The innocence of Father Brown
and a Conservative. He himself was a Conservative, even in private life.
He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certain
old-fashioned statesmen, and seen from behind he looked like the man the
empire wants. Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-indulgent
bachelor, with rooms in the Albany--which he was.
As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table,
and only twelve members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace
in the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side of
the table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view of
the garden, the colours of which were still vivid, though evening was
closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. The chairman sat in
the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end
of it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was the
custom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to stand
lining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat
proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he
had never heard of them before. But before the first chink of knife and
fork this army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required
to collect and distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence.
Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions of
courtesy long before. It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent,
to say that he ever positively appeared again. But when the important
course, the fish course, was being brought on, there was--how shall I
put it?--a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told
that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes
of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape
of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting
fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The
Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish
forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost
as much as the silver fork it was eaten with. So it did, for all I know.
This course was dealt with in eager and devouring silence; and it was
only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual
remark: “They can’t do this anywhere but here.”
“Nowhere,” said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker
and nodding his venerable head a number of times. “Nowhere, assuredly,
except here. It was represented to me that at the Café Anglais--”
Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal
of his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. “It
was represented to me that the same could be done at the Café Anglais.
Nothing like it, sir,” he said, shaking his head ruthlessly, like a
hanging judge. “Nothing like it.”
“Overrated place,” said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look
of him) for the first time for some months.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, “it’s
jolly good for some things. You can’t beat it at--”
A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His
stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly
gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery
which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything
unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if
the inanimate world disobeyed--if a chair ran away from us.
The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every
face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time.
It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible
modern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genuine historic
aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty
bottles, and very probably ending with money. A genuine democrat would
have asked him, with comrade-like clearness of speech, what the devil he
was doing. But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man near
to them, either as a slave or as a friend. That something had gone wrong
with the servants was merely a dull, hot embarrassment. They did not
want to be brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent. They
wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over. It was over. The waiter,
after standing for some seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned round
and ran madly out of the room.
When he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was in
company with another waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulated
with southern fierceness. Then the first waiter went away, leaving the
second waiter, and reappeared with a third waiter. By the time a fourth
waiter had joined this hurried synod, Mr. Audley felt it necessary to
break the silence in the interests of Tact. He used a very loud cough,
instead of a presidential hammer, and said: “Splendid work young
Moocher’s doing in Burmah. Now, no other nation in the world could
have--”
A fifth waiter had sped towards him like an arrow, and was whispering in
his ear: “So sorry. Important! Might the proprietor speak to you?”
The chairman turned in disorder, and with a dazed stare saw Mr. Lever
coming towards them with his lumbering quickness. The gait of the good
proprietor was indeed his usual gait, but his face was by no means
usual. Generally it was a genial copper-brown; now it was a sickly
yellow.
“You will pardon me, Mr. Audley,” he said, with asthmatic
breathlessness. “I have great apprehensions. Your fish-plates, they are
cleared away with the knife and fork on them!”
“Well, I hope so,” said the chairman, with some warmth.
“You see him?” panted the excited hotel keeper; “you see the waiter who
took them away? You know him?”
“Know the waiter?” answered Mr. Audley indignantly. “Certainly not!”
Mr. Lever opened his hands with a gesture of agony. “I never send him,”
he said. “I know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take away
the plates, and he find them already away.”
Mr. Audley still looked rather too bewildered to be really the man the
empire wants; none of the company could say anything except the man of
wood--Colonel Pound--who seemed galvanised into an unnatural life. He
rose rigidly from his chair, leaving all the rest sitting, screwed his
eyeglass into his eye, and spoke in a raucous undertone as if he had
half-forgotten how to speak. “Do you mean,” he said, “that somebody has
stolen our silver fish service?”
The proprietor repeated the open-handed gesture with even greater
helplessness and in a flash all the men at the table were on their feet.
“Are all your waiters here?” demanded the colonel, in his low, harsh
accent.
“Yes; they’re all here. I noticed it myself,” cried the young duke,
pushing his boyish face into the inmost ring. “Always count ’em as I
come in; they look so queer standing up against the wall.”
“But surely one cannot exactly remember,” began Mr. Audley, with heavy
hesitation.
“I remember exactly, I tell you,” cried the duke excitedly. “There never
have been more than fifteen waiters at this place, and there were no
more than fifteen tonight, I’ll swear; no more and no less.”
The proprietor turned upon him, quaking in a kind of palsy of surprise.
“You say--you say,” he stammered, “that you see all my fifteen waiters?”
“As usual,” assented the duke. “What is the matter with that!”
“Nothing,” said Lever, with a deepening accent, “only you did not. For
one of zem is dead upstairs.”
There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. It may be
(so supernatural is the word death) that each of those idle men looked
for a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea. One of
them--the duke, I think--even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth:
“Is there anything we can do?”
“He has had a priest,” said the Jew, not untouched.
Then, as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their own position. For a
few weird seconds they had really felt as if the fifteenth waiter might
be the ghost of the dead man upstairs. They had been dumb under that
oppression, for ghosts were to them an embarrassment, like beggars. But
the remembrance of the silver broke the spell of the miraculous; broke
it abruptly and with a brutal reaction. The colonel flung over his chair
and strode to the door. “If there was a fifteenth man here, friends,” he
said, “that fifteenth fellow was a thief. Down at once to the front
and back doors and secure everything; then we’ll talk. The twenty-four
pearls of the club are worth recovering.”
Mr. Audley seemed at first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanly
to be in such a hurry about anything; but, seeing the duke dash down the
stairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more mature motion.
At the same instant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and declared that
he had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace of
the silver.
The crowd of diners and attendants that tumbled helter-skelter down the
passages divided into two groups. Most of the Fishermen followed the
proprietor to the front room to demand news of any exit. Colonel Pound,
with the chairman, the vice-president, and one or two others darted down
the corridor leading to the servants’ quarters, as the more likely line
of escape. As they did so they passed the dim alcove or cavern of
the cloak room, and saw a short, black-coated figure, presumably an
attendant, standing a little way back in the shadow of it.
“Hallo, there!” called out the duke. “Have you seen anyone pass?”
The short figure did not answer the question directly, but merely said:
“Perhaps I have got what you are looking for, gentlemen.”
They paused, wavering and wondering, while he quietly went to the back
of the cloak room, and came back with both hands full of shining silver,
which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a salesman. It took the
form of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives.
“You--you--” began the colonel, quite thrown off his balance at last.
Then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things: first, that
the short, black-clad man was dressed like a clergyman; and, second,
that the window of the room behind him was burst, as if someone had
passed violently through. “Valuable things to deposit in a cloak room,
aren’t they?” remarked the clergyman, with cheerful composure.
“Did--did you steal those things?” stammered Mr. Audley, with staring
eyes.
“If I did,” said the cleric pleasantly, “at least I am bringing them
back again.”
“But you didn’t,” said Colonel Pound, still staring at the broken
window.
“To make a clean breast of it, I didn’t,” said the other, with some
humour. And he seated himself quite gravely on a stool. “But you know
who did,” said the, colonel.
“I don’t know his real name,” said the priest placidly, “but I know
something of his fighting weight, and a great deal about his spiritual
difficulties. I formed the physical estimate when he was trying to
throttle me, and the moral estimate when he repented.”
“Oh, I say--repented!” cried young Chester, with a sort of crow of
laughter.
Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. “Odd, isn’t
it,” he said, “that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many
who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for
God or man? But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little upon
my province. If you doubt the penitence as a practical fact, there are
your knives and forks. You are The Twelve True Fishers, and there are
all your silver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men.”
“Did you catch this man?” asked the colonel, frowning.
Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. “Yes,” he said, “I