The Wisdom of Father Brown | Page 9

costume was the
most aggressively opposite to his own.
This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie, a sharp collar and
protuberant yellow boots. He contrived, in the true tradition of 'Arry at Margate, to look
at once startling and commonplace. But as the Cockney apparition drew nearer, Muscari
was astounded to observe that the head was distinctly different from the body. It was an
Italian head: fuzzy, swarthy and very vivacious, that rose abruptly out of the standing
collar like cardboard and the comic pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew. He recognized
it, above all the dire erection of English holiday array, as the face of an old but forgotten
friend name Ezza. This youth had been a prodigy at college, and European fame was
promised him when he was barely fifteen; but when he appeared in the world he failed,
first publicly as a dramatist and a demagogue, and then privately for years on end as an
actor, a traveller, a commission agent or a journalist. Muscari had known him last behind
the footlights; he was but too well attuned to the excitements of that profession, and it
was believed that some moral calamity had swallowed him up.
"Ezza!" cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in a pleasant astonishment. "Well, I've
seen you in many costumes in the green room; but I never expected to see you dressed up

as an Englishman."
"This," answered Ezza gravely, "is not the costume of an Englishman, but of the Italian of
the future."
"In that case," remarked Muscari, "I confess I prefer the Italian of the past."
"That is your old mistake, Muscari," said the man in tweeds, shaking his head; "and the
mistake of Italy. In the sixteenth century we Tuscans made the morning: we had the
newest steel, the newest carving, the newest chemistry. Why should we not now have the
newest factories, the newest motors, the newest finance--the newest clothes?"
"Because they are not worth having," answered Muscari. "You cannot make Italians
really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the short cut to good living will
never go by the new elaborate roads."
"Well, to me Marconi, or D'Annunzio, is the star of Italy" said the other. "That is why I
have become a Futurist--and a courier."
"A courier!" cried Muscari, laughing. "Is that the last of your list of trades? And whom
are you conducting?"
"Oh, a man of the name of Harrogate, and his family, I believe."
"Not the banker in this hotel?" inquired the poet, with some eagerness.
"That's the man," answered the courier.
"Does it pay well?" asked the troubadour innocently.
"It will pay me," said Ezza, with a very enigmatic smile. "But I am a rather curious sort
of courier." Then, as if changing the subject, he said abruptly: "He has a daughter--and a
son."
"The daughter is divine," affirmed Muscari, "the father and son are, I suppose, human.
But granted his harmless qualities doesn't that banker strike you as a splendid instance of
my argument? Harrogate has millions in his safes, and I have--the hole in my pocket. But
you daren't say-- you can't say--that he's cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even more
energetic. He's not clever, he's got eyes like blue buttons; he's not energetic, he moves
from chair to chair like a paralytic. He's a conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he's
got money simply because he collects money, as a boy collects stamps. You're too
strong-minded for business, Ezza. You won't get on. To be clever enough to get all that
money, one must be stupid enough to want it."
"I'm stupid enough for that," said Ezza gloomily. "But I should suggest a suspension of
your critique of the banker, for here he comes."
Mr Harrogate, the great financier, did indeed enter the room, but nobody looked at him.

He was a massive elderly man with a boiled blue eye and faded grey-sandy moustaches;
but for his heavy stoop he might have been a colonel. He carried several unopened letters
in his hand. His son Frank was a really fine lad, curly-haired, sun-burnt and strenuous;
but nobody looked at him either. All eyes, as usual, were riveted, for the moment at least,
upon Ethel Harrogate, whose golden Greek head and colour of the dawn seemed set
purposely above that sapphire sea, like a goddess's. The poet Muscari drew a deep breath
as if he were drinking something, as indeed he was. He was drinking the Classic; which
his fathers made. Ezza studied her with a gaze equally intense and far more baffling.
Miss Harrogate was specially radiant and ready for conversation on this occasion; and her
family had fallen into the easier Continental habit, allowing the