by G. K. Datlow
Hypatia Potter, nee Hard, was one of those people to whom the word “radiant” really does apply definitely and derivatively. That is, she allowed what the papers called her Personality to go out from her in rays. She would have been equally beautiful, and to some tastes more attractive, if she had been self-contained; but she had always been taught to believe that self-containment was only selfishness. She would have said that she had lost Self in Service; it would perhaps be truer to say that she had asserted Self in Service; but she was quite in good faith about the service. Therefore her outstanding starry blue eyes really struck outwards, as in the old metaphor that made eyes like Cupid’s darts, killing at a distance; but with an abstract conception of conquest beyond any mere coquetry. Her pale fair hair, though arranged in a saintly halo, had a look of almost electric radiation. And when she understood that the stranger before her was Mr Agar Rock, of the Minneapolis Meteor, her eyes took on themselves the range of long searchlights, sweeping the horizon of the States.
But in this the lady was mistaken; as she sometimes was. For Agar Rock was not Agar Rock of the Minneapolis Meteor. He was at that moment merely Agar Rock; there had surged up in him a great and sincere moral impulsion, beyond the coarse courage of the interviewer. A feeling profoundly mixed of a chivalrous and national sensibility to beauty, with an instant itch for moral action of some definite sort, which was also national, nerved him to face a great scene; and to deliver a noble insult. He remembered the original Hypatia, the beautiful Neo-Platonist, and how he had been thrilled as a boy by Kingsley’s romance in which the young monk denounces her for harlotries and idolatries. He confronted her with an iron gravity and said:
“If you’ll pardon me. Madam, I should like to have a word with you in private.”
“Well,” she said, sweeping the room with her splendid gaze, “I don’t know whether you consider this place private.”
Rock also gazed round the room and could see no sign of life less vegetable than the orange trees, except what looked like a large black mushroom, which he recognized as the hat of some native priest or other, stolidly smoking a black local cigar, and otherwise as stagnant as any vegetable. He looked for a moment at the heavy, expressionless features, noting the rudeness of that peasant type from which priests so often come, in Latin and especially Latin-American countries; and lowered his voice a little as he laughed.
“I don’t imagine that Mexican padre knows our language,” he said. “Catch those lumps of laziness learning any language but their own. Oh, I can’t swear he’s a Mexican; he might be anything; mongrel Indian or nigger, I suppose. But I’ll answer for it he’s not an American. Our ministries don’t produce that debased type.”
“As a matter of fact,” said the debased type, removing his black cigar, “I’m English and my name is Brown. But pray let me leave you if you wish to be private.”
“If you’re English,” said Rock warmly, “you ought to have some normal Nordic instinct for protesting against all this nonsense. Well, it’s enough to say now that I’m in a position to testify that there’s a pretty dangerous fellow hanging round this place; a tall fellow in a cloak, like those pictures of crazy poets.”
“Well, you can’t go much by that,” said the priest mildly; “a lot of people round here use those cloaks, because the chill strikes very suddenly after sunset.”
Rock darted a dark and doubtful glance at him; as if suspecting some evasion in the interests of all that was symbolized to him by mushroom hats and moonshine. “It wasn’t only the cloak,” he growled, “though it was partly the way he wore it. The whole look of the fellow was theatrical, down to his damned theatrical good looks. And if you’ll forgive me, Madam, I strongly advise you to have nothing to do with him, if he comes bothering here. Your husband has already told the hotel people to keep him out—”
Hypatia sprang to her feet and, with a very unusual gesture, covered her face, thrusting her fingers into her hair. She seemed to be shaken, possibly with sobs, but by the time she had recovered they had turned into a sort of wild laughter.
“Oh, you are all too funny,” she said, and, in a way very unusual with her, ducked and darted to the door and disappeared.
“Bit hysterical when they laugh like that,” said Rock uncomfortably; then, rather at a loss, and turning to the little priest: “as I say, if you’re English, you ought really to be on my side against these Dagos, anyhow. Oh, I’m not one of those who talk tosh about Anglo-Saxons; but there is such a thing as history. You can always claim that America got her civilization from England.”
“Also, to temper our pride,” said Father Brown, “we must always admit that England got her civilization from Dagos.”
Again there glowed in the other’s mind the exasperated sense that his interlocutor was fencing with him, and fencing on the wrong side, in some secret and evasive way; and he curtly professed a failure to comprehend.
“Well, there was a Dago, or possibly a Wop, called Julius Caesar,” said Father Brown; “he was afterwards killed in a stabbing match; you know these Dagos always use knives. And there was another one called Augustine, who brought Christianity to our little island; and really, I don’t think we should have had much civilization without those two.”
“Anyhow, that’s all ancient history,” said the somewhat irritated journalist, “and I’m very much interested in modern history. What I see is that these scoundrels are bringing Paganism to our country, and destroying all the Christianity there is. Also destroying all the common sense there is. All settled habits, all solid social order, all the way in which the farmers who were our fathers and grandfathers did manage to live in the world, melted into a hot mush by sensations and sensualities about filmstars who divorced every month or so, and make every silly girl think that marriage is only a way of getting divorced.”
“You are quite right,” said Father Brown. “Of course I quite agree with you there. But you must make some allowances. Perhaps these Southern people are a little prone to that sort of fault. You must remember that Northern people have other kinds of faults. Perhaps these surroundings do encourage people to give too rich an importance to mere romance.”
The whole integral indignation of Agar Rock’s life rose up within him at the word.
“I hate Romance,” he said, hitting the little table before him. “I’ve fought the papers I worked for for forty years about the infernal trash. Every blackguard bolting with a barmaid is called a romantic elopement or something; and now our own Hypatia Hard, a daughter of a decent people, may get dragged into some rotten romantic divorce case, that will be trumpeted to the whole world as happily as a royal wedding. This mad poet Romanes is hanging round her; and you bet the spotlight will follow him, as if he were any rotten little Dago who is called the Great Lover on the films. I saw him outside; and he’s got the regular spotlight face. Now my sympathies are with decency and common sense. My sympathies are with poor Potter, a plain straightforward broker from Pittsburgh, who thinks he has a right to his own home. And he’s making a fight for it, too. I heard him hollering at the management, telling them to keep that rascal out; and quite right too. The people here seem a sly and slinky lot; but I rather fancy he’s put the fear of God into them already.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Father Brown, “I rather agree with you about the manager and the men in this hotel; but you mustn’t judge all Mexicans by them. Also I fancy the gentleman you speak of has not only hollered, but handed round dollars enough to get the whole staff on his side. I saw them locking doors and whispering most excitedly. By the way, your plain straightforward friend seems to have a lot of money.”
“I’ve no doubt his business does well,” said Rock. “He’s quite the best type of sound business man. What do you mean?”
“I fancied it might suggest another thought to you,” said Father Brown; and, rising with rather heavy civility, he left the room.
Rock watched the Potters very carefully that evening at dinner; and gained some new impressions
, though none that disturbed his deep sense of the wrong that probably threatened the peace of the Potter home. Potter himself proved worthy of somewhat closer study; though the journalist had at first accepted him as prosaic and unpretentious, there was a pleasure in recognizing finer lines in what he considered the hero or victim of a tragedy. Potter had really rather a thoughtful and distinguished face, though worried and occasionally petulant. Rock got an impression that the man was recovering from an illness; his faded hair was thin but rather long, as if it had been lately neglected, and his rather unusual beard gave the onlooker the same notion. Certainly he spoke once or twice to his wife in a rather sharp and acid manner, fussing about tablets or some detail of digestive science; but his real worry was doubtless concerned with the danger from without. His wife played up to him in the splendid if somewhat condescending manner of a Patient Griselda; but her eyes also roamed continually to the doors and shutters, as if in half-hearted fear of an invasion. Rock had only too good reason to dread, after her curious outbreak, the fact that her fear might turn out to be only half-hearted.
It was in the middle of the night that the extraordinary event occurred. Rock, imagining himself to be the last to go up to bed, was surprised to find Father Brown still tucked obscurely under an orange-tree in the hall, and placidly reading a book. He returned the other’s farewell without further words, and the journalist had his foot on the lowest step of the stair, when suddenly the outer door sprang on its hinges and shook and rattled under the shock of blows planted from without; and a great voice louder than the blows was heard violently demanding admission. Somehow the journalist was certain that the blows had been struck with a pointed stick like an alpenstock. He looked back at the darkened lower floor, and saw the servants of the hotel sliding here and there to see that the doors were locked; and not unlocking them. Then he slowly mounted to his room, and sat down furiously to write his report.
He described the siege of the hotel; the evil atmosphere; the shabby luxury of the place; the shifty evasions of the priest; above all, that terrible voice crying without, like a wolf prowling round the house. Then, as he wrote, he heard a new sound and sat up suddenly. It was a long repeated whistle, and in his mood he hated it doubly, because it was like the signal of a conspirator and like the love-call of a bird. There followed an utter silence, in which he sat rigid; then he rose abruptly; for he had heard yet another noise. It was a faint swish followed by a sharp rap or rattle; and he was almost certain that somebody was throwing something at the window. He walked stiffly downstairs, to the floor which was now dark and deserted; or nearly deserted. For the little priest was still sitting under the orange shrub, lit by a low lamp; and still reading his book.
“You seem to be sitting up late,” he said harshly.
“Quite a dissipated character,” said Father Brown, looking up with a broad smile, “reading Economics of Usury at all wild hours of the night.”
“The place is locked up,” said Rock.
“Very thoroughly locked up,” replied the other. “Your friend with the beard seems to have taken every precaution. By the way, your friend with the beard is a little rattled; I thought he was rather cross at dinner.”
“Natural enough,” growled the other, “if he thinks savages in this savage place are out to wreck his home life.”
“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Father Brown, “if a man tried to make his home life nice inside, while he was protecting it from the things outside.”
“Oh, I know you will work up all the casuistical excuses,” said the other; “perhaps he was rather snappy with his wife; but he’s got the right on his side. Look here, you seem to me to be rather a deep dog. I believe you know more about this than you say. What the devil is going on in this infernal place? Why are you sitting up all night to see it through?”
“Well,” said Father Brown patiently, “I rather thought my bedroom might be wanted.”
“Wanted by whom?”
“As a matter of fact, Mrs Potter wanted another room,” explained Father Brown with limpid clearness. “I gave her mine, because I could open the window. Go and see, if you like.”
“I’ll see to something else first,” said Rock grinding his teeth. “You can play your monkey tricks in this Spanish monkey-house, but I’m still in touch with civilization.” He strode into the telephone-booth and rang up his paper; pouring out the whole tale of the wicked priest who helped the wicked poet. Then he ran upstairs into the priest’s room, in which the priest had just lit a short candle, showing the windows beyond wide open.
He was just in time to see a sort of rude ladder unhooked from the window-sill and rolled up by a laughing gentleman on the lawn below. The laughing gentleman was a tall and swarthy gentleman, and was accompanied by a blonde but equally laughing lady. This time, Mr Rock could not even comfort himself by calling her laughter hysterical. It was too horribly genuine; and rang down the rambling garden-paths as she and her troubadour disappeared into the dark thickets.
Agar Rock turned on his companion a face of final and awful justice; like the Day of Judgement.
“Well, all America is going to hear of this,” he said. “In plain words, you helped her to bolt with that curly-haired lover.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown, “I helped her to bolt with that curly-haired lover.”
“You call yourself a minister of Jesus Christ,” cried Rock, “and you boast of a crime.”
“I have been mixed up with several crimes,” said the priest gently. “Happily for once this is a story without a crime. This is a simple fire-side idyll; that ends with a glow of domesticity.”
“And ends with a rope-ladder instead of a rope,” said Rock. “Isn’t she a married woman?”
“Oh, yes,” said Father Brown.
“Well, oughtn’t she to be with her husband?” demanded Rock.
“She is with her husband,” said Father Brown.
The other was startled into anger. “You lie,” he said. “The poor little man is still snoring in bed.”
“You seem to know a lot about his private affairs,” said Father Brown plaintively. “You could almost write a life of the Man with a Beard. The only thing you don’t seem ever to have found out about him is his name.”
“Nonsense,” said Rock. “His name is in the hotel book.”
“I know it is,” answered the priest, nodding gravely, “in very large letters; the name of Rudel Romanes. Hypatia Potter, who met him here, put her name boldly under his, when she meant to elope with him; and her husband put his name under that, when he pursued them to this place. He put it very close under hers, by way of protest. The Romanes (who has pots of money, as a popular misanthrope despising men) bribed the brutes in this hotel to bar and bolt it and keep the lawful husband out. And I, as you truly say, helped him to get in.”
When a man is told something that turns things upside-down; that the tail wags the dog; that the fish has caught the fisherman; that the earth goes round the moon; he takes some little time before he even asks seriously if it is true. He is still content with the consciousness that it is the opposite of the obvious truth. Rock said at last: “You don’t mean that little fellow is the romantic Rudel we’re always reading about; and that curly haired fellow is Mr Potter of Pittsburgh.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown. “I knew it the moment I clapped eyes on both of them. But I verified it afterwards.”
Rock ruminated for a time and said at last: “I suppose it’s barely possible you’re right. But how did you come to have such a notion, in the face of the facts?”
Father Brown looked rather abashed; subsided into a chair, and stared into vacancy, until a faint smile began to dawn on his round and rather foolish face.
“Well,” he said, “you see—the truth is, I’m not romantic.”
“I don’t know what the devil you are,” said Rock roughly.
“Now you are romantic,” said Father Brown helpfully. “For instance, you see somebody looking poetical, and you assume
he is a poet. Do you know what the majority of poets look like? What a wild confusion was created by that coincidence of three good-looking aristocrats at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Byron and Goethe and Shelley! Believe me, in the common way, a man may write: “Beauty has laid her flaming lips on mine,” or whatever that chap wrote, without being himself particularly beautiful. Besides, do you realize how old a man generally is by the time his fame has filled the world? Watts painted Swinburne with a halo of hair; but Swinburne was bald before most of his last American or Australian admirers had heard of his hyacinthine locks. So was D’Annunzio. As a fact, Romanes still has rather a fine head, as you will see if you look at it closely; he looks like an intellectual man; and he is. Unfortunately, like a good many other intellectual men, he’s a fool. He’s let himself go to seed with selfishness and fussing about his digestion. So that the ambitious American lady, who thought it would be like soaring to Olympus with the Nine Muses to elope with a poet, found that a day or so of it was about enough for her. So that when her husband came after her, and stormed the place, she was delighted to go back to him.”
“But her husband?” queried Rock. “I am still rather puzzled about her husband.”
“Ah, you’ve been reading too many of your erotic modern novels,” said Father Brown; and partly closed his eyes in answer to the protesting glare of the other. “I know a lot of stories start with a wildly beautiful woman wedded to some elderly swine in the stock market. But why? In that, as in most things, modern novels are the very reverse of modern. I don’t say it never happens; but it hardly ever happens now except by her own fault. Girls nowadays marry whom they like; especially spoilt girls like Hypatia. And whom do they marry? A beautiful wealthy girl like that would have a ring of admirers; and whom would she choose? The chances are a hundred to one that she’d marry very young and choose the handsomest man she met at a dance or a tennis-party. Well, ordinary business men are sometimes handsome. A young god appeared (called Potter) and she wouldn’t care if he was a broker or a burglar. But, given the environment, you will admit it’s more likely he would be a broker; also, it’s quite likely that he’d be called Potter. You see, you are so incurably romantic that your whole case was founded on the idea that a man looking like a young god couldn’t be called Potter. Believe me, names are not so appropriately distributed.”