A Very Murderous Christmas

by Cecily Gayford

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ Fletcher replied and stepped out into the gently falling snow.

  The Flying Stars

  G. K. Chesterton

  ‘The most beautiful crime I ever committed,’ Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, ‘was also, by a singular coincidence, my last. It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of the Cafe Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some cathedral town. Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich and wicked peasant (which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get his indignant head relieved against a grey line of clipped poplars, and those solemn plains of Gaul over which broods the mighty spirit of Millet.

  ‘Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree. Enough, you know the species. I really think my imitation of Dickens’s style was dexterous and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening.’

  Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must study it. From this standpoint the drama may be said to have begun when the front doors of the house with the stable opened on the garden with the monkey tree, and a young girl came out with bread to feed the birds on the afternoon of Boxing Day. She had a pretty face, with brave brown eyes; but her figure was beyond conjecture, for she was so wrapped up in brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur. But for the attractive face she might have been a small toddling bear.

  The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead roses. On one side of the house stood the stable, on the other an alley or cloister of laurels led to the larger garden behind. The young lady, having scattered bread for the birds (for the fourth or fifth time that day, because the dog ate it), passed unobtrusively down the lane of laurels and into a glimmering plantation of evergreens behind. Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure.

  ‘Oh, don’t jump, Mr Crook,’ she called out in some alarm; ‘it’s much too high.’

  The individual riding the party wall like an aerial horse was a tall, angular young man, with dark hair sticking up like a hair brush, intelligent and even distinguished lineaments, but a sallow and almost alien complexion. This showed the more plainly because he wore an aggressive red tie, the only part of his costume of which he seemed to take any care. Perhaps it was a symbol. He took no notice of the girl’s alarmed adjuration, but leapt like a grasshopper to the ground beside her, where he might very well have broken his legs.

  ‘I think I was meant to be a burglar,’ he said placidly, ‘and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t see any harm in it, anyhow.’

  ‘How can you say such things!’ she remonstrated.

  ‘Well,’ said the young man, ‘if you’re born on the wrong side of the wall, I can’t see that it’s wrong to climb over it.’

  ‘I never know what you will say or do next,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t often know myself,’ replied Mr Crook; ‘but then I am on the right side of the wall now.’

  ‘And which is the right side of the wall?’ asked the young lady, smiling.

  ‘Whichever side you are on,’ said the young man named Crook.

  As they went together through the laurels towards the front garden a motor horn sounded thrice, coming nearer and nearer, and a car of splendid speed, great elegance, and a pale green colour swept up to the front doors like a bird and stood throbbing.

  ‘Hullo, hullo!’ said the young man with the red tie, ‘here’s somebody born on the right side, anyhow. I didn’t know, Miss Adams, that your Santa Claus was so modern as this.’

  ‘Oh, that’s my godfather, Sir Leopold Fischer. He always comes on Boxing Day.’

  Then, after an innocent pause, which unconsciously betrayed some lack of enthusiasm, Ruby Adams added:

  ‘He is very kind.’

  John Crook, journalist, had heard of that eminent City magnate; and it was not his fault if the City magnate had not heard of him; for in certain articles in The Clarion or The New Age Sir Leopold had been dealt with austerely. But he said nothing and grimly watched the unloading of the motor-car, which was rather a long process. A large, neat chauffeur in green got out from the front, and a small, neat manservant in grey got out from the back, and between them they deposited Sir Leopold on the doorstep and began to unpack him, like some very carefully protected parcel. Rugs enough to stock a bazaar, furs of all the beasts of the forest, and scarves of all the colours of the rainbow were unwrapped one by one, till they revealed something resembling the human form; the form of a friendly, but foreign-looking old gentleman, with a grey goat-like beard and a beaming smile, who rubbed his big fur gloves together.

  Long before this revelation was complete the two big doors of the porch had opened in the middle, and Colonel Adams (father of the furry young lady) had come out himself to invite his eminent guest inside. He was a tall, sunburnt, and very silent man, who wore a red smoking-cap like a fez, making him look like one of the English Sirdars or Pashas in Egypt. With him was his brother-in-law, lately come from Canada, a big and rather boisterous young gentleman-farmer, with a yellow beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel’s late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family gatherings.

  In the large entrance hall of the house there was ample room even for Sir Leopold and the removal of his wraps. Porch and vestibule, indeed, were unduly large in proportion to the house, and formed, as it were, a big room with the front door at one end, and the bottom of the staircase at the other. In front of the large hall fire, over which hung the colonel’s sword, the process was completed and the company, including the saturnine Crook, presented to Sir Leopold Fischer. That venerable financier, however, still seemed to be struggling with portions of his well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his god-daughter. With an unaffected vainglory that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole group.

  ‘I’ll put ’em back now, my dear,’ said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. ‘I had to be careful of ’em coming down. They’re the three great African diamonds called “The Flying Stars”, because they’ve been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but e
ven the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It was quite possible.’

  ‘Quite natural, I should say,’ growled the man in the red tie. ‘I shouldn’t blame ’em if they had taken ’em. When they ask for bread, and you don’t even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves.’

  ‘I won’t have you talking like that,’ cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. ‘You’ve only talked like that since you became a horrid what’s-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?’

  ‘A saint,’ said Father Brown.

  ‘I think,’ said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, ‘that Ruby means a Socialist.’

  ‘A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes,’ remarked Crook, with some impatience; ‘and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.’

  ‘But who won’t allow you,’ put in the priest in a low voice, ‘to own your own soot.’

  Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. ‘Does one want to own soot?’ he asked.

  ‘One might,’ answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. ‘I’ve heard that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn’t come, entirely with soot – applied externally.’

  ‘Oh, splendid,’ cried Ruby. ‘Oh, I wish you’d do it to this company.’

  The boisterous Canadian, Mr Blount, was lifting his loud voice in applause, and the astonished financier his (in some considerable deprecation), when a knock sounded at the double front doors. The priest opened them, and they showed again the front garden of evergreens, monkey tree and all, now gathering gloom against a gorgeous violet sunset. The scene thus framed was so coloured and quaint, like a back scene in a play, that they forgot a moment the insignificant figure standing in the door. He was dusty-looking and in a frayed coat, evidently a common messenger. ‘Any of you gentlemen Mr Blount?’ he asked, and held forward a letter doubtfully. Mr Blount started, and stopped in his shout of assent. Ripping up the envelope with evident astonishment he read it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared, and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.

  ‘I’m sick at being such a nuisance, colonel,’ he said, with the cheery colonial conventions; ‘but would it upset you if an old acquaintance called on me here tonight on business? In point of fact it’s Florian, that famous French acrobat and comic actor; I knew him years ago out West (he was a French-Canadian by birth), and he seems to have business for me, though I hardly guess what.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ replied the colonel carelessly. ‘My dear chap, any friend of yours. No doubt he will prove an acquisition.’

  ‘He’ll black his face, if that’s what you mean,’ cried Blount, laughing. ‘I don’t doubt he’d black everyone else’s eyes. I don’t care; I’m not refined. I like the jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top hat.’

  ‘Not on mine, please,’ said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.

  ‘Well, well,’ observed Crook, airily, ‘don’t let’s quarrel. There are lower jokes than sitting on a top hat.’

  Dislike of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and evident intimacy with the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his most sarcastic, magisterial manner: ‘No doubt you have found something much lower than sitting on a top hat. What is it, pray?’

  ‘Letting a top hat sit on you, for instance,’ said the Socialist.

  ‘Now, now, now,’ cried the Canadian farmer with his barbarian benevolence, ‘don’t let’s spoil a jolly evening. What I say is, let’s do something for the company tonight. Not blacking faces or sitting on hats, if you don’t like those – but something of the sort. Why couldn’t we have a proper old English pantomime – clown, columbine, and so on. I saw one when I left England at twelve years old, and it’s blazed in my brain like a bonfire ever since. I came back to the old country only last year, and I find the thing’s extinct. Nothing but a lot of snivelling fairy plays. I want a hot poker and a policeman made into sausages, and they give me princesses moralising by moonlight, Blue Birds, or something. Blue Beard’s more in my line, and him I like best when he turned into the pantaloon.’

  ‘I’m all for making a policeman into sausages,’ said John Crook. ‘It’s a better definition of Socialism than some recently given. But surely the get-up would be too big a business.’

  ‘Not a scrap,’ cried Blount, quite carried away. ‘A harlequinade’s the quickest thing we can do, for two reasons. First, one can gag to any degree; and, second, all the objects are household things – tables and towel-horses and washing baskets, and things like that.’

  ‘That’s true,’ admitted Crook, nodding eagerly and walking about. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t have my policeman’s uniform. Haven’t killed a policeman lately.’

  Blount frowned thoughtfully a space, and then smote his thigh. ‘Yes, we can!’ he cried. ‘I’ve got Florian’s address here, and he knows every costumier in London. I’ll phone him to bring a police dress when he comes.’ And he went bounding away to the telephone.

  ‘Oh, it’s glorious, godfather,’ cried Ruby, almost dancing. ‘I’ll be columbine and you shall be pantaloon.’

  The millionaire held himself stiff with a sort of heathen solemnity. ‘I think, my dear,’ he said, ‘you must get someone else for pantaloon.’

  ‘I will be pantaloon, if you like,’ said Colonel Adams, taking his cigar out of his mouth, and speaking for the first and last time.

  ‘You ought to have a statue,’ cried the Canadian, as he came back, radiant, from the telephone. ‘There, we are all fitted. Mr Crook shall be clown; he’s a journalist and knows all the oldest jokes. I can be harlequin, that only wants long legs and jumping about. My friend Florian ’phones he’s bringing the police costume; he’s changing on the way. We can act it in this very hall, the audience sitting on those broad stairs opposite, one row above another. These front doors can be the back scene, either open or shut. Shut, you see an English interior. Open, a moonlit garden. It all goes by magic.’ And snatching a chance piece of billiard chalk from his pocket, he ran it across the hall floor, halfway between the front door and the staircase, to mark the line of the footlights.

  How even such a banquet of bosh was got ready in the time remained a riddle. But they went at it with that mixture of recklessness and industry that lives when youth is in a house; and youth was in that house that night, though not all may have isolated the two faces and hearts from which it flamed. As always happens, the invention grew wilder and wilder through the very tameness of the bourgeois conventions from which it had to create. The columbine looked charming in an outstanding skirt that strangely resembled the large lamp-shade in the drawing-room. The clown and pantaloon made themselves white with flour from the cook, and red with rouge from some other domestic, who remained (like all true Christian benefactors) anonymous. The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In fact, he would certainly have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds. Indeed, her uncle, James Blount, was getting almost out of hand in his excitement; he was like a schoolboy. He put a paper donkey’s head unexpectedly on Father Brown, who bore it patiently, and even found some private manner of moving his ears. He even essayed to put the paper donkey’s tail to the coat-tails of Sir Leopold Fischer. This, however, was frowned down. ‘Uncle is too absurd,’ cried Ruby to Crook, round whose shoulders she had seriously placed a string of sausages. ‘Why is he so wild?’

  ‘He is harlequin to your columbine,’ said Crook. ‘I am only the clown
who makes the old jokes.’

  ‘I wish you were the harlequin,’ she said, and left the string of sausages swinging.

  Father Brown, though he knew every detail done behind the scenes, and had even evoked applause by his transformation of a pillow into a pantomime baby, went round to the front and sat among the audience with all the solemn expectation of a child at his first matinee. The spectators were few, relations, one or two local friends, and the servants; Sir Leopold sat in the front seat, his full and still fur-collared figure largely obscuring the view of the little cleric behind him; but it has never been settled by artistic authorities whether the cleric lost much. The pantomime was utterly chaotic, yet not contemptible; there ran through it a rage of improvisation which came chiefly from Crook the clown. Commonly he was a clever man, and he was inspired tonight with a wild omniscience, a folly wiser than the world, that which comes to a young man who has seen for an instant a particular expression on a particular face. He was supposed to be the clown, but he was really almost everything else, the author (so far as there was an author), the prompter, the scene-painter, the scene-shifter, and, above all, the orchestra. At abrupt intervals in the outrageous performance he would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and bang out some popular music equally absurd and appropriate.

  The climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front doors at the back of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit garden, but showing more prominently the famous professional guest; the great Florian, dressed up as a policeman. The clown at the piano played the constabulary chorus in the ‘Pirates of Penzance’, but it was drowned in the deafening applause, for every gesture of the great comic actor was an admirable though restrained version of the carriage and manner of the police. The harlequin leapt upon him and hit him over the helmet; the pianist playing ‘Where did you get that hat?’ he faced about in admirably simulated astonishment, and then the leaping harlequin hit him again (the pianist suggesting a few bars of ‘Then we had another one’). Then the harlequin rushed right into the arms of the policeman and fell on top of him, amid a roar of applause. Then it was that the strange actor gave that celebrated imitation of a dead man, of which the fame still lingers round Putney. It was almost impossible to believe that a living person could appear so limp.