The innocence of Father Brown
humbler humped shoulders of the Abbey, for the short man was in clerical
dress. The official description of the tall man was M. Hercule Flambeau,
private detective, and he was going to his new offices in a new pile of
flats facing the Abbey entrance. The official description of the short
man was the Reverend J. Brown, attached to St. Francis Xavier’s Church,
Camberwell, and he was coming from a Camberwell deathbed to see the new
offices of his friend.
The building was American in its sky-scraping altitude, and American
also in the oiled elaboration of its machinery of telephones and lifts.
But it was barely finished and still understaffed; only three tenants
had moved in; the office just above Flambeau was occupied, as also
was the office just below him; the two floors above that and the three
floors below were entirely bare. But the first glance at the new tower
of flats caught something much more arresting. Save for a few relics of
scaffolding, the one glaring object was erected outside the office
just above Flambeau’s. It was an enormous gilt effigy of the human eye,
surrounded with rays of gold, and taking up as much room as two or three
of the office windows.
“What on earth is that?” asked Father Brown, and stood still. “Oh, a
new religion,” said Flambeau, laughing; “one of those new religions that
forgive your sins by saying you never had any. Rather like Christian
Science, I should think. The fact is that a fellow calling himself Kalon
(I don’t know what his name is, except that it can’t be that) has taken
the flat just above me. I have two lady typewriters underneath me, and
this enthusiastic old humbug on top. He calls himself the New Priest of
Apollo, and he worships the sun.”
“Let him look out,” said Father Brown. “The sun was the cruellest of all
the gods. But what does that monstrous eye mean?”
“As I understand it, it is a theory of theirs,” answered Flambeau, “that
a man can endure anything if his mind is quite steady. Their two great
symbols are the sun and the open eye; for they say that if a man were
really healthy he could stare at the sun.”
“If a man were really healthy,” said Father Brown, “he would not bother
to stare at it.”
“Well, that’s all I can tell you about the new religion,” went on
Flambeau carelessly. “It claims, of course, that it can cure all
physical diseases.”
“Can it cure the one spiritual disease?” asked Father Brown, with a
serious curiosity.
“And what is the one spiritual disease?” asked Flambeau, smiling.
“Oh, thinking one is quite well,” said his friend.
Flambeau was more interested in the quiet little office below him than
in the flamboyant temple above. He was a lucid Southerner, incapable
of conceiving himself as anything but a Catholic or an atheist; and new
religions of a bright and pallid sort were not much in his line. But
humanity was always in his line, especially when it was good-looking;
moreover, the ladies downstairs were characters in their way. The office
was kept by two sisters, both slight and dark, one of them tall and
striking. She had a dark, eager and aquiline profile, and was one of
those women whom one always thinks of in profile, as of the clean-cut
edge of some weapon. She seemed to cleave her way through life. She had
eyes of startling brilliancy, but it was the brilliancy of steel rather
than of diamonds; and her straight, slim figure was a shade too stiff
for its grace. Her younger sister was like her shortened shadow,
a little greyer, paler, and more insignificant. They both wore a
business-like black, with little masculine cuffs and collars. There are
thousands of such curt, strenuous ladies in the offices of London,
but the interest of these lay rather in their real than their apparent
position.
For Pauline Stacey, the elder, was actually the heiress of a crest
and half a county, as well as great wealth; she had been brought up in
castles and gardens, before a frigid fierceness (peculiar to the modern
woman) had driven her to what she considered a harsher and a higher
existence. She had not, indeed, surrendered her money; in that there
would have been a romantic or monkish abandon quite alien to her
masterful utilitarianism. She held her wealth, she would say, for use
upon practical social objects. Part of it she had put into her business,
the nucleus of a model typewriting emporium; part of it was distributed
in various leagues and causes for the advancement of such work among
women. How far Joan, her sister and partner, shared this slightly
prosaic idealism no one could be very sure. But she followed her leader
with a dog-like affection which was somehow more attractive, with its
touch of tragedy, than the hard, high spirits of the elder. For Pauline
Stacey had nothing to say to tragedy; she was understood to deny its
existence.
Her rigid rapidity and cold impatience had amused Flambeau very much on
the first occasion of his entering the flats. He had lingered outside
the lift in the entrance hall waiting for the lift-boy, who generally
conducts strangers to the various floors. But this bright-eyed falcon
of a girl had openly refused to endure such official delay. She said
sharply that she knew all about the lift, and was not dependent on
boys--or men either. Though her flat was only three floors above, she
managed in the few seconds of ascent to give Flambeau a great many of
her fundamental views in an off-hand manner; they were to the general
effect that she was a modern working woman and loved modern working
machinery. Her bright black eyes blazed with abstract anger against
those who rebuke mechanic science and ask for the return of romance.
Everyone, she said, ought to be able to manage machines, just as she
could manage the lift. She seemed almost to resent the fact of Flambeau
opening the lift-door for her; and that gentleman went up to his own
apartments smiling with somewhat mingled feelings at the memory of such
spit-fire self-dependence.
She certainly had a temper, of a snappy, practical sort; the gestures of
her thin, elegant hands were abrupt or even destructive.
Once Flambeau entered her office on some typewriting business, and found
she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the
middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids
of an ethical tirade about the “sickly medical notions” and the morbid
admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister
to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She
asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass
eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.
Flambeau, quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from
asking Miss Pauline (with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles
was a more morbid sign of weakness than a lift, and why, if science
might help us in the one effort, it might not help us in the other.
“That is so different,” said Pauline Stacey, loftily. “Batteries and
motors and all those things are marks of the force of man--yes, Mr.
Flambeau, and the force of woman, too! We shall take our turn at these
great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and
splendid--that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the
doctors sell--why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick
on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But I
was free-born, Mr. Flambeau! People only think they need these things
because they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power
and courage, just as the silly nurses tell children not to stare at the
sun, and so they can’t do it without blinking. But why among the stars
should there be one star I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I
will open my eyes and stare at him whenever I choose.”
“Your eyes,” said Flambeau, with a foreign bow, “will dazzle the sun.”
He took pleasure in complimenting this strange stiff beauty, partly
because it threw her a little off her balance. But as he went upstairs
to his floor he drew a deep breath and whistled, saying to himself: “So
she has got into the hands of that conjurer upstairs with his golden
eye.” For, little as he knew or cared about the new religion of Kalon,
he had heard of his special notion about sun-gazing.
He soon discovered that the spiritual bond between the floors above and
below him was close and increasing. The man who called himself Kalon was
a magnificent creature, worthy, in a physical sense, to be the pontiff
of Apollo. He was nearly as tall even as Flambeau, and very much better
looking, with a golden beard, strong blue eyes, and a mane flung back
like a lion’s. In structure he was the blonde beast of Nietzsche,
but all this animal beauty was heightened, brightened and softened by
genuine intellect and spirituality. If he looked like one of the great
Saxon kings, he looked like one of the kings that were also saints. And
this despite the cockney incongruity of his surroundings; the fact that
he had an office half-way up a building in Victoria Street; that the
clerk (a commonplace youth in cuffs and collars) sat in the outer room,
between him and the corridor; that his name was on a brass plate,
and the gilt emblem of his creed hung above his street, like the
advertisement of an oculist. All this vulgarity could not take away from
the man called Kalon the vivid oppression and inspiration that came
from his soul and body. When all was said, a man in the presence of
this quack did feel in the presence of a great man. Even in the loose
jacket-suit of linen that he wore as a workshop dress in his office he
was a fascinating and formidable figure; and when robed in the white
vestments and crowned with the golden circlet, in which he daily saluted
the sun, he really looked so splendid that the laughter of the street
people sometimes died suddenly on their lips. For three times in the day
the new sun-worshipper went out on his little balcony, in the face
of all Westminster, to say some litany to his shining lord: once at
daybreak, once at sunset, and once at the shock of noon. And it
was while the shock of noon still shook faintly from the towers of
Parliament and parish church that Father Brown, the friend of Flambeau,
first looked up and saw the white priest of Apollo.
Flambeau had seen quite enough of these daily salutations of Phoebus,
and plunged into the porch of the tall building without even looking
for his clerical friend to follow. But Father Brown, whether from a
professional interest in ritual or a strong individual interest in
tomfoolery, stopped and stared up at the balcony of the sun-worshipper,
just as he might have stopped and stared up at a Punch and Judy. Kalon
the Prophet was already erect, with argent garments and uplifted hands,
and the sound of his strangely penetrating voice could be heard all the
way down the busy street uttering his solar litany. He was already
in the middle of it; his eyes were fixed upon the flaming disc. It is
doubtful if he saw anything or anyone on this earth; it is substantially
certain that he did not see a stunted, round-faced priest who, in the
crowd below, looked up at him with blinking eyes. That was perhaps the
most startling difference between even these two far divided men. Father
Brown could not look at anything without blinking; but the priest of
Apollo could look on the blaze at noon without a quiver of the eyelid.
“O sun,” cried the prophet, “O star that art too great to be allowed
among the stars! O fountain that flowest quietly in that secret spot
that is called space. White Father of all white unwearied things, white
flames and white flowers and white peaks. Father, who art more innocent
than all thy most innocent and quiet children; primal purity, into the