I.—THE RESURRECTION OF FATHER BROWN
THERE was a brief period during which Father Brown enjoyed, or
rather did not enjoy, something like fame. He was a nine days' wonder
in the newspapers; he was even a common topic of controversy in the
weekly reviews; his exploits were narrated eagerly and inaccurately
in any number of clubs and drawing-rooms, especially in America.
Incongruous and indeed incredible as it may seem to any one who knew
him, his adventures as a detective were even made the subject of
short stories appearing in magazines.
Strangely enough, this wandering limelight struck him in the most
obscure, or at least the most remote, of his many places of
residence. He had been sent out to officiate, as something between a
missionary and a parish priest, in one of those sections of the
northern coast of South America, where strips of country still cling
insecurely to European powers, or are continually threatening to
become independent republics, under the gigantic shadow of President
Monroe. The population was red and brown with pink spots; that is, it
was Spanish-American, and largely Spanish-American-Indian, but there
was a considerable and increasing infiltration of Americans of the
northern sort—Englishmen, Germans, and the rest. And the trouble
seems to have begun when one of these visitors, very recently landed
and very much annoyed at having lost one of his bags, approached the
first building of which he came in sight—which happened to be the
mission-house and chapel attached to it, in front of which ran a long
veranda and a long row of stakes, up which were trained the black
twisted vines, their square leaves red with autumn. Behind them, also
in a row, a number of human beings sat almost as rigid as the stakes,
and coloured in some fashion like the vines. For while their
broad-brimmed hats were as black as their unblinking eyes, the
complexions of many of them might have been made out of the dark red
timber of those transatlantic forests. Many of them were smoking very
long, thin black cigars; and in all that group the smoke was almost
the only moving thing. The visitor would probably have described them
as natives, though some of them were very proud of Spanish blood. But
he was not one to draw any fine distinction between Spaniards and Red
Indians, being rather disposed to dismiss people from the scene when
once he had convicted them of being native to it.
He was a newspaper man from Kansas City, a lean, light-haired man
with what Meredith called an adventurous nose; one could almost fancy
it found its way by feeling its way and moved like the proboscis of
an ant-eater. His name was Snaith, and his parents, after some
obscure meditation, had called him Saul, a fact which he had the good
feeling to conceal as far as possible. Indeed, he had ultimately
compromised by calling himself Paul, though by no means for the same
reason that had affected the Apostle of the Gentiles. On the
contrary, so far as he had any views on such things, the name of the
persecutor would have been more appropriate; for he regarded
organized religion with the conventional contempt which can be learnt
more easily from Ingersoll than from Voltaire. And this was, as it
happened, the not very important side of his character which he
turned towards the mission-station and the groups in front of the
veranda. Something in their shameless repose and indifference
inflamed his own fury of efficiency; and, as he could get no
particular answer to his first questions, he began to do all the
talking himself.
Standing out there in the strong sunshine, a spick-and-span figure
in his Panama hat and neat clothes, his grip-sack held m a steely
grip, he began to shout at the people in the shadow. He began to
explain to them very loudly why they were lazy and filthy, and
bestially ignorant and lower than the beasts that perish, in case
this problem should have previously exercised their minds. In his
opinion it was the deleterious influence of priests that had made
them so miserably poor and so hopelessly oppressed that they were
able to sit in the shade and smoke and do nothing.
'And a mighty soft crowd you must be at that,' he said, 'to be
bullied by these stuck-up josses because they walk about in their
mitres and their tiaras and their gold copes and other glad rags,
looking down on everybody else like dirt—being bamboozled by crowns
and canopies and sacred umbrellas like a kid at a pantomime; just
because a pompous old High Priest of Mumbo-Jumbo looks as if he was
the lord of the earth. What about you? What do you look like, you
poor simps? I tell you, that's why you're way-back in barbarism and
can't read or write and—'
At this point the High Priest of Mumbo-Jumbo came in an
undignified hurry out of the door of the mission-house, not looking
very like a lord of the earth, but rather like a bundle of black
second-hand clothes buttoned round a short bolster in the semblance
of a guy. He was not wearing his tiara, supposing him to possess one,
but a shabby broad hat not very dissimilar from those of the Spanish
Indians, and it was thrust to the back of his head with a gesture of
botheration. He seemed just about to speak to the motionless natives
when he caught sight of the stranger and said quickly:
'Oh, can I be of any assistance? Would you like to come inside?'
Mr Paul Snaith came inside; and it was the beginning of a
considerable increase of that journalist's information on many
things. Presumably his journalistic instinct was stronger than his
prejudices, as, indeed, it often is in clever journalists; and he
asked a good many questions, the answers to which interested and
surprised him. He discovered that the Indians could read and write,
for the simple reason that the priest had taught them; but that they
did not read or write any more than they could help, from a natural
preference for more direct communications. He learned that these
strange people, who sat about in heaps on the veranda without
stirring a hair, could work quite hard on their own patches of land;
especially those of them who were more than half Spanish; and he
learned with still more astonishment that they all had patches of
land that were really their own. That much was part of a stubborn
tradition that seemed quite native to natives. But in that also the
priest had played a certain part, and by doing so had taken perhaps
what was his first and last part in politics, if it was only local
politics.
There had recently swept through that region one of those fevers
of atheist and almost anarchist Radicalism which break out
periodically in countries of the Latin culture, generally beginning
in a secret society and generally ending in a civil war and in very
little else. The local leader of the iconoclastic party was a certain
Alvarez, a rather picturesque adventurer of Portuguese nationality
but, as his enemies said, of partly Negro origin, the head of any
number of lodges and temples of initiation of the sort that in such
places clothe even atheism with something mystical. The leader on the
more conservative side was a much more commonplace person, a very
wealthy man named Mendoza, the owner of many factories and quite
respectable, but not very exciting. It was the general opinion that
the cause of law and order would have been entirely lost if it had
not adopted a more popular policy of its own, in the form of securing
land for the peasants; and this movement had mainly originated from
the little mission-station of Father Brown.
While he was talking to the journalist, Mendoza, the Conservative
leader, came in. He was a stout, dark man, with a bald head like a
pear and a round body also like a pear; he was smoking a very
fragrant cigar, but he threw it away, perhaps a little theatrically,
when he came into the presence of the priest, as if he had been
entering church; and bowed with a curve that in so corpulent a
gentleman seemed quite improbable. He was always exceedingly serious
in his social gestures, especially towards religious institutions. He
was one of those laymen who are much more ecclesiastical than
ecclesiastics. It embarrassed Father Brown a good deal, especially
when carried thus into private life.
'I think I am an anti-clerical,' Father Brown would say with a
faint smile; 'but there wouldn't be half so much clericalism if they
would only leave things to the clerics.'
'Why Mr Mendoza,' exclaimed the journalist with a new animation,'
I think we have met before. Weren't you at the Trade Congress in
Mexico last year?'
The heavy eyelids of Mr Mendoza showed a flutter of recognition,
and he smiled in his slow way. 'I remember.'
'Pretty big business done there in an hour or two,' said Snaith
with relish.' Made a good deal of difference to you, too, I guess.'
'I have been very fortunate,' said Mendoza modestly.
'Don't you believe it!' cried the enthusiastic Snaith.' Good
fortune comes to the people who know when to catch hold; and you
caught hold good and sure. But I hope I'm not interrupting your
business?'
'Not at all,' said the other. 'I often have the honour of calling
on the padre for a little talk. Merely for a little talk.'
It seemed as if this familiarity between Father Brown and a
successful and even famous man of business completed the
reconciliation between the priest and the practical Mr Snaith. He
felt, it might be supposed, a new respectability clothe the station
and the mission, and was ready to overlook such occasional reminders
of the existence of religion as a chapel and a presbytery can seldom
wholly avoid. He became quite enthusiastic about the priest's
programme—at least on its secular and social side—and announced
himself ready at any moment to act in the capacity of a live wire for
its communication to the world at large. And it was at this point
that Father Brown began to find the journalist rather more
troublesome in his sympathy than in his hostility.
Mr Paul Snaith set out vigorously to feature Father Brown. He sent
long and loud eulogies on him across the continent to his newspaper
in the Middle West. He took snapshots of the unfortunate cleric in
the most commonplace occupations, and exhibited them in gigantic
photographs in the gigantic Sunday papers of the United States. He
turned his sayings into slogans, and was continually presenting the
world with 'A message' from the reverend gentleman in South America.
Any stock less strong and strenuously receptive than the American
race would have become very much bored with Father Brown. As it was,
he received handsome and eager offers to go on a lecturing tour in
the States; and when he declined, the terms were raised with
expressions of respectful wonder. A series of stories about him, like
the stories of Sherlock Holmes, were, by the instrumentality of Mr
Snaith, planned out and put before the hero with requests for his
assistance and encouragement. As the priest found they had started,
he could offer no suggestion except that they should stop. And this
in turn was taken by Mr Snaith as the text for a discussion on
whether Father Brown should disappear temporarily over a cliff, in
the manner of Dr Watson's hero. To all these demands the priest had
patiently to reply in writing, saying that he would consent on such
terms to the temporary cessation of the stories and begging that a
considerable interval might occur before they began again. The notes
he wrote grew shorter and shorter; and as he wrote the last of them,
he sighed.
Needless to say, this strange boom in the North reacted on the
little outpost in the South where he had expected to live in so
lonely an exile. The considerable English and American population
already on the spot began to be proud of possessing so widely
advertised a person. American tourists, of the sort who land with a
loud demand for Westminster Abbey, landed on that distant coast with
a loud demand for Father Brown. They were within measurable distance
of running excursion trains named after him, and bringing crowds to
see him as if he were a public monument. He was especially troubled
by the active and ambitious new traders and shopkeepers of the place,
who were perpetually pestering him to try their wares and to give
them testimonials. Even if the testimonials were not forthcoming,
they would prolong the correspondence for the purpose of collecting
autographs. As he was a good-natured person they got a good deal of
what they wanted out of him; and it was in answer to a particular
request from a Frankfort wine-merchant named Eckstein that he wrote
hastily a few words on a card, which were to prove a terrible
turning-point in his life.
Eckstein was a fussy little man with fuzzy hair and pince-nez, who
was wildly anxious that the priest should not only try some of his
celebrated medicinal port, but should let him know where and when he
would drink it, in acknowledging its receipt. The priest was not
particularly surprised at the request, for he was long past surprise
at the lunacies of advertisement. So he scribbled something down and
turned to other business which seemed a little more sensible. He was
again interrupted, by a note from no less a person than his political
enemy Alvarez, asking him to come to a conference at which it was
hoped that a compromise on an outstanding question might be reached;
and suggesting an appointment that evening at a cafe just outside the
walls of the little town. To this also he sent a message of
acceptance by the rather florid and military messenger who was
waiting for it; and then, having an hour or two before him, sat down
to attempt to get through a little of his own legitimate business. At
the end of the time he poured himself out a glass of Mr Eckstein's
remarkable wine and, glancing at the clock with a humorous
expression, drank it and went out into the night.
Strong moonlight lay on the little Spanish town, so that when he
came to the picturesque gateway, with its rather rococo arch and the
fantastic fringe of palms beyond it, it looked rather like a scene in
a Spanish opera. One long leaf of palm with jagged edges, black
against the moon, hung down on the other side of the arch, visible
through the archway, and had something of the look of the jaw of a
black crocodile. The fancy would not have lingered in his imagination
but for something else that caught his naturally alert eye. The air
was deathly still, and there was not a stir of wind; but he
distinctly saw the pendent palm-leaf move.
He looked around him and realized that he was alone. He had left
behind the last houses, which were mostly closed and shuttered, and
was walking between two long blank walls built of large and shapeless
but flattened stones, tufted here and there with the queer prickly
weeds of that region—walls which ran parallel all the way to the
gateway. He could not see the lights of the cafe outside the gate;
probably it was too far away. Nothing could be seen under the arch
but a wider expanse of large-flagged pavement, pale in the moon, with
the straggling prickly pear here and there. He had a strong sense of
the smell of evil; he felt queer physical oppression; but he did not
think of stopping. His courage, which was considerable, was perhaps
even less strong a part of him than his curiosity. All his life he
had been led by an intellectual hunger for the truth, even of
trifles. He often controlled it in the name of proportion; but it was
always there. He walked straight through the gateway, and on the
other side a man sprang like a monkey out of the tree-top and struck
at him with a knife. At the same moment another man came crawling
swiftly along the wall and, whirling a cudgel round his head, brought
it down. Father Brown turned, staggered, and sank in a heap, but as
he sank there dawned on his round face an expression of mild and
immense surprise.
There was living in the same little town at this time another
young American, particularly different from Mr Paul Snaith. His name
was John Adams Race, and he was an electrical engineer, employed by
Mendoza to fit out the old town with all the new conveniences. He was
a figure far less familiar in satire and international gossip than
that of the American journalist. Yet, as a matter of fact, America
contains a million men of the moral type of Race to one of the moral
type of Snaith. He was exceptional in being exceptionally good at his
job, but in every other way he was very simple. He had begun life as
a druggist's assistant in a Western village, and risen by sheer work
and merit; but he still regarded his home town as the natural heart
of the habitable world. He had been taught a very Puritan, or purely
Evangelical, sort of Christianity from the Family Bible at his
mother's knee; and in so far as he had time to have any religion,
that was still his religion. Amid all the dazzling lights of the
latest and even wildest discoveries, when he was at the very edge and
extreme of experiment, working miracles of light and sound like a god
creating new stars and solar systems, he never for a moment doubted
that the things 'back home' were the best things in the world; his
mother and the Family Bible and the quiet and quaint morality of his
village. He had as serious and noble a sense of the sacredness of his
mother as if he had been a frivolous Frenchman. He was quite sure the
Bible religion was really the right thing; only he vaguely missed it
wherever he went in the modern world. He could hardly be expected to
sympathize with the religious externals of Catholic countries; and in
a dislike of mitres and croziers he sympathized with Mr Snaith,
though not in so cocksure a fashion. He had no liking for the public
bowings and scrapings of Mendoza and certainly no temptation to the
masonic mysticism of the atheist Alvarez. Perhaps all that
semi-tropical life was too coloured for him, shot with Indian red and
Spanish gold. Anyhow, when he said there was nothing to touch his
home town, he was not boasting. He really meant that there was
somewhere something plain and unpretentious and touching, which he
really respected more than anything else in the world. Such being the
mental attitude of John Adams Race in a South American station, there
had been growing on him for some time a curious feeling, which
contradicted all his prejudices and for which he could not account.
For the truth was this: that the only thing he had ever met in his
travels that in the least reminded him of the old wood-pile and the
provincial proprieties and the Bible on his mother's knee was (for
some inscrutable reason) the round face and black clumsy umbrella of
Father Brown.
He found himself insensibly watching that commonplace and even
comic black figure as it went bustling about; watching it with an
almost morbid fascination, as if it were a walking riddle or
contradiction. He had found something he could not help liking in the
heart of everything he hated; it was as if he had been horribly
tormented by lesser demons and then found that the Devil was quite an
ordinary person.
Thus it happened that, looking out of his window on that moonlit
night, he saw the Devil go by, the demon of unaccountable
blamelessness, in his broad black hat and long black coat, shuffling
along the street towards the gateway, and saw it with an interest
which he could not himself understand. He wondered where the priest
was going, and what he was really up to; and remained gazing out into
the moonlit street long after the little black figure had passed. And
then he saw something else that intrigued him further. Two other men
whom he recognized passed across his window as across a lighted
stage. A sort of blue limelight of the moon ran in a spectral halo
round the big bush of hair that stood erect on the head of little
Eckstein, the wine-seller, and it outlined a taller and darker figure
with an eagle profile and a queer old-fashioned and very top-heavy
black hat, which seemed to make the whole outline still more bizarre,
like a shape in a shadow pantomime. Race rebuked himself for allowing
the moon to play such tricks with his fancy; for on a second glance
he recognized the black Spanish sidewhiskers and high-featured face
of Dr Calderon, a worthy medical man of the town, whom he had once
found attending professionally on Mendoza. Still, there was something
in the way the men were whispering to each other and peering up the
street that struck him as peculiar. On a sudden impulse he leapt over
the low window-sill and himself went bareheaded up the road,
following their trail. He saw them disappear under the dark archway,
and a moment after there came a dreadful cry from beyond; curiously
loud and piercing, and all the more blood-curdling to Race because it
said something very distinctly in some tongue that he did not know.
The next moment there was a rushing of feet, more cries, and then
a confused roar of rage or grief that shook the turrets and tall palm
trees of the place; there was a movement in the mob that had
gathered, as if they were sweeping backwards through the gateway. And
then the dark archway resounded with a new voice, this time
intelligible to him and falling with the note of doom, as someone
shouted through the gateway:
'Father Brown is dead!'
He never knew what prop gave way in his mind, or why something on
which he had been counting suddenly failed him; but he ran towards
the gateway and was just in time to meet his countryman, the
journalist Snaith, coming out of the dark entrance, deadly pale and
snapping his fingers nervously.
'It's quite true,' said Snaith, with something which for him
approached to reverence. 'He's a goner. The doctor's been looking at
him, and there's no hope. Some of these damned Dagos clubbed him as
he came through the gate—God knows why. It'll be a great loss to
the place.'
Race did not or perhaps could not reply, but ran on under the arch
to the scene beyond. The small black figure lay where it had fallen
on the wilderness of wide stones starred here and there with green
thorn; and the great crowd was being kept back, chiefly by the mere
gestures of one gigantic figure in the foreground. For there were
many there who swayed hither and thither at the mere movement of his
hand, as if he had been a magician.
Alvarez, the dictator and demagogue, was a tall, swaggering
figure, always rather flamboyantly clad, and on this occasion he wore
a green uniform with embroideries like silver snakes crawling all
over it, with an order round his neck hung on a very vivid maroon
ribbon. His close curling hair was already grey, and in contrast his
complexion, which his friends called olive and his foes octoroon,
looked almost literally golden, as if it were a mask moulded in gold.
But his large-featured face, which was powerful and humorous, was at
this moment properly grave and grim. He had been waiting, he
explained, for Father Brown at the cafe when he had heard a rustle
and a fall and, coming out, had found the corpse lying on the
flagstones.
'I know what some of you are thinking,' he said, looking round
proudly, 'and if you are afraid of me—as you are—I will say it
for you. I am an atheist; I have no god to call on for those who will
not take my word. But I tell you in the name of every root of honour
that may be left to a soldier and a man, that I had no part in this.
If I had the men here that did it, I would rejoice to hang them on
that tree.'
'Naturally we are glad to hear you say so,' said old Mendoza
stiffly and solemnly, standing by the body of his fallen coadjutor.
'This blow has been too appalling for us to say what else we feel at
present. I suggest that it will be more decent and proper if we
remove my friend's body and break up this irregular meeting. I
understand,' he added gravely to the doctor, 'that there is
unfortunately no doubt.'
'There is no doubt,' said Dr Calderon.
John Race went back to his lodgings sad and with a singular sense
of emptiness. It seemed impossible that he should miss a man whom he
never knew. He learned that the funeral was to take place next day;
for all felt that the crisis should be past as quickly as possible,
for fear of riots that were hourly growing more probable. When Snaith
had seen the row of Red Indians sitting on the veranda, they might
have been a row of ancient Aztec images carved in red wood. But he
had not seen them as they were when they heard that the priest was
dead.
Indeed they would certainly have risen in revolution and lynched
the republican leader, if they had not been immediately blocked by
the direct necessity of behaving respectfully to the coffin of their
own religious leader. The actual assassins, whom it would have been
most natural to lynch, seemed to have vanished into thin air. Nobody
knew their names; and nobody would ever know whether the dying man
had even seen their faces. That strange look of surprise that was
apparently his last look on earth might have been the recognition of
their faces. Alvarez repeated violently that it was no work of his,
and attended the funeral, walking behind the coffin in his splendid
silver and green uniform with a sort of bravado of reverence.
Behind the veranda a flight of stone steps scaled a very steep
green bank, fenced by a cactus-hedge, and up this the coffin was
laboriously lifted to the ground above, and placed temporarily at the
foot of the great gaunt crucifix that dominated the road and guarded
the consecrated ground. Below in the road were great seas of people
lamenting and telling their beads—an orphan population that had
lost a father. Despite all these symbols that were provocative enough
to him, Alvarez behaved with restraint and respect; and all would
have gone well—as Race told himself—had the others only let him
alone.
Race told himself bitterly that old Mendoza had always looked like
an old fool and had now very conspicuously and completely behaved
like an old fool. By a custom common in simpler societies, the coffin
was left open and the face uncovered, bringing the pathos to the
point of agony for all those simple people. This, being consonant to
tradition, need have done no harm; but some officious person had
added to it the custom of the French freethinkers, of having speeches
by the graveside. Mendoza proceeded to make a speech—a rather long
speech, and the longer it was, the longer and lower sank John Race's
spirits and sympathies with the religious ritual involved. A list of
saintly attributes, apparently of the most antiquated sort, was
rolled out with the dilatory dullness of an after-dinner speaker who
does not know how to sit down. That was bad enough; but Mendoza had
also the ineffable stupidity to start reproaching and even taunting
his political opponents. In three minutes he had succeeded in making
a scene, and a very extraordinary scene it was.
'We may well ask,' he said, looking around him pompously; 'we may
well ask where such virtues can be found among those who have madly
abandoned the creed of their fathers. It is when we have atheists
among us, atheist leaders, nay sometimes even atheist rulers, that we
find their infamous philosophy bearing fruit in crimes like this. If
we ask who murdered this holy man, we shall assuredly find—'
Africa of the forests looked out of the eyes of Alvarez the hybrid
adventurer; and Race fancied he could see suddenly that the man was
after all a barbarian, who could not control himself to the end; one
might guess that all his 'illuminated' transcendentalism had a touch
of Voodoo. Anyhow, Mendoza could not continue, for Alvarez had sprung
up and was shouting back at him and shouting him down, with
infinitely superior lungs.
'Who murdered him?' he roared. 'Your God murdered him! His own God
murdered him! According to you, he murders all his faithful and
foolish servants—as he murdered that one,' and he made a violent
gesture, not towards the coffin but the crucifix. Seeming to control
himself a little, he went on in a tone still angry but more
argumentative: 'I don't believe it, but you do. Isn't it better to
have no God than one that robs you in this fashion? I, at least, am
not afraid to say that there is none. There is no power in all this
blind and brainless universe that can hear your prayer or return your
friend. Though you beg Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Though
I dare Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Here and now I will put
it to the test—I defy the God who is not there to waken the man who
sleeps for ever.'
There was a shock of silence, and the demagogue had made his
sensation.
'We might have known,' cried Mendoza in a thick gobbling voice,
'when we allowed such men as you—'
A new voice cut into his speech; a high and shrill voice with a
Yankee accent.
'Stop! Stop!' cried Snaith the journalist; 'something's up! I
swear I saw him move.'
He went racing up the steps and rushed to the coffin, while the
mob below swayed with indescribable frenzies. The next moment he had
turned a face of amazement over his shoulder and made a signal with
his finger to Dr Calderon, who hastened forward to confer with him.
When the two men stepped away again from the coffin, all could see
that the position of the head had altered. A roar of excitement rose
from the crowd and seemed to stop suddenly, as if cut off in mid-air;
for the priest in the coffin gave a groan and raised himself on one
elbow, looking with bleared and blinking eyes at the crowd.
John Adams Race, who had hitherto known only miracles of science,
never found himself able in after-years to describe the
topsy-turvydom of the next few days. He seemed to have burst out of
the world of time and space, and to be living in the impossible. In
half an hour the whole of that town and district had been transformed
into something never known for a thousand years; a medieval people
turned to a mob of monks by a staggering miracle; a Greek city where
the god had descended among men. Thousands prostrated themselves in
the road; hundreds took vows on the spot; and even the outsiders,
like the two Americans, were able to think and speak of nothing but
the prodigy. Alvarez himself was shaken, as well he might be; and sat
down, with his head upon his hands.
And in the midst of all this tornado of beatitude was a little man
struggling to be heard. His voice was small and faint, and the noise
was deafening. He made weak little gestures that seemed more those of
irritation than anything else. He came to the edge of the parapet
above the crowd, waving it to be quiet, with movements rather like
the flap of the short wings of a penguin. There was something a
little more like a lull in the noise; and then Father Brown for the
first time reached the utmost stretch of the indignation that he
could launch against his children.
'Oh, you silly people,' he said in a high and quavering voice;
'Oh, you silly, silly people.'
Then he suddenly seemed to pull himself together, made a bolt for
the steps with his more normal gait, and began hurriedly to descend.
'Where are you going, Father?' said Mendoza, with more than his
usual veneration.
'To the telegraph office,' said Father Brown hastily. 'What? No;
of course it's not a miracle. Why should there be a miracle? Miracles
are not so cheap as all that.'
And he came tumbling down the steps, the people flinging
themselves before him to implore his blessing.
'Bless you, bless you,' said Father Brown hastily. 'God bless you
all and give you more sense.'
And he scuttled away with extraordinary rapidity to the telegraph
office, where he wired to his Bishop's secretary: 'There is some mad
story about a miracle here; hope his lordship not give authority.
Nothing in it.'
As he turned away from his effort, he tottered a little with the
reaction, and John Race caught him by the arm.
'Let me see you home,' he said; 'you deserve more than these
people are giving you.'
John Race and the priest were seated in the presbytery; the table
was still piled up with the papers with which the latter had been
wrestling the day before; the bottle of wine and the emptied
wine-glass still stood where he had left them.
'And now,' said Father Brown almost grimly, 'I can begin to
think.'
'I shouldn't think too hard just yet,' said the American. 'You
must be wanting a rest. Besides, what are you going to think about?'
'I have pretty often had the task of investigating murders, as it
happens,' said Father Brown. 'Now I have got to investigate my own
murder.'
'If I were you,' said Race, 'I should take a little wine first.'
Father Brown stood up and filled himself another glass, lifted it,
looked thoughtfully into vacancy, and put it down again. Then he sat
down once more and said:
'Do you know what I felt like when I died? You may not believe it,
but my feeling was one of overwhelming astonishment.'
'Well,' answered Race, 'I suppose you were astonished at being
knocked on the head.'
Father Brown leaned over to him and said in a low voice, 'I was
astonished at not being knocked on the head.'
Race looked at him for a moment as if he thought the knock on the
head had been only too effective; but he only said: 'What do you
mean?'
'I mean that when that man brought his bludgeon down with a great
swipe, it stopped at my head and did not even touch it. In the same
way, the other fellow made as if to strike me with a knife, but he
never gave me a scratch. It was just like play-acting. I think it
was. But then followed the extraordinary thing.'
He looked thoughtfully at the papers on the table for a moment and
then went on:
'Though I had not even been touched with knife or stick, I began
to feel my legs doubling up under me and my very life failing. I knew
I was being struck down by something, but it was not by those
weapons. Do you know what I think it was?' And he pointed to the wine
on the table.
Race picked up the wine-glass and looked at it and smelt it.
'I think you are right,' he said. 'I began as a druggist and
studied chemistry. I couldn't say for certain without an analysis;
but I think there's something very unusual in this stuff. There are
drugs by which the Asiatics produce a temporary sleep that looks like
death.'
'Quite so,' said the priest calmly.' The whole of this miracle was
faked, for some reason or other. That funeral scene was staged—and
timed. I think it is part of that raving madness of publicity that
has got hold of Snaith; but I can hardly believe he would go quite so
far, merely for that. After all, it's one thing to make copy out of
me and run me as a sort of sham Sherlock Holmes, and—'
Even as the priest spoke his face altered. His blinking eyelids
shut suddenly and he stood up as if he were choking. Then he put one
wavering hand as if groping his way towards the door.
'Where are you going?' asked the other in some wonder.
'If you ask me,' said Father Brown, who was quite white, 'I was
going to pray. Or rather, to praise.'
'I'm not sure I understand. What is the matter with you?'
'I was going to praise God for having so strangely and so
incredibly saved me—saved me by an inch.'
'Of course,' said Race, 'I am not of your religion; but believe
me, I have religion enough to understand that. Of course, you would
thank God for saving you from death.'
'No,' said the priest. 'Not from death. From disgrace.'
The other sat staring; and the priest's next words broke out of
him with a sort of cry. 'And if it had only been my disgrace! But it
was the disgrace of all I stand for; the disgrace of the Faith that
they went about to encompass. What it might have been! The most huge
and horrible scandal ever launched against us since the last lie was
choked in the throat of Titus Oates.'
'What on earth are you talking about?' demanded his companion.
'Well, I had better tell you at once,' said the priest; and
sitting down, he went on more composedly: 'It came to me in a flash
when I happened to mention Snaith and Sherlock Holmes. Now I happen
to remember what I wrote about his absurd scheme; it was the natural
thing to write, and yet I think they had ingeniously manoeuvred me
into writing just those words. They were something like 'I am ready
to die and come to life again like Sherlock Holmes, if that is the
best way.' And the moment I thought of that, I realized that I had
been made to write all sorts of things of that kind, all pointing to
the same idea. I wrote, as if to an accomplice, saying that I would
drink the drugged wine at a particular time. Now, don't you see?'
Race sprang to his feet still staring: 'Yes,' he said, 'I think I
began to see.'
'They would have boomed the miracle. Then they would have bust up
the miracle. And what is the worst, they would have proved that I was
in the conspiracy. It would have been our sham miracle. That's all
there is to it; and about as near hell as you and I will ever be, I
hope.'
Then he said, after a pause, in quite a mild voice: 'They
certainly would have got quite a lot of good copy out of me.'
Race looked at the table and said darkly: 'How many of these
brutes were in it?'
Father Brown shook his head. 'More than I like to think of,' he
said; 'but I hope some of them were only tools. Alvarez might think
that all's fair in war, perhaps; he has a queer mind. I'm very much
afraid that Mendoza is an old hypocrite; I never trusted him, and he
hated my action in an industrial matter. But all that will wait; I
have only got to thank God for the escape. And especially that I
wired at once to the Bishop.'
John Race appeared to be very thoughtful. 'You've told me a lot I
didn't know,' he said at last, 'and I feel inclined to tell you the
only thing you don't know. I can imagine how those fellows calculated
well enough. They thought any man alive, waking up in a coffin to
find himself canonized like a saint, and made into a walking miracle
for everyone to admire, would be swept along with his worshippers and
accept the crown of glory that fell on him out the sky. And I reckon
their calculation was pretty practical psychology, as men go. I've
seen all sorts of men in all sorts of places; and I tell you frankly
I don't believe there's one man in a thousand who could wake up like
that with all his wits about him; and while he was still almost
talking in his sleep, would have the sanity and the simplicity and
the humility to—' He was much surprised to find himself moved, and
his level voice wavering.
Father Brown was gazing abstractedly, and in a rather cockeyed
fashion, at the bottle on the table. 'Look here,' he said, ' what
about a bottle of real wine?'