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"The Scandal of Father Brown"
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CONTENTS
The Scandal of Father Brown
The Quick One
The Blast of the Book
The Green Man
The Pursuit of Mr Blue
The Crime of the Communist
The Point of a Pin
The Insoluble Problem
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Chapter I. The Scandal of Father Brown
It would not be fair to record the adventures of
Father Brown, without admitting that he was once
involved in a grave scandal. There still are
persons, perhaps even of his own community, who
would say that there was a sort of blot upon his
name. It happened in a picturesque Mexican
road-house of rather loose repute, as appeared
later; and to some it seemed that for once the
priest had allowed a romantic streak in him, and his
sympathy for human weakness, to lead him into loose
and unorthodox action. The story in itself was a
simple one; and perhaps the whole surprise of it
consisted in its simplicity.
Burning Troy began with Helen; this disgraceful
story began with the beauty of Hypatia Potter.
Americans have a great power, which Europeans do not
always appreciate, of creating institutions from
below; that is by popular initiative. Like every
other good thing, it has its lighter aspects; one of
which, as has been remarked by Mr. Wells and others,
is that a person may become a public institution
without becoming an official institution. A girl of
great beauty or brilliancy will be a sort of
uncrowned queen, even if she is not a Film Star or
the original of a Gibson Girl. Among those who had
the fortune, or misfortune, to exist beautifully in
public in this manner, was a certain Hypatia Hard,
who had passed through the preliminary stage of
receiving florid compliments in society paragraphs
of the local press, to the position of one who is
actually interviewed by real pressmen. On War and
Peace and Patriotism and Prohibition and Evolution
and the Bible she had made her pronouncements with a
charming smile; and if none of them seemed very near
to the real grounds of her own reputation, it was
almost equally hard to say what the grounds of her
reputation really were. Beauty, and being the
daughter of a rich man, are things not rare in her
country; but to these she added whatever it is that
attracts the wandering eye of journalism. Next to
none of her admirers had even seen her, or even
hoped to do so; and none of them could possibly
derive any sordid benefit from her father’s wealth.
It was simply a sort of popular romance, the modern
substitute for mythology; and it laid the first
foundations of the more turgid and tempestuous sort
of romance in which she was to figure later on; and
in which many held that the reputation of Father
Brown, as well as of others, had been blown to rags.
It was accepted, sometimes romantically,
sometimes resignedly, by those whom American satire
has named the Sob Sisters, that she had already
married a very worthy and respectable business man
of the name of Potter. It was even possible to
regard her for a moment as Mrs. Potter, on the
universal understanding that her husband was only
the husband of Mrs. Potter.
Then came the Great Scandal, by which her friends
and enemies were horrified beyond their wildest
hopes. Her name was coupled (as the queer phrase
goes) with a literary man living in Mexico; in
status an American, but in spirit a very Spanish
American. Unfortunately his vices resembled her
virtues, in being good copy. He was no less a person
than the famous or infamous Rudel Romanes; the poet
whose works had been so universally popularized by
being vetoed by libraries or prosecuted by the
police. Anyhow, her pure and placid star was seen in
conjunction with this comet. He was of the sort to
be compared to a comet, being hairy and hot; the
first in his portraits, the second in his poetry. He
was also destructive; the comet’s tail was a trail
of divorces, which some called his success as a
lover and some his prolonged failure as a husband.
It was hard on Hypatia; there are disadvantages in
conducting the perfect private life in public; like
a domestic interior in a shop-window. Interviewers
reported doubtful utterances about Love’s Larger Law
of Supreme Self-Realization. The Pagans applauded.
The Sob Sisterhood permitted themselves a note of
romantic regret; some having even the hardened
audacity to quote from the poem of Maud Mueller, to
the effect that of all the words of tongue or pen,
the saddest are ‘It might have been.’ And Mr. Agar
P. Rock, who hated the Sob Sisterhood with a holy
and righteous hatred, said that in this case he
thoroughly agreed with Bret Harte’s emendation of
the poem:
‘More sad are those we daily see; it is, but it
hadn’t ought to be.’
For Mr. Rock was very firmly and rightly
convinced that a very large number of things hadn’t
ought to be. He was a slashing and savage critic of
national degeneration, on the Minneapolis Meteor,
and a bold and honest man. He had perhaps come to
specialize too much in the spirit of indignation,
but it had had a healthy enough origin in his
reaction against sloppy attempts to confuse right
and wrong in modern journalism and gossip. He
expressed it first in the form of a protest against
an unholy halo of romance being thrown round the
gunman and the gangster. Perhaps he was rather too
much inclined to assume, in robust impatience, that
all gangsters were Dagos and that all Dagos were
gangsters. But his prejudices, even when they were a
little provincial, were rather refreshing after a
certain sort of maudlin and unmanly hero-worship,
which was ready to regard a professional murderer as
a leader of fashion, so long as the pressmen
reported that his smile was irresistible or his
tuxedo was all right. Anyhow, the prejudices did not
boil the less in the bosom of Mr. Rock, because he
was actually in the land of the Dagos when this
story opens; striding furiously up a hill beyond the
Mexican border, to the white hotel, fringed with
ornamental palms, in which it was supposed that the
Potters were staying and that the mysterious Hypatia
now held her court. Agar Rock was a good specimen of
a Puritan, even to look at; he might even have been
a virile Puritan of the seventeenth century, rather
than the softer and more sophisticated Puritan of
the twentieth. If you had told him that his
antiquated black hat and habitual black frown, and
fine flinty features, cast a gloom over the sunny
land of palms and vines, he would have been very
much gratified. He looked to right and left with
eyes bright with universal suspicions. And, as he
did so, he saw two figures on the ridge above him,
outlined against the clear sub-tropical sunset;
figures in a momentary posture which might have made
even a less suspicious man suspect something.
One of the figures was rather remarkable in
itself. It was poised at the exact angle of the
turning road above the valley, as if by an instinct
for the site as well as the attitude of statuary. It
was wrapt in a great black cloak, in the Byronic
manner, and the head that rose above it in swarthy
beauty was remarkably like Byron’s. This man had the
same curling hair and curling nostrils; and he
seemed to be snorting something of the same scorn
and indignation against the world. He grasped in his
hand a rather long cane or walking-stick, which
having a spike of the sort used for mountaineering,
carried at the moment a fanciful suggestion of a
spear. It was rendered all the more fanciful by
something comically contradictory in the figure of
the other man, who carried an umbrella. It was
indeed a new and neatly-rolled umbrella, very
different, for instance, from Father Brown’s
umbrella: and he was neatly clad like a clerk in
light holiday clothes; a stumpy stoutish bearded
man; but the prosaic umbrella was raised and even
brandished at an acute angle of attack. The taller
man thrust back at him, but in a hasty defensive
manner; and then the scene rather collapsed into
comedy; for the umbrella opened of itself and its
owner almost seemed to sink behind it, while the
other man had the air of pushing his spear through a
great grotesque shield. But the other man did not
push it, or the quarrel, very far; he plucked out
the point, turned away impatiently and strode down
the road; while the other, rising and carefully
refolding his umbrella, turned in the opposite
direction towards the hotel. Rock had not heard any
of the words of the quarrel, which must have
immediately preceded this brief and rather absurd
bodily conflict; but as he went up the road in the
track of the short man with the beard, he revolved
many things. And the romantic cloak and rather
operatic good looks of the one man, combined with
the sturdy self-assertion of the other, fitted in
with the whole story which he had come to seek; and
he knew that he could have fixed those two strange
figures with their names: Romanes and Potter.
His view was in every way confirmed when he
entered the pillared porch; and heard the voice of
the bearded man raised high in altercation or
command. He was evidently speaking to the manager or
staff of the hotel, and Rock heard enough to know
that he was warning them of a wild and dangerous
character in the neighbourhood.
‘If he’s really been to the hotel already,’ the
little man was saying, in answer to some murmur,
‘all I can say is that you’d better not let him in
again. Your police ought to be looking after a
fellow of that sort, but anyhow, I won’t have the
lady pestered with him.’
Rock listened in grim silence and growing
conviction; then he slid across the vestibule to an
alcove where he saw the hotel register and turning
to the last page, saw ‘the fellow’ had indeed been
to the hotel already. There appeared the name of
‘Rudel Romanes,’ that romantic public character, in
very large and florid foreign lettering; and after a
space under it, rather close together, the names of
Hypatia Potter and Ellis T. Potter, in a correct and
quite American handwriting.
Agar Rock looked moodily about him, and saw in
the surroundings and even the small decorations of
the hotel everything that he hated most. It is
perhaps unreasonable to complain of oranges growing
on orange-trees, even in small tubs; still more of
their only growing on threadbare curtains or faded
wallpapers as a formal scheme of ornament. But to
him those red and golden moons, decoratively
alternated with silver moons, were in a queer way
the quintessence of all moonshine. He saw in them
all that sentimental deterioration which his
principles deplored in modern manners, and which his
prejudices vaguely connected with the warmth and
softness of the South. It annoyed him even to catch
sight of a patch of dark canvas, half-showing a
Watteau shepherd with a guitar, or a blue tile with
a common-place design of a Cupid on a dolphin. His
common sense would have told him that he might have
seen these things in a shop-window on Fifth Avenue;
but where they were, they seemed like a taunting
siren voice of the Paganism of the Mediterranean.
And then suddenly, the look of all these things
seemed to alter, as a still mirror will flicker when
a figure has flashed past it for a moment; and he
knew the whole room was full of a challenging
presence. He turned almost stiffly, and with a sort
of resistance, and knew that he was facing the
famous Hypatia, of whom he had read and heard for so
many years.
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.’
‘Well,’ said the other, after a short pause, ‘and
what do you suppose happened after that?’
Father Brown got up rather abruptly from the seat
in which he had collapsed; the candlelight threw the
shadow of his short figure across the wall and
ceiling, giving an odd impression that the balance
of the room had been altered.
‘Ah,’ he muttered, ‘that’s the devil of it.
That’s the real devil. Much worse than the old
Indian demons in this jungle. You thought I was only
making out a case for the loose ways of these Latin
Americans — well, the queer thing about you’ — and
he blinked owlishly at the other through his
spectacles — ‘the queerest thing about you is that
in a way you’re right.
‘You say down with romance. I say I’d take my
chance in fighting the genuine romances — all the
more because they are precious few, outside the
first fiery days of youth. I say — take away the
Intellectual Friendships; take away the Platonic
Unions; take away the Higher Laws of Self-Fulfilment
and the rest, and I’ll risk the normal dangers of
the job. Take away the love that isn’t love, but
only pride and vainglory and publicity and making a
splash; and we’ll take our chance of fighting the
love that is love, when it has to be fought, as well
as the love that is lust and lechery. Priests know
young people will have passions, as doctors know
they will have measles. But Hypatia Potter is forty
if she is a day, and she cares no more for that
little poet than if he were her publisher or her
publicity man. That’s just the point — he was her
publicity man. It’s your newspapers that have ruined
her; it’s living in the limelight; it’s wanting to
see herself in the headlines, even in a scandal if
it were only sufficiently psychic and superior. It’s
wanting to be George Sand, her name immortally
linked with Alfred de Musset. When her real romance
of youth was over, it was the sin of middle age that
got hold of her; the sin of intellectual ambition.
She hasn’t got any intellect to speak of; but you
don’t need any intellect to be an intellectual.’
‘I should say she was pretty brainy in one
sense,’ observed Rock reflectively.
‘Yes, in one sense,’ said Father Brown. ‘In only
one sense. In a business sense. Not in any sense
that has anything to do with these poor lounging
Dagos down here. You curse the Film Stars and tell
me you hate romance. Do you suppose the Film Star,
who is married for the fifth time, is misled by any
romance? Such people are very practical; more
practical than you are. You say you admire the
simple solid Business Man. Do you suppose that Rudel
Romanes isn’t a Business Man? Can’t you see he knew,
quite as well as she did, the advertising advantages
of this grand affair with a famous beauty. He also
knew very well that his hold on it was pretty
insecure; hence his fussing about and bribing
servants to lock doors. But what I mean to say,
first and last, is that there’d be a lot less
scandal if people didn’t idealize sin and pose as
sinners. These poor Mexicans may seem sometimes to
live like beasts, or rather sin like men; but they
don’t go in for Ideals. You must at least give them
credit for that.’
He sat down again, as abruptly as he had risen,
and laughed apologetically. ‘Well, Mr Rock,’ he
said, ‘that is my complete confession; the whole
horrible story of how I helped a romantic elopement.
You can do what you like with it.’
‘In that case,’ said Rock, rising, ‘I will go to
my room and make a few alterations in my report.
But, first of all, I must ring up my paper and tell
them I’ve been telling them a pack of lies.’
Not much more than half an hour had passed,
between the time when Rock had telephoned to say the
priest was helping the poet to run away with the
lady, and the time when he telephoned to say that
the priest had prevented the poet from doing
precisely the same thing. But in that short interval
of time was born and enlarged and scattered upon the
winds the Scandal of Father Brown. The truth is
still half an hour behind the slander; and nobody
can be certain when or where it will catch up with
it. The garrulity of pressmen and the eagerness of
enemies had spread the first story through the city,
even before it appeared in the first printed
version. It was instantly corrected and contradicted
by Rock himself, in a second message stating how the
story had really ended; but it was by no means
certain that the first story was killed. A
positively incredible number of people seemed to
have read the first issue of the paper and not the
second. Again and again, in every corner of the
world, like a flame bursting from blackened ashes,
there would appear the old tale of the Brown
Scandal, or Priest Ruins Potter Home. Tireless
apologists of the priest’s party watched for it, and
patiently tagged after it with contradictions and
exposures and letters of protest. Sometimes the
letters were published in the papers; and sometimes
they were not. But still nobody knew how many people
had heard the story without hearing the
contradiction. It was possible to find whole blocks
of blameless and innocent people who thought the
Mexican Scandal was an ordinary recorded historical
incident like the Gunpowder Plot. Then somebody
would enlighten these simple people, only to
discover that the old story had started afresh among
a few quite educated people, who would seem the last
people on earth to be duped by it. And so the two
Father Browns chase each other round the world for
ever; the first a shameless criminal fleeing from
justice; the second a martyr broken by slander, in a
halo of rehabilitation. But neither of them is very
like the real Father Brown, who is not broken at
all; but goes stumping with his stout umbrella
through life, liking most of the people in it;
accepting the world as his companion, but never as
his judge.
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Chapter II. The Quick One
The strange story of the incongruous strangers is
still remembered along that strip of the Sussex
coast, where the large and quiet hotel called the
Maypole and Garland looks across its own gardens to
the sea. Two quaintly assorted figures did, indeed,
enter that quiet hotel on that sunny afternoon; one
being conspicuous in the sunlight, and visible over
the whole shore, by the fact of wearing a lustrous
green turban, surrounding a brown face and a black
beard; the other would have seemed to some even more
wild and weird, by reason of his wearing a soft
black clergyman’s hat with a yellow moustache and
yellow hair of leonine length. He at least had often
been seen preaching on the sands or conducting Band
of Hope services with a little wooden spade; only he
had certainly never been seen going into the bar of
an hotel. The arrival of these quaint companions was
the climax of the story, but not the beginning of
it; and, in order to make a rather mysterious story
as clear as possible, it is better to begin at the
beginning.
Half an hour before those two conspicuous figures
entered the hotel, and were noticed by everybody,
two other very inconspicuous figures had also
entered it, and been noticed by nobody. One was a
large man, and handsome in a heavy style, but he had
a knack of taking up very little room, like a
background; only an almost morbidly suspicious
examination of his boots would have told anybody
that he was an Inspector of Police in plain clothes;
in very plain clothes. The other was a drab and
insignificant little man, also in plain clothes,
only that they happened to be clerical clothes; but
nobody had ever seen him preaching on the sands.
These travellers also found themselves in a sort
of large smoking-room with a bar, for a reason which
determined all the events of that tragic afternoon.
The truth is that the respectable hotel called the
Maypole and Garland was being ‘done-up’. Those who
had liked it in the past were moved to say that it
was being done down; or possibly done in. This was
the opinion of the local grumbler, Mr. Raggley, the
eccentric old gentleman who drank cherry brandy in a
corner and cursed. Anyhow, it was being carefully
stripped of all the stray indications that it had
once been an English inn; and being busily turned,
yard by yard and room by room, into something
resembling the sham palace of a Levantine usurer in
an American film. It was, in short, being
‘decorated’; but the only part where the decoration
was complete, and where customers could yet be made
comfortable, was this large room leading out of the
hall. It had once been honourably known as a Bar
Parlour and was now mysteriously known as a Saloon
Lounge, and was newly ‘decorated’, in the manner of
an Asiatic Divan. For Oriental ornament pervaded the
new scheme; and where there had once been a gun hung
on hooks, and sporting prints and a stuffed fish in
a glass case, there were now festoons of Eastern
drapery and trophies of scimitars, tulwards and
yataghans, as if in unconscious preparation for the
coming of the gentleman with the turban. The
practical point was, however, that the few guests
who did arrive had to be shepherded into this
lounge, now swept and garnished, because all the
more regular and refined parts of the hotel were
still in a state of transition. Perhaps that was
also the reason why even those few guests were
somewhat neglected, the manager and others being
occupied with explanations or exhortations
elsewhere. Anyhow, the first two travellers who
arrived had to kick their heels for some time
unattended. The bar was at the moment entirely
empty, and the Inspector rang and rapped impatiently
on the counter; but the little clergyman had already
dropped into a lounge seat and seemed in no hurry
for anything. Indeed his friend the policeman,
turning his head, saw that the round face of the
little cleric had gone quite blank, as it had a way
of doing sometimes; he seemed to be staring through
his moonlike spectacles at the newly decorated wall.
‘I may as well offer you a penny for your
thoughts,’ said Inspector Greenwood, turning from
the counter with a sigh, ‘as nobody seems to want my
pennies for anything else. This seems to be the only
room in the house that isn’t full of ladders and
whitewash; and this is so empty that there isn’t
even a potboy to give me a pot of beer.’
‘Oh . . . my thoughts are not worth a penny, let
alone a pot of beer,’ answered the cleric, wiping
his spectacles, ‘I don’t know why . . . but I was
thinking how easy it would be to commit a murder
here.’
‘It’s all very well for you, Father Brown,’ said
the Inspector good-humouredly. ‘You’ve had a lot
more murders than your fair share; and we poor
policemen sit starving all our lives, even for a
little one. But why should you say . . . Oh I see,
you’re looking at all those Turkish daggers on the
wall. There are plenty of things to commit a murder
with, if that’s what you mean. But not more than
there are in any ordinary kitchen: carving knives or
pokers or what not. That isn’t where the snag of a
murder comes in.’
Father Brown seemed to recall his rambling
thoughts in some bewilderment; and said that he
supposed so.
‘Murder is always easy,’ said Inspector
Greenwood. ‘There can’t possibly be anything more
easy than murder. I could murder you at this minute
— more easily than I can get a drink in this damned
bar. The only difficulty is committing a murder
without committing oneself as a murderer. It’s this
shyness about owning up to a murder; it’s this silly
modesty of murderers about their own masterpieces,
that makes the trouble. They will stick to this
extraordinary fixed idea of killing people without
being found out; and that’s what restrains them,
even in a room full of daggers. Otherwise every
cutler’s shop would be piled with corpses. And that,
by the way, explains the one kind of murder that
really can’t be prevented. Which is why, of course,
we poor bobbies are always blamed for not preventing
it. When a madman murders a King or a President, it
can’t be prevented. You can’t make a King live in a
coal-cellar, or carry about a President in a steel
box. Anybody can murder him who does not mind being
a murderer. That is where the madman is like the
martyr — sort of beyond this world. A real fanatic
can always kill anybody he likes.’
Before the priest could reply, a joyous band of
bagmen rolled into the room like a shoal of
porpoises; and the magnificent bellow of a big,
beaming man, with an equally big and beaming
tie-pin, brought the eager and obsequious manager
running like a dog to the whistle, with a rapidity
which the police in plain clothes had failed to
inspire.
‘I’m sure I’m very sorry, Mr. Jukes,’ said the
manager, who wore a rather agitated smile and a wave
or curl of very varnished hair across his forehead.
‘We’re rather understaffed at present; and I had to
attend to something in the hotel, Mr. Jukes.’
Mr. Jukes was magnanimous, but in a noisy way;
and ordered drinks all round, conceding one even to
the almost cringing manager. Mr. Jukes was a
traveller for a very famous and fashionable wine and
spirits firm; and may have conceived himself as
lawfully the leader in such a place. Anyhow, he
began a boisterous monologue, rather tending to tell
the manager how to manage his hotel; and the others
seemed to accept him as an authority. The policeman
and the priest had retired to a low bench and small
table in the background, from which they watched
events, up to that rather remarkable moment when the
policeman had very decisively to intervene.
For the next thing that happened, as already
narrated, was the astonishing apparition of a brown
Asiatic in a green turban, accompanied by the (if
possible) more astonishing apparition of a
Noncomformist minister; omens such as appear before
a doom. In this case there was no doubt about
evidence for the portent. A taciturn but observant
boy cleaning the steps for the last hour (being a
leisurely worker), the dark, fat, bulky
bar-attendant, even the diplomatic but distracted
manager, all bore witness to the miracle.
The apparitions, as the sceptics say, were due to
perfectly natural causes. The man with the mane of
yellow hair and the semi-clerical clothes was not
only familiar as a preacher on the sands, but as a
propagandist throughout the modern world. He was no
less a person than the Rev. David Pryce-Jones, whose
far-resounding slogan was Prohibition and
Purification for Our Land and the Britains Overseas.
He as an excellent public speaker and organizer; and
an idea had occurred to him that ought to have
occurred to Prohibitionists long ago. It was the
simple idea that, if Prohibition is right, some
honour is due to the Prophet who was perhaps the
first Prohibitionist. He had corresponded with the
leaders of Mahommedan religious thought, and had
finally induced a distinguished Moslem (one of whose
names was Akbar and the rest an untranslatable
ululation of Allah with attributes) to come and
lecture in England on the ancient Moslem veto on
wine. Neither of them certainly had been in a
public-house bar before; but they had come there by
the process already described; driven from the
genteel tea-rooms, shepherded into the
newly-decorated saloon. Probably all would have been
well, if the great Prohibitionist, in his innocence,
had not advanced to the counter and asked for a
glass of milk.
The commercial travellers, though a kindly race,
emitted involuntary noises of pain; a murmur of
suppressed jests was heard, as ‘Shun the bowl,’ or
‘Better bring out the cow’. But the magnificent Mr.
Jukes, feeling it due to his wealth and tie-pin to
produce more refined humour, fanned himself as one
about to faint, and said pathetically: ‘They know
they can knock me down with a feather. They know a
breath will blow me away. They know my doctor says
I’m not to have these shocks. And they come and
drink cold milk in cold blood, before my very eyes.’
The Rev. David Pryce-Jones, accustomed to deal
with hecklers at public meetings, was so unwise as
to venture on remonstrance and recrimination, in
this very different and much more popular
atmosphere. The Oriental total abstainer abstained
from speech as well as spirits; and certainly gained
in dignity by doing so. In fact, so far as he was
concerned, the Moslem culture certainly scored a
silent victory; he was obviously so much more of a
gentleman than the commercial gentlemen, that a
faint irritation began to arise against his
aristocratic aloofness; and when Mr Pryce-Jones
began to refer in argument to something of the kind,
the tension became very acute indeed.
‘I ask you, friends,’ said Mr. Pryce-Jones, with
expansive platform gestures, ‘why does our friend
here set an example to us Christians in truly
Christian self-control and brotherhood? Why does he
stand here as a model of true Christianity, of real
refinement, of genuine gentlemanly behaviour, amid
all the quarrels and riots of such places as these?
Because, whatever the doctrinal differences between
us, at least in his soil the evil plant, the
accursed hop or vine, has never — ’
At this crucial moment of the controversy it was
that John Raggley, the stormy petrel of a hundred
storms of controversy, red-faced, white-haired, his
antiquated top-hat on the back of his head, his
stick swinging like a club, entered the house like
an invading army.
John Raggley was generally regarded as a crank.
He was the sort of man who writes letters to the
newspaper, which generally do not appear in the
newspaper; but which do appear afterwards as
pamphlets, printed (or misprinted) at his own
expense; and circulated to a hundred waste-paper
baskets. He had quarrelled alike with the Tory
squires and the Radical County Councils; he hated
Jews; and he distrusted nearly everything that is
sold in shops, or even in hotels. But there was a
backing of facts behind his fads; he knew the county
in every corner and curious detail; and he was a
sharp observer. Even the manager, a Mr. Wills, had a
shadowy respect for Mr. Raggley, having a nose for
the sort of lunacy allowed in the gentry; not indeed
the prostrate reverence which he had for the jovial
magnificence of Mr. Jukes, who was really good for
trade, but a least a disposition to avoid
quarrelling with the old grumbler, partly perhaps
out of fear of the old grumbler’s tongue.
‘And you will have your usual, Sir,’ said Mr.
Wills, leaning and leering across the counter.
‘It’s the only decent stuff you’ve still got,’
snorted Mr. Raggley, slapping down his queer and
antiquated hat. ‘Damn it, I sometimes think the only
English thing left in England is cherry brandy.
Cherry brandy does taste of cherries. Can you find
me any beer that tastes of hops, or any cider that
tastes of apples, or any wine that has the remotest
indication of being made out of grapes? There’s an
infernal swindle going on now in every inn in the
country, that would have raised a revolution in any
other country. I’ve found out a thing or two about
it, I can tell you. You wait till I can get it
printed, and people will sit up. If I could stop our
people being poisoned with all this bad drink — ’
Here again the Rev. David Pryce-Jones showed a
certain failure in tact; though it was a virtue he
almost worshipped. He was so unwise as to attempt to
establish an alliance with Mr. Raggley, by a fine
confusion between the idea of bad drink and the idea
that drink is bad. Once more he endeavoured to drag
his stiff and stately Eastern friend into the
argument, as a refined foreigner superior to our
rough English ways. He was even so foolish as to
talk of a broad theological outlook; and ultimately
to mention the name of Mahomet, which was echoed in
a sort of explosion.
‘God damn your soul!’ roared Mr. Raggley, with a
less broad theological outlook. ‘Do you mean that
Englishmen mustn’t drink English beer, because wine
was forbidden in a damned desert by that dirty old
humbug Mahomet?’
In an instant the Inspector of Police had reached
the middle of the room with a stride. For, the
instant before that, a remarkable change had taken
place in the demeanour of the Oriental gentleman,
who had hitherto stood perfectly still, with steady
and shining eyes. He now proceeded, as his friend
had said, to set an example in truly Christian
self-control and brotherhood by reaching the wall
with the bound of a tiger, tearing down one of the
heavy knives hanging there and sending it smack like
a stone from a sling, so that it stuck quivering in
the wall exactly half an inch above Mr. Raggley’s
ear. It would undoubtedly have stuck quivering in
Mr. Raggley, if Inspector Greenwood had not been
just in time to jerk the arm and deflect the aim.
Father Brown continued in his seat, watching the
scene with screwed-up eyes and a screw of something
almost like a smile at the corners of his mouth, as
if he saw something beyond the mere momentary
violence of the quarrel.
And then the quarrel took a curious turn; which
may not be understood by everybody, until men like
Mr. John Raggley are better understood than they
are. For the red-faced old fanatic was standing up
and laughing uproariously as if it were the best
joke he had ever heard. All his snapping
vituperation and bitterness seemed to have gone out
of him; and he regarded the other fanatic, who had
just tried to murder him, with a sort of boisterous
benevolence.
‘Blast your eyes,’ he said, ‘you’re the first man
I’ve met in twenty years!’
‘Do you charge this man, Sir?’ said the
Inspector, looking doubtful.
‘Charge him, of course not,’ said Raggley. ‘I’d
stand him a drink if he were allowed any drinks. I
hadn’t any business to insult his religion; and I
wish to God all you skunks had the guts to kill a
man, I won’t say for insulting your religion,
because you haven’t got any, but for insulting
anything — even your beer.’
‘Now he’s called us all skunks,’ said Father
Brown to Greenwood, ‘peace and harmony seem to be
restored. I wish that teetotal lecturer could get
himself impaled on his friend’s knife; it was he who
made all the mischief.’
As he spoke, the odd groups in the room were
already beginning to break up; it had been found
possible to clear the commercial room for the
commercial travellers, and they adjourned to it, the
potboy carrying a new round of drinks after them on
a tray. Father Brown stood for a moment gazing at
the glasses left on the counter; recognizing at once
the ill-omened glass of milk, and another which
smelt of whisky; and then turned just in time to see
the parting between those two quaint figures,
fanatics of the East and West. Raggley was still
ferociously genial; there was still something a
little darkling and sinister about the Moslem, which
was perhaps natural; but he bowed himself out with
grave gestures of dignified reconciliation; and
there was every indication that the trouble was
really over.
Some importance, however, continued attached, in
the mind of Father Brown at least, to the memory and
interpretation of those last courteous salutes
between the combatants. Because curiously enough,
when Father Brown came down very early next morning,
to perform his religious duties in the
neighbourhood, he found the long saloon bar, with
its fantastic Asiatic decoration, filled with a dead
white light of daybreak in which every detail was
distinct; and one of the details was the dead body
of John Raggley bent and crushed into a corner of
the room, with the heavy-hilted crooked dagger
rammed through his heart.
Father Brown went very softly upstairs again and
summoned his friend the Inspector; and the two stood
beside the corpse, in a house in which no one else
was as yet stirring. ‘We mustn’t either assume or
avoid the obvious,’ said Greenwood after a silence,
‘but it is well to remember, I think, what I was
saying to you yesterday afternoon. It’s rather odd,
by the way, that I should have said it — yesterday
afternoon.’
‘I know,’ said the priest, nodding with an owlish
stare.
‘I said,’ observed Greenwood, ‘that the one sort
of murder we can’t stop is murder by somebody like a
religious fanatic. That brown fellow probably thinks
that if he’s hanged, he’ll go straight to Paradise
for defending the honour of the Prophet.’
‘There is that, of course,’ said Father Brown.
‘It would be very reasonable, so to speak, of our
Moslem friend to have stabbed him. And you may say
we don’t know of anybody else yet, who could at all
reasonably have stabbed him. But . . . but I was
thinking . . . ’ And his round face suddenly went
blank again and all speech died on his lips.
‘What’s the matter now?’ asked the other.
‘Well, I know it sounds funny,’ said Father Brown
in a forlorn voice. ‘But I was thinking ... I was
thinking, in a way, it doesn’t much matter who
stabbed him.’
‘Is this the New Morality?’ asked his friend. ‘Or
the old Casuistry, perhaps. Are the Jesuits really
going in for murder?’
‘I didn’t say it didn’t matter who murdered him,’
said Father Brown. ‘Of course the man who stabbed
him might possibly be the man who murdered him. But
it might be quite a different man. Anyhow, it was
done at quite a different time. I suppose you’ll
want to work on the hilt for finger-prints; but
don’t take too much notice of them. I can imagine
other reasons for other people sticking this knife
in the poor old boy. Not very edifying reasons, of
course, but quite distinct from the murder. You’ll
have to put some more knives into him, before you
find out about that.’
‘You mean — ’ began the other, watching him
keenly.
‘I mean the autopsy,’ said the priest, ‘to find
the real cause of death.’
‘You’re quite right, I believe,’ said the
Inspector, ‘about the stabbing, anyhow. We must wait
for the doctor; but I’m pretty sure he’ll say you’re
right. There isn’t blood enough. This knife was
stuck in the corpse when it had been cold for hours.
But why?’
‘Possibly to put the blame on the Mahommedan,’
answered Father Brown. ‘Pretty mean, I admit, but
not necessarily murder. I fancy there are people in
this place trying to keep secrets, who are not
necessarily murderers.’
‘I haven’t speculated on that line yet,’ said
Greenwood. ‘What makes you think so?’
‘What I said yesterday, when we first came into
this horrible room. I said it would be easy to
commit a murder here. But I wasn’t thinking about
all those stupid weapons, though you thought I was.
About something quite different.’
For the next few hours the Inspector and his
friend conducted a close and thorough investigation
into the goings and comings of everybody for the
last twenty-four hours, the way the drinks had been
distributed, the glasses that were washed or
unwashed, and every detail about every individual
involved, or apparently not involved. One might have
supposed they thought that thirty people had been
poisoned, as well as one.
It seemed certain that nobody had entered the
building except by the big entrance that adjoined
the bar; all the others were blocked in one way or
another by the repairs. A boy had been cleaning the
steps outside this entrance; but he had nothing very
clear to report. Until the amazing entry of the Turk
in the Turban, with his teetotal lecturer, there did
not seem to have been much custom of any kind,
except for the commercial travellers who came in to
take what they called ‘quick ones’; and they seemed
to have moved together, like Wordsworth’s Cloud;
there was a slight difference of opinion between the
boy outside and the men inside about whether one of
them had not been abnormally quick in obtaining a
quick one, and come out on the doorstep by himself;
but the manager and the barman had no memory of any
such independent individual. The manager and the
barman knew all the travellers quite well, and there
was no doubt about their movements as a whole. They
had stood at the bar chaffing and drinking; they had
been involved, through their lordly leader, Mr.
Jukes, in a not very serious altercation with Mr.
Pryce-Jones; and they had witnessed the sudden and
very serious altercation between Mr. Akbar and Mr.
Raggley. Then they were told they could adjourn to
the Commercial Room and did so, their drinks being
borne after them like a trophy.
‘There’s precious little to go on,’ said
Inspector Greenwood. ‘Of course a lot of officious
servants must do their duty as usual, and wash out
all the glasses; including old Raggley’s glass. If
it weren’t for everybody else’s efficiency, we
detectives might be quite efficient.’
‘I know,’ said Father Brown, and his mouth took
on again the twisted smile. ‘I sometimes think
criminals invented hygiene. Or perhaps hygienic
reformers invented crime; they look like it, some of
them. Everybody talks about foul dens and filthy
slums in which crime can run riot; but it’s just the
other way. They are called foul, not because crimes
are committed, but because crimes are discovered.
It’s in the neat, spotless, clean and tidy places
that crime can run riot; no mud to make footprints;
no dregs to contain poison; kind servants washing
out all traces of the murder; and the murderer
killing and cremating six wives and all for want of
a little Christian dirt. Perhaps I express myself
with too much warmth — but look here. As it happens,
I do remember one glass, which has doubtless been
cleaned since, but I should like to know more about
it.’
‘Do you mean Raggley’s glass?’ asked Greenwood.
‘No; I mean Nobody’s glass,’ replied the priest.
‘It stood near that glass of milk and it still held
an inch or two of whisky. Well, you and I had no
whisky. I happen to remember that the manager, when
treated by the jovial Jukes, had “a drop of gin”. I
hope you don’t suggest that our Moslem was a
whisky-drinker disguised in a green turban; or that
the Rev. David Pryce-Jones managed to drink whisky
and milk together, without noticing it.’
‘Most of the commercial travellers took whisky,’
said the Inspector. ‘They generally do.’
‘Yes; and they generally see they get it too,’
answered Father Brown. ‘In this case, they had it
all carefully carted after them to their own room.
But this glass was left behind.’
‘An accident, I suppose,’ said Greenwood
doubtfully. ‘The man could easily get another in the
Commercial Room afterwards.’
Father Brown shook his head. ‘You’ve got to see
people as they are. Now these sort of men — well,
some call them vulgar and some common; but that’s
all likes and dislikes. I’d be content to say that
they are mostly simple men. Lots of them very good
men, very glad to go back to the missus and the
kids; some of them might be blackguards; might have
had several missuses; or even murdered several
missuses. But most of them are simple men; and, mark
you, just the least tiny bit drunk. Not much;
there’s many a duke or don at Oxford drunker; but
when that sort of man is at that stage of
conviviality, he simply can’t help noticing things,
and noticing them very loud. Don’t you observe that
the least little incident jerks them into speech; if
the beer froths over, they froth over with it, and
have to say, “Whoa, Emma,” or “Doing me proud,
aren’t you?” Now I should say it’s flatly impossible
for five of these festive beings to sit round a
table in the Commercial Room, and have only four
glasses set before them, the fifth man being left
out, without making a shout about it. Probably they
would make a shout about it. Certainly he would make
a shout about it. He wouldn’t wait, like an
Englishman of another class, till he could get a
drink quietly later. The air would resound with
things like, “And what about little me?” or, “Here,
George, have I joined the Band of Hope?” or, “Do you
see any green in my turban, George?” But the barman
heard no such complaints. I take it as certain that
the glass of whisky left behind had been nearly
emptied by somebody else; somebody we haven’t
thought about yet.’
‘But can you think of any such person?’ ask the
other.
‘It’s because the manager and the barman won’t
hear of any such person, that you dismiss the one
really independent piece of evidence; the evidence
of that boy outside cleaning the steps. He says that
a man, who well may have been a bagman, but who did
not, in fact, stick to the other bagmen, went in and
came out again almost immediately. The manager and
the barman never saw him; or say they never saw him.
But he got a glass of whisky from the bar somehow.
Let us call him, for the sake of argument, The Quick
One. Now you know I don’t often interfere with your
business, which I know you do better than I should
do it, or should want to do it. I’ve never had
anything to do with setting police machinery at
work, or running down criminals, or anything like
that. But, for the first time in my life, I want to
do it now. I want you to find The Quick One; to
follow The Quick One to the ends of the earth; to
set the whole infernal official machinery at work
like a drag-net across the nations, and jolly well
recapture The Quick One. Because he is the man we
want.’
Greenwood made a despairing gesture. ‘Has he face
or form or any visible quality except quickness?’ he
inquired.
‘He was wearing a sort of Inverness cape,’ said
Father Brown, ‘and he told the boy outside he must
reach Edinburgh by next morning. That’s all the boy
outside remembers. But I know your organization has
got on to people with less clue than that.’
‘You seem very keen on this,’ said the Inspector,
a little puzzled.
The priest looked puzzled also, as if at his own
thoughts; he sat with knotted brow and then said
abruptly: ‘You see, it’s so easy to be
misunderstood. All men matter. You matter. I matter.
It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.’
The Inspector stared at him without
comprehension; but he proceeded.
‘We matter to God — God only knows why. But
that’s the only possible justification of the
existence of policemen.’ The policeman did not seem
enlightened as to his own cosmic justification.
‘Don’t you see, the law really is right in a way,
after all. If all men matter, all murders matter.
That which He has so mysteriously created, we must
not suffer to be mysteriously destroyed. But — ’
He said the last word sharply, like one taking a
new step in decision.
‘But, when once I step off that mystical level of
equality, I don’t see that most of your important
murders are particularly important. You are always
telling me that this case and that is important. As
a plain, practical man of the world, I must realize
that it is the Prime Minister who has been murdered.
As a plain, practical man of the world, I don’t
think that the Prime Minister matters at all. As a
mere matter of human importance, I should say he
hardly exists at all. Do you suppose if he and the
other public men were shot dead tomorrow, there
wouldn’t be other people to stand up and say that
every avenue was being explored, or that the
Government had the matter under the gravest
consideration? The masters of the modern world don’t
matter. Even the real masters don’t matter much.
Hardly anybody you ever read about in a newspaper
matters at all.’
He stood up, giving the table a small rap: one of
his rare gestures; and his voice changed again. ‘But
Raggley did matter. He was one of a great line of
some half a dozen men who might have saved England.
They stand up stark and dark like disregarded
sign-posts, down all that smooth descending road
which has ended in this swamp of merely commercial
collapse. Dean Swift and Dr Johnson and old William
Cobbett; they had all without exception the name of
being surly or savage, and they were all loved by
their friends, and they all deserved to be. Didn’t
you see how that old man, with the heart of a lion,
stood up and forgave his enemy as only fighters can
forgive? He jolly well did do what that temperance
lecturer talked about; he set an example to us
Christians and was a model of Christianity. And when
there is foul and secret murder of a man like that —
then I do think it matters, matters so much that
even the modern machinery of police will be a thing
that any respectable person may make use of ... Oh,
don’t mention it. And so, for once in a way, I
really do want to make use of you.’
And so, for some stretch of those strange days
and nights, we might almost say that the little
figure of Father Brown drove before him into action
all the armies and engines of the police forces of
the Crown, as the little figure of Napoleon drove
the batteries and the battle-lines of the vast
strategy that covered Europe. Police stations and
post offices worked all night; traffic was stopped,
correspondence was intercepted, inquiries were made
in a hundred places, in order to track the flying
trail of that ghostly figure, without face or name,
with an Inverness cape and an Edinburgh ticket.
Meanwhile, of course, the other lines of
investigation were not neglected. The full report of
the post-mortem had not yet come in; but everybody
seemed certain that it was a case of poisoning. This
naturally threw the primary suspicion upon the
cherry brandy; and this again naturally threw the
primary suspicion on the hotel.
‘Most probably on the manager of the hotel,’ said
Greenwood gruffly. ‘He looks a nasty little worm to
me. Of course it might be something to do with some
servant, like the barman; he seems rather a sulky
specimen, and Raggley might have cursed him a bit,
having a flaming temper, though he was generally
generous enough afterwards. But, after all, as I
say, the primary responsibility, and therefore the
primary suspicion, rests on the manager.’
‘Oh, I knew the primary suspicion would rest on
the manager,’ said Father Brown. ‘That was why I
didn’t suspect him. You see, I rather fancied
somebody else must have known that the primary
suspicion would rest on the manager; or the servants
of the hotel. That is why I said it would be easy to
kill anybody in the hotel . . . But you’d better go
and have it out with him, I suppose.’
The Inspector went; but came back again after a
surprisingly short interview, and found his clerical
friend turning over some papers that seemed to be a
sort of dossier of the stormy career of John
Raggley.
‘This is a rum go,’ said the Inspector. ‘I
thought I should spend hours cross-examining that
slippery little toad there, for we haven’t legally
got a thing against him. And instead of that, he
went to pieces all at once, and I really think he’s
told me all he knows in sheer funk.’
‘I know,’ said Father Brown. ‘That’s the way he
went to pieces when he found Raggley’s corpse
apparently poisoned in his hotel. That’s why he lost
his head enough to do such a clumsy thing as
decorate the corpse with a Turkish knife, to put the
blame on the nigger, as he would say. There never is
anything the matter with him but funk; he’s the very
last man that ever would really stick a knife into a
live person. I bet he had to nerve himself to stick
it into a dead one. But he’s the very first person
to be frightened of being charged with what he
didn’t do; and to make a fool of himself, as he
did.’
‘I suppose I must see the barman too,’ observed
Greenwood.
‘I suppose so,’ answered the other. ‘I don’t
believe myself it was any of the hotel people —
well, because it was made to look as if it must be
the hotel people . . . But look here, have you seen
any of this stuff they’ve got together about
Raggley? He had a jolly interesting life; I wonder
whether anyone will write his biography.’
‘I took a note of everything likely to affect an
affair like this,’ answered the official. ‘He was a
widower; but he did once have a row with a man about
his wife; a Scotch land-agent then in these parts;
and Raggley seems to have been pretty violent. They
say he hated Scotchmen; perhaps that’s the reason .
. . Oh, I know what you are smiling grimly about. A
Scotchman . . . Perhaps an Edinburgh man.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Father Brown. ‘It’s quite likely,
though, that he did dislike Scotchmen, apart from
private reasons. It’s an odd thing, but all that
tribe of Tory Radicals, or whatever you call them,
who resisted the Whig mercantile movement, all of
them did dislike Scotchmen. Cobbett did; Dr Johnson
did; Swift described their accent in one of his
deadliest passages; even Shakespeare has been
accused of the prejudice. But the prejudices of
great men generally have something to do with
principles. And there was a reason, I fancy. The
Scot came from a poor agricultural land, that became
a rich industrial land. He was able and active; he
thought he was bringing industrial civilization from
the north; he simply didn’t know that there had been
for centuries a rural civilization in the south. His
own grandfather’s land was highly rural but not
civilized . . . Well, well, I suppose we can only
wait for more news.’
‘I hardly think you’ll get the latest news out of
Shakespeare and Dr Johnson,’ grinned the police
officer. ‘What Shakespeare thought of Scotchmen
isn’t exactly evidence.’
Father Brown cocked an eyebrow, as if a new
thought had surprised him. ‘Why, now I come to think
of it,’ he said, ‘there might be better evidence,
even out of Shakespeare. He doesn’t often mention
Scotchmen. But he was rather fond of making fun of
Welshmen.’
The Inspector was searching his friend’s face;
for he fancied he recognized an alertness behind its
demure expression. ‘By Jove,’ he said. ‘Nobody
thought of turning the suspicions that way, anyhow.’
‘Well,’ said Father Brown, with broad-minded
calm, ‘you started by talking about fanatics; and
how a fanatic could do anything. Well, I suppose we
had the honour of entertaining in this bar-parlour
yesterday, about the biggest and loudest and most
fat-headed fanatic in the modern world. If being a
pig-headed idiot with one idea is the way to murder,
I put in a claim for my reverend brother
Pryce-Jones, the Prohibitionist, in preference to
all the fakirs in Asia, and it’s perfectly true, as
I told you, that his horrible glass of milk was
standing side by side on the counter with the
mysterious glass of whisky.’
‘Which you think was mixed up with the murder,’
said Greenwood, staring. ‘Look here, I don’t know
whether you’re really serious or not.’
Even as he was looking steadily in his friend’s
face, finding something still inscrutable in its
expression, the telephone rang stridently behind the
bar. Lifting the flap in the counter Inspector
Greenwood passed rapidly inside, unhooked the
receiver, listened for an instant, and then uttered
a shout; not addressed to his interlocutor, but to
the universe in general. Then he listened still more
attentively and said explosively at intervals, ‘Yes,
yes . . . Come round at once; bring him round if
possible . . . Good piece of work . . . Congratulate
you.’
Then Inspector Greenwood came back into the outer
lounge, like a man who has renewed his youth, sat
down squarely on his seat, with his hands planted on
his knees, stared at his friend, and said:
‘Father Brown, I don’t know how you do it. You
seem to have known he was a murderer before anybody
else knew he was a man. He was nobody; he was
nothing; he was a slight confusion in the evidence;
nobody in the hotel saw him; the boy on the steps
could hardly swear to him; he was just a fine shade
of doubt founded on an extra dirty glass. But we’ve
got him, and he’s the man we want.’
Father Brown had risen with the sense of the
crisis, mechanically clutching the papers destined
to be so valuable to the biographer of Mr Raggley;
and stood staring at his friend. Perhaps this
gesture jerked his friend’s mind to fresh
confirmations.
‘Yes, we’ve got The Quick One. And very quick he
was, like quicksilver, in making his get-away; we
only just stopped him — off on a fishing trip to
Orkney, he said. But he’s the man, all right; he’s
the Scotch land-agent who made love to Raggley’s
wife; he’s the man who drank Scotch whisky in this
bar and then took a train to Edinburgh. And nobody
would have known it but for you.’
‘Well, what I meant,’ began Father Brown, in a
rather dazed tone; and at that instant there was a
rattle and rumble of heavy vehicles outside the
hotel; and two or three other and subordinate
policemen blocked the bar with their presence. One
of them, invited by his superior to sit down, did so
in an expansive manner, like one at once happy and
fatigued; and he also regarded Father Brown with
admiring eyes.
‘Got the murderer. Sir, oh yes,’ he said: ‘I know
he’s a murderer, ‘cause he bally nearly murdered me.
I’ve captured some tough characters before now; but
never one like this — hit me in the stomach like the
kick of a horse and nearly got away from five men.
Oh, you’ve got a real killer this time. Inspector.’
‘Where is he?’ asked Father Brown, staring.
‘Outside in the van, in handcuffs,’ replied the
policeman, ‘and, if you’re wise, you’ll leave him
there — for the present.’
Father Brown sank into a chair in a sort of soft
collapse; and the papers he had been nervously
clutching were shed around him, shooting and sliding
about the floor like sheets of breaking snow. Not
only his face, but his whole body, conveyed the
impression of a punctured balloon.
‘Oh . . . Oh,’ he repeated, as if any further
oath would be inadequate. ‘Oh . . .I’ve done it
again.’
‘If you mean you’ve caught the criminal again,’
began Greenwood. But his friend stopped him with a
feeble explosion, like that of expiring soda-water.
‘I mean,’ said Father Brown, ‘that it’s always
happening; and really, I don’t know why. I always
try to say what I mean. But everybody else means
such a lot by what I say.’
‘What in the world is the matter now?’ cried
Greenwood, suddenly exasperated.
‘Well, I say things,’ said Father Brown in a weak
voice, which could alone convey the weakness of the
words. ‘I say things, but everybody seems to know
they mean more than they say. Once I saw a broken
mirror and said “Something has happened” and they
all answered, “Yes, yes, as you truly say, two men
wrestled and one ran into the garden,” and so on. I
don’t understand it, “Something happened,” and “Two
men wrestled,” don’t seem to me at all the same; but
I dare say I read old books of logic. Well, it’s
like that here. You seem to be all certain this man
is a murderer. But I never said he was a murderer. I
said he was the man we wanted. He is. I want him
very much. I want him frightfully. I want him as the
one thing we haven’t got in the whole of this
horrible case — a witness!’
They all stared at him, but in a frowning
fashion, like men trying to follow a sharp new turn
of the argument; and it was he who resumed the
argument.
‘From the first minute I entered that big empty
bar or saloon, I knew what was the matter with all
this business was emptiness; solitude; too many
chances for anybody to be alone. In a word, the
absence of witnesses. All we knew was that when we
came in, the manager and the barman were not in the
bar. But when were they in the bar? What chance was
there of making any sort of time-table of when
anybody was anywhere? The whole thing was blank for
want of witnesses. I rather fancy the barman or
somebody was in the bar just before we came; and
that’s how the Scotchman got his Scotch whisky. He
certainly didn’t get it after we came. But we can’t
begin to inquire whether anybody in the hotel
poisoned poor Raggley’s cherry brandy, till we
really know who was in the bar and when. Now I want
you to do me another favour, in spite of this stupid
muddle, which is probably all my fault. I want you
to collect all the people involved in this room — I
think they’re all still available, unless the
Asiatic has gone back to Asia — and then take the
poor Scotchman out of his handcuffs, and bring him
in here, and let him tell us who did serve him with
whisky, and who was in the bar, and who else was in
the room, and all the rest. He’s the only man whose
evidence can cover just that period when the crime
was done. I don’t see the slightest reason for
doubting his word.’
‘But look here,’ said Greenwood. ‘This brings it
all back to the hotel authorities; and I thought you
agreed that the manager isn’t the murderer. Is it
the barman, or what?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the priest blankly. ‘I don’t
know for certain even about the manager. I don’t
know anything about the barman. I fancy the manager
might be a bit of a conspirator, even if he wasn’t a
murderer. But I do know there’s one solitary witness
on earth who may have seen something; and that’s why
I set all your police dogs on his trail to the ends
of the earth.’
The mysterious Scotchman, when he finally
appeared before the company thus assembled, was
certainly a formidable figure; tall, with a hulking
stride and a long sardonic hatchet face, with tufts
of red hair; and wearing not only an Inverness cape
but a Glengarry bonnet, he might well be excused for
a somewhat acrid attitude; but anybody could see he
was of the sort to resist arrest, even with
violence. It was not surprising that he had come to
blows with a fighting fellow like Raggley. It was
not even surprising that the police had been
convinced, by the mere details of capture, that he
was a tough and a typical killer. But he claimed to
be a perfectly respectable farmer, in Aberdeenshire,
his name being James Grant; and somehow not only
Father Brown, but Inspector Greenwood, a shrewd man
with a great deal of experience, was pretty soon
convinced that the Scot’s ferocity was the fury of
innocence rather than guilt.
‘Now what we want from you, Mr Grant,’ said the
Inspector gravely, dropping without further parley
into tones of courtesy, ‘is simply your evidence on
one very important fact. I am greatly grieved at the
misunderstanding by which you have suffered, but I
am sure you wish to serve the ends of justice. I
believe you came into this bar just after it opened,
at half-past five, and were served with a glass of
whisky. We are not certain what servant of the
hotel, whether the barman or the manager or some
subordinate, was in the bar at the time. Will you
look round the room, and tell me whether the
bar-attendant who served you is present here.’
‘Aye, he’s present,’ said Mr Grant, grimly
smiling, having swept the group with a shrewd
glance. ‘I’d know him anywhere; and ye’ll agree he’s
big enough to be seen. Do ye have all your
inn-servants as grand as yon?’
The Inspector’s eye remained hard and steady, and
his voice colourless and continuous; the face of
Father Brown was a blank; but on many other faces
there was a cloud; the barman was not particularly
big and not at all grand; and the manager was
decidedly small.
‘We only want the barman identified,’ said the
Inspector calmly. ‘Of course we know him; but we
should like you to verify it independently. You mean
. . .?’ And he stopped suddenly.
‘Weel, there he is plain enough,’ said the
Scotchman wearily; and made a gesture, and with that
gesture the gigantic Jukes, the prince of commercial
travellers, rose like a trumpeting elephant; and in
a flash had three policemen fastened on him like
hounds on a wild beast.
‘Well, all that was simple enough,’ said Father
Brown to his friend afterwards. ‘As I told you, the
instant I entered the empty bar-room, my first
thought was that, if the barman left the bar
unguarded like that, there was nothing in the world
to stop you or me or anybody else lifting the flap
and walking in, and putting poison in any of the
bottles standing waiting for customers. Of course, a
practical poisoner would probably do it as Jukes
did, by substituting a poisoned bottle for the
ordinary bottle; that could be done in a flash. It
was easy enough for him, as he travelled in bottles,
to carry a flask of cherry brandy prepared and of
the same pattern. Of course, it requires one
condition; but it’s a fairly common condition. It
would hardly do to start poisoning the beer or
whisky that scores of people drink; it would cause a
massacre. But when a man is well known as drinking
only one special thing, like cherry brandy, that
isn’t very widely drunk, it’s just like poisoning
him in his own home. Only it’s a jolly sight safer.
For practically the whole suspicion instantly falls
on the hotel, or somebody to do with the hotel; and
there’s no earthly argument to show that it was done
by anyone out of a hundred customers that might come
into the bar: even if people realized that a
customer could do it. It was about as absolutely
anonymous and irresponsible a murder as a man could
commit.’
‘And why exactly did the murderer commit it?’
asked his friend.
Father Brown rose and gravely gathered the papers
which he had previously scattered in a moment of
distraction.
‘May I recall your attention,’ he said smiling,
‘to the materials of the forthcoming Life and
Letters of the Late John Raggley? Or, for that
matter, his own spoken words? He said in this very
bar that he was going to expose a scandal about the
management of hotels; and the scandal was the pretty
common one of a corrupt agreement between hotel
proprietors and a salesman who took and gave secret
commissions, so that his business had a monopoly of
all the drink sold in the place. It wasn’t even an
open slavery like an ordinary tied house; it was a
swindle at the expense of everybody the manager was
supposed to serve. It was a legal offence. So the
ingenious Jukes, taking the first moment when the
bar was empty, as it often was, stepped inside and
made the exchange of bottles; unfortunately at that
very moment a Scotchman in an Inverness cape came in
harshly demanding whisky. Jukes saw his only chance
was to pretend to be the barman and serve the
customer. He was very much relieved that the
customer was a Quick One.’
‘I think you’re rather a Quick One yourself,’
observed Greenwood; ‘if you say you smelt something
at the start, in the mere air of an empty room. Did
you suspect Jukes at all at the start?’
‘Well, he sounded rather rich somehow,’ answered
Father Brown vaguely. ‘You know when a man has a
rich voice. And I did sort of ask myself why he
should have such a disgustingly rich voice, when all
those honest fellows were fairly poor. But I think I
knew he was a sham when I saw that big shining
breast-pin.’
‘You mean because it was sham?’ asked Greenwood
doubtfully.
‘Oh, no; because it was genuine,’ said Father
Brown.
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Chapter III. The Blast of the Book
Professor Openshaw always lost his temper, with a
loud bang, if anybody called him a Spiritualist; or
a believer in Spiritualism. This, however, did not
exhaust his explosive elements; for he also lost his
temper if anybody called him a disbeliever in
Spiritualism. It was his pride to have given his
whole life to investigating Psychic Phenomena; it
was also his pride never to have given a hint of
whether he thought they were really psychic or
merely phenomenal. He enjoyed nothing so much as to
sit in a circle of devout Spiritualists and give
devastating descriptions of how he had exposed
medium after medium and detected fraud after fraud;
for indeed he was a man of much detective talent and
insight, when once he had fixed his eye on an
object, and he always fixed his eye on a medium, as
a highly suspicious object. There was a story of his
having spotted the same Spiritualist mountebank
under three different disguises: dressed as a woman,
a white-bearded old man, and a Brahmin of a rich
chocolate brown. These recitals made the true
believers rather restless, as indeed they were
intended to do; but they could hardly complain, for
no Spiritualist denies the existence of fraudulent
mediums; only the Professor’s flowing narrative
might well seem to indicate that all mediums were
fraudulent.
But woe to the simple-minded and innocent
Materialist (and Materialists as a race are rather
innocent and simple-minded) who, presuming on this
narrative tendency, should advance the thesis that
ghosts were against the laws of nature, or that such
things were only old superstitions; or that it was
all tosh, or, alternatively, bunk. Him would the
Professor, suddenly reversing all his scientific
batteries, sweep from the field with a cannonade of
unquestionable cases and unexplained phenomena, of
which the wretched rationalist had never heard in
his life, giving all the dates and details, stating
all the attempted and abandoned natural
explanations; stating everything, indeed, except
whether he, John Oliver Openshaw, did or did not
believe in Spirits, and that neither Spiritualist
nor Materialist could ever boast of finding out.
Professor Openshaw, a lean figure with pale
leonine hair and hypnotic blue eyes, stood
exchanging a few words with Father Brown, who was a
friend of his, on the steps outside the hotel where
both had been breakfasting that morning and sleeping
the night before. The Professor had come back rather
late from one of this grand experiments, in general
exasperation, and was still tingling with the fight
that he always waged alone and against both sides.
‘Oh, I don’t mind you,’ he said laughing. ‘You
don’t believe in it even if it’s true. But all these
people are perpetually asking me what I’m trying to
prove. They don’t seem to understand that I’m a man
of science. A man of science isn’t trying to prove
anything. He’s trying to find out what will prove
itself.’
‘But he hasn’t found out yet,’ said Father Brown.
‘Well, I have some little notions of my own, that
are not quite so negative as most people think,’
answered the Professor, after an instant of frowning
silence; ‘anyhow, I’ve begun to fancy that if there
is something to be found, they’re looking for it
along the wrong line. It’s all too theatrical; it’s
showing off, all their shiny ectoplasm and trumpets
and voices and the rest; all on the model of old
melodramas and mouldy historical novels about the
Family Ghost. If they’d go to history instead of
historical novels, I’m beginning to think they’d
really find something. But not Apparitions.’
‘After all,’ said Father Brown, ‘Apparitions are
only Appearances. I suppose you’d say the Family
Ghost is only keeping up appearances.’
The Professor’s gaze, which had commonly a fine
abstracted character, suddenly fixed and focused
itself as it did on a dubious medium. It had rather
the air of a man screwing a strong magnifying-glass
into his eye. Not that he thought the priest was in
the least like a dubious medium; but he was startled
into attention by his friend’s thought following so
closely on his own.
‘Appearances!’ he muttered, ‘crikey, but it’s odd
you should say that just now. The more I learn, the
more I fancy they lose by merely looking for
appearances. Now if they’d look a little into
Disappearances — ’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘after all, the real
fairy legends weren’t so very much about the
appearance of famous fairies; calling up Titania or
exhibiting Oberon by moonlight. But there were no
end of legends about people disappearing, because
they were stolen by the fairies. Are you on the
track of Kilmeny or Thomas the Rhymer?’
‘I’m on the track of ordinary modern people
you’ve read of in the newspapers,’ answered
Openshaw. ‘You may well stare; but that’s my game
just now; and I’ve been on it for a long time.
Frankly, I think a lot of psychic appearances could
be explained away. It’s the disappearances I can’t
explain, unless they’re psychic. These people in the
newspaper who vanish and are never found — if you
knew the details as I do ... and now only this
morning I got confirmation; an extraordinary letter
from an old missionary, quite a respectable old boy.
He’s coming to see me at my office this morning.
Perhaps you’d lunch with me or something; and I’d
tell the results — in confidence.’
‘Thanks; I will — unless,’ said Father Brown
modestly, ‘the fairies have stolen me by then.’
With that they parted and Openshaw walked round
the corner to a small office he rented in the
neighbourhood; chiefly for the publication of a
small periodical, of psychical and psychological
notes of the driest and most agnostic sort. He had
only one clerk, who sat at a desk in the outer
office, totting up figures and facts for the
purposes of the printed report; and the Professor
paused to ask if Mr. Pringle had called. The clerk
answered mechanically in the negative and went on
mechanically adding up figures; and the Professor
turned towards the inner room that was his study.
‘Oh, by the way, Berridge,’ he added, without
turning round, ‘if Mr. Pringle comes, send him
straight in to me. You needn’t interrupt your work;
I rather want those notes finished tonight if
possible. You might leave them on my desk tomorrow,
if I am late.’
And he went into his private office, still
brooding on the problem which the name of Pringle
had raised; or rather, perhaps, had ratified and
confirmed in his mind. Even the most perfectly
balanced of agnostics is partially human; and it is
possible that the missionary’s letter seemed to have
greater weight as promising to support his private
and still tentative hypothesis. He sat down in his
large and comfortable chair, opposite the engraving
of Montaigne; and read once more the short letter
from the Rev. Luke Pringle, making the appointment
for that morning. No man knew better than Professor
Openshaw the marks of the letter of the crank; the
crowded details; the spidery handwriting; the
unnecessary length and repetition. There were none
of these things in this case; but a brief and
businesslike typewritten statement that the writer
had encountered some curious cases of Disappearance,
which seemed to fall within the province of the
Professor as a student of psychic problems. The
Professor was favourably impressed; nor had he any
unfavourable impression, in spite of a slight
movement of surprise, when he looked up and saw that
the Rev. Luke Pringle was already in the room.
‘Your clerk told me to come straight in,’ said
Mr. Pringle apologetically, but with a broad and
rather agreeable grin. The grin was partly masked by
masses of reddish-grey beard and whiskers; a perfect
jungle of a beard, such as is sometimes grown by
white men living in the jungles; but the eyes above
the snub nose had nothing about them in the least
wild or outlandish. Openshaw had instantly turned on
them that concentrated spotlight or burning-glass of
sceptical scrutiny which he turned on many men to
see if they were mountebanks or maniacs; and, in
this case, he had a rather unusual sense of
reassurance. The wild beard might have belonged to a
crank, but the eyes completely contradicted the
beard; they were full of that quite frank and
friendly laughter which is never found in the faces
of those who are serious frauds or serious lunatics.
He would have expected a man with those eyes to be a
Philistine, a jolly sceptic, a man who shouted out
shallow but hearty contempt of ghosts and spirits;
but anyhow, no professional humbug could afford to
look as frivolous as that. The man was buttoned up
to the throat in a shabby old cape, and only his
broad limp hat suggested the cleric; but
missionaries from wild places do not always bother
to dress like clerics.
‘You probably think all this another hoax.
Professor,’ said Mr. Pringle, with a sort of
abstract enjoyment, ‘and I hope you will forgive my
laughing at your very natural air of disapproval.
All the same, I’ve got to tell my story to somebody
who knows, because it’s true. And, all joking apart,
it’s tragic as well as true. Well, to cut it short,
I was missionary in Nya-Nya, a station in West
Africa, in the thick of the forests, where almost
the only other white man was the officer in command
of the district, Captain Wales; and he and I grew
rather thick. Not that he liked missions; he was, if
I may say so, thick in many ways; one of those
square-headed, square-shouldered men of action who
hardly need to think, let alone believe.
That’s what makes it all the queerer. One day he
came back to his tent in the forest, after a short
leave, and said he had gone through a jolly rum
experience, and didn’t know what to do about it. He
was holding a rusty old book in a leather binding,
and he put it down on a table beside his revolver
and an old Arab sword he kept, probably as a
curiosity. He said this book had belonged to a man
on the boat he had just come off; and the man swore
that nobody must open the book, or look inside it;
or else they would be carried off by the devil, or
disappear, or something. Wales said this was all
nonsense, of course; and they had a quarrel; and the
upshot seems to have been that this man, taunted
with cowardice or superstition, actually did look
into the book; and instantly dropped it; walked to
the side of the boat — ’
‘One moment,’ said the Professor, who had made
one or two notes. ‘Before you tell me anything else.
Did this man tell Wales where he had got the book,
or who it originally belonged to?’
‘Yes,’ replied Pringle, now entirely grave. ‘It
seems he said he was bringing it back to Dr Hankey,
the Oriental traveller now in England, to whom it
originally belonged, and who had warned him of its
strange properties. Well, Hankey is an able man and
a rather crabbed and sneering sort of man; which
makes it queerer still. But the point of Wales’s
story is much simpler. It is that the man who had
looked into the book walked straight over the side
of the ship, and was never seen again.’
‘Do you believe it yourself?’ asked Openshaw
after a pause.
‘Well, I do,’ replied Pringle. ‘I believe it for
two reasons. First, that Wales was an entirely
unimaginative man; and he added one touch that only
an imaginative man could have added. He said that
the man walked straight over the side on a still and
calm day; but there was no splash.’
The Professor looked at his notes for some
seconds in silence; and then said: ‘And your other
reason for believing it?’
‘My other reason,’ answered the Rev. Luke
Pringle, ‘is what I saw myself.’
There was another silence; until he continued in
the same matter-of-fact way. Whatever he had, he had
nothing of the eagerness with which the crank, or
even the believer, tried to convince others.
‘I told you that Wales put down the book on the
table beside the sword. There was only one entrance
to the tent; and it happened that I was standing in
it, looking out into the forest, with my back to my
companion. He was standing by the table grumbling
and growling about the whole business; saying it was
tomfoolery in the twentieth century to be frightened
of opening a book; asking why the devil he shouldn’t
open it himself. Then some instinct stirred in me
and I said he had better not do that, it had better
be returned to Dr Hankey. “What harm could it do?”
he said restlessly. “What harm did it do?” I
answered obstinately. “What happened to your friend
on the boat?” He didn’t answer, indeed I didn’t know
what he could answer; but I pressed my logical
advantage in mere vanity. “If it comes to that,” I
said, “what is your version of what really happened
on the boat?” Still he didn’t answer; and I looked
round and saw that he wasn’t there.
‘The tent was empty. The book was lying on the
table; open, but on its face, as if he had turned it
downwards. But the sword was lying on the ground
near the other side of the tent; and the canvas of
the tent showed a great slash, as if somebody had
hacked his way out with the sword. The gash in the
tent gaped at me; but showed only the dark glimmer
of the forest outside. And when I went across and
looked through the rent I could not be certain
whether the tangle of the tall plants and the
undergrowth had been bent or broken; at least not
farther than a few feet. I have never seen or heard
of Captain Wales from that day.
‘I wrapped the book up in brown paper, taking
good care not to look at it; and I brought it back
to England, intending at first to return it to Dr.
Hankey. Then I saw some notes in your paper
suggesting a hypothesis about such things; and I
decided to stop on the way and put the matter before
you; as you have a name for being balanced and
having an open mind.’
Professor Openshaw laid down his pen and looked
steadily at the man on the other side of the table;
concentrating in that single stare all his long
experience of many entirely different types of
humbug, and even some eccentric and extraordinary
types of honest men. In the ordinary way, he would
have begun with the healthy hypothesis that the
story was a pack of lies. On the whole he did
incline to assume that it was a pack of lies. And
yet he could not fit the man into his story; if it
were only that he could not see that sort of liar
telling that sort of lie. The man was not trying to
look honest on the surface, as most quacks and
impostors do; somehow, it seemed all the other way;
as if the man was honest, in spite of something else
that was merely on the surface. He thought of a good
man with one innocent delusion; but again the
symptoms were not the same; there was even a sort of
virile indifference; as if the man did not care much
about his delusion, if it was a delusion.
‘Mr. Pringle,’ he said sharply, like a barrister
making a witness jump, ‘where is this book of yours
now?’
The grin reappeared on the bearded face which had
grown grave during the recital. ‘I left it outside,’
said Mr. Pringle. ‘I mean in the outer office. It
was a risk, perhaps; but the less risk of the two.’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded the Professor. ‘Why
didn’t you bring it straight in here?’
‘Because,’ answered the missionary, ‘I knew that
as soon as you saw it, you’d open it — before you
had heard the story. I thought it possible you might
think twice about opening it — after you’d heard the
story.’
Then after a silence he added: ‘There was nobody
out there but your clerk; and he looked a stolid
steady-going specimen, immersed in business
calculations.’
Openshaw laughed unaffectedly. ‘Oh, Babbage,’ he
cried, ‘your magic tomes are safe enough with him, I
assure you. His name’s Berridge — but I often call
him Babbage; because he’s so exactly like a
Calculating Machine. No human being, if you can call
him a human being, would be less likely to open
other people’s brown paper parcels. Well, we may as
well go and bring it in now; though I assure you I
will consider seriously the course to be taken with
it. Indeed, I tell you frankly,’ and he stared at
the man again, ‘that I’m not quite sure whether we
ought to open it here and now, or send it to this
Dr. Hankey.’
The two had passed together out of the inner into
the outer office; and even as they did so, Mr.
Pringle gave a cry and ran forward towards the
clerk’s desk. For the clerk’s desk was there; but
not the clerk. On the clerk’s desk lay a faded old
leather book, torn out of its brown-paper wrappings,
and lying closed, but as if it had just been opened.
The clerk’s desk stood against the wide window that
looked out into the street; and the window was
shattered with a huge ragged hole in the glass; as
if a human body had been shot through it into the
world without. There was no other trace of Mr.
Berridge.
Both the two men left in the office stood as
still as statues; and then it was the Professor who
slowly came to life. He looked even more judicial
than he had ever looked in his life, as he slowly
turned and held out his hand to the missionary.
‘Mr. Pringle,’ he said, ‘I beg your pardon. I beg
your pardon only for thoughts that I have had; and
half-thoughts at that. But nobody could call himself
a scientific man and not face a fact like this.’
‘I suppose,’ said Pringle doubtfully, ‘that we
ought to make some inquiries. Can you ring up his
house and find out if he has gone home?’
‘I don’t know that he’s on the telephone,’
answered Openshaw, rather absently; ‘he lives
somewhere up Hampstead way, I think. But I suppose
somebody will inquire here, if his friends or family
miss him.’
‘Could we furnish a description,’ asked the
other, ‘if the police want it?’
‘The police!’ said the Professor, starting from
his reverie. ‘A description . . . Well, he looked
awfully like everybody else, I’m afraid, except for
goggles. One of those clean-shaven chaps. But the
police . . . look here, what are we to do about this
mad business?’
‘I know what I ought to do,’ said the Rev. Mr.
Pringle firmly, ‘I am going to take this book
straight to the only original Dr Hankey, and ask him
what the devil it’s all about. He lives not very far
from here, and I’ll come straight back and tell you
what he says.’
‘Oh, very well,’ said the Professor at last, as
he sat down rather wearily; perhaps relieved for the
moment to be rid of the responsibility. But long
after the brisk and ringing footsteps of the little
missionary had died away down the street, the
Professor sat in the same posture, staring into
vacancy like a man in a trance.
He was still in the same seat and almost in the
same attitude, when the same brisk footsteps were
heard on the pavement without and the missionary
entered, this time, as a glance assured him, with
empty hands.
‘Dr Hankey,’ said Pringle gravely, ‘wants to keep
the book for an hour and consider the point. Then he
asks us both to call, and he will give us his
decision. He specially desired, Professor, that you
should accompany me on the second visit.’
Openshaw continued to stare in silence; then he
said, suddenly: ‘Who the devil is Dr Hankey?’
‘You sound rather as if you meant he was the
devil,’ said Pringle smiling, ‘and I fancy some
people have thought so. He had quite a reputation in
your own line; but he gained it mostly in India,
studying local magic and so on, so perhaps he’s not
so well known here. He is a yellow skinny little
devil with a lame leg, and a doubtful temper; but he
seems to have set up in an ordinary respectable
practice in these parts, and I don’t know anything
definitely wrong about him — unless it’s wrong to be
the only person who can possibly know anything about
all this crazy affair.’
Professor Openshaw rose heavily and went to the
telephone; he rang up Father Brown, changing the
luncheon engagement to a dinner, that he might hold
himself free for the expedition to the house of the
Anglo-Indian doctor; after that he sat down again,
lit a cigar and sank once more into his own
unfathomable thoughts.
Father Brown went round to the restaurant
appointed for dinner, and kicked his heels for some
time in a vestibule full of mirrors and palms in
pots; he had been informed of Openshaw’s afternoon
engagement, and, as the evening closed-in dark and
stormy round the glass and the green plants, guessed
that it had produced something unexpected and unduly
prolonged. He even wondered for a moment whether the
Professor would turn up at all; but when the
Professor eventually did, it was clear that his own
more general guesses had been justified. For it was
a very wild-eyed and even wild-haired Professor who
eventually drove back with Mr Pringle from the
expedition to the North of London, where suburbs are
still fringed with heathy wastes and scraps of
common, looking more sombre under the rather
thunderstorm sunset. Nevertheless, they had
apparently found the house, standing a little apart
though within hail of other houses; they had
verified the brass-plate duly engraved: ‘J.I.
Hankey, MD, MRCS.’ Only they did not find J.I.
Hankey, MD, MRCS. They found only what a nightmare
whisper had already subconsciously prepared them to
find: a commonplace parlour with the accursed volume
lying on the table, as if it had just been read; and
beyond, a back door burst open and a faint trail of
footsteps that ran a little way up so steep a
garden-path that it seemed that no lame man could
have run up so lightly. But it was a lame man who
had run; for in those few steps there was the
misshapen unequal mark of some sort of surgical
boot; then two marks of that boot alone (as if the
creature had hopped) and then nothing. There was
nothing further to be learnt from Dr J.I. Hankey,
except that he had made his decision. He had read
the oracle and received the doom.
When the two came into the entrance under the
palms, Pringle put the book down suddenly on a small
table, as if it burned his fingers. The priest
glanced at it curiously; there was only some rude
lettering on the front with a couplet:
They that looked into this book
Them the Flying Terror took;
and underneath, as he afterwards discovered,
similar warnings in Greek, Latin and French. The
other two had turned away with a natural impulsion
towards drinks, after their exhaustion and
bewilderment; and Openshaw had called to the waiter,
who brought cocktails on a tray.
‘You will dine with us, I hope,’ said the
Professor to the missionary; but Mr Pringle amiably
shook his head.
‘If you’ll forgive me,’ he said, ‘I’m going off
to wrestle with this book and this business by
myself somewhere. I suppose I couldn’t use your
office for an hour or so?’
‘I suppose — I’m afraid it’s locked,’ said
Openshaw in some surprise.
‘You forget there’s a hole in the window.’ The
Rev. Luke Pringle gave the very broadest of all
broad grins and vanished into the darkness without.
‘A rather odd fellow, that, after all,’ said the
Professor, frowning.
He was rather surprised to find Father Brown
talking to the waiter who had brought the cocktails,
apparently about the waiter’s most private affairs;
for there was some mention of a baby who was now out
of danger. He commented on the fact with some
surprise, wondering how the priest came to know the
man; but the former only said, ‘Oh, I dine here
every two or three months, and I’ve talked to him
now and then.’
The Professor, who himself dined there about five
times a week, was conscious that he had never
thought of talking to the man; but his thoughts were
interrupted by a strident ringing and a summons to
the telephone. The voice on the telephone said it
was Pringle, it was rather a muffled voice, but it
might well be muffled in all those bushes of beard
and whisker. Its message was enough to establish
identity.
‘Professor,’ said the voice, ‘I can’t stand it
any longer. I’m going to look for myself. I’m
speaking from your office and the book is in front
of me. If anything happens to me, this is to say
good-bye. No — it’s no good trying to stop me. You
wouldn’t be in time anyhow. I’m opening the book
now. I . . . ’
Openshaw thought he heard something like a sort
of thrilling or shivering yet almost soundless
crash; then he shouted the name of Pringle again and
again; but he heard no more. He hung up the
receiver, and, restored to a superb academic calm,
rather like the calm of despair, went back and
quietly took his seat at the dinner-table. Then, as
coolly as if he were describing the failure of some
small silly trick at a seance, he told the priest
every detail of this monstrous mystery.
‘Five men have now vanished in this impossible
way,’ he said. ‘Every one is extraordinary; and yet
the one case I simply can’t get over is my clerk,
Berridge. It’s just because he was the quietest
creature that he’s the queerest case.’
‘Yes,’ replied Father Brown, ‘it was a queer
thing for Berridge to do, anyway. He was awfully
conscientious. He was also so jolly careful to keep
all the office business separate from any fun of his
own. Why, hardly anybody knew he was quite a
humorist at home and — ’
‘Berridge!’ cried the Professor. ‘What on earth
are you talking about? Did you know him?’
‘Oh no,’ said Father Brown carelessly, ‘only as
you say I know the waiter. I’ve often had to wait in
your office, till you turned up; and of course I
passed the time of day with poor Berridge. He was
rather a card. I remember he once said he would like
to collect valueless things, as collectors did the
silly things they thought valuable. You know the old
story about the woman who collected valueless
things.’
‘I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,’
said Openshaw. ‘But even if my clerk was eccentric
(and I never knew a man I should have thought less
so), it wouldn’t explain what happened to him; and
it certainly wouldn’t explain the others.’
‘What others?’ asked the priest.
The Professor stared at him and spoke distinctly,
as if to a child: ‘My dear Father Brown, Five Men
have disappeared.’
‘My dear Professor Openshaw, no men have
disappeared.’
Father Brown gazed back at his host with equal
steadiness and spoke with equal distinctness.
Nevertheless, the Professor required the words
repeated, and they were repeated as distinctly. ‘I
say that no men have disappeared.’
After a moment’s silence, he added, ‘I suppose
the hardest thing is to convince anybody that
0+0+0=0. Men believe the oddest things if they are
in a series; that is why Macbeth believed the three
words of the three witches; though the first was
something he knew himself; and the last something he
could only bring about himself. But in your case the
middle term is the weakest of all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You saw nobody vanish. You did not see the man
vanish from the boat. You did not see the man vanish
from the tent. All that rests on the word of Mr
Pringle, which I will not discuss just now. But
you’ll admit this; you would never have taken his
word yourself, unless you had seen it confirmed by
your clerk’s disappearance; just as Macbeth would
never have believed he would be king, if he had not
been confirmed in believing he would be Cawdor.’
‘That may be true,’ said the Professor, nodding
slowly. ‘But when it was confirmed, I knew it was
the truth. You say I saw nothing myself. But I did;
I saw my own clerk disappear. Berridge did
disappear.’
‘Berridge did not disappear,’ said Father Brown.
‘On the contrary.’
‘What the devil do you mean by “on the
contrary”?’
‘I mean,’ said Father Brown, ‘that he never
disappeared. He appeared.’
Openshaw stared across at his friend, but the
eyes had already altered in his head, as they did
when they concentrated on a new presentation of a
problem. The priest went on: ‘He appeared in your
study, disguised in a bushy red beard and buttoned
up in a clumsy cape, and announced himself as the
Rev. Luke Pringle. And you had never noticed your
own clerk enough to know him again, when he was in
so rough-and-ready a disguise.’
‘But surely,’ began the Professor.
‘Could you describe him for the police?’ asked
Father Brown. ‘Not you. You probably knew he was
clean-shaven and wore tinted glasses; and merely
taking off those glasses was a better disguise than
putting on anything else. You had never seen his
eyes any more than his soul; jolly laughing eyes. He
had planted his absurd book and all the properties;
then he calmly smashed the window, put on the beard
and cape and walked into your study; knowing that
you had never looked at him in your life.’
‘But why should he play me such an insane trick?’
demanded Openshaw.
‘Why, because you had never looked at him in your
life,’ said Father Brown; and his hand slightly
curled and clinched, as if he might have struck the
table, if he had been given to gesture. ‘You called
him the Calculating Machine, because that was all
you ever used him for. You never found out even what
a stranger strolling into your office could find
out, in five minutes’ chat: that he was a character;
that he was full of antics; that he had all sorts of
views on you and your theories and your reputation
for “spotting” people. Can’t you understand his
itching to prove that you couldn’t spot your own
clerk? He has nonsense notions of all sorts. About
collecting useless things, for instance. Don’t you
know the story of the woman who bought the two most
useless things: an old doctor’s brass-plate and a
wooden leg? With those your ingenious clerk created
the character of the remarkable Dr Hankey; as easily
as the visionary Captain Wales. Planting them in his
own house — ’
‘Do you mean that place we visited beyond
Hampstead was Berridge’s own house?’ asked Openshaw.
‘Did you know his house — or even his address?’
retorted the priest. ‘Look here, don’t think I’m
speaking disrespectfully of you or your work. You
are a great servant of truth and you know I could
never be disrespectful to that. You’ve seen through
a lot of liars, when you put your mind to it. But
don’t only look at liars. Do, just occasionally,
look at honest men — like the waiter.’
‘Where is Berridge now?’ asked the Professor,
after a long silence.
‘I haven’t the least doubt,’ said Father Brown,
‘that he is back in your office. In fact, he came
back into your office at the exact moment when the
Rev. Luke Pringle read the awful volume and faded
into the void.’
There was another long silence and then Professor
Openshaw laughed; with the laugh of a great man who
is great enough to look small. Then he said
abruptly:
‘I suppose I do deserve it; for not noticing the
nearest helpers I have. But you must admit the
accumulation of incidents was rather formidable. Did
you never feel just a momentary awe of the awful
volume?’
‘Oh, that,’ said Father Brown. ‘I opened it as
soon as I saw it lying there. It’s all blank pages.
You see, I am not superstitious.’
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Chapter IV. The Green Man
A young man in knickerbockers, with an eager
sanguine profile, was playing golf against himself
on the links that lay parallel to the sand and sea,
which were all growing grey with twilight. He was
not carelessly knocking a ball about, but rather
practising particular strokes with a sort of
microscopic fury; like a neat and tidy whirlwind. He
had learned many games quickly, but he had a
disposition to learn them a little more quickly than
they can be learnt. He was rather prone to be a
victim of those remarkable invitations by which a
man may learn the Violin in Six Lessons — or acquire
a perfect French accent by a Correspondence Course.
He lived in the breezy atmosphere of such hopeful
advertisement and adventure. He was at present the
private secretary of Admiral Sir Michael Craven, who
owned the big house behind the park abutting on the
links. He was ambitious, and had no intention of
continuing indefinitely to be private secretary to
anybody. But he was also reasonable; and he knew
that the best way of ceasing to be a secretary was
to be a good secretary. Consequently he was a very
good secretary; dealing with the ever-accumulating
arrears of the Admiral’s correspondence with the
same swift centripetal concentration with which he
addressed the golf-ball. He had to struggle with the
correspondence alone and at his own discretion at
present; for the Admiral had been with his ship for
the last six months, and, though now returning, was
not expected for hours, or possibly days.
With an athletic stride, the young man, whose
name was Harold Harker, crested the rise of turf
that was the rampart of the links and, looking out
across the sands to the sea, saw a strange sight. He
did not see it very clearly; for the dusk was
darkening every minute under stormy clouds; but it
seemed to him, by a sort of momentary illusion, like
a dream of days long past or a drama played by
ghosts, out of another age in history.
The last of the sunset lay in long bars of copper
and gold above the last dark strip of sea that
seemed rather black than blue. But blacker still
against this gleam in the west, there passed in
sharp outline, like figures in a shadow pantomime,
two men with three-cornered cocked hats and swords;
as if they had just landed from one of the wooden
ships of Nelson. It was not at all the sort of
hallucination that would have come natural to Mr.
Harker, had he been prone to hallucinations. He was
of the type that is at once sanguine and scientific;
and would be more likely to fancy the flying-ships
of the future than the fighting ships of the past.
He therefore very sensibly came to the conclusion
that even a futurist can believe his eyes.
His illusion did not last more than a moment. On
the second glance, what he saw was unusual but not
incredible. The two men who were striding in single
file across the sands, one some fifteen yards behind
the other, were ordinary modern naval officers; but
naval officers wearing that almost extravagant
full-dress uniform which naval officers never do
wear if they can possibly help it; only on great
ceremonial occasions such as the visits of Royalty.
In the man walking in front, who seemed more or less
unconscious of the man walking behind, Harker
recognized at once the high-bridged nose and
spike-shaped beard of his own employer the Admiral.
The other man following in his tracks he did not
know. But he did know something about the
circumstances connected with the ceremonial
occasion. He knew that when the Admiral’s ship put
in at the adjacent port, it was to be formally
visited by a Great Personage; which was enough, in
that sense, to explain the officers being in full
dress. But he did also know the officers; or at any
rate the Admiral. And what could have possessed the
Admiral to come on shore in that rig-out, when one
could swear he would seize five minutes to change
into mufti or at least into undress uniform, was
more than his secretary could conceive. It seemed
somehow to be the very last thing he would do. It
was indeed to remain for many weeks one of the chief
mysteries of this mysterious business. As it was,
the outline of these fantastic court uniforms
against the empty scenery, striped with dark sea and
sand, had something suggestive of comic opera; and
reminded the spectator of Pinafore.
The second figure was much more singular;
somewhat singular in appearance, despite his correct
lieutenant’s uniform, and still more extraordinary
in behaviour. He walked in a strangely irregular and
uneasy manner; sometimes quickly and sometimes
slowly; as if he could not make up his mind whether
to overtake the Admiral or not. The Admiral was
rather deaf and certainly heard no footsteps behind
him on the yielding sand; but the footsteps behind
him, if traced in the detective manner, would have
given rise to twenty conjectures from a limp to a
dance. The man’s face was swarthy as well as
darkened with shadow, and every now and then the
eyes in it shifted and shone, as if to accent his
agitation. Once he began to run and then abruptly
relapsed into a swaggering slowness and
carelessness. Then he did something which Mr. Harker
could never have conceived any normal naval officer
in His Britannic Majesty’s Service doing, even in a
lunatic asylum. He drew his sword.
It was at this bursting-point of the prodigy that
the two passing figures disappeared behind a
headland on the shore. The staring secretary had
just time to notice the swarthy stranger, with a
resumption of carelessness, knock off a head of
sea-holly with his glittering blade. He seemed then
to have abandoned all idea of catching the other man
up. But Mr. Harold Harker’s face became very
thoughtful indeed; and he stood there ruminating for
some time before he gravely took himself inland,
towards the road that ran past the gates of the
great house and so by a long curve down to the sea.
It was up this curving road from the coast that
the Admiral might be expected to come, considering
the direction in which he had been walking, and
making the natural assumption that he was bound for
his own door. The path along the sands, under the
links, turned inland just beyond the headland and
solidifying itself into a road, returned towards
Craven House. It was down this road, therefore, that
the secretary darted, with characteristic
impetuosity, to meet his patron returning home. But
the patron was apparently not returning home. What
was still more peculiar, the secretary was not
returning home either; at least until many hours
later; a delay quite long enough to arouse alarm and
mystification at Craven House.
Behind the pillars and palms of that rather too
palatial country house, indeed, there was expectancy
gradually changing to uneasiness. Gryce the butler,
a big bilious man abnormally silent below as well as
above stairs, showed a certain restlessness as he
moved about the main front-hall and occasionally
looked out of the side windows of the porch, on the
white road that swept towards the sea. The Admiral’s
sister Marion, who kept house for him, had her
brother’s high nose with a more sniffy expression;
she was voluble, rather rambling, not without
humour, and capable of sudden emphasis as shrill as
a cockatoo. The Admiral’s daughter Olive was dark,
dreamy, and as a rule abstractedly silent, perhaps
melancholy; so that her aunt generally conducted
most of the conversation, and that without
reluctance. But the girl also had a gift of sudden
laughter that was very engaging.
‘I can’t think why they’re not here already,’
said the elder lady. ‘The postman distinctly told me
he’d seen the Admiral coming along the beach; along
with that dreadful creature Rook. Why in the world
they call him Lieutenant Rook — ’
‘Perhaps,’ suggested the melancholy young lady,
with a momentary brightness, ‘perhaps they call him
Lieutenant because he is a Lieutenant.’
‘I can’t think why the Admiral keeps him,’
snorted her aunt, as if she were talking of a
housemaid. She was very proud of her brother and
always called him the Admiral; but her notions of a
commission in the Senior Service were inexact.
‘Well, Roger Rook is sulky and unsociable and all
that,’ replied Olive, ‘but of course that wouldn’t
prevent him being a capable sailor.’
‘Sailor!’ cried her aunt with one of her rather
startling cockatoo notes, ‘he isn’t my notion of a
sailor. The Lass that Loved a Sailor, as they used
to sing when I was young . . . Just think of it!
He’s not gay and free and whats-its-name. He doesn’t
sing chanties or dance a hornpipe.’
‘Well,’ observed her niece with gravity. ‘The
Admiral doesn’t very often dance a hornpipe.’
‘Oh, you know what I mean — he isn’t bright or
breezy or anything,’ replied the old lady. ‘Why,
that secretary fellow could do better than that.’
Olive’s rather tragic face was transfigured by
one of her good and rejuvenating waves of laughter.
‘I’m sure Mr. Harker would dance a hornpipe for
you,’ she said, ‘and say he had learnt it in half an
hour from the book of instructions. He’s always
learning things of that sort.’
She stopped laughing suddenly and looked at her
aunt’s rather strained face.
‘I can’t think why Mr. Harker doesn’t come,’ she
added.
‘I don’t care about Mr. Harker,’ replied the
aunt, and rose and looked out of the window.
The evening light had long turned from yellow to
grey and was now turning almost to white under the
widening moonlight, over the large flat landscape by
the coast; unbroken by any features save a clump of
sea-twisted trees round a pool and beyond, rather
gaunt and dark against the horizon, the shabby
fishermen’s tavern on the shore that bore the name
of the Green Man. And all that road and landscape
was empty of any living thing. Nobody had seen the
figure in the cocked hat that had been observed,
earlier in the evening, walking by the sea; or the
other and stranger figure that had been seen
trailing after him. Nobody had even seen the
secretary who saw them.
It was after midnight when the secretary at last
burst in and aroused the household; and his face,
white as a ghost, looked all the paler against the
background of the stolid face and figure of a big
Inspector of Police. Somehow that red, heavy,
indifferent face looked, even more than the white
and harassed one, like a mask of doom. The news was
broken to the two women with such consideration or
concealments as were possible. But the news was that
the body of Admiral Craven had been eventually
fished out of the foul weeds and scum of the pool
under the trees; and that he was drowned and dead.
Anybody acquainted with Mr. Harold Harker,
secretary, will realize that, whatever his
agitation, he was by morning in a mood to be
tremendously on the spot. He hustled the Inspector,
whom he had met the night before on the road down by
the Green Man, into another room for private and
practical consultation. He questioned the Inspector
rather as the Inspector might have questioned a
yokel. But Inspector Burns was a stolid character;
and was either too stupid or too clever to resent
such trifles. It soon began to look as if he were by
no means so stupid as he looked; for he disposed of
Harker’s eager questions in a manner that was slow
but methodical and rational.
‘Well,’ said Harker (his head full of many
manuals with titles like ‘Be a Detective in Ten
Days’). ‘Well, it’s the old triangle, I suppose.
Accident, Suicide or Murder.’
‘I don’t see how it could be accident,’ answered
the policeman. ‘It wasn’t even dark yet and the
pool’s fifty yards from the straight road that he
knew like his own doorstep. He’d no more have got
into that pond than he’d go and carefully lie down
in a puddle in the street. As for suicide, it’s
rather a responsibility to suggest it, and rather
improbable too. The Admiral was a pretty spry and
successful man and frightfully rich, nearly a
millionaire in fact; though of course that doesn’t
prove anything. He seemed to be pretty normal and
comfortable in his private life too; he’s the last
man I should suspect of drowning himself.’
‘So that we come,’ said the secretary, lowering
his voice with the thrill, ‘I suppose we come to the
third possibility.’
‘We won’t be in too much of a hurry about that,’
said the Inspector to the annoyance of Harker, who
was in a hurry about everything. ‘But naturally
there are one or two things one would like to know.
One would like to know — about his property, for
instance. Do you know who’s likely to come in for
it? You’re his private secretary; do you know
anything about his will?’
‘I’m not so private a secretary as all that,’
answered the young man. ‘His solicitors are Messrs.
Willis, Hardman and Dyke, over in Suttford High
Street; and I believe the will is in their custody.’
‘Well, I’d better get round and see them pretty
soon,’ said the Inspector.
‘Let’s get round and see them at once,’ said the
impatient secretary.
He took a turn or two restlessly up and down the
room and then exploded in a fresh place.
‘What have you done about the body, Inspector?’
he asked.
‘Dr Straker is examining it now at the Police
Station. His report ought to be ready in an hour or
so.’
‘It can’t be ready too soon,’ said Harker. ‘It
would save time if we could meet him at the
lawyer’s.’ Then he stopped and his impetuous tone
changed abruptly to one of some embarrassment.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I want ... we want to
consider the young lady, the poor Admiral’s
daughter, as much as possible just now. She’s got a
notion that may be all nonsense; but I wouldn’t like
to disappoint her. There’s some friend of hers she
wants to consult, staying in the town at present.
Man of the name of Brown; priest or parson of some
sort — she’s given me his address. I don’t take much
stock in priests or parsons, but — ’
The Inspector nodded. ‘I don’t take any stock in
priests or parsons; but I take a lot of stock in
Father Brown,’ he said. ‘I happened to have to do
with him in a queer sort of society jewel case. He
ought to have been a policeman instead of parson.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said the breathless secretary as
he vanished from the room. ‘Let him come to the
lawyer’s too.’
Thus it happened that, when they hurried across
to the neighbouring town to meet Dr Straker at the
solicitor’s office, they found Father Brown already
seated there, with his hands folded on his heavy
umbrella, chatting pleasantly to the only available
member of the firm. Dr Straker also had arrived, but
apparently only at that moment, as he was carefully
placing his gloves in his top-hat and his top-hat on
a side-table. And the mild and beaming expression of
the priest’s moonlike face and spectacles, together
with the silent chuckles of the jolly old grizzled
lawyer, to whom he was talking, were enough to show
that the doctor had not yet opened his mouth to
bring the news of death.
‘A beautiful morning after all,’ Father Brown was
saying. ‘That storm seems to have passed over us.
There were some big black clouds, but I notice that
not a drop of rain fell.’
‘Not a drop,’ agreed the solicitor toying with a
pen; he was the third partner, Mr. Dyke; ‘there’s
not a cloud in the sky now. It’s the sort of day for
a holiday.’ Then he realized the newcomers and
looked up, laying down the pen and rising. ‘Ah, Mr.
Harker, how are you? I hear the Admiral is expected
home soon.’ Then Harker spoke, and his voice rang
hollow in the room.
‘I am sorry to say we are the bearers of bad
news. Admiral Craven was drowned before reaching
home.’
There was a change in the very air of the still
office, though not in the attitudes of the
motionless figures; both were staring at the speaker
as if a joke had been frozen on their lips. Both
repeated the word ‘drowned’ and looked at each
other, and then again at their informant. Then there
was a small hubbub of questions.
‘When did this happen?’ asked the priest.
‘Where was he found?’ asked the lawyer.
‘He was found,’ said the Inspector, ‘in that pool
by the coast, not far from the Green Man, and
dragged out all covered with green scum and weeds so
as to be almost unrecognizable. But Dr Straker here
has — What is the matter. Father Brown? Are you
ill?’
‘The Green Man,’ said Father Brown with a
shudder. ‘I’m so sorry ... I beg your pardon for
being upset.’
‘Upset by what?’ asked the staring officer.
‘By his being covered with green scum, I
suppose,’ said the priest, with a rather shaky
laugh. Then he added rather more firmly, ‘I thought
it might have been seaweed.’
By this time everybody was looking at the priest,
with a not unnatural suspicion that he was mad; and
yet the next crucial surprise was not to come from
him. After a dead silence, it was the doctor who
spoke.
Dr. Straker was a remarkable man, even to look
at. He was very tall and angular, formal and
professional in his dress; yet retaining a fashion
that has hardly been known since Mid-Victorian
times. Though comparatively young, he wore his brown
beard, very long and spreading over his waistcoat;
in contrast with it, his features, which were both
harsh and handsome, looked singularly pale. His good
looks were also diminished by something in his deep
eyes that was not squinting, but like the shadow of
a squint. Everybody noticed these things about him,
because the moment he spoke, he gave forth an
indescribable air of authority. But all he said was:
‘There is one more thing to be said, if you come
to details, about Admiral Craven being drowned.’
Then he added reflectively, ‘Admiral Craven was not
drowned.’
The Inspector turned with quite a new promptitude
and shot a question at him.
‘I have just examined the body,’ said Dr Straker,
‘the cause of death was a stab through the heart
with some pointed blade like a stiletto. It was
after death, and even some little time after, that
the body was hidden in the pool.’
Father Brown was regarding Dr Straker with a very
lively eye, such as he seldom turned upon anybody;
and when the group in the office began to break up,
he managed to attach himself to the medical man for
a little further conversation, as they went back
down the street. There had not been very much else
to detain them except the rather formal question of
the will. The impatience of the young secretary had
been somewhat tried by the professional etiquette of
the old lawyer. But the latter was ultimately
induced, rather by the tact of the priest than the
authority of the policeman, to refrain from making a
mystery where there was no mystery at all. Mr. Dyke
admitted, with a smile, that the Admiral’s will was
a very normal and ordinary document, leaving
everything to his only child Olive; and that there
really was no particular reason for concealing the
fact.
The doctor and the priest walked slowly down the
street that struck out of the town in the direction
of Craven House. Harker had plunged on ahead of him
with all his native eagerness to get somewhere; but
the two behind seemed more interested in their
discussion than their direction. It was in rather an
enigmatic tone that the tall doctor said to the
short cleric beside him:
‘Well, Father Brown, what do you think of a thing
like this?’
Father Brown looked at him rather intently for an
instant, and then said:
‘Well, I’ve begun to think of one or two things;
but my chief difficulty is that I only knew the
Admiral slightly; though I’ve seen something of his
daughter.’
‘The Admiral,’ said the doctor with a grim
immobility of feature, ‘was the sort of man of whom
it is said that he had not an enemy in the world.’
‘I suppose you mean,’ answered the priest, ‘that
there’s something else that will not be said.’
‘Oh, it’s no affair of mine,’ said Straker
hastily but rather harshly. ‘He had his moods, I
suppose. He once threatened me with a legal action
about an operation; but I think he thought better of
it. I can imagine his being rather rough with a
subordinate.’
Father Brown’s eyes were fixed on the figure of
the secretary striding far ahead; and as he gazed he
realized the special cause of his hurry. Some fifty
yards farther ahead the Admiral’s daughter was
dawdling along the road towards the Admiral’s house.
The secretary soon came abreast of her; and for the
remainder of the time Father Brown watched the
silent drama of two human backs as they diminished
into the distance. The secretary was evidently very
much excited about something; but if the priest
guessed what it was, he kept it to himself. When he
came to the corner leading to the doctor’s house, he
only said briefly: ‘I don’t know if you have
anything more to tell us.’
‘Why should I?’ answered the doctor very
abruptly; and striding off, left it uncertain
whether he was asking why he should have anything to
tell, or why he should tell it.
Father Brown went stumping on alone, in the track
of the two young people; but when he came to the
entrance and avenues of the Admiral’s park, he was
arrested by the action of the girl, who turned
suddenly and came straight towards him; her face
unusually pale and her eyes bright with some new and
as yet nameless emotion.
‘Father Brown,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I must
talk to you as soon as possible. You must listen to
me, I can’t see any other way out.’
‘Why certainly,’ he replied, as coolly as if a
gutter-boy had asked him the time. ‘Where shall we
go and talk?’
The girl led him at random to one of the rather
tumbledown arbours in the grounds; and they sat down
behind a screen of large ragged leaves. She began
instantly, as if she must relieve her feelings or
faint.
‘Harold Harker,’ she said, ‘has been talking to
me about things. Terrible things.’
The priest nodded and the girl went on hastily.
‘About Roger Rook. Do you know about Roger?’
‘I’ve been told,’ he answered, ‘that his
fellow-seamen call him The Jolly Roger, because he
is never jolly; and looks like the pirate’s skull
and crossbones.’
‘He was not always like that,’ said Olive in a
low voice. ‘Something very queer must have happened
to him. I knew him well when we were children; we
used to play over there on the sands. He was
harum-scarum and always talking about being a
pirate; I dare say he was the sort they say might
take to crime through reading shockers; but there
was something poetical in his way of being
piratical. He really was a Jolly Roger then. I
suppose he was the last boy who kept up the old
legend of really running away to sea; and at last
his family had to agree to his joining the Navy.
Well . . . ’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown patiently.
‘Well,’ she admitted, caught in one of her rare
moments of mirth, ‘I suppose poor Roger found it
disappointing. Naval officers so seldom carry knives
in their teeth or wave bloody cutlasses and black
flags. But that doesn’t explain the change in him.
He just stiffened; grew dull and dumb, like a dead
man walking about. He always avoids me; but that
doesn’t matter. I supposed some great grief that’s
no business of mine had broken him up. And now —
well, if what Harold says is true, the grief is
neither more nor less than going mad; or being
possessed of a devil.’
‘And what does Harold say?’ asked the priest.
‘It’s so awful I can hardly say it,’ she
answered. ‘He swears he saw Roger creeping behind my
father that night; hesitating and then drawing his
sword . . . and the doctor says father was stabbed
with a steel point ... I can’t believe Roger Rook
had anything to do with it. His sulks and my
father’s temper sometimes led to quarrels; but what
are quarrels? I can’t exactly say I’m standing up
for an old friend; because he isn’t even friendly.
But you can’t help feeling sure of some things, even
about an old acquaintance. And yet Harold swears
that he — ’
‘Harold seems to swear a great deal,’ said Father
Brown.
There was a sudden silence; after which she said
in a different tone, ‘Well, he does swear other
things too. Harold Harker proposed to me just now.’
‘Am I to congratulate you, or rather him?’
inquired her companion.
‘I told him he must wait. He isn’t good at
waiting.’ She was caught again in a ripple of her
incongruous sense of the comic: ‘He said I was his
ideal and his ambition and so on. He has lived in
the States; but somehow I never remember it when he
is talking about dollars; only when he is talking
about ideals.’
‘And I suppose,’ said Father Brown very softy,
‘that it is because you have to decide about Harold
that you want to know the truth about Roger.’
She stiffened and frowned, and then equally
abruptly smiled, saying: ‘Oh, you know too much.’
‘I know very little, especially in this affair,’
said the priest gravely. ‘I only know who murdered
your father.’ She started up and stood staring down
at him stricken white. Father Brown made a wry face
as he went on: ‘I made a fool of myself when I first
realized it; when they’d just been asking where he
was found, and went on talking about green scum and
the Green Man.’
Then he also rose; clutching his clumsy umbrella
with a new resolution, he addressed the girl with a
new gravity.
‘There is something else that I know, which is
the key to all these riddles of yours; but I won’t
tell you yet. I suppose it’s bad news; but it’s
nothing like so bad as the things you have been
fancying.’ He buttoned up his coat and turned
towards the gate. ‘I’m going to see this Mr. Rook of
yours. In a shed by the shore, near where Mr. Harker
saw him walking. I rather think he lives there.’ And
he went bustling off in the direction of the beach.
Olive was an imaginative person; perhaps too
imaginative to be safely left to brood over such
hints as her friend had thrown out; but he was in
rather a hurry to find the best relief for her
broodings. The mysterious connection between Father
Brown’s first shock of enlightenment and the chance
language about the pool and the inn, hag-rode her
fancy in a hundred forms of ugly symbolism. The
Green Man became a ghost trailing loathsome weeds
and walking the countryside under the moon; the sign
of the Green Man became a human figure hanging as
from a gibbet; and the tarn itself became a tavern,
a dark subaqueous tavern for the dead sailors. And
yet he had taken the most rapid method to overthrow
all such nightmares, with a burst of blinding
daylight which seemed more mysterious than the
night.
For before the sun had set, something had come
back into her life that turned her whole world
topsy-turvy once more; something she had hardly
known that she desired until it was abruptly
granted; something that was, like a dream, old and
familiar, and yet remained incomprehensible and
incredible. For Roger Rook had come striding across
the sands, and even when he was a dot in the
distance, she knew he was transfigured; and as he
came nearer and nearer, she saw that his dark face
was alive with laughter and exultation. He came
straight toward her, as if they had never parted,
and seized her shoulders saying: ‘Now I can look
after you, thank God.’
She hardly knew what she answered; but she heard
herself questioning rather wildly why he seemed so
changed and so happy.
‘Because I am happy,’ he answered. ‘I have heard
the bad news.’
All parties concerned, including some who seemed
rather unconcerned, found themselves assembled on
the garden-path leading to Craven House, to hear the
formality, now truly formal, of the lawyer’s reading
of the will; and the probable, and more practical
sequel of the lawyer’s advice upon the crisis.
Besides the grey-haired solicitor himself, armed
with the testamentary document, there was the
Inspector armed with more direct authority touching
the crime, and Lieutenant Rook in undisguised
attendance on the lady; some were rather mystified
on seeing the tall figure of the doctor, some smiled
a little on seeing the dumpy figure of the priest.
Mr. Harker, that Flying Mercury, had shot down to
the lodge-gates to meet them, led them back on to
the lawn, and then dashed ahead of them again to
prepare their reception. He said he would be back in
a jiffy; and anyone observing his piston-rod of
energy could well believe it; but, for the moment,
they were left rather stranded on the lawn outside
the house.
‘Reminds me of somebody making runs at cricket,’
said the Lieutenant.
‘That young man,’ said the lawyer, ‘is rather
annoyed that the law cannot move quite so quickly as
he does. Fortunately Miss Craven understands our
professional difficulties and delays. She has kindly
assured me that she still has confidence in my
slowness.’
‘I wish,’ said the doctor, suddenly, ‘that I had
as much confidence in his quickness.’
‘Why, what do you mean?’ asked Rook, knitting his
brows; ‘do you mean that Harker is too quick?’
‘Too quick and too slow,’ said Dr. Straker, in
his rather cryptic fashion. ‘I know one occasion at
least when he was not so very quick. Why was he
hanging about half the night by the pond and the
Green Man, before the Inspector came down and found
the body? Why did he meet the Inspector? Why should
he expect to meet the Inspector outside the Green
Man?’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Rook. ‘Do you mean
that Harker wasn’t telling the truth?’
Dr Straker was silent. The grizzled lawyer
laughed with grim good humour. ‘I have nothing more
serious to say against the young man,’ he said,
‘than that he made a prompt and praiseworthy attempt
to teach me my own business.’
‘For that matter, he made an attempt to teach me
mine,’ said the Inspector, who had just joined the
group in front. ‘But that doesn’t matter. If Dr
Straker means anything by his hints, they do matter.
I must ask you to speak plainly, doctor. It may be
my duty to question him at once.’
‘Well, here he comes,’ said Rook, as the alert
figure of the secretary appeared once more in the
doorway.
At this point Father Brown, who had remained
silent and inconspicuous at the tail of the
procession, astonished everybody very much; perhaps
especially those who knew him. He not only walked
rapidly to the front, but turned facing the whole
group with an arresting and almost threatening
expression, like a sergeant bringing soldiers to the
halt.
‘Stop!’ he said almost sternly. ‘I apologize to
everybody; but it’s absolutely necessary that I
should see Mr. Harker first. I’ve got to tell him
something I know; and I don’t think anybody else
knows; something he’s got to hear. It may save a
very tragic misunderstanding with somebody later
on.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked old Dyke the
lawyer.
‘I mean the bad news,’ said Father Brown.
‘Here, I say,’ began the Inspector indignantly;
and then suddenly caught the priest’s eye and
remembered strange things he had seen in other days.
‘Well, if it were anyone in the world but you I
should say of all the infernal cheek — ’
But Father Brown was already out of hearing, and
a moment afterwards was plunged in talk with Harker
in the porch. They walked to and fro together for a
few paces and then disappeared into the dark
interior. It was about twelve minutes afterwards
that Father Brown came out alone.
To their surprise he showed no dispostion to
re-enter the house, now that the whole company were
at last about to enter it. He threw himself down on
the rather rickety seat in the leafy arbour, and as
the procession disappeared through the doorway, lit
a pipe and proceeded to stare vacantly at the long
ragged leaves about his head and to listen to the
birds. There was no man who had a more hearty and
enduring appetite for doing nothing.
He was, apparently, in a cloud of smoke and a
dream of abstraction, when the front doors were once
more flung open and two or three figures came out
helter-skelter, running towards him, the daughter of
the house and her young admirer Mr Rook being easily
winners in the race. Their faces were alight with
astonishment; and the face of Inspector Burns, who
advanced more heavily behind them, like an elephant
shaking the garden, was inflamed with some
indignation as well.
‘What can all this mean?’ cried Olive, as she
came panting to a halt. ‘He’s gone!’
‘Bolted!’ said the Lieutenant explosively.
‘Harker’s just managed to pack a suitcase and
bolted! Gone clean out of the back door and over the
garden-wall to God knows where. What did you say to
him?’
‘Don’t be silly!’ said Olive, with a more worried
expression. ‘Of course you told him you’d found him
out, and now he’s gone. I never could have believed
he was wicked like that!’
‘Well!’ gasped the Inspector, bursting into their
midst. ‘What have you done now? What have you let me
down like this for?’
‘Well,’ repeated Father Brown, ‘what have I
done?’
‘You have let a murderer escape,’ cried Burns,
with a decision that was like a thunderclap in the
quiet garden; ‘you have helped a murderer to escape.
Like a fool I let you warn him; and now he is miles
away.’
‘I have helped a few murderers in my time, it is
true,’ said Father Brown; then he added, in careful
distinction, ‘not, you will understand, helped them
to commit the murder.’
‘But you knew all the time,’ insisted Olive. ‘You
guessed from the first that it must be he. That’s
what you meant about being upset by the business of
finding the body. That’s what the doctor meant by
saying my father might be disliked by a
subordinate.’
‘That’s what I complain of,’ said the official
indignantly. ‘You knew even then that he was the — ’
‘You knew even then,’ insisted Olive, ‘that the
murderer was — ’
Father Brown nodded gravely. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I
knew even then that the murderer was old Dyke.’
‘Was who?’ repeated the Inspector and stopped
amid, a dead silence; punctuated only by the
occasional pipe of birds.
‘I mean Mr. Dyke, the solicitor,’ explained
Father Brown, like one explaining something
elementary to an infant class. ‘That gentleman with
grey hair who’s supposed to be going to read the
will.’
They all stood like statues staring at him, as he
carefully filled his pipe again and struck a match.
At last Burns rallied his vocal powers to break the
strangling silence with an effort resembling
violence.
‘But, in the name of heaven, why?’
‘Ah, why?’ said the priest and rose thoughtfully,
puffing at his pipe. ‘As to why he did it ... Well,
I suppose the time has come to tell you, or those of
you who don’t know, the fact that is the key of all
this business. It’s a great calamity; and it’s a
great crime; but it’s not the murder of Admiral
Craven.’
He looked Olive full in the face and said very
seriously: ‘I tell you the bad news bluntly and in
few words; because I think you are brave enough, and
perhaps happy enough, to take it well. You have the
chance, and I think the power, to be something like
a great woman. You are not a great heiress.’
Amid the silence that followed it was he who
resumed his explanation.
‘Most of your father’s money, I am sorry to say,
has gone. It went by the financial dexterity of the
grey-haired gentleman named Dyke, who is (I grieve
to say) a swindler. Admiral Craven was murdered to
silence him about the way in which he was swindled.
The fact that he was ruined and you were
disinherited is the single simple clue, not only to
the murder, but to all the other mysteries in this
business.’ He took a puff or two and then continued.
‘I told Mr. Rook you were disinherited and he
rushed back to help you. Mr. Rook is a rather
remarkable person.’
‘Oh, chuck it,’ said Mr. Rook with a hostile air.
‘Mr. Rook is a monster,’ said Father Brown with
scientific calm. ‘He is an anachronism, an atavism,
a brute survival of the Stone Age. If there was one
barbarous superstition we all supposed to be utterly
extinct and dead in these days, it was that notion
about honour and independence. But then I get mixed
up with so many dead superstitions. Mr. Rook is an
extinct animal. He is a plesiosaurus. He did not
want to live on his wife or have a wife who could
call him a fortune-hunter. Therefore he sulked in a
grotesque manner and only came to life again when I
brought him the good news that you were ruined. He
wanted to work for his wife and not be kept by her.
Disgusting, isn’t it? Let us turn to the brighter
topic of Mr. Harker.
‘I told Mr. Harker you were disinherited and he
rushed away in a sort of panic. Do not be too hard
on Mr. Harker. He really had better as well as worse
enthusiasms; but he had them all mixed up. There is
no harm in having ambitions; but he had ambitions
and called them ideals. The old sense of honour
taught men to suspect success; to say, “This is a
benefit; it may be a bribe.” The new
nine-times-accursed nonsense about Making Good
teaches men to identify being good with making
money. That was all that was the matter with him; in
every other way he was a thoroughly good fellow, and
there are thousands like him. Gazing at the stars
and rising in the world were all Uplift. Marrying a
good wife and marrying a rich wife were all Making
Good. But he was not a cynical scoundrel; or he
would simply have come back and jilted or cut you as
the case might be. He could not face you; while you
were there, half of his broken ideal was left.
‘I did not tell the Admiral; but somebody did.
Word came to him somehow, during the last grand
parade on board, that his friend the family lawyer
had betrayed him. He was in such a towering passion
that he did what he could never have done in his
sense; came straight on shore in his cocked hat and
gold lace to catch the criminal; he wired to the
police station, and that was why the Inspector was
wandering round the Green Man. Lieutenant Rook
followed him on shore because he suspected some
family trouble and had half a hope he might help and
put himself right. Hence his hesitating behaviour.
As for his drawing his sword when he dropped behind
and thought he was alone, well that’s a matter of
imagination. He was a romantic person who had
dreamed of swords and run away to sea; and found
himself in a service where he wasn’t even allowed to
wear a sword except about once in three years. He
thought he was quite alone on the sands where he
played as a boy. If you don’t understand what he
did, I can only say, like Stevenson, “you will never
be a pirate.” Also you will never be a poet; and you
have never been a boy.’
‘I never have,’ answered Olive gravely, ‘and yet
I think I understand.’
‘Almost every man,’ continued the priest musing,
‘will play with anything shaped like a sword or
dagger, even if it is a paper knife. That is why I
thought it so odd when the lawyer didn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Burns, ‘didn’t what?’
‘Why, didn’t you notice,’ answered Brown, ‘at
that first meeting in the office, the lawyer played
with a pen and not with a paper-knife; though he had
a beautiful bright steel paper-knife in the pattern
of a stiletto? The pens were dusty and splashed with
ink; but the knife had just been cleaned. But he did
not play with it. There are limits to the irony of
assassins.’
After a silence the Inspector said, like one
waking from a dream: ‘Look here ... I don’t know
whether I’m on my head or my heels; I don’t know
whether you think you’ve got to the end; but I
haven’t got to the beginning. Where do you get all
this lawyer stuff from? What started you out on that
trail?’
Father Brown laughed curtly and without mirth.
‘The murderer made a slip at the start,’ he said,
‘and I can’t think why nobody else noticed it. When
you brought the first news of the death to the
solicitor’s office, nobody was supposed to know
anything there, except that the Admiral was expected
home. When you said he was drowned, I asked when it
happened and Mr Dyke asked where the corpse was
found.’
He paused a moment to knock out his pipe and
resumed reflectively: ‘Now when you are simply told
of a seaman, returning from the sea, that he had
drowned, it is natural to assume that he had been
drowned at sea. At any rate, to allow that he may
have been drowned at sea. If he had been washed
overboard, or gone down with his ship, or had his
body “committed to the deep”, there would be no
reason to expect his body to be found at all. The
moment that man asked where it was found, I was sure
he knew where it was found. Because he had put it
there. Nobody but the murderer need have thought of
anything so unlikely as a seaman being drowned in a
landlocked pool a few hundred yards from the sea.
That is why I suddenly felt sick and turned green, I
dare say; as green as the Green Man. I never can get
used to finding myself suddenly sitting beside a
murderer. So I had to turn it off by talking in
parables; but the parable meant something, after
all. I said that the body was covered with green
scum, but it might just as well have been seaweed.’
It is fortunate that tragedy can never kill
comedy and that the two can run side by side; and
that while the only acting partner of the business
of Messrs. Willis, Hardman and Dyke blew his brains
out when the Inspector entered the house to arrest
him, Olive and Roger were calling to each other
across the sands at evening, as they did when they
were children together.
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Chapter V. The Pursuit of Mr Blue
Along a seaside parade on a sunny afternoon, a
person with the depressing name of Muggleton was
moving with suitable gloom. There was a horseshoe of
worry in his forehead, and the numerous groups and
strings of entertainers stretched along the beach
below looked up to him in vain for applause.
Pierrots turned up their pale moon faces, like the
white bellies of dead fish, without improving his
spirits; niggers with faces entirely grey with a
sort of grimy soot were equally unsuccessful in
filling his fancy with brighter things. He was a sad
and disappointed man. His other features, besides
the bald brow with its furrow, were retiring and
almost sunken; and a certain dingy refinement about
them made more incongruous the one aggressive
ornament of his face. It was an outstanding and
bristling military moustache; and it looked
suspiciously like a false moustache. It is possible,
indeed, that it was a false moustache. It is
possible, on the other hand, that even if it was not
false it was forced. He might almost have grown it
in a hurry, by a mere act of will; so much was it a
part of his job rather than his personality.
For the truth is that Mr Muggleton was a private
detective in a small way, and the cloud on his brow
was due to a big blunder in his professional career;
anyhow it was connected with something darker than
the mere possession of such a surname. He might
almost, in an obscure sort of way, have been proud
of his surname; for he came of poor but decent
Nonconformist people who claimed some connection
with the founder of the Muggletonians; the only man
who had hitherto had the courage to appear with that
name in human history.
The more legitimate cause of his annoyance (at
least as he himself explained it) was that he had
just been present at the bloody murder of a
world-famous millionaire, and had failed to prevent
it, though he had been engaged at a salary of five
pounds a week to do so. Thus we may explain the fact
that even the languorous singing of the song
entitled, ‘Won’t You Be My Loodah Doodah Day?’
failed to fill him with the joy of life.
For that matter, there were others on the beach,
who might have had more sympathy with his murderous
theme and Muggletonian tradition. Seaside resorts
are the chosen pitches, not only of pierrots
appealing to the amorous emotions, but also of
preachers who often seem to specialize in a
correspondingly sombre and sulphurous style of
preaching. There was one aged ranter whom he could
hardly help noticing, so piercing were the cries,
not to say shrieks of religious prophecy that rang
above all the banjos and castanets. This was a long,
loose, shambling old man, dressed in something like
a fisherman’s jersey; but inappropriately equipped
with a pair of those very long and drooping whiskers
which have never been seen since the disappearance
of certain sportive Mid-Victorian dandies. As it was
the custom for all mountebanks on the beach to
display something, as if they were selling it, the
old man displayed a rather rotten-looking
fisherman’s net, which he generally spread out
invitingly on the sands, as if it were a carpet for
queens; but occasionally whirled wildly round his
head with a gesture almost as terrific as that of
the Roman Retiarius, ready to impale people on a
trident. Indeed, he might really have impaled
people, if he had had a trident. His words were
always pointed towards punishment; his hearers heard
nothing except threats to the body or the soul; he
was so far in the same mood as Mr. Muggleton, that
he might almost have been a mad hangman addressing a
crowd of murderers. The boys called him Old
Brimstone; but he had other eccentricities besides
the purely theological. One of his eccentricities
was to climb up into the nest of iron girders under
the pier and trail his net in the water, declaring
that he got his living by fishing; though it is
doubtful whether anybody had ever seen him catching
fish. Worldly trippers, however, would sometimes
start at a voice in their ear, threatening judgement
as from a thundercloud, but really coming from the
perch under the iron roof where the old monomaniac
sat glaring, his fantastic whiskers hanging like
grey seaweed.
The detective, however, could have put up with
Old Brimstone much better than with the other parson
he was destined to meet. To explain this second and
more momentous meeting, it must be pointed out that
Muggleton, after his remarkable experience in the
matter of the murder, had very properly put all his
cards on the table. He told his story to the police
and to the only available representative of Braham
Bruce, the dead millionaire; that is, to his very
dapper secretary, a Mr Anthony Taylor. The Inspector
was more sympathetic than the secretary; but the
sequel of his sympathy was the last thing Muggleton
would normally have associated with police advice.
The Inspector, after some reflection, very much
surprised Mr. Muggleton by advising him to consult
an able amateur whom he knew to be staying in the
town. Mr. Muggleton had read reports and romances
about the Great Criminologist, who sits in his
library like an intellectual spider, and throws out
theoretical filaments of a web as large as the
world. He was prepared to be led to the lonely
chateau where the expert wore a purple
dressing-gown, to the attic where he lived on opium
and acrostics, to the vast laboratory or the lonely
tower. To his astonishment he was led to the very
edge of the crowded beach by the pier to meet a
dumpy little clergyman, with a broad hat and a broad
grin, who was at that moment hopping about on the
sands with a crowd of poor children; and excitedly
waving a very little wooden spade.
When the criminologist clergyman, whose name
appeared to be Brown, had at last been detached from
the children, though not from the spade, he seemed
to Muggleton to grow more and more unsatisfactory.
He hung about helplessly among the idiotic
side-shows of the seashore, talking about random
topics and particularly attaching himself to those
rows of automatic machines which are set up in such
places; solemnly spending penny after penny in order
to play vicarious games of golf, football, cricket,
conducted by clockwork figures; and finally
contenting himself with the miniature exhibition of
a race, in which one metal doll appeared merely to
run and jump after the other. And yet all the time
he was listening very carefully to the story which
the defeated detective poured out to him. Only his
way of not letting his right hand know what his left
hand was doing, with pennies, got very much on the
detective’s nerves.
‘Can’t we go and sit down somewhere,’ said
Muggleton impatiently. ‘I’ve got a letter you ought
to see, if you’re to know anything at all of this
business.’
Father Brown turned away with a sigh from the
jumping dolls, and went and sat down with his
companion on an iron seat on the shore; his
companion had already unfolded the letter and handed
it silently to him.
It was an abrupt and queer sort of letter, Father
Brown thought. He knew that millionaires did not
always specialize in manners, especially in dealing
with dependants like detectives; but there seemed to
be something more in the letter than mere
brusquerie.
DEAR MUGGLETON,
I never thought I should come down to wanting
help of this sort; but I’m about through with
things. It’s been getting more and more intolerable
for the last two years. I guess all you need to know
about the story is this. There is a dirty rascal who
is a cousin of mine, I’m ashamed to say. He’s been a
tout, a tramp, a quack doctor, an actor, and all
that; even has the brass to act under our name and
call himself Bertrand Bruce. I believe he’s either
got some potty job at the theatre here, or is
looking for one. But you may take it from me that
the job isn’t his real job. His real job is running
me down and knocking me out for good, if he can.
It’s an old story and no business of anybody’s;
there was a time when we started neck and neck and
ran a race of ambition — and what they call love as
well. Was it my fault that he was a rotter and I was
a man who succeeds in things? But the dirty devil
swears he’ll succeed yet; shoot me and run off with
my — never mind. I suppose he’s a sort of madman,
but he’ll jolly soon try to be some sort of
murderer. I’ll give you £5 a week if you’ll meet me
at the lodge at the end of the pier, just after the
pier closes tonight — and take on my job. It’s the
only safe place to meet — if anything is safe by
this time.
J. BRAHAM BRUCE
‘Dear me,’ said Father Brown mildly. ‘Dear me. A
rather hurried letter.’
Muggleton nodded; and after a pause began his own
story; in an oddly refined voice contrasting with
his clumsy appearance. The priest knew well the
hobbies of concealed culture hidden in many dingy
lower and middle class men; but even he was startled
by the excellent choice of words only a shade too
pedantic; the man talked like a book.
‘I arrived at the little round-house at the end
of the pier before there was any sign of my
distinguished client. I opened the door and went
inside, feeling that he might prefer me, as well as
himself, to be as inconspicuous as possible. Not
that it mattered very much; for the pier was too
long for anybody to have seen us from the beach or
the parade, and, on glancing at my watch, I saw by
the time that the pier entrance must have already
closed. It was flattering, after a fashion, that he
should thus ensure that we should be alone together
at the rendezvous, as showing that he did really
rely on my assistance or protection. Anyhow, it was
his idea that we should meet on the pier after
closing time, so I fell in with it readily enough.
There were two chairs inside the little round
pavilion, or whatever you call it; so I simply took
one of them and waited. I did not have to wait long.
He was famous for his punctuality, and sure enough,
as I looked up at the one little round window
opposite me I saw him pass slowly, as if making a
preliminary circuit of the place.
‘I had only seen portraits of him, and that was a
long time ago; and naturally he was rather older
than the portraits, but there was no mistaking the
likeness. The profile that passed the window was of
the sort called aquiline, after the beak of the
eagle; but he rather suggested a grey and venerable
eagle; an eagle in repose; an eagle that has long
folded its wings. There was no mistaking, however,
that look of authority, or silent pride in the habit
of command, that has always marked men who, like
him, have organized great systems and been obeyed.
He was quietly dressed, what I could see of him;
especially as compared with the crowd of seaside
trippers which had filled so much of my day; but I
fancied his overcoat was of that extra elegant sort
that is cut to follow the line of the figure, and it
had a strip of astrakhan lining showing on the
lapels. All this, of course, I took in at a glance,
for I had already got to my feet and gone to the
door. I put out my hand and received the first shock
of that terrible evening. The door was locked.
Somebody had locked me in.
‘For a moment I stood stunned, and still staring
at the round window, from which, of course, the
moving profile had already passed; and then I
suddenly saw the explanation. Another profile,
pointed like that of a pursuing hound, flashed into
the circle of vision, as into a round mirror. The
moment I saw it, I knew who it was. It was the
Avenger; the murderer or would-be murderer, who had
trailed the old millionaire for so long across land
and sea, and had now tracked him to this blind-alley
of an iron pier that hung between sea and land. And
I knew, of course, that it was the murderer who had
locked the door.
‘The man I saw first had been tall, but his
pursuer was even taller; an effect that was only
lessened by his carrying his shoulders hunched very
high and his neck and head thrust forward like a
true beast of the chase. The effect of the
combination gave him rather the look of a gigantic
hunchback. But something of the blood relationship
that connected this ruffian with his famous kinsman
showed in the two profiles as they passed across the
circle of glass. The pursuer also had a nose rather
like the beak of a bird; though his general air of
ragged degradation suggested the vulture rather than
the eagle. He was unshaven to the point of being
bearded, and the humped look of his shoulders was
increased by the coils of a coarse woollen scarf.
All these are trivialities, and can give no
impression of the ugly energy of that outline, or
the sense of avenging doom in that stooping and
striding figure. Have you ever seen William Blake’s
design, sometimes called with some levity, “The
Ghost of a Flea,” but also called, with somewhat
greater lucidity, “A Vision of Blood Guilt,” or
something of that kind? That is just such a
nightmare of a stealthy giant, with high shoulders,
carrying a knife and bowl. This man carried neither,
but as he passed the window the second time, I saw
with my own eyes that he loosened a revolver from
the folds of the scarf and held it gripped and
poised in his hand. The eyes in his head shifted and
shone in the moonlight, and that in a very creepy
way; they shot forward and back with lightning
leaps; almost as if he could shoot them out like
luminous horns, as do certain reptiles.
‘Three times the pursued and the pursuer passed
in succession outside the window, treading their
narrow circle, before I fully awoke to the need of
some action, however desperate. I shook the door
with rattling violence; when next I saw the face of
the unconscious victim I beat furiously on the
window; then I tried to break the window. But it was
a double window of exceptionally thick glass, and so
deep was the embrasure that I doubted if I could
properly reach the outer window at all. Anyhow, my
dignified client took no notice of my noise or
signals; and the revolving shadow-pantomime of those
two masks of doom continued to turn round and round
me, till I felt almost dizzy as well as sick. Then
they suddenly ceased to reappear. I waited; and I
knew that they would not come again. I knew that the
crisis had come.
‘I need not tell you more. You can almost imagine
the rest, even as I sat there helpless, trying to
imagine it; or trying not to imagine it. It is
enough to say that in that awful silence, in which
all sounds of footsteps had died away, there were
only two other noises besides the rumbling
undertones of the sea. The first was the loud noise
of a shot and the second the duller noise of a
splash.
‘My client had been murdered within a few yards
of me, and I could make no sign. I will not trouble
you with what I felt about that. But even if I could
recover from the murder, I am still confronted with
the mystery.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown very gently, ‘which
mystery?’
‘The mystery of how the murderer got away,’
answered the other. ‘The instant people were
admitted to the pier next morning, I was released
from my prison and went racing back to the entrance
gates, to inquire who had left the pier since they
were opened. Without bothering you with details, I
may explain that they were, by a rather unusual
arrangement, real full-size iron doors that would
keep anybody out (or in) until they were opened. The
officials there had seen nobody in the least
resembling the assassin returning that way. And he
was a rather unmistakable person. Even if he had
disguised himself somehow, he could hardly have
disguised his extraordinary height or got rid of the
family nose. It is extraordinarily unlikely that he
tried to swim ashore, for the sea was very rough;
and there are certainly no traces of any landing.
And, somehow, having seen the face of that fiend
even once, let alone about six times, something
gives me an overwhelming conviction that he did not
simply drown himself in the hour of triumph.’
‘I quite understand what you mean by that,’
replied Father Brown. ‘Besides, it would be very
inconsistent with the tone of his original
threatening letter, in which he promised himself all
sorts of benefits after the crime . . . there’s
another point it might be well to verify. What about
the structure of the pier underneath? Piers are very
often made with a whole network of iron supports,
which a man might climb through as a monkey climbs
through a forest.’
‘Yes, I thought of that,’ replied the private
investigator; ‘but unfortunately this pier is oddly
constructed in more ways than one. It’s quite
unusually long, and there are iron columns with all
that tangle of iron girders; only they’re very far
apart and I can’t see any way a man could climb from
one to the other.’
‘I only mentioned it,’ said Father Brown
thoughtfully, ‘because that queer fish with the long
whiskers, the old man who preaches on the sand,
often climbs up on to the nearest girder. I believe
he sits there fishing when the tide comes up. And
he’s a very queer fish to go fishing.’
‘Why, what do you mean?’
‘Well,’ said Father Brown very slowly, twiddling
with a button and gazing abstractedly out to the
great green waters glittering in the last evening
light after the sunset. ‘Well ... I tried to talk to
him in a friendly sort of way — friendly and not too
funny, if you understand, about his combining the
ancient trades of fishing and preaching; I think I
made the obvious reference; the text that refers to
fishing for living souls. And he said quite queerly
and harshly, as he jumped back on to his iron perch,
‘Well, at least I fish for dead bodies.”’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed the detective, staring at
him.
‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘It seemed to me an odd
remark to make in a chatty way, to a stranger
playing with children on the sands.’
After another staring silence his companion
eventually ejaculated: ‘You don’t mean you think he
had anything to do with the death.’
‘I think,’ answered Father Brown, ‘that he might
throw some light on it.’
‘Well, it’s beyond me now,’ said the detective.
‘It’s beyond me to believe that anybody can throw
any light on it. It’s like a welter of wild waters
in the pitch dark; the sort of waters that he ...
that he fell into. It’s simply stark staring
unreason; a big man vanishing like a bubble; nobody
could possibly ... Look here!’ He stopped suddenly,
staring at the priest, who had not moved, but was
still twiddling with the button and staring at the
breakers. ‘What do you mean? What are you looking
like that for? You don’t mean to say that you . . .
that you can make any sense of it?’
‘It would be much better if it remained
nonsense,’ said Father Brown in a low voice. ‘Well,
if you ask me right out — yes, I think I can make
some sense of it.’
There was a long silence, and then the inquiry
agent said with a rather singular abruptness: ‘Oh,
here comes the old man’s secretary from the hotel. I
must be off. I think I’ll go and talk to that mad
fisherman of yours.’
‘Post hoc propter hoc?’ asked the priest with a
smile.
‘Well,’ said the other, with jerky candour, ‘the
secretary don’t like me and I don’t think I like
him. He’s been poking around with a lot of questions
that didn’t seem to me to get us any further, except
towards a quarrel. Perhaps he’s jealous because the
old man called in somebody else, and wasn’t content
with his elegant secretary’s advice. See you later.’
And he turned away, ploughing through the sand to
the place where the eccentric preacher had already
mounted his marine nest; and looked in the green
gloaming rather like some huge polyp or stinging
jelly-fish trailing his poisonous filaments in the
phosphorescent sea.
Meanwhile the priest was serenely watching the
serene approach of the secretary; conspicuous even
from afar, in that popular crowd, by the clerical
neatness and sobriety of his top-hat and tail-coat.
Without feeling disposed to take part in any feuds
between the secretary and the inquiry agent, Father
Brown had a faint feeling of irrational sympathy
with the prejudices of the latter. Mr. Anthony
Taylor, the secretary, was an extremely presentable
young man, in countenance, as well as costume; and
the countenance was firm and intellectual as well as
merely good-looking. He was pale, with dark hair
coming down on the sides of his head, as if pointing
towards possible whiskers; he kept his lips
compressed more tightly than most people. The only
thing that Father Brown’s fancy could tell itself in
justification sounded queerer than it really looked.
He had a notion that the man talked with his
nostrils. Anyhow, the strong compression of his
mouth brought out something abnormally sensitive and
flexible in these movements at the sides of his
nose, so that he seemed to be communicating and
conducting life by snuffling and smelling, with his
head up, as does a dog. It somehow fitted in with
the other features that, when he did speak, it was
with a sudden rattling rapidity like a gatling-gun,
which sounded almost ugly from so smooth and
polished a figure.
For once he opened the conversation, by saying:
‘No bodies washed ashore, I imagine.’
‘None have been announced, certainly,’ said
Father Brown.
‘No gigantic body of the murderer with the
woollen scarf,’ said Mr. Taylor.
‘No,’ said Father Brown.
Mr. Taylor’s mouth did not move any more for the
moment; but his nostrils spoke for him with such
quick and quivering scorn, that they might almost
have been called talkative.
When he did speak again, after some polite
commonplaces from the priest, it was to say curtly:
‘Here comes the Inspector; I suppose they’ve been
scouring England for the scarf.’
Inspector Grinstead, a brown-faced man with a
grey pointed beard, addressed Father Brown rather
more respectfully than the secretary had done.
‘I thought you would like to know, sir,’ he said,
‘that there is absolutely no trace of the man
described as having escaped from the pier.’
‘Or rather not described as having escaped from
the pier,’ said Taylor. ‘The pier officials, the
only people who could have described him, have never
seen anybody to describe.’
‘Well,’ said the Inspector, ‘we’ve telephoned all
the stations and watched all the roads, and it will
be almost impossible for him to escape from England.
It really seems to me as if he couldn’t have got out
that way. He doesn’t seem to be anywhere.’
‘He never was anywhere,’ said the secretary, with
an abrupt grating voice, that sounded like a gun
going off on that lonely shore.
The Inspector looked blank; but a light dawned
gradually on the face of the priest, who said at
last with almost ostentatious unconcern:
‘Do you mean that the man was a myth? Or possibly
a lie?’
‘Ah,’ said the secretary, inhaling through his
haughty nostrils, ‘you’ve thought of that at last.’
‘I thought of that at first,’ said Father Brown.
‘It’s the first thing anybody would think of, isn’t
it, hearing an unsupported story from a stranger
about a strange murderer on a lonely pier. In plain
words, you mean that little Muggleton never heard
anybody murdering the millionaire. Possibly you mean
that little Muggleton murdered him himself.’
‘Well,’ said the secretary, ‘Muggleton looks a
dingy down-and-out sort of cove to me. There’s no
story but his about what happened on the pier, and
his story consists of a giant who vanished; quite a
fairy-tale. It isn’t a very creditable tale, even as
he tells it. By his own account, he bungled his case
and let his patron be killed a few yards away. He’s
a pretty rotten fool and failure, on his own
confession.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown. ‘I’m rather fond of
people who are fools and failures on their own
confession.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ snapped the other.
‘Perhaps,’ said Father Brown, wistfully, ‘it’s
because so many people are fools and failures
without any confession.’
Then, after a pause, he went on: ‘But even if he
is a fool and a failure, that doesn’t prove he is a
liar and a murderer. And you’ve forgotten that there
is one piece of external evidence that does really
support history. I mean the letter from the
millionaire, telling the whole tale of his cousin
and his vendetta. Unless you can prove that the
document itself is actually a forgery, you have to
admit there was some probability of Bruce being
pursued by somebody who had a real motive. Or
rather, I should say, the one actually admitted and
recorded motive.’
‘I’m not quite sure that I understand you,’ said
the Inspector, ‘about the motive.’
‘My dear fellow,’ said Father Brown, for the
first time stung by impatience into familiarity,
‘everybody’s got a motive in a way. Considering the
way that Bruce made his money, considering the way
that most millionaires make their money, almost
anybody in the world might have done such a
perfectly natural thing as throw him into the sea.
In many, one might almost fancy, it would be almost
automatic. To almost all it must have occurred at
some time or other. Mr Taylor might have done it.’
‘What’s that?’ snapped Mr. Taylor, and his
nostrils swelled visibly.
‘I might have done it,’ went on Father Brown,
‘nisi me constringeret ecclesiae auctoritas.
Anybody, but for the one true morality, might be
tempted to accept so obvious, so simple a social
solution. I might have done it; you might have done
it; the Mayor or the muffin-man might have done it.
The only person on this earth I can think of, who
probably would not have done it, is the private
inquiry agent whom Bruce had just engaged at five
pounds a week, and who hadn’t yet had any of his
money.’
The secretary was silent for a moment; then he
snorted and said: ‘If that’s the offer in the
letter, we’d certainly better see whether it’s a
forgery. For really, we don’t know that the whole
tale isn’t as false as a forgery. The fellow admits
himself that the disappearance of his hunch-backed
giant is utterly incredible and inexplicable.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown; ‘that’s what I like
about Muggleton. He admits things.’
‘All the same,’ insisted Taylor, his nostrils
vibrant with excitement. ‘All the same, the long and
the short of it is that he can’t prove that his tall
man in the scarf ever existed or does exist; and
every single fact found by the police and the
witnesses proves that he does not exist. No, Father
Brown. There is only one way in which you can
justify this little scallywag you seem to be so fond
of. And that is by producing his Imaginary Man. And
that is exactly what you can’t do.’
‘By the way,’ said the priest, absent-mindedly,
‘I suppose you come from the hotel where Bruce has
rooms, Mr. Taylor?’
Taylor looked a little taken aback, and seemed
almost to stammer. ‘Well, he always did have those
rooms; and they’re practically his. I haven’t
actually seen him there this time.’
‘I suppose you motored down with him,’ observed
Brown; ‘or did you both come by train?’
‘I came by train and brought the luggage,’ said
the secretary impatiently. ‘Something kept him, I
suppose. I haven’t actually seen him since he left
Yorkshire on his own a week or two ago.’
‘So it seems,’ said the priest very softly, ‘that
if Muggleton wasn’t the last to see Bruce by the
wild sea-waves, you were the last to see him, on the
equally wild Yorkshire moors.’
Taylor had turned quite white, but he forced his
grating voice to composure: ‘I never said Muggleton
didn’t see Bruce on the pier.’
‘No; and why didn’t you?’ asked Father Brown. ‘If
he made up one man on the pier, why shouldn’t he
make up two men on the pier? Of course we do know
that Bruce did exist; but we don’t seem to know what
has happened to him for several weeks. Perhaps he
was left behind in Yorkshire.’
The rather strident voice of the secretary rose
almost to a scream. All his veneer of society
suavity seemed to have vanished.
‘You’re simply shuffling! You’re simply shirking!
You’re trying to drag in mad insinuations about me,
simply because you can’t answer my question.’
‘Let me see,’ said Father Brown reminiscently.
‘What was your question?’
‘You know well enough what it was; and you know
you’re damned well stumped by it. Where is the man
with the scarf? Who has seen him? Whoever heard of
him or spoke of him, except that little liar of
yours? If you want to convince us, you must produce
him. If he ever existed, he may be hiding in the
Hebrides or off to Callao. But you’ve got to produce
him, though I know he doesn’t exist. Well then!
Where is he?’
‘I rather think he is over there,’ said Father
Brown, peering and blinking towards the nearer waves
that washed round the iron pillars of the pier;
where the two figures of the agent and the old
fisher and preacher were still dark against the
green glow of the water. ‘I mean in that sort of net
thing that’s tossing about in the sea.’
With whatever bewilderment, Inspector Grinstead
took the upper hand again with a flash, and strode
down the beach.
‘Do you mean to say,’ he cried, ‘that the
murderer’s body is in the old boy’s net?’
Father Brown nodded as he followed down the
shingly slope; and, even as they moved, little
Muggleton the agent turned and began to climb the
same shore, his mere dark outline a pantomime of
amazement and discovery.
‘It’s true, for all we said,’ he gasped. ‘The
murderer did try to swim ashore and was drowned, of
course, in that weather. Or else he did really
commit suicide. Anyhow, he drifted dead into Old
Brimstone’s fishing-net, and that’s what the old
maniac meant when he said he fished for dead men.’
The Inspector ran down the shore with an agility
that outstripped them all, and was heard shouting
out orders. In a few moments the fishermen and a few
bystanders, assisted by the policemen, had hauled
the net into shore, and rolled it with its burden on
to the wet sands that still reflected the sunset.
The secretary looked at what lay on the sands and
the words died on his lips. For what lay on the
sands was indeed the body of a gigantic man in rags,
with the huge shoulders somewhat humped and bony
eagle face; and a great red ragged woollen scarf or
comforter, sprawled along the sunset sands like a
great stain of blood. But Taylor was staring not at
the gory scarf or the fabulous stature, but at the
face; and his own face was a conflict of incredulity
and suspicion.
The Inspector instantly turned to Muggleton with
a new air of civility.
‘This certainly confirms your story,’ he said.
And until he heard the tone of those words,
Muggleton had never guessed how almost universally
his story had been disbelieved. Nobody had believed
him. Nobody but Father Brown.
Therefore, seeing Father Brown edging away from
the group, he made a movement to depart in his
company; but even then he was brought up rather
short by the discovery that the priest was once more
being drawn away by the deadly attractions of the
funny little automatic machines. He even saw the
reverend gentleman fumbling for a penny. He stopped,
however, with the penny poised in his finger and
thumb, as the secretary spoke for the last time in
his loud discordant voice.
‘And I suppose we may add,’ he said, ‘that the
monstrous and imbecile charges against me are also
at an end.’
‘My dear sir,’ said the priest, ‘I never made any
charges against you. I’m not such a fool as to
suppose you were likely to murder your master in
Yorkshire and then come down here to fool about with
his luggage. All I said was that I could make out a
better case against you than you were making out so
vigorously against poor Mr. Muggleton. All the same,
if you really want to learn the truth about his
business (and I assure you the truth isn’t generally
grasped yet), I can give you a hint even from your
own affairs. It is rather a rum and significant
thing that Mr. Bruce the millionaire had been
unknown to all his usual haunts and habits for weeks
before he was really killed. As you seem to be a
promising amateur detective, I advise you to work on
that line.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Taylor sharply.
But he got no answer out of Father Brown, who was
once more completely concentrated on jiggling the
little handle of the machine, that made one doll
jump out and then another doll jump after it.
‘Father Brown,’ said Muggleton, his old annoyance
faintly reviving: ‘Will you tell me why you like
that fool thing so much?’
‘For one reason,’ replied the priest, peering
closely into the glass puppet-show. ‘Because it
contains the secret of this tragedy.’
Then he suddenly straightened himself; and looked
quite seriously at his companion.
‘I knew all along,’ he said, ‘that you were
telling the truth and the opposite of the truth.’
Muggleton could only stare at a return of all the
riddles.
‘It’s quite simple,’ added the priest, lowering
his voice. ‘That corpse with the scarlet scarf over
there is the corpse of Braham Bruce the millionaire.
There won’t be any other.’
‘But the two men — ’ began Muggleton, and his
mouth fell open.
‘Your description of the two men was quite
admirably vivid,’ said Father Brown. ‘I assure you
I’m not at all likely to forget it. If I may say so,
you have a literary talent; perhaps journalism would
give you more scope than detection. I believe I
remember practically each point about each person.
Only, you see, queerly enough, each point affected
you in one way and me in exactly the opposite way.
Let’s begin with the first you mentioned. You said
that the first man you saw had an indescribable air
of authority and dignity. And you said to yourself,
“That’s the Trust Magnate, the great merchant
prince, the ruler of markets.” But when I heard
about the air of dignity and authority, I said to
myself, “That’s the actor; everything about this is
the actor, “ You don’t get that look by being
President of the Chain Store Amalgamation Company.
You get that look by being Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost,
or Julius Caesar, or King Lear, and you never
altogether lose it. You couldn’t see enough of his
clothes to tell whether they were really seedy, but
you saw a strip of fur and a sort of faintly
fashionable cut; and I said to myself again, “The
actor.”
‘Next, before we go into details about the other
man, notice one thing about him evidently absent
from the first man. You said the second man was not
only ragged but unshaven to the point of being
bearded. Now we have all seen shabby actors, dirty
actors, drunken actors, utterly disreputable actors.
But such a thing as a scrub-bearded actor, in a job
or even looking round for a job, has scarcely been
seen in this world. On the other hand, shaving is
often almost the first thing to go, with a gentleman
or a wealthy eccentric who is really letting himself
go to pieces. Now we have every reason to believe
that your friend the millionaire was letting himself
go to pieces. His letter was the letter of a man who
had already gone to pieces. But it wasn’t only
negligence that made him look poor and shabby. Don’t
you understand that the man was practically in
hiding? That was why he didn’t go to his hotel; and
his own secretary hadn’t seen him for weeks. He was
a millionaire; but his whole object was to be a
completely disguised millionaire. Have you ever read
“The Woman in White”? Don’t you remember that the
fashionable and luxurious Count Fosco, fleeing for
his life before a secret society, was found stabbed
in the blue blouse of a common French workman? Then
let us go back for a moment to the demeanour of
these men. You saw the first man calm and collected
and you said to yourself, “That’s the innocent
victim”; though the innocent victim’s own letter
wasn’t at all calm and collected. I heard he was
calm and collected; and I said to myself, “That’s
the murderer.” Why should he be anything else but
calm and collected? He knew what he was going to do.
He had made up his mind to do it for a long time; if
he had ever had any hesitation or remorse he had
hardened himself against them before he came on the
scene — in his case, we might say, on the stage. He
wasn’t likely to have any particular stage-fright.
He didn’t pull out his pistol and wave it about; why
should he? He kept it in his pocket till he wanted
it; very likely he fired from his pocket. The other
man fidgeted with his pistol because he was nervous
as a cat, and very probably had never had a pistol
before. He did it for the same reason that he rolled
his eyes; and I remember that, even in your own
unconscious evidence, it is particularly stated that
he rolled them backwards. In fact, he was looking
behind him. In fact, he was not the pursuer but the
pursued. But because you happened to see the first
man first, you couldn’t help thinking of the other
man as coming up behind him. In mere mathematics and
mechanics, each of them was running after the other
— just like the others.’
‘What others?’ inquired the dazed detective.
‘Why, these,’ cried Father Brown, striking the
automatic machine with the little wooden spade,
which had incongruously remained in his hand
throughout these murderous mysteries. ‘These little
clockwork dolls that chase each other round and
round for ever. Let us call them Mr. Blue and M.r
Red, after the colour of their coats. I happened to
start off with Mr. Blue, and so the children said
that Mr. Red was running after him; but it would
have looked exactly the contrary if I had started
with Mr. Red.’
‘Yes, I begin to see,’ said Muggleton; ‘and I
suppose all the rest fits in. The family likeness,
of course, cuts both ways, and they never saw the
murderer leaving the pier — ’
‘They never looked for the murderer leaving the
pier,’ said the other. ‘Nobody told them to look for
a quiet clean-shaven gentleman in an astrakhan coat.
All the mystery of his vanishing revolved on your
description of a hulking fellow in a red neckcloth.
But the simple truth was that the actor in the
astrakhan coat murdered the millionaire with the red
rag, and there is the poor fellow’s body. It’s just
like the red and blue dolls; only, because you saw
one first, you guessed wrong about which was red
with vengeance and which was blue with funk.’
At this point two or three children began to
straggle across the sands, and the priest waved them
to him with the wooden spade, theatrically tapping
the automatic machine. Muggleton guessed that it was
mainly to prevent their straying towards the
horrible heap on the shore.
‘One more penny left in the world,’ said Father
Brown, ‘and then we must go home to tea. Do you
know, Doris, I rather like those revolving games,
that just go round and round like the Mulberry-Bush.
After all, God made all the suns and stars to play
Mulberry-Bush. But those other games, where one must
catch up with another, where runners are rivals and
run neck and neck and outstrip each other; well —
much nastier things seem to happen. I like to think
of Mr. Red and Mr. Blue always jumping with
undiminished spirits; all free and equal; and never
hurting each other. “Fond lover, never, never, wilt
thou kiss — or kill.” Happy, happy Mr. Red!
He cannot change; though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever will thou jump; and he be Blue.
Reciting this remarkable quotation from Keats, with
some emotion, Father Brown tucked the little spade
under one arm, and giving a hand to two of the
children, stumped solemnly up the beach to tea.
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Chapter VI. The Crime of the Communist
Three men came out from under the lowbrowed Tudor
arch in the mellow facade of Mandeville College,
into the strong evening sunlight of a summer day
which seemed as if it would never end; and in that
sunlight they saw something that blasted like
lightning; well-fitted to be the shock of their
lives.
Even before they had realized anything in the way
of a catastrophe, they were conscious of a contrast.
They themselves, in a curious quiet way, were quite
harmonious with their surroundings. Though the Tudor
arches that ran like a cloister round the College
gardens had been built four hundred years ago, at
that moment when the Gothic fell from heaven and
bowed, or almost crouched, over the cosier chambers
of Humanism and the Revival of Learning — though
they themselves were in modern clothes (that is in
clothes whose ugliness would have amazed any of the
four centuries) yet something in the spirit of the
place made them all at one. The gardens had been
tended so carefully as to achieve the final triumph
of looking careless; the very flowers seemed
beautiful by accident, like elegant weeds; and the
modern costumes had at least any picturesqueness
that can be produced by being untidy. The first of
the three, a tall, bald, bearded maypole of a man,
was a familiar figure in the Quad in cap and gown;
the gown slipped off one of his sloping shoulders.
The second was very square-shouldered, short and
compact, with a rather jolly grin, commonly clad in
a jacket, with his gown over his arm. The third was
even shorter and much shabbier, in black clerical
clothes. But they all seemed suitable to Mandeville
College; and the indescribable atmosphere of the two
ancient and unique Universities of England. They
fitted into it and they faded into it; which is
there regarded as most fitting.
The two men seated on garden chairs by a little
table were a sort of brilliant blot on this
grey-green landscape. They were clad mostly in black
and yet they glittered from head to heel, from their
burnished top-hats to their perfectly polished
boots. It was dimly felt as an outrage that anybody
should be so well-dressed in the well-bred freedom
of Mandeville College. The only excuse was that they
were foreigners. One was an American, a millionaire
named Hake, dressed in the spotlessly and
sparklingly gentlemanly manner known only to the
rich of New York. The other, who added to all these
things the outrage of an astrakhan overcoat (to say
nothing of a pair of florid whiskers), was a German
Count of great wealth, the shortest part of whose
name was Von Zimmern. The mystery of this story,
however, is not the mystery of why they were there.
They were there for the reason that commonly
explains the meeting of incongruous things; they
proposed to give the College some money. They had
come in support of a plan supported by several
financiers and magnates of many countries, for
founding a new Chair of Economics at Mandeville
College. They had inspected the College with that
tireless conscientious sightseeing of which no sons
of Eve are capable except the American and the
German. And now they were resting from their labours
and looking solemnly at the College gardens. So far
so good.
The three other men, who had already met them,
passed with a vague salutation; but one of them
stopped; the smallest of the three, in the black
clerical clothes.
‘I say,’ he said, with rather the air of a
frightened rabbit, ‘I don’t like the look of those
men.’
‘Good God! Who could?’ ejaculated the tall man,
who happened to be the Master of Mandeville. ‘At
least we have some rich men who don’t go about
dressed up like tailors’ dummies.’
‘Yes,’ hissed the little cleric, ‘that’s what I
mean. Like tailors’ dummies.’
‘Why, what do you mean?’ asked the shorter of the
other men, sharply.
‘I mean they’re like horrible waxworks,’ said the
cleric in a faint voice. ‘I mean they don’t move.
Why don’t they move?’
Suddenly starting out of his dim retirement, he
darted across the garden and touched the German
Baron on the elbow. The German Baron fell over,
chair and all, and the trousered legs that stuck up
in the air were as stiff as the legs of the chair.
Mr. Gideon P. Hake continued to gaze at the
College gardens with glassy eyes; but the parallel
of a waxwork confirmed the impression that they were
like eyes made of glass. Somehow the rich sunlight
and the coloured garden increased the creepy
impression of a stiffly dressed doll; a marionette
on an Italian stage. The small man in black, who was
a priest named Brown, tentatively touched the
millionaire on the shoulder, and the millionaire
fell sideways, but horribly all of a piece, like
something carved in wood.
‘Rigor mortis,’ said Father Brown, ‘and so soon.
But it does vary a good deal.’
The reason the first three men had joined the
other two men so late (not to say too late) will
best be understood by noting what had happened just
inside the building, behind the Tudor archway, but a
short time before they came out. They had all dined
together in Hall, at the High Table; but the two
foreign philanthropists, slaves of duty in the
matter of seeing everything, had solemnly gone back
to the chapel, of which one cloister and a staircase
remained unexamined; promising to rejoin the rest in
the garden, to examine as earnestly the College
cigars. The rest, in a more reverent and
right-minded spirit, had adjourned as usual to the
long narrow oak table, round which the after-dinner
wine had circulated, for all anybody knew, ever
since the College had been founded in the Middle
Ages by Sir John Mandeville, for the encouragement
of telling stories. The Master, with the big fair
beard and bald brow, took the head of the table, and
the squat man in the square jacket sat on his left;
for he was the Bursar or business man of the
College. Next to him, on that side of the table, sat
a queer-looking man with what could only be called a
crooked face; for its dark tufts of moustache and
eyebrow, slanting at contrary angles, made a sort of
zig-zag, as if half his face were puckered or
paralysed. His name was Byles; he was the lecturer
in Roman History, and his political opinions were
founded on those of Coriolanus, not to mention
Tarquinius Superbus. This tart Toryism, and rabidly
reactionary view of all current problems, was not
altogether unknown among the more old-fashioned sort
of dons; but in the case of Byles there was a
suggestion that it was a result rather than a cause
of his acerbity. More than one sharp observer had
received the impression that there was something
really wrong with Byles; that some secret or some
great misfortune had embittered him; as if that
half-withered face had really been blasted like a
storm-stricken tree. Beyond him again sat Father
Brown and at the end of the table a Professor of
Chemistry, large and blond and bland, with eyes that
were sleepy and perhaps a little sly. It was well
known that this natural philosopher regarded the
other philosophers, of a more classical tradition,
very much as old logics. On the other side of the
table, opposite Father Brown, was a very swarthy and
silent young man, with a black pointed beard,
introduced because somebody had insisted on having a
Chair of Persian; opposite the sinister Byles was a
very mild-looking little Chaplain, with a head like
an egg. Opposite the Bursar and at the right hand of
the Master, was an empty chair; and there were many
there who were glad to see it empty.
‘I don’t know whether Craken is coming,’ said the
Master, not without a nervous glance at the chair,
which contrasted with the usual languid freedom of
his demeanour. ‘I believe in giving people a lot of
rope myself; but I confess I’ve reached the point of
being glad when he is here, merely because he isn’t
anywhere else.’
‘Never know what he’ll be up to next,’ said the
Bursar, cheerfully, ‘especially when he’s
instructing the young.’
‘A brilliant fellow, but fiery of course,’ said
the Master, with a rather abrupt relapse into
reserve.
‘Fireworks are fiery, and also brilliant,’
growled old Byles, ‘but I don’t want to be burned in
my bed so that Craken can figure as a real Guy
Fawkes.’
‘Do you really think he would join a physical
force revolution, if there were one,’ asked the
Bursar smiling.
‘Well, he thinks he would,’ said Byles sharply.
‘Told a whole hall full of undergraduates the other
day that nothing now could avert the Class War
turning into a real war, with killing in the streets
of the town; and it didn’t matter, so long as it
ended in Communism and the victory of the
working-class.’
‘The Class War,’ mused the Master, with a sort of
distaste mellowed by distance; for he had known
William Morris long ago and been familiar enough
with the more artistic and leisurely Socialists. ‘I
never can understand all this about the Class War.
When I was young, Socialism was supposed to mean
saying that there are no classes.’
‘Nother way of saying that Socialists are no
class,’ said Byles with sour relish.
‘Of course, you’d be more against them than I
should,’ said the Master thoughtfully, ‘but I
suppose my Socialism is almost as old-fashioned as
your Toryism. Wonder what our young friends really
think. What do you think, Baker?’ he said abruptly
to the Bursar on his left.
‘Oh, I don’t think, as the vulgar saying is,’
said the Bursar laughing. ‘You must remember I’m a
very vulgar person. I’m not a thinker. I’m only a
business man; and as a business man I think it’s all
bosh. You can’t make men equal and it’s damned bad
business to pay them equal; especially a lot of them
not worth paying for at all. Whatever it is, you’ve
got to take the practical way out, because it’s the
only way out. It’s not our fault if nature made
everything a scramble.’
‘I agree with you there,’ said the Professor of
Chemistry, speaking with a lisp that seemed childish
in so large a man. ‘Communism pretends to be oh so
modern; but it is not. Throwback to the
superstitions of monks and primitive tribes. A
scientific government, with a really ethical
responsibility to posterity, would be always looking
for the line of promise and progress; not levelling
and flattening it all back into the mud again.
Socialism is sentimentalism; and more dangerous than
a pestilence, for in that at least the fittest would
survive.’
The Master smiled a little sadly. ‘You know you
and I will never feel quite the same about
differences of opinion. Didn’t somebody say up here,
about walking with a friend by the river, “Not
differing much, except in opinion.” Isn’t that the
motto of a university? To have hundreds of opinions
and not be opinionated. If people fall here, it’s by
what they are, not what they think. Perhaps I’m a
relic of the eighteenth century; but I incline to
the old sentimental heresy, “For forms of faith let
graceless zealots fight; he can’t be wrong whose
life is in the right.” What do you think about that,
Father Brown?’
He glanced a little mischievously across at the
priest and was mildly startled. For he had always
found the priest very cheerful and amiable and easy
to get on with; and his round face was mostly solid
with good humour. But for some reason the priest’s
face at this moment was knotted with a frown much
more sombre than any the company had ever seen on
it; so that for an instant that commonplace
countenance actually looked darker and more ominous
than the haggard face of Byles. An instant later the
cloud seemed to have passed; but Father Brown still
spoke with a certain sobriety and firmness.
‘I don’t believe in that, anyhow,’ he said
shortly. ‘How can his life be in the right, if his
whole view of life is wrong? That’s a modern muddle
that arose because people didn’t know how much views
of life can differ. Baptists and Methodists knew
they didn’t differ very much in morality; but then
they didn’t differ very much in religion or
philosophy. It’s quite different when you pass from
the Baptists to the Anabaptists; or from the
Theosophists to the Thugs. Heresy always does affect
morality, if it’s heretical enough. I suppose a man
may honestly believe that thieving isn’t wrong. But
what’s the good of saying that he honestly believes
in dishonesty?’
‘Damned good,’ said Byles with a ferocious
contortion of feature, believed by many to be meant
for a friendly smile. ‘And that’s why I object to
having a Chair of Theoretical Thieving in this
College.’
‘Well, you’re all very down on Communism, of
course,’ said the Master, with a sigh. ‘But do you
really think there’s so much of it to be down on?
Are any of your heresies really big enough to be
dangerous?’
‘I think they have grown so big,’ said Father
Brown gravely, ‘that in some circles they are
already taken for granted. They are actually
unconscious. That is, without conscience.’
‘And the end of it,’ said Byles, ‘will be the
ruin of this country.’
‘The end will be something worse,’ said Father
Brown.
A shadow shot or slid rapidly along the panelled
wall opposite, as swiftly followed by the figure
that had flung it; a tall but stooping figure with a
vague outline like a bird of prey; accentuated by
the fact that its sudden appearance and swift
passage were like those of a bird startled and
flying from a bush. It was only the figure of a
long-limbed, high-shouldered man with long drooping
moustaches, in fact, familiar enough to them all;
but something in the twilight and candlelight and
the flying and streaking shadow connected it
strangely with the priest’s unconscious words of
omen; for all the world, as if those words had
indeed been an augury, in the old Roman sense; and
the sign of it the flight of a bird. Perhaps Mr.
Byles might have given a lecture on such Roman
augury; and especially on that bird of ill-omen.
The tall man shot along the wall like his own
shadow until he sank into the empty chair on the
Master’s right, and looked across at the Bursar and
the rest with hollow and cavernous eyes. His hanging
hair and moustache were quite fair, but his eyes
were so deep-set that they might have been black.
Everyone knew, or could guess, who the newcomer was;
but an incident instantly followed that sufficiently
illuminated the situation. The Professor of Roman
History rose stiffly to his feet and stalked out of
the room, indicating with little finesse his
feelings about sitting at the same table with the
Professor of Theoretical Thieving, otherwise the
Communist, Mr. Craken.
The Master of Mandeville covered the awkward
situation with nervous grace. ‘I was defending you,
or some aspects of you, my dear Craken,’ he said
smiling, ‘though I am sure you would find me quite
indefensible. After all, I can’t forget that the old
Socialist friends of my youth had a very fine ideal
of fraternity and comradeship. William Morris put it
all in a sentence, “Fellowship is heaven; and lack
of fellowship is hell.”
‘Dons as Democrats; see headline,’ said Mr.
Craken rather disagreeably. ‘And is Hard-Case Hake
going to dedicate the new Commercial Chair to the
memory of William Morris?’
‘Well,’ said the Master, still maintaining a
desperate geniality, ‘I hope we may say, in a sense,
that all our Chairs are Chairs of good-fellowship.’
‘Yes; that’s the academic version of the Morris
maxim,’ growled Craken. ‘“A Fellowship is heaven;
and lack of a Fellowship is hell.”’
‘Don’t be so cross, Craken,’ interposed the
Bursar briskly. ‘Take some port. Tenby, pass the
port to Mr Craken.’
‘Oh well, I’ll have a glass,’ said the Communist
Professor a little less ungraciously. ‘I really came
down here to have a smoke in the garden. Then I
looked out of the window and saw your two precious
millionaires were actually blooming in the garden;
fresh, innocent buds. After all, it might be worth
while to give them a bit of my mind.’
The Master had risen under cover of his last
conventional cordiality, and was only too glad to
leave the Bursar to do his best with the Wild Man.
Others had risen, and the groups at the table had
begun to break up; and the Bursar and Mr Craken were
left more or less alone at the end of the long
table. Only Father Brown continued to sit staring
into vacancy with a rather cloudy expression.
‘Oh, as to that,’ said the Bursar. ‘I’m pretty
tired of them myself, to tell the truth; I’ve been
with them the best part of a day going into facts
and figures and all the business of this new
Professorship. But look here, Craken,’ and he leaned
across the table and spoke with a sort of soft
emphasis, ‘you really needn’t cut up so rough about
this new Professorship. It doesn’t really interfere
with your subject. You’re the only Professor of
Political Economy at Mandeville and, though I don’t
pretend to agree with your notions, everybody knows
you’ve got a European reputation. This is a special
subject they call Applied Economics. Well, even
today, as I told you, I’ve had a hell of a lot of
Applied Economics. In other words, I’ve had to talk
business with two business men. Would you
particularly want to do that? Would you envy it?
Would you stand it? Isn’t that evidence enough that
there is a separate subject and may well be a
separate Chair?’
‘Good God,’ cried Craken with the intense
invocation of the atheist. ‘Do you think I don’t
want to apply Economics? Only, when we apply it, you
call it red ruin and anarchy; and when you apply it,
I take the liberty of calling it exploitation. If
only you fellows would apply Economics, it’s just
possible that people might get something to eat. We
are the practical people; and that’s why you’re
afraid of us. That’s why you have to get two greasy
Capitalists to start another Lectureship; just
because I’ve let the cat out of the bag.’
‘Rather a wild cat, wasn’t it?’ said the Bursar
smiling, ‘that you let out of the bag?’
‘And rather a gold-bag, wasn’t it,’ said Craken,
‘that you are tying the cat up in again?’
‘Well, I don’t suppose we shall ever agree about
all that,’ said the other. ‘But those fellows have
come out of their chapel into the garden; and if you
want to have your smoke there, you’d better come.’
He watched with some amusement his companion
fumbling in all his pockets till he produced a pipe,
and then, gazing at it with an abstracted air,
Craken rose to his feet, but even in doing so,
seemed to be feeling all over himself again. Mr.
Baker the Bursar ended the controversy with a happy
laugh of reconciliation. ‘You are the practical
people, and you will blow up the town with dynamite.
Only you’ll probably forget the dynamite, as I bet
you’ve forgotten the tobacco. Never mind, take a
fill of mine. Matches?’ He threw a tobacco-pouch and
its accessories across the table; to be caught by Mr
Craken with that dexterity never forgotten by a
cricketer, even when he adopts opinions generally
regarded as not cricket. The two men rose together;
but Baker could not forbear remarking, ‘Are you
really the only practical people? Isn’t there
anything to be said for the Applied Economics, that
remembers to carry a tobacco-pouch as well as a
pipe?’
Craken looked at him with smouldering eyes; and
said at last, after slowly draining the last of his
wine: ‘Let’s say there’s another sort of
practicality. I dare say I do forget details and so
on. What I want you to understand is this’ — he
automatically returned the pouch; but his eyes were
far away and jet-burning, almost terrible — ‘because
the inside of our intellect has changed, because we
really have a new idea of right, we shall do things
you think really wrong. And they will be very
practical.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, suddenly coming out of
his trance. ‘That’s exactly what I said.’
He looked across at Craken with a glassy and
rather ghastly smile, saying: ‘Mr Craken and I are
in complete agreement.’
‘Well,’ said Baker, ‘Craken is going out to smoke
a pipe with the plutocrats; but I doubt whether it
will be a pipe of peace.’
He turned rather abruptly and called to an aged
attendant in the background. Mandeville was one of
the last of the very old-fashioned Colleges; and
even Craken was one of the first of the Communists;
before the Bolshevism of today. ‘That reminds me,’
the Bursar was saying, ‘as you won’t hand round your
peace pipe, we must send out the cigars to our
distinguished guests. If they’re smokers they must
be longing for a smoke; for they’ve been nosing
about in the chapel since feeding-time.’
Craken exploded with a savage and jarring laugh.
‘Oh, I’ll take them their cigars,’ he said. ‘I’m
only a proletarian.’
Baker and Brown and the attendant were all
witnesses to the fact that the Communist strode
furiously into the garden to confront the
millionaires; but nothing more was seen or heard of
them until, as is already recorded, Father Brown
found them dead in their chairs.
It was agreed that the Master and the priest
should remain to guard the scene of tragedy, while
the Bursar, younger and more rapid in his movements,
ran off to fetch doctors and policemen. Father Brown
approached the table on which one of the cigars had
burned itself away all but an inch or two; the other
had dropped from the hand and been dashed out into
dying sparks on the crazy-pavement. The Master of
Mandeville sat down rather shakily on a sufficiently
distant seat and buried his bald brow in his hands.
Then he looked up at first rather wearily; and then
he looked very startled indeed and broke the
stillness of the garden with a word like a small
explosion of horror.
There was a certain quality about Father Brown
which might sometimes be called blood-curdling. He
always thought about what he was doing and never
about whether it was done; he would do the most ugly
or horrible or undignified or dirty things as calmly
as a surgeon. There was a certain blank, in his
simple mind, of all those things commonly associated
with being superstitious or sentimental. He sat down
on the chair from which the corpse had fallen,
picked up the cigar the corpse had partially smoked,
carefully detached the ash, examined the butt-end
and then stuck it in his mouth and lit it. It looked
like some obscene and grotesque antic in derision of
the dead; and it seemed to him to be the most
ordinary common sense. A cloud floated upwards like
the smoke of some savage sacrifice and idolatry; but
to Father Brown it appeared a perfectly self-evident
fact that the only way to find out what a cigar is
like is to smoke it. Nor did it lessen the horror
for his old friend, the Master of Mandeville, to
have a dim but shrewd guess that Father Brown was,
upon the possibilities of the case, risking his own
life.
‘No; I think that’s all right,’ said the priest,
putting the stump down again. ‘Jolly good cigars.
Your cigars. Not American or German. I don’t think
there’s anything odd about the cigar itself; but
they’d better take care of the ashes. These men were
poisoned somehow with the sort of stuff that
stiffens the body quickly ... By the way, there goes
somebody who knows more about it than we do.’
The Master sat up with a curiously uncomfortable
jolt; for indeed the large shadow which had fallen
across the pathway preceded a figure which, however
heavy, was almost as soft-footed as a shadow.
Professor Wadham, eminent occupant of the Chair of
Chemistry, always moved very quietly in spite of his
size, and there was nothing odd about his strolling
in the garden; yet there seemed something
unnaturally neat in his appearing at the exact
moment when chemistry was mentioned.
Professor Wadham prided himself on his quietude;
some would say his insensibility. He did not turn a
hair on his flattened flaxen head, but stood looking
down at the dead men with a shade of something like
indifference on his large froglike face. Only when
he looked at the cigar-ash, which the priest had
preserved, he touched it with one finger; then he
seemed to stand even stiller than before; but in the
shadow of his face his eyes for an instant seemed to
shoot out telescopically like one of his own
microscopes. He had certainly realized or recognized
something; but he said nothing.
‘I don’t know where anyone is to begin in this
business,’ said the Master.
‘I should begin,’ said Father Brown, ‘by asking
where these unfortunate men had been most of the
time today.’
‘They were messing about in my laboratory for a
good time,’ said Wadham, speaking for the first
time. ‘Baker often comes up to have a chat, and this
time he brought his two patrons to inspect my
department. But I think they went everywhere; real
tourists. I know they went to the chapel and even
into the tunnel under the crypt, where you have to
light candles; instead of digesting their food like
sane men. Baker seems to have taken them
everywhere.’
‘Were they interested in anything particular in
your department?’ asked the priest. ‘What were you
doing there just then?’
The Professor of Chemistry murmured a chemical
formula beginning with ‘sulphate’, and ending with
something that sounded like ‘silenium’;
unintelligible to both his hearers. He then wandered
wearily away and sat on a remote bench in the sun,
closing his eyes, but turning up his large face with
heavy forbearance.
At his point, by a sharp contrast, the lawns were
crossed by a brisk figure travelling as rapidly and
as straight as a bullet; and Father Brown recognized
the neat black clothes and shrewd doglike face of a
police-surgeon whom he had met in the poorer parts
of town. He was the first to arrive of the official
contingent.
‘Look here,’ said the Master to the priest,
before the doctor was within earshot. ‘I must know
something. Did you mean what you said about
Communism being a real danger and leading to crime?’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown smiling rather grimly,
‘I have really noticed the spread of some Communist
ways and influences; and, in one sense, this is a
Communist crime.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Master. ‘Then I must go off
and see to something at once. Tell the authorities
I’ll be back in ten minutes.’
The Master had vanished into one of the Tudor
archways at just about the moment when the
police-doctor had reached the table and cheerfully
recognized Father Brown. On the latter’s suggestion
that they should sit down at the tragic table, Dr
Blake threw one sharp and doubtful glance at the
big, bland and seemingly somnolent chemist, who
occupied a more remote seat. He was duly informed of
the Professor’s identity, and what had so far been
gathered of the Professor’s evidence; and listened
to it silently while conducting a preliminary
examination of the dead bodies. Naturally, he seemed
more concentrated on the actual corpses than on the
hearsay evidence, until one detail suddenly
distracted him entirely from the science of anatomy.
‘What did the Professor say he was working at?’
he inquired.
Father Brown patiently repeated the chemical
formula he did not understand.
‘What?’ snapped Dr Blake, like a pistol-shot.
‘Gosh! This is pretty frightful!’
‘Because it’s poison?’ inquired Father Brown.
‘Because it’s piffle,’ replied Dr. Blake. ‘It’s
simply nonsense. The Professor is quite a famous
chemist. Why is a famous chemist deliberately
talking nonsense?’
‘Well, I think I know that one,’ answered Father
Brown mildly. ‘He is talking nonsense, because he is
telling lies. He is concealing something; and he
wanted specially to conceal it from these two men
and their representatives.’
The doctor lifted his eyes from the two men and
looked across at the almost unnaturally immobile
figure of the great chemist. He might almost have
been asleep; a garden butterfly had settled upon him
and seemed to turn his stillness into that of a
stone idol. The large folds of his froglike face
reminded the doctor of the hanging skins of a
rhinoceros.
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, in a very low voice.
‘He is a wicked man.’
‘God damn it all!’ cried the doctor, suddenly
moved to his very depths. ‘Do you mean that a great
scientific man like that deals in murder?’
‘Fastidious critics would have complained of his
dealing in murder,’ said the priest dispassionately.
‘I don’t say I’m very fond of people dealing in
murder in that way myself. But what’s much more to
the point — I’m sure that these poor fellows were
among his fastidious critics.’
‘You mean they found his secret and he silenced
them?’ said Blake frowning. ‘But what in hell was
his secret? How could a man murder on a large scale
in a place like this?’
‘I have told you his secret,’ said the priest.
‘It is a secret of the soul. He is a bad man. For
heaven’s sake don’t fancy I say that because he and
I are of opposite schools or traditions. I have a
crowd of scientific friends; and most of them are
heroically disinterested. Even of the most
sceptical, I would only say they are rather
irrationally disinterested. But now and then you do
get a man who is a materialist, in the sense of a
beast. I repeat he’s a bad man. Much worse than — ’
And Father Brown seemed to hesitate for a word.
‘You mean much worse than the Communist?’
suggested the other.
‘No; I mean much worse than the murderer,’ said
Father Brown.
He got to his feet in an abstracted manner; and
hardly realized that his companion was staring at
him.
‘But didn’t you mean,’ asked Blake at last, ‘that
this Wadham is the murderer?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Father Brown more cheerfully. ‘The
murderer is a much more sympathetic and
understandable person. He at least was desperate;
and had the excuses of sudden rage and despair.’
‘Why,’ cried the doctor, ‘do you mean it was the
Communist after all?’
It was at this very moment, appropriately enough,
that the police officials appeared with an
announcement that seemed to conclude the case in a
most decisive and satisfactory manner. They had been
somewhat delayed in reaching the scene of the crime,
by the simple fact that they had already captured
the criminal. Indeed, they had captured him almost
at the gates of their own official residence. They
had already had reason to suspect the activities of
Craken the Communist during various disorders in the
town; when they heard of the outrage they felt it
safe to arrest him; and found the arrest thoroughly
justified. For, as Inspector Cook radiantly
explained to dons and doctors on the lawn of
Mandeville garden, no sooner was the notorious
Communist searched, than it was found that he was
actually carrying a box of poisoned matches.
The moment Father Brown heard the word ‘matches’,
he jumped from his seat as if a match had been
lighted under him.
‘Ah,’ he cried, with a sort of universal
radiance, ‘and now it’s all clear.’
‘What do you mean by all clear?’ demanded the
Master of Mandeville, who had returned in all the
pomp of his own officialism to match the pomp of the
police officials now occupying the College like a
victorious army. ‘Do you mean you are convinced now
that the case against Craken is clear?’
‘I mean that Craken is cleared,’ said Father
Brown firmly, ‘and the case against Craken is
cleared away. Do you really believe Craken is the
kind of man who would go about poisoning people with
matches?’
‘That’s all very well,’ replied the Master, with
the troubled expression he had never lost since the
first sensation occurred. ‘But it was you yourself
who said that fanatics with false principles may do
wicked things. For that matter, it was you yourself
who said that Communism is creeping up everywhere
and Communistic habits spreading.’
Father Brown laughed in a rather shamefaced
manner.
‘As to the last point,’ he said, ‘I suppose I owe
you all an apology. I seem to be always making a
mess of things with my silly little jokes.’
‘Jokes!’ repeated the Master, staring rather
indignantly.
‘Well,’ explained the priest, rubbing his head.
‘When I talked about a Communist habit spreading, I
only meant a habit I happen to have noticed about
two or three times even today. It is a Communist
habit by no means confined to Communists. It is the
extraordinary habit of so many men, especially
Englishmen, of putting other people’s matchboxes in
their pockets without remembering to return them. Of
course, it seems an awfully silly little trifle to
talk about. But it does happen to be the way the
crime was committed.’
‘It sounds to me quite crazy,’ said the doctor.
‘Well, if almost any man may forget to return
matches, you can bet your boots that Craken would
forget to return them. So the poisoner who had
prepared the matches got rid of them on to Craken,
by the simple process of lending them and not
getting them back. A really admirable way of
shedding responsibility; because Craken himself
would be perfectly unable to imagine where he had
got them from. But when he used them quite
innocently to light the cigars he offered to our two
visitors, he was caught in an obvious trap; one of
those too obvious traps. He was the bold bad
Revolutionist murdering two millionaires.’
‘Well, who else would want to murder them?’
growled the doctor.
‘Ah, who indeed?’ replied the priest; and his
voice changed to much greater gravity. ‘There we
come to the other thing I told you; and that, let me
tell you, was not a joke. I told you that heresies
and false doctrines had become common and
conversational; that everybody was used to them;
that nobody really noticed them. Did you think I
meant Communism when I said that? Why, it was just
the other way. You were all as nervous as cats about
Communism; and you watched Craken like a wolf. Of
course. Communism is a heresy; but it isn’t a heresy
that you people take for granted. It is Capitalism
you take for granted; or rather the vices of
Capitalism disguised as a dead Darwinism. Do you
recall what you were all saying in the Common Room,
about life being only a scramble, and nature
demanding the survival of the fittest, and how it
doesn’t matter whether the poor are paid justly or
not? Why, that is the heresy that you have grown
accustomed to, my friends; and it’s every bit as
much a heresy as Communism. That’s the
anti-Christian morality or immorality that you take
quite naturally. And that’s the immorality that has
made a man a murderer today.’
‘What man?’ cried the Master, and his voice
cracked with a sudden weakness.
‘Let me approach it another way,’ said the priest
placidly. ‘You all talk as if Craken ran away; but
he didn’t. When the two men toppled over, he ran
down the street, summoned the doctor merely by
shouting through the window, and shortly afterwards
was trying to summon the police. That was how he was
arrested. But doesn’t it strike you, now one comes
to think of it, that Mr Baker the Bursar is rather a
long time looking for the police?’
‘What is he doing then?’ asked the Master
sharply.
‘I fancy he’s destroying papers; or perhaps
ransacking these men’s rooms to see they haven’t
left us a letter. Or it may have something to do
with our friend Wadham. Where does he come in? That
is really very simple and a sort of joke too. Mr
Wadham is experimenting in poisons for the next war;
and has something of which a whiff of flame will
stiffen a man dead. Of course, he had nothing to do
with killing these men; but he did conceal his
chemical secret for a very simple reason. One of
them was a Puritan Yankee and the other a
cosmopolitan Jew; and those two types are often
fanatical Pacifists. They would have called it
planning murder and probably refused to help the
College. But Baker was a friend of Wadham and it was
easy for him to dip matches in the new material.’
Another peculiarity of the little priest was that
his mind was all of a piece, and he was unconscious
of many incongruities; he would change the note of
his talk from something quite public to something
quite private, without any particular embarrassment.
On this occasion, he made most of the company stare
with mystification, by beginning to talk to one
person when he had just been talking to ten; quite
indifferent to the fact that only the one could have
any notion of what he was talking about.
‘I’m sorry if I misled you, doctor, by that
maundering metaphysical digression on the man of
sin,’ he said apologetically. ‘Of course it had
nothing to do with the murder; but the truth is I’d
forgotten all about the murder for the moment. I’d
forgotten everything, you see, but a sort of vision
of that fellow, with his vast unhuman face,
squatting among the flowers like some blind monster
of the Stone Age. And I was thinking that some men
are pretty monstrous, like men of stone; but it was
all irrelevant. Being bad inside has very little to
do with committing crimes outside. The worst
criminals have committed no crimes. The practical
point is why did the practical criminal commit this
crime. Why did Baker the Bursar want to kill these
men? That’s all that concerns us now. The answer is
the answer to the question I’ve asked twice. Where
were these men most of the time, apart from nosing
in chapels or laboratories? By the Bursar’s own
account, they were talking business with the Bursar.
‘Now, with all respect to the dead, I do not
exactly grovel before the intellect of these two
financiers. Their views on economics and ethics were
heathen and heartless. Their views on Peace were
tosh. Their views on Port were even more deplorable.
But one thing they did understand; and that was
business. And it took them a remarkably short time
to discover that the business man in charge of the
funds of this College was a swindler. Or shall I
say, a true follower of the doctrine of the
unlimited struggle for life and the survival of the
fittest.’
‘You mean they were going to expose him and he
killed them before they could speak,’ said the
doctor frowning. ‘There are a lot of details I don’t
understand.’
‘There are some details I’m not sure of myself,’
said the priest frankly. ‘I suspect all that
business of candles underground had something to do
with abstracting the millionaires’ own matches, or
perhaps making sure they had no matches. But I’m
sure of the main gesture, the gay and careless
gesture of Baker tossing his matches to the careless
Craken. That gesture was the murderous blow.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ said the
Inspector. ‘How did Baker know that Craken wouldn’t
light up himself then and there at the table and
become an unwanted corpse?’
The face of Father Brown became almost heavy with
reproach; and his voice had a sort of mournful yet
generous warmth in it.
‘Well, hang it all,’ he said, ‘he was only an
atheist.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,’ said the
Inspector, politely.
‘He only wanted to abolish God,’ explained Father
Brown in a temperate and reasonable tone. ‘He only
wanted to destroy the Ten Commandments and root up
all the religion and civilization that had made him,
and wash out all the common sense of ownership and
honesty; and let his culture and his country be
flattened out by savages from the ends of the earth.
That’s all he wanted. You have no right to accuse
him of anything beyond that. Hang it all, everybody
draws the line somewhere! And you come here and
calmly suggest that a Mandeville Man of the old
generation (for Craken was of the old generation,
whatever his views) would have begun to smoke, or
even strike a match, while he was still drinking the
College Port, of the vintage of ’08 — no, no; men
are not so utterly without laws and limits as all
that! I was there; I saw him; he had not finished
his wine, and you ask me why he did not smoke! No
such anarchic question has ever shaken the arches of
Mandeville College Funny place, Mandeville College.
Funny place, Oxford. Funny place, England.’
‘But you haven’t anything particular to do with
Oxford?’ asked the doctor curiously.
‘I have to do with England,’ said Father Brown.
‘I come from there. And the funniest thing of all is
that even if you love it and belong to it, you still
can’t make head or tail of it.’
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Chapter VII. The Point of a Pin
Father Brown always declared that he solved this
problem in his sleep. And this was true, though in
rather an odd fashion; because it occurred at a time
when his sleep was rather disturbed. It was
disturbed very early in the morning by the hammering
that began in the huge building, or half-building,
that was in process of erection opposite to his
rooms; a colossal pile of flats still mostly covered
with scaffolding and with boards announcing Messrs
Swindon & Sand as the builders and owners. The
hammering was renewed at regular intervals and was
easily recognizable: because Messrs Swindon & Sand
specialized in some new American system of cement
flooring which, in spite of its subsequent
smoothness, solidity, impenetrability and permanent
comfort (as described in the advertisements), had to
be clamped down at certain points with heavy tools.
Father Brown endeavoured, however, to extract
exiguous comfort from it; saying that it always woke
him up in time for the very earliest Mass, and was
therefore something almost in the nature of a
carillon. After all, he said, it was almost as
poetic that Christians should be awakened by hammers
as by bells. As a fact, however, the building
operations were a little on his nerves, for another
reason. For there was hanging like a cloud over the
half-built skyscraper the possibility of a Labour
crisis, which the newspapers doggedly insisted on
describing as a Strike. As a matter of fact, if it
ever happened, it would be a Lock-out. But he
worried a good deal about whether it would happen.
And it might be questioned whether hammering is more
of a strain on the attention because it may go on
for ever, or because it may stop at any minute.
‘As a mere matter of taste and fancy,’ said
Father Brown, staring up at the edifice with his
owlish spectacles, ‘I rather wish it would stop. I
wish all houses would stop while they still have the
scaffolding up. It seems almost a pity that houses
are ever finished. They look so fresh and hopeful
with all that fairy filigree of white wood, all
light and bright in the sun; and a man so often only
finishes a house by turning it into a tomb.’
As he turned away from the object of his
scrutiny, he nearly ran into a man who had just
darted across the road towards him. It was a man
whom he knew slightly, but sufficiently to regard
him (in the circumstances) as something of a bird of
ill-omen. Mr. Mastyk was a squat man with a square
head that looked hardly European, dressed with a
heavy dandyism that seemed rather too consciously
Europeanized. But Brown had seen him lately talking
to young Sand of the building firm; and he did not
like it. This man Mastyk was the head of an
organization rather new in English industrial
politics; produced by extremes at both ends; a
definite army of non-Union and largely alien labour
hired out in gangs to various firms; and he was
obviously hovering about in the hope of hiring it
out to this one. In short, he might negotiate some
way of out-manoeuvring the Trade Union and flooding
the works with blacklegs. Father Brown had been
drawn into some of the debates, being in some sense
called in on both sides. And as the Capitalists all
reported that, to their positive knowledge, he was a
Bolshevist; and as the Bolshevists all testified
that he was a reactionary rigidly attached to
bourgeois ideologies, it may be inferred that he
talked a certain amount of sense without any
appreciable effect on anybody. The news brought by
Mr Mastyk, however, was calculated to jerk everybody
out of the ordinary rut of the dispute.
‘They want you to go over there at once,’ said Mr
Mastyk, in awkwardly accented English. ‘There is a
threat to murder.’
Father Brown followed his guide in silence up
several stairways and ladders to a platform of the
unfinished building, on which were grouped the more
or less familiar figures of the heads of the
building business. They included even what had once
been the head of it; though the head had been for
some time rather a head in the clouds. It was at
least a head in a coronet, that hid it from human
sight like a cloud. Lord Stanes, in other words, had
not only retired from the business but been caught
up into the House of Lords and disappeared. His rare
reappearances were languid and somewhat dreary; but
this one, in conjunction with that of Mastyk, seemed
none the less menacing. Lord Stanes was a lean,
long-headed, hollow-eyed man with very faint fair
hair fading into baldness; and he was the most
evasive person the priest had ever met. He was
unrivalled in the true Oxford talent of saying, ‘No
doubt you’re right,’ so as to sound like, ‘No doubt
you think you’re right,’ or of merely remarking,
‘You think so?’ so as to imply the acid addition,
‘You would.’ But Father Brown fancied that the man
was not merely bored but faintly embittered, though
whether at being called down from Olympus to control
such trade squabbles, or merely at not being really
any longer in control of them, it was difficult to
guess.
On the whole, Father Brown rather preferred the
more bourgeois group of partners. Sir Hubert Sand
and his nephew Henry; though he doubted privately
whether they really had very many ideologies. True,
Sir Hubert Sand had obtained considerable celebrity
in the newspapers; both as a patron of sport and as
a patriot in many crises during and after the Great
War. He had won notable distinction in France, for a
man of his years, and had afterwards been featured
as a triumphant captain of industry overcoming
difficulties among the munition-workers. He had been
called a Strong Man; but that was not his fault. He
was in fact a heavy, hearty Englishman; a great
swimmer; a good squire; an admirable amateur
colonel. Indeed, something that can only be called a
military makeup pervaded his appearance. He was
growing stout, but he kept his shoulders set back;
his curly hair and moustache were still brown while
the colours of his face were already somewhat
withered and faded. His nephew was a burly youth of
the pushing, or rather shouldering, sort with a
relatively small head thrust out on a thick neck, as
if he went at things with his head down; a gesture
somehow rendered rather quaint and boyish by the
pince-nez that were balanced on his pugnacious
pug-nose.
Father Brown had looked at all these things
before; and at that moment everybody was looking at
something entirely new. In the centre of the
wood-work there was nailed up a large loose flapping
piece of paper on which something was scrawled in
crude and almost crazy capital letters, as if the
writer were either almost illiterate or were
affecting or parodying illiteracy. The words
actually ran: ‘The Council of the Workers warns
Hubert Sand that he will lower wages and lock out
workmen at his peril. If the notices go out
tomorrow, he will be dead by the justice of the
people.’
Lord Stanes was just stepping back from his
examination of the paper, and, looking across at his
partner, he said with rather a curious intonation:
‘Well, it’s you they want to murder. Evidently I’m
not considered worth murdering.’
One of those still electric shocks of fancy that
sometimes thrilled Father Brown’s mind in an almost
meaningless way shot through him at that particular
instant. He had a queer notion that the man who was
speaking could not now be murdered, because he was
already dead. It was, he cheerfully admitted, a
perfectly senseless idea. But there was something
that always gave him the creeps about the cold
disenchanted detachment of the noble senior partner;
about his cadaverous colour and inhospitable eyes.
‘The fellow,’ he thought in the same perverse mood,
‘has green eyes and looks as if he had green blood.’
Anyhow, it was certain that Sir Hubert Sand had
not got green blood. His blood, which was red enough
in every sense, was creeping up into his withered or
weather-beaten cheeks with all the warm fullness of
life that belongs to the natural and innocent
indignation of the good-natured.
‘In all my life,’ he said, in a strong voice and
yet shakily, ‘I have never had such a thing said or
done about me. I may have differed — ’
‘We can none of us differ about this,’ struck in
his nephew impetuously. ‘I’ve tried to get on with
them, but this is a bit too thick.’
‘You don’t really think,’ began Father Brown,
‘that your workmen — ’
‘I say we may have differed,’ said old Sand,
still a little tremulously, ‘God knows I never like
the idea of threatening English workmen with cheaper
labour — ’
‘We none of us liked it,’ said the young man,
‘but if I know you, uncle, this has about settled
it.’
Then after a pause he added, ‘I suppose, as you
say, we did disagree about details; but as to real
policy — ’
‘My dear fellow,’ said his uncle, comfortably. ‘I
hoped there would never be any real disagreement.’
From which anybody who understands the English
nation may rightly infer that there had been very
considerable disagreement. Indeed the uncle and
nephew differed almost as much as an Englishman and
an American. The uncle had the English ideal of
getting outside the business, and setting up a sort
of an alibi as a country gentleman. The nephew had
the American ideal of getting inside the business;
of getting inside the very mechanism like a
mechanic. And, indeed, he had worked with most of
the mechanics and was familiar with most of the
processes and tricks of the trade. And he was
American again, in the fact that he did this partly
as an employer to keep his men up to the mark, but
in some vague way also as an equal, or at least with
a pride in showing himself also as a worker. For
this reason he had often appeared almost as a
representative of the workers, on technical points
which were a hundred miles away from his uncle’s
popular eminence in politics or sport. The memory of
those many occasions, when young Henry had
practically come out of the workshop in his
shirt-sleeves, to demand some concession about the
conditions of the work, lent a peculiar force and
even violence to his present reaction the other way.
‘Well, they’ve damned-well locked themselves out
this time,’ he cried. ‘After a threat like that
there’s simply nothing left but to defy them.
There’s nothing left but to sack them all now;
instanter; on the spot. Otherwise we’ll be the
laughing-stock of the world.’
Old Sand frowned with equal indignation, but
began slowly: ‘I shall be very much criticized — ’
‘Criticized!’ cried the young man shrilly.
‘Criticized if you defy a threat of murder! Have you
any notion how you’ll be criticized if you don’t
defy it? Won’t you enjoy the headlines? “Great
Capitalist Terrorized” — “Employer Yields to Murder
Threat.”
‘Particularly,’ said Lord Stanes, with something
faintly unpleasant in his tone. ‘Particularly when
he has been in so many headlines already as “The
Strong Man of Steel-Building.” ’
Sand had gone very red again and his voice came
thickly from under his thick moustache. ‘Of course
you’re right there. If these brutes think I’m afraid
— ’
At this point there was an interruption in the
conversation of the group; and a slim young man came
towards them swiftly. The first notable thing about
him was that he was one of those whom men, and women
too, think are just a little too nice-looking to
look nice. He had beautiful dark curly hair and a
silken moustache and he spoke like a gentleman, but
with almost too refined and exactly modulated an
accent. Father Brown knew him at once as Rupert Rae,
the secretary of Sir Hubert, whom he had often seen
pottering about in Sir Hubert’s house; but never
with such impatience in his movements or such a
wrinkle on his brow.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said to his employer, ‘but
there’s a man been hanging about over there. I’ve
done my best to get rid of him. He’s only got a
letter, but he swears he must give it to you
personally.’
‘You mean he went first to my house?’ said Sand,
glancing swiftly at his secretary. ‘I suppose you’ve
been there all the morning.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Rupert Rae.
There was a short silence; and then Sir Hubert
Sand curtly intimated that the man had better be
brought along; and the man duly appeared.
Nobody, not even the least fastidious lady, would
have said that the newcomer was too nice-looking. He
had very large ears and a face like a frog, and he
stared before him with an almost ghastly fixity,
which Father Brown attributed to his having a glass
eye. In fact, his fancy was tempted to equip the man
with two glass eyes; with so glassy a stare did he
contemplate the company. But the priest’s
experience, as distinct from his fancy, was able to
suggest several natural causes for that unnatural
waxwork glare; one of them being an abuse of the
divine gift of fermented liquor. The man was short
and shabby and carried a large bowler hat in one
hand and a large sealed letter in the other.
Sir Hubert Sand looked at him; and then said
quietly enough, but in a voice that somehow seemed
curiously small, coming out of the fullness of his
bodily presence: ‘Oh — it’s you.’
He held out his hand for the letter; and then
looked around apologetically, with poised finger,
before ripping it open and reading it. When he had
read it, he stuffed it into his inside pocket and
said hastily and a little harshly: ‘Well, I suppose
all this business is over, as you say. No more
negotiations possible now; we couldn’t pay the wages
they want anyhow. But I shall want to see you again,
Henry, about — about winding things up generally.’
‘All right,’ said Henry, a little sulkily
perhaps, as if he would have preferred to wind them
up by himself. ‘I shall be up in number 188 after
lunch; got to know how far they’ve got up there.’
The man with the glass eye, if it was a glass
eye, stumped stiffly away; and the eye of Father
Brown (which was by no means a glass eye) followed
him thoughtfully as he threaded his way through the
ladders and disappeared into the street.
It was on the following morning that Father Brown
had the unusual experience of over-sleeping himself;
or at least of starting from sleep with a subjective
conviction that he must be late. This was partly due
to his remembering, as a man may remember a dream,
the fact of having been half-awakened at a more
regular hour and fallen asleep again; a common
enough occurrence with most of us, but a very
uncommon occurrence with Father Brown. And he was
afterwards oddly convinced, with that mystic side of
him which was normally turned away from the world,
that in that detached dark islet of dreamland,
between the two wakings, there lay like buried
treasure the truth of this tale.
As it was, he jumped up with great promptitude,
plunged into his clothes, seized his big knobby
umbrella and bustled out into the street, where the
bleak white morning was breaking like splintered ice
about the huge black building facing him. He was
surprised to find that the streets shone almost
empty in the cold crystalline light; the very look
of it told him it could hardly be so late as he had
feared. Then suddenly the stillness was cloven by
the arrowlike swiftness of a long grey car which
halted before the big deserted flats. Lord Stanes
unfolded himself from within and approached the
door, carrying (rather languidly) two large
suitcases. At the same moment the door opened, and
somebody seemed to step back instead of stepping out
into the street. Stanes called twice to the man
within, before that person seemed to complete his
original gesture by coming out on to the doorstep;
then the two held a brief colloquy, ending in the
nobleman carrying his suitcases upstairs, and the
other coming out into full daylight and revealing
the heavy shoulders and peering head of young Henry
Sand.
Father Brown made no more of this rather odd
meeting, until two days later the young man drove up
in his own car, and implored the priest to enter it.
‘Something awful has happened,’ he said, ‘and I’d
rather talk to you than Stanes. You know Stanes
arrived the other day with some mad idea of camping
in one of the flats that’s just finished. That’s why
I had to go there early and open the door to him.
But all that will keep. I want you to come up to my
uncle’s place at once.’
‘Is he ill?’ inquired the priest quickly.
‘I think he’s dead,’ answered the nephew.
‘What do you mean by saying you think he’s dead?’
asked Father Brown a little briskly. ‘Have you got a
doctor?’
‘No,’ answered the other. ‘I haven’t got a doctor
or a patient either . . .It’s no good calling in
doctors to examine the body; because the body has
run away. But I’m afraid I know where it has run to
... the truth is — we kept it dark for two days; but
he’s disappeared.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better,’ said Father Brown
mildly, ‘if you told me what has really happened
from the beginning?’
‘I know,’ answered Henry Sand; ‘it’s an infernal
shame to talk flippantly like this about the poor
old boy; but people get like that when they’re
rattled. I’m not much good at hiding things; the
long and the short of it is — well, I won’t tell you
the long of it now. It’s what some people would call
rather a long shot; shooting suspicions at random
and so on. But the short of it is that my
unfortunate uncle has committed suicide.’
They were by this time skimming along in the car
through the last fringes of the town and the first
fringes of the forest and park beyond it; the lodge
gates of Sir Hubert Sand’s small estate were about a
half mile farther on amid the thickening throng of
the beeches. The estate consisted chiefly of a small
park and a large ornamental garden, which descended
in terraces of a certain classical pomp to the very
edge of the chief river of the district. As soon as
they arrived at the house, Henry took the priest
somewhat hastily through the old Georgian rooms and
out upon the other side; where they silently
descended the slope, a rather steep slope embanked
with flowers, from which they could see the pale
river spread out before them almost as flat as in a
bird’s-eye view. They were just turning the corner
of the path under an enormous classical urn crowned
with a somewhat incongruous garland of geraniums,
when Father Brown saw a movement in the bushes and
thin trees just below him, that seemed as swift as a
movement of startled birds.
In the tangle of thin trees by the river two
figures seemed to divide or scatter; one of them
glided swiftly into the shadows and the other came
forward to face them; bringing them to a halt and an
abrupt and rather unaccountable silence. Then Henry
Sand said in his heavy way: ‘I think you know Father
Brown . . . Lady Sand.’
Father Brown did know her; but at that moment he
might almost have said that he did not know her. The
pallor and constriction of her face was like a mask
of tragedy; she was much younger than her husband,
but at that moment she looked somehow older than
everything in that old house and garden. And the
priest remembered, with a subconscious thrill, that
she was indeed older in type and lineage and was the
true possessor of the place. For her own family had
owned it as impoverished aristocrats, before she had
restored its fortunes by marrying a successful
business man. As she stood there, she might have
been a family picture, or even a family ghost. Her
pale face was of that pointed yet oval type seen in
some old pictures of Mary Queen of Scots; and its
expression seemed almost to go beyond the natural
unnaturalness of a situation, in which her husband
had vanished under suspicion of suicide. Father
Brown, with the same subconscious movement of the
mind, wondered who it was with whom she had been
talking among the trees.
‘I suppose you know all this dreadful news,’ she
said, with a comfortless composure. ‘Poor Hubert
must have broken down under all this revolutionary
persecution, and been just maddened into taking his
own life. I don’t know whether you can do anything;
or whether these horrible Bolsheviks can be made
responsible for hounding him to death.’
‘I am terribly distressed, Lady Sand,’ said
Father Brown. ‘And still, I must own, a little
bewildered. You speak of persecution; do you think
that anybody could hound him to death merely by
pinning up that paper on the wall?’
‘I fancy,’ answered the lady, with a darkening
brow, ‘that there were other persecutions besides
the paper.’
‘It shows what mistakes one may make,’ said the
priest sadly. ‘I never should have thought he would
be so illogical as to die in order to avoid death.’
‘I know,’ she answered, gazing at him gravely. ‘I
should never have believed it, if it hadn’t been
written with his own hand.’
‘What?’ cried Father Brown, with a little jump
like a rabbit that has been shot at.
‘Yes,’ said Lady Sand calmly. ‘He left a
confession of suicide; so I fear there is no doubt
about it.’ And she passed on up the slope alone,
with all the inviolable isolation of the family
ghost.
The spectacles of Father Brown were turned in
mute inquiry to the eyeglasses of Mr. Henry Sand.
And the latter gentleman, after an instant’s
hesitation, spoke again in his rather blind and
plunging fashion: ‘Yes, you see, it seems pretty
clear now what he did. He was always a great swimmer
and used to come down in his dressing-gown every
morning for a dip in the river. Well, he came down
as usual, and left his dressing-gown on the bank;
it’s lying there still. But he also left a message
saying he was going for his last swim and then
death, or something like that.’
‘Where did he leave the message?’ asked Father
Brown.
‘He scrawled it on that tree there, overhanging
the water, I suppose the last thing he took hold of;
just below where the dressing-gown’s lying. Come and
see for yourself.’
Father Brown ran down the last short slope to the
shore and peered under the hanging tree, whose
plumes were almost dipping in the stream. Sure
enough, he saw on the smooth bark the words
scratched conspicuously and unmistakably: ‘One more
swim and then drowning. Good-bye. Hubert Sand.’
Father Brown’s gaze travelled slowly up the bank
till it rested on a gorgeous rag of raiment, all red
and yellow with gilded tassels. It was the
dressing-gown and the priest picked it up and began
to turn it over. Almost as he did so he was
conscious that a figure had flashed across his field
of vision; a tall dark figure that slipped from one
clump of trees to another, as if following the trail
of the vanishing lady. He had little doubt that it
was the companion from whom she had lately parted.
He had still less doubt that it was the dead man’s
secretary, Mr Rupert Rae.
‘Of course, it might be a final afterthought to
leave the message,’ said Father Brown, without
looking up, his eye riveted on the red and gold
garment. ‘We’ve all heard of love-messages written
on trees; and I suppose there might be
death-messages written on trees too.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t have anything in the pockets
of his dressing-gown, I suppose,’ said young Sand.
‘And a man might naturally scratch his message on a
tree if he had no pens, ink or paper.’
‘Sounds like French exercises,’ said the priest
dismally. ‘But I wasn’t thinking of that.’ Then,
after a silence, he said in a rather altered voice:
‘To tell the truth, I was thinking whether a man
might not naturally scratch his message on a tree,
even if he had stacks of pens, and quarts of ink,
and reams of paper.’
Henry was looking at him with a rather startled
air, his eyeglasses crooked on his pug-nose. ‘And
what do you mean by that?’ he asked sharply.
‘Well,’ said Father Brown slowly, ‘I don’t
exactly mean that postmen will carry letters in the
form of logs, or that you will ever drop a line to a
friend by putting a postage stamp on a pinetree. It
would have to be a particular sort of position — in
fact, it would have to be a particular sort of
person, who really preferred this sort of arboreal
correspondence. But, given the position and the
person, I repeat what I said. He would still write
on a tree, as the song says, if all the world were
paper and all the sea were ink; if that river flowed
with everlasting ink or all these woods were a
forest of quills and fountain-pens.’
It was evident that Sand felt something creepy
about the priest’s fanciful imagery; whether because
he found it incomprehensible or because he was
beginning to comprehend.
‘You see,’ said Father Brown, turning the
dressing-gown over slowly as he spoke, ‘a man isn’t
expected to write his very best handwriting when he
chips it on a tree. And if the man were not the man,
if I make myself clear — Hullo!’
He was looking down at the red dressing-gown, and
it seemed for the moment as if some of the red had
come off on his finger; but both the faces turned
towards it were already a shade paler.
‘Blood!’ said Father Brown; and for the instant
there was a deadly stillness save for the melodious
noises of the river.
Henry Sand cleared his throat and nose with
noises that were by no means melodious. Then he said
rather hoarsely: ‘Whose blood?’
‘Oh, mine,’ said Father Brown; but he did not
smile.
A moment after he said: ‘There was a pin in this
thing and I pricked myself. But I don’t think you
quite appreciate the point . . . the point of the
pin. I do’; and he sucked his finger like a child.
‘You see,’ he said after another silence, ‘the
gown was folded up and pinned together; nobody could
have unfolded it — at least without scratching
himself. In plain words, Hubert Sand never wore this
dressing-gown. Any more than Hubert Sand ever wrote
on that tree. Or drowned himself in that river.’
The pince-nez tilted on Henry’s inquiring nose
fell off with a click; but he was otherwise
motionless, as if rigid with surprise.
‘Which brings us back,’ went on Father Brown
cheerfully, ‘to somebody’s taste for writing his
private correspondence on trees, like Hiawatha and
his picture-writing. Sand had all the time there
was, before drowning himself. Why didn’t he leave a
note for his wife like a sane man? Or, shall we say
. . . Why didn’t the Other Man leave a note for the
wife like a sane man? Because he would have had to
forge the husband’s handwriting; always a tricky
thing now that experts are so nosey about it. But
nobody can be expected to imitate even his own
handwriting, let alone somebody else’s when he
carves capital letters in the bark of a tree. This
is not a suicide, Mr Sand. If it’s anything at all,
it’s a murder.’
The bracken and bushes of the undergrowth snapped
and crackled as the big young man rose out of them
like a leviathan, and stood lowering, with his thick
neck thrust forward.
‘I’m no good at hiding things,’ he said, ‘and I
half-suspected something like this — expected it,
you might say, for a long time. To tell the truth, I
could hardly be civil to the fellow — to either of
them, for that matter.’
‘What exactly do you mean?’ asked the priest,
looking him gravely full in the face.
‘I mean,’ said Henry Sand, ‘that you have shown
me the murder and I think I could show you the
murderers.’
Father Brown was silent and the other went on
rather jerkily.
‘You said people sometimes wrote love-messages on
trees. Well, as a fact, there are some of them on
that tree; there are two sort of monograms twisted
together up there under the leaves — I suppose you
know that Lady Sand was the heiress of this place
long before she married; and she knew that damned
dandy of a secretary even in those days. I guess
they used to meet here and write their vows upon the
trysting-tree. They seem to have used the
trysting-tree for another purpose later on.
Sentiment, no doubt, or economy.’
‘They must be very horrible people,’ said Father
Brown.
‘Haven’t there been any horrible people in
history or the police-news?’ demanded Sand with some
excitement. ‘Haven’t there been lovers who made love
seem more horrible than hate? Don’t you know about
Bothwell and all the bloody legends of such lovers?’
‘I know the legend of Bothwell,’ answered the
priest. ‘I also know it to be quite legendary. But
of course it’s true that husbands have been
sometimes put away like that. By the way, where was
he put away? I mean, where did they hide the body?’
‘I suppose they drowned him, or threw him in the
water when he was dead,’ snorted the young man
impatiently.
Father Brown blinked thoughtfully and then said:
‘A river is a good place to hide an imaginary body.
It’s a rotten bad place to hide a real one. I mean,
it’s easy to say you’ve thrown it in, because it
might be washed away to sea. But if you really did
throw it in, it’s about a hundred to one it
wouldn’t; the chances of it going ashore somewhere
are enormous. I think they must have had a better
scheme for hiding the body than that — or the body
would have been found by now. And if there were any
marks of violence — ’
‘Oh, bother hiding the body,’ said Henry, with
some irritation; ‘haven’t we witness enough in the
writing on their own devilish tree?’
‘The body is the chief witness in every murder,’
answered the other. ‘The hiding of the body, nine
times out of ten, is the practical problem to be
solved.’
There was a silence; and Father Brown continued
to turn over the red dressing-gown and spread it out
on the shining grass of the sunny shore; he did not
look up. But, for some time past he had been
conscious that the whole landscape had been changed
for him by the presence of a third party; standing
as still as a statue in the garden.
‘By the way,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘how
do you explain that little guy with the glass eye,
who brought your poor uncle a letter yesterday? It
seemed to me he was entirely altered by reading it;
that’s why I wasn’t surprised at the suicide, when I
thought it was a suicide. That chap was a rather
low-down private detective, or I’m much mistaken.’
‘Why,’ said Henry in a hesitating manner, ‘why,
he might have been — husbands do sometimes put on
detectives in domestic tragedies like this, don’t
they? I suppose he’d got the proofs of their
intrigue; and so they — ’
‘I shouldn’t talk too loud,’ said Father Brown,
‘because your detective is detecting us at this
moment, from about a yard beyond those bushes.’
They looked up, and sure enough the goblin with
the glass eye was fixing them with that disagreeable
optic, looking all the more grotesque for standing
among the white and waxen blooms of the classical
garden.
Henry Sand scrambled to his feet again with a
rapidity that seemed breathless for one of his bulk,
and asked the man very angrily and abruptly what he
was doing, at the same time telling him to clear out
at once.
‘Lord Stanes,’ said the goblin of the garden,
‘would be much obliged if Father Brown would come up
to the house and speak to him.’
Henry Sand turned away furiously; but the priest
put down his fury to the dislike that was known to
exist between him and the nobleman in question. As
they mounted the slope, Father Brown paused a moment
as if tracing patterns on the smooth tree-trunk,
glanced upwards once at the darker and more hidden
hieroglyph said to be a record of romance; and then
stared at the wider and more sprawling letters of
the confession, or supposed confession of suicide.
‘Do those letters remind you of anything?’ he
asked. And when his sulky companion shook his head,
he added: ‘They remind me of the writing on that
placard that threatened him with the vengeance of
the strikers.’
‘This is the hardest riddle and the queerest tale
I have ever tackled,’ said Father Brown, a month
later, as he sat opposite Lord Stanes in the
recently furnished apartment of No. 188, the end
flat which was the last to be finished before the
interregnum of the industrial dispute and the
transfer of work from the Trade Union. It was
comfortably furnished; and Lord Stanes was presiding
over grog and cigars, when the priest made his
confession with a grimace. Lord Stanes had become
rather surprisingly friendly, in a cool and casual
way.
‘I know that is saying a good deal, with your
record,’ said Stanes, ‘but certainly the detectives,
including our seductive friend with the glass eye,
don’t seem at all able to see the solution.’
Father Brown laid down his cigar and said
carefully: ‘It isn’t that they can’t see the
solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.’
‘Indeed,’ said the other, ‘perhaps I can’t see
the problem either.’
‘The problem is unlike all other problems, for
this reason,’ said Father Brown. ‘It seems as if the
criminal deliberately did two different things,
either of which might have been successful; but
which, when done together, could only defeat each
other. I am assuming, what I firmly believe, that
the same murderer pinned up the proclamation
threatening a sort of Bolshevik murder, and also
wrote on the tree confessing to an ordinary suicide.
Now you may say it is after all possible that the
proclamation was a proletarian proclamation; that
some extremist workmen wanted to kill their
employer, and killed him. Even if that were true, it
would still stick at the mystery of why they left,
or why anybody left, a contrary trail of private
self-destruction. But it certainly isn’t true. None
of these workmen, however, bitter, would have done a
thing like that. I know them pretty well; I know
their leaders quite well. To suppose that people
like Tom Bruce or Hogan would assassinate somebody
they could go for in the newspapers, and damage in
all sorts of different ways, is the sort of
psychology that sensible people call lunacy. No;
there was somebody, who was not an indignant
workman, who first played the part of an indignant
workman, and then played the part of a suicidal
employer. But, in the name of wonder, why? If he
thought he could pass it off smoothly as a suicide,
why did he first spoil it all by publishing a threat
of murder? You might say it was an afterthought to
fix up the suicide story, as less provocative than
the murder story. But it wasn’t less provocative
after the murder story. He must have known he had
already turned our thoughts towards murder, when it
should have been his whole object to keep our
thoughts away from it. If it was an after-thought,
it was the after-thought of a very thoughtless
person. And I have a notion that this assassin is a
very thoughtful person. Can you make anything of
it?’
‘No; but I see what you mean,’ said Stanes, ‘by
saying that I didn’t even see the problem. It isn’t
merely who killed Sand; it’s why anybody should
accuse somebody else of killing Sand and then accuse
Sand of killing himself.’
Father Brown’s face was knotted and the cigar was
clenched in his teeth; the end of it plowed and
darkened rhythmically like the signal of some
burning pulse of the brain. Then he spoke as if to
himself:
‘We’ve got to follow very closely and very
clearly. It’s like separating threads of thought
from each other; something like this. Because the
murder charge really rather spoilt the suicide
charge, he wouldn’t normally have made the murder
charge. But he did make it; so he had some other
reason for making it. It was so strong a reason that
perhaps it reconciled him even to weakening his
other line of defence; that it was a suicide. In
other words, the murder charge wasn’t really a
murder charge. I mean he wasn’t using it as a murder
charge; he wasn’t doing it so as to shift to
somebody else the guilt of murder; he was doing it
for some other extraordinary reason of his own. His
plan had to contain a proclamation that Sand would
be murdered; whether it threw suspicion on other
people or not. Somehow or other the mere
proclamation itself was necessary. But why?’
He smoked and smouldered away with the same
volcanic concentration for five minutes before he
spoke again. ‘What could a murderous proclamation
do, besides suggesting that the strikers were the
murderers? What did it do? One thing is obvious; it
inevitably did the opposite of what it said. It told
Sand not to lock out his men; and it was perhaps the
only thing in the world that would really have made
him do it. You’ve got to think of the sort of man
and the sort of reputation. When a man has been
called a Strong Man in our silly sensational
newspapers, when he is fondly regarded as a
Sportsman by all the most distinguished asses in
England, he simply can’t back down because he is
threatened with a pistol. It would be like walking
about at Ascot with a white feather stuck in his
absurd white hat. It would break that inner idol or
ideal of oneself, which every man not a downright
dastard does really prefer to life. And Sand wasn’t
a dastard; he was courageous; he was also impulsive.
It acted instantly like a charm: his nephew, who had
been more or less mixed up with the workmen, cried
out instantly that the threat must be absolutely and
instantly defied.’
‘Yes,’ said Lord Stanes, ‘I noticed that.’ They
looked at each other for an instant, and then Stanes
added carelessly: ‘So you think the thing the
criminal wanted was…’
‘The Lock-out!’ cried the priest energetically.
‘The Strike or whatever you call it; the cessation
of work, anyhow. He wanted the work to stop at once;
perhaps the blacklegs to come in at once; certainly
the Trade Unionists to go out at once. That is what
he really wanted; God knows why. And he brought that
off, I think, really without bothering much about
its other implication of the existence of Bolshevist
assassins. But then . . . then I think something
went wrong. I’m only guessing and groping very
slowly here; but the only explanation I can think of
is that something began to draw attention to the
real seat of the trouble; to the reason, whatever it
was, of his wanting to bring the building to a halt.
And then belatedly, desperately, and rather
inconsistently, he tried to lay the other trail that
led to the river, simply and solely because it led
away from the flats.’
He looked up through his moonlike spectacles,
absorbing all the quality of the background and
furniture; the restrained luxury of a quiet man of
the world; and contrasting it with the two suitcases
with which its occupant had arrived so recently in a
newly-finished and unfurnished flat. Then he said
rather abruptly: ‘In short, the murderer was
frightened of something or somebody in the flats. By
the way, why did you come to live in the flats? . .
. Also by the way, young Henry told me you made an
early appointment with him when you moved in. Is
that true?’
‘Not in the least,’ said Stanes. ‘I got the key
from his uncle the night before. I’ve no notion why
Henry came here that morning.’
‘Ah,’ said Father Brown, ‘then I think I have
some notion of why he came . . . I thought you
startled him by coming in just when he was coming
out.’
‘And yet,’ said Stanes, looking across with a
glitter in his grey-green eyes, ‘you do rather think
that I also am a mystery.’
‘I think you are two mysteries,’ said Father
Brown. ‘The first is why you originally retired from
Sand’s business. The second is why you have since
come back to live in Sand’s buildings.’
Stanes smoked reflectively, knocked out his ash,
and rang a bell on the table before him. ‘If you’ll
excuse me,’ he said, ‘I will summon two more to the
council. Jackson, the little detective you know of,
will answer the bell; and I’ve asked Henry Sand to
come in a little later.’
Father Brown rose from his seat, walked across
the room and looked down frowning into the
fire-place.
‘Meanwhile,’ continued Stanes, ‘I don’t mind
answering both your questions. I left the Sand
business because I was sure there was some
hanky-panky in it and somebody was pinching all the
money. I came back to it, and took this flat,
because I wanted to watch for the real truth about
old Sand’s death — on the spot.’
Father Brown faced round as the detective entered
the room; he stood staring at the hearthrug and
repeated: ‘On the spot.’
‘Mr. Jackson will tell you,’ said Stanes, ‘that
Sir Hubert commissioned him to find out who was the
thief robbing the firm; and he brought a note of his
discoveries the day before old Hubert disappeared.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘and I know now where
he disappeared to. I know where the body is.’
‘Do you mean — ?’ began his host hastily.
‘It is here,’ said Father Brown, and stamped on
the hearthrug. ‘Here, under the elegant Persian rug
in this cosy and comfortable room.’
‘Where in the world did you find that?’
‘I’ve just remembered,’ said Father Brown, ‘that
I found it in my sleep.’
He closed his eyes as if trying to picture a
dream, and went on dreamily:
‘This is a murder story turning on the problem of
How to Hide the Body; and I found it in my sleep. I
was always woken up every morning by hammering from
this building. On that morning I half-woke up, went
to sleep again and woke once more, expecting to find
it late; but it wasn’t. Why? Because there had been
hammering that morning, though all the usual work
had stopped; short, hurried hammering in the small
hours before dawn. Automatically a man sleeping
stirs at such a familiar sound. But he goes to sleep
again, because the usual sound is not at the usual
hour. Now why did a certain secret criminal want all
the work to cease suddenly; and only new workers
come in? Because, if the old workers had come in
next day, they would have found a new piece of work
done in the night. The old workers would have known
where they left off; and they would have found the
whole flooring of this room already nailed down.
Nailed down by a man who knew how to do it; having
mixed a good deal with the workmen and learned their
ways.’
As he spoke, the door was pushed open and a head
poked in with a thrusting motion; a small head at
the end of a thick neck and a face that blinked at
them through glasses.
‘Henry Sand said,’ observed Father Brown, staring
at the ceiling, ‘that he was no good at hiding
things. But I think he did himself an injustice.’
Henry Sand turned and moved swiftly away down the
corridor.
‘He not only hid his thefts from the firm quite
successfully for years,’ went on the priest with an
air of abstraction, ‘but when his uncle discovered
them, he hid his uncle’s corpse in an entirely new
and original manner.’
At the same instant Stanes again rang a bell,
with a long strident steady ringing; and the little
man with the glass eye was propelled or shot along
the corridor after the fugitive, with something of
the rotatory motion of a mechanical figure in a
zoetrope. At the same moment, Father Brown looked
out of the window, leaning over a small balcony, and
saw five or six men start from behind bushes and
railings in the street below and spread out equally
mechanically like a fan or net; opening out after
the fugitive who had shot like a bullet out of the
front door. Father Brown saw only the pattern of the
story; which had never strayed from that room; where
Henry had strangled Hubert and hid his body under
impenetrable flooring, stopping the whole work on
the building to do it. A pin-prick had started his
own suspicions; but only to tell him he had been led
down the long loop of a lie. The point of the pin
was that it was pointless.
He fancied he understood Stanes at last, and he
liked to collect queer people who were difficult to
understand. He realized that this tired gentleman,
whom he had once accused of having green blood, had
indeed a sort of cold green flame of
conscientiousness or conventional honour, that had
made him first shift out of a shady business, and
then feel ashamed of having shifted it on to others;
and come back as a bored laborious detective;
pitching his camp on the very spot where the corpse
had been buried; so that the murderer, finding him
sniffing so near the corpse, had wildly staged the
alternative drama of the dressing-gown and the
drowned man. All that was plain enough, but, before
he withdrew his head from the night air and the
stars, Father Brown threw one glance upwards at the
vast black bulk of the cyclopean building heaved far
up into the night, and remembered Egypt and Babylon,
and all that is at once eternal and ephemeral in the
work of man.
‘I was right in what I said first of all,’ he
said. ‘It reminds one of Coppee’s poem about the
Pharaoh and the Pyramid. This house is supposed to
be a hundred houses; and yet the whole mountain of
building is only one man’s tomb.’
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Chapter VIII. The Insoluble Problem
This queer incident, in some ways perhaps the
queerest of the many that came his way, happened to
Father Brown at the time when his French friend
Flambeau had retired from the profession of crime
and had entered with great energy and success on the
profession of crime investigator. It happened that
both as a thief and a thief-taker, Flambeau had
rather specialized in the matter of jewel thefts, on
which he was admitted to be an expert, both in the
matter of identifying jewels and the equally
practical matter of identifying jewel-thieves. And
it was in connection with his special knowledge of
this subject, and a special commission which it had
won for him, that he rang up his friend the priest
on the particular morning on which this story
begins.
Father Brown was delighted to hear the voice of
his old friend, even on the telephone; but in a
general way, and especially at that particular
moment, Father Brown was not very fond of the
telephone. He was one who preferred to watch
people’s faces and feel social atmospheres, and he
knew well that without these things, verbal messages
are apt to be very misleading, especially from total
strangers. And it seemed as if, on that particular
morning, a swarm of total strangers had been buzzing
in his ear with more or less unenlightening verbal
messages; the telephone seemed to be possessed of a
demon of triviality. Perhaps the most distinctive
voice was one which asked him whether he did not
issue regular permits for murder and theft upon the
payment of a regular tariff hung up in his church;
and as the stranger, on being informed that this was
not the case, concluded the colloquy with a hollow
laugh, it may be presumed that he remained
unconvinced. Then an agitated, rather inconsequent
female voice rang up requesting him to come round at
once to a certain hotel he had heard of some
forty-five miles on the road to a neighbouring
cathedral town; the request being immediately
followed by a contradiction in the same voice, more
agitated and yet more inconsequent, telling him that
it did not matter and that he was not wanted after
all. Then came an interlude of a Press agency asking
him if he had anything to say on what a Film Actress
had said about Moustaches for Men; and finally yet a
third return of the agitated and inconsequent lady
at the hotel, saying that he was wanted, after all.
He vaguely supposed that this marked some of the
hesitations and panics not unknown among those who
are vaguely veering in the direction of Instruction,
but he confessed to a considerable relief when the
voice of Flambeau wound up the series with a hearty
threat of immediately turning up for breakfast.
Father Brown very much preferred to talk to a
friend sitting comfortably over a pipe, but it soon
appeared that his visitor was on the warpath and
full of energy, having every intention of carrying
off the little priest captive on some important
expedition of his own. It was true that there was a
special circumstance involved which might be
supposed to claim the priest’s attention. Flambeau
had figured several times of late as successfully
thwarting a theft of famous precious stones; he had
torn the tiara of the Duchess of Dulwich out of the
very hand of the bandit as he bolted through the
garden. He laid so ingenious a trap for the criminal
who planned to carry off the celebrated Sapphire
Necklace that the artist in question actually
carried off the copy which he had himself planned to
leave as a substitute.
Such were doubtless the reasons that had led to
his being specially summoned to guard the delivery
of a rather different sort of treasure; perhaps even
more valuable in its mere materials, but possessing
also another sort of value. A world-famous
reliquary, supposed to contain a relic of St.
Dorothy the martyr, was to be delivered at the
Catholic monastery in a cathedral town; and one of
the most famous of international jewel-thieves was
supposed to have an eye on it; or rather presumably
on the gold and rubies of its setting, rather than
its purely hagiological importance. Perhaps there
was something in this association of ideas which
made Flambeau feel that the priest would be a
particularly appropriate companion in his adventure;
but anyhow, he descended on him, breathing fire and
ambition and very voluble about his plans for
preventing the theft.
Flambeau indeed bestrode the priest’s hearth
gigantically and in the old swaggering musketeer
attitude, twirling his great moustaches.
‘You can’t,’ he cried, referring to the
sixty-mile road to Casterbury. ‘You can’t allow a
profane robbery like that to happen under your very
nose.’
The relic was not to reach the monastery till the
evening; and there was no need for its defenders to
arrive earlier; for indeed a motor-journey would
take them the greater part of the day. Moreover,
Father Brown casually remarked that there was an inn
on the road, at which he would prefer to lunch, as
he had been already asked to look in there as soon
as was convenient.
As they drove along through a densely wooded but
sparsely inhabited landscape, in which inns and all
other buildings seemed to grow rarer and rarer, the
daylight began to take on the character of a stormy
twilight even in the heat of noon; and dark purple
clouds gathered over dark grey forests. As is common
under the lurid quietude of that kind of light, what
colour there was in the landscape gained a sort of
secretive glow which is not found in objects under
the full sunlight; and ragged red leaves or golden
or orange fungi seemed to burn with a dark fire of
their own. Under such a half-light they came to a
break in the woods like a great rent in a grey wall,
and saw beyond, standing above the gap, the tall and
rather outlandish-looking inn that bore the name of
the Green Dragon.
The two old companions had often arrived together
at inns and other human habitations, and found a
somewhat singular state of things there; but the
signs of singularity had seldom manifested
themselves so early. For while their car was still
some hundreds of yards from the dark green door,
which matched the dark green shutters of the high
and narrow building, the door was thrown open with
violence and a woman with a wild mop of red hair
rushed to meet them, as if she were ready to board
the car in full career. Flambeau brought the car to
a standstill but almost before he had done so, she
thrust her white and tragic face into the window,
crying:
‘Are you Father Brown?’ and then almost in the
same breath; ‘who is this man?’
‘This gentleman’s name is Flambeau,’ said Father
Brown in a tranquil manner, ‘and what can I do for
you?’
‘Come into the inn,’ she said, with extraordinary
abruptness even under the circumstances. ‘There’s
been a murder done.’
They got out of the car in silence and followed
her to the dark green door which opened inwards on a
sort of dark green alley, formed of stakes and
wooden pillars, wreathed with vine and ivy, showing
square leaves of black and red and many sombre
colours. This again led through an inner door into a
sort of large parlour hung with rusty trophies of
Cavalier arms, of which the furniture seemed to be
antiquated and also in great confusion, like the
inside of a lumber-room. They were quite startled
for the moment; for it seemed as if one large piece
of lumber rose and moved towards them; so dusty and
shabby and ungainly was the man who thus abandoned
what seemed like a state of permanent immobility.
Strangely enough, the man seemed to have a
certain agility of politeness, when once he did
move; even if it suggested the wooden joints of a
courtly step-ladder or an obsequious towel-horse.
Both Flambeau and Father Brown felt that they had
hardly ever clapped eyes on a man who was so
difficult to place. He was not what is called a
gentleman; yet he had something of the dusty
refinement of a scholar; there was something faintly
disreputable or declasse about him; and yet the
smell of him was rather bookish than Bohemian. He
was thin and pale, with a pointed nose and a dark
pointed beard; his brow was bald, but his hair
behind long and lank and stringy; and the expression
of his eyes was almost entirely masked by a pair of
blue spectacles. Father Brown felt that he had met
something of the sort somewhere, and a long time
ago; but he could no longer put a name to it. The
lumber he sat among was largely literary lumber;
especially bundles of seventeenth-century pamphlets.
‘Do I understand the lady to say,’ asked Flambeau
gravely, ‘that there is a murder here?’
The lady nodded her red ragged head rather
impatiently; except for those flaming elf-locks she
had lost some of her look of wildness; her dark
dress was of a certain dignity and neatness; her
features were strong and handsome; and there was
something about her suggesting that double strength
of body and mind which makes women powerful,
particularly in contrast with men like the man in
blue spectacles. Nevertheless, it was he who gave
the only articulate answer, intervening with a
certain antic gallantry.
‘It is true that my unfortunate sister-in-law,’
he explained, ‘has almost this moment suffered a
most appalling shock which we should all have
desired to spare her. I only wish that I myself had
made the discovery and suffered only the further
distress of bringing the terrible news.
Unfortunately it was Mrs Flood herself who found her
aged grandfather, long sick and bedridden in this
hotel, actually dead in the garden; in circumstances
which point only too plainly to violence and
assault. Curious circumstances, I may say, very
curious circumstances indeed.’ And he coughed
slightly, as if apologizing for them.
Flambeau bowed to the lady and expressed his
sincere sympathies; then he said to the man: ‘I
think you said, sir, that you are Mrs Flood’s
brother-in-law.’
‘I am Dr Oscar Flood,’ replied the other. ‘My
brother, this lady’s husband, is at present away on
the Continent on business, and she is running the
hotel. Her grandfather was partially paralysed and
very far advanced in years. He was never known to
leave his bedroom; so that really these
extraordinary circumstances . . .’
‘Have you sent for a doctor or the police?’ asked
Flambeau.
‘Yes,’ replied Dr Flood, ‘we rang up after making
the dreadful discovery; but they can hardly be here
for some hours. This roadhouse stands so very
remote. It is only used by people going to
Casterbury or even beyond. So we thought we might
ask for your valuable assistance until — ’
‘If we are to be of any assistance,’ said Father
Brown, interrupting in too abstracted a manner to
seem uncivil, ‘I should say we had better go and
look at the circumstances at once.’
He stepped almost mechanically towards the door;
and almost ran into a man who was shouldering his
way in; a big, heavy young man with dark hair
unbrushed and untidy, who would nevertheless have
been rather handsome save for a slight disfigurement
of one eye, which gave him rather a sinister
appearance.
‘What the devil are you doing?’ he blurted out,
‘telling every Tom, Dick and Harry — at least you
ought to wait for the police.’
‘I will be answerable to the police,’ said
Flambeau with a certain magnificence, and a sudden
air of having taken command of everything. He
advanced to the doorway, and as he was much bigger
than the big young man, and his moustaches were as
formidable as the horns of a Spanish bull, the big
young man backed before him and had an inconsequent
air of being thrown out and left behind, as the
group swept out into the garden and up the flagged
path towards the mulberry plantation. Only Flambeau
heard the little priest say to the doctor: ‘He
doesn’t seem to love us really, does he? By the way,
who is he?’
‘His name is Dunn,’ said the doctor, with a
certain restraint of manner. ‘My sister-in-law gave
him the job of managing the garden, because he lost
an eye in the War.’
As they went through the mulberry bushes, the
landscape of the garden presented that rich yet
ominous effect which is found when the land is
actually brighter than the sky. In the broken
sunlight from behind, the tree-tops in front of them
stood up like pale green flames against a sky
steadily blackening with storm, through every shade
of purple and violet. The same light struck strips
of the lawn and garden beds; and whatever it
illuminated seemed more mysteriously sombre and
secret for the light. The garden bed was dotted with
tulips that looked like drops of dark blood, and
some of which one might have sworn were truly black;
and the line ended appropriately with a tulip tree;
which Father Brown was disposed, if partly by some
confused memory, to identify with what is commonly
called the Judas tree. What assisted the association
was the fact that there was hanging from one of the
branches, like a dried fruit, the dry, thin body of
an old man, with a long beard that wagged
grotesquely in the wind.
There lay on it something more than the horror of
darkness, the horror of sunlight; for the fitful sun
painted tree and man in gay colours like a stage
property; the tree was in flower and the corpse was
hung with a faded peacock-green dressing-gown, and
wore on its wagging head a scarlet smoking-cap. Also
it had red bedroom-slippers, one of which had fallen
off and lay on the grass like a blot of blood.
But neither Flambeau or Father Brown was looking
at these things as yet. They were both staring at a
strange object that seemed to stick out of the
middle of the dead man’s shrunken figure; and which
they gradually perceived to be the black but rather
rusty iron hilt of a seventeenth-century sword,
which had completely transfixed the body. They both
remained almost motionless as they gazed at it;
until the restless Dr Flood seemed to grow quite
impatient with their stolidity.
‘What puzzles me most,’ he said, nervously
snapping his fingers, ‘is the actual state of the
body. And yet it has given me an idea already.’
Flambeau had stepped up to the tree and was
studying the sword-hilt through an eye-glass. But
for some odd reason, it was at that very instant
that the priest in sheer perversity spun round like
a teetotum, turned his back on the corpse, and
looked peeringly in the very opposite direction. He
was just in time to see the red head of Mrs Flood at
the remote end of the garden, turned towards a dark
young man, too dim with distance to be identified,
who was at that moment mounting a motor-bicycle; who
vanished, leaving behind him only the dying din of
that vehicle. Then the woman turned and began to
walk towards them across the garden, just as Father
Brown turned also and began a careful inspection of
the sword-hilt and the hanging corpse.
‘I understand you only found him about half an
hour ago,’ said Flambeau. ‘Was there anybody about
here just before that? I mean anybody in his
bedroom, or that part of the house, or this part of
the garden — say for an hour beforehand?’
‘No,’ said the doctor with precision. ‘That is
the very tragic accident. My sister-in-law was in
the pantry, which is a sort of out-house on the
other side; this man Dunn was in the kitchen garden,
which is also in that direction; and I myself was
poking about among the books, in a room just behind
the one you found me in. There are two female
servants, but one had gone to the post and the other
was in the attic.’
‘And were any of these people,’ asked Flambeau,
very quietly, ‘I say any of these people, at all on
bad terms with the poor old gentleman?’
‘He was the object of almost universal
affection,’ replied the doctor solemnly. ‘If there
were any misunderstandings, they were mild and of a
sort common in modern times. The old man was
attached to the old religious habits; and perhaps
his daughter and son-in-law had rather wider views.
All that can have had nothing to do with a ghastly
and fantastic assassination like this.’
‘It depends on how wide the modern views were,’
said Father Brown, ‘or how narrow.’
At this moment they heard Mrs Flood hallooing
across the garden as she came, and calling her
brother-in-law to her with a certain impatience. He
hurried towards her and was soon out of earshot; but
as he went he waved his hand apologetically and then
pointed with a long finger to the ground.
‘You will find the footprints very intriguing,’
he said; with the same strange air, as of a funereal
showman.
The two amateur detectives looked across at each
other. ‘I find several other things intriguing,’
said Flambeau.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the priest, staring rather
foolishly at the grass.
‘I was wondering,’ said Flambeau, ‘why they
should hang a man by the neck till he was dead, and
then take the trouble to stick him with a sword.’
‘And I was wondering,’ said Father Brown, ‘why
they should kill a man with a sword thrust through
his heart, and then take the trouble to hang him by
the neck.’
‘Oh, you are simply being contrary,’ protested
his friend. ‘I can see at a glance that they didn’t
stab him alive. The body would have bled more and
the wound wouldn’t have closed like that.’
‘And I could see at a glance,’ said Father Brown,
peering up very awkwardly, with his short stature
and short sight, ‘that they didn’t hang him alive.
If you’ll look at the knot in the noose, you will
see it’s tied so clumsily that a twist of rope holds
it away from the neck, so that it couldn’t throttle
a man at all. He was dead before they put the rope
on him; and he was dead before they put the sword in
him. And how was he really killed?’
‘I think,’ remarked the other, ‘that we’d better
go back to the house and have a look at his bedroom
— and other things.’
‘So we will,’ said Father Brown. ‘But among other
things perhaps we had better have a look at these
footprints. Better begin at the other end, I think,
by his window. Well, there are no footprints on the
paved path, as there might be; but then again there
mightn’t be. Well, here is the lawn just under his
bedroom window. And here are his footprints plain
enough.’
He blinked ominously at the footprints; and then
began carefully retracing his path towards the tree,
every now and then ducking in an undignified manner
to look at something on the ground. Eventually he
returned to Flambeau and said in a chatty manner:
‘Well, do you know the story that is written
there very plainly? Though it’s not exactly a plain
story.’
‘I wouldn’t be content to call it plain,’ said
Flambeau. ‘I should call it quite ugly — ’
‘Well,’ said Father Brown, ‘the story that is
stamped quite plainly on the earth, with exact
moulds of the old man’s slippers, is this. The aged
paralytic leapt from the window and ran down the
beds parallel to the path, quite eager for all the
fun of being strangled and stabbed; so eager that he
hopped on one leg out of sheer lightheartedness; and
even occasionally turned cartwheels — ’
‘Stop!’ cried Flambeau, angrily. ‘What the hell
is all this hellish pantomime?’
Father Brown merely raised his eyebrows and
gestured mildly towards the hieroglyphs in the dust.
‘About half the way there’s only the mark of one
slipper; and in some places the mark of a hand
planted all by itself.’
‘Couldn’t he have limped and then fallen?’ asked
Flambeau.
Father Brown shook his head. ‘At least he’d have
tried to use his hands and feet, or knees and
elbows, in getting up. There are no other marks
there of any kind. Of course the flagged path is
quite near, and there are no marks on that; though
there might be on the soil between the cracks; it’s
a crazy pavement.’
‘By God, it’s a crazy pavement; and a crazy
garden; and a crazy story!’ And Flambeau looked
gloomily across the gloomy and storm-stricken
garden, across which the crooked patchwork paths did
indeed give a queer aptness to the quaint old
English adjective.
‘And now,’ said Father Brown, ‘let us go up and
look at his room.’ They went in by a door not far
from the bedroom window; and the priest paused a
moment to look at an ordinary garden broomstick, for
sweeping up leaves, that was leaning against the
wall. ‘Do you see that?’
‘It’s a broomstick,’ said Flambeau, with solid
irony.
‘It’s a blunder,’ said Father Brown; ‘the first
blunder that I’ve seen in this curious plot.’
They mounted the stairs and entered the old man’s
bedroom; and a glance at it made fairly clear the
main facts, both about the foundation and disunion
of the family. Father Brown had felt from the first
that he was in what was, or had been, a Catholic
household; but was, at least partly, inhabited by
lapsed or very loose Catholics. The pictures and
images in the grandfather’s room made it clear that
what positive piety remained had been practically
confined to him; and that his kindred had, for some
reason or other, gone Pagan. But he agreed that this
was a hopelessly inadequate explanation even of an
ordinary murder; let alone such a very extraordinary
murder as this. ‘Hang it all,’ he muttered, ‘the
murder is really the least extra-ordinary part of
it.’ And even as he used the chance phrase, a slow
light began to dawn upon his face.
Flambeau had seated himself on a chair by the
little table which stood beside the dead man’s bed.
He was frowning thoughtfully at three or four white
pills or pellets that lay in a small tray beside a
bottle of water.
‘The murderer or murderess,’ said Flambeau, ‘had
some incomprehensible reason or other for wanting us
to think the dead man was strangled or stabbed or
both. He was not strangled or stabbed or anything of
the kind. Why did they want to suggest it? The most
logical explanation is that he died in some
particular way which would, in itself, suggest a
connection with some particular person. Suppose, for
instance, he was poisoned. And suppose somebody is
involved who would naturally look more like a
poisoner than anybody else.’
‘After all,’ said Father Brown softly, ‘our
friend in the blue spectacles is a doctor.’
‘I’m going to examine these pills pretty
carefully,’ went on Flambeau. ‘I don’t want to lose
them, though. They look as if they were soluble in
water.’
‘It may take you some time to do anything
scientific with them,’ said the priest, ‘and the
police doctor may be here before that. So I should
certainly advise you not to lose them. That is, if
you are going to wait for the police doctor.’
‘I am going to stay here till I have solved this
problem,’ said Flambeau.
‘Then you will stay here for ever,’ said Father
Brown, looking calmly out of the window. ‘I don’t
think I shall stay in this room, anyhow.’
‘Do you mean that I shan’t solve the problem?’
asked his friend. ‘Why shouldn’t I solve the
problem?’
‘Because it isn’t soluble in water. No, nor in
blood,’ said the priest; and he went down the dark
stairs into the darkening garden. There he saw again
what he had already seen from the window.
The heat and weight and obscurity of the
thunderous sky seemed to be pressing yet more
closely on the landscape; the clouds had conquered
the sun which, above, in a narrowing clearance,
stood up paler than the moon. There was a thrill of
thunder in the air, but now no more stirring of wind
or breeze; and even the colours of the garden seemed
only like richer shades of darkness. But one colour
still glowed with a certain dusky vividness; and
that was the red hair of the woman of that house,
who was standing with a sort of rigidity, staring,
with her hands thrust up into her hair. That scene
of eclipse, with something deeper in his own doubts
about its significance, brought to the surface the
memory of haunting and mystical lines; and he found
himself murmuring: ‘A secret spot, as savage and
enchanted as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
by woman wailing for her demon lover.’ His muttering
became more agitated. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners . . . that’s what it is; that’s
terribly like what it is; woman wailing for her
demon lover.’
He was hesitant and almost shaky as he approached
the woman; but he spoke with his common composure.
He was gazing at her very steadily, as he told her
earnestly that she must not be morbid because of the
mere accidental accessories of the tragedy, with all
their mad ugliness. ‘The pictures in your
grandfather’s room were truer to him than that ugly
picture that we saw,’ he said gravely. ‘Something
tells me he was a good man; and it does not matter
what his murderers did with his body.’
‘Oh, I am sick of his holy pictures and statues!’
she said, turning her head away. ‘Why don’t they
defend themselves, if they are what you say they
are? But rioters can knock off the Blessed Virgin’s
head and nothing happens to them. Oh, what’s the
good? You can’t blame us, you daren’t blame us, if
we’ve found out that Man is stronger than God.’
‘Surely,’ said Father Brown very gently, ‘it is
not generous to make even God’s patience with us a
point against Him.’
‘God may be patient and Man impatient,’ she
answered, ‘and suppose we like the impatience
better. You call it sacrilege; but you can’t stop
it.’
Father Brown gave a curious little jump.
‘Sacrilege!’ he said; and suddenly turned back to
the doorway with a new brisk air of decision. At the
same moment Flambeau appeared in the doorway, pale
with excitement, with a screw of paper in his hands.
Father Brown had already opened his mouth to speak,
but his impetuous friend spoke before him.
‘I’m on the track at last!’ cried Flambeau.
‘These pills look the same, but they’re really
different. And do you know that, at the very moment
I spotted them, that one-eyed brute of a gardener
thrust his white face into the room; and he was
carrying a horse-pistol. I knocked it out of his
hand and threw him down the stairs, but I begin to
understand everything. If I stay here another hour
or two, I shall finish my job.’
‘Then you will not finish it,’ said the priest,
with a ring in his voice very rare in him indeed.
‘We shall not stay here another hour. We shall not
stay here another minute. We must leave this place
at once!’
‘What!’ cried the astounded Flambeau. ‘Just when
we are getting near the truth! Why, you can tell
that we’re getting near the truth because they are
afraid of us.’
Father Brown looked at him with a stony and
inscrutable face, and said: ‘They are not afraid of
us when we are here. They will only be afraid of us
when we are not here.’
They had both become conscious that the rather
fidgety figure of Dr Flood was hovering in the lurid
haze; now it precipitated itself forward with the
wildest gestures.
‘Stop! Listen!’ cried the agitated doctor. ‘I
have discovered the truth!’
‘Then you can explain it to your own police,’
said Father Brown, briefly. ‘They ought to be coming
soon. But we must be going.’
The doctor seemed thrown into a whirlpool of
emotions, eventually rising to the surface again
with a despairing cry. He spread out his arms like a
cross, barring their way.
‘Be it so!’ he cried. ‘I will not deceive you
now, by saying I have discovered the truth. I will
only confess the truth.’
‘Then you can confess it to your own priest,’
said Father Brown, and strode towards the garden
gate, followed by his staring friend. Before he
reached the gate, another figure had rushed athwart
him like the wind; and Dunn the gardener was
shouting at him some unintelligible derision at
detectives who were running away from their job.
Then the priest ducked just in time to dodge a blow
from the horse-pistol, wielded like a club. But Dunn
was just not in time to dodge a blow from the fist
of Flambeau, which was like the club of Hercules.
The two left Mr Dunn spread flat behind them on the
path, and, passing out of the gate, went out and got
into their car in silence. Flambeau only asked one
brief question and Father Brown only answered:
‘Casterbury.’
At last, after a long silence, the priest
observed: ‘I could almost believe the storm belonged
only to that garden, and came out of a storm in the
soul.’
‘My friend,’ said Flambeau. ‘I have known you a
long time, and when you show certain signs of
certainty, I follow your lead. But I hope you are
not going to tell me that you took me away from that
fascinating job, because you did not like the
atmosphere.’
‘Well, it was certainly a terrible atmosphere,’
replied Father Brown, calmly. ‘Dreadful and
passionate and oppressive. And the most dreadful
thing about it was this — that there was no hate in
it at all.’
‘Somebody,’ suggested Flambeau, ‘seems to have
had a slight dislike of grandpapa.’
‘Nobody had any dislike of anybody,’ said Father
Brown with a groan. ‘That was the dreadful thing in
that darkness. It was love.’
‘Curious way of expressing love — to strangle
somebody and stick him with a sword,’ observed the
other.
‘It was love,’ repeated the priest, ‘and it
filled the house with terror.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ protested Flambeau, ‘that that
beautiful woman is in love with that spider in
spectacles.’
‘No,’ said Father Brown and groaned again. ‘She
is in love with her husband. It is ghastly.’
‘It is a state of things that I have often heard
you recommend,’ replied Flambeau. ‘You cannot call
that lawless love.’
‘Not lawless in that sense,’ answered Father
Brown; then he turned sharply on his elbow and spoke
with a new warmth: ‘Do you think I don’t know that
the love of a man and a woman was the first command
of God and is glorious for ever? Are you one of
those idiots who think we don’t admire love and
marriage? Do I need to be told of the Garden of Eden
or the wine of Cana? It is just because the strength
in the thing was the strength of God, that it rages
with that awful energy even when it breaks loose
from God. When the Garden becomes a jungle, but
still a glorious jungle; when the second
fermentation turns the wine of Cana into the vinegar
of Calvary. Do you think I don’t know all that?’
‘I’m sure you do,’ said Flambeau, ‘but I don’t
yet know much about my problem of the murder.’
‘The murder cannot be solved,’ said Father Brown.
‘And why not?’ demanded his friend.
‘Because there is no murder to solve,’ said
Father Brown.
Flambeau was silent with sheer surprise; and it
was his friend who resumed in a quiet tone:
‘I’ll tell you a curious thing. I talked with
that woman when she was wild with grief; but she
never said anything about the murder. She never
mentioned murder, or even alluded to murder. What
she did mention repeatedly was sacrilege.’ Then,
with another jerk of verbal disconnection, he added:
‘Have you ever heard of Tiger Tyrone?’
‘Haven’t I!’ cried Flambeau. ‘Why, that’s the
very man who’s supposed to be after the reliquary,
and whom I’ve been commissioned specially to
circumvent. He’s the most violent and daring
gangster who ever visited this country; Irish, of
course, but the sort that goes quite crazily
anti-clerical. Perhaps he’s dabbled in a little
diabolism in these secret societies; anyhow, he has
a macabre taste for playing all sorts of wild tricks
that look wickeder than they are. Otherwise he’s not
the wickedest; he seldom kills, and never for
cruelty; but he loves doing anything to shock
people, especially his own people; robbing churches
or digging up skeletons or what not.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘it all fits in. I
ought to have seen it all long before.’
‘I don’t see how we could have seen anything,
after only an hour’s investigation,’ said the
detective defensively.
‘I ought to have seen it before there was
anything to investigate,’ said the priest. ‘I ought
to have known it before you arrived this morning.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘It only shows how wrong voices sound on the
telephone,’ said Father Brown reflectively. ‘I heard
all three stages of the thing this morning; and I
thought they were trifles. First, a woman rang me up
and asked me to go to that inn as soon as possible.
What did that mean? Of course it meant that the old
grandfather was dying. Then she rang up to say that
I needn’t go, after all. What did that mean? Of
course it meant that the old grandfather was dead.
He had died quite peaceably in his bed; probably
heart failure from sheer old age. And then she rang
up a third time and said I was to go, after all.
What did that mean? Ah, that is rather more
interesting!’
He went on after a moment’s pause: ‘Tiger Tyrone,
whose wife worships him, took hold of one of his mad
ideas, and yet it was a crafty idea, too. He had
just heard that you were tracking him down, that you
knew him and his methods and were coming to save the
reliquary; he may have heard that I have sometimes
been of some assistance. He wanted to stop us on the
road; and his trick for doing it was to stage a
murder. It was a pretty horrible thing to do; but it
wasn’t a murder. Probably he bullied his wife with
an air of brutal common sense, saying he could only
escape penal servitude by using a dead body that
couldn’t suffer anything from such use. Anyhow, his
wife would do anything for him; but she felt all the
unnatural hideousness of that hanging masquerade;
and that’s why she talked about sacrilege. She was
thinking of the desecration of the relic; but also
of the desecration of the death-bed. The brother’s
one of those shoddy “scientific” rebels who tinker
with dud bombs; an idealist run to seed. But he’s
devoted to Tiger; and so is the gardener. Perhaps
it’s a point in his favour that so many people seem
devoted to him.
‘There was one little point that set me guessing
very early. Among the old books the doctor was
turning over, was a bundle of seventeeth-century
pamphlets; and I caught one title: True Declaration
of the Trial and Execution of My Lord Stafford. Now
Stafford was executed in the Popish Plot business,
which began with one of history’s detective stories;
the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Godfrey was
found dead in a ditch, and part of the mystery was
that he had marks of strangulation, but was also
transfixed with his own sword. I thought at once
that somebody in the house might have got the idea
from here. But he couldn’t have wanted it as a way
of committing a murder. He can only have wanted it
as a way of creating a mystery. Then I saw that this
applied to all the other outrageous details. They
were devilish enough; but it wasn’t mere devilry;
there was a rag of excuse; because they had to make
the mystery as contradictory and complicated as
possible, to make sure that we should be a long time
solving it — or rather seeing through it. So they
dragged the poor old man off his deathbed and made
the corpse hop and turn cartwheels and do everything
that it couldn’t have done. They had to give us an
Insoluble Problem. They swept their own tracks off
the path, leaving the broom. Fortunately we did see
through it in time.’
‘You saw through it in time,’ said Flambeau. ‘I
might have lingered a little longer over the second
trail they left, sprinkled with assorted pills.’
‘Well, anyhow, we got away,’ said Father Brown,
comfortably.
‘And that, I presume,’ said Flambeau, ‘is the
reason I am driving at this rate along the road to
Casterbury.’
That night in the monastery and church at
Casterbury there were events calculated to stagger
monastic seclusion. The reliquary of St Dorothy, in
a casket gorgeous with gold and rubies, was
temporarily placed in a side room near the chapel of
the monastery, to be brought in with a procession
for a special service at the end of Benediction. It
was guarded for the moment by one monk, who watched
it in a tense and vigilant manner; for he and his
brethren knew all about the shadow of peril from the
prowling of Tiger Tyrone. Thus it was that the monk
was on his feet in a flash, when he saw one of the
low-latticed windows beginning to open and a dark
object crawling like a black serpent through the
crack. Rushing across, he gripped it and found it
was the arm and sleeve of a man, terminating with a
handsome cuff and a smart dark-grey glove. Laying
hold of it, he shouted for help, and even as he did
so, a man darted into the room through the door
behind his back and snatched the casket he had left
behind him on the table. Almost at the same instant,
the arm wedged in the window came away in his hand,
and he stood holding the stuffed limb of a dummy.
Tiger Tyrone had played that trick before, but to
the monk it was a novelty. Fortunately, there was at
least one person to whom the Tiger’s tricks were not
a novelty; and that person appeared with militant
moustaches, gigantically framed in the doorway, at
the very moment when the Tiger turned to escape by
it. Flambeau and Tiger Tyrone looked at each other
with steady eyes and exchanged something that was
almost like a military salute.
Meanwhile Father Brown had slipped into the
chapel, to say a prayer for several persons involved
in these unseemly events. But he was rather smiling
than otherwise, and, to tell the truth, he was not
by any means hopeless about Mr. Tyrone and his
deplorable family; but rather more hopeful than he
was for many more respectable people. Then his
thoughts widened with the grander perspectives of
the place and the occasion. Against black and green
marbles at the end of the rather rococo chapel, the
dark-red vestments of the festival of a martyr were
in their turn a background for a fierier red; a red
like red-hot coals; the rubies of the reliquary; the
roses of St Dorothy. And he had again a thought to
throw back to the strange events of that day, and
the woman who had shuddered at the sacrilege she had
helped. After all, he thought, St Dorothy also had a
Pagan lover; but he had not dominated her or
destroyed her faith. She had died free and for the
truth; and then had sent him roses from Paradise.
He raised his eyes and saw through the veil of
incense smoke and of twinkling lights that
Benediction was drawing to its end while the
procession waited. The sense of accumulated riches
of time and tradition pressed past him like a crowd
moving in rank after rank, through unending
centuries; and high above them all, like a garland
of unfading flames, like the sun of our mortal
midnight, the great monstrance blazed against the
darkness of the vaulted shadows, as it blazed
against the black enigma of the universe. For some
are convinced that this enigma also is an Insoluble
Problem. And others have equal certitude that it has
but one solution.
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