had any right to think of anybody. My friend, there are no good or bad
social types or trades. Any man can be a murderer like poor John; any
man, even the same man, can be a saint like poor Michael. But if there
is one type that tends at times to be more utterly godless than another,
it is that rather brutal sort of business man. He has no social ideal,
let alone religion; he has neither the gentleman's traditions nor the
trade unionist's class loyalty. All his boasts about getting good
bargains were practically boasts of having cheated people. His snubbing
of his sister's poor little attempts at mysticism was detestable. Her
mysticism was all nonsense; but he only hated spiritualism because it
was spirituality. Anyhow, there's no doubt he was the villain of the
piece; the only interest is in a rather original piece of villainy. It
was really a new and unique motive for murder. It was the motive of
using the corpse as a stage property--a sort of hideous doll or dummy.
At the start he conceived a plan of killing Michael in the motor, merely
to take him home and pretend to have killed him in the garden. But all
sorts of fantastic finishing touches followed quite naturally from the
primary fact; that he had at his disposal in a closed car at night the
dead body of a recognized and recognizable burglar. He could leave his
finger-prints and foot-prints; he could lean the familiar face against
windows and take it away. You will notice that Moonshine ostensibly
appeared and vanished while Bankes was ostensibly out of the room
looking for the emerald necklace.
"Finally, he had only to tumble the corpse on to the lawn, fire a shot
from each pistol, and there he was. It might never have been found out
but for a guess about the two beards."
"Why had your friend Michael kept the old beard?" Devine said
thoughtfully. "That seems to me questionable."
"To me, who knew him, it seems quite inevitable," replied Father Brown.
"His whole attitude was like that wig that he wore. There was no
disguise about his disguises. He didn't want the old disguise any more,
but he wasn't frightened of it; he would have felt it false to destroy
the false beard. It would have been like hiding; and he was not hiding.
He was not hiding from God; he was not hiding from himself. He was in
the broad daylight. If they'd taken him back to prison, he'd still have
been quite happy. He was not whitewashed, but washed white. There was
something very strange about him; almost as strange as the grotesque
dance of death through which he was dragged after he was dead. When he
moved to and fro smiling among these beehives, even then, in a most
radiant and shining sense, he was dead. He was out of the judgement of
this world."
There was a short pause, and then Devine shrugged his shoulders and
said: "It all comes back to bees and wasps looking very much alike in
this world, doesn't it?"
III
THE SONG OF THE FLYING FISH
THE soul of Mr. Peregrine Smart hovered like a fly
round one possession and one joke. It might be considered a mild joke,
for it consisted merely of asking people if they had seen his goldfish.
It might also be considered an expensive joke; but it is doubtful
whether he was not secretly more attached to the joke than to the
evidence of expenditure. In talking to his neighbours in the little
group of new houses that had grown up round the old village green, he
lost no time in turning the conversation in the direction of his hobby.
To Dr. Burdock, a rising biologist with a resolute chin and hair brushed
back like a German's, Mr. Smart made the easy transition. "You are
interested in natural history; have you seen my goldfish?" To so
orthodox an evolutionist as Dr. Burdock doubtless all nature was one;
but at first sight the link was not close, as he was a specialist who
had concentrated entirely upon the primitive ancestry of the giraffe. To
Father Brown, from a church in the neighbouring provincial town, he
traced a rapid train of thought which touched on the topics of
"Rome--St. Peter--fisherman--fish--goldfish." In talking to Mr.
Imlack Smith, the bank manager, a slim and sallow gentleman of dressy
appearance but quiet demeanour, he violently wrenched the conversation
to the subject of the gold standard, from which it was merely a step to
goldfish. In talking to that brilliant Oriental traveller and scholar.
Count Yvon de Lara (whose title was French and his face rather Russian,
not to say Tartar), the versatile conversationalist showed an intense
and intelligent interest in the Ganges and the Indian Ocean, leading
naturally to the possible presence of goldfish in those waters.
From Mr. Harry Hartopp, the very rich but very shy and silent young
gentleman who had recently come down from London, he had at last
extorted the information that the embarrassed youth in question was _not_
interested in fishing, and had then added: "Talking about fishing, have
you seen my goldfish?"
The peculiar thing about the goldfish was that they were made of gold.
They were part of an eccentric but expensive toy, said to have been made
by the freak of some rich Eastern prince, and Mr. Smart had picked it up
at some sale or in some curiosity shop, such as he frequented for the
purpose of lumbering up his house with unique and useless things. From
the other end of the room it looked like a rather unusually large bowl
containing rather unusually large living fish; a closer inspection
showed it to be a huge bubble of beautifully blown Venetian glass, very
thin and delicately clouded with faintly iridescent colour, in the
tinted twilight of which hung grotesque golden fishes with great rubies
for eyes. The whole thing was undoubtedly worth a great deal in solid
material; how much more would depend upon the waves of lunacy passing
over the world of collectors. Mr. Smart's new secretary, a young man
named Francis Boyle, though an Irishman and not credited with caution,
was mildly surprised at his talking so freely of the gems of his
collection to the group of comparative strangers who happened to have
alighted in a rather nomadic fashion in the neighbourhood; for
collectors are commonly vigilant and sometimes secretive. In the course
of settling down to his new duties, Mr. Boyle found he was not alone in
this sentiment, and that in others, it passed from a mild wonder to a
grave disapproval.
"It's a wonder his throat isn't cut," said Mr. Smart's valet, Harris,
not without a hypothetical relish, almost as if he had said, in a purely
artistic sense: "It's a pity."
"It's extraordinary how he leaves things about," said Mr. Smart's head
clerk, Jameson, who had come up from the office to assist the new
secretary, "and he won't even put up those ramshackle old bars across
his ramshackle old door."
"It's all very well with Father Brown and the doctor," said Mr. Smart's
housekeeper, with a certain vigorous vagueness that marked her opinions,
"but when it comes to foreigners, I call it tempting providence. It
isn't only the Count, either; that man at the bank looks to me much too
yellow to be English."
"Well, that young Hartopp is English enough," said Boyle good-humouredly,
"to the extent of not having a word to say for himself."
"He thinks the more," said the housekeeper. "He may not be exactly a
foreigner, but he is not such a fool as he looks. Foreign is as foreign
does, I say," she added darkly.
Her disapproval would probably have deepened if she had heard the
conversation, in her master's drawing-room that afternoon, a
conversation of which the goldfish were the text, though the offensive
foreigner tended more and more to be the central figure. It was not that
he spoke so very much; but even his silences had something positive
about them. He looked the more massive for sitting in a sort of heap on
a heap of cushions, and in the deepening twilight his wide Mongolian
face seemed faintly luminous, like a moon. Perhaps his background
brought out something atmospherically Asiatic about his face and figure,
for the room was a chaos of more or less costly curiosities, amid which
could be seen the crooked curves and burning colours of countless
Eastern weapons, Eastern pipes and vessels, Eastern musical instruments
and illuminated manuscripts. Anyhow, as the conversation proceeded,
Boyle felt more and more that the figure seated on the cushions and dark
against the twilight had the exact outline of a huge image of Buddha.
The conversation was general enough, for all the little local group were
present. They were, indeed, often in the habit of dropping in at each
other's houses, and by this time constituted a sort of club, of people
coming from the four or five houses standing round the green. Of these
houses Peregrine Smart's was the oldest, largest, and most picturesque;
it straggled down almost the whole of one side of the square, leaving
only room for a small villa, inhabited by a retired colonel named
Varney, who was reported to be an invalid, and certainly was never seen
to go abroad. At right angles to these stood two or three shops that
served the simpler needs of the hamlet, and at the corner the inn of the
Blue Dragon, at which Mr. Hartopp, the stranger from London, was
staying. On the opposite side were three houses, one rented by the Count
de Lara, one by Dr. Burdock, and the third still standing empty. On the
fourth side was the bank, with an adjoining house for the bank manager,
and a line offence enclosing some land that was let for building. It was
thus a very self-contained group, and the comparative emptiness of the
open ground for miles round it threw the members more and more on each
other's society. That afternoon, one stranger had indeed broken into the
magic circle: a hatchet-faced fellow with fierce tufts of eyebrows and
moustache, and so shabbily dressed that he must have been a millionaire
or a duke if he had really (as was alleged) come down to do business
with the old collector. But he was known, at the Blue Dragon at least,
as Mr. Harmer.
To him had been recounted anew the glories of the gilded fish and the
criticisms regarding their custody.
"People are always telling me I ought to lock them up more carefully,"
observed Mr. Smart, cocking an eyebrow over his shoulder at the
dependant who stood there holding some papers from the office. Smart was
a round-faced, round-bodied little old man rather like a bald parrot.
"Jameson and Harris and the rest are always at me to bar the doors as if
it were a mediæval fortress, though really these rotten old rusty bars
are too mediæval to keep anybody out, I should think. I prefer to trust
to luck and the local police."
"It is not always the best bars that keep people out," said the Count.
"It all depends on who's trying to get in. There was an ancient Hindu
hermit who lived naked in a cave and passed through the three armies
that encircled the Mogul and took the great ruby out of the tyrant's
turban, and went back unscathed like a shadow. For he wished to teach
the great how small are the laws of space and time."
"When we really study the small laws of space and time," said Dr.
Burdock dryly, "we generally find out how those tricks are done. Western
science has let in daylight on a good deal of Eastern magic. Doubtless a
great deal can be done with hypnotism and suggestion, to say nothing of
sleight-of-hand."
"The ruby was not in the royal tent," observed the Count in his dream
fashion; "but he found it among a hundred tents."
"Can't all that be explained by telepathy?" asked the doctor sharply.
The question sounded the sharper because it was followed by a heavy
silence, almost as if the distinguished Oriental traveller had, with
imperfect politeness, gone to sleep.
"I beg your pardon," he said rousing himself with a sudden smile. "I had
forgotten we were talking with words. In the east we talk with thoughts,
and so we never misunderstand each other. It is strange how you people
worship words and are satisfied with words. What difference does it make
to a thing that you now call it telepathy, as you once called it
tomfoolery? If a man climbs into the sky on a mango-tree, how is it
altered by saying it is only levitation, instead of saying it is only
lies. If a mediæval witch waved a wand and turned me into a blue baboon,
you would say it was only atavism."
The doctor looked for a moment as if he might say that it would not be
so great a change after all. But before his irritation could find that
or any other vent, the man called Harmer interrupted gruffly:
"It's true enough those Indian conjurers can do queer things, but I
notice they generally do them in India. Confederates, perhaps, or merely
mass psychology. I don't think those tricks have ever been played in an
English village, and I should say our friend's goldfish were quite
safe."
"I will tell you a story," said de Lara, in his motionless way, "which
happened not in India, but outside an English barrack in the most
modernized part of Cairo. A sentinel was standing inside the grating of
an iron gateway looking out between the bars on to the street. There
appeared outside the gate a beggar, barefoot and in native rags, who
asked him, in English that was startlingly distinct and refined, for a
certain official document kept in the building for safety. The soldier
told the man, of that he could not come inside; and the man answered,
smiling: course, 'What is inside and what is outside?' The soldier was
still staring scornfully through the iron grating when he gradually
realized that, though neither he nor the gate had moved, he was actually
standing in the street and looking in at the barrack yard, where the
beggar stood still and smiling and equally motionless. Then, when the
beggar turned towards the building, the sentry awoke to such sense as he
had left, and shouted a warning to all the soldiers within the gated
enclosure to hold the prisoner fast. 'You won't get out of there
anyhow,' he said vindictively. Then the beggar said in his silvery
voice: 'What is outside and what is inside?' And the soldier, still
glaring through the same bars, saw that they were once more between him
and the street, where the beggar stood free and smiling with a paper in
his hand."
Mr. Imlack Smith, the bank manager, was looking at the carpet with his
dark sleek head bowed, and he spoke for the first time.
"Did anything happen about the paper?" he asked.
"Your professional instincts are correct, sir," said the Count with grim
affability. "It was a paper of considerable financial importance. Its
consequences were international."
"I hope they don't occur often," said young Hartopp gloomily.
"I do not touch the political side," said the Count serenely, "but only
the philosophical. It illustrates how the wise man can get behind time
and space and turn the levers of them, so to speak, so that the whole
world turns round before our eyes. But is it so hard for you people to
believe that spiritual powers are really more powerful than material
ones."
"Well," said old Smart cheerfully, "I don't profess to be an authority
on spiritual powers. What do you say, Father Brown?"
"The only thing that strikes me," answered the little priest, "is that
all the supernatural acts we have yet heard of seem to be thefts. And
stealing by spiritual methods seem to me much the same as stealing by
material ones."
"Father Brown is a Philistine," said the smiling Smith.
"I have a sympathy with the tribe," said Father Brown. "A Philistine is
only a man who is right without knowing why."
"All this is too clever for me," said Hartopp heartily.
"Perhaps," said Father Brown with a smile, "you would like to speak
without words, as the Count suggests. He would begin by saying nothing
in a pointed fashion, and you would retort with a burst of taciturnity."
"Something might be done with music," murmured the Count dreamily. "It
would be better than all these words."
"Yes, I might understand that better," said the young man in a low
voice.
Boyle had followed the conversation with curious attention, for there
was something in the demeanour of more than one of the talkers that
seemed to him significant or even odd. As the talk drifted to music,
with an appeal to the dapper bank manager (who was an amateur musician
of some merit), the young secretary awoke with a start to his
secretarial duties, and reminded his employer that the head clerk was
still standing patiently with the papers in his hand.
"Oh, never mind about those just now, Jameson," said Smart rather
hurriedly. "Only something about my account; I'll see Mr. Smith about it
later. You were saying that the 'cello, Mr. Smith----"
But the cold breath of business had sufficed to disperse the fumes of
transcendental talk, and the guests began one after another to say
farewell. Only Mr. Imlack Smith, bank manager and musician, remained to
the last; and when the rest were gone he and his host went into the
inner room, where the goldfish were kept, and closed the door.
The house was long and narrow, with a covered balcony running along the
first floor, which consisted mostly of a sort of suite of rooms used by
the householder himself, his bedroom and dressing-room, and an inner
room in which his very valuable treasures were sometimes stored for the
night instead of being left in the rooms below. This balcony, like the
insufficiently barred door below it, was a matter of concern to the
housekeeper and the head clerk and the others who lamented the
carelessness of the collector; but, in truth, that cunning old gentleman
was more careful than he seemed. He professed no great belief in the
antiquated fastenings of the old house, which the housekeeper lamented
to see rusting in idleness, but he had an eye to the more important
point of strategy. He always put his favourite goldfish in the room at
the back of his bedroom for the night, and slept in front of it, as it
were, with a pistol under his pillow. And when Boyle and Jameson,
awaiting his return from the _tête-à-tête_, at length saw the door open
and their employer reappear, he was carrying the great glass bowl as
reverently as it if had been the relic of a saint.
Outside, the last edges of the sunset still clung to the corners of the
green square; but inside, a lamp had already been kindled; and in the
mingling of the two lights the coloured globe glowed like some monstrous
jewel, and the fantastic outlines of the fiery fishes seemed to give it,
indeed, something of the mystery of a talisman, like strange shapes seen
by a seer in the crystal of doom. Over the old man's shoulder the olive
face of Imlack Smith stared like a sphinx.
"I am going up to London to-night, Mr. Boyle," said old Smart, with more
gravity than he commonly showed. "Mr. Smith and I are catching the
six-forty-five. I should prefer you, Jameson, to sleep upstairs in my
room to-night; if you put the bowl in the back room as usual, it will be
quite safe then. Not that I suppose anything could possibly happen."
"Anything may happen anywhere," said the smiling Mr. Smith. "I think you
generally take a gun to bed with you. Perhaps you had better leave it
behind in this case."
Peregrine Smart did not reply, and they passed out of the house on to
the road round the village green.
The secretary and the head clerk slept that night as directed in their
employer's bedroom. To speak more strictly, Jameson, the head clerk,
slept in a bed in the dressing-room, but the door stood open between,
and the two rooms running along the front were practically one. Only the
bedroom had a long French window giving on the balcony, and an entrance
at the back into the inner apartment where the goldfish bowl had been
placed for safety. Boyle dragged his bed right across so as to bar this
entrance, put the revolver under his pillow, and then undressed and went
to bed, feeling that he had taken all possible precautions against an
impossible or improbable event. He did not see why there should be any
particular danger of normal burglary; and as for the spiritual burglary
that figured in the traveller's tales of the Count de Lara, if his
thoughts ran on them so near to sleep it was because they were such
stuff as dreams are made of. They soon turned into dreams with intervals
of dreamless slumber. The old clerk was a little more restless as usual;
but after fussing about a little longer and repeating some of his
favourite regrets and warnings, he also retired to his bed in the same
manner and slept. The moon brightened and grew dim again above the green
square and the grey blocks of houses in a solitude and silence that
seemed to have no human witness; and it was when the white cracks of
daybreak had already appeared in the corners of the grey sky that the
thing happened.
Boyle, being young, was naturally both the healthier and the heavier
sleeper of the two. Though active enough when he was once awake, he
always had a load to lift in waking. Moreover, he had dreams of the sort
that cling to the emerging minds like the dim tentacles of an octopus.
They were a medley of many things, including his last look from the
balcony across the four grey roads and the green square. But the pattern
of them changed and shifted and turned dizzily, to the accompaniment of
a low grinding noise, which sounded somehow like a subterranean river, and
may have been no more than old Mr. Jameson snoring in the dressing-room.
But in the dreamer's mind all that murmur and motion was vaguely
connected with the words of the Count de Lara, about a wisdom that could
hold the levers of time and space and turn the world. In the dream it
seemed as if a vast murmuring machinery under the world were really
moving whole landscapes hither and thither, so that the ends of the
earth might appear in a man's front-garden, or his own front-garden be
exiled beyond the sea.
The first complete impressions he had were the words of a song, with a
rather thin metallic accompaniment; they were sung in a foreign accent
and a voice that was still strange and yet faintly familiar. And yet he
could hardly feel sure that he was not making up poetry in his sleep.
_Over the land and over the sea
My flying fishes will come to me,
For the note is not of the world that wakes them,
But in----_
He struggled to his feet and saw that his fellow-guardian was already
out of bed; Jameson was peering out of the long window on to the balcony
and calling out sharply to someone in the street below.
"Who's that?" he called out sharply. "What do you want?"
He turned to Boyle in agitation, saying: "There's somebody prowling
about just outside. I knew it wasn't safe. I'm going down to bar that
front door, whatever they say."
He ran downstairs in a flutter and Boyle could hear the clattering of
the bars upon the front door; but Boyle himself stepped out upon the
balcony and looked out on the long grey road that led up to the house,
and he thought he was still dreaming.
Upon that grey road leading across that empty moor and through that
little English hamlet, there had appeared a figure that might have
stepped straight out of the jungle or the bazaar--a figure out of one
of the Count's fantastic stories; a figure out of the "Arabian Nights."
The rather ghostly grey twilight which begins to define and yet to
discolour everything when the light in the east has ceased to be
localized, lifted slowly like a veil of grey gauze and showed him a
figure wrapped in outlandish raiment. A scarf of a strange sea-blue,
vast and voluminous, went round the head like a turban, and then again
round the chin, giving rather the general character of a hood; so far as
the face was concerned it had a the effects of a mask. For the raiment
round the head was drawn close as a veil; and the head itself was bowed
over a queer-looking musical instrument made of silver or steel, and
shaped like a deformed or crooked violin. It was played with something
like a silver comb, and the notes were curiously thin and keen. Before
Boyle could open his mouth, the same haunting alien accent came from
under the shadow of the burnous, singing-words of the same sort:
_As the golden birds go back to the tree
My golden fishes return to me.
Return_----
"You've no right here," called out Boyle in exasperation, hardly knowing
what he said.
"I have a right to the goldfish," said the stranger, speaking more like
King Solomon than an unsandalled Bedouin in a ragged blue cloak. "And
they will come to me. Come!"
He struck his strange fiddle as his voice rose sharply on the word.
There was a pang of sound that seemed to pierce the mind, and then there
came a fainter sound, like an answer: a vibrant whisper. It came from
the dark room behind where the bowl of goldfish was standing.
Boyle turned towards it; and even as he turned the echo in the inner
room changed to a long tingling sound like an electric bell, and then to
a faint crash. It was still a matter of seconds since he had challenged
the man from the balcony; but the old clerk had already regained the top
of the stairs, panting a little, for he was an elderly gentleman.
"I've locked up the door, anyhow," he said.
"The stable door," said Boyle out of the darkness of the inner room.
Jameson followed him into that apartment and found him staring down at
the floor, which was covered with a litter of coloured glass like the
curved bits of a broken rainbow.
"What do you mean by the stable door?" began Jameson.
"I mean that the steed is stolen," answered Boyle. "The flying steeds.
The flying fishes our Arab friend outside has just whistled to like so
many performing puppies."
"But how could he?" exploded the old clerk, as if such events were
hardly respectable.
"Well, they're gone," said Boyle shortly. "The broken bowl is here,
which would have taken a long time to open properly, but only a second
to smash. But the fish are gone, God knows how, though I think our
friend ought to be asked."
"We are wasting time," said the distracted Jameson. "We ought to be
after him at once."