Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (86 page)

Long
before this revelation was complete the two big doors of the porch had opened
in the middle, and Colonel Adams (father of the furry young lady) had come out
himself to invite his eminent guest inside. He was a tall, sunburnt, and very
silent man, who wore a red smoking-cap like a fez, making him look like one of
the English Sirdars or Pashas in Egypt. With him was his brother-in-law, lately
come from Canada, a big and rather boisterous young gentleman-farmer, with a
yellow beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant
figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel’s late
wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had
been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest,
even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found
something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family
gatherings.

In the
large entrance hall of the house there was ample room even for Sir Leopold and
the removal of his wraps. Porch and vestibule, indeed, were unduly large in
proportion to the house, and formed, as it were, a big room with the front door
at one end, and the bottom of the staircase at the other. In front of the large
hall fire, over which hung the colonel’s sword, the process was completed and
the company, including the saturnine Crook, presented to Sir Leopold Fischer.
That venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his
well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat
pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas
present for his goddaughter. With an unaffected vain-glory that had something
disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a
touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted
in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and
vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer
stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of
the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of
the whole group.

“I’ll
put ’em back now, my dear,” said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of
his coat. “I had to be careful of ’em coming down. They’re the three great
African diamonds called ‘The Flying Stars,’ because they’ve been stolen so
often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in
the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might
have lost them on the road here. It was quite possible.”

“Quite
natural, I should say,” growled the man in the red tie. “I shouldn’t blame ’em
if they had taken ’em. When they ask for bread, and you don’t even give them a
stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves.”

“I won’t
have you talking like that,” cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. “You’ve
only talked like that since you became a horrid what’s-his-name. You know what
I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?”

“A
saint,” said Father Brown.

“I
think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a
Socialist.”

“A
radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes,” remarked Crook, with some
impatience; “and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither,
I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the
chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all
the chimney-sweeps paid for it.”

“But
who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”

Crook
looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. “Does one want to own
soot” he asked.

“One
might,” answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. “I’ve heard that gardeners
use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn’t
come, entirely with soot—applied externally.”

“Oh,
splendid,” cried Ruby. “Oh, I wish you’d do it to this company.”

The
boisterous Canadian, Mr. Blount, was lifting his loud voice in applause, and
the astonished financier his (in some considerable deprecation), when a knock
sounded at the double front doors. The priest opened them, and they showed
again the front garden of evergreens, monkey-tree and all, now gathering gloom
against a gorgeous violet sunset. The scene thus framed was so coloured and
quaint, like a back scene in a play, that they forgot a moment the
insignificant figure standing in the door. He was dusty-looking and in a frayed
coat, evidently a common messenger. “Any of you gentlemen Mr. Blount?” he
asked, and held forward a letter doubtfully. Mr. Blount started, and stopped in
his shout of assent. Ripping up the envelope with evident astonishment he read
it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared, and he turned to his
brother-in-law and host.

“I’m
sick at being such a nuisance, colonel,” he said, with the cheery colonial
conventions; “but would it upset you if an old acquaintance called on me here
tonight on business? In point of fact it’s Florian, that famous French acrobat
and comic actor; I knew him years ago out West (he was a French-Canadian by
birth), and he seems to have business for me, though I hardly guess what.”

“Of
course, of course,” replied the colonel carelessly. “My dear chap, any friend
of yours. No doubt he will prove an acquisition.”

“He’ll
black his face, if that’s what you mean,” cried Blount, laughing. “I don’t
doubt he’d black everyone else’s eyes. I don’t care; I’m not refined. I like
the jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top hat.”

“Not
on mine, please,” said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.

“Well,
well,” observed Crook, airly, “don’t let’s quarrel. There are lower jokes than
sitting on a top hat.”

Dislike
of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and evident intimacy with
the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his most sarcastic, magisterial
manner: “No doubt you have found something much lower than sitting on a top
hat. What is it, pray?”

“
Letting a top hat
sit on you, for instance,” said the Socialist.

“Now,
now, now,” cried the Canadian farmer with his barbarian benevolence, “don’t let’s
spoil a jolly evening. What I say is let’s do something for the company
tonight. Not blacking faces or sitting on hats, if you don’t like those—but
something of the sort. Why couldn’t we have a proper old English
pantomime—clown, columbine, and so on. I saw one when I left England at twelve
years old, and it’s blazed in my brain like a bonfire ever since. I came back
to the old country only last year, and I find the thing’s extinct. Nothing but
a lot of snivelling fairy plays. I want a hot poker and a policeman made into
sausages, and they give me princesses moralising by moonlight, Blue Birds, or something.
Blue Beard’s more in my line, and him I liked best when he turned into the
pantaloon.”

“I’m
all for making a policeman into sausages,” said John Crook. “It’s a better
definition of Socialism than some recently given. But surely the get-up would be
too big a business.”

“Not a
scrap,” cried Blount, quite carried away. “A harlequinade’s the quickest thing
we can do, for two reasons. First, one can gag to any degree; and, second, all
the objects are household things—tables and trowel-horses and washing baskets,
and things like that.”

“That’s
true,” admitted Crook, nodding eagerly and walking about. “But I’m afraid I can’t
have my policeman’s uniform? Haven’t killed a policeman lately.”

Blount
frowned thoughtfully a space, and then smote his thigh. “Yes, we can!” he
cried. “I’ve got Florian’s address here, and he knows every
costumier
in London. I’ll ’phone
him to bring a police dress when he comes.” And he went bounding away to the
telephone.

“Oh,
it’s glorious, godfather,” cried Ruby, almost dancing. “I’ll be columbine and
you shall be pantaloon.”

The
millionaire held himself stiff with a sort of heathen solemnity. “I think, my
dear,” he said, “you must get someone else for pantaloon.”

“I
will be pantaloon, if you like,” said Colonel Adams, taking his cigar out of
his mouth, and speaking for the first and last time.

“You
ought to have a statue,” cried the Canadian, as he came back, radiant, from the
telephone. “There, we are all fitted. Mr. Crook shall be clown; he’s a
journalist and knows all the oldest jokes. I can be harlequin, that only wants
long legs and jumping about. My friend Florian ’phones he’s bringing the police
costume; he’s changing on the way. We can act it in this very hall, the
audience sitting on those broad stairs opposite, one row above another. These
front doors can be the back scene, either open or shut. Shut, you see an
English interior. Open, a moonlit garden. It all goes by magic.” And snatching
a chance piece of billiard chalk from his pocket, he ran it across the hall
floor, half-way between the front door and the staircase, to mark the line of
the footlights.

How
even such a banquet of bosh was got ready in the time remained a riddle. But
they went at it with that mixture of recklessness and industry that lives when
youth is in a house; and youth was in that house that night, though not all may
have isolated the two faces and hearts from which it flamed. As always happens,
the invention grew wilder and wilder through the very tameness of the
bourgeois
conventions from
which it had to create. The columbine looked charming in an outstanding skirt
that strangely resembled the large lamp-shade in the drawing-room. The clown
and pantaloon made themselves white with flour from the cook, and red with
rouge from some other domestic, who remained (like all true Christian
benefactors) anonymous. The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of
cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian
lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In
fact he would certainly have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime
paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds.
Indeed, her uncle, James Blount, was getting almost out of hand in his
excitement; he was like a schoolboy. He put a paper donkey’s head unexpectedly
on Father Brown, who bore it patiently, and even found some private manner of
moving his ears. He even essayed to put the paper donkey’s tail to the
coat-tails of Sir Leopold Fischer. This, however, was frowned down. “Uncle is
too absurd,” cried Ruby to Crook, round whose shoulders she had seriously
placed a string of sausages. “Why is he so wild?”

“He is
harlequin to your columbine,” said Crook. “I am only the clown who makes the
old jokes.”

“I
wish you were the harlequin,” she said, and left the string of sausages
swinging.

Father
Brown, though he knew every detail done behind the scenes, and had even evoked
applause by his transformation of a pillow into a pantomime baby, went round to
the front and sat among the audience with all the solemn expectation of a child
at his first matinee. The spectators were few, relations, one or two local
friends, and the servants; Sir Leopold sat in the front seat, his full and
still fur-collared figure largely obscuring the view of the little cleric
behind him; but it has never been settled by artistic authorities whether the
cleric lost much. The pantomime was utterly chaotic, yet not contemptible;
there ran through it a rage of improvisation which came chiefly from Crook the
clown. Commonly he was a clever man, and he was inspired tonight with a wild
omniscience, a folly wiser than the world, that which comes to a young man who
has seen for an instant a particular expression on a particular face. He was
supposed to be the clown, but he was really almost everything else, the author
(so far as there was an author), the prompter, the scene-painter, the
scene-shifter, and, above all, the orchestra. At abrupt intervals in the
outrageous performance he would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and
bang out some popular music equally absurd and appropriate.

The
climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front doors at the
back of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit garden, but showing
more prominently the famous professional guest; the great Florian, dressed up
as a policeman. The clown at the piano played the constabulary chorus in the “Pirates
of Penzance,” but it was drowned in the deafening applause, for every gesture
of the great comic actor was an admirable though restrained version of the
carriage and manner of the police. The harlequin leapt upon him and hit him
over the helmet; the pianist playing “Where did you get that hat?” he faced
about in admirably simulated astonishment, and then the leaping harlequin hit
him again (the pianist suggesting a few bars of “Then we had another one”).
Then the harlequin rushed right into the arms of the policeman and fell on top
of him, amid a roar of applause. Then it was that the strange actor gave that
celebrated imitation of a dead man, of which the fame still lingers round
Putney. It was almost impossible to believe that a living person could appear
so limp.