by G. K. Datlow
Elias allowed a gentle sigh, as of faint fatigue, to escape him.
“Priests,” he said, “belonged, as Marx has shown, to the feudal stage of economic development and are therefore no longer really any part of the problem. The part once played by the priest is now played by the capitalist expert and—”
“Yes,” interrupted the journalist, with his grim and ironic implacability, “and it’s about time you knew that some of them are jolly expert in playing it.” And without moving his own eyes from the bright but dead eyes of Elias, he told him of the threat of Stein.
“I was prepared for something of that sort,” said the smiling Elias without moving; “I may say quite prepared.”
“Dirty dogs!” exploded Jake. “If a poor man said a thing like that he’d go to penal servitude. But I reckon they’ll go somewhere worse before they guess. If they don’t go to hell, I don’t know where the hell they’ll go to—”
Home made a movement of protest, perhaps not so much at what the man was saying as at what he was going to say, and Elias cut the speech short with cold exactitude.
“It is quite unnecessary for us,” he said, looking at Byrne steadily through his spectacles, “to bandy threats with the other side. It is quite sufficient that their threats are quite ineffective so far as we are concerned. We also have made all our own arrangements, and some of them will not appear until they appear in motion. So far as we are concerned, an immediate rupture and an extreme trial of strength will be quite according to plan.”
As he spoke in a quite quiet and dignified fashion, something in his motionless yellow face and his great goggles started a faint fear creeping up the journalist’s spine. Halket’s savage face might seem to have a snarl in its very silhouette when seen sideways; but when seen face to face, the smouldering rage in his eyes had also something of anxiety, as if the ethical and economic riddle were after all a little too much for him; and Home seemed even more hanging on wires of worry and self-criticism. But about this third man with the goggles, who spoke so sensibly and simply, there was something uncanny; it was like a dead man talking at the table.
As Byrne went out with his message of defiance, and passed along the very narrow passage beside the grocery store, he found the end of it blocked by a strange though strangely familiar figure: short and sturdy, and looking rather quaint when seen in dark outline with its round head and wide hat.
“Father Brown!” cried the astonished journalist. “I think you must have come into the wrong door. You’re not likely to be in this little conspiracy.”
“Mine is a rather older conspiracy,” replied Father Brown smiling, “but it is quite a widespread conspiracy.”
“Well,” replied Byrne, “you can’t imagine any of the people here being within a thousand miles of your concern.”
“It is not always easy to tell,” replied the priest equably; “but as a matter of fact, there is one person here who’s within an inch of it.”
He disappeared into the dark entrance and the journalist went on his way very much puzzled. He was still more puzzled by a small incident that happened to him as he turned into the hotel to make his report to his capitalist clients. The bower of blossoms and bird-cages in which those crabbed old gentlemen were embosomed was approached by a flight of marble steps, flanked by gilded nymphs and tritons. Down these steps ran an active young man with black hair, a snub nose, and a flower in his buttonhole, who seized him and drew him aside before he could ascend the stair.
“I say,” whispered the young man, “I’m Potter—old Gid’s secretary, you know: now, between ourselves, there is a sort of a thunderbolt being forged, isn’t there, now?”
“I came to the conclusion,” replied Byrne cautiously, “that the Cyclops had something on the anvil. But always remember that the Cyclops is a giant, but he has only one eye. I think Bolshevism is—”
While he was speaking the secretary listened with a face that had a certain almost Mongolian immobility, despite the liveliness of his legs and his attire. But when Byrne said the word “Bolshevism,” the young man’s sharp eyes shifted and he said quickly:
“What has that—oh yes, that sort of thunderbolt; so sorry, my mistake. So easy to say anvil when you mean ice-box.”
With which the extraordinary young man disappeared down the steps and Byrne continued to mount them, more and more mystification clouding his mind.
He found the group of three augmented to four by the presence of a hatchet-faced person with very thin straw-coloured hair and a monocle, who appeared to be a sort of adviser to old Gallup, possibly his solicitor, though he was not definitely so called. His name was Nares, and the questions which he directed towards Byrne referred chiefly, for some reason or other, to the number of those probably enrolled in the revolutionary organization. Of this, as Byrne knew little, he said less; and the four men eventually rose from their seats, the last word being with the man who had been most silent.
“Thank you, Mr Byrne,” said Stein, folding up his eyeglasses. “It only remains to say that everything is ready; on that point I quite agree with Mr Elias. Tomorrow, before noon, the police will have arrested Mr Elias, on evidence I shall by then have put before them, and those three at least will be in jail before night. As you know, I attempted to avoid this course. I think that is all, gentlemen.”
But Mr Jacob P. Stein did not lay his formal information next day, for a reason that has often interrupted the activities of such industrious characters. He did not do it because he happened to be dead; and none of the rest of the programme was carried out, for a reason which Byrne found displayed in gigantic letters when he opened his morning paper: “Terrific Triple Murder: Three Millionaires Slain in One Night.” Other exclamatory phrases followed in smaller letters, only about four times the size of normal type, which insisted on the special feature of the mystery: the fact that the three men had been killed not only simultaneously but in three widely separated places—Stein in his artistic and luxurious country seat a hundred miles inland, Wise outside the little bungalow on the coast where he lived on sea breezes and the simple life, and old Gallup in a thicket just outside the lodge-gates of his great house at the other end of the county. In all three cases there could be no doubt about the scenes of violence that had preceded death, though the actual body of Gallup was not found till the second day, where it hung, huge and horrible, amid the broken forks and branches of the little wood into which its weight had crashed, like a bison rushing on the spears: while Wise had clearly been flung over the cliff into the sea, not without a struggle, for his scraping and slipping footprints could still be traced upon the very brink. But the first signal of the tragedy had been the sight of his large limp straw hat, floating far out upon the waves and conspicuous from the cliffs above. Stein’s body also had at first eluded search, till a faint trail of blood led the investigators to a bath on the ancient Roman model he had been constructing in his garden; for he had been a man of an experimental turn of mind with a taste for antiquities.
Whatever he might think, Byrne was bound to admit that there was no legal evidence against anybody as things stood. A motive for murder was not enough. Even a moral aptitude for murder was not enough. And he could not conceive that pale young pacifist, Henry Home, butchering another man by brutal violence, though he might imagine the blaspheming Jake and even the sneering Jew as capable of anything. The police, and the man who appeared to be assisting them (who was no other than the rather mysterious man with the monocle, who had been introduced as Mr Nares), realized the position quite as clearly as the journalist.
They knew that at the moment the Bolshevist conspirators could not be prosecuted and convicted, and that it would be a highly sensational failure if they were prosecuted and acquitted. Nares started with an artful candour by calling them in some sense to the council, inviting them to a private conclave and asking them to give their opinions freely in the interests of humanity. He had started his investigations at the nearest scene of tragedy, the bungalow by t
he sea; and Byrne was permitted to be present at a curious scene, which was at once a peaceful parley of diplomatists and a veiled inquisition or putting of suspects to the question. Rather to Byrne’s surprise the incongruous company, seated round the table in the seaside bungalow, included the dumpy figure and owlish head of Father Brown, though his connexion with the affair did not appear until some time afterwards. The presence of young Potter, the dead man’s secretary, was more natural; yet somehow his demeanour was not quite so natural. He alone was quite familiar with their meeting-place, and was even in some grim sense their host; yet he offered little assistance or information. His round snub-nosed face wore an expression more like sulks than sorrow.
Jake Halket as usual talked most; and a man of his type could not be expected to keep up the polite fiction that he and his friends were not accused. Young Home, in his more refined way, tried to restrain him when he began to abuse the men who had been murdered; but Jake was always quite as ready to roar down his friends as his foes. In a spout of blasphemies he relieved his soul of a very unofficial obituary notice of the late Gideon Wise. Elias sat quite still and apparently indifferent behind those spectacles that masked his eyes.
“It would be useless, I suppose,” said Nares coldly, “to tell you that your remarks are indecent. It may affect you more if I tell you they are imprudent. You practically admit that you hated the dead man.”
“Going to put me in quod for that, are you?” jeered the demagogue. “All right. Only you’ll have to build a prison for a million men if you’re going to jail all the poor people who had reason to hate Gid Wise. And you know it’s God truth as well as I do.”
Nares was silent; and nobody spoke until Elias interposed with his clear though faintly lisping drawl.
“This appears to me to be a highly unprofitable discussion on both sides,” he said. “You have summoned us here either to ask us for information or to subject us to cross-examination. If you trust us, we tell you we have no information. If you distrust us, you must tell us of what we are accused, or have the politeness to keep the fact to yourselves. Nobody has been able to suggest the faintest trace of evidence connecting any one of us with these tragedies any more than with the murder of Julius Caesar. You dare not arrest us, and you will not believe us. What is the good of our remaining here?”
And he rose, calmly buttoning his coat, his friends following his example. As they went towards the door, young Home turned back and faced the investigators for a moment with his pale fanatical face.
“I wish to say,” he said, “that I went to a filthy jail during the whole war because I would not consent to kill a man.”
With that they passed out, and the members of the group remaining looked grimly at each other.
“I hardly think,” said Father Brown, “that we remain entirely victorious, in spite of the retreat.”
“I don’t mind anything,” said Nares, “except being bullyragged by that blasphemous blackguard Halket. Home is a gentleman, anyhow. But whatever they say, I am dead certain they know; they are in it, or most of them are. They almost admitted it. They taunted us with not being able to prove we’re right, much more than with being wrong. What do you think, Father Brown?”
The person addressed looked across at Nares with a gaze almost disconcertingly mild and meditative.
“It is quite true,” he said, “that I have formed an idea that one particular person knows more than he has told us. But I think it would be well if I did not mention his name just yet.”
Nares’ eyeglass dropped from his eye, and he looked up sharply. “This is unofficial so far,” he said. “I suppose you know that at a later stage if you withhold information, your position may be serious.”
“My position is simple,” replied the priest. “I am here to look after the legitimate interests of my friend Halket. I think it will be in his interest, under the circumstances, if I tell you I think he will before long sever his connexion with this organization, and cease to be a Socialist in that sense. I have every reason to believe he will probably end as a Catholic.”
“Halket!” exploded the other incredulously. “Why he curses priests from morning till night!”
“I don’t think you quite understand that kind of man,” said Father Brown mildly. “He curses priests for failing (in his opinion) to defy the whole world for justice. Why should he expect them to defy the whole world for justice, unless he had already begun to assume they were—what they are? But we haven’t met here to discuss the psychology of conversion. I only mention this because it may simplify your task—perhaps narrow your search.”
“If it is true, it would jolly well narrow it to that narrow-faced rascal Elias—and I shouldn’t wonder, for a more creepy, coldblooded, sneering devil I never saw.”
Father Brown sighed. “He always reminded me of poor Stein,” he said, “in fact I think he was some relation.”
“Oh, I say,” began Nares, when his protest was cut short by the door being flung open, revealing once more the long loose figure and pale face of young Home; but it seemed as if he had not merely his natural, but a new and unnatural pallor.
“Hullo,” cried Nares, putting up his single eyeglass, “why have you come back again?”
Home crossed the room rather shakily without a word and sat down heavily in a chair. Then he said, as in a sort of daze: “I missed the others… I lost my way. I thought I’d better come back.”
The remains of evening refreshments were on the table, and Henry Home, that lifelong Prohibitionist, poured himself out a wine-glassful of liqueur brandy and drank it at a gulp. “You seem upset,” said Father Brown.
Home had put his hands to his forehead and spoke as from under the shadow of it: he seemed to be speaking to the priest only, in a low voice.
“I may as well tell you. I have seen a ghost.”
“A ghost!” repeated Nares in astonishment. “Whose ghost?”
“The ghost of Gideon Wise, the master of this house,” answered Home more firmly, “standing over the abyss into which he fell.”
“Oh, nonsense!” said Nares; “no sensible person believes in ghosts.”
“That is hardly exact,” said Father Brown, smiling a little. “There is really quite as good evidence for many ghosts as there is for most crimes.”
“Well, it’s my business to run after the criminals,” said Nares rather roughly, “and I will leave other people to run away from the ghosts. If anybody at this time of day chooses to be frightened of ghosts it’s his affair.”
“I didn’t say I was frightened of them, though I dare say I might be,” said Father Brown. “Nobody knows till he tries. I said I believed in them, at any rate, enough to want to hear more about this one. What, exactly, did you see, Mr Home?”
“It was over there on the brink of those crumbling cliffs; you know there is a sort of gap or crevice just about the spot where he was thrown over. The others had gone on ahead, and I was crossing the moor towards the path along the cliff. I often went that way, for I liked seeing the high seas dash up against the crags. I thought little of it to-night, beyond wondering that the sea should be so rough on this sort of clear moonlight night. I could see the pale crests of spray appear and disappear as the great waves leapt up at the headland. Thrice I saw the momentary flash of foam in the moonlight and then I saw something inscrutable. The fourth flash of the silver foam seemed to be fixed in the sky. It did not fall; I waited with insane intensity for it to fall. I fancied I was mad, and that time had been for me mysteriously arrested or prolonged. Then I drew nearer, and then I think I screamed aloud. For that suspended spray, like unfallen snowflakes, had fitted together into a face and a figure, white as the shining leper in a legend, and terrible as the fixed lightning.”
“And it was Gideon Wise, you say?”
Home nodded without speech. There was a silence broken abruptly by Nares rising to his feet; so abruptly indeed that he knocked a chair over.
“Oh, this is all nonsense,” he said, “b
ut we’d better go out and see.”
“I won’t go,” said Home with sudden violence. “I’ll never walk by that path again.”
“I think we must all walk by that path tonight,” said the priest gravely; “though I will never deny it has been a perilous path…to more people than one.”
“I will not… God, how you all goad me,” cried Home, and his eyes began to roll in a strange fashion. He had risen with the rest, but he made no motion towards the door.
“Mr Home,” said Nares firmly, “I am a police-officer, and this house, though you may not know it, is surrounded by the police. I have tried to investigate in a friendly fashion, but I must investigate everything, even anything so silly as a ghost. I must ask you to take me to the spot you speak of.”
There was another silence while Home stood heaving and panting as with indescribable fears. Then he suddenly sat down on his chair again and said with an entirely new and much more composed voice:
“I can’t do it. You may just as well know why. You will know it sooner or later. I killed him.”
For an instant there was the stillness of a house struck by a thunderbolt and full of corpses. Then the voice of Father Brown sounded in that enormous silence strangely small like the squeak of a mouse.
“Did you kill him deliberately?” he asked.
“How can one answer such a question?” answered the man in the chair, moodily gnawing his finger. “I was mad, I suppose. He was intolerable and insolent, I know. I was on his land and I believe he struck me; anyhow, we came to a grapple and he went over the cliff. When I was well away from the scene it burst upon me that I had done a crime that cut me off from men; the brand of Cain throbbed on my brow and my very brain; I realized for the first time that I had indeed killed a man. I knew I should have to confess it sooner or later.” He sat suddenly erect in his chair. “But I will say nothing against anybody else. It is no use asking me about plots or accomplices—I will say nothing.”