyes were shining, and he spoke triumphantly. “Aha! you’ve not seen a place quite like this before, I fancy; that’s why I’ve brought you here, my friend. Now you shall see whether I exaggerate about the mariners of Cornwall. This place belongs to Old Pendragon, whom we call the Admiral; though he retired before getting the rank. The spirit of Raleigh and Hawkins is a memory with the Devon folk; it’s a modern fact with the Pendragons. If Queen Elizabeth were to rise from the grave and come up this river in a gilded barge, she would be received by the Admiral in a house exactly such as she was accustomed to, in every corner and casement, in every panel on the wall or plate on the table. And she would find an English Captain still talking fiercely of fresh lands to be found in little ships, as much as if she had dined with Drake.”
“She’d find a rum sort of thing in the garden,” said Father Brown, “which would not please her Renaissance eye. That Elizabethan domestic architecture is charming in its way; but it’s against the very nature of it to break out into turrets.”
“And yet,” answered Fanshaw, “that’s the most romantic and Elizabethan part of the business. It was built by the Pendragons in the very days of the Spanish wars; and though it’s needed patching and even rebuilding for another reason, it’s always been rebuilt in the old way. The story goes that the lady of Sir Peter Pendragon built it in this place and to this height, because from the top you can just see the corner where vessels turn into the river mouth; and she wished to be the first to see her husband’s ship, as he sailed home from the Spanish Main.”
“For what other reason,” asked Father Brown, “do you mean that it has been rebuilt?”
“Oh, there’s a strange story about that, too,” said the young squire with relish. “You are really in a land of strange stories. King Arthur was here and Merlin and the fairies before him. The story goes that Sir Peter Pendragon, who (I fear) had some of the faults of the pirates as well as the virtues of the sailor, was bringing home three Spanish gentlemen in honourable captivity, intending to escort them to Elizabeth’s court. But he was a man of flaming and tigerish temper, and coming to high words with one of them, he caught him by the throat and flung him by accident or design, into the sea. A second Spaniard, who was the brother of the first, instantly drew his sword and flew at Pendragon, and after a short but furious combat in which both got three wounds in as many minutes, Pendragon drove his blade through the other’s body and the second Spaniard was accounted for. As it happened the ship had already turned into the river mouth and was close to comparatively shallow water. The third Spaniard sprang over the side of the ship, struck out for the shore, and was soon near enough to it to stand up to his waist in water. And turning again to face the ship, and holding up both arms to Heaven—like a prophet calling plagues upon a wicked city— he called out to Pendragon in a piercing and terrible voice, that he at least was yet living, that he would go on living, that he would live for ever; and that generation after generation the house of Pendragon should never see him or his, but should know by very certain signs that he and his vengeance were alive. With that he dived under the wave, and was either drowned or swam so long under water that no hair of his head was seen afterwards.”
“There’s that girl in the canoe again,” said Flambeau irrelevantly, for good-looking young women would call him off any topic. “She seems bothered by the queer tower just as we were.”
Indeed, the black-haired young lady was letting her canoe float slowly and silently past the strange islet; and was looking intently up at the strange tower, with a strong glow of curiosity on her oval and olive face.
“Never mind girls,” said Fanshaw impatiently, “there are plenty of them in the world, but not many things like the Pendragon Tower. As you may easily suppose, plenty of superstitions and scandals have followed in the track of the Spaniard’s curse; and no doubt, as you would put it, any accident happening to this Cornish family would be connected with it by rural credulity. But it is perfectly true that this tower has been burnt down two or three times; and the family can’t be called lucky, for more than two, I think, of the Admiral’s near kin have perished by shipwreck; and one at least, to my own knowledge, on practically the same spot where Sir Peter threw the Spaniard overboard.”
“What a pity!” exclaimed Flambeau. “She’s going.”
“When did your friend the Admiral tell you this family history?” asked Father Brown, as the girl in the canoe paddled off, without showing the least intention of extending her interest from the tower to the yacht, which Fanshaw had already caused to lie alongside the island.
“Many years ago,” replied Fanshaw; “he hasn’t been to sea for some time now, though he is as keen on it as ever. I believe there’s a family compact or something. Well, here’s the landing stage; let’s come ashore and see the old boy.”
They followed him on to the island, just under the tower, and Father Brown, whether from the mere touch of dry land, or the interest of something on the other bank of the river (which he stared at very hard for some seconds), seemed singularly improved in briskness. They entered a wooded avenue between two fences of thin greyish wood, such as often enclose parks or gardens, and over the top of which the dark trees tossed to and fro like black and purple plumes upon the hearse of a giant. The tower, as they left it behind, looked all the quainter, because such entrances are usually flanked by two towers; and this one looked lopsided. But for this, the avenue had the usual appearance of the entrance to a gentleman’s grounds; and, being so curved that the house was now out of sight, somehow looked a much larger park than any plantation on such an island could really be. Father Brown was, perhaps, a little fanciful in his fatigue, but he almost thought the whole place must be growing larger, as things do in a nightmare. Anyhow, a mystical monotony was the only character of their march, until Fanshaw suddenly stopped, and pointed to something sticking out through the grey fence— something that looked at first rather like the imprisoned horn of some beast. Closer observation showed that it was a slightly curved blade of metal that shone faintly in the fading light.
Flambeau, who like all Frenchmen had been a soldier, bent over it and said in a startled voice: “Why, it’s a sabre! I believe I know the sort, heavy and curved, but shorter than the cavalry; they used to have them in artillery and the—”
As he spoke the blade plucked itself out of the crack it had made and came down again with a more ponderous slash, splitting the fissiparous fence to the bottom with a rending noise. Then it was pulled out again, flashed above the fence some feet further along, and again split it halfway down with the first stroke; and after waggling a little to extricate itself (accompanied with curses in the darkness) split it down to the ground with a second. Then a kick of devilish energy sent the whole loosened square of thin wood flying into the pathway, and a great gap of dark coppice gaped in the paling.
Fanshaw peered into the dark opening and uttered an exclamation of astonishment. “My dear Admiral!” he exclaimed, “do you—er— do you generally cut out a new front door whenever you want to go for a walk?”
The voice in the gloom swore again, and then broke into a jolly laugh. “No,” it said; “I’ve really got to cut down this fence somehow; it’s spoiling all the plants, and no one else here can do it. But I’ll only carve another bit off the front door, and then come out and welcome you.”
And sure enough, he heaved up his weapon once more, and, hacking twice, brought down another and similar strip of fence, making the opening about fourteen feet wide in all. Then through this larger forest gateway he came out into the evening light, with a chip of grey wood sticking to his sword-blade.
He momentarily fulfilled all Fanshaw’s fable of an old piratical Admiral; though the details seemed afterwards to decompose into accidents. For instance, he wore a broad-brimmed hat as protection against the sun; but the front flap of it was turned up straight to the sky, and the two corners pulled down lower than the ears, so that it stood across his forehead in a crescent like the old cocked hat worn by Nelson. He wore an ordinary dark-blue jacket, with nothing special about the buttons, but the combination of it with white linen trousers somehow had a sailorish look. He was tall and loose, and walked with a sort of swagger, which was not a sailor’s roll, and yet somehow suggested it; and he held in his hand a short sabre which was like a navy cutlass, but about twice as big. Under the bridge of the hat his eagle face looked eager, all the more because it was not only clean-shaven, but without eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the hair had come off his face from his thrusting it through a throng of elements. His eyes were prominent and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while partly tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly, but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides— Father Brown thought he had never seen a figure so expressive of all the romances about the countries of the Sun.
When Fanshaw had presented his two friends to their host he fell again into a tone of rallying the latter about his wreckage of the fence and his apparent rage of profanity. The Admiral pooh-poohed it at first as a piece of necessary but annoying garden work; but at length the ring of real energy came back into his laughter, and he cried with a mixture of impatience and good humour:
“Well, perhaps I do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel a kind of pleasure in smashing anything. So would you if your only pleasure was in cruising about to find some new Cannibal Islands, and you had to stick on this muddy little rockery in a sort of rustic pond. When I remember how I’ve cut down a mile and a half of green poisonous jungle with an old cutlass half as sharp as this; and then remember I must stop here and chop this matchwood, because of some confounded old bargain scribbled in a family Bible, why, I—”
He swung up the heavy steel again; and this time sundered the wall of wood from top to bottom at one stroke.
“I feel like that,” he said laughing, but furiously flinging the sword some yards down the path, “and now let’s go up to the house; you must have some dinner.”
The semicircle of lawn in front of the house was varied by three circular garden beds, one of red tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and the third of some white, waxen-looking blossoms that the visitors did not know and presumed to be exotic. A heavy, hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener was hanging up a heavy coil of garden hose. The corners of the expiring sunset, which seemed to cling about the corners of the house, gave glimpses here and there of the colours of remoter flowerbeds; and in a treeless space on one side of the house opening upon the river stood a tall brass tripod on which was tilted a big brass telescope. Just outside the steps of the porch stood a little painted green garden table, as if someone had just had tea there. The entrance was flanked with two of those half-featured lumps of stone with holes for eyes that are said to be South Sea idols; and on the brown oak beam across the doorway were some confused carvings that looked almost as barbaric.
As they passed indoors, the little cleric hopped suddenly on to the table, and standing on it peered unaffectedly through his spectacles at the mouldings in the oak. Admiral Pendragon looked very much astonished, though not particularly annoyed; while Fanshaw was so amused with what looked like a performing pigmy on his little stand, that he could not control his laughter. But Father Brown was not likely to notice either the laughter or the astonishment.
He was gazing at three carved symbols, which, though very worn and obscure, seemed still to convey some sense to him. The first seemed to be the outline of some tower or other building, crowned with what looked like curly-pointed ribbons. The second was clearer: an old Elizabethan galley with decorative waves beneath it, but interrupted in the middle by a curious jagged rock, which was either a fault in the wood or some conventional representation of the water coming in. The third represented the upper half of a human figure, ending in an escalloped line like the waves; the face was rubbed and featureless, and both arms were held very stiffly up in the air.
“Well,” muttered Father Brown, blinking, “here is the legend of the Spaniard plain enough. Here he is holding up his arms and cursing in the sea; and here are the two curses: the wrecked ship and the burning of Pendragon Tower.”
Pendragon shook his head with a kind of venerable amusement. “And how many other things might it not be?” he said. “Don’t you know that that sort of half-man, like a half-lion or half-stag, is quite common in heraldry? Might not that line through the ship be one of those parti-per-pale lines, indented, I think they call it? And though the third thing isn’t so very heraldic, it would be more heraldic to suppose it a tower crowned with laurel than with fire; and it looks just as like it.”
“But it seems rather odd,” said Flambeau, “that it should exactly confirm the old legend.”
“Ah,” replied the sceptical traveller, “but you don’t know how much of the old legend may have been made up from the old figures. Besides, it isn’t the only old legend. Fanshaw, here, who is fond of such things, will tell you there are other versions of the tale, and much more horrible ones. One story credits my unfortunate ancestor with having had the Spaniard cut in two; and that will fit the pretty picture also. Another obligingly credits our family with the possession of a tower full of snakes and explains those little, wriggly things in that way. And a third theory supposes the crooked line on the ship to be a conventionalized thunderbolt; but that alone, if seriously examined, would show what a very little way these unhappy coincidences really go.”
“Why, how do you mean?” asked Fanshaw.
“It so happens,” replied his host coolly, “that there was no thunder and lightning at all in the two or three shipwrecks I know of in our family.”
“Oh!” said Father Brown, and jumped down from the little table.
There was another silence in which they heard the continuous murmur of the river; then Fanshaw said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed tone: “Then you don’t think there is anything in the tales of the tower in flames?”
“There are the tales, of course,” said the Admiral, shrugging his shoulders; “and some of them, I don’t deny, on evidence as decent as one ever gets for such things. Someone saw a blaze hereabout, don’t you know, as he walked home through a wood; someone keeping sheep on the uplands inland thought he saw a flame hovering over Pendragon Tower. Well, a damp dab of mud like this confounded island seems the last place where one would think of fires.”
“What is that fire over there?” asked Father Brown with a gentle suddenness, pointing to the woods on the left river-bank. They were all thrown a little off their balance, and the more fanciful Fanshaw had even some difficulty in recovering his, as they saw a long, thin stream of blue smoke ascending silently into the end of the evening light.
Then Pendragon broke into a scornful laugh again. “Gipsies!” he said; “they’ve been camping about here for about a week. Gentlemen, you want your dinner,” and he turned as if to enter the house.
But the antiquarian superstition in Fanshaw was still quivering, and he said hastily: “But, Admiral, what’s that hissing noise quite near the island? It’s very like fire.”
“It’s more like what it is,” said the Admiral, laughing as he led the way; “it’s only some canoe going by.”
Almost as he spoke, the butler, a lean man in black, with very black hair and a very long, yellow face, appeared in the doorway and told him that dinner was served.
The dining-room was as nautical as the cabin of a ship; but its note was rather that of the modern than the Elizabethan captain. There were, indeed, three antiquated cutlasses in a trophy over the fireplace, and one brown sixteenth-century map with Tritons and little ships dotted about a curly sea. But such things were less prominent on the white panelling than some cases of quaint-coloured South American birds, very scientifically stuffed, fantastic shells from the Pacific, and several instruments so rude and queer in shape that savages might have used them either to kill their enemies or to cook them. But the alien colour culminated in the fact that, besides the butler, the Admiral’s only servants were two negroes, somewhat quaintly clad in tight uniforms of yellow. The priest’s instinctive trick of analysing his own impressions told him that the colour and the little neat coat-tails of these bipeds had suggested the word “Canary,” and so by a mere pun connected them with southward travel. Towards the end of the dinner they took their yellow clothes and black faces out of the room, leaving only the black clothes and yellow face of the butler.
“I’m rather sorry you take this so lightly,” said Fanshaw to the host; “for the truth is, I’ve brought these friends of mine with the idea of their helping you, as they know a good deal of these things. Don’t you really believe in the family story at all?”
“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”
Rather to Flambeau’s surprise, his clerical friend, who seemed to have entirely woken up, took up the digression and talked natural history with his host with a flow of words and much unexpected information, until the dessert and decanters were set down and the last of the servants vanished. Then he said, without altering his tone.
“Please don’t think me impertinent, Admiral Pendragon. I don’t ask for curiosity, but really for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made a bad shot if I guess you don’t want these old things talked of before your butler?”
The Admiral lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and exclaimed: “Well, I don’t know where you got it, but the truth is I can’t stand the fellow, though I’ve no excuse for discharging a family servant. Fanshaw, with his fairy tales, would say my blood moved against men with that black, Spanish-looking hair.”
Flambeau struck the table with his heavy fist. “By Jove!” he cried; “and so had that girl!”
“I hope it’ll all end tonight,” continued the Admiral, “when my nephew comes back safe from his ship. You looked surprised. You won’t understand, I suppose, unless I tell you the story. You see, my father had two sons; I remained a bachelor, but my elder brother married, and had a son who became a sailor like all the rest of us, and will inherit the proper estate. Well, my father was a strange man; he somehow combined Fanshaw’s superstition with a good deal of my scepticism—they were always fighting in him; and after my first voyages, he developed a notion which he thought somehow would settle finally whether the curse was truth or trash. If all the Pendragons sailed about anyhow, he thought there would be too much chance of natural catastrophes to prove anything. But if we went to sea one at a time in strict order of succession to the property, he thought it might show whether any connected fate followed the family as a family. It was a silly notion, I think, and I quarrelled with my father pretty heartily; for I was an ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by succession, after my own nephew.”
“And your father and brother,” said the priest, very gently, “died at sea, I fear.”
“Yes,” groaned the Admiral; “by one of those brutal accidents on which are built all the lying mythologies of mankind, they were both shipwrecked. My father, coming up this coast out of the Atlantic, was washed up on these Cornish rocks. My brother’s ship was sunk, no one knows where, on the voyage home from Tasmania. His body was never found. I tell you it was from perfectly natural mishap; lots of other people besides Pendragons were drowned; and both disasters are discussed in a normal way by navigators. But, of course, it set this forest of superstition on fire; and men saw the flaming tower everywhere. That’s why I say it will be all right when Walter returns. The girl he’s engaged to was coming today; but I was so afraid of some chance delay frightening her that I wired her not to come till she heard from me. But he’s practically sure to be here some time tonight, and then it’ll all end in smoke— tobacco smoke. We’ll crack that old lie when we crack a bottle of this wine.”
“Very good wine,” said Father Brown, gravely lifting his glass, “but, as you see, a very bad wine-bibber. I most sincerely beg your pardon”: for he had spilt a small spot of wine on the table-cloth. He drank and put down the glass with a composed face; but his hand had started at the exact moment when he became conscious of a face looking in through the garden window just behind the Admiral— the face of a woman, swarthy, with southern hair and eyes, and young, but like a mask of tragedy.
After a pause the priest spoke again in his mild manner. “Admiral,” he said, “will you do me a favour? Let me, and my friends if they like, stop in that tower of yours just for tonight? Do you know that in my business you’re an exorcist almost before anything else?”
Pendragon sprang to his feet and paced swiftly to and fro across the window, from which the face had instantly vanished. “I tell you there is nothing in it,” he cried, with ringing violence. “There is one thing I know about this matter. You may call me an atheist. I am an atheist.” Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a face of frightful concentration. “This business is perfectly natural. There is no curse in it at all.”
Father Brown smiled. “In that case,” he said, “there can’t be any objection to my sleeping in your delightful summer-house.”
“The idea is utterly ridiculous,” replied the Admiral, beating a tattoo on the back of his chair.
“Please forgive me for everything,” said Brown in his most sympathetic tone, “including spilling the wine. But it seems to me you are not quite so easy about the flaming tower as you try to be.”
Admiral Pendragon sat down again as abruptly as he had risen; but he sat quite still, and when he spoke again it was in a lower voice. “You do it at your own peril,” he said; “but wouldn’t you be an atheist to keep sane in all this devilry?”
Some three hours afterwards Fanshaw, Flambeau and the priest were still dawdling about the garden in the dark; and it began to dawn on the other two that Father Brown had no intention of going to bed either in the tower or the house.
“I think the lawn wants weeding,” said he dreamily. “If I could find a spud or something I’d do it myself.”
They followed him, laughing and half remonstrating; but he replied with the utmost solemnity, explaining to them, in a maddening little sermon, that one can always find some small occupation that is helpful to others. He did not find a spud; but he found an old broom made of twigs, with which he began energetically to brush the fallen leaves off the grass.
“Always some little thing to be done,” he said with idiotic cheerfulness; “as George Herbert says: ‘Who sweeps an Admiral’s garden in Cornwall as for Thy laws makes that and the action fine.’ And now,” he added, suddenly slinging the broom away, “Let’s go and water the flowers.”
With the same mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some considerable lengths of the large garden hose, saying with an air of wistful discrimination: “The red tulips before the yellow, I think. Look a bit dry, don’t you think?”
He turned the little tap on the instrument, and the water shot out straight and solid as a long rod of steel.
“Look out, Samson,” cried Flambeau; “why, you’ve cut off the tulip’s head.”
Father Brown stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plant.
“Mine does seem to be a rather kill or cure sort of watering,” he admitted, scratching his head. “I suppose it’s a pity I didn’t find the spud. You should have seen me with the spud! Talking of tools, you’ve got that swordstick, Flambeau, you always carry? That’s right; and Sir Cecil could have that sword the Admiral threw away by the fence here. How grey everything looks!”
“The mist’s rising from the river,” said the staring Flambeau.
Almost as he spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on a higher ridge of the trenched and terraced lawn, hailing them with a brandished rake and a horribly bellowing voice. “Put down that hose,” he shouted; “put down that hose and go to your—”
“I am fearfully clumsy,” replied the reverend gentleman weakly; “do you know, I upset some wine at dinner.” He made a wavering half-turn of apology towards the gardener, with the hose still spouting in his hand. The gardener caught the cold crash of the water full in his face like the crash of a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped and went sprawling with his boots in the air.
“How very dreadful!” said Father Brown, looking round in a sort of wonder. “Why, I’ve hit a man!”
He stood with his head forward for a moment as if looking or listening; and then set off at a trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose behind him. The tower was quite close, but its outline was curiously dim.
“Your river mist,” he said, “has a rum smell.”
“By the Lord it has,” cried Fanshaw, who was very white. “But you can’t mean—”
“I mean,” said Father Brown, “that one of the Admiral’s scientific predictions is coming true tonight. This story is going to end in smoke.”
As he spoke a most beautiful rose-red light seemed to burst into blossom like a gigantic rose; but accompanied with a crackling and rattling noise that was like the laughter of devils.
“My God! what is this?” cried Sir Cecil Fanshaw.
“The sign of the flaming tower,” said Father Brown, and sent the driving water from his hose into the heart of the red patch.
“Lucky we hadn’t gone to bed!” ejaculated Fanshaw. “I suppose it can’t spread to the house.”
“You may remember,” said the priest quietly, “that the wooden fence that might have carried it was cut away.”
Flambeau turned electrified eyes upon his friend, but Fanshaw only said rather absently: “Well, nobody can be killed, anyhow.”
“This is rather a curious kind of tower,” observed Father Brown, “when it takes to killing people, it always kills people who are somewhere else.”
At the same instant the monstrous figure of the gardener with the streaming beard stood again on the green ridge against the sky, waving others to come on; but now waving not a rake but a cutlass. Behind him came the two negroes, also with the old crooked cutlasses out of the trophy. But in the blood-red glare, with their black faces and yellow figures, they looked like devils carrying instruments of torture. In the dim garden behind them a distant voice was heard calling out brief directions. When the priest heard the voice, a terrible change came over his countenance.
But he remained composed; and never took his eye off the patch of flame which had begun by spreading, but now seemed to shrink a little as it hissed under the torch of the long silver spear of water. He kept his finger along the nozzle of the pipe to ensure the aim, and attended to no other business, knowing only by the noise and that semi-conscious corner of the eye, the exciting incidents that began to tumble themselves about the island garden. He gave two brief directions to his friends. One was: “Knock these fellows down somehow and tie them up, whoever they are; there’s rope down by those faggots. They want to take away my nice hose.” The other was: “As soon as you get a chance, call out to that canoeing girl; she’s over on the bank with the gipsies. Ask her if they could get some buckets across and fill them from the river.” Then he closed his mouth and continued to water the new red flower as ruthlessly as he had watered the red tulip.
He never turned his head to look at the strange fight that followed between the foes and friends of the mysterious fire. He almost felt the island shake when Flambeau collided with the huge gardener; he merely imagined how it would whirl round them as they wrestled. He heard the crashing fall; and his friend’s gasp of triumph as he dashed on to the first negro; and the cries of both the blacks as Flambeau and Fanshaw bound them. Flambeau’s enormous strength more than redressed the odds in the fight, especially as the fourth man still hovered near the house, only a shadow and a voice. He heard also the water broken by the paddles of a canoe; the girl’s voice giving orders, the voices of gipsies answering and coming nearer, the plumping and sucking noise of empty buckets plunged into a full stream; and finally the sound of many feet around the fire. But all this was less to him than the fact that the red rent, which had lately once more increased, had once more slightly diminished.
Then came a cry that very nearly made him turn his head. Flambeau and Fanshaw, now reinforced by some of the gipsies, had rushed after the mysterious man by the house; and he heard from the other end of the garden the Frenchman’s cry of horror and astonishment. It was echoed by a howl not to be called human, as the being broke from their hold and ran along the garden. Three times at least it raced round the whole island, in a way that was as horrible as the chase of a lunatic, both in the cries of the pursued and the ropes carried by the pursuers; but was more horrible still, because it somehow suggested one of the chasing games of children in a garden. Then, finding them closing in on every side, the figure sprang upon one of the higher river banks and disappeared with a splash into the dark and driving river.
“You can do no more, I fear,” said Brown in a voice cold with pain. “He has been washed down to the rocks by now, where he has sent so many others. He knew the use of a family legend.”
“Oh, don’t talk in these parables,” cried Flambeau impatiently. “Can’t you put it simply in words of one syllable?”
“Yes,” answered Brown, with his eye on the hose. “‘Both eyes bright, she’s all right; one eye blinks, down she sinks.’”
The fire hissed and shrieked more and more, like a strangled thing, as it grew narrower and narrower under the flood from the pipe and buckets, but Father Brown still kept his eye on it as he went on speaking:
“I thought of asking this young lady, if it were morning yet, to look through that telescope at the river mouth and the river. She might have seen something to interest her: the sign of the ship, or Mr Walter Pendragon coming home, and perhaps even the sign of the half-man, for though he is certainly safe by now, he may very well have waded ashore. He has been within a shave of another shipwreck; and would never have escaped it, if the lady hadn’t had the sense to suspect the old Admiral’s telegram and come down to watch him. Don’t let’s talk about the old Admiral. Don’t let’s talk about anything. It’s enough to say that whenever this tower, with its pitch and resin-wood, really caught fire, the spark on the horizon always looked like the twin light to the coast light-house.”
“And that,” said Flambeau, “is how the father and brother died. The wicked uncle of the legends very nearly got his estate after all.”
Father Brown did not answer; indeed, he did not speak again, save for civilities, till they were all safe round a cigar-box in the cabin of the yacht. He saw that the frustrated fire was extinguished; and then refused to linger, though he actually heard young Pendragon, escorted by an enthusiastic crowd, come tramping up the river bank; and might (had he been moved by romantic curiosities) have received the combined thanks of the man from the ship and the girl from the canoe. But his fatigue had fallen on him once more, and he only started once, when Flambeau abruptly told him he had dropped cigar-ash on his trousers.
“That’s no cigar-ash,” he said rather wearily. “That’s from the fire, but you don’t think so because you’re all smoking cigars. That’s just the way I got my first faint suspicion about the chart.”
“Do you mean Pendragon’s chart of his Pacific Islands?” asked Fanshaw.
“You thought it was a chart of the Pacific Islands,” answered Brown. “Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it’s a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it’s for a lady’s hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they’ve seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was the map of this river.”
“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.
NINE
The God of the Gongs
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.
But he was a very different figure from the confused mass of white and black that had appeared for an instant in the doorway. He was buttoned and buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion. A tall black hat was tilted on his broad black head— a hat of the sort that the French wit has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black man was like the black hat. He also was black, and yet his glossy skin flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is needless to say that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat. The red flower stood up in his buttonhole aggressively, as if it had suddenly grown there. And in the way he carried his cane in one hand and his cigar in the other there was a certain attitude— an attitude we must always remember when we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent and insolent—the cake walk.
“Sometimes,” said Flambeau, looking after him, “I’m not surprised that they lynch them.”
“I am never surprised,” said Father Brown, “at any work of hell. But as I was saying,” he resumed, as the negro, still ostentatiously pulling on his yellow gloves, betook himself briskly towards the watering-place, a queer music-hall figure against that grey and frosty scene—“as I was saying, I couldn’t describe the man very minutely, but he had a flourish and old-fashioned whiskers and moustachios, dark or dyed, as in the pictures of foreign financiers, round his neck was wrapped a long purple scarf that thrashed out in the wind as he walked. It was fixed at the throat rather in the way that nurses fix children’s comforters with a safety-pin. Only this,” added the priest, gazing placidly out to sea, “was not a safety-pin.”
The man sitting on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to sea. Now he was once more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that one of his eyes was naturally larger than the other. Both were now well opened, and he could almost fancy the left eye grew larger as he gazed.
“It was a very long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or some such thing,” continued the cleric; “and it was fixed in a rather odd way—he wore pince-nez and a broad black—”
The motionless man continued to gaze at the sea, and the eyes in his head might have belonged to two different men. Then he made a movement of blinding swiftness.
Father Brown had his back to him, and in that flash might have fallen dead on his face. Flambeau had no weapon, but his large brown hands were resting on the end of the long iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered their shape, and he heaved the whole huge thing high over his head, like a headsman’s axe about to fall. The mere height of the thing, as he held it vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by which he was inviting men to climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in the level evening light, looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It was the shock of that shadow, before the shock of the iron crash, that made the stranger quail and dodge, and then dart into his inn, leaving the flat and shining dagger he had dropped exactly where it had fallen.
“We must get away from here instantly,” cried Flambeau, flinging the huge seat away with furious indifference on the beach. He caught the little priest by the elbow and ran him down a grey perspective of barren back garden, at the end of which there was a closed back garden door. Flambeau bent over it an instant in violent silence, and then said: “The door is locked.”
As he spoke a black feather from one of the ornamental firs fell, brushing the brim of his hat. It startled him more than the small and distant detonation that had come just before. Then came another distant detonation, and the door he was trying to open shook under the bullet buried in it. Flambeau’s shoulders again filled out and altered suddenly. Three hinges and a lock burst at the same instant, and he went out into the empty path behind, carrying the great garden door with him, as Samson carried the gates of Gaza.
Then he flung the garden door over the garden wall, just as a third shot picked up a spurt of snow and dust behind his heel. Without ceremony he snatched up the little priest, slung him astraddle on his shoulders, and went racing towards Seawood as fast as his long legs could carry him. It was not until nearly two miles farther on that he set his small companion down. It had hardly been a dignified escape, in spite of the classic model of Anchises, but Father Brown’s face only wore a broad grin.
“Well,” said Flambeau, after an impatient silence, as they resumed their more conventional tramp through the streets on the edge of the town, where no outrage need be feared, “I don’t know what all this means, but I take it I may trust my own eyes that you never met the man you have so accurately described.”
“I did meet him in a way,” Brown said, biting his finger rather nervously—“I did really. And it was too dark to see him properly, because it was under that bandstand affair. But I’m afraid I didn’t describe him so very accurately after all, for his pince-nez was broken under him, and the long gold pin wasn’t stuck through his purple scarf but through his heart.”
“And I suppose,” said the other in a lower voice, “that glass-eyed guy had something to do with it.”
“I had hoped he had only a little,” answered Brown in a rather troubled voice, “and I may have been wrong in what I did. I acted on impulse. But I fear this business has deep roots and dark.”
They walked on through some streets in silence. The yellow lamps were beginning to be lit in the cold blue twilight, and they were evidently approaching the more central parts of the town. Highly coloured bills announcing the glove-fight between Nigger Ned and Malvoli were slapped about the walls.
“Well,” said Flambeau, “I never murdered anyone, even in my criminal days, but I can almost sympathize with anyone doing it in such a dreary place. Of all God-forsaken dustbins of Nature, I think the most heart-breaking are places like that bandstand, that were meant to be festive and are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid man feeling he must kill his rival in the solitude and irony of such a scene. I remember once taking a tramp in your glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing but gorse and skylarks, when I came out on a vast circle of land, and over me lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier above tier of seats, as huge as a Roman amphitheatre and as empty as a new letter-rack. A bird sailed in heaven over it. It was the Grand Stand at Epsom. And I felt that no one would ever be happy there again.”
“It’s odd you should mention Epsom,” said the priest. “Do you remember what was called the Sutton Mystery, because two suspected men—ice-cream men, I think—happened to live at Sutton? They were eventually released. A man was found strangled, it was said, on the Downs round that part. As a fact, I know (from an Irish policeman who is a friend of mine) that he was found close up to the Epsom Grand Stand—in fact, only hidden by one of the lower doors being pushed back.”
“That is queer,” assented Flambeau. “But it rather confirms my view that such pleasure places look awfully lonely out of season, or the man wouldn’t have been murdered there.”
“I’m not so sure he—” began Brown, and stopped.
“Not so sure he was murdered?” queried his companion.
“Not so sure he was murdered out of the season,” answered the little priest, with simplicity. “Don’t you think there’s something rather tricky about this solitude, Flambeau? Do you feel sure a wise murderer would always want the spot to be lonely? It’s very, very seldom a man is quite alone. And, short of that, the more alone he is, the more certain he is to be seen. No; I think there must be some other—Why, here we are at the Pavilion or Palace, or whatever they call it.”
They had emerged on a small square, brilliantly lighted, of which the principal building was gay with gilding, gaudy with posters, and flanked with two giant photographs of Malvoli and Nigger Ned.
“Hallo!” cried Flambeau in great surprise, as his clerical friend stumped straight up the broad steps. “I didn’t know pugilism was your latest hobby. Are you going to see the fight?”
“I don’t think there will be any fight,” replied Father Brown.
They passed rapidly through ante-rooms and inner rooms; they passed through the hall of combat itself, raised, roped, and padded with innumerable seats and boxes, and still the cleric did not look round or pause till he came to a clerk at a desk outside a door marked “Committee”. There he stopped and asked to see Lord Pooley.
The attendant observed that his lordship was very busy, as the fight was coming on soon, but Father Brown had a good-tempered tedium of reiteration for which the official mind is generally not prepared. In a few moments the rather baffled Flambeau found himself in the presence of a man who was still shouting directions to another man going out of the room. “Be careful, you know, about the ropes after the fourth— Well, and what do you want, I wonder!”
Lord Pooley was a gentleman, and, like most of the few remaining to our race, was worried—especially about money. He was half grey and half flaxen, and he had the eyes of fever and a high-bridged, frost-bitten nose.
“Only a word,” said Father Brown. “I have come to prevent a man being killed.”
Lord Pooley bounded off his chair as if a spring had flung him from it. “I’m damned if I’ll stand any more of this!” he cried. “You and your committees and parsons and petitions! Weren’t there parsons in the old days, when they fought without gloves? Now they’re fighting with the regulation gloves, and there’s not the rag of a possibility of either of the boxers being killed.”
“I didn’t mean either of the boxers,” said the little priest.
“Well, well, well!” said the nobleman, with a touch of frosty humour. “Who’s going to be killed? The referee?”
“I don’t know who’s going to be killed,” replied Father Brown, with a reflective stare. “If I did I shouldn’t have to spoil your pleasure. I could simply get him to escape. I never could see anything wrong about prize-fights. As it is, I must ask you to announce that the fight is off for the present.”
“Anything else?” jeered the gentleman with feverish eyes. “And what do you say to the two thousand people who have come to see it?”
“I say there will be one thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them left alive when they have seen it,” said Father Brown.
Lord Pooley looked at Flambeau. “Is your friend mad?” he asked.
“Far from it,” was the reply.
“And look here,” resumed Pooley in his restless way, “it’s worse than that. A whole pack of Italians have turned up to back Malvoli—swarthy, savage fellows of some country, anyhow. You know what these Mediterranean races are like. If I send out word that it’s off we shall have Malvoli storming in here at the head of a whole Corsican clan.”
“My lord, it is a matter of life and death,” said the priest. “Ring your bell. Give your message. And see whether it is Malvoli who answers.”
The nobleman struck the bell on the table with an odd air of new curiosity. He said to the clerk who appeared almost instantly in the doorway: “I have a serious announcement to make to the audience shortly. Meanwhile, would you kindly tell the two champions that the fight will have to be put off.”
The clerk stared for some seconds as if at a demon and vanished.
“What authority have you for what you say?” asked Lord Pooley abruptly. “Whom did you consult?”
“I consulted a bandstand,” said Father Brown, scratching his head. “But, no, I’m wrong; I consulted a book, too. I picked it up on a bookstall in London—very cheap, too.”
He had taken out of his pocket a small, stout, leather-bound volume, and Flambeau, looking over his shoulder, could see that it was some book of old travels, and had a leaf turned down for reference.
“‘The only form in which Voodoo—’” began Father Brown, reading aloud.
“In which what?” inquired his lordship.
“‘In which Voodoo,’” repeated the reader, almost with relish, “‘is widely organized outside Jamaica itself is in the form known as the Monkey, or the God of the Gongs, which is powerful in many parts of the two American continents, especially among half-breeds, many of whom look exactly like white men. It differs from most other forms of devil-worship and human sacrifice in the fact that the blood is not shed formally on the altar, but by a sort of assassination among the crowd. The gongs beat with a deafening din as the doors of the shrine open and the monkey-god is revealed; almost the whole congregation rivet ecstatic eyes on him. But after—’”
The door of the room was flung open, and the fashionable negro stood framed in it, his eyeballs rolling, his silk hat still insolently tilted on his head. “Huh!” he cried, showing his apish teeth. “What this? Huh! Huh! You steal a coloured gentleman’s prize— prize his already—yo’ think yo’ jes’ save that white ‘Talian trash—”
“The matter is only deferred,” said the nobleman quietly. “I will be with you to explain in a minute or two.”
“Who you to—” shouted Nigger Ned, beginning to storm.
“My name is Pooley,” replied the other, with a creditable coolness. “I am the organizing secretary, and I advise you just now to leave the room.”
“Who this fellow?” demanded the dark champion, pointing to the priest disdainfully.
“My name is Brown,” was the reply. “And I advise you just now to leave the country.”
The prize-fighter stood glaring for a few seconds, and then, rather to the surprise of Flambeau and the others, strode out, sending the door to with a crash behind him.
“Well,” asked Father Brown rubbing his dusty hair up, “what do you think of Leonardo da Vinci? A beautiful Italian head.”
“Look here,” said Lord Pooley, “I’ve taken a considerable responsibility, on your bare word. I think you ought to tell me more about this.”
“You are quite right, my lord,” answered Brown. “And it won’t take long to tell.” He put the little leather book in his overcoat pocket. “I think we know all that this can tell us, but you shall look at it to see if I’m right. That negro who has just swaggered out is one of the most dangerous men on earth, for he has the brains of a European, with the instincts of a cannibal. He has turned what was clean, common-sense butchery among his fellow-barbarians into a very modern and scientific secret society of assassins. He doesn’t know I know it, nor, for the matter of that, that I can’t prove it.”
There was a silence, and the little man went on.
“But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I’m alone with him?”
Lord Pooley’s eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: “If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.”
Father Brown shook his head, like a murderer of much riper experience. “So Flambeau said,” he replied, with a sigh. “But consider. The more a man feels lonely the less he can be sure he is alone. It must mean empty spaces round him, and they are just what make him obvious. Have you never seen one ploughman from the heights, or one shepherd from the valleys? Have you never walked along a cliff, and seen one man walking along the sands? Didn’t you know when he’s killed a crab, and wouldn’t you have known if it had been a creditor? No! No! No! For an intelligent murderer, such as you or I might be, it is an impossible plan to make sure that nobody is looking at you.”
“But what other plan is there?”
“There is only one,” said the priest. “To make sure that everybody is looking at something else. A man is throttled close by the big stand at Epsom. Anybody might have seen it done while the stand stood empty—any tramp under the hedges or motorist among the hills. But nobody would have seen it when the stand was crowded and the whole ring roaring, when the favourite was coming in first—or wasn’t. The twisting of a neck-cloth, the thrusting of a body behind a door could be done in an instant— so long as it was that instant. It was the same, of course,” he continued turning to Flambeau, “with that poor fellow under the bandstand. He was dropped through the hole (it wasn’t an accidental hole) just at some very dramatic moment of the entertainment, when the bow of some great violinist or the voice of some great singer opened or came to its climax. And here, of course, when the knock-out blow came—it would not be the only one. That is the little trick Nigger Ned has adopted from his old God of Gongs.”
“By the way, Malvoli—” Pooley began.
“Malvoli,” said the priest, “has nothing to do with it. I dare say he has some Italians with him, but our amiable friends are not Italians. They are octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty. Also,” he added, with a smile, “I fear the English decline to draw any fine distinction between the moral character produced by my religion and that which blooms out of Voodoo.”
The blaze of the spring season had burst upon Seawood, littering its foreshore with famines and bathing-machines, with nomadic preachers and nigger minstrels, before the two friends saw it again, and long before the storm of pursuit after the strange secret society had died away. Almost on every hand the secret of their purpose perished with them. The man of the hotel was found drifting dead on the sea like so much seaweed; his right eye was closed in peace, but his left eye was wide open, and glistened like glass in the moon. Nigger Ned had been overtaken a mile or two away, and murdered three policemen with his closed left hand. The remaining officer was surprised—nay, pained—and the negro got away. But this was enough to set all the English papers in a flame, and for a month or two the main purpose of the British Empire was to prevent the buck nigger (who was so in both senses) escaping by any English port. Persons of a figure remotely reconcilable with his were subjected to quite extraordinary inquisitions, made to scrub their faces before going on board ship, as if each white complexion were made up like a mask, of greasepaint. Every negro in England was put under special regulations and made to report himself; the outgoing ships would no more have taken a nigger than a basilisk. For people had found out how fearful and vast and silent was the force of the savage secret society, and by the time Flambeau and Father Brown were leaning on the parade parapet in April, the Black Man meant in England almost what he once meant in Scotland.
“He must be still in England,” observed Flambeau, “and horridly well hidden, too. They must have found him at the ports if he had only whitened his face.”
“You see, he is really a clever man,” said Father Brown apologetically. “And I’m sure he wouldn’t whiten his face.”
“Well, but what would he do?”
“I think,” said Father Brown, “he would blacken his face.”
Flambeau, leaning motionless on the parapet, laughed and said: “My dear fellow!”
Father Brown, also leaning motionless on the parapet, moved one finger for an instant into the direction of the soot-masked niggers singing on the sands.
TEN
The Salad of Colonel Cray
FATHER BROWN was walking home from Mass on a white weird morning when the mists were slowly lifting—one of those mornings when the very element of light appears as something mysterious and new. The scattered trees outlined themselves more and more out of the vapour, as if they were first drawn in grey chalk and then in charcoal. At yet more distant intervals appeared the houses upon the broken fringe of the suburb; their outlines became clearer and clearer until he recognized many in which he had chance acquaintances, and many more the names of whose owners he knew. But all the windows and doors were sealed; none of the people were of the sort that would be up at such a time, or still less on such an errand. But as he passed under the shadow of one handsome villa with verandas and wide ornate gardens, he heard a noise that made him almost involuntarily stop. It was the unmistakable noise of a pistol or carbine or some light firearm discharged; but it was not this that puzzled him most. The first full noise was immediately followed by a series of fainter noises— as he counted them, about six. He supposed it must be the echo; but the odd thing was that the echo was not in the least like the original sound. It was not like anything else that he could think of; the three things nearest to it seemed to be the noise made by siphons of soda-water, one of the many noises made by an animal, and the noise made by a person attempting to conceal laughter. None of which seemed to make much sense.
Father Brown was made of two men. There was a man of action, who was as modest as a primrose and as punctual as a clock; who went his small round of duties and never dreamed of altering it. There was also a man of reflection, who was much simpler but much stronger, who could not easily be stopped; whose thought was always (in the only intelligent sense of the words) free thought. He could not help, even unconsciously, asking himself all the questions that there were to be asked, and answering as many of them as he could; all that went on like his breathing or circulation. But he never consciously carried his actions outside the sphere of his own duty; and in this case the two attitudes were aptly tested. He was just about to resume his trudge in the twilight, telling himself it was no affair of his, but instinctively twisting and untwisting twenty theories about what the odd noises might mean. Then the grey sky-line brightened into silver, and in the broadening light he realized that he had been to the house which belonged to an Anglo-Indian Major named Putnam; and that the Major had a native cook from Malta who was of his communion. He also began to remember that pistol-shots are sometimes serious things; accompanied with consequences with which he was legitimately concerned. He turned back and went in at the garden gate, making for the front door.
Half-way down one side of the house stood out a projection like a very low shed; it was, as he afterwards discovered, a large dustbin. Round the corner of this came a figure, at first a mere shadow in the haze, apparently bending and peering about. Then, coming nearer, it solidified into a figure that was, indeed, rather unusually solid. Major Putnam was a bald-headed, bull-necked man, short and very broad, with one of those rather apoplectic faces that are produced by a prolonged attempt to combine the oriental climate with the occidental luxuries. But the face was a good-humoured one, and even now, though evidently puzzled and inquisitive, wore a kind of innocent grin. He had a large palm-leaf hat on the back of his head (suggesting a halo that was by no means appropriate to the face), but otherwise he was clad only in a very vivid suit of striped scarlet and yellow pyjamas; which, though glowing enough to behold, must have been, on a fresh morning, pretty chilly to wear. He had evidently come out of his house in a hurry, and the priest was not surprised when he called out without further ceremony: “Did you hear that noise?”
“Yes,” answered Father Brown; “I thought I had better look in, in case anything was the matter.”
The Major looked at him rather queerly with his good-humoured gooseberry eyes. “What do you think the noise was?” he asked.
“It sounded like a gun or something,” replied the other, with some hesitation; “but it seemed to have a singular sort of echo.”
The Major was still looking at him quietly, but with protruding eyes, when the front door was flung open, releasing a flood of gaslight on the face of the fading mist; and another figure in pyjamas sprang or tumbled out into the garden. The figure was much longer, leaner, and more athletic; the pyjamas, though equally tropical, were comparatively tasteful, being of white with a light lemon-yellow stripe. The man was haggard, but handsome, more sunburned than the other; he had an aquiline profile and rather deep-sunken eyes, and a slight air of oddity arising from the combination of coal-black hair with a much lighter moustache. All this Father Brown absorbed in detail more at leisure. For the moment he only saw one thing about the man; which was the revolver in his hand.
“Cray!” exclaimed the Major, staring at him; “did you fire that shot?”
“Yes, I did,” retorted the black-haired gentleman hotly; “and so would you in my place. If you were chased everywhere by devils and nearly—”
The Major seemed to intervene rather hurriedly. “This is my friend Father Brown,” he said. And then to Brown: “I don’t know whether you’ve met Colonel Cray of the Royal Artillery.”
“I have heard of him, of course,” said the priest innocently. “Did you—did you hit anything?”
“I thought so,” answered Cray with gravity.
“Did he—” asked Major Putnam in a lowered voice, “did he fall or cry out, or anything?”
Colonel Cray was regarding his host with a strange and steady stare. “I’ll tell you exactly what he did,” he said. “He sneezed.”
Father Brown’s hand went half-way to his head, with the gesture of a man remembering somebody’s name. He knew now what it was that was neither soda-water nor the snorting of a dog.
“Well,” ejaculated the staring Major, “I never heard before that a service revolver was a thing to be sneezed at.”
“Nor I,” said Father Brown faintly. “It’s lucky you didn’t turn your artillery on him or you might have given him quite a bad cold.” Then, after a bewildered pause, he said: “Was it a burglar?”
“Let us go inside,” said Major Putnam, rather sharply, and led the way into his house.
The interior exhibited a paradox often to be marked in such morning hours: that the rooms seemed brighter than the sky outside; even after the Major had turned out the one gaslight in the front hall. Father Brown was surprised to see the whole dining-table set out as for a festive meal, with napkins in their rings, and wine-glasses of some six unnecessary shapes set beside every plate. It was common enough, at that time of the morning, to find the remains of a banquet over-night; but to find it freshly spread so early was unusual.
While he stood wavering in the hall Major Putnam rushed past him and sent a raging eye over the whole oblong of the tablecloth. At last he spoke, spluttering: “All the silver gone!” he gasped. “Fish-knives and forks gone. Old cruet-stand gone. Even the old silver cream-jug gone. And now, Father Brown, I am ready to answer your question of whether it was a burglar.”
“They’re simply a blind,” said Cray stubbornly. “I know better than you why people persecute this house; I know better than you why—”
The Major patted him on the shoulder with a gesture almost peculiar to the soothing of a sick child, and said: “It was a burglar. Obviously it was a burglar.”
“A burglar with a bad cold,” observed Father Brown, “that might assist you to trace him in the neighbourhood.”
The Major shook his head in a sombre manner. “He must be far beyond trace now, I fear,” he said.
Then, as the restless man with the revolver turned again towards the door in the garden, he added in a husky, confidential voice: “I doubt whether I should send for the police, for fear my friend here has been a little too free with his bullets, and got on the wrong side of the law. He’s lived in very wild places; and, to be frank with you, I think he sometimes fancies things.”
“I think you once told me,” said Brown, “that he believes some Indian secret society is pursuing him.”
Major Putnam nodded, but at the same time shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose we’d better follow him outside,” he said. “I don’t want any more—shall we say, sneezing?”
They passed out into the morning light, which was now even tinged with sunshine, and saw Colonel Cray’s tall figure bent almost double, minutely examining the condition of gravel and grass. While the Major strolled unobtrusively towards him, the priest took an equally indolent turn, which took him round the next corner of the house to within a yard or two of the projecting dustbin.
He stood regarding this dismal object for some minute and a half—, then he stepped towards it, lifted the lid and put his head inside. Dust and other discolouring matter shook upwards as he did so; but Father Brown never observed his own appearance, whatever else he observed. He remained thus for a measurable period, as if engaged in some mysterious prayers. Then he came out again, with some ashes on his hair, and walked unconcernedly away.
By the time he came round to the garden door again he found a group there which seemed to roll away morbidities as the sunlight had already rolled away the mists. It was in no way rationally reassuring; it was simply broadly comic, like a cluster of Dickens’s characters. Major Putnam had managed to slip inside and plunge into a proper shirt and trousers, with a crimson cummerbund, and a light square jacket over all; thus normally set off, his red festive face seemed bursting with a commonplace cordiality. He was indeed emphatic, but then he was talking to his cook—the swarthy son of Malta, whose lean, yellow and rather careworn face contrasted quaintly with his snow-white cap and costume. The cook might well be careworn, for cookery was the Major’s hobby. He was one of those amateurs who always know more than the professional. The only other person he even admitted to be a judge of an omelette was his friend Cray—and as Brown remembered this, he turned to look for the other officer. In the new presence of daylight and people clothed and in their right mind, the sight of him was rather a shock. The taller and more elegant man was still in his night-garb, with tousled black hair, and now crawling about the garden on his hands and knees, still looking for traces of the burglar; and now and again, to all appearance, striking the ground with his hand in anger at not finding him. Seeing him thus quadrupedal in the grass, the priest raised his eyebrows rather sadly; and for the first time guessed that “fancies things” might be an euphemism.
The third item in the group of the cook and the epicure was also known to Father Brown; it was Audrey Watson, the Major’s ward and housekeeper; and at this moment, to judge by her apron, tucked-up sleeves and resolute manner, much more the housekeeper than the ward.
“It serves you right,” she was saying: “I always told you not to have that old-fashioned cruet-stand.”
“I prefer it,” said Putnam, placably. “I’m old-fashioned myself; and the things keep together.”
“And vanish together, as you see,” she retorted. “Well, if you are not going to bother about the burglar, I shouldn’t bother about the lunch. It’s Sunday, and we can’t send for vinegar and all that in the town; and you Indian gentlemen can’t enjoy what you call a dinner without a lot of hot things. I wish to goodness now you hadn’t asked Cousin Oliver to take me to the musical service. It isn’t over till half-past twelve, and the Colonel has to leave by then. I don’t believe you men can manage alone.”
“Oh yes, we can, my dear,” said the Major, looking at her very amiably. “Marco has all the sauces, and we’ve often done ourselves well in very rough places, as you might know by now. And it’s time you had a treat, Audrey; you mustn’t be a housekeeper every hour of the day; and I know you want to hear the music.”
“I want to go to church,” she said, with rather severe eyes.
She was one of those handsome women who will always be handsome, because the beauty is not in an air or a tint, but in the very structure of the head and features. But though she was not yet middle-aged and her auburn hair was of a Titianesque fullness in form and colour, there was a look in her mouth and around her eyes which suggested that some sorrows wasted her, as winds waste at last the edges of a Greek temple. For indeed the little domestic difficulty of which she was now speaking so decisively was rather comic than tragic. Father Brown gathered, from the course of the conversation, that Cray, the other gourmet, had to leave before the usual lunch-time; but that Putnam, his host, not to be done out of a final feast with an old crony, had arranged for a special dejeuner to be set out and consumed in the course of the morning, while Audrey and other graver persons were at morning service. She was going there under the escort of a relative and old friend of hers, Dr Oliver Oman, who, though a scientific man of a somewhat bitter type, was enthusiastic for music, and would go even to church to get it. There was nothing in all this that could conceivably concern the tragedy in Miss Watson’s face; and by a half conscious instinct, Father Brown turned again to the seeming lunatic grubbing about in the grass.
When he strolled across to him, the black, unbrushed head was lifted abruptly, as if in some surprise at his continued presence. And indeed, Father Brown, for reasons best known to himself, had lingered much longer than politeness required; or even, in the ordinary sense, permitted.
“Well!” cried Cray, with wild eyes. “I suppose you think I’m mad, like the rest?”
“I have considered the thesis,” answered the little man, composedly. “And I incline to think you are not.”
“What do you mean?” snapped Cray quite savagely.
“Real madmen,” explained Father Brown, “always encourage their own morbidity. They never strive against it. But you are trying to find traces of the burglar; even when there aren’t any. You are struggling against it. You want what no madman ever wants.”
“And what is that?”
“You want to be proved wrong,” said Brown.
During the last words Cray had sprung or staggered to his feet and was regarding the cleric with agitated eyes. “By hell, but that is a true word!” he cried. “They are all at me here that the fellow was only after the silver—as if I shouldn’t be only too pleased to think so! She’s been at me,” and he tossed his tousled black head towards Audrey, but the other had no need of the direction, “she’s been at me today about how cruel I was to shoot a poor harmless house-breaker, and how I have the devil in me against poor harmless natives. But I was a good-natured man once—as good-natured as Putnam.”
After a pause he said: “Look here, I’ve never seen you before; but you shall judge of the whole story. Old Putnam and I were friends in the same mess; but, owing to some accidents on the Afghan border, I got my command much sooner than most men; only we were both invalided home for a bit. I was engaged to Audrey out there; and we all travelled back together. But on the journey back things happened. Curious things. The result of them was that Putnam wants it broken off, and even Audrey keeps it hanging on— and I know what they mean. I know what they think I am. So do you.
“Well, these are the facts. The last day we were in an Indian city I asked Putnam if I could get some Trichinopoli cigars, he directed me to a little place opposite his lodgings. I have since found he was quite right; but ‘opposite’ is a dangerous word when one decent house stands opposite five or six squalid ones; and I must have mistaken the door. It opened with difficulty, and then only on darkness; but as I turned back, the door behind me sank back and settled into its place with a noise as of innumerable bolts. There was nothing to do but to walk forward; which I did through passage after passage, pitch-dark. Then I came to a flight of steps, and then to a blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate Eastern ironwork, which I could only trace by touch, but which I loosened at last. I came out again upon gloom, which was half turned into a greenish twilight by a multitude of small but steady lamps below. They showed merely the feet or fringes of some huge and empty architecture. Just in front of me was something that looked like a mountain. I confess I nearly fell on the great stone platform on which I had emerged, to realize that it was an idol. And worst of all, an idol with its back to me.
“It was hardly half human, I guessed; to judge by the small squat head, and still more by a thing like a tail or extra limb turned up behind and pointing, like a loathsome large finger, at some symbol graven in the centre of the vast stone back. I had begun, in the dim light, to guess at the hieroglyphic, not without horror, when a more horrible thing happened. A door opened silently in the temple wall behind me and a man came out, with a brown face and a black coat. He had a carved smile on his face, of copper flesh and ivory teeth; but I think the most hateful thing about him was that he was in European dress. I was prepared, I think, for shrouded priests or naked fakirs. But this seemed to say that the devilry was over all the earth. As indeed I found it to be.
“‘If you had only seen the Monkey’s Feet,’ he said, smiling steadily, and without other preface, ‘we should have been very gentle— you would only be tortured and die. If you had seen the Monkey’s Face, still we should be very moderate, very tolerant—you would only be tortured and live. But as you have seen the Monkey’s Tail, we must pronounce the worst sentence. which is: Go Free.’
“When he said the words I heard the elaborate iron latch with which I had struggled, automatically unlock itself: and then, far down the dark passages I had passed, I heard the heavy street-door shifting its own bolts backwards.
“‘It is vain to ask for mercy; you must go free,’ said the smiling man. ‘Henceforth a hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you like an adder; weapons shall come against you out of nowhere; and you shall die many times.’ And with that he was swallowed once more in the wall behind; and I went out into the street.”
Cray paused; and Father Brown unaffectedly sat down on the lawn and began to pick daisies.
Then the soldier continued: “Putnam, of course, with his jolly common sense, pooh-poohed all my fears; and from that time dates his doubt of my mental balance. Well, I’ll simply tell you, in the fewest words, the three things that have happened since; and you shall judge which of us is right.
“The first happened in an Indian village on the edge of the jungle, but hundreds of miles from the temple, or town, or type of tribes and customs where the curse had been put on me. I woke in black midnight, and lay thinking of nothing in particular, when I felt a faint tickling thing, like a thread or a hair, trailed across my throat. I shrank back out of its way, and could not help thinking of the words in the temple. But when I got up and sought lights and a mirror, the line across my neck was a line of blood.
“The second happened in a lodging in Port Said, later, on our journey home together. It was a jumble of tavern and curiosity-shop; and though there was nothing there remotely suggesting the cult of the Monkey, it is, of course, possible that some of its images or talismans were in such a place. Its curse was there, anyhow. I woke again in the dark with a sensation that could not be put in colder or more literal words than that a breath bit like an adder. Existence was an agony of extinction; I dashed my head against walls until I dashed it against a window; and fell rather than jumped into the garden below. Putnam, poor fellow, who had called the other thing a chance scratch, was bound to take seriously the fact of finding me half insensible on the grass at dawn. But I fear it was my mental state he took seriously; and not my story.
“The third happened in Malta. We were in a fortress there; and as it happened our bedrooms overlooked the open sea, which almost came up to our window-sills, save for a flat white outer wall as bare as the sea. I woke up again; but it was not dark. There was a full moon, as I walked to the window; I could have seen a bird on the bare battlement, or a sail on the horizon. What I did see was a sort of stick or branch circling, self-supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in at my window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was one of those queer-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had come from no human hand.”
Father Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a wistful look. “Has Major Putnam,” he asked, “got any Eastern curios, idols, weapons and so on, from which one might get a hint?”
“Plenty of those, though not much use, I fear,” replied Cray; “but by all means come into his study.”
As they entered they passed Miss Watson buttoning her gloves for church, and heard the voice of Putnam downstairs still giving a lecture on cookery to the cook. In the Major’s study and den of curios they came suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted and dressed for the street, who was poring over an open book on the smoking-table—a book which he dropped rather guiltily, and turned.
Cray introduced him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such disfavour in his very face that Brown guessed the two men, whether Audrey knew it or not, were rivals. Nor was the priest wholly unsympathetic with the prejudice. Dr Oman was a very well-dressed gentleman indeed; well-featured, though almost dark enough for an Asiatic. But Father Brown had to tell himself sharply that one should be in charity even with those who wax their pointed beards, who have small gloved hands, and who speak with perfectly modulated voices.
Cray seemed to find something specially irritating in the small prayer-book in Oman’s dark-gloved hand. “I didn’t know that was in your line,” he said rather rudely.
Oman laughed mildly, but without offence. “This is more so, I know,” he said, laying his hand on the big book he had dropped, “a dictionary of drugs and such things. But it’s rather too large to take to church.” Then he closed the larger book, and there seemed again the faintest touch of hurry and embarrassment.
“I suppose,” said the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject, “all these spears and things are from India?”
“From everywhere,” answered the doctor. “Putnam is an old soldier, and has been in Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for all I know.”
“I hope it was not in the Cannibal Islands,” said Brown, “that he learnt the art of cookery.” And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other strange utensils on the wall.
At this moment the jolly subject of their conversation thrust his laughing, lobsterish face into the room. “Come along, Cray,” he cried. “Your lunch is just coming in. And the bells are ringing for those who want to go to church.”
Cray slipped upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook themselves solemnly down the street, with a string of other churchgoers; but Father Brown noticed that the doctor twice looked back and scrutinized the house; and even came back to the corner of the street to look at it again.
The priest looked puzzled. “He can’t have been at the dustbin,” he muttered. “Not in those clothes. Or was he there earlier today?”
Father Brown, touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer; but today he seemed about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social law, rigid or implied, could he be supposed to linger round the lunch of the Anglo-Indian friends; but he lingered, covering his position with torrents of amusing but quite needless conversation. He was the more puzzling because he did not seem to want any lunch. As one after another of the most exquisitely balanced kedgerees of curries, accompanied with their appropriate vintages, were laid before the other two, he only repeated that it was one of his fast-days, and munched a piece of bread and sipped and then left untasted a tumbler of cold water. His talk, however, was exuberant.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,” he cried—, “I’ll mix you a salad! I can’t eat it, but I’ll mix it like an angel! You’ve got a lettuce there.”
“Unfortunately it’s the only thing we have got,” answered the good-humoured Major. “You must remember that mustard, vinegar, oil and so on vanished with the cruet and the burglar.”
“I know,” replied Brown, rather vaguely. “That’s what I’ve always been afraid would happen. That’s why I always carry a cruet-stand about with me. I’m so fond of salads.”
And to the amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his waistcoat pocket and put it on the table.
“I wonder why the burglar wanted mustard, too,” he went on, taking a mustard-pot from another pocket. “A mustard plaster, I suppose. And vinegar”—and producing that condiment— “haven’t I heard something about vinegar and brown paper? As for oil, which I think I put in my left—”
His garrulity was an instant arrested; for lifting his eyes, he saw what no one else saw—the black figure of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit lawn and looking steadily into the room. Before he could quite recover himself Cray had cloven in.
“You’re an astounding card,” he said, staring. “I shall come and hear your sermons, if they’re as amusing as your manners.” His voice changed a little, and he leaned back in his chair.
“Oh, there are sermons in a cruet-stand, too,” said Father Brown, quite gravely. “Have you heard of faith like a grain of mustard-seed; or charity that anoints with oil? And as for vinegar, can any soldiers forget that solitary soldier, who, when the sun was darkened—”
Colonel Cray leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth.
Father Brown, who was making the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the mustard into the tumbler of water beside him; stood up and said in a new, loud and sudden voice—“Drink that!”
At the same moment the motionless doctor in the garden came running, and bursting open a window cried: “Am I wanted? Has he been poisoned?”
“Pretty near,” said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic had very suddenly taken effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as for life, but alive.
Major Putnam had sprung up, his purple face mottled. “A crime!” he cried hoarsely. “I will go for the police!”
The priest could hear him dragging down his palm-leaf hat from the peg and tumbling out of the front door; he heard the garden gate slam. But he only stood looking at Cray; and after a silence said quietly:
“I shall not talk to you much; but I will tell you what you want to know. There is no curse on you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a coincidence or a part of the trick; the trick was the trick of a white man. There is only one weapon that will bring blood with that mere feathery touch: a razor held by a white man. There is one way of making a common room full of invisible, overpowering poison: turning on the gas—the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of club that can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You’ll see some of them in the Major’s study.”
With that he went outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The moment after, Audrey Watson came rushing into the house and fell on her knees beside Cray’s chair. He could not hear what they said to each other; but their faces moved with amazement, not unhappiness. The doctor and the priest walked slowly towards the garden gate.
“I suppose the Major was in love with her, too,” he said with a sigh; and when the other nodded, observed: “You were very generous, doctor. You did a fine thing. But what made you suspect?”
“A very small thing,” said Oman; “but it kept me restless in church till I came back to see that all was well. That book on his table was a work on poisons; and was put down open at the place where it stated that a certain Indian poison, though deadly and difficult to trace, was particularly easily reversible by the use of the commonest emetics. I suppose he read that at the last moment—”
“And remembered that there were emetics in the cruet-stand,” said Father Brown. “Exactly. He threw the cruet in the dustbin— where I found it, along with other silver—for the sake of a burglary blind. But if you look at that pepper-pot I put on the table, you’ll see a small hole. That’s where Cray’s bullet struck, shaking up the pepper and making the criminal sneeze.”
There was a silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: “The Major is a long time looking for the police.”
“Or the police in looking for the Major?” said the priest. “Well, good-bye.”
ELEVEN
The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal American daily called the Western Sun— also humorously described as the “Rising Sunset”. This was in allusion to a great journalistic declaration (attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed the sun would rise in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling.” Those, however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it. For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as “Weary Willie,” and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long procession of its portraits.
Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism”. But many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as “Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks”—or “Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.
That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening. The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills; the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal old-country inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.
In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time for a reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with close red hair and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought with him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother journalist.
“Could you do me the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his nation, “of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives, as I understand?”
“It’s a few yards down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his cigar; “I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I’m going on to Pendragon Park to try and see the fun.”
“What is Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.
“Sir Claude Champion’s place—haven’t you come down for that, too?” asked the other pressman, looking up. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“I have come to see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.
“I’ve come to see Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan’t catch her at home.” And he laughed rather unpleasantly.
“Are you interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.
“I’m interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,” replied his companion gloomily. “Mine’s a filthy trade, and I never pretend it isn’t.”
With that he spat on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was pale and dissipated, with the promise of formidable passions yet to be loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse and careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his long, thin fingers. His name, which came out in the course of talk, was James Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to a pink paper which he heartily despised, called Smart Society, in the capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.
Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois on Darwin which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western Sun. Dalroy had come down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal which might very well end in the Divorce Court, but which was at present hovering between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well as Mr Boulnois. So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended to know) Sir Claude Champion, as “one of the brightest and wealthiest of England’s Upper Ten”; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and, above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous culture and restless publicity—, he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by the word “dilettante”.
That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun, gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire, or even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude—a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know— it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according to Dalroy’s account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately, an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other. Indeed, Boulnois’s cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon Park.
But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his own shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to Champion’s had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement. Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were perpetually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet it was needless to name.
“I don’t think it can go on without a smash,” said the young man with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be squared—or he may be square. But if he’s square he’s thick— what you might call cubic. But I don’t believe it’s possible.”
“He is a man of grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep voice.
“Yes,” answered Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers can’t be such a blighted fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall be following myself in a minute or two.”
But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded; the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there with a star, but lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise of a rising moon.
The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of stiff, high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of the Park that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the name on the narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that the hour of the “Thinker’s” appointment had just struck, he went in and knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a porter’s lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation of prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified.
“Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has been obliged to go out suddenly.”
“But see here, I had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a rising voice. “Do you know where he went to?”
“To Pendragon Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began to close the door.
Kidd started a little.
“Did he go with Mrs—with the rest of the party?” he asked rather vaguely.
“No, sir,” said the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out alone.” And he shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty not done.
The American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness, was annoyed. He felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit and teach them business habits; the hoary old dog and the grizzled, heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric shirt-front, and the drowsy old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn’t keep an appointment.
“If that’s the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife’s purest devotion,” said Mr Calhoun Kidd. “But perhaps he’s gone over to make a row. In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the spot.”
And turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word “Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere almost described in Scott’s great tragedy; the smell of something that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.
More than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo of his own tramp. But as he went on he was more and more inclined to conclude, with the remains of his reason, that there really were other feet upon the road. He thought hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see the image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as Pierrot’s, but patched with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense, there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy—more—he hesitated for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter—Catastrophism.
More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale.
Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked sword—such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many an unjust duel in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of him and lay there glistening like a large needle. He ran like a hare and bent to look at it. Seen at close quarters it had rather a showy look: the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were a little dubious. But there were other red drops upon the blade which were not dubious.
He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile had come, and saw that at this point the sable facade of fir and pine was interrupted by a smaller road at right angles; which, when he turned it, brought him in full view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he did not look at this, having something more interesting to look at.
Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden, was one of those small picturesque surprises common in the old landscape gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw something else clinging to it also, for one wild moment—the figure of a man.
Though he saw it there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson, with glints of gold, yet he knew in one flash of moonlight who it was. That white face flung up to heaven, clean-shaven and so unnaturally young, like Byron with a Roman nose, those black curls already grizzled— he had seen the thousand public portraits of Sir Claude Champion. The wild red figure reeled an instant against the sundial; the next it had rolled down the steep bank and lay at the American’s feet, faintly moving one arm. A gaudy, unnatural gold ornament on the arm suddenly reminded Kidd of Romeo and Juliet; of course the tight crimson suit was part of the play. But there was a long red stain down the bank from which the man had rolled—that was no part of the play. He had been run through the body.
Mr Calhoun Kidd shouted and shouted again. Once more he seemed to hear phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth who had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him; if Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had a sinister air of keeping appointments that hadn’t. The moonlight discoloured everything, against Dalroy’s red hair his wan face looked not so much white as pale green.
All this morbid impressionism must be Kidd’s excuse for having cried out, brutally and beyond all reason: “Did you do this, you devil?”
James Dalroy smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak, the fallen figure made another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards the place where the sword fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to speak.
“Boulnois… Boulnois, I say… Boulnois did it… jealous of me…he was jealous, he was, he was…”
Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the words:
“Boulnois…with my own sword…he threw it…”
Again the failing hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that acrid humour that is the strange salt of the seriousness of his race.
“See here,” he said sharply and with command, “you must fetch a doctor. This man’s dead.”
“And a priest, too, I suppose,” said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner. “All these Champions are papists.”
The American knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the head and used some last efforts at restoration; but before the other journalist reappeared, followed by a doctor and a priest, he was already prepared to assert they were too late.
“Were you too late also?” asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking man, with conventional moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which darted over Kidd dubiously.
“In one sense,” drawled the representative of the Sun. “I was too late to save the man, but I guess I was in time to hear something of importance. I heard the dead man denounce his assassin.”
“And who was the assassin?” asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows together.
“Boulnois,” said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly.
The doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow—, but he did not contradict. Then the priest, a shorter figure in the background, said mildly: “I understood that Mr Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon Park this evening.”
“There again,” said the Yankee grimly, “I may be in a position to give the old country a fact or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was going to stay in all this evening; he fixed up a real good appointment there with me. But John Boulnois changed his mind; John Boulnois left his home abruptly and all alone, and came over to this darned Park an hour or so ago. His butler told me so. I think we hold what the all-wise police call a clue—have you sent for them?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “but we haven’t alarmed anyone else yet.”
“Does Mrs Boulnois know?” asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth.
“I have not told her,” said the doctor gruffly—, “but here come the police.”
The little priest had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned with the fallen sword, which looked ludicrously large and theatrical when attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical and commonplace. “Just before the police come,” he said apologetically, “has anyone got a light?”
The Yankee journalist took an electric torch from his pocket, and the priest held it close to the middle part of the blade, which he examined with blinking care. Then, without glancing at the point or pommel, he handed the long weapon to the doctor.
“I fear I’m no use here,” he said, with a brief sigh. “I’ll say good night to you, gentlemen.” And he walked away up the dark avenue towards the house, his hands clasped behind him and his big head bent in cogitation.
The rest of the group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates, where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked slower and slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead, on the steps of the house. It was his silent way of acknowledging an equally silent approach; for there came towards him a presence that might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd’s demands for a lovely and aristocratic ghost. It was a young woman in silvery satins of a Renascence design; she had golden hair in two long shining ropes, and a face so startingly pale between them that she might have been chryselephantine—made, that is, like some old Greek statues, out of ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though low, was confident.
“Father Brown?” she said.
“Mrs Boulnois?” he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and immediately said: “I see you know about Sir Claude.”
“How do you know I know?” she asked steadily.
He did not answer the question, but asked another: “Have you seen your husband?”
“My husband is at home,” she said. “He has nothing to do with this.”
Again he did not answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a curiously intense expression on her face.
“Shall I tell you something more?” she said, with a rather fearful smile. “I don’t think he did it, and you don’t either.” Father Brown returned her gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more gravely.
“Father Brown,” said the lady, “I am going to tell you all I know, but I want you to do me a favour first. Will you tell me why you haven’t jumped to the conclusion of poor John’s guilt, as all the rest have done? Don’t mind what you say: I—I know about the gossip and the appearances that are against me.”
Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his hand across his forehead. “Two very little things,” he said. “At least, one’s very trivial and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don’t fit in with Mr Boulnois being the murderer.”
He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and continued absentmindedly: “To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of importance to vague ideas. All those things that ‘aren’t evidence’ are what convince me. I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all impossibilities. I know your husband only slightly, but I think this crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so wicked. Anybody can be wicked—as wicked as he chooses. We can direct our moral wills; but we can’t generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this murder. He would not snatch Romeo’s sword from its romantic scabbard; or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body among the roses, or fling the sword away among the pines. If Boulnois killed anyone he’d do it quietly and heavily, as he’d do any other doubtful thing— take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet. No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It’s more like Champion.”
“Ah!” she said, and looked at him with eyes like diamonds.
“And the trivial thing was this,” said Brown. “There were finger-prints on that sword; finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are made if they’re on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were on a polished surface. They were half-way down the blade of the sword. Whose prints they were I have no earthly clue; but why should anybody hold a sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all enemies except one.”
“Except one,” she repeated.
“There is only one enemy,” said Father Brown, “whom it is easier to kill with a dagger than a sword.”
“I know,” said the woman. “Oneself.”
There was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly: “Am I right, then? Did Sir Claude kill himself?”
“Yes” she said, with a face like marble. “I saw him do it.”
“He died,” said Father Brown, “for love of you?”
An extraordinary expression flashed across her face, very different from pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion had expected: her voice became suddenly strong and full. “I don’t believe,” she said, “he ever cared about me a rap. He hated my husband.”
“Why?” asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the lady.
“He hated my husband because…it is so strange I hardly know how to say it…because…”
“Yes?” said Brown patiently.
“Because my husband wouldn’t hate him.”
Father Brown only nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point— he never pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well.
Mrs Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of certainty. “My husband,” she said, “is a great man. Sir Claude Champion was not a great man: he was a celebrated and successful man. My husband has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn’t be got to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be envied. He went mad and killed himself for that.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown; “I think I begin to understand.”
“Oh, don’t you see?” she cried; “the whole picture is made for that— the place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very door, like a dependant—to make him feel a failure. He never felt it. He thinks no more about such things than— than an absent-minded lion. Champion would burst in on John’s shabbiest hours or homeliest meals with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac.”
“And Haman began to tell them,” said Father Brown, “of all the things wherein the king had honoured him; and he said: ‘All these things profit me nothing while I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate.’”
“The crisis came,” Mrs Boulnois continued, “when I persuaded John to let me take down some of his speculations and send them to a magazine. They began to attract attention, especially in America, and one paper wanted to interview him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day) heard of this late little crumb of success falling to his unconscious rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish hatred. Then he began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which has been the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except by explaining to my husband, and there are some things the soul cannot do, as the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband. Nobody could do it now. If you said to him in so many words, ‘Champion is stealing your wife,’ he would think the joke a little vulgar: that it could be anything but a joke—that notion could find no crack in his great skull to get in by. Well, John was to come and see us act this evening, but just as we were starting he said he wouldn’t; he had got an interesting book and a cigar. I told this to Sir Claude, and it was his death-blow. The monomaniac suddenly saw despair. He stabbed himself, crying out like a devil that Boulnois was slaying him; he lies there in the garden dead of his own jealousy to produce jealousy, and John is sitting in the dining-room reading a book.”
There was another silence, and then the little priest said: “There is only one weak point, Mrs Boulnois, in all your very vivid account. Your husband is not sitting in the dining-room reading a book. That American reporter told me he had been to your house, and your butler told him Mr Boulnois had gone to Pendragon Park after all.”
Her bright eyes widened to an almost electric glare; and yet it seemed rather bewilderment than confusion or fear. “Why, what can you mean?” she cried. “All the servants were out of the house, seeing the theatricals. And we don’t keep a butler, thank goodness!”
Father Brown started and spun half round like an absurd teetotum. “What, what?” he cried seeming galvanized into sudden life. “Look here—I say—can I make your husband hear if I go to the house?”
“Oh, the servants will be back by now,” she said, wondering.
“Right, right!” rejoined the cleric energetically, and set off scuttling up the path towards the Park gates. He turned once to say: “Better get hold of that Yankee, or ‘Crime of John Boulnois’ will be all over the Republic in large letters.”
“You don’t understand,” said Mrs Boulnois. “He wouldn’t mind. I don’t think he imagines that America really is a place.”
When Father Brown reached the house with the beehive and the drowsy dog, a small and neat maid-servant showed him into the dining-room, where Boulnois sat reading by a shaded lamp, exactly as his wife described him. A decanter of port and a wineglass were at his elbow; and the instant the priest entered he noted the long ash stand out unbroken on his cigar.
“He has been here for half an hour at least,” thought Father Brown. In fact, he had the air of sitting where he had sat when his dinner was cleared away.
“Don’t get up, Mr Boulnois,” said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic way. “I shan’t interrupt you a moment. I fear I break in on some of your scientific studies.”
“No,” said Boulnois; “I was reading ‘The Bloody Thumb.’” He said it with neither frown nor smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep and virile indifference in the man which his wife had called greatness. He laid down a gory yellow “shocker” without even feeling its incongruity enough to comment on it humorously. John Boulnois was a big, slow-moving man with a massive head, partly grey and partly bald, and blunt, burly features. He was in shabby and very old-fashioned evening-dress, with a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front: he had assumed it that evening in his original purpose of going to see his wife act Juliet.
“I won’t keep you long from ‘The Bloody Thumb’ or any other catastrophic affairs,” said Father Brown, smiling. “I only came to ask you about the crime you committed this evening.”
Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the first time.
“I know it was a strange crime,” assented Brown in a low voice. “Stranger than murder perhaps—to you. The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones—but that’s why it’s so important to confess them. Your crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six times a week: and yet you find it sticks to your tongue like a nameless atrocity.”
“It makes one feel,” said the philosopher slowly, “such a damned fool.”
“I know,” assented the other, “but one often has to choose between feeling a damned fool and being one.”
“I can’t analyse myself well,” went on Boulnois; “but sitting in that chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday. It was security, eternity—I can’t convey it… the cigars were within reach…the matches were within reach… the Thumb had four more appearances to…it was not only a peace, but a plenitude. Then that bell rang, and I thought for one long, mortal minute that I couldn’t get out of that chair—literally, physically, muscularly couldn’t. Then I did it like a man lifting the world, because I knew all the servants were out. I opened the front door, and there was a little man with his mouth open to speak and his notebook open to write in. I remembered the Yankee interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was parted in the middle, and I tell you that murder—”
“I understand,” said Father Brown. “I’ve seen him.”
“I didn’t commit murder,” continued the Catastrophist mildly, “but only perjury. I said I had gone across to Pendragon Park and shut the door in his face. That is my crime, Father Brown, and I don’t know what penance you would inflict for it.”
“I shan’t inflict any penance,” said the clerical gentleman, collecting his heavy hat and umbrella with an air of some amusement; “quite the contrary. I came here specially to let you off the little penance which would otherwise have followed your little offence.”
“And what,” asked Boulnois, smiling, “is the little penance I have so luckily been let off?”
“Being hanged,” said Father Brown.
TWELVE
The Fairy Tale of Father Brown
THE picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist. It had come under the Prussian hegemony quite late in history— hardly fifty years before the fine summer day when Flambeau and Father Brown found themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer. There had been not a little of war and wild justice there within living memory, as soon will be shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss that impression of childishness which is the most charming side of Germany—those little pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king seems as domestic as a cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut battlements of the castle, gilded by the sunshine, looked the more like the gilt gingerbread. For it was brilliant weather. The sky was as Prussian a blue as Potsdam itself could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the colour which a child extracts from a shilling paint-box. Even the grey-ribbed trees looked young, for the pointed buds on them were still pink, and in a pattern against the strong blue looked like innumerable childish figures.
Despite his prosaic appearance and generally practical walk of life, Father Brown was not without a certain streak of romance in his composition, though he generally kept his daydreams to himself, as many children do. Amid the brisk, bright colours of such a day, and in the heraldic framework of such a town, he did feel rather as if he had entered a fairy tale. He took a childish pleasure, as a younger brother might, in the formidable sword-stick which Flambeau always flung as he walked, and which now stood upright beside his tall mug of Munich. Nay, in his sleepy irresponsibility, he even found himself eyeing the knobbed and clumsy head of his own shabby umbrella, with some faint memories of the ogre’s club in a coloured toy-book. But he never composed anything in the form of fiction, unless it be the tale that follows:
“I wonder,” he said, “whether one would have real adventures in a place like this, if one put oneself in the way? It’s a splendid back-scene for them, but I always have a kind of feeling that they would fight you with pasteboard sabres more than real, horrible swords.”
“You are mistaken,” said his friend. “In this place they not only fight with swords, but kill without swords. And there’s worse than that.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked Father Brown.
“Why,” replied the other, “I should say this was the only place in Europe where a man was ever shot without firearms.”
“Do you mean a bow and arrow?” asked Brown in some wonder.
“I mean a bullet in the brain,” replied Flambeau. “Don’t you know the story of the late Prince of this place? It was one of the great police mysteries about twenty years ago. You remember, of course, that this place was forcibly annexed at the time of Bismarck’s very earliest schemes of consolidation— forcibly, that is, but not at all easily. The empire (or what wanted to be one) sent Prince Otto of Grossenmark to rule the place in the Imperial interests. We saw his portrait in the gallery there— a handsome old gentleman if he’d had any hair or eyebrows, and hadn’t been wrinkled all over like a vulture; but he had things to harass him, as I’ll explain in a minute. He was a soldier of distinguished skill and success, but he didn’t have altogether an easy job with this little place. He was defeated in several battles by the celebrated Arnhold brothers—the three guerrilla patriots to whom Swinburne wrote a poem, you remember:
Wolves with the hair of the ermine, Crows that are crowned and kings— These things be many as vermin, Yet Three shall abide these things.
Or something of that kind. Indeed, it is by no means certain that the occupation would ever have been successful had not one of the three brothers, Paul, despicably, but very decisively declined to abide these things any longer, and, by surrendering all the secrets of the insurrection, ensured its overthrow and his own ultimate promotion to the post of chamberlain to Prince Otto. After this, Ludwig, the one genuine hero among Mr Swinburne’s heroes, was killed, sword in hand, in the capture of the city; and the third, Heinrich, who, though not a traitor, had always been tame and even timid compared with his active brothers, retired into something like a hermitage, became converted to a Christian quietism which was almost Quakerish, and never mixed with men except to give nearly all he had to the poor. They tell me that not long ago he could still be seen about the neighbourhood occasionally, a man in a black cloak, nearly blind, with very wild, white hair, but a face of astonishing softness.”
“I know,” said Father Brown. “I saw him once.”
His friend looked at him in some surprise. “I didn’t know you’d been here before,” he said. “Perhaps you know as much about it as I do. Anyhow, that’s the story of the Arnholds, and he was the last survivor of them. Yes, and of all the men who played parts in that drama.”
“You mean that the Prince, too, died long before?”
“Died,” repeated Flambeau, “and that’s about as much as we can say. You must understand that towards the end of his life he began to have those tricks of the nerves not uncommon with tyrants. He multiplied the ordinary daily and nightly guard round his castle till there seemed to be more sentry-boxes than houses in the town, and doubtful characters were shot without mercy. He lived almost entirely in a little room that was in the very centre of the enormous labyrinth of all the other rooms, and even in this he erected another sort of central cabin or cupboard, lined with steel, like a safe or a battleship. Some say that under the floor of this again was a secret hole in the earth, no more than large enough to hold him, so that, in his anxiety to avoid the grave, he was willing to go into a place pretty much like it. But he went further yet. The populace had been supposed to be disarmed ever since the suppression of the revolt, but Otto now insisted, as governments very seldom insist, on an absolute and literal disarmament. It was carried out, with extraordinary thoroughness and severity, by very well-organized officials over a small and familiar area, and, so far as human strength and science can be absolutely certain of anything, Prince Otto was absolutely certain that nobody could introduce so much as a toy pistol into Heiligwaldenstein.”
“Human science can never be quite certain of things like that,” said Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches over his head, “if only because of the difficulty about definition and connotation. What is a weapon? People have been murdered with the mildest domestic comforts; certainly with tea-kettles, probably with tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton a revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon— until it was fired into him, of course. Perhaps somebody introduced a firearm so new that it didn’t even look like a firearm. Perhaps it looked like a thimble or something. Was the bullet at all peculiar?”
“Not that I ever heard of,” answered Flambeau; “but my information is fragmentary, and only comes from my old friend Grimm. He was a very able detective in the German service, and he tried to arrest me; I arrested him instead, and we had many interesting chats. He was in charge here of the inquiry about Prince Otto, but I forgot to ask him anything about the bullet. According to Grimm, what happened was this.” He paused a moment to drain the greater part of his dark lager at a draught, and then resumed:
“On the evening in question, it seems, the Prince was expected to appear in one of the outer rooms, because he had to receive certain visitors whom he really wished to meet. They were geological experts sent to investigate the old question of the alleged supply of gold from the rocks round here, upon which (as it was said) the small city-state had so long maintained its credit and been able to negotiate with its neighbours even under the ceaseless bombardment of bigger armies. Hitherto it had never been found by the most exacting inquiry which could—”
“Which could be quite certain of discovering a toy pistol,” said Father Brown with a smile. “But what about the brother who ratted? Hadn’t he anything to tell the Prince?”
“He always asseverated that he did not know,” replied Flambeau; “that this was the one secret his brothers had not told him. It is only right to say that it received some support from fragmentary words—spoken by the great Ludwig in the hour of death, when he looked at Heinrich but pointed at Paul, and said, ‘You have not told him…’ and was soon afterwards incapable of speech. Anyhow, the deputation of distinguished geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the most magnificent and appropriate dress, for there are no men who like wearing their decorations so much as the men of science—as anybody knows who has ever been to a soiree of the Royal Society. It was a brilliant gathering, but very late, and gradually the Chamberlain—you saw his portrait, too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a meaningless sort of smile underneath—the Chamberlain, I say, discovered there was everything there except the Prince himself. He searched all the outer salons; then, remembering the man’s mad fits of fear, hurried to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but the steel turret or cabin erected in the middle of it took some time to open. When it did open it was empty, too. He went and looked into the hole in the ground, which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like a grave—that is his account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries and tumult in the long rooms and corridors without.
“First it was a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the horizon of the crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless clamour startlingly close, and loud enough to be distinct if each word had not killed the other. Next came words of a terrible clearness, coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into the room and telling the news as briefly as such news is told.
“Otto, Prince of Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark, was lying in the dews of the darkening twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his arms flung out and his face flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed from his shattered temple and jaw, but it was the only part of him that moved like a living thing. He was clad in his full white and yellow uniform, as to receive his guests within, except that the sash or scarf had been unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before he could be lifted he was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle—he who had always hidden in the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed and alone.”
“Who found his body?” asked Father Brown.
“Some girl attached to the Court named Hedwig von something or other,” replied his friend, “who had been out in the wood picking wild flowers.”
“Had she picked any?” asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the veil of the branches above him.
“Yes,” replied Flambeau. “I particularly remember that the Chamberlain, or old Grimm or somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up at her call, to see a girl holding spring flowers and bending over that—that bloody collapse. However, the main point is that before help arrived he was dead, and the news, of course, had to be carried back to the castle. The consternation it created was something beyond even that natural in a Court at the fall of a potentate. The foreign visitors, especially the mining experts, were in the wildest doubt and excitement, as well as many important Prussian officials, and it soon began to be clear that the scheme for finding the treasure bulked much bigger in the business than people had supposed. Experts and officials had been promised great prizes or international advantages, and some even said that the Prince’s secret apartments and strong military protection were due less to fear of the populace than to the pursuit of some private investigation of—”
“Had the flowers got long stalks?” asked Father Brown.
Flambeau stared at him. “What an odd person you are!” he said. “That’s exactly what old Grimm said. He said the ugliest part of it, he thought—uglier than the blood and bullet—was that the flowers were quite short, plucked close under the head.”
“Of course,” said the priest, “when a grown up girl is really picking flowers, she picks them with plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their heads off, as a child does, it looks as if—” And he hesitated.
“Well?” inquired the other.
“Well, it looks rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an excuse for being there after—well, after she was there.”
“I know what you’re driving at,” said Flambeau rather gloomily. “But that and every other suspicion breaks down on the one point— the want of a weapon. He could have been killed, as you say, with lots of other things—even with his own military sash; but we have to explain not how he was killed, but how he was shot. And the fact is we can’t. They had the girl most ruthlessly searched; for, to tell the truth, she was a little suspect, though the niece and ward of the wicked old Chamberlain, Paul Arnhold. But she was very romantic, and was suspected of sympathy with the old revolutionary enthusiasm in her family. All the same, however romantic you are, you can’t imagine a big bullet into a man’s jaw or brain without using a gun or pistol. And there was no pistol, though there were two pistol shots. I leave it to you, my friend.”
“How do you know there were two shots?” asked the little priest.
“There was only one in his head,” said his companion, “but there was another bullet-hole in the sash.”
Father Brown’s smooth brow became suddenly constricted. “Was the other bullet found?” he demanded.
Flambeau started a little. “I don’t think I remember,” he said.
“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” cried Brown, frowning more and more, with a quite unusual concentration of curiosity. “Don’t think me rude. Let me think this out for a moment.”
“All right,” said Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight breeze stirred the budding trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of white and pink that seemed to make the sky bluer and the whole coloured scene more quaint. They might have been cherubs flying home to the casements of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest tower of the castle, the Dragon Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had lain dead.
“What became of this Hedwig eventually?” asked the priest at last.
“She is married to General Schwartz,” said Flambeau. “No doubt you’ve heard of his career, which was rather romantic. He had distinguished himself even, before his exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he rose from the ranks, which is very unusual even in the smallest of the German…”
Father Brown sat up suddenly.
“Rose from the ranks!” he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle. “Well, well, what a queer story! What a queer way of killing a man; but I suppose it was the only one possible. But to think of hate so patient—”
“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “In what way did they kill the man?”
“They killed him with the sash,” said Brown carefully; and then, as Flambeau protested: “Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought to say he died of having a sash. I know it doesn’t sound like having a disease.”
“I suppose,” said Flambeau, “that you’ve got some notion in your head, but it won’t easily get the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he might easily have been strangled. But he was shot. By whom? By what?”
“He was shot by his own orders,” said the priest.
“You mean he committed suicide?”
“I didn’t say by his own wish,” replied Father Brown. “I said by his own orders.”
“Well, anyhow, what is your theory?”
Father Brown laughed. “I am only on my holiday,” he said. “I haven’t got any theories. Only this place reminds me of fairy stories, and, if you like, I’ll tell you a story.”
The little pink clouds, that looked rather like sweet-stuff, had floated up to crown the turrets of the gilt gingerbread castle, and the pink baby fingers of the budding trees seemed spreading and stretching to reach them; the blue sky began to take a bright violet of evening, when Father Brown suddenly spoke again:
“It was on a dismal night, with rain still dropping from the trees and dew already clustering, that Prince Otto of Grossenmark stepped hurriedly out of a side door of the castle and walked swiftly into the wood. One of the innumerable sentries saluted him, but he did not notice it. He had no wish to be specially noticed himself. He was glad when the great trees, grey and already greasy with rain, swallowed him up like a swamp. He had deliberately chosen the least frequented side of his palace, but even that was more frequented than he liked. But there was no particular chance of officious or diplomatic pursuit, for his exit had been a sudden impulse. All the full-dressed diplomatists he left behind were unimportant. He had realized suddenly that he could do without them.
“His great passion was not the much nobler dread of death, but the strange desire of gold. For this legend of the gold he had left Grossenmark and invaded Heiligwaldenstein. For this and only this he had bought the traitor and butchered the hero, for this he had long questioned and cross-questioned the false Chamberlain, until he had come to the conclusion that, touching his ignorance, the renegade really told the truth. For this he had, somewhat reluctantly, paid and promised money on the chance of gaining the larger amount; and for this he had stolen out of his palace like a thief in the rain, for he had thought of another way to get the desire of his eyes, and to get it cheap.
“Away at the upper end of a rambling mountain path to which he was making his way, among the pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs above the town, stood the hermitage, hardly more than a cavern fenced with thorn, in which the third of the great brethren had long hidden himself from the world. He, thought Prince Otto, could have no real reason for refusing to give up the gold. He had known its place for years, and made no effort to find it, even before his new ascetic creed had cut him off from property or pleasures. True, he had been an enemy, but he now professed a duty of having no enemies. Some concession to his cause, some appeal to his principles, would probably get the mere money secret out of him. Otto was no coward, in spite of his network of military precautions, and, in any case, his avarice was stronger than his fears. Nor was there much cause for fear. Since he was certain there were no private arms in the whole principality, he was a hundred times more certain there were none in the Quaker’s little hermitage on the hill, where he lived on herbs, with two old rustic servants, and with no other voice of man for year after year. Prince Otto looked down with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the rifles of his friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies. Rifles ranked so close even to that mountain path that a cry from him would bring the soldiers rushing up the hill, to say nothing of the fact that the wood and ridge were patrolled at regular intervals; rifles so far away, in the dim woods, dwarfed by distance, beyond the river, that an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour. And round the palace rifles at the west door and the east door, at the north door and the south, and all along the four facades linking them. He was safe.
“It was all the more clear when he had crested the ridge and found how naked was the nest of his old enemy. He found himself on a small platform of rock, broken abruptly by the three corners of precipice. Behind was the black cave, masked with green thorn, so low that it was hard to believe that a man could enter it. In front was the fall of the cliffs and the vast but cloudy vision of the valley. On the small rock platform stood an old bronze lectern or reading-stand, groaning under a great German Bible. The bronze or copper of it had grown green with the eating airs of that exalted place, and Otto had instantly the thought, “Even if they had arms, they must be rusted by now.” Moonrise had already made a deathly dawn behind the crests and crags, and the rain had ceased.
“Behind the lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old man in a black robe that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but whose white hair and weak voice seemed alike to waver in the wind. He was evidently reading some daily lesson as part of his religious exercises. “They trust in their horses…”
“‘Sir,’ said the Prince of Heiligwaldenstein, with quite unusual courtesy, ‘I should like only one word with you.’
”‘…and in their chariots,’ went on the old man weakly, ‘but we will trust in the name of the Lord of Hosts…’ His last words were inaudible, but he closed the book reverently and, being nearly blind, made a groping movement and gripped the reading-stand. Instantly his two servants slipped out of the low-browed cavern and supported him. They wore dull-black gowns like his own, but they had not the frosty silver on the hair, nor the frost-bitten refinement of the features. They were peasants, Croat or Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking eyes. For the first time something troubled the Prince, but his courage and diplomatic sense stood firm.
“‘I fear we have not met,’ he said, ‘since that awful cannonade in which your poor brother died.’
“‘All my brothers died,’ said the old man, still looking across the valley. Then, for one instant turning on Otto his drooping, delicate features, and the wintry hair that seemed to drip over his eyebrows like icicles, he added: ‘You see, I am dead, too.’
“‘I hope you’ll understand,’ said the Prince, controlling himself almost to a point of conciliation, ‘that I do not come here to haunt you, as a mere ghost of those great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right or wrong in that, but at least there was one point on which we were never wrong, because you were always right. Whatever is to be said of the policy of your family, no one for one moment imagines that you were moved by the mere gold; you have proved yourself above the suspicion that…’
“The old man in the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him with watery blue eyes and a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But when the word ‘gold’ was said he held out his hand as if in arrest of something, and turned away his face to the mountains.
“‘He has spoken of gold,’ he said. ‘He has spoken of things not lawful. Let him cease to speak.’
“Otto had the vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to regard success not as an incident but as a quality. He conceived himself and his like as perpetually conquering peoples who were perpetually being conquered. Consequently, he was ill acquainted with the emotion of surprise, and ill prepared for the next movement, which startled and stiffened him. He had opened his mouth to answer the hermit, when the mouth was stopped and the voice strangled by a strong, soft gag suddenly twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty seconds before he even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it, and that they had done it with his own military scarf.
“The old man went again weakly to his great brazen-supported Bible, turned over the leaves, with a patience that had something horrible about it, till he came to the Epistle of St James, and then began to read: ‘The tongue is a little member, but—’
“Something in the very voice made the Prince turn suddenly and plunge down the mountain-path he had climbed. He was half-way towards the gardens of the palace before he even tried to tear the strangling scarf from his neck and jaws. He tried again and again, and it was impossible; the men who had knotted that gag knew the difference between what a man can do with his hands in front of him and what he can do with his hands behind his head. His legs were free to leap like an antelope on the mountains, his arms were free to use any gesture or wave any signal, but he could not speak. A dumb devil was in him.
“He had come close to the woods that walled in the castle before he had quite realized what his wordless state meant and was meant to mean. Once more he looked down grimly at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-lit city below him, and he smiled no more. He felt himself repeating the phrases of his former mood with a murderous irony. Far as the eye could see ran the rifles of his friends, every one of whom would shoot him dead if he could not answer the challenge. Rifles were so near that the wood and ridge could be patrolled at regular intervals; therefore it was useless to hide in the wood till morning. Rifles were ranked so far away that an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour; therefore it was vain to return to the city by any remote course. A cry from him would bring his soldiers rushing up the hill. But from him no cry would come.
“The moon had risen in strengthening silver, and the sky showed in stripes of bright, nocturnal blue between the black stripes of the pines about the castle. Flowers of some wide and feathery sort— for he had never noticed such things before—were at once luminous and discoloured by the moonshine, and seemed indescribably fantastic as they clustered, as if crawling about the roots of the trees. Perhaps his reason had been suddenly unseated by the unnatural captivity he carried with him, but in that wood he felt something unfathomably German—the fairy tale. He knew with half his mind that he was drawing near to the castle of an ogre—he had forgotten that he was the ogre. He remembered asking his mother if bears lived in the old park at home. He stooped to pick a flower, as if it were a charm against enchantment. The stalk was stronger than he expected, and broke with a slight snap. Carefully trying to place it in his scarf, he heard the halloo, ‘Who goes there?’ Then he remembered the scarf was not in its usual place.
“He tried to scream and was silent. The second challenge came; and then a shot that shrieked as it came and then was stilled suddenly by impact. Otto of Grossenmark lay very peacefully among the fairy trees, and would do no more harm either with gold or steel; only the silver pencil of the moon would pick out and trace here and there the intricate ornament of his uniform, or the old wrinkles on his brow. May God have mercy on his soul.
“The sentry who had fired, according to the strict orders of the garrison, naturally ran forward to find some trace of his quarry. He was a private named Schwartz, since not unknown in his profession, and what he found was a bald man in uniform, but with his face so bandaged by a kind of mask made of his own military scarf that nothing but open, dead eyes could be seen, glittering stonily in the moonlight. The bullet had gone through the gag into the jaw; that is why there was a shot-hole in the scarf, but only one shot. Naturally, if not correctly, young Schwartz tore off the mysterious silken mask and cast it on the grass; and then he saw whom he had slain.
“We cannot be certain of the next phase. But I incline to believe that there was a fairy tale, after all, in that little wood, horrible as was its occasion. Whether the young lady named Hedwig had any previous knowledge of the soldier she saved and eventually married, or whether she came accidentally upon the accident and their intimacy began that night, we shall probably never know. But we can know, I fancy, that this Hedwig was a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became something of a hero. She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the sentry to go back to his post, in which place there was nothing to connect him with the disaster; he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty such sentries within call. She remained by the body and gave the alarm; and there was nothing to connect her with the disaster either, since she had not got, and could not have, any firearms.
“Well,” said Father Brown rising cheerfully “I hope they’re happy.”
“Where are you going?” asked his friend.
“I’m going to have another look at that portrait of the Chamberlain, the Arnhold who betrayed his brethren,” answered the priest. “I wonder what part—I wonder if a man is less a traitor when he is twice a traitor?”
And he ruminated long before the portrait of a white-haired man with black eyebrows and a pink, painted sort of smile that seemed to contradict the black warning in his eyes.
The Absence of Mr Glass
THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood’s apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry. These things were there, in their place; but one felt that they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there: there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars; but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence, stood always on this table of luxury; but the fanciful have asserted that the whisky, brandy, and rum seemed always to stand at the same level. Poetry was there: the left-hand corner of the room was lined with as complete a set of English classics as the right hand could show of English and foreign physiologists. But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense of their being chained to their places, like the Bibles in the old churches. Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library. And if this strict scientific intangibility steeped even the shelves laden with lyrics and ballads and the tables laden with drink and tobacco, it goes without saying that yet more of such heathen holiness protected the other shelves that held the specialist’s library, and the other tables that sustained the frail and even fairylike instruments of chemistry or mechanics.
Dr Hood paced the length of his string of apartments, bounded— as the boys’ geographies say—on the east by the North Sea and on the west by the serried ranks of his sociological and criminologist library. He was clad in an artist’s velvet, but with none of an artist’s negligence; his hair was heavily shot with grey, but growing thick and healthy; his face was lean, but sanguine and expectant. Everything about him and his room indicated something at once rigid and restless, like that great northern sea by which (on pure principles of hygiene) he had built his home.
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced into those long, strict, sea-flanked apartments one who was perhaps the most startling opposite of them and their master. In answer to a curt but civil summons, the door opened inwards and there shambled into the room a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.
The doctor regarded the new-comer with a restrained astonishment, not unlike that he would have shown if some huge but obviously harmless sea-beast had crawled into his room. The new-comer regarded the doctor with that beaming but breathless geniality which characterizes a corpulent charwoman who has just managed to stuff herself into an omnibus. It is a rich confusion of social self-congratulation and bodily disarray. His hat tumbled to the carpet, his heavy umbrella slipped between his knees with a thud; he reached after the one and ducked after the other, but with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke simultaneously as follows:
“My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I’ve come about that business of the MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray excuse me if I am wrong.”
By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.
“I hardly understand you,” replied the scientist, with a cold intensity of manner. “I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty and importance, but—”
“Oh, this is of the greatest importance,” broke in the little man called Brown. “Why, her mother won’t let them get engaged.” And he leaned back in his chair in radiant rationality.
The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement. “And still,” he said, “I do not quite understand.”
“You see, they want to get married,” said the man with the clerical hat. “Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be more important than that?”
The great Orion Hood’s scientific triumphs had deprived him of many things—some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting physician.
“Mr Brown,” he said gravely, “it is quite fourteen and a half years since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was the case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I gave the French Republic and the King of England—no, better: fourteen years better. I have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story.”
L’assenza del signor Glass
GLI studi del dottor Orion Hood, l’eminente criminologo e specialista di certi disordini morali, si affacciavano sul lungomare di Scarborough attraverso una fila di ampie e ben illuminate portefinestre, che mostravano il Mare del Nord come un’unica, sterminata muraglia esterna di marmo verde-azzurro. In un luogo simile il mare aveva qualcosa della monotonia di uno zoccolo di parete verde-azzurro: poiché gli ambienti stessi erano governati da un ordine tremendo, non dissimile dal tremendo ordine del mare. Non si creda che gli appartamenti del dottor Hood escludessero il lusso, o perfino la poesia. Queste cose c’erano, al loro posto; ma si sentiva che non era mai loro concesso di uscirne. Il lusso c’era: su un tavolo apposta stavano otto o dieci scatole dei migliori sigari; ma erano disposte secondo un disegno tale che i più forti restavano sempre più vicini alla parete e i più leggeri più vicini alla finestra. Un cofanetto per liquori contenente tre qualità di alcolici, tutti d’eccellenza da rosolio, stava sempre su questo tavolo del lusso; ma i fantasiosi hanno affermato che il whisky, il brandy e il rum parevano tenersi sempre al medesimo livello. La poesia c’era: l’angolo sinistro della stanza era foderato da una raccolta di classici inglesi tanto completa quanto la destra poteva mostrarne di fisiologi inglesi e stranieri. Ma se si toglieva da quella fila un volume di Chaucer o di Shelley, la sua assenza irritava la mente come un vuoto tra i denti davanti di un uomo. Non si sarebbe potuto dire che i libri non venissero mai letti; probabilmente lo erano, ma si aveva la sensazione che fossero incatenati al loro posto, come le Bibbie nelle vecchie chiese. Il dottor Hood trattava il proprio scaffale privato come se fosse una biblioteca pubblica. E se questa rigorosa, scientifica intangibilità impregnava perfino gli scaffali carichi di liriche e ballate e i tavoli carichi di bevande e tabacco, va da sé che una santità pagana ancora maggiore proteggeva gli altri scaffali che reggevano la biblioteca dello specialista, e gli altri tavoli che sostenevano i fragili e quasi fatati strumenti della chimica o della meccanica.
Il dottor Hood percorreva in lungo la fila dei suoi appartamenti, delimitati — come dicono le geografie dei ragazzi — a est dal Mare del Nord e a ovest dalle serrate schiere della sua biblioteca sociologica e criminologica. Era vestito del velluto di un artista, ma senza nulla della negligenza di un artista; i capelli erano abbondantemente striati di grigio, ma crescevano folti e sani; il viso era magro, ma sanguigno e proteso nell’attesa. Ogni cosa in lui e nella sua stanza rivelava qualcosa a un tempo rigido e inquieto, come quel grande mare settentrionale accanto al quale (per puri principî d’igiene) egli aveva costruito la propria casa.
Il Destino, essendo in vena scherzosa, spinse la porta e introdusse in quei lunghi, austeri appartamenti fiancheggiati dal mare qualcuno che era forse il più sorprendente contrario di essi e del loro padrone. In risposta a un invito secco ma cortese, la porta si aprì verso l’interno e nella stanza si trascinò una figuretta informe, che pareva trovare il proprio cappello e il proprio ombrello ingovernabili quanto una massa di bagagli. L’ombrello era un fagotto nero e prosaico da tempo irreparabile; il cappello era un cappello nero dalle larghe tese ricurve, clericale ma non comune in Inghilterra; l’uomo era l’incarnazione stessa di tutto ciò che è dimesso e sprovveduto.
Il dottore osservò il nuovo venuto con uno stupore contenuto, non diverso da quello che avrebbe mostrato se qualche enorme ma palesemente innocua creatura marina fosse strisciata nella sua stanza. Il nuovo venuto osservò il dottore con quella raggiante ma trafelata cordialità che caratterizza una corpulenta donna di fatica appena riuscita a incastrarsi in un omnibus. È un ricco miscuglio di sociale autocompiacimento e di scompiglio corporale. Il cappello gli rotolò sul tappeto, il pesante ombrello gli scivolò tra le ginocchia con un tonfo; egli si protese dietro l’uno e si chinò dietro l’altro, ma, con un immutato sorriso sul viso tondo, prese a parlare simultaneamente come segue:
«Mi chiamo Brown. Vi prego di scusarmi. Sono venuto per quella faccenda dei MacNab. Ho sentito che spesso aiutate la gente a uscire da guai simili. Vi prego di scusarmi se sbaglio.»
A questo punto aveva recuperato in modo scomposto il cappello, e su di esso fece uno strano piccolo inchino a scatti, come per rimettere ogni cosa perfettamente a posto.
«Faccio fatica a capirvi», replicò lo scienziato, con fredda intensità di modi. «Temo che abbiate sbagliato studio. Sono il dottor Hood, e il mio lavoro è quasi interamente letterario ed educativo. È vero che talvolta sono stato consultato dalla polizia in casi di particolare difficoltà e importanza, ma…»
«Oh, questa è della massima importanza», lo interruppe l’omino di nome Brown. «Ma se la madre non li lascia fidanzare!» E si abbandonò contro lo schienale della poltrona in una raggiante razionalità.
Le sopracciglia del dottor Hood si aggrottarono cupamente, ma gli occhi sotto di esse brillavano di qualcosa che poteva essere collera oppure divertimento. «E tuttavia», disse, «non capisco ancora bene.»
«Vedete, vogliono sposarsi», disse l’uomo dal cappello clericale. «Maggie MacNab e il giovane Todhunter vogliono sposarsi. Ora, che cosa può esserci di più importante di questo?»
I trionfi scientifici del grande Orion Hood lo avevano privato di molte cose — alcuni dicevano della salute, altri del suo Dio; ma non lo avevano del tutto spogliato del senso dell’assurdo. All’ultima perorazione dell’ingenuo prete gli scappò dall’interno una risatina, ed egli si gettò in una poltrona nell’ironico atteggiamento del medico consulente.
«Signor Brown», disse gravemente, «sono ben quattordici anni e mezzo che non mi si chiede personalmente di risolvere un problema personale: allora si trattava di un tentativo di avvelenare il Presidente francese a un banchetto del Lord Sindaco. Ora, se ho ben capito, la questione è se una certa vostra amica di nome Maggie sia una fidanzata adatta per un certo amico di lei chiamato Todhunter. Ebbene, signor Brown, io sono un buon giocatore. Accetto la sfida. Darò alla famiglia MacNab il mio miglior consiglio, buono quanto quello che diedi alla Repubblica francese e al Re d’Inghilterra — no, migliore: migliore di quattordici anni. Non ho altro da fare questo pomeriggio. Raccontatemi la vostra storia.»
The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in passing the matches, than as if he were (as he was) practically thanking the Curator of Kew Gardens for coming with him into a field to find a four-leaved clover. With scarcely a semi-colon after his hearty thanks, the little man began his recital:
“I told you my name was Brown; well, that’s the fact, and I’m the priest of the little Catholic Church I dare say you’ve seen beyond those straggly streets, where the town ends towards the north. In the last and straggliest of those streets which runs along the sea like a sea-wall there is a very honest but rather sharp-tempered member of my flock, a widow called MacNab. She has one daughter, and she lets lodgings, and between her and the daughter, and between her and the lodgers—well, I dare say there is a great deal to be said on both sides. At present she has only one lodger, the young man called Todhunter; but he has given more trouble than all the rest, for he wants to marry the young woman of the house.”
“And the young woman of the house,” asked Dr Hood, with huge and silent amusement, “what does she want?”
“Why, she wants to marry him,” cried Father Brown, sitting up eagerly. “That is just the awful complication.”
“It is indeed a hideous enigma,” said Dr Hood.
“This young James Todhunter,” continued the cleric, “is a very decent man so far as I know; but then nobody knows very much. He is a bright, brownish little fellow, agile like a monkey, clean-shaven like an actor, and obliging like a born courtier. He seems to have quite a pocketful of money, but nobody knows what his trade is. Mrs MacNab, therefore (being of a pessimistic turn), is quite sure it is something dreadful, and probably connected with dynamite. The dynamite must be of a shy and noiseless sort, for the poor fellow only shuts himself up for several hours of the day and studies something behind a locked door. He declares his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that. There are tales of two voices heard talking in the room; though, when the door is opened, Todhunter is always found alone. There are tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a quarrel. Todhunter dashed down his window with violence, and the man in the high hat melted into the sea-fog again. This story is told by the family with the fiercest mystification; but I really think Mrs MacNab prefers her own original tale: that the Other Man (or whatever it is) crawls out every night from the big box in the corner, which is kept locked all day. You see, therefore, how this sealed door of Todhunter’s is treated as the gate of all the fancies and monstrosities of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’. And yet there is the little fellow in his respectable black jacket, as punctual and innocent as a parlour clock. He pays his rent to the tick; he is practically a teetotaller; he is tirelessly kind with the younger children, and can keep them amused for a day on end; and, last and most urgent of all, he has made himself equally popular with the eldest daughter, who is ready to go to church with him tomorrow.”
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to any triviality. The great specialist having condescended to the priest’s simplicity, condescended expansively. He settled himself with comfort in his arm-chair and began to talk in the tone of a somewhat absent-minded lecturer:
“Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring. Now the root fact in all history is Race. Race produces religion; Race produces legal and ethical wars. There is no stronger case than that of the wild, unworldly and perishing stock which we commonly call the Celts, of whom your friends the MacNabs are specimens. Small, swarthy, and of this dreamy and drifting blood, they accept easily the superstitious explanation of any incidents, just as they still accept (you will excuse me for saying) that superstitious explanation of all incidents which you and your Church represent. It is not remarkable that such people, with the sea moaning behind them and the Church (excuse me again) droning in front of them, should put fantastic features into what are probably plain events. You, with your small parochial responsibilities, see only this particular Mrs MacNab, terrified with this particular tale of two voices and a tall man out of the sea. But the man with the scientific imagination sees, as it were, the whole clans of MacNab scattered over the whole world, in its ultimate average as uniform as a tribe of birds. He sees thousands of Mrs MacNabs, in thousands of houses, dropping their little drop of morbidity in the tea-cups of their friends; he sees—”
Before the scientist could conclude his sentence, another and more impatient summons sounded from without; someone with swishing skirts was marshalled hurriedly down the corridor, and the door opened on a young girl, decently dressed but disordered and red-hot with haste. She had sea-blown blonde hair, and would have been entirely beautiful if her cheek-bones had not been, in the Scotch manner, a little high in relief as well as in colour. Her apology was almost as abrupt as a command.
Il piccolo ecclesiastico di nome Brown lo ringraziò con incontestabile calore, ma pur sempre con una bizzarra specie di semplicità. Era piuttosto come se stesse ringraziando uno sconosciuto in una sala fumatori per il disturbo di passargli i fiammiferi, anziché come se stesse (com’era in realtà) ringraziando praticamente il Curatore dei Kew Gardens per essere andato con lui in un campo a cercare un quadrifoglio. Con appena un punto e virgola dopo i suoi calorosi ringraziamenti, l’omino diede inizio al suo racconto:
«Vi ho detto che mi chiamo Brown; be’, questo è il fatto, e sono il prete della piccola Chiesa cattolica che oserei dire avete visto oltre quelle vie sparpagliate, dove la città finisce verso nord. Nell’ultima e più sparpagliata di quelle vie che corre lungo il mare come una diga c’è una parrocchiana molto onesta ma piuttosto d’umore pungente, una vedova di nome MacNab. Ha una figlia, e affitta camere, e tra lei e la figlia, e tra lei e i pigionanti — be’, oserei dire che ci sarebbe molto da dire dall’una e dall’altra parte. Al momento ha un solo pigionante, il giovane di nome Todhunter; ma costui le ha dato più grattacapi di tutti gli altri messi insieme, perché vuole sposare la giovane di casa.»
«E la giovane di casa», chiese il dottor Hood, con enorme e silenzioso divertimento, «lei che cosa vuole?»
«Ma, vuole sposarlo», esclamò Padre Brown, drizzandosi sulla sedia con ardore. «È proprio questa la terribile complicazione.»
«È in effetti un enigma spaventoso», disse il dottor Hood.
«Questo giovane James Todhunter», proseguì il chierico, «è un uomo assai perbene per quanto ne so; ma poi nessuno ne sa granché. È un tipetto sveglio, bruniccio, agile come una scimmia, sbarbato come un attore e ossequioso come un cortigiano nato. Sembra avere le tasche piene di denaro, ma nessuno sa quale sia il suo mestiere. La signora MacNab, perciò (essendo di indole pessimista), è convintissima che sia qualcosa di terribile, e probabilmente collegato con la dinamite. La dinamite dev’essere di specie schiva e silenziosa, perché il poveretto non fa che chiudersi dentro per parecchie ore del giorno a studiare qualcosa dietro una porta serrata. Egli dichiara che la sua segretezza è temporanea e giustificata, e promette di spiegarsi prima delle nozze. Questo è tutto ciò che chiunque sappia per certo, ma la signora MacNab vi racconterà assai più di quanto perfino lei sappia per certo. Sapete come crescono le dicerie, simili all’erba, su una tale chiazza d’ignoranza. Si racconta di due voci udite conversare nella stanza; eppure, quando la porta si apre, Todhunter è sempre trovato solo. Si racconta di un misterioso uomo alto in cilindro di seta, che una volta uscì dalle nebbie marine e in apparenza dal mare stesso, avanzando lieve attraverso i campi sabbiosi e per il piccolo giardino sul retro al crepuscolo, finché lo si udì conversare col pigionante alla sua finestra aperta. Il colloquio parve concludersi in un litigio. Todhunter abbassò con violenza la propria finestra, e l’uomo dall’alto cappello si dissolse di nuovo nella nebbia del mare. Questa storia è narrata dalla famiglia con la più fiera perplessità; ma io credo davvero che la signora MacNab preferisca la sua versione originale: che l’Altro Uomo (o qualunque cosa sia) esca strisciando ogni notte dalla grande cassa nell’angolo, che di giorno è tenuta sempre chiusa a chiave. Vedete, dunque, come questa porta sigillata di Todhunter sia trattata come la soglia di tutte le fantasie e mostruosità delle “Mille e una notte”. Eppure ecco lì il tipetto nel suo rispettabile giacchino nero, puntuale e innocente come un orologio da salotto. Paga l’affitto al secondo; è praticamente astemio; è instancabilmente gentile con i bambini più piccoli, e sa tenerli divertiti per un giorno intero; e, ultima e più pressante cosa di tutte, si è reso ugualmente popolare presso la figlia maggiore, che è pronta ad andare in chiesa con lui domani.»
Un uomo caldamente preso da qualche vasta teoria ha sempre il gusto di applicarla a qualunque inezia. Il grande specialista, essendosi degnato di scendere alla semplicità del prete, si degnò espansivamente. Si accomodò con agio nella poltrona e cominciò a parlare col tono di un conferenziere alquanto sovrappensiero:
«Anche nel più minuscolo caso, è meglio guardare prima alle tendenze principali della Natura. Un particolare fiore può non essere morto ai primi del verno, ma i fiori stanno morendo; un particolare ciottolo può non essere mai bagnato dalla marea, ma la marea sta salendo. All’occhio scientifico tutta la storia umana è una serie di movimenti collettivi, distruzioni o migrazioni, come il massacro delle mosche d’inverno o il ritorno degli uccelli in primavera. Ora, il fatto radicale in tutta la storia è la Razza. La Razza produce religione; la Razza produce guerre legali ed etiche. Non c’è caso più forte di quello del ceppo selvaggio, ultraterreno e morente che comunemente chiamiamo i Celti, di cui i vostri amici MacNab sono esemplari. Piccoli, olivastri e di questo sangue sognante e vagabondo, essi accettano con facilità la spiegazione superstiziosa di qualunque accadimento, così come accettano tuttora (mi scuserete se lo dico) quella spiegazione superstiziosa di tutti gli accadimenti che voi e la vostra Chiesa rappresentate. Non è cosa notevole che simile gente, col mare che geme alle loro spalle e la Chiesa (scusatemi di nuovo) che salmodia dinanzi a loro, metta tratti fantastici in ciò che sono probabilmente semplici eventi. Voi, con le vostre piccole responsabilità parrocchiali, vedete soltanto questa particolare signora MacNab, atterrita da questa particolare storia di due voci e di un uomo alto uscito dal mare. Ma l’uomo dotato d’immaginazione scientifica vede, per così dire, l’intera stirpe dei MacNab sparsa per il mondo intero, nella sua media ultima uniforme come una tribù di uccelli. Egli vede migliaia di signore MacNab, in migliaia di case, versare la loro gocciolina di morbosità nelle tazze di tè delle loro amiche; egli vede…»
Prima che lo scienziato potesse concludere la frase, un altro e più impaziente richiamo risuonò dall’esterno; qualcuno con un fruscio di gonne fu condotto in fretta lungo il corridoio, e la porta si aprì su una giovane fanciulla, decorosamente vestita ma scompigliata e rovente per la fretta. Aveva capelli biondi scompigliati dal vento del mare, e sarebbe stata del tutto bella se gli zigomi non fossero stati, alla maniera scozzese, un po’ troppo sporgenti in rilievo oltre che in colore. Le sue scuse furono quasi altrettanto brusche di un ordine.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir,” she said, “but I had to follow Father Brown at once; it’s nothing less than life or death.”
Father Brown began to get to his feet in some disorder. “Why, what has happened, Maggie?” he said.
“James has been murdered, for all I can make out,” answered the girl, still breathing hard from her rush. “That man Glass has been with him again; I heard them talking through the door quite plain. Two separate voices: for James speaks low, with a burr, and the other voice was high and quavery.”
“That man Glass?” repeated the priest in some perplexity.
“I know his name is Glass,” answered the girl, in great impatience. “I heard it through the door. They were quarrelling—about money, I think—for I heard James say again and again, ‘That’s right, Mr Glass,’ or ‘No, Mr Glass,’ and then, ‘Two or three, Mr Glass.’ But we’re talking too much; you must come at once, and there may be time yet.”
“But time for what?” asked Dr Hood, who had been studying the young lady with marked interest. “What is there about Mr Glass and his money troubles that should impel such urgency?”
“I tried to break down the door and couldn’t,” answered the girl shortly, “Then I ran to the back-yard, and managed to climb on to the window-sill that looks into the room. It was an dim, and seemed to be empty, but I swear I saw James lying huddled up in a corner, as if he were drugged or strangled.”
“This is very serious,” said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and umbrella and standing up; “in point of fact I was just putting your case before this gentleman, and his view—”
“Has been largely altered,” said the scientist gravely. “I do not think this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down town with you.”
In a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the MacNabs’ street: the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the mountaineer, the criminologist with a lounging grace (which was not without a certain leopard-like swiftness), and the priest at an energetic trot entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect of this edge of the town was not entirely without justification for the doctor’s hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered houses stood farther and farther apart in a broken string along the seashore; the afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the sand, two black, barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands held up in astonishment, and as Mrs MacNab ran down the street to meet them with lean hands similarly spread, and her fierce face in shadow, she was a little like a demon herself. The doctor and the priest made scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her daughter’s story, with more disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance against Mr Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered, or against the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter, and for not having lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in the front of the house until they came to the lodger’s door at the back, and there Dr Hood, with the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder sharply to the panel and burst in the door.
It opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even for a flash, could doubt that the room had been the theatre of some thrilling collision between two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards lay littered across the table or fluttered about the floor as if a game had been interrupted. Two wine glasses stood ready for wine on a side-table, but a third lay smashed in a star of crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay what looked like a long knife or short sword, straight, but with an ornamental and pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees against the leaden level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of the room was rolled a gentleman’s silk top hat, as if it had just been knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked to see it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter, with a scarf across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.
Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in the whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him that it almost slipped down on to his shoulders.
“Mr Glass’s hat,” said the doctor, returning with it and peering into the inside with a pocket lens. “How to explain the absence of Mr Glass and the presence of Mr Glass’s hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and systematically brushed and burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should think.”
“But, good heavens!” called out Miss MacNab, “aren’t you going to untie the man first?”
“I say ‘old’ with intention, though not with certainty” continued the expositor; “my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair of human beings falls out in very varying degrees, but almost always falls out slightly, and with the lens I should see the tiny hairs in a hat recently worn. It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass is bald. Now when this is taken with the high-pitched and querulous voice which Miss MacNab described so vividly (patience, my dear lady, patience), when we take the hairless head together with the tone common in senile anger, I should think we may deduce some advance in years. Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly tall. I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous appearance at the window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I have more exact indication. This wineglass has been smashed all over the place, but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside the mantelpiece. No such fragment could have fallen there if the vessel had been smashed in the hand of a comparatively short man like Mr Todhunter.”
«Mi dispiace interrompervi, signore», disse, «ma dovevo seguire subito Padre Brown; non si tratta di niente di meno che di vita o di morte.»
Padre Brown cominciò ad alzarsi in piedi con qualche impaccio. «Ebbene, che cosa è successo, Maggie?» disse.
«James è stato assassinato, per quanto io possa capire», rispose la fanciulla, ancora ansante per la corsa. «Quel Glass è stato di nuovo con lui; li ho sentiti parlare attraverso la porta chiarissimamente. Due voci distinte: perché James parla basso, con una erre arrotata, e l’altra voce era acuta e tremula.»
«Quel Glass?» ripeté il prete con una certa perplessità.
«So che si chiama Glass», rispose la fanciulla, con grande impazienza. «L’ho sentito attraverso la porta. Litigavano — per denaro, credo — perché ho sentito James dire più e più volte: “Va bene, signor Glass”, oppure “No, signor Glass”, e poi: “Due o tre, signor Glass”. Ma stiamo parlando troppo; dovete venire subito, e forse c’è ancora tempo.»
«Ma tempo per che cosa?» chiese il dottor Hood, che aveva studiato la giovane con marcato interesse. «Che cosa c’è, nel signor Glass e nei suoi guai di denaro, da imporre una simile urgenza?»
«Ho cercato di sfondare la porta e non ci sono riuscita», rispose la fanciulla in breve, «poi sono corsa nel cortile sul retro e sono riuscita ad arrampicarmi sul davanzale della finestra che dà nella stanza. Era in penombra, e sembrava vuota, ma giuro d’aver visto James riverso rannicchiato in un angolo, come se fosse drogato o strangolato.»
«Questo è molto serio», disse Padre Brown, raccogliendo il suo errabondo cappello e l’ombrello e alzandosi in piedi; «di fatto stavo giusto esponendo il vostro caso a questo signore, e la sua opinione…»
«È stata largamente modificata», disse gravemente lo scienziato. «Non credo che questa giovane sia tanto celtica quanto avevo supposto. Poiché non ho altro da fare, mi metterò il cappello e verrò a farmi una passeggiata in città con voi.»
In pochi minuti tutti e tre si stavano avvicinando alla squallida coda della via dei MacNab: la fanciulla col passo severo e trafelato dello scalatore di montagna, il criminologo con una grazia indolente (che non era priva di una certa rapidità felina), e il prete a un trotto energico del tutto privo di distinzione. L’aspetto di questo margine della città non era del tutto privo di giustificazione per gli accenni del dottore a umori e ambienti desolati. Le case sparse si distanziavano sempre più l’una dall’altra in una fila spezzata lungo la riva del mare; il pomeriggio si chiudeva in un crepuscolo prematuro e in parte sinistro; il mare era di un purpureo cupo come inchiostro e mormorava minacciosamente. Nel raffazzonato giardino sul retro dei MacNab, che scendeva verso la sabbia, due alberi neri e dall’aria sterile si ergevano come mani demoniache levate nello stupore; e mentre la signora MacNab correva giù per la via a incontrarli con magre mani parimenti protese, e il feroce viso in ombra, somigliava un poco a un demonio anche lei. Il dottore e il prete diedero scarsa risposta alle stridule reiterazioni della storia della figlia, con più inquietanti particolari suoi propri, e ai giuramenti di vendetta divisi tra il signor Glass per aver assassinato, e il signor Todhunter per essere stato assassinato, o quest’ultimo per aver osato voler sposare sua figlia, e per non essere vissuto abbastanza da farlo. Passarono per lo stretto andito sul davanti della casa finché giunsero alla porta del pigionante sul retro, e là il dottor Hood, con la destrezza di un vecchio investigatore, puntò di colpo la spalla contro il pannello e sfondò la porta.
Si aprì su una scena di silenziosa catastrofe. Nessuno, vedendola, anche solo per un lampo, avrebbe potuto dubitare che la stanza fosse stata il teatro di qualche emozionante scontro tra due, o forse più, persone. Carte da gioco giacevano sparse sul tavolo o svolazzavano per il pavimento come se una partita fosse stata interrotta. Due bicchieri da vino stavano pronti per il vino su un tavolinetto laterale, ma un terzo giaceva in frantumi in una stella di cristallo sul tappeto. A pochi piedi da esso giaceva quello che pareva un lungo coltello o una corta spada, dritta, ma con un’impugnatura ornata e figurata; la sua opaca lama coglieva appena un grigio bagliore dalla tetra finestra retrostante, che mostrava gli alberi neri contro il piatto plumbeo del mare. Verso l’angolo opposto della stanza era rotolato un cilindro di seta da gentiluomo, come se fosse stato appena fatto saltar via dalla testa; a tal punto, in verità, che quasi ci si aspettava di vederlo ancora rotolare. E nell’angolo dietro di esso, gettato come un sacco di patate, ma legato come un baule ferroviario, giaceva il signor James Todhunter, con una sciarpa attraverso la bocca e sei o sette corde annodate intorno ai gomiti e alle caviglie. I suoi occhi bruni erano vivi e si muovevano vigili.
Il dottor Orion Hood si arrestò per un istante sullo zerbino e s’imbevve dell’intera scena di muta violenza. Poi attraversò lesto il tappeto, raccolse l’alto cilindro di seta e con gravità lo posò sul capo del tuttora incaprettato Todhunter. Gli era tanto largo che quasi gli scivolò giù sulle spalle.
«Il cappello del signor Glass», disse il dottore, tornando con esso e scrutandone l’interno con una lente tascabile. «Come spiegare l’assenza del signor Glass e la presenza del cappello del signor Glass? Perché il signor Glass non è uomo trascurato coi propri abiti. Questo cappello è di foggia elegante e sistematicamente spazzolato e lustrato, benché non molto nuovo. Un vecchio damerino, direi.»
«Ma, santo cielo!» esclamò la signorina MacNab, «non intendete slegare prima quest’uomo?»
«Dico “vecchio” di proposito, benché non con certezza», proseguì l’espositore; «la mia ragione potrebbe sembrare un po’ tirata per i capelli. I capelli degli esseri umani cadono in grado assai variabile, ma quasi sempre cadono un poco, e con la lente dovrei vedere i minuscoli peli in un cappello indossato di recente. Questo non ne ha, il che mi induce a supporre che il signor Glass sia calvo. Ora, quando ciò si prende insieme alla voce acuta e querula che la signorina MacNab ha descritto con tanta vivezza (pazienza, mia cara signora, pazienza), quando prendiamo il capo glabro insieme al tono comune nella collera senile, penso che possiamo dedurre un certo avanzamento negli anni. Nondimeno, egli era probabilmente vigoroso, ed era quasi certamente alto. Potrei fare affidamento in qualche misura sulla storia della sua precedente apparizione alla finestra, come uomo alto in cilindro di seta, ma credo di avere un’indicazione più precisa. Questo bicchiere da vino è andato in frantumi dappertutto, ma una delle sue schegge giace sull’alta mensola accanto al caminetto. Nessun frammento simile avrebbe potuto cadere lassù se il recipiente fosse stato spezzato nella mano di un uomo relativamente basso come il signor Todhunter.»
“By the way,” said Father Brown, “might it not be as well to untie Mr Todhunter?”
“Our lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,” proceeded the specialist. “I may say at once that it is possible that the man Glass was bald or nervous through dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter, as has been remarked, is a quiet thrifty gentleman, essentially an abstainer. These cards and wine-cups are no part of his normal habit; they have been produced for a particular companion. But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or may not possess this wine-service, but there is no appearance of his possessing any wine. What, then, were these vessels to contain? I would at once suggest some brandy or whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort, from a flask in the pocket of Mr Glass. We have thus something like a picture of the man, or at least of the type: tall, elderly, fashionable, but somewhat frayed, certainly fond of play and strong waters, perhaps rather too fond of them. Mr Glass is a gentleman not unknown on the fringes of society.”
“Look here,” cried the young woman, “if you don’t let me pass to untie him I’ll run outside and scream for the police.”
“I should not advise you, Miss MacNab,” said Dr Hood gravely, “to be in any hurry to fetch the police. Father Brown, I seriously ask you to compose your flock, for their sakes, not for mine. Well, we have seen something of the figure and quality of Mr Glass; what are the chief facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially three: that he is economical, that he is more or less wealthy, and that he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that there are the three chief marks of the kind of man who is blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious that the faded finery, the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are the unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him. We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end vulture with a scent for a mystery. These two men have met here today and have quarrelled, using blows and a bare weapon.”
“Are you going to take those ropes off?” asked the girl stubbornly.
Dr Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table, and went across to the captive. He studied him intently, even moving him a little and half-turning him round by the shoulders, but he only answered:
“No; I think these ropes will do very well till your friends the police bring the handcuffs.”
Father Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet, lifted his round face and said: “What do you mean?”
The man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from the carpet and was examining it intently as he answered:
“Because you find Mr Todhunter tied up,” he said, “you all jump to the conclusion that Mr Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose, escaped. There are four objections to this: First, why should a gentleman so dressy as our friend Glass leave his hat behind him, if he left of his own free will? Second,” he continued, moving towards the window, “this is the only exit, and it is locked on the inside. Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty complete story.”
“But the ropes?” inquired the priest, whose eyes had remained open with a rather vacant admiration.
“Ah, the ropes,” said the expert with a singular intonation. “Miss MacNab very much wanted to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter free from his ropes. Well, I will tell her. I did not do it because Mr Todhunter can set himself free from them at any minute he chooses.”
“What?” cried the audience on quite different notes of astonishment.
“I have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,” reiterated Hood quietly. “I happen to know something about knots; they are quite a branch of criminal science. Every one of those knots he has made himself and could loosen himself; not one of them would have been made by an enemy really trying to pinion him. The whole of this affair of the ropes is a clever fake, to make us think him the victim of the struggle instead of the wretched Glass, whose corpse may be hidden in the garden or stuffed up the chimney.”
There was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening, the sea-blighted boughs of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker than ever, yet they seemed to have come nearer to the window. One could almost fancy they were sea-monsters like krakens or cuttlefish, writhing polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see the end of this tragedy, even as he, the villain and victim of it, the terrible man in the tall hat, had once crawled up from the sea. For the whole air was dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most morbid of human things, because it is a crime concealing a crime; a black plaster on a blacker wound.
The face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather that creative curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea. “Say it again, please,” he said in a simple, bothered manner; “do you mean that Todhunter can tie himself up all alone and untie himself all alone?”
“That is what I mean,” said the doctor.
“Jerusalem!” ejaculated Brown suddenly, “I wonder if it could possibly be that!”
He scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite a new impulsiveness into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then he turned his own rather fatuous face to the company. “Yes, that’s it!” he cried in a certain excitement. “Can’t you see it in the man’s face? Why, look at his eyes!”
«A proposito», disse Padre Brown, «non sarebbe altrettanto opportuno slegare il signor Todhunter?»
«La nostra lezione dai recipienti da bere non finisce qui», proseguì lo specialista. «Posso dire subito che è possibile che l’uomo Glass fosse calvo o nervoso per dissolutezza anziché per l’età. Il signor Todhunter, come è stato osservato, è un gentiluomo quieto e parsimonioso, essenzialmente un astinente. Queste carte e questi calici da vino non fanno parte delle sue abitudini normali; sono stati messi fuori per un compagno particolare. Ma, come si dà il caso, possiamo andare oltre. Il signor Todhunter può possedere o meno questo servizio da vino, ma non c’è alcuna apparenza ch’egli possieda del vino. Che cosa, dunque, dovevano contenere questi recipienti? Suggerirei senz’altro del brandy o del whisky, forse di sorta pregiata, da una fiaschetta nella tasca del signor Glass. Abbiamo così qualcosa come un ritratto dell’uomo, o almeno del tipo: alto, anziano, alla moda, ma alquanto logoro, di certo amante del gioco e degli alcolici, forse un po’ troppo amante di essi. Il signor Glass è un gentiluomo non ignoto ai margini della buona società.»
«Sentite un po’», gridò la giovane donna, «se non mi lasciate passare a slegarlo, corro fuori a chiamare la polizia a gran voce.»
«Non ve lo consiglierei, signorina MacNab», disse gravemente il dottor Hood, «non abbiate alcuna fretta di andare a cercare la polizia. Padre Brown, vi prego seriamente di calmare il vostro gregge, per il loro bene, non per il mio. Bene, abbiamo visto qualcosa della figura e della qualità del signor Glass; quali sono i fatti principali che si conoscono del signor Todhunter? Sono in sostanza tre: che è parco, che è più o meno benestante, e che ha un segreto. Ora, è certamente evidente che questi sono i tre principali contrassegni del genere d’uomo che viene ricattato. Ed è altrettanto certamente evidente che gli sbiaditi lussi, le abitudini dissolute e la stridula irritabilità del signor Glass sono gli inconfondibili contrassegni del genere d’uomo che lo ricatta. Abbiamo le due figure tipiche di una tragedia da denaro del silenzio: da un lato, l’uomo rispettabile con un mistero; dall’altro, l’avvoltoio del West End col fiuto per un mistero. Questi due uomini si sono incontrati qui oggi e hanno litigato, venendo alle mani e a un’arma sguainata.»
«Avete intenzione di togliere quelle corde?» chiese ostinata la fanciulla.
Il dottor Hood ripose con cura il cilindro di seta sul tavolinetto laterale e attraversò la stanza fino al prigioniero. Lo studiò intensamente, arrivando a smuoverlo un poco e a girarlo a metà tenendolo per le spalle, ma si limitò a rispondere:
«No; credo che queste corde andranno benissimo finché i vostri amici della polizia non porteranno le manette.»
Padre Brown, che aveva fissato ottuso il tappeto, sollevò il viso tondo e disse: «Che cosa intendete?»
L’uomo di scienza aveva raccolto dal tappeto la singolare spada-pugnale e la stava esaminando intensamente mentre rispondeva:
«Poiché trovate il signor Todhunter legato», disse, «tutti saltate alla conclusione che sia stato il signor Glass a legarlo; e poi, suppongo, a fuggire. Ci sono quattro obiezioni a questo: primo, perché un gentiluomo così attillato come il nostro amico Glass avrebbe lasciato qui il cappello, se se ne fosse andato di sua libera volontà? Secondo», proseguì, muovendosi verso la finestra, «questa è l’unica uscita, ed è chiusa a chiave dall’interno. Terzo, questa lama qui ha un minuscolo tocco di sangue sulla punta, ma non c’è ferita sul signor Todhunter. Il signor Glass si è portato via quella ferita, morto o vivo. Aggiungete a tutto ciò la probabilità di fondo. È molto più verosimile che la persona ricattata cerchi di uccidere il proprio incubo, anziché che il ricattatore cerchi di uccidere l’oca che gli depone l’uovo d’oro. Ecco, credo, abbiamo una storia abbastanza completa.»
«Ma le corde?» s’informò il prete, i cui occhi erano rimasti spalancati in un’ammirazione piuttosto vacua.
«Ah, le corde», disse l’esperto con singolare intonazione. «La signorina MacNab desiderava tanto sapere perché non liberassi il signor Todhunter dalle sue corde. Bene, glielo dirò. Non l’ho fatto perché il signor Todhunter può liberarsene da solo in qualunque momento gli aggradi.»
«Cosa?» gridò l’uditorio su note del tutto diverse di stupore.
«Ho esaminato tutti i nodi sul signor Todhunter», ribadì Hood con calma. «Si dà il caso che io me ne intenda di nodi; sono addirittura un ramo della scienza criminale. Ognuno di quei nodi se lo è fatto da solo e potrebbe scioglierselo da solo; non uno di essi sarebbe stato fatto da un nemico che davvero cercasse d’immobilizzarlo. L’intera faccenda delle corde è un’astuta messinscena, per farci credere ch’egli sia la vittima della colluttazione anziché il disgraziato Glass, il cui cadavere può essere nascosto in giardino o cacciato su per il camino.»
Vi fu un silenzio piuttosto abbattuto; la stanza si oscurava, i rami rovinati dal mare degli alberi del giardino apparivano più scarni e neri che mai, eppure sembravano essersi avvicinati alla finestra. Si sarebbe quasi potuto immaginarli mostri marini come kraken o seppie, viluppi di polipi contorti risaliti strisciando dal mare a vedere la fine di questa tragedia, come lui, il malvagio e la vittima di essa, il terribile uomo dall’alto cappello, era una volta risalito strisciando dal mare. Poiché l’aria intera era densa della morbosità del ricatto, che è la più morbosa delle cose umane, perché è un delitto che cela un delitto; un cerotto nero su una piaga più nera.
Il viso del piccolo prete cattolico, che di solito era compiaciuto e persino comico, si era d’un tratto annodato in un curioso cipiglio. Non era la vuota curiosità della sua iniziale innocenza. Era piuttosto quella creativa curiosità che sopraggiunge quando un uomo ha i primi accenni di un’idea. «Ripetetelo, per favore», disse in maniera semplice e turbata; «volete dire che Todhunter può legarsi tutto da solo e slegarsi tutto da solo?»
«È questo che intendo», disse il dottore.
«Perbacco!» esclamò a un tratto Brown, «chissà che non sia proprio così!»
Sfrecciò attraverso la stanza piuttosto come un coniglio, e scrutò con una del tutto nuova impulsività il viso parzialmente coperto del prigioniero. Poi rivolse alla compagnia il proprio viso alquanto fatuo. «Sì, è così!» gridò con una certa eccitazione. «Non lo vedete sul viso dell’uomo? Ma guardategli gli occhi!»
Both the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his glance. And though the broad black scarf completely masked the lower half of Todhunter’s visage, they did grow conscious of something struggling and intense about the upper part of it.
“His eyes do look queer,” cried the young woman, strongly moved. “You brutes; I believe it’s hurting him!”
“Not that, I think,” said Dr Hood; “the eyes have certainly a singular expression. But I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as expressing rather such slight psychological abnormality—”
“Oh, bosh!” cried Father Brown: “can’t you see he’s laughing?”
“Laughing!” repeated the doctor, with a start; “but what on earth can he be laughing at?”
“Well,” replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, “not to put too fine a point on it, I think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I’m a little inclined to laugh at myself, now I know about it.”
“Now you know about what?” asked Hood, in some exasperation.
“Now I know,” replied the priest, “the profession of Mr Todhunter.”
He shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with what seemed to be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an equally vacant laugh, a highly irritating process for those who had to watch it. He laughed very much over the hat, still more uproariously over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming specialist.
“Dr Hood,” he cried enthusiastically, “you are a great poet! You have called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and comic by comparison.”
“I have no notion what you are talking about,” said Dr Hood rather haughtily; “my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete. A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass—”
“That’s it, that’s it,” said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly, “that’s the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so extremely absent. I suppose,” he added reflectively, “that there was never anybody so absent as Mr Glass.”
“Do you mean he is absent from the town?” demanded the doctor.
“I mean he is absent from everywhere,” answered Father Brown; “he is absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak.”
“Do you seriously mean,” said the specialist with a smile, “that there is no such person?”
The priest made a sign of assent. “It does seem a pity,” he said.
Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. “Well,” he said, “before we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room. If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?”
“It is Mr Todhunter’s,” replied Father Brown.
“But it doesn’t fit him,” cried Hood impatiently. “He couldn’t possibly wear it!”
Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. “I never said he could wear it,” he answered. “I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his.”
“And what is the shade of difference?” asked the criminologist with a slight sneer.
“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin to impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter’s shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between a man’s hat and the hats that are his.”
“But a hatter,” protested Hood, “can get money out of his stock of new hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?”
“Rabbits,” replied Father Brown promptly.
“What?” cried Dr Hood.
“Rabbits, ribbons, sweetmeats, goldfish, rolls of coloured paper,” said the reverend gentleman with rapidity. “Didn’t you see it all when you found out the faked ropes? It’s just the same with the sword. Mr Todhunter hasn’t got a scratch on him, as you say; but he’s got a scratch in him, if you follow me.”
“Do you mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes?” inquired Mrs MacNab sternly.
“I do not mean inside Mr Todhunter’s clothes,” said Father Brown. “I mean inside Mr Todhunter.”
“Well, what in the name of Bedlam do you mean?”
“Mr Todhunter,” explained Father Brown placidly, “is learning to be a professional conjurer, as well as juggler, ventriloquist, and expert in the rope trick. The conjuring explains the hat. It is without traces of hair, not because it is worn by the prematurely bald Mr Glass, but because it has never been worn by anybody. The juggling explains the three glasses, which Todhunter was teaching himself to throw up and catch in rotation. But, being only at the stage of practice, he smashed one glass against the ceiling. And the juggling also explains the sword, which it was Mr Todhunter’s professional pride and duty to swallow. But, again, being at the stage of practice, he very slightly grazed the inside of his throat with the weapon. Hence he has a wound inside him, which I am sure (from the expression on his face) is not a serious one. He was also practising the trick of a release from ropes, like the Davenport Brothers, and he was just about to free himself when we all burst into the room. The cards, of course, are for card tricks, and they are scattered on the floor because he had just been practising one of those dodges of sending them flying through the air. He merely kept his trade secret, because he had to keep his tricks secret, like any other conjurer. But the mere fact of an idler in a top hat having once looked in at his back window, and been driven away by him with great indignation, was enough to set us all on a wrong track of romance, and make us imagine his whole life overshadowed by the silk-hatted spectre of Mr Glass.”
“But What about the two voices?” asked Maggie, staring.
“Have you never heard a ventriloquist?” asked Father Brown. “Don’t you know they speak first in their natural voice, and then answer themselves in just that shrill, squeaky, unnatural voice that you heard?”
There was a long silence, and Dr Hood regarded the little man who had spoken with a dark and attentive smile. “You are certainly a very ingenious person,” he said; “it could not have been done better in a book. But there is just one part of Mr Glass you have not succeeded in explaining away, and that is his name. Miss MacNab distinctly heard him so addressed by Mr Todhunter.”
The Rev. Mr Brown broke into a rather childish giggle. “Well, that,” he said, “that’s the silliest part of the whole silly story. When our juggling friend here threw up the three glasses in turn, he counted them aloud as he caught them, and also commented aloud when he failed to catch them. What he really said was: ‘One, two and three—missed a glass one, two—missed a glass.’ And so on.”
There was a second of stillness in the room, and then everyone with one accord burst out laughing. As they did so the figure in the corner complacently uncoiled all the ropes and let them fall with a flourish. Then, advancing into the middle of the room with a bow, he produced from his pocket a big bill printed in blue and red, which announced that ZALADIN, the World’s Greatest Conjurer, Contortionist, Ventriloquist and Human Kangaroo would be ready with an entirely new series of Tricks at the Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, on Monday next at eight o’clock precisely.
TWO
Sia il Professore sia la fanciulla seguirono la direzione del suo sguardo. E benché l’ampia sciarpa nera mascherasse completamente la metà inferiore del volto di Todhunter, si fecero coscienti di qualcosa di lottante e d’intenso nella parte superiore di esso.
«I suoi occhi hanno davvero un’aria strana», gridò la giovane donna, fortemente commossa. «Bruti che siete; credo che gli stiate facendo male!»
«Non è questo, credo», disse il dottor Hood; «gli occhi hanno di certo un’espressione singolare. Ma io interpreterei quelle rughe trasversali come esprimenti piuttosto una lieve anomalia psicologica…»
«Oh, sciocchezze!» gridò Padre Brown: «non vedete che sta ridendo?»
«Ridendo!» ripeté il dottore, con un sussulto; «ma di che diamine può mai ridere?»
«Be’», replicò il Reverendo Brown in tono di scusa, «per non usare troppi giri di parole, credo che stia ridendo di voi. E, in verità, sono un po’ incline a ridere di me stesso, ora che l’ho capito.»
«Ora che avete capito che cosa?» chiese Hood, con qualche esasperazione.
«Ora ho capito», replicò il prete, «la professione del signor Todhunter.»
Si aggirò strascicando i piedi per la stanza, guardando un oggetto dopo l’altro con quello che pareva uno sguardo vacuo, e poi invariabilmente scoppiando in una risata altrettanto vacua, un processo altamente irritante per coloro che dovevano starlo a guardare. Rise moltissimo per il cappello, ancor più fragorosamente per il bicchiere rotto, ma il sangue sulla punta della spada lo gettò in convulsioni mortali di ilarità. Poi si volse allo specialista fumante di stizza.
«Dottor Hood», gridò con entusiasmo, «siete un grande poeta! Avete chiamato dal nulla un essere increato. Quanto più divino è ciò che se aveste soltanto stanato i meri fatti! Anzi, i meri fatti sono piuttosto banali e comici al confronto.»
«Non ho la minima idea di che cosa stiate parlando», disse il dottor Hood piuttosto altezzoso; «i miei fatti sono tutti inevitabili, benché necessariamente incompleti. Uno spazio può essere concesso all’intuizione, forse (o alla poesia, se preferite il termine), ma solo perché i dettagli corrispondenti non possono ancora essere accertati. In assenza del signor Glass…»
«È questo, è questo», disse il piccolo prete, annuendo con gran ardore, «è questa la prima idea da fissare bene; l’assenza del signor Glass. Egli è così straordinariamente assente. Suppongo», aggiunse pensoso, «che non vi sia mai stato nessuno tanto assente quanto il signor Glass.»
«Volete dire che è assente dalla città?» domandò il dottore.
«Voglio dire che è assente da ogni luogo», rispose Padre Brown; «è assente dalla Natura delle Cose, per così dire.»
«Volete dire sul serio», disse lo specialista con un sorriso, «che una tale persona non esiste?»
Il prete fece un segno d’assenso. «Sembra proprio un peccato», disse.
Orion Hood proruppe in una risata sprezzante. «Bene», disse, «prima di passare alle altre cento e una prove, prendiamo la prima prova che abbiamo trovato; il primo fatto in cui siamo inciampati quando siamo inciampati in questa stanza. Se non c’è alcun signor Glass, di chi è questo cappello?»
«È del signor Todhunter», replicò Padre Brown.
«Ma non gli va bene», gridò Hood spazientito. «Non potrebbe assolutamente portarlo!»
Padre Brown scosse il capo con ineffabile mitezza. «Non ho mai detto che potesse portarlo», rispose. «Ho detto che era il suo cappello. O, se insistete su una sfumatura di differenza, un cappello che è suo.»
«E qual è la sfumatura di differenza?» chiese il criminologo con un lieve sogghigno.
«Mio buon signore», gridò il mite ometto, col suo primo moto affine all’impazienza, «se scendete per la via fino alla più vicina cappelleria, vedrete che c’è, nel comune parlare, una differenza tra il cappello di un uomo e i cappelli che sono suoi.»
«Ma un cappellaio», protestò Hood, «può ricavare denaro dalla sua scorta di cappelli nuovi. Che cosa potrebbe ricavare Todhunter da questo unico cappello vecchio?»
«Conigli», replicò prontamente Padre Brown.
«Cosa?» gridò il dottor Hood.
«Conigli, nastri, dolciumi, pesci rossi, rotoli di carta colorata», disse il reverendo gentiluomo con rapidità. «Non avete visto tutto quanto quando avete scoperto le corde truccate? È esattamente lo stesso con la spada. Il signor Todhunter non ha un graffio addosso, come dite voi; ma ha un graffio dentro, se mi seguite.»
«Volete dire dentro i vestiti del signor Todhunter?» s’informò severamente la signora MacNab.
«Non voglio dire dentro i vestiti del signor Todhunter», disse Padre Brown. «Voglio dire dentro il signor Todhunter.»
«Be’, che cosa in nome di Bedlam intendete dire?»
«Il signor Todhunter», spiegò placidamente Padre Brown, «sta imparando a fare il prestigiatore di professione, oltre che il giocoliere, il ventriloquo e l’esperto nel trucco delle corde. La prestidigitazione spiega il cappello. Esso è privo di tracce di capelli, non perché sia portato dal prematuramente calvo signor Glass, ma perché non è mai stato portato da nessuno. La giocoleria spiega i tre bicchieri, che Todhunter s’insegnava da sé a lanciare in aria e riacchiappare a rotazione. Ma, essendo soltanto allo stadio dell’esercizio, ne ha fracassato uno contro il soffitto. E la giocoleria spiega anche la spada, che era orgoglio e dovere professionale del signor Todhunter inghiottire. Ma, di nuovo, essendo allo stadio dell’esercizio, si è graffiato assai lievemente l’interno della gola con l’arma. Di qui ha una ferita dentro di sé, che sono certo (dall’espressione del suo viso) non è grave. Si esercitava anche nel trucco della liberazione dalle corde, come i Fratelli Davenport, ed era proprio sul punto di liberarsi quando tutti abbiamo fatto irruzione nella stanza. Le carte, naturalmente, sono per i giochi di carte, e sono sparse sul pavimento perché egli si era giusto esercitato in uno di quei trucchi di lanciarle a volo per l’aria. Ha semplicemente tenuto segreto il proprio mestiere, perché doveva tenere segreti i suoi trucchi, come ogni altro prestigiatore. Ma il mero fatto che un fannullone in cilindro avesse una volta sbirciato dalla sua finestra sul retro, e ne fosse stato scacciato con grande indignazione, è bastato a metterci tutti su una falsa pista da romanzo, e a farci immaginare l’intera sua vita adombrata dallo spettro incilindrato del signor Glass.»
«Ma allora le due voci?» chiese Maggie, sgranando gli occhi.
«Non avete mai sentito un ventriloquo?» chiese Padre Brown. «Non sapete che parlano prima con la loro voce naturale, e poi si rispondono da soli proprio con quella voce stridula, cigolante e innaturale che avete sentito?»
Vi fu un lungo silenzio, e il dottor Hood osservò l’ometto che aveva parlato con un sorriso cupo e attento. «Siete di certo una persona ingegnosissima», disse; «non si sarebbe potuto far di meglio in un libro. Ma c’è proprio una parte del signor Glass che non siete riuscito a spiegar via, ed è il suo nome. La signorina MacNab lo ha udito distintamente rivolgersi così dal signor Todhunter.»
Il Rev. signor Brown proruppe in un risolino piuttosto puerile. «Be’, quella», disse, «quella è la parte più sciocca dell’intera sciocca storia. Quando il nostro amico giocoliere qui lanciava in aria i tre bicchieri a turno, li contava ad alta voce mentre li riacchiappava, e commentava pure ad alta voce quando non riusciva ad acchiapparli. Ciò che diceva in realtà era: “One, two and three — missed a glass one, two — missed a glass”. E così via.»
Vi fu un attimo d’immobilità nella stanza, e poi tutti a una voce scoppiarono a ridere. Nel far ciò la figura nell’angolo srotolò compiaciuta tutte le corde e le lasciò cadere con un gesto plateale. Poi, avanzando nel mezzo della stanza con un inchino, trasse di tasca un grande manifesto stampato in blu e rosso, che annunciava come ZALADIN, il Più Grande Prestigiatore del Mondo, Contorsionista, Ventriloquo e Canguro Umano, si sarebbe esibito con una serie interamente nuova di Numeri all’Empire Pavilion, Scarborough, lunedì prossimo alle otto in punto dell’orologio.
DUE
The Paradise of Thieves
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.”
Il Paradiso dei Ladri
IL grande Muscari, il più originale fra i giovani poeti toscani, entrò con passo svelto nel suo ristorante prediletto, che dominava il Mediterraneo, era riparato da un tendone e recintato da piccoli alberi di limoni e d’aranci. Camerieri dai grembiuli bianchi disponevano già sui tavoli candidi le insegne di un pranzo mattutino ed elegante; e ciò pareva accrescere una soddisfazione che già rasentava il colmo della spavalderia. Muscari aveva un naso d’aquila come Dante; i capelli e il fazzoletto al collo erano scuri e fluenti; portava un mantello nero, e avrebbe potuto quasi portare una maschera nera, tanto recava con sé una sorta di melodramma veneziano. Si comportava come se il trovatore avesse ancora un preciso ufficio sociale, al pari di un vescovo. Andava tanto vicino quanto il suo secolo consentiva al camminare per il mondo alla lettera come Don Giovanni, con lo spadino e la chitarra.
Poiché non viaggiava mai senza un astuccio di spade, con le quali aveva combattuto molti brillanti duelli, né senza un astuccio corrispondente per il suo mandolino, con il quale aveva davvero portato una serenata a Miss Ethel Harrogate, la figlia oltremodo convenzionale di un banchiere dello Yorkshire in villeggiatura. Eppure non era né un ciarlatano né un fanciullo; ma un latino ardente e logico, che amava una certa cosa ed era quella cosa. La sua poesia era diretta quanto la prosa di chiunque altro. Desiderava la fama o il vino o la bellezza delle donne con una torrida immediatezza inconcepibile fra i nebulosi ideali o i nebulosi compromessi del nord; a razze più indistinte la sua intensità sapeva di pericolo o addirittura di delitto. Come il fuoco o il mare, era troppo semplice perché ci si potesse fidare.
Il banchiere e la sua bella figlia inglese alloggiavano nell’albergo annesso al ristorante di Muscari; ecco perché era il suo ristorante prediletto. Un’occhiata lanciata per la sala gli disse tuttavia all’istante che la comitiva inglese non era ancora scesa. Il ristorante era scintillante, ma ancora relativamente vuoto. Due preti conversavano a un tavolo in un angolo, ma Muscari (cattolico ardente) non vi badò più di quanto avrebbe badato a un paio di cornacchie. Ma da un posto ancora più lontano, in parte celato dietro un albero nano dorato d’arance, si levò e avanzò verso il poeta una persona il cui abbigliamento era il più aggressivamente opposto al suo.
Questa figura era vestita di un tweed a quadri pezzati, con una cravatta rosa, un colletto rigido e sporgenti stivali gialli. Riusciva, nella genuina tradizione di ‘Arry a Margate, ad apparire nel medesimo tempo sconcertante e volgare. Ma via via che l’apparizione cockney si avvicinava, Muscari fu stupefatto di osservare che la testa era nettamente diversa dal corpo. Era una testa italiana: crespa, bruna e vivacissima, che si ergeva di colpo dal colletto ritto come cartone e dalla comica cravatta rosa. Era anzi una testa che conosceva. La riconobbe, al di sopra di tutta la funesta impalcatura dell’abbigliamento vacanziero inglese, come il volto di un vecchio ma dimenticato amico di nome Ezza. Questo giovane era stato un prodigio al collegio, e gli si prometteva fama europea quando aveva appena quindici anni; ma quando comparve nel mondo fallì, prima pubblicamente come drammaturgo e demagogo, poi privatamente per anni interi come attore, viaggiatore, agente di commercio o giornalista. Muscari lo aveva conosciuto l’ultima volta dietro le luci della ribalta; era fin troppo bene intonato alle eccitazioni di quella professione, e si credeva che qualche calamità morale lo avesse inghiottito.
«Ezza!» esclamò il poeta, alzandosi e stringendogli la mano con piacevole stupore. «Ebbene, ti ho visto in molti costumi nel camerino; ma non mi sarei mai aspettato di vederti agghindato da inglese.»
«Questo,» rispose Ezza con gravità, «non è il costume di un inglese, ma dell’italiano del futuro.»
«In tal caso,» osservò Muscari, «confesso di preferire l’italiano del passato.»
«Questo è il tuo vecchio errore, Muscari,» disse l’uomo in tweed, scuotendo il capo; «ed è l’errore dell’Italia. Nel Cinquecento noi toscani facevamo il mattino: avevamo l’acciaio più nuovo, l’intaglio più nuovo, la chimica più nuova. Perché non dovremmo avere ora le fabbriche più nuove, i motori più nuovi, la finanza più nuova… gli abiti più nuovi?»
«Perché non vale la pena di averli,» rispose Muscari. «Non si possono rendere gli italiani veramente progressisti; sono troppo intelligenti. Gli uomini che vedono la scorciatoia per il buon vivere non passeranno mai per le nuove e complicate strade.»
«Ebbene, per me Marconi, o D’Annunzio, è la stella d’Italia,» disse l’altro. «Ecco perché sono diventato futurista… e corriere.»
«Un corriere!» esclamò Muscari, ridendo. «È questo l’ultimo della tua lista di mestieri? E chi stai accompagnando?»
«Oh, un tale di nome Harrogate, e la sua famiglia, credo.»
«Non il banchiere di questo albergo?» domandò il poeta, con una certa premura.
«È lui,» rispose il corriere.
«Rende bene?» chiese il trovatore con innocenza.
«Renderà a me,» disse Ezza, con un sorriso quanto mai enigmatico. «Ma sono un corriere di specie piuttosto curiosa.» Poi, come mutando argomento, aggiunse bruscamente: «Ha una figlia… e un figlio.»
«La figlia è divina,» affermò Muscari, «il padre e il figlio sono, suppongo, umani. Ma pur concedendogli le sue innocue qualità, non ti pare che quel banchiere sia uno splendido esempio della mia tesi? Harrogate ha milioni nelle sue casseforti, e io ho… il buco nella tasca. Ma non oseresti dire… non puoi dire… che sia più ingegnoso di me, o più audace di me, o anche solo più energico. Non è ingegnoso, ha occhi come bottoni azzurri; non è energico, si sposta di sedia in sedia come un paralitico. È un vecchio zuccone coscienzioso e benevolo; ma ha denaro semplicemente perché colleziona denaro, come un ragazzo colleziona francobolli. Sei troppo di carattere per gli affari, Ezza. Non farai strada. Per essere abbastanza abili da mettere insieme tutto quel denaro, bisogna essere abbastanza stupidi da desiderarlo.»
«Io sono abbastanza stupido per questo,» disse Ezza cupo. «Ma suggerirei di sospendere la tua critica al banchiere, perché eccolo che arriva.»
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.
Il signor Harrogate, il grande finanziere, entrò infatti nella sala, ma nessuno lo guardò. Era un uomo anziano e massiccio, con un occhio azzurro slavato e baffi d’un grigio sabbia sbiadito; se non fosse stato per la sua pesante curvatura, avrebbe potuto passare per un colonnello. Reggeva in mano parecchie lettere non aperte. Suo figlio Frank era un ragazzo davvero avvenente, ricciuto, abbronzato e vigoroso; ma nessuno guardava neppure lui. Tutti gli occhi, come al solito, erano inchiodati, almeno per il momento, su Ethel Harrogate, la cui aurea testa greca e il colore dell’aurora parevano posti apposta al di sopra di quel mare di zaffiro, come quelli di una dea. Il poeta Muscari trasse un profondo respiro come se bevesse qualcosa, e in effetti era così. Beveva il Classico, che i suoi padri avevano creato. Ezza la studiava con uno sguardo ugualmente intenso e assai più indecifrabile.
Miss Harrogate era particolarmente raggiante e disposta alla conversazione in quell’occasione; e la sua famiglia era caduta nella più agevole abitudine continentale, permettendo all’estraneo Muscari e persino al corriere Ezza di dividere la loro tavola e i loro discorsi. In Ethel Harrogate la convenzionalità si incoronava di una perfezione e di uno splendore tutti suoi. Fiera della prosperità del padre, amante dei piaceri alla moda, figlia affettuosa ma civetta sfacciata, era tutte queste cose con una sorta di aurea buona natura che rendeva gradevole il suo stesso orgoglio e la sua rispettabilità mondana una cosa fresca e cordiale.
Erano in un vortice di eccitazione a proposito di un supposto pericolo del sentiero montano che avrebbero tentato quella settimana. Il pericolo non veniva dalla roccia e dalla valanga, ma da qualcosa di ancor più romanzesco. A Ethel era stato assicurato con fervore che i briganti, i veri tagliagole della leggenda moderna, infestavano ancora quel crinale e tenevano quel passo degli Appennini.
«Dicono,» esclamò lei, con il terribile gusto di una collegiale, «che tutta quella regione non è governata dal Re d’Italia, ma dal Re dei Ladri. Chi è il Re dei Ladri?»
«Un grand’uomo,» rispose Muscari, «degno di stare alla pari del vostro Robin Hood, signorina. Di Montano, il Re dei Ladri, si sentì parlare per la prima volta sui monti una decina d’anni fa, quando la gente diceva che i briganti si fossero estinti. Ma la sua selvaggia autorità si diffuse con la rapidità di una rivoluzione silenziosa. Gli uomini trovavano i suoi feroci proclami inchiodati in ogni villaggio di montagna; le sue sentinelle, fucile in pugno, in ogni gola montana. Sei volte il Governo italiano tentò di scacciarlo, e fu sconfitto in sei battaglie campali come se le avesse condotte Napoleone.»
«Ecco, cose del genere,» osservò il banchiere con gravità, «non sarebbero mai permesse in Inghilterra; forse, dopotutto, faremmo meglio a scegliere un altro itinerario. Ma il corriere lo riteneva perfettamente sicuro.»
«È perfettamente sicuro,» disse il corriere con disprezzo. «L’ho percorso venti volte. Può esserci stato qualche vecchio galeotto chiamato Re al tempo delle nostre nonne; ma appartiene alla storia, se non alla favola. Il brigantaggio è del tutto debellato.»
«Non potrà mai essere del tutto debellato,» rispose Muscari; «perché la rivolta armata è uno svago naturale per i meridionali. I nostri contadini sono come i loro monti, ricchi di grazia e di verde allegria, ma con i fuochi al di sotto. C’è un punto della disperazione umana in cui i poveri del nord si danno al bere… e i nostri poveri si danno al pugnale.»
«Un poeta è un privilegiato,» ribatté Ezza, con un ghigno. «Se il signor Muscari fosse inglese, cercherebbe ancora briganti da strada a Wandsworth. Mi creda, non c’è più pericolo di essere catturati in Italia di quanto ce ne sia di essere scotennati a Boston.»
«Allora intendete tentarlo?» chiese il signor Harrogate, aggrottando le sopracciglia.
«Oh, suona piuttosto spaventoso,» esclamò la ragazza, volgendo i suoi occhi gloriosi su Muscari. «Crede davvero che il passo sia pericoloso?»
Muscari gettò indietro la sua nera criniera. «So che è pericoloso,» disse. «Lo attraverso domani.»
Il giovane Harrogate rimase indietro un momento a vuotare un bicchiere di vino bianco e ad accendere una sigaretta, mentre la bella si ritirava con il banchiere, il corriere e il poeta, distribuendo scrosci di argentea satira. Quasi nello stesso istante i due preti nell’angolo si alzarono; il più alto, un italiano dai capelli bianchi, prese congedo. Il prete più basso si voltò e si diresse verso il figlio del banchiere, e questi fu stupito di rendersi conto che, benché fosse un prete cattolico romano, l’uomo era inglese. Ricordava vagamente di averlo incontrato nella ressa mondana di qualcuno dei suoi amici cattolici. Ma l’uomo parlò prima che i suoi ricordi potessero raccogliersi.
«Il signor Frank Harrogate, credo,» disse. «Mi hanno presentato a lei, ma non intendo prevalermene. La strana cosa che ho da dire verrà assai meglio da uno sconosciuto. Signor Harrogate, dico una parola e me ne vado: abbia cura di sua sorella nel suo grande dolore.»
Persino per l’indifferenza davvero fraterna di Frank, lo splendore e la derisione della sorella parevano ancora scintillare e risuonare; udiva ancora la sua risata dal giardino dell’albergo, e fissava il suo tetro consigliere con perplessità.
«Intende i briganti?» chiese; e poi, ricordando un suo vago timore, «o pensa forse a Muscari?»
«Non si pensa mai al vero dolore,» disse lo strano prete. «Si può solo essere gentili quando arriva.»
E uscì prontamente dalla sala, lasciando l’altro quasi a bocca aperta.
Un giorno o due dopo, una vettura che conteneva la comitiva arrancava e sobbalzava davvero su per gli speroni della minacciosa catena montuosa. Tra l’allegra negazione del pericolo da parte di Ezza e la chiassosa sfida che ad esso lanciava Muscari, la famiglia dei finanzieri restò ferma nel suo proposito originario; e Muscari fece coincidere il suo viaggio fra i monti con il loro. Un tratto più sorprendente fu la comparsa, alla stazione della cittadina costiera, del piccolo prete del ristorante; egli addusse soltanto che anche a lui gli affari imponevano di attraversare i monti dell’entroterra. Ma il giovane Harrogate non poté fare a meno di collegare la sua presenza con i mistici timori e gli avvertimenti del giorno prima.
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 alone 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.
“It’s like Kew Gardens on Beachy Head,” said Ethel.
“It is our secret,” answered he, “the secret of the volcano; that is also the secret of the revolution—that a thing can be violent and yet fruitful.”
“You are rather violent yourself,” and she smiled at him.
“And yet rather fruitless,” he admitted; “if I die tonight I die unmarried and a fool.”
“It is not my fault if you have come,” she said after a difficult silence.
“It is never your fault,” answered Muscari; “it was not your fault that Troy fell.”
As they spoke they came under overwhelming cliffs that spread almost like wings above a corner of peculiar peril. Shocked by the big shadow on the narrow ledge, the horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to the earth to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse reared up to his full height— the titanic and terrifying height of a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel, who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments that he lived.
At the moment when the gorgeous mountain walls went round the poet’s head like a purple windmill a thing happened which was superficially even more startling. The elderly and lethargic banker sprang erect in the coach and leapt over the precipice before the tilted vehicle could take him there. In the first flash it looked as wild as suicide; but in the second it was as sensible as a safe investment. The Yorkshireman had evidently more promptitude, as well as more sagacity, than Muscari had given him credit for; for he landed in a lap of land which might have been specially padded with turf and clover to receive him. As it happened, indeed, the whole company were equally lucky, if less dignified in their form of ejection. Immediately under this abrupt turn of the road was a grassy and flowery hollow like a sunken meadow; a sort of green velvet pocket in the long, green, trailing garments of the hills. Into this they were all tipped or tumbled with little damage, save that their smallest baggage and even the contents of their pockets were scattered in the grass around them. The wrecked coach still hung above, entangled in the tough hedge, and the horses plunged painfully down the slope. The first to sit up was the little priest, who scratched his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him say to himself: “Now why on earth have we fallen just here?”
He blinked at the litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy umbrella. Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance at the address, he returned to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel’s sunshade, and just beyond it lay a curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest picked it up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his heavy face turned the colour of clay.
“Heaven deliver us!” he muttered; “it can’t be hers! Has her sorrow come on her already?” He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. “I think I’m justified,” he said, “till I know a little more.”
He gazed painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the flowers by Muscari, who was saying: “We have fallen into heaven; it is a sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and goddesses who can fall upwards.”
And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy a vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. “After all,” he thought, “perhaps the poison isn’t hers; perhaps it’s one of Muscari’s melodramatic tricks.”
La vettura era una specie di comodo calessino, inventato dal talento modernista del corriere, che dominava la spedizione con la sua attività scientifica e il suo brio spensierato. La teoria del pericolo dei ladri fu bandita dal pensiero e dalla parola; benché fosse concessa a tal punto nell’atto formale che si adottò qualche lieve protezione. Il corriere e il giovane banchiere portavano rivoltelle cariche, e Muscari (con molta fanciullesca soddisfazione) si allacciò una specie di sciabola sotto il suo mantello nero.
Con un balzo fulmineo aveva piazzato la sua persona accanto all’incantevole inglese; dall’altro suo lato sedeva il prete, il cui nome era Brown e che era fortunatamente un individuo silenzioso; il corriere e il padre e il figlio erano sul sedile dietro. Muscari era di umore altissimo, credendo sul serio nel pericolo, e i suoi discorsi a Ethel potevano bene averle fatto credere che fosse un maniaco. Ma c’era qualcosa in quella folle e magnifica salita, tra rupi simili a picchi carichi di boschi simili a frutteti, che trascinava il suo spirito su solo con quello di lui in cieli purpurei e assurdi con soli roteanti. La bianca strada saliva come un gatto bianco; scavalcava abissi senza sole come una corda tesa; era gettata attorno a promontori lontani come un lazo.
Eppure, per quanto in alto salissero, il deserto ancora fioriva come la rosa. I campi risplendevano al sole e al vento col colore del martin pescatore e del pappagallo e del colibrì, le tinte di cento fiori in fiore. Non ci sono prati e boschi più incantevoli di quelli inglesi, né creste o abissi più nobili di quelli dello Snowdon e di Glencoe. Ma Ethel Harrogate non aveva mai visto prima i parchi meridionali inclinati sulle frastagliate vette settentrionali; la gola di Glencoe carica dei frutti del Kent. Non c’era qui nulla di quel gelo e di quella desolazione che in Gran Bretagna si associa agli scenari alti e selvaggi. Era piuttosto come un palazzo di mosaico, squarciato dai terremoti; o come un olandese giardino di tulipani fatto volare fino alle stelle con la dinamite.
«È come i Kew Gardens su Beachy Head,» disse Ethel.
«È il nostro segreto,» rispose lui, «il segreto del vulcano; è anche il segreto della rivoluzione… che una cosa può essere violenta e tuttavia feconda.»
«Anche lei è piuttosto violento,» e gli sorrise.
«E tuttavia piuttosto infecondo,» ammise; «se muoio stanotte, muoio scapolo e sciocco.»
«Non è colpa mia se è venuto,» disse dopo un difficile silenzio.
«Non è mai colpa vostra,» rispose Muscari; «non fu colpa vostra se Troia cadde.»
Mentre parlavano giunsero sotto rupi soverchianti che si spandevano quasi come ali sopra un angolo di peculiare pericolo. Turbati dalla grande ombra sullo stretto ripiano, i cavalli si agitarono con esitazione. Il cocchiere balzò a terra per tenerli per la testa, ed essi divennero ingovernabili. Un cavallo si impennò in tutta la sua altezza… la titanica e terrificante altezza di un cavallo quando diventa bipede. Fu quanto bastava ad alterare l’equilibrio; l’intera vettura si inclinò come una nave e sfondò la frangia di cespugli oltre il ciglio. Muscari gettò un braccio attorno a Ethel, che si aggrappò a lui, e gridò forte. Era per momenti simili che egli viveva.
Nel momento in cui le magnifiche pareti montane giravano intorno alla testa del poeta come un mulino a vento purpureo, accadde una cosa che in superficie era ancor più sconcertante. Il banchiere anziano e letargico scattò in piedi nella vettura e balzò oltre il precipizio prima che il veicolo inclinato potesse portarvelo. Nel primo lampo parve folle quanto un suicidio; ma nel secondo fu assennato quanto un investimento sicuro. Lo Yorkshirese aveva evidentemente più prontezza, oltre che più sagacia, di quanta Muscari gliene avesse attribuita; poiché atterrò in un grembo di terra che pareva imbottito apposta d’erba e di trifoglio per accoglierlo. Come accadde, in effetti, l’intera compagnia fu ugualmente fortunata, se pure meno dignitosa nella forma dell’espulsione. Immediatamente sotto quella brusca svolta della strada c’era una conca erbosa e fiorita come un prato incassato; una sorta di tasca di velluto verde nelle lunghe, verdi, strascicanti vesti delle colline. In essa furono tutti rovesciati o precipitati con pochi danni, salvo che i loro bagagli più piccoli e persino il contenuto delle loro tasche si sparpagliarono nell’erba intorno a loro. La vettura sfasciata pendeva ancora in alto, impigliata nella dura siepe, e i cavalli si tuffavano dolorosamente giù per il pendio. Il primo a mettersi a sedere fu il piccolo prete, che si grattò il capo con un’aria di sciocco stupore. Frank Harrogate lo udì dire fra sé: «E adesso perché diavolo siamo caduti proprio qui?»
Batté le palpebre osservando il disordine intorno a sé, e recuperò il proprio ombrello assai goffo. Oltre di esso giaceva il largo sombrero caduto dalla testa di Muscari, e accanto una lettera d’affari sigillata che, dopo un’occhiata all’indirizzo, restituì al vecchio Harrogate. Dall’altro suo lato l’erba nascondeva in parte il parasole di Miss Ethel, e appena oltre giaceva una curiosa boccettina di vetro lunga sì e no due pollici. Il prete la raccolse; con gesto rapido e discreto la stappò e la annusò, e il suo pesante volto si fece del colore dell’argilla.
«Il cielo ci scampi!» mormorò; «non può essere sua! Il suo dolore si è già abbattuto su di lei?» La fece scivolare nel taschino del proprio panciotto. «Credo di essere giustificato,» disse, «finché non ne saprò un po’ di più.»
Guardò con pena la ragazza, che in quel momento veniva sollevata dai fiori da Muscari, il quale diceva: «Siamo caduti in cielo; è un segno. I mortali salgono e cadono giù; ma sono soltanto gli dèi e le dee a poter cadere verso l’alto.»
E davvero ella si levò dal mare di colori come una visione così bella e felice che il prete sentì il suo sospetto vacillare e spostarsi. «Dopotutto,» pensò, «forse il veleno non è suo; forse è uno dei trucchi melodrammatici di Muscari.»
Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly theatrical bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut reins of the horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood in the grass trembling. When he had done so, a most remarkable thing occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed and extremely sunburnt, came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses’ heads. He had a queer-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there was nothing else remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent appearance. The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer.
Looking around him at the confused and startled group in the hollow, Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered man, with a short gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below, leaning his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the road from which they had fallen and saw, looking down on them, the muzzles of four other carbines and four other brown faces with bright but quite motionless eyes.
“The brigands!” cried Muscari, with a kind of monstrous gaiety. “This was a trap. Ezza, if you will oblige me by shooting the coachman first, we can cut our way out yet. There are only six of them.”
“The coachman,” said Ezza, who was standing grimly with his hands in his pockets, “happens to be a servant of Mr Harrogate’s.”
“Then shoot him all the more,” cried the poet impatiently; “he was bribed to upset his master. Then put the lady in the middle, and we will break the line up there—with a rush.”
And, wading in wild grass and flowers, he advanced fearlessly on the four carbines; but finding that no one followed except young Harrogate, he turned, brandishing his cutlass to wave the others on. He beheld the courier still standing slightly astride in the centre of the grassy ring, his hands in his pockets; and his lean, ironical Italian face seemed to grow longer and longer in the evening light.
“You thought, Muscari, I was the failure among our schoolfellows,” he said, “and you thought you were the success. But I have succeeded more than you and fill a bigger place in history. I have been acting epics while you have been writing them.”
“Come on, I tell you!” thundered Muscari from above. “Will you stand there talking nonsense about yourself with a woman to save and three strong men to help you? What do you call yourself?”
“I call myself Montano,” cried the strange courier in a voice equally loud and full. “I am the King of Thieves, and I welcome you all to my summer palace.”
And even as he spoke five more silent men with weapons ready came out of the bushes, and looked towards him for their orders. One of them held a large paper in his hand.
“This pretty little nest where we are all picnicking,” went on the courier-brigand, with the same easy yet sinister smile, “is, together with some caves underneath it, known by the name of the Paradise of Thieves. It is my principal stronghold on these hills; for (as you have doubtless noticed) the eyrie is invisible both from the road above and from the valley below. It is something better than impregnable; it is unnoticeable. Here I mostly live, and here I shall certainly die, if the gendarmes ever track me here. I am not the kind of criminal that ‘reserves his defence,’ but the better kind that reserves his last bullet.”
All were staring at him thunderstruck and still, except Father Brown, who heaved a huge sigh as of relief and fingered the little phial in his pocket. “Thank God!” he muttered; “that’s much more probable. The poison belongs to this robber-chief, of course. He carries it so that he may never be captured, like Cato.”
The King of Thieves was, however, continuing his address with the same kind of dangerous politeness. “It only remains for me,” he said, “to explain to my guests the social conditions upon which I have the pleasure of entertaining them. I need not expound the quaint old ritual of ransom, which it is incumbent upon me to keep up; and even this only applies to a part of the company. The Reverend Father Brown and the celebrated Signor Muscari I shall release tomorrow at dawn and escort to my outposts. Poets and priests, if you will pardon my simplicity of speech, never have any money. And so (since it is impossible to get anything out of them), let us, seize the opportunity to show our admiration for classic literature and our reverence for Holy Church.”
He paused with an unpleasing smile; and Father Brown blinked repeatedly at him, and seemed suddenly to be listening with great attention. The brigand captain took the large paper from the attendant brigand and, glancing over it, continued: “My other intentions are clearly set forth in this public document, which I will hand round in a moment; and which after that will be posted on a tree by every village in the valley, and every cross-road in the hills. I will not weary you with the verbalism, since you will be able to check it; the substance of my proclamation is this: I announce first that I have captured the English millionaire, the colossus of finance, Mr Samuel Harrogate. I next announce that I have found on his person notes and bonds for two thousand pounds, which he has given up to me. Now since it would be really immoral to announce such a thing to a credulous public if it had not occurred, I suggest it should occur without further delay. I suggest that Mr Harrogate senior should now give me the two thousand pounds in his pocket.”
The banker looked at him under lowering brows, red-faced and sulky, but seemingly cowed. That leap from the failing carriage seemed to have used up his last virility. He had held back in a hang-dog style when his son and Muscari had made a bold movement to break out of the brigand trap. And now his red and trembling hand went reluctantly to his breast-pocket, and passed a bundle of papers and envelopes to the brigand.
Muscari posò lievemente la dama sui piedi, le fece un inchino assurdamente teatrale, e poi, sguainando la sciabola, colpì con forza le tese redini dei cavalli, sicché essi si rialzarono in piedi e rimasero nell’erba tremanti. Fatto ciò, accadde una cosa oltremodo notevole. Un uomo quietissimo, vestito assai poveramente e straordinariamente abbronzato, uscì dai cespugli e afferrò le teste dei cavalli. Aveva un coltello di strana foggia, molto largo e ricurvo, allacciato alla cintura; non c’era null’altro di notevole in lui, tranne la sua comparsa improvvisa e silenziosa. Il poeta gli chiese chi fosse, ed egli non rispose.
Guardandosi intorno al gruppo confuso e sbigottito nella conca, Muscari si accorse allora che un altro uomo, abbronzato e cencioso, con uno schioppo sotto il braccio, li osservava dal ripiano appena sottostante, appoggiando i gomiti sull’orlo dell’erba. Poi levò lo sguardo verso la strada dalla quale erano caduti e vide, chini su di loro, le bocche di altre quattro carabine e altri quattro volti bruni con occhi lucenti ma del tutto immobili.
«I briganti!» esclamò Muscari, con una specie di mostruosa allegria. «Era una trappola. Ezza, se mi farai il favore di sparare prima al cocchiere, possiamo ancora aprirci la strada a colpi di lama. Sono soltanto sei.»
«Il cocchiere,» disse Ezza, che se ne stava arcigno con le mani in tasca, «si dà il caso che sia un servitore del signor Harrogate.»
«Allora sparagli a maggior ragione,» esclamò il poeta con impazienza; «è stato corrotto per ribaltare il suo padrone. Poi mettete la dama in mezzo, e sfonderemo la linea lassù… con un assalto.»
E, avanzando tra l’erba selvatica e i fiori, si spinse senza paura contro le quattro carabine; ma accorgendosi che nessuno lo seguiva tranne il giovane Harrogate, si voltò, brandendo la sciabola per far cenno agli altri di avanzare. Scorse il corriere ancora ritto, leggermente a gambe larghe, al centro dell’anello erboso, le mani in tasca; e il suo magro, ironico volto italiano pareva allungarsi sempre più nella luce della sera.
«Pensavi, Muscari, che io fossi il fallito fra i nostri compagni di scuola,» disse, «e pensavi di essere tu il successo. Ma io ho avuto più successo di te e occupo un posto più grande nella storia. Io ho recitato poemi epici mentre tu li scrivevi.»
«Vieni, ti dico!» tuonò Muscari dall’alto. «Vuoi startene lì a dire sciocchezze su te stesso con una donna da salvare e tre uomini gagliardi ad aiutarti? Come ti fai chiamare?»
«Mi faccio chiamare Montano,» gridò lo strano corriere con voce ugualmente alta e piena. «Sono il Re dei Ladri, e do il benvenuto a tutti voi nel mio palazzo d’estate.»
E mentre ancora parlava, altri cinque uomini silenziosi con le armi pronte uscirono dai cespugli, e si volsero verso di lui in attesa di ordini. Uno di essi teneva in mano un grande foglio.
«Questo grazioso nidietto dove stiamo tutti facendo un picnic,» proseguì il corriere-brigante, con lo stesso sorriso disinvolto eppure sinistro, «è noto, insieme ad alcune grotte che vi stanno sotto, con il nome di Paradiso dei Ladri. È la mia principale roccaforte su queste colline; poiché (come avrete senza dubbio notato) il nido d’aquila è invisibile sia dalla strada in alto sia dalla valle in basso. È qualcosa di meglio che inespugnabile; è inosservabile. Qui perlopiù vivo, e qui certamente morirò, se mai i gendarmi mi rintracceranno. Non sono il genere di criminale che «si riserva la difesa», ma il genere migliore che si riserva l’ultima pallottola.»
Tutti lo fissavano fulminati e immobili, tranne padre Brown, che trasse un enorme sospiro come di sollievo e tastò la boccetta nella sua tasca. «Grazie a Dio!» mormorò; «così è molto più probabile. Il veleno appartiene a questo capobrigante, s’intende. Lo porta con sé perché non possa mai essere catturato, come Catone.»
Il Re dei Ladri, tuttavia, continuava il suo discorso con lo stesso genere di pericolosa cortesia. «Non mi resta che,» disse, «spiegare ai miei ospiti le condizioni sociali alle quali ho il piacere di intrattenerli. Non ho bisogno di esporre il bizzarro antico rituale del riscatto, che mi incombe di mantenere; e anche questo si applica soltanto a una parte della compagnia. Il reverendo padre Brown e il celebre signor Muscari li rilascerò domani all’alba e li scorterò fino ai miei avamposti. I poeti e i preti, se mi perdonate la semplicità del discorso, non hanno mai denaro. E dunque (poiché è impossibile cavarne alcunché), cogliamo l’occasione per mostrare la nostra ammirazione per la letteratura classica e la nostra reverenza per la Santa Chiesa.»
Si fermò con un sorriso sgradevole; e padre Brown batté ripetutamente le palpebre verso di lui, e parve d’un tratto ascoltare con grande attenzione. Il capitano dei briganti prese il grande foglio dal brigante che lo assisteva e, scorrendolo con l’occhio, proseguì: «Le mie altre intenzioni sono chiaramente esposte in questo documento pubblico, che farò circolare fra un momento; e che dopo di ciò verrà affisso a un albero presso ogni villaggio della valle, e a ogni crocevia delle colline. Non vi stancherò con il verbalismo, giacché potrete verificarlo; la sostanza del mio proclama è questa: annuncio in primo luogo di aver catturato il milionario inglese, il colosso della finanza, il signor Samuel Harrogate. Annuncio poi di aver trovato sulla sua persona banconote e titoli per duemila sterline, che egli mi ha ceduto. Ora, poiché sarebbe davvero immorale annunciare una cosa simile a un pubblico credulo se essa non fosse avvenuta, suggerisco che avvenga senza ulteriore indugio. Suggerisco che il signor Harrogate senior mi consegni ora le duemila sterline che ha in tasca.»
Il banchiere lo guardò da sotto le sopracciglia abbassate, rosso in volto e imbronciato, ma in apparenza intimidito. Quel balzo dalla carrozza in rovina pareva avergli consumato l’ultima virilità. Si era tenuto indietro con aria mogia quando il figlio e Muscari avevano fatto un ardito movimento per rompere la trappola dei briganti. E ora la sua mano rossa e tremante andò con riluttanza al taschino del petto, e passò un fascio di carte e di buste al brigante.
“Excellent!” cried that outlaw gaily; “so far we are all cosy. I resume the points of my proclamation, so soon to be published to all Italy. The third item is that of ransom. I am asking from the friends of the Harrogate family a ransom of three thousand pounds, which I am sure is almost insulting to that family in its moderate estimate of their importance. Who would not pay triple this sum for another day’s association with such a domestic circle? I will not conceal from you that the document ends with certain legal phrases about the unpleasant things that may happen if the money is not paid; but meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, let me assure you that I am comfortably off here for accommodation, wine and cigars, and bid you for the present a sportsman-like welcome to the luxuries of the Paradise of Thieves.”
All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with carbines and dirty slouch hats had been gathering silently in such preponderating numbers that even Muscari was compelled to recognize his sally with the sword as hopeless. He glanced around him; but the girl had already gone over to soothe and comfort her father, for her natural affection for his person was as strong or stronger than her somewhat snobbish pride in his success. Muscari, with the illogicality of a lover, admired this filial devotion, and yet was irritated by it. He slapped his sword back in the scabbard and went and flung himself somewhat sulkily on one of the green banks. The priest sat down within a yard or two, and Muscari turned his aquiline nose on him in an instantaneous irritation.
“Well,” said the poet tartly, “do people still think me too romantic? Are there, I wonder, any brigands left in the mountains?”
“There may be,” said Father Brown agnostically.
“What do you mean?” asked the other sharply.
“I mean I am puzzled,” replied the priest. “I am puzzled about Ezza or Montano, or whatever his name is. He seems to me much more inexplicable as a brigand even than he was as a courier.”
“But in what way?” persisted his companion. “Santa Maria! I should have thought the brigand was plain enough.”
“I find three curious difficulties,” said the priest in a quiet voice. “I should like to have your opinion on them. First of all I must tell you I was lunching in that restaurant at the seaside. As four of you left the room, you and Miss Harrogate went ahead, talking and laughing; the banker and the courier came behind, speaking sparely and rather low. But I could not help hearing Ezza say these words—‘Well, let her have a little fun; you know the blow may smash her any minute.’ Mr Harrogate answered nothing; so the words must have had some meaning. On the impulse of the moment I warned her brother that she might be in peril; I said nothing of its nature, for I did not know. But if it meant this capture in the hills, the thing is nonsense. Why should the brigand-courier warn his patron, even by a hint, when it was his whole purpose to lure him into the mountain-mousetrap? It could not have meant that. But if not, what is this disaster, known both to courier and banker, which hangs over Miss Harrogate’s head?”
“Disaster to Miss Harrogate!” ejaculated the poet, sitting up with some ferocity. “Explain yourself; go on.”
“All my riddles, however, revolve round our bandit chief,” resumed the priest reflectively. “And here is the second of them. Why did he put so prominently in his demand for ransom the fact that he had taken two thousand pounds from his victim on the spot? It had no faintest tendency to evoke the ransom. Quite the other way, in fact. Harrogate’s friends would be far likelier to fear for his fate if they thought the thieves were poor and desperate. Yet the spoliation on the spot was emphasized and even put first in the demand. Why should Ezza Montano want so specially to tell all Europe that he had picked the pocket before he levied the blackmail?”
“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.
«Eccellente!» esclamò allegramente quel fuorilegge; «finora siamo tutti a nostro agio. Riprendo i punti del mio proclama, tanto presto destinato a essere pubblicato per tutta l’Italia. Il terzo articolo è quello del riscatto. Chiedo agli amici della famiglia Harrogate un riscatto di tremila sterline, che sono certo riesca quasi offensivo per quella famiglia nella sua modesta stima della loro importanza. Chi non pagherebbe il triplo di questa somma per un altro giorno di frequentazione con una simile cerchia domestica? Non vi nasconderò che il documento termina con certe frasi legali sulle spiacevoli cose che potrebbero accadere se il denaro non venisse pagato; ma nel frattempo, signore e signori, lasciate che vi assicuri di essere qui comodamente provvisto di alloggio, vino e sigari, e vi porgo per ora un benvenuto da gentiluomo sportivo alle delizie del Paradiso dei Ladri.»
Per tutto il tempo in cui aveva parlato, gli uomini dall’aria equivoca, con le carabine e i sudici cappellacci a tesa molle, si erano radunati in silenzio in numero così preponderante che persino Muscari fu costretto a riconoscere disperata la sua sortita con la spada. Si guardò intorno; ma la ragazza era già andata a placare e a confortare il padre, poiché il suo naturale affetto per la sua persona era altrettanto forte, o più forte, del suo alquanto snobistico orgoglio per il successo di lui. Muscari, con l’illogicità dell’innamorato, ammirava questa devozione filiale, e tuttavia ne era irritato. Ricacciò la spada nel fodero con un colpo e andò a gettarsi un po’ imbronciato su uno dei declivi erbosi. Il prete si sedette a un metro o due, e Muscari volse su di lui il suo naso aquilino in una istantanea irritazione.
«Ebbene,» disse il poeta con asprezza, «la gente mi crede ancora troppo romantico? Ci sono, mi domando, ancora briganti sui monti?»
«Può darsi,» disse padre Brown agnosticamente.
«Che cosa intende?» chiese l’altro seccamente.
«Intendo che sono perplesso,» rispose il prete. «Sono perplesso riguardo a Ezza o Montano, o quale che sia il suo nome. Mi sembra assai più inspiegabile come brigante di quanto lo fosse come corriere.»
«Ma in che modo?» insistette il suo compagno. «Santa Maria! Avrei pensato che il brigante fosse abbastanza chiaro.»
«Trovo tre curiose difficoltà,» disse il prete con voce tranquilla. «Mi piacerebbe avere la sua opinione su di esse. Prima di tutto devo dirle che stavo pranzando in quel ristorante sul mare. Mentre voi quattro lasciavate la sala, lei e Miss Harrogate andavate avanti, chiacchierando e ridendo; il banchiere e il corriere venivano dietro, parlando parcamente e piuttosto sottovoce. Ma non potei fare a meno di udire Ezza pronunciare queste parole: «Ebbene, lasciate che si diverta un poco; sapete che il colpo può fracassarla da un momento all’altro.» Il signor Harrogate non rispose nulla; sicché quelle parole dovevano avere un qualche significato. Sull’impulso del momento avvertii suo fratello che ella poteva essere in pericolo; non dissi nulla della sua natura, perché non lo sapevo. Ma se voleva dire questa cattura tra le colline, la cosa è un’assurdità. Perché mai il corriere-brigante avrebbe dovuto avvertire il suo patrono, sia pure con un cenno, quando il suo intero scopo era attirarlo nella trappola per topi montana? Non poteva voler dire questo. Ma se non questo, qual è questo disastro, noto tanto al corriere quanto al banchiere, che incombe sul capo di Miss Harrogate?»
«Un disastro per Miss Harrogate!» esclamò il poeta, rizzandosi a sedere con una certa ferocia. «Si spieghi; continui.»
«Tutti i miei enigmi, tuttavia, ruotano attorno al nostro capobrigante,» riprese il prete pensieroso. «Ed ecco il secondo di essi. Perché mise così in evidenza, nella sua richiesta di riscatto, il fatto di aver preso duemila sterline alla sua vittima sul posto? Non aveva la benché minima tendenza a suscitare il riscatto. Anzi, tutto il contrario. Gli amici di Harrogate sarebbero stati assai più propensi a temere per la sua sorte se avessero creduto i ladri poveri e disperati. Eppure la spoliazione sul posto veniva sottolineata e messa persino al primo posto nella richiesta. Perché mai Ezza Montano avrebbe voluto tanto espressamente dire a tutta l’Europa di aver vuotato la tasca prima di imporre il ricatto?»
«Non riesco a immaginarlo,» disse Muscari, arruffandosi per una volta i neri capelli con gesto spontaneo. «Lei crede di illuminarmi, ma mi conduce più a fondo nel buio. Quale sarà la terza obiezione al Re dei Ladri?» «La terza obiezione,» disse padre Brown, sempre in meditazione, «è questo declivio su cui siamo seduti. Perché il nostro corriere-brigante lo chiama la sua roccaforte principale e il Paradiso dei Ladri? È certamente un punto morbido su cui cadere e un punto dolce da guardare. È anche verissimo, come dice, che è invisibile dalla valle e dalla vetta, ed è perciò un nascondiglio. Ma non è una fortezza. Non potrebbe mai essere una fortezza. Credo che sarebbe la peggior fortezza del mondo. Poiché è in realtà dominato dall’alto dalla comune strada maestra che valica i monti… proprio il luogo dove più probabilmente passerebbe la polizia. Ma come, cinque miseri schioppi ci hanno tenuti qui inermi appena mezz’ora fa. Un quarto di compagnia di soldati di qualsiasi tipo avrebbe potuto scaraventarci giù dal precipizio. Qualunque sia il significato di questo strano angolino d’erba e di fiori, non è una posizione trincerata. È qualcos’altro; ha un altro strano genere d’importanza; un valore che non comprendo. Somiglia piuttosto a un teatro casuale o a un camerino naturale; è come la scena di qualche commedia romantica; è come…»
Mentre le parole del piccolo prete si allungavano e si perdevano in una spenta e sognante sincerità, Muscari, i cui sensi animali erano all’erta e impazienti, udì un nuovo rumore sui monti. Anche per lui il suono era ancora tenuissimo e fioco; ma avrebbe potuto giurare che la brezza serale portava con sé qualcosa come il pulsare di zoccoli di cavalli e un lontano vociare.
Nello stesso momento, e molto prima che la vibrazione avesse toccato le meno esperte orecchie inglesi, Montano il brigante corse su per il declivio sopra di loro e si fermò nella siepe rotta, reggendosi contro un albero e scrutando giù per la strada. Era una strana figura mentre stava lì, poiché aveva assunto un fantastico cappello a tesa larga e un pendaglio oscillante e una sciabola nella sua veste di re dei banditi, ma il vivace e prosaico tweed del corriere trapelava a chiazze su tutta la sua persona.
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.”
THREE
Un attimo dopo volse il suo volto olivastro e sogghignante e fece un movimento con la mano. I briganti si dispersero al segnale, non in confusione, ma in quella che era evidentemente una specie di disciplina da guerriglia. Invece di occupare la strada lungo il crinale, si sparpagliarono lungo il suo fianco dietro gli alberi e la siepe, come spiando invisibili un nemico. Il rumore al di là si fece più forte, cominciando a scuotere la strada montana, e si udì chiaramente una voce che gridava ordini. I briganti ondeggiavano e si accalcavano, imprecando e bisbigliando, e l’aria della sera era piena di piccoli rumori metallici mentre armavano le pistole, o allentavano i coltelli, o trascinavano i foderi sulle pietre. Poi i rumori provenienti dalle due parti parvero incontrarsi sulla strada in alto; i rami si spezzavano, i cavalli nitrivano, gli uomini gridavano.
«Un soccorso!» esclamò Muscari, balzando in piedi e agitando il cappello; «i gendarmi sono loro addosso! E ora sotto per la libertà e un colpo per conquistarla! E ora a fare i ribelli contro i ladroni! Su, non lasciamo tutto alla polizia; è una cosa così tremendamente moderna. Piombiamo sulle spalle di questi furfanti. I gendarmi ci stanno soccorrendo; venite, amici, soccorriamo i gendarmi!»
E gettando il cappello oltre gli alberi, sguainò di nuovo la sciabola e cominciò a scalare il pendio su fino alla strada. Frank Harrogate scattò in piedi e corse per aiutarlo, la rivoltella in pugno, ma fu sbalordito di sentirsi imperiosamente richiamato dalla voce rauca del padre, che pareva in grande agitazione.
«Non lo permetto,» disse il banchiere con voce strozzata; «ti ordino di non intrometterti.»
«Ma, padre,» disse Frank con molto calore, «un gentiluomo italiano ha aperto la via. Non vorrai che si dica che gli inglesi si sono tirati indietro.»
«È inutile,» disse il vecchio, che tremava violentemente, «è inutile. Dobbiamo sottometterci alla nostra sorte.»
Padre Brown guardò il banchiere; poi si portò la mano istintivamente come sul cuore, ma in realtà sulla boccettina di veleno; e un gran lume gli salì al volto come la luce della rivelazione della morte.
Muscari intanto, senza attendere sostegno, aveva superato la cresta del declivio fino alla strada, e colpì con forza sulla spalla il re dei briganti, facendolo barcollare e girare su se stesso. Anche Montano aveva la sciabola sguainata, e Muscari, senza altre parole, gli vibrò un fendente alla testa che egli fu costretto a bloccare e parare. Ma proprio mentre le due corte lame si incrociavano e cozzavano, il Re dei Ladri abbassò deliberatamente la punta e rise.
«A che pro, vecchio mio?» disse in vivace gergo italiano; «questa maledetta farsa finirà presto.»
«Che cosa intendi, imbroglione?» ansimò il focoso poeta. «Il tuo coraggio è una finzione tanto quanto la tua onestà?»
«Tutto in me è una finzione,» rispose l’ex corriere di ottimo umore. «Sono un attore; e se mai ho avuto un carattere privato, l’ho dimenticato. Non sono un brigante autentico più di quanto sia un corriere autentico. Sono soltanto un fascio di maschere, e con quello non si può battersi a duello.» E rise con fanciullesco piacere e ricadde nel suo vecchio atteggiamento a gambe larghe, con le spalle alla mischia su per la strada.
L’oscurità si infittiva sotto le pareti montane, e non era facile discernere molto dello svolgimento della lotta, salvo che uomini alti spingevano i musi dei loro cavalli attraverso una folla aggrappata di briganti, i quali parevano più inclini a molestare e a spintonare gli invasori che a ucciderli. Somigliava più a una folla cittadina che impedisce il passaggio della polizia che a qualsiasi cosa il poeta avesse mai immaginato come l’ultima resistenza di uomini di sangue condannati e messi al bando. Proprio mentre roteava gli occhi nello sconcerto, sentì un tocco al gomito, e trovò lo strano piccolo prete che se ne stava lì come un piccolo Noè con un grande cappello, e chiedeva il favore di una parola o due.
«Signor Muscari,» disse il chierico, «in questa bizzarra crisi si possono perdonare le allusioni personali. Posso dirle senza offesa di un modo in cui farebbe più bene che aiutando i gendarmi, i quali riusciranno comunque a sfondare. Mi permetterà l’impertinente confidenza, ma le importa di quella ragazza? Le importa abbastanza da sposarla e da esserle un buon marito, voglio dire?»
«Sì,» disse il poeta con tutta semplicità.
«E a lei importa di lei?»
«Credo di sì,» fu la risposta ugualmente grave.
«Allora vada là e si offra,» disse il prete: «le offra tutto ciò che può; le offra il cielo e la terra se li possiede. Il tempo è poco.»
«Perché?» chiese lo stupito uomo di lettere.
«Perché,» disse padre Brown, «la sua Rovina sta salendo per la strada.»
«Nulla sta salendo per la strada,» obiettò Muscari, «tranne il soccorso.»
«Ebbene, lei vada là,» disse il suo consigliere, «e si tenga pronto a salvarla dal soccorso.»
Quasi mentre parlava, le siepi furono rotte lungo tutto il crinale da un’ondata di briganti in fuga. Si tuffavano nei cespugli e nell’erba folta come uomini sconfitti e inseguiti; e i grandi cappelli a punta della gendarmeria a cavallo si videro passare sopra la siepe rotta. Fu dato un altro ordine; ci fu un rumore di smontare da cavallo, e un ufficiale alto, con il cappello a punta, un pizzo grigio all’imperiale e un foglio in mano, comparve nel varco che era la porta del Paradiso dei Ladri. Ci fu un momentaneo silenzio, rotto in modo straordinario dal banchiere, che gridò con voce roca e strozzata: «Derubato! Sono stato derubato!»
«Ma come, è successo ore fa,» esclamò il figlio stupito: «quando ti hanno derubato di duemila sterline.»
«Non di duemila sterline,» disse il finanziere, con una brusca e terribile compostezza, «solo di una boccettina.»
Il poliziotto dal pizzo grigio attraversava a gran passi la verde conca. Incontrando sul suo cammino il Re dei Ladri, gli batté sulla spalla con qualcosa di mezzo tra una carezza e uno scapaccione e gli diede una spinta che lo mandò via barcollando. «Ti caccerai nei guai anche tu,» disse, «se fai questi giochetti.»
Di nuovo, all’occhio artistico di Muscari, non pareva affatto la cattura di un grande fuorilegge alle strette. Proseguendo, il poliziotto si fermò davanti al gruppo degli Harrogate e disse: «Samuel Harrogate, vi arresto in nome della legge per appropriazione indebita dei fondi della Banca di Hull e Huddersfield.»
Il grande banchiere annuì con una strana aria di assenso d’affari, parve riflettere un momento, e prima che potessero interporsi fece un mezzo giro e un passo che lo portò sull’orlo della parete montana esterna. Poi, gettando le mani in alto, balzò esattamente come era balzato dalla vettura. Ma questa volta non cadde in un piccolo prato appena sottostante; cadde mille piedi più in basso, per diventare un rottame di ossa nella valle.
L’ira del poliziotto italiano, che espresse volubilmente a padre Brown, era in gran parte mescolata ad ammirazione. «Era proprio da lui sfuggirci all’ultimo,» disse. «Era un grande brigante, se volete. Quest’ultimo suo trucco lo ritengo assolutamente senza precedenti. Fuggì con il denaro della società in Italia, e si fece davvero catturare da finti briganti al suo soldo, così da spiegare tanto la scomparsa del denaro quanto la propria scomparsa. Quella richiesta di riscatto fu presa davvero sul serio dalla maggior parte della polizia. Ma per anni ha fatto cose altrettanto belle, proprio altrettanto belle. Sarà una grave perdita per la sua famiglia.»
Muscari conduceva via l’infelice figlia, che si teneva stretta a lui, come fece per molti anni ancora. Ma persino in quel tragico disastro non poté fare a meno di avere un sorriso e una mano di amicizia semiironica per l’indifendibile Ezza Montano. «E dove andrai adesso?» gli chiese da sopra la spalla.
«A Birmingham,» rispose l’attore, tirando boccate da una sigaretta. «Non ti avevo detto che ero futurista? Credo davvero in quelle cose, se credo in qualcosa. Cambiamento, trambusto e cose nuove ogni mattina. Vado a Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Huddersfield, Glasgow, Chicago… in breve, verso una società illuminata, energica, civile!»
«In breve,» disse Muscari, «verso il vero Paradiso dei Ladri.»
TRE
The Duel of Dr Hirsch
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.
Il duello del dottor Hirsch
Il signor Maurice Brun e il signor Armand Armagnac attraversavano i soleggiati Champs Elysées con una sorta di vivace rispettabilità. Erano entrambi bassi, svelti e sfrontati. Avevano entrambi barbe nere che non parevano appartenere ai loro volti, secondo quella strana moda francese che fa sembrare artificiali i capelli veri. Il signor Brun aveva un cuneo scuro di barba, apparentemente incollato sotto il labbro inferiore. Il signor Armagnac, tanto per cambiare, aveva due barbe; una che sporgeva da ciascun angolo del suo mento risoluto. Erano entrambi giovani. Erano entrambi atei, con una deprimente fissità di vedute ma grande mobilità di esposizione. Erano entrambi allievi del grande dottor Hirsch, scienziato, pubblicista e moralista.
Il signor Brun era divenuto celebre per la sua proposta che la comune espressione «Adieu» fosse cancellata da tutti i classici francesi, e che una lieve ammenda fosse imposta a chi la usasse nella vita privata. «Allora», diceva, «il nome stesso del vostro immaginario Dio avrà echeggiato per l’ultima volta all’orecchio dell’uomo». Il signor Armagnac si specializzava piuttosto in una resistenza al militarismo, e desiderava che il ritornello della Marsigliese fosse mutato da «Aux armes, citoyens» in «Aux grèves, citoyens». Ma il suo antimilitarismo era di una specie peculiare e gallica. Un eminente e ricchissimo quacchero inglese, venuto a trovarlo per organizzare il disarmo dell’intero pianeta, rimase alquanto turbato dalla proposta di Armagnac che (tanto per cominciare) i soldati fucilassero i loro ufficiali.
E fu proprio in questo che i due uomini differivano di più dal loro capo e padre in filosofia. Il dottor Hirsch, benché nato in Francia e coperto dei più trionfali favori dell’istruzione francese, era temperamentalmente di un altro tipo: mite, sognatore, umano; e, malgrado il suo sistema scettico, non privo di trascendentalismo. Era, in breve, più simile a un tedesco che a un francese; e per quanto lo ammirassero, qualcosa nel subconscio di questi Galli era irritato dal suo perorare la pace in una maniera così pacifica. Per il loro partito in tutta Europa, tuttavia, Paul Hirsch era un santo della scienza. Le sue vaste e ardite teorie cosmiche davano lustro alla sua vita austera e alla sua moralità innocente, se pur alquanto glaciale; occupava qualcosa della posizione di Darwin raddoppiata con la posizione di Tolstoj. Ma non era né un anarchico né un antipatriota; le sue vedute sul disarmo erano moderate ed evoluzioniste: il Governo repubblicano riponeva in lui considerevole fiducia quanto a vari miglioramenti chimici. Aveva persino di recente scoperto un esplosivo silenzioso, il cui segreto il Governo era attentamente custodendo.
La sua casa sorgeva in un’elegante via presso l’Elysée: una via che in quella forte estate pareva quasi tanto folta di fogliame quanto il parco stesso; una fila di ippocastani frantumava la luce del sole, interrotta in un solo punto dove un grande caffè si protendeva sulla strada. Quasi di fronte a questo stavano le persiane bianche e verdi della casa del grande scienziato, con un balcone di ferro, anch’esso verniciato di verde, che correva dinanzi alle finestre del primo piano. Sotto di esso c’era l’ingresso a una specie di corte, allegra di arbusti e piastrelle, in cui i due francesi entrarono discorrendo animatamente.
La porta fu loro aperta dal vecchio domestico del dottore, Simon, che avrebbe benissimo potuto passare egli stesso per un dottore, avendo un severo abito nero, occhiali, capelli grigi e un’aria confidenziale. In effetti, era un uomo di scienza assai più presentabile del suo padrone, il dottor Hirsch, che era un tipo simile a un ravanello biforcuto, con appena il bulbo di una testa sufficiente a rendere insignificante il suo corpo. Con tutta la gravità di un grande medico che maneggia una ricetta, Simon porse una lettera al signor Armagnac. Quel signore la strappò con impazienza razziale, e lesse rapidamente quanto segue:
Non posso scendere a parlare con voi. C’è un uomo in questa casa che mi rifiuto d’incontrare. È un ufficiale sciovinista, Dubosc. Sta seduto sulle scale. Ha preso a calci i mobili in tutte le altre stanze; io mi sono chiuso a chiave nel mio studio, di fronte a quel caffè. Se mi volete bene, andate al caffè e aspettate a uno dei tavoli all’aperto. Cercherò di mandarvelo. Voglio che gli rispondiate voi e che ve la sbrighiate con lui. Io non posso incontrarlo di persona. Non posso: non voglio.
Ci sarà un altro caso Dreyfus.
P. HIRSCH
Il signor Armagnac guardò il signor Brun. Il signor Brun prese in prestito la lettera, la lesse, e guardò il signor Armagnac. Poi entrambi si portarono lestamente a uno dei tavolini sotto gli ippocastani di fronte, dove si procurarono due alti bicchieri di orribile assenzio verde, che parevano poter bere con qualsiasi tempo e a qualunque ora. Per il resto il caffè sembrava vuoto, eccetto un soldato che beveva caffè a un tavolo, e a un altro un uomo corpulento che beveva un piccolo sciroppo e un prete che non beveva nulla.
Maurice Brun si schiarì la gola e disse: «Naturalmente dobbiamo aiutare il maestro in ogni modo, ma…»
Ci fu un brusco silenzio, e Armagnac disse: «Può avere ottime ragioni per non incontrare l’uomo di persona, ma…»
Prima che l’uno o l’altro potesse completare una frase, fu evidente che l’invasore era stato espulso dalla casa di fronte. Gli arbusti sotto l’arcata ondeggiarono e si aprirono di schianto, mentre quell’ospite sgradito veniva scagliato fuori da essi come una palla di cannone.
Era una figura robusta con un piccolo cappello di feltro tirolese inclinato, una figura che aveva in effetti qualcosa di generalmente tirolese. Le spalle dell’uomo erano larghe e ampie, ma le gambe erano snelle e agili nei calzoni al ginocchio e nelle calze a maglia. Il volto era bruno come una nocciola; aveva occhi castani vivacissimi e inquieti; i capelli scuri erano ravviati all’indietro rigidi sul davanti e rasati corti dietro, così da delineare un cranio quadrato e possente; e aveva un enorme paio di baffi neri come le corna di un bisonte. Una testa così sostanziosa poggia di solito su un collo taurino; ma questo era nascosto da una grande sciarpa colorata, avvolta su fino alle orecchie e ricadente sul davanti dentro la giacca come una sorta di panciotto fantasia. Era una sciarpa di forti colori spenti, rosso cupo, oro antico e porpora, probabilmente di fabbricazione orientale. Nel complesso l’uomo aveva qualcosa di lievemente barbarico; più simile a un possidente ungherese che a un ordinario ufficiale francese. Il suo francese, però, era evidentemente quello di un nativo; e il suo patriottismo francese era così impulsivo da riuscire lievemente assurdo. Il suo primo atto quando irruppe dall’arcata fu di chiamare con voce di squillo giù per la strada: «Ci sono francesi qui?», come se invocasse cristiani alla 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.
Armagnac e Brun balzarono all’istante in piedi; ma era troppo tardi. Già la gente accorreva dagli angoli delle strade; c’era una piccola ma sempre più fitta folla. Con il pronto istinto francese per la politica di strada, l’uomo dai baffi neri era già corso a un angolo del caffè, era saltato su uno dei tavoli, e afferrando un ramo d’ippocastano per reggersi, gridò come gridò un tempo Camille Desmoulins quando sparse le foglie di quercia tra il popolino.
«Francesi!» sbraitò a raffica; «non so parlare! Che Dio mi aiuti, è per questo che parlo! Quei tali nei loro sudici parlamenti che imparano a parlare imparano anche a tacere: muti come quella spia rannicchiata nella casa di fronte! Muto com’è quando batto alla porta della sua camera! Muto com’è ora, benché oda la mia voce attraverso questa strada e tremi là dove siede! Oh, sanno tacere con eloquenza, i politicanti! Ma è venuto il momento in cui noi che non sappiamo parlare dobbiamo parlare. Siete traditi ai prussiani. Traditi in questo istante. Traditi da quell’uomo. Io sono Jules Dubosc, colonnello d’artiglieria, Belfort. Ieri nei Vosgi abbiamo catturato una spia tedesca, e le fu trovato addosso un foglio: un foglio che ho qui in mano. Oh, hanno cercato di soffocare la cosa; ma io l’ho portato dritto all’uomo che l’aveva scritto: l’uomo in quella casa! È di suo pugno. È firmato con le sue iniziali. È un’indicazione per trovare il segreto di questa nuova Polvere Silenziosa. Hirsch l’ha inventata; Hirsch ha scritto questa nota su di essa. Questa nota è in tedesco, ed è stata trovata nella tasca di un tedesco. “Dite all’uomo che la formula della polvere è nella busta grigia nel primo cassetto a sinistra della scrivania del Segretario, Ministero della Guerra, in inchiostro rosso. Faccia attenzione. P.H.”»
Sparava frasi brevi come una mitragliatrice a tiro rapido, ma era chiaramente il tipo d’uomo che o è pazzo o ha ragione. Il grosso della folla era nazionalista, e già in minaccioso tumulto; e una minoranza di intellettuali ugualmente adirati, guidati da Armagnac e Brun, non faceva che rendere la maggioranza più bellicosa.
«Se questo è un segreto militare», gridò Brun, «perché lo strombazzate per la strada?»
«Vi dirò io perché lo faccio!» ruggì Dubosc sopra la folla ruggente. «Sono andato da quest’uomo in modo schietto e civile. Se avesse avuto una spiegazione avrebbe potuto darla nella più completa riservatezza. Rifiuta di spiegare. Mi rimanda a due estranei in un caffè come a due lacchè. Mi ha cacciato di casa, ma io ci tornerò dentro, con il popolo di Parigi alle spalle!»
Un grido parve scuotere la facciata stessa dei palazzi e volarono due sassi, uno dei quali ruppe una finestra sopra il balcone. L’indignato colonnello si tuffò ancora una volta sotto l’arcata e lo si udì gridare e tuonare all’interno. A ogni istante il mare umano si faceva più vasto e più vasto; si gonfiava contro le ringhiere e i gradini della casa del traditore; già era certo che il luogo sarebbe stato preso d’assalto come la Bastiglia, quando la porta-finestra rotta si aprì e il dottor Hirsch uscì sul balcone. Per un istante la furia si mutò a metà in riso; poiché egli era una figura assurda in una scena simile. Il suo lungo collo nudo e le spalle spioventi avevano la forma di una bottiglia di champagne, ma quella era l’unica cosa festosa in lui. La giacca gli pendeva addosso come a un attaccapanni; portava i capelli color carota lunghi e stopposi; le guance e il mento erano interamente frangiati da una di quelle irritanti barbe che cominciano lontano dalla bocca. Era pallidissimo, e portava occhiali azzurri.
Livido com’era, parlò con una sorta di precisione compassata, tanto che la folla ammutolì nel bel mezzo della sua terza frase.
«…solo due cose da dirvi adesso. La prima è ai miei nemici, la seconda ai miei amici. Ai miei nemici dico: è vero, non incontrerò il signor Dubosc, benché egli infurii fuori da questa stanza stessa. È vero, ho pregato altri due uomini di affrontarlo al mio posto. E vi dirò perché! Perché non voglio e non devo vederlo: perché sarebbe contro ogni regola di dignità e d’onore vederlo. Prima che io sia trionfalmente scagionato davanti a un tribunale, c’è un altro arbitrato che questo signore mi deve in quanto gentiluomo, e nel rimandarlo ai miei padrini io sono rigorosamente…»
Armagnac e Brun agitavano freneticamente i cappelli, e persino i nemici del dottore ruggirono un applauso a questa inattesa sfida. Ancora una volta poche frasi furono inudibili, ma poterono udirlo dire: «Ai miei amici… io stesso preferirei sempre armi puramente intellettuali, e a queste un’umanità evoluta certamente si limiterà. Ma la nostra più preziosa verità è la forza fondamentale della materia e dell’eredità. I miei libri hanno successo; le mie teorie sono inconfutate; ma in politica soffro di un pregiudizio quasi fisico nei francesi. Non so parlare come Clemenceau e Déroulède, perché le loro parole sono come echi delle loro pistole. Il francese chiede un duellante come l’inglese chiede uno sportivo. Ebbene, do le mie prove: pagherò questa tangente barbarica, e poi tornerò alla ragione per il resto della mia vita».
Due uomini si trovarono all’istante nella folla stessa a offrire i loro servigi al colonnello Dubosc, che venne fuori di lì a poco, soddisfatto. Uno era il soldato semplice con il caffè, che disse semplicemente: «Farò da padrino per voi, signore. Sono il duca di Valognes». L’altro era l’uomo corpulento, che il suo amico prete dapprima cercò di dissuadere; poi se ne andò via da solo.
Sul far della sera una cena leggera fu apparecchiata sul retro del Café Charlemagne. Benché privi di ogni tettoia di vetro o di stucco dorato, i commensali si trovavano quasi tutti sotto un delicato e irregolare tetto di foglie; poiché gli alberi ornamentali stavano così fitti intorno e tra i tavoli da conferire qualcosa della penombra e dell’abbaglio di un piccolo frutteto. A uno dei tavoli centrali un pretino tozzo e tarchiato sedeva in completa solitudine, e si applicava a un mucchio di bianchetti con la sorta più grave di godimento. Poiché il suo vitto quotidiano era assai frugale, aveva un gusto peculiare per i lussi improvvisi e isolati; era un epicureo astemio. Non alzò gli occhi dal piatto, intorno al quale pepe rosso, limoni, pane scuro e burro, eccetera, erano rigidamente schierati, finché un’ombra alta non cadde attraverso il tavolo, e il suo amico Flambeau si sedette di fronte a lui. Flambeau era cupo.
“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.”
“And it is?” asked Father Brown.
“It is,” said his friend gloomily. “It is a clumsy forgery by somebody who knew nothing of the real hiding-place. It says the paper is in the cupboard on the right of the Secretary’s desk. As a fact the cupboard with the secret drawer is some way to the left of the desk. It says the grey envelope contains a long document written in red ink. It isn’t written in red ink, but in ordinary black ink. It’s manifestly absurd to say that Hirsch can have made a mistake about a paper that nobody knew of but himself; or can have tried to help a foreign thief by telling him to fumble in the wrong drawer. I think we must chuck it up and apologize to old Carrots.”
Father Brown seemed to cogitate; he lifted a little whitebait on his fork. “You are sure the grey envelope was in the left cupboard?” he asked.
“Positive,” replied Flambeau. “The grey envelope— it was a white envelope really—was—”
Father Brown put down the small silver fish and the fork and stared across at his companion. “What?” he asked, in an altered voice.
“Well, what?” repeated Flambeau, eating heartily.
“It was not grey,” said the priest. “Flambeau, you frighten me.”
“What the deuce are you frightened of?”
“I’m frightened of a white envelope,” said the other seriously, “If it had only just been grey! Hang it all, it might as well have been grey. But if it was white, the whole business is black. The Doctor has been dabbling in some of the old brimstone after all.”
“But I tell you he couldn’t have written such a note!” cried Flambeau. “The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr Hirsch knew all about the facts.”
“The man who wrote that note knew all about the facts,” said his clerical companion soberly. “He could never have got ‘em so wrong without knowing about ‘em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on every subject—like the devil.”
“Do you mean—?”
“I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth,” said his friend firmly. “Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden—then you would know you had found the house. The man must have known that particular house to be so accurately inaccurate.”
“But what could it mean?” demanded the diner opposite.
“I can’t conceive,” said Brown; “I don’t understand this Hirsch affair at all. As long as it was only the left drawer instead of the right, and red ink instead of black, I thought it must be the chance blunders of a forger, as you say. But three is a mystical number; it finishes things. It finishes this. That the direction about the drawer, the colour of ink, the colour of envelope, should none of them be right by accident, that can’t be a coincidence. It wasn’t.”
“What was it, then? Treason?” asked Flambeau, resuming his dinner.
“I don’t know that either,” answered Brown, with a face of blank bewilderment. “The only thing I can think of… Well, I never understood that Dreyfus case. I can always grasp moral evidence easier than the other sorts. I go by a man’s eyes and voice, don’t you know, and whether his family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses—and avoids. Well, I was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by the horrible things imputed both ways; I know (though it’s not modern to say so) that human nature in the highest places is still capable of being Cenci or Borgia. No—, what puzzled me was the sincerity of both parties. I don’t mean the political parties; the rank and file are always roughly honest, and often duped. I mean the persons of the play. I mean the conspirators, if they were conspirators. I mean the traitor, if he was a traitor. I mean the men who must have known the truth. Now Dreyfus went on like a man who knew he was a wronged man. And yet the French statesmen and soldiers went on as if they knew he wasn’t a wronged man but simply a wrong ‘un. I don’t mean they behaved well; I mean they behaved as if they were sure. I can’t describe these things; I know what I mean.”
“I wish I did,” said his friend. “And what has it to do with old Hirsch?”
“Suppose a person in a position of trust,” went on the priest, “began to give the enemy information because it was false information. Suppose he even thought he was saving his country by misleading the foreigner. Suppose this brought him into spy circles, and little loans were made to him, and little ties tied on to him. Suppose he kept up his contradictory position in a confused way by never telling the foreign spies the truth, but letting it more and more be guessed. The better part of him (what was left of it) would still say: ‘I have not helped the enemy; I said it was the left drawer.’ The meaner part of him would already be saying: ‘But they may have the sense to see that means the right.’ I think it is psychologically possible—in an enlightened age, you know.”
«Temo di dover mollare questa faccenda», disse pesantemente. «Sto tutto dalla parte dei soldati francesi come Dubosc, e sono tutto contro gli atei francesi come Hirsch; ma mi pare che in questo caso abbiamo commesso un errore. Il duca e io pensammo che fosse bene indagare sull’accusa, e devo dire che sono contento di averlo fatto».
«Il foglio è dunque un falso?» chiese il prete.
«È proprio questa la cosa strana», rispose Flambeau. «È esattamente come la calligrafia di Hirsch, e nessuno vi sa indicare un solo errore. Ma non è stato scritto da Hirsch. Se è un patriota francese non l’ha scritto lui, perché fornisce informazioni alla Germania. E se è una spia tedesca non l’ha scritto lui, be’… perché non fornisce informazioni alla Germania».
«Vuoi dire che l’informazione è sbagliata?» chiese padre Brown.
«Sbagliata», rispose l’altro, «e sbagliata proprio là dove il dottor Hirsch avrebbe avuto ragione: sul nascondiglio della sua stessa formula segreta nel suo stesso dipartimento ufficiale. Per grazia di Hirsch e delle autorità, al duca e a me è stato effettivamente permesso di ispezionare il cassetto segreto al Ministero della Guerra dove è custodita la formula Hirsch. Siamo le uniche persone che l’abbiano mai conosciuto, eccetto l’inventore stesso e il ministro della Guerra; ma il ministro lo permise per salvare Hirsch dal duello. Dopo di che non possiamo davvero sostenere Dubosc se la sua rivelazione è una montatura».
«E lo è?» chiese padre Brown.
«Lo è», disse cupo l’amico. «È un falso maldestro opera di qualcuno che nulla sapeva del vero nascondiglio. Dice che il foglio è nell’armadietto a destra della scrivania del Segretario. In realtà l’armadietto col cassetto segreto è alquanto a sinistra della scrivania. Dice che la busta grigia contiene un lungo documento scritto in inchiostro rosso. Non è scritto in inchiostro rosso, ma in ordinario inchiostro nero. È manifestamente assurdo dire che Hirsch possa aver commesso un errore su un foglio di cui nessuno era a conoscenza tranne lui stesso; o che possa aver cercato di aiutare un ladro straniero dicendogli di frugare nel cassetto sbagliato. Credo che dobbiamo lasciar perdere e scusarci col vecchio Carote».
Padre Brown parve meditare; sollevò un piccolo bianchetto sulla forchetta. «Sei sicuro che la busta grigia fosse nell’armadietto di sinistra?» chiese.
«Sicurissimo», rispose Flambeau. «La busta grigia… era una busta bianca in realtà… era…»
Padre Brown posò il piccolo pesce d’argento e la forchetta e fissò il suo compagno di fronte. «Cosa?» chiese, con voce mutata.
«Be’, cosa?» ripeté Flambeau, mangiando di gusto.
«Non era grigia», disse il prete. «Flambeau, mi fai paura».
«Che diavolo ti fa paura?»
«Mi fa paura una busta bianca», disse l’altro seriamente, «Se solo fosse stata grigia! Al diavolo, sarebbe anche potuta essere grigia. Ma se era bianca, tutta la faccenda è nera. Il dottore ha trafficato con un po’ del vecchio zolfo, dopotutto».
«Ma ti dico che non poteva aver scritto una nota simile!» esclamò Flambeau. «La nota è del tutto sbagliata sui fatti. E innocente o colpevole, il dottor Hirsch sapeva tutto dei fatti».
«L’uomo che ha scritto quella nota sapeva tutto dei fatti», disse pacatamente il suo compagno in tonaca. «Non avrebbe mai potuto sbagliarli tutti così senza conoscerli. Bisogna sapere un mucchio di cose per aver torto su ogni argomento: come il diavolo».
«Vuoi dire…?»
«Voglio dire che un uomo che dicesse menzogne a caso avrebbe detto qualche verità», disse fermamente l’amico. «Supponi che qualcuno ti mandasse a cercare una casa con una porta verde e una persiana azzurra, con un giardino davanti ma non dietro, con un cane ma senza gatto, e dove si bevesse caffè ma non tè. Se non trovassi una casa simile diresti che è tutto inventato. Ma io dico di no. Io dico che se trovassi una casa dove la porta fosse azzurra e la persiana verde, dove ci fosse un giardino dietro e non davanti, dove i gatti fossero comuni e i cani abbattuti all’istante, dove il tè si bevesse a litri e il caffè fosse proibito… allora sapresti di aver trovato la casa. L’uomo doveva conoscere quella casa particolare per essere così accuratamente inesatto».
«Ma cosa potrebbe significare?» domandò il commensale di fronte.
«Non riesco a concepirlo», disse Brown; «non capisco affatto questa faccenda di Hirsch. Finché si trattava solo del cassetto di sinistra invece di quello di destra, e dell’inchiostro rosso invece del nero, pensavo dovessero essere le sviste casuali di un falsario, come dici tu. Ma il tre è un numero mistico; conclude le cose. Conclude questa. Che l’indicazione sul cassetto, il colore dell’inchiostro, il colore della busta non siano nessuno di essi giusto per caso, questo non può essere una coincidenza. Non lo era».
«E cos’era, allora? Tradimento?» chiese Flambeau, riprendendo la sua cena.
«Non lo so nemmeno questo», rispose Brown, con un volto di totale smarrimento. «L’unica cosa a cui riesco a pensare… Ebbene, non ho mai capito quel caso Dreyfus. So sempre afferrare le prove morali più facilmente delle altre specie. Vado dagli occhi e dalla voce di un uomo, capisci, e da se la sua famiglia pare felice, e dagli argomenti che sceglie… e che evita. Ebbene, ero perplesso nel caso Dreyfus. Non per le cose orribili imputate in entrambi i sensi; io so (benché non sia moderno dirlo) che la natura umana nei luoghi più alti è ancora capace di essere un Cenci o un Borgia. No… ciò che mi lasciava perplesso era la sincerità di entrambe le parti. Non intendo i partiti politici; la truppa è sempre grossolanamente onesta, e spesso ingannata. Intendo i personaggi del dramma. Intendo i congiurati, se erano congiurati. Intendo il traditore, se era un traditore. Intendo gli uomini che dovevano aver saputo la verità. Ora, Dreyfus si comportava come un uomo che sapeva di essere un uomo offeso. Eppure gli statisti e i soldati francesi si comportavano come se sapessero che egli non era un uomo offeso ma semplicemente un mascalzone. Non intendo che si comportassero bene; intendo che si comportavano come se fossero sicuri. Non so descrivere queste cose; so cosa intendo».
«Vorrei saperlo anch’io», disse l’amico. «E cosa c’entra col vecchio Hirsch?»
«Supponi che una persona in una posizione di fiducia», proseguì il prete, «cominciasse a dare informazioni al nemico perché erano informazioni false. Supponi che credesse persino di salvare il suo paese fuorviando lo straniero. Supponi che questo lo portasse in ambienti di spionaggio, e che gli venissero fatti piccoli prestiti, e legati addosso piccoli vincoli. Supponi che mantenesse la sua contraddittoria posizione in modo confuso non dicendo mai la verità alle spie straniere, ma lasciando che sempre più la si indovinasse. La parte migliore di lui (quel che ne restava) direbbe ancora: “Non ho aiutato il nemico; ho detto che era il cassetto di sinistra”. La parte più vile di lui direbbe già: “Ma potrebbero avere il buon senso di capire che significa quello di destra”. Credo sia psicologicamente possibile… in un’epoca illuminata, sai».
“It may be psychologically possible,” answered Flambeau, “and it certainly would explain Dreyfus being certain he was wronged and his judges being sure he was guilty. But it won’t wash historically, because Dreyfus’s document (if it was his document) was literally correct.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Dreyfus,” said Father Brown.
Silence had sunk around them with the emptying of the tables; it was already late, though the sunlight still clung to everything, as if accidentally entangled in the trees. In the stillness Flambeau shifted his seat sharply—making an isolated and echoing noise— and threw his elbow over the angle of it. “Well,” he said, rather harshly, “if Hirsch is not better than a timid treason-monger…”
“You mustn’t be too hard on them,” said Father Brown gently. “It’s not entirely their fault; but they have no instincts. I mean those things that make a woman refuse to dance with a man or a man to touch an investment. They’ve been taught that it’s all a matter of degree.”
“Anyhow,” cried Flambeau impatiently, “he’s not a patch on my principal; and I shall go through with it. Old Dubosc may be a bit mad, but he’s a sort of patriot after all.”
Father Brown continued to consume whitebait.
Something in the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau’s fierce black eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. “What’s the matter with you?” Flambeau demanded. “Dubosc’s all right in that way. You don’t doubt him?”
“My friend,” said the small priest, laying down his knife and fork in a kind of cold despair, “I doubt everything. Everything, I mean, that has happened today. I doubt the whole story, though it has been acted before my face. I doubt every sight that my eyes have seen since morning. There is something in this business quite different from the ordinary police mystery where one man is more or less lying and the other man more or less telling the truth. Here both men… Well! I’ve told you the only theory I can think of that could satisfy anybody. It doesn’t satisfy me.”
“Nor me either,” replied Flambeau frowning, while the other went on eating fish with an air of entire resignation. “If all you can suggest is that notion of a message conveyed by contraries, I call it uncommonly clever, but…well, what would you call it?”
“I should call it thin,” said the priest promptly. “I should call it uncommonly thin. But that’s the queer thing about the whole business. The lie is like a schoolboy’s. There are only three versions, Dubosc’s and Hirsch’s and that fancy of mine. Either that note was written by a French officer to ruin a French official; or it was written by the French official to help German officers; or it was written by the French official to mislead German officers. Very well. You’d expect a secret paper passing between such people, officials or officers, to look quite different from that. You’d expect, probably a cipher, certainly abbreviations; most certainly scientific and strictly professional terms. But this thing’s elaborately simple, like a penny dreadful: ‘In the purple grotto you will find the golden casket.’ It looks as if… as if it were meant to be seen through at once.”
Almost before they could take it in a short figure in French uniform had walked up to their table like the wind, and sat down with a sort of thump.
“I have extraordinary news,” said the Duc de Valognes. “I have just come from this Colonel of ours. He is packing up to leave the country, and he asks us to make his excuses sur le terrain.”
“What?” cried Flambeau, with an incredulity quite frightful— “apologize?”
“Yes,” said the Duke gruffly; “then and there—before everybody— when the swords are drawn. And you and I have to do it while he is leaving the country.”
“But what can this mean?” cried Flambeau. “He can’t be afraid of that little Hirsch! Confound it!” he cried, in a kind of rational rage; “nobody could be afraid of Hirsch!”
“I believe it’s some plot!” snapped Valognes—“some plot of the Jews and Freemasons. It’s meant to work up glory for Hirsch…”
The face of Father Brown was commonplace, but curiously contented; it could shine with ignorance as well as with knowledge. But there was always one flash when the foolish mask fell, and the wise mask fitted itself in its place; and Flambeau, who knew his friend, knew that his friend had suddenly understood. Brown said nothing, but finished his plate of fish.
“Where did you last see our precious Colonel?” asked Flambeau, irritably.
“He’s round at the Hotel Saint Louis by the Elysee, where we drove with him. He’s packing up, I tell you.”
“Will he be there still, do you think?” asked Flambeau, frowning at the table.
“I don’t think he can get away yet,” replied the Duke; “he’s packing to go a long journey…”
“No,” said Father Brown, quite simply, but suddenly standing up, “for a very short journey. For one of the shortest, in fact. But we may still be in time to catch him if we go there in a motor-cab.”
Nothing more could be got out of him until the cab swept round the corner by the Hotel Saint Louis, where they got out, and he led the party up a side lane already in deep shadow with the growing dusk. Once, when the Duke impatiently asked whether Hirsch was guilty of treason or not, he answered rather absently: “No; only of ambition—like Caesar.” Then he somewhat inconsequently added: “He lives a very lonely life; he has had to do everything for himself.”
“Well, if he’s ambitious, he ought to be satisfied now,” said Flambeau rather bitterly. “All Paris will cheer him now our cursed Colonel has turned tail.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” said Father Brown, lowering his voice, “your cursed Colonel is just in front.”
The other two started and shrank farther back into the shadow of the wall, for the sturdy figure of their runaway principal could indeed be seen shuffling along in the twilight in front, a bag in each hand. He looked much the same as when they first saw him, except that he had changed his picturesque mountaineering knickers for a conventional pair of trousers. It was clear he was already escaping from the hotel.
«Può essere psicologicamente possibile», rispose Flambeau, «e spiegherebbe certamente che Dreyfus fosse certo di essere offeso e i suoi giudici sicuri che fosse colpevole. Ma non regge storicamente, perché il documento di Dreyfus (se era il suo documento) era letteralmente corretto».
«Non stavo pensando a Dreyfus», disse padre Brown.
Il silenzio era sceso intorno a loro con lo svuotarsi dei tavoli; era già tardi, benché la luce del sole ancora si aggrappasse a ogni cosa, come se fosse rimasta accidentalmente impigliata tra gli alberi. Nell’immobilità Flambeau spostò bruscamente la sedia, producendo un rumore isolato ed echeggiante, e gettò il gomito sullo spigolo di essa. «Be’», disse, piuttosto aspramente, «se Hirsch non è meglio di un timido mercante di tradimenti…»
«Non dovete essere troppo severo con loro», disse gentilmente padre Brown. «Non è interamente colpa loro; ma non hanno istinti. Intendo quelle cose che fanno rifiutare a una donna di ballare con un uomo o a un uomo di toccare un investimento. È stato loro insegnato che è tutta una questione di grado».
«Comunque sia», gridò Flambeau spazientito, «lui non regge il confronto col mio principale; e io andrò fino in fondo. Il vecchio Dubosc sarà anche un po’ pazzo, ma è una specie di patriota, dopotutto».
Padre Brown continuò a consumare bianchetti.
Qualcosa nel modo flemmatico in cui lo faceva indusse i feroci occhi neri di Flambeau a vagare di nuovo sul compagno. «Che cos’hai che non va?» domandò Flambeau. «Dubosc è a posto, in quel senso. Non dubiti di lui?»
«Amico mio», disse il piccolo prete, posando coltello e forchetta in una sorta di gelida disperazione, «io dubito di tutto. Di tutto, intendo, ciò che è accaduto oggi. Dubito dell’intera storia, benché sia stata recitata davanti al mio volto. Dubito di ogni cosa che i miei occhi hanno visto da stamattina. C’è qualcosa in questa faccenda del tutto diverso dall’ordinario mistero poliziesco in cui un uomo più o meno mente e l’altro più o meno dice la verità. Qui entrambi gli uomini… Ebbene! Ti ho detto l’unica teoria a cui riesco a pensare che potrebbe soddisfare chiunque. Non soddisfa me».
«Nemmeno me», rispose Flambeau accigliandosi, mentre l’altro seguitava a mangiare pesce con aria di totale rassegnazione. «Se tutto ciò che sai suggerire è quella nozione di un messaggio trasmesso per contrari, la trovo insolitamente ingegnosa, ma… be’, come la chiameresti?»
«La chiamerei debole», disse prontamente il prete. «La chiamerei insolitamente debole. Ma è proprio questa la cosa strana di tutta la faccenda. La menzogna è quella di uno scolaretto. Ci sono solo tre versioni: quella di Dubosc, quella di Hirsch e quella mia fantasia. O quella nota è stata scritta da un ufficiale francese per rovinare un funzionario francese; o è stata scritta dal funzionario francese per aiutare ufficiali tedeschi; o è stata scritta dal funzionario francese per ingannare ufficiali tedeschi. Benissimo. Ti aspetteresti che un foglio segreto che passa tra persone simili, funzionari o ufficiali, avesse tutt’altro aspetto. Ti aspetteresti, probabilmente, un cifrario, certamente abbreviazioni; molto certamente termini scientifici e rigorosamente professionali. Ma questa cosa è elaboratamente semplice, come un romanzetto d’appendice: “Nella grotta purpurea troverai lo scrigno d’oro”. Sembra come se… come se fosse fatta apposta per essere scoperta subito».
Quasi prima che potessero afferrarlo, una figura bassa in uniforme francese si era avvicinata al loro tavolo come il vento, e si sedette con una specie di tonfo.
«Ho notizie straordinarie», disse il duca di Valognes. «Vengo proprio adesso da questo nostro colonnello. Sta facendo i bagagli per lasciare il paese, e ci chiede di porgere le sue scuse sur le terrain».
«Cosa?» esclamò Flambeau, con un’incredulità addirittura spaventosa, «scusarsi?»
«Sì», disse il duca burbero; «lì per lì, davanti a tutti, quando le spade saranno sguainate. E tu e io dobbiamo farlo mentre lui lascia il paese».
«Ma cosa può significare questo?» esclamò Flambeau. «Non può aver paura di quel piccolo Hirsch! Corpo di mille diavoli!» gridò, in una specie di rabbia razionale; «nessuno potrebbe aver paura di Hirsch!»
«Credo sia qualche complotto!» scattò Valognes, «qualche complotto degli ebrei e dei massoni. È fatto apposta per montare la gloria di Hirsch…»
Il volto di Father Brown era ordinario, ma curiosamente appagato; poteva risplendere d’ignoranza tanto quanto di sapere. Ma c’era sempre un lampo in cui la maschera sciocca cadeva, e la maschera saggia si adattava al suo posto; e Flambeau, che conosceva l’amico, capì che l’amico aveva improvvisamente compreso. Brown non disse nulla, ma finì il suo piatto di pesce.
«Dove hai visto per l’ultima volta il nostro prezioso colonnello?» chiese Flambeau, irritato.
«È qui vicino, all’Hôtel Saint Louis presso l’Elysée, dove l’abbiamo accompagnato in vettura. Sta facendo i bagagli, ti dico».
«Ci sarà ancora, pensi?» chiese Flambeau, accigliandosi verso il tavolo.
«Non credo possa andarsene ancora», rispose il duca; «sta facendo i bagagli per un lungo viaggio…»
«No», disse Father Brown, con la massima semplicità, ma alzandosi d’un tratto in piedi, «per un viaggio brevissimo. Uno dei più brevi, anzi. Ma potremmo essere ancora in tempo per acchiapparlo se ci andiamo in taxi».
Non si poté cavargli altro finché il taxi non svoltò l’angolo presso l’Hôtel Saint Louis, dove scesero, ed egli condusse la comitiva su per un vicolo laterale già immerso in una profonda ombra con il crescere del crepuscolo. Una volta, quando il duca chiese impaziente se Hirsch fosse colpevole di tradimento o no, egli rispose piuttosto distrattamente: «No; soltanto di ambizione… come Cesare». Poi, in modo alquanto sconclusionato, aggiunse: «Vive una vita molto solitaria; ha dovuto fare tutto da sé».
«Be’, se è ambizioso, dovrebbe essere soddisfatto adesso», disse Flambeau piuttosto amaramente. «Tutta Parigi lo acclamerà ora che il nostro maledetto colonnello ha voltato le spalle».
«Non parlare così forte», disse Father Brown, abbassando la voce, «il tuo maledetto colonnello è proprio davanti a noi».
Gli altri due trasalirono e si ritrassero più addietro nell’ombra del muro, poiché la figura robusta del loro principale in fuga si poteva effettivamente vedere strascicare i piedi nel crepuscolo davanti a loro, una borsa in ciascuna mano. Aveva pressappoco lo stesso aspetto di quando lo videro la prima volta, salvo che aveva cambiato i suoi pittoreschi calzoni da montanaro con un paio di pantaloni convenzionali. Era chiaro che stava già fuggendo dall’albergo.
The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage scenery. A colourless, continuous wall ran down one flank of it, interrupted at intervals by dull-hued and dirt-stained doors, all shut fast and featureless save for the chalk scribbles of some passing gamin. The tops of trees, mostly rather depressing evergreens, showed at intervals over the top of the wall, and beyond them in the grey and purple gloaming could be seen the back of some long terrace of tall Parisian houses, really comparatively close, but somehow looking as inaccessible as a range of marble mountains. On the other side of the lane ran the high gilt railings of a gloomy park.
Flambeau was looking round him in rather a weird way. “Do you know,” he said, “there is something about this place that—”
“Hullo!” called out the Duke sharply; “that fellow’s disappeared. Vanished, like a blasted fairy!”
“He has a key,” explained their clerical friend. “He’s only gone into one of these garden doors,” and as he spoke they heard one of the dull wooden doors close again with a click in front of them.
Flambeau strode up to the door thus shut almost in his face, and stood in front of it for a moment, biting his black moustache in a fury of curiosity. Then he threw up his long arms and swung himself aloft like a monkey and stood on the top of the wall, his enormous figure dark against the purple sky, like the dark tree-tops.
The Duke looked at the priest. “Dubosc’s escape is more elaborate than we thought,” he said; “but I suppose he is escaping from France.”
“He is escaping from everywhere,” answered Father Brown.
Valognes’s eyes brightened, but his voice sank. “Do you mean suicide?” he asked.
“You will not find his body,” replied the other.
A kind of cry came from Flambeau on the wall above. “My God,” he exclaimed in French, “I know what this place is now! Why, it’s the back of the street where old Hirsch lives. I thought I could recognize the back of a house as well as the back of a man.”
“And Dubosc’s gone in there!” cried the Duke, smiting his hip. “Why, they’ll meet after all!” And with sudden Gallic vivacity he hopped up on the wall beside Flambeau and sat there positively kicking his legs with excitement. The priest alone remained below, leaning against the wall, with his back to the whole theatre of events, and looking wistfully across to the park palings and the twinkling, twilit trees.
The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it; but Flambeau, who had the instincts of a burglar (and a detective), had already swung himself from the wall into the fork of a straggling tree from which he could crawl quite close to the only illuminated window in the back of the high dark house. A red blind had been pulled down over the light, but pulled crookedly, so that it gaped on one side, and by risking his neck along a branch that looked as treacherous as a twig, Flambeau could just see Colonel Dubosc walking about in a brilliantly-lighted and luxurious bedroom. But close as Flambeau was to the house, he heard the words of his colleagues by the wall, and repeated them in a low voice.
“Yes, they will meet now after all!”
“They will never meet,” said Father Brown. “Hirsch was right when he said that in such an affair the principals must not meet. Have you read a queer psychological story by Henry James, of two persons who so perpetually missed meeting each other by accident that they began to feel quite frightened of each other, and to think it was fate? This is something of the kind, but more curious.”
“There are people in Paris who will cure them of such morbid fancies,” said Valognes vindictively. “They will jolly well have to meet if we capture them and force them to fight.”
“They will not meet on the Day of Judgement,” said the priest. “If God Almighty held the truncheon of the lists, if St Michael blew the trumpet for the swords to cross—even then, if one of them stood ready, the other would not come.”
“Oh, what does all this mysticism mean?” cried the Duc de Valognes, impatiently; “why on earth shouldn’t they meet like other people?”
“They are the opposite of each other,” said Father Brown, with a queer kind of smile. “They contradict each other. They cancel out, so to speak.”
He continued to gaze at the darkening trees opposite, but Valognes turned his head sharply at a suppressed exclamation from Flambeau. That investigator, peering into the lighted room, had just seen the Colonel, after a pace or two, proceed to take his coat off. Flambeau’s first thought was that this really looked like a fight; but he soon dropped the thought for another. The solidity and squareness of Dubosc’s chest and shoulders was all a powerful piece of padding and came off with his coat. In his shirt and trousers he was a comparatively slim gentleman, who walked across the bedroom to the bathroom with no more pugnacious purpose than that of washing himself. He bent over a basin, dried his dripping hands and face on a towel, and turned again so that the strong light fell on his face. His brown complexion had gone, his big black moustache had gone; he—was clean-shaven and very pate. Nothing remained of the Colonel but his bright, hawk-like, brown eyes. Under the wall Father Brown was going on in heavy meditation, as if to himself.
“It is all just like what I was saying to Flambeau. These opposites won’t do. They don’t work. They don’t fight. If it’s white instead of black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line—then there’s something wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong. One of these men is fair and the other dark, one stout and the other slim, one strong and the other weak. One has a moustache and no beard, so you can’t see his mouth; the other has a beard and no moustache, so you can’t see his chin. One has hair cropped to his skull, but a scarf to hide his neck; the other has low shirt-collars, but long hair to bide his skull. It’s all too neat and correct, Monsieur, and there’s something wrong. Things made so opposite are things that cannot quarrel. Wherever the one sticks out the other sinks in. Like a face and a mask, like a lock and a key…”
Flambeau was peering into the house with a visage as white as a sheet. The occupant of the room was standing with his back to him, but in front of a looking-glass, and had already fitted round his face a sort of framework of rank red hair, hanging disordered from the head and clinging round the jaws and chin while leaving the mocking mouth uncovered. Seen thus in the glass the white face looked like the face of Judas laughing horribly and surrounded by capering flames of hell. For a spasm Flambeau saw the fierce, red-brown eyes dancing, then they were covered with a pair of blue spectacles. Slipping on a loose black coat, the figure vanished towards the front of the house. A few moments later a roar of popular applause from the street beyond announced that Dr Hirsch had once more appeared upon the balcony.
FOUR
Il vicolo lungo il quale lo seguirono era uno di quelli che paiono stare sul retro delle cose, e assomigliano al rovescio delle quinte di un palcoscenico. Un muro incolore e continuo correva lungo un fianco di esso, interrotto a intervalli da porte dai colori spenti e macchiate di sporco, tutte serrate e prive di caratteristiche, salvo per gli scarabocchi di gesso di qualche monello di passaggio. Le cime degli alberi, per lo più sempreverdi piuttosto deprimenti, spuntavano a intervalli oltre la sommità del muro, e al di là di essi, nella foschia grigia e purpurea, si scorgeva il retro di qualche lunga fila di alte case parigine, in realtà relativamente vicine, ma in qualche modo dall’aria tanto inaccessibile quanto una catena di montagne di marmo. Sull’altro lato del vicolo correvano le alte cancellate dorate di un tetro parco.
Flambeau si guardava intorno in modo piuttosto singolare. «Sai», disse, «c’è qualcosa in questo posto che…»
«Ehilà!» chiamò il duca bruscamente; «quel tale è sparito. Svanito, come una fata maledetta!»
«Ha una chiave», spiegò l’amico in tonaca. «È solo entrato in una di queste porte da giardino», e mentre parlava udirono una delle opache porte di legno richiudersi con uno scatto davanti a loro.
Flambeau si diresse a grandi passi verso la porta così chiusa quasi in faccia a lui, e vi rimase davanti un momento, mordendosi i baffi neri in una furia di curiosità. Poi levò in alto le lunghe braccia e si issò come una scimmia e stette sulla sommità del muro, la sua enorme figura scura contro il cielo purpureo, come le scure cime degli alberi.
Il duca guardò il prete. «La fuga di Dubosc è più elaborata di quanto pensassimo», disse; «ma suppongo che stia fuggendo dalla Francia».
«Sta fuggendo da ogni luogo», rispose Father Brown.
Gli occhi di Valognes si illuminarono, ma la voce si abbassò. «Vuoi dire suicidio?» chiese.
«Non troverete il suo corpo», rispose l’altro.
Una specie di grido venne da Flambeau sul muro in alto. «Mio Dio», esclamò in francese, «ora so cos’è questo posto! Ma è il retro della strada dove abita il vecchio Hirsch. Pensavo di saper riconoscere il retro di una casa tanto bene quanto il retro di un uomo».
«E Dubosc è entrato là dentro!» esclamò il duca, battendosi il fianco. «Ma allora si incontreranno, dopotutto!» E con improvvisa vivacità gallica saltò su sul muro accanto a Flambeau e vi si sedette scalciando addirittura le gambe per l’eccitazione. Il prete soltanto rimase in basso, appoggiato al muro, con le spalle all’intero teatro degli eventi, e guardava con nostalgia oltre, verso lo steccato del parco e gli scintillanti, crepuscolari alberi.
Il duca, per quanto eccitato, aveva gli istinti di un aristocratico, e desiderava piuttosto contemplare la casa che spiarla; ma Flambeau, che aveva gli istinti di uno scassinatore (e di un investigatore), si era già lanciato dal muro nella biforcazione di un albero sparuto da cui poteva arrampicarsi fin proprio vicino all’unica finestra illuminata sul retro dell’alta e buia casa. Una persiana rossa era stata calata sopra la luce, ma calata di traverso, sì che si apriva su un lato, e rischiando l’osso del collo lungo un ramo che pareva infido come un fuscello, Flambeau poteva appena scorgere il colonnello Dubosc che andava attorno in una camera da letto splendidamente illuminata e lussuosa. Ma per quanto vicino fosse Flambeau alla casa, udiva le parole dei colleghi presso il muro, e le ripeteva a bassa voce.
«Sì, adesso si incontreranno, dopotutto!»
«Non si incontreranno mai», disse Father Brown. «Hirsch aveva ragione quando disse che in una faccenda simile i due protagonisti non devono incontrarsi. Hai letto un bizzarro racconto psicologico di Henry James, di due persone che tanto perpetuamente mancavano d’incontrarsi per accidente da cominciare a provare vera paura l’una dell’altra, e a pensare che fosse il destino? Questo è qualcosa del genere, ma più curioso».
«Ci sono persone a Parigi che li guariranno da simili fantasie morbose», disse Valognes vendicativamente. «Dovranno bene incontrarsi se li catturiamo e li costringiamo a battersi».
«Non si incontreranno il Giorno del Giudizio», disse il prete. «Se Dio Onnipotente reggesse il bastone del comando del campo, se san Michele soffiasse nella tromba perché le spade si incrociassero… anche allora, se uno di loro stesse pronto, l’altro non verrebbe».
«Oh, cosa vuol dire tutto questo misticismo?» esclamò il duca di Valognes, spazientito; «perché mai non dovrebbero incontrarsi come le altre persone?»
«Sono l’opposto l’uno dell’altro», disse Father Brown, con una strana specie di sorriso. «Si contraddicono a vicenda. Si annullano, per così dire».
Continuò a fissare gli alberi che si oscuravano di fronte, ma Valognes voltò bruscamente la testa a un’esclamazione soffocata di Flambeau. Quell’investigatore, scrutando nella stanza illuminata, aveva appena visto il colonnello, dopo un passo o due, procedere a togliersi la giacca. Il primo pensiero di Flambeau fu che questo somigliasse davvero a un preludio di duello; ma presto abbandonò quel pensiero per un altro. La solidità e la squadratura del petto e delle spalle di Dubosc erano tutte una possente imbottitura e vennero via con la giacca. In camicia e pantaloni egli era un gentiluomo relativamente esile, che attraversò la camera da letto verso il bagno con nessun proposito più bellicoso di quello di lavarsi. Si chinò su un catino, si asciugò le mani e il viso gocciolanti su un asciugamano, e si voltò di nuovo così che la forte luce gli cadde sul volto. La sua carnagione bruna era sparita, i suoi grandi baffi neri erano spariti; egli… era ben rasato e pallidissimo. Nulla rimaneva del colonnello se non i suoi vivaci occhi castani da falco. Sotto il muro Father Brown stava proseguendo in greve meditazione, come tra sé.
«È tutto proprio come dicevo a Flambeau. Questi opposti non funzionano. Non reggono. Non si battono. Se è bianco invece di nero, e solido invece di liquido, e così via lungo tutta la linea… allora c’è qualcosa che non va, Monsieur, c’è qualcosa che non va. Uno di questi uomini è chiaro e l’altro scuro, uno tarchiato e l’altro esile, uno forte e l’altro debole. Uno ha i baffi e niente barba, così che non se ne vede la bocca; l’altro ha la barba e niente baffi, così che non se ne vede il mento. Uno ha i capelli rasati fino al cranio, ma una sciarpa a nascondergli il collo; l’altro ha colletti bassi, ma capelli lunghi a nascondergli il cranio. È tutto troppo lindo e corretto, Monsieur, e c’è qualcosa che non va. Cose fatte così opposte sono cose che non possono litigare. Ovunque l’uno sporge, l’altro rientra. Come un volto e una maschera, come una serratura e una chiave…»
Flambeau scrutava dentro la casa con il viso bianco come un lenzuolo. L’occupante della stanza era in piedi voltandogli le spalle, ma davanti a uno specchio, e si era già adattato intorno al viso una sorta di intelaiatura di ispidi capelli rossi, pendenti in disordine dal capo e avviluppati intorno alle mascelle e al mento, lasciando scoperta la bocca beffarda. Vista così nello specchio, la faccia bianca somigliava alla faccia di Giuda che ride orribilmente circondato da guizzanti fiamme dell’inferno. Per uno spasimo Flambeau vide danzare i feroci occhi rosso-bruni, poi furono coperti da un paio di occhiali azzurri. Infilandosi un’ampia giacca nera, la figura svanì verso il davanti della casa. Pochi istanti dopo un boato di popolare applauso dalla strada al di là annunciò che il dottor Hirsch era ancora una volta comparso sul balcone.
QUATTRO
The Man in the Passage
TWO men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi. The evening daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty. The passage was comparatively long and dark, so each man could see the other as a mere black silhouette at the other end. Nevertheless, each man knew the other, even in that inky outline; for they were both men of striking appearance and they hated each other.
The covered passage opened at one end on one of the steep streets of the Adelphi, and at the other on a terrace overlooking the sunset-coloured river. One side of the passage was a blank wall, for the building it supported was an old unsuccessful theatre restaurant, now shut up. The other side of the passage contained two doors, one at each end. Neither was what was commonly called the stage door; they were a sort of special and private stage doors used by very special performers, and in this case by the star actor and actress in the Shakespearean performance of the day. Persons of that eminence often like to have such private exits and entrances, for meeting friends or avoiding them.
The two men in question were certainly two such friends, men who evidently knew the doors and counted on their opening, for each approached the door at the upper end with equal coolness and confidence. Not, however, with equal speed; but the man who walked fast was the man from the other end of the tunnel, so they both arrived before the secret stage door almost at the same instant. They saluted each other with civility, and waited a moment before one of them, the sharper walker who seemed to have the shorter patience, knocked at the door.
In this and everything else each man was opposite and neither could be called inferior. As private persons both were handsome, capable and popular. As public persons, both were in the first public rank. But everything about them, from their glory to their good looks, was of a diverse and incomparable kind. Sir Wilson Seymour was the kind of man whose importance is known to everybody who knows. The more you mixed with the innermost ring in every polity or profession, the more often you met Sir Wilson Seymour. He was the one intelligent man on twenty unintelligent committees—on every sort of subject, from the reform of the Royal Academy to the project of bimetallism for Greater Britain. In the Arts especially he was omnipotent. He was so unique that nobody could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been ruled by him all your life.
His appearance was “distinguished” in exactly the same sense; it was at once conventional and unique. Fashion could have found no fault with his high silk hat—, yet it was unlike anyone else’s hat— a little higher, perhaps, and adding something to his natural height. His tall, slender figure had a slight stoop yet it looked the reverse of feeble. His hair was silver-grey, but he did not look old; it was worn longer than the common yet he did not look effeminate; it was curly but it did not look curled. His carefully pointed beard made him look more manly and militant than otherwise, as it does in those old admirals of Velazquez with whose dark portraits his house was hung. His grey gloves were a shade bluer, his silver-knobbed cane a shade longer than scores of such gloves and canes flapped and flourished about the theatres and the restaurants.
The other man was not so tall, yet would have struck nobody as short, but merely as strong and handsome. His hair also was curly, but fair and cropped close to a strong, massive head—the sort of head you break a door with, as Chaucer said of the Miller’s. His military moustache and the carriage of his shoulders showed him a soldier, but he had a pair of those peculiar frank and piercing blue eyes which are more common in sailors. His face was somewhat square, his jaw was square, his shoulders were square, even his jacket was square. Indeed, in the wild school of caricature then current, Mr Max Beerbohm had represented him as a proposition in the fourth book of Euclid.
For he also was a public man, though with quite another sort of success. You did not have to be in the best society to have heard of Captain Cutler, of the siege of Hong-Kong, and the great march across China. You could not get away from hearing of him wherever you were; his portrait was on every other postcard; his maps and battles in every other illustrated paper; songs in his honour in every other music-hall turn or on every other barrel-organ. His fame, though probably more temporary, was ten times more wide, popular and spontaneous than the other man’s. In thousands of English homes he appeared enormous above England, like Nelson. Yet he had infinitely less power in England than Sir Wilson Seymour.
The door was opened to them by an aged servant or “dresser”, whose broken-down face and figure and black shabby coat and trousers contrasted queerly with the glittering interior of the great actress’s dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at every angle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of one huge diamond—if one could get inside a diamond. The other features of luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of the Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against the wall.
They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the other room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of both visitors; for the other room was the private room of the great actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind that does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy, hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to all men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company with her male colleague, the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of Midsummer Night’s Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman’s face.
L’uomo nell’andito
DUE uomini comparvero simultaneamente ai due estremi di una specie di andito che correva lungo il fianco del Teatro Apollo all’Adelphi. La luce serale nelle strade era ampia e luminosa, opalescente e vuota. L’andito era relativamente lungo e scuro, sicché ciascuno dei due poteva scorgere l’altro come una mera silhouette nera all’estremità opposta. Nondimeno, ognuno riconosceva l’altro, persino in quel profilo d’inchiostro; poiché entrambi erano uomini dall’aspetto notevole ed entrambi si odiavano.
L’andito coperto sboccava a un capo su una delle ripide strade dell’Adelphi, e all’altro su una terrazza affacciata sul fiume tinto del colore del tramonto. Un lato dell’andito era un muro cieco, poiché l’edificio che vi si appoggiava era un vecchio ristorante-teatro fallito, ormai chiuso. L’altro lato dell’andito conteneva due porte, una a ciascun capo. Nessuna delle due era ciò che comunemente si chiama porta di scena; erano una sorta di porte di scena speciali e private, usate da artisti del tutto particolari, e nella fattispecie dal grande attore e dalla grande attrice della rappresentazione shakespeariana del momento. Persone di tale eminenza amano spesso avere simili uscite ed entrate private, per incontrare gli amici o per evitarli.
I due uomini in questione erano appunto due di quegli amici, uomini che evidentemente conoscevano quelle porte e contavano che si aprissero, poiché ciascuno si avvicinò alla porta all’estremità superiore con eguale disinvoltura e sicurezza. Non però con eguale prontezza; ché l’uomo che camminava svelto era quello venuto dall’altro capo del tunnel, sicché entrambi giunsero davanti alla segreta porta di scena quasi nel medesimo istante. Si salutarono con cortesia, e attesero un momento prima che uno di loro, il camminatore più svelto che pareva avere la pazienza più corta, bussasse alla porta.
In questo come in ogni altra cosa i due uomini erano opposti e nessuno poteva dirsi inferiore. Come persone private entrambi erano belli, capaci e ben visti. Come persone pubbliche, entrambi appartenevano al più alto rango pubblico. Ma tutto in loro, dalla gloria alla bella presenza, era di specie diversa e incomparabile. Sir Wilson Seymour era l’uomo la cui importanza è nota a chiunque conti qualcosa. Più ci si mescolava alla cerchia più interna di ogni ambiente o professione, più spesso s’incontrava Sir Wilson Seymour. Era l’unico uomo intelligente in venti commissioni di sciocchi—su ogni sorta di argomento, dalla riforma della Royal Academy al progetto di bimetallismo per la Grande Britannia. Nelle Arti soprattutto era onnipotente. Era così singolare che nessuno riusciva a decidere del tutto se fosse un grande aristocratico datosi all’Arte, o un grande artista di cui gli aristocratici si erano impadroniti. Ma non lo si poteva incontrare per cinque minuti senza rendersi conto d’esserne stati governati per tutta la vita.
Il suo aspetto era «distinto» esattamente nel medesimo senso; era al tempo stesso convenzionale e unico. La moda non avrebbe trovato nulla da ridire sul suo alto cilindro di seta—, eppure non somigliava a quello di nessun altro— un poco più alto, forse, e tale da aggiungere qualcosa alla sua statura naturale. La figura alta e slanciata aveva una lieve curvatura, eppure appariva il contrario di fiacca. I capelli erano grigio-argento, ma non pareva vecchio; li portava più lunghi del consueto, eppure non pareva effeminato; erano ricci, ma non parevano arricciati. La barba accuratamente appuntita lo faceva apparire più virile e battagliero che altrimenti, come accade in quei vecchi ammiragli di Velázquez con i cui foschi ritratti era addobbata la sua casa. I guanti grigi erano una sfumatura più azzurri, il bastone dal pomo d’argento una sfumatura più lungo delle decine di simili guanti e bastoni che si agitavano e sventolavano attorno ai teatri e ai ristoranti.
L’altro uomo non era tanto alto, eppure nessuno lo avrebbe giudicato basso, ma soltanto forte e bello. Anche i suoi capelli erano ricci, ma biondi e tagliati corti su una testa forte e massiccia—il tipo di testa con cui si sfonda una porta, come diceva Chaucer di quella del Mugnaio. I baffi militareschi e il portamento delle spalle lo rivelavano soldato, ma aveva un paio di quei singolari occhi azzurri, franchi e penetranti, che sono più comuni nei marinai. Il volto era piuttosto quadrato, la mascella era quadrata, le spalle erano quadrate, persino la giacca era quadrata. Anzi, nella scuola scatenata della caricatura allora in voga, il signor Max Beerbohm lo aveva rappresentato come una proposizione del quarto libro di Euclide.
Poiché anche lui era un uomo pubblico, sebbene di tutt’altra specie di successo. Non occorreva frequentare la buona società per aver sentito parlare del capitano Cutler, dell’assedio di Hong-Kong e della grande marcia attraverso la Cina. Non si poteva sfuggire al sentirne parlare dovunque si fosse; il suo ritratto era su una cartolina sì e una no; le sue carte geografiche e le sue battaglie su un giornale illustrato sì e uno no; canzoni in suo onore in un numero di music-hall sì e uno no, o su un organetto sì e uno no. La sua fama, benché probabilmente più effimera, era dieci volte più ampia, popolare e spontanea di quella dell’altro. In migliaia di case inglesi egli appariva enorme al di sopra dell’Inghilterra, come Nelson. Eppure aveva infinitamente meno potere in Inghilterra di Sir Wilson Seymour.
Aprì loro la porta un anziano servitore o «vestiarista», il cui volto e la cui figura sfiniti, la cui giacca e i pantaloni neri e logori contrastavano stranamente con lo scintillante interno del camerino della grande attrice. Era attrezzato e riempito di specchi disposti a ogni angolo di rifrazione, sicché parevano le cento sfaccettature di un unico enorme diamante—se solo si potesse penetrare dentro un diamante. Gli altri tratti di lusso, alcuni fiori, alcuni cuscini colorati, alcuni ritagli di costume di scena, venivano moltiplicati da tutti gli specchi nella follia delle Mille e una notte, e danzavano e si scambiavano di posto di continuo, man mano che l’inserviente strascicante spingeva in fuori uno specchio o lo ricacciava contro la parete.
Entrambi si rivolsero allo squallido vestiarista chiamandolo per nome, Parkinson, e chiesero della signora, la signorina Aurora Rome. Parkinson disse che ella era nell’altra stanza, ma che sarebbe andato ad avvisarla. Un’ombra passò sulla fronte di entrambi i visitatori; poiché l’altra stanza era la stanza privata del grande attore con cui la signorina Aurora recitava, ed ella era di quel genere che non accende l’ammirazione senza accendere la gelosia. In circa mezzo minuto, tuttavia, la porta interna si aprì, ed ella entrò come faceva sempre, anche nella vita privata, sicché il silenzio stesso pareva un fragore di applausi, e per giunta ben meritato. Era abbigliata in una foggia alquanto strana di rasi verde pavone e azzurro pavone, che luccicavano come metalli azzurri e verdi, di quelli che deliziano i bambini e gli esteti, e la sua pesante, calda chioma castana incorniciava uno di quei volti magici che sono pericolosi per tutti gli uomini, ma specialmente per i ragazzi e per gli uomini che incanutiscono. In compagnia del suo collega maschile, il grande attore americano Isidore Bruno, ella stava producendo un’interpretazione particolarmente poetica e fantastica del Sogno di una notte di mezza estate: in cui la preminenza artistica era attribuita a Oberon e Titania, ossia a Bruno e a lei stessa. Immerso in una scenografia sognante e squisita, e mosso in danze mistiche, il costume verde, come dorsi bruniti di scarabeo, esprimeva tutta l’ elusiva individualità di una regina degli elfi. Ma quando la si aveva di fronte di persona in quella che era ancora piena luce del giorno, un uomo guardava soltanto il volto della donna.
She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so many males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his victories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered later on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was against his breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventional unconventionality to give anything so obvious as flowers. He had picked up a trifle, he said, which was rather a curiosity, it was an ancient Greek dagger of the Mycenaean Epoch, and might well have been worn in the time of Theseus and Hippolyta. It was made of brass like all the Heroic weapons, but, oddly enough, sharp enough to prick anyone still. He had really been attracted to it by the leaf-like shape; it was as perfect as a Greek vase. If it was of any interest to Miss Rome or could come in anywhere in the play, he hoped she would—
The inner door burst open and a big figure appeared, who was more of a contrast to the explanatory Seymour than even Captain Cutler. Nearly six-foot-six, and of more than theatrical thews and muscles, Isidore Bruno, in the gorgeous leopard skin and golden-brown garments of Oberon, looked like a barbaric god. He leaned on a sort of hunting-spear, which across a theatre looked a slight, silvery wand, but which in the small and comparatively crowded room looked as plain as a pike-staff—and as menacing. His vivid black eyes rolled volcanically, his bronzed face, handsome as it was, showed at that moment a combination of high cheekbones with set white teeth, which recalled certain American conjectures about his origin in the Southern plantations.
“Aurora,” he began, in that deep voice like a drum of passion that had moved so many audiences, “will you—”
He stopped indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented itself just inside the doorway—a figure so incongruous in the scene as to be almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform of the Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence as Bruno’s and Aurora’s) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. He did not, however, seem conscious of any contrast, but said with dull civility: “I believe Miss Rome sent for me.”
A shrewd observer might have remarked that the emotional temperature rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a professional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stood round the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger coming in with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. The presence of the one man who did not care about her increased Miss Rome’s sense that everybody else was in love with her, and each in a somewhat dangerous way: the actor with all the appetite of a savage and a spoilt child; the soldier with all the simple selfishness of a man of will rather than mind; Sir Wilson with that daily hardening concentration with which old Hedonists take to a hobby; nay, even the abject Parkinson, who had known her before her triumphs, and who followed her about the room with eyes or feet, with the dumb fascination of a dog.
A shrewd person might also have noted a yet odder thing. The man like a black wooden Noah (who was not wholly without shrewdness) noted it with a considerable but contained amusement. It was evident that the great Aurora, though by no means indifferent to the admiration of the other sex, wanted at this moment to get rid of all the men who admired her and be left alone with the man who did not— did not admire her in that sense at least; for the little priest did admire and even enjoy the firm feminine diplomacy with which she set about her task. There was, perhaps, only one thing that Aurora Rome was clever about, and that was one half of humanity— the other half. The little priest watched, like a Napoleonic campaign, the swift precision of her policy for expelling all while banishing none. Bruno, the big actor, was so babyish that it was easy to send him off in brute sulks, banging the door. Cutler, the British officer, was pachydermatous to ideas, but punctilious about behaviour. He would ignore all hints, but he would die rather than ignore a definite commission from a lady. As to old Seymour, he had to be treated differently; he had to be left to the last. The only way to move him was to appeal to him in confidence as an old friend, to let him into the secret of the clearance. The priest did really admire Miss Rome as she achieved all these three objects in one selected action.
She went across to Captain Cutler and said in her sweetest manner: “I shall value all these flowers, because they must be your favourite flowers. But they won’t be complete, you know, without my favourite flower. Do go over to that shop round the corner and get me some lilies-of-the-valley, and then it will be quite lovely.”
The first object of her diplomacy, the exit of the enraged Bruno, was at once achieved. He had already handed his spear in a lordly style, like a sceptre, to the piteous Parkinson, and was about to assume one of the cushioned seats like a throne. But at this open appeal to his rival there glowed in his opal eyeballs all the sensitive insolence of the slave; he knotted his enormous brown fists for an instant, and then, dashing open the door, disappeared into his own apartments beyond. But meanwhile Miss Rome’s experiment in mobilizing the British Army had not succeeded so simply as seemed probable. Cutler had indeed risen stiffly and suddenly, and walked towards the door, hatless, as if at a word of command. But perhaps there was something ostentatiously elegant about the languid figure of Seymour leaning against one of the looking-glasses that brought him up short at the entrance, turning his head this way and that like a bewildered bulldog.
Ella salutò entrambi gli uomini con quel sorriso raggiante e sconcertante che teneva tanti maschi alla medesima giusta e pericolosa distanza da lei. Accettò alcuni fiori da Cutler, che erano tropicali e costosi come le sue vittorie; e un altro genere di dono da Sir Wilson Seymour, offertole più tardi e con maggior noncuranza da quel gentiluomo. Poiché era contro la sua educazione mostrare premura, e contro la sua convenzionale anticonvenzionalità offrire qualcosa di così ovvio come dei fiori. Aveva raccolto una bagattella, disse, che era piuttosto una curiosità: un antico pugnale greco dell’Epoca micenea, che avrebbe ben potuto essere portato al tempo di Teseo e Ippolita. Era fatto di bronzo come tutte le armi Eroiche, ma, cosa abbastanza singolare, ancora tanto affilato da poter pungere chiunque. In verità ne era stato attratto dalla forma a foglia; era perfetto come un vaso greco. Se poteva interessare alla signorina Rome o trovar posto in qualche punto della recita, egli sperava che ella volesse—
La porta interna si spalancò e apparve una figura imponente, che era un contrasto ancor più forte con l’esplicativo Seymour di quanto non lo fosse persino il capitano Cutler. Alto quasi due metri, e di muscoli e tendini più che teatrali, Isidore Bruno, nella sfarzosa pelle di leopardo e nelle vesti bruno-dorate di Oberon, somigliava a un dio barbarico. Si appoggiava a una specie di lancia da caccia, che di là da un teatro appariva un’esile bacchetta argentea, ma che nella stanza piccola e relativamente affollata appariva evidente come un palo di picca—e altrettanto minacciosa. I vividi occhi neri gli ruotavano vulcanicamente, il volto bronzeo, per quanto bello, mostrava in quel momento una combinazione di zigomi sporgenti e denti bianchi serrati, che richiamava certe congetture americane sulla sua origine nelle piantagioni del Sud.
«Aurora,» cominciò, con quella voce profonda simile a un tamburo di passione che aveva commosso tanti pubblici, «vuoi—»
Si arrestò indeciso perché una sesta figura si era d’un tratto presentata proprio dentro il vano della porta—una figura tanto incongrua nella scena da riuscire quasi comica. Era un uomo assai piccolo nella nera uniforme del clero secolare romano, e somigliava (specialmente in una simile presenza come quella di Bruno e di Aurora) piuttosto al Noè di legno uscito da un’arca. Non pareva però consapevole di alcun contrasto, ma disse con opaca cortesia: «Credo che la signorina Rome mi abbia mandato a chiamare.»
Un osservatore acuto avrebbe forse notato che la temperatura emotiva piuttosto salì a un’interruzione così priva di emozione. Il distacco di un celibe di professione parve rivelare agli altri che essi stavano attorno alla donna come una cerchia di rivali innamorati; proprio come un estraneo che entri con la brina sul cappotto rivela che una stanza è come una fornace. La presenza dell’unico uomo che di lei non si curava accrebbe nella signorina Rome la sensazione che tutti gli altri fossero innamorati di lei, e ciascuno in modo alquanto pericoloso: l’attore con tutto l’appetito di un selvaggio e di un bambino viziato; il soldato con tutto il semplice egoismo di un uomo di volontà più che d’ingegno; Sir Wilson con quella concentrazione che di giorno in giorno s’indurisce, con cui i vecchi Edonisti si dedicano a un capriccio; anzi, persino l’abietto Parkinson, che l’aveva conosciuta prima dei suoi trionfi, e che la seguiva per la stanza con gli occhi o con i piedi, con il muto incanto di un cane.
Una persona acuta avrebbe potuto notare anche una cosa ancor più strana. L’uomo simile a un nero Noè di legno (che non era del tutto privo d’acume) la notò con un divertimento considerevole ma contenuto. Era evidente che la grande Aurora, benché tutt’altro che indifferente all’ammirazione dell’altro sesso, desiderasse in quel momento sbarazzarsi di tutti gli uomini che l’ammiravano ed essere lasciata sola con l’uomo che non lo faceva— che almeno non l’ammirava in quel senso; poiché il piccolo prete ammirava sì, e persino godeva della ferma diplomazia femminile con cui ella si accinse al suo compito. C’era forse una sola cosa in cui Aurora Rome fosse abile, ed era una metà dell’umanità— l’altra metà. Il piccolo prete osservò, come una campagna napoleonica, la rapida precisione della sua strategia per espellere tutti senza bandirne alcuno. Bruno, il grande attore, era così puerile che era facile mandarlo via in un bruto broncio, sbattendo la porta. Cutler, l’ufficiale britannico, era pachidermatico alle idee, ma scrupoloso quanto al comportamento. Avrebbe ignorato ogni allusione, ma sarebbe morto piuttosto che ignorare un incarico preciso da parte di una dama. Quanto al vecchio Seymour, occorreva trattarlo diversamente; occorreva lasciarlo per ultimo. L’unico modo di smuoverlo era rivolgersi a lui in confidenza come a un vecchio amico, metterlo a parte del segreto dello sgombero. Il prete davvero ammirò la signorina Rome mentre conseguiva tutti e tre questi obiettivi in un’unica mossa ben scelta.
Ella si avvicinò al capitano Cutler e disse nel suo tono più dolce: «Terrò molto a tutti questi fiori, perché devono essere i vostri fiori preferiti. Ma non saranno completi, sapete, senza il mio fiore preferito. Andate fino a quel negozio dietro l’angolo e portatemi qualche mughetto, e allora sarà proprio delizioso.»
Il primo obiettivo della sua diplomazia, l’uscita del furente Bruno, fu conseguito all’istante. Egli aveva già consegnato la sua lancia con gesto altero, come uno scettro, al pietoso Parkinson, e stava per prendere posto su uno dei sedili imbottiti come su un trono. Ma a quell’aperto appello al suo rivale avvampò nei suoi bulbi oculari d’opale tutta la sensibile insolenza dello schiavo; serrò per un istante gli enormi pugni bruni, e poi, spalancando di scatto la porta, sparì nei propri appartamenti al di là. Ma intanto l’esperimento della signorina Rome di mobilitare l’Esercito Britannico non era riuscito così semplice come pareva probabile. Cutler si era infatti alzato rigido e improvviso, e si era incamminato verso la porta, senza cappello, come a un comando. Ma forse c’era qualcosa di ostentatamente elegante nella languida figura di Seymour appoggiato contro uno degli specchi, che lo bloccò di colpo sulla soglia, facendogli girare la testa di qua e di là come un mastino sconcertato.
“I must show this stupid man where to go,” said Aurora in a whisper to Seymour, and ran out to the threshold to speed the parting guest.
Seymour seemed to be listening, elegant and unconscious as was his posture, and he seemed relieved when he heard the lady call out some last instructions to the Captain, and then turn sharply and run laughing down the passage towards the other end, the end on the terrace above the Thames. Yet a second or two after Seymour’s brow darkened again. A man in his position has so many rivals, and he remembered that at the other end of the passage was the corresponding entrance to Bruno’s private room. He did not lose his dignity; he said some civil words to Father Brown about the revival of Byzantine architecture in the Westminster Cathedral, and then, quite naturally, strolled out himself into the upper end of the passage. Father Brown and Parkinson were left alone, and they were neither of them men with a taste for superfluous conversation. The dresser went round the room, pulling out looking-glasses and pushing them in again, his dingy dark coat and trousers looking all the more dismal since he was still holding the festive fairy spear of King Oberon. Every time he pulled out the frame of a new glass, a new black figure of Father Brown appeared; the absurd glass chamber was full of Father Browns, upside down in the air like angels, turning somersaults like acrobats, turning their backs to everybody like very rude persons.
Father Brown seemed quite unconscious of this cloud of witnesses, but followed Parkinson with an idly attentive eye till he took himself and his absurd spear into the farther room of Bruno. Then he abandoned himself to such abstract meditations as always amused him— calculating the angles of the mirrors, the angles of each refraction, the angle at which each must fit into the wall…when he heard a strong but strangled cry.
He sprang to his feet and stood rigidly listening. At the same instant Sir Wilson Seymour burst back into the room, white as ivory. “Who’s that man in the passage?” he cried. “Where’s that dagger of mine?”
Before Father Brown could turn in his heavy boots Seymour was plunging about the room looking for the weapon. And before he could possibly find that weapon or any other, a brisk running of feet broke upon the pavement outside, and the square face of Cutler was thrust into the same doorway. He was still grotesquely grasping a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley. “What’s this?” he cried. “What’s that creature down the passage? Is this some of your tricks?”
“My tricks!” hissed his pale rival, and made a stride towards him.
In the instant of time in which all this happened Father Brown stepped out into the top of the passage, looked down it, and at once walked briskly towards what he saw.
At this the other two men dropped their quarrel and darted after him, Cutler calling out: “What are you doing? Who are you?”
“My name is Brown,” said the priest sadly, as he bent over something and straightened himself again. “Miss Rome sent for me, and I came as quickly as I could. I have come too late.”
The three men looked down, and in one of them at least the life died in that late light of afternoon. It ran along the passage like a path of gold, and in the midst of it Aurora Rome lay lustrous in her robes of green and gold, with her dead face turned upwards. Her dress was torn away as in a struggle, leaving the right shoulder bare, but the wound from which the blood was welling was on the other side. The brass dagger lay flat and gleaming a yard or so away.
There was a blank stillness for a measurable time, so that they could hear far off a flower-girl’s laugh outside Charing Cross, and someone whistling furiously for a taxicab in one of the streets off the Strand. Then the Captain, with a movement so sudden that it might have been passion or play-acting, took Sir Wilson Seymour by the throat.
Seymour looked at him steadily without either fight or fear. “You need not kill me,” he said in a voice quite cold; “I shall do that on my own account.”
The Captain’s hand hesitated and dropped; and the other added with the same icy candour: “If I find I haven’t the nerve to do it with that dagger I can do it in a month with drink.”
“Drink isn’t good enough for me,” replied Cutler, “but I’ll have blood for this before I die. Not yours—but I think I know whose.”
And before the others could appreciate his intention he snatched up the dagger, sprang at the other door at the lower end of the passage, burst it open, bolt and all, and confronted Bruno in his dressing-room. As he did so, old Parkinson tottered in his wavering way out of the door and caught sight of the corpse lying in the passage. He moved shakily towards it; looked at it weakly with a working face; then moved shakily back into the dressing-room again, and sat down suddenly on one of the richly cushioned chairs. Father Brown instantly ran across to him, taking no notice of Cutler and the colossal actor, though the room already rang with their blows and they began to struggle for the dagger. Seymour, who retained some practical sense, was whistling for the police at the end of the passage.
When the police arrived it was to tear the two men from an almost ape-like grapple; and, after a few formal inquiries, to arrest Isidore Bruno upon a charge of murder, brought against him by his furious opponent. The idea that the great national hero of the hour had arrested a wrongdoer with his own hand doubtless had its weight with the police, who are not without elements of the journalist. They treated Cutler with a certain solemn attention, and pointed out that he had got a slight slash on the hand. Even as Cutler bore him back across tilted chair and table, Bruno had twisted the dagger out of his grasp and disabled him just below the wrist. The injury was really slight, but till he was removed from the room the half-savage prisoner stared at the running blood with a steady smile.
«Devo mostrare a questo sciocco dove andare,» disse Aurora in un sussurro a Seymour, e corse fuori sulla soglia per affrettare la partenza dell’ospite.
Seymour pareva stare in ascolto, per quanto elegante e distratta fosse la sua posa, e parve sollevato quando udì la dama gridare alcune ultime istruzioni al capitano, e poi voltarsi di scatto e correre ridendo giù per l’andito verso l’altro capo, il capo sulla terrazza sopra il Tamigi. Eppure un secondo o due dopo la fronte di Seymour tornò a rannuvolarsi. Un uomo nella sua posizione ha tanti rivali, e ricordò che all’altro capo dell’andito si trovava l’ingresso corrispondente alla stanza privata di Bruno. Non perse la propria dignità; disse qualche parola cortese a padre Brown sul rilancio dell’architettura bizantina nella Cattedrale di Westminster, e poi, del tutto naturalmente, uscì egli stesso verso l’estremità superiore dell’andito. Padre Brown e Parkinson rimasero soli, e nessuno dei due era uomo con la passione della conversazione superflua. Il vestiarista girava per la stanza, tirando fuori gli specchi e ricacciandoli dentro, con la sua giacca e i pantaloni scuri e logori che apparivano tanto più tetri in quanto egli reggeva ancora la festosa lancia fatata del re Oberon. Ogni volta che tirava fuori la cornice di un nuovo specchio, appariva una nuova figura nera di padre Brown; l’assurda camera di specchi era piena di padri Brown, capovolti in aria come angeli, che facevano capriole come acrobati, che voltavano le spalle a tutti come persone molto scortesi.
Padre Brown pareva del tutto inconsapevole di quella nube di testimoni, ma seguì Parkinson con occhio pigramente attento finché costui non portò sé stesso e la sua assurda lancia nella stanza più lontana di Bruno. Allora si abbandonò a quelle astratte meditazioni che sempre lo divertivano— calcolare gli angoli degli specchi, gli angoli di ciascuna rifrazione, l’angolo con cui ciascuno doveva incastrarsi nella parete…quando udì un grido forte ma strozzato.
Balzò in piedi e rimase rigido in ascolto. Nel medesimo istante Sir Wilson Seymour irruppe di nuovo nella stanza, bianco come avorio. «Chi è quell’uomo nell’andito?» gridò. «Dov’è quel mio pugnale?»
Prima che padre Brown potesse voltarsi nei suoi pesanti stivali, Seymour stava frugando per la stanza in cerca dell’arma. E prima che potesse in qualche modo trovare quell’arma o qualsiasi altra, uno scalpiccìo svelto di piedi risuonò sul selciato là fuori, e il volto quadrato di Cutler si affacciò nel medesimo vano di porta. Stringeva ancora grottescamente un mazzo di mughetti. «Che cos’è questo?» gridò. «Che cos’è quella creatura in fondo all’andito? È qualcuno dei vostri trucchi?»
«I miei trucchi!» sibilò il suo pallido rivale, e fece un passo verso di lui.
Nell’istante di tempo in cui tutto ciò accadde, padre Brown uscì in cima all’andito, guardò giù, e subito si diresse spedito verso ciò che aveva visto.
A questo gli altri due uomini abbandonarono la loro contesa e si slanciarono dietro di lui, con Cutler che gridava: «Che cosa fate? Chi siete?»
«Mi chiamo Brown,» disse il prete mestamente, mentre si chinava su qualcosa e tornava a raddrizzarsi. «La signorina Rome mi ha mandato a chiamare, e sono venuto il più in fretta che ho potuto. Sono arrivato troppo tardi.»
I tre uomini abbassarono lo sguardo, e in almeno uno di loro la vita morì in quella tarda luce del pomeriggio. Essa correva lungo l’andito come un sentiero d’oro, e nel mezzo di esso giaceva Aurora Rome lucente nelle sue vesti di verde e d’oro, con il volto morto rivolto in alto. L’abito era strappato come in una colluttazione, lasciando nuda la spalla destra, ma la ferita da cui sgorgava il sangue era dall’altro lato. Il pugnale di bronzo giaceva piatto e luccicante a un metro o poco più di distanza.
Ci fu un vuoto immobile per un tempo misurabile, sicché poterono udire lontano la risata di una fioraia fuori da Charing Cross, e qualcuno che fischiava furiosamente per un taxi in una delle strade che si dipartono dallo Strand. Poi il capitano, con un movimento così repentino che avrebbe potuto essere passione o recitazione, prese Sir Wilson Seymour per la gola.
Seymour lo guardò fisso senza lotta né paura. «Non c’è bisogno che mi uccidiate,» disse in tono del tutto freddo; «lo farò da me.»
La mano del capitano esitò e ricadde; e l’altro aggiunse con la medesima gelida franchezza: «Se scoprirò di non avere il coraggio di farlo con quel pugnale, potrò farlo in un mese con l’alcol.»
«L’alcol non è abbastanza buono per me,» ribatté Cutler, «ma avrò sangue per questo prima di morire. Non il vostro—ma credo di sapere di chi.»
E prima che gli altri potessero cogliere la sua intenzione afferrò il pugnale, si slanciò verso l’altra porta all’estremità inferiore dell’andito, la spalancò, chiavistello e tutto, e affrontò Bruno nel suo camerino. Mentre lo faceva, il vecchio Parkinson uscì barcollando alla sua maniera vacillante dalla porta e scorse il cadavere disteso nell’andito. Si mosse malfermo verso di esso; lo guardò debolmente con il volto contratto; poi tornò malfermo dentro il camerino, e si sedette d’improvviso su una delle sedie riccamente imbottite. Padre Brown gli corse subito accanto, senza badare a Cutler e al colossale attore, benché la stanza già risuonasse dei loro colpi ed essi avessero cominciato a lottare per il pugnale. Seymour, che conservava un certo senso pratico, fischiava per chiamare la polizia all’estremità dell’andito.
Quando la polizia giunse, dovette strappare i due uomini da una lotta quasi scimmiesca; e, dopo alcune domande formali, arrestare Isidore Bruno con l’accusa di omicidio, mossa contro di lui dal suo furente avversario. L’idea che il grande eroe nazionale del momento avesse arrestato un malfattore con le proprie mani ebbe indubbiamente il suo peso sulla polizia, che non è priva di elementi da giornalista. Trattarono Cutler con una certa solenne attenzione, e fecero notare che aveva riportato un lieve taglio alla mano. Proprio mentre Cutler lo respingeva all’indietro tra sedie e tavolo rovesciati, Bruno gli aveva strappato il pugnale dalla stretta e lo aveva ferito appena sotto il polso. La ferita era davvero lieve, ma finché non fu portato via dalla stanza il prigioniero mezzo selvaggio fissò il sangue che colava con un sorriso fermo.
“Looks a cannibal sort of chap, don’t he?” said the constable confidentially to Cutler.
Cutler made no answer, but said sharply a moment after: “We must attend to the…the death…” and his voice escaped from articulation.
“The two deaths,” came in the voice of the priest from the farther side of the room. “This poor fellow was gone when I got across to him.” And he stood looking down at old Parkinson, who sat in a black huddle on the gorgeous chair. He also had paid his tribute, not without eloquence, to the woman who had died.
The silence was first broken by Cutler, who seemed not untouched by a rough tenderness. “I wish I was him,” he said huskily. “I remember he used to watch her wherever she walked more than—anybody. She was his air, and he’s dried up. He’s just dead.”
“We are all dead,” said Seymour in a strange voice, looking down the road.
They took leave of Father Brown at the corner of the road, with some random apologies for any rudeness they might have shown. Both their faces were tragic, but also cryptic.
The mind of the little priest was always a rabbit-warren of wild thoughts that jumped too quickly for him to catch them. Like the white tail of a rabbit he had the vanishing thought that he was certain of their grief, but not so certain of their innocence.
“We had better all be going,” said Seymour heavily; “we have done all we can to help.”
“Will you understand my motives,” asked Father Brown quietly, “if I say you have done all you can to hurt?”
They both started as if guiltily, and Cutler said sharply: “To hurt whom?”
“To hurt yourselves,” answered the priest. “I would not add to your troubles if it weren’t common justice to warn you. You’ve done nearly everything you could do to hang yourselves, if this actor should be acquitted. They’ll be sure to subpoena me; I shall be bound to say that after the cry was heard each of you rushed into the room in a wild state and began quarrelling about a dagger. As far as my words on oath can go, you might either of you have done it. You hurt yourselves with that; and then Captain Cutler must have hurt himself with the dagger.”
“Hurt myself!” exclaimed the Captain, with contempt. “A silly little scratch.”
“Which drew blood,” replied the priest, nodding. “We know there’s blood on the brass now. And so we shall never know whether there was blood on it before.”
There was a silence; and then Seymour said, with an emphasis quite alien to his daily accent: “But I saw a man in the passage.”
“I know you did,” answered the cleric Brown with a face of wood, “so did Captain Cutler. That’s what seems so improbable.”
Before either could make sufficient sense of it even to answer, Father Brown had politely excused himself and gone stumping up the road with his stumpy old umbrella.
As modern newspapers are conducted, the most honest and most important news is the police news. If it be true that in the twentieth century more space is given to murder than to politics, it is for the excellent reason that murder is a more serious subject. But even this would hardly explain the enormous omnipresence and widely distributed detail of “The Bruno Case,” or “The Passage Mystery,” in the Press of London and the provinces. So vast was the excitement that for some weeks the Press really told the truth; and the reports of examination and cross-examination, if interminable, even if intolerable are at least reliable. The true reason, of course, was the coincidence of persons. The victim was a popular actress; the accused was a popular actor; and the accused had been caught red-handed, as it were, by the most popular soldier of the patriotic season. In those extraordinary circumstances the Press was paralysed into probity and accuracy; and the rest of this somewhat singular business can practically be recorded from reports of Bruno’s trial.
The trial was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those who are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much more serious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living impatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really filled with frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chief actors being of a worldly importance, the barristers were well balanced; the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, but weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English and trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner was defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneur by those who misunderstood the Irish character— and those who had not been examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions, the doctor, whom Seymour had summoned on the spot, agreeing with the eminent surgeon who had later examined the body. Aurora Rome had been stabbed with some sharp instrument such as a knife or dagger; some instrument, at least, of which the blade was short. The wound was just over the heart, and she had died instantly. When the doctor first saw her she could hardly have been dead for twenty minutes. Therefore when Father Brown found her she could hardly have been dead for three.
Some official detective evidence followed, chiefly concerned with the presence or absence of any proof of a struggle; the only suggestion of this was the tearing of the dress at the shoulder, and this did not seem to fit in particularly well with the direction and finality of the blow. When these details had been supplied, though not explained, the first of the important witnesses was called.
Sir Wilson Seymour gave evidence as he did everything else that he did at all—not only well, but perfectly. Though himself much more of a public man than the judge, he conveyed exactly the fine shade of self-effacement before the King’s justice; and though everyone looked at him as they would at the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they could have said nothing of his part in it but that it was that of a private gentleman, with an accent on the noun. He was also refreshingly lucid, as he was on the committees. He had been calling on Miss Rome at the theatre; he had met Captain Cutler there; they had been joined for a short time by the accused, who had then returned to his own dressing-room; they had then been joined by a Roman Catholic priest, who asked for the deceased lady and said his name was Brown. Miss Rome had then gone just outside the theatre to the entrance of the passage, in order to point out to Captain Cutler a flower-shop at which he was to buy her some more flowers; and the witness had remained in the room, exchanging a few words with the priest. He had then distinctly heard the deceased, having sent the Captain on his errand, turn round laughing and run down the passage towards its other end, where was the prisoner’s dressing-room. In idle curiosity as to the rapid movement of his friends, he had strolled out to the head of the passage himself and looked down it towards the prisoner’s door. Did he see anything in the passage? Yes; he saw something in the passage.
«Ha un’aria da cannibale, quel tipo, non è vero?» disse la guardia in confidenza a Cutler.
Cutler non rispose, ma disse bruscamente un momento dopo: «Dobbiamo occuparci della…della morte…» e la voce gli sfuggì dall’articolazione.
«Delle due morti,» giunse la voce del prete dal lato più lontano della stanza. «Questo pover’uomo se n’era già andato quando gli sono arrivato accanto.» E rimase a guardare in basso il vecchio Parkinson, che sedeva in un nero mucchio sulla sfarzosa sedia. Anch’egli aveva reso il proprio tributo, non senza eloquenza, alla donna che era morta.
Il silenzio fu rotto per primo da Cutler, che pareva non intatto da una ruvida tenerezza. «Vorrei essere lui,» disse con voce rauca. «Ricordo che la seguiva con lo sguardo dovunque camminasse, più di—chiunque. Ella era la sua aria, e lui si è inaridito. È semplicemente morto.»
«Siamo tutti morti,» disse Seymour con voce strana, guardando in fondo alla strada.
Congedarono padre Brown all’angolo della strada, con qualche scusa a caso per ogni scortesia che potessero aver mostrato. Entrambi i loro volti erano tragici, ma anche criptici.
La mente del piccolo prete era sempre una conigliera di pensieri selvatici che saltavano troppo in fretta perché egli riuscisse ad afferrarli. Come la coda bianca di un coniglio, ebbe il pensiero che gli sfuggiva che era certo del loro dolore, ma non altrettanto certo della loro innocenza.
«Faremmo bene ad andarcene tutti,» disse Seymour pesantemente; «abbiamo fatto tutto ciò che potevamo per aiutare.»
«Vorrete comprendere le mie intenzioni,» chiese padre Brown quietamente, «se dico che avete fatto tutto ciò che potevate per nuocere?»
Entrambi trasalirono come colpevoli, e Cutler disse bruscamente: «Nuocere a chi?»
«A voi stessi,» rispose il prete. «Non aggiungerei ai vostri guai se non fosse comune giustizia avvertirvi. Avete fatto quasi tutto quel che potevate per impiccarvi, qualora quest’attore fosse assolto. Certo mi citeranno come testimone; sarò tenuto a dire che, dopo che si udì il grido, ciascuno di voi si precipitò nella stanza in uno stato di frenesia e cominciò a litigare per un pugnale. Per quanto possano andare le mie parole giurate, l’uno o l’altro di voi potrebbe averlo fatto. Vi siete nociuti con questo; e poi il capitano Cutler deve essersi nociuto con il pugnale.»
«Nociuto a me stesso!» esclamò il capitano con disprezzo. «Uno sciocco graffietto.»
«Che ha fatto uscire del sangue,» rispose il prete, annuendo. «Sappiamo che ora c’è sangue sul bronzo. E perciò non sapremo mai se ci fosse sangue prima.»
Ci fu un silenzio; e poi Seymour disse, con un’enfasi del tutto estranea al suo tono di ogni giorno: «Ma io ho visto un uomo nell’andito.»
«So che l’avete visto,» rispose il chierico Brown con volto di legno, «e così il capitano Cutler. È proprio questo che pare tanto improbabile.»
Prima che l’uno o l’altro potesse cavarne senso a sufficienza anche solo per rispondere, padre Brown si era cortesemente congedato e se n’era andato arrancando su per la strada con il suo tozzo vecchio ombrello.
Per come sono condotti i giornali moderni, la notizia più onesta e più importante è la cronaca nera. Se è vero che nel ventesimo secolo si dà più spazio all’omicidio che alla politica, è per l’eccellente ragione che l’omicidio è un argomento più serio. Ma persino questo spiegherebbe a stento l’enorme onnipresenza e l’ampiamente diffuso dettaglio del «Caso Bruno», o del «Mistero dell’Andito», sulla Stampa di Londra e delle province. Tanto vasta era l’eccitazione che per alcune settimane la Stampa disse davvero la verità; e i resoconti degli interrogatori e dei controinterrogatori, se pur interminabili, persino se intollerabili, sono almeno attendibili. La vera ragione, naturalmente, era la coincidenza delle persone. La vittima era un’attrice popolare; l’accusato era un attore popolare; e l’accusato era stato colto con le mani nel sacco, per così dire, dal più popolare soldato della stagione patriottica. In quelle straordinarie circostanze la Stampa fu paralizzata nella probità e nell’esattezza; e il resto di questa faccenda alquanto singolare può praticamente essere ricostruito dai resoconti del processo a Bruno.
Il processo fu presieduto dal giudice Monkhouse, uno di quelli che vengono derisi come giudici umoristici, ma che sono in generale assai più seri dei giudici seri, perché la loro levità nasce da una viva insofferenza per la solennità professionale; mentre il giudice serio è in realtà pieno di frivolezza, perché è pieno di vanità. Essendo tutti i principali protagonisti di importanza mondana, gli avvocati erano ben bilanciati; l’accusa per la Corona era sostenuta da Sir Walter Cowdray, un avvocato pesante, ma di peso, del tipo che sa sembrare inglese e degno di fiducia, e come essere retorico con riluttanza. Il prigioniero era difeso dal signor Patrick Butler, K.C., che veniva scambiato per un mero flâneur da quanti fraintendevano il carattere irlandese— e da quanti non erano stati interrogati da lui. La perizia medica non presentava contraddizioni: il medico, che Seymour aveva convocato sul posto, concordava con l’eminente chirurgo che più tardi aveva esaminato il corpo. Aurora Rome era stata pugnalata con qualche strumento affilato come un coltello o un pugnale; qualche strumento, perlomeno, di cui la lama era corta. La ferita era proprio sopra il cuore, ed ella era morta all’istante. Quando il medico la vide per la prima volta, poteva a stento essere morta da venti minuti. Perciò quando padre Brown la trovò, poteva a stento essere morta da tre.
Seguì qualche testimonianza ufficiale della polizia investigativa, concernente soprattutto la presenza o l’assenza di qualsiasi prova di colluttazione; l’unico indizio di questa era lo strappo dell’abito alla spalla, e ciò non pareva accordarsi particolarmente bene con la direzione e la definitività del colpo. Quando questi dettagli furono forniti, sebbene non spiegati, fu chiamato il primo dei testimoni importanti.
Sir Wilson Seymour rese testimonianza come faceva ogni altra cosa che facesse—non solo bene, ma perfettamente. Benché egli stesso fosse ben più uomo pubblico del giudice, rese esattamente la fine sfumatura di umiltà di sé dinanzi alla giustizia del Re; e benché tutti lo guardassero come avrebbero guardato il Primo Ministro o l’Arcivescovo di Canterbury, non avrebbero potuto dire nulla del suo ruolo se non che era quello di un privato gentiluomo, con l’accento sul sostantivo. Fu anche mirabilmente lucido, come lo era nelle commissioni. Aveva fatto visita alla signorina Rome al teatro; vi aveva incontrato il capitano Cutler; a loro si era unito per breve tempo l’accusato, che era poi tornato nel proprio camerino; a loro si era poi unito un prete cattolico romano, che aveva chiesto della defunta signora e aveva detto di chiamarsi Brown. La signorina Rome era poi uscita appena fuori dal teatro, all’ingresso dell’andito, per indicare al capitano Cutler un negozio di fiori in cui doveva comprarle ancora qualche fiore; e il testimone era rimasto nella stanza, scambiando qualche parola con il prete. Aveva poi distintamente udito la defunta, dopo aver mandato il capitano per la sua commissione, voltarsi ridendo e correre giù per l’andito verso l’altro capo, dove si trovava il camerino del prigioniero. Per oziosa curiosità circa il rapido andirivieni dei suoi amici, era uscito egli stesso in cima all’andito e aveva guardato giù verso la porta del prigioniero. Vide qualcosa nell’andito? Sì; vide qualcosa nell’andito.
Sir Walter Cowdray allowed an impressive interval, during which the witness looked down, and for all his usual composure seemed to have more than his usual pallor. Then the barrister said in a lower voice, which seemed at once sympathetic and creepy: “Did you see it distinctly?”
Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains in full working-order. “Very distinctly as regards its outline, but quite indistinctly, indeed not at all, as regards the details inside the outline. The passage is of such length that anyone in the middle of it appears quite black against the light at the other end.” The witness lowered his steady eyes once more and added: “I had noticed the fact before, when Captain Cutler first entered it.” There was another silence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.
“Well,” said Sir Walter patiently, “what was the outline like? Was it, for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?”
“Not in the least,” answered Seymour quietly.
“What did it look like to you?”
“It looked to me,” replied the witness, “like a tall man.”
Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen, or his umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever he happened to be looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes away from the prisoner by main force; but they felt his figure in the dock, and they felt it as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye, he seemed to swell taller and taller when an eyes had been torn away from him.
Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face, smoothing his black silk robes, and white silk whiskers. Sir Wilson was leaving the witness-box, after a few final particulars to which there were many other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence sprang up and stopped him.
“I shall only detain you a moment,” said Mr Butler, who was a rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression of partial slumber. “Will you tell his lordship how you knew it was a man?”
A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour’s features. “I’m afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers,” he said. “When I saw daylight between the long legs I was sure it was a man, after all.”
Butler’s sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion. “After all!” he repeated slowly. “So you did think at first it was a woman?”
Seymour looked troubled for the first time. “It is hardly a point of fact,” he said, “but if his lordship would like me to answer for my impression, of course I shall do so. There was something about the thing that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man; somehow the curves were different. And it had something that looked like long hair.”
“Thank you,” said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly, as if he had got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness than Sir Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was solidly the same. He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room, the dispatching of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, his return to the upper end of the passage, the thing he saw in the passage, his suspicion of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno. But he could give little artistic assistance about the black figure that he and Seymour had seen. Asked about its outline, he said he was no art critic—with a somewhat too obvious sneer at Seymour. Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said it looked more like a beast— with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner. But the man was plainly shaken with sorrow and sincere anger, and Cowdray quickly excused him from confirming facts that were already fairly clear.
The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination; although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take a long time about it. “You used a rather remarkable expression,” he said, looking at Cutler sleepily. “What do you mean by saying that it looked more like a beast than a man or a woman?”
Cutler seemed seriously agitated. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have said that,” he said; “but when the brute has huge humped shoulders like a chimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig—”
Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle. “Never mind whether its hair was like a pig’s,” he said, “was it like a woman’s?”
“A woman’s!” cried the soldier. “Great Scott, no!”
“The last witness said it was,” commented the counsel, with unscrupulous swiftness. “And did the figure have any of those serpentine and semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion has been made? No? No feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you, was rather heavy and square than otherwise?”
“He may have been bending forward,” said Cutler, in a hoarse and rather faint voice.
“Or again, he may not,” said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly for the second time.
The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was the little Catholic clergyman, so little, compared with the others, that his head seemed hardly to come above the box, so that it was like cross-examining a child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow got it into his head (mostly by some ramifications of his family’s religion) that Father Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner was wicked and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he took Father Brown up sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried to explain anything; and told him to answer yes or no, and tell the plain facts without any jesuitry. When Father Brown began, in his simplicity, to say who he thought the man in the passage was, the barrister told him that he did not want his theories.
“A black shape was seen in the passage. And you say you saw the black shape. Well, what shape was it?”
Father Brown blinked as under rebuke; but he had long known the literal nature of obedience. “The shape,” he said, “was short and thick, but had two sharp, black projections curved upwards on each side of the head or top, rather like horns, and—”
Sir Walter Cowdray concesse un intervallo suggestivo, durante il quale il testimone guardò in basso, e con tutta la sua consueta compostezza parve avere più del consueto pallore. Poi l’avvocato disse a voce più bassa, che parve al tempo stesso partecipe e sinistra: «Lo vide distintamente?»
Sir Wilson Seymour, per quanto turbato, aveva il suo eccellente cervello in piena efficienza. «Molto distintamente quanto al suo profilo, ma del tutto indistintamente, anzi per niente, quanto ai dettagli all’interno del profilo. L’andito è di tale lunghezza che chiunque si trovi nel mezzo appare del tutto nero contro la luce dell’estremità opposta.» Il testimone abbassò di nuovo i suoi occhi fermi e aggiunse: «Avevo già notato il fatto in precedenza, quando il capitano Cutler vi entrò per la prima volta.» Ci fu un altro silenzio, e il giudice si sporse in avanti e prese un appunto.
«Bene,» disse Sir Walter pazientemente, «com’era questo profilo? Era, per esempio, come la figura della donna assassinata?»
«Per niente,» rispose Seymour quietamente.
«A che cosa vi sembrò somigliare?»
«Mi sembrò,» rispose il testimone, «un uomo alto.»
Tutti in tribunale tenevano gli occhi inchiodati sulla propria penna, o sul manico del proprio ombrello, o sul proprio libro, o sui propri stivali o su qualunque cosa gli capitasse di guardare. Parevano tenere gli occhi lontani dal prigioniero a viva forza; ma sentivano la sua figura nel banco degli imputati, e la sentivano gigantesca. Per quanto Bruno fosse alto all’occhio, pareva gonfiarsi sempre più alto quando ogni occhio ne era stato strappato via.
Cowdray tornava al suo posto con il volto solenne, lisciandosi le nere toghe di seta e i bianchi favoriti di seta. Sir Wilson stava lasciando il banco dei testimoni, dopo alcuni ultimi particolari per i quali c’erano molti altri testimoni, quando l’avvocato della difesa balzò in piedi e lo fermò.
«Vi tratterrò solo un momento,» disse il signor Butler, che era una persona dall’aria campagnola, con le sopracciglia rosse e un’espressione di parziale sonnolenza. «Vorrete dire a sua signoria come sapevate che era un uomo?»
Un tenue, raffinato sorriso parve passare sui tratti di Seymour. «Temo che sia la volgare prova dei pantaloni,» disse. «Quando vidi la luce del giorno tra le lunghe gambe, fui certo che fosse un uomo, dopotutto.»
Gli occhi assonnati di Butler si spalancarono d’un tratto come una silenziosa esplosione. «Dopotutto!» ripeté lentamente. «Sicché in un primo momento pensaste che fosse una donna?»
Seymour parve turbato per la prima volta. «Non è propriamente un punto di fatto,» disse, «ma se sua signoria desidera che io risponda della mia impressione, naturalmente lo farò. C’era qualcosa in quella cosa che non era esattamente una donna e tuttavia non era del tutto un uomo; in qualche modo le curve erano diverse. E aveva qualcosa che sembrava capelli lunghi.»
«Grazie,» disse il signor Butler, K.C., e si sedette d’un tratto, come se avesse ottenuto ciò che voleva.
Il capitano Cutler fu un testimone assai meno plausibile e composto di Sir Wilson, ma il suo resoconto degli incidenti iniziali fu solidamente il medesimo. Descrisse il ritorno di Bruno nel proprio camerino, l’invio di sé stesso a comprare un mazzo di mughetti, il suo ritorno all’estremità superiore dell’andito, la cosa che vide nell’andito, il suo sospetto verso Seymour, e la sua lotta con Bruno. Ma poté fornire ben poco aiuto artistico circa la figura nera che lui e Seymour avevano visto. Interrogato sul suo profilo, disse di non essere un critico d’arte—con una punta un po’ troppo evidente contro Seymour. Interrogato se fosse un uomo o una donna, disse che somigliava piuttosto a una bestia— con un ringhio un po’ troppo evidente contro il prigioniero. Ma l’uomo era palesemente scosso dal dolore e da un’ira sincera, e Cowdray lo dispensò prontamente dal confermare fatti che erano già abbastanza chiari.
Anche l’avvocato difensore fu di nuovo breve nel suo controinterrogatorio; sebbene (come era sua abitudine) persino nell’essere breve, sembrasse metterci un lungo tempo. «Avete usato un’espressione piuttosto notevole,» disse, guardando Cutler con aria assonnata. «Che cosa intendete dicendo che somigliava a una bestia più che a un uomo o a una donna?»
Cutler parve seriamente agitato. «Forse non avrei dovuto dirlo,» disse; «ma quando quel bruto ha enormi spalle gobbe come uno scimpanzé, e setole che gli spuntano dalla testa come un maiale—»
Il signor Butler troncò a metà la sua curiosa impazienza. «Non importa se i suoi capelli erano come quelli di un maiale,» disse, «erano come quelli di una donna?»
«Di una donna!» gridò il soldato. «Santo cielo, no!»
«L’ultimo testimone ha detto di sì,» osservò l’avvocato, con senza scrupoli prontezza. «E la figura aveva forse qualcuna di quelle curve serpentine e semi-femminili a cui si è fatta eloquente allusione? No? Nessuna curva femminile? La figura, se vi capisco bene, era piuttosto pesante e quadrata che altrimenti?»
«Può darsi che fosse chinato in avanti,» disse Cutler, con voce roca e piuttosto fioca.
«O anche, può darsi di no,» disse il signor Butler, e si sedette d’un tratto per la seconda volta.
Il terzo testimone chiamato da Sir Walter Cowdray fu il piccolo ecclesiastico cattolico, così piccolo, rispetto agli altri, che la testa pareva a stento sporgere sopra il banco, sicché era come controinterrogare un bambino. Ma sfortunatamente Sir Walter si era in qualche modo ficcato in testa (per lo più per certe ramificazioni della religione della sua famiglia) che padre Brown fosse dalla parte del prigioniero, perché il prigioniero era malvagio e straniero e persino in parte nero. Perciò riprendeva bruscamente padre Brown ogni volta che quell’orgoglioso pontefice tentava di spiegare qualcosa; e gli diceva di rispondere sì o no, e di raccontare i semplici fatti senza gesuiterie. Quando padre Brown cominciò, nella sua semplicità, a dire chi credeva fosse l’uomo nell’andito, l’avvocato gli disse che non voleva le sue teorie.
«Una sagoma nera fu vista nell’andito. E voi dite di aver visto la sagoma nera. Bene, che forma aveva?»
Padre Brown batté le palpebre come sotto un rimprovero; ma da tempo conosceva la natura letterale dell’obbedienza. «La forma,» disse, «era corta e tozza, ma aveva due nette, nere sporgenze ricurve verso l’alto su ciascun lato della testa o della sommità, piuttosto simili a corna, e—»
“Oh! the devil with horns, no doubt,” ejaculated Cowdray, sitting down in triumphant jocularity. “It was the devil come to eat Protestants.”
“No,” said the priest dispassionately; “I know who it was.”
Those in court had been wrought up to an irrational, but real sense of some monstrosity. They had forgotten the figure in the dock and thought only of the figure in the passage. And the figure in the passage, described by three capable and respectable men who had all seen it, was a shifting nightmare: one called it a woman, and the other a beast, and the other a devil…
The judge was looking at Father Brown with level and piercing eyes. “You are a most extraordinary witness,” he said; “but there is something about you that makes me think you are trying to tell the truth. Well, who was the man you saw in the passage?”
“He was myself,” said Father Brown.
Butler, K.C., sprang to his feet in an extraordinary stillness, and said quite calmly: “Your lordship will allow me to cross-examine?” And then, without stopping, he shot at Brown the apparently disconnected question: “You have heard about this dagger; you know the experts say the crime was committed with a short blade?”
“A short blade,” assented Brown, nodding solemnly like an owl, “but a very long hilt.”
Before the audience could quite dismiss the idea that the priest had really seen himself doing murder with a short dagger with a long hilt (which seemed somehow to make it more horrible), he had himself hurried on to explain.
“I mean daggers aren’t the only things with short blades. Spears have short blades. And spears catch at the end of the steel just like daggers, if they’re that sort of fancy spear they had in theatres; like the spear poor old Parkinson killed his wife with, just when she’d sent for me to settle their family troubles— and I came just too late, God forgive me! But he died penitent— he just died of being penitent. He couldn’t bear what he’d done.”
The general impression in court was that the little priest, who was gobbling away, had literally gone mad in the box. But the judge still looked at him with bright and steady eyes of interest; and the counsel for the defence went on with his questions unperturbed.
“If Parkinson did it with that pantomime spear,” said Butler, “he must have thrust from four yards away. How do you account for signs of struggle, like the dress dragged off the shoulder?” He had slipped into treating his mere witness as an expert; but no one noticed it now.
“The poor lady’s dress was torn,” said the witness, “because it was caught in a panel that slid to just behind her. She struggled to free herself, and as she did so Parkinson came out of the prisoner’s room and lunged with the spear.”
“A panel?” repeated the barrister in a curious voice.
“It was a looking-glass on the other side,” explained Father Brown. “When I was in the dressing-room I noticed that some of them could probably be slid out into the passage.”
There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the judge who spoke. “So you really mean that when you looked down that passage, the man you saw was yourself—in a mirror?”
“Yes, my lord; that was what I was trying to say,” said Brown, “but they asked me for the shape; and our hats have corners just like horns, and so I—”
The judge leaned forward, his old eyes yet more brilliant, and said in specially distinct tones: “Do you really mean to say that when Sir Wilson Seymour saw that wild what-you-call-him with curves and a woman’s hair and a man’s trousers, what he saw was Sir Wilson Seymour?”
“Yes, my lord,” said Father Brown.
“And you mean to say that when Captain Cutler saw that chimpanzee with humped shoulders and hog’s bristles, he simply saw himself?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The judge leaned back in his chair with a luxuriance in which it was hard to separate the cynicism and the admiration. “And can you tell us why,” he asked, “you should know your own figure in a looking-glass, when two such distinguished men don’t?”
Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered: “Really, my lord, I don’t know unless it’s because I don’t look at it so often.”
FIVE
«Oh! il diavolo con le corna, senza dubbio,» sbottò Cowdray, sedendosi con trionfante giovialità. «Era il diavolo venuto a divorare i protestanti.»
«No,» disse il prete con distacco; «io so chi era.»
Quelli in tribunale erano stati portati a un irrazionale ma reale senso di qualche mostruosità. Avevano dimenticato la figura nel banco degli imputati e pensavano soltanto alla figura nell’andito. E la figura nell’andito, descritta da tre uomini capaci e rispettabili che l’avevano tutti veduta, era un incubo mutevole: uno la chiamava una donna, e l’altro una bestia, e l’altro un diavolo…
Il giudice guardava padre Brown con occhi calmi e penetranti. «Siete un testimone assai straordinario,» disse; «ma c’è qualcosa in voi che mi fa pensare che stiate cercando di dire la verità. Bene, chi era l’uomo che vedeste nell’andito?»
«Ero io stesso,» disse padre Brown.
Butler, K.C., balzò in piedi in uno straordinario silenzio, e disse con tutta calma: «Vostra signoria mi permetterà di controinterrogare?» E poi, senza fermarsi, sparò a Brown la domanda apparentemente sconnessa: «Avete sentito parlare di questo pugnale; sapete che gli esperti dicono che il delitto fu commesso con una lama corta?»
«Una lama corta,» convenne Brown, annuendo solennemente come un gufo, «ma un’impugnatura molto lunga.»
Prima che l’uditorio potesse del tutto scacciare l’idea che il prete avesse davvero visto sé stesso commettere un omicidio con un pugnale corto dalla lunga impugnatura (il che pareva in qualche modo renderlo più orribile), egli si era da sé affrettato a spiegare.
«Voglio dire che i pugnali non sono le uniche cose con lame corte. Le lance hanno lame corte. E le lance si agganciano all’estremità dell’acciaio proprio come i pugnali, se sono di quel tipo di lancia da parata che avevano nei teatri; come la lancia con cui il povero vecchio Parkinson uccise sua moglie, proprio quando ella aveva mandato a chiamare me per comporre i loro guai familiari— e io arrivai troppo tardi, Dio mi perdoni! Ma egli morì pentito— morì proprio di pentimento. Non poteva sopportare ciò che aveva fatto.»
L’impressione generale in tribunale fu che il piccolo prete, che blaterava a raffica, fosse letteralmente impazzito nel banco dei testimoni. Ma il giudice continuava a guardarlo con occhi vivi e fermi d’interesse; e l’avvocato della difesa proseguì con le sue domande imperturbato.
«Se Parkinson lo fece con quella lancia da pantomima,» disse Butler, «deve aver colpito da quattro metri di distanza. Come spiegate i segni di colluttazione, come l’abito strappato via dalla spalla?» Egli era scivolato nel trattare il suo semplice testimone come un esperto; ma nessuno se ne accorse ora.
«L’abito della povera signora era strappato,» disse il testimone, «perché era rimasto impigliato in un pannello che scivolò a chiudersi proprio dietro di lei. Ella si dibatté per liberarsi, e mentre lo faceva Parkinson uscì dalla stanza del prigioniero e vibrò il colpo con la lancia.»
«Un pannello?» ripeté l’avvocato con voce curiosa.
«Era uno specchio sull’altro lato,» spiegò padre Brown. «Quando ero nel camerino notai che alcuni di essi potevano probabilmente essere fatti scivolare in fuori nell’andito.»
Ci fu un altro vasto e innaturale silenzio, e questa volta fu il giudice a parlare. «Sicché intendete davvero dire che quando voi guardaste giù per quell’andito, l’uomo che vedeste eravate voi stesso—in uno specchio?»
«Sì, mio signore; era ciò che cercavo di dire,» disse Brown, «ma mi hanno chiesto la forma; e i nostri cappelli hanno gli angoli proprio come corna, e così io—»
Il giudice si sporse in avanti, i vecchi occhi ancor più brillanti, e disse in tono particolarmente distinto: «Intendete davvero dire che quando Sir Wilson Seymour vide quel selvaggio come-lo-chiamate con le curve e i capelli di donna e i pantaloni d’uomo, ciò che vide era Sir Wilson Seymour?»
«Sì, mio signore,» disse padre Brown.
«E intendete dire che quando il capitano Cutler vide quello scimpanzé con le spalle gobbe e le setole di porco, vide semplicemente sé stesso?»
«Sì, mio signore.»
Il giudice si riappoggiò allo schienale con una compiacenza in cui era difficile separare il cinismo dall’ammirazione. «E potete dirci perché,» chiese, «voi dovreste riconoscere la vostra propria figura in uno specchio, quando due uomini così ragguardevoli non lo fanno?»
Padre Brown batté le palpebre ancor più penosamente di prima; poi balbettò: «Davvero, mio signore, non lo so, a meno che non sia perché non la guardo così spesso.»
CINQUE
The Mistake of the Machine
FLAMBEAU and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third Degree in America.
“I’ve been reading,” said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method they talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean; they put a pulsometer on a man’s wrist and judge by how his heart goes at the pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?”
“I think it very interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a corpse if the murderer touched it.”
“Do you really mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two methods equally valuable?”
“I think them equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we can ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to shed it.”
“The method,” remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the greatest American men of science.”
“What sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown, “and how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”
“But surely,” insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at something or other.”
“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing done once and I’ve never believed in it since.” And he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.
It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his co-religionists in a prison in Chicago—where the Irish population displayed a capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him tolerably busy. The official second-in-command under the Governor was an ex-detective named Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee philosopher, occasionally varying a very rigid visage with an odd apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in a slightly patronizing way; and Father Brown liked him, though he heartily disliked his theories. His theories were extremely complicated and were held with extreme simplicity.
One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom, took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered with papers, and waited. The official selected from the papers a scrap of newspaper cutting, which he handed across to the cleric, who read it gravely. It appeared to be an extract from one of the pinkest of American Society papers, and ran as follows:
“Society’s brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim’s Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick’s show the year previous, the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at which the confections handed round were sarcastically moulded in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to eat his partner. The witticism which will inspire this evening is as yet in Mr Todd’s pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the simple manners and customs at the other end of Society’s scale. This would be all the more telling, as hospitable Todd is entertaining in Lord Falconroy, the famous traveller, a true-blooded aristocrat fresh from England’s oak-groves. Lord Falconroy’s travels began before his ancient feudal title was resurrected, he was in the Republic in his youth, and fashion murmurs a sly reason for his return. Miss Etta Todd is one of our deep-souled New Yorkers, and comes into an income of nearly twelve hundred million dollars.”
“Well,” asked Usher, “does that interest you?”
“Why, words rather fail me,” answered Father Brown. “I cannot think at this moment of anything in this world that would interest me less. And, unless the just anger of the Republic is at last going to electrocute journalists for writing like that, I don’t quite see why it should interest you either.”
“Ah!” said Mr Usher dryly, and handing across another scrap of newspaper. “Well, does that interest you?”
The paragraph was headed “Savage Murder of a Warder. Convict Escapes,” and ran: “Just before dawn this morning a shout for help was heard in the Convict Settlement at Sequah in this State. The authorities, hurrying in the direction of the cry, found the corpse of the warder who patrols the top of the north wall of the prison, the steepest and most difficult exit, for which one man has always been found sufficient. The unfortunate officer had, however, been hurled from the high wall, his brains beaten out as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further inquiries showed that one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied by a rather sullen ruffian giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily detained for some comparatively trivial assault; but he gave everyone the impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous future. Finally, when daylight had fully revealed the scene of murder, it was found that he had written on the wall above the body a fragmentary sentence, apparently with a finger dipped in blood: ‘This was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no harm to him or any man but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim’s Pond—O.R.’ A man must have used most fiendish treachery or most savage and amazing bodily daring to have stormed such a wall in spite of an armed man.”
L’errore della macchina
FLAMBEAU e il suo amico prete sedevano nei Temple Gardens sul far del tramonto; e la vicinanza del luogo, o qualche altro simile influsso casuale, aveva portato il loro discorso su questioni di procedura giudiziaria. Dal problema della libertà concessa nel controinterrogatorio la conversazione era andata a spasso fino alla tortura romana e medievale, al giudice istruttore in Francia e al Terzo Grado in America.
«Ho letto», disse Flambeau, «di questo nuovo metodo psicometrico di cui si parla tanto, specialmente in America. Sai a che cosa alludo: applicano un pulsometro al polso di un uomo e giudicano da come batte il cuore alla pronuncia di certe parole. Che cosa ne pensi?»
«Lo trovo molto interessante», rispose Padre Brown; «mi ricorda quella curiosa idea dei Secoli Bui, secondo cui il sangue sarebbe sgorgato da un cadavere se l’assassino l’avesse toccato.»
«Vuoi davvero dire», domandò l’amico, «che consideri i due metodi ugualmente validi?»
«Li considero ugualmente privi di valore», rispose Brown. «Il Blood scorre, rapido o lento, nei morti come nei vivi, per tanti più milioni di ragioni di quante potremo mai conoscerne. Il Blood dovrebbe scorrere in modo assai bizzarro; il sangue dovrebbe scorrere in salita sul Cervino, prima che io lo prenda come segno che devo spargerlo.»
«Il metodo», osservò l’altro, «è stato garantito da alcuni dei più grandi uomini di scienza americani.»
«Che sentimentali sono gli uomini di scienza!» esclamò Padre Brown, «e quanto più sentimentali debbono essere gli uomini di scienza americani! Chi, se non uno yankee, penserebbe di dimostrare qualcosa dai palpiti del cuore? Ma via, devono essere sentimentali come un uomo che crede che una donna sia innamorata di lui se arrossisce. È una prova ricavata dalla circolazione del sangue, scoperta dall’immortale Harvey; e per giunta una prova bella e marcia.»
«Eppure», insistette Flambeau, «potrebbe pur puntare abbastanza dritto verso qualcosa.»
«C’è uno svantaggio in un bastone che punta dritto», rispose l’altro. «Quale? Ma via, l’altro capo del bastone punta sempre nella direzione opposta. Dipende se prendi il bastone dal capo giusto. Una volta vidi fare la cosa e da allora non ci ho mai più creduto.» E si mise a raccontare la storia della sua disillusione.
Era accaduto quasi vent’anni prima, quando egli era cappellano dei suoi correligionari in una prigione di Chicago, dove la popolazione irlandese mostrava una capacità tanto per il delitto quanto per il pentimento che lo teneva discretamente occupato. Il vicecomandante ufficiale, sotto il Governatore, era un ex detective di nome Greywood Usher, un cadaverico, misurato filosofo yankee, che di tanto in tanto variava un volto assai rigido con una strana smorfia di scusa. Costui aveva simpatia per Padre Brown in un modo leggermente paternalistico; e Padre Brown aveva simpatia per lui, benché detestasse cordialmente le sue teorie. Le sue teorie erano estremamente complicate e venivano sostenute con estrema semplicità.
Una sera aveva mandato a chiamare il prete, il quale, secondo il suo solito, prese posto in silenzio a un tavolo carico e ingombro di carte, e attese. L’ufficiale scelse tra le carte un ritaglio di giornale, che porse al chierico, il quale lo lesse con gravità. Pareva un estratto da uno dei più rosei giornali mondani americani, e diceva così:
«Il più brillante vedovo dell’alta società si dà ancora una volta alla mania delle Cene Stravaganti. Tutti i nostri concittadini più esclusivi ricorderanno la Cena Sfilata delle Carrozzelle, in cui Todd-l’Ultimo-Tiro, nella sua sontuosa dimora di Pilgrim’s Pond, fece apparire tante delle nostre eminenti debuttanti perfino più giovani dei loro anni. Ugualmente elegante e più eterogeneo e generoso di cuore, nella sua veduta sociale, fu lo spettacolo dell’Ultimo-Tiro dell’anno prima, il popolare Pranzo dell’Assalto Cannibale, in cui i dolci fatti circolare erano sarcasticamente foggiati in forma di braccia e gambe umane, e durante il quale più d’uno dei nostri più gai ginnasti della mente fu udito offrirsi di mangiare la propria dama. L’arguzia che ispirerà la serata di stasera è ancora chiusa nel piuttosto riservato intelletto del signor Todd, o serrata nei seni ingioiellati dei più gai capofila della nostra città; ma si parla di una graziosa parodia dei modi e dei costumi semplici dell’altro capo della scala sociale. Il che sarebbe tanto più efficace, poiché l’ospitale Todd ha come suo invitato Lord Falconroy, il celebre viaggiatore, un aristocratico di puro sangue fresco dalle querce d’Inghilterra. I viaggi di Lord Falconroy cominciarono prima che il suo antico titolo feudale fosse risuscitato: egli fu nella Repubblica in gioventù, e la moda sussurra una maliziosa ragione per il suo ritorno. Miss Etta Todd è una delle nostre newyorkesi dall’anima profonda, ed entra in possesso di una rendita di quasi milleduecento milioni di dollari.»
«Ebbene», chiese Usher, «la cosa ti interessa?»
«Ma via, mi mancano quasi le parole», rispose Padre Brown. «In questo momento non riesco a pensare a nulla al mondo che possa interessarmi di meno. E, a meno che il giusto sdegno della Repubblica non stia finalmente per mandare sulla sedia elettrica i giornalisti che scrivono così, non vedo bene perché dovrebbe interessare neppure te.»
«Ah!» disse il signor Usher seccamente, porgendo un altro ritaglio di giornale. «Ebbene, questo ti interessa?»
Il trafiletto era intitolato «Feroce Assassinio di un Guardiano. Evaso un Detenuto», e diceva: «Poco prima dell’alba di questa mattina un grido d’aiuto è stato udito nel Penitenziario di Sequah, in questo Stato. Le autorità, precipitatesi nella direzione del grido, hanno trovato il cadavere del guardiano che pattuglia la sommità del muro settentrionale della prigione, l’uscita più ripida e più difficile, per la quale un solo uomo è sempre stato ritenuto sufficiente. Lo sventurato agente era però stato scagliato giù dall’alto muro, il cranio fracassato come da una clava, e il suo fucile è scomparso. Ulteriori indagini hanno rivelato che una delle celle era vuota; era occupata da un individuo piuttosto tetro e brutale che dava come proprio nome quello di Oscar Rian. Era trattenuto solo temporaneamente per un’aggressione relativamente lieve; ma dava a tutti l’impressione di un uomo con un passato nero e un futuro pericoloso. Infine, quando la luce del giorno ebbe pienamente rivelato la scena del delitto, si scoprì che egli aveva scritto sul muro sopra il corpo una frase frammentaria, apparentemente con un dito intinto nel sangue: ‘Fu legittima difesa e lui aveva il fucile. Non intendevo far male a lui né a nessun altro, tranne uno. Serbo la pallottola per Pilgrim’s Pond. — O.R.’ Un uomo deve aver usato la più diabolica astuzia, o il più selvaggio e prodigioso ardimento fisico, per aver preso d’assalto un simile muro a dispetto di un uomo armato.»
“Well, the literary style is somewhat improved,” admitted the priest cheerfully, “but still I don’t see what I can do for you. I should cut a poor figure, with my short legs, running about this State after an athletic assassin of that sort. I doubt whether anybody could find him. The convict settlement at Sequah is thirty miles from here; the country between is wild and tangled enough, and the country beyond, where he will surely have the sense to go, is a perfect no-man’s land tumbling away to the prairies. He may be in any hole or up any tree.”
“He isn’t in any hole,” said the governor; “he isn’t up any tree.”
“Why, how do you know?” asked Father Brown, blinking.
“Would you like to speak to him?” inquired Usher.
Father Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. “He is here?” he exclaimed. “Why, how did your men get hold of him?”
“I got hold of him myself,” drawled the American, rising and lazily stretching his lanky legs before the fire. “I got hold of him with the crooked end of a walking-stick. Don’t look so surprised. I really did. You know I sometimes take a turn in the country lanes outside this dismal place; well, I was walking early this evening up a steep lane with dark hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields on both sides; and a young moon was up and silvering the road. By the light of it I saw a man running across the field towards the road; running with his body bent and at a good mile-race trot. He appeared to be much exhausted; but when he came to the thick black hedge he went through it as if it were made of spiders’ webs; —or rather (for I heard the strong branches breaking and snapping like bayonets) as if he himself were made of stone. In the instant in which he appeared up against the moon, crossing the road, I slung my hooked cane at his legs, tripping him and bringing him down. Then I blew my whistle long and loud, and our fellows came running up to secure him.”
“It would have been rather awkward,” remarked Brown, “if you had found he was a popular athlete practising a mile race.”
“He was not,” said Usher grimly. “We soon found out who he was; but I had guessed it with the first glint of the moon on him.”
“You thought it was the runaway convict,” observed the priest simply, “because you had read in the newspaper cutting that morning that a convict had run away.”
“I had somewhat better grounds,” replied the governor coolly. “I pass over the first as too simple to be emphasized— I mean that fashionable athletes do not run across ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out in bramble hedges. Nor do they run all doubled up like a crouching dog. There were more decisive details to a fairly well-trained eye. The man was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but they were something more than merely coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting as to be quite grotesque; even as he appeared in black outline against the moonrise, the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him look like a hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It at once occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change his convict clothes for some confederate’s clothes which did not fit him. Second, there was a pretty stiff wind against which he was running; so that I must have seen the streaky look of blowing hair, if the hair had not been very short. Then I remembered that beyond these ploughed fields he was crossing lay Pilgrim’s Pond, for which (you will remember) the convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my walking-stick flying.”
“A brilliant piece of rapid deduction,” said Father Brown; “but had he got a gun?”
As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically: “I’ve been told a bullet is not half so useful without it.”
“He had no gun,” said the other gravely; “but that was doubtless due to some very natural mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy that made him change the clothes made him drop the gun; he began to repent the coat he had left behind him in the blood of his victim.”
“Well, that is possible enough,” answered the priest.
“And it’s hardly worth speculating on,” said Usher, turning to some other papers, “for we know it’s the man by this time.”
His clerical friend asked faintly: “But how?” And Greywood Usher threw down the newspapers and took up the two press-cuttings again.
“Well, since you are so obstinate,” he said, “let’s begin at the beginning. You will notice that these two cuttings have only one thing in common, which is the mention of Pilgrim’s Pond, the estate, as you know, of the millionaire Ireton Todd. You also know that he is a remarkable character; one of those that rose on stepping-stones—”
“Of our dead selves to higher things,” assented his companion. “Yes; I know that. Petroleum, I think.”
“Anyhow,” said Usher, “Last-Trick Todd counts for a great deal in this rum affair.”
He stretched himself once more before the fire and continued talking in his expansive, radiantly explanatory style.
“To begin with, on the face of it, there is no mystery here at all. It is not mysterious, it is not even odd, that a jailbird should take his gun to Pilgrim’s Pond. Our people aren’t like the English, who will forgive a man for being rich if he throws away money on hospitals or horses. Last-Trick Todd has made himself big by his own considerable abilities; and there’s no doubt that many of those on whom he has shown his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a shot-gun. Todd might easily get dropped by some man he’d never even heard of; some labourer he’d locked out, or some clerk in a business he’d busted. Last-Trick is a man of mental endowments and a high public character; but in this country the relations of employers and employed are considerably strained.
“That’s how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian made for Pilgrim’s Pond to kill Todd. So it looked to me, till another little discovery woke up what I have of the detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe, I picked up my cane again and strolled down the two or three turns of country road that brought me to one of the side entrances of Todd’s grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after which the place is named. It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time; the moonlight was more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks of it lying on the mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid shores in which they say our fathers used to make witches walk until they sank. I’d forgotten the exact tale; but you know the place I mean; it lies north of Todd’s house towards the wilderness, and has two queer wrinkled trees, so dismal that they look more like huge fungoids than decent foliage. As I stood peering at this misty pool, I fancied I saw the faint figure of a man moving from the house towards it, but it was all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the fact, and still less of the details. Besides, my attention was very sharply arrested by something much closer. I crouched behind the fence which ran not more than two hundred yards from one wing of the great mansion, and which was fortunately split in places, as if specially for the application of a cautious eye. A door had opened in the dark bulk of the left wing, and a figure appeared black against the illuminated interior—a muffled figure bending forward, evidently peering out into the night. It closed the door behind it, and I saw it was carrying a lantern, which threw a patch of imperfect light on the dress and figure of the wearer. It seemed to be the figure of a woman, wrapped up in a ragged cloak and evidently disguised to avoid notice; there was something very strange both about the rags and the furtiveness in a person coming out of those rooms lined with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path which brought her within half a hundred yards of me—, then she stood up for an instant on the terrace of turf that looks towards the slimy lake, and holding her flaming lantern above her head she deliberately swung it three times to and fro as for a signal. As she swung it the second time a flicker of its light fell for a moment on her own face, a face that I knew. She was unnaturally pale, and her head was bundled in her borrowed plebeian shawl; but I am certain it was Etta Todd, the millionaire’s daughter.
«Be’, lo stile letterario è alquanto migliorato», ammise il prete allegramente, «ma continuo a non vedere che cosa posso fare per te. Farei una ben magra figura, con le mie gambe corte, a correre per questo Stato dietro a un assassino atletico di quella fatta. Dubito che qualcuno possa trovarlo. Il penitenziario di Sequah è a trenta miglia da qui; la campagna in mezzo è abbastanza selvaggia e intricata, e la campagna oltre, dove certamente avrà il buon senso di andare, è una perfetta terra di nessuno che degrada verso le praterie. Può trovarsi in qualsiasi buca o su qualsiasi albero.»
«Non è in nessuna buca», disse il governatore; «non è su nessun albero.»
«Ma via, come lo sai?» chiese Padre Brown, sbattendo le palpebre.
«Vorresti parlargli?» s’informò Usher.
Padre Brown spalancò i suoi occhi innocenti. «È qui?» esclamò. «Ma via, come hanno fatto i tuoi uomini ad acciuffarlo?»
«L’ho acciuffato io stesso», strascicò l’americano, alzandosi e stirando pigramente le sue lunghe gambe davanti al fuoco. «L’ho acciuffato con l’estremità ricurva di un bastone da passeggio. Non fare quella faccia sorpresa. L’ho fatto davvero. Sai che ogni tanto faccio un giro per i sentieri di campagna fuori da questo luogo tetro; ebbene, stasera presto stavo camminando su per un ripido sentiero, con siepi scure e campi arati dall’aria grigia da entrambi i lati; ed era sorta una luna nuova che inargentava la strada. Alla sua luce vidi un uomo correre attraverso il campo verso la strada; correva col corpo piegato e a un buon trotto da corsa sul miglio. Sembrava assai sfinito; ma quando giunse alla fitta siepe nera vi passò attraverso come se fosse fatta di ragnatele; — o piuttosto (perché udii i rami robusti spezzarsi e schioccare come baionette) come se lui stesso fosse fatto di pietra. Nell’istante in cui apparve stagliato contro la luna, attraversando la strada, gli scagliai il mio bastone uncinato tra le gambe, facendolo inciampare e cadere. Poi soffiai nel mio fischietto a lungo e forte, e i nostri uomini accorsero per assicurarlo.»
«Sarebbe stato piuttosto imbarazzante», osservò Brown, «se avessi scoperto che era un popolare atleta all’allenamento per la corsa sul miglio.»
«Non lo era», disse Usher cupamente. «Scoprimmo presto chi fosse; ma io l’avevo indovinato al primo bagliore della luna su di lui.»
«Pensasti che fosse il detenuto evaso», osservò il prete con semplicità, «perché quella mattina avevi letto nel ritaglio di giornale che un detenuto era evaso.»
«Avevo motivi un po’ migliori», replicò freddamente il governatore. «Trascuro il primo, troppo semplice per doverlo sottolineare — voglio dire che gli atleti alla moda non corrono attraverso i campi arati né si cavano gli occhi nelle siepi di rovi. Né corrono tutti curvi come un cane accovacciato. C’erano dettagli più decisivi, per un occhio abbastanza ben addestrato. L’uomo era vestito di abiti rozzi e cenciosi, ma erano qualcosa di più che semplicemente rozzi e cenciosi. Gli stavano così male da risultare del tutto grotteschi; perfino mentre appariva in nero controluce contro il levar della luna, il bavero della giacca in cui aveva sepolto la testa lo faceva sembrare un gobbo, e le lunghe maniche larghe facevano credere che non avesse mani. Mi venne subito in mente che in qualche modo era riuscito a cambiare i suoi abiti da detenuto con quelli di qualche complice, che non gli andavano. In secondo luogo, spirava un vento piuttosto forte contro il quale egli correva; sicché avrei dovuto vedere la striatura dei capelli al vento, se i capelli non fossero stati cortissimi. Poi mi ricordai che oltre quei campi arati che stava attraversando si stendeva Pilgrim’s Pond, per il quale (ricorderai) il detenuto serbava la sua pallottola; e feci volare il mio bastone da passeggio.»
«Un brillante saggio di deduzione fulminea», disse Padre Brown; «ma aveva un fucile?»
Poiché Usher si fermò di colpo nel suo andirivieni, il prete aggiunse in tono di scusa: «Mi hanno detto che una pallottola non serve neppure a metà, senza.»
«Non aveva fucile», disse l’altro con gravità; «ma ciò era senza dubbio dovuto a qualche naturalissimo contrattempo o cambiamento di piani. Probabilmente la stessa prudenza che gli fece cambiare gli abiti gli fece abbandonare il fucile; cominciò a pentirsi della giacca che aveva lasciato dietro di sé nel sangue della sua vittima.»
«Be’, è abbastanza possibile», rispose il prete.
«E non val quasi la pena di far congetture», disse Usher, voltandosi verso certe altre carte, «perché a quest’ora sappiamo che è lui.»
Il suo amico ecclesiastico chiese fiaccamente: «Ma come?» E Greywood Usher gettò via i giornali e riprese in mano i due ritagli di stampa.
«Ebbene, dato che sei così ostinato», disse, «cominciamo dal principio. Noterai che questi due ritagli hanno una sola cosa in comune, ed è la menzione di Pilgrim’s Pond, la tenuta, come sai, del milionario Ireton Todd. Sai anche che è un carattere notevole; uno di quelli che si sono innalzati usando come gradini —»
«Le proprie spoglie mortali per salire a cose più alte», assentì il compagno. «Sì; lo so. Petrolio, credo.»
«In ogni caso», disse Usher, «Todd-l’Ultimo-Tiro conta parecchio in questa strana faccenda.»
Si stirò ancora una volta davanti al fuoco e continuò a parlare nel suo stile espansivo, radiosamente esplicativo.
«Tanto per cominciare, a prima vista, qui non c’è alcun mistero. Non è misterioso, non è nemmeno strano, che un galeotto porti il suo fucile a Pilgrim’s Pond. La nostra gente non è come gli inglesi, che perdonano a un uomo di essere ricco se butta via denaro in ospedali o cavalli. Todd-l’Ultimo-Tiro si è fatto grande con le proprie considerevoli capacità; e non c’è dubbio che molti di quelli su cui ha esercitato le sue capacità gradirebbero esercitare le proprie su di lui con una doppietta. Todd potrebbe facilmente essere abbattuto da qualche uomo di cui non ha mai neppure sentito parlare; qualche operaio che ha serrato fuori, o qualche impiegato di un’azienda che ha mandato in rovina. L’Ultimo-Tiro è un uomo di doti intellettuali e di alta figura pubblica; ma in questo paese i rapporti tra datori di lavoro e lavoratori sono considerevolmente tesi.
«Ecco come appare tutta la faccenda, supponendo che questo Rian si sia diretto a Pilgrim’s Pond per uccidere Todd. Così parve anche a me, finché un’altra piccola scoperta non ridestò quel poco di detective che è in me. Quando ebbi il mio prigioniero al sicuro, ripresi il mio bastone e discesi a passeggio i due o tre gomiti della strada di campagna che mi portarono a uno degli ingressi laterali della tenuta di Todd, quello più vicino alla pozza o lago da cui il luogo prende nome. Sarà stato un paio d’ore fa, verso le sette a quest’ora; il chiaro di luna era più luminoso, e potevo vedere le lunghe striature bianche della sua luce distese sul misterioso stagno con le sue rive grigie, untuose, semiliquide, in cui dicono che i nostri padri costringevano le streghe a camminare finché non affondavano. Ho dimenticato la storia esatta; ma sai il luogo che intendo; si trova a nord della casa di Todd, verso la landa selvaggia, e ha due bizzarri alberi grinzosi, così tetri da sembrare più enormi funghi che decorosa fronda. Mentre stavo là a scrutare quella pozza nebbiosa, mi parve di vedere la debole figura di un uomo muoversi dalla casa verso di essa, ma tutto era troppo indistinto e lontano perché si potesse esser certi del fatto, e ancor meno dei particolari. Del resto, la mia attenzione fu assai bruscamente arrestata da qualcosa di molto più vicino. Mi accovacciai dietro la palizzata che correva a non più di duecento metri da un’ala del grande maniero, e che per fortuna era rotta qua e là, come apposta per l’applicazione di un occhio cauto. Una porta si era aperta nella scura mole dell’ala sinistra, e una figura apparve nera contro l’interno illuminato — una figura imbacuccata, curva in avanti, che evidentemente scrutava fuori nella notte. Si richiuse la porta alle spalle, e vidi che portava una lanterna, la quale gettava una chiazza di luce imperfetta sull’abito e sulla figura di chi la reggeva. Sembrava la figura di una donna, avvolta in un mantello a brandelli ed evidentemente travestita per non farsi notare; c’era qualcosa di assai strano sia negli stracci sia nella furtività di una persona che usciva da quelle stanze rivestite d’oro. Ella prese cautamente il curvo sentiero del giardino che la condusse a una cinquantina di metri da me —, poi si fermò per un istante sulla terrazza d’erba che guarda verso il lago melmoso, e reggendo la lanterna fiammeggiante sopra il capo, la fece deliberatamente oscillare tre volte avanti e indietro come per un segnale. Mentre la faceva oscillare la seconda volta, un guizzo della sua luce cadde per un attimo sul suo viso, un viso che conoscevo. Era innaturalmente pallida, e la testa era imbacuccata nello scialle plebeo preso in prestito; ma sono certo che era Etta Todd, la figlia del milionario.
“She retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door closed behind her again. I was about to climb the fence and follow, when I realized that the detective fever that had lured me into the adventure was rather undignified; and that in a more authoritative capacity I already held all the cards in my hand. I was just turning away when a new noise broke on the night. A window was thrown up in one of the upper floors, but just round the corner of the house so that I could not see it; and a voice of terrible distinctness was heard shouting across the dark garden to know where Lord Falconroy was, for he was missing from every room in the house. There was no mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a political platform or meeting of directors; it was Ireton Todd himself. Some of the others seemed to have gone to the lower windows or on to the steps, and were calling up to him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll down to the Pilgrim’s Pond an hour before, and could not be traced since. Then Todd cried ‘Mighty Murder!’ and shut down the window violently; and I could hear him plunging down the stairs inside. Repossessing myself of my former and wiser purpose, I whipped out of the way of the general search that must follow; and returned here not later than eight o’clock.
“I now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph which seemed to you so painfully lacking in interest. If the convict was not keeping the shot for Todd, as he evidently wasn’t, it is most likely that he was keeping it for Lord Falconroy; and it looks as if he had delivered the goods. No more handy place to shoot a man than in the curious geological surroundings of that pool, where a body thrown down would sink through thick slime to a depth practically unknown. Let us suppose, then, that our friend with the cropped hair came to kill Falconroy and not Todd. But, as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why people in America might want to kill Todd. There is no reason why anybody in America should want to kill an English lord newly landed, except for the one reason mentioned in the pink paper—that the lord is paying his attentions to the millionaire’s daughter. Our crop-haired friend, despite his ill-fitting clothes, must be an aspiring lover.
“I know the notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that’s because you are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter will be married in St George’s, Hanover Square, to a crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don’t do justice to the climbing and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens. You see a good-looking grey-haired man in evening-dress with a sort of authority about him, you know he is a pillar of the State, and you fancy he had a father. You are in error. You do not realize that a comparatively few years ago he may have been in a tenement or (quite likely) in a jail. You don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen comparatively late in life. Todd’s daughter was fully eighteen when her father first made his pile; so there isn’t really anything impossible in her having a hanger-on in low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as I think she must be doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so, the hand that held the lantern may not be unconnected with the hand that held the gun. This case, sir, will make a noise.”
“Well,” said the priest patiently, “and what did you do next?”
“I reckon you’ll be shocked,” replied Greywood Usher, “as I know you don’t cotton to the march of science in these matters. I am given a good deal of discretion here, and perhaps take a little more than I’m given; and I thought it was an excellent opportunity to test that Psychometric Machine I told you about. Now, in my opinion, that machine can’t lie.”
“No machine can lie,” said Father Brown; “nor can it tell the truth.”
“It did in this case, as I’ll show you,” went on Usher positively. “I sat the man in the ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair, and simply wrote words on a blackboard; and the machine simply recorded the variations of his pulse; and I simply observed his manner. The trick is to introduce some word connected with the supposed crime in a list of words connected with something quite different, yet a list in which it occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote ‘heron’ and ‘eagle’ and ‘owl’, and when I wrote ‘falcon’ he was tremendously agitated; and when I began to make an ‘r’ at the end of the word, that machine just bounded. Who else in this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived Englishman like Falconroy except the man who’s shot him? Isn’t that better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses—if the evidence of a reliable machine?”
“You always forget,” observed his companion, “that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked the detective.
“I mean Man,” said Father Brown, “the most unreliable machine I know of. I don’t want to be rude; and I don’t think you will consider Man to be an offensive or inaccurate description of yourself. You say you observed his manner; but how do you know you observed it right? You say the words have to come in a natural way; but how do you know that you did it naturally? How do you know, if you come to that, that he did not observe your manner? Who is to prove that you were not tremendously agitated? There was no machine tied on to your pulse.”
“I tell you,” cried the American in the utmost excitement, “I was as cool as a cucumber.”
“Criminals also can be as cool as cucumbers,” said Brown with a smile. “And almost as cool as you.”
“Well, this one wasn’t,” said Usher, throwing the papers about. “Oh, you make me tired!”
«Ella rifece i suoi passi con eguale segretezza e la porta si richiuse dietro di lei. Stavo per scavalcare la palizzata e seguirla, quando mi resi conto che la febbre da detective che mi aveva attirato nell’avventura era piuttosto poco dignitosa; e che, in una veste più autorevole, avevo già tutte le carte in mano. Stavo appunto voltandomi quando un nuovo rumore ruppe la notte. Una finestra fu spalancata a uno dei piani superiori, ma proprio dietro l’angolo della casa, sicché non potei vederla; e una voce di terribile nitidezza fu udita gridare attraverso il giardino buio per sapere dove fosse Lord Falconroy, poiché mancava da ogni stanza della casa. Non si poteva sbagliare, quella voce. L’ho udita su più d’una tribuna politica o in più d’una riunione di amministratori; era Ireton Todd in persona. Alcuni degli altri parevano essere andati alle finestre inferiori o sulla gradinata, e gli gridavano che Falconroy era andato a fare una passeggiata giù verso Pilgrim’s Pond un’ora prima, e da allora non se n’era più trovata traccia. Allora Todd gridò ‘Assassinio potente!’ e chiuse violentemente la finestra; e potei udirlo precipitarsi giù per le scale all’interno. Riappropriatomi del mio primo e più saggio proposito, mi sottrassi in fretta alla via della ricerca generale che doveva seguire; e tornai qui non più tardi delle otto in punto.
«Ora ti prego di richiamare alla mente quel piccolo trafiletto mondano che ti pareva così penosamente privo d’interesse. Se il detenuto non serbava il colpo per Todd, come evidentemente non era, è quanto mai probabile che lo serbasse per Lord Falconroy; e pare che abbia consegnato la merce. Non c’è luogo più comodo per abbattere un uomo che nei curiosi dintorni geologici di quella pozza, dove un corpo gettato giù affonderebbe attraverso una fitta melma fino a una profondità praticamente ignota. Supponiamo, dunque, che il nostro amico dai capelli rasati sia venuto per uccidere Falconroy e non Todd. Ma, come ho fatto notare, ci sono molte ragioni per cui in America si potrebbe voler uccidere Todd. Non c’è ragione per cui qualcuno in America dovesse voler uccidere un lord inglese appena sbarcato, tranne l’unica ragione menzionata nel giornale rosa — che il lord fa la corte alla figlia del milionario. Il nostro amico dai capelli rasati, a dispetto dei suoi abiti mal tagliati, dev’essere un corteggiatore pieno d’ambizione.
«So che l’idea ti sembrerà stridente e perfino comica; ma è perché sei inglese. A te suona come dire che la figlia dell’Arcivescovo di Canterbury sposerà, in St George’s, Hanover Square, uno spazzino di crocevia in libertà vigilata. Non rendi giustizia alla forza scalatrice e aspirante dei nostri cittadini più notevoli. Vedi un bell’uomo dai capelli grigi in abito da sera con una certa aria d’autorità, sai che è un pilastro dello Stato, e t’immagini che abbia avuto un padre. Ti sbagli. Non ti rendi conto che, relativamente pochi anni fa, egli può essere stato in un casamento popolare o (assai probabilmente) in galera. Non tieni conto della nostra esuberanza e slancio nazionale. Molti dei nostri cittadini più influenti non solo si sono innalzati di recente, ma si sono innalzati relativamente tardi nella vita. La figlia di Todd aveva ben diciott’anni quando suo padre mise su per la prima volta il suo gruzzolo; sicché non c’è davvero nulla d’impossibile nel fatto ch’ella abbia uno spasimante di bassa condizione; o perfino che si aggrappi a lui, come credo che stia facendo, a giudicare dalla faccenda della lanterna. Se è così, la mano che reggeva la lanterna potrebbe non essere estranea alla mano che reggeva il fucile. Questo caso, signore, farà rumore.»
«Ebbene», disse il prete con pazienza, «e che cosa facesti poi?»
«Immagino che ne rimarrai scandalizzato», rispose Greywood Usher, «dato che so che non hai simpatia per la marcia della scienza in queste faccende. Qui mi è concessa una buona dose di discrezionalità, e forse me ne prendo un po’ di più di quanta me ne sia concessa; e pensai che fosse un’eccellente occasione per mettere alla prova quella Macchina Psicometrica di cui ti ho parlato. Ora, secondo me, quella macchina non può mentire.»
«Nessuna macchina può mentire», disse Padre Brown; «né può dire la verità.»
«In questo caso l’ha fatto, come ti dimostrerò», proseguì Usher con sicurezza. «Feci sedere l’uomo dagli abiti mal tagliati in una comoda poltrona, e semplicemente scrissi delle parole su una lavagna; e la macchina semplicemente registrava le variazioni del suo polso; e io semplicemente osservavo il suo contegno. Il trucco sta nell’introdurre qualche parola connessa al presunto delitto in un elenco di parole connesse a tutt’altro, eppure un elenco in cui essa ricorra in modo del tutto naturale. Così scrissi ‘airone’ e ‘aquila’ e ‘gufo’, e quando scrissi ‘falco’ egli fu tremendamente agitato; e quando cominciai a tracciare una ‘r’ alla fine della parola, quella macchina fece un vero balzo. Chi altri, in questa repubblica, ha una ragione di sussultare al nome di un inglese appena arrivato come Falconroy, se non l’uomo che l’ha ucciso? Non è forse una prova migliore di un mucchio di chiacchiere di testimoni — se è la prova di una macchina affidabile?»
«Tu dimentichi sempre», osservò il suo compagno, «che la macchina affidabile dev’essere sempre azionata da una macchina inaffidabile.»
«Ma via, che cosa vuoi dire?» chiese il detective.
«Voglio dire l’Uomo», disse Padre Brown, «la macchina più inaffidabile che io conosca. Non voglio essere scortese; e non credo che considererai l’Uomo una descrizione offensiva o inesatta di te stesso. Dici di aver osservato il suo contegno; ma come sai di averlo osservato bene? Dici che le parole devono venire in modo naturale; ma come sai di averlo fatto in modo naturale? Come sai, se è per questo, che non fu lui a osservare il tuo contegno? Chi può provare che tu non fossi tremendamente agitato? Non c’era nessuna macchina legata al tuo polso.»
«Ti dico», gridò l’americano al colmo dell’eccitazione, «che ero freddo come un cetriolo.»
«Anche i criminali possono essere freddi come cetrioli», disse Brown con un sorriso. «E quasi altrettanto freddi quanto te.»
«Be’, questo non lo era», disse Usher, sparpagliando le carte. «Oh, mi fai venire il mal di testa!»
“I’m sorry,” said the other. “I only point out what seems a reasonable possibility. If you could tell by his manner when the word that might hang him had come, why shouldn’t he tell from your manner that the word that might hang him was coming? I should ask for more than words myself before I hanged anybody.”
Usher smote the table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.
“And that,” he cried, “is just what I’m going to give you. I tried the machine first just in order to test the thing in other ways afterwards and the machine, sir, is right.”
He paused a moment and resumed with less excitement. “I rather want to insist, if it comes to that, that so far I had very little to go on except the scientific experiment. There was really nothing against the man at all. His clothes were ill-fitting, as I’ve said, but they were rather better, if anything, than those of the submerged class to which he evidently belonged. Moreover, under all the stains of his plunging through ploughed fields or bursting through dusty hedges, the man was comparatively clean. This might mean, of course, that he had only just broken prison; but it reminded me more of the desperate decency of the comparatively respectable poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to confess, quite in accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as they are; he seemed to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do. He professed total ignorance of the crime and the whole question; and showed nothing but a sullen impatience for something sensible that might come to take him out of his meaningless scrape. He asked me more than once if he could telephone for a lawyer who had helped him a long time ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you would expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing against him in the world except that little finger on the dial that pointed to the change of his pulse.
“Then, sir, the machine was on its trial; and the machine was right. By the time I came with him out of the private room into the vestibule where all sorts of other people were awaiting examination, I think he had already more or less made up his mind to clear things up by something like a confession. He turned to me and began to say in a low voice: ‘Oh, I can’t stick this any more. If you must know all about me—’
“At the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench stood up, screaming aloud and pointing at him with her finger. I have never in my life heard anything more demoniacally distinct. Her lean finger seemed to pick him out as if it were a pea-shooter. Though the word was a mere howl, every syllable was as clear as a separate stroke on the clock.
“‘Drugger Davis!’ she shouted. ‘They’ve got Drugger Davis!’
“Among the wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers, twenty faces were turned, gaping with glee and hate. If I had never heard the words, I should have known by the very shock upon his features that the so-called Oscar Rian had heard his real name. But I’m not quite so ignorant, you may be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis was one of the most terrible and depraved criminals that ever baffled our police. It is certain he had done murder more than once long before his last exploit with the warder. But he was never entirely fixed for it, curiously enough because he did it in the same manner as those milder—or meaner—crimes for which he was fixed pretty often. He was a handsome, well-bred-looking brute, as he still is, to some extent; and he used mostly to go about with barmaids or shop-girls and do them out of their money. Very often, though, he went a good deal farther; and they were found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and their whole property missing. Then came one case where the girl was found dead; but deliberation could not quite be proved, and, what was more practical still, the criminal could not be found. I heard a rumour of his having reappeared somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending money instead of borrowing it; but still to such poor widows as he might personally fascinate, but still with the same bad result for them. Well, there is your innocent man, and there is his innocent record. Even, since then, four criminals and three warders have identified him and confirmed the story. Now what have you got to say to my poor little machine after that? Hasn’t the machine done for him? Or do you prefer to say that the woman and I have done for him?”
“As to what you’ve done for him,” replied Father Brown, rising and shaking himself in a floppy way, “you’ve saved him from the electrical chair. I don’t think they can kill Drugger Davis on that old vague story of the poison; and as for the convict who killed the warder, I suppose it’s obvious that you haven’t got him. Mr Davis is innocent of that crime, at any rate.”
“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “Why should he be innocent of that crime?”
“Why, bless us all!” cried the small man in one of his rare
moments of animation, “why, because he’s guilty of the other crimes!
I don’t know what you people are made of. You seem to think that
all sins are kept together in a bag. You talk as if a miser on Monday
were always a spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here
spent weeks and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of money;
that he used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst;
that he turned up afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender,
and cheated most poor people in the same patient and pacific style.
Let it be granted—let us admit, for the sake of argument,
that he did all this. If that is so, I will tell you what he didn’t do.
He didn’t storm a spiked wall against a man with a loaded gun.
He didn’t write on the wall with his own hand, to say he had done it.
He didn’t stop to state that his justification was self-defence.
He didn’t explain that he had no quarrel with the poor warder.
He didn’t name the house of the rich man to which he was going with the gun.
He didn’t write his own, initials in a man’s blood. Saints alive!
Can’t you see the whole character is different, in good and evil?
Why, you don’t seem to be like I am a bit. One would think
you’d never had any vices of your own.”
«Mi dispiace», disse l’altro. «Faccio soltanto notare quella che sembra una ragionevole possibilità. Se tu potevi capire dal suo contegno quando era giunta la parola che poteva mandarlo alla forca, perché non avrebbe potuto lui capire dal tuo contegno che la parola che poteva mandarlo alla forca stava arrivando? Io, per parte mia, prima d’impiccare qualcuno chiederei ben più che parole.»
Usher batté il pugno sul tavolo e si alzò in una sorta di trionfo rabbioso.
«Ed è», gridò, «proprio quel che ti darò. Provai la macchina dapprima soltanto per poter poi mettere la cosa alla prova in altri modi, e la macchina, signore, ha ragione.»
Fece una pausa e riprese con minore eccitazione. «Voglio piuttosto insistere, se è per questo, sul fatto che fin lì avevo ben poco su cui basarmi, oltre all’esperimento scientifico. In realtà non c’era proprio nulla contro quell’uomo. Gli abiti gli stavano male, come ho detto, ma erano piuttosto migliori, semmai, di quelli della classe sommersa a cui evidentemente apparteneva. Per giunta, sotto tutte le macchie del suo tuffarsi attraverso i campi arati o del suo forzare siepi polverose, l’uomo era relativamente pulito. Questo poteva voler dire, naturalmente, che era appena evaso di prigione; ma mi ricordava piuttosto la disperata decenza dei poveri relativamente rispettabili. Il suo contegno era, sono costretto a confessarlo, del tutto conforme al loro. Era silenzioso e dignitoso come lo sono essi; sembrava avere un grande, ma sepolto, rancore, come l’hanno essi. Professava totale ignoranza del delitto e dell’intera questione; e non mostrava altro che una tetra impazienza per qualche cosa sensata che venisse a trarlo fuori dal suo insensato impiccio. Mi chiese più d’una volta se potesse telefonare a un avvocato che l’aveva aiutato molto tempo prima in una vertenza sindacale, e in ogni senso si comportava come ci si aspetterebbe che si comportasse un innocente. Non c’era nulla al mondo contro di lui, tranne quel piccolo indice sul quadrante che segnava il variare del suo polso.
«Allora, signore, la macchina era sotto processo; e la macchina aveva ragione. Quando uscii con lui dalla stanza privata nell’anticamera dove ogni sorta d’altra gente attendeva d’essere interrogata, credo che avesse già più o meno deciso di chiarire le cose con qualcosa di simile a una confessione. Si volse verso di me e cominciò a dire a voce bassa: ‘Oh, non ne posso più. Se proprio dovete sapere tutto di me —’
«Nello stesso istante una delle povere donne sedute sulla lunga panca si alzò, gridando a squarciagola e puntandogli contro il dito. Mai in vita mia ho udito qualcosa di più demoniacamente distinto. Il suo dito scarno pareva individuarlo come se fosse una cerbottana. Benché la parola non fosse che un ululato, ogni sillaba era chiara come un rintocco distinto sull’orologio.
«‘Drugger Davis!’ gridò. ‘Hanno preso Drugger Davis!’
«Fra le disgraziate, per lo più ladre e prostitute, venti volti si voltarono, spalancati di gioia maligna e d’odio. Se non avessi mai udito le parole, avrei capito dallo stesso urto sui suoi lineamenti che il cosiddetto Oscar Rian aveva udito il proprio vero nome. Ma non sono poi tanto ignorante, forse ti stupirai a sentirlo. Drugger Davis era uno dei criminali più terribili e depravati che mai abbiano messo in scacco la nostra polizia. È certo che aveva ucciso più d’una volta, molto prima della sua ultima impresa col guardiano. Ma non fu mai del tutto incastrato per questo, cosa abbastanza curiosa, perché lo faceva nello stesso modo di quei più miti — o più meschini — delitti per i quali veniva incastrato piuttosto spesso. Era un bruto bello, dall’aria ben educata, come lo è ancora, in certa misura; e per lo più girava con cameriere di bar o commesse di negozio e le truffava dei loro denari. Molto spesso, però, andava assai più oltre; e le si trovava narcotizzate con sigarette o cioccolatini e tutti i loro averi spariti. Poi venne un caso in cui la ragazza fu trovata morta; ma la premeditazione non poté essere del tutto provata, e, cosa ancor più pratica, il criminale non poté essere trovato. Sentii voce che fosse ricomparso in qualche luogo nel carattere opposto, questa volta, prestando denaro invece di prenderlo in prestito; ma sempre a povere vedove che egli potesse personalmente affascinare, e sempre con lo stesso cattivo esito per loro. Ebbene, ecco il tuo uomo innocente, ed ecco il suo innocente curriculum. E, da allora, ben quattro criminali e tre guardiani l’hanno identificato e hanno confermato la storia. Ora, che cos’hai da dire alla mia povera piccola macchina, dopo questo? Non l’ha forse spacciato, la macchina? O preferisci dire che io e la donna l’abbiamo spacciato noi?»
«Quanto a ciò che hai fatto per lui», rispose Padre Brown, alzandosi e scuotendosi in un modo flaccido, «l’hai salvato dalla sedia elettrica. Non credo che possano giustiziare Drugger Davis su quella vecchia e vaga storia del veleno; e quanto al detenuto che uccise il guardiano, immagino sia ovvio che non l’hai preso. Il signor Davis è innocente di quel delitto, in ogni caso.»
«Che cosa vuoi dire?» domandò l’altro. «Perché dovrebbe essere innocente di quel delitto?»
«Ma via, il cielo ci aiuti!» gridò l’ometto in uno dei suoi rari momenti di animazione, «ma via, perché è colpevole degli altri delitti! Non so di che cosa siate fatti, voialtri. Sembra che pensiate che tutti i peccati stiano insieme in un sacco. Parlate come se un avaro il lunedì fosse sempre uno scialacquatore il martedì. Mi dici che quest’uomo che tieni qui ha passato settimane e mesi ad abbindolare donne bisognose per piccole somme di denaro; che usò un narcotico nel migliore dei casi, e un veleno nel peggiore; che riapparve poi come il più infimo genere di usuraio, e truffò la più povera gente col medesimo stile paziente e pacifico. Sia pure concesso — ammettiamo, per amor di discussione, che abbia fatto tutto questo. Se è così, ti dirò io ciò che non ha fatto. Non ha preso d’assalto un muro irto di punte contro un uomo con un fucile carico. Non ha scritto sul muro di suo pugno, per dire che l’aveva fatto lui. Non si è fermato a dichiarare che la sua giustificazione era la legittima difesa. Non ha spiegato di non aver alcuna lite col povero guardiano. Non ha nominato la casa del ricco a cui si dirigeva col fucile. Non ha scritto le proprie iniziali nel sangue di un uomo. Santi del cielo! Non vedi che tutto il carattere è diverso, nel bene e nel male? Ma via, non mi sembri affatto simile a me. Si direbbe che tu non abbia mai avuto vizi tuoi.»
The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the door of his private and official room was hammered and rattled in an unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.
The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after he began to think he was mad himself. There burst and fell into his private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger’s. The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he thought he had never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above all, he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like that speak to him first.
“See here, old man Usher,” shouted the being in the red handkerchief, “I’m getting tired. Don’t you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I don’t get fooled any. Leave go of my guests, and I’ll let up on the fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split instant and you’ll feel pretty mean. I reckon I’m not a man with no pull.”
The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement which had dried up all other sentiments. The mere shock to his eyes had rendered his ears, almost useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand of violence. While the bell was still strong and pealing, the voice of Father Brown fell soft but distinct.
“I have a suggestion to make,” he said, “but it seems a little confusing. I don’t know this gentleman—but— but I think I know him. Now, you know him—you know him quite well— but you don’t know him—naturally. Sounds paradoxical, I know.”
“I reckon the Cosmos is cracked,” said Usher, and fell asprawl in his round office chair.
“Now, see here,” vociferated the stranger, striking the table, but speaking in a voice that was all the more mysterious because it was comparatively mild and rational though still resounding. “I won’t let you in. I want—”
“Who in hell are you?” yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.
“I think the gentleman’s name is Todd,” said the priest.
Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.
“I fear you don’t read the Society papers properly,” he said, and began to read out in a monotonous voice, “‘Or locked in the jewelled bosoms of our city’s gayest leaders; but there is talk of a pretty parody of the manners and customs of the other end of Society’s scale.’ There’s been a big Slum Dinner up at Pilgrim’s Pond tonight; and a man, one of the guests, disappeared. Mr Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked him here, without even waiting to take off his fancy-dress.”
“What man do you mean?”
“I mean the man with comically ill-fitting clothes you saw running across the ploughed field. Hadn’t you better go and investigate him? He will be rather impatient to get back to his champagne, from which he ran away in such a hurry, when the convict with the gun hove in sight.”
“Do you seriously mean—” began the official.
“Why, look here, Mr Usher,” said Father Brown quietly, “you said the machine couldn’t make a mistake; and in one sense it didn’t. But the other machine did; the machine that worked it. You assumed that the man in rags jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy, because he was Lord Falconroy’s murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because he is Lord Falconroy.”
“Then why the blazes didn’t he say so?” demanded the staring Usher.
“He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician,” replied the priest, “so he tried to keep the name back at first. But he was just going to tell it you, when”—and Father Brown looked down at his boots—“when a woman found another name for him.”
“But you can’t be so mad as to say,” said Greywood Usher, very white, “that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis.”
The priest looked at him very earnestly, but with a baffling and undecipherable face.
“I am not saying anything about it,” he said. “I leave all the rest to you. Your pink paper says that the title was recently revived for him; but those papers are very unreliable. It says he was in the States in youth; but the whole story seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are both pretty considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But I think,” he went on softly and reflectively, “I think you Americans are too modest. I think you idealize the English aristocracy—even in assuming it to be so aristocratic. You see a good-looking Englishman in evening-dress; you know he’s in the House of Lords; and you fancy he has a father. You don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most influential noblemen have not only risen recently, but—”
“Oh, stop it!” cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean hand in impatience against a shade of irony in the other’s face.
“Don’t stay talking to this lunatic!” cried Todd brutally. “Take me to my friend.”
Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same demure expression, carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.
“I’m afraid you neglect the fashionable press rather,” he said, “but this cutting may interest you.”
Usher read the headlines, “Last-Trick’s Strayed Revellers: Mirthful Incident near Pilgrim’s Pond.” The paragraph went on: “A laughable occurrence took place outside Wilkinson’s Motor Garage last night. A policeman on duty had his attention drawn by larrikins to a man in prison dress who was stepping with considerable coolness into the steering-seat of a pretty high-toned Panhard; he was accompanied by a girl wrapped in a ragged shawl. On the police interfering, the young woman threw back the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd’s daughter, who had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond, where all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going for the customary joy-ride.”
Under the pink slip Mr Usher found a strip of a later paper, headed, “Astounding Escape of Millionaire’s Daughter with Convict. She had Arranged Freak Dinner. Now Safe in—”
Mr Greenwood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was gone.
SIX
Lo stupefatto americano aveva già dischiuso le labbra per protestare quando la porta della sua stanza privata e ufficiale fu percossa e scossa in un modo privo di cerimonie a cui egli era del tutto disavvezzo.
La porta si spalancò. L’istante prima Greywood Usher stava giungendo alla conclusione che Padre Brown fosse forse pazzo. L’istante dopo cominciò a pensare che il pazzo fosse lui stesso. Irruppe e cadde dentro la sua stanza privata un uomo negli stracci più luridi, con un unto cappello floscio ancora storto sul capo, e una scalcinata visiera verde spinta su da uno dei suoi occhi, entrambi fiammeggianti come quelli di una tigre. Il resto del suo viso era quasi indistinguibile, mascherato com’era da una barba e da basette arruffate attraverso cui il naso riusciva a stento a sporgere, e ulteriormente sepolto in una lurida sciarpa o fazzoletto rosso. Il signor Usher si vantava di aver visto la maggior parte degli esemplari più rozzi dello Stato, ma pensò di non aver mai visto un babbuino vestito da spaventapasseri come quello. Ma, soprattutto, non aveva mai in tutta la sua placida esistenza scientifica sentito un uomo simile rivolgergli per primo la parola.
«Senta un po’, vecchio Usher», gridò l’essere dal fazzoletto rosso, «mi sto stancando. Non provi a giocare a nascondino con me; non mi lascio mica infinocchiare. Lasci andare i miei ospiti, e io lascerò correre sulla vostra graziosa macchineria a orologeria. Lo trattenga qui un solo istante e si sentirà proprio meschino. Immagino di non essere un uomo senza appoggi.»
L’eminente Usher fissava il mostro mugghiante con uno stupore che aveva prosciugato ogni altro sentimento. Il solo urto ai suoi occhi aveva reso le sue orecchie quasi inutili. Alla fine suonò un campanello con una mano violenta. Mentre il campanello squillava ancora forte, la voce di Padre Brown scese sommessa ma distinta.
«Ho una proposta da fare», disse, «ma pare un po’ sconcertante. Non conosco questo signore — ma — ma credo di conoscerlo. Ora, tu lo conosci — lo conosci assai bene — ma non lo conosci — naturalmente. Suona paradossale, lo so.»
«Immagino che il Cosmo sia impazzito», disse Usher, e crollò spalmato nella sua rotonda poltrona d’ufficio.
«Ora, senta un po’», vociferò lo sconosciuto, battendo sul tavolo, ma parlando con una voce tanto più misteriosa in quanto era relativamente mite e ragionevole, benché ancora rimbombante. «Non la lascerò entrare. Voglio —»
«Chi diavolo siete voi?» urlò Usher, drizzandosi di colpo a sedere.
«Credo che il signore si chiami Todd», disse il prete.
Poi raccolse il ritaglio rosa di giornale.
«Temo che tu non legga per bene i giornali mondani», disse, e cominciò a leggere ad alta voce con voce monotona: «‘O serrata nei seni ingioiellati dei più gai capofila della nostra città; ma si parla di una graziosa parodia dei modi e dei costumi dell’altro capo della scala sociale.’ C’è stata una grande Cena dei Bassifondi, stasera, su a Pilgrim’s Pond; e un uomo, uno degli invitati, è scomparso. Il signor Ireton Todd è un buon padrone di casa, e l’ha rintracciato fin qui, senza nemmeno aspettare di togliersi il costume in maschera.»
«Quale uomo intende?»
«Intendo l’uomo dagli abiti comicamente mal tagliati che hai visto correre attraverso il campo arato. Non faresti meglio ad andare a indagare su di lui? Sarà piuttosto impaziente di tornare al suo champagne, da cui è fuggito con tanta fretta, quando il detenuto col fucile è comparso all’orizzonte.»
«Vuoi seriamente dire —» cominciò l’ufficiale.
«Ma via, guardi qui, signor Usher», disse Padre Brown con calma, «tu hai detto che la macchina non poteva sbagliare; e in un certo senso non ha sbagliato. Ma l’altra macchina sì; la macchina che l’azionava. Tu hai supposto che l’uomo in stracci sussultasse al nome di Lord Falconroy perché era l’assassino di Lord Falconroy. Sussultò al nome di Lord Falconroy perché egli è Lord Falconroy.»
«E allora perché diamine non l’ha detto?» domandò Usher sbarrando gli occhi.
«Sentiva che la sua condizione e il suo recente panico non erano molto patrizî», rispose il prete, «e così dapprima cercò di tacere il nome. Ma stava appunto per dirtelo, quando» — e Padre Brown abbassò lo sguardo sui propri stivali — «quando una donna trovò per lui un altro nome.»
«Ma non puoi essere tanto pazzo da dire», disse Greywood Usher, bianchissimo, «che Lord Falconroy fosse Drugger Davis.»
Il prete lo guardò con grande serietà, ma con un viso sconcertante e indecifrabile.
«Non dico nulla in proposito», disse. «Lascio tutto il resto a te. Il tuo giornale rosa dice che il titolo gli fu recentemente rinnovato; ma quei giornali sono assai poco attendibili. Dice che egli fu negli Stati in gioventù; ma l’intera storia sembra assai strana. Davis e Falconroy sono entrambi due bei codardi, ma lo sono anche molti altri uomini. Non impiccherei un cane sulla mia sola opinione in proposito. Ma penso», proseguì sommessamente e in tono meditativo, «penso che voi americani siate troppo modesti. Penso che idealizziate l’aristocrazia inglese — perfino nel supporla tanto aristocratica. Vedi un bell’inglese in abito da sera; sai che è nella Camera dei Lord; e t’immagini che abbia un padre. Non tieni conto della nostra esuberanza e slancio nazionale. Molti dei nostri più influenti nobiluomini non solo si sono innalzati di recente, ma —»
«Oh, smettila!» gridò Greywood Usher, torcendo una magra mano d’impazienza contro un’ombra d’ironia sul viso dell’altro.
«Non stia a parlare con questo lunatico!» gridò Todd brutalmente. «Mi porti dal mio amico.»
La mattina seguente Padre Brown comparve con la stessa espressione compunta, recando ancora un altro pezzo di giornale rosa.
«Temo che tu trascuri piuttosto la stampa mondana», disse, «ma questo ritaglio potrebbe interessarti.»
Usher lesse i titoli: «I Festaioli Smarriti dell’Ultimo-Tiro: Ilare Episodio presso Pilgrim’s Pond.» Il trafiletto proseguiva: «Un’occorrenza risibile ha avuto luogo davanti all’Autorimessa Wilkinson la scorsa notte. Un poliziotto di servizio ha avuto l’attenzione richiamata da alcuni monelli verso un uomo in tenuta carceraria che saliva con considerevole freddezza al posto di guida di una Panhard piuttosto di gran classe; era accompagnato da una ragazza avvolta in uno scialle a brandelli. All’intervento della polizia, la giovane donna gettò indietro lo scialle, e tutti riconobbero la figlia del Milionario Todd, appena giunta dalla Cena Stravagante dei Bassifondi allo Stagno, dove tutti gli invitati più scelti erano in un simile déshabillé. Ella e il signore che aveva indossato la divisa carceraria stavano andando a fare la consueta gita di piacere.»
Sotto il ritaglio rosa il signor Usher trovò una striscia di un giornale più tardo, intitolata: «Sbalorditiva Fuga della Figlia del Milionario con un Detenuto. Aveva Lei Organizzato la Cena Stravagante. Ora al Sicuro a —»
Il signor Greenwood Usher alzò gli occhi, ma Padre Brown se n’era andato.
SEI
The Head of Caesar
THERE is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs. The very steps up to the dark front doors seem as steep as the side of pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey facade is its telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking down it begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but there is one exception—a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the tall mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess, and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs.
Anyone passing the place during a certain autumn evening, itself almost fairylike, might have seen a hand pull aside the red half-blind which (along with some large white lettering) half hid the interior from the street, and a face peer out not unlike a rather innocent goblin’s. It was, in fact, the face of one with the harmless human name of Brown, formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London. His friend, Flambeau, a semi-official investigator, was sitting opposite him, making his last notes of a case he had cleared up in the neighbourhood. They were sitting at a small table, close up to the window, when the priest pulled the curtain back and looked out. He waited till a stranger in the street had passed the window, to let the curtain fall into its place again. Then his round eyes rolled to the large white lettering on the window above his head, and then strayed to the next table, at which sat only a navvy with beer and cheese, and a young girl with red hair and a glass of milk. Then (seeing his friend put away the pocket-book), he said softly:
“If you’ve got ten minutes, I wish you’d follow that man with the false nose.”
Flambeau looked up in surprise; but the girl with the red hair also looked up, and with something that was stronger than astonishment. She was simply and even loosely dressed in light brown sacking stuff; but she was a lady, and even, on a second glance, a rather needlessly haughty one. “The man with the false nose!” repeated Flambeau. “Who’s he?”
“I haven’t a notion,” answered Father Brown. “I want you to find out; I ask it as a favour. He went down there”—and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures— “and can’t have passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want to know the direction.”
Flambeau gazed at his friend for some time, with an expression between perplexity and amusement; and then, rising from the table; squeezed his huge form out of the little door of the dwarf tavern, and melted into the twilight.
Father Brown took a small book out of his pocket and began to read steadily; he betrayed no consciousness of the fact that the red-haired lady had left her own table and sat down opposite him. At last she leaned over and said in a low, strong voice: “Why do you say that? How do you know it’s false?”
He lifted his rather heavy eyelids, which fluttered in considerable embarrassment. Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman’s eyes followed his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.
“No,” said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn’t say ‘Sela’, like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was wool-gathering just now; it says ‘Ales.’”
“Well?” inquired the staring young lady. “What does it matter what it says?”
His ruminating eye roved to the girl’s light canvas sleeve, round the wrist of which ran a very slight thread of artistic pattern, just enough to distinguish it from a working-dress of a common woman and make it more like the working-dress of a lady art-student. He seemed to find much food for thought in this; but his reply was very slow and hesitant. “You see, madam,” he said, “from outside the place looks—well, it is a perfectly decent place—but ladies like you don’t—don’t generally think so. They never go into such places from choice, except—”
“Well?” she repeated.
“Except an unfortunate few who don’t go in to drink milk.”
“You are a most singular person,” said the young lady. “What is your object in all this?”
“Not to trouble you about it,” he replied, very gently. “Only to arm myself with knowledge enough to help you, if ever you freely ask my help.”
“But why should I need help?”
He continued his dreamy monologue. “You couldn’t have come in to see protegees, humble friends, that sort of thing, or you’d have gone through into the parlour…and you couldn’t have come in because you were ill, or you’d have spoken to the woman of the place, who’s obviously respectable…besides, you don’t look ill in that way, but only unhappy… This street is the only original long lane that has no turning; and the houses on both sides are shut up… I could only suppose that you’d seen somebody coming whom you didn’t want to meet; and found the public-house was the only shelter in this wilderness of stone… I don’t think I went beyond the licence of a stranger in glancing at the only man who passed immediately after… And as I thought he looked like the wrong sort…and you looked like the right sort… I held myself ready to help if he annoyed you; that is all. As for my friend, he’ll be back soon; and he certainly can’t find out anything by stumping down a road like this… I didn’t think he could.”
“Then why did you send him out?” she cried, leaning forward with yet warmer curiosity. She had the proud, impetuous face that goes with reddish colouring, and a Roman nose, as it did in Marie Antoinette.
La testa di Cesare
C’è, in qualche punto di Brompton o di Kensington, un interminabile viale di case alte, ricche ma per lo più vuote, che ha l’aria di una fila di sepolcri. Perfino i gradini che salgono verso gli scuri portoni sembrano ripidi come il fianco delle piramidi; e uno esiterebbe a bussare, per timore che ad aprirgli venga una mummia. Ma un tratto ancora più deprimente di quella grigia facciata è la sua lunghezza telescopica e la sua immutabile continuità. Il pellegrino che vi cammina lungo comincia a credere che non giungerà mai a un’interruzione o a un angolo; ma un’eccezione c’è, piccolissima, eppure salutata dal pellegrino quasi con un grido. Fra due di quei palazzi altissimi si apre una specie di scuderia, una fessura, in confronto alla strada, non più larga dello spiraglio di una porta, ma quanto basta a lasciar posto, nell’angolo, a una minuscola birreria o trattoria, ancora concessa dai ricchi ai loro stallieri. C’è qualcosa di allegro nella sua stessa sordidezza, e qualcosa di libero e di fatato nella sua stessa insignificanza. Ai piedi di quei grigi giganti di pietra ha l’aria di una casa illuminata di nani.
Chiunque fosse passato di là in una certa sera d’autunno, essa stessa quasi fatata, avrebbe potuto vedere una mano scostare la mezza tendina rossa che (insieme a certe grandi lettere bianche) nascondeva in parte l’interno alla strada, e un volto sporgersi a spiare, non dissimile da quello di un folletto piuttosto innocente. Era, in realtà, il volto di un uomo dall’innocuo nome umano di Brown, già parroco di Cobhole nell’Essex, e ora impegnato a Londra. Il suo amico Flambeau, investigatore semiufficiale, gli sedeva di fronte, prendendo le ultime note di un caso che aveva risolto nei paraggi. Sedevano a un tavolino, accostato alla finestra, quando il prete tirò indietro la tendina e guardò fuori. Attese che uno sconosciuto passasse davanti alla finestra per lasciar poi ricadere la tendina al suo posto. Poi i suoi occhi rotondi si volsero alle grandi lettere bianche sul vetro sopra la sua testa, e infine vagarono al tavolo accanto, al quale sedevano soltanto uno sterratore con birra e formaggio, e una ragazza dai capelli rossi con un bicchiere di latte. Allora (vedendo l’amico riporre il taccuino) disse sottovoce:
«Se hai dieci minuti, vorrei che seguissi quell’uomo dal naso finto.»
Flambeau alzò lo sguardo, sorpreso; ma anche la ragazza dai capelli rossi alzò gli occhi, con qualcosa di più forte dello stupore. Era vestita in modo semplice e persino trasandato, di una stoffa marrone chiaro simile a tela da sacco; ma era una signora, e per giunta, a un secondo sguardo, una signora d’un’alterigia quasi superflua. «L’uomo dal naso finto!» ripeté Flambeau. «E chi è?»
«Non ne ho la minima idea,» rispose Padre Brown. «Voglio che lo scopra tu; te lo chiedo come favore. È andato di là» — e con uno dei suoi gesti insignificanti spinse il pollice al di sopra della spalla — «e non può aver superato ancora tre lampioni. Voglio solo sapere in che direzione va.»
Flambeau fissò l’amico per qualche istante, con un’espressione a metà tra la perplessità e il divertimento; poi, alzatosi dal tavolo, spinse la sua mole enorme fuori dalla porticina della taverna dei nani e si dileguò nel crepuscolo.
Padre Brown trasse di tasca un libretto e prese a leggere placidamente; non tradì la minima consapevolezza del fatto che la signora dai capelli rossi aveva lasciato il proprio tavolo e si era seduta di fronte a lui. Alla fine ella si sporse e disse a voce bassa e ferma: «Perché lo dice? Come sa che è finto?»
Egli sollevò le palpebre piuttosto pesanti, che ammiccarono in un notevole imbarazzo. Poi lo sguardo incerto tornò a vagare verso le lettere bianche sul vetro della facciata della bettola. Gli occhi della giovane donna seguirono i suoi, e si posarono anch’essi laggiù, ma in puro sconcerto.
«No,» disse Padre Brown, rispondendo ai pensieri di lei. «Non dice “Sela”, come la parola nei Salmi; l’ho letto così anch’io poco fa, mentre stavo con la testa fra le nuvole; dice “Ales”, birre.»
«E allora?» domandò la giovane signora sgranando gli occhi. «Che importa quel che dice?»
Lo sguardo meditabondo di lui corse alla manica di tela leggera della ragazza, intorno al polso della quale correva un filo sottilissimo di ricamo artistico, appena sufficiente a distinguerla dall’abito da lavoro di una donna comune e a renderla piuttosto simile all’abito da lavoro di una signora studentessa di belle arti. Parve trarne molto materiale di riflessione; ma la sua risposta fu lentissima ed esitante. «Vede, signora,» disse, «di fuori il posto sembra… be’, è un locale perfettamente rispettabile… ma le signore come lei di solito non lo… non lo credono. Non entrano mai in luoghi simili di loro spontanea scelta, tranne…»
«E allora?» ripeté lei.
«Tranne quelle poche sventurate che non ci entrano a bere latte.»
«Lei è una persona quanto mai singolare,» disse la giovane signora. «Qual è lo scopo di tutto questo?»
«Non quello di importunarla,» rispose lui con molta dolcezza. «Solo di armarmi di sufficiente conoscenza per aiutarla, se mai vorrà liberamente chiedermi aiuto.»
«Ma perché mai dovrei aver bisogno d’aiuto?»
Egli proseguì il suo monologo sognante. «Non può essere entrata a far visita a protette, a umili amiche, o cose del genere, altrimenti sarebbe passata nella saletta interna… e non può essere entrata perché si sentiva male, altrimenti avrebbe parlato con la donna del locale, che è evidentemente una persona per bene… e poi non ha l’aria di star male in quel senso, ma solo infelice… Questa strada è l’unica vera lunga corsia senza svolte; e le case da entrambi i lati sono sbarrate… Non potevo che supporre che avesse visto avvicinarsi qualcuno che non voleva incontrare; e che avesse trovato nella bettola l’unico rifugio in questo deserto di pietra… Non credo di aver oltrepassato la licenza di uno sconosciuto gettando un’occhiata all’unico uomo passato subito dopo… E poiché mi è parso del genere sbagliato… e lei mi è parsa del genere giusto… Mi sono tenuto pronto ad aiutarla, se quello l’avesse molestata; tutto qui. Quanto al mio amico, tornerà presto; e di certo non potrà scoprire nulla percorrendo a grandi passi una strada come questa… Non pensavo che potesse.»
«Allora perché lo ha mandato fuori?» gridò lei, sporgendosi in avanti con curiosità ancor più accesa. Aveva il viso fiero e impetuoso che si accompagna alle sfumature rossicce, e un naso romano, come l’aveva Maria Antonietta.
He looked at her steadily for the first time, and said: “Because I hoped you would speak to me.”
She looked back at him for some time with a heated face, in which there hung a red shadow of anger; then, despite her anxieties, humour broke out of her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and she answered almost grimly: “Well, if you’re so keen on my conversation, perhaps you’ll answer my question.” After a pause she added: “I had the honour to ask you why you thought the man’s nose was false.”
“The wax always spots like that just a little in this weather,” answered Father Brown with entire simplicity,
“But it’s such a crooked nose,” remonstrated the red-haired girl.
The priest smiled in his turn. “I don’t say it’s the sort of nose one would wear out of mere foppery,” he admitted. “This man, I think, wears it because his real nose is so much nicer.”
“But why?” she insisted.
“What is the nursery-rhyme?” observed Brown absent-mindedly. “There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile… That man, I fancy, has gone a very crooked road—by following his nose.”
“Why, what’s he done?” she demanded, rather shakily.
“I don’t want to force your confidence by a hair,” said Father Brown, very quietly. “But I think you could tell me more about that than I can tell you.”
The girl sprang to her feet and stood quite quietly, but with clenched hands, like one about to stride away; then her hands loosened slowly, and she sat down again. “You are more of a mystery than all the others,” she said desperately, “but I feel there might be a heart in your mystery.”
“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.” “I will tell you everything,” said the red-haired girl doggedly, “except why I am telling you; and that I don’t know.”
She picked at the darned table-cloth and went on: “You look as if you knew what isn’t snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours is a good old family, you’ll understand it is a necessary part of the story; indeed, my chief danger is in my brother’s high-and-dry notions, noblesse oblige and all that. Well, my name is Christabel Carstairs; and my father was that Colonel Carstairs you’ve probably heard of, who made the famous Carstairs Collection of Roman coins. I could never describe my father to you; the nearest I can say is that he was very like a Roman coin himself. He was as handsome and as genuine and as valuable and as metallic and as out-of-date. He was prouder of his Collection than of his coat-of-arms— nobody could say more than that. His extraordinary character came out most in his will. He had two sons and one daughter. He quarrelled with one son, my brother Giles, and sent him to Australia on a small allowance. He then made a will leaving the Carstairs Collection, actually with a yet smaller allowance, to my brother Arthur. He meant it as a reward, as the highest honour he could offer, in acknowledgement of Arthur’s loyalty and rectitude and the distinctions he had already gained in mathematics and economics at Cambridge. He left me practically all his pretty large fortune; and I am sure he meant it in contempt.
“Arthur, you may say, might well complain of this; but Arthur is my father over again. Though he had some differences with my father in early youth, no sooner had he taken over the Collection than he became like a pagan priest dedicated to a temple. He mixed up these Roman halfpence with the honour of the Carstairs family in the same stiff, idolatrous way as his father before him. He acted as if Roman money must be guarded by all the Roman virtues. He took no pleasures; he spent nothing on himself; he lived for the Collection. Often he would not trouble to dress for his simple meals; but pattered about among the corded brown-paper parcels (which no one else was allowed to touch) in an old brown dressing-gown. With its rope and tassel and his pale, thin, refined face, it made him look like an old ascetic monk. Every now and then, though, he would appear dressed like a decidedly fashionable gentleman; but that was only when he went up to the London sales or shops to make an addition to the Carstairs Collection.
“Now, if you’ve known any young people, you won’t be shocked if I say that I got into rather a low frame of mind with all this; the frame of mind in which one begins to say that the Ancient Romans were all very well in their way. I’m not like my brother Arthur; I can’t help enjoying enjoyment. I got a lot of romance and rubbish where I got my red hair, from the other side of the family. Poor Giles was the same; and I think the atmosphere of coins might count in excuse for him; though he really did wrong and nearly went to prison. But he didn’t behave any worse than I did; as you shall hear.
“I come now to the silly part of the story. I think a man as clever as you can guess the sort of thing that would begin to relieve the monotony for an unruly girl of seventeen placed in such a position. But I am so rattled with more dreadful things that I can hardly read my own feeling; and don’t know whether I despise it now as a flirtation or bear it as a broken heart. We lived then at a little seaside watering-place in South Wales, and a retired sea-captain living a few doors off had a son about five years older than myself, who had been a friend of Giles before he went to the Colonies. His name does not affect my tale; but I tell you it was Philip Hawker, because I am telling you everything. We used to go shrimping together, and said and thought we were in love with each other; at least he certainly said he was, and I certainly thought I was. If I tell you he had bronzed curly hair and a falconish sort of face, bronzed by the sea also, it’s not for his sake, I assure you, but for the story; for it was the cause of a very curious coincidence.
“One summer afternoon, when I had promised to go shrimping along the sands with Philip, I was waiting rather impatiently in the front drawing-room, watching Arthur handle some packets of coins he had just purchased and slowly shunt them, one or two at a time, into his own dark study and museum which was at the back of the house. As soon as I heard the heavy door close on him finally, I made a bolt for my shrimping-net and tam-o’-shanter and was just going to slip out, when I saw that my brother had left behind him one coin that lay gleaming on the long bench by the window. It was a bronze coin, and the colour, combined with the exact curve of the Roman nose and something in the very lift of the long, wiry neck, made the head of Caesar on it the almost precise portrait of Philip Hawker. Then I suddenly remembered Giles telling Philip of a coin that was like him, and Philip wishing he had it. Perhaps you can fancy the wild, foolish thoughts with which my head went round; I felt as if I had had a gift from the fairies. It seemed to me that if I could only run away with this, and give it to Philip like a wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for ever; I felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like the pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur would think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs treasure! I believe my brother could see me burned like a witch for such a thing, But then, the very thought of such fanatical cruelty heightened my old hatred of his dingy old antiquarian fussiness and my longing for the youth and liberty that called to me from the sea. Outside was strong sunlight with a wind; and a yellow head of some broom or gorse in the garden rapped against the glass of the window. I thought of that living and growing gold calling to me from all the heaths of the world—and then of that dead, dull gold and bronze and brass of my brother’s growing dustier and dustier as life went by. Nature and the Carstairs Collection had come to grips at last.
Lui la guardò fisso per la prima volta, e disse: «Perché speravo che avrebbe parlato con me.»
Ella lo ricambiò con lo sguardo per qualche istante, il viso acceso, sul quale indugiava un’ombra rossa d’ira; poi, a dispetto delle sue angosce, l’ironia le sprizzò dagli occhi e dagli angoli della bocca, ed ella rispose quasi torva: «Bene, se le sta tanto a cuore la mia conversazione, forse risponderà alla mia domanda.» Dopo una pausa aggiunse: «Ho avuto l’onore di chiederle perché pensava che il naso di quell’uomo fosse finto.»
«La cera fa sempre di quelle macchioline, con questo tempo,» rispose Padre Brown con assoluta semplicità.
«Ma è un naso così storto,» obiettò la ragazza dai capelli rossi.
Il prete sorrise a sua volta. «Non dico che sia il tipo di naso che uno porterebbe per pura civetteria,» ammise. «Quest’uomo, credo, lo porta perché il suo vero naso è molto più bello.»
«Ma perché?» insistette lei.
«Come fa quella filastrocca?» osservò Brown distrattamente. «C’era un uomo storto che percorse un miglio storto… Quell’uomo, immagino, ha percorso una strada molto storta, seguendo il proprio naso.»
«Perché, che cosa ha fatto?» domandò lei, con voce piuttosto malferma.
«Non voglio forzare d’un capello la sua confidenza,» disse Padre Brown, molto pacatamente. «Ma credo che su questo lei potrebbe dirmi assai più di quanto io possa dire a lei.»
La ragazza scattò in piedi e restò immobile, ma con i pugni serrati, come chi sta per andarsene a grandi passi; poi le mani a poco a poco si distesero, ed ella tornò a sedersi. «Lei è più misterioso di tutti gli altri,» disse disperatamente, «ma sento che nel suo mistero potrebbe esserci un cuore.»
«Ciò che tutti temiamo di più,» disse il prete a voce bassa, «è un labirinto senza centro. È per questo che l’ateismo è soltanto un incubo.» «Le dirò tutto,» disse la ragazza dai capelli rossi ostinatamente, «tranne perché glielo dico; e questo non lo so.»
Ella prese a stuzzicare la tovaglia rammendata e proseguì: «Lei ha l’aria di saper riconoscere ciò che snobismo non è, oltre a ciò che lo è; e quando dico che la nostra è una buona vecchia famiglia, capirà che è una parte necessaria della storia; anzi, il mio pericolo principale sta nelle idee rigide e superate di mio fratello, il noblesse oblige e tutto il resto. Ebbene, il mio nome è Christabel Carstairs; e mio padre era quel colonnello Carstairs di cui probabilmente avrà sentito parlare, quello che mise insieme la famosa collezione Carstairs di monete romane. Non saprei mai descriverle mio padre; il massimo che posso dire è che somigliava moltissimo lui stesso a una moneta romana. Era così bello, così autentico, così prezioso, così metallico e così fuori moda. Andava più fiero della sua Collezione che del suo stemma: nessuno potrebbe dir di più. Il suo carattere straordinario si rivelò soprattutto nel testamento. Aveva due figli e una figlia. Litigò con uno dei figli, mio fratello Giles, e lo spedì in Australia con un piccolo assegno. Fece poi testamento lasciando la collezione Carstairs, con un assegno ancora più piccolo, a mio fratello Arthur. Lo intendeva come una ricompensa, il più alto onore che potesse offrire, in riconoscimento della lealtà e della rettitudine di Arthur e delle distinzioni che questi aveva già ottenuto in matematica ed economia a Cambridge. A me lasciò praticamente tutto il suo cospicuo patrimonio; e sono sicura che lo intese per disprezzo.
«Arthur, dirà lei, avrebbe ben potuto lamentarsene; ma Arthur è mio padre daccapo. Benché avesse avuto qualche divergenza con mio padre nella prima giovinezza, non appena ebbe assunto la Collezione divenne come un sacerdote pagano consacrato a un tempio. Confondeva quei mezzi soldi romani con l’onore della famiglia Carstairs, nello stesso modo rigido e idolatra di suo padre prima di lui. Si comportava come se il denaro romano dovesse essere custodito da tutte le virtù romane. Non si concedeva piaceri; non spendeva nulla per sé; viveva per la Collezione. Spesso non si dava neppure la pena di vestirsi come si deve per i suoi frugali pasti; ma trotterellava tra i pacchi di carta marrone legati con lo spago (che a nessun altro era concesso toccare) con una vecchia veste da camera marrone. Con quella corda e quel fiocco, e il suo volto pallido, magro, raffinato, aveva l’aria di un vecchio monaco asceta. Ogni tanto, però, compariva vestito da gentiluomo decisamente alla moda; ma soltanto quando saliva alle vendite o nei negozi di Londra per fare qualche aggiunta alla collezione Carstairs.
«Ora, se ha conosciuto qualche giovane, non si scandalizzerà se le dico che, con tutto questo, mi venne un umore piuttosto tetro; quello stato d’animo in cui uno comincia a dire che gli antichi Romani, a modo loro, andavano benissimo. Non sono come mio fratello Arthur; non posso fare a meno di godermi il godimento. La mia buona dose di romanticismo e di follie l’ho avuta di dove ho avuto i capelli rossi, dall’altro ramo della famiglia. Il povero Giles era lo stesso; e credo che l’atmosfera delle monete possa valergli da scusa; benché avesse davvero fatto del male e fosse quasi finito in prigione. Ma non si comportò affatto peggio di me; come sentirà.
«Vengo ora alla parte sciocca della storia. Credo che un uomo intelligente come lei possa indovinare il genere di cosa che comincerebbe a spezzare la monotonia per una ragazza ribelle di diciassette anni posta in una simile situazione. Ma sono così sconvolta da cose ben più terribili che a stento riesco a leggere il mio stesso sentimento; e non so se ora disprezzarlo come una civetteria o portarlo addosso come un cuore infranto. Vivevamo allora in una piccola cittadina balneare del Galles del Sud, e un capitano di mare in pensione che abitava a pochi passi da noi aveva un figlio più grande di me di circa cinque anni, che era stato amico di Giles prima che questi partisse per le Colonie. Il suo nome non incide sul mio racconto; ma glielo dico, era Philip Hawker, perché le sto dicendo tutto. Andavamo insieme a pescare i gamberetti, e dicevamo e credevamo di essere innamorati l’uno dell’altra; per lo meno lui certamente diceva di esserlo, e io certamente credevo di esserlo. Se le dico che aveva i capelli ricci e bruniti e una specie di volto da falco, brunito anch’esso dal mare, non è per amor suo, glielo assicuro, ma per amor della storia; perché fu la causa di una coincidenza molto curiosa.
«Un pomeriggio d’estate, avendo promesso di andare a pescare gamberetti lungo la spiaggia con Philip, aspettavo piuttosto spazientita nel salotto sul davanti, guardando Arthur maneggiare certi pacchetti di monete che aveva appena acquistato e trasferirle lentamente, una o due per volta, nel suo studio-museo buio, che era sul retro della casa. Non appena udii la pesante porta chiudersi definitivamente su di lui, mi precipitai a prendere la mia rete da gamberetti e il mio berretto scozzese, e stavo giusto per sgusciar fuori, quando vidi che mio fratello aveva lasciato dietro di sé una moneta, che luccicava sul lungo banco accanto alla finestra. Era una moneta di bronzo, e il colore, unito alla curva esatta del naso romano e a un non so che nel modo stesso in cui si levava il lungo collo nerboruto, faceva della testa di Cesare che vi era impressa il ritratto quasi preciso di Philip Hawker. Poi mi tornò a un tratto in mente che Giles aveva parlato a Philip di una moneta che gli somigliava, e che Philip aveva espresso il desiderio di averla. Forse lei può immaginare i pensieri sfrenati e folli che mi girarono per la testa; mi sentii come se avessi ricevuto un dono dalle fate. Mi pareva che, se solo fossi potuta scappare con quella moneta e dargliela come una specie di selvaggia fede nuziale, sarebbe stata per sempre un legame fra noi; provai mille sensazioni simili tutte insieme. Poi si spalancò sotto di me, come l’abisso, l’enorme, tremenda nozione di ciò che stavo facendo; e soprattutto il pensiero insopportabile, come toccare ferro rovente, di quel che Arthur ne avrebbe pensato. Una Carstairs ladra; e ladra del tesoro dei Carstairs! Credo che mio fratello sarebbe stato capace di vedermi bruciata come una strega per una cosa simile. Ma allora, il pensiero stesso di una crudeltà così fanatica accresceva il mio vecchio odio per la sua trita, vecchia pignoleria da antiquario e la mia sete di giovinezza e di libertà che dal mare mi chiamava. Fuori splendeva un sole forte, con un vento; e una testa gialla di ginestra o di ginestrone nel giardino batteva contro il vetro della finestra. Pensai a quell’oro vivo e crescente che mi chiamava da tutte le lande del mondo, e poi a quell’oro morto e opaco, e al bronzo e all’ottone di mio fratello, che si facevano sempre più polverosi col passare della vita. La Natura e la collezione Carstairs erano infine venute alle prese.
“Nature is older than the Carstairs Collection. As I ran down the streets to the sea, the coin clenched tight in my fist, I felt all the Roman Empire on my back as well as the Carstairs pedigree. It was not only the old lion argent that was roaring in my ear, but all the eagles of the Caesars seemed flapping and screaming in pursuit of me. And yet my heart rose higher and higher like a child’s kite, until I came over the loose, dry sand-hills and to the flat, wet sands, where Philip stood already up to his ankles in the shallow shining water, some hundred yards out to sea. There was a great red sunset; and the long stretch of low water, hardly rising over the ankle for half a mile, was like a lake of ruby flame. It was not till I had torn off my shoes and stockings and waded to where he stood, which was well away from the dry land, that I turned and looked round. We were quite alone in a circle of sea-water and wet sand, and I gave him the head of Caesar.
“At the very instant I had a shock of fancy: that a man far away on the sand-hills was looking at me intently. I must have felt immediately after that it was a mere leap of unreasonable nerves; for the man was only a dark dot in the distance, and I could only just see that he was standing quite still and gazing, with his head a little on one side. There was no earthly logical evidence that he was looking at me; he might have been looking at a ship, or the sunset, or the sea-gulls, or at any of the people who still strayed here and there on the shore between us. Nevertheless, whatever my start sprang from was prophetic; for, as I gazed, he started walking briskly in a bee-line towards us across the wide wet sands. As he drew nearer and nearer I saw that he was dark and bearded, and that his eyes were marked with dark spectacles. He was dressed poorly but respectably in black, from the old black top hat on his head to the solid black boots on his feet. In spite of these he walked straight into the sea without a flash of hesitation, and came on at me with the steadiness of a travelling bullet.
“I can’t tell you the sense of monstrosity and miracle I had when he thus silently burst the barrier between land and water. It was as if he had walked straight off a cliff and still marched steadily in mid-air. It was as if a house had flown up into the sky or a man’s head had fallen off. He was only wetting his boots; but he seemed to be a demon disregarding a law of Nature. If he had hesitated an instant at the water’s edge it would have been nothing. As it was, he seemed to look so much at me alone as not to notice the ocean. Philip was some yards away with his back to me, bending over his net. The stranger came on till he stood within two yards of me, the water washing half-way up to his knees. Then he said, with a clearly modulated and rather mincing articulation: ‘Would it discommode you to contribute elsewhere a coin with a somewhat different superscription?’
“With one exception there was nothing definably abnormal about him. His tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough, nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily. His dark beard was not really long or wild—, but he looked rather hairy, because the beard began very high up in his face, just under the cheek-bones. His complexion was neither sallow nor livid, but on the contrary rather clear and youthful; yet this gave a pink-and-white wax look which somehow (I don’t know why) rather increased the horror. The only oddity one could fix was that his nose, which was otherwise of a good shape, was just slightly turned sideways at the tip; as if, when it was soft, it had been tapped on one side with a toy hammer. The thing was hardly a deformity; yet I cannot tell you what a living nightmare it was to me. As he stood there in the sunset-stained water he affected me as some hellish sea-monster just risen roaring out of a sea like blood. I don’t know why a touch on the nose should affect my imagination so much. I think it seemed as if he could move his nose like a finger. And as if he had just that moment moved it.
“‘Any little assistance,’ he continued with the same queer, priggish accent, ‘that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the family.’
“Then it rushed over me that I was being blackmailed for the theft of the bronze piece; and all my merely superstitious fears and doubts were swallowed up in one overpowering, practical question. How could he have found out? I had stolen the thing suddenly and on impulse; I was certainly alone; for I always made sure of being unobserved when I slipped out to see Philip in this way. I had not, to all appearance, been followed in the street; and if I had, they could not ‘X-ray’ the coin in my closed hand. The man standing on the sand-hills could no more have seen what I gave Philip than shoot a fly in one eye, like the man in the fairy-tale.
“‘Philip,’ I cried helplessly, ‘ask this man what he wants.’
“When Philip lifted his head at last from mending his net he looked rather red, as if sulky or ashamed; but it may have been only the exertion of stooping and the red evening light; I may have only had another of the morbid fancies that seemed to be dancing about me. He merely said gruffly to the man: ‘You clear out of this.’ And, motioning me to follow, set off wading shoreward without paying further attention to him. He stepped on to a stone breakwater that ran out from among the roots of the sand-hills, and so struck homeward, perhaps thinking our incubus would find it less easy to walk on such rough stones, green and slippery with seaweed, than we, who were young and used to it. But my persecutor walked as daintily as he talked; and he still followed me, picking his way and picking his phrases. I heard his delicate, detestable voice appealing to me over my shoulder, until at last, when we had crested the sand-hills, Philip’s patience (which was by no means so conspicuous on most occasions) seemed to snap. He turned suddenly, saying, ‘Go back. I can’t talk to you now.’ And as the man hovered and opened his mouth, Philip struck him a buffet on it that sent him flying from the top of the tallest sand-hill to the bottom. I saw him crawling out below, covered with sand.
«La Natura è più antica della collezione Carstairs. Mentre correvo giù per le strade verso il mare, la moneta stretta forte nel pugno, sentii tutto l’Impero Romano sulle spalle, oltre al lignaggio dei Carstairs. Non era soltanto il vecchio leone d’argento a ruggirmi all’orecchio, ma tutte le aquile dei Cesari parevano sbattere le ali e stridere inseguendomi. Eppure il cuore mi si sollevava sempre più in alto, come l’aquilone di un bambino, finché non superai le sabbiose dune sciolte e asciutte e giunsi alla sabbia piana e bagnata, dove Philip già stava con l’acqua fino alle caviglie nella bassa marea scintillante, a un centinaio di metri dalla riva. C’era un grande tramonto rosso; e la lunga distesa d’acqua bassa, che a stento superava la caviglia per mezzo miglio, era come un lago di fiamma di rubino. Solo dopo essermi sfilata scarpe e calze ed essere andata a guado fin dove egli stava, che era ben lontano dalla terra asciutta, mi voltai e mi guardai intorno. Eravamo del tutto soli in un cerchio d’acqua marina e sabbia bagnata, e gli diedi la testa di Cesare.
«Proprio in quell’istante ebbi un soprassalto della fantasia: che un uomo lontano, sulle dune, mi stesse fissando con intensità. Subito dopo devo aver sentito che era solo un guizzo di nervi irragionevoli; perché l’uomo non era che un punto scuro in lontananza, e riuscivo appena a vedere che se ne stava immobile a guardare, con la testa un po’ inclinata da un lato. Non c’era alcuna prova logica al mondo che stesse guardando me; poteva guardare una nave, o il tramonto, o i gabbiani, o una qualsiasi delle persone che ancora vagavano qua e là sulla riva tra noi. Nondimeno, qualunque fosse l’origine del mio sussulto, esso fu profetico; perché, mentre lo fissavo, egli si mise a camminare svelto in linea retta verso di noi attraverso l’ampia sabbia bagnata. Man mano che si avvicinava, vidi che era scuro e barbuto, e che gli occhi erano segnati da occhiali scuri. Era vestito poveramente ma con decoro, di nero, dal vecchio cilindro nero in capo ai solidi stivali neri ai piedi. Malgrado questi, entrò dritto nel mare senza un lampo di esitazione, e avanzò verso di me con la fermezza di una pallottola in volo.
«Non saprei dirle il senso di mostruosità e di miracolo che provai quando egli così, in silenzio, ruppe la barriera fra terra e acqua. Era come se avesse camminato dritto oltre l’orlo di un dirupo e continuasse a marciare imperturbato a mezz’aria. Era come se una casa fosse volata su nel cielo o come se a un uomo fosse caduta la testa. Non faceva altro che bagnarsi gli stivali; eppure pareva un demonio che ignorasse una legge di Natura. Se avesse esitato un istante sul filo dell’acqua, non sarebbe stato nulla. Così invece pareva guardare tanto solo me da non accorgersi dell’oceano. Philip era a qualche metro di distanza, con la schiena rivolta a me, chino sulla sua rete. Lo sconosciuto avanzò finché non venne a trovarsi a due metri da me, con l’acqua che gli lambiva a mezza gamba i ginocchi. Poi disse, con un’articolazione nitidamente modulata e piuttosto affettata: “Le arrecherebbe disturbo elargire altrove una moneta con un’iscrizione un po’ diversa?”
«Con una sola eccezione, non c’era nulla di definibilmente anormale in lui. Gli occhiali colorati non erano davvero opachi, ma di un azzurro abbastanza comune, né gli occhi dietro di essi erano sfuggenti, bensì mi fissavano fermi. La barba scura non era davvero lunga o incolta, ma egli aveva un’aria piuttosto pelosa, perché la barba cominciava molto in alto sul viso, proprio sotto gli zigomi. La carnagione non era né gialliccia né livida, anzi, al contrario, piuttosto chiara e giovanile; eppure ciò le dava un aspetto di cera bianca e rosa che, chissà perché, accresceva l’orrore. L’unica stranezza che si potesse fissare era che il naso, per il resto di buona forma, era appena appena piegato di lato in punta; come se, quando era molle, gli fosse stato dato un colpetto da un lato con un martelletto giocattolo. La cosa non era neppure una deformità; eppure non saprei dirle che incubo vivente esso fosse per me. Mentre egli stava là nell’acqua tinta di tramonto, mi faceva l’effetto di un infernale mostro marino appena emerso ruggendo da un mare di sangue. Non so perché un tocco sul naso dovesse turbare tanto la mia immaginazione. Credo mi paresse che egli potesse muovere il naso come un dito. E come se proprio in quel momento l’avesse mosso.
«“Un qualsiasi piccolo aiuto,” proseguì con lo stesso strano accento saccente, “che possa ovviare alla necessità di mettermi in comunicazione con la famiglia.”
«Allora mi si riversò addosso la certezza di essere ricattata per il furto della moneta di bronzo; e tutte le mie paure e i miei dubbi meramente superstiziosi furono inghiottiti da un’unica, soverchiante, pratica domanda. Come poteva averlo scoperto? Avevo rubato l’oggetto d’improvviso e d’impulso; ero certamente sola; perché mi assicuravo sempre di non essere osservata quando sgusciavo fuori a vedere Philip in quel modo. Non ero stata seguita per strada, per quanto potevo vedere; e se anche lo fossi stata, non avrebbero potuto “radiografare” la moneta nel mio pugno chiuso. L’uomo che stava sulle dune non poteva aver visto ciò che davo a Philip più di quanto potesse colpire una mosca in un occhio solo, come l’uomo della fiaba.
«“Philip,” gridai smarrita, “chiedi a quest’uomo che cosa vuole.”
«Quando Philip alzò infine la testa dal rammendare la rete, era piuttosto rosso, come imbronciato o vergognoso; ma poteva essere solo lo sforzo del chinarsi e la rossa luce della sera; poteva essere solo un’altra di quelle fantasie morbose che parevano danzarmi intorno. Egli disse soltanto, burbero, all’uomo: “Levati di torno.” E, facendomi cenno di seguirlo, si avviò a guado verso riva senza prestargli ulteriore attenzione. Salì su un frangiflutti di pietra che si spingeva fuori tra le radici delle dune, e così puntò verso casa, pensando forse che il nostro incubo avrebbe trovato meno agevole di noi camminare su pietre così scabre, verdi e viscide d’alghe, noi che eravamo giovani e ci eravamo abituati. Ma il mio persecutore camminava con la stessa delicatezza con cui parlava; e continuava a seguirmi, scegliendo la strada e scegliendo le frasi. Udivo la sua voce delicata e detestabile appellarsi a me al di sopra della mia spalla, finché, quando avemmo scavalcato le dune, la pazienza di Philip (che nella maggior parte delle occasioni non era affatto tanto cospicua) parve spezzarsi. Egli si voltò di scatto, dicendo: “Torna indietro. Non posso parlarti adesso.” E mentre l’uomo indugiava e apriva bocca, Philip gli assestò su di essa un pugno tale da farlo volare dalla cima della duna più alta fino al fondo. Lo vidi arrancare più in basso, coperto di sabbia.
“This stroke comforted me somehow, though it might well increase my peril; but Philip showed none of his usual elation at his own prowess. Though as affectionate as ever, he still seemed cast down; and before I could ask him anything fully, he parted with me at his own gate, with two remarks that struck me as strange. He said that, all things considered, I ought to put the coin back in the Collection; but that he himself would keep it ‘for the present’. And then he added quite suddenly and irrelevantly:, ‘You know Giles is back from Australia?’”
The door of the tavern opened and the gigantic shadow of the investigator Flambeau fell across the table. Father Brown presented him to the lady in his own slight, persuasive style of speech, mentioning his knowledge and sympathy in such cases; and almost without knowing, the girl was soon reiterating her story to two listeners. But Flambeau, as he bowed and sat down, handed the priest a small slip of paper. Brown accepted it with some surprise and read on it: “Cab to Wagga Wagga, 379, Mafeking Avenue, Putney.” The girl was going on with her story.
“I went up the steep street to my own house with my head in a whirl; it had not begun to clear when I came to the doorstep, on which I found a milk-can—and the man with the twisted nose. The milk-can told me the servants were all out; for, of course, Arthur, browsing about in his brown dressing-gown in a brown study, would not hear or answer a bell. Thus there was no one to help me in the house, except my brother, whose help must be my ruin. In desperation I thrust two shillings into the horrid thing’s hand, and told him to call again in a few days, when I had thought it out. He went off sulking, but more sheepishly than I had expected— perhaps he had been shaken by his fall—and I watched the star of sand splashed on his back receding down the road with a horrid vindictive pleasure. He turned a corner some six houses down.
“Then I let myself in, made myself some tea, and tried to think it out. I sat at the drawing-room window looking on to the garden, which still glowed with the last full evening light. But I was too distracted and dreamy to look at the lawns and flower-pots and flower-beds with any concentration. So I took the shock the more sharply because I’d seen it so slowly.
“The man or monster I’d sent away was standing quite still in the middle of the garden. Oh, we’ve all read a lot about pale-faced phantoms in the dark; but this was more dreadful than anything of that kind could ever be. Because, though he cast a long evening shadow, he still stood in warm sunlight. And because his face was not pale, but had that waxen bloom still upon it that belongs to a barber’s dummy. He stood quite still, with his face towards me; and I can’t tell you how horrid he looked among the tulips and all those tall, gaudy, almost hothouse-looking flowers. It looked as if we’d stuck up a waxwork instead of a statue in the centre of our garden.
“Yet almost the instant he saw me move in the window he turned and ran out of the garden by the back gate, which stood open and by which he had undoubtedly entered. This renewed timidity on his part was so different from the impudence with which he had walked into the sea, that I felt vaguely comforted. I fancied, perhaps, that he feared confronting Arthur more than I knew. Anyhow, I settled down at last, and had a quiet dinner alone (for it was against the rules to disturb Arthur when he was rearranging the museum), and, my thoughts, a little released, fled to Philip and lost themselves, I suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly, but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained, but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane. But when I stared harder, it was more like a man’s thumb pressed on the pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage re-awakened together, I rushed at the window and then recoiled with a strangled scream that any man but Arthur must have heard.
“For it was not a thumb, any more than it was a snail. It was the tip of a crooked nose, crushed against the glass; it looked white with the pressure; and the staring face and eyes behind it were at first invisible and afterwards grey like a ghost. I slammed the shutters together somehow, rushed up to my room and locked myself in. But, even as I passed, I could swear I saw a second black window with something on it that was like a snail.
“It might be best to go to Arthur after all. If the thing was crawling close all around the house like a cat, it might have purposes worse even than blackmail. My brother might cast me out and curse me for ever, but he was a gentleman, and would defend me on the spot. After ten minutes’ curious thinking, I went down, knocked on the door and then went in: to see the last and worst sight.
“My brother’s chair was empty, and he was obviously out. But the man with the crooked nose was sitting waiting for his return, with his hat still insolently on his head, and actually reading one of my brother’s books under my brother’s lamp. His face was composed and occupied, but his nose-tip still had the air of being the most mobile part of his face, as if it had just turned from left to right like an elephant’s proboscis. I had thought him poisonous enough while he was pursuing and watching me; but I think his unconsciousness of my presence was more frightful still.
“I think I screamed loud and long; but that doesn’t matter. What I did next does matter: I gave him all the money I had, including a good deal in paper which, though it was mine, I dare say I had no right to touch. He went off at last, with hateful, tactful regrets all in long words; and I sat down, feeling ruined in every sense. And yet I was saved that very night by a pure accident. Arthur had gone off suddenly to London, as he so often did, for bargains; and returned, late but radiant, having nearly secured a treasure that was an added splendour even to the family Collection. He was so resplendent that I was almost emboldened to confess the abstraction of the lesser gem—, but he bore down all other topics with his over-powering projects. Because the bargain might still misfire any moment, he insisted on my packing at once and going up with him to lodgings he had already taken in Fulham, to be near the curio-shop in question. Thus in spite of myself, I fled from my foe almost in the dead of night—but from Philip also… My brother was often at the South Kensington Museum, and, in order to make some sort of secondary life for myself, I paid for a few lessons at the Art Schools. I was coming back from them this evening, when I saw the abomination of desolation walking alive down the long straight street and the rest is as this gentleman has said.
«Quel colpo, chissà come, mi confortò, benché potesse benissimo accrescere il mio pericolo; ma Philip non mostrò nulla della sua abituale esultanza per le proprie prodezze. Per quanto affettuoso come sempre, sembrava ancora abbattuto; e prima che potessi interrogarlo compiutamente, si separò da me al proprio cancello, con due osservazioni che mi parvero strane. Disse che, tutto sommato, avrei fatto bene a rimettere la moneta nella Collezione; ma che lui stesso l’avrebbe tenuta “per il momento”. E poi aggiunse d’improvviso e senza alcun nesso: “Sai che Giles è tornato dall’Australia?”»
La porta della taverna si aprì e l’ombra gigantesca dell’investigatore Flambeau cadde sul tavolo. Padre Brown lo presentò alla signora nel suo consueto modo di parlare, misurato e persuasivo, accennando alla sua competenza e alla sua comprensione in casi simili; e quasi senza accorgersene, la ragazza si mise presto a ripetere la sua storia a due ascoltatori. Ma Flambeau, mentre s’inchinava e si sedeva, porse al prete un foglietto di carta. Brown lo prese con una certa sorpresa e vi lesse: «Vettura per Wagga Wagga, Mafeking Avenue 379, Putney.» La ragazza continuava la sua storia.
«Salii per la strada ripida verso casa mia con la testa in un vortice; non aveva ancora cominciato a schiarirsi quando giunsi al gradino della porta, sul quale trovai un bidone del latte, e l’uomo dal naso storto. Il bidone del latte mi diceva che i domestici erano tutti fuori; perché, naturalmente, Arthur, tutto intento a rovistare nella sua veste da camera marrone, immerso in uno studio marrone, non avrebbe udito né risposto a un campanello. Così non c’era nessuno in casa che potesse aiutarmi, tranne mio fratello, il cui aiuto sarebbe stato la mia rovina. Nella disperazione cacciai due scellini nella mano dell’orribile individuo, e gli dissi di tornare fra qualche giorno, quando ci avessi riflettuto. Se ne andò imbronciato, ma con più fare dimesso di quanto mi aspettassi — forse era rimasto scosso dalla caduta — e osservai la stella di sabbia spiaccicata sulla sua schiena allontanarsi giù per la strada con un orribile piacere vendicativo. Svoltò un angolo, sei case più in giù.
«Poi entrai, mi preparai un po’ di tè, e cercai di riflettere. Sedetti alla finestra del salotto che dà sul giardino, ancora rosseggiante dell’ultima piena luce serale. Ma ero troppo distratta e sognante per guardare i prati e i vasi e le aiuole con una qualche concentrazione. E così ricevetti il colpo tanto più acutamente, per averlo veduto tanto lentamente.
«L’uomo, o mostro, che avevo mandato via se ne stava del tutto immobile in mezzo al giardino. Oh, abbiamo tutti letto un mucchio di cose sui fantasmi dal viso pallido nel buio; ma questo era più tremendo di qualsiasi cosa di quel genere potesse mai essere. Perché, benché proiettasse una lunga ombra serale, egli stava tuttora in piena luce di sole calda. E perché il suo viso non era pallido, ma aveva ancora su di sé quella fioritura cerea che appartiene al manichino di un barbiere. Stava del tutto immobile, col viso rivolto verso di me; e non saprei dirle quanto orribile apparisse tra i tulipani e tutti quei fiori alti, sgargianti, dall’aria quasi da serra. Sembrava che avessimo piantato una figura di cera invece di una statua al centro del nostro giardino.
«Eppure, quasi nell’istante stesso in cui mi vide muovere alla finestra, si voltò e uscì di corsa dal giardino per il cancello sul retro, che era rimasto aperto e per il quale senza dubbio era entrato. Questa rinnovata timidezza da parte sua era così diversa dalla sfrontatezza con cui era entrato nel mare, che mi sentii vagamente confortata. Immaginai, forse, che temesse di trovarsi di fronte ad Arthur più di quanto non sapessi. Comunque sia, mi calmai infine, e cenai tranquilla e sola (perché era contro le regole disturbare Arthur quando riordinava il museo), e i miei pensieri, un poco liberati, volarono a Philip e vi si smarrirono, suppongo. Comunque sia, guardavo assente, ma piuttosto piacevolmente che no, verso un’altra finestra, senza tende, ma a quell’ora nera come una lavagna con l’ultimo calar della notte. Mi parve che qualcosa come una lumaca fosse sulla parte esterna del vetro. Ma quando guardai più intensamente, somigliava piuttosto al pollice di un uomo premuto contro il vetro; aveva quell’aria ricurva che ha un pollice. Con la paura e il coraggio ridestatisi insieme, mi lanciai verso la finestra e poi indietreggiai con un grido strozzato che chiunque altro tranne Arthur avrebbe dovuto udire.
«Perché non era un pollice, come non era una lumaca. Era la punta di un naso storto, schiacciato contro il vetro; appariva bianco per la pressione; e il volto e gli occhi sbarrati che vi stavano dietro erano dapprima invisibili e poi grigi come uno spettro. In qualche modo sbattei insieme le imposte, corsi di sopra nella mia stanza e mi ci chiusi a chiave. Ma, mentre passavo, avrei potuto giurare di aver visto una seconda finestra nera con qualcosa sopra che somigliava a una lumaca.
«Forse la cosa migliore era, dopotutto, andare da Arthur. Se la cosa strisciava fitta tutt’intorno alla casa come un gatto, poteva avere propositi peggiori perfino del ricatto. Mio fratello poteva scacciarmi e maledirmi per sempre, ma era un gentiluomo, e mi avrebbe difesa lì per lì. Dopo dieci minuti di curiose riflessioni, scesi, bussai alla porta e poi entrai: per vedere l’ultima e peggiore visione.
«La poltrona di mio fratello era vuota, ed egli era evidentemente uscito. Ma l’uomo dal naso storto stava lì seduto ad aspettare il suo ritorno, con il cappello ancora insolentemente in capo, e leggeva addirittura uno dei libri di mio fratello sotto la lampada di mio fratello. Il suo volto era composto e assorto, ma la punta del naso conservava tuttora l’aria di essere la parte più mobile della sua faccia, come se si fosse appena voltata da sinistra a destra come la proboscide di un elefante. L’avevo giudicato abbastanza velenoso mentre mi inseguiva e mi spiava; ma credo che la sua inconsapevolezza della mia presenza fosse ancor più spaventosa.
«Credo di aver gridato forte e a lungo; ma non ha importanza. Ciò che feci dopo, quello sì ha importanza: gli diedi tutto il denaro che avevo, comprese parecchie banconote che, benché fossero mie, oso dire non avessi diritto di toccare. Se ne andò infine, con odiosi, garbati rammarichi tutti in lunghe parole; e io mi sedetti, sentendomi rovinata in ogni senso. Eppure fui salvata quella notte stessa da un puro caso. Arthur era partito all’improvviso per Londra, come faceva così spesso, per certi affari; e ne era tornato, tardi ma raggiante, avendo quasi assicurato un tesoro che sarebbe stato uno splendore aggiunto perfino alla Collezione di famiglia. Era così radioso che quasi mi feci coraggio per confessare la sottrazione della gemma minore; ma egli travolse ogni altro argomento con i suoi progetti soverchianti. Poiché l’affare poteva ancora sfumare da un momento all’altro, insistette perché facessi subito i bagagli e salissi con lui a un alloggio che aveva già preso a Fulham, per essere vicino al negozio di curiosità in questione. Così, a mio dispetto, fuggii dal mio nemico quasi nel cuore della notte, ma anche da Philip… Mio fratello era spesso al South Kensington Museum, e, per procurarmi una specie di vita secondaria, pagai per qualche lezione alle Scuole d’Arte. Ne stavo tornando questa sera, quando ho visto l’abominio della desolazione camminare vivo giù per la lunga strada diritta, e il resto è come ha detto questo signore.
“I’ve got only one thing to say. I don’t deserve to be helped; and I don’t question or complain of my punishment; it is just, it ought to have happened. But I still question, with bursting brains, how it can have happened. Am I punished by miracle? or how can anyone but Philip and myself know I gave him a tiny coin in the middle of the sea?”
“It is an extraordinary problem,” admitted Flambeau.
“Not so extraordinary as the answer,” remarked Father Brown rather gloomily. “Miss Carstairs, will you be at home if we call at your Fulham place in an hour and a half hence?”
The girl looked at him, and then rose and put her gloves on. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll be there”; and almost instantly left the place.
That night the detective and the priest were still talking of the matter as they drew near the Fulham house, a tenement strangely mean even for a temporary residence of the Carstairs family.
“Of course the superficial, on reflection,” said Flambeau, “would think first of this Australian brother who’s been in trouble before, who’s come back so suddenly and who’s just the man to have shabby confederates. But I can’t see how he can come into the thing by any process of thought, unless…”
“Well?” asked his companion patiently.
Flambeau lowered his voice. “Unless the girl’s lover comes in, too, and he would be the blacker villain. The Australian chap did know that Hawker wanted the coin. But I can’t see how on earth he could know that Hawker had got it, unless Hawker signalled to him or his representative across the shore.”
“That is true,” assented the priest, with respect.
“Have you noted another thing?” went on Flambeau eagerly. “this Hawker hears his love insulted, but doesn’t strike till he’s got to the soft sand-hills, where he can be victor in a mere sham-fight. If he’d struck amid rocks and sea, he might have hurt his ally.”
“That is true again,” said Father Brown, nodding.
“And now, take it from the start. It lies between few people, but at least three. You want one person for suicide; two people for murder; but at least three people for blackmail”
“Why?” asked the priest softly.
“Well, obviously,” cried his friend, “there must be one to be exposed; one to threaten exposure; and one at least whom exposure would horrify.”
After a long ruminant pause, the priest said: “You miss a logical step. Three persons are needed as ideas. Only two are needed as agents.”
“What can you mean?” asked the other.
“Why shouldn’t a blackmailer,” asked Brown, in a low voice, “threaten his victim with himself? Suppose a wife became a rigid teetotaller in order to frighten her husband into concealing his pub-frequenting, and then wrote him blackmailing letters in another hand, threatening to tell his wife! Why shouldn’t it work? Suppose a father forbade a son to gamble and then, following him in a good disguise, threatened the boy with his own sham paternal strictness! Suppose—but, here we are, my friend.”
“My God!” cried Flambeau; “you don’t mean—”
An active figure ran down the steps of the house and showed under the golden lamplight the unmistakable head that resembled the Roman coin. “Miss Carstairs,” said Hawker without ceremony, “wouldn’t go in till you came.”
“Well,” observed Brown confidently, “don’t you think it’s the best thing she can do to stop outside—with you to look after her? You see, I rather guess you have guessed it all yourself.”
“Yes,” said the young man, in an undertone, “I guessed on the sands and now I know; that was why I let him fall soft.”
Taking a latchkey from the girl and the coin from Hawker, Flambeau let himself and his friend into the empty house and passed into the outer parlour. It was empty of all occupants but one. The man whom Father Brown had seen pass the tavern was standing against the wall as if at bay; unchanged, save that he had taken off his black coat and was wearing a brown dressing-gown.
“We have come,” said Father Brown politely, “to give back this coin to its owner.” And he handed it to the man with the nose.
Flambeau’s eyes rolled. “Is this man a coin-collector?” he asked.
“This man is Mr Arthur Carstairs,” said the priest positively, “and he is a coin-collector of a somewhat singular kind.”
The man changed colour so horribly that the crooked nose stood out on his face like a separate and comic thing. He spoke, nevertheless, with a sort of despairing dignity. “You shall see, then,” he said, “that I have not lost all the family qualities.” And he turned suddenly and strode into an inner room, slamming the door.
“Stop him!” shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it was too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for doctor and police.
An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body of the man in the brown dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping brown-paper parcels; out of which poured and rolled, not Roman, but very modern English coins.
The priest held up the bronze head of Caesar. “This,” he said, “was all that was left of the Carstairs Collection.”
After a silence he went on, with more than common gentleness: “It was a cruel will his wicked father made, and you see he did resent it a little. He hated the Roman money he had, and grew fonder of the real money denied him. He not only sold the Collection bit by bit, but sank bit by bit to the basest ways of making money— even to blackmailing his own family in a disguise. He blackmailed his brother from Australia for his little forgotten crime (that is why he took the cab to Wagga Wagga in Putney), he blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone could have noticed. And that, by the way, is why she had that supernatural guess when he was away on the sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up face quite close.”
There was another silence. “Well,” growled the detective, “and so this great numismatist and coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser.”
“Is there so great a difference?” asked Father Brown, in the same strange, indulgent tone. “What is there wrong about a miser that is not often as wrong about a collector? What is wrong, except… thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image; thou shalt not bow down to them nor serve them, for I…but we must go and see how the poor young people are getting on.”
“I think,” said Flambeau, “that in spite of everything, they are probably getting on very well.”
SEVEN
«Ho una cosa sola da dire. Non merito di essere aiutata; e non discuto né mi lagno della mia punizione; è giusta, doveva accadere. Ma continuo a domandarmi, col cervello che scoppia, come possa essere accaduta. Sono punita per miracolo? o come può chiunque, tranne Philip e me, sapere che gli diedi una minuscola moneta in mezzo al mare?»
«È un problema straordinario,» ammise Flambeau.
«Non tanto straordinario quanto la soluzione,» osservò Padre Brown piuttosto cupamente. «Miss Carstairs, sarà in casa se passiamo dalla sua abitazione di Fulham fra un’ora e mezza?»
La ragazza lo guardò, poi si alzò e si infilò i guanti. «Sì,» disse, «ci sarò»; e quasi all’istante lasciò il locale.
Quella notte il detective e il prete stavano ancora discorrendo della faccenda mentre si avvicinavano alla casa di Fulham, un caseggiato stranamente misero perfino per una residenza temporanea della famiglia Carstairs.
«Naturalmente, chi è superficiale, a ripensarci,» disse Flambeau, «penserebbe per primo a questo fratello australiano che si è già cacciato nei guai in passato, che è tornato così all’improvviso e che è proprio il tipo da avere loschi complici. Ma non riesco a vedere come possa entrarci per nessuna via di ragionamento, a meno che…»
«E allora?» chiese il compagno con pazienza.
Flambeau abbassò la voce. «A meno che non entri in gioco anche l’innamorato della ragazza, e allora sarebbe lui il furfante più nero. Il tale australiano sapeva bene che Hawker voleva la moneta. Ma non riesco proprio a vedere come diavolo potesse sapere che Hawker l’aveva avuta, a meno che Hawker non gli abbia fatto un segnale, a lui o a un suo incaricato, attraverso la spiaggia.»
«Questo è vero,» convenne il prete, con rispetto.
«Ha notato un’altra cosa?» proseguì Flambeau con foga. «Questo Hawker sente insultare la sua innamorata, ma non colpisce finché non è arrivato alle molli dune di sabbia, dove può essere vincitore in un combattimento solo simulato. Se avesse colpito tra le rocce e il mare, avrebbe potuto ferire il suo alleato.»
«Anche questo è vero,» disse Padre Brown, annuendo.
«E ora, prendiamola dall’inizio. La cosa sta fra poche persone, ma almeno tre. Per un suicidio ne basta una; per un omicidio, due; ma per un ricatto ce ne vogliono almeno tre.»
«Perché?» chiese il prete sottovoce.
«Ma è evidente,» gridò l’amico, «ci deve essere uno da smascherare; uno che minacci di smascherare; e almeno uno che lo smascheramento inorridirebbe.»
Dopo una lunga pausa meditabonda, il prete disse: «Ti sfugge un passaggio logico. Tre persone sono necessarie come idee. Solo due sono necessarie come agenti.»
«Che cosa vuoi dire?» chiese l’altro.
«Perché un ricattatore,» chiese Brown a voce bassa, «non dovrebbe minacciare la propria vittima con se stesso? Supponi che una moglie diventasse una rigida astemia allo scopo di spaventare il marito e indurlo a nascondere la propria frequentazione delle osterie, e poi gli scrivesse lettere ricattatorie con un’altra grafia, minacciando di riferire tutto a sua moglie! Perché non dovrebbe funzionare? Supponi che un padre proibisse a un figlio di giocare d’azzardo e poi, seguendolo ben travestito, minacciasse il ragazzo con quella stessa finta severità paterna! Supponi… ma eccoci arrivati, amico mio.»
«Dio mio!» gridò Flambeau; «non vorrai dire…»
Una figura svelta scese di corsa i gradini della casa e mostrò, sotto la dorata luce del lampione, l’inconfondibile testa che somigliava alla moneta romana. «Miss Carstairs,» disse Hawker senza cerimonie, «non voleva entrare prima che arrivaste.»
«Ebbene,» osservò Brown con sicurezza, «non pensa che la cosa migliore che possa fare sia restar fuori, con lei a vegliarla? Vede, direi che ha già indovinato tutto da solo.»
«Sì,» disse il giovane, a mezza voce, «ho indovinato sulla spiaggia e adesso lo so; ecco perché l’ho fatto cadere sul morbido.»
Preso un passe-partout dalla ragazza e la moneta da Hawker, Flambeau fece entrare sé e l’amico nella casa vuota e passò nel salottino d’ingresso. Era privo di ogni occupante tranne uno. L’uomo che Padre Brown aveva visto passare davanti alla taverna stava in piedi contro il muro come una bestia braccata; immutato, salvo che si era tolto il cappotto nero e indossava una veste da camera marrone.
«Siamo venuti,» disse Padre Brown cortesemente, «a restituire questa moneta al suo proprietario.» E la porse all’uomo dal naso.
Gli occhi di Flambeau rotearono. «Quest’uomo è un collezionista di monete?» chiese.
«Quest’uomo è il signor Arthur Carstairs,» disse il prete con fermezza, «ed è un collezionista di monete di specie alquanto singolare.»
L’uomo cambiò colore in modo così orribile che il naso storto gli spiccò sul viso come una cosa a sé e comica. Parlò, ciò nonostante, con una sorta di dignità disperata. «Vedrete, allora,» disse, «che non ho perduto tutte le qualità di famiglia.» E si voltò di scatto e si diresse a grandi passi in una stanza interna, sbattendo la porta.
«Fermatelo!» gridò Padre Brown, balzando e quasi cadendo su una sedia; e, dopo uno strattone o due, Flambeau ebbe la porta aperta. Ma era troppo tardi. In un silenzio di morte Flambeau attraversò a grandi passi la stanza e telefonò per un medico e la polizia.
Una bottiglietta di medicina vuota giaceva sul pavimento. Sul tavolo, il corpo dell’uomo nella veste da camera marrone giaceva in mezzo ai suoi pacchi di carta marrone squarciati e spalancati; dai quali si riversavano e rotolavano non monete romane, ma monete inglesi modernissime.
Il prete sollevò la testa di bronzo di Cesare. «Questa,» disse, «era tutto ciò che restava della collezione Carstairs.»
Dopo un silenzio proseguì, con più della consueta dolcezza: «Fu un testamento crudele, quello che il suo malvagio padre fece, e come vede egli lo risentì un poco. Odiava il denaro romano che possedeva, e si affezionò sempre più al denaro vero che gli era negato. Non solo vendette la Collezione pezzo per pezzo, ma sprofondò pezzo per pezzo nei modi più vili di far denaro, fino a ricattare la propria famiglia sotto travestimento. Ricattò suo fratello dall’Australia per il suo piccolo, dimenticato delitto (ecco perché prese la vettura per Wagga Wagga a Putney), ricattò sua sorella per il furto che lui solo poteva aver notato. E questo, per inciso, è il motivo per cui ella ebbe quell’intuizione soprannaturale mentre lui era lontano, sulle dune. La semplice figura e l’andatura, per quanto distanti, hanno più probabilità di ricordarci qualcuno che non un volto ben truccato tutto da vicino.»
Ci fu un altro silenzio. «Bene,» brontolò il detective, «e così questo grande numismatico e collezionista di monete non era altro che un volgare avaro.»
«C’è forse una differenza così grande?» chiese Padre Brown, nello stesso strano tono indulgente. «Che cosa c’è di male in un avaro che non sia altrettanto spesso male in un collezionista? Che cosa c’è di male, tranne… non ti farai alcuna immagine scolpita; non ti prostrerai davanti ad esse né le servirai, poiché io… ma dobbiamo andare a vedere come se la passano quei due poveri giovani.»
«Credo,» disse Flambeau, «che, malgrado tutto, se la passino probabilmente molto bene.»
SETTE
The Purple Wig
MR EDWARD NUTT, the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat at his desk, opening letters and marking proofs to the merry tune of a typewriter, worked by a vigorous young lady.
He was a stoutish, fair man, in his shirt-sleeves; his movements were resolute, his mouth firm and his tones final; but his round, rather babyish blue eyes had a bewildered and even wistful look that rather contradicted all this. Nor indeed was the expression altogether misleading. It might truly be said of him, as for many journalists in authority, that his most familiar emotion was one of continuous fear; fear of libel actions, fear of lost advertisements, fear of misprints, fear of the sack.
His life was a series of distracted compromises between the proprietor of the paper (and of him), who was a senile soap-boiler with three ineradicable mistakes in his mind, and the very able staff he had collected to run the paper; some of whom were brilliant and experienced men and (what was even worse) sincere enthusiasts for the political policy of the paper.
A letter from one of these lay immediately before him, and rapid and resolute as he was, he seemed almost to hesitate before opening it. He took up a strip of proof instead, ran down it with a blue eye, and a blue pencil, altered the word “adultery” to the word “impropriety,” and the word “Jew” to the word “Alien,” rang a bell and sent it flying upstairs.
Then, with a more thoughtful eye, he ripped open the letter from his more distinguished contributor, which bore a postmark of Devonshire, and read as follows:
DEAR NUTT,—As I see you’re working Spooks and Dooks at the same time, what about an article on that rum business of the Eyres of Exmoor; or as the old women call it down here, the Devil’s Ear of Eyre? The head of the family, you know, is the Duke of Exmoor; he is one of the few really stiff old Tory aristocrats left, a sound old crusted tyrant it is quite in our line to make trouble about. And I think I’m on the track of a story that will make trouble.
Of course I don’t believe in the old legend about James I; and as for you, you don’t believe in anything, not even in journalism. The legend, you’ll probably remember, was about the blackest business in English history—the poisoning of Overbury by that witch’s cat Frances Howard, and the quite mysterious terror which forced the King to pardon the murderers. There was a lot of alleged witchcraft mixed up with it; and the story goes that a man-servant listening at the keyhole heard the truth in a talk between the King and Carr; and the bodily ear with which he heard grew large and monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret. And though he had to be loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor of dukes, the elf-shaped ear is still recurrent in the family. Well, you don’t believe in black magic; and if you did, you couldn’t use it for copy. If a miracle happened in your office, you’d have to hush it up, now so many bishops are agnostics. But that is not the point The point is that there really is something queer about Exmoor and his family; something quite natural, I dare say, but quite abnormal. And the Ear is in it somehow, I fancy; either a symbol or a delusion or disease or something. Another tradition says that Cavaliers just after James I began to wear their hair long only to cover the ear of the first Lord Exmoor. This also is no doubt fanciful.
The reason I point it out to you is this: It seems to me that we make a mistake in attacking aristocracy entirely for its champagne and diamonds. Most men rather admire the nobs for having a good time, but I think we surrender too much when we admit that aristocracy has made even the aristocrats happy. I suggest a series of articles pointing out how dreary, how inhuman, how downright diabolist, is the very smell and atmosphere of some of these great houses. There are plenty of instances; but you couldn’t begin with a better one than the Ear of the Eyres. By the end of the week I think I can get you the truth about it.—Yours ever, FRANCIS FINN.
Mr Nutt reflected a moment, staring at his left boot; then he called out in a strong, loud and entirely lifeless voice, in which every syllable sounded alike: “Miss Barlow, take down a letter to Mr Finn, please.”
DEAR FINN,—I think it would do; copy should reach us second post Saturday.—Yours, E. NUTT.
This elaborate epistle he articulated as if it were all one word; and Miss Barlow rattled it down as if it were all one word. Then he took up another strip of proof and a blue pencil, and altered the word “supernatural” to the word “marvellous”, and the expression “shoot down” to the expression “repress”.
In such happy, healthful activities did Mr Nutt disport himself, until the ensuing Saturday found him at the same desk, dictating to the same typist, and using the same blue pencil on the first instalment of Mr Finn’s revelations. The opening was a sound piece of slashing invective about the evil secrets of princes, and despair in the high places of the earth. Though written violently, it was in excellent English; but the editor, as usual, had given to somebody else the task of breaking it up into sub-headings, which were of a spicier sort, as “Peeress and Poisons”, and “The Eerie Ear”, “The Eyres in their Eyrie”, and so on through a hundred happy changes. Then followed the legend of the Ear, amplified from Finn’s first letter, and then the substance of his later discoveries, as follows:
I know it is the practice of journalists to put the end of the story at the beginning and call it a headline. I know that journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. Your present correspondent thinks that this, like many other journalistic customs, is bad journalism; and that the Daily Reformer has to set a better example in such things. He proposes to tell his story as it occurred, step by step. He will use the real names of the parties, who in most cases are ready to confirm his testimony. As for the headlines, the sensational proclamations—they will come at the end.
La parrucca purpurea
MR EDWARD NUTT, l’operoso direttore del Daily Reformer, sedeva alla scrivania, aprendo lettere e correggendo bozze sull’allegro motivo d’una macchina da scrivere, azionata da una vigorosa signorina.
Era un uomo biondo e alquanto tarchiato, in maniche di camicia; i suoi gesti erano risoluti, ferma la bocca e perentorio il tono; ma i suoi occhi azzurri, tondi e piuttosto puerili, avevano un’aria smarrita e persino malinconica che tutto ciò in qualche modo smentiva. Né, in verità, l’espressione era del tutto ingannevole. Si poteva dire di lui con verità, come di molti giornalisti in posizione d’autorità, che l’emozione a lui più familiare fosse quella d’una paura continua: paura delle querele per diffamazione, paura degli inserzionisti perduti, paura dei refusi, paura del licenziamento.
La sua vita era una serie di compromessi frenetici tra il proprietario del giornale (e di lui stesso), che era un rimbambito fabbricante di sapone con tre errori inestirpabili in testa, e la ben capace redazione che aveva radunato per mandare avanti il giornale; alcuni dei quali erano uomini brillanti ed esperti e (ciò che era ancor peggio) sinceri entusiasti della linea politica del giornale.
Una lettera d’uno di costoro gli stava proprio davanti, e per quanto rapido e risoluto egli fosse, parve quasi esitare prima di aprirla. Prese invece una striscia di bozza, la percorse con un occhio azzurro e una matita azzurra, mutò la parola «adulterio» nella parola «scorrettezza», e la parola «ebreo» nella parola «straniero», suonò un campanello e la spedì di volo al piano di sopra.
Poi, con occhio più meditabondo, strappò e aprì la lettera del suo collaboratore più illustre, che recava un timbro postale del Devonshire, e che diceva così:
CARO NUTT, —Visto che stai lavorando insieme Fantasmi e Nobili, che ne diresti d’un articolo su quella strana faccenda degli Eyre di Exmoor; o, come la chiamano le vecchiette da queste parti, l’Orecchio del Diavolo di Eyre? Il capo della famiglia, sai, è il Duca di Exmoor; è uno dei pochi aristocratici Tory della vecchia, rigida razza rimasti, un solido tiranno all’antica tutto incrostato, su cui è proprio nel nostro stile suscitare scandalo. E credo di essere sulle tracce d’una storia che farà scandalo.
Naturalmente io non credo alla vecchia leggenda su Giacomo I; e quanto a te, tu non credi a nulla, nemmeno al giornalismo. La leggenda, probabilmente ricorderai, riguardava la vicenda più nera della storia inglese —l’avvelenamento di Overbury per opera di quella gatta stregonesca di Frances Howard, e il terrore del tutto misterioso che costrinse il Re a graziare gli assassini. C’era di mezzo un mucchio di presunta stregoneria; e la storia racconta che un servitore, origliando al buco della serratura, udì la verità in un colloquio tra il Re e Carr; e l’orecchio corporeo con cui aveva udito crebbe grande e mostruoso come per magia, tanto era spaventoso il segreto. E benché egli dovesse essere colmato di terre e d’oro e fatto capostipite di duchi, l’orecchio a forma d’elfo ricorre ancora nella famiglia. Ebbene, tu non credi alla magia nera; e se anche ci credessi, non potresti farne materia da stampa. Se un miracolo accadesse nel tuo ufficio, dovresti metterlo a tacere, ora che tanti vescovi sono agnostici. Ma non è questo il punto. Il punto è che c’è davvero qualcosa di strano in Exmoor e nella sua famiglia; qualcosa di del tutto naturale, oserei dire, ma del tutto anormale. E l’Orecchio c’entra in qualche modo, immagino; o come simbolo o come illusione o malattia o qualcosa del genere. Un’altra tradizione dice che i Cavalieri, subito dopo Giacomo I, cominciarono a portare i capelli lunghi soltanto per coprire l’orecchio del primo Lord Exmoor. Anche questo è senza dubbio fantasioso.
Il motivo per cui te lo faccio notare è questo: mi sembra che sbagliamo ad attaccare l’aristocrazia unicamente per il suo champagne e i suoi diamanti. La maggior parte degli uomini piuttosto ammira i signori per il fatto che se la spassano, ma credo che noi concediamo troppo quando ammettiamo che l’aristocrazia abbia reso felici persino gli aristocratici. Propongo una serie di articoli che mostrino quanto siano tetri, quanto disumani, quanto addirittura diabolici il puro odore e l’atmosfera di certe di queste grandi dimore. Gli esempi abbondano; ma non potresti cominciarne uno migliore che con l’Orecchio degli Eyre. Entro la fine della settimana credo di poterti procurare la verità in proposito. —Tuo sempre, FRANCIS FINN.
Mr Nutt rifletté un istante, fissando lo stivale sinistro; poi chiamò a voce alta, forte e del tutto priva di vita, in cui ogni sillaba suonava eguale all’altra: «Miss Barlow, prenda una lettera per Mr Finn, per favore».
CARO FINN, —Credo che possa andare; la copia dovrebbe arrivarci col secondo giro di posta di sabato. —Tuo, E. NUTT.
Questa elaborata epistola egli la articolò come se fosse tutta una parola sola; e Miss Barlow la batté a macchina come se fosse tutta una parola sola. Poi prese un’altra striscia di bozza e una matita azzurra, e mutò la parola «soprannaturale» nella parola «meraviglioso», e l’espressione «abbattere a fucilate» nell’espressione «reprimere».
In tali liete e salutari occupazioni Mr Nutt si trastullava, finché il sabato successivo non lo trovò alla medesima scrivania, a dettare alla medesima dattilografa, e a usare la medesima matita azzurra sulla prima puntata delle rivelazioni di Mr Finn. L’esordio era un solido pezzo di sferzante invettiva sui malvagi segreti dei principi, e sulla disperazione negli alti luoghi della terra. Benché scritto con violenza, era in inglese eccellente; ma il direttore, come al solito, aveva affidato a qualcun altro il compito di spezzettarlo in sottotitoli, che erano d’una specie più piccante, come «Nobildonna e veleni» e «L’Inquietante Orecchio», «Gli Eyre nel loro Nido», e così via attraverso un centinaio di felici trovate. Seguiva poi la leggenda dell’Orecchio, ampliata dalla prima lettera di Finn, e poi la sostanza delle sue scoperte successive, così come segue:
So che è costume dei giornalisti mettere la fine della storia al principio e chiamarla titolo. So che il giornalismo consiste in gran parte nel dire «Lord Jones è morto» a gente che non aveva mai saputo che Lord Jones fosse vivo. Il vostro presente corrispondente ritiene che questo, come molti altri costumi giornalistici, sia cattivo giornalismo; e che il Daily Reformer debba dare un esempio migliore in tali cose. Egli si propone di raccontare la sua storia così come si svolse, passo per passo. Userà i veri nomi delle persone, che nella maggior parte dei casi sono pronte a confermare la sua testimonianza. Quanto ai titoli, alle sensazionali proclamazioni —verranno alla fine.
I was walking along a public path that threads through a private Devonshire orchard and seems to point towards Devonshire cider, when I came suddenly upon just such a place as the path suggested. It was a long, low inn, consisting really of a cottage and two barns; thatched all over with the thatch that looks like brown and grey hair grown before history. But outside the door was a sign which called it the Blue Dragon; and under the sign was one of those long rustic tables that used to stand outside most of the free English inns, before teetotallers and brewers between them destroyed freedom. And at this table sat three gentlemen, who might have lived a hundred years ago.
Now that I know them all better, there is no difficulty about disentangling the impressions; but just then they looked like three very solid ghosts. The dominant figure, both because he was bigger in all three dimensions, and because he sat centrally in the length of the table, facing me, was a tall, fat man dressed completely in black, with a rubicund, even apoplectic visage, but a rather bald and rather bothered brow. Looking at him again, more strictly, I could not exactly say what it was that gave me the sense of antiquity, except the antique cut of his white clerical necktie and the barred wrinkles across his brow.
It was even less easy to fix the impression in the case of the man at the right end of the table, who, to say truth, was as commonplace a person as could be seen anywhere, with a round, brown-haired head and a round snub nose, but also clad in clerical black, of a stricter cut. It was only when I saw his broad curved hat lying on the table beside him that I realized why I connected him with anything ancient. He was a Roman Catholic priest.
Perhaps the third man, at the other end of the table, had really more to do with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical presence and more inconsiderate in his dress. His lank limbs were clad, I might also say clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons; he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair (which ought to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which, in conjunction with his yellow face, looked rather purple than red. The unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all the more notable because his hair was almost unnaturally healthy and curling, and he wore it full. But, after all analysis, I incline to think that what gave me my first old-fashioned impression was simply a set of tall, old-fashioned wine-glasses, one or two lemons and two churchwarden pipes. And also, perhaps, the old-world errand on which I had come.
Being a hardened reporter, and it being apparently a public inn, I did not need to summon much of my impudence to sit down at the long table and order some cider. The big man in black seemed very learned, especially about local antiquities; the small man in black, though he talked much less, surprised me with a yet wider culture. So we got on very well together; but the third man, the old gentleman in the tight pantaloons, seemed rather distant and haughty, until I slid into the subject of the Duke of Exmoor and his ancestry.
I thought the subject seemed to embarrass the other two a little; but it broke the spell of the third man’s silence most successfully. Speaking with restraint and with the accent of a highly educated gentleman, and puffing at intervals at his long churchwarden pipe, he proceeded to tell me some of the most horrible stories I have ever heard in my life: how one of the Eyres in the former ages had hanged his own father; and another had his wife scourged at the cart tail through the village; and another had set fire to a church full of children, and so on.
Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for public print—, such as the story of the Scarlet Nuns, the abominable story of the Spotted Dog, or the thing that was done in the quarry. And all this red roll of impieties came from his thin, genteel lips rather primly than otherwise, as he sat sipping the wine out of his tall, thin glass.
I could see that the big man opposite me was trying, if anything, to stop him; but he evidently held the old gentleman in considerable respect, and could not venture to do so at all abruptly. And the little priest at the other end of the-table, though free from any such air of embarrassment, looked steadily at the table, and seemed to listen to the recital with great pain—as well as he might.
“You don’t seem,” I said to the narrator, “to be very fond of the Exmoor pedigree.”
He looked at me a moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and tightening; then he deliberately broke his long pipe and glass on the table and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the framing temper of a fiend.
“These gentlemen,” he said, “will tell you whether I have cause to like it. The curse of the Eyres of old has lain heavy on this country, and many have suffered from it. They know there are none who have suffered from it as I have.” And with that he crushed a piece of the fallen glass under his heel, and strode away among the green twilight of the twinkling apple-trees.
“That is an extraordinary old gentleman,” I said to the other two; “do you happen to know what the Exmoor family has done to him? Who is he?”
The big man in black was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled bull; he did not at first seem to take it in. Then he said at last, “Don’t you know who he is?”
I reaffirmed my ignorance, and there was another silence; then the little priest said, still looking at the table, “That is the Duke of Exmoor.”
Then, before I could collect my scattered senses, he added equally quietly, but with an air of regularizing things: “My friend here is Doctor Mull, the Duke’s librarian. My name is Brown.”
Camminavo lungo un sentiero pubblico che s’insinua attraverso un frutteto privato del Devonshire e sembra additare il sidro del Devonshire, quando m’imbattei d’improvviso proprio in quel genere di luogo che il sentiero lasciava presagire. Era una lunga e bassa locanda, consistente in realtà d’un casolare e due granai; tutta ricoperta di paglia, quella paglia che par capigliatura bruna e grigia cresciuta prima della storia. Ma fuori della porta c’era un’insegna che la chiamava il Drago Azzurro; e sotto l’insegna c’era uno di quei lunghi tavoli rustici che un tempo stavano fuori dalla maggior parte delle libere locande inglesi, prima che astemi e birrai, gli uni e gli altri, distruggessero la libertà. E a questo tavolo sedevano tre gentiluomini, che avrebbero potuto vivere un centinaio d’anni fa.
Ora che li conosco tutti meglio, non c’è alcuna difficoltà a districare le impressioni; ma in quel momento parevano proprio tre fantasmi assai solidi. La figura dominante, sia perché era più grande in tutte e tre le dimensioni, sia perché sedeva al centro della lunghezza del tavolo, di fronte a me, era un uomo alto e grasso vestito tutto di nero, con un volto rubicondo, persino apoplettico, ma una fronte piuttosto calva e piuttosto turbata. Guardandolo di nuovo, più attentamente, non avrei saputo dire con esattezza che cosa mi desse quel senso d’antichità, se non il taglio antiquato della sua bianca cravatta clericale e le rughe a sbarre che gli solcavano la fronte.
Era ancor meno facile fissare l’impressione nel caso dell’uomo all’estremità destra del tavolo, il quale, a dire il vero, era una persona quanto più comune si possa vedere in qualsiasi luogo, con una testa rotonda dai capelli castani e un naso camuso e rotondo, ma anch’egli vestito di nero clericale, d’un taglio più severo. Fu solo quando vidi il suo largo cappello ricurvo posato sul tavolo accanto a lui che compresi perché lo associavo a qualcosa di antico. Era un prete cattolico romano.
Forse il terzo uomo, all’altra estremità del tavolo, c’entrava davvero più degli altri, benché fosse insieme più esile di presenza fisica e più trascurato nel vestire. Le membra affusolate erano fasciate, potrei anzi dire strette, in maniche e pantaloni grigi assai attillati; aveva un volto lungo, olivastro, aquilino, che pareva in qualche modo tanto più saturnino in quanto le mascelle da lanterna erano imprigionate nel colletto e nella cravatta al modo dell’antica foggia; e i suoi capelli (che avrebbero dovuto essere castano scuro) erano d’uno strano colore rossiccio e spento che, in unione col volto giallastro, appariva più purpureo che rosso. Quel colore discreto eppure insolito era tanto più notevole in quanto i capelli erano quasi innaturalmente sani e ricciuti, e li portava folti. Ma, dopo tutte le analisi, propendo a credere che ciò che mi diede la prima impressione all’antica fosse semplicemente una serie di alti calici da vino d’antica foggia, uno o due limoni e due pipe dal lungo cannello. E anche, forse, la commissione d’altri tempi che mi conduceva là.
Essendo un cronista navigato, e trattandosi a quanto pareva d’una locanda pubblica, non ebbi bisogno di far ricorso a molta della mia sfrontatezza per sedermi al lungo tavolo e ordinare del sidro. Il grosso uomo in nero sembrava assai erudito, specialmente in fatto d’antichità locali; il piccolo uomo in nero, benché parlasse assai meno, mi sorprese con una cultura ancor più vasta. Così andammo assai d’accordo tutti insieme; ma il terzo uomo, il vecchio gentiluomo dai pantaloni attillati, appariva piuttosto distante e altero, finché non scivolai sull’argomento del Duca di Exmoor e della sua stirpe.
Mi parve che l’argomento imbarazzasse un poco gli altri due; ma ruppe l’incantesimo del silenzio del terzo uomo nel modo più efficace. Parlando con misura e con l’accento d’un gentiluomo di elevata educazione, e tirando a intervalli boccate dalla sua lunga pipa dal cannello, egli prese a raccontarmi alcune delle storie più orribili che abbia mai udito in vita mia: come uno degli Eyre, in età remote, avesse impiccato il proprio padre; e un altro avesse fatto flagellare la moglie dietro un carro per tutto il villaggio; e un altro avesse dato fuoco a una chiesa piena di bambini, e così via.
Alcuni dei racconti, in verità, non sono adatti alla stampa pubblica —, come la storia delle Monache Scarlatte, l’abominevole storia del Cane Maculato, o la cosa che fu compiuta nella cava. E tutto questo rosso rotolo d’empietà usciva dalle sue labbra sottili e signorili in modo piuttosto compunto, mentre egli sedeva sorseggiando il vino dal suo alto e sottile bicchiere.
Vedevo bene che il grosso uomo di fronte a me stava cercando, semmai, di fermarlo; ma evidentemente teneva il vecchio gentiluomo in considerevole rispetto, e non osava farlo in maniera troppo brusca. E il piccolo prete all’altra estremità del tavolo, benché libero da ogni simile aria d’imbarazzo, guardava fisso il tavolo, e pareva ascoltare quel racconto con gran pena —come ben poteva essere.
«Non sembrate», dissi al narratore, «avere in gran simpatia la genealogia degli Exmoor».
Egli mi guardò un istante, le labbra ancora compunte, ma che sbiancavano e s’irrigidivano; poi deliberatamente spezzò sul tavolo la sua lunga pipa e il bicchiere e si alzò, il ritratto stesso del gentiluomo perfetto racchiudente in sé la collera d’un demonio.
«Questi signori», disse, «vi diranno se ho motivo di simpatizzarci. La maledizione degli antichi Eyre è gravata pesante su questa contrada, e molti ne hanno sofferto. Sanno bene che nessuno ne ha sofferto quanto me». E con ciò schiacciò un frammento del bicchiere caduto sotto il tacco, e s’allontanò a gran passi tra il verde crepuscolo dei meli scintillanti.
«Che straordinario vecchio gentiluomo», dissi agli altri due; «sapete per caso che cosa gli abbia fatto la famiglia Exmoor? Chi è?»
Il grosso uomo in nero mi fissava con l’aria selvaggia d’un toro sconcertato; sulle prime parve non capire. Poi disse alla fine: «Non sapete chi è?»
Ribadii la mia ignoranza, e vi fu un altro silenzio; poi il piccolo prete disse, sempre guardando il tavolo: «Quello è il Duca di Exmoor».
Poi, prima che potessi raccogliere i sensi sconvolti, egli aggiunse con altrettanta calma, ma con l’aria di mettere ordine nelle cose: «Il mio amico qui è il Dottor Mull, il bibliotecario del Duca. Il mio nome è Brown».
“But,” I stammered, “if that is the Duke, why does he damn all the old dukes like that?”
“He seems really to believe,” answered the priest called Brown, “that they have left a curse on him.” Then he added, with some irrelevance, “That’s why he wears a wig.”
It was a few moments before his meaning dawned on me. “You don’t mean that fable about the fantastic ear?” I demanded. “I’ve heard of it, of course, but surely it must be a superstitious yarn spun out of something much simpler. I’ve sometimes thought it was a wild version of one of those mutilation stories. They used to crop criminals’ ears in the sixteenth century.”
“I hardly think it was that,” answered the little man thoughtfully, “but it is not outside ordinary science or natural law for a family to have some deformity frequently reappearing—such as one ear bigger than the other.”
The big librarian had buried his big bald brow in his big red hands, like a man trying to think out his duty. “No,” he groaned. “You do the man a wrong after all. Understand, I’ve no reason to defend him, or even keep faith with him. He has been a tyrant to me as to everybody else. Don’t fancy because you see him sitting here that he isn’t a great lord in the worst sense of the word. He would fetch a man a mile to ring a bell a yard off—if it would summon another man three miles to fetch a matchbox three yards off. He must have a footman to carry his walking-stick; a body servant to hold up his opera-glasses—”
“But not a valet to brush his clothes,” cut in the priest, with a curious dryness, “for the valet would want to brush his wig, too.”
The librarian turned to him and seemed to forget my presence; he was strongly moved and, I think, a little heated with wine. “I don’t know how you know it, Father Brown,” he said, “but you are right. He lets the whole world do everything for him—except dress him. And that he insists on doing in a literal solitude like a desert. Anybody is kicked out of the house without a character who is so much as found near his dressing-room door.,
“He seems a pleasant old party,” I remarked.
“No,” replied Dr Mull quite simply; “and yet that is just what I mean by saying you are unjust to him after all. Gentlemen, the Duke does really feel the bitterness about the curse that he uttered just now. He does, with sincere shame and terror, hide under that purple wig something he thinks it would blast the sons of man to see. I know it is so; and I know it is not a mere natural disfigurement, like a criminal mutilation, or a hereditary disproportion in the features. I know it is worse than that; because a man told me who was present at a scene that no man could invent, where a stronger man than any of us tried to defy the secret, and was scared away from it.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Mull went on in oblivion of me, speaking out of the cavern of his hands. “I don’t mind telling you, Father, because it’s really more defending the poor Duke than giving him away. Didn’t you ever hear of the time when he very nearly lost all the estates?”
The priest shook his head; and the librarian proceeded to tell the tale as he had heard it from his predecessor in the same post, who had been his patron and instructor, and whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up to a certain point it was a common enough tale of the decline of a great family’s fortunes—the tale of a family lawyer. His lawyer, however, had the sense to cheat honestly, if the expression explains itself. Instead of using funds he held in trust, he took advantage of the Duke’s carelessness to put the family in a financial hole, in which it might be necessary for the Duke to let him hold them in reality.
The lawyer’s name was Isaac Green, but the Duke always called him Elisha; presumably in reference to the fact that he was quite bald, though certainly not more than thirty. He had risen very rapidly, but from very dirty beginnings; being first a “nark” or informer, and then a money-lender: but as solicitor to the Eyres he had the sense, as I say, to keep technically straight until he was ready to deal the final blow. The blow fell at dinner; and the old librarian said he should never forget the very look of the lampshades and the decanters, as the little lawyer, with a steady smile, proposed to the great landlord that they should halve the estates between them. The sequel certainly could not be overlooked; for the Duke, in dead silence, smashed a decanter on the man’s bald head as suddenly as I had seen him smash the glass that day in the orchard. It left a red triangular scar on the scalp, and the lawyer’s eyes altered, but not his smile.
He rose tottering to his feet, and struck back as such men do strike. “I am glad of that,” he said, “for now I can take the whole estate. The law will give it to me.”
Exmoor, it seems, was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed. “The law will give it you,” he said; “but you will not take it… Why not? Why? because it would mean the crack of doom for me, and if you take it I shall take off my wig… Why, you pitiful plucked fowl, anyone can see your bare head. But no man shall see mine and live.”
Well, you may say what you like and make it mean what you like. But Mull swears it is the solemn fact that the lawyer, after shaking his knotted fists in the air for an instant, simply ran from the room and never reappeared in the countryside; and since then Exmoor has been feared more for a warlock than even for a landlord and a magistrate.
Now Dr Mull told his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and with a passion I think at least partisan. I was quite conscious of the possibility that the whole was the extravagance of an old braggart and gossip. But before I end this half of my discoveries, I think it due to Dr Mull to record that my two first inquiries have confirmed his story. I learned from an old apothecary in the village that there was a bald man in evening dress, giving the name of Green, who came to him one night to have a three-cornered cut on his forehead plastered. And I learnt from the legal records and old newspapers that there was a lawsuit threatened, and at least begun, by one Green against the Duke of Exmoor.
«Ma», balbettai, «se quello è il Duca, perché maledice tutti i vecchi duchi a quel modo?»
«Sembra credere davvero», rispose il prete di nome Brown, «che essi gli abbiano lasciato addosso una maledizione». Poi aggiunse, con una certa incongruenza: «Ecco perché porta una parrucca».
Passarono alcuni istanti prima che il suo significato mi si facesse chiaro. «Non vorrete dire quella favola sull’orecchio fantastico?» domandai. «Ne ho sentito parlare, certo, ma dev’essere di sicuro una fandonia superstiziosa filata da qualcosa di assai più semplice. Ho talvolta pensato che fosse una versione stravagante d’una di quelle storie di mutilazioni. Un tempo tagliavano le orecchie ai criminali, nel sedicesimo secolo».
«Non credo proprio che fosse questo», rispose pensoso il piccolo uomo, «ma non è fuori dalla scienza comune o dalla legge naturale che una famiglia abbia qualche deformità che ricompare di frequente —come un orecchio più grande dell’altro».
Il grosso bibliotecario aveva sepolto la sua grande fronte calva nelle sue grosse mani rosse, come un uomo che cerchi di ragionare sul proprio dovere. «No», gemette. «In fondo fate torto a quell’uomo. Intendetemi, non ho ragione di difenderlo, né tanto meno di serbargli fede. È stato un tiranno per me come per chiunque altro. Non crediate, per il fatto che lo vedete seduto qui, che non sia un gran signore nel senso peggiore della parola. Farebbe venire un uomo da un miglio di distanza per suonare un campanello a un iarda —se ciò servisse a chiamare un altro uomo da tre miglia a prendere una scatola di fiammiferi a tre iarde. Deve avere un valletto che gli porti il bastone da passeggio; un servitore di camera che gli regga il binocolo da teatro —»
«Ma non un cameriere che gli spazzoli gli abiti», interruppe il prete, con una curiosa secchezza, «perché il cameriere vorrebbe spazzolargli anche la parrucca».
Il bibliotecario si volse a lui e parve dimenticare la mia presenza; era fortemente commosso e, credo, un po’ riscaldato dal vino. «Non so come lo sappiate, Padre Brown», disse, «ma avete ragione. Lascia che tutto il mondo faccia ogni cosa per lui —tranne vestirlo. E questo insiste a farlo in una solitudine letterale, come in un deserto. Chiunque venga anche solo trovato presso la porta del suo spogliatoio è cacciato di casa senza referenze».
«Sembra un vecchio tipo simpatico», osservai.
«No», rispose il Dottor Mull con la massima semplicità; «eppure è proprio questo che intendo dicendo che in fondo siete ingiusto con lui. Signori, il Duca sente davvero l’amarezza di quella maledizione che ha appena pronunciato. Egli, con sincera vergogna e terrore, nasconde sotto quella parrucca purpurea qualcosa che ritiene folgorerebbe i figli dell’uomo alla sola vista. So che è così; e so che non è una mera deformità naturale, come una mutilazione da criminale, o una sproporzione ereditaria dei lineamenti. So che è peggio di ciò; perché me lo ha detto un uomo che era presente a una scena che nessuno saprebbe inventare, in cui un uomo più forte di qualsiasi di noi tentò di sfidare il segreto, e ne fu scacciato dallo spavento».
Aprii la bocca per parlare, ma Mull proseguì dimentico di me, parlando dalla caverna delle sue mani. «Non mi dispiace dirvelo, Padre, perché in realtà è più difendere il povero Duca che tradirlo. Non avete mai sentito della volta in cui egli per poco non perse tutte le proprietà?»
Il prete scosse il capo; e il bibliotecario prese a raccontare la vicenda come l’aveva udita dal suo predecessore nel medesimo incarico, che era stato suo patrono e maestro, e in cui pareva riporre fiducia assoluta. Fino a un certo punto era una storia abbastanza comune del declino delle fortune d’una grande famiglia —la storia d’un avvocato di famiglia. Il suo avvocato, tuttavia, ebbe il buon senso d’imbrogliare onestamente, se l’espressione si spiega da sé. Invece d’usare i fondi che deteneva in fiducia, approfittò della trascuratezza del Duca per cacciare la famiglia in un buco finanziario, in cui poteva rendersi necessario che il Duca gliela lasciasse tenere in realtà.
L’avvocato si chiamava Isaac Green, ma il Duca lo chiamava sempre Eliseo; presumibilmente in riferimento al fatto che era del tutto calvo, benché di certo non avesse più di trent’anni. Era salito assai rapidamente, ma da inizi assai sordidi; essendo dapprima uno «spione» o informatore, e poi uno strozzino: ma come procuratore degli Eyre ebbe il buon senso, come dico, di restare tecnicamente in regola finché non fu pronto a vibrare il colpo finale. Il colpo cadde a cena; e il vecchio bibliotecario disse che non avrebbe mai dimenticato l’aspetto stesso dei paralumi e delle caraffe, mentre il piccolo avvocato, con un sorriso fermo, proponeva al gran signore terriero che si spartissero le proprietà a metà. Il seguito di certo non poté passare inosservato; poiché il Duca, in un silenzio di morte, fracassò una caraffa sulla testa calva dell’uomo, con la medesima subitaneità con cui l’avevo visto fracassare il bicchiere quel giorno nel frutteto. Lasciò una rossa cicatrice triangolare sul cuoio capelluto, e gli occhi dell’avvocato mutarono, ma non il suo sorriso.
Egli si rizzò vacillante in piedi, e restituì il colpo come tali uomini restituiscono i colpi. «Me ne rallegro», disse, «perché ora posso prendermi l’intera proprietà. La legge me la darà».
Exmoor, a quanto pare, era bianco come la cenere, ma gli occhi gli ardevano ancora. «La legge te la darà», disse; «ma tu non la prenderai… Perché no? Perché? Perché significherebbe per me lo schianto del giudizio finale, e se tu la prendi io mi toglierò la parrucca… Ma sì, tu miserabile pollo spennato, chiunque può vedere la tua testa nuda. Ma nessun uomo vedrà la mia e vivrà».
Ebbene, potete dire ciò che vi pare e dargli il senso che vi pare. Ma Mull giura che è fatto solenne che l’avvocato, dopo aver scosso per un istante i pugni nodosi nell’aria, semplicemente fuggì dalla stanza e non ricomparve mai più in tutto il circondario; e da allora Exmoor è stato temuto più come stregone che persino come signore terriero e magistrato.
Ora, il Dottor Mull raccontò la sua storia con gesti teatrali piuttosto scomposti, e con una passione che credo quanto meno di parte. Ero ben cosciente della possibilità che il tutto fosse la stravaganza d’un vecchio spaccone e pettegolo. Ma prima di chiudere questa metà delle mie scoperte, credo doveroso verso il Dottor Mull registrare che le mie prime due indagini hanno confermato la sua storia. Ho appreso da un vecchio speziale del villaggio che c’era stato un uomo calvo in abito da sera, che dava il nome di Green, il quale venne da lui una notte a farsi medicare un taglio a tre punte sulla fronte. E ho appreso dagli atti legali e dai vecchi giornali che una causa era stata minacciata, e per lo meno avviata, da un certo Green contro il Duca di Exmoor.
Mr Nutt, of the Daily Reformer, wrote some highly incongruous words across the top of the copy, made some highly mysterious marks down the side of it, and called to Miss Barlow in the same loud, monotonous voice: “Take down a letter to Mr Finn.”
DEAR FINN,—Your copy will do, but I have had to headline it a bit; and our public would never stand a Romanist priest in the story— you must keep your eye on the suburbs. I’ve altered him to Mr Brown, a Spiritualist.
Yours,
E. NUTT.
A day or two afterward found the active and judicious editor examining, with blue eyes that seemed to grow rounder and rounder, the second instalment of Mr Finn’s tale of mysteries in high life. It began with the words:
I have made an astounding discovery. I freely confess it is quite different from anything I expected to discover, and will give a much more practical shock to the public. I venture to say, without any vanity, that the words I now write will be read all over Europe, and certainly all over America and the Colonies. And yet I heard all I have to tell before I left this same little wooden table in this same little wood of apple-trees.
I owe it all to the small priest Brown; he is an extraordinary man. The big librarian had left the table, perhaps ashamed of his long tongue, perhaps anxious about the storm in which his mysterious master had vanished: anyway, he betook himself heavily in the Duke’s tracks through the trees. Father Brown had picked up one of the lemons and was eyeing it with an odd pleasure.
“What a lovely colour a lemon is!” he said. “There’s one thing I don’t like about the Duke’s wig—the colour.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I answered.
“I dare say he’s got good reason to cover his ears, like King Midas,” went on the priest, with a cheerful simplicity which somehow seemed rather flippant under the circumstances. “I can quite understand that it’s nicer to cover them with hair than with brass plates or leather flaps. But if he wants to use hair, why doesn’t he make it look like hair? There never was hair of that colour in this world. It looks more like a sunset-cloud coming through the wood. Why doesn’t he conceal the family curse better, if he’s really so ashamed of it? Shall I tell you? It’s because he isn’t ashamed of it. He’s proud of it”
“It’s an ugly wig to be proud of—and an ugly story,” I said.
“Consider,” replied this curious little man, “how you yourself really feel about such things. I don’t suggest you’re either more snobbish or more morbid than the rest of us: but don’t you feel in a vague way that a genuine old family curse is rather a fine thing to have? Would you be ashamed, wouldn’t you be a little proud, if the heir of the Glamis horror called you his friend? or if Byron’s family had confided, to you only, the evil adventures of their race? Don’t be too hard on the aristocrats themselves if their heads are as weak as ours would be, and they are snobs about their own sorrows.”
“By Jove!” I cried; “and that’s true enough. My own mother’s family had a banshee; and, now I come to think of it, it has comforted me in many a cold hour.”
“And think,” he went on, “of that stream of blood and poison that spurted from his thin lips the instant you so much as mentioned his ancestors. Why should he show every stranger over such a Chamber of Horrors unless he is proud of it? He doesn’t conceal his wig, he doesn’t conceal his blood, he doesn’t conceal his family curse, he doesn’t conceal the family crimes—but—”
The little man’s voice changed so suddenly, he shut his hand so sharply, and his eyes so rapidly grew rounder and brighter like a waking owl’s, that it had all the abruptness of a small explosion on the table.
“But,” he ended, “he does really conceal his toilet.”
It somehow completed the thrill of my fanciful nerves that at that instant the Duke appeared again silently among the glimmering trees, with his soft foot and sunset-hued hair, coming round the corner of the house in company with his librarian. Before he came within earshot, Father Brown had added quite composedly, “Why does he really hide the secret of what he does with the purple wig? Because it isn’t the sort of secret we suppose.”
The Duke came round the corner and resumed his seat at the head of the table with all his native dignity. The embarrassment of the librarian left him hovering on his hind legs, like a huge bear. The Duke addressed the priest with great seriousness. “Father Brown,” he said, “Doctor Mull informs me that you have come here to make a request. I no longer profess an observance of the religion of my fathers; but for their sakes, and for the sake of the days when we met before, I am very willing to hear you. But I presume you would rather be heard in private.”
Whatever I retain of the gentleman made me stand up. Whatever I have attained of the journalist made me stand still. Before this paralysis could pass, the priest had made a momentarily detaining motion. “If,” he said, “your Grace will permit me my real petition, or if I retain any right to advise you, I would urge that as many people as possible should be present. All over this country I have found hundreds, even of my own faith and flock, whose imaginations are poisoned by the spell which I implore you to break. I wish we could have all Devonshire here to see you do it.”
“To see me do what?” asked the Duke, arching his eyebrows.
“To see you take off your wig,” said Father Brown.
The Duke’s face did not move; but he looked at his petitioner with a glassy stare which was the most awful expression I have ever seen on a human face. I could see the librarian’s great legs wavering under him like the shadows of stems in a pool; and I could not banish from my own brain the fancy that the trees all around us were filling softly in the silence with devils instead of birds.
Mr Nutt, del Daily Reformer, scrisse alcune parole assai incongrue in cima alla copia, tracciò alcuni segni assai misteriosi lungo il margine, e chiamò Miss Barlow con la medesima voce forte e monotona: «Prenda una lettera per Mr Finn».
CARO FINN, —La tua copia va bene, ma ho dovuto metterci un po’ di titoli; e il nostro pubblico non tollererebbe mai un prete papista nella storia — devi tenere d’occhio i sobborghi. L’ho trasformato in Mr Brown, uno spiritista.
Tuo,
E. NUTT.
Un giorno o due dopo, l’attivo e giudizioso direttore esaminava, con occhi azzurri che parevano farsi sempre più tondi, la seconda puntata del racconto di misteri dell’alta società di Mr Finn. Cominciava con le parole:
Ho fatto una scoperta sbalorditiva. Confesso liberamente che è del tutto diversa da qualsiasi cosa mi aspettassi di scoprire, e darà al pubblico uno scossone assai più concreto. Oso dire, senza alcuna vanità, che le parole che ora scrivo saranno lette in tutta Europa, e di certo in tutta l’America e nelle Colonie. Eppure udii tutto ciò che ho da raccontare prima di lasciare questo stesso piccolo tavolo di legno in questo stesso piccolo bosco di meli.
Lo devo tutto al piccolo prete Brown; è un uomo straordinario. Il grosso bibliotecario aveva lasciato il tavolo, forse vergognoso della sua lunga lingua, forse inquieto per la tempesta in cui il suo misterioso padrone era svanito: comunque si mise pesantemente sulle tracce del Duca attraverso gli alberi. Padre Brown aveva raccolto uno dei limoni e lo osservava con uno strano piacere.
«Che bel colore ha un limone!» disse. «C’è una cosa che non mi piace della parrucca del Duca —il colore».
«Non credo di capire», risposi.
«Oserei dire che ha buona ragione di coprirsi le orecchie, come Re Mida», proseguì il prete, con una gaia semplicità che in qualche modo pareva piuttosto leggera date le circostanze. «Capisco benissimo che è più piacevole coprirle coi capelli che con piastre d’ottone o falde di cuoio. Ma se vuol servirsi dei capelli, perché non li fa sembrare capelli? Non ci furono mai al mondo capelli di quel colore. Sembra piuttosto una nuvola di tramonto che filtra attraverso il bosco. Perché non nasconde meglio la maledizione di famiglia, se davvero ne ha tanta vergogna? Volete che ve lo dica? È perché non ne ha vergogna. Ne è fiero».
«È una brutta parrucca di cui essere fieri —e una brutta storia», dissi.
«Riflettete», rispose questo curioso omino, «su come voi stesso sentiate davvero simili cose. Non insinuo che siate né più snob né più morboso del resto di noi: ma non sentite forse in modo vago che una genuina antica maledizione di famiglia è una cosa piuttosto pregevole da possedere? Non vi vergognereste, non sareste un po’ fiero, se l’erede dell’orrore di Glamis vi chiamasse suo amico? o se la famiglia di Byron avesse confidato, a voi soltanto, le malvagie avventure della loro stirpe? Non siate troppo severo con gli aristocratici stessi se le loro teste sono deboli quanto lo sarebbero le nostre, e sono degli snob riguardo ai propri dolori».
«Perbacco!» esclamai; «ed è proprio vero. La famiglia di mia madre aveva una banshee; e, ora che ci penso, mi ha confortato in più d’un’ora gelida».
«E pensate», proseguì, «a quel fiotto di sangue e veleno che gli sprizzò dalle sottili labbra nell’istante stesso in cui menzionaste i suoi antenati. Perché mai dovrebbe mostrare a ogni estraneo una simile Camera degli Orrori, se non ne fosse fiero? Non nasconde la sua parrucca, non nasconde il suo sangue, non nasconde la maledizione di famiglia, non nasconde i delitti di famiglia —ma —»
La voce dell’omino mutò così di colpo, egli chiuse la mano così di scatto, e i suoi occhi si fecero così rapidamente più tondi e più brillanti come quelli d’un gufo che si desta, che tutto ciò ebbe la subitaneità d’una piccola esplosione sul tavolo.
«Ma», concluse, «egli nasconde davvero la sua toeletta».
Completò in qualche modo il brivido dei miei nervi fantasiosi il fatto che in quell’istante il Duca ricomparve silenzioso tra gli alberi luccicanti, col suo passo felpato e i capelli color tramonto, girando l’angolo della casa in compagnia del suo bibliotecario. Prima che giungesse a portata d’orecchio, Padre Brown aveva aggiunto con tutta calma: «Perché mai nasconde davvero il segreto di ciò che fa con la parrucca purpurea? Perché non è il genere di segreto che supponiamo».
Il Duca girò l’angolo e riprese il suo posto a capo del tavolo con tutta la sua innata dignità. L’imbarazzo del bibliotecario lo lasciò librato sulle zampe posteriori, come un enorme orso. Il Duca si rivolse al prete con gran serietà. «Padre Brown», disse, «il Dottor Mull m’informa che siete venuto qui a farmi una richiesta. Non professo più l’osservanza della religione dei miei padri; ma per amor loro, e per amore dei giorni in cui c’incontrammo un tempo, sono ben disposto ad ascoltarvi. Ma presumo che preferireste essere ascoltato in privato».
Quel poco che serbo del gentiluomo mi fece alzare in piedi. Quel poco che ho acquisito del giornalista mi fece restare immobile. Prima che questa paralisi potesse passare, il prete fece un gesto di trattenermi per un momento. «Se», disse, «Vostra Grazia mi permetterà la mia vera preghiera, o se conservo alcun diritto di consigliarvi, insisterei perché fossero presenti quante più persone possibile. In tutta questa contrada ho trovato centinaia di persone, anche della mia stessa fede e del mio stesso gregge, le cui immaginazioni sono avvelenate dall’incantesimo che vi supplico di spezzare. Vorrei che potessimo avere qui tutto il Devonshire a vedervelo fare».
«A vedermi fare che cosa?» chiese il Duca, inarcando le sopracciglia.
«A vedervi togliere la parrucca», disse Padre Brown.
Il volto del Duca non si mosse; ma egli guardò il suo supplice con uno sguardo vitreo che era l’espressione più spaventosa che io abbia mai visto su un volto umano. Vedevo le grosse gambe del bibliotecario vacillare sotto di lui come le ombre degli steli in uno stagno; e non riuscivo a bandire dalla mia mente la fantasia che gli alberi tutt’intorno a noi si andassero riempiendo dolcemente, nel silenzio, di demoni anziché d’uccelli.
“I spare you,” said the Duke in a voice of inhuman pity. “I refuse. If I gave you the faintest hint of the load of horror I have to bear alone, you would lie shrieking at these feet of mine and begging to know no more. I will spare you the hint. You shall not spell the first letter of what is written on the altar of the Unknown God.”
“I know the Unknown God,” said the little priest, with an unconscious grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. “I know his name; it is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among us. And I say to you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it. I entreat your Grace to end this nightmare now and here at this table.”
“If I did,” said the Duke in a low voice, “you and all you believe, and all by which alone you live, would be the first to shrivel and perish. You would have an instant to know the great Nothing before you died.”
“The Cross of Christ be between me and harm,” said Father Brown. “Take off your wig.”
I was leaning over the table in ungovernable excitement; in listening to this extraordinary duel half a thought had come into my head. “Your Grace,” I cried, “I call your bluff. Take off that wig or I will knock it off.”
I suppose I can be prosecuted for assault, but I am very glad I did it. When he said, in the same voice of stone, “I refuse,” I simply sprang on him. For three long instants he strained against me as if he had all hell to help him; but I forced his head until the hairy cap fell off it. I admit that, whilst wrestling, I shut my eyes as it fell.
I was awakened by a cry from Mull, who was also by this time at the Duke’s side. His head and mine were both bending over the bald head of the wigless Duke. Then the silence was snapped by the librarian exclaiming: “What can it mean? Why, the man had nothing to hide. His ears are just like everybody else’s.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown, “that is what he had to hide.”
The priest walked straight up to him, but strangely enough did not even glance at his ears. He stared with an almost comical seriousness at his bald forehead, and pointed to a three-cornered cicatrice, long healed, but still discernible. “Mr Green, I think.” he said politely, “and he did get the whole estate after all.”
And now let me tell the readers of the Daily Reformer what I think the most remarkable thing in the whole affair. This transformation scene, which will seem to you as wild and purple as a Persian fairy-tale, has been (except for my technical assault) strictly legal and constitutional from its first beginnings. This man with the odd scar and the ordinary ears is not an impostor. Though (in one sense) he wears another man’s wig and claims another man’s ear, he has not stolen another man’s coronet. He really is the one and only Duke of Exmoor. What happened was this. The old Duke really had a slight malformation of the ear, which really was more or less hereditary. He really was morbid about it; and it is likely enough that he did invoke it as a kind of curse in the violent scene (which undoubtedly happened) in which he struck Green with the decanter. But the contest ended very differently. Green pressed his claim and got the estates; the dispossessed nobleman shot himself and died without issue. After a decent interval the beautiful English Government revived the “extinct” peerage of Exmoor, and bestowed it, as is usual, on the most important person, the person who had got the property.
This man used the old feudal fables—properly, in his snobbish soul, really envied and admired them. So that thousands of poor English people trembled before a mysterious chieftain with an ancient destiny and a diadem of evil stars—when they are really trembling before a guttersnipe who was a pettifogger and a pawnbroker not twelve years ago. I think it very typical of the real case against our aristocracy as it is, and as it will be till God sends us braver men.
Mr Nutt put down the manuscript and called out with unusual sharpness: “Miss Barlow, please take down a letter to Mr Finn.”
DEAR FINN,—You must be mad; we can’t touch this. I wanted vampires and the bad old days and aristocracy hand-in-hand with superstition. They like that But you must know the Exmoors would never forgive this. And what would our people say then, I should like to know! Why, Sir Simon is one of Exmoor’s greatest pals; and it would ruin that cousin of the Eyres that’s standing for us at Bradford. Besides, old Soap-Suds was sick enough at not getting his peerage last year; he’d sack me by wire if I lost him it with such lunacy as this. And what about Duffey? He’s doing us some rattling articles on “The Heel of the Norman.” And how can he write about Normans if the man’s only a solicitor? Do be reasonable.—Yours, E. NUTT.
As Miss Barlow rattled away cheerfully, he crumpled up the copy and tossed it into the waste-paper basket; but not before he had, automatically and by force of habit, altered the word “God” to the word “circumstances.”
EIGHT
«Vi risparmio», disse il Duca con voce d’una pietà disumana. «Rifiuto. Se vi dessi il più tenue accenno del carico d’orrore che devo portare da solo, giacereste urlando a questi miei piedi implorando di non sapere altro. Vi risparmierò l’accenno. Non compiterete la prima lettera di ciò che è scritto sull’altare del Dio Ignoto».
«Io conosco il Dio Ignoto», disse il piccolo prete, con un’inconsapevole grandezza di certezza che si ergeva come una torre di granito. «Conosco il suo nome; è Satana. Il vero Dio si fece carne e abitò tra noi. E vi dico che, ovunque troviate uomini governati unicamente dal mistero, è il mistero dell’iniquità. Se il diavolo vi dice che qualcosa è troppo spaventoso da guardare, guardatela. Se dice che qualcosa è troppo terribile da udire, uditela. Se ritenete qualche verità insopportabile, sopportatela. Supplico Vostra Grazia di porre fine a questo incubo, ora e qui a questo tavolo».
«Se lo facessi», disse il Duca a bassa voce, «voi e tutto ciò in cui credete, e tutto ciò per cui soltanto vivete, sareste i primi ad avvizzire e perire. Avreste un istante per conoscere il grande Nulla prima di morire».
«La Croce di Cristo sia tra me e il male», disse Padre Brown. «Toglietevi la parrucca».
Ero chino sul tavolo in un’eccitazione incontrollabile; ascoltando questo straordinario duello, mezza idea mi era balenata in testa. «Vostra Grazia», gridai, «vi sfido a mostrare le carte. Toglietevi quella parrucca o gliela farò saltar via io».
Suppongo di poter essere perseguito per aggressione, ma sono ben lieto d’averlo fatto. Quando egli disse, con la medesima voce di pietra, «Rifiuto», gli piombai semplicemente addosso. Per tre lunghi istanti egli resistette contro di me come se avesse tutto l’inferno in suo aiuto; ma gli forzai il capo finché il berretto peloso non gli cadde. Ammetto che, mentre lottavo, chiusi gli occhi quando cadde.
Fui destato da un grido di Mull, che a quel punto era anch’egli al fianco del Duca. La sua testa e la mia erano entrambe chine sopra la testa calva del Duca senza parrucca. Poi il silenzio fu spezzato dal bibliotecario che esclamava: «Che cosa può significare? Ma quest’uomo non aveva nulla da nascondere. Le sue orecchie sono proprio come quelle di tutti gli altri».
«Sì», disse Padre Brown, «è questo che aveva da nascondere».
Il prete gli si avvicinò dritto, ma, cosa abbastanza strana, non gettò nemmeno un’occhiata alle sue orecchie. Fissò con una serietà quasi comica la fronte calva di lui, e indicò una cicatrice a tre punte, da tempo rimarginata, ma ancora discernibile. «Il signor Green, immagino», disse cortesemente, «e in fin dei conti l’intera proprietà se l’è presa davvero».
E ora lasciate che dica ai lettori del Daily Reformer ciò che ritengo la cosa più notevole dell’intera vicenda. Questa scena di trasformazione, che vi parrà tanto stravagante e purpurea quanto una fiaba persiana, è stata (a parte la mia aggressione tecnica) rigorosamente legale e costituzionale fin dai suoi primi inizi. Quest’uomo dalla strana cicatrice e dalle orecchie ordinarie non è un impostore. Benché (in un certo senso) porti la parrucca d’un altro uomo e rivendichi l’orecchio d’un altro uomo, non ha rubato la corona d’un altro uomo. È davvero l’unico e solo Duca di Exmoor. Ecco che cosa accadde. Il vecchio Duca aveva davvero una lieve malformazione dell’orecchio, che davvero era più o meno ereditaria. Ne era davvero morbosamente ossessionato; ed è assai probabile che egli l’abbia invocata come una sorta di maledizione nella scena violenta (che senza dubbio avvenne) in cui colpì Green con la caraffa. Ma la contesa finì assai diversamente. Green fece valere la sua rivendicazione e ottenne le proprietà; il nobile spossessato si sparò e morì senza eredi. Dopo un decoroso intervallo il bel Governo inglese fece rivivere il titolo nobiliare «estinto» di Exmoor, e lo conferì, com’è d’uso, alla persona più importante, la persona che aveva ottenuto le proprietà.
Quest’uomo si servì delle vecchie favole feudali —e, come si conviene, nella sua anima snob davvero le invidiava e le ammirava. Cosicché migliaia di poveri inglesi tremavano davanti a un misterioso capo dall’antico destino e da un diadema di stelle maligne —mentre in realtà tremano davanti a uno straccione che era un azzeccagarbugli e un usuraio meno di dodici anni fa. Lo ritengo assai tipico del vero atto d’accusa contro la nostra aristocrazia com’è, e come sarà finché Dio non ci manderà uomini più valorosi.
Mr Nutt posò il manoscritto e chiamò con insolita asprezza: «Miss Barlow, prenda per favore una lettera per Mr Finn».
CARO FINN, —Devi essere impazzito; non possiamo toccare questa roba. Volevo vampiri e i cattivi tempi antichi e l’aristocrazia a braccetto con la superstizione. Quella roba piace. Ma devi ben sapere che gli Exmoor non perdonerebbero mai questo. E che cosa direbbe allora la nostra gente, vorrei saperlo! Ma insomma, Sir Simon è uno dei più grandi amiconi di Exmoor; e rovinerebbe quel cugino degli Eyre che si candida per noi a Bradford. Per giunta, il vecchio Schiuma-di-Sapone era già abbastanza inviperito per non aver ottenuto il suo titolo nobiliare l’anno scorso; mi licenzierebbe per telegramma se glielo facessi perdere con una follia come questa. E che ne facciamo di Duffey? Ci sta scrivendo certi articoli coi fiocchi su «Il Tallone del Normanno». E come può scrivere di Normanni se quell’uomo è soltanto un procuratore? Sii ragionevole. —Tuo, E. NUTT.
Mentre Miss Barlow batteva via allegramente, egli accartocciò la copia e la gettò nel cestino della carta straccia; ma non prima d’aver, automaticamente e per forza d’abitudine, mutato la parola «Dio» nella parola «circostanze».
OTTO
The Perishing of the Pendragons
FATHER BROWN was in no mood for adventures. He had lately fallen ill with over-work, and when he began to recover, his friend Flambeau had taken him on a cruise in a small yacht with Sir Cecil Fanshaw, a young Cornish squire and an enthusiast for Cornish coast scenery. But Brown was still rather weak; he was no very happy sailor; and though he was never of the sort that either grumbles or breaks down, his spirits did not rise above patience and civility. When the other two men praised the ragged violet sunset or the ragged volcanic crags, he agreed with them. When Flambeau pointed out a rock shaped like a dragon, he looked at it and thought it very like a dragon. When Fanshaw more excitedly indicated a rock that was like Merlin, he looked at it, and signified assent. When Flambeau asked whether this rocky gate of the twisted river was not the gate of Fairyland, he said “Yes.” He heard the most important things and the most trivial with the same tasteless absorption. He heard that the coast was death to all but careful seamen; he also heard that the ship’s cat was asleep. He heard that Fanshaw couldn’t find his cigar-holder anywhere; he also heard the pilot deliver the oracle “Both eyes bright, she’s all right; one eye winks, down she sinks.” He heard Flambeau say to Fanshaw that no doubt this meant the pilot must keep both eyes open and be spry. And he heard Fanshaw say to Flambeau that, oddly enough, it didn’t mean this: it meant that while they saw two of the coast lights, one near and the other distant, exactly side by side, they were in the right river-channel; but that if one light was hidden behind the other, they were going on the rocks. He heard Fanshaw add that his country was full of such quaint fables and idioms; it was the very home of romance; he even pitted this part of Cornwall against Devonshire, as a claimant to the laurels of Elizabethan seamanship. According to him there had been captains among these coves and islets compared with whom Drake was practically a landsman. He heard Flambeau laugh, and ask if, perhaps, the adventurous title of “Westward Ho!” only meant that all Devonshire men wished they were living in Cornwall. He heard Fanshaw say there was no need to be silly; that not only had Cornish captains been heroes, but that they were heroes still: that near that very spot there was an old admiral, now retired, who was scarred by thrilling voyages full of adventures; and who had in his youth found the last group of eight Pacific Islands that was added to the chart of the world. This Cecil Fanshaw was, in person, of the kind that commonly urges such crude but pleasing enthusiasms; a very young man, light-haired, high-coloured, with an eager profile; with a boyish bravado of spirits, but an almost girlish delicacy of tint and type. The big shoulders, black brows and black mousquetaire swagger of Flambeau were a great contrast.
All these trivialities Brown heard and saw; but heard them as a tired man hears a tune in the railway wheels, or saw them as a sick man sees the pattern of his wall-paper. No one can calculate the turns of mood in convalescence: but Father Brown’s depression must have had a great deal to do with his mere unfamiliarity with the sea. For as the river mouth narrowed like the neck of a bottle, and the water grew calmer and the air warmer and more earthly, he seemed to wake up and take notice like a baby. They had reached that phase just after sunset when air and water both look bright, but earth and all its growing things look almost black by comparison. About this particular evening, however, there was something exceptional. It was one of those rare atmospheres in which a smoked-glass slide seems to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on cloudier days. The trampled earth of the river-banks and the peaty stain in the pools did not look drab but glowing umber, and the dark woods astir in the breeze did not look, as usual, dim blue with mere depth of distance, but more like wind-tumbled masses of some vivid violet blossom. This magic clearness and intensity in the colours was further forced on Brown’s slowly reviving senses by something romantic and even secret in the very form of the landscape.
The river was still well wide and deep enough for a pleasure boat so small as theirs; but the curves of the country-side suggested that it was closing in on either hand; the woods seemed to be making broken and flying attempts at bridge-building—as if the boat were passing from the romance of a valley to the romance of a hollow and so to the supreme romance of a tunnel. Beyond this mere look of things there was little for Brown’s freshening fancy to feed on; he saw no human beings, except some gipsies trailing along the river bank, with faggots and osiers cut in the forest; and one sight no longer unconventional, but in such remote parts still uncommon: a dark-haired lady, bare-headed, and paddling her own canoe. If Father Brown ever attached any importance to either of these, he certainly forgot them at the next turn of the river which brought in sight a singular object.
The water seemed to widen and split, being cloven by the dark wedge of a fish-shaped and wooded islet. With the rate at which they went, the islet seemed to swim towards them like a ship; a ship with a very high prow—or, to speak more strictly, a very high funnel. For at the extreme point nearest them stood up an odd-looking building, unlike anything they could remember or connect with any purpose. It was not specially high, but it was too high for its breadth to be called anything but a tower. Yet it appeared to be built entirely of wood, and that in a most unequal and eccentric way. Some of the planks and beams were of good, seasoned oak; some of such wood cut raw and recent; some again of white pinewood, and a great deal more of the same sort of wood painted black with tar. These black beams were set crooked or crisscross at all kinds of angles, giving the whole a most patchy and puzzling appearance. There were one or two windows, which appeared to be coloured and leaded in an old-fashioned but more elaborate style. The travellers looked at it with that paradoxical feeling we have when something reminds us of something, and yet we are certain it is something very different.
La fine dei Pendragon
PADRE BROWN non era affatto disposto alle avventure. Da poco si era ammalato per il troppo lavoro, e quando cominciò a rimettersi, il suo amico Flambeau lo aveva portato in crociera su un piccolo panfilo insieme a Sir Cecil Fanshaw, un giovane possidente della Cornovaglia entusiasta dei paesaggi costieri della sua terra. Ma Brown era ancora piuttosto debole; non era un marinaio molto felice; e per quanto non fosse di quelli che brontolano o si abbattono, il suo umore non si sollevava oltre la pazienza e la cortesia. Quando gli altri due lodavano il tramonto violaceo e frastagliato o le frastagliate rupi vulcaniche, egli conveniva con loro. Quando Flambeau gli additava uno scoglio a forma di drago, egli lo guardava e pensava che somigliasse davvero a un drago. Quando Fanshaw, più eccitato, gli indicava uno scoglio che somigliava a Merlino, egli lo guardava e assentiva. Quando Flambeau gli chiedeva se quella rocciosa porta del fiume tortuoso non fosse la porta del Paese delle Fate, rispondeva «Sì». Udiva le cose più importanti e le più insignificanti con la medesima insipida assorta attenzione. Udì che quella costa era mortale per tutti tranne che per i marinai prudenti; udì anche che il gatto di bordo dormiva. Udì che Fanshaw non riusciva a trovare da nessuna parte il suo bocchino da sigaro; udì anche il pilota pronunciare l’oracolo: «Occhi due che brillano bene, la nave va; un occhio che ammicca, e la nave affonda». Udì Flambeau dire a Fanshaw che, senza dubbio, ciò significava che il pilota doveva tenere entrambi gli occhi aperti ed essere sveglio. E udì Fanshaw dire a Flambeau che, per quanto strano, non significava questo: significava che finché vedevano due dei fanali della costa, uno vicino e l’altro lontano, esattamente affiancati, erano nel giusto canale del fiume; ma che se un fanale restava nascosto dietro l’altro, andavano a sbattere contro gli scogli. Udì Fanshaw aggiungere che il suo paese era pieno di siffatte pittoresche favole e locuzioni; era la patria stessa del romanzesco; e giunse persino a contrapporre quella parte della Cornovaglia al Devonshire, come pretendente agli allori della marineria elisabettiana. A suo dire, fra quelle cale e quegli isolotti c’erano stati capitani al cui confronto Drake era praticamente un uomo di terraferma. Udì Flambeau ridere e chiedere se, per caso, l’avventuroso titolo di «Westward Ho!» non volesse dire soltanto che tutti gli uomini del Devonshire avrebbero voluto vivere in Cornovaglia. Udì Fanshaw dire che non c’era bisogno di fare lo sciocco; che non solo i capitani della Cornovaglia erano stati eroi, ma che lo erano tuttora: che proprio lì presso viveva un vecchio ammiraglio, ora in congedo, segnato dalle cicatrici di viaggi avventurosi e pieni di emozioni; e che in gioventù aveva scoperto l’ultimo gruppo di otto isole del Pacifico aggiunto alla carta del mondo. Questo Cecil Fanshaw era, di persona, del tipo che comunemente professa simili entusiasmi rozzi ma piacevoli; un uomo giovanissimo, dai capelli chiari, dal colorito acceso, dal profilo ardente; con una spavalderia fanciullesca di spirito, ma una delicatezza quasi femminea di tinta e di lineamenti. Le grandi spalle, le sopracciglia nere e la nera spavalderia da moschettiere di Flambeau facevano gran contrasto.
Tutte queste inezie Brown le udiva e le vedeva; ma le udiva come un uomo stanco ode un motivo nelle ruote del treno, o le vedeva come un malato vede il disegno della sua carta da parati. Nessuno può calcolare i mutamenti d’umore nella convalescenza: ma la depressione di Padre Brown doveva avere molto a che fare con la sua semplice estraneità al mare. Poiché, man mano che la foce del fiume si restringeva come il collo di una bottiglia, e l’acqua si faceva più tranquilla e l’aria più tiepida e più terrestre, egli parve destarsi e prender nota di ogni cosa come un bambino. Erano giunti a quella fase, subito dopo il tramonto, in cui l’aria e l’acqua appaiono entrambe luminose, ma la terra e tutte le cose che vi crescono appaiono, al confronto, quasi nere. Quella sera particolare, però, aveva qualcosa di eccezionale. Era una di quelle rare atmosfere in cui pare che un vetro affumicato sia stato fatto scorrere via da tra noi e la Natura; sicché persino i colori scuri, in quel giorno, apparivano più sfarzosi dei colori vivaci nelle giornate più nuvolose. La terra calpestata delle rive del fiume e la macchia torbosa delle pozze non apparivano scialbe, ma di un’ardente terra d’ombra, e i boschi cupi agitati dalla brezza non apparivano, come al solito, di un azzurro fioco per la sola profondità della distanza, ma piuttosto simili a masse scomposte dal vento di qualche vivace fioritura violacea. Questa magica limpidezza e intensità dei colori si imponeva ancor più ai sensi lentamente ridestantisi di Brown per qualcosa di romantico e persino di segreto nella forma stessa del paesaggio.
Il fiume era ancora abbastanza largo e profondo per un’imbarcazione da diporto piccola come la loro; ma le curve della campagna facevano intuire che si stesse chiudendo da entrambi i lati; i boschi parevano compiere spezzati e volanti tentativi di costruire ponti — come se la barca passasse dal romanzesco di una valle al romanzesco di una gola, e così al supremo romanzesco di una galleria. Al di là di questa mera apparenza, poco vi era di cui la rinascente fantasia di Brown potesse nutrirsi; non vedeva esseri umani, tranne alcuni zingari che si trascinavano lungo la riva del fiume, con fascine e vimini tagliati nella foresta; e una vista non più insolita in sé, ma in parti così remote ancora rara: una dama dai capelli scuri, a capo scoperto, che remava sulla propria canoa. Se mai Padre Brown attribuì qualche importanza all’una o all’altra di queste cose, certo le dimenticò alla svolta successiva del fiume, che portò in vista un oggetto singolare.
L’acqua parve allargarsi e dividersi, fessa dal cuneo scuro di un isolotto boscoso a forma di pesce. Alla velocità con cui procedevano, l’isolotto sembrava nuotare verso di loro come una nave; una nave con una prua altissima — o, per dir meglio, un fumaiolo altissimo. Poiché nel punto estremo più vicino a loro sorgeva un edificio dall’aspetto bizzarro, diverso da qualsiasi cosa potessero ricordare o collegare a un qualunque scopo. Non era particolarmente alto, ma era troppo alto rispetto alla sua larghezza per poter essere chiamato altrimenti che torre. Eppure pareva costruito interamente di legno, e ciò in un modo quanto mai irregolare ed eccentrico. Alcune delle assi e delle travi erano di buona quercia stagionata; altre di legno tagliato crudo e di recente; altre ancora di pino bianco, e molto più ancora dello stesso genere di legno dipinto di nero con la pece. Queste travi nere erano poste storte o incrociate ad ogni sorta di angoli, dando all’insieme un aspetto quanto mai rappezzato e sconcertante. C’erano una o due finestre, che parevano colorate e piombate in uno stile antiquato ma più elaborato. I viaggiatori la guardarono con quella sensazione paradossale che proviamo quando qualcosa ci ricorda qualcos’altro, e tuttavia siamo certi che si tratti di qualcosa di assai diverso.
Father Brown, even when he was mystified, was clever in analysing his own mystification. And he found himself reflecting that the oddity seemed to consist in a particular shape cut out in an incongruous material; as if one saw a top-hat made of tin, or a frock-coat cut out of tartan. He was sure he had seen timbers of different tints arranged like that somewhere, but never in such architectural proportions. The next moment a glimpse through the dark trees told him all he wanted to know and he laughed. Through a gap in the foliage there appeared for a moment one of those old wooden houses, faced with black beams, which are still to be found here and there in England, but which most of us see imitated in some show called “Old London” or “Shakespeare’s England’. It was in view only long enough for the priest to see that, however old-fashioned, it was a comfortable and well-kept country-house, with flower-beds in front of it. It had none of the piebald and crazy look of the tower that seemed made out of its refuse.
“What on earth’s this?” said Flambeau, who was still staring at the tower.
Fanshaw’s eyes were shining, and he spoke triumphantly. “Aha! you’ve not seen a place quite like this before, I fancy; that’s why I’ve brought you here, my friend. Now you shall see whether I exaggerate about the mariners of Cornwall. This place belongs to Old Pendragon, whom we call the Admiral; though he retired before getting the rank. The spirit of Raleigh and Hawkins is a memory with the Devon folk; it’s a modern fact with the Pendragons. If Queen Elizabeth were to rise from the grave and come up this river in a gilded barge, she would be received by the Admiral in a house exactly such as she was accustomed to, in every corner and casement, in every panel on the wall or plate on the table. And she would find an English Captain still talking fiercely of fresh lands to be found in little ships, as much as if she had dined with Drake.”
“She’d find a rum sort of thing in the garden,” said Father Brown, “which would not please her Renaissance eye. That Elizabethan domestic architecture is charming in its way; but it’s against the very nature of it to break out into turrets.”
“And yet,” answered Fanshaw, “that’s the most romantic and Elizabethan part of the business. It was built by the Pendragons in the very days of the Spanish wars; and though it’s needed patching and even rebuilding for another reason, it’s always been rebuilt in the old way. The story goes that the lady of Sir Peter Pendragon built it in this place and to this height, because from the top you can just see the corner where vessels turn into the river mouth; and she wished to be the first to see her husband’s ship, as he sailed home from the Spanish Main.”
“For what other reason,” asked Father Brown, “do you mean that it has been rebuilt?”
“Oh, there’s a strange story about that, too,” said the young squire with relish. “You are really in a land of strange stories. King Arthur was here and Merlin and the fairies before him. The story goes that Sir Peter Pendragon, who (I fear) had some of the faults of the pirates as well as the virtues of the sailor, was bringing home three Spanish gentlemen in honourable captivity, intending to escort them to Elizabeth’s court. But he was a man of flaming and tigerish temper, and coming to high words with one of them, he caught him by the throat and flung him by accident or design, into the sea. A second Spaniard, who was the brother of the first, instantly drew his sword and flew at Pendragon, and after a short but furious combat in which both got three wounds in as many minutes, Pendragon drove his blade through the other’s body and the second Spaniard was accounted for. As it happened the ship had already turned into the river mouth and was close to comparatively shallow water. The third Spaniard sprang over the side of the ship, struck out for the shore, and was soon near enough to it to stand up to his waist in water. And turning again to face the ship, and holding up both arms to Heaven—like a prophet calling plagues upon a wicked city— he called out to Pendragon in a piercing and terrible voice, that he at least was yet living, that he would go on living, that he would live for ever; and that generation after generation the house of Pendragon should never see him or his, but should know by very certain signs that he and his vengeance were alive. With that he dived under the wave, and was either drowned or swam so long under water that no hair of his head was seen afterwards.”
“There’s that girl in the canoe again,” said Flambeau irrelevantly, for good-looking young women would call him off any topic. “She seems bothered by the queer tower just as we were.”
Indeed, the black-haired young lady was letting her canoe float slowly and silently past the strange islet; and was looking intently up at the strange tower, with a strong glow of curiosity on her oval and olive face.
“Never mind girls,” said Fanshaw impatiently, “there are plenty of them in the world, but not many things like the Pendragon Tower. As you may easily suppose, plenty of superstitions and scandals have followed in the track of the Spaniard’s curse; and no doubt, as you would put it, any accident happening to this Cornish family would be connected with it by rural credulity. But it is perfectly true that this tower has been burnt down two or three times; and the family can’t be called lucky, for more than two, I think, of the Admiral’s near kin have perished by shipwreck; and one at least, to my own knowledge, on practically the same spot where Sir Peter threw the Spaniard overboard.”
“What a pity!” exclaimed Flambeau. “She’s going.”
“When did your friend the Admiral tell you this family history?” asked Father Brown, as the girl in the canoe paddled off, without showing the least intention of extending her interest from the tower to the yacht, which Fanshaw had already caused to lie alongside the island.
Padre Brown, anche quando era sconcertato, era abile nell’analizzare il proprio sconcerto. E si sorprese a riflettere che la stranezza pareva consistere in una forma particolare ritagliata in un materiale incongruo; come se si vedesse un cilindro fatto di latta, o una redingote tagliata nel tartan. Era certo di aver visto da qualche parte travi di tinte diverse disposte in quel modo, ma mai in simili proporzioni architettoniche. Un istante dopo, uno scorcio attraverso gli alberi scuri gli disse tutto ciò che voleva sapere, ed egli rise. Attraverso uno squarcio nel fogliame apparve per un momento una di quelle vecchie case di legno, rivestite di travi nere, che si trovano ancora qua e là in Inghilterra, ma che i più di noi vedono imitate in qualche spettacolo intitolato «Old London» o «Shakespeare’s England». Rimase in vista soltanto quel tanto che bastò al prete per scorgere che, per quanto antiquata, era una comoda e ben tenuta casa di campagna, con aiuole fiorite davanti. Non aveva nulla dell’aspetto pezzato e stravagante della torre, che pareva fatta con i suoi scarti.
«Che diavolo è questo?» disse Flambeau, che fissava ancora la torre.
Gli occhi di Fanshaw brillavano, ed egli parlò con tono trionfante. «Ah! non avete mai visto un posto come questo, immagino; ecco perché vi ho condotti qui, amici miei. Ora vedrete se esagero a proposito dei marinai della Cornovaglia. Questo luogo appartiene al vecchio Pendragon, che noi chiamiamo l’Ammiraglio; sebbene si sia ritirato prima di ottenere il grado. Lo spirito di Raleigh e di Hawkins è un ricordo per la gente del Devon; è un fatto attuale per i Pendragon. Se la regina Elisabetta risorgesse dalla tomba e risalisse questo fiume su una chiatta dorata, sarebbe ricevuta dall’Ammiraglio in una casa esattamente come quelle cui era avvezza, in ogni angolo e in ogni finestra, in ogni pannello alla parete o piatto sulla tavola. E vi troverebbe un capitano inglese che parla ancora con fierezza di nuove terre da scoprire su piccole navi, come se avesse cenato con Drake.»
«Vi troverebbe una ben curiosa cosa nel giardino» disse Padre Brown, «che non piacerebbe al suo occhio rinascimentale. Quell’architettura domestica elisabettiana è affascinante a suo modo; ma è contro la sua stessa natura prorompere in torrette.»
«Eppure» rispose Fanshaw, «è questa la parte più romantica ed elisabettiana della faccenda. Fu costruita dai Pendragon proprio ai tempi delle guerre di Spagna; e benché abbia avuto bisogno di rappezzi e persino di ricostruzioni per un’altra ragione, è sempre stata ricostruita alla vecchia maniera. Si racconta che la dama di Sir Peter Pendragon la fece erigere in questo luogo e a questa altezza, perché dalla cima si può appena scorgere l’angolo dove i vascelli svoltano nella foce del fiume; e desiderava essere la prima a vedere la nave del marito mentre tornava a casa dalle acque della Spagna.»
«Per quale altra ragione» chiese Padre Brown, «intendete dire che è stata ricostruita?»
«Oh, c’è anche su questo una strana storia» disse il giovane possidente con gusto. «Vi trovate davvero in una terra di storie strane. Qui c’erano re Artù e Merlino e le fate prima di lui. Si racconta che Sir Peter Pendragon, il quale (temo) aveva alcuni dei difetti dei pirati oltre alle virtù del marinaio, stava riportando a casa tre gentiluomini spagnoli in onorevole prigionia, con l’intenzione di scortarli alla corte di Elisabetta. Ma egli era uomo di temperamento fiammeggiante e tigresco, e venuto a parole grosse con uno di loro, lo afferrò alla gola e lo scagliò, per caso o di proposito, in mare. Un secondo spagnolo, che era il fratello del primo, sguainò all’istante la spada e si avventò su Pendragon, e dopo un breve ma furioso combattimento in cui entrambi ricevettero tre ferite in altrettanti minuti, Pendragon spinse la propria lama attraverso il corpo dell’altro, e anche il secondo spagnolo fu liquidato. Volle il caso che la nave fosse già svoltata nella foce del fiume e si trovasse vicina ad acque relativamente basse. Il terzo spagnolo balzò oltre la murata, si diresse a nuoto verso la riva, e presto le fu tanto vicino da potervi stare ritto, con l’acqua alla cintola. E voltandosi di nuovo verso la nave, e levando entrambe le braccia al Cielo — come un profeta che invoca flagelli su una città malvagia — gridò a Pendragon, con voce acuta e terribile, che lui almeno era ancora vivo, che avrebbe continuato a vivere, che sarebbe vissuto in eterno; e che, di generazione in generazione, la casa dei Pendragon non avrebbe mai visto lui né i suoi, ma avrebbe saputo, per segni certissimi, che lui e la sua vendetta erano vivi. Con ciò si tuffò sotto l’onda, e o annegò o nuotò tanto a lungo sott’acqua che nessun capello del suo capo fu più visto.»
«C’è di nuovo quella ragazza nella canoa» disse Flambeau fuori luogo, poiché le giovani belle donne lo distoglievano da qualsiasi argomento. «Sembra intrigata dalla strana torre proprio come lo eravamo noi.»
E infatti la giovane dama dai capelli neri lasciava scivolare la propria canoa lentamente e silenziosamente davanti allo strano isolotto; e guardava intensamente in su verso la strana torre, con un forte ardore di curiosità sul suo volto ovale e olivastro.
«Lasciate perdere le ragazze» disse Fanshaw con impazienza, «ce ne sono in abbondanza al mondo, ma non molte cose come la Torre dei Pendragon. Come potete facilmente supporre, superstizioni e scandali in gran numero hanno seguito la scia della maledizione dello spagnolo; e senza dubbio, come direste voi, qualsiasi disgrazia capitasse a questa famiglia della Cornovaglia verrebbe ricollegata a essa dalla credulità dei contadini. Ma è perfettamente vero che questa torre è stata incendiata due o tre volte; e la famiglia non può dirsi fortunata, poiché più di due, credo, dei parenti stretti dell’Ammiraglio sono periti in naufragio; e almeno uno, per mia diretta conoscenza, quasi esattamente nel punto in cui Sir Peter gettò lo spagnolo in mare.»
«Che peccato!» esclamò Flambeau. «Se ne va.»
«Quando il vostro amico Ammiraglio vi raccontò questa storia di famiglia?» chiese Padre Brown, mentre la ragazza nella canoa si allontanava remando, senza mostrare la minima intenzione di estendere il proprio interesse dalla torre al panfilo, che Fanshaw aveva già fatto accostare all’isola.
“Many years ago,” replied Fanshaw; “he hasn’t been to sea for some time now, though he is as keen on it as ever. I believe there’s a family compact or something. Well, here’s the landing stage; let’s come ashore and see the old boy.”
They followed him on to the island, just under the tower, and Father Brown, whether from the mere touch of dry land, or the interest of something on the other bank of the river (which he stared at very hard for some seconds), seemed singularly improved in briskness. They entered a wooded avenue between two fences of thin greyish wood, such as often enclose parks or gardens, and over the top of which the dark trees tossed to and fro like black and purple plumes upon the hearse of a giant. The tower, as they left it behind, looked all the quainter, because such entrances are usually flanked by two towers; and this one looked lopsided. But for this, the avenue had the usual appearance of the entrance to a gentleman’s grounds; and, being so curved that the house was now out of sight, somehow looked a much larger park than any plantation on such an island could really be. Father Brown was, perhaps, a little fanciful in his fatigue, but he almost thought the whole place must be growing larger, as things do in a nightmare. Anyhow, a mystical monotony was the only character of their march, until Fanshaw suddenly stopped, and pointed to something sticking out through the grey fence— something that looked at first rather like the imprisoned horn of some beast. Closer observation showed that it was a slightly curved blade of metal that shone faintly in the fading light.
Flambeau, who like all Frenchmen had been a soldier, bent over it and said in a startled voice: “Why, it’s a sabre! I believe I know the sort, heavy and curved, but shorter than the cavalry; they used to have them in artillery and the—”
As he spoke the blade plucked itself out of the crack it had made and came down again with a more ponderous slash, splitting the fissiparous fence to the bottom with a rending noise. Then it was pulled out again, flashed above the fence some feet further along, and again split it halfway down with the first stroke; and after waggling a little to extricate itself (accompanied with curses in the darkness) split it down to the ground with a second. Then a kick of devilish energy sent the whole loosened square of thin wood flying into the pathway, and a great gap of dark coppice gaped in the paling.
Fanshaw peered into the dark opening and uttered an exclamation of astonishment. “My dear Admiral!” he exclaimed, “do you—er— do you generally cut out a new front door whenever you want to go for a walk?”
The voice in the gloom swore again, and then broke into a jolly laugh. “No,” it said; “I’ve really got to cut down this fence somehow; it’s spoiling all the plants, and no one else here can do it. But I’ll only carve another bit off the front door, and then come out and welcome you.”
And sure enough, he heaved up his weapon once more, and, hacking twice, brought down another and similar strip of fence, making the opening about fourteen feet wide in all. Then through this larger forest gateway he came out into the evening light, with a chip of grey wood sticking to his sword-blade.
He momentarily fulfilled all Fanshaw’s fable of an old piratical Admiral; though the details seemed afterwards to decompose into accidents. For instance, he wore a broad-brimmed hat as protection against the sun; but the front flap of it was turned up straight to the sky, and the two corners pulled down lower than the ears, so that it stood across his forehead in a crescent like the old cocked hat worn by Nelson. He wore an ordinary dark-blue jacket, with nothing special about the buttons, but the combination of it with white linen trousers somehow had a sailorish look. He was tall and loose, and walked with a sort of swagger, which was not a sailor’s roll, and yet somehow suggested it; and he held in his hand a short sabre which was like a navy cutlass, but about twice as big. Under the bridge of the hat his eagle face looked eager, all the more because it was not only clean-shaven, but without eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the hair had come off his face from his thrusting it through a throng of elements. His eyes were prominent and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while partly tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly, but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides— Father Brown thought he had never seen a figure so expressive of all the romances about the countries of the Sun.
When Fanshaw had presented his two friends to their host he fell again into a tone of rallying the latter about his wreckage of the fence and his apparent rage of profanity. The Admiral pooh-poohed it at first as a piece of necessary but annoying garden work; but at length the ring of real energy came back into his laughter, and he cried with a mixture of impatience and good humour:
“Well, perhaps I do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel a kind of pleasure in smashing anything. So would you if your only pleasure was in cruising about to find some new Cannibal Islands, and you had to stick on this muddy little rockery in a sort of rustic pond. When I remember how I’ve cut down a mile and a half of green poisonous jungle with an old cutlass half as sharp as this; and then remember I must stop here and chop this matchwood, because of some confounded old bargain scribbled in a family Bible, why, I—”
He swung up the heavy steel again; and this time sundered the wall of wood from top to bottom at one stroke.
“I feel like that,” he said laughing, but furiously flinging the sword some yards down the path, “and now let’s go up to the house; you must have some dinner.”
The semicircle of lawn in front of the house was varied by three circular garden beds, one of red tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and the third of some white, waxen-looking blossoms that the visitors did not know and presumed to be exotic. A heavy, hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener was hanging up a heavy coil of garden hose. The corners of the expiring sunset, which seemed to cling about the corners of the house, gave glimpses here and there of the colours of remoter flowerbeds; and in a treeless space on one side of the house opening upon the river stood a tall brass tripod on which was tilted a big brass telescope. Just outside the steps of the porch stood a little painted green garden table, as if someone had just had tea there. The entrance was flanked with two of those half-featured lumps of stone with holes for eyes that are said to be South Sea idols; and on the brown oak beam across the doorway were some confused carvings that looked almost as barbaric.
«Molti anni fa» rispose Fanshaw; «non va per mare da qualche tempo, ormai, benché ne sia appassionato come sempre. Credo ci sia un patto di famiglia, o qualcosa del genere. Bene, ecco l’imbarcadero; scendiamo a terra e andiamo a vedere il vecchio.»
Lo seguirono sull’isola, proprio sotto la torre, e Padre Brown, forse per il semplice contatto con la terra asciutta, o per l’interesse di qualcosa sull’altra riva del fiume (che fissò con grande intensità per alcuni secondi), parve singolarmente ravvivato nel brio. Imboccarono un viale alberato tra due steccati di legno sottile e grigiastro, di quelli che spesso recingono parchi o giardini, e sopra i quali gli alberi scuri si agitavano avanti e indietro come pennacchi neri e purpurei sul carro funebre di un gigante. La torre, quando la si lasciò alle spalle, appariva ancor più bizzarra, poiché simili ingressi sono di solito fiancheggiati da due torri; e questa pareva sbilenca. Ma a parte questo, il viale aveva il consueto aspetto dell’ingresso alla tenuta di un gentiluomo; ed essendo così ricurvo che la casa era ormai fuori vista, pareva chissà come un parco assai più vasto di quanto potesse in realtà essere una piantagione su un’isola simile. Padre Brown era forse un po’ fantasioso nella sua stanchezza, ma pensò quasi che l’intero luogo dovesse ingrandirsi, come accade alle cose in un incubo. Comunque fosse, una mistica monotonia fu l’unico carattere della loro marcia, finché Fanshaw non si fermò di colpo, e indicò qualcosa che sporgeva attraverso lo steccato grigio — qualcosa che a prima vista somigliava piuttosto al corno imprigionato di qualche bestia. Un’osservazione più ravvicinata rivelò che era una lama di metallo leggermente ricurva, che luccicava debolmente nella luce morente.
Flambeau, che come tutti i francesi era stato soldato, si chinò su di essa e disse con voce trasalita: «Diamine, è una sciabola! Credo di conoscerne il tipo, pesante e ricurva, ma più corta di quella della cavalleria; le usavano nell’artiglieria e nei…»
Mentre parlava, la lama si divelse dalla fenditura che aveva aperto e ricadde con un fendente più ponderoso, spaccando fino in fondo lo steccato fissiparo con un rumore lacerante. Poi fu estratta di nuovo, balenò sopra lo steccato qualche piede più in là, e di nuovo lo fendette a metà al primo colpo; e dopo aver ondeggiato un poco per liberarsi (accompagnata da bestemmie nell’oscurità), lo spaccò fino a terra con un secondo. Poi un calcio d’energia diabolica scagliò l’intero quadrato di legno sottile ormai allentato in mezzo al sentiero, e un grande varco di bosco scuro si spalancò nella palizzata.
Fanshaw scrutò nell’apertura buia ed emise un’esclamazione di stupore. «Mio caro Ammiraglio!» esclamò, «avete l’abitudine di… ehm… ritagliarvi una nuova porta d’ingresso ogni volta che volete andare a passeggio?»
La voce nell’oscurità imprecò di nuovo, poi proruppe in una gioviale risata. «No» disse; «devo proprio abbattere questo steccato in qualche modo; sta rovinando tutte le piante, e qui non c’è nessun altro capace di farlo. Ma taglierò solo un altro pezzo della porta d’ingresso, e poi verrò fuori a darvi il benvenuto.»
E, com’era prevedibile, sollevò di nuovo l’arma e, menando due fendenti, abbatté un’altra striscia simile di steccato, rendendo l’apertura larga in tutto una quindicina di piedi. Poi, attraverso questo più ampio varco nella foresta, uscì nella luce della sera, con una scheggia di legno grigio appiccicata alla lama della spada.
Egli incarnò per un istante tutta la favola di Fanshaw sul vecchio Ammiraglio piratesco; sebbene i particolari, in seguito, parvero scomporsi in accidenti. Per esempio, portava un cappello a larghe tese come riparo dal sole; ma la falda anteriore era rialzata dritta verso il cielo, e i due angoli tirati giù più bassi delle orecchie, così che gli attraversava la fronte a mezzaluna, come il vecchio bicorno portato da Nelson. Indossava una comune giacca blu scuro, senza nulla di speciale nei bottoni, ma la sua combinazione con calzoni di lino bianco aveva chissà come un che di marinaresco. Era alto e slanciato, e camminava con una sorta di spavalderia, che non era l’ondeggiare del marinaio, eppure in qualche modo lo suggeriva; e teneva in mano una corta sciabola simile a un coltellaccio da marina, ma grande quasi il doppio. Sotto l’arco del cappello il suo volto d’aquila appariva ardente, tanto più che non solo era ben rasato, ma privo di sopracciglia. Pareva quasi che tutti i peli gli fossero andati via dal viso a forza di cacciarlo attraverso una calca di elementi. Gli occhi erano sporgenti e penetranti. Il suo colorito era curiosamente attraente, e in parte tropicale; ricordava vagamente un’arancia sanguigna. Voglio dire che, pur essendo rubizzo e sanguigno, vi era in esso un giallo per nulla malaticcio, ma che pareva piuttosto splendere come le mele d’oro delle Esperidi — Padre Brown pensò di non aver mai visto una figura così espressiva di tutte le storie romanzesche sui paesi del Sole.
Quando Fanshaw ebbe presentato i suoi due amici al padrone di casa, ricadde in un tono di canzonatura verso quest’ultimo a proposito della sua distruzione dello steccato e della sua evidente rabbia di bestemmie. L’Ammiraglio dapprima ne fece poco conto, come di un lavoro di giardinaggio necessario ma seccante; ma alla fine il suono di una vera energia ritornò nella sua risata, ed egli esclamò con un misto di impazienza e buon umore:
«Beh, forse ci vado un po’ rabbiosamente, e provo una specie di piacere a fracassare qualsiasi cosa. Lo fareste anche voi se il vostro unico piacere fosse quello di veleggiare in cerca di qualche nuova Isola dei Cannibali, e doveste starvene inchiodati su questa fangosa roccaglietta in una specie di stagno rustico. Quando ricordo come ho abbattuto un miglio e mezzo di verde giungla velenosa con un vecchio coltellaccio affilato la metà di questo; e poi ricordo che devo fermarmi qui a tagliuzzare questa legna da fiammiferi, per via di qualche maledetto vecchio patto scarabocchiato in una Bibbia di famiglia, ebbene, io…»
Sollevò di nuovo il pesante acciaio; e questa volta recise il muro di legno dall’alto in basso con un solo colpo.
«Mi sento così» disse ridendo, ma scagliando furiosamente la spada qualche metro giù per il sentiero, «e ora saliamo alla casa; dovete cenare.»
Il semicerchio di prato davanti alla casa era variato da tre aiuole circolari, una di tulipani rossi, la seconda di tulipani gialli, e la terza di certi fiori bianchi, dall’aspetto ceroso, che i visitatori non conoscevano e presumevano esotici. Un giardiniere pesante, peloso e dall’aria piuttosto arcigna stava appendendo una pesante matassa di tubo da giardino. Gli ultimi bagliori del tramonto morente, che parevano indugiare attorno agli angoli della casa, lasciavano intravedere qua e là i colori di aiuole più lontane; e in uno spazio privo di alberi, su un lato della casa che si apriva sul fiume, sorgeva un alto treppiede di ottone su cui era inclinato un grande telescopio d’ottone. Proprio fuori dai gradini del portico c’era un tavolinetto da giardino verniciato di verde, come se qualcuno vi avesse appena preso il tè. L’ingresso era fiancheggiato da due di quei blocchi di pietra dai lineamenti appena abbozzati, con fori al posto degli occhi, che si dice siano idoli dei Mari del Sud; e sulla bruna trave di quercia sopra la porta c’erano alcuni intagli confusi che apparivano quasi altrettanto barbarici.
As they passed indoors, the little cleric hopped suddenly on to the table, and standing on it peered unaffectedly through his spectacles at the mouldings in the oak. Admiral Pendragon looked very much astonished, though not particularly annoyed; while Fanshaw was so amused with what looked like a performing pigmy on his little stand, that he could not control his laughter. But Father Brown was not likely to notice either the laughter or the astonishment.
He was gazing at three carved symbols, which, though very worn and obscure, seemed still to convey some sense to him. The first seemed to be the outline of some tower or other building, crowned with what looked like curly-pointed ribbons. The second was clearer: an old Elizabethan galley with decorative waves beneath it, but interrupted in the middle by a curious jagged rock, which was either a fault in the wood or some conventional representation of the water coming in. The third represented the upper half of a human figure, ending in an escalloped line like the waves; the face was rubbed and featureless, and both arms were held very stiffly up in the air.
“Well,” muttered Father Brown, blinking, “here is the legend of the Spaniard plain enough. Here he is holding up his arms and cursing in the sea; and here are the two curses: the wrecked ship and the burning of Pendragon Tower.”
Pendragon shook his head with a kind of venerable amusement. “And how many other things might it not be?” he said. “Don’t you know that that sort of half-man, like a half-lion or half-stag, is quite common in heraldry? Might not that line through the ship be one of those parti-per-pale lines, indented, I think they call it? And though the third thing isn’t so very heraldic, it would be more heraldic to suppose it a tower crowned with laurel than with fire; and it looks just as like it.”
“But it seems rather odd,” said Flambeau, “that it should exactly confirm the old legend.”
“Ah,” replied the sceptical traveller, “but you don’t know how much of the old legend may have been made up from the old figures. Besides, it isn’t the only old legend. Fanshaw, here, who is fond of such things, will tell you there are other versions of the tale, and much more horrible ones. One story credits my unfortunate ancestor with having had the Spaniard cut in two; and that will fit the pretty picture also. Another obligingly credits our family with the possession of a tower full of snakes and explains those little, wriggly things in that way. And a third theory supposes the crooked line on the ship to be a conventionalized thunderbolt; but that alone, if seriously examined, would show what a very little way these unhappy coincidences really go.”
“Why, how do you mean?” asked Fanshaw.
“It so happens,” replied his host coolly, “that there was no thunder and lightning at all in the two or three shipwrecks I know of in our family.”
“Oh!” said Father Brown, and jumped down from the little table.
There was another silence in which they heard the continuous murmur of the river; then Fanshaw said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed tone: “Then you don’t think there is anything in the tales of the tower in flames?”
“There are the tales, of course,” said the Admiral, shrugging his shoulders; “and some of them, I don’t deny, on evidence as decent as one ever gets for such things. Someone saw a blaze hereabout, don’t you know, as he walked home through a wood; someone keeping sheep on the uplands inland thought he saw a flame hovering over Pendragon Tower. Well, a damp dab of mud like this confounded island seems the last place where one would think of fires.”
“What is that fire over there?” asked Father Brown with a gentle suddenness, pointing to the woods on the left river-bank. They were all thrown a little off their balance, and the more fanciful Fanshaw had even some difficulty in recovering his, as they saw a long, thin stream of blue smoke ascending silently into the end of the evening light.
Then Pendragon broke into a scornful laugh again. “Gipsies!” he said; “they’ve been camping about here for about a week. Gentlemen, you want your dinner,” and he turned as if to enter the house.
But the antiquarian superstition in Fanshaw was still quivering, and he said hastily: “But, Admiral, what’s that hissing noise quite near the island? It’s very like fire.”
“It’s more like what it is,” said the Admiral, laughing as he led the way; “it’s only some canoe going by.”
Almost as he spoke, the butler, a lean man in black, with very black hair and a very long, yellow face, appeared in the doorway and told him that dinner was served.
The dining-room was as nautical as the cabin of a ship; but its note was rather that of the modern than the Elizabethan captain. There were, indeed, three antiquated cutlasses in a trophy over the fireplace, and one brown sixteenth-century map with Tritons and little ships dotted about a curly sea. But such things were less prominent on the white panelling than some cases of quaint-coloured South American birds, very scientifically stuffed, fantastic shells from the Pacific, and several instruments so rude and queer in shape that savages might have used them either to kill their enemies or to cook them. But the alien colour culminated in the fact that, besides the butler, the Admiral’s only servants were two negroes, somewhat quaintly clad in tight uniforms of yellow. The priest’s instinctive trick of analysing his own impressions told him that the colour and the little neat coat-tails of these bipeds had suggested the word “Canary,” and so by a mere pun connected them with southward travel. Towards the end of the dinner they took their yellow clothes and black faces out of the room, leaving only the black clothes and yellow face of the butler.
“I’m rather sorry you take this so lightly,” said Fanshaw to the host; “for the truth is, I’ve brought these friends of mine with the idea of their helping you, as they know a good deal of these things. Don’t you really believe in the family story at all?”
Mentre entravano, il piccolo chierico saltò all’improvviso sul tavolino, e restandovi in piedi scrutò senza affettazione, attraverso gli occhiali, le modanature nella quercia. L’Ammiraglio Pendragon parve assai stupito, benché non particolarmente seccato; mentre Fanshaw fu tanto divertito da ciò che pareva un pigmeo da spettacolo sul suo piccolo palco, che non riuscì a trattenere il riso. Ma Padre Brown non era tipo da accorgersi né del riso né dello stupore.
Fissava tre simboli intagliati, i quali, benché assai consumati e oscuri, parevano ancora trasmettergli un qualche senso. Il primo pareva il contorno di una torre o di qualche altro edificio, coronato da qualcosa che somigliava a nastri dalle punte ricciute. Il secondo era più chiaro: una vecchia galea elisabettiana con onde decorative sotto di essa, ma interrotta nel mezzo da un curioso scoglio frastagliato, che era o un difetto del legno o una qualche rappresentazione convenzionale dell’acqua che entra. Il terzo raffigurava la metà superiore di una figura umana, che terminava in una linea a festoni simile alle onde; il volto era corroso e privo di lineamenti, ed entrambe le braccia erano tese molto rigidamente in alto.
«Ebbene» mormorò Padre Brown, sbattendo le palpebre, «ecco la leggenda dello spagnolo abbastanza chiara. Eccolo che leva le braccia e maledice nel mare; ed ecco le due maledizioni: la nave naufragata e l’incendio della Torre dei Pendragon.»
Pendragon scosse il capo con una sorta di venerabile divertimento. «E quante altre cose potrebbe non essere?» disse. «Non sapete che quel tipo di mezzo uomo, come il mezzo leone o il mezzo cervo, è assai comune in araldica? Non potrebbe quella linea attraverso la nave essere una di quelle linee partite in palo, dentellate, credo le chiamino? E benché la terza cosa non sia poi così araldica, sarebbe più araldico supporla una torre coronata d’alloro anziché di fuoco; e le somiglia altrettanto.»
«Ma sembra piuttosto strano» disse Flambeau, «che debba confermare esattamente la vecchia leggenda.»
«Ah» rispose lo scettico viaggiatore, «ma voi non sapete quanto della vecchia leggenda possa essere stato inventato a partire dalle vecchie figure. E poi, non è l’unica vecchia leggenda. Fanshaw, qui, che ama simili cose, vi dirà che ci sono altre versioni del racconto, e assai più orribili. Una attribuisce al mio sventurato antenato di aver fatto tagliare in due lo spagnolo; e anche questo si accorderebbe con la bella figura. Un’altra gentilmente attribuisce alla nostra famiglia il possesso di una torre piena di serpenti, e spiega a quel modo quelle piccole cose contorte. E una terza teoria suppone che la linea storta sulla nave sia una folgore stilizzata; ma questo soltanto, se esaminato seriamente, mostrerebbe quanto poco valgano in realtà queste infelici coincidenze.»
«Come, che intendete dire?» chiese Fanshaw.
«Si dà il caso» rispose il padrone di casa con freddezza, «che non ci furono affatto tuoni né fulmini nei due o tre naufragi di cui sono a conoscenza nella nostra famiglia.»
«Oh!» disse Padre Brown, e saltò giù dal tavolino.
Vi fu un altro silenzio in cui udirono il continuo mormorio del fiume; poi Fanshaw disse, con tono dubbioso e forse deluso: «Allora non credete che ci sia nulla nei racconti della torre in fiamme?»
«Ci sono i racconti, certo» disse l’Ammiraglio, scrollando le spalle; «e alcuni di essi, non lo nego, poggiano su prove tanto rispettabili quanto se ne può mai avere per cose del genere. Qualcuno ha visto un bagliore da queste parti, sapete, tornando a casa attraverso un bosco; qualcuno che pascolava le pecore sugli altipiani dell’interno ha creduto di vedere una fiamma librarsi sopra la Torre dei Pendragon. Beh, un umido grumo di fango come questa maledetta isola sembra l’ultimo luogo dove si penserebbe a incendi.»
«Che cos’è quel fuoco laggiù?» chiese Padre Brown con dolce subitaneità, indicando i boschi sulla riva sinistra del fiume. Furono tutti un po’ colti alla sprovvista, e il più fantasioso Fanshaw ebbe persino qualche difficoltà a riprendersi, mentre vedevano un lungo e sottile filo di fumo azzurro salire silenziosamente nell’ultima luce della sera.
Allora Pendragon proruppe di nuovo in una risata sprezzante. «Zingari!» disse; «si sono accampati qui intorno da circa una settimana. Signori, avete bisogno della vostra cena» e si voltò come per entrare in casa.
Ma la superstizione da antiquario in Fanshaw fremeva ancora, ed egli disse in fretta: «Ma, Ammiraglio, che cos’è quel sibilo così vicino all’isola? Somiglia molto al fuoco.»
«Somiglia di più a ciò che è» disse l’Ammiraglio, ridendo mentre faceva strada; «è solo qualche canoa che passa.»
Quasi mentre parlava, il maggiordomo, un uomo magro vestito di nero, dai capelli nerissimi e dal viso lunghissimo e giallo, comparve sulla soglia e gli annunciò che la cena era servita.
La sala da pranzo era marinaresca come la cabina di una nave; ma la sua nota era piuttosto quella del capitano moderno che di quello elisabettiano. C’erano, in verità, tre antiquati coltellacci in un trofeo sopra il camino, e una bruna carta del Cinquecento con tritoni e piccole navi sparse su un mare tutto a riccioli. Ma cose simili risaltavano meno, sui pannelli bianchi, di alcune teche con curiosi uccelli sudamericani dai colori vivaci, imbalsamati assai scientificamente, di fantastiche conchiglie del Pacifico, e di parecchi strumenti così rozzi e bizzarri di forma che dei selvaggi avrebbero potuto usarli tanto per uccidere i loro nemici quanto per cucinarli. Ma il colore esotico culminava nel fatto che, oltre al maggiordomo, gli unici servitori dell’Ammiraglio erano due negri, vestiti in modo alquanto pittoresco con attillate uniformi gialle. L’istintivo vezzo del prete di analizzare le proprie impressioni gli disse che il colore e le piccole ordinate falde della giacca di questi bipedi gli avevano suggerito la parola «Canarie», e così, per un semplice gioco di parole, li collegavano ai viaggi verso mezzogiorno. Verso la fine della cena essi portarono via dalla stanza i loro abiti gialli e i loro visi neri, lasciando solo gli abiti neri e il viso giallo del maggiordomo.
«Mi dispiace piuttosto che prendiate la cosa così alla leggera» disse Fanshaw al padrone di casa; «perché, a dire il vero, ho condotto qui questi miei amici con l’idea che potessero aiutarvi, giacché ne sanno parecchio di queste cose. Non credete proprio per niente alla storia di famiglia?»
“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”
Rather to Flambeau’s surprise, his clerical friend, who seemed to have entirely woken up, took up the digression and talked natural history with his host with a flow of words and much unexpected information, until the dessert and decanters were set down and the last of the servants vanished. Then he said, without altering his tone.
“Please don’t think me impertinent, Admiral Pendragon. I don’t ask for curiosity, but really for my guidance and your convenience. Have I made a bad shot if I guess you don’t want these old things talked of before your butler?”
The Admiral lifted the hairless arches over his eyes and exclaimed: “Well, I don’t know where you got it, but the truth is I can’t stand the fellow, though I’ve no excuse for discharging a family servant. Fanshaw, with his fairy tales, would say my blood moved against men with that black, Spanish-looking hair.”
Flambeau struck the table with his heavy fist. “By Jove!” he cried; “and so had that girl!”
“I hope it’ll all end tonight,” continued the Admiral, “when my nephew comes back safe from his ship. You looked surprised. You won’t understand, I suppose, unless I tell you the story. You see, my father had two sons; I remained a bachelor, but my elder brother married, and had a son who became a sailor like all the rest of us, and will inherit the proper estate. Well, my father was a strange man; he somehow combined Fanshaw’s superstition with a good deal of my scepticism—they were always fighting in him; and after my first voyages, he developed a notion which he thought somehow would settle finally whether the curse was truth or trash. If all the Pendragons sailed about anyhow, he thought there would be too much chance of natural catastrophes to prove anything. But if we went to sea one at a time in strict order of succession to the property, he thought it might show whether any connected fate followed the family as a family. It was a silly notion, I think, and I quarrelled with my father pretty heartily; for I was an ambitious man and was left to the last, coming, by succession, after my own nephew.”
“And your father and brother,” said the priest, very gently, “died at sea, I fear.”
“Yes,” groaned the Admiral; “by one of those brutal accidents on which are built all the lying mythologies of mankind, they were both shipwrecked. My father, coming up this coast out of the Atlantic, was washed up on these Cornish rocks. My brother’s ship was sunk, no one knows where, on the voyage home from Tasmania. His body was never found. I tell you it was from perfectly natural mishap; lots of other people besides Pendragons were drowned; and both disasters are discussed in a normal way by navigators. But, of course, it set this forest of superstition on fire; and men saw the flaming tower everywhere. That’s why I say it will be all right when Walter returns. The girl he’s engaged to was coming today; but I was so afraid of some chance delay frightening her that I wired her not to come till she heard from me. But he’s practically sure to be here some time tonight, and then it’ll all end in smoke— tobacco smoke. We’ll crack that old lie when we crack a bottle of this wine.”
“Very good wine,” said Father Brown, gravely lifting his glass, “but, as you see, a very bad wine-bibber. I most sincerely beg your pardon”: for he had spilt a small spot of wine on the table-cloth. He drank and put down the glass with a composed face; but his hand had started at the exact moment when he became conscious of a face looking in through the garden window just behind the Admiral— the face of a woman, swarthy, with southern hair and eyes, and young, but like a mask of tragedy.
After a pause the priest spoke again in his mild manner. “Admiral,” he said, “will you do me a favour? Let me, and my friends if they like, stop in that tower of yours just for tonight? Do you know that in my business you’re an exorcist almost before anything else?”
Pendragon sprang to his feet and paced swiftly to and fro across the window, from which the face had instantly vanished. “I tell you there is nothing in it,” he cried, with ringing violence. “There is one thing I know about this matter. You may call me an atheist. I am an atheist.” Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a face of frightful concentration. “This business is perfectly natural. There is no curse in it at all.”
Father Brown smiled. “In that case,” he said, “there can’t be any objection to my sleeping in your delightful summer-house.”
“The idea is utterly ridiculous,” replied the Admiral, beating a tattoo on the back of his chair.
“Please forgive me for everything,” said Brown in his most sympathetic tone, “including spilling the wine. But it seems to me you are not quite so easy about the flaming tower as you try to be.”
Admiral Pendragon sat down again as abruptly as he had risen; but he sat quite still, and when he spoke again it was in a lower voice. “You do it at your own peril,” he said; “but wouldn’t you be an atheist to keep sane in all this devilry?”
Some three hours afterwards Fanshaw, Flambeau and the priest were still dawdling about the garden in the dark; and it began to dawn on the other two that Father Brown had no intention of going to bed either in the tower or the house.
“I think the lawn wants weeding,” said he dreamily. “If I could find a spud or something I’d do it myself.”
They followed him, laughing and half remonstrating; but he replied with the utmost solemnity, explaining to them, in a maddening little sermon, that one can always find some small occupation that is helpful to others. He did not find a spud; but he found an old broom made of twigs, with which he began energetically to brush the fallen leaves off the grass.
«Non credo a nulla» rispose Pendragon assai vivacemente, con un occhio brillante puntato su un uccello tropicale rosso. «Sono un uomo di scienza.»
Con una certa sorpresa di Flambeau, il suo amico chierico, che pareva essersi del tutto ridestato, raccolse la digressione e conversò di storia naturale con il padrone di casa con una fluenza di parole e molte inaspettate informazioni, finché non furono posati il dessert e le caraffe, e l’ultimo dei servitori svanì. Allora disse, senza mutare tono:
«Vi prego di non considerarmi impertinente, Ammiraglio Pendragon. Non lo chiedo per curiosità, ma davvero per mia norma e vostra convenienza. Sbaglio di grosso se indovino che non desiderate si parli di queste vecchie cose davanti al vostro maggiordomo?»
L’Ammiraglio sollevò gli archi glabri sopra gli occhi ed esclamò: «Beh, non so dove l’abbiate colto, ma la verità è che non sopporto quell’individuo, sebbene non abbia alcuna scusa per licenziare un servitore di famiglia. Fanshaw, con le sue favole, direbbe che il mio sangue si ribella agli uomini con quei capelli neri dall’aspetto spagnolo.»
Flambeau batté il pugno pesante sul tavolo. «Perbacco!» esclamò; «e così li aveva anche quella ragazza!»
«Spero che tutto finisca stanotte» proseguì l’Ammiraglio, «quando mio nipote tornerà sano e salvo dalla sua nave. Vi vedo sorpresi. Non capirete, immagino, se non vi racconto la storia. Vedete, mio padre ebbe due figli; io rimasi scapolo, ma mio fratello maggiore si sposò, ed ebbe un figlio che divenne marinaio come tutti gli altri di noi, e che erediterà la tenuta di diritto. Ebbene, mio padre era un uomo strano; combinava chissà come la superstizione di Fanshaw con una buona dose del mio scetticismo — le due cose erano sempre in lotta dentro di lui; e dopo i miei primi viaggi, sviluppò un’idea che, pensava, avrebbe in qualche modo stabilito una volta per tutte se la maledizione fosse verità o fandonia. Se tutti i Pendragon fossero andati per mare alla rinfusa, pensava, ci sarebbe stata troppa probabilità di catastrofi naturali per provare alcunché. Ma se fossimo andati per mare uno alla volta, in stretto ordine di successione alla proprietà, pensava che ciò avrebbe potuto mostrare se un qualche destino connesso perseguitasse la famiglia in quanto famiglia. Era un’idea sciocca, penso, e litigai con mio padre di gran cuore; poiché ero uomo ambizioso, e fui lasciato per ultimo, venendo, per successione, dopo lo stesso mio nipote.»
«E vostro padre e vostro fratello» disse il prete assai dolcemente, «morirono in mare, temo.»
«Sì» gemette l’Ammiraglio; «per uno di quei brutali accidenti su cui si edificano tutte le mendaci mitologie del genere umano, naufragarono entrambi. Mio padre, risalendo questa costa dall’Atlantico, fu gettato su questi scogli della Cornovaglia. La nave di mio fratello fu affondata, nessuno sa dove, sulla via del ritorno dalla Tasmania. Il suo corpo non fu mai ritrovato. Vi dico che fu per una disgrazia perfettamente naturale; molte altre persone oltre ai Pendragon annegarono; ed entrambi i disastri sono discussi in modo normale dai navigatori. Ma, naturalmente, ciò diede fuoco a questa foresta di superstizione; e gli uomini videro la torre fiammeggiante dappertutto. Ecco perché dico che andrà tutto bene quando Walter tornerà. La ragazza con cui è fidanzato doveva venire oggi; ma temevo tanto che qualche ritardo fortuito la spaventasse, che le telegrafai di non venire finché non avesse avuto mie notizie. Ma lui sarà quasi certamente qui in qualche momento di stanotte, e allora tutto finirà in fumo — fumo di tabacco. Sfateremo quella vecchia menzogna quando stapperemo una bottiglia di questo vino.»
«Ottimo vino» disse Padre Brown, sollevando gravemente il bicchiere, «ma, come vedete, un pessimo bevitore. Vi chiedo davvero sinceramente scusa»: poiché aveva versato una piccola macchia di vino sulla tovaglia. Bevve e posò il bicchiere con volto composto; ma la sua mano aveva avuto un sussulto nell’esatto momento in cui si era accorto di un viso che spiava attraverso la finestra del giardino, proprio dietro l’Ammiraglio — il viso di una donna, bruna, con capelli e occhi meridionali, e giovane, ma simile a una maschera di tragedia.
Dopo una pausa il prete riprese a parlare con il suo mite modo. «Ammiraglio» disse, «volete farmi un favore? Permettete che io, e i miei amici se vorranno, ci fermiamo in quella vostra torre solo per stanotte? Sapete che, nella mia professione, si è esorcisti quasi prima di ogni altra cosa?»
Pendragon balzò in piedi e passeggiò rapidamente avanti e indietro davanti alla finestra, dalla quale il viso era all’istante svanito. «Vi dico che non c’è nulla in tutto ciò» gridò, con squillante violenza. «C’è una cosa che so a proposito di questa faccenda. Potete chiamarmi ateo. Sono ateo.» Qui si voltò di scatto e fissò Padre Brown con un volto di spaventosa concentrazione. «Questa faccenda è perfettamente naturale. Non c’è alcuna maledizione in essa.»
Padre Brown sorrise. «In tal caso» disse, «non può esserci alcuna obiezione a che io dorma nella vostra deliziosa casina estiva.»
«L’idea è del tutto ridicola» rispose l’Ammiraglio, tamburellando sullo schienale della sedia.
«Vi prego di perdonarmi ogni cosa» disse Brown col suo tono più partecipe, «compreso l’aver versato il vino. Ma mi sembra che non siate del tutto così tranquillo riguardo alla torre fiammeggiante come cercate di apparire.»
L’Ammiraglio Pendragon si risedette con la stessa bruschezza con cui si era alzato; ma sedette del tutto immobile, e quando riprese a parlare fu con voce più bassa. «Lo fate a vostro rischio e pericolo» disse; «ma non sareste anche voi ateo, per restare sano di mente in mezzo a tutta questa diavoleria?»
Circa tre ore dopo Fanshaw, Flambeau e il prete gironzolavano ancora per il giardino nell’oscurità; e cominciò a farsi strada negli altri due l’idea che Padre Brown non avesse alcuna intenzione di andare a dormire, né nella torre né in casa.
«Credo che il prato abbia bisogno di essere sarchiato» disse egli sognante. «Se solo trovassi una zappetta o qualcosa del genere, lo farei io stesso.»
Lo seguirono, ridendo e in parte protestando; ma egli rispose con la massima solennità, spiegando loro, in un esasperante piccolo sermone, che si può sempre trovare qualche piccola occupazione utile agli altri. Non trovò una zappetta; ma trovò una vecchia scopa fatta di ramoscelli, con la quale cominciò energicamente a spazzare via dall’erba le foglie cadute.
“Always some little thing to be done,” he said with idiotic cheerfulness; “as George Herbert says: ‘Who sweeps an Admiral’s garden in Cornwall as for Thy laws makes that and the action fine.’ And now,” he added, suddenly slinging the broom away, “Let’s go and water the flowers.”
With the same mixed emotions they watched him uncoil some considerable lengths of the large garden hose, saying with an air of wistful discrimination: “The red tulips before the yellow, I think. Look a bit dry, don’t you think?”
He turned the little tap on the instrument, and the water shot out straight and solid as a long rod of steel.
“Look out, Samson,” cried Flambeau; “why, you’ve cut off the tulip’s head.”
Father Brown stood ruefully contemplating the decapitated plant.
“Mine does seem to be a rather kill or cure sort of watering,” he admitted, scratching his head. “I suppose it’s a pity I didn’t find the spud. You should have seen me with the spud! Talking of tools, you’ve got that swordstick, Flambeau, you always carry? That’s right; and Sir Cecil could have that sword the Admiral threw away by the fence here. How grey everything looks!”
“The mist’s rising from the river,” said the staring Flambeau.
Almost as he spoke the huge figure of the hairy gardener appeared on a higher ridge of the trenched and terraced lawn, hailing them with a brandished rake and a horribly bellowing voice. “Put down that hose,” he shouted; “put down that hose and go to your—”
“I am fearfully clumsy,” replied the reverend gentleman weakly; “do you know, I upset some wine at dinner.” He made a wavering half-turn of apology towards the gardener, with the hose still spouting in his hand. The gardener caught the cold crash of the water full in his face like the crash of a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped and went sprawling with his boots in the air.
“How very dreadful!” said Father Brown, looking round in a sort of wonder. “Why, I’ve hit a man!”
He stood with his head forward for a moment as if looking or listening; and then set off at a trot towards the tower, still trailing the hose behind him. The tower was quite close, but its outline was curiously dim.
“Your river mist,” he said, “has a rum smell.”
“By the Lord it has,” cried Fanshaw, who was very white. “But you can’t mean—”
“I mean,” said Father Brown, “that one of the Admiral’s scientific predictions is coming true tonight. This story is going to end in smoke.”
As he spoke a most beautiful rose-red light seemed to burst into blossom like a gigantic rose; but accompanied with a crackling and rattling noise that was like the laughter of devils.
“My God! what is this?” cried Sir Cecil Fanshaw.
“The sign of the flaming tower,” said Father Brown, and sent the driving water from his hose into the heart of the red patch.
“Lucky we hadn’t gone to bed!” ejaculated Fanshaw. “I suppose it can’t spread to the house.”
“You may remember,” said the priest quietly, “that the wooden fence that might have carried it was cut away.”
Flambeau turned electrified eyes upon his friend, but Fanshaw only said rather absently: “Well, nobody can be killed, anyhow.”
“This is rather a curious kind of tower,” observed Father Brown, “when it takes to killing people, it always kills people who are somewhere else.”
At the same instant the monstrous figure of the gardener with the streaming beard stood again on the green ridge against the sky, waving others to come on; but now waving not a rake but a cutlass. Behind him came the two negroes, also with the old crooked cutlasses out of the trophy. But in the blood-red glare, with their black faces and yellow figures, they looked like devils carrying instruments of torture. In the dim garden behind them a distant voice was heard calling out brief directions. When the priest heard the voice, a terrible change came over his countenance.
But he remained composed; and never took his eye off the patch of flame which had begun by spreading, but now seemed to shrink a little as it hissed under the torch of the long silver spear of water. He kept his finger along the nozzle of the pipe to ensure the aim, and attended to no other business, knowing only by the noise and that semi-conscious corner of the eye, the exciting incidents that began to tumble themselves about the island garden. He gave two brief directions to his friends. One was: “Knock these fellows down somehow and tie them up, whoever they are; there’s rope down by those faggots. They want to take away my nice hose.” The other was: “As soon as you get a chance, call out to that canoeing girl; she’s over on the bank with the gipsies. Ask her if they could get some buckets across and fill them from the river.” Then he closed his mouth and continued to water the new red flower as ruthlessly as he had watered the red tulip.
He never turned his head to look at the strange fight that followed between the foes and friends of the mysterious fire. He almost felt the island shake when Flambeau collided with the huge gardener; he merely imagined how it would whirl round them as they wrestled. He heard the crashing fall; and his friend’s gasp of triumph as he dashed on to the first negro; and the cries of both the blacks as Flambeau and Fanshaw bound them. Flambeau’s enormous strength more than redressed the odds in the fight, especially as the fourth man still hovered near the house, only a shadow and a voice. He heard also the water broken by the paddles of a canoe; the girl’s voice giving orders, the voices of gipsies answering and coming nearer, the plumping and sucking noise of empty buckets plunged into a full stream; and finally the sound of many feet around the fire. But all this was less to him than the fact that the red rent, which had lately once more increased, had once more slightly diminished.
«C’è sempre qualche piccola cosa da fare» disse con idiota allegria; «come dice George Herbert: “Chi scopa il giardino di un Ammiraglio in Cornovaglia per amore delle Tue leggi rende nobili tanto quello quanto l’azione.” E ora» aggiunse, gettando via all’improvviso la scopa, «andiamo ad annaffiare i fiori.»
Con le stesse emozioni contrastanti lo osservarono srotolare tratti considerevoli del grande tubo da giardino, mentre diceva con aria di malinconica ponderatezza: «Prima i tulipani rossi che i gialli, credo. Sembrano un po’ aridi, non vi pare?»
Aprì il rubinetto dello strumento, e l’acqua schizzò fuori dritta e solida come una lunga asta d’acciaio.
«Attento, Sansone» gridò Flambeau; «diamine, avete decapitato il tulipano.»
Father Brown restò a contemplare mestamente la pianta decapitata.
«La mia sembra proprio essere un’annaffiatura del tipo o guarisce o uccide» ammise, grattandosi il capo. «Immagino sia un peccato che non abbia trovato la zappetta. Avreste dovuto vedermi con la zappetta! A proposito di attrezzi, avete quel bastone-spada, Flambeau, che portate sempre con voi? Bene; e Sir Cecil potrebbe prendere quella spada che l’Ammiraglio ha gettato via lì presso lo steccato. Com’è grigio tutto quanto!»
«È la nebbia che sale dal fiume» disse Flambeau con lo sguardo fisso.
Quasi mentre parlava, l’enorme figura del giardiniere peloso comparve su un crinale più alto del prato scavato e terrazzato, apostrofandoli con un rastrello brandito e una voce orribilmente muggente. «Metti giù quel tubo» urlò; «metti giù quel tubo e vai a…»
«Sono spaventosamente maldestro» rispose fiaccamente il reverendo signore; «sapete, ho rovesciato del vino a cena.» Fece un vacillante mezzo giro di scusa verso il giardiniere, con il tubo che ancora zampillava in mano. Il giardiniere ricevette il freddo urto dell’acqua in pieno viso, come l’urto di una palla di cannone; barcollò, scivolò e cadde lungo disteso, con gli stivali all’aria.
«Che cosa terribile!» disse Father Brown, guardandosi intorno in una sorta di stupore. «Diamine, ho colpito un uomo!»
Restò un momento con il capo proteso in avanti, come se guardasse o ascoltasse; e poi si avviò al trotto verso la torre, trascinandosi ancora dietro il tubo. La torre era piuttosto vicina, ma il suo profilo era curiosamente indistinto.
«La vostra nebbia del fiume» disse, «ha un odore curioso.»
«Perdio, è vero» gridò Fanshaw, che era pallidissimo. «Ma non vorrete dire…»
«Voglio dire» disse Father Brown, «che una delle previsioni scientifiche dell’Ammiraglio si sta avverando stanotte. Questa storia finirà in fumo.»
Mentre parlava, una bellissima luce color rosso rosa parve sbocciare come una gigantesca rosa; ma accompagnata da un crepitio e un fragore che pareva il riso dei demoni.
«Mio Dio! che cos’è questo?» gridò Sir Cecil Fanshaw.
«Il segno della torre fiammeggiante» disse Father Brown, e diresse il getto d’acqua del suo tubo nel cuore della macchia rossa.
«Per fortuna non eravamo andati a letto!» esclamò Fanshaw. «Immagino che non possa propagarsi alla casa.»
«Ricorderete forse» disse il prete con calma, «che lo steccato di legno che avrebbe potuto trasmetterlo è stato tagliato via.»
Flambeau volse verso l’amico occhi elettrizzati, ma Fanshaw disse soltanto, piuttosto distrattamente: «Beh, nessuno può restare ucciso, in ogni caso.»
«È una torre piuttosto curiosa, questa» osservò Father Brown; «quando si mette a uccidere la gente, uccide sempre gente che si trova da qualche altra parte.»
Nello stesso istante la mostruosa figura del giardiniere, con la barba grondante, si ergeva di nuovo sul crinale verde contro il cielo, facendo cenno agli altri di avanzare; ma ora agitando non un rastrello, bensì un coltellaccio. Dietro di lui venivano i due negri, anch’essi con i vecchi coltellacci ricurvi presi dal trofeo. Ma nel bagliore rosso sangue, con i loro visi neri e le loro figure gialle, sembravano demoni che recassero strumenti di tortura. Nel giardino fioco alle loro spalle si udiva una voce lontana che gridava brevi ordini. Quando il prete udì quella voce, un terribile mutamento gli passò sul volto.
Ma egli rimase composto; e non tolse mai l’occhio dalla macchia di fiamma, che aveva cominciato a diffondersi, ma ora pareva ridursi un poco mentre sfrigolava sotto la torcia della lunga lancia d’argento d’acqua. Teneva il dito lungo l’ugello del tubo per assicurare la mira, e non badava ad altro, conoscendo solo dal rumore e da quell’angolo semicosciente dell’occhio gli eccitanti avvenimenti che cominciavano ad accavallarsi per il giardino dell’isola. Diede due brevi ordini ai suoi amici. Il primo fu: «Buttate giù questi tizi in qualche modo e legateli, chiunque siano; c’è della corda laggiù presso quelle fascine. Vogliono portarmi via il mio bel tubo.» L’altro fu: «Appena ne avete l’occasione, chiamate quella ragazza della canoa; è là sulla riva con gli zingari. Chiedetele se possono far passare qualche secchio e riempirlo al fiume.» Poi chiuse la bocca e continuò ad annaffiare il nuovo fiore rosso spietatamente come aveva annaffiato il tulipano rosso.
Non voltò mai il capo a guardare la strana battaglia che seguì tra i nemici e gli amici del misterioso fuoco. Sentì quasi l’isola tremare quando Flambeau si scontrò con l’enorme giardiniere; immaginò soltanto come essa dovesse turbinare loro attorno mentre lottavano. Udì il fragore della caduta; e l’ansito di trionfo dell’amico mentre si lanciava sul primo negro; e le grida di entrambi i neri mentre Flambeau e Fanshaw li legavano. La forza smisurata di Flambeau più che compensava lo svantaggio nella lotta, tanto più che il quarto uomo ancora si aggirava presso la casa, solo un’ombra e una voce. Udì anche l’acqua rotta dalle pagaie di una canoa; la voce della ragazza che dava ordini, le voci degli zingari che rispondevano e si avvicinavano, il tonfo e il risucchio dei secchi vuoti immersi in una corrente piena; e infine il suono di molti piedi attorno al fuoco. Ma tutto ciò era per lui meno importante del fatto che lo squarcio rosso, che poco prima era di nuovo cresciuto, si era di nuovo lievemente ridotto.
Then came a cry that very nearly made him turn his head. Flambeau and Fanshaw, now reinforced by some of the gipsies, had rushed after the mysterious man by the house; and he heard from the other end of the garden the Frenchman’s cry of horror and astonishment. It was echoed by a howl not to be called human, as the being broke from their hold and ran along the garden. Three times at least it raced round the whole island, in a way that was as horrible as the chase of a lunatic, both in the cries of the pursued and the ropes carried by the pursuers; but was more horrible still, because it somehow suggested one of the chasing games of children in a garden. Then, finding them closing in on every side, the figure sprang upon one of the higher river banks and disappeared with a splash into the dark and driving river.
“You can do no more, I fear,” said Brown in a voice cold with pain. “He has been washed down to the rocks by now, where he has sent so many others. He knew the use of a family legend.”
“Oh, don’t talk in these parables,” cried Flambeau impatiently. “Can’t you put it simply in words of one syllable?”
“Yes,” answered Brown, with his eye on the hose. “‘Both eyes bright, she’s all right; one eye blinks, down she sinks.’”
The fire hissed and shrieked more and more, like a strangled thing, as it grew narrower and narrower under the flood from the pipe and buckets, but Father Brown still kept his eye on it as he went on speaking:
“I thought of asking this young lady, if it were morning yet, to look through that telescope at the river mouth and the river. She might have seen something to interest her: the sign of the ship, or Mr Walter Pendragon coming home, and perhaps even the sign of the half-man, for though he is certainly safe by now, he may very well have waded ashore. He has been within a shave of another shipwreck; and would never have escaped it, if the lady hadn’t had the sense to suspect the old Admiral’s telegram and come down to watch him. Don’t let’s talk about the old Admiral. Don’t let’s talk about anything. It’s enough to say that whenever this tower, with its pitch and resin-wood, really caught fire, the spark on the horizon always looked like the twin light to the coast light-house.”
“And that,” said Flambeau, “is how the father and brother died. The wicked uncle of the legends very nearly got his estate after all.”
Father Brown did not answer; indeed, he did not speak again, save for civilities, till they were all safe round a cigar-box in the cabin of the yacht. He saw that the frustrated fire was extinguished; and then refused to linger, though he actually heard young Pendragon, escorted by an enthusiastic crowd, come tramping up the river bank; and might (had he been moved by romantic curiosities) have received the combined thanks of the man from the ship and the girl from the canoe. But his fatigue had fallen on him once more, and he only started once, when Flambeau abruptly told him he had dropped cigar-ash on his trousers.
“That’s no cigar-ash,” he said rather wearily. “That’s from the fire, but you don’t think so because you’re all smoking cigars. That’s just the way I got my first faint suspicion about the chart.”
“Do you mean Pendragon’s chart of his Pacific Islands?” asked Fanshaw.
“You thought it was a chart of the Pacific Islands,” answered Brown. “Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it’s a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it’s for a lady’s hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they’ve seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was the map of this river.”
“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.
NINE
Poi venne un grido che quasi lo fece voltare. Flambeau e Fanshaw, ora rinforzati da alcuni degli zingari, si erano lanciati all’inseguimento del misterioso uomo presso la casa; ed egli udì, dall’altra estremità del giardino, il grido di orrore e stupore del francese. Fu echeggiato da un ululato che non si poteva dire umano, mentre l’essere si liberava dalla loro presa e correva lungo il giardino. Almeno tre volte fece il giro dell’intera isola, in un modo tanto orribile quanto la caccia di un pazzo, sia per le grida dell’inseguito sia per le corde portate dagli inseguitori; ma ancor più orribile, perché suggeriva chissà come uno di quei giochi d’inseguimento dei bambini in un giardino. Poi, trovandoli che si stringevano da ogni lato, la figura balzò su una delle rive più alte del fiume e scomparve con un tonfo nel fiume scuro e vorticoso.
«Non potete far altro, temo» disse Brown con voce fredda di dolore. «Ormai è stato trascinato giù verso gli scogli, dove lui ha mandato tanti altri. Sapeva come servirsi di una leggenda di famiglia.»
«Oh, non parlate per parabole» gridò Flambeau con impazienza. «Non potete dirlo semplicemente, con parole di una sola sillaba?»
«Sì» rispose Brown, con l’occhio sul tubo. «“Occhi due che brillano bene, la nave va; un occhio che ammicca, e la nave affonda.”»
Il fuoco sibilava e strideva sempre più, come una cosa strangolata, mentre si faceva sempre più stretto sotto il diluvio del tubo e dei secchi, ma Padre Brown continuava a tenervi sopra l’occhio mentre proseguiva a parlare:
«Avevo pensato di chiedere a questa signorina, se fosse già mattino, di guardare attraverso quel telescopio verso la foce e verso il fiume. Avrebbe potuto vedere qualcosa che l’interessasse: il segno della nave, o il signor Walter Pendragon che torna a casa, e forse persino il segno del mezzo uomo, poiché, sebbene ormai sia certamente in salvo, può benissimo essere giunto a riva a guado. È stato a un pelo da un altro naufragio; e non gli sarebbe mai scampato, se la signorina non avesse avuto il buon senso di sospettare del telegramma del vecchio Ammiraglio e di scendere qui a sorvegliarlo. Non parliamo del vecchio Ammiraglio. Non parliamo di nulla. Basta dire che, ogni volta che questa torre, con la sua pece e il suo legno resinoso, prendeva davvero fuoco, la scintilla all’orizzonte appariva sempre come il fanale gemello del faro della costa.»
«Ed è così» disse Flambeau, «che morirono il padre e il fratello. Il malvagio zio delle leggende per poco non si è preso, alla fine, la tenuta.»
Padre Brown non rispose; anzi, non parlò più, se non per cortesia, finché non furono tutti al sicuro attorno a una scatola di sigari nella cabina del panfilo. Vide che il frustrato incendio era spento; e poi rifiutò di attardarsi, benché udisse davvero il giovane Pendragon, scortato da una folla entusiasta, arrivare a passo pesante lungo la riva del fiume; e avrebbe potuto (se fosse stato mosso da romantiche curiosità) ricevere i ringraziamenti congiunti dell’uomo della nave e della ragazza della canoa. Ma la stanchezza gli era ripiombata addosso ancora una volta, e trasalì una sola volta, quando Flambeau gli disse bruscamente che gli era caduta della cenere di sigaro sui calzoni.
«Non è cenere di sigaro» disse piuttosto spossato. «Viene dal fuoco, ma voi non lo pensate perché state tutti fumando sigari. È proprio così che ho avuto il mio primo debole sospetto a proposito della carta.»
«Volete dire la carta delle isole del Pacifico di Pendragon?» chiese Fanshaw.
«Voi credevate che fosse una carta delle isole del Pacifico» rispose Brown. «Mettete una piuma accanto a un fossile e a un pezzetto di corallo, e tutti penseranno che sia un esemplare. Mettete la stessa piuma accanto a un nastro e a un fiore artificiale, e tutti penseranno che sia per il cappello di una signora. Mettete la stessa piuma accanto a un calamaio, a un libro e a una pila di carta da lettere, e la maggior parte degli uomini giurerà di aver visto una penna d’oca. Così voi avete visto quella mappa tra uccelli tropicali e conchiglie, e avete pensato che fosse una mappa delle isole del Pacifico. Era la mappa di questo fiume.»
«Ma come lo sapete?» chiese Fanshaw.
«Ho visto lo scoglio che voi pensavate somigliasse a un drago, e quello simile a Merlino, e…»
«Sembra che abbiate notato parecchio, mentre entravamo» esclamò Fanshaw. «Noi vi credevamo piuttosto assente.»
«Avevo il mal di mare» disse semplicemente Padre Brown. «Mi sentivo semplicemente orribile. Ma sentirsi orribili non ha nulla a che fare con il non vedere le cose.» E chiuse gli occhi.
«Credete che la maggior parte degli uomini avrebbe visto tutto ciò?» chiese Flambeau. Non ricevette risposta: Padre Brown dormiva.
NOVE
The God of the Gongs
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.
Il dio dei gong
Era uno di quei pomeriggi freddi e vuoti del principio dell’inverno, quando la luce del giorno è d’argento più che d’oro e di peltro più che d’argento. Se era lugubre in cento uffici tetri e in cento salotti sbadiglianti, lo era ancora di più lungo i margini della piatta costa dell’Essex, dove la monotonia si faceva tanto più disumana per il fatto di venire interrotta, a intervalli lunghissimi, da un lampione che pareva meno civile di un albero, o da un albero che pareva più brutto di un lampione. Una leggera nevicata s’era mezzo sciolta in poche strisce, anch’esse più plumbee che argentee, quando era stata fissata di nuovo dal sigillo del gelo; neve fresca non ne era caduta, ma un nastro di vecchia neve correva lungo l’orlo estremo della costa, così da correre parallelo al pallido nastro della spuma.
La linea del mare pareva gelata nella vivezza stessa del suo azzurro-violetto, come la vena di un dito assiderato. Per miglia e miglia, in avanti e all’indietro, non v’era anima viva che respirasse, salvo due pedoni che camminavano di buon passo, sebbene uno avesse le gambe assai più lunghe e facesse falcate assai più lunghe dell’altro.
Non pareva un luogo né un tempo troppo adatto per una vacanza, ma Padre Brown di vacanze ne aveva poche, e doveva prenderle quando poteva, e preferiva sempre, se possibile, prenderle in compagnia del suo vecchio amico Flambeau, ex criminale ed ex investigatore. Il prete s’era messo in testa di visitare la sua vecchia parrocchia a Cobhole, e stava andando verso nord-est lungo la costa.
Dopo aver camminato ancora un miglio o due, si accorsero che la riva cominciava a essere formalmente arginata, sì da formare qualcosa come una passeggiata; i brutti lampioni si fecero meno radi e più ornati, pur restando esattamente altrettanto brutti. Mezzo miglio più avanti Padre Brown fu dapprima messo in imbarazzo da piccoli labirinti di vasi da fiori senza fiori, coperti di quelle piante basse, piatte, dai colori spenti, che somigliano meno a un giardino che a un pavimento a tessere, tra deboli sentieri ricurvi costellati di panchine dagli schienali ricurvi. Fiutò debolmente l’atmosfera di un certo tipo di cittadina di mare che non gli era particolarmente cara, e, guardando avanti lungo la passeggiata in riva al mare, vide qualcosa che tolse ogni dubbio alla faccenda. Nella grigia lontananza il grande palco dell’orchestra di una località balneare si ergeva come un fungo gigante con sei zampe.
«Suppongo,» disse Padre Brown, tirandosi su il bavero del cappotto e stringendosi un po’ di più intorno al collo una sciarpa di lana, «che ci stiamo avvicinando a un luogo di villeggiatura.»
«Temo,» rispose Flambeau, «un luogo di villeggiatura al quale poche persone hanno, in questo momento, il piacere di villeggiare. Cercano di far rivivere questi posti d’inverno, ma non ci riescono mai, tranne che con Brighton e quelli antichi. Questa dev’essere Seawood, credo… l’esperimento di Lord Pooley; aveva fatto venire i Cantori Siciliani a Natale, e si parla di tenere qui uno dei grandi incontri di pugilato. Ma dovranno buttare in mare quel posto marcio; è tetro come un vagone ferroviario dimenticato.»
Erano giunti sotto il grande palco dell’orchestra, e il prete stava guardandolo dal basso con una curiosità che aveva in sé qualcosa di piuttosto strano, la testa un po’ inclinata da un lato, come quella di un uccello. Era la costruzione convenzionale e piuttosto pacchiana propria di simili scopi: una cupola appiattita o baldacchino, dorato qua e là, e sollevato su sei sottili colonne di legno dipinto, il tutto rialzato di circa un metro e mezzo sopra la passeggiata su una piattaforma di legno rotonda come un tamburo. Ma c’era qualcosa di fantastico nella neve unito a qualcosa di artificiale nell’oro, che ossessionava Flambeau non meno del suo amico con una qualche associazione che egli non riusciva ad afferrare, ma che sapeva essere insieme artistica ed estranea.
«Ci sono,» disse infine. «È giapponese. È come quelle fantasiose stampe giapponesi, dove la neve sulla montagna sembra zucchero, e la doratura sulle pagode è come la doratura sul panpepato. Sembra proprio un piccolo tempio pagano.»
«Sì,» disse Padre Brown. «Andiamo a dare un’occhiata al dio.» E con un’agilità che difficilmente ci si sarebbe aspettata da lui, saltò sulla piattaforma rialzata.
«Oh, benissimo,» disse Flambeau, ridendo; e l’istante dopo la sua torreggiante figura fu visibile su quella bizzarra sopraelevazione.
Per quanto lieve fosse la differenza d’altezza, essa dava, in quelle distese piatte, il senso di vedere sempre più lontano, sempre più oltre, per terra e per mare. Verso l’interno i piccoli giardinetti invernali sfumavano in un confuso boschetto grigio; oltre quello, in lontananza, si stendevano i lunghi bassi fienili di una fattoria solitaria, e oltre ancora nient’altro che le lunghe pianure dell’Anglia orientale. Verso il mare non v’era vela né segno di vita salvo qualche gabbiano: e persino questi somigliavano agli ultimi fiocchi di neve, e parevano galleggiare più che volare.
Flambeau si voltò di scatto a un’esclamazione dietro di sé. Pareva venire da più in basso di quanto ci si sarebbe potuti aspettare, e rivolgersi ai suoi calcagni più che alla sua testa. Tese all’istante la mano, ma non poté trattenersi dal ridere a ciò che vide. Per una ragione o per l’altra la piattaforma aveva ceduto sotto Padre Brown, e lo sventurato ometto era sprofondato fino al livello della passeggiata. Era giusto tanto alto, o tanto basso, che la sola testa gli sporgeva fuori dal buco nel legno sfondato, somigliante alla testa di san Giovanni Battista su un vassoio. Il volto portava un’espressione sconcertata, come forse quello di san Giovanni Battista.
Dopo un momento cominciò a ridacchiare un poco. «Questo legno dev’essere marcio,» disse Flambeau. «Anche se pare strano che regga me e ceda là dove passate voi. Lasciate che vi aiuti a uscire.»
Ma il piccolo prete stava guardando con una certa curiosità gli angoli e i bordi del legno che si diceva marcio, e c’era una sorta di turbamento sulla sua fronte.
«Su, andiamo,» gridò Flambeau spazientito, sempre con la sua grande mano bruna protesa. «Non volete uscire?»
Il prete teneva tra il pollice e l’indice una scheggia del legno spezzato, e non rispose immediatamente. Alla fine disse pensosamente: «Uscire? Ma no. Anzi, credo di voler entrare.» E si tuffò nel buio sotto il pavimento di legno così bruscamente da far cadere il suo grande cappello clericale ricurvo e lasciarlo posato sulle assi di sopra, senza alcuna testa clericale dentro.
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.
Flambeau guardò ancora una volta verso l’interno e verso il mare, e ancora una volta non riuscì a scorgere nient’altro che mari invernali come la neve, e nevi piatte come il mare.
Si udì un rumore di rovistio dietro di lui, e il piccolo prete venne fuori dal buco arrampicandosi più in fretta di quanto vi fosse caduto. Il suo volto non era più sconcertato, ma piuttosto risoluto, e, forse solo per i riflessi della neve, un tantino più pallido del solito.
«Ebbene?» chiese il suo alto amico. «Avete trovato il dio del tempio?»
«No,» rispose Padre Brown. «Ho trovato ciò che talvolta era più importante. La Vittima.»
«Che diavolo intendete?» gridò Flambeau, del tutto allarmato.
Padre Brown non rispose. Fissava, con un nodo sulla fronte, il paesaggio; e all’improvviso vi puntò il dito. «Che casa è quella laggiù?» domandò.
Seguendo il suo dito, Flambeau vide per la prima volta gli angoli di un edificio più vicino della fattoria, ma per la maggior parte celato da una frangia d’alberi. Non era un edificio grande, e sorgeva ben arretrato rispetto alla riva; ma un luccichio d’ornamento su di esso suggeriva che fosse parte del medesimo schema decorativo della località balneare, come il palco dell’orchestra, i giardinetti e le panchine di ferro dallo schienale ricurvo.
Padre Brown saltò giù dal palco, seguito dall’amico; e mentre camminavano nella direzione indicata gli alberi si diradarono a destra e a sinistra, ed essi videro un piccolo albergo piuttosto sgargiante, di quelli comuni nelle località balneari: l’albergo del Saloon Bar più che del Bar Parlour. Quasi tutta la facciata era di stucco dorato e di vetro istoriato, e tra quel grigio paesaggio marino e i grigi alberi simili a streghe, la sua qualità dozzinale aveva qualcosa di spettrale nella sua malinconia. Entrambi sentirono vagamente che se in una simile locanda fosse stato offerto qualche cibo o bevanda, sarebbero stati il prosciutto di cartone e il boccale vuoto della pantomima.
In questo, tuttavia, non furono del tutto confermati. Man mano che si avvicinavano sempre più al luogo, videro davanti al buffet, che a quanto pareva era chiuso, una di quelle panchine di ferro da giardino dallo schienale ricurvo che avevano adornato i giardinetti, ma assai più lunga, che correva quasi per tutta la lunghezza della facciata. Presumibilmente, era stata messa lì perché i visitatori potessero sedersi a guardare il mare, ma difficilmente ci si aspettava di trovare qualcuno intento a farlo con un tempo simile.
Ciò nonostante, proprio davanti all’estremità della panchina di ferro c’era un piccolo tavolo rotondo da ristorante, e su di esso stavano una piccola bottiglia di Chablis e un piatto di mandorle e uva passa. Dietro il tavolo e sulla panchina sedeva un giovane dai capelli scuri, a capo scoperto, che fissava il mare in uno stato di immobilità quasi sbalorditiva.
Ma sebbene fosse potuto sembrare una figura di cera quando furono a quattro metri da lui, saltò su come un pupazzo a molla quando essi giunsero a tre, e disse in modo deferente, benché non privo di dignità: «Volete accomodarvi, signori? Al momento non ho personale, ma qualcosa di semplice posso prepararvelo io stesso.»
«Molto obbligato,» disse Flambeau. «Siete dunque voi il proprietario?»
«Sì,» disse l’uomo bruno, ricadendo un poco nel suo atteggiamento immobile. «I miei camerieri sono tutti italiani, capite, e ho pensato fosse giusto che vedessero il loro compatriota battere il negro, se davvero ci riesce. Sapete che il grande incontro tra Malvoli e Nigger Ned si terrà, alla fin fine?»
«Temo che non possiamo attardarci ad abusare seriamente della vostra ospitalità,» disse Padre Brown. «Ma il mio amico gradirà volentieri un bicchiere di sherry, ne sono certo, per tenere fuori il freddo e brindare al successo del campione latino.»
Flambeau non capì la faccenda dello sherry, ma non vi si oppose minimamente. Poté solo dire amabilmente: «Oh, grazie mille.»
«Sherry, signore… senz’altro,» disse il loro ospite, voltandosi verso la sua locanda. «Scusatemi se vi trattengo qualche minuto. Come vi ho detto, non ho personale…» E si diresse verso le finestre nere della sua locanda sbarrata e senza luci.
«Oh, non ha davvero importanza,» cominciò Flambeau, ma l’uomo si voltò per rassicurarlo.
«Ho le chiavi,» disse. «Saprei ritrovare la strada al buio.»
«Non intendevo…» cominciò Padre Brown.
Fu interrotto da una voce umana muggente che venne dalle viscere dell’albergo disabitato. Tuonò un qualche nome straniero forte ma inintelligibile, e il proprietario dell’albergo si mosse verso di essa più prontamente di quanto avesse fatto per lo sherry di Flambeau. Come l’immediata prova dimostrò, il proprietario aveva detto, allora e in seguito, nient’altro che la letterale verità. Ma tanto Flambeau quanto Padre Brown hanno spesso confessato che, in tutte le loro (spesso inaudite) avventure, nulla aveva loro gelato il sangue come quella voce d’orco, che risuonava all’improvviso da una locanda silenziosa e vuota.
«Il mio cuoco!» gridò in fretta il proprietario. «Avevo dimenticato il mio cuoco. Comincerà tra poco. Sherry, signore?»
E, per l’appunto, apparve sulla soglia una gran mole bianca con berretto bianco e grembiule bianco, come s’addice a un cuoco, ma con il superfluo risalto di una faccia nera. Flambeau aveva spesso sentito dire che i negri erano buoni cuochi. Eppure, in qualche modo, qualcosa nel contrasto di colore e di casta accrebbe il suo stupore che il proprietario dell’albergo rispondesse alla chiamata del cuoco, e non il cuoco alla chiamata del proprietario. Ma rifletté che i capocuochi sono proverbialmente arroganti; e, per giunta, l’ospite era tornato con lo sherry, e questa era la cosa importante.
«Mi meraviglio piuttosto,» disse Padre Brown, «che ci sia così poca gente sulla spiaggia, dal momento che questo grande incontro si terrà davvero, dopotutto. In tutte queste miglia abbiamo incontrato un uomo solo.»
Il proprietario dell’albergo alzò le spalle. «Vengono dall’altro capo della città, capite… dalla stazione, tre miglia da qui. Sono interessati soltanto allo sport, e si fermeranno negli alberghi solo per la notte. Dopotutto, non è certo tempo da crogiolarsi sulla riva.»
«O sulla panchina,» disse Flambeau, indicando il tavolino.
«Devo stare all’erta,» disse l’uomo dal volto immobile. Era un tipo tranquillo, dai lineamenti gradevoli, piuttosto giallastro; i suoi abiti scuri non avevano nulla di particolare, salvo che la cravatta nera era portata piuttosto alta, come uno stock, e fermata da uno spillone d’oro con una qualche testa grottesca in cima. Né vi era nulla di notevole nel volto, salvo qualcosa che era probabilmente un semplice tic nervoso: l’abitudine di socchiudere un occhio più dell’altro, dando l’impressione che l’altro fosse più grande, o fosse, forse, artificiale.
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.
But he was a very different figure from the confused mass of white and black that had appeared for an instant in the doorway. He was buttoned and buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion. A tall black hat was tilted on his broad black head— a hat of the sort that the French wit has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black man was like the black hat. He also was black, and yet his glossy skin flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is needless to say that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat. The red flower stood up in his buttonhole aggressively, as if it had suddenly grown there. And in the way he carried his cane in one hand and his cigar in the other there was a certain attitude— an attitude we must always remember when we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent and insolent—the cake walk.
“Sometimes,” said Flambeau, looking after him, “I’m not surprised that they lynch them.”
“I am never surprised,” said Father Brown, “at any work of hell. But as I was saying,” he resumed, as the negro, still ostentatiously pulling on his yellow gloves, betook himself briskly towards the watering-place, a queer music-hall figure against that grey and frosty scene—“as I was saying, I couldn’t describe the man very minutely, but he had a flourish and old-fashioned whiskers and moustachios, dark or dyed, as in the pictures of foreign financiers, round his neck was wrapped a long purple scarf that thrashed out in the wind as he walked. It was fixed at the throat rather in the way that nurses fix children’s comforters with a safety-pin. Only this,” added the priest, gazing placidly out to sea, “was not a safety-pin.”
The man sitting on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to sea. Now he was once more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that one of his eyes was naturally larger than the other. Both were now well opened, and he could almost fancy the left eye grew larger as he gazed.
“It was a very long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or some such thing,” continued the cleric; “and it was fixed in a rather odd way—he wore pince-nez and a broad black—”
The motionless man continued to gaze at the sea, and the eyes in his head might have belonged to two different men. Then he made a movement of blinding swiftness.
Father Brown had his back to him, and in that flash might have fallen dead on his face. Flambeau had no weapon, but his large brown hands were resting on the end of the long iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered their shape, and he heaved the whole huge thing high over his head, like a headsman’s axe about to fall. The mere height of the thing, as he held it vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by which he was inviting men to climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in the level evening light, looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It was the shock of that shadow, before the shock of the iron crash, that made the stranger quail and dodge, and then dart into his inn, leaving the flat and shining dagger he had dropped exactly where it had fallen.
“We must get away from here instantly,” cried Flambeau, flinging the huge seat away with furious indifference on the beach. He caught the little priest by the elbow and ran him down a grey perspective of barren back garden, at the end of which there was a closed back garden door. Flambeau bent over it an instant in violent silence, and then said: “The door is locked.”
As he spoke a black feather from one of the ornamental firs fell, brushing the brim of his hat. It startled him more than the small and distant detonation that had come just before. Then came another distant detonation, and the door he was trying to open shook under the bullet buried in it. Flambeau’s shoulders again filled out and altered suddenly. Three hinges and a lock burst at the same instant, and he went out into the empty path behind, carrying the great garden door with him, as Samson carried the gates of Gaza.
Then he flung the garden door over the garden wall, just as a third shot picked up a spurt of snow and dust behind his heel. Without ceremony he snatched up the little priest, slung him astraddle on his shoulders, and went racing towards Seawood as fast as his long legs could carry him. It was not until nearly two miles farther on that he set his small companion down. It had hardly been a dignified escape, in spite of the classic model of Anchises, but Father Brown’s face only wore a broad grin.
“Well,” said Flambeau, after an impatient silence, as they resumed their more conventional tramp through the streets on the edge of the town, where no outrage need be feared, “I don’t know what all this means, but I take it I may trust my own eyes that you never met the man you have so accurately described.”
“I did meet him in a way,” Brown said, biting his finger rather nervously—“I did really. And it was too dark to see him properly, because it was under that bandstand affair. But I’m afraid I didn’t describe him so very accurately after all, for his pince-nez was broken under him, and the long gold pin wasn’t stuck through his purple scarf but through his heart.”
Il silenzio che seguì fu rotto dal loro ospite che disse tranquillamente: «Dove l’avete incontrato, quell’unico uomo, durante il vostro cammino?»
«Cosa abbastanza curiosa,» rispose il prete, «qui vicino… proprio presso quel palco dell’orchestra.»
Flambeau, che s’era seduto sulla lunga panchina di ferro a finire il suo sherry, lo posò e si alzò in piedi, fissando l’amico con stupore. Aprì la bocca per parlare, e poi la richiuse.
«Curioso,» disse pensieroso l’uomo dai capelli scuri. «Com’era?»
«Era piuttosto buio quando l’ho visto,» cominciò Padre Brown, «ma era…»
Come s’è detto, si può provare che l’albergatore aveva detto la precisa verità. La sua frase, che il cuoco sarebbe partito tra poco, si adempì alla lettera, poiché il cuoco venne fuori, infilandosi i guanti, proprio mentre parlavano.
Ma era una figura assai diversa dalla confusa massa di bianco e nero apparsa per un istante sulla soglia. Era abbottonato e affibbiato fin sopra gli occhi sporgenti nella maniera più sfolgorante. Un alto cilindro nero era inclinato sulla sua larga testa nera: un cappello di quelli che l’arguzia francese ha paragonato a otto specchi. Ma in qualche modo l’uomo nero era come il cappello nero. Anch’egli era nero, eppure la sua pelle lustra rimandava la luce da otto angoli o più. È inutile dire che portava ghette bianche e un panciotto con la parte interna bianca. Il fiore rosso spiccava aggressivamente all’occhiello, come se vi fosse cresciuto d’improvviso. E nel modo in cui reggeva il bastone in una mano e il sigaro nell’altra c’era un certo atteggiamento: un atteggiamento che dobbiamo sempre ricordare quando parliamo di pregiudizi razziali, qualcosa di innocente e insolente insieme: il cake walk.
«A volte,» disse Flambeau, seguendolo con lo sguardo, «non mi stupisce che li linciano.»
«Io non mi stupisco mai,» disse Padre Brown, «di nessuna opera dell’inferno. Ma, come stavo dicendo,» riprese, mentre il negro, sempre ostentatamente infilandosi i guanti gialli, si avviava a passo svelto verso la località balneare, bizzarra figura da café-chantant contro quello scenario grigio e gelido… «come stavo dicendo, non saprei descrivere l’uomo con molta minuzia, ma aveva un che di sfarzoso e favoriti e baffi all’antica, scuri o tinti, come nei ritratti dei finanzieri stranieri, e attorno al collo aveva avvolta una lunga sciarpa purpurea che sventolava al vento mentre camminava. Era fermata alla gola all’incirca nel modo in cui le bambinaie fermano le sciarpine dei bambini con una spilla di sicurezza. Solo che questa,» aggiunse il prete, guardando placidamente verso il mare, «non era una spilla di sicurezza.»
Anche l’uomo seduto sulla lunga panca di ferro guardava placidamente verso il mare. Ora era di nuovo in riposo. Flambeau ebbe la piena certezza che uno dei suoi occhi era per natura più grande dell’altro. Ora erano entrambi bene aperti, e gli parve quasi che l’occhio sinistro si facesse più grande mentre fissava.
«Era uno spillone d’oro molto lungo, e aveva la testa intagliata di una scimmia o di qualcosa di simile,» continuò l’ecclesiastico; «ed era fermato in un modo piuttosto singolare… l’uomo portava un pince-nez e un largo nero…»
L’uomo immobile continuava a fissare il mare, e gli occhi nella sua testa avrebbero potuto appartenere a due uomini diversi. Poi fece un movimento di accecante rapidità.
Padre Brown gli dava le spalle, e in quel lampo sarebbe potuto cadere morto a faccia in giù. Flambeau non aveva armi, ma le sue grandi mani brune erano posate sull’estremità della lunga panchina di ferro. Le sue spalle mutarono di colpo forma, ed egli sollevò l’intera enorme cosa alta sopra il capo, come la scure di un boia sul punto di calare. La sola altezza dell’oggetto, mentre lo teneva verticale, somigliava a una lunga scala di ferro con cui invitava gli uomini a salire verso le stelle. Ma la lunga ombra, nella luce radente della sera, somigliava a un gigante che brandiva la Torre Eiffel. Fu lo shock di quell’ombra, prima dello shock del fragore del ferro, a far sì che lo sconosciuto sussultasse e schivasse, e poi si precipitasse nella sua locanda, lasciando il piatto e lucente pugnale che aveva lasciato cadere esattamente dov’era caduto.
«Dobbiamo andarcene di qui all’istante,» gridò Flambeau, scagliando via l’enorme panchina sulla spiaggia con furiosa indifferenza. Afferrò il piccolo prete per il gomito e lo trascinò di corsa lungo una grigia prospettiva di sterile giardino sul retro, in fondo alla quale c’era una porta chiusa che dava sul retro. Flambeau vi si chinò sopra un istante in violento silenzio, e poi disse: «La porta è chiusa a chiave.»
Mentre parlava, una nera penna da uno degli abeti ornamentali cadde, sfiorando la tesa del suo cappello. Lo spaventò più della piccola e lontana detonazione che era giunta poco prima. Poi venne un’altra lontana detonazione, e la porta che stava cercando di aprire tremò sotto la pallottola conficcatavisi dentro. Le spalle di Flambeau si gonfiarono di nuovo e mutarono di colpo. Tre cardini e una serratura scoppiarono nel medesimo istante, ed egli uscì nel vuoto sentiero retrostante, portando con sé la grande porta del giardino, come Sansone portò le porte di Gaza.
Poi scagliò la porta del giardino oltre il muro di cinta, proprio mentre un terzo colpo sollevava uno schizzo di neve e polvere dietro il suo calcagno. Senza tante cerimonie afferrò il piccolo prete, se lo issò a cavalcioni sulle spalle, e si mise a correre verso Seawood più veloce che le lunghe gambe potessero portarlo. Fu solo dopo quasi due miglia più avanti che depose il suo piccolo compagno. Non era stata precisamente una fuga dignitosa, malgrado il classico modello di Anchise, ma il volto di Padre Brown non portava che un largo sogghigno.
«Ebbene,» disse Flambeau, dopo un impaziente silenzio, mentre riprendevano la loro più convenzionale camminata per le strade sul limitare della città, dove non v’era da temere alcuna violenza, «non so che cosa significhi tutto questo, ma suppongo di potermi fidare dei miei occhi che voi non avete mai incontrato l’uomo che avete descritto con tanta precisione.»
«In un certo senso l’ho incontrato davvero,» disse Brown, mordendosi il dito piuttosto nervosamente… «l’ho incontrato per davvero. Ed era troppo buio per vederlo bene, perché era sotto quella faccenda del palco dell’orchestra. Ma temo di non averlo descritto poi così tanto accuratamente, perché il suo pince-nez era rotto sotto di lui, e il lungo spillone d’oro non era conficcato nella sua sciarpa purpurea, ma nel suo cuore.»
“And I suppose,” said the other in a lower voice, “that glass-eyed guy had something to do with it.”
“I had hoped he had only a little,” answered Brown in a rather troubled voice, “and I may have been wrong in what I did. I acted on impulse. But I fear this business has deep roots and dark.”
They walked on through some streets in silence. The yellow lamps were beginning to be lit in the cold blue twilight, and they were evidently approaching the more central parts of the town. Highly coloured bills announcing the glove-fight between Nigger Ned and Malvoli were slapped about the walls.
“Well,” said Flambeau, “I never murdered anyone, even in my criminal days, but I can almost sympathize with anyone doing it in such a dreary place. Of all God-forsaken dustbins of Nature, I think the most heart-breaking are places like that bandstand, that were meant to be festive and are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid man feeling he must kill his rival in the solitude and irony of such a scene. I remember once taking a tramp in your glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing but gorse and skylarks, when I came out on a vast circle of land, and over me lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier above tier of seats, as huge as a Roman amphitheatre and as empty as a new letter-rack. A bird sailed in heaven over it. It was the Grand Stand at Epsom. And I felt that no one would ever be happy there again.”
“It’s odd you should mention Epsom,” said the priest. “Do you remember what was called the Sutton Mystery, because two suspected men—ice-cream men, I think—happened to live at Sutton? They were eventually released. A man was found strangled, it was said, on the Downs round that part. As a fact, I know (from an Irish policeman who is a friend of mine) that he was found close up to the Epsom Grand Stand—in fact, only hidden by one of the lower doors being pushed back.”
“That is queer,” assented Flambeau. “But it rather confirms my view that such pleasure places look awfully lonely out of season, or the man wouldn’t have been murdered there.”
“I’m not so sure he—” began Brown, and stopped.
“Not so sure he was murdered?” queried his companion.
“Not so sure he was murdered out of the season,” answered the little priest, with simplicity. “Don’t you think there’s something rather tricky about this solitude, Flambeau? Do you feel sure a wise murderer would always want the spot to be lonely? It’s very, very seldom a man is quite alone. And, short of that, the more alone he is, the more certain he is to be seen. No; I think there must be some other—Why, here we are at the Pavilion or Palace, or whatever they call it.”
They had emerged on a small square, brilliantly lighted, of which the principal building was gay with gilding, gaudy with posters, and flanked with two giant photographs of Malvoli and Nigger Ned.
“Hallo!” cried Flambeau in great surprise, as his clerical friend stumped straight up the broad steps. “I didn’t know pugilism was your latest hobby. Are you going to see the fight?”
“I don’t think there will be any fight,” replied Father Brown.
They passed rapidly through ante-rooms and inner rooms; they passed through the hall of combat itself, raised, roped, and padded with innumerable seats and boxes, and still the cleric did not look round or pause till he came to a clerk at a desk outside a door marked “Committee”. There he stopped and asked to see Lord Pooley.
The attendant observed that his lordship was very busy, as the fight was coming on soon, but Father Brown had a good-tempered tedium of reiteration for which the official mind is generally not prepared. In a few moments the rather baffled Flambeau found himself in the presence of a man who was still shouting directions to another man going out of the room. “Be careful, you know, about the ropes after the fourth— Well, and what do you want, I wonder!”
Lord Pooley was a gentleman, and, like most of the few remaining to our race, was worried—especially about money. He was half grey and half flaxen, and he had the eyes of fever and a high-bridged, frost-bitten nose.
“Only a word,” said Father Brown. “I have come to prevent a man being killed.”
Lord Pooley bounded off his chair as if a spring had flung him from it. “I’m damned if I’ll stand any more of this!” he cried. “You and your committees and parsons and petitions! Weren’t there parsons in the old days, when they fought without gloves? Now they’re fighting with the regulation gloves, and there’s not the rag of a possibility of either of the boxers being killed.”
“I didn’t mean either of the boxers,” said the little priest.
“Well, well, well!” said the nobleman, with a touch of frosty humour. “Who’s going to be killed? The referee?”
“I don’t know who’s going to be killed,” replied Father Brown, with a reflective stare. “If I did I shouldn’t have to spoil your pleasure. I could simply get him to escape. I never could see anything wrong about prize-fights. As it is, I must ask you to announce that the fight is off for the present.”
“Anything else?” jeered the gentleman with feverish eyes. “And what do you say to the two thousand people who have come to see it?”
“I say there will be one thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them left alive when they have seen it,” said Father Brown.
Lord Pooley looked at Flambeau. “Is your friend mad?” he asked.
“Far from it,” was the reply.
“And look here,” resumed Pooley in his restless way, “it’s worse than that. A whole pack of Italians have turned up to back Malvoli—swarthy, savage fellows of some country, anyhow. You know what these Mediterranean races are like. If I send out word that it’s off we shall have Malvoli storming in here at the head of a whole Corsican clan.”
“My lord, it is a matter of life and death,” said the priest. “Ring your bell. Give your message. And see whether it is Malvoli who answers.”
«E suppongo,» disse l’altro a voce più bassa, «che quel tipo con l’occhio di vetro c’entri qualcosa.»
«Avevo sperato che c’entrasse soltanto un poco,» rispose Brown con voce piuttosto turbata, «e posso aver sbagliato in ciò che ho fatto. Ho agito d’impulso. Ma temo che questa faccenda abbia radici profonde e oscure.»
Camminarono per alcune strade in silenzio. Le gialle lampade cominciavano a essere accese nel freddo crepuscolo azzurro, ed evidentemente si stavano avvicinando alle zone più centrali della città. Manifesti dai colori vivaci che annunciavano l’incontro di pugilato tra Nigger Ned e Malvoli erano appiccicati un po’ dappertutto sui muri.
«Ebbene,» disse Flambeau, «io non ho mai ucciso nessuno, nemmeno ai tempi in cui ero un criminale, ma posso quasi simpatizzare con chiunque lo faccia in un posto tanto tetro. Di tutte le pattumiere della Natura abbandonate da Dio, credo che le più strazianti siano i luoghi come quel palco dell’orchestra, concepiti per essere festosi e ridotti a desolazione. Riesco a immaginare un uomo morboso che sente di dover uccidere il proprio rivale nella solitudine e nell’ironia di una simile scena. Ricordo che una volta, facendo una camminata sulle vostre gloriose colline del Surrey, senza pensare a nient’altro che a ginestre e allodole, sbucai su un vasto anello di terra, e sopra di me si levò una vasta, muta struttura, fila su fila di gradinate, immensa come un anfiteatro romano e vuota come un portalettere nuovo. Un uccello veleggiava in cielo sopra di essa. Era la Tribuna d’Onore di Epsom. E sentii che nessuno vi sarebbe mai più stato felice.»
«È strano che accenniate a Epsom,» disse il prete. «Ricordate quello che fu chiamato il Mistero di Sutton, perché due uomini sospetti… venditori di gelati, mi pare… si dava il caso abitassero a Sutton? Alla fine furono rilasciati. Un uomo fu trovato strangolato, si disse, sulle Downs, dalle parti di lì. In realtà, so (da un poliziotto irlandese che è un mio amico) che fu trovato proprio accanto alla Tribuna d’Onore di Epsom… anzi, celato soltanto dal fatto che uno degli usci più bassi era stato spinto all’indietro.»
«Questo sì che è strano,» convenne Flambeau. «Ma piuttosto conferma la mia idea che simili luoghi di divertimento appaiano terribilmente solitari fuori stagione, altrimenti l’uomo non sarebbe stato assassinato lì.»
«Non sono così sicuro che egli…» cominciò Brown, e si fermò.
«Non così sicuro che sia stato assassinato?» chiese il suo compagno.
«Non così sicuro che sia stato assassinato fuori stagione,» rispose il piccolo prete, con semplicità. «Non pensate che ci sia qualcosa di piuttosto ingannevole in questa solitudine, Flambeau? Siete davvero sicuro che un assassino accorto vorrebbe sempre che il luogo fosse solitario? È molto, molto di rado che un uomo sia del tutto solo. E, a parte questo, più è solo, più è certo che venga visto. No; credo che ci debba essere qualche altra… Toh, eccoci al Pavilion, o Palace, o come diavolo lo chiamano.»
Erano sbucati su una piccola piazza, brillantemente illuminata, il cui edificio principale era gaio di dorature, sgargiante di manifesti, e fiancheggiato da due gigantesche fotografie di Malvoli e Nigger Ned.
«Ehilà!» gridò Flambeau con gran sorpresa, mentre il suo amico ecclesiastico saliva impettito i larghi gradini. «Non sapevo che il pugilato fosse il vostro ultimo passatempo. Andate a vedere l’incontro?»
«Non credo che ci sarà alcun incontro,» rispose Padre Brown.
Passarono rapidamente per anticamere e sale interne; attraversarono la sala del combattimento stessa, rialzata, delimitata da corde, e imbottita di innumerevoli sedili e palchi, e sempre l’ecclesiastico non si guardò intorno né si fermò finché non giunse a un impiegato seduto a una scrivania fuori da una porta con la scritta «Comitato». Lì si fermò e chiese di vedere Lord Pooley.
L’inserviente osservò che sua signoria era molto occupato, poiché l’incontro sarebbe cominciato presto, ma Padre Brown aveva un bonario tedio di reiterazione a cui la mente burocratica non è generalmente preparata. In pochi istanti il piuttosto sconcertato Flambeau si trovò al cospetto di un uomo che stava ancora gridando istruzioni a un altro uomo che usciva dalla stanza. «Fate attenzione, sapete, alle corde dopo il quarto… Bene, e voi che cosa volete, di grazia!»
Lord Pooley era un gentiluomo, e, come la maggior parte dei pochi rimasti alla nostra razza, era preoccupato… specialmente per il denaro. Era per metà grigio e per metà biondo lino, e aveva gli occhi della febbre e un naso dall’arco alto e mordicchiato dal gelo.
«Solo una parola,» disse Padre Brown. «Sono venuto a impedire che un uomo venga ucciso.»
Lord Pooley balzò dalla sedia come se una molla ve lo avesse scagliato via. «Che io sia dannato se sopporto ancora tutto questo!» gridò. «Voi e i vostri comitati e i vostri pastori e le vostre petizioni! Non c’erano forse i pastori ai vecchi tempi, quando si combatteva senza guantoni? Ora combattono con i guantoni regolamentari, e non c’è nemmeno l’ombra della possibilità che uno dei due pugili venga ucciso.»
«Non intendevo nessuno dei due pugili,» disse il piccolo prete.
«Bene, bene, bene!» disse il nobiluomo, con un tocco di gelido umorismo. «E chi è che verrà ucciso? L’arbitro?»
«Non so chi verrà ucciso,» rispose Padre Brown, con uno sguardo meditabondo. «Se lo sapessi non dovrei guastarvi il divertimento. Potrei semplicemente farlo fuggire. Non sono mai riuscito a vedere nulla di male negli incontri di pugilato. Stando così le cose, devo pregarvi di annunciare che l’incontro è rinviato per il momento.»
«Nient’altro?» sghignazzò il gentiluomo dagli occhi febbrili. «E che cosa direte alle duemila persone che sono venute a vederlo?»
«Dirò che di esse ne resteranno vive millenovecentonovantanove dopo che l’avranno visto,» disse Padre Brown.
Lord Pooley guardò Flambeau. «Il vostro amico è pazzo?» chiese.
«Tutt’altro,» fu la risposta.
«E badate,» riprese Pooley nel suo modo irrequieto, «c’è di peggio. È spuntata un’intera masnada di italiani a sostenere Malvoli… individui bruni e selvaggi di chissà quale paese. Sapete come sono queste razze mediterranee. Se mando a dire che l’incontro è saltato, avremo Malvoli che irrompe qui alla testa di un intero clan corso.»
«Milord, è una questione di vita o di morte,» disse il prete. «Suonate il campanello. Date il vostro messaggio. E vedete se è Malvoli a rispondere.»
The nobleman struck the bell on the table with an odd air of new curiosity. He said to the clerk who appeared almost instantly in the doorway: “I have a serious announcement to make to the audience shortly. Meanwhile, would you kindly tell the two champions that the fight will have to be put off.”
The clerk stared for some seconds as if at a demon and vanished.
“What authority have you for what you say?” asked Lord Pooley abruptly. “Whom did you consult?”
“I consulted a bandstand,” said Father Brown, scratching his head. “But, no, I’m wrong; I consulted a book, too. I picked it up on a bookstall in London—very cheap, too.”
He had taken out of his pocket a small, stout, leather-bound volume, and Flambeau, looking over his shoulder, could see that it was some book of old travels, and had a leaf turned down for reference.
“‘The only form in which Voodoo—’” began Father Brown, reading aloud.
“In which what?” inquired his lordship.
“‘In which Voodoo,’” repeated the reader, almost with relish, “‘is widely organized outside Jamaica itself is in the form known as the Monkey, or the God of the Gongs, which is powerful in many parts of the two American continents, especially among half-breeds, many of whom look exactly like white men. It differs from most other forms of devil-worship and human sacrifice in the fact that the blood is not shed formally on the altar, but by a sort of assassination among the crowd. The gongs beat with a deafening din as the doors of the shrine open and the monkey-god is revealed; almost the whole congregation rivet ecstatic eyes on him. But after—’”
The door of the room was flung open, and the fashionable negro stood framed in it, his eyeballs rolling, his silk hat still insolently tilted on his head. “Huh!” he cried, showing his apish teeth. “What this? Huh! Huh! You steal a coloured gentleman’s prize— prize his already—yo’ think yo’ jes’ save that white ‘Talian trash—”
“The matter is only deferred,” said the nobleman quietly. “I will be with you to explain in a minute or two.”
“Who you to—” shouted Nigger Ned, beginning to storm.
“My name is Pooley,” replied the other, with a creditable coolness. “I am the organizing secretary, and I advise you just now to leave the room.”
“Who this fellow?” demanded the dark champion, pointing to the priest disdainfully.
“My name is Brown,” was the reply. “And I advise you just now to leave the country.”
The prize-fighter stood glaring for a few seconds, and then, rather to the surprise of Flambeau and the others, strode out, sending the door to with a crash behind him.
“Well,” asked Father Brown rubbing his dusty hair up, “what do you think of Leonardo da Vinci? A beautiful Italian head.”
“Look here,” said Lord Pooley, “I’ve taken a considerable responsibility, on your bare word. I think you ought to tell me more about this.”
“You are quite right, my lord,” answered Brown. “And it won’t take long to tell.” He put the little leather book in his overcoat pocket. “I think we know all that this can tell us, but you shall look at it to see if I’m right. That negro who has just swaggered out is one of the most dangerous men on earth, for he has the brains of a European, with the instincts of a cannibal. He has turned what was clean, common-sense butchery among his fellow-barbarians into a very modern and scientific secret society of assassins. He doesn’t know I know it, nor, for the matter of that, that I can’t prove it.”
There was a silence, and the little man went on.
“But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I’m alone with him?”
Lord Pooley’s eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: “If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.”
Father Brown shook his head, like a murderer of much riper experience. “So Flambeau said,” he replied, with a sigh. “But consider. The more a man feels lonely the less he can be sure he is alone. It must mean empty spaces round him, and they are just what make him obvious. Have you never seen one ploughman from the heights, or one shepherd from the valleys? Have you never walked along a cliff, and seen one man walking along the sands? Didn’t you know when he’s killed a crab, and wouldn’t you have known if it had been a creditor? No! No! No! For an intelligent murderer, such as you or I might be, it is an impossible plan to make sure that nobody is looking at you.”
“But what other plan is there?”
“There is only one,” said the priest. “To make sure that everybody is looking at something else. A man is throttled close by the big stand at Epsom. Anybody might have seen it done while the stand stood empty—any tramp under the hedges or motorist among the hills. But nobody would have seen it when the stand was crowded and the whole ring roaring, when the favourite was coming in first—or wasn’t. The twisting of a neck-cloth, the thrusting of a body behind a door could be done in an instant— so long as it was that instant. It was the same, of course,” he continued turning to Flambeau, “with that poor fellow under the bandstand. He was dropped through the hole (it wasn’t an accidental hole) just at some very dramatic moment of the entertainment, when the bow of some great violinist or the voice of some great singer opened or came to its climax. And here, of course, when the knock-out blow came—it would not be the only one. That is the little trick Nigger Ned has adopted from his old God of Gongs.”
“By the way, Malvoli—” Pooley began.
“Malvoli,” said the priest, “has nothing to do with it. I dare say he has some Italians with him, but our amiable friends are not Italians. They are octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty. Also,” he added, with a smile, “I fear the English decline to draw any fine distinction between the moral character produced by my religion and that which blooms out of Voodoo.”
The blaze of the spring season had burst upon Seawood, littering its foreshore with famines and bathing-machines, with nomadic preachers and nigger minstrels, before the two friends saw it again, and long before the storm of pursuit after the strange secret society had died away. Almost on every hand the secret of their purpose perished with them. The man of the hotel was found drifting dead on the sea like so much seaweed; his right eye was closed in peace, but his left eye was wide open, and glistened like glass in the moon. Nigger Ned had been overtaken a mile or two away, and murdered three policemen with his closed left hand. The remaining officer was surprised—nay, pained—and the negro got away. But this was enough to set all the English papers in a flame, and for a month or two the main purpose of the British Empire was to prevent the buck nigger (who was so in both senses) escaping by any English port. Persons of a figure remotely reconcilable with his were subjected to quite extraordinary inquisitions, made to scrub their faces before going on board ship, as if each white complexion were made up like a mask, of greasepaint. Every negro in England was put under special regulations and made to report himself; the outgoing ships would no more have taken a nigger than a basilisk. For people had found out how fearful and vast and silent was the force of the savage secret society, and by the time Flambeau and Father Brown were leaning on the parade parapet in April, the Black Man meant in England almost what he once meant in Scotland.
“He must be still in England,” observed Flambeau, “and horridly well hidden, too. They must have found him at the ports if he had only whitened his face.”
“You see, he is really a clever man,” said Father Brown apologetically. “And I’m sure he wouldn’t whiten his face.”
“Well, but what would he do?”
“I think,” said Father Brown, “he would blacken his face.”
Flambeau, leaning motionless on the parapet, laughed and said: “My dear fellow!”
Father Brown, also leaning motionless on the parapet, moved one finger for an instant into the direction of the soot-masked niggers singing on the sands.
TEN
Il nobiluomo batté il campanello sul tavolo con una strana aria di nuova curiosità. Disse all’impiegato che apparve quasi all’istante sulla soglia: «Ho un annuncio importante da fare al pubblico tra breve. Nel frattempo, vorreste gentilmente dire ai due campioni che l’incontro dovrà essere rinviato.»
L’impiegato fissò per alcuni secondi come dinanzi a un demonio, e svanì.
«Su quale autorità fondate ciò che dite?» chiese Lord Pooley bruscamente. «Chi avete consultato?»
«Ho consultato un palco d’orchestra,» disse Padre Brown, grattandosi la testa. «Ma, no, sbaglio; ho consultato anche un libro. L’ho preso su una bancarella di libri a Londra… e per giunta a pochissimo prezzo.»
Aveva tratto di tasca un piccolo, robusto volume rilegato in pelle, e Flambeau, guardando al di sopra della sua spalla, poté vedere che era un qualche libro di viaggi antichi, con una pagina piegata come segno.
«“L’unica forma in cui il Voodoo…”» cominciò Father Brown, leggendo ad alta voce.
«In cui che cosa?» domandò sua signoria.
«“In cui il Voodoo,”» ripeté il lettore, quasi con gusto, «“è ampiamente organizzato al di fuori della Giamaica stessa è nella forma nota come la Scimmia, ovvero il Dio dei Gong, che è potente in molte parti dei due continenti americani, specialmente tra i meticci, molti dei quali somigliano esattamente a uomini bianchi. Si distingue dalla maggior parte delle altre forme di culto del diavolo e di sacrificio umano per il fatto che il sangue non viene versato formalmente sull’altare, ma mediante una sorta di assassinio in mezzo alla folla. I gong battono con un frastuono assordante mentre le porte del santuario si aprono e il dio-scimmia si rivela; quasi tutta la congregazione inchioda su di lui gli occhi estatici. Ma dopo…”»
La porta della stanza fu spalancata, e l’elegante negro si stagliò incorniciato in essa, gli occhi roteanti, il cilindro di seta ancora insolentemente inclinato sul capo. «Uh!» gridò, mostrando i denti scimmieschi. «Che roba è questa? Uh! Uh! Voi rubate premio a un signore di colore… premio già suo… voi credete di salvare quella feccia di ‘Taliano bianco…»
«La faccenda è soltanto rinviata,» disse tranquillamente il nobiluomo. «Sarò da voi a spiegarvi tra un minuto o due.»
«Chi siete voi per…» gridò Nigger Ned, cominciando a infuriare.
«Il mio nome è Pooley,» rispose l’altro, con lodevole freddezza. «Sono il segretario organizzatore, e vi consiglio in questo momento di lasciare la stanza.»
«Chi è questo tale?» domandò il tenebroso campione, indicando il prete con disdegno.
«Il mio nome è Brown,» fu la risposta. «E vi consiglio in questo momento di lasciare il paese.»
Il pugile rimase a fissare torvo per qualche secondo, e poi, con una certa sorpresa di Flambeau e degli altri, uscì a grandi passi, sbattendosi la porta dietro con un fragore.
«Ebbene,» chiese Father Brown arruffandosi i capelli impolverati, «che cosa ne pensate di Leonardo da Vinci? Una bella testa italiana.»
«Sentite,» disse Lord Pooley, «mi sono assunto una responsabilità considerevole, sulla vostra semplice parola. Credo che dovreste dirmi di più su questa faccenda.»
«Avete perfettamente ragione, milord,» rispose Brown. «E non ci vorrà molto a dirlo.» Rimise il piccolo libro di pelle nella tasca del soprabito. «Credo che sappiamo già tutto ciò che questo può dirci, ma voi dategli un’occhiata per vedere se ho ragione. Quel negro che è appena uscito impettito è uno degli uomini più pericolosi della terra, poiché ha il cervello di un europeo, con gli istinti di un cannibale. Ha trasformato quella che era pulita, comune macelleria tra i suoi compagni barbari in una modernissima e scientifica società segreta di assassini. Egli non sa che io lo so, né, del resto, che io non posso provarlo.»
Ci fu un silenzio, e l’ometto proseguì.
«Ma se io voglio assassinare qualcuno, sarà davvero il piano migliore assicurarmi di essere solo con lui?»
Gli occhi di Lord Pooley recuperarono il loro gelido scintillio mentre guardava il piccolo ecclesiastico. Disse soltanto: «Se voleste assassinare qualcuno, ve lo consiglierei.»
Father Brown scosse il capo, come un assassino di ben più matura esperienza. «Così ha detto Flambeau,» rispose, con un sospiro. «Ma riflettete. Più un uomo si sente solo, meno può esser certo di essere solo. Ciò deve voler dire spazi vuoti intorno a lui, ed è proprio ciò che lo rende evidente. Non avete mai visto un aratore dalle alture, o un pastore dalle valli? Non avete mai camminato lungo una scogliera, e visto un uomo solo camminare lungo la rena? Non vi siete accorto quando uccideva un granchio, e non ve ne sareste accorto se fosse stato un creditore? No! No! No! Per un assassino intelligente, quale voi o io potremmo essere, è un piano impossibile assicurarsi che nessuno vi stia guardando.»
«Ma quale altro piano c’è?»
«Ce n’è uno solo,» disse il prete. «Assicurarsi che tutti stiano guardando qualcos’altro. Un uomo viene strangolato proprio accanto alla grande tribuna di Epsom. Chiunque avrebbe potuto vederlo fare mentre la tribuna era vuota… un qualsiasi vagabondo sotto le siepi o un automobilista tra le colline. Ma nessuno lo avrebbe visto quando la tribuna era gremita e tutto l’anello ruggiva, quando il favorito stava arrivando primo… o non stava arrivando. La torsione di una cravatta, lo spingere un corpo dietro una porta si potevano compiere in un istante… purché fosse quell’istante. Fu lo stesso, naturalmente,» continuò voltandosi verso Flambeau, «con quel povero diavolo sotto il palco dell’orchestra. Fu fatto cadere attraverso il buco (non era un buco accidentale) proprio in qualche momento assai drammatico dello spettacolo, quando l’archetto di qualche grande violinista o la voce di qualche grande cantante si apriva o giungeva al suo culmine. E qui, naturalmente, quando fosse giunto il colpo del knock-out… non sarebbe stato l’unico. È questo il piccolo trucco che Nigger Ned ha adottato dal suo antico Dio dei Gong.»
«A proposito, Malvoli…» cominciò Pooley.
«Malvoli,» disse il prete, «non c’entra nulla. Oserei dire che ha con sé alcuni italiani, ma i nostri amabili amici non sono italiani. Sono ottavoni e mulatti africani di varie sfumature, ma temo che noi inglesi crediamo che tutti gli stranieri siano più o meno uguali purché siano scuri e sporchi. Inoltre,» aggiunse, con un sorriso, «temo che gli inglesi si rifiutino di tracciare una qualsiasi sottile distinzione tra il carattere morale prodotto dalla mia religione e quello che fiorisce dal Voodoo.»
La vampa della stagione primaverile era piombata su Seawood, disseminandone la spiaggia di venditori di leccornie e di cabine da bagno, di predicatori nomadi e di menestrelli negri, prima che i due amici la rivedessero, e molto prima che la tempesta della caccia alla strana società segreta si fosse placata. Quasi ovunque il segreto del loro proposito perì con loro. L’uomo dell’albergo fu trovato alla deriva, morto sul mare come tanta alga; il suo occhio destro era chiuso in pace, ma il suo occhio sinistro era spalancato, e luccicava come vetro alla luna. Nigger Ned era stato raggiunto a un miglio o due di distanza, e aveva ucciso tre poliziotti con la sola mano sinistra serrata. L’agente rimasto rimase sorpreso… anzi, addolorato… e il negro fuggì. Ma ciò bastò a mettere a fuoco tutti i giornali inglesi, e per un mese o due lo scopo principale dell’Impero Britannico fu impedire al bruto negro (che lo era in entrambi i sensi) di sfuggire per qualsiasi porto inglese. Persone di corporatura anche solo lontanamente conciliabile con la sua furono sottoposte a interrogatori del tutto straordinari, costrette a strofinarsi la faccia prima di salire a bordo di una nave, come se ogni carnagione bianca fosse composta, alla maniera di una maschera, di cerone. Ogni negro in Inghilterra fu posto sotto speciali regolamenti e obbligato a presentarsi; le navi in partenza avrebbero preso a bordo un negro non più volentieri di un basilisco. Poiché la gente aveva scoperto quanto fosse spaventosa, vasta e silenziosa la forza della selvaggia società segreta, e nel momento in cui Flambeau e Father Brown si appoggiarono al parapetto della passeggiata in aprile, l’Uomo Nero significava in Inghilterra quasi ciò che un tempo aveva significato in Scozia.
«Dev’essere ancora in Inghilterra,» osservò Flambeau, «e per giunta orribilmente ben nascosto. Devono averlo trovato ai porti se avesse soltanto sbiancato la sua faccia.»
«Vedete, è davvero un uomo astuto,» disse Father Brown in tono di scusa. «E sono certo che non sbiancherebbe la propria faccia.»
«Ebbene, ma allora che cosa farebbe?»
«Penso,» disse Father Brown, «che si annerirebbe la faccia.»
Flambeau, appoggiato immobile al parapetto, rise e disse: «Mio caro amico!»
Father Brown, anch’egli appoggiato immobile al parapetto, mosse per un istante un dito nella direzione dei negri mascherati di fuliggine che cantavano sulla rena.
DIECI
The Salad of Colonel Cray
FATHER BROWN was walking home from Mass on a white weird morning when the mists were slowly lifting—one of those mornings when the very element of light appears as something mysterious and new. The scattered trees outlined themselves more and more out of the vapour, as if they were first drawn in grey chalk and then in charcoal. At yet more distant intervals appeared the houses upon the broken fringe of the suburb; their outlines became clearer and clearer until he recognized many in which he had chance acquaintances, and many more the names of whose owners he knew. But all the windows and doors were sealed; none of the people were of the sort that would be up at such a time, or still less on such an errand. But as he passed under the shadow of one handsome villa with verandas and wide ornate gardens, he heard a noise that made him almost involuntarily stop. It was the unmistakable noise of a pistol or carbine or some light firearm discharged; but it was not this that puzzled him most. The first full noise was immediately followed by a series of fainter noises— as he counted them, about six. He supposed it must be the echo; but the odd thing was that the echo was not in the least like the original sound. It was not like anything else that he could think of; the three things nearest to it seemed to be the noise made by siphons of soda-water, one of the many noises made by an animal, and the noise made by a person attempting to conceal laughter. None of which seemed to make much sense.
Father Brown was made of two men. There was a man of action, who was as modest as a primrose and as punctual as a clock; who went his small round of duties and never dreamed of altering it. There was also a man of reflection, who was much simpler but much stronger, who could not easily be stopped; whose thought was always (in the only intelligent sense of the words) free thought. He could not help, even unconsciously, asking himself all the questions that there were to be asked, and answering as many of them as he could; all that went on like his breathing or circulation. But he never consciously carried his actions outside the sphere of his own duty; and in this case the two attitudes were aptly tested. He was just about to resume his trudge in the twilight, telling himself it was no affair of his, but instinctively twisting and untwisting twenty theories about what the odd noises might mean. Then the grey sky-line brightened into silver, and in the broadening light he realized that he had been to the house which belonged to an Anglo-Indian Major named Putnam; and that the Major had a native cook from Malta who was of his communion. He also began to remember that pistol-shots are sometimes serious things; accompanied with consequences with which he was legitimately concerned. He turned back and went in at the garden gate, making for the front door.
Half-way down one side of the house stood out a projection like a very low shed; it was, as he afterwards discovered, a large dustbin. Round the corner of this came a figure, at first a mere shadow in the haze, apparently bending and peering about. Then, coming nearer, it solidified into a figure that was, indeed, rather unusually solid. Major Putnam was a bald-headed, bull-necked man, short and very broad, with one of those rather apoplectic faces that are produced by a prolonged attempt to combine the oriental climate with the occidental luxuries. But the face was a good-humoured one, and even now, though evidently puzzled and inquisitive, wore a kind of innocent grin. He had a large palm-leaf hat on the back of his head (suggesting a halo that was by no means appropriate to the face), but otherwise he was clad only in a very vivid suit of striped scarlet and yellow pyjamas; which, though glowing enough to behold, must have been, on a fresh morning, pretty chilly to wear. He had evidently come out of his house in a hurry, and the priest was not surprised when he called out without further ceremony: “Did you hear that noise?”
“Yes,” answered Father Brown; “I thought I had better look in, in case anything was the matter.”
The Major looked at him rather queerly with his good-humoured gooseberry eyes. “What do you think the noise was?” he asked.
“It sounded like a gun or something,” replied the other, with some hesitation; “but it seemed to have a singular sort of echo.”
The Major was still looking at him quietly, but with protruding eyes, when the front door was flung open, releasing a flood of gaslight on the face of the fading mist; and another figure in pyjamas sprang or tumbled out into the garden. The figure was much longer, leaner, and more athletic; the pyjamas, though equally tropical, were comparatively tasteful, being of white with a light lemon-yellow stripe. The man was haggard, but handsome, more sunburned than the other; he had an aquiline profile and rather deep-sunken eyes, and a slight air of oddity arising from the combination of coal-black hair with a much lighter moustache. All this Father Brown absorbed in detail more at leisure. For the moment he only saw one thing about the man; which was the revolver in his hand.
“Cray!” exclaimed the Major, staring at him; “did you fire that shot?”
“Yes, I did,” retorted the black-haired gentleman hotly; “and so would you in my place. If you were chased everywhere by devils and nearly—”
The Major seemed to intervene rather hurriedly. “This is my friend Father Brown,” he said. And then to Brown: “I don’t know whether you’ve met Colonel Cray of the Royal Artillery.”
“I have heard of him, of course,” said the priest innocently. “Did you—did you hit anything?”
“I thought so,” answered Cray with gravity.
L’insalata del colonnello Cray
PADRE BROWN tornava a casa dalla Messa in un mattino bianco e strano, mentre le nebbie si sollevavano lentamente: uno di quei mattini in cui l’elemento stesso della luce appare come qualcosa di misterioso e nuovo. Gli alberi sparsi si stagliavano sempre più netti fuori dal vapore, come se fossero prima tracciati col gessetto grigio e poi col carboncino. A intervalli ancora più lontani spuntavano le case sul frastagliato margine del sobborgo; i loro contorni si facevano via via più chiari, finché egli non riconobbe quelle in cui aveva qualche conoscenza casuale, e molte altre di cui sapeva i nomi dei proprietari. Ma tutte le finestre e le porte erano sigillate; nessuno di quegli abitanti era del genere che si alza a un’ora simile, e ancor meno per una simile incombenza. Ma mentre passava sotto l’ombra di una bella villa con verande e ampi giardini ornati, udì un rumore che quasi involontariamente lo fece fermare. Era l’inconfondibile detonazione di una pistola o di una carabina o di qualche arma da fuoco leggera; ma non fu questo a lasciarlo più perplesso. La prima piena detonazione fu immediatamente seguita da una serie di rumori più fievoli: contandoli, ne uscivano circa sei. Suppose dovesse trattarsi dell’eco; ma la cosa curiosa era che l’eco non somigliava affatto al suono originale. Non somigliava a nulla di ciò che gli veniva in mente; le tre cose che più le si avvicinavano parevano essere il rumore prodotto dai sifoni dell’acqua di seltz, uno dei molti versi di un animale, e il rumore di una persona che cerca di nascondere una risata. Nessuno dei quali sembrava avere molto senso.
Padre Brown era fatto di due uomini. C’era l’uomo d’azione, modesto come una primula e puntuale come un orologio; che compiva il suo piccolo giro di doveri e non sognava neppure di mutarlo. C’era anche l’uomo di riflessione, molto più semplice ma molto più forte, che non si lasciava fermare facilmente; il cui pensiero era sempre (nel solo senso intelligente della parola) libero pensiero. Non poteva fare a meno, anche inconsapevolmente, di porsi tutte le domande che c’erano da porsi, e di rispondere a quante più poteva; tutto ciò procedeva come il suo respiro o la sua circolazione. Ma non spingeva mai coscientemente le proprie azioni fuori dalla sfera del proprio dovere; e in questo caso le due attitudini furono messe alla prova in modo assai calzante. Stava proprio per riprendere il suo arrancare nel crepuscolo, dicendosi che non erano affari suoi, ma intrecciando e sciogliendo d’istinto venti teorie su ciò che quegli strani rumori potessero significare. Poi la grigia linea del cielo si schiarì in argento, e nella luce che si allargava egli comprese di essere giunto alla casa che apparteneva a un maggiore anglo-indiano di nome Putnam; e che il maggiore aveva un cuoco indigeno maltese, il quale era della sua stessa comunione. Cominciò anche a ricordare che i colpi di pistola sono talvolta cose serie, accompagnate da conseguenze delle quali egli aveva legittimo motivo di occuparsi. Tornò indietro ed entrò dal cancello del giardino, dirigendosi verso la porta principale.
A metà di uno dei lati della casa sporgeva una sporgenza simile a una tettoia molto bassa; era, come scoprì in seguito, un grande bidone della spazzatura. Dietro l’angolo di questo comparve una figura, dapprima una semplice ombra nella foschia, apparentemente china e intenta a spiare intorno. Poi, avvicinandosi, si solidificò in una figura che era, in verità, insolitamente solida. Il maggiore Putnam era un uomo calvo, dal collo taurino, basso e assai largo, con uno di quei volti alquanto apoplettici che sono prodotti da un prolungato tentativo di combinare il clima orientale con i lussi occidentali. Ma il volto era di buon umore, e persino adesso, benché evidentemente perplesso e curioso, portava una sorta di sorriso innocente. Aveva un largo cappello di foglie di palma spinto sulla nuca (che suggeriva un’aureola per nulla appropriata a quel volto), ma per il resto era vestito soltanto di un vivacissimo completo di pigiama a righe scarlatte e gialle; il quale, per quanto sgargiante a vedersi, doveva essere, in un fresco mattino, piuttosto gelido da indossare. Era evidentemente uscito di casa in fretta, e il prete non si sorprese quando quello gridò senza ulteriori cerimonie: «Ha sentito quel rumore?»
«Sì», rispose Padre Brown; «ho pensato che fosse meglio fare un salto, casomai fosse successo qualcosa.»
Il maggiore lo guardò in modo piuttosto strano con i suoi bonari occhi color uva spina. «Che cosa pensa che fosse, quel rumore?» chiese.
«Sembrava un fucile o qualcosa del genere», rispose l’altro, con una certa esitazione; «ma pareva avere una specie di eco singolare.»
Il maggiore continuava a fissarlo con calma, ma con gli occhi sporgenti, quando la porta principale fu spalancata, liberando un fiotto di luce a gas sul volto della nebbia che si dissolveva; e un’altra figura in pigiama balzò o ruzzolò fuori nel giardino. La figura era molto più alta, più snella e più atletica; il pigiama, benché altrettanto tropicale, era relativamente di buon gusto, essendo bianco con una leggera riga giallo limone. L’uomo era emaciato ma bello, più abbronzato dell’altro; aveva un profilo aquilino e occhi piuttosto infossati, e una lieve aria di stranezza che nasceva dall’accostamento dei capelli neri come il carbone a baffi assai più chiari. Tutto ciò Padre Brown lo assimilò nei particolari con più agio in seguito. Per il momento notò dell’uomo una cosa sola; ossia la rivoltella che teneva in mano.
«Cray!» esclamò il maggiore, fissandolo; «hai sparato tu quel colpo?»
«Sì, sono stato io», ribatté con calore il signore dai capelli neri; «e altrettanto avrebbe fatto lei al mio posto. Se fosse inseguito dappertutto dai diavoli e quasi…»
Il maggiore parve intervenire piuttosto in fretta. «Questo è il mio amico Padre Brown», disse. E poi, rivolto a Brown: «Non so se abbia conosciuto il colonnello Cray della Regia Artiglieria.»
«Ne ho sentito parlare, naturalmente», disse il prete con innocenza. «Ha… ha colpito qualcosa?»
«Credo di sì», rispose Cray con gravità.
“Did he—” asked Major Putnam in a lowered voice, “did he fall or cry out, or anything?”
Colonel Cray was regarding his host with a strange and steady stare. “I’ll tell you exactly what he did,” he said. “He sneezed.”
Father Brown’s hand went half-way to his head, with the gesture of a man remembering somebody’s name. He knew now what it was that was neither soda-water nor the snorting of a dog.
“Well,” ejaculated the staring Major, “I never heard before that a service revolver was a thing to be sneezed at.”
“Nor I,” said Father Brown faintly. “It’s lucky you didn’t turn your artillery on him or you might have given him quite a bad cold.” Then, after a bewildered pause, he said: “Was it a burglar?”
“Let us go inside,” said Major Putnam, rather sharply, and led the way into his house.
The interior exhibited a paradox often to be marked in such morning hours: that the rooms seemed brighter than the sky outside; even after the Major had turned out the one gaslight in the front hall. Father Brown was surprised to see the whole dining-table set out as for a festive meal, with napkins in their rings, and wine-glasses of some six unnecessary shapes set beside every plate. It was common enough, at that time of the morning, to find the remains of a banquet over-night; but to find it freshly spread so early was unusual.
While he stood wavering in the hall Major Putnam rushed past him and sent a raging eye over the whole oblong of the tablecloth. At last he spoke, spluttering: “All the silver gone!” he gasped. “Fish-knives and forks gone. Old cruet-stand gone. Even the old silver cream-jug gone. And now, Father Brown, I am ready to answer your question of whether it was a burglar.”
“They’re simply a blind,” said Cray stubbornly. “I know better than you why people persecute this house; I know better than you why—”
The Major patted him on the shoulder with a gesture almost peculiar to the soothing of a sick child, and said: “It was a burglar. Obviously it was a burglar.”
“A burglar with a bad cold,” observed Father Brown, “that might assist you to trace him in the neighbourhood.”
The Major shook his head in a sombre manner. “He must be far beyond trace now, I fear,” he said.
Then, as the restless man with the revolver turned again towards the door in the garden, he added in a husky, confidential voice: “I doubt whether I should send for the police, for fear my friend here has been a little too free with his bullets, and got on the wrong side of the law. He’s lived in very wild places; and, to be frank with you, I think he sometimes fancies things.”
“I think you once told me,” said Brown, “that he believes some Indian secret society is pursuing him.”
Major Putnam nodded, but at the same time shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose we’d better follow him outside,” he said. “I don’t want any more—shall we say, sneezing?”
They passed out into the morning light, which was now even tinged with sunshine, and saw Colonel Cray’s tall figure bent almost double, minutely examining the condition of gravel and grass. While the Major strolled unobtrusively towards him, the priest took an equally indolent turn, which took him round the next corner of the house to within a yard or two of the projecting dustbin.
He stood regarding this dismal object for some minute and a half—, then he stepped towards it, lifted the lid and put his head inside. Dust and other discolouring matter shook upwards as he did so; but Father Brown never observed his own appearance, whatever else he observed. He remained thus for a measurable period, as if engaged in some mysterious prayers. Then he came out again, with some ashes on his hair, and walked unconcernedly away.
By the time he came round to the garden door again he found a group there which seemed to roll away morbidities as the sunlight had already rolled away the mists. It was in no way rationally reassuring; it was simply broadly comic, like a cluster of Dickens’s characters. Major Putnam had managed to slip inside and plunge into a proper shirt and trousers, with a crimson cummerbund, and a light square jacket over all; thus normally set off, his red festive face seemed bursting with a commonplace cordiality. He was indeed emphatic, but then he was talking to his cook—the swarthy son of Malta, whose lean, yellow and rather careworn face contrasted quaintly with his snow-white cap and costume. The cook might well be careworn, for cookery was the Major’s hobby. He was one of those amateurs who always know more than the professional. The only other person he even admitted to be a judge of an omelette was his friend Cray—and as Brown remembered this, he turned to look for the other officer. In the new presence of daylight and people clothed and in their right mind, the sight of him was rather a shock. The taller and more elegant man was still in his night-garb, with tousled black hair, and now crawling about the garden on his hands and knees, still looking for traces of the burglar; and now and again, to all appearance, striking the ground with his hand in anger at not finding him. Seeing him thus quadrupedal in the grass, the priest raised his eyebrows rather sadly; and for the first time guessed that “fancies things” might be an euphemism.
The third item in the group of the cook and the epicure was also known to Father Brown; it was Audrey Watson, the Major’s ward and housekeeper; and at this moment, to judge by her apron, tucked-up sleeves and resolute manner, much more the housekeeper than the ward.
“It serves you right,” she was saying: “I always told you not to have that old-fashioned cruet-stand.”
«Ha forse…», domandò il maggiore Putnam a voce bassa, «è forse caduto, o ha gridato, o qualcosa del genere?»
Il colonnello Cray fissava il suo ospite con uno sguardo strano e immobile. «Vi dirò esattamente ciò che ha fatto», disse. «Ha starnutito.»
La mano di Father Brown salì a mezz’aria verso la fronte, col gesto di chi cerca di ricordare il nome di qualcuno. Ora sapeva che cosa fosse quel suono che non era né acqua di selz né lo sbuffare di un cane.
«Be’», sbottò il maggiore, sempre con gli occhi sbarrati, «non avevo mai sentito prima d’ora che una rivoltella d’ordinanza fosse cosa da starnutirci sopra.»
«Neppure io», disse Father Brown con voce fioca. «Per fortuna non gli avete scaricato addosso la vostra artiglieria, altrimenti gli avreste procurato un bel raffreddore.» Poi, dopo una pausa sconcertata, soggiunse: «Era un ladro?»
«Entriamo in casa», disse il maggiore Putnam con una certa asprezza, e li precedette dentro la sua casa.
L’interno esibiva un paradosso che spesso si nota a quelle ore mattutine: le stanze sembravano più luminose del cielo là fuori; persino dopo che il maggiore ebbe spento l’unica lampada a gas dell’ingresso. Father Brown si stupì di vedere l’intera tavola da pranzo apparecchiata come per un pasto di festa, coi tovaglioli negli anelli e i bicchieri da vino di una mezza dozzina di fogge inutili disposti accanto a ogni piatto. Era cosa abbastanza comune, a quell’ora del mattino, trovare i resti di un banchetto della notte precedente; ma trovarlo così di fresco imbandito a un’ora tanto mattutina era insolito.
Mentre egli se ne stava esitante nell’ingresso, il maggiore Putnam gli passò accanto di slancio e lanciò uno sguardo furibondo su tutto il rettangolo della tovaglia. Alla fine parlò, farfugliando: «È sparita tutta l’argenteria!», ansimò. «Spariti i coltelli e le forchette da pesce. Sparita la vecchia oliera. Sparita perfino la vecchia lattiera d’argento. E ora, Father Brown, sono pronto a rispondere alla vostra domanda, se cioè fosse un ladro.»
«Non sono altro che una copertura», disse Cray con ostinazione. «Io so meglio di voi perché la gente perseguita questa casa; io so meglio di voi perché…»
Il maggiore gli batté la mano sulla spalla con un gesto quasi proprio di chi vuol calmare un bambino malato, e disse: «Era un ladro. Evidentemente era un ladro.»
«Un ladro con un brutto raffreddore», osservò Father Brown, «il che potrebbe aiutarvi a rintracciarlo nei dintorni.»
Il maggiore scosse il capo con aria cupa. «Ormai dev’essere ben oltre ogni possibilità di rintraccio, temo», disse.
Poi, mentre l’uomo irrequieto con la rivoltella si voltava di nuovo verso la porta del giardino, aggiunse con voce roca e confidenziale: «Dubito che convenga mandare a chiamare la polizia, per paura che il mio amico qui presente sia stato un po’ troppo prodigo di pallottole e si sia messo dalla parte del torto con la legge. Ha vissuto in luoghi selvaggissimi; e, a esser franchi con voi, credo che a volte si immagini delle cose.»
«Una volta mi avete detto, mi pare», disse Brown, «che egli crede d’esser perseguitato da una qualche società segreta indiana.»
Il maggiore Putnam annuì, ma nello stesso tempo scrollò le spalle. «Suppongo che faremmo bene a seguirlo là fuori», disse. «Non voglio altri… diciamo così, starnuti?»
Uscirono nella luce del mattino, che ora era addirittura tinta di sole, e videro l’alta figura del colonnello Cray piegata quasi in due, mentre esaminava minuziosamente lo stato della ghiaia e dell’erba. Mentre il maggiore si avvicinava a lui con aria noncurante, il prete fece un giro altrettanto indolente, che lo portò all’angolo successivo della casa, a un metro o due dalla sporgenza del bidone della spazzatura.
Rimase a contemplare quel lugubre oggetto per un minuto e mezzo circa; poi vi si accostò, ne sollevò il coperchio e vi ficcò dentro la testa. Polvere e altre sostanze sudicie si sollevarono in una nuvola mentre egli faceva così; ma Father Brown non badò mai al proprio aspetto, per quanto badasse a tutto il resto. Restò in quella posa per un tempo apprezzabile, come assorto in qualche misteriosa preghiera. Poi si ritrasse, con un po’ di cenere tra i capelli, e si allontanò con aria indifferente.
Nel momento in cui fece ritorno alla porta del giardino, vi trovò un gruppetto che pareva scacciare le morbosità come il sole aveva già scacciato le nebbie. Non era una scena razionalmente rassicurante; era semplicemente, in senso lato, comica, come un grappolo di personaggi di Dickens. Il maggiore Putnam era riuscito a sgusciar dentro e a infilarsi una camicia e dei calzoni come si deve, con una fascia cremisi ai fianchi e una leggera giacca squadrata sopra il tutto; così normalmente agghindato, il suo rosso volto festoso pareva scoppiare di una cordialità dozzinale. Era davvero enfatico, ma d’altronde stava parlando col suo cuoco: quel bruno figlio di Malta, il cui viso magro, giallo e piuttosto sciupato contrastava in modo bizzarro col berretto e la divisa candidi come la neve. Poteva ben essere sciupato, quel cuoco, giacché la cucina era il passatempo del maggiore. Egli era uno di quei dilettanti che ne sanno sempre più dei professionisti. L’unica altra persona che egli ammettesse capace di giudicare una frittata era il suo amico Cray; e mentre Brown lo rammentava, si voltò a cercare l’altro ufficiale. Alla nuova presenza della luce del giorno e di persone vestite e in senno, la vista di lui riuscì piuttosto uno shock. L’uomo più alto ed elegante era ancora nella sua veste da notte, coi capelli neri arruffati, e ora strisciava per il giardino carponi, sulle mani e sulle ginocchia, sempre in cerca delle tracce del ladro; e di tanto in tanto, a quanto pareva, percuoteva il suolo con la mano, adirato di non trovarlo. Vedendolo così quadrupede nell’erba, il prete inarcò le sopracciglia con una certa tristezza; e per la prima volta intuì che «si immagina delle cose» poteva essere un eufemismo.
Il terzo elemento del gruppo, insieme al cuoco e al buongustaio, era pure noto a Father Brown: era Audrey Watson, la pupilla e governante del maggiore; e in quel momento, a giudicare dal grembiule, dalle maniche rimboccate e dal piglio risoluto, assai più governante che pupilla.
«Vi sta bene», stava dicendo: «Vi ho sempre detto di non tenere quella vecchia oliera fuori moda.»
“I prefer it,” said Putnam, placably. “I’m old-fashioned myself; and the things keep together.”
“And vanish together, as you see,” she retorted. “Well, if you are not going to bother about the burglar, I shouldn’t bother about the lunch. It’s Sunday, and we can’t send for vinegar and all that in the town; and you Indian gentlemen can’t enjoy what you call a dinner without a lot of hot things. I wish to goodness now you hadn’t asked Cousin Oliver to take me to the musical service. It isn’t over till half-past twelve, and the Colonel has to leave by then. I don’t believe you men can manage alone.”
“Oh yes, we can, my dear,” said the Major, looking at her very amiably. “Marco has all the sauces, and we’ve often done ourselves well in very rough places, as you might know by now. And it’s time you had a treat, Audrey; you mustn’t be a housekeeper every hour of the day; and I know you want to hear the music.”
“I want to go to church,” she said, with rather severe eyes.
She was one of those handsome women who will always be handsome, because the beauty is not in an air or a tint, but in the very structure of the head and features. But though she was not yet middle-aged and her auburn hair was of a Titianesque fullness in form and colour, there was a look in her mouth and around her eyes which suggested that some sorrows wasted her, as winds waste at last the edges of a Greek temple. For indeed the little domestic difficulty of which she was now speaking so decisively was rather comic than tragic. Father Brown gathered, from the course of the conversation, that Cray, the other gourmet, had to leave before the usual lunch-time; but that Putnam, his host, not to be done out of a final feast with an old crony, had arranged for a special dejeuner to be set out and consumed in the course of the morning, while Audrey and other graver persons were at morning service. She was going there under the escort of a relative and old friend of hers, Dr Oliver Oman, who, though a scientific man of a somewhat bitter type, was enthusiastic for music, and would go even to church to get it. There was nothing in all this that could conceivably concern the tragedy in Miss Watson’s face; and by a half conscious instinct, Father Brown turned again to the seeming lunatic grubbing about in the grass.
When he strolled across to him, the black, unbrushed head was lifted abruptly, as if in some surprise at his continued presence. And indeed, Father Brown, for reasons best known to himself, had lingered much longer than politeness required; or even, in the ordinary sense, permitted.
“Well!” cried Cray, with wild eyes. “I suppose you think I’m mad, like the rest?”
“I have considered the thesis,” answered the little man, composedly. “And I incline to think you are not.”
“What do you mean?” snapped Cray quite savagely.
“Real madmen,” explained Father Brown, “always encourage their own morbidity. They never strive against it. But you are trying to find traces of the burglar; even when there aren’t any. You are struggling against it. You want what no madman ever wants.”
“And what is that?”
“You want to be proved wrong,” said Brown.
During the last words Cray had sprung or staggered to his feet and was regarding the cleric with agitated eyes. “By hell, but that is a true word!” he cried. “They are all at me here that the fellow was only after the silver—as if I shouldn’t be only too pleased to think so! She’s been at me,” and he tossed his tousled black head towards Audrey, but the other had no need of the direction, “she’s been at me today about how cruel I was to shoot a poor harmless house-breaker, and how I have the devil in me against poor harmless natives. But I was a good-natured man once—as good-natured as Putnam.”
After a pause he said: “Look here, I’ve never seen you before; but you shall judge of the whole story. Old Putnam and I were friends in the same mess; but, owing to some accidents on the Afghan border, I got my command much sooner than most men; only we were both invalided home for a bit. I was engaged to Audrey out there; and we all travelled back together. But on the journey back things happened. Curious things. The result of them was that Putnam wants it broken off, and even Audrey keeps it hanging on— and I know what they mean. I know what they think I am. So do you.
“Well, these are the facts. The last day we were in an Indian city I asked Putnam if I could get some Trichinopoli cigars, he directed me to a little place opposite his lodgings. I have since found he was quite right; but ‘opposite’ is a dangerous word when one decent house stands opposite five or six squalid ones; and I must have mistaken the door. It opened with difficulty, and then only on darkness; but as I turned back, the door behind me sank back and settled into its place with a noise as of innumerable bolts. There was nothing to do but to walk forward; which I did through passage after passage, pitch-dark. Then I came to a flight of steps, and then to a blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate Eastern ironwork, which I could only trace by touch, but which I loosened at last. I came out again upon gloom, which was half turned into a greenish twilight by a multitude of small but steady lamps below. They showed merely the feet or fringes of some huge and empty architecture. Just in front of me was something that looked like a mountain. I confess I nearly fell on the great stone platform on which I had emerged, to realize that it was an idol. And worst of all, an idol with its back to me.
“It was hardly half human, I guessed; to judge by the small squat head, and still more by a thing like a tail or extra limb turned up behind and pointing, like a loathsome large finger, at some symbol graven in the centre of the vast stone back. I had begun, in the dim light, to guess at the hieroglyphic, not without horror, when a more horrible thing happened. A door opened silently in the temple wall behind me and a man came out, with a brown face and a black coat. He had a carved smile on his face, of copper flesh and ivory teeth; but I think the most hateful thing about him was that he was in European dress. I was prepared, I think, for shrouded priests or naked fakirs. But this seemed to say that the devilry was over all the earth. As indeed I found it to be.
«Io la preferisco così» disse Putnam, conciliante. «Sono un uomo all’antica; e le cose restano assieme.»
«E assieme spariscono, come vedi» ribatté lei. «Ebbene, se non hai intenzione di darti pensiero per lo scassinatore, non credo che dovrei darmi pensiero io per il pranzo. È domenica, e in città non possiamo mandare a prendere l’aceto e tutto il resto; e voi signori delle Indie non riuscite a godervi quella che chiamate una cena senza una gran quantità di cose piccanti. Vorrei con tutto il cuore che tu non avessi chiesto al cugino Oliver di accompagnarmi alla funzione in musica. Non finisce prima delle dodici e mezza, e il colonnello deve ripartire per allora. Non credo proprio che voialtri uomini possiate cavarvela da soli.»
«Oh sì, cara, che possiamo» disse il maggiore, guardandola con la massima cordialità. «Marco ha tutte le salse, e ci siamo spesso arrangiati bene in posti ben più aspri, come dovresti ormai sapere. Ed è ora che tu abbia uno svago, Audrey; non puoi fare la padrona di casa in ogni ora del giorno; e so bene che desideri sentire la musica.»
«Io desidero andare in chiesa» disse lei, con occhi piuttosto severi.
Era una di quelle donne belle che saranno sempre belle, perché la bellezza non sta in un’aria o in una tinta, ma nella struttura stessa del capo e dei lineamenti. Ma benché non fosse ancora di mezza età e i suoi capelli ramati avessero una pienezza tizianesca di forma e di colore, c’era intorno alla bocca e agli occhi un che che lasciava intendere come qualche dolore la consumasse, come i venti consumano alla fine gli orli di un tempio greco. Ché in verità la piccola difficoltà domestica di cui ora parlava con tanta decisione era comica più che tragica. Father Brown arguì, dal corso della conversazione, che Cray, l’altro buongustaio, doveva partire prima della consueta ora di pranzo; ma che Putnam, il suo ospite, non volendosi lasciar defraudare di un ultimo banchetto con un vecchio compagno, aveva disposto che un déjeuner speciale fosse imbandito e consumato nel corso della mattinata, mentre Audrey e altre persone più serie erano alla funzione mattutina. Lei vi si recava sotto la scorta di un parente e vecchio amico, il dottor Oliver Oman, il quale, benché uomo di scienza di indole alquanto amara, era un entusiasta della musica, e sarebbe andato perfino in chiesa pur di sentirla. Non c’era nulla, in tutto questo, che potesse concepibilmente riguardare la tragedia impressa nel volto di Miss Watson; e per un istinto semiconsapevole Father Brown tornò a rivolgersi a quel presunto pazzo che frugava nell’erba.
Quando gli si avvicinò a passo lento, la testa nera e spettinata si sollevò di scatto, come sorpresa che egli fosse ancora presente. E in effetti Father Brown, per ragioni note soltanto a lui, si era attardato molto più di quanto la cortesia richiedesse; o anche, nel senso ordinario, consentisse.
«Ebbene!» esclamò Cray, con occhi stralunati. «Immagino che pensiate anche voi che io sia pazzo, come tutti gli altri.»
«Ho preso in esame la tesi» rispose l’ometto, con compostezza. «E propendo a credere che non lo siate.»
«Che intendete dire?» sbottò Cray con vera ferocia.
«I veri pazzi» spiegò Father Brown «assecondano sempre la propria morbosità. Non vi lottano mai contro. Voi, invece, cercate di trovare le tracce dello scassinatore, anche là dove non ce ne sono. Vi state battendo contro di essa. Voi volete ciò che nessun pazzo desidera mai.»
«E che cosa?»
«Volete che vi si dimostri in torto» disse Brown.
Durante quelle ultime parole Cray era balzato, o si era sollevato barcollando, in piedi, e osservava l’ecclesiastico con occhi agitati. «Per l’inferno, ma questa è parola di verità!» gridò. «Qui mi stanno tutti addosso a dirmi che il tale non cercava altro che l’argenteria… come se non fossi io il primo a esserne fin troppo lieto di crederlo! Lei mi è stata addosso» e gettò all’indietro la testa nera e arruffata verso Audrey, ma l’altro non aveva bisogno di quell’indicazione, «lei mi è stata addosso oggi su quanto fossi stato crudele a sparare a un povero e innocuo scassinatore, e su come io abbia il diavolo in corpo contro i poveri e innocui indigeni. Eppure un tempo ero un uomo di buona pasta… di buona pasta quanto Putnam.»
Dopo una pausa disse: «Sentite, non vi ho mai visto prima; ma sarete voi a giudicare di tutta la storia. Il vecchio Putnam e io eravamo amici nello stesso reggimento; ma, per via di certe vicende sulla frontiera afghana, ottenni il mio comando assai prima della maggior parte degli uomini; solo che fummo entrambi rimandati a casa per un poco. Laggiù mi ero fidanzato con Audrey; e tornammo tutti assieme. Ma durante il viaggio di ritorno accaddero delle cose. Cose curiose. Il risultato fu che Putnam vuole che il fidanzamento si rompa, e perfino Audrey lo tiene in sospeso… e io so che cosa vogliono dire. So che cosa credono che io sia. E lo sapete anche voi.
«Ebbene, ecco i fatti. L’ultimo giorno che passammo in una città indiana chiesi a Putnam dove potessi procurarmi qualche sigaro di Trichinopoli; lui mi indicò un botteguccio di fronte al suo alloggio. Ho poi appurato che aveva perfettamente ragione; ma “di fronte” è parola pericolosa quando una casa decorosa sta di fronte a cinque o sei tuguri; e devo aver sbagliato porta. Si aprì a fatica, e per giunta solo sul buio; ma appena mi voltai per tornare indietro, la porta alle mie spalle ricadde e si assestò al suo posto con un rumore come di innumerevoli chiavistelli. Non restava che procedere; il che feci attraverso corridoio dopo corridoio, in un buio pesto. Poi giunsi a una rampa di gradini, e quindi a una porta cieca, assicurata da un saliscendi di elaborato ferro battuto orientale, che potevo seguire soltanto al tatto, ma che alla fine riuscii ad allentare. Sbucai di nuovo in una penombra, mezzo mutata in un crepuscolo verdastro da una moltitudine di piccole ma ferme lampade in basso. Esse rivelavano soltanto i piedi o le frange di una qualche architettura immensa e vuota. Proprio davanti a me c’era qualcosa che pareva una montagna. Confesso che per poco non caddi lungo disteso sulla grande piattaforma di pietra su cui ero emerso, nell’accorgermi che si trattava di un idolo. E, peggio di tutto, un idolo che mi voltava le spalle.
«A malapena mezzo umano, congetturai; a giudicare dalla piccola testa tozza, e ancor più da una specie di coda o membro soprannumerario rivolto all’insù dietro di esso e puntato, come un ripugnante dito enorme, verso un qualche simbolo inciso al centro dell’immensa schiena di pietra. Avevo cominciato, in quella luce fioca, a decifrare il geroglifico, non senza orrore, quando accadde una cosa ancor più orribile. Una porta si aprì silenziosamente nella parete del tempio dietro di me e ne uscì un uomo, dal volto bruno e dalla giacca nera. Aveva un sorriso scolpito in viso, di carne di rame e denti d’avorio; ma credo che la cosa più odiosa in lui fosse che era in abito europeo. Ero preparato, credo, a sacerdoti ammantati o a fachiri nudi. Ma questo pareva dire che la diavoleria si stendeva su tutta la terra. Come in effetti scoprii che era.
“‘If you had only seen the Monkey’s Feet,’ he said, smiling steadily, and without other preface, ‘we should have been very gentle— you would only be tortured and die. If you had seen the Monkey’s Face, still we should be very moderate, very tolerant—you would only be tortured and live. But as you have seen the Monkey’s Tail, we must pronounce the worst sentence. which is: Go Free.’
“When he said the words I heard the elaborate iron latch with which I had struggled, automatically unlock itself: and then, far down the dark passages I had passed, I heard the heavy street-door shifting its own bolts backwards.
“‘It is vain to ask for mercy; you must go free,’ said the smiling man. ‘Henceforth a hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you like an adder; weapons shall come against you out of nowhere; and you shall die many times.’ And with that he was swallowed once more in the wall behind; and I went out into the street.”
Cray paused; and Father Brown unaffectedly sat down on the lawn and began to pick daisies.
Then the soldier continued: “Putnam, of course, with his jolly common sense, pooh-poohed all my fears; and from that time dates his doubt of my mental balance. Well, I’ll simply tell you, in the fewest words, the three things that have happened since; and you shall judge which of us is right.
“The first happened in an Indian village on the edge of the jungle, but hundreds of miles from the temple, or town, or type of tribes and customs where the curse had been put on me. I woke in black midnight, and lay thinking of nothing in particular, when I felt a faint tickling thing, like a thread or a hair, trailed across my throat. I shrank back out of its way, and could not help thinking of the words in the temple. But when I got up and sought lights and a mirror, the line across my neck was a line of blood.
“The second happened in a lodging in Port Said, later, on our journey home together. It was a jumble of tavern and curiosity-shop; and though there was nothing there remotely suggesting the cult of the Monkey, it is, of course, possible that some of its images or talismans were in such a place. Its curse was there, anyhow. I woke again in the dark with a sensation that could not be put in colder or more literal words than that a breath bit like an adder. Existence was an agony of extinction; I dashed my head against walls until I dashed it against a window; and fell rather than jumped into the garden below. Putnam, poor fellow, who had called the other thing a chance scratch, was bound to take seriously the fact of finding me half insensible on the grass at dawn. But I fear it was my mental state he took seriously; and not my story.
“The third happened in Malta. We were in a fortress there; and as it happened our bedrooms overlooked the open sea, which almost came up to our window-sills, save for a flat white outer wall as bare as the sea. I woke up again; but it was not dark. There was a full moon, as I walked to the window; I could have seen a bird on the bare battlement, or a sail on the horizon. What I did see was a sort of stick or branch circling, self-supported, in the empty sky. It flew straight in at my window and smashed the lamp beside the pillow I had just quitted. It was one of those queer-shaped war-clubs some Eastern tribes use. But it had come from no human hand.”
Father Brown threw away a daisy-chain he was making, and rose with a wistful look. “Has Major Putnam,” he asked, “got any Eastern curios, idols, weapons and so on, from which one might get a hint?”
“Plenty of those, though not much use, I fear,” replied Cray; “but by all means come into his study.”
As they entered they passed Miss Watson buttoning her gloves for church, and heard the voice of Putnam downstairs still giving a lecture on cookery to the cook. In the Major’s study and den of curios they came suddenly on a third party, silk-hatted and dressed for the street, who was poring over an open book on the smoking-table—a book which he dropped rather guiltily, and turned.
Cray introduced him civilly enough, as Dr Oman, but he showed such disfavour in his very face that Brown guessed the two men, whether Audrey knew it or not, were rivals. Nor was the priest wholly unsympathetic with the prejudice. Dr Oman was a very well-dressed gentleman indeed; well-featured, though almost dark enough for an Asiatic. But Father Brown had to tell himself sharply that one should be in charity even with those who wax their pointed beards, who have small gloved hands, and who speak with perfectly modulated voices.
Cray seemed to find something specially irritating in the small prayer-book in Oman’s dark-gloved hand. “I didn’t know that was in your line,” he said rather rudely.
Oman laughed mildly, but without offence. “This is more so, I know,” he said, laying his hand on the big book he had dropped, “a dictionary of drugs and such things. But it’s rather too large to take to church.” Then he closed the larger book, and there seemed again the faintest touch of hurry and embarrassment.
“I suppose,” said the priest, who seemed anxious to change the subject, “all these spears and things are from India?”
“From everywhere,” answered the doctor. “Putnam is an old soldier, and has been in Mexico and Australia, and the Cannibal Islands for all I know.”
“I hope it was not in the Cannibal Islands,” said Brown, “that he learnt the art of cookery.” And he ran his eyes over the stew-pots or other strange utensils on the wall.
At this moment the jolly subject of their conversation thrust his laughing, lobsterish face into the room. “Come along, Cray,” he cried. “Your lunch is just coming in. And the bells are ringing for those who want to go to church.”
Cray slipped upstairs to change; Dr Oman and Miss Watson betook themselves solemnly down the street, with a string of other churchgoers; but Father Brown noticed that the doctor twice looked back and scrutinized the house; and even came back to the corner of the street to look at it again.
«Se solo aveste veduto i Piedi della Scimmia», disse egli, sorridendo con fermezza e senza altro preambolo, «saremmo stati assai clementi: sareste soltanto stato torturato e messo a morte. Se aveste veduto il Volto della Scimmia, saremmo ancora stati assai moderati, assai tolleranti: sareste soltanto stato torturato e lasciato in vita. Ma poiché avete veduto la Coda della Scimmia, dobbiamo pronunciare la sentenza più terribile, che è questa: andate libero.»
«Quando pronunciò quelle parole, udii l’elaborato chiavistello di ferro con cui mi ero affannato sbloccarsi da sé, automaticamente; e poi, giù in fondo agli oscuri corridoi che avevo attraversato, udii il pesante portone della strada far scorrere indietro i propri catenacci.
«“È vano invocare pietà; dovete andare libero”, disse l’uomo sorridente. “D’ora innanzi un capello vi ucciderà come una spada, e un soffio vi morderà come una vipera; le armi verranno contro di voi dal nulla; e morirete molte volte.” E con ciò fu di nuovo inghiottito nel muro alle sue spalle; e io uscii nella strada.»
Cray si interruppe; e Padre Brown, con la massima naturalezza, si sedette sul prato e prese a cogliere margherite.
Poi il soldato proseguì: «Putnam, s’intende, con il suo allegro buon senso, sdegnò tutte le mie paure; e da quel momento data il suo dubbio sul mio equilibrio mentale. Ebbene, vi racconterò semplicemente, con le minori parole possibili, le tre cose che sono accadute da allora; e giudicherete voi chi di noi due ha ragione.
«La prima accadde in un villaggio indiano ai margini della giungla, ma a centinaia di miglia dal tempio, o dalla città, o dal genere di tribù e di usanze là dove la maledizione mi era stata scagliata addosso. Mi svegliai nel cuore della notte, nera pesta, e me ne stavo disteso senza pensare a nulla di preciso, quando sentii una cosa che mi solleticava lievemente, come un filo o un capello, trascinato attraverso la gola. Mi ritrassi per scansarlo, e non potei fare a meno di ripensare alle parole udite nel tempio. Ma quando mi alzai e cercai un lume e uno specchio, la linea che mi attraversava il collo era una linea di sangue.
«La seconda accadde in un alloggio a Port Said, più tardi, durante il viaggio di ritorno che facevamo insieme. Era un guazzabuglio a metà tra taverna e bottega di curiosità; e sebbene non vi fosse nulla che rimandasse, sia pur da lontano, al culto della Scimmia, è naturalmente possibile che qualcuna delle sue immagini o dei suoi talismani si trovasse in un luogo simile. La sua maledizione, in ogni caso, era là. Mi svegliai di nuovo nel buio con una sensazione che non si può rendere in parole più fredde o più letterali di queste: un soffio mordeva come una vipera. L’esistenza era un’agonia di annientamento; battei il capo contro le pareti finché non lo battei contro una finestra; e caddi, più che saltare, nel giardino sottostante. Putnam, pover’uomo, che aveva definito l’altro episodio un graffio casuale, fu costretto a prendere sul serio il fatto di trovarmi mezzo esanime sull’erba all’alba. Ma temo che a essere preso sul serio fosse il mio stato mentale, e non la mia storia.
«La terza accadde a Malta. Ci trovavamo là in una fortezza; e volle il caso che le nostre camere da letto si affacciassero sul mare aperto, che quasi arrivava ai davanzali, se non fosse stato per un piatto muro esterno, bianco e spoglio come il mare. Mi svegliai di nuovo; ma non era buio. C’era la luna piena, mentre mi avvicinavo alla finestra; avrei potuto scorgere un uccello sul nudo bastione, o una vela all’orizzonte. Ciò che scorsi fu una specie di bastone o di ramo che roteava, sostenendosi da sé, nel cielo vuoto. Volò dritto dentro la mia finestra e mandò in frantumi la lampada accanto al guanciale che avevo appena lasciato. Era una di quelle mazze da guerra dalla forma bizzarra che usano certe tribù orientali. Ma non era venuta da alcuna mano umana.»
Padre Brown gettò via una collana di margherite che stava intrecciando, e si alzò con aria pensosa. «Il maggiore Putnam», domandò, «possiede qualche curiosità orientale, idoli, armi e simili, da cui si potrebbe ricavare qualche indizio?»
«Di quelle ne ha in abbondanza, benché temo servano a poco», rispose Cray; «ma venite pure nel suo studio.»
Mentre entravano, incrociarono Miss Watson che si abbottonava i guanti per andare in chiesa, e udirono la voce di Putnam al piano di sotto che teneva ancora una conferenza di cucina alla cuoca. Nello studio-tana di curiosità del maggiore si imbatterono all’improvviso in un terzo personaggio, in cilindro e vestito per uscire, chino su un libro aperto sul tavolo da fumo: un libro che lasciò cadere con una certa aria colpevole, voltandosi.
Cray glielo presentò con sufficiente cortesia, come il dottor Oman, ma mostrò nel volto stesso una tale avversione che Brown intuì che i due uomini, che Audrey lo sapesse o no, erano rivali. Né il prete era del tutto insensibile a quel pregiudizio. Il dottor Oman era davvero un signore assai elegante; di bei lineamenti, benché quasi tanto scuro da parere un asiatico. Ma Padre Brown dovette richiamarsi bruscamente all’ordine, ricordandosi che si deve essere caritatevoli anche verso coloro che si incerano la barba a punta, che hanno piccole mani inguantate e che parlano con voce perfettamente modulata.
Cray pareva trovare qualcosa di particolarmente irritante nel piccolo libro di preghiere che Oman stringeva nella mano guantata di scuro. «Non sapevo che fosse nelle vostre corde», disse, piuttosto sgarbatamente.
Oman rise con dolcezza, ma senza offendersi. «Questo lo è di più, lo so», disse, posando la mano sul grosso libro che aveva lasciato cadere, «un dizionario di droghe e cose del genere. Ma è un po’ troppo voluminoso da portare in chiesa.» Poi chiuse il libro più grande, e parve di nuovo affiorare quel lievissimo tocco di fretta e di imbarazzo.
«Immagino», disse il prete, che pareva ansioso di cambiare argomento, «che tutte queste lance e questi oggetti vengano dall’India?»
«Vengono da ogni dove», rispose il dottore. «Putnam è un vecchio soldato, ed è stato in Messico e in Australia, e chissà, magari anche alle Isole dei Cannibali.»
«Spero che non sia stato alle Isole dei Cannibali», disse Brown, «che ha imparato l’arte culinaria.» E fece scorrere lo sguardo sulle pentole da stufato e sugli altri strani utensili appesi alla parete.
In quel momento l’allegro soggetto della loro conversazione spinse dentro la stanza il suo volto ridente e paonazzo come un’aragosta. «Vieni, Cray», esclamò. «Il tuo pranzo sta arrivando in tavola. E le campane suonano per chi vuole andare in chiesa.»
Cray sgusciò di sopra a cambiarsi; il dottor Oman e Miss Watson si avviarono solennemente giù per la strada, con una fila di altri fedeli diretti in chiesa; ma Padre Brown notò che il dottore per due volte si voltò indietro a scrutare la casa; e giunse persino a tornare all’angolo della strada per guardarla ancora una volta.
The priest looked puzzled. “He can’t have been at the dustbin,” he muttered. “Not in those clothes. Or was he there earlier today?”
Father Brown, touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer; but today he seemed about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social law, rigid or implied, could he be supposed to linger round the lunch of the Anglo-Indian friends; but he lingered, covering his position with torrents of amusing but quite needless conversation. He was the more puzzling because he did not seem to want any lunch. As one after another of the most exquisitely balanced kedgerees of curries, accompanied with their appropriate vintages, were laid before the other two, he only repeated that it was one of his fast-days, and munched a piece of bread and sipped and then left untasted a tumbler of cold water. His talk, however, was exuberant.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,” he cried—, “I’ll mix you a salad! I can’t eat it, but I’ll mix it like an angel! You’ve got a lettuce there.”
“Unfortunately it’s the only thing we have got,” answered the good-humoured Major. “You must remember that mustard, vinegar, oil and so on vanished with the cruet and the burglar.”
“I know,” replied Brown, rather vaguely. “That’s what I’ve always been afraid would happen. That’s why I always carry a cruet-stand about with me. I’m so fond of salads.”
And to the amazement of the two men he took a pepper-pot out of his waistcoat pocket and put it on the table.
“I wonder why the burglar wanted mustard, too,” he went on, taking a mustard-pot from another pocket. “A mustard plaster, I suppose. And vinegar”—and producing that condiment— “haven’t I heard something about vinegar and brown paper? As for oil, which I think I put in my left—”
His garrulity was an instant arrested; for lifting his eyes, he saw what no one else saw—the black figure of Dr Oman standing on the sunlit lawn and looking steadily into the room. Before he could quite recover himself Cray had cloven in.
“You’re an astounding card,” he said, staring. “I shall come and hear your sermons, if they’re as amusing as your manners.” His voice changed a little, and he leaned back in his chair.
“Oh, there are sermons in a cruet-stand, too,” said Father Brown, quite gravely. “Have you heard of faith like a grain of mustard-seed; or charity that anoints with oil? And as for vinegar, can any soldiers forget that solitary soldier, who, when the sun was darkened—”
Colonel Cray leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth.
Father Brown, who was making the salad, tipped two spoonfuls of the mustard into the tumbler of water beside him; stood up and said in a new, loud and sudden voice—“Drink that!”
At the same moment the motionless doctor in the garden came running, and bursting open a window cried: “Am I wanted? Has he been poisoned?”
“Pretty near,” said Brown, with the shadow of a smile; for the emetic had very suddenly taken effect. And Cray lay in a deck-chair, gasping as for life, but alive.
Major Putnam had sprung up, his purple face mottled. “A crime!” he cried hoarsely. “I will go for the police!”
The priest could hear him dragging down his palm-leaf hat from the peg and tumbling out of the front door; he heard the garden gate slam. But he only stood looking at Cray; and after a silence said quietly:
“I shall not talk to you much; but I will tell you what you want to know. There is no curse on you. The Temple of the Monkey was either a coincidence or a part of the trick; the trick was the trick of a white man. There is only one weapon that will bring blood with that mere feathery touch: a razor held by a white man. There is one way of making a common room full of invisible, overpowering poison: turning on the gas—the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of club that can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You’ll see some of them in the Major’s study.”
With that he went outside and spoke for a moment to the doctor. The moment after, Audrey Watson came rushing into the house and fell on her knees beside Cray’s chair. He could not hear what they said to each other; but their faces moved with amazement, not unhappiness. The doctor and the priest walked slowly towards the garden gate.
“I suppose the Major was in love with her, too,” he said with a sigh; and when the other nodded, observed: “You were very generous, doctor. You did a fine thing. But what made you suspect?”
“A very small thing,” said Oman; “but it kept me restless in church till I came back to see that all was well. That book on his table was a work on poisons; and was put down open at the place where it stated that a certain Indian poison, though deadly and difficult to trace, was particularly easily reversible by the use of the commonest emetics. I suppose he read that at the last moment—”
“And remembered that there were emetics in the cruet-stand,” said Father Brown. “Exactly. He threw the cruet in the dustbin— where I found it, along with other silver—for the sake of a burglary blind. But if you look at that pepper-pot I put on the table, you’ll see a small hole. That’s where Cray’s bullet struck, shaking up the pepper and making the criminal sneeze.”
There was a silence. Then Dr Oman said grimly: “The Major is a long time looking for the police.”
“Or the police in looking for the Major?” said the priest. “Well, good-bye.”
ELEVEN
Il prete pareva perplesso. «Non può essere stato lui presso la pattumiera», mormorò. «Non con quei vestiti. Oppure c’era passato prima, oggi?»
Padre Brown, a contatto con le altre persone, era sensibile come un barometro; ma quel giorno sembrava sensibile all’incirca quanto un rinoceronte. Nessuna legge sociale, esplicita o sottintesa, poteva imporgli di attardarsi intorno al desinare degli amici anglo-indiani; eppure si attardava, coprendo la propria posizione con fiumi di conversazione spassosa quanto perfettamente superflua. Risultava tanto più sconcertante in quanto non pareva desiderare alcun pranzo. Mentre uno dopo l’altro i più squisitamente equilibrati kedgeree di curry, accompagnati dalle annate a essi appropriate, venivano posti dinanzi agli altri due, egli si limitava a ripetere che era uno dei suoi giorni di digiuno, e sgranocchiava un pezzo di pane, sorseggiava e poi lasciava intatto un bicchiere d’acqua fredda. La sua parlata, tuttavia, era esuberante.
«Vi dirò io che cosa farò per voi», esclamò, «vi preparerò un’insalata! Non posso mangiarla, ma la condirò come un angelo! Avete lì della lattuga.»
«Purtroppo è l’unica cosa che ci sia rimasta», rispose il Maggiore di buon umore. «Dovete ricordare che senape, aceto, olio e via dicendo sono spariti con l’oliera e con il ladro.»
«Lo so», replicò Brown, piuttosto vagamente. «È proprio ciò che ho sempre temuto potesse accadere. Ecco perché porto sempre con me un’oliera. Vado tanto matto per le insalate.»
E, con stupore dei due uomini, trasse di tasca dal panciotto una pepiera e la posò sulla tavola.
«Mi domando perché il ladro volesse anche la senape», proseguì, estraendo un vasetto di senape da un’altra tasca. «Per un impiastro, suppongo. E l’aceto» — e produsse quel condimento — «non ho forse sentito qualcosa a proposito di aceto e carta paglia? Quanto all’olio, che credo di aver messo nella tasca sinistra…»
La sua loquacità fu di colpo arrestata; poiché, alzando gli occhi, egli vide ciò che nessun altro vedeva: la nera figura del dottor Oman ritta sul prato illuminato dal sole, lo sguardo fisso e immobile dentro la stanza. Prima che potesse del tutto ricomporsi, Cray si era inserito nel discorso.
«Siete un tipo sbalorditivo», disse, fissandolo. «Verrò ad ascoltare le vostre prediche, se sono spassose quanto i vostri modi.» La sua voce mutò un poco, ed egli si abbandonò all’indietro sulla sedia.
«Oh, ci sono prediche anche in un’oliera», disse Padre Brown, con la massima gravità. «Avete udito parlare della fede simile a un granello di senape; o della carità che unge con l’olio? E quanto all’aceto, può un soldato dimenticare quel soldato solitario che, quando il sole si oscurò…»
Il colonnello Cray si sporse un poco in avanti e strinse la tovaglia.
Padre Brown, che stava preparando l’insalata, versò due cucchiaiate di senape nel bicchiere d’acqua accanto a sé; si alzò e disse con voce nuova, forte e improvvisa: «Bevete questo!»
Nello stesso istante il dottore, prima immobile nel giardino, giunse di corsa e, spalancando una finestra, gridò: «C’è bisogno di me? È stato avvelenato?»
«Poco ci manca», disse Brown, con l’ombra di un sorriso; ché l’emetico aveva molto rapidamente prodotto il suo effetto. E Cray giaceva su una sedia a sdraio, ansimando come chi lotta per la vita, ma vivo.
Il maggiore Putnam era balzato in piedi, il volto paonazzo chiazzato. «Un delitto!», gridò con voce rauca. «Vado a chiamare la polizia!»
Il prete poté udirlo strappare dall’attaccapanni il suo cappello di foglie di palma e precipitarsi fuori dalla porta d’ingresso; udì sbattere il cancello del giardino. Ma egli rimase soltanto a guardare Cray; e dopo un silenzio disse tranquillamente:
«Non vi parlerò molto; ma vi dirò ciò che desiderate sapere. Non c’è alcuna maledizione su di voi. Il Tempio della Scimmia fu o una coincidenza o parte del trucco; e il trucco era il trucco di un uomo bianco. C’è una sola arma capace di far uscire il sangue con quel semplice tocco lieve come una piuma: un rasoio impugnato da un uomo bianco. C’è un solo modo di riempire una comune stanza di un veleno invisibile e soverchiante: aprire il gas — il delitto di un uomo bianco. E c’è un solo tipo di clava che possa essere scagliata da una finestra, girare a mezz’aria e tornare alla finestra accanto: il boomerang australiano. Ne vedrete alcuni nello studio del Maggiore.»
Detto questo, uscì e scambiò per un momento qualche parola con il dottore. L’istante successivo, Audrey Watson entrò di corsa nella casa e cadde in ginocchio accanto alla sedia di Cray. Egli non poté udire ciò che i due si dissero; ma i loro volti si muovevano di stupore, non d’infelicità. Il dottore e il prete s’incamminarono lentamente verso il cancello del giardino.
«Suppongo che anche il Maggiore fosse innamorato di lei», disse con un sospiro; e quando l’altro annuì, osservò: «Siete stato molto generoso, dottore. Avete compiuto una bella azione. Ma che cosa vi fece nascere il sospetto?»
«Una cosa piccolissima», disse Oman; «ma mi tenne inquieto in chiesa finché non tornai indietro a vedere che tutto fosse a posto. Quel libro sul suo tavolo era un’opera sui veleni; ed era stato posato aperto proprio nel punto in cui si affermava che un certo veleno indiano, per quanto letale e difficile da rintracciare, era particolarmente facile da neutralizzare con l’uso dei più comuni emetici. Suppongo che egli lo abbia letto all’ultimo momento…»
«E si sia ricordato che c’erano degli emetici nell’oliera», disse Padre Brown. «Esattamente. Gettò l’oliera nella pattumiera — dove io la trovai, insieme ad altro argento — per dare a intendere che fosse stato un furto. Ma se guardate quella pepiera che ho posato sulla tavola, vi vedrete un piccolo foro. È là che colpì la pallottola di Cray, sollevando il pepe e facendo starnutire il criminale.»
Ci fu un silenzio. Poi il dottor Oman disse cupamente: «Il Maggiore ci mette parecchio tempo a cercare la polizia.»
«O la polizia a cercare il Maggiore?», disse il prete. «Be’, arrivederci.»
UNDICI
The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal American daily called the Western Sun— also humorously described as the “Rising Sunset”. This was in allusion to a great journalistic declaration (attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed the sun would rise in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling.” Those, however, who mock American journalism from the standpoint of somewhat mellower traditions forget a certain paradox which partly redeems it. For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as “Weary Willie,” and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long procession of its portraits.
Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism”. But many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as “Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks”—or “Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.
That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening. The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills; the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive about his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal old-country inn, The Champion Arms, standing open, he went in to make inquiries.
In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time for a reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with close red hair and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought with him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical negligence from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother journalist.
“Could you do me the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his nation, “of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives, as I understand?”
“It’s a few yards down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his cigar; “I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I’m going on to Pendragon Park to try and see the fun.”
“What is Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.
“Sir Claude Champion’s place—haven’t you come down for that, too?” asked the other pressman, looking up. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“I have come to see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.
“I’ve come to see Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan’t catch her at home.” And he laughed rather unpleasantly.
“Are you interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.
“I’m interested in catastrophes; and there are going to be some,” replied his companion gloomily. “Mine’s a filthy trade, and I never pretend it isn’t.”
With that he spat on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was pale and dissipated, with the promise of formidable passions yet to be loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse and careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his long, thin fingers. His name, which came out in the course of talk, was James Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to a pink paper which he heartily despised, called Smart Society, in the capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.
Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois on Darwin which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western Sun. Dalroy had come down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent of a scandal which might very well end in the Divorce Court, but which was at present hovering between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well as Mr Boulnois. So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay, falsely pretended to know) Sir Claude Champion, as “one of the brightest and wealthiest of England’s Upper Ten”; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and, above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous culture and restless publicity—, he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by the word “dilettante”.
Lo strano delitto di John Boulnois
IL SIGNOR CALHOUN KIDD era un giovanotto assai giovane dalla faccia assai vecchia, una faccia inaridita dal proprio ardore, incorniciata da capelli d’un nero azzurrino e da un cravattino nero a farfalla. Era l’inviato in Inghilterra del colossale quotidiano americano chiamato il Western Sun, detto anche scherzosamente il «Sole al Tramonto che Sorge». Il che alludeva a una grande dichiarazione giornalistica (attribuita allo stesso signor Kidd) secondo cui «lui ci scommetteva che il sole avrebbe finito col sorgere a occidente, se solo i cittadini americani si dessero un po’ più da fare». Coloro tuttavia che deridono il giornalismo americano dal punto di vista di tradizioni un po’ più stagionate dimenticano un certo paradosso che in parte lo riscatta. Poiché, se è vero che il giornalismo degli Stati permette una volgarità pantomimica che va assai oltre qualunque cosa inglese, è pur vero che mostra un autentico fervore per i più seri problemi della mente, del quale i giornali inglesi sono innocenti, o piuttosto incapaci. Il Sun traboccava delle materie più solenni trattate nel modo più farsesco. William James vi figurava accanto a «Guglielmo lo Straccione», e i pragmatisti si alternavano ai pugili nella lunga processione dei suoi ritratti.
Così, quando un uomo di Oxford assai schivo di nome John Boulnois pubblicò in una rivista assai illeggibile chiamata la Natural Philosophy Quarterly una serie di articoli su presunti punti deboli dell’evoluzione darwiniana, la cosa non smosse un solo angolo dei giornali inglesi; benché la teoria di Boulnois (secondo la quale l’universo sarebbe relativamente statico e soltanto di tanto in tanto visitato da convulsioni di mutamento) godesse a Oxford d’una certa moda un po’ fissata, tanto da meritarsi il nome di «Catastrofismo». Molti giornali americani però si avventarono su quella sfida come su un grande avvenimento; e il Sun proiettò l’ombra del signor Boulnois in dimensioni addirittura gigantesche attraverso le proprie pagine. In virtù del paradosso già rilevato, articoli di preziosa intelligenza ed entusiasmo venivano presentati sotto titoli apparentemente vergati da un maniaco analfabeta, titoli quali «Darwin morde la polvere; il critico Boulnois dice che salta gli scogli», oppure «Restate catastrofici, dice il pensatore Boulnois». E al signor Calhoun Kidd, del Western Sun, fu ingiunto di prendere il suo cravattino a farfalla e la sua faccia lugubre e di portarli fin nella casetta fuori Oxford dove il pensatore Boulnois viveva nella felice ignoranza d’un simile titolo.
Quel fatale filosofo aveva acconsentito, in maniera alquanto stordita, a ricevere l’intervistatore, e aveva fissato l’ora delle nove di quella sera. Gli ultimi bagliori d’un tramonto d’estate si aggrappavano a Cumnor e alle basse colline boscose; il romantico yankee era insieme incerto della strada e curioso dei dintorni; e vedendo aperta la porta d’una genuina, feudale locanda di vecchio stampo campagnolo, The Champion Arms, entrò a chiedere informazioni.
Nel salottino del bar suonò il campanello, e dovette attendere un bel po’ prima che qualcuno rispondesse. L’unica altra persona presente era un uomo magro dai capelli rossi e ben tagliati e dagli abiti sciolti e un po’ da cavallante, che stava bevendo un whisky pessimo, ma fumando un sigaro eccellente. Il whisky, naturalmente, era la marca di punta di The Champion Arms; il sigaro se l’era probabilmente portato da Londra. Nulla poteva essere più diverso della sua cinica trascuratezza dall’azzimata secchezza del giovane americano; ma qualcosa nella sua matita e nel taccuino aperto, e forse nell’espressione del suo vivo occhio azzurro, indusse Kidd a indovinare, correttamente, che aveva davanti un collega giornalista.
«Potrebbe farmi la cortesia», chiese Kidd con la cortesia della sua nazione, «di indicarmi la strada per la Grey Cottage, dove abita il signor Boulnois, se ben capisco?»
«È qualche decina di metri più giù», disse l’uomo dai capelli rossi togliendosi il sigaro di bocca; «ci passerò io stesso fra un minuto, ma sto andando fino a Pendragon Park per cercare di godermi lo spettacolo.»
«Che cos’è Pendragon Park?» chiese Calhoun Kidd.
«La tenuta di Sir Claude Champion… non è venuto giù anche lei per quello?» chiese l’altro giornalista, alzando gli occhi. «Lei è un giornalista, no?»
«Sono venuto a trovare il signor Boulnois», disse Kidd.
«Io sono venuto a trovare la signora Boulnois», ribatté l’altro. «Ma non la coglierò certo in casa.» E rise in modo piuttosto sgradevole.
«Lei si interessa di Catastrofismo?» chiese lo yankee stupito.
«Mi interesso di catastrofi; e qualcuna sta per accadere», rispose il compagno cupamente. «Il mio è un mestiere sudicio, e non ho mai preteso il contrario.»
Ciò detto sputò per terra; eppure in quell’atto e in quell’istante stesso si poteva capire che quell’uomo era stato educato da gentiluomo.
Il giornalista americano lo considerò con maggiore attenzione. Aveva un volto pallido e dissipato, che prometteva formidabili passioni ancora da scatenare; ma era un volto intelligente e sensibile; i suoi abiti erano grossolani e trasandati, però portava un bell’anello con sigillo su una delle sue dita lunghe e sottili. Il suo nome, che venne fuori nel corso della conversazione, era James Dalroy; era figlio d’un proprietario terriero irlandese andato in rovina, ed era legato a un giornaletto rosa da lui cordialmente disprezzato, chiamato Smart Society, in qualità di cronista e di qualcosa che somigliava penosamente a una spia.
Smart Society, mi duole dirlo, non provava nulla di quell’interesse per il Boulnois su Darwin che tanto onorava la mente e il cuore del Western Sun. Dalroy era venuto giù, a quanto pareva, per fiutare l’odore d’uno scandalo che avrebbe potuto benissimo finire davanti al Tribunale dei divorzi, ma che per il momento aleggiava tra la Grey Cottage e Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude Champion era noto ai lettori del Western Sun quanto il signor Boulnois. Come lo erano il Papa e il vincitore del Derby; ma l’idea d’una loro intima conoscenza avrebbe colpito Kidd come ugualmente incongrua. Egli aveva sentito parlare (e aveva scritto, anzi aveva falsamente preteso di conoscere) di Sir Claude Champion come d’«uno dei più brillanti e ricchi esponenti dell’aristocrazia inglese»; come del grande sportivo che faceva correre gli yacht intorno al mondo; come del grande viaggiatore che scriveva libri sull’Himalaya, come del politico che conquistava i collegi elettorali con una sorprendente specie di Democrazia Tory, e come del grande dilettante d’arte, di musica, di letteratura e, soprattutto, di recitazione. Sir Claude era davvero piuttosto magnifico, anche a occhi non americani. C’era in lui qualcosa del principe rinascimentale, nella sua cultura onnivora e nella sua incessante ricerca di pubblicità; non era soltanto un grande dilettante, ma un dilettante ardente. Non c’era in lui nulla di quella frivolezza antiquaria che rendiamo con la parola «dilettante».
That faultless falcon profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun, gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire, or even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude—a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know— it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat with the newly-unearthed founder of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according to Dalroy’s account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately, an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other. Indeed, Boulnois’s cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon Park.
But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted in his own shy and ponderous style; and the proximity of the household to Champion’s had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement. Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were perpetually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet it was needless to name.
“I don’t think it can go on without a smash,” said the young man with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be squared—or he may be square. But if he’s square he’s thick— what you might call cubic. But I don’t believe it’s possible.”
“He is a man of grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep voice.
“Yes,” answered Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers can’t be such a blighted fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall be following myself in a minute or two.”
But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded; the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there with a star, but lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise of a rising moon.
The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of stiff, high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of the Park that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the name on the narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that the hour of the “Thinker’s” appointment had just struck, he went in and knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a porter’s lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation of prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified.
“Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has been obliged to go out suddenly.”
“But see here, I had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a rising voice. “Do you know where he went to?”
“To Pendragon Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began to close the door.
Kidd started a little.
“Did he go with Mrs—with the rest of the party?” he asked rather vaguely.
“No, sir,” said the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out alone.” And he shut the door, brutally, but with an air of duty not done.
The American, that curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness, was annoyed. He felt a strong desire to hustle them all along a bit and teach them business habits; the hoary old dog and the grizzled, heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric shirt-front, and the drowsy old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn’t keep an appointment.
“If that’s the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife’s purest devotion,” said Mr Calhoun Kidd. “But perhaps he’s gone over to make a row. In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the spot.”
And turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word “Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere almost described in Scott’s great tragedy; the smell of something that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.
More than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo of his own tramp. But as he went on he was more and more inclined to conclude, with the remains of his reason, that there really were other feet upon the road. He thought hazily of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see the image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as Pierrot’s, but patched with black. The apex of the triangle of dark-blue sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense, there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy—more—he hesitated for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter—Catastrophism.
Quel profilo impeccabile di falco, con l’occhio italiano d’un nero purpureo, che era stato fotografato tante volte tanto per Smart Society quanto per il Western Sun, dava a chiunque l’impressione d’un uomo divorato dall’ambizione come da un fuoco, o addirittura da un morbo. Ma per quanto Kidd sapesse un mucchio di cose su Sir Claude — anzi, molte più di quante ce ne fossero da sapere — non gli sarebbe mai passato neppure nei sogni più sfrenati di collegare un aristocratico così vistoso col fondatore appena dissotterrato del Catastrofismo, o di indovinare che Sir Claude Champion e John Boulnois potessero essere intimi amici. Eppure tale, secondo il racconto di Dalroy, era il fatto. I due avevano cacciato in coppia a scuola e all’università e, benché i loro destini sociali fossero stati assai diversi (giacché Champion era un grande proprietario terriero e quasi un milionario, mentre Boulnois era un povero studioso e, fino a poco prima, uno sconosciuto), continuavano a mantenere rapporti strettissimi. Anzi, il cottage di Boulnois sorgeva proprio fuori dai cancelli di Pendragon Park.
Ma se i due uomini potessero rimanere amici ancora a lungo stava diventando una cupa e brutta questione. Un anno o due prima Boulnois aveva sposato una bella e non priva di successo attrice, alla quale era devoto nel suo stile timido e ponderoso; e la vicinanza della sua casa a quella di Champion aveva offerto a quella volubile celebrità l’occasione di comportarsi in un modo che non poteva che destare un’agitazione penosa e piuttosto vile. Sir Claude aveva portato alla perfezione le arti della pubblicità; e sembrava trarre un folle piacere dall’essere altrettanto ostentato in un intrigo che non poteva procurargli alcun onore. Valletti di Pendragon lasciavano di continuo mazzi di fiori per la signora Boulnois; carrozze e automobili si presentavano di continuo al cottage per la signora Boulnois; balli e mascherate riempivano di continuo i giardini in cui il baronetto faceva sfilare la signora Boulnois, come la Regina dell’Amore e della Bellezza a un torneo. Proprio quella sera, contrassegnata dal signor Kidd per l’esposizione del Catastrofismo, era stata contrassegnata da Sir Claude Champion per una rappresentazione all’aperto di Romeo and Juliet, in cui egli avrebbe recitato Romeo di fronte a una Giulietta che è inutile nominare.
«Non credo che possa andare avanti senza uno schianto», disse il giovane dai capelli rossi, alzandosi e scuotendosi. «Il vecchio Boulnois si può comprare… oppure è integro. Ma se è integro, è ottuso… quello che si direbbe un vero cubo. Comunque non credo che la cosa sia possibile.»
«È un uomo di grandi facoltà intellettuali», disse Calhoun Kidd con voce profonda.
«Sì», rispose Dalroy; «ma neppure un uomo di grandi facoltà intellettuali può essere uno sciocco tanto maledetto. Deve proprio andare? Io la seguirò fra un minuto o due.»
Ma Calhoun Kidd, finito un latte e soda, s’incamminò di buon passo su per la strada verso la Grey Cottage, lasciando il suo cinico informatore al suo whisky e al suo tabacco. L’ultima luce del giorno era svanita; i cieli erano d’un grigio verde scuro, come ardesia, cosparsi qua e là di qualche stella, ma più chiari sul lato sinistro, con la promessa d’una luna nascente.
La Grey Cottage, che sorgeva trincerata, per così dire, entro un quadrato di rigide e alte siepi di biancospino, era così addossata ai pini e alle palizzate del Park che Kidd sulle prime la scambiò per la portineria del Park. Trovato però il nome sullo stretto cancello di legno, e vedendo dal proprio orologio che l’ora dell’appuntamento col «pensatore» era appena scoccata, entrò e bussò alla porta d’ingresso. All’interno della siepe del giardino poteva vedere che la casa, per quanto poco pretenziosa, era più grande e più lussuosa di quanto sembrasse a prima vista, ed era tutt’altro genere di luogo rispetto a una portineria. Fuori stavano una cuccia da cani e un’arnia, come simboli dell’antica vita campestre inglese; la luna sorgeva dietro un boschetto di floridi peri, il cane che uscì dalla cuccia aveva un’aria venerabile e restio a latrare; e il domestico anziano e dimesso che aprì la porta fu succinto ma dignitoso.
«Il signor Boulnois mi ha pregato di porgerle le sue scuse, signore», disse, «ma è stato costretto a uscire all’improvviso.»
«Ma senta, avevo un appuntamento», disse l’intervistatore, alzando la voce. «Sa dove è andato?»
«A Pendragon Park, signore», disse il servitore, piuttosto tetro, e cominciò a chiudere la porta.
Kidd trasalì lievemente.
«È andato con la signora… con il resto della compagnia?» chiese in modo piuttosto vago.
«No, signore», disse l’uomo secco; «è rimasto indietro, e poi è uscito da solo.» E chiuse la porta, brutalmente, ma con un’aria di dovere non compiuto.
L’americano, quel curioso miscuglio di impudenza e di sensibilità, ne fu seccato. Sentì un vivo desiderio di scuoterli tutti un po’ e di insegnare loro il senso degli affari; il vecchio cane canuto e il vecchio maggiordomo brizzolato dalla faccia pesante col suo sparato preistorico, e la vecchia luna sonnolenta, e soprattutto il vecchio filosofo scervellato che non sapeva mantenere un appuntamento.
«Se è così che si comporta, merita di perdere la più pura devozione di sua moglie», disse il signor Calhoun Kidd. «Ma forse è andato di là a fare una scenata. In tal caso credo che un uomo del Western Sun sarà sul posto.»
E svoltato l’angolo presso i cancelli aperti della portineria, si mise in cammino, arrancando su per il lungo viale di neri boschi di pini che puntavano in brusca prospettiva verso i giardini interni di Pendragon Park. Gli alberi erano neri e ordinati come i pennacchi su un carro funebre; c’erano ancora poche stelle. Era un uomo dalle associazioni più letterarie che direttamente naturali; la parola «Ravenswood» gli tornava ripetutamente in mente. In parte era per il colore corvino dei boschi di pini; ma in parte anche per un’atmosfera indescrivibile quasi descritta nella grande tragedia di Scott; l’odore di qualcosa che era morto nel diciottesimo secolo; l’odore di giardini umidi e di urne infrante, di torti che ormai non saranno mai raddrizzati; di qualcosa che non è meno inguaribilmente triste per il fatto d’essere stranamente irreale.
Più d’una volta, mentre saliva per quella strana strada nera d’artificio tragico, si fermò, sussultando, credendo di udire passi davanti a sé. Non riusciva a scorgere nulla davanti se non le due cupe pareti gemelle di pino e il cuneo di cielo stellato al di sopra. Dapprima pensò di essersela immaginata, o d’essere stato beffato da una semplice eco del proprio incedere. Ma via via che proseguiva si sentiva sempre più incline a concludere, con ciò che restava della sua ragione, che davvero c’erano altri piedi sulla strada. Pensò confusamente a fantasmi; e si stupì di quanto rapidamente riuscisse a raffigurarsi l’immagine d’un fantasma appropriato e locale, uno con la faccia bianca come quella di Pierrot, ma chiazzata di nero. L’apice del triangolo di cielo blu scuro si faceva più chiaro e più azzurro, ma egli non si rendeva ancora conto che ciò avveniva perché si stava avvicinando alle luci della grande casa e del giardino. Sentiva soltanto che l’atmosfera si faceva più intensa, che nella tristezza c’era più violenza e più segretezza… più… esitò sulla parola, e poi la disse con uno scatto di riso… Catastrofismo.
More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale.
Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked sword—such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many an unjust duel in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of him and lay there glistening like a large needle. He ran like a hare and bent to look at it. Seen at close quarters it had rather a showy look: the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were a little dubious. But there were other red drops upon the blade which were not dubious.
He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile had come, and saw that at this point the sable facade of fir and pine was interrupted by a smaller road at right angles; which, when he turned it, brought him in full view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he did not look at this, having something more interesting to look at.
Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden, was one of those small picturesque surprises common in the old landscape gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw something else clinging to it also, for one wild moment—the figure of a man.
Though he saw it there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson, with glints of gold, yet he knew in one flash of moonlight who it was. That white face flung up to heaven, clean-shaven and so unnaturally young, like Byron with a Roman nose, those black curls already grizzled— he had seen the thousand public portraits of Sir Claude Champion. The wild red figure reeled an instant against the sundial; the next it had rolled down the steep bank and lay at the American’s feet, faintly moving one arm. A gaudy, unnatural gold ornament on the arm suddenly reminded Kidd of Romeo and Juliet; of course the tight crimson suit was part of the play. But there was a long red stain down the bank from which the man had rolled—that was no part of the play. He had been run through the body.
Mr Calhoun Kidd shouted and shouted again. Once more he seemed to hear phantasmal footsteps, and started to find another figure already near him. He knew the figure, and yet it terrified him. The dissipated youth who had called himself Dalroy had a horribly quiet way with him; if Boulnois failed to keep appointments that had been made, Dalroy had a sinister air of keeping appointments that hadn’t. The moonlight discoloured everything, against Dalroy’s red hair his wan face looked not so much white as pale green.
All this morbid impressionism must be Kidd’s excuse for having cried out, brutally and beyond all reason: “Did you do this, you devil?”
James Dalroy smiled his unpleasing smile; but before he could speak, the fallen figure made another movement of the arm, waving vaguely towards the place where the sword fell; then came a moan, and then it managed to speak.
“Boulnois… Boulnois, I say… Boulnois did it… jealous of me…he was jealous, he was, he was…”
Kidd bent his head down to hear more, and just managed to catch the words:
“Boulnois…with my own sword…he threw it…”
Again the failing hand waved towards the sword, and then fell rigid with a thud. In Kidd rose from its depth all that acrid humour that is the strange salt of the seriousness of his race.
“See here,” he said sharply and with command, “you must fetch a doctor. This man’s dead.”
“And a priest, too, I suppose,” said Dalroy in an undecipherable manner. “All these Champions are papists.”
The American knelt down by the body, felt the heart, propped up the head and used some last efforts at restoration; but before the other journalist reappeared, followed by a doctor and a priest, he was already prepared to assert they were too late.
“Were you too late also?” asked the doctor, a solid prosperous-looking man, with conventional moustache and whiskers, but a lively eye, which darted over Kidd dubiously.
“In one sense,” drawled the representative of the Sun. “I was too late to save the man, but I guess I was in time to hear something of importance. I heard the dead man denounce his assassin.”
“And who was the assassin?” asked the doctor, drawing his eyebrows together.
“Boulnois,” said Calhoun Kidd, and whistled softly.
The doctor stared at him gloomily with a reddening brow—, but he did not contradict. Then the priest, a shorter figure in the background, said mildly: “I understood that Mr Boulnois was not coming to Pendragon Park this evening.”
“There again,” said the Yankee grimly, “I may be in a position to give the old country a fact or two. Yes, sir, John Boulnois was going to stay in all this evening; he fixed up a real good appointment there with me. But John Boulnois changed his mind; John Boulnois left his home abruptly and all alone, and came over to this darned Park an hour or so ago. His butler told me so. I think we hold what the all-wise police call a clue—have you sent for them?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “but we haven’t alarmed anyone else yet.”
Altri pini, altro sentiero gli sfilarono accanto, e poi si fermò radicato come da una folata di magia. È vano dire che si sentì come precipitato in un sogno; ma questa volta ebbe la piena certezza d’essere precipitato in un libro. Poiché noi esseri umani siamo abituati alle cose fuori posto; siamo avvezzi al frastuono dell’incongruo; è una nenia con cui possiamo addormentarci. Se accade una sola cosa appropriata, essa ci ridesta come la fitta d’un accordo perfetto. Accadde qualcosa quale sarebbe accaduto in un luogo simile in una fiaba dimenticata.
Sopra il nero bosco di pini venne volando e balenando nella luna una spada nuda… uno di quegli spadini snelli e scintillanti che possono aver combattuto più d’un ingiusto duello in quell’antico parco. Cadde sul sentiero assai più avanti di lui e vi rimase luccicando come un grosso ago. Corse come una lepre e si chinò a guardarlo. Visto da vicino aveva un’aria piuttosto appariscente: le grosse gemme rosse nell’impugnatura e nella guardia erano un po’ dubbie. Ma c’erano altre gocce rosse sulla lama, e quelle non erano dubbie.
Si guardò intorno smarrito nella direzione da cui era venuto l’abbagliante proiettile, e vide che a quel punto la nera facciata d’abeti e di pini era interrotta da una stradina ad angolo retto; la quale, dopo che l’ebbe imboccata, lo portò in piena vista della lunga casa illuminata, con davanti un lago e delle fontane. Ma egli non guardò tutto ciò, avendo qualcosa di più interessante da guardare.
Sopra di lui, all’angolo del ripido terrapieno erboso del giardino a terrazze, c’era una di quelle piccole pittoresche sorprese comuni nell’antica arte dei giardini; una specie di piccola collinetta rotonda o cupola d’erba, come un gigantesco monticello di talpa, cinta e coronata da tre cerchi concentrici di rose, e con una meridiana nel punto più alto al centro. Kidd poteva vedere lo gnomone della meridiana ergersi scuro contro il cielo come la pinna dorsale d’uno squalo e la vana luce lunare aggrapparsi a quell’ozioso orologio. Ma vide anche qualcos’altro aggrappato ad esso, per un solo folle istante: la figura d’un uomo.
Benché la vedesse là per un solo istante, benché fosse strampalata e incredibile nel costume, essendo l’uomo vestito dal collo ai talloni d’un attillato cremisi, con bagliori d’oro, pure in un solo lampo di luna riconobbe chi era. Quel volto bianco levato verso il cielo, sbarbato e così innaturalmente giovane, come Byron con un naso romano, quei riccioli neri già brizzolati… aveva visto i mille ritratti pubblici di Sir Claude Champion. La sfrenata figura rossa barcollò un istante contro la meridiana; l’istante dopo era rotolata giù per il ripido terrapieno e giaceva ai piedi dell’americano, muovendo debolmente un braccio. Un vistoso, innaturale ornamento d’oro sul braccio rammentò a un tratto a Kidd Romeo and Juliet; naturalmente l’attillata veste cremisi era parte della recita. Ma c’era una lunga macchia rossa lungo il terrapieno da cui l’uomo era rotolato, e quella non era parte della recita. Era stato trafitto da parte a parte.
Il signor Calhoun Kidd gridò e gridò ancora. Di nuovo gli parve di udire passi spettrali, e sussultò trovando un’altra figura già vicina a sé. Conosceva quella figura, eppure lo terrorizzava. Il giovane dissipato che si era fatto chiamare Dalroy aveva un modo di fare orribilmente calmo; se Boulnois mancava di mantenere gli appuntamenti fissati, Dalroy aveva la sinistra aria di mantenere quelli che non erano stati fissati. La luce lunare scoloriva ogni cosa: contro i capelli rossi di Dalroy il suo volto smorto non sembrava tanto bianco quanto d’un pallido verde.
Tutto questo morboso impressionismo dovrà servire da scusa a Kidd per aver gridato, brutalmente e contro ogni ragione: «Sei stato tu, demonio?»
James Dalroy sorrise il suo sgradevole sorriso; ma prima che potesse parlare, la figura caduta fece un altro movimento del braccio, agitandolo vagamente verso il punto in cui era caduta la spada; poi venne un gemito, e poi riuscì a parlare.
«Boulnois… Boulnois, dico… è stato Boulnois… geloso di me… era geloso, sì, era, era…»
Kidd chinò il capo per udire di più, e riuscì appena a cogliere le parole:
«Boulnois… con la mia stessa spada… l’ha scagliata…»
Di nuovo la mano che veniva meno si agitò verso la spada, e poi cadde rigida con un tonfo. In Kidd salì dal profondo tutto quell’acre umorismo che è lo strano sale della serietà della sua razza.
«Senta un po’», disse in tono secco e imperioso, «deve andare a chiamare un dottore. Quest’uomo è morto.»
«E anche un prete, immagino», disse Dalroy in maniera indecifrabile. «Tutti questi Champion sono papisti.»
L’americano s’inginocchiò accanto al corpo, tastò il cuore, sollevò la testa e tentò qualche estremo sforzo di rianimazione; ma prima che l’altro giornalista ricomparisse, seguìto da un dottore e da un prete, era già pronto a dichiarare che erano arrivati troppo tardi.
«Anche lei è arrivato troppo tardi?» chiese il dottore, un uomo massiccio e dall’aria prospera, con baffi e favoriti convenzionali, ma con un occhio vivace, che si posò dubbioso su Kidd.
«In un certo senso», biascicò il rappresentante del Sun. «Sono arrivato troppo tardi per salvare l’uomo, ma credo di essere arrivato in tempo per udire qualcosa d’importante. Ho udito il morto denunciare il suo assassino.»
«E chi era l’assassino?» chiese il dottore, aggrottando le sopracciglia.
«Boulnois», disse Calhoun Kidd, e fischiò piano.
Il dottore lo fissò cupamente con la fronte che si arrossava, ma non lo contraddisse. Poi il prete, una figura più bassa sullo sfondo, disse mitemente: «Mi risultava che il signor Boulnois non sarebbe venuto a Pendragon Park questa sera.»
«Ecco un altro punto», disse lo yankee tetramente, «su cui forse sono in grado di fornire alla vecchia Inghilterra un fatto o due. Sissignore, John Boulnois aveva intenzione di restarsene in casa tutta la sera; aveva combinato un buon appuntamento proprio lì con me. Ma John Boulnois ha cambiato idea; John Boulnois ha lasciato casa sua all’improvviso e tutto solo, ed è venuto in questo maledetto Park un’ora fa circa. Me l’ha detto il suo maggiordomo. Credo che abbiamo in mano quello che la sapientissima polizia chiama un indizio… l’avete fatta chiamare?»
«Sì», disse il dottore, «ma non abbiamo ancora allarmato nessun altro.»
“Does Mrs Boulnois know?” asked James Dalroy, and again Kidd was conscious of an irrational desire to hit him on his curling mouth.
“I have not told her,” said the doctor gruffly—, “but here come the police.”
The little priest had stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned with the fallen sword, which looked ludicrously large and theatrical when attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical and commonplace. “Just before the police come,” he said apologetically, “has anyone got a light?”
The Yankee journalist took an electric torch from his pocket, and the priest held it close to the middle part of the blade, which he examined with blinking care. Then, without glancing at the point or pommel, he handed the long weapon to the doctor.
“I fear I’m no use here,” he said, with a brief sigh. “I’ll say good night to you, gentlemen.” And he walked away up the dark avenue towards the house, his hands clasped behind him and his big head bent in cogitation.
The rest of the group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates, where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked slower and slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead, on the steps of the house. It was his silent way of acknowledging an equally silent approach; for there came towards him a presence that might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd’s demands for a lovely and aristocratic ghost. It was a young woman in silvery satins of a Renascence design; she had golden hair in two long shining ropes, and a face so startingly pale between them that she might have been chryselephantine—made, that is, like some old Greek statues, out of ivory and gold. But her eyes were very bright, and her voice, though low, was confident.
“Father Brown?” she said.
“Mrs Boulnois?” he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and immediately said: “I see you know about Sir Claude.”
“How do you know I know?” she asked steadily.
He did not answer the question, but asked another: “Have you seen your husband?”
“My husband is at home,” she said. “He has nothing to do with this.”
Again he did not answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a curiously intense expression on her face.
“Shall I tell you something more?” she said, with a rather fearful smile. “I don’t think he did it, and you don’t either.” Father Brown returned her gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more gravely.
“Father Brown,” said the lady, “I am going to tell you all I know, but I want you to do me a favour first. Will you tell me why you haven’t jumped to the conclusion of poor John’s guilt, as all the rest have done? Don’t mind what you say: I—I know about the gossip and the appearances that are against me.”
Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed, and passed his hand across his forehead. “Two very little things,” he said. “At least, one’s very trivial and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don’t fit in with Mr Boulnois being the murderer.”
He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and continued absentmindedly: “To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of importance to vague ideas. All those things that ‘aren’t evidence’ are what convince me. I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all impossibilities. I know your husband only slightly, but I think this crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so wicked. Anybody can be wicked—as wicked as he chooses. We can direct our moral wills; but we can’t generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this murder. He would not snatch Romeo’s sword from its romantic scabbard; or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body among the roses, or fling the sword away among the pines. If Boulnois killed anyone he’d do it quietly and heavily, as he’d do any other doubtful thing— take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet. No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It’s more like Champion.”
“Ah!” she said, and looked at him with eyes like diamonds.
“And the trivial thing was this,” said Brown. “There were finger-prints on that sword; finger-prints can be detected quite a time after they are made if they’re on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were on a polished surface. They were half-way down the blade of the sword. Whose prints they were I have no earthly clue; but why should anybody hold a sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all enemies except one.”
“Except one,” she repeated.
“There is only one enemy,” said Father Brown, “whom it is easier to kill with a dagger than a sword.”
“I know,” said the woman. “Oneself.”
There was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly: “Am I right, then? Did Sir Claude kill himself?”
“Yes” she said, with a face like marble. “I saw him do it.”
“He died,” said Father Brown, “for love of you?”
An extraordinary expression flashed across her face, very different from pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion had expected: her voice became suddenly strong and full. “I don’t believe,” she said, “he ever cared about me a rap. He hated my husband.”
“Why?” asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the lady.
“He hated my husband because…it is so strange I hardly know how to say it…because…”
“Yes?” said Brown patiently.
“Because my husband wouldn’t hate him.”
Father Brown only nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point— he never pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well.
«Lo sa la signora Boulnois?» chiese James Dalroy, e di nuovo Kidd fu conscio d’un irrazionale desiderio di colpirlo sulla bocca beffarda.
«Non gliel’ho detto», disse il dottore burbero, «ma ecco che arriva la polizia.»
Il piccolo prete era uscito nel viale principale, e ora tornava con la spada caduta, che appariva ridicolmente grande e teatrale attaccata alla sua figura tozza, insieme clericale e ordinaria. «Un momento prima che arrivi la polizia», disse in tono di scusa, «qualcuno ha un lume?»
Il giornalista yankee tirò fuori dalla tasca una torcia elettrica, e il prete l’accostò alla parte centrale della lama, che esaminò con cura ammiccante. Poi, senza neppure gettare uno sguardo alla punta o al pomo, porse la lunga arma al dottore.
«Temo di essere inutile qui», disse con un breve sospiro. «Auguro a lor signori la buona notte.» E si allontanò su per il viale buio verso la casa, le mani intrecciate dietro la schiena e la grossa testa china nella meditazione.
Il resto del gruppo affrettò ancor più il passo verso i cancelli della portineria, dove già si potevano scorgere un ispettore e due agenti in consultazione col portinaio. Ma il piccolo prete non fece che camminare sempre più lento nel fioco chiostro di pini, e alla fine si arrestò di colpo, sui gradini della casa. Era il suo silenzioso modo di riconoscere un avvicinarsi altrettanto silenzioso; poiché veniva verso di lui una presenza che avrebbe potuto soddisfare perfino le pretese di Calhoun Kidd in fatto di un fantasma leggiadro e aristocratico. Era una giovane donna in raso argenteo di foggia rinascimentale; aveva capelli d’oro raccolti in due lunghe trecce lucenti, e un volto tra esse così sorprendentemente pallido che avrebbe potuto essere criselefantina, fatta cioè, come certe antiche statue greche, d’avorio e d’oro. Ma i suoi occhi erano lucentissimi, e la sua voce, benché sommessa, era sicura.
«Padre Brown?» disse.
«La signora Boulnois?» rispose lui gravemente. Poi la guardò e subito disse: «Vedo che lei sa di Sir Claude.»
«Come fa a sapere che io lo so?» chiese lei con fermezza.
Egli non rispose alla domanda, ma ne fece un’altra: «Ha visto suo marito?»
«Mio marito è a casa», disse lei. «Non ha niente a che vedere con questo.»
Di nuovo egli non rispose; e la donna gli si fece più vicina, con un’espressione curiosamente intensa sul volto.
«Vuole che le dica qualcos’altro?» disse, con un sorriso piuttosto pauroso. «Io non credo che sia stato lui, e non lo crede neppure lei.» Padre Brown ricambiò il suo sguardo con una lunga, grave fissità, e poi annuì, ancor più gravemente.
«Padre Brown», disse la signora, «sto per dirle tutto quello che so, ma prima voglio che lei mi faccia un favore. Vuol dirmi perché non è saltato alla conclusione della colpevolezza del povero John, come hanno fatto tutti gli altri? Non si preoccupi di quel che dice: io… io so dei pettegolezzi e delle apparenze che sono contro di me.»
Padre Brown parve sinceramente imbarazzato, e si passò una mano sulla fronte. «Due cosette», disse. «Almeno, una è assai banale e l’altra assai vaga. Ma per quel che valgono, non si accordano col fatto che il signor Boulnois sia l’assassino.»
Volse il suo volto tondo e inespressivo verso le stelle e continuò distrattamente: «Prendiamo prima l’idea vaga. Io attribuisco molta importanza alle idee vaghe. Tutte quelle cose che ‘non sono prove’ sono ciò che mi convince. Ritengo che un’impossibilità morale sia la più grande di tutte le impossibilità. Conosco suo marito solo di sfuggita, ma penso che questo suo delitto, così come lo si concepisce in generale, sia qualcosa di molto simile a un’impossibilità morale. La prego di non credere che io intenda dire che Boulnois non potrebbe essere così malvagio. Chiunque può essere malvagio… malvagio quanto vuole. Possiamo dirigere la nostra volontà morale; ma in generale non possiamo mutare i nostri gusti istintivi e i nostri modi di fare le cose. Boulnois potrebbe commettere un delitto, ma non questo delitto. Non strapperebbe la spada di Romeo dal suo romantico fodero; né trafiggerebbe il suo nemico sulla meridiana come su una specie d’altare; né lascerebbe il suo corpo tra le rose, né scaglierebbe via la spada tra i pini. Se Boulnois uccidesse qualcuno lo farebbe in modo tranquillo e pesante, come farebbe qualunque altra cosa dubbia… bere un decimo bicchiere di porto, o leggere un poeta greco licenzioso. No, l’ambientazione romantica non è da Boulnois. È più da Champion.»
«Ah!» disse lei, e lo guardò con occhi come diamanti.
«E la cosa banale era questa», disse Brown. «C’erano impronte digitali su quella spada; le impronte digitali possono essere rilevate anche parecchio tempo dopo che sono state lasciate, se si trovano su una superficie liscia come vetro o acciaio. Queste erano su una superficie liscia. Erano a metà della lama della spada. Di chi fossero non ne ho la minima idea; ma perché mai qualcuno dovrebbe impugnare una spada a metà lama? Era una spada lunga, ma la lunghezza è un vantaggio quando ci si scaglia su un nemico. Almeno, sulla maggior parte dei nemici. Su tutti i nemici tranne uno.»
«Tranne uno», ripeté lei.
«C’è un solo nemico», disse Padre Brown, «che è più facile uccidere con un pugnale che con una spada.»
«Lo so», disse la donna. «Se stessi.»
Vi fu un lungo silenzio, e poi il prete disse tranquillamente ma di colpo: «Ho ragione, allora? È stato Sir Claude a uccidersi?»
«Sì», disse lei, con un volto come di marmo. «L’ho visto farlo.»
«È morto», disse Padre Brown, «per amore di lei?»
Un’espressione straordinaria le balenò sul volto, assai diversa dalla pietà, dal pudore, dal rimorso, o da qualunque cosa il suo interlocutore si fosse aspettato: la sua voce si fece a un tratto forte e piena. «Non credo», disse, «che gliene importasse un accidente di me. Odiava mio marito.»
«Perché?» chiese l’altro, e volse il suo volto tondo dal cielo alla signora.
«Odiava mio marito perché… è così strano che quasi non so come dirlo… perché…»
«Sì?» disse Brown con pazienza.
«Perché mio marito non voleva odiare lui.»
Padre Brown si limitò ad annuire, e parve ancora in ascolto; differiva dalla maggior parte dei detective, veri e romanzeschi, in un piccolo punto: non fingeva mai di non capire quando capiva perfettamente bene.
Mrs Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of certainty. “My husband,” she said, “is a great man. Sir Claude Champion was not a great man: he was a celebrated and successful man. My husband has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn’t be got to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be envied. He went mad and killed himself for that.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown; “I think I begin to understand.”
“Oh, don’t you see?” she cried; “the whole picture is made for that— the place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very door, like a dependant—to make him feel a failure. He never felt it. He thinks no more about such things than— than an absent-minded lion. Champion would burst in on John’s shabbiest hours or homeliest meals with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac.”
“And Haman began to tell them,” said Father Brown, “of all the things wherein the king had honoured him; and he said: ‘All these things profit me nothing while I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate.’”
“The crisis came,” Mrs Boulnois continued, “when I persuaded John to let me take down some of his speculations and send them to a magazine. They began to attract attention, especially in America, and one paper wanted to interview him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day) heard of this late little crumb of success falling to his unconscious rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish hatred. Then he began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which has been the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except by explaining to my husband, and there are some things the soul cannot do, as the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband. Nobody could do it now. If you said to him in so many words, ‘Champion is stealing your wife,’ he would think the joke a little vulgar: that it could be anything but a joke—that notion could find no crack in his great skull to get in by. Well, John was to come and see us act this evening, but just as we were starting he said he wouldn’t; he had got an interesting book and a cigar. I told this to Sir Claude, and it was his death-blow. The monomaniac suddenly saw despair. He stabbed himself, crying out like a devil that Boulnois was slaying him; he lies there in the garden dead of his own jealousy to produce jealousy, and John is sitting in the dining-room reading a book.”
There was another silence, and then the little priest said: “There is only one weak point, Mrs Boulnois, in all your very vivid account. Your husband is not sitting in the dining-room reading a book. That American reporter told me he had been to your house, and your butler told him Mr Boulnois had gone to Pendragon Park after all.”
Her bright eyes widened to an almost electric glare; and yet it seemed rather bewilderment than confusion or fear. “Why, what can you mean?” she cried. “All the servants were out of the house, seeing the theatricals. And we don’t keep a butler, thank goodness!”
Father Brown started and spun half round like an absurd teetotum. “What, what?” he cried seeming galvanized into sudden life. “Look here—I say—can I make your husband hear if I go to the house?”
“Oh, the servants will be back by now,” she said, wondering.
“Right, right!” rejoined the cleric energetically, and set off scuttling up the path towards the Park gates. He turned once to say: “Better get hold of that Yankee, or ‘Crime of John Boulnois’ will be all over the Republic in large letters.”
“You don’t understand,” said Mrs Boulnois. “He wouldn’t mind. I don’t think he imagines that America really is a place.”
When Father Brown reached the house with the beehive and the drowsy dog, a small and neat maid-servant showed him into the dining-room, where Boulnois sat reading by a shaded lamp, exactly as his wife described him. A decanter of port and a wineglass were at his elbow; and the instant the priest entered he noted the long ash stand out unbroken on his cigar.
“He has been here for half an hour at least,” thought Father Brown. In fact, he had the air of sitting where he had sat when his dinner was cleared away.
“Don’t get up, Mr Boulnois,” said the priest in his pleasant, prosaic way. “I shan’t interrupt you a moment. I fear I break in on some of your scientific studies.”
“No,” said Boulnois; “I was reading ‘The Bloody Thumb.’” He said it with neither frown nor smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep and virile indifference in the man which his wife had called greatness. He laid down a gory yellow “shocker” without even feeling its incongruity enough to comment on it humorously. John Boulnois was a big, slow-moving man with a massive head, partly grey and partly bald, and blunt, burly features. He was in shabby and very old-fashioned evening-dress, with a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front: he had assumed it that evening in his original purpose of going to see his wife act Juliet.
“I won’t keep you long from ‘The Bloody Thumb’ or any other catastrophic affairs,” said Father Brown, smiling. “I only came to ask you about the crime you committed this evening.”
Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the first time.
“I know it was a strange crime,” assented Brown in a low voice. “Stranger than murder perhaps—to you. The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones—but that’s why it’s so important to confess them. Your crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six times a week: and yet you find it sticks to your tongue like a nameless atrocity.”
“It makes one feel,” said the philosopher slowly, “such a damned fool.”
“I know,” assented the other, “but one often has to choose between feeling a damned fool and being one.”
“I can’t analyse myself well,” went on Boulnois; “but sitting in that chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday. It was security, eternity—I can’t convey it… the cigars were within reach…the matches were within reach… the Thumb had four more appearances to…it was not only a peace, but a plenitude. Then that bell rang, and I thought for one long, mortal minute that I couldn’t get out of that chair—literally, physically, muscularly couldn’t. Then I did it like a man lifting the world, because I knew all the servants were out. I opened the front door, and there was a little man with his mouth open to speak and his notebook open to write in. I remembered the Yankee interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was parted in the middle, and I tell you that murder—”
“I understand,” said Father Brown. “I’ve seen him.”
“I didn’t commit murder,” continued the Catastrophist mildly, “but only perjury. I said I had gone across to Pendragon Park and shut the door in his face. That is my crime, Father Brown, and I don’t know what penance you would inflict for it.”
“I shan’t inflict any penance,” said the clerical gentleman, collecting his heavy hat and umbrella with an air of some amusement; “quite the contrary. I came here specially to let you off the little penance which would otherwise have followed your little offence.”
“And what,” asked Boulnois, smiling, “is the little penance I have so luckily been let off?”
“Being hanged,” said Father Brown.
TWELVE
La signora Boulnois si fece di nuovo più vicina con lo stesso contenuto ardore di certezza. «Mio marito», disse, «è un grande uomo. Sir Claude Champion non era un grande uomo: era un uomo celebre e di successo. Mio marito non è mai stato celebre né di successo; ed è la solenne verità che non ha mai neppure sognato di esserlo. Non si aspetta d’essere famoso per il pensare più di quanto se lo aspetti per il fumare sigari. Da quel lato ha una specie di splendida stupidità. Non è mai cresciuto. Continuava ad amare Champion esattamente come lo amava a scuola; lo ammirava come si ammira un gioco di prestigio fatto a tavola. Ma non c’era verso di fargli concepire l’idea di invidiare Champion. E Champion voleva essere invidiato. Ne impazzì e si uccise per questo.»
«Sì», disse Padre Brown; «credo di cominciare a capire.»
«Oh, non vede?» esclamò lei; «l’intero quadro è costruito per questo… il luogo è concepito apposta. Champion mise John in una piccola casa proprio sulla sua soglia, come un subalterno… per fargli sentire d’essere un fallito. Lui non lo sentì mai. A cose simili non pensa più di quanto ci pensi… di quanto ci pensi un leone distratto. Champion irrompeva nelle ore più dimesse o nei pasti più modesti di John con qualche abbagliante regalo o annuncio o spedizione che rendeva la cosa simile alla visita di Harun al-Rashid, e John accettava o rifiutava amabilmente con un occhio distolto, per così dire, come un pigro scolaretto che si dice d’accordo o in disaccordo con un altro. Dopo cinque anni di tutto ciò John non aveva mosso un capello; e Sir Claude Champion era un monomaniaco.»
«E Aman prese a raccontare loro», disse Padre Brown, «tutte le cose per cui il re lo aveva onorato; e disse: ‘Tutte queste cose a nulla mi giovano, finché vedo Mardocheo il Giudeo seduto alla porta del re.’»
«La crisi giunse», proseguì la signora Boulnois, «quando persuasi John a lasciarmi trascrivere alcune delle sue speculazioni e a mandarle a una rivista. Cominciarono ad attirare l’attenzione, specialmente in America, e un giornale volle intervistarlo. Quando Champion (che veniva intervistato quasi ogni giorno) venne a sapere di questa tarda briciola di successo caduta al suo inconsapevole rivale, si spezzò l’ultimo anello che tratteneva il suo odio diabolico. Allora cominciò a porre quell’insano assedio al mio amore e al mio onore che è stato il pettegolezzo di tutta la contea. Lei mi chiederà perché permisi attenzioni così atroci. Le rispondo che non avrei potuto respingerle se non spiegando la cosa a mio marito, e ci sono cose che l’anima non può fare, come il corpo non può volare. Nessuno avrebbe potuto spiegarlo a mio marito. Nessuno potrebbe farlo neppure adesso. Se gli si dicesse con parole chiare: ‘Champion ti sta rubando la moglie’, penserebbe che lo scherzo è un po’ volgare: che potesse essere qualcosa di diverso da uno scherzo… quell’idea non troverebbe una fessura nel suo grande cranio per entrarvi. Ebbene, John doveva venire a vederci recitare questa sera, ma proprio mentre stavamo partendo disse che non sarebbe venuto; aveva trovato un libro interessante e un sigaro. Lo dissi a Sir Claude, e fu per lui un colpo di morte. Il monomaniaco vide a un tratto la disperazione. Si pugnalò, gridando come un demonio che Boulnois lo stava uccidendo; giace là nel giardino morto della propria gelosia per suscitare gelosia, e John se ne sta seduto in sala da pranzo a leggere un libro.»
Vi fu un altro silenzio, e poi il piccolo prete disse: «C’è un solo punto debole, signora Boulnois, in tutto il suo racconto così vivido. Suo marito non è seduto in sala da pranzo a leggere un libro. Quel cronista americano mi ha detto d’essere stato a casa sua, e il suo maggiordomo gli ha detto che il signor Boulnois era andato a Pendragon Park, dopotutto.»
I suoi occhi lucenti si spalancarono in un bagliore quasi elettrico; eppure sembrava piuttosto sbigottimento che confusione o paura. «Ma che cosa vuol dire?» esclamò. «Tutti i domestici erano fuori casa, a vedere la recita. E non teniamo alcun maggiordomo, grazie al cielo!»
Padre Brown trasalì e si voltò a mezzo come un assurdo trottolino. «Come, come?» esclamò, sembrando galvanizzato in un’improvvisa vitalità. «Senta un po’… dico… riuscirò a farmi sentire da suo marito se vado alla casa?»
«Oh, i domestici saranno tornati ormai», disse lei, meravigliata.
«Bene, bene!» ribatté il chierico con energia, e partì sgusciando su per il sentiero verso i cancelli del Park. Si voltò una volta per dire: «Meglio acchiappare quello yankee, o il ‘Delitto di John Boulnois’ sarà sparso per tutta la Repubblica a caratteri cubitali.»
«Lei non capisce», disse la signora Boulnois. «A lui non importerebbe. Non credo che si immagini nemmeno che l’America sia davvero un luogo.»
Quando Padre Brown raggiunse la casa con l’arnia e il cane sonnolento, una piccola e linda cameriera lo introdusse nella sala da pranzo, dove Boulnois sedeva a leggere sotto una lampada schermata, esattamente come sua moglie l’aveva descritto. Una caraffa di porto e un calice erano al suo gomito; e nell’istante in cui il prete entrò notò la lunga cenere che sporgeva intatta dal suo sigaro.
«È qui da almeno mezz’ora», pensò Padre Brown. In effetti aveva l’aria di sedere dove sedeva quando la cena era stata sparecchiata.
«Non si alzi, signor Boulnois», disse il prete nel suo modo garbato e prosaico. «Non la disturberò che un momento. Temo di irrompere in mezzo a qualche suo studio scientifico.»
«No», disse Boulnois; «stavo leggendo ‘Il pollice insanguinato’.» Lo disse senza né un cipiglio né un sorriso, e il suo visitatore fu conscio d’una certa profonda e virile indifferenza in quell’uomo, quella che sua moglie aveva chiamato grandezza. Posò un truce romanzo giallo d’appendice senza neppure avvertirne abbastanza l’incongruità da commentarlo con umorismo. John Boulnois era un uomo grosso e dai movimenti lenti, con una testa massiccia in parte grigia e in parte calva, e lineamenti ottusi e pesanti. Indossava un abito da sera dimesso e assai fuori moda, con uno stretto sparato triangolare: se l’era messo quella sera nella sua intenzione originaria di andare a vedere sua moglie recitare Giulietta.
«Non la tratterrò a lungo dal ‘Pollice insanguinato’ o da qualunque altra faccenda catastrofica», disse Padre Brown, sorridendo. «Sono venuto soltanto a chiederle del delitto che ha commesso questa sera.»
Boulnois lo guardò fisso, ma una striscia rossa cominciò a comparirgli sull’ampia fronte; e sembrò uno che scoprisse l’imbarazzo per la prima volta.
«So che è stato uno strano delitto», ammise Brown a bassa voce. «Più strano d’un omicidio, forse… per lei. I piccoli peccati sono a volte più difficili da confessare dei grandi… ma è proprio per questo che è tanto importante confessarli. Il suo delitto viene commesso da ogni padrona di casa alla moda sei volte alla settimana: eppure lei se lo sente appiccicato alla lingua come un’atrocità senza nome.»
«Fa sentire», disse il filosofo lentamente, «uno sciocco maledetto.»
«Lo so», ammise l’altro, «ma spesso bisogna scegliere tra sentirsi uno sciocco maledetto ed esserlo.»
«Non so analizzarmi bene», proseguì Boulnois; «ma seduto in quella poltrona con quel racconto ero felice come uno scolaretto in un mezzo giorno di vacanza. Era sicurezza, eternità… non so renderlo… i sigari erano a portata di mano… i fiammiferi erano a portata di mano… il Pollice aveva ancora quattro comparse da fare… non era soltanto una pace, ma una pienezza. Poi suonò quel campanello, e per un lungo, mortale minuto pensai che non sarei riuscito a tirarmi fuori da quella poltrona… letteralmente, fisicamente, muscolarmente non ci riuscivo. Poi lo feci come un uomo che solleva il mondo, perché sapevo che tutti i domestici erano fuori. Aprii la porta d’ingresso, e c’era un ometto con la bocca aperta per parlare e il taccuino aperto per scrivere. Mi ricordai dell’intervistatore yankee che avevo dimenticato. Aveva i capelli con la scriminatura in mezzo, e le assicuro che quell’omicidio…»
«Capisco», disse Padre Brown. «L’ho visto.»
«Non commisi omicidio», continuò il catastrofista mitemente, «ma soltanto spergiuro. Dissi che ero andato di là a Pendragon Park e gli chiusi la porta in faccia. Questo è il mio delitto, Padre Brown, e non so quale penitenza vorrà infliggermi.»
«Non le infliggerò alcuna penitenza», disse il gentiluomo in abito talare, raccogliendo il suo pesante cappello e l’ombrello con aria di un certo divertimento; «tutt’al contrario. Sono venuto qui apposta per condonarle la piccola penitenza che altrimenti sarebbe seguìta al suo piccolo peccato.»
«E qual è», chiese Boulnois, sorridendo, «la piccola penitenza da cui sono stato così fortunatamente condonato?»
«L’impiccagione», disse Padre Brown.
DODICI
The Fairy Tale of Father Brown
THE picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist. It had come under the Prussian hegemony quite late in history— hardly fifty years before the fine summer day when Flambeau and Father Brown found themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer. There had been not a little of war and wild justice there within living memory, as soon will be shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss that impression of childishness which is the most charming side of Germany—those little pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king seems as domestic as a cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut battlements of the castle, gilded by the sunshine, looked the more like the gilt gingerbread. For it was brilliant weather. The sky was as Prussian a blue as Potsdam itself could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the colour which a child extracts from a shilling paint-box. Even the grey-ribbed trees looked young, for the pointed buds on them were still pink, and in a pattern against the strong blue looked like innumerable childish figures.
Despite his prosaic appearance and generally practical walk of life, Father Brown was not without a certain streak of romance in his composition, though he generally kept his daydreams to himself, as many children do. Amid the brisk, bright colours of such a day, and in the heraldic framework of such a town, he did feel rather as if he had entered a fairy tale. He took a childish pleasure, as a younger brother might, in the formidable sword-stick which Flambeau always flung as he walked, and which now stood upright beside his tall mug of Munich. Nay, in his sleepy irresponsibility, he even found himself eyeing the knobbed and clumsy head of his own shabby umbrella, with some faint memories of the ogre’s club in a coloured toy-book. But he never composed anything in the form of fiction, unless it be the tale that follows:
“I wonder,” he said, “whether one would have real adventures in a place like this, if one put oneself in the way? It’s a splendid back-scene for them, but I always have a kind of feeling that they would fight you with pasteboard sabres more than real, horrible swords.”
“You are mistaken,” said his friend. “In this place they not only fight with swords, but kill without swords. And there’s worse than that.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked Father Brown.
“Why,” replied the other, “I should say this was the only place in Europe where a man was ever shot without firearms.”
“Do you mean a bow and arrow?” asked Brown in some wonder.
“I mean a bullet in the brain,” replied Flambeau. “Don’t you know the story of the late Prince of this place? It was one of the great police mysteries about twenty years ago. You remember, of course, that this place was forcibly annexed at the time of Bismarck’s very earliest schemes of consolidation— forcibly, that is, but not at all easily. The empire (or what wanted to be one) sent Prince Otto of Grossenmark to rule the place in the Imperial interests. We saw his portrait in the gallery there— a handsome old gentleman if he’d had any hair or eyebrows, and hadn’t been wrinkled all over like a vulture; but he had things to harass him, as I’ll explain in a minute. He was a soldier of distinguished skill and success, but he didn’t have altogether an easy job with this little place. He was defeated in several battles by the celebrated Arnhold brothers—the three guerrilla patriots to whom Swinburne wrote a poem, you remember:
Wolves with the hair of the ermine, Crows that are crowned and kings— These things be many as vermin, Yet Three shall abide these things.
Or something of that kind. Indeed, it is by no means certain that the occupation would ever have been successful had not one of the three brothers, Paul, despicably, but very decisively declined to abide these things any longer, and, by surrendering all the secrets of the insurrection, ensured its overthrow and his own ultimate promotion to the post of chamberlain to Prince Otto. After this, Ludwig, the one genuine hero among Mr Swinburne’s heroes, was killed, sword in hand, in the capture of the city; and the third, Heinrich, who, though not a traitor, had always been tame and even timid compared with his active brothers, retired into something like a hermitage, became converted to a Christian quietism which was almost Quakerish, and never mixed with men except to give nearly all he had to the poor. They tell me that not long ago he could still be seen about the neighbourhood occasionally, a man in a black cloak, nearly blind, with very wild, white hair, but a face of astonishing softness.”
“I know,” said Father Brown. “I saw him once.”
His friend looked at him in some surprise. “I didn’t know you’d been here before,” he said. “Perhaps you know as much about it as I do. Anyhow, that’s the story of the Arnholds, and he was the last survivor of them. Yes, and of all the men who played parts in that drama.”
“You mean that the Prince, too, died long before?”
“Died,” repeated Flambeau, “and that’s about as much as we can say. You must understand that towards the end of his life he began to have those tricks of the nerves not uncommon with tyrants. He multiplied the ordinary daily and nightly guard round his castle till there seemed to be more sentry-boxes than houses in the town, and doubtful characters were shot without mercy. He lived almost entirely in a little room that was in the very centre of the enormous labyrinth of all the other rooms, and even in this he erected another sort of central cabin or cupboard, lined with steel, like a safe or a battleship. Some say that under the floor of this again was a secret hole in the earth, no more than large enough to hold him, so that, in his anxiety to avoid the grave, he was willing to go into a place pretty much like it. But he went further yet. The populace had been supposed to be disarmed ever since the suppression of the revolt, but Otto now insisted, as governments very seldom insist, on an absolute and literal disarmament. It was carried out, with extraordinary thoroughness and severity, by very well-organized officials over a small and familiar area, and, so far as human strength and science can be absolutely certain of anything, Prince Otto was absolutely certain that nobody could introduce so much as a toy pistol into Heiligwaldenstein.”
La fiaba di Padre Brown
LA pittoresca città-stato di Heiligwaldenstein era uno di quei regni di balocchi di cui certe regioni dell’Impero Germanico constano ancora. Era passata sotto l’egemonia prussiana assai tardi nella storia — sì e no cinquant’anni prima di quella bella giornata d’estate in cui Flambeau e Padre Brown si trovarono seduti nei suoi giardini a bere la sua birra. Vi erano state, entro la memoria dei viventi, non poche guerre e giustizie selvagge, come presto si vedrà. Ma a guardarla soltanto non si poteva scacciare quell’impressione di puerilità che è il lato più incantevole della Germania — quelle piccole monarchie paterne da pantomima in cui un re pare domestico come un cuoco. I soldati tedeschi presso le innumerevoli garitte parevano stranamente simili a balocchi tedeschi, e i merli ben tagliati del castello, dorati dal sole, parevano ancor più pan di zenzero indorato. Perché era un tempo splendido. Il cielo era d’un azzurro tanto prussiano quanto Potsdam medesima potesse esigere, ma somigliava ancor più a quell’uso prodigo e sfolgorante del colore che un bambino ricava da una scatola di colori da uno scellino. Persino gli alberi dai tronchi grigi e nervosi parevano giovani, ché le gemme aguzze su di essi erano ancora rosee, e disegnate contro l’azzurro intenso parevano innumerevoli figurine infantili.
Nonostante il suo aspetto prosaico e il tenore di vita in genere pratico, Padre Brown non era privo di una certa vena di romanticismo nella sua natura, per quanto di solito tenesse le fantasticherie per sé, come fanno molti bambini. In mezzo ai colori vivaci e squillanti di una simile giornata, e nella cornice araldica di una simile città, egli si sentiva davvero come se fosse entrato in una fiaba. Provava un piacere fanciullesco, come potrebbe un fratello minore, nel formidabile bastone-spada che Flambeau roteava sempre mentre camminava, e che ora stava ritto accanto al suo alto boccale di birra di Monaco. Anzi, nella sua sonnolenta noncuranza, si sorprese persino a fissare la testa nodosa e goffa del proprio ombrello sdrucito, con qualche fioca reminiscenza della clava dell’orco in un libro illustrato di balocchi. Ma non compose mai nulla in forma di finzione, se non forse il racconto che segue:
«Mi domando», disse, «se in un luogo simile si avrebbero avventure vere, qualora ci si mettesse sul loro cammino. È uno splendido fondale per esse, ma ho sempre una specie di sensazione che combatterebbero con sciabole di cartone più che con vere, orribili spade.»
«Ti sbagli», disse il suo amico. «In questo posto non solo combattono con la spada, ma uccidono senza spada. E c’è di peggio.»
«Come, che vuoi dire?» chiese Padre Brown.
«Ecco», replicò l’altro, «direi che questo è il solo luogo in Europa dove un uomo sia mai stato colpito da un proiettile senza armi da fuoco.»
«Intendi con arco e freccia?» chiese Brown con una certa meraviglia.
«Intendo una pallottola nel cervello», replicò Flambeau. «Non conosci la storia del defunto Principe di questo luogo? Fu uno dei grandi misteri polizieschi di circa vent’anni fa. Ricorderai, naturalmente, che questo luogo fu annesso con la forza all’epoca dei primissimi disegni di consolidamento di Bismarck — con la forza, sì, ma non affatto con facilità. L’impero (o ciò che aspirava ad esserlo) mandò il Principe Otto di Grossenmark a governare il luogo nell’interesse imperiale. Abbiamo visto il suo ritratto là nella galleria — un bel vecchio signore, se avesse avuto capelli e sopracciglia, e non fosse stato tutto rugoso come un avvoltoio; ma aveva di che tormentarsi, come ti spiegherò tra un momento. Era un soldato di abilità e successo distinti, ma non ebbe affatto un compito facile con questo piccolo luogo. Fu sconfitto in parecchie battaglie dai celebri fratelli Arnhold — i tre patrioti guerriglieri ai quali Swinburne dedicò una poesia, ricordi:
Lupi col pelo dell’ermellino, Corvi coronati e re — Queste cose son molte come vermina, Pure Tre a queste cose resisteranno.
O qualcosa del genere. In verità, non è affatto certo che l’occupazione sarebbe mai riuscita se uno dei tre fratelli, Paul, spregevolmente ma con molta risolutezza non avesse rifiutato di resistere ancora a queste cose e, consegnando tutti i segreti dell’insurrezione, non ne avesse assicurato la disfatta e la propria ultima promozione alla carica di ciambellano del Principe Otto. Dopo di ciò, Ludwig, l’unico vero eroe fra gli eroi di Mr Swinburne, fu ucciso, spada in pugno, nella presa della città; e il terzo, Heinrich, che, pur non essendo un traditore, era sempre stato mansueto e persino timido in confronto ai suoi attivi fratelli, si ritirò in una sorta di eremo, si convertì a un quietismo cristiano quasi quacchero, e non ebbe più commercio con gli uomini se non per dare quasi tutto ciò che aveva ai poveri. Mi dicono che non molto tempo fa lo si poteva ancora vedere di tanto in tanto per il vicinato, un uomo in mantello nero, quasi cieco, con capelli bianchissimi e scarmigliati, ma con un volto di sorprendente dolcezza.»
«Lo so», disse Padre Brown. «L’ho visto una volta.»
L’amico lo guardò con una certa sorpresa. «Non sapevo che tu fossi già stato qui», disse. «Forse ne sai quanto me. Comunque, questa è la storia degli Arnhold, ed egli fu l’ultimo superstite di essi. Sì, e di tutti gli uomini che ebbero una parte in quel dramma.»
«Vuoi dire che anche il Principe morì assai tempo fa?»
«Morì», ripeté Flambeau, «ed è press’a poco tutto ciò che possiamo dire. Devi capire che verso la fine della sua vita cominciò ad avere quei tic nervosi non insoliti nei tiranni. Moltiplicò la consueta guardia diurna e notturna intorno al suo castello finché parvero esservi più garitte che case in città, e i tipi sospetti venivano fucilati senza pietà. Viveva quasi interamente in una stanzetta che stava proprio al centro dell’enorme labirinto di tutte le altre stanze, e persino in questa aveva eretto un’altra sorta di cabina o armadio centrale, rivestita d’acciaio, come una cassaforte o una corazzata. Alcuni dicono che sotto il pavimento di questa vi fosse a sua volta una buca segreta nella terra, non più grande del necessario per contenerlo, cosicché, nella sua ansia di evitare la tomba, era disposto a cacciarsi in un luogo che ad essa somigliava assai. Ma andò ancora oltre. Si supponeva che la popolazione fosse stata disarmata fin dalla repressione della rivolta, ma Otto ora insisté, come assai di rado i governi insistono, su un disarmo assoluto e letterale. Fu attuato, con straordinaria minuzia e severità, da funzionari benissimo organizzati su un’area piccola e ben nota, e, per quanto la forza e la scienza umana possano essere assolutamente certe di qualcosa, il Principe Otto era assolutamente certo che nessuno potesse introdurre neppure una pistola giocattolo a Heiligwaldenstein.»
“Human science can never be quite certain of things like that,” said Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches over his head, “if only because of the difficulty about definition and connotation. What is a weapon? People have been murdered with the mildest domestic comforts; certainly with tea-kettles, probably with tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton a revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon— until it was fired into him, of course. Perhaps somebody introduced a firearm so new that it didn’t even look like a firearm. Perhaps it looked like a thimble or something. Was the bullet at all peculiar?”
“Not that I ever heard of,” answered Flambeau; “but my information is fragmentary, and only comes from my old friend Grimm. He was a very able detective in the German service, and he tried to arrest me; I arrested him instead, and we had many interesting chats. He was in charge here of the inquiry about Prince Otto, but I forgot to ask him anything about the bullet. According to Grimm, what happened was this.” He paused a moment to drain the greater part of his dark lager at a draught, and then resumed:
“On the evening in question, it seems, the Prince was expected to appear in one of the outer rooms, because he had to receive certain visitors whom he really wished to meet. They were geological experts sent to investigate the old question of the alleged supply of gold from the rocks round here, upon which (as it was said) the small city-state had so long maintained its credit and been able to negotiate with its neighbours even under the ceaseless bombardment of bigger armies. Hitherto it had never been found by the most exacting inquiry which could—”
“Which could be quite certain of discovering a toy pistol,” said Father Brown with a smile. “But what about the brother who ratted? Hadn’t he anything to tell the Prince?”
“He always asseverated that he did not know,” replied Flambeau; “that this was the one secret his brothers had not told him. It is only right to say that it received some support from fragmentary words—spoken by the great Ludwig in the hour of death, when he looked at Heinrich but pointed at Paul, and said, ‘You have not told him…’ and was soon afterwards incapable of speech. Anyhow, the deputation of distinguished geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the most magnificent and appropriate dress, for there are no men who like wearing their decorations so much as the men of science—as anybody knows who has ever been to a soiree of the Royal Society. It was a brilliant gathering, but very late, and gradually the Chamberlain—you saw his portrait, too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a meaningless sort of smile underneath—the Chamberlain, I say, discovered there was everything there except the Prince himself. He searched all the outer salons; then, remembering the man’s mad fits of fear, hurried to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but the steel turret or cabin erected in the middle of it took some time to open. When it did open it was empty, too. He went and looked into the hole in the ground, which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like a grave—that is his account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries and tumult in the long rooms and corridors without.
“First it was a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the horizon of the crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless clamour startlingly close, and loud enough to be distinct if each word had not killed the other. Next came words of a terrible clearness, coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into the room and telling the news as briefly as such news is told.
“Otto, Prince of Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark, was lying in the dews of the darkening twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his arms flung out and his face flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed from his shattered temple and jaw, but it was the only part of him that moved like a living thing. He was clad in his full white and yellow uniform, as to receive his guests within, except that the sash or scarf had been unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before he could be lifted he was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle—he who had always hidden in the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed and alone.”
“Who found his body?” asked Father Brown.
“Some girl attached to the Court named Hedwig von something or other,” replied his friend, “who had been out in the wood picking wild flowers.”
“Had she picked any?” asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the veil of the branches above him.
“Yes,” replied Flambeau. “I particularly remember that the Chamberlain, or old Grimm or somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up at her call, to see a girl holding spring flowers and bending over that—that bloody collapse. However, the main point is that before help arrived he was dead, and the news, of course, had to be carried back to the castle. The consternation it created was something beyond even that natural in a Court at the fall of a potentate. The foreign visitors, especially the mining experts, were in the wildest doubt and excitement, as well as many important Prussian officials, and it soon began to be clear that the scheme for finding the treasure bulked much bigger in the business than people had supposed. Experts and officials had been promised great prizes or international advantages, and some even said that the Prince’s secret apartments and strong military protection were due less to fear of the populace than to the pursuit of some private investigation of—”
“Had the flowers got long stalks?” asked Father Brown.
«La scienza umana non può mai essere del tutto certa di cose simili», disse Padre Brown, sempre guardando il rosso germogliare dei rami sopra il suo capo, «non foss’altro per la difficoltà che riguarda la definizione e la connotazione. Cos’è un’arma? Vi è chi è stato assassinato con i più miti conforti domestici; certamente con bollitori del tè, e probabilmente con copriteiere. D’altra parte, se mostrassi a un antico Britanno una rivoltella, dubito che capirebbe che è un’arma — finché non gli venisse sparata addosso, s’intende. Forse qualcuno introdusse un’arma da fuoco tanto nuova da non parere nemmeno un’arma da fuoco. Forse aveva l’aspetto di un ditale o cosa simile. La pallottola aveva qualcosa di particolare?»
«Non che io abbia mai udito», rispose Flambeau; «ma le mie informazioni sono frammentarie, e provengono soltanto dal mio vecchio amico Grimm. Era un investigatore assai capace al servizio tedesco, e cercò di arrestarmi; io arrestai lui invece, e facemmo molte interessanti chiacchierate. Era incaricato qui dell’indagine sul Principe Otto, ma dimenticai di chiedergli alcunché sulla pallottola. Secondo Grimm, ciò che accadde fu questo.» Fece una pausa per vuotare la maggior parte della sua scura birra d’un fiato, e poi riprese:
«La sera in questione, pare, il Principe era atteso in una delle sale esterne, perché doveva ricevere certi visitatori che desiderava davvero incontrare. Erano periti geologi mandati a indagare la vecchia questione del preteso giacimento d’oro nelle rocce di qui, sul quale (a quanto si diceva) la piccola città-stato aveva così a lungo mantenuto il proprio credito ed era stata capace di trattare con i vicini persino sotto il bombardamento incessante di eserciti più grandi. Fino ad allora non era mai stato scoperto dalla più rigorosa indagine che potesse —»
«Che potesse essere ben certa di scoprire una pistola giocattolo», disse Padre Brown con un sorriso. «Ma quanto al fratello che tradì? Non aveva nulla da riferire al Principe?»
«Asseverò sempre di non sapere», replicò Flambeau; «che questo era l’unico segreto che i suoi fratelli non gli avevano detto. È giusto dire che ricevette qualche sostegno da parole frammentarie — pronunciate dal grande Ludwig nell’ora della morte, quando guardò Heinrich ma indicò Paul, e disse, ‘Tu non gli hai detto…’ e poco dopo fu incapace di parlare. Comunque, la deputazione di illustri geologi e mineralogisti di Parigi e Berlino era là nell’abito più magnifico e appropriato, ché non vi sono uomini a cui piaccia tanto sfoggiare le proprie onorificenze quanto agli uomini di scienza — come sa chiunque sia mai stato a un ricevimento della Royal Society. Fu una brillante adunanza, ma assai tarda, e a poco a poco il Ciambellano — hai visto anche il suo ritratto: un uomo dalle sopracciglia nere, gli occhi seri e una specie di sorriso insignificante sotto di esse — il Ciambellano, dico, scoprì che vi era là ogni cosa tranne il Principe stesso. Perlustrò tutti i saloni esterni; poi, ricordando gli accessi di folle paura dell’uomo, si affrettò alla camera più interna. Anche quella era vuota, ma la torretta o cabina d’acciaio eretta nel mezzo di essa richiese un po’ di tempo per aprirsi. Quando si aprì, era vuota anch’essa. Andò a guardare dentro la buca nel terreno, che pareva più profonda e in qualche modo tanto più simile a una tomba — questo è il suo racconto, s’intende. E proprio mentre lo faceva udì un’esplosione di grida e di tumulto nelle lunghe stanze e nei corridoi al di fuori.
«Dapprima fu un fragore lontano e un fremito di qualcosa di impensabile all’orizzonte della folla, persino al di là del castello. Poi fu un clamore senza parole, allarmante nella sua vicinanza, e abbastanza forte da essere distinto se ogni parola non avesse ucciso l’altra. Poi vennero parole di terribile chiarezza, che si avvicinavano, e poi un uomo, che irruppe nella stanza e diede la notizia con la brevità con cui tali notizie si danno.
«Otto, Principe di Heiligwaldenstein e Grossenmark, giaceva nella rugiada del crepuscolo sempre più fondo nei boschi al di là del castello, con le braccia spalancate e il volto rivolto in alto verso la luna. Il sangue pulsava ancora dalla tempia e dalla mascella fracassate, ma era la sola parte di lui che si movesse come cosa viva. Indossava la sua completa uniforme bianca e gialla, come per ricevere i suoi ospiti all’interno, salvo che la fascia o sciarpa era stata slegata e giaceva alquanto sgualcita al suo fianco. Prima che lo si potesse sollevare, era morto. Ma, morto o vivo, egli era un enigma — lui che si era sempre nascosto nella camera più interna, là fuori nei boschi umidi, disarmato e solo.»
«Chi trovò il suo corpo?» chiese Padre Brown.
«Una ragazza addetta alla Corte, di nome Hedwig von non so che», replicò il suo amico, «che era uscita nel bosco a cogliere fiori selvatici.»
«Ne aveva colti?» chiese il sacerdote, fissando piuttosto vacuo il velo dei rami sopra di lui.
«Sì», replicò Flambeau. «Ricordo in particolare che il Ciambellano, o il vecchio Grimm o qualcuno, disse quanto fosse orribile, quando accorsero al suo grido, vedere una ragazza che teneva primaverili fiori e si chinava su quel — quel crollo sanguinoso. Comunque, il punto principale è che prima che arrivassero i soccorsi egli era morto, e la notizia, naturalmente, dovette essere riportata al castello. La costernazione che suscitò fu qualcosa che oltrepassava persino quella naturale in una Corte alla caduta di un potente. I visitatori stranieri, specie i periti minerari, erano nel più selvaggio dubbio e agitazione, come pure molti importanti funzionari prussiani, e presto cominciò a farsi chiaro che il progetto di trovare il tesoro pesava assai più nella faccenda di quanto la gente avesse supposto. A periti e funzionari erano stati promessi grandi premi o vantaggi internazionali, e alcuni dicevano persino che gli appartamenti segreti del Principe e la forte protezione militare fossero dovuti meno alla paura della popolazione che al perseguimento di una qualche indagine privata su —»
«I fiori avevano gambi lunghi?» chiese Padre Brown.
Flambeau stared at him. “What an odd person you are!” he said. “That’s exactly what old Grimm said. He said the ugliest part of it, he thought—uglier than the blood and bullet—was that the flowers were quite short, plucked close under the head.”
“Of course,” said the priest, “when a grown up girl is really picking flowers, she picks them with plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their heads off, as a child does, it looks as if—” And he hesitated.
“Well?” inquired the other.
“Well, it looks rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an excuse for being there after—well, after she was there.”
“I know what you’re driving at,” said Flambeau rather gloomily. “But that and every other suspicion breaks down on the one point— the want of a weapon. He could have been killed, as you say, with lots of other things—even with his own military sash; but we have to explain not how he was killed, but how he was shot. And the fact is we can’t. They had the girl most ruthlessly searched; for, to tell the truth, she was a little suspect, though the niece and ward of the wicked old Chamberlain, Paul Arnhold. But she was very romantic, and was suspected of sympathy with the old revolutionary enthusiasm in her family. All the same, however romantic you are, you can’t imagine a big bullet into a man’s jaw or brain without using a gun or pistol. And there was no pistol, though there were two pistol shots. I leave it to you, my friend.”
“How do you know there were two shots?” asked the little priest.
“There was only one in his head,” said his companion, “but there was another bullet-hole in the sash.”
Father Brown’s smooth brow became suddenly constricted. “Was the other bullet found?” he demanded.
Flambeau started a little. “I don’t think I remember,” he said.
“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” cried Brown, frowning more and more, with a quite unusual concentration of curiosity. “Don’t think me rude. Let me think this out for a moment.”
“All right,” said Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight breeze stirred the budding trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of white and pink that seemed to make the sky bluer and the whole coloured scene more quaint. They might have been cherubs flying home to the casements of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest tower of the castle, the Dragon Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had lain dead.
“What became of this Hedwig eventually?” asked the priest at last.
“She is married to General Schwartz,” said Flambeau. “No doubt you’ve heard of his career, which was rather romantic. He had distinguished himself even, before his exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he rose from the ranks, which is very unusual even in the smallest of the German…”
Father Brown sat up suddenly.
“Rose from the ranks!” he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle. “Well, well, what a queer story! What a queer way of killing a man; but I suppose it was the only one possible. But to think of hate so patient—”
“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “In what way did they kill the man?”
“They killed him with the sash,” said Brown carefully; and then, as Flambeau protested: “Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought to say he died of having a sash. I know it doesn’t sound like having a disease.”
“I suppose,” said Flambeau, “that you’ve got some notion in your head, but it won’t easily get the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he might easily have been strangled. But he was shot. By whom? By what?”
“He was shot by his own orders,” said the priest.
“You mean he committed suicide?”
“I didn’t say by his own wish,” replied Father Brown. “I said by his own orders.”
“Well, anyhow, what is your theory?”
Father Brown laughed. “I am only on my holiday,” he said. “I haven’t got any theories. Only this place reminds me of fairy stories, and, if you like, I’ll tell you a story.”
The little pink clouds, that looked rather like sweet-stuff, had floated up to crown the turrets of the gilt gingerbread castle, and the pink baby fingers of the budding trees seemed spreading and stretching to reach them; the blue sky began to take a bright violet of evening, when Father Brown suddenly spoke again:
“It was on a dismal night, with rain still dropping from the trees and dew already clustering, that Prince Otto of Grossenmark stepped hurriedly out of a side door of the castle and walked swiftly into the wood. One of the innumerable sentries saluted him, but he did not notice it. He had no wish to be specially noticed himself. He was glad when the great trees, grey and already greasy with rain, swallowed him up like a swamp. He had deliberately chosen the least frequented side of his palace, but even that was more frequented than he liked. But there was no particular chance of officious or diplomatic pursuit, for his exit had been a sudden impulse. All the full-dressed diplomatists he left behind were unimportant. He had realized suddenly that he could do without them.
“His great passion was not the much nobler dread of death, but the strange desire of gold. For this legend of the gold he had left Grossenmark and invaded Heiligwaldenstein. For this and only this he had bought the traitor and butchered the hero, for this he had long questioned and cross-questioned the false Chamberlain, until he had come to the conclusion that, touching his ignorance, the renegade really told the truth. For this he had, somewhat reluctantly, paid and promised money on the chance of gaining the larger amount; and for this he had stolen out of his palace like a thief in the rain, for he had thought of another way to get the desire of his eyes, and to get it cheap.
Flambeau lo fissò. «Che tipo strano sei!» disse. «È esattamente ciò che disse il vecchio Grimm. Disse che la parte più brutta della cosa, a suo parere — più brutta del sangue e della pallottola — era che i fiori erano cortissimi, colti proprio sotto la corolla.»
«Naturale», disse il sacerdote, «quando una ragazza adulta coglie davvero fiori, li coglie con parecchio gambo. Se strappasse loro soltanto la testa, come fa un bambino, parrebbe come se —» Ed esitò.
«Ebbene?» s’informò l’altro.
«Ebbene, parrebbe piuttosto come se li avesse strappati nervosamente, per farsi una scusa di trovarsi là dopo — insomma, dopo che vi si trovava.»
«So dove vuoi arrivare», disse Flambeau piuttosto cupamente. «Ma quello e ogni altro sospetto crollano sull’unico punto — la mancanza di un’arma. Avrebbe potuto essere ucciso, come tu dici, con moltissime altre cose — persino con la sua stessa fascia militare; ma dobbiamo spiegare non come fu ucciso, bensì come fu colpito da un proiettile. E il fatto è che non possiamo. Fecero perquisire la ragazza con la massima spietatezza; perché, a dire il vero, era un po’ sospetta, sebbene nipote e pupilla del malvagio vecchio Ciambellano, Paul Arnhold. Ma era assai romantica, e la si sospettava di simpatia per il vecchio entusiasmo rivoluzionario della sua famiglia. Ciò nondimeno, per quanto romantico si sia, non si può immaginare una grossa pallottola nella mascella o nel cervello di un uomo senza usare un fucile o una pistola. E non c’era nessuna pistola, sebbene vi fossero due colpi di pistola. Lascio a te, amico mio.»
«Come sai che vi furono due colpi?» chiese il piccolo sacerdote.
«Ce n’era uno solo nella sua testa», disse il suo compagno, «ma vi era un altro foro di pallottola nella fascia.»
La liscia fronte di Padre Brown si contrasse d’improvviso. «L’altra pallottola fu ritrovata?» domandò.
Flambeau trasalì un poco. «Non credo di ricordarlo», disse.
«Ferma! Ferma! Ferma!» esclamò Brown, aggrottandosi sempre più, con una concentrazione di curiosità del tutto insolita. «Non credermi villano. Lasciami riflettere su questo per un momento.»
«Va bene», disse Flambeau, ridendo, e finì la sua birra. Una lieve brezza mosse gli alberi in boccio e sospinse su nel cielo nuvolette bianche e rosee che parevano rendere il cielo più azzurro e tutta la scena colorata più bizzarra. Avrebbero potuto essere cherubini in volo verso le finestre di casa (casa) di una specie di celeste stanza dei bambini. La torre più antica del castello, la Torre del Drago, si ergeva grottesca come il boccale di birra, ma altrettanto familiare. Solo al di là della torre luccicava il bosco in cui l’uomo era rimasto morto.
«Che ne fu alla fine di questa Hedwig?» chiese infine il sacerdote.
«È sposata al Generale Schwartz», disse Flambeau. «Senza dubbio avrai udito della sua carriera, che fu piuttosto romantica. Si era distinto persino prima delle sue imprese a Sadowa e Gravelotte; in realtà, salì dalla truppa, cosa assai insolita persino nel più piccolo dei… tedeschi.»
Padre Brown si raddrizzò di scatto.
«Salito dalla truppa!» esclamò, e atteggiò la bocca come per fischiare. «Bene, bene, che storia curiosa! Che curioso modo di uccidere un uomo; ma suppongo fosse l’unico possibile. Ma pensare a un odio tanto paziente —»
«Che vuoi dire?» domandò l’altro. «In che modo uccisero l’uomo?»
«Lo uccisero con la fascia», disse Brown con cautela; e poi, mentre Flambeau protestava: «Sì, sì, so della pallottola. Forse dovrei dire che morì per aver avuto una fascia. So che non suona come l’avere una malattia.»
«Suppongo», disse Flambeau, «che tu abbia qualche idea in testa, ma non toglierà facilmente la pallottola dalla sua. Come ho spiegato prima, avrebbe potuto benissimo essere strangolato. Ma fu colpito da un proiettile. Da chi? Con che cosa?»
«Fu colpito per suo proprio ordine», disse il sacerdote.
«Vuoi dire che ha commesso il suicidio?»
«Non ho detto per suo proprio desiderio», replicò Padre Brown. «Ho detto per suo proprio ordine.»
«Bene, comunque sia, qual è la tua teoria?»
Padre Brown rise. «Sono soltanto in vacanza», disse. «Non ho nessuna teoria. Solo che questo luogo mi ricorda le fiabe, e, se vuoi, ti racconterò una storia.»
Le piccole nuvole rosee, che parevano piuttosto zucchero filato, erano salite fluttuando a coronare le torrette del castello di pan di zenzero indorato, e le rosee dita di neonato degli alberi in boccio parevano allargarsi e protendersi per raggiungerle; il cielo azzurro cominciava a prendere un vivido violetto della sera, quando Padre Brown d’un tratto parlò di nuovo:
«Fu in una tetra notte, con la pioggia che ancora gocciolava dagli alberi e la rugiada che già s’infittiva, che il Principe Otto di Grossenmark uscì in fretta da una porta laterale del castello e s’incamminò rapido nel bosco. Una delle innumerevoli sentinelle lo salutò, ma egli non la notò. Non desiderava essere notato in modo particolare. Fu lieto quando i grandi alberi, grigi e già viscidi di pioggia, lo inghiottirono come una palude. Aveva deliberatamente scelto il lato meno frequentato del suo palazzo, ma persino quello era più frequentato di quanto gli piacesse. Ma non v’era particolare rischio d’inseguimento officioso o diplomatico, ché la sua uscita era stata un impulso subitaneo. Tutti i diplomatici in gran gala che si lasciava alle spalle erano insignificanti. Aveva compreso d’un tratto di poter fare a meno di loro.
«La sua grande passione non era il ben più nobile terrore della morte, bensì lo strano desiderio dell’oro. Per questa leggenda dell’oro aveva lasciato Grossenmark e invaso Heiligwaldenstein. Per questo e solo per questo aveva comprato il traditore e scannato l’eroe, per questo aveva a lungo interrogato e contro-interrogato il falso Ciambellano, finché era giunto alla conclusione che, quanto alla sua ignoranza, il rinnegato diceva davvero il vero. Per questo aveva, alquanto a malincuore, pagato e promesso denaro sulla probabilità di guadagnarne la somma maggiore; e per questo era sgusciato fuori dal suo palazzo come un ladro sotto la pioggia, ché aveva pensato a un altro modo per ottenere il desiderio dei suoi occhi, e per ottenerlo a buon mercato.
“Away at the upper end of a rambling mountain path to which he was making his way, among the pillared rocks along the ridge that hangs above the town, stood the hermitage, hardly more than a cavern fenced with thorn, in which the third of the great brethren had long hidden himself from the world. He, thought Prince Otto, could have no real reason for refusing to give up the gold. He had known its place for years, and made no effort to find it, even before his new ascetic creed had cut him off from property or pleasures. True, he had been an enemy, but he now professed a duty of having no enemies. Some concession to his cause, some appeal to his principles, would probably get the mere money secret out of him. Otto was no coward, in spite of his network of military precautions, and, in any case, his avarice was stronger than his fears. Nor was there much cause for fear. Since he was certain there were no private arms in the whole principality, he was a hundred times more certain there were none in the Quaker’s little hermitage on the hill, where he lived on herbs, with two old rustic servants, and with no other voice of man for year after year. Prince Otto looked down with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the rifles of his friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies. Rifles ranked so close even to that mountain path that a cry from him would bring the soldiers rushing up the hill, to say nothing of the fact that the wood and ridge were patrolled at regular intervals; rifles so far away, in the dim woods, dwarfed by distance, beyond the river, that an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour. And round the palace rifles at the west door and the east door, at the north door and the south, and all along the four facades linking them. He was safe.
“It was all the more clear when he had crested the ridge and found how naked was the nest of his old enemy. He found himself on a small platform of rock, broken abruptly by the three corners of precipice. Behind was the black cave, masked with green thorn, so low that it was hard to believe that a man could enter it. In front was the fall of the cliffs and the vast but cloudy vision of the valley. On the small rock platform stood an old bronze lectern or reading-stand, groaning under a great German Bible. The bronze or copper of it had grown green with the eating airs of that exalted place, and Otto had instantly the thought, “Even if they had arms, they must be rusted by now.” Moonrise had already made a deathly dawn behind the crests and crags, and the rain had ceased.
“Behind the lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old man in a black robe that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but whose white hair and weak voice seemed alike to waver in the wind. He was evidently reading some daily lesson as part of his religious exercises. “They trust in their horses…”
“‘Sir,’ said the Prince of Heiligwaldenstein, with quite unusual courtesy, ‘I should like only one word with you.’
”‘…and in their chariots,’ went on the old man weakly, ‘but we will trust in the name of the Lord of Hosts…’ His last words were inaudible, but he closed the book reverently and, being nearly blind, made a groping movement and gripped the reading-stand. Instantly his two servants slipped out of the low-browed cavern and supported him. They wore dull-black gowns like his own, but they had not the frosty silver on the hair, nor the frost-bitten refinement of the features. They were peasants, Croat or Magyar, with broad, blunt visages and blinking eyes. For the first time something troubled the Prince, but his courage and diplomatic sense stood firm.
“‘I fear we have not met,’ he said, ‘since that awful cannonade in which your poor brother died.’
“‘All my brothers died,’ said the old man, still looking across the valley. Then, for one instant turning on Otto his drooping, delicate features, and the wintry hair that seemed to drip over his eyebrows like icicles, he added: ‘You see, I am dead, too.’
“‘I hope you’ll understand,’ said the Prince, controlling himself almost to a point of conciliation, ‘that I do not come here to haunt you, as a mere ghost of those great quarrels. We will not talk about who was right or wrong in that, but at least there was one point on which we were never wrong, because you were always right. Whatever is to be said of the policy of your family, no one for one moment imagines that you were moved by the mere gold; you have proved yourself above the suspicion that…’
“The old man in the black gown had hitherto continued to gaze at him with watery blue eyes and a sort of weak wisdom in his face. But when the word ‘gold’ was said he held out his hand as if in arrest of something, and turned away his face to the mountains.
“‘He has spoken of gold,’ he said. ‘He has spoken of things not lawful. Let him cease to speak.’
“Otto had the vice of his Prussian type and tradition, which is to regard success not as an incident but as a quality. He conceived himself and his like as perpetually conquering peoples who were perpetually being conquered. Consequently, he was ill acquainted with the emotion of surprise, and ill prepared for the next movement, which startled and stiffened him. He had opened his mouth to answer the hermit, when the mouth was stopped and the voice strangled by a strong, soft gag suddenly twisted round his head like a tourniquet. It was fully forty seconds before he even realized that the two Hungarian servants had done it, and that they had done it with his own military scarf.
“The old man went again weakly to his great brazen-supported Bible, turned over the leaves, with a patience that had something horrible about it, till he came to the Epistle of St James, and then began to read: ‘The tongue is a little member, but—’
«Lassù, all’estremità superiore di un tortuoso sentiero di montagna verso il quale si stava dirigendo, tra le rocce a pilastro lungo la cresta che sovrasta la città, sorgeva l’eremo, poco più di una caverna cinta di spini, in cui il terzo dei grandi fratelli si era a lungo nascosto dal mondo. Costui, pensava il Principe Otto, non poteva avere nessuna vera ragione per rifiutare di cedere l’oro. Ne conosceva il luogo da anni, e non aveva fatto alcuno sforzo per trovarlo, persino prima che il suo nuovo credo ascetico lo avesse reciso dalla proprietà e dai piaceri. Vero, era stato un nemico, ma ora professava il dovere di non avere nemici. Qualche concessione alla sua causa, qualche appello ai suoi principi, gli avrebbe probabilmente strappato il semplice segreto del denaro. Otto non era un vigliacco, malgrado la sua rete di precauzioni militari, e, in ogni caso, la sua avarizia era più forte delle sue paure. Né v’era molto motivo di paura. Poiché era certo che non vi fossero armi private in tutto il principato, era cento volte più certo che non ve ne fossero nel piccolo eremo del quacchero sulla collina, dove costui viveva d’erbe, con due vecchi servitori campagnoli, e con nessun’altra voce d’uomo anno dopo anno. Il Principe Otto guardò in basso con una specie di torvo sorriso i luminosi, squadrati labirinti della città illuminata a lampada sotto di lui. Perché fin dove l’occhio poteva arrivare correvano i fucili dei suoi amici, e non un pizzico di polvere per i suoi nemici. I fucili erano schierati così fitti persino presso quel sentiero di montagna che un grido da parte sua avrebbe fatto accorrere i soldati su per la collina, per non dire del fatto che il bosco e la cresta erano pattugliati a intervalli regolari; fucili così lontani, nei boschi fioschi, rimpiccioliti dalla distanza, al di là del fiume, che un nemico non poteva insinuarsi in città con nessun aggiramento. E intorno al palazzo fucili alla porta di ponente e alla porta di levante, alla porta di settentrione e a quella di mezzogiorno, e lungo tutte e quattro le facciate che le collegavano. Era al sicuro.
«Fu tutto ancor più chiaro quando ebbe raggiunto la cresta e scoperto quanto fosse nudo il nido del suo vecchio nemico. Si trovò su una piccola piattaforma di roccia, interrotta bruscamente dai tre angoli del precipizio. Dietro v’era la nera caverna, mascherata di spini verdi, così bassa che era difficile credere che un uomo potesse entrarvi. Davanti v’era il baratro delle rupi e la vasta ma nebbiosa visione della valle. Sulla piccola piattaforma rocciosa sorgeva un vecchio leggìo di bronzo, gemente sotto una grande Bibbia tedesca. Il bronzo o rame di esso si era fatto verde per le arie corrosive di quel luogo elevato, e Otto ebbe all’istante il pensiero: “Anche se avessero armi, ormai devono essere arrugginite.” La luna nascente aveva già fatto una alba mortale dietro le creste e i dirupi, e la pioggia era cessata.
«Dietro il leggìo, e guardando attraverso la valle, stava un vecchissimo uomo in una veste nera che cadeva diritta come le rupi intorno a lui, ma i cui capelli bianchi e la voce fioca parevano del pari vacillare nel vento. Egli stava evidentemente leggendo qualche lezione quotidiana come parte dei suoi esercizi religiosi. “Essi confidano nei loro cavalli…”
«‘Signore’, disse il Principe di Heiligwaldenstein, con cortesia del tutto insolita, ‘vorrei soltanto una parola con voi.’
«‘…e nei loro carri’, proseguì fioco il vecchio, ‘ma noi confideremo nel nome del Signore degli Eserciti…’ Le sue ultime parole furono impercettibili, ma chiuse il libro con reverenza e, essendo quasi cieco, fece un gesto a tastoni e afferrò il leggìo. All’istante i suoi due servitori sgusciarono fuori dalla caverna dalla bassa volta e lo sostennero. Portavano vesti d’un nero smorto come la sua, ma non avevano l’argento gelido sui capelli, né la gelo-morsa raffinatezza dei lineamenti. Erano contadini, croati o magiari, dai visi larghi e ottusi e dagli occhi ammiccanti. Per la prima volta qualcosa turbò il Principe, ma il suo coraggio e il suo senso diplomatico tennero saldo.
«‘Temo che non ci siamo incontrati’, disse, ‘dal tempo di quella tremenda cannonata in cui morì il vostro povero fratello.’
«‘Tutti i miei fratelli morirono’, disse il vecchio, sempre guardando attraverso la valle. Poi, volgendo per un istante su Otto i suoi cadenti, delicati lineamenti, e i capelli invernali che parevano gocciolare sulle sopracciglia come ghiaccioli, aggiunse: ‘Vedete, anch’io sono morto.’
«‘Spero che comprenderete’, disse il Principe, dominandosi quasi fino a un punto di conciliazione, ‘che non vengo qui a perseguitarvi, come mero spettro di quelle grandi contese. Non parleremo di chi avesse ragione o torto in ciò, ma vi fu almeno un punto sul quale non fummo mai in torto, perché voi aveste sempre ragione. Qualunque cosa si debba dire della politica della vostra famiglia, nessuno neppure per un momento immagina che voi foste mosso dal mero oro; vi siete dimostrato al di sopra del sospetto che…’
«Il vecchio nella veste nera aveva fino allora continuato a fissarlo con occhi azzurri acquosi e una specie di fragile saggezza sul volto. Ma quando fu pronunciata la parola ‘oro’ egli tese la mano come per arrestare qualcosa, e volse via il volto verso i monti.
«‘Egli ha parlato dell’oro’, disse. ‘Ha parlato di cose non lecite. Che cessi di parlare.’
«Otto aveva il vizio del suo tipo e della sua tradizione prussiani, che è di considerare il successo non come un accidente ma come una qualità. Concepiva sé stesso e i suoi simili come popoli perpetuamente conquistatori di popoli perpetuamente conquistati. Di conseguenza, era mal familiare con l’emozione della sorpresa, e mal preparato al gesto successivo, che lo fece trasalire e irrigidire. Aveva aperto la bocca per rispondere all’eremita, quando la bocca fu tappata e la voce strozzata da un forte, morbido bavaglio d’improvviso attorcigliato intorno al suo capo come un laccio emostatico. Passarono ben quaranta secondi prima che egli persino comprendesse che i due servitori ungheresi lo avevano fatto, e che lo avevano fatto con la sua stessa sciarpa militare.
«Il vecchio tornò di nuovo fiocamente alla sua grande Bibbia sorretta dal bronzo, voltò le pagine, con una pazienza che aveva qualcosa di orribile, finché giunse all’Epistola di San Giacomo, e allora cominciò a leggere: ‘La lingua è un piccolo membro, ma —’
“Something in the very voice made the Prince turn suddenly and plunge down the mountain-path he had climbed. He was half-way towards the gardens of the palace before he even tried to tear the strangling scarf from his neck and jaws. He tried again and again, and it was impossible; the men who had knotted that gag knew the difference between what a man can do with his hands in front of him and what he can do with his hands behind his head. His legs were free to leap like an antelope on the mountains, his arms were free to use any gesture or wave any signal, but he could not speak. A dumb devil was in him.
“He had come close to the woods that walled in the castle before he had quite realized what his wordless state meant and was meant to mean. Once more he looked down grimly at the bright, square labyrinths of the lamp-lit city below him, and he smiled no more. He felt himself repeating the phrases of his former mood with a murderous irony. Far as the eye could see ran the rifles of his friends, every one of whom would shoot him dead if he could not answer the challenge. Rifles were so near that the wood and ridge could be patrolled at regular intervals; therefore it was useless to hide in the wood till morning. Rifles were ranked so far away that an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour; therefore it was vain to return to the city by any remote course. A cry from him would bring his soldiers rushing up the hill. But from him no cry would come.
“The moon had risen in strengthening silver, and the sky showed in stripes of bright, nocturnal blue between the black stripes of the pines about the castle. Flowers of some wide and feathery sort— for he had never noticed such things before—were at once luminous and discoloured by the moonshine, and seemed indescribably fantastic as they clustered, as if crawling about the roots of the trees. Perhaps his reason had been suddenly unseated by the unnatural captivity he carried with him, but in that wood he felt something unfathomably German—the fairy tale. He knew with half his mind that he was drawing near to the castle of an ogre—he had forgotten that he was the ogre. He remembered asking his mother if bears lived in the old park at home. He stooped to pick a flower, as if it were a charm against enchantment. The stalk was stronger than he expected, and broke with a slight snap. Carefully trying to place it in his scarf, he heard the halloo, ‘Who goes there?’ Then he remembered the scarf was not in its usual place.
“He tried to scream and was silent. The second challenge came; and then a shot that shrieked as it came and then was stilled suddenly by impact. Otto of Grossenmark lay very peacefully among the fairy trees, and would do no more harm either with gold or steel; only the silver pencil of the moon would pick out and trace here and there the intricate ornament of his uniform, or the old wrinkles on his brow. May God have mercy on his soul.
“The sentry who had fired, according to the strict orders of the garrison, naturally ran forward to find some trace of his quarry. He was a private named Schwartz, since not unknown in his profession, and what he found was a bald man in uniform, but with his face so bandaged by a kind of mask made of his own military scarf that nothing but open, dead eyes could be seen, glittering stonily in the moonlight. The bullet had gone through the gag into the jaw; that is why there was a shot-hole in the scarf, but only one shot. Naturally, if not correctly, young Schwartz tore off the mysterious silken mask and cast it on the grass; and then he saw whom he had slain.
“We cannot be certain of the next phase. But I incline to believe that there was a fairy tale, after all, in that little wood, horrible as was its occasion. Whether the young lady named Hedwig had any previous knowledge of the soldier she saved and eventually married, or whether she came accidentally upon the accident and their intimacy began that night, we shall probably never know. But we can know, I fancy, that this Hedwig was a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became something of a hero. She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the sentry to go back to his post, in which place there was nothing to connect him with the disaster; he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty such sentries within call. She remained by the body and gave the alarm; and there was nothing to connect her with the disaster either, since she had not got, and could not have, any firearms.
“Well,” said Father Brown rising cheerfully “I hope they’re happy.”
“Where are you going?” asked his friend.
“I’m going to have another look at that portrait of the Chamberlain, the Arnhold who betrayed his brethren,” answered the priest. “I wonder what part—I wonder if a man is less a traitor when he is twice a traitor?”
And he ruminated long before the portrait of a white-haired man with black eyebrows and a pink, painted sort of smile that seemed to contradict the black warning in his eyes.
«Qualcosa nella voce stessa fece voltare d’improvviso il Principe e precipitarsi giù per il sentiero di montagna che aveva scalato. Era a metà strada verso i giardini del palazzo prima ancora di tentare di strapparsi la sciarpa strangolatrice dal collo e dalle mascelle. Provò e riprovò, e fu impossibile; gli uomini che avevano annodato quel bavaglio conoscevano la differenza tra ciò che un uomo può fare con le mani davanti a sé e ciò che può fare con le mani dietro il capo. Le sue gambe erano libere di balzare come un’antilope sui monti, le sue braccia erano libere di fare qualsiasi gesto o agitare qualsiasi segnale, ma non poteva parlare. Un demone muto era in lui.
«Era giunto vicino ai boschi che cingevano il castello prima di aver del tutto compreso ciò che il suo stato senza parole significasse e fosse destinato a significare. Ancora una volta guardò torvo in basso i luminosi, squadrati labirinti della città illuminata a lampada sotto di lui, e non sorrise più. Si sentì ripetere le frasi del suo stato d’animo di prima con un’ironia omicida. Fin dove l’occhio poteva arrivare correvano i fucili dei suoi amici, ciascuno dei quali lo avrebbe abbattuto se non avesse potuto rispondere alla parola d’ordine. I fucili erano così vicini che il bosco e la cresta potevano essere pattugliati a intervalli regolari; perciò era inutile nascondersi nel bosco fino al mattino. I fucili erano schierati così lontano che un nemico non poteva insinuarsi in città con nessun aggiramento; perciò era vano tornare alla città per qualche via remota. Un grido da parte sua avrebbe fatto accorrere i suoi soldati su per la collina. Ma da lui nessun grido sarebbe venuto.
«La luna era sorta in un argento sempre più intenso, e il cielo mostrava strisce d’azzurro vivido e notturno tra le nere strisce dei pini attorno al castello. Fiori di una qualche specie ampia e piumosa — perché prima non aveva mai notato tali cose — erano al tempo stesso luminosi e scoloriti dal chiaro di luna, e parevano indescrivibilmente fantastici mentre si affollavano, come strisciando intorno alle radici degli alberi. Forse la sua ragione era stata d’improvviso scardinata dall’innaturale prigionia che portava con sé, ma in quel bosco egli sentì qualcosa di insondabilmente tedesco — la fiaba. Sapeva con metà della mente che si stava avvicinando al castello di un orco — aveva dimenticato di essere lui l’orco. Ricordò di aver chiesto a sua madre se gli orsi vivessero nel vecchio parco a casa. Si chinò a cogliere un fiore, come se fosse un talismano contro l’incantesimo. Il gambo era più robusto di quanto si aspettasse, e si spezzò con un lieve schiocco. Mentre cercava con cura di infilarlo nella sua sciarpa, udì il grido: ‘Chi va là?’ Allora ricordò che la sciarpa non era al suo solito posto.
«Tentò di gridare e restò muto. Venne la seconda intimazione; e poi uno sparo che stridette mentre veniva e poi fu d’improvviso acquietato dall’impatto. Otto di Grossenmark giaceva assai placidamente fra i fatati alberi, e non avrebbe più fatto danno né con oro né con acciaio; solo la matita d’argento della luna avrebbe messo in risalto e tracciato qua e là l’intricato ornamento della sua uniforme, o le vecchie rughe sulla sua fronte. Che Dio abbia pietà della sua anima.
«La sentinella che aveva sparato, secondo gli ordini rigorosi della guarnigione, corse naturalmente avanti per trovare qualche traccia della sua preda. Era un soldato semplice di nome Schwartz, poi non ignoto nella sua professione, e ciò che trovò fu un uomo calvo in uniforme, ma col volto tanto fasciato da una specie di maschera fatta della sua stessa sciarpa militare che nulla si poteva vedere se non occhi aperti e morti, luccicanti pietrosi al chiaro di luna. La pallottola era passata attraverso il bavaglio nella mascella; ecco perché vi era un foro di sparo nella sciarpa, ma un solo sparo. Naturalmente, se non correttamente, il giovane Schwartz strappò via la misteriosa maschera di seta e la gettò sull’erba; e allora vide chi aveva ucciso.
«Non possiamo essere certi della fase successiva. Ma propendo a credere che vi fu una fiaba, dopotutto, in quel piccolo bosco, per quanto orribile ne fosse l’occasione. Se la giovane signora di nome Hedwig avesse qualche precedente conoscenza del soldato che salvò e alla fine sposò, oppure se s’imbatté per caso nell’accidente e la loro intimità cominciò quella notte, probabilmente non lo sapremo mai. Ma possiamo sapere, credo, che questa Hedwig fu un’eroina, e meritò di sposare un uomo che divenne una specie di eroe. Fece la cosa audace e la cosa saggia. Persuase la sentinella a tornare al suo posto, luogo in cui non v’era nulla che lo collegasse al disastro; egli non era che uno dei più fedeli e ordinati di cinquanta simili sentinelle a portata di richiamo. Ella restò presso il corpo e diede l’allarme; e non v’era nulla che collegasse lei al disastro, giacché non aveva, e non poteva avere, alcuna arma da fuoco.
«Ebbene», disse Padre Brown alzandosi allegramente, «spero che siano felici.»
«Dove vai?» chiese il suo amico.
«Vado a dare un’altra occhiata a quel ritratto del Ciambellano, l’Arnhold che tradì i propri fratelli», rispose il sacerdote. «Mi domando quale parte — mi domando se un uomo sia meno traditore quando è due volte traditore.»
E rimuginò a lungo davanti al ritratto di un uomo dai capelli bianchi con le sopracciglia nere e una specie di rosa, dipinto sorriso che pareva contraddire il nero monito nei suoi occhi.