The wisdom of Father Brown
dived into the darkness under the wooden floor so abruptly as to knock
off his big curved clerical hat and leave it lying on the boards above,
without any clerical head in it.
Flambeau looked once more inland and out to sea, and once more could see
nothing but seas as wintry as the snow, and snows as level as the sea.
There came a scurrying noise behind him, and the little priest came
scrambling out of the hole faster than he had fallen in. His face was no
longer disconcerted, but rather resolute, and, perhaps only through the
reflections of the snow, a trifle paler than usual.
“Well?” asked his tall friend. “Have you found the god of the temple?”
“No,” answered Father Brown. “I have found what was sometimes more
important. The Sacrifice.”
“What the devil do you mean?” cried Flambeau, quite alarmed.
Father Brown did not answer. He was staring, with a knot in his
forehead, at the landscape; and he suddenly pointed at it. “What’s that
house over there?” he asked.
Following his finger, Flambeau saw for the first time the corners of a
building nearer than the farmhouse, but screened for the most part with
a fringe of trees. It was not a large building, and stood well back from
the shore--, but a glint of ornament on it suggested that it was part
of the same watering-place scheme of decoration as the bandstand, the
little gardens and the curly-backed iron seats.
Father Brown jumped off the bandstand, his friend following; and as they
walked in the direction indicated the trees fell away to right and
left, and they saw a small, rather flashy hotel, such as is common in
resorts--the hotel of the Saloon Bar rather than the Bar Parlour. Almost
the whole frontage was of gilt plaster and figured glass, and between
that grey seascape and the grey, witch-like trees, its gimcrack quality
had something spectral in its melancholy. They both felt vaguely that
if any food or drink were offered at such a hostelry, it would be the
paste-board ham and empty mug of the pantomime.
In this, however, they were not altogether confirmed. As they drew
nearer and nearer to the place they saw in front of the buffet, which
was apparently closed, one of the iron garden-seats with curly backs
that had adorned the gardens, but much longer, running almost the whole
length of the frontage. Presumably, it was placed so that visitors might
sit there and look at the sea, but one hardly expected to find anyone
doing it in such weather.
Nevertheless, just in front of the extreme end of the iron seat stood
a small round restaurant table, and on this stood a small bottle of
Chablis and a plate of almonds and raisins. Behind the table and on the
seat sat a dark-haired young man, bareheaded, and gazing at the sea in a
state of almost astonishing immobility.
But though he might have been a waxwork when they were within four yards
of him, he jumped up like a jack-in-the-box when they came within three,
and said in a deferential, though not undignified, manner: “Will you
step inside, gentlemen? I have no staff at present, but I can get you
anything simple myself.”
“Much obliged,” said Flambeau. “So you are the proprietor?”
“Yes,” said the dark man, dropping back a little into his motionless
manner. “My waiters are all Italians, you see, and I thought it only
fair they should see their countryman beat the black, if he really can
do it. You know the great fight between Malvoli and Nigger Ned is coming
off after all?”
“I’m afraid we can’t wait to trouble your hospitality seriously,” said
Father Brown. “But my friend would be glad of a glass of sherry, I’m
sure, to keep out the cold and drink success to the Latin champion.”
Flambeau did not understand the sherry, but he did not object to it in
the least. He could only say amiably: “Oh, thank you very much.”
“Sherry, sir--certainly,” said their host, turning to his hostel.
“Excuse me if I detain you a few minutes. As I told you, I have no
staff--” And he went towards the black windows of his shuttered and
unlighted inn.
“Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” began Flambeau, but the man turned to
reassure him.
“I have the keys,” he said. “I could find my way in the dark.”
“I didn’t mean--” began Father Brown.
He was interrupted by a bellowing human voice that came out of the
bowels of the uninhabited hotel. It thundered some foreign name loudly
but inaudibly, and the hotel proprietor moved more sharply towards it
than he had done for Flambeau’s sherry. As instant evidence proved, the
proprietor had told, then and after, nothing but the literal truth. But
both Flambeau and Father Brown have often confessed that, in all their
(often outrageous) adventures, nothing had so chilled their blood as
that voice of an ogre, sounding suddenly out of a silent and empty inn.
“My cook!” cried the proprietor hastily. “I had forgotten my cook. He
will be starting presently. Sherry, sir?”
And, sure enough, there appeared in the doorway a big white bulk with
white cap and white apron, as befits a cook, but with the needless
emphasis of a black face. Flambeau had often heard that negroes made
good cooks. But somehow something in the contrast of colour and caste
increased his surprise that the hotel proprietor should answer the
call of the cook, and not the cook the call of the proprietor. But he
reflected that head cooks are proverbially arrogant; and, besides, the
host had come back with the sherry, and that was the great thing.
“I rather wonder,” said Father Brown, “that there are so few people
about the beach, when this big fight is coming on after all. We only met
one man for miles.”
The hotel proprietor shrugged his shoulders. “They come from the other
end of the town, you see--from the station, three miles from here. They
are only interested in the sport, and will stop in hotels for the night
only. After all, it is hardly weather for basking on the shore.”
“Or on the seat,” said Flambeau, and pointed to the little table.
“I have to keep a look-out,” said the man with the motionless face. He
was a quiet, well-featured fellow, rather sallow; his dark clothes had
nothing distinctive about them, except that his black necktie was worn
rather high, like a stock, and secured by a gold pin with some grotesque
head to it. Nor was there anything notable in the face, except something
that was probably a mere nervous trick--a habit of opening one eye
more narrowly than the other, giving the impression that the other was
larger, or was, perhaps, artificial.
The silence that ensued was broken by their host saying quietly:
“Whereabouts did you meet the one man on your march?”
“Curiously enough,” answered the priest, “close by here--just by that
bandstand.”
Flambeau, who had sat on the long iron seat to finish his sherry, put it
down and rose to his feet, staring at his friend in amazement. He opened
his mouth to speak, and then shut it again.
“Curious,” said the dark-haired man thoughtfully. “What was he like?”
“It was rather dark when I saw him,” began Father Brown, “but he was--”
As has been said, the hotel-keeper can be proved to have told the
precise truth. His phrase that the cook was starting presently was
fulfilled to the letter, for the cook came out, pulling his gloves on,
even as they spoke.
But he was a very different figure from the confused mass of white and
black that had appeared for an instant in the doorway. He was buttoned
and buckled up to his bursting eyeballs in the most brilliant fashion.
A tall black hat was tilted on his broad black head--a hat of the sort
that the French wit has compared to eight mirrors. But somehow the black
man was like the black hat. He also was black, and yet his glossy skin
flung back the light at eight angles or more. It is needless to say
that he wore white spats and a white slip inside his waistcoat. The red
flower stood up in his buttonhole aggressively, as if it had suddenly
grown there. And in the way he carried his cane in one hand and his
cigar in the other there was a certain attitude--an attitude we must
always remember when we talk of racial prejudices: something innocent
and insolent--the cake walk.
“Sometimes,” said Flambeau, looking after him, “I’m not surprised that
they lynch them.”
“I am never surprised,” said Father Brown, “at any work of hell. But as
I was saying,” he resumed, as the negro, still ostentatiously pulling on
his yellow gloves, betook himself briskly towards the watering-place,
a queer music-hall figure against that grey and frosty scene--“as I was
saying, I couldn’t describe the man very minutely, but he had a flourish
and old-fashioned whiskers and moustachios, dark or dyed, as in the
pictures of foreign financiers, round his neck was wrapped a long purple
scarf that thrashed out in the wind as he walked. It was fixed at the
throat rather in the way that nurses fix children’s comforters with a
safety-pin. Only this,” added the priest, gazing placidly out to sea,
“was not a safety-pin.”
The man sitting on the long iron bench was also gazing placidly out to
sea. Now he was once more in repose. Flambeau felt quite certain that
one of his eyes was naturally larger than the other. Both were now well
opened, and he could almost fancy the left eye grew larger as he gazed.
“It was a very long gold pin, and had the carved head of a monkey or
some such thing,” continued the cleric; “and it was fixed in a rather
odd way--he wore pince-nez and a broad black--”
The motionless man continued to gaze at the sea, and the eyes in his
head might have belonged to two different men. Then he made a movement
of blinding swiftness.
Father Brown had his back to him, and in that flash might have fallen
dead on his face. Flambeau had no weapon, but his large brown hands were
resting on the end of the long iron seat. His shoulders abruptly altered
their shape, and he heaved the whole huge thing high over his head, like
a headsman’s axe about to fall. The mere height of the thing, as he held
it vertical, looked like a long iron ladder by which he was inviting men
to climb towards the stars. But the long shadow, in the level evening
light, looked like a giant brandishing the Eiffel Tower. It was the
shock of that shadow, before the shock of the iron crash, that made the
stranger quail and dodge, and then dart into his inn, leaving the flat
and shining dagger he had dropped exactly where it had fallen.
“We must get away from here instantly,” cried Flambeau, flinging the
huge seat away with furious indifference on the beach. He caught the
little priest by the elbow and ran him down a grey perspective of barren
back garden, at the end of which there was a closed back garden door.
Flambeau bent over it an instant in violent silence, and then said: “The
door is locked.”
As he spoke a black feather from one of the ornamental firs fell,
brushing the brim of his hat. It startled him more than the small and
distant detonation that had come just before. Then came another distant
detonation, and the door he was trying to open shook under the bullet
buried in it. Flambeau’s shoulders again filled out and altered
suddenly. Three hinges and a lock burst at the same instant, and he went
out into the empty path behind, carrying the great garden door with him,
as Samson carried the gates of Gaza.
Then he flung the garden door over the garden wall, just as a third shot
picked up a spurt of snow and dust behind his heel. Without ceremony he
snatched up the little priest, slung him astraddle on his shoulders, and
went racing towards Seawood as fast as his long legs could carry him.
It was not until nearly two miles farther on that he set his small
companion down. It had hardly been a dignified escape, in spite of the
classic model of Anchises, but Father Brown’s face only wore a broad
grin.