The wisdom of Father Brown
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 gipsies. 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 gipsies
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 gipsies, 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 light-house.”
“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 frustrated fire was extinguished; and then
refused to linger, though he actually heard young Pendragon, escorted by
an enthusiastic crowd, come tramping up the river bank; 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.
NINE -- The God of the Gongs
IT was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when
the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver.
If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms,
it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the
monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals
by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that
looked more ugly than a lamp-post. A light fall of snow had half-melted
into a few strips, also looking leaden rather than silver, when it had
been fixed again by the seal of frost; no fresh snow had fallen, but a
ribbon of the old snow ran along the very margin of the coast, so as to
parallel the pale ribbon of the foam.
The line of the sea looked frozen in the very vividness of its
violet-blue, like the vein of a frozen finger. For miles and miles,
forward and back, there was no breathing soul, save two pedestrians,
walking at a brisk pace, though one had much longer legs and took much
longer strides than the other.
It did not seem a very appropriate place or time for a holiday, but
Father Brown had few holidays, and had to take them when he could, and
he always preferred, if possible, to take them in company with his old
friend Flambeau, ex-criminal and ex-detective. The priest had had
a fancy for visiting his old parish at Cobhole, and was going
north-eastward along the coast.
After walking a mile or two farther, they found that the shore was
beginning to be formally embanked, so as to form something like a
parade; the ugly lamp-posts became less few and far between and more
ornamental, though quite equally ugly. Half a mile farther on Father
Brown was puzzled first by little labyrinths of flowerless flower-pots,
covered with the low, flat, quiet-coloured plants that look less like
a garden than a tessellated pavement, between weak curly paths studded
with seats with curly backs. He faintly sniffed the atmosphere of a
certain sort of seaside town that he did not specially care about, and,
looking ahead along the parade by the sea, he saw something that put
the matter beyond a doubt. In the grey distance the big bandstand of a
watering-place stood up like a giant mushroom with six legs.
“I suppose,” said Father Brown, turning up his coat-collar and drawing
a woollen scarf rather closer round his neck, “that we are approaching a
pleasure resort.”
“I fear,” answered Flambeau, “a pleasure resort to which few people just
now have the pleasure of resorting. They try to revive these places in
the winter, but it never succeeds except with Brighton and the old ones.
This must be Seawood, I think--Lord Pooley’s experiment; he had the
Sicilian Singers down at Christmas, and there’s talk about holding one
of the great glove-fights here. But they’ll have to chuck the rotten
place into the sea; it’s as dreary as a lost railway-carriage.”
They had come under the big bandstand, and the priest was looking up at
it with a curiosity that had something rather odd about it, his head
a little on one side, like a bird’s. It was the conventional, rather
tawdry kind of erection for its purpose: a flattened dome or canopy,
gilt here and there, and lifted on six slender pillars of painted wood,
the whole being raised about five feet above the parade on a round
wooden platform like a drum. But there was something fantastic about
the snow combined with something artificial about the gold that haunted
Flambeau as well as his friend with some association he could not
capture, but which he knew was at once artistic and alien.
“I’ve got it,” he said at last. “It’s Japanese. It’s like those fanciful
Japanese prints, where the snow on the mountain looks like sugar, and
the gilt on the pagodas is like gilt on gingerbread. It looks just like
a little pagan temple.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown. “Let’s have a look at the god.” And with an
agility hardly to be expected of him, he hopped up on to the raised
platform.
“Oh, very well,” said Flambeau, laughing; and the next instant his own
towering figure was visible on that quaint elevation.
Slight as was the difference of height, it gave in those level wastes a
sense of seeing yet farther and farther across land and sea. Inland the
little wintry gardens faded into a confused grey copse; beyond that, in
the distance, were long low barns of a lonely farmhouse, and beyond that
nothing but the long East Anglian plains. Seawards there was no sail
or sign of life save a few seagulls: and even they looked like the last
snowflakes, and seemed to float rather than fly.
Flambeau turned abruptly at an exclamation behind him. It seemed to come
from lower down than might have been expected, and to be addressed to
his heels rather than his head. He instantly held out his hand, but he
could hardly help laughing at what he saw. For some reason or other the
platform had given way under Father Brown, and the unfortunate little
man had dropped through to the level of the parade. He was just tall
enough, or short enough, for his head alone to stick out of the hole in
the broken wood, looking like St John the Baptist’s head on a charger.
The face wore a disconcerted expression, as did, perhaps, that of St
John the Baptist.
In a moment he began to laugh a little. “This wood must be rotten,” said
Flambeau. “Though it seems odd it should bear me, and you go through the
weak place. Let me help you out.”
But the little priest was looking rather curiously at the corners and
edges of the wood alleged to be rotten, and there was a sort of trouble
on his brow.
“Come along,” cried Flambeau impatiently, still with his big brown hand
extended. “Don’t you want to get out?”
The priest was holding a splinter of the broken wood between his finger
and thumb, and did not immediately reply. At last he said thoughtfully:
“Want to get out? Why, no. I rather think I want to get in.” And he