The Father Brown Megapack

by G. K. Datlow

  Mr Gideon P. Hake continued to gaze at the College gardens with glassy eyes; but the parallel of a waxwork confirmed the impression that they were like eyes made of glass. Somehow the rich sunlight and the coloured garden increased the creepy impression of a stiffly dressed doll; a marionette on an Italian stage. The small man in black, who was a priest named Brown, tentatively touched the millionaire on the shoulder, and the millionaire fell sideways, but horribly all of a piece, like something carved in wood.

  “Rigor mortis,” said Father Brown, “and so soon. But it does vary a good deal.”

  The reason the first three men had joined the other two men so late (not to say too late) will best be understood by noting what had happened just inside the building, behind the Tudor archway, but a short time before they came out. They had all dined together in Hall, at the High Table; but the two foreign philanthropists, slaves of duty in the matter of seeing everything, had solemnly gone back to the chapel, of which one cloister and a staircase remained unexamined; promising to rejoin the rest in the garden, to examine as earnestly the College cigars. The rest, in a more reverent and right-minded spirit, had adjourned as usual to the long narrow oak table, round which the after-dinner wine had circulated, for all anybody knew, ever since the College had been founded in the Middle Ages by Sir John Mandeville, for the encouragement of telling stories. The Master, with the big fair beard and bald brow, took the head of the table, and the squat man in the square jacket sat on his left; for he was the Bursar or business man of the College. Next to him, on that side of the table, sat a queer-looking man with what could only be called a crooked face; for its dark tufts of moustache and eyebrow, slanting at contrary angles, made a sort of zig-zag, as if half his face were puckered or paralysed. His name was Byles; he was the lecturer in Roman History, and his political opinions were founded on those of Coriolanus, not to mention Tarquinius Superbus. This tart Toryism, and rabidly reactionary view of all current problems, was not altogether unknown among the more old-fashioned sort of dons; but in the case of Byles there was a suggestion that it was a result rather than a cause of his acerbity. More than one sharp observer had received the impression that there was something really wrong with Byles; that some secret or some great misfortune had embittered him; as if that half-withered face had really been blasted like a storm-stricken tree. Beyond him again sat Father Brown and at the end of the table a Professor of Chemistry, large and blond and bland, with eyes that were sleepy and perhaps a little sly. It was well known that this natural philosopher regarded the other philosophers, of a more classical tradition, very much as old logics. On the other side of the table, opposite Father Brown, was a very swarthy and silent young man, with a black pointed beard, introduced because somebody had insisted on having a Chair of Persian; opposite the sinister Byles was a very mild-looking little Chaplain, with a head like an egg. Opposite the Bursar and at the right hand of the Master, was an empty chair; and there were many there who were glad to see it empty.

  “I don’t know whether Craken is coming,” said the Master, not without a nervous glance at the chair, which contrasted with the usual languid freedom of his demeanour. “I believe in giving people a lot of rope myself; but I confess I’ve reached the point of being glad when he is here, merely because he isn’t anywhere else.”

  “Never know what he’ll be up to next,” said the Bursar, cheerfully, “especially when he’s instructing the young.”

  “A brilliant fellow, but fiery of course,” said the Master, with a rather abrupt relapse into reserve.

  “Fireworks are fiery, and also brilliant,” growled old Byles, “but I don’t want to be burned in my bed so that Craken can figure as a real Guy Fawkes.”

  “Do you really think he would join a physical force revolution, if there were one,” asked the Bursar smiling.

  “Well, he thinks he would,” said Byles sharply. “Told a whole hall full of undergraduates the other day that nothing now could avert the Class War turning into a real war, with killing in the streets of the town; and it didn’t matter, so long as it ended in Communism and the victory of the working-class.”

  “The Class War,” mused the Master, with a sort of distaste mellowed by distance; for he had known William Morris long ago and been familiar enough with the more artistic and leisurely Socialists. “I never can understand all this about the Class War. When I was young, Socialism was supposed to mean saying that there are no classes.”

  “Nother way of saying that Socialists are no class,” said Byles with sour relish.

  “Of course, you’d be more against them than I should,” said the Master thoughtfully, “but I suppose my Socialism is almost as old-fashioned as your Toryism. Wonder what our young friends really think. What do you think, Baker?” he said abruptly to the Bursar on his left.

  “Oh, I don’t think, as the vulgar saying is,” said the Bursar laughing. “You must remember I’m a very vulgar person. I’m not a thinker. I’m only a business man; and as a business man I think it’s all bosh. You can’t make men equal and it’s damned bad business to pay them equal; especially a lot of them not worth paying for at all. Whatever it is, you’ve got to take the practical way out, because it’s the only way out. It’s not our fault if nature made everything a scramble.”

  “I agree with you there,” said the Professor of Chemistry, speaking with a lisp that seemed childish in so large a man. “Communism pretends to be oh so modern; but it is not. Throwback to the superstitions of monks and primitive tribes. A scientific government, with a really ethical responsibility to posterity, would be always looking for the line of promise and progress; not levelling and flattening it all back into the mud again. Socialism is sentimentalism; and more dangerous than a pestilence, for in that at least the fittest would survive.”

  The Master smiled a little sadly. “You know you and I will never feel quite the same about differences of opinion. Didn’t somebody say up here, about walking with a friend by the river, ‘Not differing much, except in opinion.’ Isn’t that the motto of a university? To have hundreds of opinions and not be opinionated. If people fall here, it’s by what they are, not what they think. Perhaps I’m a relic of the eighteenth century; but I incline to the old sentimental heresy, ‘For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight; he can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.’ What do you think about that, Father Brown?”

  He glanced a little mischievously across at the priest and was mildly startled. For he had always found the priest very cheerful and amiable and easy to get on with; and his round face was mostly solid with good humour. But for some reason the priest’s face at this moment was knotted with a frown much more sombre than any the company had ever seen on it; so that for an instant that commonplace countenance actually looked darker and more ominous than the haggard face of Byles. An instant later the cloud seemed to have passed; but Father Brown still spoke with a certain sobriety and firmness.

  “I don’t believe in that, anyhow,” he said shortly. “How can his life be in the right, if his whole view of life is wrong? That’s a modern muddle that arose because people didn’t know how much views of life can differ. Baptists and Methodists knew they didn’t differ very much in morality; but then they didn’t differ very much in religion or philosophy. It’s quite different when you pass from the Baptists to the Anabaptists; or from the Theosophists to the Thugs. Heresy always does affect morality, if it’s heretical enough. I suppose a man may honestly believe that thieving isn’t wrong. But what’s the good of saying that he honestly believes in dishonesty?”

  “Damned good,” said Byles with a ferocious contortion of feature, believed by many to be meant for a friendly smile. “And that’s why I object to having a Chair of Theoretical Thieving in this College.”

  “Well, you’re all very down on Communism, of course,” said the Master, with a sigh. “But do you really think there’s so much of it to be down on? Are any of your heresies really big enough to be dangerous?”

  “I think th
ey have grown so big,” said Father Brown gravely, “that in some circles they are already taken for granted. They are actually unconscious. That is, without conscience.”

  “And the end of it,” said Byles, “will be the ruin of this country.”

  “The end will be something worse,” said Father Brown.

  A shadow shot or slid rapidly along the panelled wall opposite, as swiftly followed by the figure that had flung it; a tall but stooping figure with a vague outline like a bird of prey; accentuated by the fact that its sudden appearance and swift passage were like those of a bird startled and flying from a bush. It was only the figure of a long-limbed, high-shouldered man with long drooping moustaches, in fact, familiar enough to them all; but something in the twilight and candlelight and the flying and streaking shadow connected it strangely with the priest’s unconscious words of omen; for all the world, as if those words had indeed been an augury, in the old Roman sense; and the sign of it the flight of a bird. Perhaps Mr Byles might have given a lecture on such Roman augury; and especially on that bird of ill-omen.

  The tall man shot along the wall like his own shadow until he sank into the empty chair on the Master’s right, and looked across at the Bursar and the rest with hollow and cavernous eyes. His hanging hair and moustache were quite fair, but his eyes were so deep-set that they might have been black. Everyone knew, or could guess, who the newcomer was; but an incident instantly followed that sufficiently illuminated the situation. The Professor of Roman History rose stiffly to his feet and stalked out of the room, indicating with little finesse his feelings about sitting at the same table with the Professor of Theoretical Thieving, otherwise the Communist, Mr Craken.

  The Master of Mandeville covered the awkward situation with nervous grace. “I was defending you, or some aspects of you, my dear Craken,” he said smiling, “though I am sure you would find me quite indefensible. After all, I can’t forget that the old Socialist friends of my youth had a very fine ideal of fraternity and comradeship. William Morris put it all in a sentence, ‘Fellowship is heaven; and lack of fellowship is hell.’”

  “Dons as Democrats; see headline,” said Mr Craken rather disagreeably. “And is Hard-Case Hake going to dedicate the new Commercial Chair to the memory of William Morris?”

  “Well,” said the Master, still maintaining a desperate geniality, “I hope we may say, in a sense, that all our Chairs are Chairs of good-fellowship.”

  “Yes; that’s the academic version of the Morris maxim,” growled Craken. “‘A Fellowship is heaven; and lack of a Fellowship is hell.’”

  “Don’t be so cross, Craken,” interposed the Bursar briskly. “Take some port. Tenby, pass the port to Mr Craken.”

  “Oh well, I’ll have a glass,” said the Communist Professor a little less ungraciously. “I really came down here to have a smoke in the garden. Then I looked out of the window and saw your two precious millionaires were actually blooming in the garden; fresh, innocent buds. After all, it might be worth while to give them a bit of my mind.”

  The Master had risen under cover of his last conventional cordiality, and was only too glad to leave the Bursar to do his best with the Wild Man. Others had risen, and the groups at the table had begun to break up; and the Bursar and Mr Craken were left more or less alone at the end of the long table. Only Father Brown continued to sit staring into vacancy with a rather cloudy expression.

  “Oh, as to that,” said the Bursar. “I’m pretty tired of them myself, to tell the truth; I’ve been with them the best part of a day going into facts and figures and all the business of this new Professorship. But look here, Craken,” and he leaned across the table and spoke with a sort of soft emphasis, “you really needn’t cut up so rough about this new Professorship. It doesn’t really interfere with your subject. You’re the only Professor of Political Economy at Mandeville and, though I don’t pretend to agree with your notions, everybody knows you’ve got a European reputation. This is a special subject they call Applied Economics. Well, even today, as I told you, I’ve had a hell of a lot of Applied Economics. In other words, I’ve had to talk business with two business men. Would you particularly want to do that? Would you envy it? Would you stand it? Isn’t that evidence enough that there is a separate subject and may well be a separate Chair?”

  “Good God,” cried Craken with the intense invocation of the atheist. “Do you think I don’t want to apply Economics? Only, when we apply it, you call it red ruin and anarchy; and when you apply it, I take the liberty of calling it exploitation. If only you fellows would apply Economics, it’s just possible that people might get something to eat. We are the practical people; and that’s why you’re afraid of us. That’s why you have to get two greasy Capitalists to start another Lectureship; just because I’ve let the cat out of the bag.”

  “Rather a wild cat, wasn’t it?” said the Bursar smiling, “that you let out of the bag?”

  “And rather a gold-bag, wasn’t it,” said Craken, “that you are tying the cat up in again?”

  “Well, I don’t suppose we shall ever agree about all that,” said the other. “But those fellows have come out of their chapel into the garden; and if you want to have your smoke there, you’d better come.” He watched with some amusement his companion fumbling in all his pockets till he produced a pipe, and then, gazing at it with an abstracted air, Craken rose to his feet, but even in doing so, seemed to be feeling all over himself again. Mr Baker the Bursar ended the controversy with a happy laugh of reconciliation. “You are the practical people, and you will blow up the town with dynamite. Only you’ll probably forget the dynamite, as I bet you’ve forgotten the tobacco. Never mind, take a fill of mine. Matches?” He threw a tobacco-pouch and its accessories across the table; to be caught by Mr Craken with that dexterity never forgotten by a cricketer, even when he adopts opinions generally regarded as not cricket. The two men rose together; but Baker could not forbear remarking, “Are you really the only practical people? Isn’t there anything to be said for the Applied Economics, that remembers to carry a tobacco-pouch as well as a pipe?”

  Craken looked at him with smouldering eyes; and said at last, after slowly draining the last of his wine: “Let’s say there’s another sort of practicality. I dare say I do forget details and so on. What I want you to understand is this”—he automatically returned the pouch; but his eyes were far away and jet-burning, almost terrible—“because the inside of our intellect has changed, because we really have a new idea of right, we shall do things you think really wrong. And they will be very practical.”

  “Yes,” said Father Brown, suddenly coming out of his trance. “That’s exactly what I said.”

  He looked across at Craken with a glassy and rather ghastly smile, saying: “Mr Craken and I are in complete agreement.”

  “Well,” said Baker, “Craken is going out to smoke a pipe with the plutocrats; but I doubt whether it will be a pipe of peace.”

  He turned rather abruptly and called to an aged attendant in the background. Mandeville was one of the last of the very old-fashioned Colleges; and even Craken was one of the first of the Communists; before the Bolshevism of today. “That reminds me,” the Bursar was saying, “as you won’t hand round your peace pipe, we must send out the cigars to our distinguished guests. If they’re smokers they must be longing for a smoke; for they’ve been nosing about in the chapel since feeding-time.”

  Craken exploded with a savage and jarring laugh. “Oh, I’ll take them their cigars,” he said. “I’m only a proletarian.”

  Baker and Brown and the attendant were all witnesses to the fact that the Communist strode furiously into the garden to confront the millionaires; but nothing more was seen or heard of them until, as is already recorded, Father Brown found them dead in their chairs.

  It was agreed that the Master and the priest should remain to guard the scene of tragedy, while the Bursar, younger and more rapid in his movements, ran off to fetch doctors and policemen. Father Brown approached the table
on which one of the cigars had burned itself away all but an inch or two; the other had dropped from the hand and been dashed out into dying sparks on the crazy-pavement. The Master of Mandeville sat down rather shakily on a sufficiently distant seat and buried his bald brow in his hands. Then he looked up at first rather wearily; and then he looked very startled indeed and broke the stillness of the garden with a word like a small explosion of horror.

  There was a certain quality about Father Brown which might sometimes be called blood-curdling. He always thought about what he was doing and never about whether it was done; he would do the most ugly or horrible or undignified or dirty things as calmly as a surgeon. There was a certain blank, in his simple mind, of all those things commonly associated with being superstitious or sentimental. He sat down on the chair from which the corpse had fallen, picked up the cigar the corpse had partially smoked, carefully detached the ash, examined the butt-end and then stuck it in his mouth and lit it. It looked like some obscene and grotesque antic in derision of the dead; and it seemed to him to be the most ordinary common sense. A cloud floated upwards like the smoke of some savage sacrifice and idolatry; but to Father Brown it appeared a perfectly self-evident fact that the only way to find out what a cigar is like is to smoke it. Nor did it lessen the horror for his old friend, the Master of Mandeville, to have a dim but shrewd guess that Father Brown was, upon the possibilities of the case, risking his own life.

  “No; I think that’s all right,” said the priest, putting the stump down again. “Jolly good cigars. Your cigars. Not American or German. I don’t think there’s anything odd about the cigar itself; but they’d better take care of the ashes. These men were poisoned somehow with the sort of stuff that stiffens the body quickly… By the way, there goes somebody who knows more about it than we do.”

  The Master sat up with a curiously uncomfortable jolt; for indeed the large shadow which had fallen across the pathway preceded a figure which, however heavy, was almost as soft-footed as a shadow. Professor Wadham, eminent occupant of the Chair of Chemistry, always moved very quietly in spite of his size, and there was nothing odd about his strolling in the garden; yet there seemed something unnaturally neat in his appearing at the exact moment when chemistry was mentioned.