G K Chesterton- The Dover Reader

by G. K. Chesterton

  “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 to-night? 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 most energetically to brush the fallen leaves off the grass.

  “Always some little thing to be done,” he said with idiot 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 to-night. 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 gypsies. 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 gypsies 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 gypsies, 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 lighthouse.”

  “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 frustrate fire was extinguished; and then refused to linger, though he actually heard young Pendragon, escorted by an enthusiastic crowd, come tramping up the riverbank; 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.

  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 recognised 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 skyline brightened into silver, and in the broadening light he realised 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?”