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The innocence of Father Brown

by G. K. Chesterton · English · Gutenberg #204 · 459,997 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The innocence of Father Brown

Author: G. K. Chesterton


        
Release date: July 9, 2008 [eBook #204]
                Most recently updated: June 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/204

Credits: Judith Boss and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN ***




THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN

By G. K. Chesterton

                  Contents


                  The Blue Cross
                  The Secret Garden
                  The Queer Feet
                  The Flying Stars
                  The Invisible Man
                  The Honour of Israel Gow
                  The Wrong Shape
                  The Sins of Prince Saradine
                  The Hammer of God
                  The Eye of Apollo
                  The Sign of the Broken Sword
                  The Three Tools of Death





The Blue Cross

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of
sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies,
among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous--nor
wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight
contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official
gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket,
a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His
lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that
looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a
cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him
to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver,
that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat
covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was
Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous
investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to
make the greatest arrest of the century.

Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the
great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook
of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of
the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress, then
taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk
or secretary connected with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be
certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau.

It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased
keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after
the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in
his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as
statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the
daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one
extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic
stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his
outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned the juge d’instruction
upside down and stood him on his head, “to clear his mind”; how he ran
down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to him
to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in
such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly
those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts was
almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself. It was he who ran
the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no
carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served by
the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people’s
doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had kept up an
unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole
letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing
his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A
sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It is said
that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night
merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is quite certain that
he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet
suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it.
Lastly, he was known to be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure,
he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a
monkey. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was
perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin’s ideas were
still in process of settlement.

There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise,
could not cover, and that was his singular height. If Valentin’s quick
eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably
tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot. But all along his
train there was nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than
a cat could be a disguised giraffe. About the people on the boat he had
already satisfied himself; and the people picked up at Harwich or on
the journey limited themselves with certainty to six. There was a short
railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short
market gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow
lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic
priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last
case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so
much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull
as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had
several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting.
The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out of their local
stagnation many such creatures, blind and helpless, like moles
disinterred. Valentin was a sceptic in the severe style of France, and
could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and
this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby
umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know
which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a
moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be
careful, because he had something made of real silver “with blue stones”
 in one of his brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness
with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the
priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and came
back for his umbrella. When he did the last, Valentin even had the good
nature to warn him not to take care of the silver by telling everybody
about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for
someone else; he looked out steadily for anyone, rich or poor, male or
female, who was well up to six feet; for Flambeau was four inches above
it.

He alighted at Liverpool Street, however, quite conscientiously secure
that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to Scotland
Yard to regularise his position and arrange for help in case of need; he
then lit another cigarette and went for a long stroll in the streets of
London. As he was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria, he
paused suddenly and stood. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typical
of London, full of an accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses round
looked at once prosperous and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in
the centre looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the four
sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of this
side was broken by one of London’s admirable accidents--a restaurant
that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably
attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped blinds of
lemon yellow and white. It stood specially high above the street, and in
the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps from the street
ran up to meet the front door almost as a fire-escape might run up to
a first-floor window. Valentin stood and smoked in front of the
yellow-white blinds and considered them long.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few
clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human
eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the
exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both
these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the
instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally
murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide.
In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people
reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well
expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French intelligence
is intelligence specially and solely. He was not “a thinking machine”;
for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A
machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking
man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that
looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear
and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not by
starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They
carry a truism so far--as in the French Revolution. But exactly because
Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason. Only a
man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only
a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong,
undisputed first principles. Here he had no strong first principles.
Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and if he was in London at all,
he might be anything from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common to a tall
toast-master at the Hotel Metropole. In such a naked state of nescience,
Valentin had a view and a method of his own.

In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases, when he
could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly and carefully
followed the train of the unreasonable. Instead of going to the right
places--banks, police stations, rendezvous--he systematically went to
the wrong places; knocked at every empty house, turned down every cul de
sac, went up every lane blocked with rubbish, went round every crescent
that led him uselessly out of the way. He defended this crazy course
quite logically. He said that if one had a clue this was the worst way;
but if one had no clue at all it was the best, because there was just
the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be
the same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must
begin, and it had better be just where another man might stop. Something
about that flight of steps up to the shop, something about the quietude
and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all the detective’s rare
romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike at random. He went up the
steps, and sitting down at a table by the window, asked for a cup of
black coffee.

It was half-way through the morning, and he had not breakfasted; the
slight litter of other breakfasts stood about on the table to remind
him of his hunger; and adding a poached egg to his order, he proceeded
musingly to shake some white sugar into his coffee, thinking all the
time about Flambeau. He remembered how Flambeau had escaped, once by a
pair of nail scissors, and once by a house on fire; once by having to
pay for an unstamped letter, and once by getting people to look through
a telescope at a comet that might destroy the world. He thought his
detective brain as good as the criminal’s, which was true. But he fully
realised the disadvantage. “The criminal is the creative artist; the
detective only the critic,” he said with a sour smile, and lifted his
coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put
salt in it.

He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had come; it
was certainly a sugar-basin; as unmistakably meant for sugar as a
champagne-bottle for champagne. He wondered why they should keep salt in
it. He looked to see if there were any more orthodox vessels. Yes; there
were two salt-cellars quite full. Perhaps there was some speciality in
the condiment in the salt-cellars. He tasted it; it was sugar. Then he
looked round at the restaurant with a refreshed air of interest, to see
if there were any other traces of that singular artistic taste which
puts the sugar in the salt-cellars and the salt in the sugar-basin.
Except for an odd splash of some dark fluid on one of the white-papered
walls, the whole place appeared neat, cheerful and ordinary. He rang the
bell for the waiter.

When that official hurried up, fuzzy-haired and somewhat blear-eyed at
that early hour, the detective (who was not without an appreciation of
the simpler forms of humour) asked him to taste the sugar and see if
it was up to the high reputation of the hotel. The result was that the
waiter yawned suddenly and woke up.

“Do you play this delicate joke on your customers every morning?”
 inquired Valentin. “Does changing the salt and sugar never pall on you
as a jest?”

The waiter, when this irony grew clearer, stammeringly assured him that
the establishment had certainly no such intention; it must be a most
curious mistake. He picked up the sugar-basin and looked at it; he
picked up the salt-cellar and looked at that, his face growing more and
more bewildered. At last he abruptly excused himself, and hurrying
away, returned in a few seconds with the proprietor. The proprietor also
examined the sugar-basin and then the salt-cellar; the proprietor also
looked bewildered.

Suddenly the waiter seemed to grow inarticulate with a rush of words.

“I zink,” he stuttered eagerly, “I zink it is those two clergy-men.”

“What two clergymen?”

“The two clergymen,” said the waiter, “that threw soup at the wall.”

“Threw soup at the wall?” repeated Valentin, feeling sure this must be
some singular Italian metaphor.

“Yes, yes,” said the attendant excitedly, and pointed at the dark splash
on the white paper; “threw it over there on the wall.”

Valentin looked his query at the proprietor, who came to his rescue with
fuller reports.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “it’s quite true, though I don’t suppose it has
anything to do with the sugar and salt. Two clergymen came in and drank
soup here very early, as soon as the shutters were taken down. They were
both very quiet, respectable people; one of them paid the bill and went
out; the other, who seemed a slower coach altogether, was some minutes
longer getting his things together. But he went at last. Only, the
instant before he stepped into the street he deliberately picked up
his cup, which he had only half emptied, and threw the soup slap on the
wall. I was in the back room myself, and so was the waiter; so I could
only rush out in time to find the wall splashed and the shop empty. It
don’t do any particular damage, but it was confounded cheek; and I tried
to catch the men in the street. They were too far off though; I only
noticed they went round the next corner into Carstairs Street.”

The detective was on his feet, hat settled and stick in hand. He had
already decided that in the universal darkness of his mind he could
only follow the first odd finger that pointed; and this finger was odd
enough. Paying his bill and clashing the glass doors behind him, he was
soon swinging round into the other street.

It was fortunate that even in such fevered moments his eye was cool and
quick. Something in a shop-front went by him like a mere flash; yet
he went back to look at it. The shop was a popular greengrocer and
fruiterer’s, an array of goods set out in the open air and plainly
ticketed with their names and prices. In the two most prominent
compartments were two heaps, of oranges and of nuts respectively. On
the heap of nuts lay a scrap of cardboard, on which was written in bold,
blue chalk, “Best tangerine oranges, two a penny.” On the oranges was
the equally clear and exact description, “Finest Brazil nuts, 4d. a lb.”
 M. Valentin looked at these two placards and fancied he had met this
highly subtle form of humour before, and that somewhat recently. He
drew the attention of the red-faced fruiterer, who was looking
rather sullenly up and down the street, to this inaccuracy in his
advertisements. The fruiterer said nothing, but sharply put each
card into its proper place. The detective, leaning elegantly on his
walking-cane, continued to scrutinise the shop. At last he said, “Pray
excuse my apparent irrelevance, my good sir, but I should like to ask
you a question in experimental psychology and the association of ideas.”

The red-faced shopman regarded him with an eye of menace; but he
continued gaily, swinging his cane, “Why,” he pursued, “why are two
tickets wrongly placed in a greengrocer’s shop like a shovel hat that
has come to London for a holiday? Or, in case I do not make myself
clear, what is the mystical association which connects the idea of nuts
marked as oranges with the idea of two clergymen, one tall and the other
short?”

The eyes of the tradesman stood out of his head like a snail’s; he
really seemed for an instant likely to fling himself upon the stranger.
At last he stammered angrily: “I don’t know what you ’ave to do with it,
but if you’re one of their friends, you can tell ’em from me that I’ll
knock their silly ’eads off, parsons or no parsons, if they upset my
apples again.”

“Indeed?” asked the detective, with great sympathy. “Did they upset your
apples?”

“One of ’em did,” said the heated shopman; “rolled ’em all over the
street. I’d ’ave caught the fool but for havin’ to pick ’em up.”

“Which way did these parsons go?” asked Valentin.

“Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across the square,”
 said the other promptly.

“Thanks,” replied Valentin, and vanished like a fairy. On the other side
of the second square he found a policeman, and said: “This is urgent,
constable; have you seen two clergymen in shovel hats?”

The policeman began to chuckle heavily. “I ’ave, sir; and if you arst
me, one of ’em was drunk. He stood in the middle of the road that
bewildered that--”

“Which way did they go?” snapped Valentin.

“They took one of them yellow buses over there,” answered the man; “them
that go to Hampstead.”

Valentin produced his official card and said very rapidly: “Call up two
of your men to come with me in pursuit,” and crossed the road with such
contagious energy that the ponderous policeman was moved to almost agile
obedience. In a minute and a half the French detective was joined on the
opposite pavement by an inspector and a man in plain clothes.

“Well, sir,” began the former, with smiling importance, “and what
may--?”

Valentin pointed suddenly with his cane. “I’ll tell you on the top of
that omnibus,” he said, and was darting and dodging across the tangle of
the traffic. When all three sank panting on the top seats of the yellow
vehicle, the inspector said: “We could go four times as quick in a
taxi.”

“Quite true,” replied their leader placidly, “if we only had an idea of
where we were going.”

“Well, where are you going?” asked the other, staring.

Valentin smoked frowningly for a few seconds; then, removing his
cigarette, he said: “If you know what a man’s doing, get in front of
him; but if you want to guess what he’s doing, keep behind him. Stray
when he strays; stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he. Then you may
see what he saw and may act as he acted. All we can do is to keep our
eyes skinned for a queer thing.”

“What sort of queer thing do you mean?” asked the inspector.

“Any sort of queer thing,” answered Valentin, and relapsed into
obstinate silence.

The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads for what seemed like
hours on end; the great detective would not explain further, and perhaps
his assistants felt a silent and growing doubt of his errand. Perhaps,
also, they felt a silent and growing desire for lunch, for the hours
crept long past the normal luncheon hour, and the long roads of the
North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into length after length like
an infernal telescope. It was one of those journeys on which a man
perpetually feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the
universe, and then finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnell
Park. London died away in draggled taverns and dreary scrubs, and then
was unaccountably born again in blazing high streets and blatant hotels.
It was like passing through thirteen separate vulgar cities all
just touching each other. But though the winter twilight was already
threatening the road ahead of them, the Parisian detective still sat
silent and watchful, eyeing the frontage of the streets that slid by on
either side. By the time they had left Camden Town behind, the policemen
were nearly asleep; at least, they gave something like a jump as
Valentin leapt erect, struck a hand on each man’s shoulder, and shouted
to the driver to stop.

They tumbled down the steps into the road without realising why they
had been dislodged; when they looked round for enlightenment they found
Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger towards a window on the left
side of the road. It was a large window, forming part of the long
façade of a gilt and palatial public-house; it was the part reserved for
respectable dining, and labelled “Restaurant.” This window, like all the
rest along the frontage of the hotel, was of frosted and figured glass;
but in the middle of it was a big, black smash, like a star in the ice.

“Our cue at last,” cried Valentin, waving his stick; “the place with the
broken window.”

“What window? What cue?” asked his principal assistant. “Why, what proof
is there that this has anything to do with them?”

Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick with rage.

“Proof!” he cried. “Good God! the man is looking for proof! Why, of
course, the chances are twenty to one that it has nothing to do with
them. But what else can we do? Don’t you see we must either follow one
wild possibility or else go home to bed?” He banged his way into the
restaurant, followed by his companions, and they were soon seated at a
late luncheon at a little table, and looked at the star of smashed glass
from the inside. Not that it was very informative to them even then.

“Got your window broken, I see,” said Valentin to the waiter as he paid
the bill.

“Yes, sir,” answered the attendant, bending busily over the change, to
which Valentin silently added an enormous tip. The waiter straightened
himself with mild but unmistakable animation.

“Ah, yes, sir,” he said. “Very odd thing, that, sir.”

“Indeed?” Tell us about it,” said the detective with careless curiosity.

“Well, two gents in black came in,” said the waiter; “two of those
foreign parsons that are running about. They had a cheap and quiet
little lunch, and one of them paid for it and went out. The other was
just going out to join him when I looked at my change again and found
he’d paid me more than three times too much. ‘Here,’ I says to the chap
who was nearly out of the door, ‘you’ve paid too much.’ ‘Oh,’ he says,
very cool, ‘have we?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, and picks up the bill to show him.
Well, that was a knock-out.”

“What do you mean?” asked his interlocutor.

“Well, I’d have sworn on seven Bibles that I’d put 4s. on that bill. But
now I saw I’d put 14s., as plain as paint.”

“Well?” cried Valentin, moving slowly, but with burning eyes, “and
then?”

“The parson at the door he says all serene, ‘Sorry to confuse your
accounts, but it’ll pay for the window.’ ‘What window?’ I says. ‘The
one I’m going to break,’ he says, and smashed that blessed pane with his
umbrella.”

All three inquirers made an exclamation; and the inspector said under
his breath, “Are we after escaped lunatics?” The waiter went on with
some relish for the ridiculous story:

“I was so knocked silly for a second, I couldn’t do anything. The man
marched out of the place and joined his friend just round the corner.
Then they went so quick up Bullock Street that I couldn’t catch them,
though I ran round the bars to do it.”

“Bullock Street,” said the detective, and shot up that thoroughfare as
quickly as the strange couple he pursued.

Their journey now took them through bare brick ways like tunnels;
streets with few lights and even with few windows; streets that seemed
built out of the blank backs of everything and everywhere. Dusk was
deepening, and it was not easy even for the London policemen to guess
in what exact direction they were treading. The inspector, however, was
pretty certain that they would eventually strike some part of Hampstead
Heath. Abruptly one bulging gas-lit window broke the blue twilight like
a bull’s-eye lantern; and Valentin stopped an instant before a little
garish sweetstuff shop. After an instant’s hesitation he went in; he
stood amid the gaudy colours of the confectionery with entire gravity
and bought thirteen chocolate cigars with a certain care. He was clearly
preparing an opening; but he did not need one.

An angular, elderly young woman in the shop had regarded his elegant
appearance with a merely automatic inquiry; but when she saw the door
behind him blocked with the blue uniform of the inspector, her eyes
seemed to wake up.

“Oh,” she said, “if you’ve come about that parcel, I’ve sent it off
already.”

“Parcel?” repeated Valentin; and it was his turn to look inquiring.

“I mean the parcel the gentleman left--the clergyman gentleman.”

“For goodness’ sake,” said Valentin, leaning forward with his first
real confession of eagerness, “for Heaven’s sake tell us what happened
exactly.”

“Well,” said the woman a little doubtfully, “the clergymen came in about
half an hour ago and bought some peppermints and talked a bit, and then
went off towards the Heath. But a second after, one of them runs
back into the shop and says, ‘Have I left a parcel!’ Well, I looked
everywhere and couldn’t see one; so he says, ‘Never mind; but if it
should turn up, please post it to this address,’ and he left me the
address and a shilling for my trouble. And sure enough, though I thought
I’d looked everywhere, I found he’d left a brown paper parcel, so I
posted it to the place he said. I can’t remember the address now; it
was somewhere in Westminster. But as the thing seemed so important, I
thought perhaps the police had come about it.”

“So they have,” said Valentin shortly. “Is Hampstead Heath near here?”

“Straight on for fifteen minutes,” said the woman, “and you’ll come
right out on the open.” Valentin sprang out of the shop and began to
run. The other detectives followed him at a reluctant trot.

The street they threaded was so narrow and shut in by shadows that when
they came out unexpectedly into the void common and vast sky they were
startled to find the evening still so light and clear. A perfect dome
of peacock-green sank into gold amid the blackening trees and the dark
violet distances. The glowing green tint was just deep enough to pick
out in points of crystal one or two stars. All that was left of the
daylight lay in a golden glitter across the edge of Hampstead and that
popular hollow which is called the Vale of Health. The holiday makers
who roam this region had not wholly dispersed; a few couples sat
shapelessly on benches; and here and there a distant girl still shrieked
in one of the swings. The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around
the sublime vulgarity of man; and standing on the slope and looking
across the valley, Valentin beheld the thing which he sought.

Among the black and breaking groups in that distance was one especially
black which did not break--a group of two figures clerically clad.
Though they seemed as small as insects, Valentin could see that one of
them was much smaller than the other. Though the other had a student’s
stoop and an inconspicuous manner, he could see that the man was well
over six feet high. He shut his teeth and went forward, whirling his
stick impatiently. By the time he had substantially diminished the
distance and magnified the two black figures as in a vast microscope,
he had perceived something else; something which startled him, and yet
which he had somehow expected. Whoever was the tall priest, there could
be no doubt about the identity of the short one. It was his friend of
the Harwich train, the stumpy little cure of Essex whom he had warned
about his brown paper parcels.

Now, so far as this went, everything fitted in finally and rationally
enough. Valentin had learned by his inquiries that morning that a Father
Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver cross with sapphires, a
relic of considerable value, to show some of the foreign priests at the
congress. This undoubtedly was the “silver with blue stones”; and Father
Brown undoubtedly was the little greenhorn in the train. Now there
was nothing wonderful about the fact that what Valentin had found out
Flambeau had also found out; Flambeau found out everything. Also there
was nothing wonderful in the fact that when Flambeau heard of a sapphire
cross he should try to steal it; that was the most natural thing in all
natural history. And most certainly there was nothing wonderful about
the fact that Flambeau should have it all his own way with such a silly
sheep as the man with the umbrella and the parcels. He was the sort of
man whom anybody could lead on a string to the North Pole; it was not
surprising that an actor like Flambeau, dressed as another priest, could
lead him to Hampstead Heath. So far the crime seemed clear enough; and
while the detective pitied the priest for his helplessness, he almost
despised Flambeau for condescending to so gullible a victim. But when
Valentin thought of all that had happened in between, of all that had
led him to his triumph, he racked his brains for the smallest rhyme or
reason in it. What had the stealing of a blue-and-silver cross from a
priest from Essex to do with chucking soup at wall paper? What had it
to do with calling nuts oranges, or with paying for windows first and
breaking them afterwards? He had come to the end of his chase; yet
somehow he had missed the middle of it. When he failed (which was
seldom), he had usually grasped the clue, but nevertheless missed the
criminal. Here he had grasped the criminal, but still he could not grasp
the clue.

The two figures that they followed were crawling like black flies
across the huge green contour of a hill. They were evidently sunk in
conversation, and perhaps did not notice where they were going; but they
were certainly going to the wilder and more silent heights of the Heath.
As their pursuers gained on them, the latter had to use the undignified
attitudes of the deer-stalker, to crouch behind clumps of trees and
even to crawl prostrate in deep grass. By these ungainly ingenuities the
hunters even came close enough to the quarry to hear the murmur of the
discussion, but no word could be distinguished except the word “reason”
 recurring frequently in a high and almost childish voice. Once over
an abrupt dip of land and a dense tangle of thickets, the detectives
actually lost the two figures they were following. They did not find the
trail again for an agonising ten minutes, and then it led round the brow
of a great dome of hill overlooking an amphitheatre of rich and desolate
sunset scenery. Under a tree in this commanding yet neglected spot was
an old ramshackle wooden seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in
serious speech together. The gorgeous green and gold still clung to
the darkening horizon; but the dome above was turning slowly from
peacock-green to peacock-blue, and the stars detached themselves more
and more like solid jewels. Mutely motioning to his followers, Valentin
contrived to creep up behind the big branching tree, and, standing there
in deathly silence, heard the words of the strange priests for the first
time.

After he had listened for a minute and a half, he was gripped by a
devilish doubt. Perhaps he had dragged the two English policemen to the
wastes of a nocturnal heath on an errand no saner than seeking figs on
its thistles. For the two priests were talking exactly like priests,
piously, with learning and leisure, about the most aerial enigmas of
theology. The little Essex priest spoke the more simply, with his round
face turned to the strengthening stars; the other talked with his
head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more
innocently clerical conversation could have been heard in any white
Italian cloister or black Spanish cathedral.

The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown’s sentences,
which ended: “... what they really meant in the Middle Ages by the
heavens being incorruptible.”

The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:

“Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can
look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be
wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?”

“No,” said the other priest; “reason is always reasonable, even in the
last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge
the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone
on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the
Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason.”

The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky and said:

“Yet who knows if in that infinite universe--?”

“Only infinite physically,” said the little priest, turning sharply
in his seat, “not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of
truth.”

Valentin behind his tree was tearing his fingernails with silent fury.
He seemed almost to hear the sniggers of the English detectives whom
he had brought so far on a fantastic guess only to listen to the
metaphysical gossip of two mild old parsons. In his impatience he lost
the equally elaborate answer of the tall cleric, and when he listened
again it was again Father Brown who was speaking:

“Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look
at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and
sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please.
Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon
is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all
that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason
and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of
pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’”

Valentin was just in the act of rising from his rigid and crouching
attitude and creeping away as softly as might be, felled by the one
great folly of his life. But something in the very silence of the tall
priest made him stop until the latter spoke. When at last he did speak,
he said simply, his head bowed and his hands on his knees:

“Well, I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than our
reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one can only
bow my head.”

Then, with brow yet bent and without changing by the faintest shade his
attitude or voice, he added:

“Just hand over that sapphire cross of yours, will you? We’re all alone
here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll.”

The utterly unaltered voice and attitude added a strange violence to
that shocking change of speech. But the guarder of the relic only seemed
to turn his head by the smallest section of the compass. He seemed still
to have a somewhat foolish face turned to the stars. Perhaps he had not
understood. Or, perhaps, he had understood and sat rigid with terror.

“Yes,” said the tall priest, in the same low voice and in the same still
posture, “yes, I am Flambeau.”

Then, after a pause, he said:

“Come, will you give me that cross?”

“No,” said the other, and the monosyllable had an odd sound.

Flambeau suddenly flung off all his pontifical pretensions. The great
robber leaned back in his seat and laughed low but long.

“No,” he cried, “you won’t give it me, you proud prelate. You won’t give
it me, you little celibate simpleton. Shall I tell you why you won’t
give it me? Because I’ve got it already in my own breast-pocket.”

The small man from Essex turned what seemed to be a dazed face in the
dusk, and said, with the timid eagerness of “The Private Secretary”:

“Are--are you sure?”

Flambeau yelled with delight.

“Really, you’re as good as a three-act farce,” he cried. “Yes, you
turnip, I am quite sure. I had the sense to make a duplicate of the
right parcel, and now, my friend, you’ve got the duplicate and I’ve got
the jewels. An old dodge, Father Brown--a very old dodge.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown, and passed his hand through his hair with the
same strange vagueness of manner. “Yes, I’ve heard of it before.”

The colossus of crime leaned over to the little rustic priest with a
sort of sudden interest.

“You have heard of it?” he asked. “Where have you heard of it?”

“Well, I mustn’t tell you his name, of course,” said the little man
simply. “He was a penitent, you know. He had lived prosperously for
about twenty years entirely on duplicate brown paper parcels. And so,
you see, when I began to suspect you, I thought of this poor chap’s way
of doing it at once.”

“Began to suspect me?” repeated the outlaw with increased intensity.
“Did you really have the gumption to suspect me just because I brought
you up to this bare part of the heath?”

“No, no,” said Brown with an air of apology. “You see, I suspected you
when we first met. It’s that little bulge up the sleeve where you people
have the spiked bracelet.”

“How in Tartarus,” cried Flambeau, “did you ever hear of the spiked
bracelet?”

“Oh, one’s little flock, you know!” said Father Brown, arching his
eyebrows rather blankly. “When I was a curate in Hartlepool, there were
three of them with spiked bracelets. So, as I suspected you from the
first, don’t you see, I made sure that the cross should go safe, anyhow.
I’m afraid I watched you, you know. So at last I saw you change the
parcels. Then, don’t you see, I changed them back again. And then I left
the right one behind.”

“Left it behind?” repeated Flambeau, and for the first time there was
another note in his voice beside his triumph.

“Well, it was like this,” said the little priest, speaking in the same
unaffected way. “I went back to that sweet-shop and asked if I’d left a
parcel, and gave them a particular address if it turned up. Well, I knew
I hadn’t; but when I went away again I did. So, instead of running after
me with that valuable parcel, they have sent it flying to a friend of
mine in Westminster.” Then he added rather sadly: “I learnt that, too,
from a poor fellow in Hartlepool. He used to do it with handbags he
stole at railway stations, but he’s in a monastery now. Oh, one gets to
know, you know,” he added, rubbing his head again with the same sort of
desperate apology. “We can’t help being priests. People come and tell us
these things.”

Flambeau tore a brown-paper parcel out of his inner pocket and rent it
in pieces. There was nothing but paper and sticks of lead inside it. He
sprang to his feet with a gigantic gesture, and cried:

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a bumpkin like you could manage
all that. I believe you’ve still got the stuff on you, and if you don’t
give it up--why, we’re all alone, and I’ll take it by force!”

“No,” said Father Brown simply, and stood up also, “you won’t take it
by force. First, because I really haven’t still got it. And, second,
because we are not alone.”

Flambeau stopped in his stride forward.

“Behind that tree,” said Father Brown, pointing, “are two strong
policemen and the greatest detective alive. How did they come here, do
you ask? Why, I brought them, of course! How did I do it? Why, I’ll tell
you if you like! Lord bless you, we have to know twenty such things
when we work among the criminal classes! Well, I wasn’t sure you were
a thief, and it would never do to make a scandal against one of our
own clergy. So I just tested you to see if anything would make you show
yourself. A man generally makes a small scene if he finds salt in his
coffee; if he doesn’t, he has some reason for keeping quiet. I changed
the salt and sugar, and you kept quiet. A man generally objects if
his bill is three times too big. If he pays it, he has some motive for
passing unnoticed. I altered your bill, and you paid it.”

The world seemed waiting for Flambeau to leap like a tiger. But he was
held back as by a spell; he was stunned with the utmost curiosity.

“Well,” went on Father Brown, with lumbering lucidity, “as you wouldn’t
leave any tracks for the police, of course somebody had to. At every
place we went to, I took care to do something that would get us talked
about for the rest of the day. I didn’t do much harm--a splashed wall,
spilt apples, a broken window; but I saved the cross, as the cross will
always be saved. It is at Westminster by now. I rather wonder you didn’t
stop it with the Donkey’s Whistle.”

“With the what?” asked Flambeau.

“I’m glad you’ve never heard of it,” said the priest, making a face.
“It’s a foul thing. I’m sure you’re too good a man for a Whistler. I
couldn’t have countered it even with the Spots myself; I’m not strong
enough in the legs.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” asked the other.

“Well, I did think you’d know the Spots,” said Father Brown, agreeably
surprised. “Oh, you can’t have gone so very wrong yet!”

“How in blazes do you know all these horrors?” cried Flambeau.

The shadow of a smile crossed the round, simple face of his clerical
opponent.

“Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose,” he said. “Has it never
struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins
is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil? But, as a matter of
fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest.”

“What?” asked the thief, almost gaping.

“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”

And even as he turned away to collect his property, the three policemen
came out from under the twilight trees. Flambeau was an artist and a
sportsman. He stepped back and swept Valentin a great bow.

“Do not bow to me, mon ami,” said Valentin with silver clearness. “Let
us both bow to our master.”

And they both stood an instant uncovered while the little Essex priest
blinked about for his umbrella.




The Secret Garden


Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, was late for his dinner,
and some of his guests began to arrive before him. These were, however,
reassured by his confidential servant, Ivan, the old man with a scar,
and a face almost as grey as his moustaches, who always sat at a table
in the entrance hall--a hall hung with weapons. Valentin’s house was
perhaps as peculiar and celebrated as its master. It was an old house,
with high walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the
oddity--and perhaps the police value--of its architecture was this: that
there was no ultimate exit at all except through this front door, which
was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large and elaborate,
and there were many exits from the house into the garden. But there was
no exit from the garden into the world outside; all round it ran a tall,
smooth, unscalable wall with special spikes at the top; no bad garden,
perhaps, for a man to reflect in whom some hundred criminals had sworn
to kill.

As Ivan explained to the guests, their host had telephoned that he
was detained for ten minutes. He was, in truth, making some last
arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these
duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with
precision. Ruthless in the pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about
their punishment. Since he had been supreme over French--and largely
over European--policial methods, his great influence had been honourably
used for the mitigation of sentences and the purification of prisons.
He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only
thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black clothes and the
red rosette--an elegant figure, his dark beard already streaked with
grey. He went straight through his house to his study, which opened on
the grounds behind. The garden door of it was open, and after he had
carefully locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few
seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden. A sharp moon
was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin
regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as
his. Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the
most tremendous problem of their lives. From any such occult mood,
at least, he quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his
guests had already begun to arrive. A glance at his drawing-room when he
entered it was enough to make certain that his principal guest was not
there, at any rate. He saw all the other pillars of the little party;
he saw Lord Galloway, the English Ambassador--a choleric old man with a
russet face like an apple, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter. He
saw Lady Galloway, slim and threadlike, with silver hair and a face
sensitive and superior. He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham, a
pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair. He
saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with
her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr. Simon,
a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a
forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty
of superciliousness, since they come through constantly elevating
the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex, whom he had
recently met in England. He saw--perhaps with more interest than any
of these--a tall man in uniform, who had bowed to the Galloways without
receiving any very hearty acknowledgment, and who now advanced alone to
pay his respects to his host. This was Commandant O’Brien, of the
French Foreign Legion. He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure,
clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an
officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful
suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy. He was by birth
an Irish gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially
Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of debts, and
now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging
about in uniform, sabre and spurs. When he bowed to the Ambassador’s
family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked
away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each
other, their distinguished host was not specially interested in them. No
one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening. Valentin
was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose
friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and
triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that
multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small
religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for
the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr.
Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was
ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was
an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American
Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman,
but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more “progressive”
 than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought “progressive.”
 He thought Valentin “progressive,” thereby doing him a grave injustice.

The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive
as a dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very few of us
can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence. He was a huge
fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without
so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well
brushed back like a German’s; his face was red, fierce and cherubic,
with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise
infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean. Not
long, however, did that salon merely stare at the celebrated American;
his lateness had already become a domestic problem, and he was sent with
all speed into the dining-room with Lady Galloway on his arm.

Except on one point the Galloways were genial and casual enough. So long
as Lady Margaret did not take the arm of that adventurer O’Brien, her
father was quite satisfied; and she had not done so, she had decorously
gone in with Dr. Simon. Nevertheless, old Lord Galloway was restless and
almost rude. He was diplomatic enough during dinner, but when, over the
cigars, three of the younger men--Simon the doctor, Brown the priest,
and the detrimental O’Brien, the exile in a foreign uniform--all melted
away to mix with the ladies or smoke in the conservatory, then the
English diplomatist grew very undiplomatic indeed. He was stung
every sixty seconds with the thought that the scamp O’Brien might be
signalling to Margaret somehow; he did not attempt to imagine how. He
was left over the coffee with Brayne, the hoary Yankee who believed
in all religions, and Valentin, the grizzled Frenchman who believed in
none. They could argue with each other, but neither could appeal to
him. After a time this “progressive” logomachy had reached a crisis of
tedium; Lord Galloway got up also and sought the drawing-room. He lost
his way in long passages for some six or eight minutes: till he heard
the high-pitched, didactic voice of the doctor, and then the dull voice
of the priest, followed by general laughter. They also, he thought with
a curse, were probably arguing about “science and religion.” But the
instant he opened the salon door he saw only one thing--he saw what
was not there. He saw that Commandant O’Brien was absent, and that Lady
Margaret was absent too.

Rising impatiently from the drawing-room, as he had from the
dining-room, he stamped along the passage once more. His notion of
protecting his daughter from the Irish-Algerian n’er-do-well had become
something central and even mad in his mind. As he went towards the back
of the house, where was Valentin’s study, he was surprised to meet his
daughter, who swept past with a white, scornful face, which was a second
enigma. If she had been with O’Brien, where was O’Brien! If she had
not been with O’Brien, where had she been? With a sort of senile and
passionate suspicion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the
mansion, and eventually found a servants’ entrance that opened on to the
garden. The moon with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled away all
the storm-wrack. The argent light lit up all four corners of the garden.
A tall figure in blue was striding across the lawn towards the study
door; a glint of moonlit silver on his facings picked him out as
Commandant O’Brien.

He vanished through the French windows into the house, leaving Lord
Galloway in an indescribable temper, at once virulent and vague. The
blue-and-silver garden, like a scene in a theatre, seemed to taunt him
with all that tyrannic tenderness against which his worldly authority
was at war. The length and grace of the Irishman’s stride enraged him as
if he were a rival instead of a father; the moonlight maddened him.
He was trapped as if by magic into a garden of troubadours, a Watteau
fairyland; and, willing to shake off such amorous imbecilities by
speech, he stepped briskly after his enemy. As he did so he tripped over
some tree or stone in the grass; looked down at it first with irritation
and then a second time with curiosity. The next instant the moon and the
tall poplars looked at an unusual sight--an elderly English diplomatist
running hard and crying or bellowing as he ran.

His hoarse shouts brought a pale face to the study door, the beaming
glasses and worried brow of Dr. Simon, who heard the nobleman’s first
clear words. Lord Galloway was crying: “A corpse in the grass--a
blood-stained corpse.” O’Brien at last had gone utterly out of his mind.

“We must tell Valentin at once,” said the doctor, when the other had
brokenly described all that he had dared to examine. “It is fortunate
that he is here;” and even as he spoke the great detective entered the
study, attracted by the cry. It was almost amusing to note his typical
transformation; he had come with the common concern of a host and a
gentleman, fearing that some guest or servant was ill. When he was
told the gory fact, he turned with all his gravity instantly bright and
businesslike; for this, however abrupt and awful, was his business.

“Strange, gentlemen,” he said as they hurried out into the garden, “that
I should have hunted mysteries all over the earth, and now one comes and
settles in my own back-yard. But where is the place?” They crossed the
lawn less easily, as a slight mist had begun to rise from the river; but
under the guidance of the shaken Galloway they found the body sunken
in deep grass--the body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man. He lay
face downwards, so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad
in black cloth, and that his big head was bald, except for a wisp or
two of brown hair that clung to his skull like wet seaweed. A scarlet
serpent of blood crawled from under his fallen face.

“At least,” said Simon, with a deep and singular intonation, “he is none
of our party.”

“Examine him, doctor,” cried Valentin rather sharply. “He may not be
dead.”

The doctor bent down. “He is not quite cold, but I am afraid he is dead
enough,” he answered. “Just help me to lift him up.”

They lifted him carefully an inch from the ground, and all doubts as
to his being really dead were settled at once and frightfully. The head
fell away. It had been entirely sundered from the body; whoever had
cut his throat had managed to sever the neck as well. Even Valentin
was slightly shocked. “He must have been as strong as a gorilla,” he
muttered.

Not without a shiver, though he was used to anatomical abortions, Dr.
Simon lifted the head. It was slightly slashed about the neck and jaw,
but the face was substantially unhurt. It was a ponderous, yellow face,
at once sunken and swollen, with a hawk-like nose and heavy lids--a face
of a wicked Roman emperor, with, perhaps, a distant touch of a Chinese
emperor. All present seemed to look at it with the coldest eye of
ignorance. Nothing else could be noted about the man except that, as
they had lifted his body, they had seen underneath it the white gleam of
a shirt-front defaced with a red gleam of blood. As Dr. Simon said,
the man had never been of their party. But he might very well have been
trying to join it, for he had come dressed for such an occasion.

Valentin went down on his hands and knees and examined with his closest
professional attention the grass and ground for some twenty yards round
the body, in which he was assisted less skillfully by the doctor, and
quite vaguely by the English lord. Nothing rewarded their grovellings
except a few twigs, snapped or chopped into very small lengths, which
Valentin lifted for an instant’s examination and then tossed away.

“Twigs,” he said gravely; “twigs, and a total stranger with his head cut
off; that is all there is on this lawn.”

There was an almost creepy stillness, and then the unnerved Galloway
called out sharply:

“Who’s that! Who’s that over there by the garden wall!”

A small figure with a foolishly large head drew waveringly near them in
the moonlit haze; looked for an instant like a goblin, but turned out to
be the harmless little priest whom they had left in the drawing-room.

“I say,” he said meekly, “there are no gates to this garden, do you
know.”

Valentin’s black brows had come together somewhat crossly, as they did
on principle at the sight of the cassock. But he was far too just a man
to deny the relevance of the remark. “You are right,” he said. “Before
we find out how he came to be killed, we may have to find out how he
came to be here. Now listen to me, gentlemen. If it can be done without
prejudice to my position and duty, we shall all agree that certain
distinguished names might well be kept out of this. There are ladies,
gentlemen, and there is a foreign ambassador. If we must mark it down as
a crime, then it must be followed up as a crime. But till then I can use
my own discretion. I am the head of the police; I am so public that I
can afford to be private. Please Heaven, I will clear everyone of my own
guests before I call in my men to look for anybody else. Gentlemen, upon
your honour, you will none of you leave the house till tomorrow at noon;
there are bedrooms for all. Simon, I think you know where to find my
man, Ivan, in the front hall; he is a confidential man. Tell him to
leave another servant on guard and come to me at once. Lord Galloway,
you are certainly the best person to tell the ladies what has happened,
and prevent a panic. They also must stay. Father Brown and I will remain
with the body.”

When this spirit of the captain spoke in Valentin he was obeyed like a
bugle. Dr. Simon went through to the armoury and routed out Ivan, the
public detective’s private detective. Galloway went to the drawing-room
and told the terrible news tactfully enough, so that by the time the
company assembled there the ladies were already startled and already
soothed. Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist stood at the
head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight, like symbolic
statues of their two philosophies of death.

Ivan, the confidential man with the scar and the moustaches, came out
of the house like a cannon ball, and came racing across the lawn to
Valentin like a dog to his master. His livid face was quite lively
with the glow of this domestic detective story, and it was with almost
unpleasant eagerness that he asked his master’s permission to examine
the remains.

“Yes; look, if you like, Ivan,” said Valentin, “but don’t be long. We
must go in and thrash this out in the house.”

Ivan lifted the head, and then almost let it drop.

“Why,” he gasped, “it’s--no, it isn’t; it can’t be. Do you know this
man, sir?”

“No,” said Valentin indifferently; “we had better go inside.”

Between them they carried the corpse to a sofa in the study, and then
all made their way to the drawing-room.

The detective sat down at a desk quietly, and even without hesitation;
but his eye was the iron eye of a judge at assize. He made a few rapid
notes upon paper in front of him, and then said shortly: “Is everybody
here?”

“Not Mr. Brayne,” said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, looking round.

“No,” said Lord Galloway in a hoarse, harsh voice. “And not Mr. Neil
O’Brien, I fancy. I saw that gentleman walking in the garden when the
corpse was still warm.”

“Ivan,” said the detective, “go and fetch Commandant O’Brien and Mr.
Brayne. Mr. Brayne, I know, is finishing a cigar in the dining-room;
Commandant O’Brien, I think, is walking up and down the conservatory. I
am not sure.”

The faithful attendant flashed from the room, and before anyone could
stir or speak Valentin went on with the same soldierly swiftness of
exposition.

“Everyone here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden, his
head cut clean from his body. Dr. Simon, you have examined it. Do you
think that to cut a man’s throat like that would need great force? Or,
perhaps, only a very sharp knife?”

“I should say that it could not be done with a knife at all,” said the
pale doctor.

“Have you any thought,” resumed Valentin, “of a tool with which it could
be done?”

“Speaking within modern probabilities, I really haven’t,” said the
doctor, arching his painful brows. “It’s not easy to hack a neck through
even clumsily, and this was a very clean cut. It could be done with a
battle-axe or an old headsman’s axe, or an old two-handed sword.”

“But, good heavens!” cried the Duchess, almost in hysterics, “there
aren’t any two-handed swords and battle-axes round here.”

Valentin was still busy with the paper in front of him. “Tell me,” he
said, still writing rapidly, “could it have been done with a long French
cavalry sabre?”

A low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable reason,
curdled everyone’s blood like the knocking in Macbeth. Amid that frozen
silence Dr. Simon managed to say: “A sabre--yes, I suppose it could.”

“Thank you,” said Valentin. “Come in, Ivan.”

The confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil
O’Brien, whom he had found at last pacing the garden again.

The Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold.
“What do you want with me?” he cried.

“Please sit down,” said Valentin in pleasant, level tones. “Why, you
aren’t wearing your sword. Where is it?”

“I left it on the library table,” said O’Brien, his brogue deepening in
his disturbed mood. “It was a nuisance, it was getting--”

“Ivan,” said Valentin, “please go and get the Commandant’s sword from
the library.” Then, as the servant vanished, “Lord Galloway says he saw
you leaving the garden just before he found the corpse. What were you
doing in the garden?”

The Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. “Oh,” he cried in
pure Irish, “admirin’ the moon. Communing with Nature, me bhoy.”

A heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came again that
trivial and terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared, carrying an empty steel
scabbard. “This is all I can find,” he said.

“Put it on the table,” said Valentin, without looking up.

There was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of inhuman
silence round the dock of the condemned murderer. The Duchess’s weak
exclamations had long ago died away. Lord Galloway’s swollen hatred was
satisfied and even sobered. The voice that came was quite unexpected.

“I think I can tell you,” cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering
voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. “I can tell you
what Mr. O’Brien was doing in the garden, since he is bound to
silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; I said in my family
circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect. He was a little
angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect. I wonder,”
 she added, with rather a wan smile, “if he will care at all for it now.
For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing
like this.”

Lord Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was intimidating her in
what he imagined to be an undertone. “Hold your tongue, Maggie,” he said
in a thunderous whisper. “Why should you shield the fellow? Where’s his
sword? Where’s his confounded cavalry--”

He stopped because of the singular stare with which his daughter was
regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for the whole
group.

“You old fool!” she said in a low voice without pretence of piety, “what
do you suppose you are trying to prove? I tell you this man was innocent
while with me. But if he wasn’t innocent, he was still with me. If he
murdered a man in the garden, who was it who must have seen--who must
at least have known? Do you hate Neil so much as to put your own
daughter--”

Lady Galloway screamed. Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those
satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw
the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish
adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was
full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous
paramours.

In the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said: “Was it a
very long cigar?”

The change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round to see
who had spoken.

“I mean,” said little Father Brown, from the corner of the room, “I
mean that cigar Mr. Brayne is finishing. It seems nearly as long as a
walking-stick.”

Despite the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation in
Valentin’s face as he lifted his head.

“Quite right,” he remarked sharply. “Ivan, go and see about Mr. Brayne
again, and bring him here at once.”

The instant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin addressed the
girl with an entirely new earnestness.

“Lady Margaret,” he said, “we all feel, I am sure, both gratitude
and admiration for your act in rising above your lower dignity and
explaining the Commandant’s conduct. But there is a hiatus still.
Lord Galloway, I understand, met you passing from the study to the
drawing-room, and it was only some minutes afterwards that he found the
garden and the Commandant still walking there.”

“You have to remember,” replied Margaret, with a faint irony in her
voice, “that I had just refused him, so we should scarcely have come
back arm in arm. He is a gentleman, anyhow; and he loitered behind--and
so got charged with murder.”

“In those few moments,” said Valentin gravely, “he might really--”

The knock came again, and Ivan put in his scarred face.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but Mr. Brayne has left the house.”

“Left!” cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his feet.

“Gone. Scooted. Evaporated,” replied Ivan in humorous French. “His hat
and coat are gone, too, and I’ll tell you something to cap it all. I ran
outside the house to find any traces of him, and I found one, and a big
trace, too.”

“What do you mean?” asked Valentin.

“I’ll show you,” said his servant, and reappeared with a flashing naked
cavalry sabre, streaked with blood about the point and edge. Everyone in
the room eyed it as if it were a thunderbolt; but the experienced Ivan
went on quite quietly:

“I found this,” he said, “flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road
to Paris. In other words, I found it just where your respectable Mr.
Brayne threw it when he ran away.”

There was again a silence, but of a new sort. Valentin took the sabre,
examined it, reflected with unaffected concentration of thought, and
then turned a respectful face to O’Brien. “Commandant,” he said, “we
trust you will always produce this weapon if it is wanted for police
examination. Meanwhile,” he added, slapping the steel back in the
ringing scabbard, “let me return you your sword.”

At the military symbolism of the action the audience could hardly
refrain from applause.

For Neil O’Brien, indeed, that gesture was the turning-point of
existence. By the time he was wandering in the mysterious garden again
in the colours of the morning the tragic futility of his ordinary mien
had fallen from him; he was a man with many reasons for happiness. Lord
Galloway was a gentleman, and had offered him an apology. Lady Margaret
was something better than a lady, a woman at least, and had perhaps
given him something better than an apology, as they drifted among the
old flowerbeds before breakfast. The whole company was more lighthearted
and humane, for though the riddle of the death remained, the load of
suspicion was lifted off them all, and sent flying off to Paris with the
strange millionaire--a man they hardly knew. The devil was cast out of
the house--he had cast himself out.

Still, the riddle remained; and when O’Brien threw himself on a garden
seat beside Dr. Simon, that keenly scientific person at once resumed
it. He did not get much talk out of O’Brien, whose thoughts were on
pleasanter things.

“I can’t say it interests me much,” said the Irishman frankly,
“especially as it seems pretty plain now. Apparently Brayne hated this
stranger for some reason; lured him into the garden, and killed him with
my sword. Then he fled to the city, tossing the sword away as he went.
By the way, Ivan tells me the dead man had a Yankee dollar in his
pocket. So he was a countryman of Brayne’s, and that seems to clinch it.
I don’t see any difficulties about the business.”

“There are five colossal difficulties,” said the doctor quietly; “like
high walls within walls. Don’t mistake me. I don’t doubt that Brayne
did it; his flight, I fancy, proves that. But as to how he did it.
First difficulty: Why should a man kill another man with a great hulking
sabre, when he can almost kill him with a pocket knife and put it back
in his pocket? Second difficulty: Why was there no noise or outcry?
Does a man commonly see another come up waving a scimitar and offer
no remarks? Third difficulty: A servant watched the front door all the
evening; and a rat cannot get into Valentin’s garden anywhere. How did
the dead man get into the garden? Fourth difficulty: Given the same
conditions, how did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“And the fifth,” said Neil, with eyes fixed on the English priest who
was coming slowly up the path.

“Is a trifle, I suppose,” said the doctor, “but I think an odd one. When
I first saw how the head had been slashed, I supposed the assassin had
struck more than once. But on examination I found many cuts across the
truncated section; in other words, they were struck after the head was
off. Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sabring his
body in the moonlight?”

“Horrible!” said O’Brien, and shuddered.

The little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking, and had
waited, with characteristic shyness, till they had finished. Then he
said awkwardly:

“I say, I’m sorry to interrupt. But I was sent to tell you the news!”

“News?” repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully through his
glasses.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Father Brown mildly. “There’s been another
murder, you know.”

Both men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.

“And, what’s stranger still,” continued the priest, with his dull eye
on the rhododendrons, “it’s the same disgusting sort; it’s another
beheading. They found the second head actually bleeding into the river,
a few yards along Brayne’s road to Paris; so they suppose that he--”

“Great Heaven!” cried O’Brien. “Is Brayne a monomaniac?”

“There are American vendettas,” said the priest impassively. Then he
added: “They want you to come to the library and see it.”

Commandant O’Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling
decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this secretive carnage;
where were these extravagant amputations going to stop? First one
head was hacked off, and then another; in this case (he told himself
bitterly) it was not true that two heads were better than one. As he
crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon
Valentin’s table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head;
and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it
was only a Nationalist paper, called _The Guillotine_, which every week
showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing
features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some
note. But O’Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his
sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect
which belongs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from the
grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the
newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw
the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on
Valentin’s table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles,
the great devil grins on Notre Dame.

The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from
under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning.
Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at the upper end of
a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the mortal remains, looking
enormous in the twilight. The big black figure and yellow face of the
man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged. The
second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that
morning, lay streaming and dripping beside it; Valentin’s men were still
seeking to recover the rest of this second corpse, which was supposed
to be afloat. Father Brown, who did not seem to share O’Brien’s
sensibilities in the least, went up to the second head and examined it
with his blinking care. It was little more than a mop of wet white hair,
fringed with silver fire in the red and level morning light; the face,
which seemed of an ugly, empurpled and perhaps criminal type, had been
much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the water.

“Good morning, Commandant O’Brien,” said Valentin, with quiet
cordiality. “You have heard of Brayne’s last experiment in butchery, I
suppose?”

Father Brown was still bending over the head with white hair, and he
said, without looking up:

“I suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head, too.”

“Well, it seems common sense,” said Valentin, with his hands in his
pockets. “Killed in the same way as the other. Found within a few yards
of the other. And sliced by the same weapon which we know he carried
away.”

“Yes, yes; I know,” replied Father Brown submissively. “Yet, you know, I
doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head.”

“Why not?” inquired Dr. Simon, with a rational stare.

“Well, doctor,” said the priest, looking up blinking, “can a man cut off
his own head? I don’t know.”

O’Brien felt an insane universe crashing about his ears; but the doctor
sprang forward with impetuous practicality and pushed back the wet white
hair.

“Oh, there’s no doubt it’s Brayne,” said the priest quietly. “He had
exactly that chip in the left ear.”

The detective, who had been regarding the priest with steady and
glittering eyes, opened his clenched mouth and said sharply: “You seem
to know a lot about him, Father Brown.”

“I do,” said the little man simply. “I’ve been about with him for some
weeks. He was thinking of joining our church.”

The star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin’s eyes; he strode towards
the priest with clenched hands. “And, perhaps,” he cried, with a
blasting sneer, “perhaps he was also thinking of leaving all his money
to your church.”

“Perhaps he was,” said Brown stolidly; “it is possible.”

“In that case,” cried Valentin, with a dreadful smile, “you may indeed
know a great deal about him. About his life and about his--”

Commandant O’Brien laid a hand on Valentin’s arm. “Drop that slanderous
rubbish, Valentin,” he said, “or there may be more swords yet.”

But Valentin (under the steady, humble gaze of the priest) had already
recovered himself. “Well,” he said shortly, “people’s private opinions
can wait. You gentlemen are still bound by your promise to stay; you
must enforce it on yourselves--and on each other. Ivan here will tell
you anything more you want to know; I must get to business and write to
the authorities. We can’t keep this quiet any longer. I shall be writing
in my study if there is any more news.”

“Is there any more news, Ivan?” asked Dr. Simon, as the chief of police
strode out of the room.

“Only one more thing, I think, sir,” said Ivan, wrinkling up his grey
old face, “but that’s important, too, in its way. There’s that old
buffer you found on the lawn,” and he pointed without pretence of
reverence at the big black body with the yellow head. “We’ve found out
who he is, anyhow.”

“Indeed!” cried the astonished doctor, “and who is he?”

“His name was Arnold Becker,” said the under-detective, “though he went
by many aliases. He was a wandering sort of scamp, and is known to have
been in America; so that was where Brayne got his knife into him. We
didn’t have much to do with him ourselves, for he worked mostly in
Germany. We’ve communicated, of course, with the German police. But,
oddly enough, there was a twin brother of his, named Louis Becker,
whom we had a great deal to do with. In fact, we found it necessary to
guillotine him only yesterday. Well, it’s a rum thing, gentlemen, but
when I saw that fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my
life. If I hadn’t seen Louis Becker guillotined with my own eyes,
I’d have sworn it was Louis Becker lying there in the grass. Then, of
course, I remembered his twin brother in Germany, and following up the
clue--”

The explanatory Ivan stopped, for the excellent reason that nobody was
listening to him. The Commandant and the doctor were both staring at
Father Brown, who had sprung stiffly to his feet, and was holding his
temples tight like a man in sudden and violent pain.

“Stop, stop, stop!” he cried; “stop talking a minute, for I see half.
Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all?
Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking. I could paraphrase
any page in Aquinas once. Will my head split--or will it see? I see
half--I only see half.”

He buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid torture
of thought or prayer, while the other three could only go on staring at
this last prodigy of their wild twelve hours.

When Father Brown’s hands fell they showed a face quite fresh and
serious, like a child’s. He heaved a huge sigh, and said: “Let us get
this said and done with as quickly as possible. Look here, this will
be the quickest way to convince you all of the truth.” He turned to the
doctor. “Dr. Simon,” he said, “you have a strong head-piece, and I heard
you this morning asking the five hardest questions about this business.
Well, if you will ask them again, I will answer them.”

Simon’s pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and wonder, but
he answered at once. “Well, the first question, you know, is why a man
should kill another with a clumsy sabre at all when a man can kill with
a bodkin?”

“A man cannot behead with a bodkin,” said Brown calmly, “and for this
murder beheading was absolutely necessary.”

“Why?” asked O’Brien, with interest.

“And the next question?” asked Father Brown.

“Well, why didn’t the man cry out or anything?” asked the doctor;
“sabres in gardens are certainly unusual.”

“Twigs,” said the priest gloomily, and turned to the window which looked
on the scene of death. “No one saw the point of the twigs. Why should
they lie on that lawn (look at it) so far from any tree? They were not
snapped off; they were chopped off. The murderer occupied his enemy
with some tricks with the sabre, showing how he could cut a branch in
mid-air, or what-not. Then, while his enemy bent down to see the result,
a silent slash, and the head fell.”

“Well,” said the doctor slowly, “that seems plausible enough. But my
next two questions will stump anyone.”

The priest still stood looking critically out of the window and waited.

“You know how all the garden was sealed up like an air-tight chamber,”
 went on the doctor. “Well, how did the strange man get into the garden?”

Without turning round, the little priest answered: “There never was any
strange man in the garden.”

There was a silence, and then a sudden cackle of almost childish
laughter relieved the strain. The absurdity of Brown’s remark moved Ivan
to open taunts.

“Oh!” he cried; “then we didn’t lug a great fat corpse on to a sofa last
night? He hadn’t got into the garden, I suppose?”

“Got into the garden?” repeated Brown reflectively. “No, not entirely.”

“Hang it all,” cried Simon, “a man gets into a garden, or he doesn’t.”

“Not necessarily,” said the priest, with a faint smile. “What is the
nest question, doctor?”

“I fancy you’re ill,” exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; “but I’ll ask the
next question if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“He didn’t get out of the garden,” said the priest, still looking out of
the window.

“Didn’t get out of the garden?” exploded Simon.

“Not completely,” said Father Brown.

Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. “A man gets out of a
garden, or he doesn’t,” he cried.

“Not always,” said Father Brown.

Dr. Simon sprang to his feet impatiently. “I have no time to spare on
such senseless talk,” he cried angrily. “If you can’t understand a man
being on one side of a wall or the other, I won’t trouble you further.”

“Doctor,” said the cleric very gently, “we have always got on very
pleasantly together. If only for the sake of old friendship, stop and
tell me your fifth question.”

The impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly: “The
head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way. It seemed to be done
after death.”

“Yes,” said the motionless priest, “it was done so as to make you assume
exactly the one simple falsehood that you did assume. It was done to
make you take for granted that the head belonged to the body.”

The borderland of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved
horribly in the Gaelic O’Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all
the horse-men and fish-women that man’s unnatural fancy has begotten. A
voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: “Keep out
of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid
the evil garden where died the man with two heads.” Yet, while these
shameful symbolic shapes passed across the ancient mirror of his Irish
soul, his Frenchified intellect was quite alert, and was watching the
odd priest as closely and incredulously as all the rest.

Father Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the window,
with his face in dense shadow; but even in that shadow they could see
it was pale as ashes. Nevertheless, he spoke quite sensibly, as if there
were no Gaelic souls on earth.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you did not find the strange body of Becker in
the garden. You did not find any strange body in the garden. In face
of Dr. Simon’s rationalism, I still affirm that Becker was only partly
present. Look here!” (pointing to the black bulk of the mysterious
corpse) “you never saw that man in your lives. Did you ever see this
man?”

He rapidly rolled away the bald, yellow head of the unknown, and put in
its place the white-maned head beside it. And there, complete, unified,
unmistakable, lay Julius K. Brayne.

“The murderer,” went on Brown quietly, “hacked off his enemy’s head and
flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the
sword only. He flung the head over the wall also. Then he had only to
clap on another head to the corpse, and (as he insisted on a private
inquest) you all imagined a totally new man.”

“Clap on another head!” said O’Brien staring. “What other head? Heads
don’t grow on garden bushes, do they?”

“No,” said Father Brown huskily, and looking at his boots; “there
is only one place where they grow. They grow in the basket of the
guillotine, beside which the chief of police, Aristide Valentin, was
standing not an hour before the murder. Oh, my friends, hear me a minute
more before you tear me in pieces. Valentin is an honest man, if being
mad for an arguable cause is honesty. But did you never see in that
cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything, anything, to
break what he calls the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for
it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne’s crazy
millions had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did
little to alter the balance of things. But Valentin heard a whisper that
Brayne, like so many scatter-brained sceptics, was drifting to us; and
that was quite a different thing. Brayne would pour supplies into the
impoverished and pugnacious Church of France; he would support six
Nationalist newspapers like _The Guillotine_. The battle was already
balanced on a point, and the fanatic took flame at the risk. He resolved
to destroy the millionaire, and he did it as one would expect the
greatest of detectives to commit his only crime. He abstracted the
severed head of Becker on some criminological excuse, and took it home
in his official box. He had that last argument with Brayne, that Lord
Galloway did not hear the end of; that failing, he led him out into the
sealed garden, talked about swordsmanship, used twigs and a sabre for
illustration, and--”

Ivan of the Scar sprang up. “You lunatic,” he yelled; “you’ll go to my
master now, if I take you by--”

“Why, I was going there,” said Brown heavily; “I must ask him to
confess, and all that.”

Driving the unhappy Brown before them like a hostage or sacrifice, they
rushed together into the sudden stillness of Valentin’s study.

The great detective sat at his desk apparently too occupied to hear
their turbulent entrance. They paused a moment, and then something in
the look of that upright and elegant back made the doctor run forward
suddenly. A touch and a glance showed him that there was a small box of
pills at Valentin’s elbow, and that Valentin was dead in his chair; and
on the blind face of the suicide was more than the pride of Cato.




The Queer Feet


If you meet a member of that select club, “The Twelve True Fishermen,”
 entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe,
as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not
black. If (supposing that you have the star-defying audacity to address
such a being) you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it
to avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will then retire crushed. But
you will leave behind you a mystery as yet unsolved and a tale worth
telling.

If (to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture) you were to meet
a mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask
him what he thought was the most singular luck of his life, he would
probably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the Vernon
Hotel, where he had averted a crime and, perhaps, saved a soul, merely
by listening to a few footsteps in a passage. He is perhaps a little
proud of this wild and wonderful guess of his, and it is possible that
he might refer to it. But since it is immeasurably unlikely that you
will ever rise high enough in the social world to find “The Twelve
True Fishermen,” or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and
criminals to find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at
all unless you hear it from me.

The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual
dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical
society which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that
topsy-turvy product--an “exclusive” commercial enterprise. That is, it
was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning
people away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning
enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively
create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend
money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable
hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society
would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there
were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor
was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday
afternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by accident, in the corner of a
square in Belgravia. It was a small hotel; and a very inconvenient
one. But its very inconveniences were considered as walls protecting a
particular class. One inconvenience, in particular, was held to be of
vital importance: the fact that practically only twenty-four people
could dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was the
celebrated terrace table, which stood open to the air on a sort of
veranda overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London.
Thus it happened that even the twenty-four seats at this table could
only be enjoyed in warm weather; and this making the enjoyment yet more
difficult made it yet more desired. The existing owner of the hotel was
a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a million out of it, by making it
difficult to get into. Of course he combined with this limitation in the
scope of his enterprise the most careful polish in its performance.
The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe, and the
demeanour of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the
English upper class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like the
fingers on his hand; there were only fifteen of them all told. It was
much easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in
that hotel. Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness,
as if he were a gentleman’s servant. And, indeed, there was generally at
least one waiter to every gentleman who dined.

The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have consented to dine
anywhere but in such a place, for it insisted on a luxurious privacy;
and would have been quite upset by the mere thought that any other club
was even dining in the same building. On the occasion of their annual
dinner the Fishermen were in the habit of exposing all their treasures,
as if they were in a private house, especially the celebrated set
of fish knives and forks which were, as it were, the insignia of the
society, each being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form of a fish,
and each loaded at the hilt with one large pearl. These were always
laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the most
magnificent in that magnificent repast. The society had a vast number
of ceremonies and observances, but it had no history and no object; that
was where it was so very aristocratic. You did not have to be anything
in order to be one of the Twelve Fishers; unless you were already a
certain sort of person, you never even heard of them. It had been in
existence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-president
was the Duke of Chester.

If I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this appalling hotel,
the reader may feel a natural wonder as to how I came to know anything
about it, and may even speculate as to how so ordinary a person as my
friend Father Brown came to find himself in that golden galley. As far
as that is concerned, my story is simple, or even vulgar. There is in
the world a very aged rioter and demagogue who breaks into the most
refined retreats with the dreadful information that all men are
brothers, and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse it was
Father Brown’s trade to follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, had
been struck down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish
employer, marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to send
for the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father
Brown we are not concerned, for the excellent reason that that cleric
kept it to himself; but apparently it involved him in writing out a note
or statement for the conveying of some message or the righting of some
wrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a meek impudence which he would
have shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to be provided with a
room and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind
man, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any
difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual
stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something
just cleaned. There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon
Hotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance.
There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as
startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a
new brother taking breakfast or tea in one’s own family. Moreover,
the priest’s appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mere
glimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis in the club. Mr.
Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate, the
disgrace. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass
down a short passage decorated with a few dingy but important pictures,
and come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right
into passages leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar
passage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately
on your left hand is the corner of a glass office, which abuts upon
the lounge--a house within a house, so to speak, like the old hotel bar
which probably once occupied its place.

In this office sat the representative of the proprietor (nobody in this
place ever appeared in person if he could help it), and just beyond the
office, on the way to the servants’ quarters, was the gentlemen’s cloak
room, the last boundary of the gentlemen’s domain. But between the
office and the cloak room was a small private room without other outlet,
sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and important matters,
such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or declining to lend him
sixpence. It is a mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever that
he permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour profaned by a
mere priest, scribbling away on a piece of paper. The story which Father
Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story than this
one, only it will never be known. I can merely state that it was very
nearly as long, and that the last two or three paragraphs of it were the
least exciting and absorbing.

For it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began a
little to allow his thoughts to wander and his animal senses, which were
commonly keen, to awaken. The time of darkness and dinner was drawing
on; his own forgotten little room was without a light, and perhaps the
gathering gloom, as occasionally happens, sharpened the sense of sound.
As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document,
he caught himself writing to the rhythm of a recurrent noise outside,
just as one sometimes thinks to the tune of a railway train. When he
became conscious of the thing he found what it was: only the ordinary
patter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no very unlikely
matter. Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened ceiling, and listened to
the sound. After he had listened for a few seconds dreamily, he got to
his feet and listened intently, with his head a little on one side.
Then he sat down again and buried his brow in his hands, now not merely
listening, but listening and thinking also.

The footsteps outside at any given moment were such as one might hear in
any hotel; and yet, taken as a whole, there was something very strange
about them. There were no other footsteps. It was always a very silent
house, for the few familiar guests went at once to their own apartments,
and the well-trained waiters were told to be almost invisible until
they were wanted. One could not conceive any place where there was less
reason to apprehend anything irregular. But these footsteps were so
odd that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular. Father
Brown followed them with his finger on the edge of the table, like a man
trying to learn a tune on the piano.

First, there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light man
might make in winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped
and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp, numbering not a quarter
of the steps, but occupying about the same time. The moment the last
echoing stamp had died away would come again the run or ripple of light,
hurrying feet, and then again the thud of the heavier walking. It was
certainly the same pair of boots, partly because (as has been said)
there were no other boots about, and partly because they had a small
but unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that
cannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question
his head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen
men run in order to slide. But why on earth should a man run in order
to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? Yet no other
description would cover the antics of this invisible pair of legs. The
man was either walking very fast down one-half of the corridor in order
to walk very slow down the other half; or he was walking very slow
at one end to have the rapture of walking fast at the other. Neither
suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker and
darker, like his room.

Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cell
seemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind of
vision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in unnatural or
symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen religious dance? Or some entirely
new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself with
more exactness what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: it
certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk
with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any servant or
messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer
orders (in an oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly
drunk, but generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand
or sit in constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, with
a kind of careless emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not caring what
noise it made, belonged to only one of the animals of this earth. It was
a gentleman of western Europe, and probably one who had never worked for
his living.

Just as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to the quicker
one, and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat. The listener remarked
that though this step was much swifter it was also much more noiseless,
almost as if the man were walking on tiptoe. Yet it was not associated
in his mind with secrecy, but with something else--something that he
could not remember. He was maddened by one of those half-memories that
make a man feel half-witted. Surely he had heard that strange, swift
walking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a new idea in
his head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct outlet on the
passage, but let on one side into the glass office, and on the other
into the cloak room beyond. He tried the door into the office, and
found it locked. Then he looked at the window, now a square pane full of
purple cloud cleft by livid sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil as
a dog smells rats.

The rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained its
supremacy. He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he should
lock the door, and would come later to release him. He told himself that
twenty things he had not thought of might explain the eccentric sounds
outside; he reminded himself that there was just enough light left to
finish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the window so as to
catch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely plunged once more
into the almost completed record. He had written for about twenty
minutes, bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light;
then suddenly he sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.

This time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man had
walked, with levity indeed and lightning quickness, but he had walked.
This time he ran. One could hear the swift, soft, bounding steps coming
along the corridor, like the pads of a fleeing and leaping panther.
Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man, in still yet tearing
excitement. Yet, when the sound had swept up to the office like a sort
of whispering whirlwind, it suddenly changed again to the old slow,
swaggering stamp.

Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door to
be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side. The
attendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably because the
only guests were at dinner and his office was a sinecure. After groping
through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the dim cloak room
opened on the lighted corridor in the form of a sort of counter or
half-door, like most of the counters across which we have all handed
umbrellas and received tickets. There was a light immediately above
the semicircular arch of this opening. It threw little illumination on
Father Brown himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dim
sunset window behind him. But it threw an almost theatrical light on the
man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.

He was an elegant man in very plain evening dress; tall, but with an air
of not taking up much room; one felt that he could have slid along like
a shadow where many smaller men would have been obvious and obstructive.
His face, now flung back in the lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious,
the face of a foreigner. His figure was good, his manners good humoured
and confident; a critic could only say that his black coat was a shade
below his figure and manners, and even bulged and bagged in an odd
way. The moment he caught sight of Brown’s black silhouette against the
sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called out
with amiable authority: “I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have
to go away at once.”

Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to look
for the coat; it was not the first menial work he had done in his
life. He brought it and laid it on the counter; meanwhile, the strange
gentleman who had been feeling in his waistcoat pocket, said laughing:
“I haven’t got any silver; you can keep this.” And he threw down half a
sovereign, and caught up his coat.

Father Brown’s figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant
he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost
it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.
Often the Catholic Church (which is wedded to common sense) did not
approve of it. Often he did not approve of it himself. But it was real
inspiration--important at rare crises--when whosoever shall lose his
head the same shall save it.

“I think, sir,” he said civilly, “that you have some silver in your
pocket.”

The tall gentleman stared. “Hang it,” he cried, “if I choose to give you
gold, why should you complain?”

“Because silver is sometimes more valuable than gold,” said the priest
mildly; “that is, in large quantities.”

The stranger looked at him curiously. Then he looked still more
curiously up the passage towards the main entrance. Then he looked back
at Brown again, and then he looked very carefully at the window beyond
Brown’s head, still coloured with the after-glow of the storm. Then he
seemed to make up his mind. He put one hand on the counter, vaulted
over as easily as an acrobat and towered above the priest, putting one
tremendous hand upon his collar.

“Stand still,” he said, in a hacking whisper. “I don’t want to threaten
you, but--”

“I do want to threaten you,” said Father Brown, in a voice like a
rolling drum, “I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and
the fire that is not quenched.”

“You’re a rum sort of cloak-room clerk,” said the other.

“I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau,” said Brown, “and I am ready to hear
your confession.”

The other stood gasping for a few moments, and then staggered back into
a chair.

The first two courses of the dinner of The Twelve True Fishermen had
proceeded with placid success. I do not possess a copy of the menu; and
if I did it would not convey anything to anybody. It was written in
a sort of super-French employed by cooks, but quite unintelligible to
Frenchmen. There was a tradition in the club that the _hors d’œuvres_
should be various and manifold to the point of madness. They were taken
seriously because they were avowedly useless extras, like the whole
dinner and the whole club. There was also a tradition that the soup
course should be light and unpretending--a sort of simple and austere
vigil for the feast of fish that was to come. The talk was that strange,
slight talk which governs the British Empire, which governs it in
secret, and yet would scarcely enlighten an ordinary Englishman even if
he could overhear it. Cabinet ministers on both sides were alluded to
by their Christian names with a sort of bored benignity. The Radical
Chancellor of the Exchequer, whom the whole Tory party was supposed to
be cursing for his extortions, was praised for his minor poetry, or his
saddle in the hunting field. The Tory leader, whom all Liberals
were supposed to hate as a tyrant, was discussed and, on the whole,
praised--as a Liberal. It seemed somehow that politicians were very
important. And yet, anything seemed important about them except their
politics. Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who
still wore Gladstone collars; he was a kind of symbol of all that
phantasmal and yet fixed society. He had never done anything--not even
anything wrong. He was not fast; he was not even particularly rich.
He was simply in the thing; and there was an end of it. No party could
ignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly would
have been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a
young and rising politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth,
with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and
enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and
his principle was simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it,
and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that
this was no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a
club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly,
like a schoolboy. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated
them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company
by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal
and a Conservative. He himself was a Conservative, even in private life.
He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certain
old-fashioned statesmen, and seen from behind he looked like the man the
empire wants. Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-indulgent
bachelor, with rooms in the Albany--which he was.

As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table,
and only twelve members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace
in the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side of
the table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view of
the garden, the colours of which were still vivid, though evening was
closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. The chairman sat in
the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end
of it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was the
custom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to stand
lining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat
proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he
had never heard of them before. But before the first chink of knife and
fork this army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required
to collect and distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence.
Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions of
courtesy long before. It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent,
to say that he ever positively appeared again. But when the important
course, the fish course, was being brought on, there was--how shall I
put it?--a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told
that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes
of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape
of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting
fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The
Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish
forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost
as much as the silver fork it was eaten with. So it did, for all I know.
This course was dealt with in eager and devouring silence; and it was
only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual
remark: “They can’t do this anywhere but here.”

“Nowhere,” said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker
and nodding his venerable head a number of times. “Nowhere, assuredly,
except here. It was represented to me that at the Café Anglais--”

Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal
of his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. “It
was represented to me that the same could be done at the Café Anglais.
Nothing like it, sir,” he said, shaking his head ruthlessly, like a
hanging judge. “Nothing like it.”

“Overrated place,” said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look
of him) for the first time for some months.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, “it’s
jolly good for some things. You can’t beat it at--”

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His
stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly
gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery
which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything
unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if
the inanimate world disobeyed--if a chair ran away from us.

The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every
face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time.
It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible
modern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genuine historic
aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty
bottles, and very probably ending with money. A genuine democrat would
have asked him, with comrade-like clearness of speech, what the devil he
was doing. But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man near
to them, either as a slave or as a friend. That something had gone wrong
with the servants was merely a dull, hot embarrassment. They did not
want to be brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent. They
wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over. It was over. The waiter,
after standing for some seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned round
and ran madly out of the room.

When he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was in
company with another waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulated
with southern fierceness. Then the first waiter went away, leaving the
second waiter, and reappeared with a third waiter. By the time a fourth
waiter had joined this hurried synod, Mr. Audley felt it necessary to
break the silence in the interests of Tact. He used a very loud cough,
instead of a presidential hammer, and said: “Splendid work young
Moocher’s doing in Burmah. Now, no other nation in the world could
have--”

A fifth waiter had sped towards him like an arrow, and was whispering in
his ear: “So sorry. Important! Might the proprietor speak to you?”

The chairman turned in disorder, and with a dazed stare saw Mr. Lever
coming towards them with his lumbering quickness. The gait of the good
proprietor was indeed his usual gait, but his face was by no means
usual. Generally it was a genial copper-brown; now it was a sickly
yellow.

“You will pardon me, Mr. Audley,” he said, with asthmatic
breathlessness. “I have great apprehensions. Your fish-plates, they are
cleared away with the knife and fork on them!”

“Well, I hope so,” said the chairman, with some warmth.

“You see him?” panted the excited hotel keeper; “you see the waiter who
took them away? You know him?”

“Know the waiter?” answered Mr. Audley indignantly. “Certainly not!”

Mr. Lever opened his hands with a gesture of agony. “I never send him,”
 he said. “I know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take away
the plates, and he find them already away.”

Mr. Audley still looked rather too bewildered to be really the man the
empire wants; none of the company could say anything except the man of
wood--Colonel Pound--who seemed galvanised into an unnatural life. He
rose rigidly from his chair, leaving all the rest sitting, screwed his
eyeglass into his eye, and spoke in a raucous undertone as if he had
half-forgotten how to speak. “Do you mean,” he said, “that somebody has
stolen our silver fish service?”

The proprietor repeated the open-handed gesture with even greater
helplessness and in a flash all the men at the table were on their feet.

“Are all your waiters here?” demanded the colonel, in his low, harsh
accent.

“Yes; they’re all here. I noticed it myself,” cried the young duke,
pushing his boyish face into the inmost ring. “Always count ’em as I
come in; they look so queer standing up against the wall.”

“But surely one cannot exactly remember,” began Mr. Audley, with heavy
hesitation.

“I remember exactly, I tell you,” cried the duke excitedly. “There never
have been more than fifteen waiters at this place, and there were no
more than fifteen tonight, I’ll swear; no more and no less.”

The proprietor turned upon him, quaking in a kind of palsy of surprise.
“You say--you say,” he stammered, “that you see all my fifteen waiters?”

“As usual,” assented the duke. “What is the matter with that!”

“Nothing,” said Lever, with a deepening accent, “only you did not. For
one of zem is dead upstairs.”

There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. It may be
(so supernatural is the word death) that each of those idle men looked
for a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea. One of
them--the duke, I think--even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth:
“Is there anything we can do?”

“He has had a priest,” said the Jew, not untouched.

Then, as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their own position. For a
few weird seconds they had really felt as if the fifteenth waiter might
be the ghost of the dead man upstairs. They had been dumb under that
oppression, for ghosts were to them an embarrassment, like beggars. But
the remembrance of the silver broke the spell of the miraculous; broke
it abruptly and with a brutal reaction. The colonel flung over his chair
and strode to the door. “If there was a fifteenth man here, friends,” he
said, “that fifteenth fellow was a thief. Down at once to the front
and back doors and secure everything; then we’ll talk. The twenty-four
pearls of the club are worth recovering.”

Mr. Audley seemed at first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanly
to be in such a hurry about anything; but, seeing the duke dash down the
stairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more mature motion.

At the same instant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and declared that
he had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace of
the silver.

The crowd of diners and attendants that tumbled helter-skelter down the
passages divided into two groups. Most of the Fishermen followed the
proprietor to the front room to demand news of any exit. Colonel Pound,
with the chairman, the vice-president, and one or two others darted down
the corridor leading to the servants’ quarters, as the more likely line
of escape. As they did so they passed the dim alcove or cavern of
the cloak room, and saw a short, black-coated figure, presumably an
attendant, standing a little way back in the shadow of it.

“Hallo, there!” called out the duke. “Have you seen anyone pass?”

The short figure did not answer the question directly, but merely said:
“Perhaps I have got what you are looking for, gentlemen.”

They paused, wavering and wondering, while he quietly went to the back
of the cloak room, and came back with both hands full of shining silver,
which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a salesman. It took the
form of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives.

“You--you--” began the colonel, quite thrown off his balance at last.
Then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things: first, that
the short, black-clad man was dressed like a clergyman; and, second,
that the window of the room behind him was burst, as if someone had
passed violently through. “Valuable things to deposit in a cloak room,
aren’t they?” remarked the clergyman, with cheerful composure.

“Did--did you steal those things?” stammered Mr. Audley, with staring
eyes.

“If I did,” said the cleric pleasantly, “at least I am bringing them
back again.”

“But you didn’t,” said Colonel Pound, still staring at the broken
window.

“To make a clean breast of it, I didn’t,” said the other, with some
humour. And he seated himself quite gravely on a stool. “But you know
who did,” said the, colonel.

“I don’t know his real name,” said the priest placidly, “but I know
something of his fighting weight, and a great deal about his spiritual
difficulties. I formed the physical estimate when he was trying to
throttle me, and the moral estimate when he repented.”

“Oh, I say--repented!” cried young Chester, with a sort of crow of
laughter.

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. “Odd, isn’t
it,” he said, “that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many
who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for
God or man? But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little upon
my province. If you doubt the penitence as a practical fact, there are
your knives and forks. You are The Twelve True Fishers, and there are
all your silver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men.”

“Did you catch this man?” asked the colonel, frowning.

Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. “Yes,” he said, “I
caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long
enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring
him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

There was a long silence. All the other men present drifted away
to carry the recovered silver to their comrades, or to consult the
proprietor about the queer condition of affairs. But the grim-faced
colonel still sat sideways on the counter, swinging his long, lank legs
and biting his dark moustache.

At last he said quietly to the priest: “He must have been a clever
fellow, but I think I know a cleverer.”

“He was a clever fellow,” answered the other, “but I am not quite sure
of what other you mean.”

“I mean you,” said the colonel, with a short laugh. “I don’t want to get
the fellow jailed; make yourself easy about that. But I’d give a good
many silver forks to know exactly how you fell into this affair, and how
you got the stuff out of him. I reckon you’re the most up-to-date devil
of the present company.”

Father Brown seemed rather to like the saturnine candour of the soldier.
“Well,” he said, smiling, “I mustn’t tell you anything of the man’s
identity, or his own story, of course; but there’s no particular reason
why I shouldn’t tell you of the mere outside facts which I found out for
myself.”

He hopped over the barrier with unexpected activity, and sat beside
Colonel Pound, kicking his short legs like a little boy on a gate. He
began to tell the story as easily as if he were telling it to an old
friend by a Christmas fire.

“You see, colonel,” he said, “I was shut up in that small room there
doing some writing, when I heard a pair of feet in this passage doing a
dance that was as queer as the dance of death. First came quick, funny
little steps, like a man walking on tiptoe for a wager; then came slow,
careless, creaking steps, as of a big man walking about with a cigar.
But they were both made by the same feet, I swear, and they came in
rotation; first the run and then the walk, and then the run again. I
wondered at first idly and then wildly why a man should act these two
parts at once. One walk I knew; it was just like yours, colonel. It
was the walk of a well-fed gentleman waiting for something, who strolls
about rather because he is physically alert than because he is mentally
impatient. I knew that I knew the other walk, too, but I could not
remember what it was. What wild creature had I met on my travels that
tore along on tiptoe in that extraordinary style? Then I heard a clink
of plates somewhere; and the answer stood up as plain as St. Peter’s. It
was the walk of a waiter--that walk with the body slanted forward, the
eyes looking down, the ball of the toe spurning away the ground, the
coat tails and napkin flying. Then I thought for a minute and a half
more. And I believe I saw the manner of the crime, as clearly as if I
were going to commit it.”

Colonel Pound looked at him keenly, but the speaker’s mild grey eyes
were fixed upon the ceiling with almost empty wistfulness.

“A crime,” he said slowly, “is like any other work of art. Don’t look
surprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from
an infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has
one indispensable mark--I mean, that the centre of it is simple, however
much the fulfilment may be complicated. Thus, in _Hamlet_, let us say,
the grotesqueness of the grave-digger, the flowers of the mad girl, the
fantastic finery of Osric, the pallor of the ghost and the grin of
the skull are all oddities in a sort of tangled wreath round one plain
tragic figure of a man in black. Well, this also,” he said, getting
slowly down from his seat with a smile, “this also is the plain tragedy
of a man in black. Yes,” he went on, seeing the colonel look up in some
wonder, “the whole of this tale turns on a black coat. In this, as in
_Hamlet_, there are the rococo excrescences--yourselves, let us say. There
is the dead waiter, who was there when he could not be there. There is
the invisible hand that swept your table clear of silver and melted
into air. But every clever crime is founded ultimately on some one quite
simple fact--some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystification
comes in covering it up, in leading men’s thoughts away from it. This
large and subtle and (in the ordinary course) most profitable crime, was
built on the plain fact that a gentleman’s evening dress is the same as
a waiter’s. All the rest was acting, and thundering good acting, too.”

“Still,” said the colonel, getting up and frowning at his boots, “I am
not sure that I understand.”

“Colonel,” said Father Brown, “I tell you that this archangel of
impudence who stole your forks walked up and down this passage twenty
times in the blaze of all the lamps, in the glare of all the eyes. He
did not go and hide in dim corners where suspicion might have searched
for him. He kept constantly on the move in the lighted corridors, and
everywhere that he went he seemed to be there by right. Don’t ask me
what he was like; you have seen him yourself six or seven times tonight.
You were waiting with all the other grand people in the reception room
at the end of the passage there, with the terrace just beyond. Whenever
he came among you gentlemen, he came in the lightning style of a waiter,
with bent head, flapping napkin and flying feet. He shot out on to the
terrace, did something to the table cloth, and shot back again towards
the office and the waiters’ quarters. By the time he had come under the
eye of the office clerk and the waiters he had become another man in
every inch of his body, in every instinctive gesture. He strolled among
the servants with the absent-minded insolence which they have all seen
in their patrons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from the
dinner party should pace all parts of the house like an animal at the
Zoo; they know that nothing marks the Smart Set more than a habit of
walking where one chooses. When he was magnificently weary of walking
down that particular passage he would wheel round and pace back past
the office; in the shadow of the arch just beyond he was altered as by
a blast of magic, and went hurrying forward again among the Twelve
Fishermen, an obsequious attendant. Why should the gentlemen look at
a chance waiter? Why should the waiters suspect a first-rate walking
gentleman? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In the
proprietor’s private quarters he called out breezily for a syphon of
soda water, saying he was thirsty. He said genially that he would carry
it himself, and he did; he carried it quickly and correctly through the
thick of you, a waiter with an obvious errand. Of course, it could not
have been kept up long, but it only had to be kept up till the end of
the fish course.

“His worst moment was when the waiters stood in a row; but even then he
contrived to lean against the wall just round the corner in such a way
that for that important instant the waiters thought him a gentleman,
while the gentlemen thought him a waiter. The rest went like winking. If
any waiter caught him away from the table, that waiter caught a languid
aristocrat. He had only to time himself two minutes before the fish was
cleared, become a swift servant, and clear it himself. He put the plates
down on a sideboard, stuffed the silver in his breast pocket, giving it
a bulgy look, and ran like a hare (I heard him coming) till he came to
the cloak room. There he had only to be a plutocrat again--a plutocrat
called away suddenly on business. He had only to give his ticket to
the cloak-room attendant, and go out again elegantly as he had come in.
Only--only I happened to be the cloak-room attendant.”

“What did you do to him?” cried the colonel, with unusual intensity.
“What did he tell you?”

“I beg your pardon,” said the priest immovably, “that is where the story
ends.”

“And the interesting story begins,” muttered Pound. “I think I
understand his professional trick. But I don’t seem to have got hold of
yours.”

“I must be going,” said Father Brown.

They walked together along the passage to the entrance hall, where they
saw the fresh, freckled face of the Duke of Chester, who was bounding
buoyantly along towards them.

“Come along, Pound,” he cried breathlessly. “I’ve been looking for you
everywhere. The dinner’s going again in spanking style, and old Audley
has got to make a speech in honour of the forks being saved. We want to
start some new ceremony, don’t you know, to commemorate the occasion. I
say, you really got the goods back, what do you suggest?”

“Why,” said the colonel, eyeing him with a certain sardonic approval, “I
should suggest that henceforward we wear green coats, instead of
black. One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like a
waiter.”

“Oh, hang it all!” said the young man, “a gentleman never looks like a
waiter.”

“Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose,” said Colonel Pound, with the
same lowering laughter on his face. “Reverend sir, your friend must have
been very smart to act the gentleman.”

Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the
night was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.

“Yes,” he said; “it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do
you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to
be a waiter.”

And saying “Good evening,” he pushed open the heavy doors of that palace
of pleasures. The golden gates closed behind him, and he went at a brisk
walk through the damp, dark streets in search of a penny omnibus.




The Flying Stars


“The most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his
highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last.
It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to
provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I
found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe,
as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long
rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather
find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of
the Café Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his
riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame
him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some
cathedral town. Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich
and wicked peasant (which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get
his indignant head relieved against a grey line of clipped poplars,
and those solemn plains of Gaul over which broods the mighty spirit of
Millet.

“Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English
middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old
middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage
drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name
on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree. Enough, you know the
species. I really think my imitation of Dickens’s style was dexterous
and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening.”

Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and
even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly
incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must
study it. From this standpoint the drama may be said to have begun when
the front doors of the house with the stable opened on the garden with
the monkey tree, and a young girl came out with bread to feed the birds
on the afternoon of Boxing Day. She had a pretty face, with brave brown
eyes; but her figure was beyond conjecture, for she was so wrapped up in
brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur. But
for the attractive face she might have been a small toddling bear.

The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby
light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with
the ghosts of the dead roses. On one side of the house stood the stable,
on the other an alley or cloister of laurels led to the larger garden
behind. The young lady, having scattered bread for the birds (for
the fourth or fifth time that day, because the dog ate it), passed
unobtrusively down the lane of laurels and into a glimmering plantation
of evergreens behind. Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or
ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it
fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure.

“Oh, don’t jump, Mr. Crook,” she called out in some alarm; “it’s much
too high.”

The individual riding the party wall like an aerial horse was a tall,
angular young man, with dark hair sticking up like a hair brush,
intelligent and even distinguished lineaments, but a sallow and almost
alien complexion. This showed the more plainly because he wore an
aggressive red tie, the only part of his costume of which he seemed to
take any care. Perhaps it was a symbol. He took no notice of the girl’s
alarmed adjuration, but leapt like a grasshopper to the ground beside
her, where he might very well have broken his legs.

“I think I was meant to be a burglar,” he said placidly, “and I have no
doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice
house next door. I can’t see any harm in it, anyhow.”

“How can you say such things!” she remonstrated.

“Well,” said the young man, “if you’re born on the wrong side of the
wall, I can’t see that it’s wrong to climb over it.”

“I never know what you will say or do next,” she said.

“I don’t often know myself,” replied Mr. Crook; “but then I am on the
right side of the wall now.”

“And which is the right side of the wall?” asked the young lady,
smiling.

“Whichever side you are on,” said the young man named Crook.

As they went together through the laurels towards the front garden
a motor horn sounded thrice, coming nearer and nearer, and a car of
splendid speed, great elegance, and a pale green colour swept up to the
front doors like a bird and stood throbbing.

“Hullo, hullo!” said the young man with the red tie, “here’s somebody
born on the right side, anyhow. I didn’t know, Miss Adams, that your
Santa Claus was so modern as this.”

“Oh, that’s my godfather, Sir Leopold Fischer. He always comes on Boxing
Day.”

Then, after an innocent pause, which unconsciously betrayed some lack of
enthusiasm, Ruby Adams added:

“He is very kind.”

John Crook, journalist, had heard of that eminent City magnate; and
it was not his fault if the City magnate had not heard of him; for in
certain articles in _The Clarion_ or _The New Age_ Sir Leopold had been
dealt with austerely. But he said nothing and grimly watched the
unloading of the motor-car, which was rather a long process. A large,
neat chauffeur in green got out from the front, and a small, neat
manservant in grey got out from the back, and between them they
deposited Sir Leopold on the doorstep and began to unpack him, like some
very carefully protected parcel. Rugs enough to stock a bazaar, furs
of all the beasts of the forest, and scarves of all the colours of
the rainbow were unwrapped one by one, till they revealed something
resembling the human form; the form of a friendly, but foreign-looking
old gentleman, with a grey goat-like beard and a beaming smile, who
rubbed his big fur gloves together.

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

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

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

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

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

“A saint,” said Father Brown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The athletic harlequin swung him about like a sack or twisted or tossed
him like an Indian club; all the time to the most maddeningly ludicrous
tunes from the piano. When the harlequin heaved the comic constable
heavily off the floor the clown played “I arise from dreams of thee.”
 When he shuffled him across his back, “With my bundle on my shoulder,”
 and when the harlequin finally let fall the policeman with a most
convincing thud, the lunatic at the instrument struck into a jingling
measure with some words which are still believed to have been, “I sent a
letter to my love and on the way I dropped it.”

At about this limit of mental anarchy Father Brown’s view was obscured
altogether; for the City magnate in front of him rose to his full height
and thrust his hands savagely into all his pockets. Then he sat down
nervously, still fumbling, and then stood up again. For an instant it
seemed seriously likely that he would stride across the footlights; then
he turned a glare at the clown playing the piano; and then he burst in
silence out of the room.

The priest had only watched for a few more minutes the absurd but not
inelegant dance of the amateur harlequin over his splendidly unconscious
foe. With real though rude art, the harlequin danced slowly backwards
out of the door into the garden, which was full of moonlight and
stillness. The vamped dress of silver paper and paste, which had been
too glaring in the footlights, looked more and more magical and silvery
as it danced away under a brilliant moon. The audience was closing in
with a cataract of applause, when Brown felt his arm abruptly touched,
and he was asked in a whisper to come into the colonel’s study.

He followed his summoner with increasing doubt, which was not dispelled
by a solemn comicality in the scene of the study. There sat Colonel
Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed
whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough
to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against
the mantelpiece and heaving with all the importance of panic.

“This is a very painful matter, Father Brown,” said Adams. “The truth
is, those diamonds we all saw this afternoon seem to have vanished from
my friend’s tail-coat pocket. And as you--”

“As I,” supplemented Father Brown, with a broad grin, “was sitting just
behind him--”

“Nothing of the sort shall be suggested,” said Colonel Adams, with a
firm look at Fischer, which rather implied that some such thing had been
suggested. “I only ask you to give me the assistance that any gentleman
might give.”

“Which is turning out his pockets,” said Father Brown, and proceeded to
do so, displaying seven and sixpence, a return ticket, a small silver
crucifix, a small breviary, and a stick of chocolate.

The colonel looked at him long, and then said, “Do you know, I should
like to see the inside of your head more than the inside of your
pockets. My daughter is one of your people, I know; well, she has
lately--” and he stopped.

“She has lately,” cried out old Fischer, “opened her father’s house to
a cut-throat Socialist, who says openly he would steal anything from a
richer man. This is the end of it. Here is the richer man--and none the
richer.”

“If you want the inside of my head you can have it,” said Brown rather
wearily. “What it’s worth you can say afterwards. But the first thing I
find in that disused pocket is this: that men who mean to steal diamonds
don’t talk Socialism. They are more likely,” he added demurely, “to
denounce it.”

Both the others shifted sharply and the priest went on:

“You see, we know these people, more or less. That Socialist would no
more steal a diamond than a Pyramid. We ought to look at once to the one
man we don’t know. The fellow acting the policeman--Florian. Where is he
exactly at this minute, I wonder.”

The pantaloon sprang erect and strode out of the room. An interlude
ensued, during which the millionaire stared at the priest, and the
priest at his breviary; then the pantaloon returned and said, with
staccato gravity, “The policeman is still lying on the stage. The
curtain has gone up and down six times; he is still lying there.”

Father Brown dropped his book and stood staring with a look of blank
mental ruin. Very slowly a light began to creep in his grey eyes, and
then he made the scarcely obvious answer.

“Please forgive me, colonel, but when did your wife die?”

“Wife!” replied the staring soldier, “she died this year two months. Her
brother James arrived just a week too late to see her.”

The little priest bounded like a rabbit shot. “Come on!” he cried in
quite unusual excitement. “Come on! We’ve got to go and look at that
policeman!”

They rushed on to the now curtained stage, breaking rudely past the
columbine and clown (who seemed whispering quite contentedly), and
Father Brown bent over the prostrate comic policeman.

“Chloroform,” he said as he rose; “I only guessed it just now.”

There was a startled stillness, and then the colonel said slowly,
“Please say seriously what all this means.”

Father Brown suddenly shouted with laughter, then stopped, and
only struggled with it for instants during the rest of his speech.
“Gentlemen,” he gasped, “there’s not much time to talk. I must run after
the criminal. But this great French actor who played the policeman--this
clever corpse the harlequin waltzed with and dandled and threw about--he
was--” His voice again failed him, and he turned his back to run.

“He was?” called Fischer inquiringly.

“A real policeman,” said Father Brown, and ran away into the dark.

There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden,
in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire
sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the
south. The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo
of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost
irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden
trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as
impossible. He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten million
moons; the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch
of him on fire. But he swings, flashing and successful, from the short
tree in this garden to the tall, rambling tree in the other, and only
stops there because a shade has slid under the smaller tree and has
unmistakably called up to him.

“Well, Flambeau,” says the voice, “you really look like a Flying Star;
but that always means a Falling Star at last.”

The silver, sparkling figure above seems to lean forward in the laurels
and, confident of escape, listens to the little figure below.

“You never did anything better, Flambeau. It was clever to come from
Canada (with a Paris ticket, I suppose) just a week after Mrs. Adams
died, when no one was in a mood to ask questions. It was cleverer to
have marked down the Flying Stars and the very day of Fischer’s coming.
But there’s no cleverness, but mere genius, in what followed. Stealing
the stones, I suppose, was nothing to you. You could have done it by
sleight of hand in a hundred other ways besides that pretence of putting
a paper donkey’s tail to Fischer’s coat. But in the rest you eclipsed
yourself.”

The silvery figure among the green leaves seems to linger as if
hypnotised, though his escape is easy behind him; he is staring at the
man below.

“Oh, yes,” says the man below, “I know all about it. I know you not
only forced the pantomime, but put it to a double use. You were going
to steal the stones quietly; news came by an accomplice that you were
already suspected, and a capable police officer was coming to rout you
up that very night. A common thief would have been thankful for the
warning and fled; but you are a poet. You already had the clever notion
of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellery. Now, you saw
that if the dress were a harlequin’s the appearance of a policeman
would be quite in keeping. The worthy officer started from Putney police
station to find you, and walked into the queerest trap ever set in this
world. When the front door opened he walked straight on to the stage of
a Christmas pantomime, where he could be kicked, clubbed, stunned and
drugged by the dancing harlequin, amid roars of laughter from all
the most respectable people in Putney. Oh, you will never do anything
better. And now, by the way, you might give me back those diamonds.”

The green branch on which the glittering figure swung, rustled as if in
astonishment; but the voice went on:

“I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this
life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy
they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but
no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes
down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills
and lies about it. Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an
honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime.
Maurice Blum started out as an anarchist of principle, a father of the
poor; he ended a greasy spy and tale-bearer that both sides used and
despised. Harry Burke started his free money movement sincerely enough;
now he’s sponging on a half-starved sister for endless brandies and
sodas. Lord Amber went into wild society in a sort of chivalry; now he’s
paying blackmail to the lowest vultures in London. Captain Barillon
was the great gentleman-apache before your time; he died in a madhouse,
screaming with fear of the “narks” and receivers that had betrayed
him and hunted him down. I know the woods look very free behind you,
Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey.
But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up
in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops
will be very bare.”

Everything continued still, as if the small man below held the other in
the tree in some long invisible leash; and he went on:

“Your downward steps have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing
mean, but you are doing something mean tonight. You are leaving
suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are
separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him. But you will
do meaner things than that before you die.”

Three flashing diamonds fell from the tree to the turf. The small man
stooped to pick them up, and when he looked up again the green cage of
the tree was emptied of its silver bird.

The restoration of the gems (accidentally picked up by Father Brown, of
all people) ended the evening in uproarious triumph; and Sir Leopold, in
his height of good humour, even told the priest that though he himself
had broader views, he could respect those whose creed required them to
be cloistered and ignorant of this world.




The Invisible Man


In the cool blue twilight of two steep streets in Camden Town, the shop
at the corner, a confectioner’s, glowed like the butt of a cigar. One
should rather say, perhaps, like the butt of a firework, for the light
was of many colours and some complexity, broken up by many mirrors and
dancing on many gilt and gaily-coloured cakes and sweetmeats. Against
this one fiery glass were glued the noses of many gutter-snipes, for
the chocolates were all wrapped in those red and gold and green metallic
colours which are almost better than chocolate itself; and the huge
white wedding-cake in the window was somehow at once remote and
satisfying, just as if the whole North Pole were good to eat.
Such rainbow provocations could naturally collect the youth of the
neighbourhood up to the ages of ten or twelve. But this corner was also
attractive to youth at a later stage; and a young man, not less than
twenty-four, was staring into the same shop window. To him, also,
the shop was of fiery charm, but this attraction was not wholly to be
explained by chocolates; which, however, he was far from despising.

He was a tall, burly, red-haired young man, with a resolute face but
a listless manner. He carried under his arm a flat, grey portfolio of
black-and-white sketches, which he had sold with more or less success
to publishers ever since his uncle (who was an admiral) had disinherited
him for Socialism, because of a lecture which he had delivered against
that economic theory. His name was John Turnbull Angus.

Entering at last, he walked through the confectioner’s shop to the back
room, which was a sort of pastry-cook restaurant, merely raising his hat
to the young lady who was serving there. She was a dark, elegant, alert
girl in black, with a high colour and very quick, dark eyes; and after
the ordinary interval she followed him into the inner room to take his
order.

His order was evidently a usual one. “I want, please,” he said with
precision, “one halfpenny bun and a small cup of black coffee.” An
instant before the girl could turn away he added, “Also, I want you to
marry me.”

The young lady of the shop stiffened suddenly and said, “Those are jokes
I don’t allow.”

The red-haired young man lifted grey eyes of an unexpected gravity.

“Really and truly,” he said, “it’s as serious--as serious as the
halfpenny bun. It is expensive, like the bun; one pays for it. It is
indigestible, like the bun. It hurts.”

The dark young lady had never taken her dark eyes off him, but seemed
to be studying him with almost tragic exactitude. At the end of her
scrutiny she had something like the shadow of a smile, and she sat down
in a chair.

“Don’t you think,” observed Angus, absently, “that it’s rather cruel to
eat these halfpenny buns? They might grow up into penny buns. I shall
give up these brutal sports when we are married.”

The dark young lady rose from her chair and walked to the window,
evidently in a state of strong but not unsympathetic cogitation. When at
last she swung round again with an air of resolution she was bewildered
to observe that the young man was carefully laying out on the table
various objects from the shop-window. They included a pyramid of highly
coloured sweets, several plates of sandwiches, and the two decanters
containing that mysterious port and sherry which are peculiar to
pastry-cooks. In the middle of this neat arrangement he had carefully
let down the enormous load of white sugared cake which had been the huge
ornament of the window.

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked.

“Duty, my dear Laura,” he began.

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake, stop a minute,” she cried, “and don’t talk to
me in that way. I mean, what is all that?”

“A ceremonial meal, Miss Hope.”

“And what is that?” she asked impatiently, pointing to the mountain of
sugar.

“The wedding-cake, Mrs. Angus,” he said.

The girl marched to that article, removed it with some clatter, and put
it back in the shop window; she then returned, and, putting her elegant
elbows on the table, regarded the young man not unfavourably but with
considerable exasperation.

“You don’t give me any time to think,” she said.

“I’m not such a fool,” he answered; “that’s my Christian humility.”

She was still looking at him; but she had grown considerably graver
behind the smile.

“Mr. Angus,” she said steadily, “before there is a minute more of this
nonsense I must tell you something about myself as shortly as I can.’”

“Delighted,” replied Angus gravely. “You might tell me something about
myself, too, while you are about it.”

“Oh, do hold your tongue and listen,” she said. “It’s nothing that I’m
ashamed of, and it isn’t even anything that I’m specially sorry about.
But what would you say if there were something that is no business of
mine and yet is my nightmare?”

“In that case,” said the man seriously, “I should suggest that you bring
back the cake.”

“Well, you must listen to the story first,” said Laura, persistently.
“To begin with, I must tell you that my father owned the inn called the
‘Red Fish’ at Ludbury, and I used to serve people in the bar.”

“I have often wondered,” he said, “why there was a kind of a Christian
air about this one confectioner’s shop.”

“Ludbury is a sleepy, grassy little hole in the Eastern Counties, and
the only kind of people who ever came to the ‘Red Fish’ were occasional
commercial travellers, and for the rest, the most awful people you can
see, only you’ve never seen them. I mean little, loungy men, who had
just enough to live on and had nothing to do but lean about in bar-rooms
and bet on horses, in bad clothes that were just too good for them.
Even these wretched young rotters were not very common at our house; but
there were two of them that were a lot too common--common in every sort
of way. They both lived on money of their own, and were wearisomely idle
and over-dressed. But yet I was a bit sorry for them, because I half
believe they slunk into our little empty bar because each of them had a
slight deformity; the sort of thing that some yokels laugh at. It wasn’t
exactly a deformity either; it was more an oddity. One of them was
a surprisingly small man, something like a dwarf, or at least like a
jockey. He was not at all jockeyish to look at, though; he had a round
black head and a well-trimmed black beard, bright eyes like a bird’s; he
jingled money in his pockets; he jangled a great gold watch chain; and
he never turned up except dressed just too much like a gentleman to
be one. He was no fool though, though a futile idler; he was curiously
clever at all kinds of things that couldn’t be the slightest use; a sort
of impromptu conjuring; making fifteen matches set fire to each other
like a regular firework; or cutting a banana or some such thing into a
dancing doll. His name was Isidore Smythe; and I can see him still, with
his little dark face, just coming up to the counter, making a jumping
kangaroo out of five cigars.

“The other fellow was more silent and more ordinary; but somehow he
alarmed me much more than poor little Smythe. He was very tall and
slight, and light-haired; his nose had a high bridge, and he might
almost have been handsome in a spectral sort of way; but he had one of
the most appalling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked
straight at you, you didn’t know where you were yourself, let alone what
he was looking at. I fancy this sort of disfigurement embittered the
poor chap a little; for while Smythe was ready to show off his monkey
tricks anywhere, James Welkin (that was the squinting man’s name) never
did anything except soak in our bar parlour, and go for great walks
by himself in the flat, grey country all round. All the same, I think
Smythe, too, was a little sensitive about being so small, though he
carried it off more smartly. And so it was that I was really puzzled, as
well as startled, and very sorry, when they both offered to marry me in
the same week.

“Well, I did what I’ve since thought was perhaps a silly thing. But,
after all, these freaks were my friends in a way; and I had a horror of
their thinking I refused them for the real reason, which was that they
were so impossibly ugly. So I made up some gas of another sort, about
never meaning to marry anyone who hadn’t carved his way in the world. I
said it was a point of principle with me not to live on money that
was just inherited like theirs. Two days after I had talked in this
well-meaning sort of way, the whole trouble began. The first thing I
heard was that both of them had gone off to seek their fortunes, as if
they were in some silly fairy tale.

“Well, I’ve never seen either of them from that day to this. But I’ve
had two letters from the little man called Smythe, and really they were
rather exciting.”

“Ever heard of the other man?” asked Angus.

“No, he never wrote,” said the girl, after an instant’s hesitation.
“Smythe’s first letter was simply to say that he had started out walking
with Welkin to London; but Welkin was such a good walker that the little
man dropped out of it, and took a rest by the roadside. He happened to
be picked up by some travelling show, and, partly because he was nearly
a dwarf, and partly because he was really a clever little wretch, he
got on quite well in the show business, and was soon sent up to the
Aquarium, to do some tricks that I forget. That was his first letter.
His second was much more of a startler, and I only got it last week.”

The man called Angus emptied his coffee-cup and regarded her with mild
and patient eyes. Her own mouth took a slight twist of laughter as
she resumed, “I suppose you’ve seen on the hoardings all about this
‘Smythe’s Silent Service’? Or you must be the only person that hasn’t.
Oh, I don’t know much about it, it’s some clockwork invention for doing
all the housework by machinery. You know the sort of thing: ‘Press a
Button--A Butler who Never Drinks.’ ‘Turn a Handle--Ten Housemaids who
Never Flirt.’ You must have seen the advertisements. Well, whatever
these machines are, they are making pots of money; and they are making
it all for that little imp whom I knew down in Ludbury. I can’t help
feeling pleased the poor little chap has fallen on his feet; but the
plain fact is, I’m in terror of his turning up any minute and telling me
he’s carved his way in the world--as he certainly has.”

“And the other man?” repeated Angus with a sort of obstinate quietude.

Laura Hope got to her feet suddenly. “My friend,” she said, “I think
you are a witch. Yes, you are quite right. I have not seen a line of the
other man’s writing; and I have no more notion than the dead of what or
where he is. But it is of him that I am frightened. It is he who is all
about my path. It is he who has half driven me mad. Indeed, I think he
has driven me mad; for I have felt him where he could not have been, and
I have heard his voice when he could not have spoken.”

“Well, my dear,” said the young man, cheerfully, “if he were Satan
himself, he is done for now you have told somebody. One goes mad all
alone, old girl. But when was it you fancied you felt and heard our
squinting friend?”

“I heard James Welkin laugh as plainly as I hear you speak,” said the
girl, steadily. “There was nobody there, for I stood just outside the
shop at the corner, and could see down both streets at once. I had
forgotten how he laughed, though his laugh was as odd as his squint. I
had not thought of him for nearly a year. But it’s a solemn truth that a
few seconds later the first letter came from his rival.”

“Did you ever make the spectre speak or squeak, or anything?” asked
Angus, with some interest.

Laura suddenly shuddered, and then said, with an unshaken voice, “Yes.
Just when I had finished reading the second letter from Isidore Smythe
announcing his success. Just then, I heard Welkin say, ‘He shan’t have
you, though.’ It was quite plain, as if he were in the room. It is
awful, I think I must be mad.”

“If you really were mad,” said the young man, “you would think you must
be sane. But certainly there seems to me to be something a little rum
about this unseen gentleman. Two heads are better than one--I spare you
allusions to any other organs and really, if you would allow me, as
a sturdy, practical man, to bring back the wedding-cake out of the
window--”

Even as he spoke, there was a sort of steely shriek in the street
outside, and a small motor, driven at devilish speed, shot up to the
door of the shop and stuck there. In the same flash of time a small man
in a shiny top hat stood stamping in the outer room.

Angus, who had hitherto maintained hilarious ease from motives of mental
hygiene, revealed the strain of his soul by striding abruptly out of
the inner room and confronting the new-comer. A glance at him was quite
sufficient to confirm the savage guesswork of a man in love. This
very dapper but dwarfish figure, with the spike of black beard carried
insolently forward, the clever unrestful eyes, the neat but very nervous
fingers, could be none other than the man just described to him: Isidore
Smythe, who made dolls out of banana skins and match-boxes; Isidore
Smythe, who made millions out of undrinking butlers and unflirting
housemaids of metal. For a moment the two men, instinctively
understanding each other’s air of possession, looked at each other with
that curious cold generosity which is the soul of rivalry.

Mr. Smythe, however, made no allusion to the ultimate ground of their
antagonism, but said simply and explosively, “Has Miss Hope seen that
thing on the window?”

“On the window?” repeated the staring Angus.

“There’s no time to explain other things,” said the small millionaire
shortly. “There’s some tomfoolery going on here that has to be
investigated.”

He pointed his polished walking-stick at the window, recently depleted
by the bridal preparations of Mr. Angus; and that gentleman was
astonished to see along the front of the glass a long strip of paper
pasted, which had certainly not been on the window when he looked
through it some time before. Following the energetic Smythe outside into
the street, he found that some yard and a half of stamp paper had been
carefully gummed along the glass outside, and on this was written in
straggly characters, “If you marry Smythe, he will die.”

“Laura,” said Angus, putting his big red head into the shop, “you’re not
mad.”

“It’s the writing of that fellow Welkin,” said Smythe gruffly. “I
haven’t seen him for years, but he’s always bothering me. Five times in
the last fortnight he’s had threatening letters left at my flat, and I
can’t even find out who leaves them, let alone if it is Welkin himself.
The porter of the flats swears that no suspicious characters have been
seen, and here he has pasted up a sort of dado on a public shop window,
while the people in the shop--”

“Quite so,” said Angus modestly, “while the people in the shop were
having tea. Well, sir, I can assure you I appreciate your common sense
in dealing so directly with the matter. We can talk about other things
afterwards. The fellow cannot be very far off yet, for I swear there was
no paper there when I went last to the window, ten or fifteen minutes
ago. On the other hand, he’s too far off to be chased, as we don’t even
know the direction. If you’ll take my advice, Mr. Smythe, you’ll put
this at once in the hands of some energetic inquiry man, private rather
than public. I know an extremely clever fellow, who has set up in
business five minutes from here in your car. His name’s Flambeau, and
though his youth was a bit stormy, he’s a strictly honest man now, and
his brains are worth money. He lives in Lucknow Mansions, Hampstead.”

“That is odd,” said the little man, arching his black eyebrows. “I live,
myself, in Himylaya Mansions, round the corner. Perhaps you might care
to come with me; I can go to my rooms and sort out these queer Welkin
documents, while you run round and get your friend the detective.”

“You are very good,” said Angus politely. “Well, the sooner we act the
better.”

Both men, with a queer kind of impromptu fairness, took the same sort of
formal farewell of the lady, and both jumped into the brisk little
car. As Smythe took the handles and they turned the great corner of the
street, Angus was amused to see a gigantesque poster of “Smythe’s
Silent Service,” with a picture of a huge headless iron doll, carrying a
saucepan with the legend, “A Cook Who is Never Cross.”

“I use them in my own flat,” said the little black-bearded man,
laughing, “partly for advertisements, and partly for real convenience.
Honestly, and all above board, those big clockwork dolls of mine do
bring your coals or claret or a timetable quicker than any live servants
I’ve ever known, if you know which knob to press. But I’ll never deny,
between ourselves, that such servants have their disadvantages, too.”

“Indeed?” said Angus; “is there something they can’t do?”

“Yes,” replied Smythe coolly; “they can’t tell me who left those
threatening letters at my flat.”

The man’s motor was small and swift like himself; in fact, like his
domestic service, it was of his own invention. If he was an advertising
quack, he was one who believed in his own wares. The sense of something
tiny and flying was accentuated as they swept up long white curves of
road in the dead but open daylight of evening. Soon the white curves
came sharper and dizzier; they were upon ascending spirals, as they say
in the modern religions. For, indeed, they were cresting a corner of
London which is almost as precipitous as Edinburgh, if not quite so
picturesque. Terrace rose above terrace, and the special tower of flats
they sought, rose above them all to almost Egyptian height, gilt by
the level sunset. The change, as they turned the corner and entered the
crescent known as Himylaya Mansions, was as abrupt as the opening of a
window; for they found that pile of flats sitting above London as above
a green sea of slate. Opposite to the mansions, on the other side of the
gravel crescent, was a bushy enclosure more like a steep hedge or dyke
than a garden, and some way below that ran a strip of artificial water,
a sort of canal, like the moat of that embowered fortress. As the car
swept round the crescent it passed, at one corner, the stray stall of
a man selling chestnuts; and right away at the other end of the curve,
Angus could see a dim blue policeman walking slowly. These were the only
human shapes in that high suburban solitude; but he had an irrational
sense that they expressed the speechless poetry of London. He felt as if
they were figures in a story.

The little car shot up to the right house like a bullet, and shot out
its owner like a bomb shell. He was immediately inquiring of a tall
commissionaire in shining braid, and a short porter in shirt sleeves,
whether anybody or anything had been seeking his apartments. He was
assured that nobody and nothing had passed these officials since his
last inquiries; whereupon he and the slightly bewildered Angus were shot
up in the lift like a rocket, till they reached the top floor.

“Just come in for a minute,” said the breathless Smythe. “I want to show
you those Welkin letters. Then you might run round the corner and fetch
your friend.” He pressed a button concealed in the wall, and the door
opened of itself.

It opened on a long, commodious ante-room, of which the only arresting
features, ordinarily speaking, were the rows of tall half-human
mechanical figures that stood up on both sides like tailors’ dummies.
Like tailors’ dummies they were headless; and like tailors’ dummies
they had a handsome unnecessary humpiness in the shoulders, and a
pigeon-breasted protuberance of chest; but barring this, they were not
much more like a human figure than any automatic machine at a station
that is about the human height. They had two great hooks like arms, for
carrying trays; and they were painted pea-green, or vermilion, or
black for convenience of distinction; in every other way they were only
automatic machines and nobody would have looked twice at them. On
this occasion, at least, nobody did. For between the two rows of
these domestic dummies lay something more interesting than most of the
mechanics of the world. It was a white, tattered scrap of paper scrawled
with red ink; and the agile inventor had snatched it up almost as soon
as the door flew open. He handed it to Angus without a word. The red ink
on it actually was not dry, and the message ran, “If you have been to
see her today, I shall kill you.”

There was a short silence, and then Isidore Smythe said quietly, “Would
you like a little whiskey? I rather feel as if I should.”

“Thank you; I should like a little Flambeau,” said Angus, gloomily.
“This business seems to me to be getting rather grave. I’m going round
at once to fetch him.”

“Right you are,” said the other, with admirable cheerfulness. “Bring him
round here as quick as you can.”

But as Angus closed the front door behind him he saw Smythe push back a
button, and one of the clockwork images glided from its place and slid
along a groove in the floor carrying a tray with syphon and decanter.
There did seem something a trifle weird about leaving the little man
alone among those dead servants, who were coming to life as the door
closed.

Six steps down from Smythe’s landing the man in shirt sleeves was doing
something with a pail. Angus stopped to extract a promise, fortified
with a prospective bribe, that he would remain in that place until the
return with the detective, and would keep count of any kind of stranger
coming up those stairs. Dashing down to the front hall he then laid
similar charges of vigilance on the commissionaire at the front door,
from whom he learned the simplifying circumstances that there was no
back door. Not content with this, he captured the floating policeman
and induced him to stand opposite the entrance and watch it; and finally
paused an instant for a pennyworth of chestnuts, and an inquiry as to
the probable length of the merchant’s stay in the neighbourhood.

The chestnut seller, turning up the collar of his coat, told him he
should probably be moving shortly, as he thought it was going to snow.
Indeed, the evening was growing grey and bitter, but Angus, with all his
eloquence, proceeded to nail the chestnut man to his post.

“Keep yourself warm on your own chestnuts,” he said earnestly. “Eat
up your whole stock; I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll give you a
sovereign if you’ll wait here till I come back, and then tell me
whether any man, woman, or child has gone into that house where the
commissionaire is standing.”

He then walked away smartly, with a last look at the besieged tower.

“I’ve made a ring round that room, anyhow,” he said. “They can’t all
four of them be Mr. Welkin’s accomplices.”

Lucknow Mansions were, so to speak, on a lower platform of that hill
of houses, of which Himylaya Mansions might be called the peak. Mr.
Flambeau’s semi-official flat was on the ground floor, and presented
in every way a marked contrast to the American machinery and cold
hotel-like luxury of the flat of the Silent Service. Flambeau, who was
a friend of Angus, received him in a rococo artistic den behind his
office, of which the ornaments were sabres, harquebuses, Eastern
curiosities, flasks of Italian wine, savage cooking-pots, a plumy
Persian cat, and a small dusty-looking Roman Catholic priest, who looked
particularly out of place.

“This is my friend Father Brown,” said Flambeau. “I’ve often wanted you
to meet him. Splendid weather, this; a little cold for Southerners like
me.”

“Yes, I think it will keep clear,” said Angus, sitting down on a
violet-striped Eastern ottoman.

“No,” said the priest quietly, “it has begun to snow.”

And, indeed, as he spoke, the first few flakes, foreseen by the man of
chestnuts, began to drift across the darkening windowpane.

“Well,” said Angus heavily. “I’m afraid I’ve come on business, and
rather jumpy business at that. The fact is, Flambeau, within a stone’s
throw of your house is a fellow who badly wants your help; he’s
perpetually being haunted and threatened by an invisible enemy--a
scoundrel whom nobody has even seen.” As Angus proceeded to tell the
whole tale of Smythe and Welkin, beginning with Laura’s story, and
going on with his own, the supernatural laugh at the corner of two empty
streets, the strange distinct words spoken in an empty room, Flambeau
grew more and more vividly concerned, and the little priest seemed to be
left out of it, like a piece of furniture. When it came to the scribbled
stamp-paper pasted on the window, Flambeau rose, seeming to fill the
room with his huge shoulders.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I think you had better tell me the rest
on the nearest road to this man’s house. It strikes me, somehow, that
there is no time to be lost.”

“Delighted,” said Angus, rising also, “though he’s safe enough for the
present, for I’ve set four men to watch the only hole to his burrow.”

They turned out into the street, the small priest trundling after them
with the docility of a small dog. He merely said, in a cheerful way,
like one making conversation, “How quick the snow gets thick on the
ground.”

As they threaded the steep side streets already powdered with silver,
Angus finished his story; and by the time they reached the crescent with
the towering flats, he had leisure to turn his attention to the four
sentinels. The chestnut seller, both before and after receiving a
sovereign, swore stubbornly that he had watched the door and seen no
visitor enter. The policeman was even more emphatic. He said he had had
experience of crooks of all kinds, in top hats and in rags; he wasn’t so
green as to expect suspicious characters to look suspicious; he looked
out for anybody, and, so help him, there had been nobody. And when all
three men gathered round the gilded commissionaire, who still stood
smiling astride of the porch, the verdict was more final still.

“I’ve got a right to ask any man, duke or dustman, what he wants in
these flats,” said the genial and gold-laced giant, “and I’ll swear
there’s been nobody to ask since this gentleman went away.”

The unimportant Father Brown, who stood back, looking modestly at the
pavement, here ventured to say meekly, “Has nobody been up and down
stairs, then, since the snow began to fall? It began while we were all
round at Flambeau’s.”

“Nobody’s been in here, sir, you can take it from me,” said the
official, with beaming authority.

“Then I wonder what that is?” said the priest, and stared at the ground
blankly like a fish.

The others all looked down also; and Flambeau used a fierce exclamation
and a French gesture. For it was unquestionably true that down the
middle of the entrance guarded by the man in gold lace, actually between
the arrogant, stretched legs of that colossus, ran a stringy pattern of
grey footprints stamped upon the white snow.

“God!” cried Angus involuntarily, “the Invisible Man!”

Without another word he turned and dashed up the stairs, with Flambeau
following; but Father Brown still stood looking about him in the
snow-clad street as if he had lost interest in his query.

Flambeau was plainly in a mood to break down the door with his big
shoulders; but the Scotchman, with more reason, if less intuition,
fumbled about on the frame of the door till he found the invisible
button; and the door swung slowly open.

It showed substantially the same serried interior; the hall had grown
darker, though it was still struck here and there with the last crimson
shafts of sunset, and one or two of the headless machines had been moved
from their places for this or that purpose, and stood here and there
about the twilit place. The green and red of their coats were all
darkened in the dusk; and their likeness to human shapes slightly
increased by their very shapelessness. But in the middle of them all,
exactly where the paper with the red ink had lain, there lay something
that looked like red ink spilt out of its bottle. But it was not red
ink.

With a French combination of reason and violence Flambeau simply said
“Murder!” and, plunging into the flat, had explored, every corner and
cupboard of it in five minutes. But if he expected to find a corpse he
found none. Isidore Smythe was not in the place, either dead or alive.
After the most tearing search the two men met each other in the outer
hall, with streaming faces and staring eyes. “My friend,” said Flambeau,
talking French in his excitement, “not only is your murderer invisible,
but he makes invisible also the murdered man.”

Angus looked round at the dim room full of dummies, and in some Celtic
corner of his Scotch soul a shudder started. One of the life-size dolls
stood immediately overshadowing the blood stain, summoned, perhaps,
by the slain man an instant before he fell. One of the high-shouldered
hooks that served the thing for arms, was a little lifted, and Angus had
suddenly the horrid fancy that poor Smythe’s own iron child had struck
him down. Matter had rebelled, and these machines had killed their
master. But even so, what had they done with him?

“Eaten him?” said the nightmare at his ear; and he sickened for an
instant at the idea of rent, human remains absorbed and crushed into all
that acephalous clockwork.

He recovered his mental health by an emphatic effort, and said to
Flambeau, “Well, there it is. The poor fellow has evaporated like a
cloud and left a red streak on the floor. The tale does not belong to
this world.”

“There is only one thing to be done,” said Flambeau, “whether it belongs
to this world or the other. I must go down and talk to my friend.”

They descended, passing the man with the pail, who again asseverated
that he had let no intruder pass, down to the commissionaire and the
hovering chestnut man, who rigidly reasserted their own watchfulness.
But when Angus looked round for his fourth confirmation he could not see
it, and called out with some nervousness, “Where is the policeman?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Father Brown; “that is my fault. I just sent
him down the road to investigate something--that I just thought worth
investigating.”

“Well, we want him back pretty soon,” said Angus abruptly, “for the
wretched man upstairs has not only been murdered, but wiped out.”

“How?” asked the priest.

“Father,” said Flambeau, after a pause, “upon my soul I believe it is
more in your department than mine. No friend or foe has entered the
house, but Smythe is gone, as if stolen by the fairies. If that is not
supernatural, I--”

As he spoke they were all checked by an unusual sight; the big blue
policeman came round the corner of the crescent, running. He came
straight up to Brown.

“You’re right, sir,” he panted, “they’ve just found poor Mr. Smythe’s
body in the canal down below.”

Angus put his hand wildly to his head. “Did he run down and drown
himself?” he asked.

“He never came down, I’ll swear,” said the constable, “and he wasn’t
drowned either, for he died of a great stab over the heart.”

“And yet you saw no one enter?” said Flambeau in a grave voice.

“Let us walk down the road a little,” said the priest.

As they reached the other end of the crescent he observed abruptly,
“Stupid of me! I forgot to ask the policeman something. I wonder if they
found a light brown sack.”

“Why a light brown sack?” asked Angus, astonished.

“Because if it was any other coloured sack, the case must begin over
again,” said Father Brown; “but if it was a light brown sack, why, the
case is finished.”

“I am pleased to hear it,” said Angus with hearty irony. “It hasn’t
begun, so far as I am concerned.”

“You must tell us all about it,” said Flambeau with a strange heavy
simplicity, like a child.

Unconsciously they were walking with quickening steps down the long
sweep of road on the other side of the high crescent, Father Brown
leading briskly, though in silence. At last he said with an almost
touching vagueness, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll think it so prosy. We
always begin at the abstract end of things, and you can’t begin this
story anywhere else.

“Have you ever noticed this--that people never answer what you say? They
answer what you mean--or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says
to another in a country house, ‘Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady
doesn’t answer ‘Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and
so on,’ though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind
her chair. She says ‘There is nobody staying with us,’ meaning nobody of
the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks,
‘Who is staying in the house?’ then the lady will remember the butler,
the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never
get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly.
When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the
Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them. They
meant no man whom they could suspect of being your man. A man did go
into the house, and did come out of it, but they never noticed him.”

“An invisible man?” inquired Angus, raising his red eyebrows. “A
mentally invisible man,” said Father Brown.

A minute or two after he resumed in the same unassuming voice, like a
man thinking his way. “Of course you can’t think of such a man, until
you do think of him. That’s where his cleverness comes in. But I came
to think of him through two or three little things in the tale Mr. Angus
told us. First, there was the fact that this Welkin went for long walks.
And then there was the vast lot of stamp paper on the window. And then,
most of all, there were the two things the young lady said--things that
couldn’t be true. Don’t get annoyed,” he added hastily, noting a sudden
movement of the Scotchman’s head; “she thought they were true. A person
can’t be quite alone in a street a second before she receives a letter.
She can’t be quite alone in a street when she starts reading a letter
just received. There must be somebody pretty near her; he must be
mentally invisible.”

“Why must there be somebody near her?” asked Angus.

“Because,” said Father Brown, “barring carrier-pigeons, somebody must
have brought her the letter.”

“Do you really mean to say,” asked Flambeau, with energy, “that Welkin
carried his rival’s letters to his lady?”

“Yes,” said the priest. “Welkin carried his rival’s letters to his lady.
You see, he had to.”

“Oh, I can’t stand much more of this,” exploded Flambeau. “Who is this
fellow? What does he look like? What is the usual get-up of a mentally
invisible man?”

“He is dressed rather handsomely in red, blue and gold,” replied the
priest promptly with precision, “and in this striking, and even showy,
costume he entered Himylaya Mansions under eight human eyes; he killed
Smythe in cold blood, and came down into the street again carrying the
dead body in his arms--”

“Reverend sir,” cried Angus, standing still, “are you raving mad, or am
I?”

“You are not mad,” said Brown, “only a little unobservant. You have not
noticed such a man as this, for example.”

He took three quick strides forward, and put his hand on the shoulder of
an ordinary passing postman who had bustled by them unnoticed under the
shade of the trees.

“Nobody ever notices postmen somehow,” he said thoughtfully; “yet they
have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small
corpse can be stowed quite easily.”

The postman, instead of turning naturally, had ducked and tumbled
against the garden fence. He was a lean fair-bearded man of very
ordinary appearance, but as he turned an alarmed face over his shoulder,
all three men were fixed with an almost fiendish squint.

              * * * * *

Flambeau went back to his sabres, purple rugs and Persian cat, having
many things to attend to. John Turnbull Angus went back to the lady at
the shop, with whom that imprudent young man contrives to be extremely
comfortable. But Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills under the
stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other
will never be known.




The Honour of Israel Gow


A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown,
wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley
and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the
glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the
world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner
of the old French-Scotch chateaux, it reminded an Englishman of the
sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods
that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black
as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy
devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on
the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow
which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other
of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison
called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of
doom in the Calvinist.

The priest had snatched a day from his business at Glasgow to meet his
friend Flambeau, the amateur detective, who was at Glengyle Castle with
another more formal officer investigating the life and death of the late
Earl of Glengyle. That mysterious person was the last representative
of a race whose valour, insanity, and violent cunning had made them
terrible even among the sinister nobility of their nation in the
sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine ambition, in
chamber within chamber of that palace of lies that was built up around
Mary Queen of Scots.

The rhyme in the country-side attested the motive and the result of
their machinations candidly:

     As green sap to the simmer trees
     Is red gold to the Ogilvies.

For many centuries there had never been a decent lord in Glengyle
Castle; and with the Victorian era one would have thought that all
eccentricities were exhausted. The last Glengyle, however, satisfied his
tribal tradition by doing the only thing that was left for him to do; he
disappeared. I do not mean that he went abroad; by all accounts he was
still in the castle, if he was anywhere. But though his name was in the
church register and the big red Peerage, nobody ever saw him under the
sun.

If anyone saw him it was a solitary man-servant, something between a
groom and a gardener. He was so deaf that the more business-like
assumed him to be dumb; while the more penetrating declared him to be
half-witted. A gaunt, red-haired labourer, with a dogged jaw and chin,
but quite blank blue eyes, he went by the name of Israel Gow, and was
the one silent servant on that deserted estate. But the energy with
which he dug potatoes, and the regularity with which he disappeared
into the kitchen gave people an impression that he was providing for the
meals of a superior, and that the strange earl was still concealed in
the castle. If society needed any further proof that he was there, the
servant persistently asserted that he was not at home. One morning the
provost and the minister (for the Glengyles were Presbyterian) were
summoned to the castle. There they found that the gardener, groom and
cook had added to his many professions that of an undertaker, and had
nailed up his noble master in a coffin. With how much or how little
further inquiry this odd fact was passed, did not as yet very plainly
appear; for the thing had never been legally investigated till Flambeau
had gone north two or three days before. By then the body of Lord
Glengyle (if it was the body) had lain for some time in the little
churchyard on the hill.

As Father Brown passed through the dim garden and came under the
shadow of the chateau, the clouds were thick and the whole air damp
and thundery. Against the last stripe of the green-gold sunset he saw
a black human silhouette; a man in a chimney-pot hat, with a big spade
over his shoulder. The combination was queerly suggestive of a sexton;
but when Brown remembered the deaf servant who dug potatoes, he thought
it natural enough. He knew something of the Scotch peasant; he knew the
respectability which might well feel it necessary to wear “blacks” for
an official inquiry; he knew also the economy that would not lose an
hour’s digging for that. Even the man’s start and suspicious stare as
the priest went by were consonant enough with the vigilance and jealousy
of such a type.

The great door was opened by Flambeau himself, who had with him a lean
man with iron-grey hair and papers in his hand: Inspector Craven from
Scotland Yard. The entrance hall was mostly stripped and empty; but the
pale, sneering faces of one or two of the wicked Ogilvies looked down
out of black periwigs and blackening canvas.

Following them into an inner room, Father Brown found that the allies
had been seated at a long oak table, of which their end was covered with
scribbled papers, flanked with whisky and cigars. Through the whole of
its remaining length it was occupied by detached objects arranged at
intervals; objects about as inexplicable as any objects could be. One
looked like a small heap of glittering broken glass. Another looked like
a high heap of brown dust. A third appeared to be a plain stick of wood.

“You seem to have a sort of geological museum here,” he said, as he sat
down, jerking his head briefly in the direction of the brown dust and
the crystalline fragments.

“Not a geological museum,” replied Flambeau; “say a psychological
museum.”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake,” cried the police detective laughing, “don’t
let’s begin with such long words.”

“Don’t you know what psychology means?” asked Flambeau with friendly
surprise. “Psychology means being off your chump.”

“Still I hardly follow,” replied the official.

“Well,” said Flambeau, with decision, “I mean that we’ve only found out
one thing about Lord Glengyle. He was a maniac.”

The black silhouette of Gow with his top hat and spade passed the
window, dimly outlined against the darkening sky. Father Bro

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